TV Sleep, Jeff Mueller, Sandy Clams, and The Whimbrels
The Cellar on Treadwell
Hamden
Feb. 7, 2026
Two guitarists knelt before their pedals on The Cellar on Treadwell’s stage in Hamden Friday night. The sound in the room devolved into warbling waves of distortion. One guitarist took his hands completely off the guitar to just play the pedals instead. The other put both hands on his guitar frets, indulging in what he later told me was called “two-hand tapping.” Their niche techniques, together with their positions on the floor, felt like a mix between a craft night and a divine ritual to the sublime.
It was the kind of crazed innovation I love to see in a visiting band.
The guitarists, Joey Wright and Tom McCausland, were performing a set with their post-punk band TV Sleep, hailing from Kingston, N.Y. The band was on a four-act bill along with The Sandy Clams, Jeff Mueller, and The Whimbrels. They embraced the city they were in for the night, chanting “Louis’ Lunch! Louis’ Lunch!” before their set.
Wright took it one step further, declaring, “Louis’ Lunch saved my life!” My guess was they ate there earlier that day.
Wright went on to hazard half-baked jokes into the audience, doing some Canadian accent gag I couldn’t quite follow. When he asked if the bit landed, I shook my head. Then the crowd, including me, couldn’t help but smile at his need for immediate feedback. Bassist Kenny Hauptman caught the moment, telling Wright on stage, “But the bit on the bit worked.”
The rest of the set was a dive further down the rabbit hole of righteous noises on the edges of punk and bizarre yet charming between-song banter. The instrumentalists stayed in sync throughout, speeding up together as one massive machine.
The music was dead serious, almost devotional. The chatter was silly. At one point, Wright asked drummer Kenny Thomas to repeat something he’d said earlier. I thought it might be an insight or observation. Nope, it was just the word “heretofore.”
TV Sleep’s out-of-town offerings played well against the hyper-local solo act that followed, Jeff Mueller. How local? Mueller had to travel only one mile to get to the venue.
Mueller is known in the math rock and post-rock scenes for bands he’s been in, including June of 44, Rodan, and Shipping News. He showed up Saturday night all by his lonesome, supported by his the heartfelt screams of his niche core of fans.
Where TV Sleep’s outsider status gave them freedom to be weird, Mueller’s position as a local legend gave him the gift of the audience’s patience. He started his set with a gorgeous instrumental piece where he all but made the guitar sing. It was a rich, grainy sound, celestial yet warm. Reverberations made the notes tasty.
The guitar’s melody was like a hand, inviting the listener into the unknown. I was trying to think where I had heard anything like this. It was kind of like … classical guitar? Or Spanish guitar? Not in terms of song structure but in the quality of the sound itself.
When Mueller got into the rest of his set, he paired the song of his guitar with clear-eyed lyrics. He sang about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a song that might be hard to play anywhere else but right here in Connecticut. It was a set full of shared knowledge.
Flanked on both sides by another Connecticut act and another New York band, TV Sleep and Jeff Mueller made a shining case for the joys of playing out of state and the layers of understanding present in an in-state show. And the outstretched, open hand of a bill that puts both sides of the coin together.
