Category: Nightlife

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.

Seventies Dead from Rainbow Full of Sound

The Grateful Dead have continued to have a rich afterlife since their final show in 1995. First as Furthur, then as Dead & Company, most of its remaining members resumed touring a few years after Jerry Garcia died. Tribute acts reinvent the group’s songs in a myriad of genres, like local jam band Roots of Creation, with its Grateful Dub franchise.

Then there are the faithful re-enactors. Best known is Dark Star Orchestra, which will pull a setlist from the vault on any given night and let Deadheads guess the time-traveling destination. Rainbow Full of Sound takes that idea a step further, taking on whole tours.

Waynard Scheller put RFoS in 2012, to recreate the Dead’s 1980 run at New York’s Radio Music Hall. It was supposed to be a one-time deal. Fans loved it, though, and RFoS became a staple in Scheller’s home base of New Jersey.

In early 2020 they embarked on their first national tour, this time doing every date from the legendary 1972 European tour — almost. “We got about nine shows in, and then Covid shut us down,” Scheller said in a recent phone interview. When lockdown ended, they were finally able to finish. “Song by song, show by show, in different cities around the country. It was a huge success.”

This time around, Scheller and his shifting cast of close to 30 musicians are stretching out even more.

“It’s evolved into retracing the ’70s,” he said. “We’re starting with Europe ’72 and ending with Terrapin Station.” An upcoming show at Newmarket’s Stone Church will have Scheller on keys, guitarists Steve Bernstein and Jim McGuigan, Alan Lerner on drums and bass player Jair-Rohm Parker Wells.

RFoS is no ordinary cover band. In their hands, songs like “Eyes of the World” and “I Know You Rider” can rise above the original versions. Scheller suggests how the Dead might have sounded if Bruce Hornsby had been in the piano seat instead of Keith Godchaux in the 1970s.

Schiller is quick to point out that Godchaux was playing in the band when he was first drawn to the Dead, and that his successor Brent Mydland cemented them as a favorite band.

“When I saw them for the first time in 1978, it was Keith,” he said. “The second show was Brent. I caught like 200 shows with him on keyboard, but Keith was my first influence.”

He is a big Hornsby fan and covers many of his songs as a solo artist. Much like the band he emulates, instinct guides Schiller when RFoS performs.

“It comes out organically,” he said. “It’s not like I plan to sound like this one or that one; I just allow my influences … between Keith, Brent and Bruce … to come out on any given night.”

This is not the first Dead tribute Schiller has been part of. He initially worked with members of venerable Long Island band the Zen Tricksters, touring as Jam Stampede. He then played with Dark Star Orchestra founding guitarist John Kadlecik. One memorable night, he did a show in a New York City crypt, and in the process met Zach Nugent, of Garcia acolytes JGB, and Kenny Brooks.

Brooks played with Dead guitarist Bob Weir in RatDog, and the introduction led to an invite for Schiller to co-produce a benefit show in San Francisco, where he played in Weir’s band. “It was definitely surreal,” he said of the night. “I was kind of in shock … I wouldn’t say starstruck, because I didn’t get his autograph. It was an honor to work with him.”

That experience with the Jerry Garcia Foundation, raising money for the Yoko Ono-founded charity Imagine There’s No Hunger, led to his path crossing with Hot Tuna’s Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, and, subsequently, to Jason Crosby and Grahame Lesh of the Lesh Family Band.   

It all rests on a love of the Grateful Dead. As to why the seminal jam band excites him so much, “it’s a combination of a lot of things,” he said. “I like the improv part, where we can create music within the music. Every night we perform, it’s a different experience, and that’s interesting and stimulating as a musician.”

Finally, Schiller said, “the songs are just amazing … country, blues, bluegrass, jazz, rock and reggae, they just mixed it all together — and the big picture is the Grateful Dead.”

Rainbow Full of Sound w/ Schells & Vine
When: Saturday, May 13, 8 p.m.
Where: The Stone Church, 5 Granite St., Newmarket
Tickets: $20 at stonechurchrocks.com

Featured photo: Waynard Scheller. Courtesy photo.

Local band adds to yoga experience

When Cassie O’Brien was in her twenties, she wrote for a Concord alt weekly and was constantly impressed by the city’s music and arts scene. When she and her husband began planning a move from Washington, D.C., back to New Hampshire six years ago, they wanted someplace with a similar vibe.

Ultimately they chose the real thing.

“Thinking about where we wanted to live, we just kept circling back to Concord,” O’Brien said recently. “A sense of community … that’s what brought us here.”

The two fit in quickly. Rob O’Brien is prominent as a musician, playing the Roland Aerophone, an idiosyncratic saxophone-cum-synthesizer, with local band Andrew North & the Rangers. The disciplined jam act has a new live album, Thanks for the Warning, Vol. 1, due on May 12, with a release show at Concord’s Area 23 the following night.

Cassie is a yoga instructor and, since September, a small business owner. She runs Worthy Mind & Movement, offering a range of classes that are almost all music-centric. That element was part of the yoga studio when Cassie worked there, before she bought it. When she took it over, she wanted to take the music up a notch or two, so she began offering Buti, a yoga practice that includes a lot of dance-like movement.

Initially EDM mixes were used for classes, but on May 5 local electronica duo Bosey Jose will play live while participants work up a sweat. It will be a Glow Yoga event, with body paint and clothing that pops under a blacklight. “I kind of equate it to like going to a rave, but without all the regrets and everything afterward,” Cassie said.

The experience is perfect for “moms who want to have that night out for themselves, have a good time and let loose,” she continued. “People can hoot, they can holler, they can swear at me … anything goes, as long as they’re being safe. It’s a good release, a fun way to move your body and still get in a workout.”

Non-glow Buti classes happen during the week, along with Zumba and the more intense HIIT yoga; there’s also the meditation in motion of Primal Flow. Buti is a bit in between, Cassie explained: “There’s some cardio involved, there’s some plyometric work — planks, your holding poses and stuff like that. It’s just dynamic movement, meant to be a fun way to move your body and have a good time.”

Buti is a good entry-level yoga. “You never have to be in any pose for too long, because we are pretty much constantly moving … our movement is driven by the beat of the music,” Cassie said. For her, trading cues with live musicians will offer a new challenge. “When I want to pick up the pace and maybe do a cardio push, I’m going to have to somehow communicate to them, and I’ll also have to fall along.”

Bosey Joe once played in a barber shop, so they are a good fit for the small-business showcase. The space comes with a bonus, Rob O’Brien explained.

“I helped upgrade the studio and we have a fantastic sound system up there now with a big subwoofer,” O’Brien said. “Since these are at night and most of the offices and businesses below us are closed, we can really crank it up. I’ve been in there by myself, and it feels like a club — the energy can get really high in there.”

The volume and vibe “enhance the experience,” Cassie offered. “You get your endorphins running, it’s a rush. People after class are always saying, ‘Wow, that went by so fast! I can’t believe I’m sweating … it was so fun, I forgot I was working out.”

Buti Yoga Glow Night w/ Bosey Joe
When: Friday, May 5, 7 p.m.
Where: Worthy Mind & Movement, 8 N. Main St., Suite 1B, Concord
Tickets: $20, reserve at worthymindandmovement.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Low Lily unveils Angels in the Wreckage

On their latest album, Low Lily, the rootsy trio of married couple Liz Simmons and Flynn Cohen and fiddler Natalie Padilla, decided to be bold. Angels in the Wreckage runs an expansive 14 tracks and is full of forthright songs. An a capella anthem, “What’ll You Do” is punchy, political, ready-made for a protest march; “One Wild World” covers similar territory more tenderly. Neither song, however, shies away from their core beliefs.

“We feel a little bit more comfortable being ourselves and speaking our mind and just kind of putting it all out there, because we’re not in our 20s anymore,” Simmons said in a recent interview. “Making a 14-track album would have felt almost gratuitous when we were younger, but at this point, we just don’t care; we had a lot to say.”

The album is their first with Padilla, as former fiddler Lissa Schneckenburger departed last year. “Travel was really too much for her at this stage in her life; it was an amicable parting,” Simmons explained. In fact, Schneckenburger contributed four songs to the new LP, one a co-write with Simmons, and plays on the opening track, a cover of Shawn Colvin’s “Round of Blues.”

“It feels like she’s still kind of present in the music, in that back of the curtain way,” Simmons concluded.

Cohen met Padilla at a fiddle camp, run by Brian Wicklund, where they’d both taught for several years. Initially he thought she’d be a good accompanist for his solo gigs. “She had a lot of the same taste in multiple styles,” Simmons said. Faced with a lineup change, they realized “someone like her, with all this versatility, would be the best fit.”

Padilla was living in Montana when she joined the band, but she recently relocated to Northampton, Mass., a short drive from Cohen and Simmons’s home in Brattleboro, Vermont. “We were ready to continue to fly her out for every tour, but she actually decided of her own volition to move,” Simmons said. “Now she’s a local.”

Born into a musical family, Padilla is also a singer, songwriter and guitarist. All three talents are on display in her lilting ballad “Captivate Me,” one of the album’s best tracks. An ode to her medicine man great-grandfather, it includes a gorgeous three-part harmony, and lovely acoustic interplay between her, Cohen and multi-instrumentalist/producer Dirk Powell.

Powell mastered their 2018 album 10,000 Days Like These and was the right choice to produce this time around.

“Especially because Natalie brings some of that old-time fiddle, and Dirk is so familiar with that particular style,” Simmons said, adding, “in terms of the American roots music, him being such a kind of legend in that world, it seemed like such a natural pairing.”

Throughout the project, they worked virtually with Powell, emailing tracks to him in Louisiana. “He would pick up what we were putting down,” Simmons said. He played banjo, double bass, electric guitar and, on the superb “Lonely,” piano, triangle and button accordion. “He brings a little of that Bayou flavor, that Cajun sound, which I think works so nicely on that track.”

There are two Cohen instrumentals on the record. “Keep the Pachysandra Flying” is a full group romp. He performs solo on “Bastard Plantagenet Blues,” a tribute to his time with English guitar master Davey Graham early in his playing days.

“Flynn went to school in England in Devon for three years and had the amazing opportunity to study with him, he also even had an all-day lesson with Burt Jansch” — a gift, as it turned out, Simmons said. “Burt was like, ‘Oh, you don’t owe me anything.’ Rolling with those guys, they were just so nice. None of them are alive anymore, so he enjoys little tributes when he can to those folks.”

The record ends as it began, with a cover — Jethro Tull’s “Wond’ring Again.” Simmons considers the song apocalyptic, a reflection of the album’s overall mood. “That’s kind of where that Angels in The Wreckage title comes from,” she said. “I’m struck by how beauty and destruction can live side by side.”

For a CD release tour that stops at Concord’s Bank of New Hampshire Stage on April 28, Low Lily will perform as a five-piece, with a rhythm section of double bass player Hazel Royer and Stefan Amidon on drums. They will perform the new LP from start to finish.

“We’re really excited to go on the road and represent the album sound live in this fuller way,” Simmons said.

Low Lily CD Release Show w/ Green Heron
When: Friday, April 28, 8 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $23.75 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Low Lily. Courtesy photo.