What Cheer? Check out the Brigade

With retirement savings having lost a collective $2 trillion in the recent fiscal meltdown, there's plenty of reason to be glum. So if you need some spring in your step, check out Brass Bands Conquer the New World, a music festival (part of Honk!) taking place this coming Monday, starting with a 5 pm parade from Kennedy Plaza to AS220, featuring Providence's own What Cheer? Brigade.

You've got to love a band with a question mark in its name, and I profile What Cheer? Brigade in this week's Phoenix. 

As the local flowering of a small yet significant musical subgenre, What Cheer? Brigade puts a distinctive Providence touch on a broader anti-materialistic movement, combining an implicit social critique with the pure joy of a great sound. The band’s winning name references both the long-ago arrival here of Roger Williams, who fled religious rigidity in Massachusetts, and the sense of pursuing an offbeat contemporary quest.

Close to home, the Olneyville-based ensemble is just as likely to be found taking part in a scholastic parade in Central Falls, staging an impromptu musical farewell for an I-195 on-ramp facing imminent destruction, or playing a fundraiser for state Representative David Segal (D-Providence), a progressive favorite, at Nick-a-Nee’s, the Jewelry District watering hole.

What Cheer? aptly describes its mode as “Luddite hardcore” — a celebration of reclaiming public spaces and bringing people together in an era of rampant consumerism and prefabricated culture. At the same time, the band’s people-powered music is simultaneously old, new, dramatic, stirring, heartfelt, and groove-inducing, for young and old alike.