Album Reviews 24/05/09

Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department (Republic Records)

In case you’re new to this planet, the patriarchal establishment wants women to be obedient second-class citizens, focused on tedious, badly matched, purely sexual relationships, like 11-year-olds experiencing first crushes. That’s what this album accomplishes. It’s about private, individualist, closeted empowerment for enduring all the horribleness all women experience on a daily basis, and in that, it’s not the call to arms that the gender actually needs in a time of ever-dwindling rights for women. I will say that at least the record isn’t as embarrassingly hormonal as what Adele puts out, which is who TayTay’s trying to undercut with this stuff. Musically it’s decent, largely composed of hypnotic, post-coital musings that are a lot less grown-up than Tay (read: her producers, who write all this stuff) thinks they are. The melodic verisimilitude hides itself under “hmm, what’s that sample” moments and controlled bursts of primal, from-the-mountaintop, wild-woman battle cries signifying nothing. A-

Good Morning, Good Morning Seven (Polyvinyl Records)

Not only did Rolling Stone compare this Australian duo quite favorably to fellow Aussie bands Royel Otis and Budjerah; they went so far as to declare them the “future of music.” Hyperbolic much, I know, but they’re hitting the road with Waxahatchee soon, which should be a good fit. This LP opens with “Arcade,” which has a swampy-ethereal ambiance to it, techno-cheese and reverb-smothered vocals conjuring a half-plugged Kings Of Leon collaborating with Air, something of that sort. “Monster Of The Week” is like a more muscular Chris Isaak, for want of any better comparison. In that regard it’s definitely booze-soaked and faraway, an interesting but acquired taste that wouldn’t prompt me to yammer something like “the future of music” but definitely the type of thing that’ll please listeners who like their tuneage Pink Floyd-slow. A-

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yippee-ki-yay, my little trolls, it’s the May 10 music-CD drop date and I can’t wait to preview all the hot new songs that’ll be playing at the Fun-Ride Center in downtown Old Orchard Beach during the summer! I haven’t even gone to the mall to buy my swimsuit attire yet, would day-glo green look good on me, please be honest! But there’s some hum-ding-dang-er butt-kickers coming at us this week, fam, so let me put aside this “Swimsuit Attire For 2024’s Hot Guys” catalog and go check it out (when I was in my 20s I used to troll people by saying that the Nashua Chamber of Commerce asked me to be Mr. October in the “Men Of Nashua” calendar and no one ever laughed, so I must have been quite the cutie back when I still had to take dating seriously, so don’t be sending laughing emojis to me on my social media, it won’t work). Holy catfish, not a lot of new albums this week, but the ones that are on my super-secret list of new albums seem pretty interesting. In fact, let’s start with totally edgy Scottish slowcore/post-rock band Arab Strap, I’m Totally Fine With It Don’t Give A F— Anymore. I don’t know, these guys are usually mentioned in the same breath as Swans and the Throbbing Lobster family of musical products and such, but I’ve never taken the plunge all the way with them. But I will try doing that today, bear with me a second while I listen to the new single, “Bliss.” Right, so the video has some girl doing a weird interpretive dance to a noisy-ish beat, and the singer sounds like Iggy Pop in mellow mode. It makes me want to say it sounds like Simple Minds doing krautrock, but that might inspire readers to go check it out, which isn’t my intention at all.

• Uh oh, look out, millennials, it’s your favorite arena-folk band, Kings of Leon, with a new album, titled Can We Please Have Fun. Wait, just a second, this just in: Yes, roger that, the band’s last album, whatever its name was, was so terrible that Kings Of Leon is no longer the favorite band of any generation. In that, they’re like Mastodon and Trent Reznor, a band that sold out and let the dummies at the record label take artistic control of their, you know, artistry. Oh, definitely, I’m sure this will be just scintillating stuff, let’s go listen to the advance cut, “Mustang,” and see what the dilly is with these jive turkeys. Ugh, so gross, it sounds like Pavement at the beginning, but then it gets a little more boisterous, and then the singing Hollowill brother starts rocking out to a not very catchy part. It does have a pulse to it and will probably be a lot cooler when they play it live, but at first listen it’s not as great as their earlier hit, the one with the Millennial Whoop in it, you know, the decent one.

• Oh, please stop, what’s this, it’s hair-rock children’s-party-clown Sebastian Bach, even he has a new album, and this one’s called Child Within The Man! Now I feel compelled to find out what he’s been doing since his “acting stint” on Gilmore Girls, do you guys even remember that, or did your brain work properly and erase it the way brains are supposed to work when you get abducted by aliens or watch Gilmore Girls? The single, “Everybody Bleeds,” is hair-metal-y but old ’Bastian wants it to be kind of Alice in Chains-ish, so it’s not too — wait, what’s he doing with the high voice thing, stop that this instant.

• And finally we have How to Dress Well, the stage name of Colorado’s Tom Krell. His new album, I Am Toward You, includes a decent neo-AOR tune, “New Confusion.” He sings like trip-hop superstar Jose Gonzalez on this pretty, fractal-filled joint, it’s cool.

Magnolia Maiden

Sometimes something is perfectly fine on a small scale, but all in all just Too Much — saunas, triplets, you get it.

This classic cocktail is Just Enough.

Magnolia Maiden

  • 1½ ounce bourbon
  • 1½ ounce orange liqueur – Grand Marnier or Orange Curacao
  • 1/3 ounce simple syrup (see below)
  • splash (about 1 ounce) plain seltzer or club soda

Combine bourbon, orange liqueur and simple syrup over ice in a cocktail shaker. There are several types of shakers, but I like something called a Boston shaker. It consists of two cups, one large and one smaller. When you’ve added everything you want to shake to the large cup, turn the little one upside-down and wedge it into the big one. This will create an airtight seal and allow you to shake a drink without it making a break for freedom and drenching your kitchen with bourbon.

Shake the cocktail thoroughly. When the mystic voice of the cocktail lets you know that it is ready (or when you feel the ice start to break up inside the shaker) break the seal on the shaker. As you’ve chilled the cocktail, you’ve also chilled the air inside the shaker, which has contracted, tightening the already air-tight seal.

Strain the cocktail over fresh ice in a rocks glass. If you’re using a Boston shaker, pull the two halves apart slightly, making a shallow V shape. Your drink will pour out, leaving the ice behind. “There, there,” you can say to the shaker, “doesn’t that feel better?”

Top it off with a generous splash of club soda, and stir gently.

The only thing about this drink that is too much is its name. The bourbon isn’t too bourbony. The orange liqueur isn’t too sweet. It is neither too flat nor too bubbly. It tastes like something a relaxed person would drink.

Simple syrup

Drink recipes throw around the term “simple syrup” like everyone knows what that means. It’s one of those phrases like “slip differential” or “antioxidant” that everyone pretends to understand, but I think a surprising percentage of people don’t.

Have you ever added a packet of natural sugar to an iced coffee, and some of it ends up in a little pile at the bottom of the cup? Simple syrup is sugar that has been put into a solution with water, so that won’t happen to your cocktails.

The reason it is called “simple syrup” is that it consists of equal amounts of water and sugar; there is no recipe to memorize. Add equal amounts of white, granulated sugar and water — this can be by weight, or by volume — to a saucepan. Bring it to a boil on your stove, at whatever temperature you want, stirring occasionally. Let it boil for a few seconds to make sure all the sugar has gone into solution; then remove it from heat, let it cool, and store it in your refrigerator indefinitely. Don’t worry about it getting lonely; it’s very approachable and will make friends with your condiments quickly.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

Grilling with heat

Spice things up by adding some hot sauce to your grilled eats

A classic rite of passage each spring is bringing a grill out of storage and getting ready for the first outside cooking of the year. Nobody looks forward to this more than Phil Pelletier, owner of Smokin’ Tin Roof, a hot sauce company based in Manchester. He says that grilling season brings out a whole new side of his company’s hot sauces.

“Most of our stuff is designed to use any way you want,” he said, “so grilling is a great use for it.”

Smokin’ Tin Roof makes nine products of different heat levels — four sauces, three condiments, and hot pepper jelly. Although only one of the products is a barbecue sauce — the blueberry-based Northwoods BBQ — the other products have qualities that lend themselves to grilling.

North Carolina-style barbecue sauces are vinegar-based. The vinegar might be balanced out with something sweet, such as molasses or fruit, but the acidity is a fundamental characteristic of that type of sauce. Similarly, most hot sauces are vinegar-based as well.

“Our ‘Grow a Pear’ is made with pears,” Pelletier said as an example, “but it’s based on apple cider vinegar. You need that acidity for shelf-stability.”

South Carolina-style sauces, on the other hand, lean heavily into mustard. Smokin’ Tin Roof’s Bacon Stout Mustard works well as a wet rub for grillers who like to build layers of flavor.

Pelletier recommended against using too spicy a hot sauce for grilling, at least at first.

“Extreme heat gets in the way of the flavor you’re using, and you want a solid taste to stand up to the smoke from the grill,” he said. This is something that has come up while developing recipes for hot sauces.

“We use ghost pepper powder to vary the heat levels in our sauces, and we were really surprised that, aside from the heat, it neutralized the flavor of lemon. We ended up going in a completely different direction for that recipe; we used roasted garlic,” Pelletier said.

What a griller has to do, he says, is similar to what they do when working up a new recipe: work backward.

“You have to keep the final flavor in mind, then ask yourself, ‘What do I have to do to get that flavor?’” he said.

He gave the example of when his wife, Melissa, was developing a smokey pepper hot sauce.

“There were so many iterations of that sauce. She would get to a certain point in the recipe, and then it would suddenly go in a different direction, and we’d have to start over, focusing on her vision of a final flavor,” he said.

Keeping complementary flavors in mind — what goes with what — helps simplify choosing a grilling sauce. He uses some of Smokin’ Tin Roof’s products as examples:

Green Monstah is a verde-style sauce with pineapple. It has a bright flavor that is excellent with fish. Grow a Pear, on the other hand, has a fruity sweetness that plays well with the flavor of smoke. Pork is a natural with anything fruity, so Pelletier recommended using his Burnin’ Raspberry sauce with it.

(In a side note, Pelletier said the raspberry sauce might be his most versatile one. “We make it in two levels of heat,” he said, “which opens up a lot of directions you can take it. There is an ice cream business that buys it by the case from us to use as a sundae topping.”)

Smokin’ Tin Roof products are made with food-lovers in mind, Pelletier said, rather than chili-heads who are focused on extreme heat, which makes it a natural for grilling.

“Most serious grillers want to do something different. They want to make a unique match to whatever they want to grill,” he said.

The Weekly Dish 24/05/09

News from the local food scene

• Cake for Mom: Flight Coffee Co. (209 Route 101 in Bedford; flightcoffeeco.com, 836-6228) has two layer cakes, chocolate or vanilla with chocolate or vanilla buttercream, that can be ordered by Thursday, May 9, for a Saturday, May 11, pickup, according to a post on Flight’s Facebook page. Email catering@flightcoffeecompany.com or call 836-6228 to order a cake, which costs $45, the post said. Find more special brunches, dinners and other eats for Mother’s Day (Sunday, May 12) in the May 2 issue of the Hippo. Find the e-edition at hippopress.com; the story starts on page 24.

• Coffee weekend: The Northeast Coffee Festival runs Friday, May 10, and Saturday, May 11, in Concord. The event, which takes place at locations in downtown Concord including South Main Street, the Bank of NH Stage and Red River Theatres, will feature live music, coffee workshops, an outdoor community market and on Saturday a latte art throwdown at 4 p.m. Attending the market and the music is free; passes to other events are available at northeastcoffeefestival.com, where you can also find a map, schedule and more.

• Bacon! Tickets — and merch — are on sale now for the NH Bacon & Beer Festival ,which will be held Saturday, June 1, from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. at the Anheuser-Busch fields in Merrimack. Tickets in advance cost $60 for general admission and $100 for VIP admission, which includes a 12:30 p.m. admission time, according to nhbaconbeer.com. The event features live music from The Slakas as well as, of course, bacon (from 20 samplers), beer (from 60 craft brewers) and 25 teams competing in a pulled pork contest, according to the website. The event benefits the High Hopes Foundation.

• Berry informative: The NH Audubon will hold a “Growing Backyard Berries” workshop on Thursday, May 16, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Massabesic Center (26 Audubon Way in Auburn). The cost is $15. The presenter is Steph Sosinski, UNH Extension Home Horticulture Program Manager. Register by May 14 at the UNH Extension site, which you can reach via nhaudubon.org.

On The Job – Corey McNabb

Owner of Dragon’s Den Candles in Nashua

Explain your job and what it entails.

I own and operate Dragon’s Den Candles [DragonsDenCandles.com]. I make fantasy, tabletop gaming themed candles that are all designed with a certain sense in mind to give ambiance when you’re playing a game, or reading a book, watching a movie, that kind of thing.

How long have you had this job?

It’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple years now, about 2 1/2 years now.

What led you to this career field and your current job?

I worked in retail for 20 years and I finally got myself out of that…. Trying to come up with something new on a random Sunday my wife and I started making candles just for fun and we both really enjoyed it and it just kind of snowballed from there. I’m a big nerd so I took it in the nerdy direction with the candles I make.

What kind of education or training did you need?

I was mostly all self-taught. Did a lot of research online. We got some candle-making starter kits that had like the basic instructions and just looked up all the different ways people do them and figured out from there, as we narrowed it down and honed our method.

What is your typical at-work uniform or attire?

Just my usual casual everyday wear. We do all this right out of our house so … just khakis and a T-shirt.

What is the most challenging thing about your work, and how do you deal with it?

We have two different candle lines we mainly sell at conventions and craft fairs and ren faires…. We’re constantly traveling up and all over New England selling at different places. It’s a lot of maintaining the proper amount of stock…

What do you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?

Any kind of knowledge into all these different kinds of shows and events that we sell at would have helped tremendously, and just the general knowledge of how much of my house doing this was going to absorb.

What do you wish other people knew about your job?

Probably the amount of time that goes into it. It is a long process making all the candles that we make.

What was your first job?

My very first job ever, I worked at when I was 16 years old, Whalom park down in … Mass. It was a little amusement park. It’s no longer there. I did puppet shows, marionette shows and [was one of] the big costume guys that walked around the park.

What is the best piece of work-related advice you’ve ever received?

At the start of anything you do, it’s always going to look messy. You just need to keep pushing through. It will eventually get to what it needs to be. —Zachary Lewis

Explain your job and what it entails.

I own and operate Dragon’s Den Candles [DragonsDenCandles.com]. I make fantasy, tabletop gaming themed candles that are all designed with a certain sense in mind to give ambiance when you’re playing a game, or reading a book, watching a movie, that kind of thing.

How long have you had this job?

It’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple years now, about 2 1/2 years now.

What led you to this career field and your current job?

I worked in retail for 20 years and I finally got myself out of that…. Trying to come up with something new on a random Sunday my wife and I started making candles just for fun and we both really enjoyed it and it just kind of snowballed from there. I’m a big nerd so I took it in the nerdy direction with the candles I make.

What kind of education or training did you need?

I was mostly all self-taught. Did a lot of research online. We got some candle-making starter kits that had like the basic instructions and just looked up all the different ways people do them and figured out from there, as we narrowed it down and honed our method.

What is your typical at-work uniform or attire?

Just my usual casual everyday wear. We do all this right out of our house so … just khakis and a T-shirt.

What is the most challenging thing about your work, and how do you deal with it?

We have two different candle lines we mainly sell at conventions and craft fairs and ren faires…. We’re constantly traveling up and all over New England selling at different places. It’s a lot of maintaining the proper amount of stock…

What do you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?

Any kind of knowledge into all these different kinds of shows and events that we sell at would have helped tremendously, and just the general knowledge of how much of my house doing this was going to absorb.

What do you wish other people knew about your job?

Probably the amount of time that goes into it. It is a long process making all the candles that we make.

What was your first job?

My very first job ever, I worked at when I was 16 years old, Whalom park down in … Mass. It was a little amusement park. It’s no longer there. I did puppet shows, marionette shows and [was one of] the big costume guys that walked around the park.

What is the best piece of work-related advice you’ve ever received?

At the start of anything you do, it’s always going to look messy. You just need to keep pushing through. It will eventually get to what it needs to be. —Zachary Lewis

Five favorites
Favorite book: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Favorite movie: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Favorite music: lo-fi ambient music that I can have going on while I’m doing other stuff
Favorite food: pizza with bacon on top
Favorite thing about NH: I like the environment. It’s hilly, there’s trees, there’s rivers, I like that general atmosphere, that kind of outdoorsy air that it has here.

Featured photo: Corey McNabb. Courtesy photo.

Treasure Hunt 24/05/09

Dear Donna,

I inherited this punch bowl from my grandmother. I have four matching cups with it. Everything is in good shape. Can you give me an evaluation on it?

Thank you, Donna.

Cindy

Dear Cindy,

Thanks for all the photos, Cindy; they really help.

Your Heisey punch bowl is from the early 1900s and is the fluted pattern. Heisey was produced in Ohio and has an interesting history.

Your punch bowl in the fluted pattern most likely had at least a dozen punch cups. You could collect older ones today to complete your set again.

The values used to be at least triple what they are today. Heisey glass was mass-produced along with several others from the same period.

Condition, patterns and rarity all still come into play for pricing. I found values in the range of under $100 for the punch bowl itself. Note: The punch bowl base has a second use when separated from the bowl, as a flower vase. Sweet!

I hope this helped, Cindy, and thanks for sharing.

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!