Live Music Review //
Shirese / Mountain Movers / The Phroeggs
March 18th, 2023
@ Cafe Nine, New Haven CT
Additional photos can be found in a Facebook album here :::
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1209844799745739&type=3
At some point in time I got an email about Shirese releasing a new album. When I found out about this show and it being their album release show, I was certainly in. Cafe Nine was quite packed for this show and it really felt like the place to be on this Saturday night.
The opening band was called The Phroeggs, though Bandcamp just says "Phroeggs" but the singer/guitarist said "The Phroeggs", I believe, and that is also what their Instagram says. A four piece of drums, bass and two guitars, one of the guitar players had a mandolin plugged in and only used it for the very beginning of the set- a song which felt more like an introduction to the rest of the songs than anything else.
In a very broad sense of the term, the theme of this show was that it was psychedelic/experimental/hippie type of music. If you had to write a paragraph to promote it in advance, those would hopefully be some of your keywords. And none of the bands really failed on any of those fronts. I went into this show not really knowing anything about The Phroeggs, but I came out of it absolutely loving them.
What I particularly enjoyed about this sound was that it had all those makings of a psychedelic or jam band, depending upon on how you wanted to hear it, but then at some points during the songs it would either get completely heavy or fast (or both) and it was just like this extremely loud wall of noise washing over the entire crowd. Without that element, The Phroeggs would still be so fundamentally sound, but with it I just felt blown away by them.
Up next were Mountain Movers who are, in my opinion, one of the biggest bands from Connecticut and known outside of the state. The truly amazing thing about this show is how, yes, every band had that psych/trippy/rock n roll way about it where it felt like they could drift off into being a jam band just so easily, but at the same time the three bands all also had their own distinct sounds.
Dan Greene and Krissy Battalene both played guitars while singing and Dan Greene switched from acoustic to electric. Though none of the songs specifically did it, Mountain Movers have that sound where you feel like you should be paying attention to them because it feels like they should be singing things like "Now everyone gather 'round and hear this story about..." and it's just something that you just cannot avoid. Yet, it also just feels like it can be served as a warning more than anything else as well.
One of the themes of this show which I also enjoyed was that every band played music more than they were singing- which is to say that even though none of the artists were instrumental they were closer to that than what you think of in terms of that verse/chorus/verse songs. Everyone had songs which just felt like they could wander off and get lost in the best possible way.
Headliner Shirese was everything you could want from the epitome of rock n roll and more. With three guitarists, a bassist, drummer, lead singer and then for the last two songs a saxophone, there was a big sound within this rock n roll set but that is for a reason. Somewhere along the lines of Led Zeppelin, Velvet Underground and The Doors, Shirese is just taking this style of classic rock n roll and making it modern again.
And, honestly, Jess and I had a conversation about this on the way home, but it's been quite some time where there has really felt like there has been a band that has captured the classic rock sound in a modern way and, overall, I just don't feel like a lot of artists are doing it. Typically, I think musicians who play in this way tend to be cover bands but even if they have original songs they aren't always very good because they just sound like a cover band still.
But Shirese just has this sound that is impossible to deny. It's all their own, with the elements of their influences. And trust me, I've heard bands before where people say "Yeah, they're like the modern Led Zeppelin" and I'm like "No, they just sound like Led Zeppelin". So to have a band that can actually take these ideas and put their own spin on them is just remarkable to me and that's why should you ever have the chance to see Shirese live you definitely should take it.
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