(((folkYEAH!))) & Tierra Sol Present

Doors: 7:30pm

Show: 8:30pm

Age Restrictions: 21+

Tickets will be on sale Friday May 3rd @ 10AM

Tickets available here

Joe Lally was onstage, playing at full throttle, when he realized that his band had found a true kindred spirit. It was the fall of 2021 and the Messthetics — the instrumental trio of Lally on bass, his former Fugazi bandmate Brendan Canty on drums and guitarist Anthony Pirog  — were at Brooklyn venue the Bell House, digging into their uptempo riff workout “Serpent Tongue.” Joining them for the piece was a special guest, acclaimed jazz saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, making only his second cameo with the group after a drop-in at another New York show back in 2019. That first meeting had been a success, but this time, Lewis’ presence sparked something new.

“It pushed the song like crazy,” Lally recalls of a passage when Lewis and Pirog began trading fiery solos. As the intensity kept building, the bassist felt simultaneously challenged and exhilarated. “You’re just holding on and going, ‘It sounds great,’” he remembers telling himself. “‘Just keep going.’”

That imperative — the sense that there was more to explore within what began as an ad hoc union among the four musicians — lingered after the performance ended. Now, Lewis, Pirog, Lally and Canty are ready to unveil their first full-length album as a quartet. Recorded in just two days in December 2022 at Takoma Park, Maryland, studio Tonal Park, with engineer Don Godwin, The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis features nine tracks that capture the combustive chemistry Lally originally sensed onstage while expanding the collaboration in all directions. Across the album, due out on March 15th via the legendary Impulse! label, the quartet can be heard locking into a hard, swaggering funk groove on “That Thang,” cradling a wistful, jazz-like theme on “Asthenia” or rocketing into ecstatic art-punk overdrive on “Emergence.”

Canty relishes the way the album preserves a feeling of real-time musical conversation. “In a world that can be perfected in a myriad of ways using computers, it's super important to allow the thing you've honestly reacted to, to live,” the drummer says. “So I've spent a lot of time, since that first initial recording, protecting this recording. We did try to mix some of it, but we really left it as rough mixes for the most part.”

“Sometimes you'll play a record live and it just doesn't translate like it does onstage,” Pirog adds. “But this was just one of those moments where we were just prepared enough, everyone was open to being loose enough, that we just sat down and made it happen really fast.”

Evidence of that spontaneity runs throughout the record. Listen to the way Canty and Lewis play a tumbling, stop-start duet against Pirog and Lally’s tight descending vamp at the end of opening track “L’Orso” or how Lewis and Pirog improvise together atop a dubby groove during “Three Sisters,” urging one another toward thrilling new peaks.  

Even when the guitarist and saxophonist solo sequentially, as on closing track “Fourth Wall” — where Lewis ends his statement with a gritty wail and Pirog answers with a snarling, soulful line — you can hear a certain charge passing between them.