Trey Moore had just finished his first song Sunday night at the State House. The applause had ended and there was a silence. “I don’t talk much,” Moore said, direct and self-deprecating. But it turned out that he and the two acts that preceded him — Danie V and Ammar — had a lot to say, perhaps all the more so because, for all three acts, it was their first time returning to a performing stage since the pandemic had started.
“It’s been so long, like pre-pandemic,” Danie V said, since she’d performed in front of an audience. But there was little sense she’d missed a beat. Backed by a guitarist she introduced as Tyler — who provided an easy sense of vibe, groove, and harmonic structure — Danie V let her voice slide easily over her chosen melodies, staying close and delivering the lyrics’ message when needed, but also turning ends of phrases into opportunities for vocal improvisation that drew cheers from the audience, which moved closer to the stage as soon as she started singing. Interspersing covers of Miguel and Amy Winehouse with originals, Danie V eased the audience into the music that still awaited them.
Ammar and his band — Tim on guitar, Jared on bass, and Johnny on drums — then hit the stage rocking. The three instruments melded into one entity, all sharp attacks and driving rhythms, which let Ammar use the full range of his voice and effects to create a moody, hard-hitting, and explosive sound.
“The past two years have been really weird and difficult for all of us,” Ammar said. “There are a lot of people here I haven’t seen in years. This is crazy.” He revealed that not only had he not performed in two years, but he had stopped writing music. All the songs in the set were written at least two or three years ago — that is, except one, which he wrote five days before the show. He had to perform it. In all of his material, Ammar was thoughtful and unafraid to show his emotions. His music was catharsis, moving toward uplift.
“You may not know me, but sometimes I don’t know myself,” he joked at the beginning of the set. With a performance like that, it seemed unlikely that he’d be a stranger on New Haven’s stages for long.
Finally Trey Moore, backed by a full band, got up in front of the audience and mostly let the music do the talking. With a sound that pulled from pop, R&B, hip hop, and rock in equal measure, Moore’s songs built their power over time, gathering intensity and energy and letting it dissipate, over and over, as Moore switched from bass to guitar and sometimes assigned himself just vocal duties. A well-chosen cover here and there — like Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids,” which let Moore pay homage to a clear influence — punctuated the set, but the rest of the night really belonged to Moore’s own music, which often followed the winning formula of lyrics about heartbreak and loneliness set to uplifting, empowering music. His final song of the night felt like a sweeping epic; it may have detailed a broken romance, but it carved out a huge space for optimism.
“Everything is wrong, everything is right,” Moore said. “Everything is possible in my mind.”
