“I hadn’t played a live show with a band in like four years, almost, and I felt like this is the time,” said Cassie Ramone, the longtime Brooklyn indie rock guitarist practically grinning inside an oversized blazer that, with tights, completed her mockup of Britney Spears’ schoolgirl outfit circa “‘…Baby One More Time.”
Ramone was making her return in Bushwick, playing covers of the big Spears records over Halloween weekend, as part of a group gathered by one Charmaine Querol, herself dressed in an approximation of the pop singer’s bright, red latex. “We all love Britney equally,” reports Querol. She would know, as she had assembled what the club had booked as “Nevva, Vivian Girls + More,” the former a local band Querol drums for, which released a debut EP two years ago. The Vivians are perhaps more well-known – “for a time, it was the most exciting band in the city,” Jon Caramanica once wrote in the Times – but haven’t toured since before the pandemic.
On stage, the group would shred through a decade of the hits, going through multiple costume changes and achieving particularly profundity in a shoegazed-out version of “Womanizer,” which felt newly definitive, at least in a Brooklyn kind of way. Other notable performances that night included local Our Wicked Lady-regular Maya Lucia cranking out Kate Bush covers with a band dressed in bonnets, a nod to Bush’s somewhat forgotten hit 1980 single “Babooshka,” and a local glam rock project called Leone, performing energetically heavy metal takes on the No Doubt catalog. As one promoter mused, “It’s really a who’s who of these Bushwick bands.”
