Roma di Luna and A Night In The Box at Acadia Café on 12/1/07

By: Carl Atiya Swanson

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Roma di Luna - Photo from their MySpace

It’s a pity that the Acadia Café on Nicollet and Franklin will be pulling up stakes and moving to the West Bank on January 1^st, 2008. Its new location (kitty-corner from the 400 Bar in the old Riverview Café) will not have the separate theater area that made the Acadia so infuriatingly charming. The Nicollet space gets a bad rap; the sound mix gets muddy, there isn’t enough room on stage to lay an egg, the bathrooms are right behind the curtain and people are always going in and out. Still, on a snowy night, the creaky stadium seating can stomp and rollick, the sound can ring clear and handclaps and soul shouts abound.

This is just what happened when Roma di Luna and A Night in the Box took the stage on Saturday, December 1st. On a day when many may have been tempted to stay in to drink hot cocoa and listen to Burl Ives, Minneapolitans proved again that winter weather is no excuse not to commune with your fellow human. Roma di Luna sound checked to a filling house where most every seat in the house was occupied during the night, and the warmth was welcome.

Alexi and Channy Moon Caselle, the husband-wife duo that form Roma’s core, started off the official set as a duo, with Alexi sitting sing to play his stolid but emotive folk guitar and Channy standing to play her violin and sing. In singing, Channy evinces the feeling of warm running water; there is a comfort to the flow of the words, she bends and rounds syllables as if to envelope the listener. What is lost in enunciation is gained in the feeling that it is all coming from some other place, and whether it is hushed or high, it is immediate.

After two songs, including a powerful rendition of “In the Bells,” the rest of the band came back out to join them. What followed was the first round of the night’s foot-stomping and hand-clapping, as delicate songs were given extra gravitas, and old-time, hootenanny-like tunes turned raucous.  “Romance of Wolves” gave Channy’s fiddle its Roma gypsy moment to shine, as the whole band rallied around the dervish-like folk dance melody. The band then slowed down for two songs, including a restart on “Never Give in to Silence” due to a lost mic connection (no way of escaping all sound problems, it seems), but they finished strongly with a never-before-played arrangement of “Ghost Dance” and “Red Walls,” a reel inspired by a Monet painting.

A Night in the Box - Photo by Stacy Schwartz

A Night in the Box began their set with the unwieldy-titled “The Broken Down Radiator of Romance Blues,” giving us the first taste of their Southern Rock-come-‘O Brother Where Art Thou’ madness. Lead singing duties were split between Clayton Hagen and Travis Hetman, and Hetman kicked off with his Robert Plant voice (we would hear Hagen’s later) and the first of many twitchy, spastic dance moves and spontaneous clapping from audience members.  

Like Roma di Luna, A Night in the Box featured a violin, played in fine bluegrass fashion by Kailyn Spencer, but the highlight of the show was Hagen’s ability to pull a full string sound out of whatever he was playing at that moment - it is not every day that you see a banjo played like it was a ’64 Stratocaster. Even when Hagen broke a string on “Empty Levee Blues,” there was still a raucous Lynyrd Skynyrd exchange between him and drummer Alex Dalton, replete with kicking of cymbals and vamping out to the crowd. Ending with their a cappella anthem to the hard city grind, “The Hustle,” the crowd clapping gave a triumphant ebullience to the end of the show, a shot of moonshine to keep us warm in the night.

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Location Info: Acadia Café
Artist Info: A Night In The Box, Roma di Luna

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