Brian Slattery Photos
Arachne at Best Video Thursday night.
Lydia Arachne, the songwriter and bandleader of Semaphora, offered a knowing smile to the audience at Best Video on Thursday night as she announced her first song.
“This song,” she said, “is about cats and how they might save us in the future if we misplace our nuclear waste.”
She delivered it as a joke, but the story turns out to be true. The comment set the tone for what had come before and what would follow, as the Connecticut-based Semaphora and opening act Gold Eris — a well-paired set of bands — each performed music that was intelligent and heartfelt in equal measure.
Gold Eris.
Gold Eris — led by Thomas Oliverio on vocals, keyboard, and guitar, with Lydia Arachne on keys and bass and Nick Morcaldi on drums — started its set with a pulsing keyboard, chiming chords from an organ, and lilting bass, with Oliverio’s voice keening over all of it. “I can’t stop myself from unwinding,” he sang. “There goes my binding. There it goes.” The introduction was effective, as Oliverio followed it up with song after song that drew power from directness and honesty, to the point that it masked how clever some of the songwriting was.
His songs were about relationships and soul searching and the fraught path to finding something like truly free self-expression. (“I wrote this song a really, really, really long time ago,” he said to introduce one number about vampires, which he described as “an allegory about coming out.”) Meanwhile, however, he and his backup musicians — including Arachne — navigating the harmonic and rhythmic twists and turns of the music with cool grace. Only once did Oliverio call attention to it, when he expressed pride in his band for playing in the odd meter of 5/4 in a way that felt relaxed and natural.
“That 5/4 time signature, what what?” he joked.
“I give that time signature a 5 out of 4,” Arachne deadpanned in response. In between songs Oliverio also showed a self-deprecating, pleasantly youthful sense of humor. After introducing one song as being about a real jerk in his life, he paused and smiled.
“It’s your mom,” he added, that was the subject of the song. “It’s all about your mom.” The audience, guard down, broke into helpless laughter.
After a quick break, Semaphora — Arachne on keys and vocals, Elizabeth Ashkins and Alyssa Morrin on vocals, Lucy Loffredo on bass, and Sam Gibbons on drums — took the Best Video stage with songs jammed with danceable rhythms, sophisticated harmonic structures, and complex lyrics that almost gave the sense, in the best way, that one was listening to excerpts from a clever, surreal musical that didn’t exist yet. As Arachne, Loffredo, and Gibbons glided through song after song of tricky, groovy rhythms and chord changes, Ashkins and Morrin, only occasionally working from a notebook, sang through the twists and turns of Arachne’s lyrics, full of clever three-syllable rhymes, call-response mayhem, and tight harmonies.
Semaphora’s second and most recent full-length album, Sister Administrator, was released in 2020, but Arachne has been working on new songs since then and was eager to share them at Best Video, which she named as one of her favorite places to play. “Someday when I have time, I’m going to make that third album I’ve been talking about,” she said. “This is about predestiny and how colonialism is bad.”
The audience also learned that Arachne had a 2011 BlackBerry for a phone (“if you have an older phone than that, I probably want to be your friend,” she added). Songs followed about Clippy, the Microsoft Office sentient paperclip graphic (“an icon in every sense,” Arachne said) that appeared in days of computing yore when users needed help, and about the language spoken on Easter Island.
“How much longer do we have your attention,” she asked near the end of her set. The audience was in no mood to leave. So she continued with a song about monkeys because “I have a friend in Singapore, where background monkeys are a regular occurrence,” she explained. “According to her, it’s not as fun as it sounds, but I thought it sounded pretty fun.”
But the set ended on a deeper note, as Arachne, a teacher at the School of Rock, dedicated the last song to a student of hers, a talented drummer, who had died recently. The song was upbeat and wistful, a thoughtful celebration.
“We miss you,” Ashkins said at the end.
