Nico Hedley
Union Pool
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Dec. 14, 2023
It takes a whole helluva lot to get me to go Williamsburg’s Union Pool, a bar that’s never not packed wall-to-wall with young boozers looking for the cheapest beer and easiest lay. It’s a fun place on the surface, but the vibe brought by the clientele is … tough. Which is a shame since the space itself is prime for excelling as a venue: Massive front bar, a backyard with a taco-truck parked and ready to serve, and a small event space with one of the cutest stages in NYC.
Needless to say, however, that when Jacob Richter, drummer, rhythm theorist, and contemporary jazz musician extraordinaire (whom I’ve previously profiled here), calls me up to say he’s subbing in with a rock band, in this case fronted by Nico Hedley, I go where he says to go.
“What kind of music are y’all playing?”
“I don’t know man. It’s rock. It’s good.”
“Yeah, but like, what kind of rock.”
“I don’t know the sub-genres. It’s just good. Post-this, whatever-core, you tell me.”
So, reader, let me tell you:
Nico Hedley is meat-and-potatoes, coffee-and-cigarettes, pizza-and-beer, falling-in-love-with-a-stranger, meaning-every-word-you-say, rock-and-fucking-roll. Built on the forever functional songwriting formula of loud-quiet-loud or quiet-loud-quiet, a la Weezer, Pixies, and every ecstatic etcetera, Nico Hedley guided the band through a set of American jangle and chug — the sound is full, the catharsis earned and earnest.
Playing to crowd of friends and fans, Hedley’s music is a major-key pummel — a sound that strikes enough familiar chords to remind you that you should listen again to that one record you really liked in high school, the one you’d sneak out of the house to scream along to on a midnight joyride, the one that got you through your first breakup, the one you showed you senior year sweetheart, the one that made you want to move to New York in the first place …
Through all this familiarity there is, however, a gorgeous turn in the lyrics. One could expect from this sort of thing that the words being sung would be sufficiently literary, poetic, and wrought, but often artists that pull from the same well as our Nico find their own outpourings tainted by the cynicism that is so often in that water. Not so with Nico Hedley — the lyrics woven through these songs meet all the requirements of literary weight, but the perspective they serve to illuminate is far from our expected anhedonia. Exemplified here:
…I mourn for the golden calf,
For they’ve been stripped of all their glory
By men walking the righteous path…
–and–
Maria’s called me over
to ask if I’ve been doing alright.
And I say, some of us don’t get
to feel that way, but these days
I’ve been thinking that’s just fine…
Plugged into a particularly millennial sort of angst, the throughline of Hedley’s lyrics is the quest for the modest ecstasy of ‘being alright,’ of ‘doing fine,’ of missing some sort of simplicity in life. And this is integrated completely in the music’s approach.
The transcendence here is to be found buried: Simple harmony, tuneful melody, and a constant anticipation of the next breaking moment where the guitar is allowed to howl, the drums freed to open fire, the bass dropped to tar-thick depths.
Loud-quiet-loud. Stomp-and-holler. Quiet-loud-quiet. It worked for Beethoven. It works for everyone. So long as you mean it.
