While Dave Hause has certainly not been a stranger to playing shows in and around the Boston area for the last several decades, it had been a while since he and his revved-up band The Mermaid had played a big revved-up rock-and-roll show in the greater Boston area. Four-plus years, in fact, since the Mermaid had played alongside Joe Gittleman’s Avoid One Thing at Sinclair in Cambridge. Sure, there were a couple years of Sing Us Home festival warm-ups at Faces in Malden, but the makeshift stage at the rear of a brewery in a repurposed bank is wonderful but a different feel than the Sinclair, a well-lit, tremendous-sounding yet unassuming industrial/subway style authentic rock and roll club. It’s big enough that a band has a chance to stretch their collective wings and really soar (see past coverage of barn-burning shows from Weakened Friends and The Hold Steady, for example) but intimate enough to allow for the symbiotic energy between artist and audience to transcend into something truly magical. And that’s exactly what happened last Saturday night when Dave Hause and the Mermaid made their triumphant return to the Harvard Square spot.
When we chatted with Hause about his latest record last year, he made frequent mention of the realization that the Mermaid, as currently assembled, was the best band that he’s ever been in, and that there was a desire to capitalize on how tight the band was and how fired up he was to be out in front. I can say emphatically that the Dave Hause and The Mermaid set last Saturday night at Sinclair was the best and most cathartic live musical set I’ve seen in that – or any – room in quite a long time. Years, really. Yes, I am fully aware of the hyperbolic nature of that statement, but to quote the great Brian Fallon during stage banter about pizza or dogs or Jersey (I forget)…”it’s not a lie if it’s true!” Hause and company – brother and longtime running mate Tim Hause on guitar, Kevin Conroy on drums, Luke Preston on bass, Mark Masefield on keys (and accordion!) and, for this year’s run of Mermaid shows, Matt “Mattsimum Waves” Wilson on guitar to fill out the sound – burst on stage and immediately ripped into “Cellmates” from the most recent record, a charged-up singalong rocker about spending time in the trenches with your comrades, as and making it out the other side. The song is a perfect encapsulation the crowd at-large, the rankers and rotters who’ve been along with Hause for the fifteen years of his solo career or the two-plus decades since The Loved Ones burst on the scene, a sort of post-script to the early-thirties eye-opening crises of Devour.
Speaking of which, while the Dave Hause…And The Mermaid record was the focal point for this show, the set did contain tracks from each of Hause’s seven full-length solo records. “Autism Vaccine Blues,” a personal favorite track from a desert island record for yours truly, was second in the set, a song that’s as cathartic with a full, six-piece band as it was the first time I heard Hause perform it solo, on Flogging Molly’s Green 17 tour in 2013. I know that I’ve used the word ‘cathartic’ a few times already and that’s probably poor form, but the reality is that’s the overwhelming feeling I had for the duration of the sixteen-song main set and two-song encore. The sort of poignant emotional release that comes with gathering with a few hundred friends and kindred spirits and hollering together about past loves and past lives and the cold realities that the world we’ve inherited is a far cry from the one we were sold. Even the less traditionally charged up rock songs, like “Rumspringa” from the Mermaid record or “Surfboard” from Blood Harmony took on arm-in-arm singalong vibes. (The former, for what it’s worth, featured an accordion-clad Masefield stage diving, while the latter featured an appearance on steel drum by Rhode Island’s Aaron Abramson Cote.) By the time main-set closers “Look Alive” and encores “With You” and “We Could Be Kings” rolled around, the lines between band and crowd had long-since been blurred in favor of one big, sweaty, celebratory mass.
Apes Of The State provided direct support on this little run in the Northeast after an appearance earlier in the month at the Hause brothers’ Sing Us Home festival. Appearing as a four-piece on this run sans guitarist/mandolinist Dan Ebersole, the Lancaster-PA folk punks – April Hartman on guitar and vocals, Mollie Swartz on violin and kazoo yes really, Ian Cornele on drums and Moth Rogers on bass – were met with a rousing singalong chorus of their own from the crowd, particularly on tracks like “They Can’t Kill Us All” and “Sober Intentions” and had won over the bulk of those who weren’t previously familiar by the time “What Am I Doing With My Life?” rolled around.
The local opener spot was occupied by RooFTops on this occasion. With roots that extend deep into the Boston punk and hardcore communities for many years, RooFTops has been doing the solo acoustic thing for a decade-and-a-half now. But this isn’t your parents’ acoustic folk balladeer; RooFTops is throat-shredding, anti-war, working-class punk rock to the bone (with a fun Descendents cover for added measure)!
Check out more photos from the evening’s festivities below!
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