Album Reviews 26/05/28

Satoko Fujii and Myra Melford, Katarahi (Rogueart Records)

Recorded live in September 2024 at Jazz festival Leibnitz in Austria, this unplugged neo-classical piano exhibition pairs up brave, melodically obsessed American Melford with Japanese butt-kicker Fujii, who shows off her ability to turn a Steinway into a percussion instrument. No, I mean she puts a hurting on the thing when these two ladies aren’t trying all sorts of other tricks, including playing the interior piano strings themselves. The album’s title, suggested by Fujii, translates to “an intimate conversation between two friends,” but this, I assure you, is no everyday chitchat, more a loud, boisterous meeting of two (somewhat) like minds who are keeping the waiter busy way past end-of-shift and are the last ones still sitting around. There’s real athleticism to be found here, with hilariously nimble, lightning-speed runs that sound almost AI-like in their precision, and that makes this an album for people who love to hear the instrument pushed beyond all normal boundaries. Priceless. A+

Confess, Metalmorphosis (Frontier Records s.r.l.)

And meanwhile, back at Frontiers Records Mercy Hospital, one of the last legitimate record companies that still puts out albums from bands that sound like they’re from the 1980s, there’s this, the fourth full-length from a Swedish band that identifies as a “sleaze-metal” unit, and yo, it’s actually pretty good, stealing the right anachronistic vibes and all that rot. Now, “sleaze-metal” usually describes your Motley Crües and Ratts, and that kind of sound does surface here and there, but these guys have been mainlining old Ozzy Osbourne albums in preparation for this one; opening track “Colorvision” starts off with an obligato opera-chorus thing and then becomes a variation on Ozzy’s “Now You See It Now You Don’t” which, OK, is Ozzy’s sleaziest song ever, but not in a stupid L.A. way, and yeah, they’re all tatted up and looking like a Poison tribute band, if that matters to your aesthetic. “The Warriors” wants to be the adopted little brother of Guns N’ Roses’ “Mr. Brownstone” while “Wicked Temptations” leans more toward the vibe of Skid Row (is there supposed to be an umlaut in that band name? I can’t remember). They’ve got a great sound anyway. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Holy guacamole and whatnot guys, we’re just about done with May, which means summer is basically here! To celebrate, there will be a clutch of new albums on Friday, May 29, because that’s how this “music business” gizmo works, as we’ve discussed ad nauseum before! The first one to look at this week is from Paul McCartney, former bass player for the Beatles; this one is titled The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, but before you start expecting reams of snark from your humble correspondent just because I’ve said many times that I couldn’t care less about The Beatles, the truth is that I haven’t minded a lot of his solo stuff throughout the years, except of course for the really stupid stuff like the duets he did with Jacko back in the 17th century, like “The Girl Is Mine,” just be glad you didn’t have to listen to those horrible tunes on the school bus (do kids still ride on those things or what?) or in maximum-security juvenile prison or however you spent your formative years. No, old people know that his 1973 album Band On The Run had some good songs, like the title track, and “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five,” which was pretty funky, but you have no idea what I’m talking about anyway because all you care about is twerking to nepo baby Sabrina Carpenter and watching K-Pop cartoons, let me go listen to the new single “Days We Left Behind,” from this new album! Right, right, the push single “Days We Left Behind” is exactly what I expected, a drippy unplugged sort-of-rock-ballad that’s really sad, which is understandable, given that Sir Paul is so old now that his voice is super weak and constantly shakes, like it sounds like when Svengoolie reworks some hundred-year-old tune like “Mack The Knife” to make it about Count Dracula, but hey man, it’s still Paul McCartney, right, so I should shut up I suppose. YouTube said there are other songs to sample from the album aside from this one, so for all I know there’s something clever and non-depressing. I doubt it, but be my guest if you love the sound of rich octogenarians singing about the end of the road.
• All Them Witches, you say, who even is that? OK, they’re an indie stoner-rock band based in Nashville, where the drummer relocated from Oregon when he was homeless; the band’s name is taken from a book of witchcraft, All of Them Witches, which was featured in the 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby, and that’s led to trouble, because they have weird fans who follow them around trying to get the fellas to turn them into toads and such. Anyhow, their new LP is titled House Of Mirrors and includes the single “The Welterweight.” It is not your typical Queens Of The Stone Age-type of stuff, like; to me it just sounds like early Nick Cave with a heavy guitar line that comes in once the boring part’s out of the way. Long as we’re here, if you’re the type who plans ahead, you can see this band play in Portsmouth at 3S Artspace on Oct. 19.

• In news that will titillate fans of music that’s been totally irrelevant for decades, folk/psychedelic-rock throwback Kurt Vile is back with another album, Philadelphia’s Been Good To Me. “Chance To Bleed” sounds like something the Rolling Stones left off their Tattoo You album in 1981, but don’t let that curb your enthusiasm.

• And lastly it’s — oh for cripes sakes, it’s been, what, two or three months since the last Guided by Voices album, so it’s already time for Robert Pollard to barf out his most recent failed songwriting attempts. This one, called Crawlspace Of The Pantheon, includes the single, “We Outlast Them All,” which kind of sounds like Psychedelic Furs but is as lame as ever, can you even imagine.

Featured Photo: Satoko Fujii and Myra Melford, Katarahi and Confess, Metalmorphosis

Purple Fruit Bat

I recently needed to develop a recipe for a cocktail based on the theme of a magical fruit bat, as one does, because — well, because of reasons.

Purple Fruit Bat

  • ½ ounce + 1 ounce chili-lime rum
  • ¼ cup (4 Tablespoons) dried, sweetened blueberries — the type you might put in some sort of fancy trail mix or something
  • ¾ ounce Aperol
  • ¾ ounce peach-flavored whiskey — Crown Royal makes a good one
  • 1 ounce fresh-squeezed lime juice

You will also need some special equipment for this. Well, not need need, but you’ll be able to use a couple of these items that you don’t get to break out very often, and you’ll feel vindicated for buying them in the first place:

A muddler — This is a special stick for grinding ingredients up in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. Sure, you could use a wooden spoon for this, or even an actual stick, but I like breaking out the pestle — the stick part — of my largest mortar and pestle.

A bar spoon — one of the ones with a long, twisty handle. Again, you could just use your largest cereal spoon or the wooden spoon mentioned above, but if you’ve got a cool actual bar spoon, it would be a shame not to use it. I have one that’s black and twisty and has a skull on the end of it.

A strainer — This could be an actual fine-mesh strainer that you use for pasta or something. There are any number of bar strainers, often called julep strainers or something similar. I use a $2 sink strainer from the dish-soap aisle in my supermarket. It does a really good job and has almost exactly the same diameter as a martini glass.

Add the dried blueberries and ½ ounce of the rum to a cocktail shaker, then muddle the heck out of them. Adding just a little alcohol to the muddling process will help strip colors and flavors from the berries, some of which are not water-soluble. Muddle everything for longer than you think necessary.

Add the rest of the alcohol — the rum, the Aperol and the whiskey — then stir everything thoroughly with the bar spoon. Mashing the berries like you just did has smashed them into a solid layer on the bottom of the cocktail shaker, and this will break that up and give all the berries access to an alcohol bath.

(Optional) If you’ve got a few minutes, let the berry corpses marinate in this alcohol bath for a few minutes while you make yourself a piece of toast or something.

Add the lime juice (which is acidic but not alcoholic and probably won’t help with the blueberry stripping) and some ice to the shaker, and shake the mixture thoroughly, until you hear the ice start to break up into tiny pieces.

Strain the mixture over fresh ice in a rocks glass. Sigh with satisfaction at its beautiful purple color.

This is a really nice afternoon drink. It is definitely fruity but not overly sweet. The chili-lime rum works really well with the fresh lime juice. Blueberries love acid — lemon or lime juice especially. The dark purple from the blueberries blends with the bright red of the Aperol, giving it a classic violet color.

Given the number of ingredients, “refreshing” is probably not the adjective you would expect to describe this cocktail, but there you are. It is refreshing; you’ll just have to have a couple more to check that first assessment.

Featured photo: Purple Fruit Bat. Photo by John Fladd.

Adventures in baking

Sourdough has a life of its own

April Repoza and her daughter Bailey own and operate Bigfoot Sourdough in Milford, a sort of a combination homestead bakery and mad science lab that goes well beyond simple loaves of bread.

“We do make artisan loaves,” April Repoza said, “and then we do all of the very standard ones like jalapeno-cheddar and pesto-parm. We make bagels and they’re sourdough obviously, but they’re New York-style where they’re boiled in malt syrup and then baked. We make hamburger buns. We make stuffing cubes for Thanksgiving, cookies, and brownies. We do sourdough pizzas. It’s endless. But what we’re known for is when people reach out and say, ‘Hey, can you make this flavor?’ and if it’s something I’ve never done, I’ll say, ‘Of course — you know, let me try that.’”

“We love taking on crazy ideas,” Repoza continued. “We made a Pizza Night Loaf that we actually folded cooked spaghetti into. We used a tomato sauce-based dough and added cheese and it was literally a whole meal. You’d cut it and there’d be pieces of spaghetti inside. We made a Demogorgon Loaf for Stranger Things that went kind of viral. But yes, so we make regular loaves, too. Our English muffins have definitely been our best seller recently. We make standard sourdough English muffins and then we do a flavor of the week; this week we’ve got banana-nut ones and then we do a sourdough coffee cake of the week. This week we’re doing a Cosmic Brownie Coffee Cake. We make a cinnamon roll of the week and this week it’s based on the concept of a ‘kitchen sink’ cookie; we call it Bigfoot’s Junk Drawer. There’s a viral trend of people holding their sourdough like men hold their fish when they’re showing off their catches, so I upgraded my sourdough one week and made it into a fish shape”

Getting creative with sourdoughs began with April’s daughter Bailey, Rapoza said.

“She had gone to college and came home for Christmas break and said, ‘Mom, I got us a sourdough starter. Let’s try to make some bread.’ I was like, ‘OK, sure,’ I’ve never done it before. I went to culinary school 500 years ago, but I was like, ‘Alright, let’s try it out.’ We both just fell in love with it and fell in love with the science. We did hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of research before we even offered it out to friends or family or anything like that. I wanted to really try to perfect it before we went any further. Eventually we started getting known for our unique flavors and the different projects that we take on. Every product we make is sourdough-based, from cookies to king cakes, which we made this year. It was insane! I think we sold about a hundred different king cakes this season.“

The Rapozas started with a purchased starter, April said, but after developing thousands of batches of dough, their dough has evolved to the point of being uniquely suited to their needs. “It’s funny,” she said, “because people will say, ‘Well, I use a 200-year-old starter…’, and that’s partially true, but once you start feeding it your own water and your own flour, it changes. So it’s not the exact sourdough starter from 200 years ago. Ours is definitely its own thing at this point. My family jokes that if we go on vacation I have to arrange babysitting for our dough. My mom will come over to feed it; she’s like, ‘We never expected for you to have another child.’”

Working with sourdough, and learning to think about it as a living organism, has changed the way she looks at her baking and at food in general, Rapoza said. “We constantly look for ways to make not-so-healthy things healthy, but we also like to go kind of over the edge and make healthy things a little crazy too. I feel like you can do both.”

Bigfoot Sourdough
Where: 33 Cortland Road, Milford, 801-6265, facebook.com/BigfootSourdough
When: open Thursday through Sunday, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Pickups can be arranged seven days a week by appointment. Special orders require notice 48 hours in advance.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Books and strawberries

Time for the annual Strawberry Festival

FLOW, the Friends of the Library Of Windham, who support the Nesmith Library, is holding its biggest fundraiser of the year this weekend, its annual Strawberry Festival and Book Sale.

Mary Connelly, a FLOW member, said the event is time- and labor-intensive.

“We start meeting in September [the year before],” she said, “and then go all the way up until the end of May with the actual event. FLOW supports the library; we give about $7,000 in programming money for the teen, children and adults programs. We have supported some of the physical needs that they had this year. We helped pay for a new fence around the storybook garden that they have outside and bought a picnic table for them. The Library needed a new book return this year, and if there are other things that we can help out with as we go along, we try to support those. The Library here is a wonderful resource and we’re very proud of it. We hold two book fairs each year, one in December and then this one that’s part of the Strawberry Festival.”

The book sale goes on for four days, Connelly said.

“It starts next Wednesday,” she said, “and on Wednesday it’s for FLOW members, senior citizens and teachers. And then Thursday and Friday it’s open to anybody, after which we’ll pack up whatever’s left and take it over to the High School for the Strawberry Fest on Saturday.” By the end of the day on Saturday, the book sale will become a Bag Sale. “We provide the bag,” she said, “but then for $5, whatever you can fit in the bag, you can take home with you. Over the years, we’ve learned that we need to provide the bags; we’ve had people be a little too creative in the past.”

The key element of the Strawberry Festival however, is the strawberries. FLOW sells a lot of strawberry shortcake over the course of the day, Connelly said, serving upwards of 2,000 strawberry enthusiasts most years.

“Last year, we went through 480 quarts of fresh strawberries. Anyone who wants to learn the recipe of our shortcake is welcome to come volunteer, but it isn’t complicated.” FLOW sells a classic biscuit-based shortcake with strawberries and whipped cream, she said. “And there’s ice cream too, for people who want it.”

The Strawberry Festival is a way of recognizing the start of strawberry season, Connelly said. “It was established in 1984. Originally it took place later in the season, but now we’re just a little bit outside of it. It’s a great community builder. Last year we probably had 2,500 people come over the course of the day. It was just kind of nice and steady and everybody seemed to be having a good time. It was typical weather — one minute it was sunny, the next minute it was overcast. Then it was rainy and we had to go indoors. It’s New England, though, so there’s nothing you can count on, but the high school is big enough that it can handle things indoors or outdoors.”

Strawberry Festival and Book Fair
When: Saturday, May 30, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where: Windham High School, 64 London Bridge Road, Windham.
What: There will be food trucks, live performances and a bicycle parade.
More info: Visit flowwindham.org.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Weekly Dish 26/5/28

• Looking for a purr-fect name: There are plans for a new cat cafe in downtown Concord. Entrepreneurs Star Chagnon and Taylor Marshall had hoped to call it “Purrs and Pours” but have discovered that the name is already in use. Chagnon and Marshall are looking for input from the greater Concord community for a new name for the mixed-use space, which they hope to open by the end of the summer. One half of the business will be a traditional coffee and tea cafe, with a separate “cat lounge” next door, where customers will be able to relax with cats from local rescue organizations. Chagnon and Marshall have posted links in their social media accounts that will allow the public to weigh in with possible names for the new cat cafe. Search for “Purrs and Pours” on Facebook, TikTok or YouTube, and leave your suggestions for a new name for the cafe.

• Wine and fairies: Wine on Main (9 N. Main St., Concord, 897-5828, wineonmainnh.com) will host a fairy garden workshop and wine tasting Thursday, May 28, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Wine on Main’s website describes it as “a whimsical evening of creativity, laughter, and fairy-sized fun. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll design your very own miniature fairy garden to take home, complete with charming accessories, faux plants, moss, and magical touches. No soil, no watering, just pure enchantment that lasts.” Tickets are $65 each through the Wine on Main website.

• Charcuterie assembly: There will be a charcuterie workshop Thursday, May 28, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Manchester Distillery (284 Willow St., Manchester, 978-308-2867, manchesterdistillery.com). Boards and Barrels will teach attendees “the art of building stunning charcuterie boards. Every ticket includes a craft cocktail. Good boards, great spirits, and a few laughs,” according to the Distillery’s webpage. Tickets are $81.88 per person, through eventbrite.com.

• Kitchen inspiration: The Palace Theatre (80 Hanover St., Manchester, 668-5588, palacetheatre.org) will host its 19th annual Kitchen Tour on Sunday, May 31, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. This self-guided tour will showcase kitchens in homes in Amherst, Hooksett and Merrimack and is the Palace Theatre’s biggest annual fundraising event. Registration will take place beginning at 9:30 a.m. at Granite State Cabinetry (384 Route 101, Bedford, 691-3124, gscabinetry.com). Tickets are $55 in advance or $65 on the day of the event, through the Palace Theatre’s website.

• Springtime cookie decorating: Posy Cottage Cookies (801-7590, posycottagecookies.com) will present a June Cookie Decorating Night at Station 101 (193 Union Square, Milford, 249-5416, station101nh.com) on Monday, June 1, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Get creative and decorate some delicious spring-themed cookies. This event is for all skill levels, 9+. There will be five cookie designs and four colors of royal icing. Tickets are $64.80 each, through the Posy Cottage website.

• Cooking with wine: Learn to use wine in South American recipes. LaBelle Winery Derry (14 Route 111, Derry, 672-9898, labellewinery.com/labelle-winery-derry) will host a fun and interactive cooking demonstration and tasting featuring authentic South American recipes on Wednesday, June 3, from 6 to 7 p.m. Tickets are $40 each through the LaBelle website.

• 603 Food Truck Festival: The Southern New Hampshire Chamber of Commerce, in partnership with the Town of Salem, invites you to the 603 Food Truck Festival Wednesday, June 3, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Chamber’s parking lot at 81 Main St. in Salem. To celebrate 603 Day, many vendors will be offering special featured items for just $6.03.

Treasure Hunt 26/05/28

Dear Donna,

Looking to find a value for our hanging ceiling lamp. Not sure of the age. I believe it’s all there and original other than re-wiring and cleaning often for the hanging glass. It’s not very large but can light a room brightly.

We love it and are not looking to sell it. It’s been here since we bought the house in the 1950s, if that helps.

Thank you, Donna.

Celeste

Dear Celeste,

You are making my job easy today.

I would say your small chandelier ceiling light is probably from the 1930s or 1940s. This is judging by the style.

It appears to be in great condition and clean. Doing the wiring over I always say is a great thing to do. It doesn’t take away from the value. As long as it’s done properly, it’s for safety. Chandeliers are collectible for people restoring houses to as close to original as they can. They also are just pleasantly attractive for decorators.

As far as a value, Celeste, if there is a maker’s name that would help with valuing it. But if it’s not marked the value still would be in the $400 range. So keep using and enjoy your treasure.

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