The Nields, Williams College, 9/12/98

by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Sept. 13, 1998) -- The Nields brought their Beatlesque folk-rock and a batch of new songs to Williams College on Saturday night, when they inaugurated the new student center at Goodrich Hall before a packed house of students and townspeople.

It was a homecoming of sorts for the Pioneer Valley-based quintet, which played its first gigs as an acoustic folk-trio at the Williams Inn in the early-‘90s. The group’s first recording, “66 Hoxsey Street,” took its title from the Williamstown address where the husband-wife-sister core of the band lived one summer.

Those who caught the group back in the early days can only marvel at how far they have come since then, when they were a tentative if sincere trio playing mostly cover tunes.

As seen on Saturday night, the group is now a fully-confident folk-rock band, with enormous stage presence, arena-style dynamics, and an original songbook chock full of intelligent lyrics and hook-laden pop tunes.

Lead singer Katryna Nields is a seductive frontwoman with a versatile voice, investing her performance with dancerly gestures and actor-like expression to fully inhabit the songs, which are mostly penned by her guitar-playing co-singer and sister, Nerissa Nields.

Completing the tableau are the shaven-headed guitarist David Nields -- Nerissa’s husband -- and Katryna’s Trinity College pals Dave Chalfant on bass and Dave Hower on drums. As an ensemble, they are incredibly sympathetic, making the most of their minimalist power-trio-plus-one to evoke styles ranging from British Invasion psychedelia to English new-wave to hardcore punk-rock, all pulled off with class and sophistication and just enough irony to satisfy the most diehard post-modernists in the crowd.

It is a testimony to Nerissa Nields’s deep songwriting that several tunes the band played on Saturday night seemed to speak directly to the morning’s headlines. “I was Lolita, now I’m Red Riding Hood,” sang Katryna Nields in “I Need a Doctor,” off the group’s critically-acclaimed 1996 release, “Gotta Get Over Greta.”

The theme was echoed in other songs they played from the prescient album, such as “Best Black Dress,” in which a working-girl is having an illicit affair with a “Mr. George Fox” who has a daughter just her age, and in “Fountain of Youth,” which contains the phrase that everyone in the nation was asking themselves last weekend: “What kind of a father figure refuses to grow up?”

The Nields’s songs are chock full of such literary and cultural overtones, whether they be direct references to Nabokov, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ani DiFranco and Alfred Hitchcock, or more generalized socio-political sentiments. That they couch them in catchy, melodic, hook-filled pop tunes and perform them with unconsciously theatrical flair is presumably what attracts the group’s growing fan base.

Indeed, the group played several new songs from its forthcoming album, “Play” (Zoe/Rounder), due out at the end of this month. That many in the audience were apparently already familiar with many of the tunes is a tribute to the sort of devotion the band inspires among its followers, and a harbinger of hope for this most deserving of still up-and-coming groups.

At the end of the show, one newly-minted devotee asked, “Why aren’t they on the cover of `Rolling Stone’?” With any justice, it won’t be long before they will be.

If you would like to purchase The Nields' latest CD on-line, please click on the SoundStone logo to the right.