Speaking of dancing, on November 12, Nuovo Testamento graced Iowa City with their music live at The James Theater as a part of The Englert Theatre‘s Track Zero concert series, which highlights local and touring alternative artists. I attended the concert that night, fully ready to boost a move myself.

Before they went on, the show kicked off with three openers. First was Jeff In Leather, a dance/electronic artist based in Omaha, Nebraska. He had provided a strong start to the night with a hardcore but enthralling set. He was then followed by The Mall, a synth-punk artist who had an equally flashy set. It also inspired much headbanging from me and the audience. Lastly, there was Nuovo Testamento’s tour opener and electronic music artist Nuxx, who had flair I couldn’t help but admire when performing.

Any opener I’ve witnessed in my limited concert experience, has never let me down, which remains the case here. Each set from the openers contained amazing light shows and their performances got mine and the crowd’s blood pumping. They certainly were a fantastic build-up to the central act of the night and were quite the acts themselves. Admittedly, there’s a bit of a humorous transition from the hardcore electronic music to the flowy disco-pop but this didn’t cause the night to slow down.

Thankfully, once it was time for Nuovo Testamento, I managed to find an amazing spot on the floor right in front of the stage and very middle of the floor. I was very grateful for this amazing view, and it made the whole experience more immersive for me. The James Theater is a smaller venue, so many of the performers throughout the night came down from the stage and to the dancefloor where the audience and I were. It gave the show an overall more intimate feel, which I immensely cherished. 

Once Crowley and band members Giacomo Zatti (drums) and Andrea Mantione, entered the stage, the audience’s adrenaline rush kicked in once again. Crowley, upon approaching the mic, cheerfully encouraged the audience to dance, remarking that she knew we could after seeing us watch the openers, which was something I was happy to oblige. 

The band mostly performed tracks from Trouble, including “2 Hearts”, “Soldier for Love”, “On the Edge”, and “Dream On”. It was an absolute dream to hear my favorites from the EP performed live and be able to dance along to them.

Crowley certainly helped in sparking the dancing. She was a compelling performer in her own right, dancing onstage and clearly enjoying it so much that it was hard not to follow in her footsteps. She clearly wanted all of us moving on the dance floor, and she certainly delivered in convincing me to do so, much to my surprise.

Since this was my first time going to a concert alone and I prefer dancing in groups, I was nervous about dancing around a bunch of strangers. However, this night ended up being different. Shockingly I found myself disregarding all that and moving to the beat without a care in the world. Getting to dance to this upbeat music with these strangers became a new experience that I welcomed with open arms. 

Nuovo Testamento also played some older tracks from their 2021 album New Earth, like “The Searcher” and “Vanity”. Although I’m not familiar with much of their older work, hearing these two tracks live made me want to check out this album in full, and  the audience and I were still happily dancing. 

Much like their openers, the group was illuminated by various colored lights. Once again, the audience and I were treated to light show with a lot of variety. For a group that produces such colorful music, it’s appropriate that they have an equally colorful stage to perform on. 

After the show concluded, I was left with this post-concert high that I had missed. Seeing Nuovo Testamento illicited pure joy that can only be brought on by hearing a band so energetic live. But if you want to feel even fraction of that feeling, I’d recommend their new EP. In the meantime, that will certainly do the trick. 

More information on upcoming Track Zero shows presented by The Englert Theatre can be found here.

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Nuovo Testamento has been releasing music consistently throughout their 6 year run. Their latest EP Trouble, released just this past July. Their most popular project is their 2021 album New Earth with their featured hit, The Searcher. The Searcher is catchy, dynamic, and serves as an echoing love letter to goth club pop of the past century.

Since their debut in 2019, Nuovo Testamento has been the shining star of goth clubs, replicating and revitalizing those time capsule sounds from the 80s and 90s. Members Chelsea Crowley, Giacomo Zatti, and Andrea Mantione place emphasis on their roots in Italian disco and synth pop, stating that they want listeners to “think of all of [their] favorite synth-era throwback hits mixed with a modern pop sensibility and songs that will carve their way into [their] synapses…and stay there.”

In a 2021 interview for POST-PUNK.COM, Zatti answered that the name Nuovo Testamento (translated to New Testament) came from the band’s Italian upbringing, and the deeply ingrained Catholicism within it. He said “We’re fascinated by the infinite misuses and misinterpretations of something considered so fundamental… The conflicts and contradictions in that conversation are so interesting and we were talking about it a lot at the time… we started making this music that was both light and dark… it just stuck,” (Zatti, for POST-PUNK.COM).

Their inspirations hold close to the Catholic imagery often present in the new wave and post-punk gothic projects of the 1980s. This era of U.K. New Wave bands were famously using music as a form of protest and developing a counterculture to their mainstream in the 1980s. Many European new wave groups like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Depeche Mode, and The Smiths all worked with art inspired by themes of Christianity, as Nuovo Testamento continues and reimagines their own relations with Catholicism and counterculture, continuing the tradition in the modern age.

If you still find yourself unconvinced, take it from the bandcamp.com users who recommend this band. Username blaxcodexx444 says, “The Searcher gives me Freestyle 80s vibe. I love the vocals and the synth beat are harmonies. I saw this band live, and I fell in love ever since.” User NobleNova says, “Growing up listening to 80’s music, this feels so reminiscent and nostalgic unlike anything else. I feel like I time hopped into a period of time I never got to experience. I seriously can’t get enough of this album.“

Catch Nuovo Testamento this Wednesday November 12th at the James Theater, more information on the show can be found here. Stay up-to-date with upcoming alternative shows in Iowa City from Track Zero with The Englert. With or without me, I hope you enjoy the show.

The post Concert Preview: New Wave Glamour with Nuovo Testamento at the James, Nov. 12 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Who needs chairs indeed, when you’ve got psych pop to jive to? Soulful and fluidly shrill, with fuzz and reverb. Evian was able to exhibit his talent on many instruments. At points int the set, he played the electric guitar, the keyboard, and the saxophone all contained within different songs. As the guitar, stratospherically warm and feeble, whereas the bass and drum, textured with staccato downbeats. Evian’s set, which had most of its tracks derived from the 2021 album entitled Time to Melt, was one profuse with a refined inkling for what indie rock is when extracted from a place of unfeigned, cordial atonality.

Image via Anika Maculangan

However, Evian’s stridently uplifting performance was then interrupted by disruption of the venue’s fire alarm, which forced the audience to evacuate the theater as a safety precaution. The audience, which had so far been enjoying Evian’s set, made their way out of the venue right in front of the entrance, where the fire department had soon shortly arrived to survey the building. With much luck, it was only a false alarm and there had been no actual fire. With this, the audience had then returned inside the venue, where Evian and his band had then carried on with their set.

They showered the crowd with crescendos of firm velocity, sprouted from their semblance, resonant to the Dunedin sound we all know of. A New York-based artist signed to Fat Possum Records, Evian has a coveted respect for the ’70s. What would be considered country and blues overlay on top of his already present strain of indie rock, bordering into folk. Furthermore, in Evian’s lyrical value, what we can gain is optimism for such things we may find hopeless, the light at the end of the tunnel, if it wasn’t such a banal thing to say.

Image via Anika Maculangan

With tracks like “9.99 Free”, we witness a narrative that positions itself as a slice-of-life story, yet with filters that explicate life’s refined convolutions, however intricate and complex. Whereas in more tensely brittle songs like “Never Know”, we observe an anthem that bears its rawness and tinge for realism, as it constitutes itself as a pandemic lockdown project. It constitutes where one finds themselves brimming with uncertainty and doubt. What Evian achieves is to find thorns within roses, yet convene them into a bouquet, where the spikes don’t prick.

Finally, to end his set, Evian plays a cover of the celebrated Gerry Rafferty song called “Right Down the Line“, which as soon as its iconic, venerable guitar riff strikes and cuts through the draft, the audience is immediately thankful for Evian’s aurally loosened set, all appointed within his finely calibrated soundscape. With Evian’s set, we think of maraschino cherries, where in another dimension, are pleasantly bittersweet, as he successfully fuses crudely-allotted instrumentation with mildly sprung resonance. 

Image via Anika Maculangan

After a brief intermission, the lights go off again. As Tennis comes up on the stage’s platform, the surface is instantaneously pervaded with the blinkering of a disco ball, encompassed by prismatic strobe lights and projections of pigmented dye that seem to fizzle and bleed into one another. One can note that Tennis’ layout set-wise gave the illusion of an open living room’s format. There was something so free-flowing, flexible, and adaptable about it, like the band was just a traveling set that could play whenever, wherever. There were casual keyboards in place, surrounding Alaina Moore, the band’s lead vocalist, whereas multiple sets of guitars, both acoustic and electric, had been in position adjacent to Patrick Riley.

It was fascinating to see how multifaceted the pair was, in their convertible manner of being able to operate such protean machinery, run by the couple’s engine of love and respect for one another. The duo conjured a feel for makeshift improvisation in their set, as one song after the other had evoked a sense of innately instinctive musicality. Moore danced gingerly during some of the songs, cooly holding the mic with a relaxed dexterity. It had felt as if we were just watching Moore and Riley coexist through the windowed lens of Englert’s stage. Peeking in or glancing through, Tennis welcomed these wandering eyes into their life with open arms.

Image via Cat Dooley

How one might describe Tennis’ discography, is as a transportive portal that leads to a celestially astral seashore, where waves greet the sand with trance like syncopations of Moore’s choral vocals alongside synth lines, decayed and with long attacks and high sustain. The band played Tracks off their Pollen album, an amalgamation of uplifting and more indulgently insouciant songs, creating a weaved tapestry of the ethereal and the gallantly stirring.

Lyrically, Tennis on tracks like “One Night with the Valet”, and “Let’s Make a Mistake Tonight”, implore themes of lighthearted, carefree existence, whilst being attentive to the world’s paced flow into progression and succession. This is at which one learns to embrace these fluctuating shifts in a backdrop where heaven and the universe blur into one another. What Tennis amplifies is the silver lining of every cloud to be confronted, at which their inclination toward surf pop and yacht rock simultaneously deliver callings of the ocean and the sea.

Image via Cat Dooley

Midway through the set, Alaina touches base with the crowd as she plays the game of guessing everyone’s majors. She denotes how fun it is to stage a show at a college town. She also tells the humble tale of how in 2010, the band had played a Des Moines show at Vaudeville Mews, where they had stayed with a member’s aunt and uncle. They had been their biggest supportive fans at that time at that particular show.

Something to observe is that Tennis doesn’t shy away from its past. Even musically, they play tracks from previous releases such as “My Better Self” off the 2013 album Young and Old. Some songs off the 2020 album Swimmer were also played, at which tracks like “How to Forgive” and “Runner”, remind us of the band’s affinity for synth-pop. To then close the show, the duo had played “Late Night“, where Moore had told the crowd that they would now be singing the audience to sleep. On guitars, Moore played on a mild acoustic, while Riley complimented this with demure strummings of an electric. The two had let out a lullaby before the night had come to its eventual end.

Image via Anika Maculangan

Tennis’ display of drifting, vagrant sound had led the crowd to be suspended in the air.  In a levitated state brought upon by their hazed tonality, it fades into an electronically-induced unification of what is retro and vintage. A rejuvenated revitalization of a stylistic sound buried far too long below the nu-pop stratum. Tennis is the calm after the storm that pushes for a rainbow upon exit. 

Track Zero continues with Sen Morimoto on November 11th, and ZORA on November 17th. You can read KRUI’s interview with Tennis’ Alaina Moore here.

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