What causes us to shiver? Stepping into the winter wind that cuts through goose down, a cold hand on a wrist, a rumble underfoot when standing near the Middlebury waterfall, feelings of fear or awe. Then there is the shiver that shakes to our very bones in a delicious, uncanny reaction to an absolutely perfect moment.
Before winter break, a group of five musicians debuted said shiver-inducing performance in the Old Stone Mill studio space that they had been rehearsing for a month prior. Still nameless as a group, they put on two shows: the first on Dec. 11 in the Old Stone Mill Gallery and the second on Dec. 16 in the pit gallery space in the Johnson Building.
On the subject of the band’s current namelessness, Elori Kramer ’13.5 said, “While there definitely will be one eventually, we realized that we could just put signs up around campus to advertise the show with just our names on it, and that would be just as effective on a small campus like Middlebury.”
The Middlebury everybody-knows-everybody factor worked in the band’s favor because pretty sizeable audiences attended both shows. Max Godfrey, ’13.5, an incredibly talented guitarist and singer, opened for the show. He has performed in the Gamut Room previously and lights up any space where he plays his old-time, lovable bluesy-folk with his supple, twanging voice and huge smile. He covered everything from Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” to Mississippi John Hurt’s “Coffee Blues” (already a crowd favorite, especially when he belts out, “Maxwell House — good to the last drop — just like it says on the can!”). His spirits didn’t even flag when his guitar string snapped in the middle of his set. Quickly repaired, he played well into the night, so every heart in the room was thoroughly defrosted for the music project that followed. According to Kramer, the second show in Johnson opened with two student jugglers.
When Kramer, Graeme Daubert ’12, Peter Coccoma ’12, Quinn Bernegger ’13 and Ken (a drummer from UVM) began their set, no one wanted it to end. If that room and moment, with its wide, wooden floor and buttery light and lovely songs and sprawled, enthralled humanity, could have been crystallized in time, in the tail-end dark nights of 2010, and gone on forever, no one would have complained. The quintet played a series of breathtakingly beautiful folk songs written originally by Coccoma and Daubert and then arranged in collaboration. Far from the often too feathery or flatly spare emissions of the folk genre, the group, with rich layers of several instruments, crafted mature, full-bodied songs that were enchanting and more importantly, moving. The group’s sound was so clear and clean and professional that I could hardly believe they were still enrolled in such a tuneless thing like college and not signed and living the wild and dangerous lives of folk-stars. I kid, but their talent was truly staggering and unfaltering.
The music was a kind of folk-rock in the vein of Fleet Foxes, Local Natives and Bowerbirds though certainly holding its own and representing far more innovation than any borrowing of sound and style. The space between almost every song was accompanied by a rotation, like some odd well-rehearsed dance where they exchanged instruments and roles. When the third person to pick up the accordion played it as skillfully as the previous two, all I could do was shake my head. That much musical ability should garner the admiration of all of Middlebury College and without a doubt it garnered mine, especially when I can barely keep time on the tambourine. Though they all fluently alternated instruments, the violin is the preferred instrument for Kramer, the guitar for Daubert and Coccoma and percussion for Bernegger and Ken. Every song was the group’s original creation except for an exquisite cover of Modest Mouse’s “3rd Planet.” Their self-written lyrics were rich and sensitively-fashioned, hollering from the hearts of Middlebury students with poetic streaks and penchants for the mountains. A line from a song called “Solitude” that lodged in my brain the longest was the sweetly self-aware chorus: “If I wanted my solitude, I’d go to the city, and if I wanted to be with you, I’d go to the woods for a little while.”
So with appreciative ears and multitudinous shivers of happiness, surrounded by half of the audience dancing around the room, new folksy howls about lovers and the northern woods, melodic jangling and agile chords carried us into the little hours of the morning. When it ended, we asked for more, devastated, needing that perfect tremor in time to keep going. With an apologetic half-grin, Coccoma said, “That’s all we have.”
Kramer said that the second show ended with “lots of dancing, which was a good reminder for me that more than anything, Middlebury students just love to dance.” With half the group on study abroad for the spring semester, let’s hope this folk shiver doesn’t disappear with the thawing of spring because it would be tragic to lose this new musical endeavor.
Student musicians bring folksy groove to OSM
Comments
