Last Friday night at the bottom of Hastings Hall, something unusual and loud occurred from 7 pm to almost midnight. You’d think an RA would serve a warning, or even a fee for all the noise complaints from above, but they knew better than to mess with the young punks putting on a rock show in Hastings Formal Lounge.
It was Eyes Like Fire’s final show, a band originally based in Augusta area and featuring two USM students: Mark Dennis and Ryan Cutler. For the night, they were joined by four young bands from Maine, some of them from USM, and some of them just friends.
To create a mood for the show, Hastings Formal Lounge went through a total transformation. Covers were hung up at the end of the room with a long line of amps sharing the border to create two stages. Large stage lights were set up with red gels to create a darker atmosphere, and a surfeit of mic cords littered the room as if vines were growing from the floor. The back of the formal lounge became a two-staged monster of hanging quilts and blankets, illuminated by a dark red glow and overtaken by sound equipment.
Butcher Boy took stage left stage first and played a 30 minute set of ferocious folk-punk. The instrumentation was mostly banjo, acoustic guitar, drums, bass and sometimes a trombone. Their presentation of songs was theatrical and always energetic. Their playing was a little loose, but it was downplayed by the amount of passion they displayed.
The If In Life continued the night of punk and rock on the other stage, though half of it didn’t match the spirit of music played for the rest of the night. At first their sound was very experimental and post-rock with ethereal guitar sounds and the layering of interweaving melodies. Their second song was more vocal-based and sounded very generic. The third song matched the same experimental tone of the first song, but was unfortunately followed by another generic rock song. The band seemed confused about their musical identity, because it didn’t meld together like some other eclectic bands out there.
A Bangor trio called Captain Hollow, featuring ex-collaborators of USM’s Jakob Battick, played next. Hollow played a set of rhythmic punk-lite (not to be confused with pop-punk) with abbreviated rests, and a few dance numbers. What was particularly characteristic about this group was lead singer Ryan Higgin’s slurred and trembling voice. There were some moments when Higgins became more pronounced and louder as the songs reached a harder edge.
Second to last for the night, Pamola brought their unique style of jazz-infused post-hardcore music to the stage. Most of their songs were strangely structured with the complex tweaking of guitars, intertwined in rapidly changing melodies and rhythm, many times taking unexpected turns into madness with the jagged grinding of distortion and noise and inarticulate screaming. At other times, the band followed a slow groove with the lead singer speaking a quiet narration of philosophical musings. Later in the set, Pamola was joined by the leadman of Butcher Boy who played violin and toms on a few songs. For their final song their former lead singer, also a member of Butcher Boy, joined for a final bout of thrashing and tempered yelling.
Having helped Eyes Like Fire set up a few previous shows at USM, it was a little heartbreaking to see them play their final one. They were one of few bands with abundant screaming that had a great diversity in style and elite musicianship with every song. On the final hour of Friday, they delivered just that along with some tasty treats at the end. “Sincerely Dearly” has always been one of my favorite songs of theirs, and they played it exceptionally well at this show. While the band is post-hardcore in their roots, their music reached out to genre variations of jazz, soul and rock.
Eyes Like Fire played more songs that were equally ferocious and musically complex. At one point, they had a three-person drum interlude with two members of Butcher Boy-something that gave their final show a special touch. At the end of their set, master guitarist Mark Dennis took out a piñata and smashed it to bits with a junky guitar, which led to candy bars and guitar parts flying out into the audience. In the last gasp of the show, it literally became bittersweet.
Though it felt like an era of live punk rock at USM was coming to an end, I know bands like Butcher Boy, Captain Hollow and Pamola would carry on the spirit and start a new dynasty of DIY punk.