From folk punk to hip hop to shimmering pop and progressive bluegrass, New Haven’s musicians gave voice to our hopes and fears in a difficult year — and offered broader perspectives to help us see how we got here, and how we can get through it with heads and hearts engaged.
Ceschi’s This Guitar Was Stolen Along With Years of Our Lives showed how New Haven’s beloved indie hip hop hero could start with deep despair and pull from it a raging sense of strength, gratitude, and joy. Stripping his sound down largely to acoustic instruments, sometimes employing just his voice and one guitar, Ceschi produced some of the most vital music of his career, a gift that could reduce listeners to tears and offer the kind of clarity about the situation we’re in that felt like a bright light in dark woods.
Where Ceschi’s album seemed to take in all of society, Emil Beckford’s Songs About Isolation turned to the confines of a single room. Hovering somewhere between pop and R&B, and armed with a perceptive eye, a quick sense of humor, and an open heart, Beckford made the kind of album that might make you turn it up loud and dance by yourself.
On Social Anxieties in the New World, Dreamvoid — a collaboration between Phat A$tronaut frontperson chad browne-springer and Co-op High student and producer Expired Mocha — ripped its lyrics from the headlines of the pandemic to create a soundtrack that let us face the pandemic with a thoughtful smile and a shimmy. In the summer, the album was afterparty music. With colder weather setting in again, it reminds us to stay warm by keeping moving.
Jennifer Dauphinais and Rory Thomas Derwin of WEAREBISON together made an eponymous album full of wavering synths, cold drum machines, and echoing voices that added up to an atmosphere of beautiful dread. It was about the moment we’re going through, but also a reminder that sadness was with us before 2020 and will be with us later, and it’s okay to sit with it for a moment and figure it out.
On Hindsight 2020, The Bargain — Frank Critelli, Shandy Lawson, and Muddy Rivers — banded together to create a body of songs that were more than the sum of their considerable parts. Rivers’s intricate, propulsive guitar work, Lawsom’s shining mandolin, and Critelli’s warm, weathered voice combined in both songwriting and performance to make a sound like battered hope.
On Hughes, rapper Siul Hughes added the latest chapter to a body of work begun in 2013 that mixed the personal, universal, and the political. At once a diary of a life and an account of a spiritual journey, Hughes’s pandemic album was a reminder that perhaps there is more than what we experience and what we read in the news, and that a certain serenity can be found now and again in contemplating the cosmic.
Before the pandemic, Shyanne Horner was developing her craft in public, gathering a band around her to fully realize her deceptive complex, moody, and emotional music. With the release of Weaver, the project now known as Lumot kept its core elements of angular guitar, shuffling drums, and a voice that could go from coo to howl, but dug deeper into the group sound, too. The album showed that some bands didn’t need a stage to keep moving forward as artists.
On Old Habits, duo Kat Wallace and David Sasso didn’t so much push against the boundaries of traditional music as blithely step over them to incorporate disparate elements into a newer sound. Their inventive songwriting, clever arrangements, and attention to detail created a mood both wistful and playful, while lyrics ranged from staying strong after heartbreak to learning how to rebuild after catastrophe, a message from Scripture that felt all too relevant today.
On Softest Eyes: Side A, Olive Tiger — Olive, Jesse Newman, and John McGrath — expanded the band’s sonic palette to include bowed strings, guitar, synths, and drums, which in turn allowed the band to explore even more emotional territory than it had on previous releases. The results were sometimes personal, sometimes epic, and always compelling.
New Adventures in Hi-Fi marked the last release of Pigeon English, the duo of Brian Larney and Rob Nelson, after Nelson passed away from a heart attack in May. The occasion of its release is mournful, but the music itself is an overwhelmingly fitting tribute to Nelson’s spirit — full of surprising lyric twists and turns, sometimes rambunctious and raucous, and sweet even at its saddest. It’s a reminder that joy is there to be found, if we know how to listen for it.
There is a jam band scene that you fail to talk about