Author: Michael Witthaus

A multi-band, mid-week show

Helping to shake the walls at an upcoming weeknight show from Georgia metal stalwarts Dead Reckoning will be a sizable contingent of Granite State acts. Female-fronted metal band Sepsiss, raw power trio Abel Blood and hard rockers Edgewize all hail from New Hampshire. Deathcore quartet Mark of Wrath comes from close by; they’re based in Rhode Island.

Finally, there’s Dust Prophet, a Manchester four-piece that formed in the months before the pandemic and polished its sound through lockdown. In January they released a debut album, One Last Look Upon the Sky, that’s a master class in stoner rock, the gloomy metal-limned sound forged by Black Sabbath and later refined by bands like Kyuss and Electric Wizard.

Guitarist Otto Kinzel and Sarah Wappler, who plays bass and keys, came together around a love of heavy riffs. The two were previously in an industrial-rock band called Fiends of a New Republic; they wanted to try something different.

“I didn’t have a passion to get back into using a lot of electronics,” Kinzel explained in a recent phone interview. “I just wanted it to be guitar-bass-drums, more stripped down and straightforward … just focusing on being heavy.”

In bringing their shared influences together, “It was Sarah who heavily drove that train,” Kinzel said. “She wrote a huge amount of the riffs that are on the album. She really deserves to be credited. We’re all listed as songwriters because we collaborated on the songs and melded them all together, but she was nine times out of ten the one bringing the riffs to the table.”

With Wappler churning out one heavy chord after another, and Kinzel penning lyrics worthy of slasher films, finding a drummer turned out to be their biggest challenge.

“It was like a Saturday Night Live skit in some parts, I mean, it was just unbelievable,” Kinzel recalled. “Some of the people that answered the ad that would come to audition and have zero preparation.”

Finally a fellow guitarist pointed them to drummer Tyler MacPherson, and the group was complete, mostly. Jason Doyle, a longtime friend of Kinzel’s, had mixed and mastered Dust Prophet in the studio. When the group finally began playing out, Kinzel decided he wanted to concentrate on singing, so he recruited Doyle to play guitar at their early shows.

“I was singing and playing at the same time, and I was at 50 percent … not great at either one,” Kinzel said. “Jason already knew all the songs because he did all the postproduction on them, and he’s also a great guitar player. He played a couple of dates with us and immediately went from being a live guitar player to a full-fledged member of the band.”

Adding Doyle shifted their sound. “We’re still very much a doom metal band, but there’s a bit more of a progressive element,” Kinzel observed. “I’m working in more live audio samples for interludes, more synth. In the studio, we overdubbed tons of secondary drums … congas and other hand percussion instruments are layered in and out. With me not playing guitar live, it frees me up to do that, to incorporate some of that live.”

Beyond that, the plan is to go back in the studio and document their new musical direction. “Artistically, we want to keep moving forward, and we’ve already started recording material for the next album,” Kinzel said. “We’re going to do an EP with a couple of cuts from the first album reimagined, and then maybe one or two brand new songs…. Our goal is to level up with each release.”

Kinzel is keen to do a hometown show.

“This is the first time we’ve played Manchester in 2023,” he said. “We’re always jumping at the opportunity because we get a pretty good turnout. It’s one of the few times our friends and family can come to shows because it’s a relatively local event. We know several of the other bands. We’ve played with Abel Blood before, we’ve played with Sepsiss before. We’ll see some friends and just go hang out.”

Dead Army Takeover Tour
When: Tuesday, June 6, 7 p.m.
Where: Jewel Music Venue, 61 Canal St., Manchester
Tickets: $15 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo: Dust Prophet. Courtesy photo.

Mother Iguana plans release show

Restlessness animates many artists; insomnia can cripple more than a few. For a Concord guitarist and singer-songwriter it does both. On the new album Eyeball Planet, Mac Holmes, performing as Mother Iguana, has created a song cycle about sleeplessness. The music isn’t comforting, but it brilliantly conveys the experience of the struggle to finally rest, both sonically and lyrically.

Though well-ensconced in the local music scene, Holmes recruited 22 musicians from around the world for the project. Each was given a loose outline to work with. Their tracks were emailed and assembled, collage-like, for each song. Frank Zappa and Charlie Mingus are named as influences, and the complex, textured results evoke both. Holmes explained his approach in a recent phone interview.

“My process was to write detailed prompts and briefs … including a number of reference tracks,” he said. “I encouraged people to bring their own ideas to the table and if something contradicted my idea, I’d love to hear that as well. My thinking was, they know what they do best, better than I do.”

International collaboration wasn’t the plan when Holmes began writing a few years ago.

“My initial vision for it was to do fairly dense, psychedelic arrangements with a lot of moving parts. And I can’t play most of those instruments,” he said. “Once I started along that path, I figured I should push that as far as I could go with it and just layer those things up … that’s the aesthetic I was trying to work with.”

Brazilian percussionist Tom Andrade appears on every cut, playing an exotic list of instruments too lengthy to catalog, including guizo, udu, agogô, seeds and, more prosaically, bongos. “I just love what he did so much,” Holmes said. “I wanted him on the whole thing.”

Carina Bruwer, a flute player from South Africa, offered a standout performance on “It Must Always Be Night,” which leads off the album. “She sent four or five takes of her just shredding the flute, and I felt compelled to use as much of it as I could,” Holmes said. He set them into multiple places in the mix, “kind of weaving in and out in different parts. Midway through the song, they’re kind of all going at once.”

Another Holmes influence is songwriter Van Dyke Parks, best known for his collaborations with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. “Lights Out” is reminiscent of Parks’ work. The touchstone song hints at the ambivalence of being on the line between waking and dreaming. “I watch the crack beneath the door, and every breath I take reminds me I’m awake, reminds me I’m alive,” Holmes sings over bouncy chords, and a swampy swell of horns, cello and vibraphone.

A release show for Eyeball Planet will happen Saturday, May 27, at Penuche’s Ale House in Concord. Singer Kelsie Collins, who contributed to the album (and is Holmes’ girlfriend), will be in a band that includes Zane McDaniel on bass, fiddlers JD Nadeau and Audrey Budington, along with multi-instrumentalist Brian Burnout.

Collins, who plays jazz standards and vintage country songs with Holmes in the duo Mac & Kelsie, will do a few of her own songs.

Missing from the group will be drummer/percussionist Killian Venman, who died suddenly on May 12. At the time of his death Venman was working with Holmes on a project at Rocking Horse Studio in Pittsfield, where Eyeball Planet was mixed. Holmes considered postponing the show, but encouragement from others who knew Venman compelled him to carry on with the date.

“I’ve repeatedly heard from friends that he would have wanted me to do that,” he said, “because he was very supportive. He was also a very ambitious, creative guy, who always had crazy art projects going on. That resonates with me as being the truth.”

Losing his close friend and collaborator does, however, cast a pall over what was supposed to be a celebration. That said, he’s glad to put the finishing touches on a project that’s consumed years of his life.

“It was already having a weird impact on my mental health, just in terms of orienting so much of my mental real estate,” Holmes said. “I indulged my mania working on this thing way past the point where anyone would even notice little things I was changing. I’m definitely proud of it, and the response to it so far has been good. A number of people whose opinions I really respect have said nice things about it.”

Mother Iguana
When: Saturday, May 27, 9 p.m.
Where: Penuche’s Ale House, 16 Bicentennial Square, Concord
More: motheriguana.bandcamp.com

Featured photo: Mac Holmes. Courtesy photo.

Chadwick Stokes plays party at Rex

Matt Wilhelm was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 2018, and became House Democratic Leader after last year’s midterms. Wilhelm’s first campaign, however, was centered on culture. In 2015 he led what turned out to be an unsuccessful effort to reopen Manchester’s Rex Theatre as Old Sol Music Hall.

He doesn’t regret failing; it launched him in politics. “It got my vision out there; I was able to connect with members of the community,” he said recently. “They understood what my values were and were willing to stick with me.” The Palace Theatre would ultimately buy the venue, and the renovated Rex held its first show in October 2019.

Wilhelm is happily throwing a birthday party at the Rex on May 18. It’s a fundraiser for Strong Circle PAC, which supports House Democrats in their efforts to retake the State House next year. Chadwick Stokes, of the activist bands Dispatch and State Radio, will perform a solo set at the soiree.

Wilhelm and Stokes are friends and colleagues. They met at UNH on Election Day in 2001, after Dispatch featured at a show there. A year later, the group began its first U.S. tour. Wilhelm, then a sophomore at Plymouth State, joined as an intern.

“Their career had kind of skyrocketed over the course of that last year,” Wilhelm said. “This was a real DIY band, a grassroots, word-of-mouth, Napster-driven, independent success story.” He did marketing, street team work, and some videography for Under the Radar, a DVD released in 2002.

This marked the beginning of a decade-and-a-half career in the music industry. Along with managing tours, lighting and concert merch, he co-directed Calling All Crows, a nonprofit organization named after a State Radio song. This felt a lot like community organizing to Wilhelm, providing a foundation for leading his party in the House.

“I’m a cultivator of that community … saying, here are our priorities, here’s how we rally around them, and here’s how we make progress on the issues that we care about,” he said. “In a lot of ways, it set me up for Old Sol, then set me up to launch a campaign.”

Wilhelm grew up listening to his parents’ Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young records and continues to believe in music’s power to affect change. “There’s a lot of folks that will say that was done in the ’60s, that music and activism went away,” he said, “but it’s pretty clear it didn’t.”

Stokes is proof of this sentiment; his music and politics are intertwined. That’s why he’s doing the benefit.

“As a musician, I want to use the platform I have most effectively to help people like Matt do the real nuts and bolts of policy change and legislation,” he wrote in an email. “My music is political like Matt’s politics are musical.”

The Rex set will likely range across Stokes’ career.

“I’ll probably be playing a lot of solo stuff, like ‘Chaska’ and ‘Pine Needle Tea’ and then a smattering of State Radio and Dispatch, and hopefully some new ones,” he wrote. He also expects to unveil one or two songs from a rock opera he’s working on, tentatively titled American Refugee.  

Wilhelm is pleased to be mounting a show at the venue he once hoped to turn into an arts hub. “It’s exciting, and in so many ways a long time coming, having Chad here in Manchester at the Rex,” he said. “The campaign wasn’t initially successful, but a bunch of different partners came together, including the mayor and the Palace, and made it a reality. Now I’m working on political campaigns, and so it’s kind of fun to bring it all together.”

There will be birthday cupcakes and a cash bar at Wilhelm’s birthday bash, and benefactor packages are available. Wilhelm approaches the evening buoyed by the energy he saw from Gen Z and millennial voters last November.

“I’m more hopeful knowing that there are young people coming of age right now who aren’t willing to accept the status quo and will be pushing for progress in all sorts of different ways,” he said. “I think this next generation isn’t going to let us … rest on our laurels.”

Matt Wilhelm’s 41st Birthday with Chadwick Stokes
When: Thursday, May 18, 7 p.m.
Where: The Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $50 and up at bit.ly/518concert

Featured photo: Chadwick Stokes. Courtesy photo.