Joe Russo let loose a long wail from his guitar as Ashley Kenney put down an insistent bass line. Abruptly, they stopped.
“Are we ready to go?” Russo said.
“I think so,” Kenney replied.
They weren’t wrong. They started again, stronger than before, joined by Phil Digby on drums.
What started as straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll turned into something a little more howling and thumpy, a little slower, a little darker. It seemed to be just what the summer crowd at the latest Wednesday night show at BAR on Crown Street wanted.
The trio, known as Witch Hair, was downright amiable in between songs. But as soon as the band’s members started playing, the mood took them over. Russo’s smiling face furrowed. Kenney’s lip curled. On the drums, Rigby got down to business. When Russo announced that it was the band’s last song — “we like to work short,” he explained — it didn’t seem like quite enough. As the first act on a three-band bill, Witch Hair did its job well, leaving the audience wanting more.
And Bilge Rat — Mike Kusek on guitar, Thom Hart on bass, and Quinn Pierie on drums — did not disappoint. After announcing that “we’re from right here,” Kusek and his crew launched into a set of twisty, wrenching songs that morphed from one idea to the next without ever letting things settle. That was the point. Even the choice of tempo seemed designed for maximum tension.
“Everything sound good?” Kusek asked the crowd halfway through Bilge Rat’s set.
“Better than good,” someone shouted back.
The band’s tight sense of rhythm, combined with the way each member lost himself in the music midway through each number, imbued the songs with a restless energy that made their moodiness cathartic, and their entire set inventive, intelligent, and emotional. When Kusek mentioned that most of the songs were new — or at least new to audiences (clearly the band had been practicing them a lot) — and that the band would be recording them soon, it felt like a genuine promise.
With Witch Hair’s thunder and Bilge Rat’s tense workouts as openers, the sunnier rock of the Brooklyn-based Britanys — Lucas Long on vocals and guitar, Jake Williams on guitar and vocals, and Gabe Schulman on bass Steele Kratt on drums — seemed at odds with the evening. Williams even said as much halfway through the set. The band delivered a strong set and showed why it has started to expand its audience beyond its hometown. But on Wednesday, it seemed New Haven was in a different mood than sunny.
