By: Andrea Myers
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New Holland - Photo by Andrea Myers (click for larger)
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At the end of a summer that has overflowed with indie pop/rock bands and Next Big Buzz Band hype, it was refreshing to step away from the mania for an evening and become submerged in the always comforting dive bar atmosphere of Big V's. Its easy to forget, from time to time, that the scene has so many great pockets of diverse music, and seeing promising up-and-comers New Holland deliver a tight set of heavy punk made me thankful for stumbling into yet another underground subculture of music lovers.
Unlike the emo-punk that is overplayed on the radio these days, with its distinct fashion requirements and obvious, cliché moods, New Holland play a kind of hard-ass punk that aligns itself more closely with its roots. Drawing influences from the precise instrumentals of bands ranging from Tool to The Cure and with high-flying vocal stylings reminiscent of Deftones lead singer Chino Moreno, the band pulls together some of the better elements from the last 20 years of punk, post-punk, nu-metal, post-post punk and its miscellaneous offspring.
As they took to the little stage at the end of the bar, guitarist Jon McAab started plucking out a looping melody that I thought might be the end of their sound check, since the lead singer was still missing. After a moment though, bass player Bryce Richarson and drummer Matt Smith joined in, and the three played a technically complicated, syncopated rhythm that continued to grow in notes and intensity. By the time singer Dave Walker jumped up on stage to join the band, the musicians had captivated the attention of the room and most of the bar patrons had moved over to be in front of the stage.
What surprised me most about the punk quartet was their ability to lay on the funk (rhyme scheme unintended). While Walker’s vocals could have probably sailed along with a number of different punk outfits, it was the rhythmic syncopations and builds between the three instruments that made New Holland a standout act. Though it was difficult to make out the lyrics of most songs – a problem I attributed more to the sound system than to intentional distortion, though I could be wrong – Walker sang and screamed so passionately that the vocal stylings remained significant without being lyrically poignant.
New Holland have one EP to their name, Playing to Our Weaknesses, and the band hammered out all four tracks during their set at Big V’s, along with a handful of unreleased tunes. Like any good punk band, each song was relatively short, and the end of one leaked into the beginning of the next, which kept the audience members’ heads bobbing up and down frantically for the whole set. The reasonably large group of patrons seemed captivated by New Holland, and as we all nodded along to the thriving, rhythmic punk, I looked around to see a room of people enthralled in the wall of noise coming out of the corner stage of the dirty, lovable bar.
Location Info:
Big Vs
Artist Info: New Holland
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