Basemental: Wocky’s new album, reviewed
Roxy Leblanc has been a mainstay in the Hadley underground for as long as I can remember. She fronted the band Great Smokey, an earnest and groovy psych group that took a few forms between 2009 and 2016, before calling an indefinite hiatus last winter. Since then she has developed and pushed her solo effort, where she goes by the moniker Wocky. Wocky just released her first full-length, Changeling, following her 2014 debut EP,...
Basemental: Stop the Trolls
Staying strong in the face of hate and lost spaces Last week, Basemental interviewed a local musician who lost people close to him in the Ghost Ship warehouse fire on Dec. 2 in Oakland, California. That piece sparked a discussion of safe spaces for artists, which Meyer continues this week. Exploiting tragedy to advance an extreme political agenda is a known strategy that has been employed by the right for decades. The Islamophobia...
Basemental: What Happened in Oakland
One artist’s reflections on the Ghost Ship fire NOTE: On Dec. 2, the Ghost Ship, a 10,000 square-foot arts space inside an Oakland, California, warehouse, caught fire during a performance. Thirty-six people were killed, and more were injured. Steve D’Agostino, from the local act ZEBU!, has split time between the Western Mass and Bay Area arts scenes. He was familiar with the Ghost Ship, and lost people close to him. He was...
Basemental: Don’t Give Me That Corporate Ambition
On Thursday, Dec. 1, I stood outside the TD Bank in downtown Northampton with about 30 other people to stand with the Sioux Nation and indigenous-led water protectors — not only to stop the pipeline, but to asphyxiate its funding. Local organizers answered an ask from Indigenous organizers at Standing Rock to make these goals a reality. Sound carried across Main Street as our group chanted on one side of the street, and a delegation...
Basemental: Trump vs. Punk
We must harness the power of DIY to resist Influential music writer Jessica Hopper penned a piece earlier this month on MTV.com that sought to dispel “the silver-lining myth” that a Trump presidency would produce great art, specifically music. She argued that great music is already being made – primarily by black and brown, queer, womyn, and other marginalized musicians – in the ruins of a transphobic police state with a backdrop of...
Basemental: House Shows by Deadbeat Club and Boy Harsher
Self-described glamour-grunge witch-punks Deadbeat Club only played their first show earlier this spring. According to an interview in Maximum Rocknroll, they say the band formed “because [they] were sick of playing with boys and trying to start something serious.” And serious they are. In the short time they’ve been a band, they’ve not only played dozens of shows around the Northeast, but they also released a kicking self-titled EP....
Basemental: “Hello Everybody” by Ruth Garbus, Reviewed
Honestly Weird “Hello everybody/ there’s a Nazi living in my head.” That’s the first line on Brattleboro musician Ruth Garbus’ new EP, Hello Everybody, and its overt shockingness lays the foundation for a departure from her previous handful of mostly solo releases. Not only are the lyrics more direct, but the melodies have become sharper and song structures more intuitive. Garbus, still young, has been playing music for over ten...
Basemental: New small urban festivals ditch the corporate music vibe
A few years ago, Valley musician Mike Parham came back from South by Southwest (SXSW), a music festival in Austin, Texas, and described it to me like the Wild West —somewhere between an underground music festival and a business convention. Some see SXSW as their ticket to success, but just as many musicians and critics see it as a textbook example of bloated corporate influence – the place where DIY first kissed Davos. Straddling a...
Basemental: Inside the mind of PussyVision
20-Something Vision It’s an amazing feeling to bear witness to art you feel moved by — especially when that art is ephemeral. And it’s no less amazing to see a side of someone that you didn’t even realize existed. This is what happened when I first heard Pussy, a self within my old friend Finley Janes, who performs under the monkier PussyVision. We all walk around with different selves inside of us, and some of us wear different...
Basemental: Our Club Runneth Over
This Friday night, Sept. 23, there are at least six shows I want to attend. It wouldn’t be surprising if some touring band squeezes in a last-minute basement show. There are other bars and venues, too — Ben Folds is playing the Calvin, for one — and maybe a festival nearby. Although I’m plugged into different scenes, it can be hard to keep track of them all. September 23 is a good reminder of all that is happening in Western Mass...
Basemental: Streaming music service Spotify is a bust for local artists
Spotty Results I learned some shocking things about Spotify recently. The average employee rakes in $166,000 a year, and the highest executive compensation has increased over 300 percent since 2014, reaching as much as $18.9 million. Despite that, Spotify has never really been profitable. Although the streaming giant has increased revenue and employee pay at huge margins, the company operated at a $200 million loss last year, with...
Basemental: Talking Rock and Net Neutrality with Candace Clement
We Buffer, We Suffer Candace Clement has been a been a member of the Northampton band Bunny’s A Swine for eight years. On songs like “Greetings from the Bottom,” her Strat intertwines with Emerson Stevens’ 3-string guitar contraption like a ball of twine, which gets tangled and balled up against a backbeat by drummer Dustin Ashley Cote. When she isn’t singing, she does advocacy work on media equity, most recently championing “net...
Basemental: New Music from MalYMarco, Dirt Devil, ShowHorses, and Carinae
One of the pitfalls of writing a bi-monthly column is the fact that I can barely scratch the surface of all of the cool stuff that’s happening around the Pioneer Valley. There is so much! This week’s column will serve as an informal catch-up on some new(ish) releases. All four bands are local and currently unsigned. MalYMarco malymarco.bandcamp.com Hip-hop duo MalYMarco, composed of Mal Devisa (Deja Carr) and Marco (Marc Friedman),...
Basemental Music Review: The Lentils
Mental for Lentils The first time I heard The Lentils was live in my basement in Hadley two years ago. I was completely blown away not only by the wacky and wiry guitar solos, but by the pop melodies buried beneath layers of sand. It was as if strange debris – or legumes, rather – had washed up on the beach all deformed and colored by a lifetime of surf. (After writing this paragraph, I realized one of the Bandcamp tags for the...
Basemental: Straight to Video, bassist Sam Hadge’s wild concert footage
The magic of live music stems from the intimacy of being in the same room as the performer, but Sam Hadge’s talent is capturing that intimacy for the online world who couldn’t make it to the show. Since I started going to DIY shows with regularity about a year and a half ago, Hadge has been a fixture. It seems he’s at nearly every single show in Western Mass with his video camera in hand, recording each set in its entirety, then...
Punk Local
It is worth noting the congruity between the Western Mass underground 30 years ago and the scene now. Take the power duo Wydyde. In the Bandcamp tags for their recently released debut EP Hadley Fire, Wydyde claim Dinosaur Jr. as a reference point. And there are some obvious parallels. Tubecats, Wydyde’s Hadley showhouse, is six miles from J Mascis’ Amherst. Dinosaur Jr. made their mark in the indie canon by bridging the space...
The Band Whisperer
When I reached out to Lynne Bertrand of Signature Sounds and The Parlor Room for an interview, she made one thing clear: she doesn’t sleep much. She was lobbying me to call her any time before 2 in the morning. When we did finally sit down to talk, it was after 11, approaching midnight. The back of the cozy downtown Northampton venue The Parlor Room was bustling with cheerful goodbyes as a concert was just letting out. I had the...
Basemental: DIY Music, welcome to Basemental, a new column about the Valley’s underground music scene
As a 24-year-old musician in the Valley, my world centers around Hadley basements and Easthampton community centers — the places where you can catch the best of the area’s DIY music scene. The what scene? Exhausted by the exploitative pay-to-play model often used by established venues — in which up-and-coming bands have to sell a certain amount of tickets to make any money — my musical peers and I continually choose to build...