Hamell on Trial Brings the One-Man Riot to Alchemy on Tuesday

While the rest of the state is still shaking the Newport sand out of its shoes, downtown Providence gets a palate cleanser of a very different flavor. Ed Hamell — the acid-tongued, hyper-verbal one-man band who performs as Hamell on Trial — plays Alchemy on Richmond Street this Tuesday, Aug 4.

If you've never seen him, adjust your expectations for what a solo acoustic show can be. Hamell attacks a beat-up guitar like it owes him money, spits verse-dense monologues that land somewhere between stand-up and street preaching, and generally turns a single amplified instrument into something closer to a full-contact sport. He's toured with Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe orbit, he's opened for the kind of punk institutions that don't hand their stage to just anyone, and he's spent decades proving that "singer-songwriter" and "unhinged" are not mutually exclusive categories.

Alchemy is exactly the right room for it. Small, dark, close — the kind of downtown club where the gap between performer and crowd is measured in feet, not yards. Hamell's whole act is built on that proximity; he needs to see your face when the joke curdles into something serious, and you need to be close enough to feel him mean it. Put him on a big festival stage and you lose half of what makes him electric. Put him ten feet from forty people on a Tuesday night in Providence and it's a religious experience for the converted and a genuine shock for the uninitiated.

This is the quiet argument for small rooms in a festival-mad summer. Newport is transcendent, but it's transcendent for 10,000 people at once. A club like Alchemy offers the opposite proposition — a handful of us, one relentless performer, no barrier, no jumbotron, nowhere to hide. Both things are live music. Only one of them can rearrange your Tuesday.

Doors and set times are the usual downtown-club affair, so check the venue before you roll. But the pitch is simple: for the price of a couple of festival beers, you get one of the most singular live acts in the American underground, at spitting distance, on a night you'd otherwise waste.

August in Providence is a gift precisely because of shows like this — the ones that don't make the tourist brochure and don't need to. Bring your reflexes. Hamell doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Sources: JamBase — Providence Area Concerts; Alchemy — Events