Live Music Review //
Slyne and the Family Stoned /
Jeffrey Alexander and the Heavy Lidders / Bhajan Bhoy /
More Klementines
October 4th, 2023
at 33 Golden Street, New London CT
Additional photos can be found in an album on Facebook here :::
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1333017767428441&type=3
For the second time in as many weeks I was back at 33 Golden Street in New London and they really do have something special going on down here. As with last week, this was more of an experimental / improvisational show, but 33 Golden Street also hosts musicians of other genres so you should definitely check out their calendar if you're in the area to drive there. It's about an hour from me, so that shows you how much it's worth it.
This show opened up with More Klementines who are a three piece band. One member played the banjo while another played percussion. The third member played a mandolin for most of the set but at times was playing smaller percussion instruments as well. This music sounded kind of what you would expect when you see a banjo but it was also loud, psychedelic and just chaotic.
The percussion was something the drummer sat on being hit instead of a bass drum plus cymbals, but it worked. I'm not really familiar with the banjo or mandolin and as they're both string instruments it was just an experience to hear them working together. At one point I kind of spaced out because I couldn't tell which one was making which sounds and just that blurring of the lines between sounds is what can make music so great.
Bhajan Bhoy was up second. This was the point in the night when the mood shifted from loud to louder. This set started off with noise, the turning on knobs and electronics not coming out too loudly but loud enough. Bhajan Bhoy switched over to the guitar and everything got louder. By the end of the set, The Heavy Lidders had joined Bhajan Bhoy on stage and that was even louder.
There was something very comforting about the set of Bhajan Bhoy to the extent that it was almost as if it was luring you in at the beginning, but by the end it got so out of control it could have felt like you were having an out of body experience. This music was just such an experience-- it was more than just notes on paper and if you fully let yourself get taken over by it I think that by the end it could've affected you in a positive manner somehow.
We went from Bhajan Bhoy to Jeffrey Alexander and the Heavy Lidders, who had an even louder sound somehow. They played songs which felt like psychedelic jams and then songs which just sounded like some good old fashioned classic rock. One thing about this entire set was that the rhythm just kept moving. Regardless of whether you thought of rock n roll or a jam band concert, the rhythm just kept you going in a steady way.
Everyone on this show was just so great at playing the guitar and that shined through in each and every song. For me, the Jeffrey Alexander and the Heavy Lidders set just felt like something that if I was playing it, and even for a half hour, afterwards I just would feel tired. It would just feel like everything was taken out of me and left on that stage. That's very much the way that this felt.
Slyne and the Family Stoned played one of the loudest sets I've ever heard anyone play. It started off quietly with just these trippy type of guitars. But then, at one point, it was like flipping a switch and all of a sudden these huge, chunky guitar chords were pummeling through. The drums were beating like gunshots. In an overall sense, this is that sound Nirvana strived for while in a more modern sense this could be up there with artists such as Lightning Bolt.
One of my favorite parts about this set too was just that there was this rhythm and melody where you could feel like you were listening to the music and having a good time. I imagine people coming into a bar where they don't know what's happening so they hear this rock n roll / blues type of sound and just think "All right, I like this". But at any time it just slipped into that wall of distortion and suddenly you're losing hearing what people are saying around you is being drowned out.
This night was definitely an exercise in loudness. Everyone had their own points of being loud and it was almost like everyone got together before the show and said they were going to go out there and see who could be the loudest. From artist to artist it was almost like a "You think that's loud? Check this out" as the next artist took the stage.
But there was also some of that psychedelic atmosphere within this show. A bug- possibly a fly- kept flying around at random times during the show. At first, I thought I was just seeing things or maybe that the lights were reflecting above me somehow. I eventually came to the conclusion that it was in fact a bug, but those moments of clarity weren't always there throughout the show and that's the way I like it. Getting lost in the music is definitely something I enjoy about the live experience.
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