Kristin Ezbicki is an unassuming
singer-songwriter with country sensibilities who showed up on a porch on Willow Ave on a sunny afternoon in Somerville, MA. Dubbed Porchfest, the event was a city-wide initiative to highlight local artists by having them perform on people’s porches. After a rainy miserable week, the sun came out for a few hours as Ezbicki took the stage to promote her recent album, Bring Me to the Light.

Given the venue (a porch), the limited staging space she had to share with a guitarist, a keyboard and a drum kit, and a roving audience who came and went by foot, on bicycle, plus the constant stream of cars passing by, Ezbicki handled the entire atmosphere with aplomb. But what quickly became evident, despite Ezbicki not being a household name, was that the people who stopped to listen to the music stuck around. She was good. Her voice was warm and her songs struck a chord with the crowd.

Weaving deftly between haunting lost-love melodies like Anna and an Edgar Allan Poe poem A Dream Within a Dream set to original music, Ezbicki ran through a forty-five minute set of original tunes. The highlight was the gorgeous rendition of the album title track, Bring Me to the Light that soared through the crowd (which, fortunately for all involved, happened to be at its largest size at that moment).

For a change of pace, Ezbicki invited the house band on stage for a jam session of familiar tunes including Honky Tonk Woman and Dead Flowers (both Rolling Stones covers). And the surprise of the night was a woman named Anastasia who was recruited from the crowd to play guitar – and took lead vocals on an impressive version of Coldplay’s Clocks.

Ezbicki handled all the elements and surprises and put on a terrific showcase for her talents and her original music. Reportedly, her debut album was six years in the making. Here’s hoping the next one comes sooner than that.

Porchfest, a citywide initiative to highlight local artists in Somerville, MA by playing on people’s porches, had a 4pm stop on Willow Ave. Playing as Houseband 101, the 3-piece band drew in a small crowd with credible versions of Old Man (Neil Young) and Wild Horses (Rolling Stones) among others during their 25-minute set. Fronted by James Cressey, the house band, as they say, owned the porch.

[Austin, TX] so this band was recommended to me yearrrs ago and I’d never managed to see them until this day – I believe they’ve won local awards and I believe they were described to me as soul rock – the latter is just not accurate – they’re proggy proggy prog rock with maybe a little Grateful Dead jam band thrown in – I’ll admit there were a few songs that lightened up on the guitar work and could maybe be described as soul rock but overall they’re pretty intense for the average listener – the boys are very skilled on their guitars and the singer has a great voice but unless you’re of the Rush persuasion, you’re going to find them hard to digest for easy listening – I kind of think that this set may have focused on their newer material which may be a departure from their older material

[Austin, TX] we were there to see a ‘better’ band but Rockboy assured me he’d seen this band before and they had a crazy lead singer who would writhe on the floor – that’s always all right by me so I waited patiently – the band is an assortment of young and very old geeks in red shorts and red t-shirts – and also a hussy lead vocalist in too-low white jeans, a white crop top, and an eager g-string – they started and the best I can do to explain their sound is Parrothead space rock – they kind of segued into funkier stuff that might be compared to Red Hot Chili Peppers if I were feeling charitable – I wasn’t and I’m not – and it turned out that Rockboy had mistaken this band for another more exciting band so no entertaining lead singer was going to appear either – this band was awful and we left before even seeing the ‘better’ band – the really old hippie guy on bass was kind of cute I have to admit because I kept wondering how he ever ended up in this band of odd young people… I’m not sure I have the name of this band right or Rockboy was correct on the lead singer and he just didn’t show this night – it doesn’t matter because you don’t need to see them

[Orange Country, CA] We were so close to staying on the couch instead of going to this show but Rockboy got fired up and waged a campaign to convince me to go – it wouldn’t have worked, because I’m old and tired, except for the fact that this band, amidst all of the various punk bands I’m only moderately familiar with, has always stood out as unique and gorgeous – so we went and was it ever worth it golly gee whiz – there was a bunch of speed metal bands who opened for them – one of them told the crowd between a song “We’re going to go ahead and speed things back up” which was amusing because the music had never stopped being ferocious as far as I could tell – then there was a young punker rocking out by the stage by himself with only the bare cement of a future mosh pit surrounding him – in one last glorious move, he picked up a beer can from the ground and raised it to his lips with his X-ed hand (X for ‘under 21’) – he was promptly gathered up by bouncers and dropped outside before he ever even got to see TSOL – it was very entertaining – in other mosh pit exploits, there was a girl who ran into the mosh pit which is always inspiring to me – and then she went one step further and took a guy out with her elbow – she stepped back out of the mosh pit and retrieved her eyeglasses from her back pocket to replace them on her face – even Aretha would have shown some respect – finally TSOL came on and it’s pretty much a blur of gloriousness from that point on – the lead singer is OLD now of course, and even kind of portly, but he was a raging maniac – bounding around the stage and commanding every person in the audience – I think this band’s sound is amazing – it’s some blend of speed metal, punk, goth,… – all of those genres can get boring and repetitive but TSOL’s songs are brilliantly written with unexpected turns and starts and pauses – dramatic and catchy too – they manage to be hard and beautiful at the same time, and to create an atmosphere in an instant – I can hear their CA roots too even if it’s just my own nostalgic fantasy – my euphoria was dampened when I went to the back and couldn’t pay my tab because a fight broke out behind me, and then came face to face when some sad hippie boy who was all bloody and was led out – I recommend “Thoughts of Yesterday” and “Sounds of Laughter”

Crass: [Britain] I liked punk in high school before I listened to punk – it was the ethic of punk that mattered to me but I didn’t find out until I was trained at the Rockboy School of Punk that there’s a lot of punk music that does NOT have that ethic I like – Crass is a band that has that ethic – their politics and passion are spot on – rather than Crass themselves, this was actually “Steve Ignorant’s Crass Songs – The Last Supper Tour” or the lead singer touring on his own and doing Crass songs – this show was great except I couldn’t understand a single word the extremely British, or maybe cockney British, vocalist was singing – not a word – the crowd was pretty deliriously happy though (and not noticeably punk which was interesting – it was a motley crowd) and I did enjoy watching the mosh pit manager manage the moshers – it also occurred to me that he wasn’t really singing but was doing spoken word and practically could be attributed with being one of the first hardcore rappers which is more evidence for the punkness of Wu-Tang – ha – “Do they owe us a living? Of course they do! Of course they do!”