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Less than a week ago, we bid a sad farewell to Cancer To The Stars, and here I am to see singer/guitarist Ryan Lee's solo project, The Nonfamous. It's just him, singin' and strummin', but he manages to keep it from getting too folky by kicking in massive distortion for the occasional "solo." Most of the lyrics are pretty dark, heavy on the gloom and nihilism, but there's one happy little love song to leaven things late in the set. Three voices are on display tonight. Ryan can wail, high and powerful and true, but he can't do too much of that in this context because he overwhelms the guitar and the spare, melancholy songs. Thus he spends a lot of time singing high and quiet and gentle, and unfortunately his pitch really suffers when he does this. They're new songs, so perhaps he'll grow into them. The third voice is his lower register, which is very different, deep and strong, and woefully underutilized.
Next are Stereo Soul Future, a four-piece with three lead singers who take turns. (The December Sound had to cancel, due to flooding in their rehearsal space.) The first few songs run to light, mid-tempo pop-rock, cheerful but not very viscerally satisfying. There are, again, some problems with pitch when they try to sing gently, but all the instruments are totally solid. As the set progresses, they throw in some darker and more energetic material, and their singing is much better when they cut loose. A particular standout for me is their "theme song," or at least the song with the words "stereo soul" and "future" in the chorus.
This Blue Holiday are up from Connecticut. They remind me of the very best parts of a Sheila Divine set, when they were at their most intense and I wasn't bored. This Blue Holiday manage to maintain that intensity over their whole set. The guitars have kind of an indistinct and limited range of sounds, and provide sort of a shoegazery wash of tonality to set off the consistently strong, hooky vocals and excellent rhythm section. The bass lines are interesting and the drumming is great, varied and creative, with lots of complicated fills. My only complaint about them is that, by the end of their set, their songs are starting to sound pretty similar to each other. There are free CDs, so I'll see how they stand up to repeated listening.
