Bad History Month.
As in the days before the pandemic, on Saturday night, perplexed pedestrians carrying leftovers from nearby restaurants stood outside Never Ending Books on State Street, drawn closer by the raucous music spilling out of it, stopped by the incongruity of a storefront that looked like a bookstore, but sounded like a punk club. They didn’t have to stop; all were welcome to a two-band bill that is the latest in a string of events reestablishing the spot, now under the management of Volume Two, the Never Ending Books Collective, as a hub for adventurous, energetic music.
City of Meriden.
An eager audience packed the Never Ending Books space for City of Meriden, featuring Dave Go on vocals and guitar, Nick “The Chop” on bass, and Jake “Hamstake” on drums. The band is indeed from Meriden (“Oh yeah. Meriden all day, baby,” as Go put it) and their appearance at Never Ending Books was their first live show as a band. They didn’t sound it. As Jake’s drums drove each song’s rhythms like a freight train, Nick both filled out the bottom end of the sound and took off on noise excursions into the bass’s upper register, while Go switched between fat riffs and walls of sounds, letting his voice bark over the top of it all.
City of Meriden charged out of the gate with its very first song and ripped through a set of originals that grew more intricate with every number without losing any energy. Nick played with his back to the audience for nearly the entire time, in order to coax feedback out of his amp. Jake had a huge smile on his face for most of the set. And Go was a thoroughly engaging frontman, lacing his banter with sly humor.
“Anybody here have a job?” he said. “Anybody? You guys have jobs?” As the crowd hooted its responses, he nodded. “All right. I got advice for you guys.” The band settled into a deep, thick groove while Go howled out “if you ain’t getting high at work / you lose!” Then the band switched gears and rocked its way to a hard finish. After a while about half the audience couldn’t stand still anymore and thrashed its way through every song, even as the rhythms got more angular and the songs became full of hairpin turns and sharp shifts. when Go announced the band had one more song, one audience member seemed to speak for many when he yelled out “you guys are fucking hot.”
Bad History Month, the Boston-based project fronted by songwriter Sean Sprecher, then treated the audience to a set of dark, cathartic songs that combined vulnerable, searching lyrics with an expansive band sound that grew more mesmerizing at it went on. Bass and drums marked out a wide territory for the band’s twin guitars to explore. At the beginning of the set, much of that territory was given over to empty space, gaps in the beat that created tension in the silence. The next couple songs then began to play with extreme dynamics, dropping to a low whisper for Sprecher’s vocals and switching it with blasts of noise.
As the band settled in, however, and it seemed clear that the audience wasn’t going anywhere, the songs got longer, and the jams got spacier. The guitars sent out sheets of sound and static, like dispatches from a faraway, psychedelic space; at its deepest, Bad History Month made the kind of unified band sound that could have filled a stadium, not just a storefront.
Sprecher’s self-deprecating humor moved the set easily from song to song. “I don’t know anyone here!” he exclaimed in amazement at the crowd, pleased by its turnout and the band’s reception. Much later in the set, as a song ripped to a close, he said, “and that’s how you send a song like an idiot,” to laughter.
Several songs later, Sprecher announced that the next song would be the band’s last. But at the end, the audience, still cheering, didn’t move.
“You want us to keep playing?” Sprecher asked. The audience responded with an enthusiastic roar. “It’s Saturday night — why the fuck not?” Sprecher responded. He called another song, and another. The band played on, off on another excursion, and took the audience with it.
