Brian Slattery Photos
Katy Rea.
Poetry about the end of the world. Pop music by turns dreamy, elliptical, lush, and jagged. And transfixing music from half a world away. All three art forms were on lavish display at Never Ending Books on Thursday night, as two poets and three musical acts comprised a diverse and thoroughly engrossing evening that entertained, warmed, and nourished.
The night began with two young poets, Lily and Maxwell, who each read poems that were funny, thoughtful, and full of quick turns that hooked and moved. Lily’s poems — which, she exclaimed cheerfully, were often about the apocalypse — were breathless and maximalist, building energy with each line that drew murmurs from the audience as they gathered steam. Lily quickly won over and warmed up the room. Maxwell’s poems took a quieter, more introspective turn, but dug deep as he moved into material about cultural friction in Nicaragua and a sense of displacement everywhere he went, all delivered with an observant eye that spared neither the subject not himself.
“This is a really special place,” Katy Rea said at the beginning of her set. “And I loved all the poetry. It’s usually just four bands in a row!” she added, adopting a gently mocking rawk attitude. “Really nice to be somwhere where you can hear all the words.”
The New York-based singer-songwriter — backed by Andrew on guitar, Shadow on drums, and Ian on bass — performed a set of complex, atmospheric originals that delivered a direct emotional message. Even when the songs were half-joking, they were full of heart.
“That song is about both Tony Soprano and Anthony Bourdain somehow,” she said at the end of one song, adding, “they have a lot in common if you think about it.” She thanked all the nurses she knew in the audience. Finally, toward the end of her set, she introduced one song on a note of hope for anyone who may have lost friends to a certain mode of political thinking in the past few years, as she mentioned that she ended up getting sucked into a series of conspiracy documentaries during the pandemic. “I went down a weird road,” she said. “I’m back! But I had to write a song to make me feel okay again. It’s called ‘Honestly, I Love the World.’ ” Its message of self-deprecated and open-heartedness drove the song all the way through its extended jam at the end.
Next up was Soon, a New Haven-based duo of Suhail on sarangi and Henry on guitar, who mesmerized the crowd with a set of South Asian music in which Henry’s delicate guitar accompaniment served as an open musical plain for Suhail to range across on the sarangi. The sarangi, Suhail explained, is thus named because it’s an “instrument with a hundred colors. The idea is that it can sonically reproduce, or mimic, the different emotions of human beings.”
Under Suhail’s able hands, the sarangi did just that, speaking of joy and pain at the same time, sometimes keening, sometimes swooping and swirling, and always focused, resonant, on the music at hand. Suhail mentioned that this was their first time performing live together — a statement that seemed on some level difficult to believe, given the confidence with which they played — and mentioned they would be releasing an album “soon,” which “also happens to be the name of our project.” Between the depth of the music and the lightness of the banter, Soon made a statement.
“We’re a little closer to Never Ending Books’s bedtime than we anticipated, so we’re just going to play a little micro-set,” said Erin of Dig Nitty, to round out the evening. Both musicians, Erin and Ian, are New Haven-based and have their own solo projects, Erin explained, but lately had been working on material together. They decided to go for it and try some of their collaborations. Erin switched instruments for each song — from bass to guitar to drums — while Ian held down a second guitar. The first song got poppy with a drum machine; the second song and its dual guitars had a rich, slightly folky sound; the third, featuring guitar and drums, leaned into indie rock. The common threads through each of the songs were Erin and Ian’s vocal harmonies, sweet and kind, a straight road through varied terrain. They finished to warm applause.
