Brian Slattery Photo
Minus Points.
Minus Points had just finished another blistering song, an assault of distorted strings, drums, and emotions, when there was a request from the audience: “Can you do something laid back and chill right now?”
It was a joke; no one at Cafe Nine on Tuesday night was there to play or hear laid-back or chill. Instead, three new New Haven-based bands had come to turn it up loud, and they did.
Indie-punk band Minus Points — Julian Michaels, Zach Fiscella, Paul Buzel, Jeremy Friedler, and Chase Rivera — burst onto the stage in a frenzied wall of distortion, raw emotion, and plenty of humor. The rhythm section created thunder on the low end while twin electric guitars sliced over the top. In the middle of it all, Michaels screamed through it, the human point of contact.
In between songs, Michaels was a comedic frontman, explaining as the band fixed a kick drum pedal that “I have a bunch of jokes but I don’t want to do them all right now, because they’re all sponsorship jokes.” As Minus Points drew the audience into its set, switching up tempos between thrashing screamers and spacey, almost dirgelike tempos, Michaels informed them that the band would soon be recording the songs being performed. “Then we’ll put them out … when we’re done recording them, because that’s how recording works.”
This drew a cheer from the crowd.
“Yeah! Yay recording!” Michaels said with a laugh. “Happy Tuesday! For some reasons I thought it was St. Patrick’s Day when I woke up.” Now it was the audience’s turn to laugh.
Wow, Okay, Cool — a one-man band composed of Tim Fitzpatrick, a laptop, and a small keyboard — then ripped through his own set of originals on backing tracks and synthesizer accompaniment. The gritty sound was a fitting backdrop to Fitzpatrick’s lyrics of rage, as he took up the punk mantle of railing against inequality and abuses of power. His concern for these issues extended (with a good dose of humor) to his stage banter, as when he explained that he had stickers in the back that he was giving away for free.
“All you have to do is tell me your favorite American war criminal. It shouldn’t be hard.” For anyone having difficulty with the question, a later song in his set focusing on war criminals in recent history provided a veritable answer key.
Fitzpatrick also honored the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day, revealing he’d once been in a traditional Irish band. He bridged the gap between that sound and his current one with a cover of a Pogues song. And just as video games had been a thread running through Minus Points’s set, with audience members asking for K.K. Slider songs and Minus Points having a song named “Ocarina of Crime,” so Fitzpatrick asked in his set “who’s playing Elden Ring?” adding that “this gig is keeping me from playing Elden Ring.”
The Human Fund — Zach Fontanez on drums and David Taylor Coffey on guitar, with both sharing lead vocal duties — closed out the night with a barrage of punk squall and quick-punch jokes.
“Oh yeah!” Fontanez announced from behind the kit. “It’s just like back in the good old days, before everything went to shit,” he said, a huge grin on his face. “Before music went belly-up and you were left with an old pair of boots.”
“What else are we going to do on a Tuesday night, watch sitcoms?” Coffey said. “No! We’re millennials! We know those shows stream the same day.”
The Human Fund had the kind of band sound in which feedback was an official third band member. It began and ended almost every song, and was the sound with which both Coffey and Fontanez were in constant dialogue. In true old-school punk fashion, the duo had a song about nuclear winter and how much neither of them could wait for it, delivered over a slamming beat and thick waves of distortion. A late part of their set featured a song called “Richard Nixon Sex Tape.” They also had a song in which they enjoined listeners to devalue NFTs by taking screenshots of all the proprietary images they could find.
“Hope we haven’t upset any crypto-bros,” Fontanez deadpanned after the song. “Just kidding. Get some real money, nerds!” They also devoted time to praising the previous bands and Cafe Nine itself (“I don’t think I’ve ever frowned in here,” Fontanez said).
Halfway through the set, Coffey revealed one of the band’s missions, covered in a song the duo released in July 2021, to create a micro-nation called The United Freaks of America. The idea was part protest of America, part foil to it. Coffey explained, with a tone both humorous and earnest, that anyone could join; they were making it easy. By the end of the set, it was entirely possible that many in the audience had become new citizens.
