Meernaa
Baby’s All Right
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NYC
March 17, 2024
It’s no secret now that a good majority of modern independent music is fusional in its construction — more and more are bands wearing the stripes of multiple genres and approaches, all bashed together into sounds that are sometimes striking, sometimes sickening. This has, of course, always been the case.
There’s no “true originality” in the sui generis sense — or if there is, it’s rare. Artists make their work by locking together disparate influences. But, there’s something happening now and for the last twenty or so years, where this act of fusing isn’t hidden but acknowledged flat out: multi-hyphenate genre names, prefixes attached to ‑core, or — the worst of it all — nostalgia-bait genre revivalism. All to say, the sounds of the past have never been escapable. Perhaps now we’re just being honest about where we’re coming from.
Enter Meernaa, the band helmed by Carly Bond with all the self-depreciative, awkward charm necessary to ensure the music glimmers as bright as possible. Last night at Baby’s All Right in Williamsburg, Bond would intro her band and songs as though she’d forgotten she was on stage, half asking questions to the audience, half wondering aloud how the hell she got up there — a dismissive hayseed sort of energy, Cali-hippie flustered by the bustle of American Babylon. It was a funny vibe, within it yet another pre-molded aesthetic — the blissed-out troubadour, serving in some way to disarm all of us in attendance toward the feats we were to see play out.
Hearthy is the adjective that comes most immediately to mind. Carly’s big, smoky, melismatic alto sunk into the mix of warm Rhodes and shoegazy, nauseous sliding guitar, all over beats that shift subtly between trip-hop and Americana shuffle — the sound crackles and hums with a humble roil. Over the course of the set of six or seven mid-downtempo tunes, this warbling thrum may have gotten a bit tired as the central aesthetic loci, but luckily Bond is a master tunesmith, and within every one of Meernaa’s songs there’s a glorious moment of breakage, some shattering of the rustic urn — whether in the form of sudden hollers or tightly wefted electric jazz adjacent instrumental sections, there’s always the moment.
In all this blooming murk, my big reference point is Joni Mitchell — particularly her band in the seventies with Jaco and Pat Metheny. Though, where Mitchell’s rambling, skewed, and angular poetry provides justification for the shimmer-shred of Jaco and Metheny, a barely reigned-in chaos of unbridled virtuosity, Bond’s reverberant soul vamps not only seem to make room for these instances of glory, but are actively built around the summoning of them.
The open last night was Paul Spring, who I’ve written about for this publication before. He’s literally the best.
In so far as ways to spend a St. Patrick’s Day in New York go, I couldn’t’ve had a better evening. For all the much-maligned cultural appropriation and insincere aestheticizing that the holiday brings, Meernaa and Spring were a well of deeply considered influences, tender homage, and — fundamentally — true originality within the traditions to which they both owe no small part of their inspiration.
