The Jersey City Independent "

Matt Dallow on the theremin and Nathan Carpenter on guitar and vocals at a recent Barracks show.

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New Brunswick may have the reputation as the mecca of the New Jersey basement show, having helped launch the national careers of acts like Gaslight Anthem, Titus Andronicus, and the Screaming Females. But Jersey City has its own underground history; the pop-punk band Dirt Bike Annie put on shows at a space called The Souse House back in the ’90s, where MC Chris got his start; Mohawk Barbie and The Atomic Missiles played host to young bands like the Ergs, the Ex Models, and Thursday in a basement called The Missile Silo; and the indie-pop band Spent shared a place in Jersey City Heights. Today, though, the action’s at a ramshackle four-family house nicknamed The Barracks just a few blocks from Journal Square, where insanely original folk-punk acts yowl in the basement and nobody seems to mind.

Singer Darren Deicide (pictured at left) moved into the Barracks about six years ago, and started hosting shows there a few years later. And noise complaints have never been a problem.

“First because we keep it all acoustic, and we try to finish up by midnight,” he says. “But mostly because it’s Journal Square, and the Jersey City cops just have better things to do than worry about us.”

Deicide (pronounced “dee-a-side”) also acts as a partner in the Ever Reviled Records collective, and the label’s roster provides much of the talent at Barracks shows.

That includes folk/punker Deicide himself, the gravelly-voiced blues singer The Old Man & His Po’ Buckra (who keeps time by banging a bare foot against a cajon box), the electrifying Nathan Carpenter (seen at right; Deicide describes him as “a roots musician dipped in acid, the festering zombie of blues”), and busking folksinger Dave Cuomo. There’s also a recording studio upstairs at the Barracks, run by hippie-turned-entrepreneur Jonny H.

Like most Jersey City musicians, Deicide has his own ideas about why such a large city can’t sustain more live-music venues, citing the recent sale of the Lamp Post and the on-again/off-again status of IM Automato Chino as examples of what he calls failed gentrification.

“It’s important to put Jersey City in its context, because we are constantly affected by the presence of New York City,” he explains. “For the past 20 or so years, there has been this concerted effort to ‘clean up’ New York and make it a playground for condo-dwellers and yuppies. The unsung New Jersey boroughs of New York City have existed as a well-kept secret for these people and their tacky mall culture, but they’ve slowly gotten hip to it.” 

Despite the road bump of the recession, which has slowed the pace down, Deicide says the ongoing march of development has made it hard for underground culture.

“The reason there has been such difficulty in sustaining music venues has been this economic pressure to keep fringe elements out and replace them with bland, boxed lifestyles,” he says. “These pressures are making it difficult to keep a vestige for the independent music scene. Until the tide turns in one direction or another, the Jersey City music scene survives in alternative places, like house shows, art galleries, warehouse spaces, graveyards and just about wherever else space can be cleared and noise can be made.”

But The Barracks is more than just a reaction to the lack of venues. The space also exists as a sort of leftist rebuke to the culture industry, in particular New York area promoters.


”A lot of people who go to shows don’t realize the politics that goes on behind the scenes of a show. They just show up, pay the door, have a few beers, and go,” Deicide says. ”Well let me be the first to lift the veil: there is a small group of promoters that have monopolized access to venues, and they are wiping their asses with hungry young artists who are so eager to play New York that they gleefully go with it.” 

House shows, he notes, change that equation. 



“[They] remove these weasels from the equation and put the artist right back in control, where they ought to be. The audience isn’t being ripped off, knowing that all their money is going to artists and any costs to the house, and they can bring their own booze, if they want to,” he says. “If freed from the parasitical promoter, the artist can actually get something for their performance instead of acting as unpaid labor for someone else.”



Moreover, as long as no one complains about the noise, there’s nothing actually illegal about inviting some friends over and playing music together. Unlike New Brunswick house shows — which tend to be epicenters for underage drinking and out-of-control moshing — the Barracks shows draw an older, post-collegiate, working class crowd. And while Barracks regulars tend to tip the folk/punk equation heavily toward the punk side of the scale, the shows don’t actually get all that loud.

“For one thing, we avoid PAs as much as possible,” Deicide explains. ”It’s a logistical thing, with neighbors and whatnot, but it’s also an aesthetic thing: taking the amplifiers and mics out of the equation forces musicians to go back to the old standard that existed in music before everyone became electrically and digitally assisted. You’re going to have to be someone who can get intimate with a crowd, and you’re going to have to have a truly projected voice.” 

While Deicide likens the experience to “the old juke house way,” there’s nothing retro or antiquated about the acts that perform at the house.

“Inevitably, we wind up with cutting edge roots-music at The Barracks. It’s much like the isle of misfit roots artists,” he says. ”I like artists with strong hints of individualism, and I like them displaying their talent.”

Barracks shows attract audiences from all over New Jersey, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, and it’s not unusual to have a touring artist on a bill as well. Deicide says that while many of his friends live in or near Jersey City, it’s still too soon to start talking about any sort of unified music scene here. Despite the existence of many small circles of bands and musicians, he says, they often don’t overlap.

“There isn’t much communication between these microcosms, because, well, there simply isn’t much in common between these places. Newport/Pavonia and Journal Square are light years from each other in many different ways,” Deicide says by way of example. ”But I must say, I’m starting to think this may be changing. I’m noticing more efforts to network.”


For more information on Deicide or The Barracks, visit everreviledrecords.com and myspace.com/thebarracksjukehouse, or email darrendeicide (at) gmail.com.

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