Cellar Shows How To Rock A Monday

New Haven-based artist Michael Miglietta has a visual style that leans into the surreal and the cosmic, creating dizzying, shape-shifting images with bold linework and vivid color. Under the moniker Parlay Droner, he’s also an experimental musician, exploring the harsher edges of sound. For a show of his artwork at the Cellar on Treadwell in Hamden, however, he faced a more pragmatic problem: ​“What do I have to do to get people to see a great band from Ireland on a Monday night?”

For Miglietta, the answer was an evening of visual art, music, and food that started at dinnertime and ended early enough to get some sleep for work the next day, yet felt like a weekend night in the flurry of activity going on. He marshaled the musical forces of Connecticut band City of Meriden and the Irish band Moundabout. He rustled up Detroit-style pizza (!) from Jam City Pizza. And he enlisted fellow artists Thomas Drew and Erin Altobello to set up tables. The result was a blowout to Miglietta’s first big art show of 2024, of his ​“original works and framed prints of my meticulously purposeful universe-building,” as the Cellar was full of people by 6:30.

Thomas and Esther Drew were on hand selling T‑shirts, prints, and skate decks. Drew developed his style through ​“years of comic books and video games, esoteric books, and mystical, weird stuff,” he said with a laugh. ​“How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way was my Bible.” But his style has headed off in its own direction, too; he usually focuses on ​“the internal stuff I can’t put into words,” he said. ​“I make what I can out of that.”

Erin Altobello of Lovage lit up her corner of the Cellar with her jewelry and the means for people to see how they looked on them.

This reporter settled in for a sampling of Detroit-style pizza, which, East Coaster that I am, I’d only heard of recently. I ordered a pizza with pepperoni, peppers, a dash of honey, cheese, and red sauce. The results were in an unfamiliar shape and order: the crust more like a thin bread, with the cheese melted on top of that, followed by the sauce and toppings. Was it apizza? No. Was it delicious? Absolutely. I washed it down with a blueberry ginger cider the Cellar had on tap from New England Cider — three flavors I love individually that, it turns out, do indeed blend well together.

Much of Miglietta’s artwork was on display on the wall behind the vendors, but Miglietta had also made a point of spreading it around the space, on flat surfaces, on top of a water cooler, in the hallway leading to the Cellar’s patio, and on the patio itself. So many examples of his strong style changed the atmosphere of the space. It was more dreamlike, a little unstable, a little dangerous, and a lot of fun.

The atmosphere carried over into the music. City of Meriden — Dave Gomes on vocals and guitar, Logan Carr on guitar, Dylan Scott on keys, Nick Serrambana on bass, and Jake Doherty on drums — rolled rockabilly, new wave, and hard rock into a ball and sent it careening down a musical hill, with additional velocity provided by a torrent of absurdist lyrics. Stripping mid-song banter to its basics (“here’s another song” was typical) kept the set tight and tense. Serrambana and Doherty held down solid rhythm, whether rushing out swinging or pounding out a slow, heavy groove, while Gomes, Carr, and Scott flipped between sharp rhythms, riffs, and the occasional wall-to-wall freakout, with highly entertaining results.

Moundabout — Paddy Shine and Phil Masterson, each on vocals, guitars, and electronics — then provided a counterpoint with a set of slow, very evocative, and engrossing songs about connecting with land, environment, and history in all its complexity. ​“We’re going to play some Irish folk music,” Shine joked at the beginning of the set, but in many ways he wasn’t far off. The duo began with a song about bog bodies, of which many have been found in Ireland (“how many bog bodies are lying in the ground? / How many bog bodies are waiting to be found?” they sang), and proceeded from there. ​“Come back to my goat skull table,” Shine sang on the second song.

Their slow-moving music had a hypnotic effect. Gradually, half the people in the room stopped talking and drew closer to the stage, taking chairs in the front row of tables and sitting on the floor in front of those. They sat as if gathered around a campfire, listening to the music built on drones and chants. ​“Will we see the stars tonight? Will we see the moon?” Shine sang toward the end of the set; by then, there was a keen sense of tapping into something primordial, with music, like a flame, providing a little light and warmth in the darkness.