The Bollard Bulletin for May 12, 2025
Local Music Monday: The Gospel of Festiva
Local Music Monday
In the middle of “The Dead of Night,” Carver Arena-Bruce stops singing and starts shouting: “Yeah, if I could write a different song, don’t you think I’d write a different song? If I could get all of these animals to stop howling all night long. If I could get it off my back for just a second, just to breathe. If I could find a little fight somewhere down inside of me.”
No ifs about it: Arena-Bruce found their fight, and it appears to be with God. Which is unfortunate, because as noted earlier in that song, “you can ask God for forgiveness, oh, but He plays to win.”
Festiva, previously a solo project with a little help from friends, is now the trio of Arena-Bruce on vocals and guitar with two-thirds of amiright? — Noah Grenier-Farwell on drums and Simi Kunin on bass. Earlier this spring they released Everything in Moderation, an album “written over the years, captured in a weekend” at Prism Analog, a recording studio in Bayside. It’s punk rock with a prog problem and singer-songwriter sensibilities, which is a strange vehicle to wrestle with thorny theological questions like free will versus divine intervention, but we mortals work with the materials at hand.
“Sometimes I sit and wonder: how much is fate, how much our actions? Do we really get all that much of a say?” Arena-Bruce ponders on “Awake in the House.” “But any time I’ve gotten something that I wanted, it comes in the most unexpected way.”
So, divine intervention then, at least probably. And why even bring a deity into the indie rock if you don’t believe in it? Or write a song titled, “The Shortest Gospel” that begins, “Saint Mark has got to get his shit together”?
Can’t say I understand, but as a listener, I’m intrigued. Moderation is mostly a means to exorcize demons of self-doubt, sorrow over lost and wayward loved ones, and the existential dread of death. “Oh so indecisive, to be the hands of God / Carry ghosts and lichens / Doesn’t it seem so odd now, baby?” Arena-Bruce asks on “Ghosts and Lichens.” Yes, it is odd, but it rocks, thanks to the energetic new rhythm section and the rawness of the production.
The author has tackled this subject before, on “Idol,” from 2019’s Songs I Don’t Sing for Anyone, on which God and the devil are imagined walking a street at 5 a.m. and randomly picking passersby for an eternity in heaven or hell. “Well, God and the devil, they’re on the same side / They go to the same big parties in the sky / And they laugh and toast drinks and pretend like they care / Pretend like they're different / Pretend like they're there,” that song goes.
The teleological musings on Moderation are delivered against a distinctly local backdrop of depression and desperation. “All my friends are drowning in bottles,” Arena-Bruce sings on “Hannaford, Grocery Store,” in which the titular supermarket is humorously declared “such a bore” compared to Whole Foods, where “they don’t make me pay.”
“In a Dream,” the longest and most compositionally ambitious of the lot, sums up the situation. “No God? That's fine. / I'm really coping / It’s a tough pill to swallow, but I won't be broken / And I got time off and I've got ten dollars / Gonna buy me a bottle of firewater.”
“Grimoire (Closing Credits)” ends the album on a despondent note, with Arena-Bruce alone at a piano, singing, “And you want to write a letter, but you can't do that / And you want to make it better, but you can't do that / And you want to say it's funny, but you can't do that / And you want to spend your money, but you can't do that.” But then, mysteriously, if not miraculously, in comes the chorus of “Ghosts and Lichens,” including the second part: “Like a little bird, you always fly away / In another world, I’ll see you every day.”
Who’s the you in there? If you’re a believer, you know, and someday you may even know for sure.