Album Reviews 25/02/13

EST Gee, I Ain’t Feeling You (Bonus Edition) (Interscope Records)

This 30-year-old Louisville, Kentucky-born rapper lost a good number of fans after trying actual singing on for size for a couple of albums or so, but his return to straight spitting in this one does go pretty hard, aiming for the same intensity as 2021’s Bigger Than Life or Death. Of course, “intensity” isn’t an attribute that’s usually applied to him, what with his mumbly, disjointed style; he’s been dubbed a “less coherent Rich Homie Quan” among other things, but I was captivated enough by opener “Free Rico” and its woofer-rattling, from-the-mountaintop kettle-drum beat to get past the pedestrian trap undergirding that serves as its base. “The Streets” winds and roils in hypnotic, serpentine fashion, evincing casual excitement and an endless supply of oxygen, instantly lending the record grower potential rather than evoking some texted-in flavor-of-the-week exercise. “Do My Own Stunts” is the underground stoner-a-thon, for those who live for that kind of thing. A —Eric W. Saeger

Friko, Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here (ATO Records)

In In-Case-You-Missed-It news, this album didn’t hit my radar until just now, so you have my sincere apologies if you’re already deeply familiar with it. I’m literally a year late on it, but in my defense the angle here is that on Saturday, March 8, they’ll be at The Sinclair in Cambridge, Mass., and besides, at the rate indie bands come and go in the endless flux of our no-attention-span zeitgeist, it’s worth mentioning. This Chicago duo, claiming to be inspired by such acts as Minski and such, are, as some have noted, remindful of Radiohead and Arcade Fire, but there’s a wild-horses feel to these frightwiggy tunes; they incorporate some of the decent things (few though they were) about Aughts-indie bands like New Young Pony Club and Los Campesinos, for one thing the amateurish group-singalong sound that was a staple at Bowery Ballroom shows and later refined by Arcade Fire. The overall effect is like being subjected to a cult initiation; you want to learn the lyrics because the melodies sound so bloody important, a rare thing these days. A —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

• Happy Valentine’s Day to those who celebrate, and even to those who haven’t dated or even talked to another human being since the 1990s (good choice)! It is another two months before the South Korea-originated “Black Valentine’s Day,” when people who celebrate being “happily single” take themselves out to dinner and a movie and then go home to descend into madness in front of reruns of Classic Concentration on the Buzzr channel, as opposed to us totally happily married people who spend most of our time living like Fred Flintstone, half-watching Match Game ’78 while trying to figure out how to hide ridiculously impulsive Amazon purchases from our spouses, do you guys even know how much money buying a 20-pack of button-cell batteries for kitty laser pointers can save you in the long run? But I digress, someone stop me, the record companies are gearing up for a long year of releasing albums and trying to figure out a way to out-sell Chappell Roan, who won the Best New Artist Grammy award the other week for such things as dressing up like Carol Kane in Scrooged, giving attitude to random people with cameras, and of course her masterstroke, adding gravelly Ed Banger beats to microwaved Madonna oatmeal and summarily dispatching a battalion of record company mafiosi to pressure low-information writers from Nylon and such to proclaim her marginally listenable album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess to be the greatest thing since Reese’s Cups. This too shall pass, as you know (by the way, are Zola Jesus and Poppy still relevant, someone please tweet at me), but in the meantime we have albums to discuss, new ones that are coming out on Valentine’s Day, let’s get it over with. First things first, speaking of Buzzr, guess who’s got an album coming out on Friday? None other than Richard Dawson! But wait, it’s not that Richard Dawson, the creepy touchy-grabby British dude from Family Feud, it’s a different one, some British folkie whose voice sounds like a drunk Basset hound! Nothing normal is going on here, this man has been using a literally broken guitar as his go-to instrument for years, he just likes the sound of it. His trip has been described as “the folkie version of Captain Beefheart’s approach to blues music.” In other words it’s completely horrible, but our pals at Domino Records are releasing this monstrosity nevertheless, so I’m compelled to listen to it, so I am. OK I’m not anymore, it sounds like the Unabomber singing a love song to his first-grade teacher on a wooden Fisher Price guitar from 1959. If you honestly love this I hate you.

• Usually when I hear the term “space rock” I start barfing uncontrollably, figuring I’m about to hear something that sounds like Spacemen 3 or a Loot Crate version of Pink Floyd, but British band Doves are pretty awesome: They actually sound kind of like Elbow! Constellations For The Lonely, their new one, features the tune “Renegade”; it’s psychedelic, yes, but singer Jimi Goodwin’s voice is seriously neat.

• Oh, great, notoriously awful singer Neil Young has once again found some old tapes in his goat barn and made an album out of them. Oceanside Countryside was recorded in 1977 but never released until now; it features “Field of Opportunity,” a fiddle-driven bluegrass jam that’s OK if you like bad singing with your bluegrass.

• Finally we have Sleepless Empire, the latest LP from Italian goth-metal spazzers Lacuna Coil. The song “Gravity” is doomy and epic, of course, less so when the Cookie Monster-voiced dude is doing the singing, more so when the hot chick singer is trying to sound like an America’s Got Talent contestant. It’s fine for what it is. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: EST Gee, I Ain’t Feeling You (Bonus Edition) (Interscope Records) & Friko, Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here (ATO Records)

Drinks with John Fladd

Trinidad Sour

It’s easy to fall into a rut.

Ruts are comforting. They provide predictability and structure in a chaotic world with too many unwelcome surprises.

So it’s easy — for me, at any rate — to fall back on simple utility cocktails, made from three ingredients; four if you count ice. Some sort of spirit, something sour, and something sweet — this is the basic structure of a daiquiri, a gimlet, a margarita or a sour.

But a rut — no matter how comforting — can close you off from new possibilities. In this case, the mind-expanding novelty is using Angostura bitters as the main alcohol. Normally bitters are used — extremely sparingly — bring a bitter flavor to help balance out an otherwise sweet drink. Most of them, though, are suspended in a base that averages around 45 percent alcohol, or 90 proof. So, there is no reason why you couldn’t drink them in more substantial amounts.

1½ ounces Angostura bitters – you will probably want to use a knife to pry off the plastic cap that limits you to a dash of bitters at a time, or you’ll spend the next 15 minutes shaking your wrist to fill a jigger

½ ounce rye whiskey

¾ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice

1 ounce orgeat – this is a sweet almond syrup, usually used in tropical drink; here it is used to balance out the bitter herbiness from the bitters

Combine all ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker.

Shake it. At this point, you know how to do this.

Strain into a coupé or Nick & Nora glass.

Ask your digital assistant to play “Pressure Drop” by Toots and the Maytals.

Spend the next two and a half cocktails trying to identify what it is you’re tasting.

Probably the least useful word to describe this particular drink is “delicious.” It is actually delicious in fact — that’s not the issue. There’s a sweet, sherry-like, almost raisiny flavor that isn’t actually all that much like raisins or sherry. There’s a sweetness in the front end, but a bitter aftertaste that is nothing like dark chocolate or anything else you would call “bittersweet.” There are herbal notes from the Angostura — but not mint or rosemary, or any herb that you’re probably familiar with. You can try reading the label, but the Angostura Co. has kept their ingredients secret for over 200 years with the kind of secrecy usually reserved for nuclear codes.

So what are we left with?

Bittersweet fruitiness with herbs and the tiniest bit of rye in the background. This is the kind of cocktail you would drink with — OK, I don’t know what the day-to-day life of a monastic abbot is, but if he gets any vacation time and were to take a holiday in the Caribbean, this is what he would drink, wearing sandals, and a tropical shirt covered with pictures of little monks on it.

He would have checked into the hotel under the name Costello — a tiny, private joke that would make him smile to himself. The staff would greet him with fondness, and he would greet them by name in return.

At the bar by the pool, the bar manager would tap the young woman on duty on the shoulder and send her to wait on other customers, while he would mix this cocktail without needing to be told.

“Long flight?” he’d ask the abbot. “You look like you could use this.”

“Bless you, Leo,” the abbot would say, with a look of relieved fondness on his face. “You, sir, are a saint.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Leo would say.

What’s your food story?

Project looks at relationships to what we eat

By John Fladd

[email protected]

Shanta Lee knows that you have a fascinating story about food, and she wants to hear it.

“We all are connected as humans to food,” she said. “Whether or not we want to walk across that bridge, whether or not it’s something either warm and cozy for us, or painful and uncomfortable, we all have a connection and a relationship to food.”

Lee is an artist, oral historian, photographer and poet. Her current project is called Food Stories: We Are What We Eat. She is gathering stories from people from different backgrounds that tell something specific about their relationships with food.

“It’s a discussion between food, memory, identity and our stories,” she said. “And the main goal is to get people thinking about ‘How do these things intersect?’ It’s all the different ranges and ways that we are connected to food — not just personal stories either, but also individuals who work in food industries, people who work with food sustainability, people who work with food insecurity, ordinary people who recall why they really can’t stand a certain kind of food.”

Ultimately, Lee said, these stories will culminate in an exhibition.

“Those stories, those vignettes, those visuals, those are all going to be within an exhibition that’s happening at some point in the fall this year in Manchester,” she said. “I’m still looking for a place. At some point soon, I’ll be putting out a call to artists, and inviting them to contribute to this exhibition as well, if they have their own pieces that they want to be a part of this exhibition about food.”

One of the parts of Lee’s project that excites her is a book that will tie in with the exhibition.

“When the exhibition takes place,” she said, “There will be a booklet, what you might traditionally call an exhibition catalog, and some of the stories will be in there. There might be some of the questions that I use to help prompt the writers who contributed the stories, so that maybe people can continue talking about the food stories, and still engage with the project.”

Some of the early stories she has received have been engrossing, Lee said.

“There is a story I just got from a person named Taffi: ‘One afternoon I was washing chicken feet and cleaning gizzards before putting them in the freezer. Each pair of chicken feet seemed to be speaking to me. I loved the unusual textures and colors of both chicken feet and the skins of gizzards, so I ran for my camera. I took pictures of various arrangements. For years, I’ve been concerned about the food I eat. I grow and put up most of what I eat. I buy my meat from farmers I know.’”

“So, Lee observed, “it’s talking about this deep relation to food and also the relationship to this specific kind of food.”

Another story came from a novice cook who was deeply determined to bake lasagna but got distracted by a video game and burned it to cinders.

“It was a funny story,” Lee said, “because we’ve all been there. We try so hard, we toil on it, on the dish, and then it burns. Again, whether it’s a bridge that brings together or a bridge that involves some kind of reaction to [a shared experience], there’s always a story with it and you don’t need much when it comes to involving or including food.”

Lee will collect stories for the next three or four months.

“I’m going to wrap up collecting stories by early June,” she said, “so I can prepare for the exhibition in the fall. People will be able to submit their stories to me through my website, ShantaLee.com, but I also have a Facebook page called Food Stories. People can DM me there, if they want. Ballot boxes will be showing up in different places in Manchester, so if people are so inclined to put pen to paper, they could do that.”

Ultimately, Lee said, this project is about the way food brings people together. “There’s a whole range of what attracts us to or detracts us from food,” she said, “but it’s also a social and cultural lubricant. There’s a reason we have the phrase, ‘breaking bread together.’”

Food Stories
To find out more about the Food Stories project and Shanta Lee’s partners in the project, visit shantalee.com/foodstories, her “Food Stories” Facebook page, or instagram.com/mz.shanta_lee.

Featured photo: Shanta Lee. Courtesy photo.

Meatballs and music

Elm Street eatery offers Swedish, red sauce, ‘Thanksgiving’ and other variations

By John Fladd

[email protected]

Even after 28 years in the business Kevin Cornish finds himself relearning a basic lesson of restaurant ownership: it doesn’t matter how delicious a dish is if none of your customers order it.

“We had a vegetarian meatball,” he said. “After cooking them seven days in a row without one person ordering them, we had to get rid of it.”

Rock ‘n Roll Meatballs, on Manchester’s Elm Street, is Cornish’s new restaurant, themed around — perhaps not surprisingly — 1980s rock music and meatballs. After three decades of running his successful barbecue restaurant, KC’s Rib Shack, Cornish has decided to open a second place to indulge one of his other great passions, live music.

“I love live music,” Cornish said. ”It’s probably my biggest hobby. This place [the restaurant’s location] has been opened twice with different people running it and pretty much closed twice. Manchester hasn’t always supported live music all that much. Especially in something this size, you need a scene to create a scene. There’s got to be little, ragged rock clubs for big rock clubs to succeed. My band used to play at Mad Bob’s and if we brought 25 people it was great. It was a little hole in the wall and a little bar, but in New Hampshire you can’t have a bar — you have to have a restaurant.”

Cornish had seen a few meatball-specific restaurants on the West Coast and liked the idea. He and three partners decided to adopt that formula for their menu. Despite his number of years as a restaurant owner, though, Cornish found that developing recipes for the new place required a long process of trial and error.

“When it came to the meatballs,” he said, “for one day or several days, we’d just work on beef meatballs, or beef and pork meatballs, or chicken meatballs. For months leading up to this, my wife was so sick of eating chicken meatballs — she was like, ‘What do we have for dinner tonight?’ Meatballs, you know?”

Ultimately, developing the recipe turned out to be a group project.

“We would come in and we lined this whole bar up with all the ingredients we would need. Each of us would take a table, and a bowl, and work up a recipe. It was nice to get in here and cook seven different types of meatballs in an afternoon, and being able to try them right next to each other. By coming in here and having everybody make a different one … we were able to zero in on, ‘Wow, we really like the flavor of this, but maybe, but we like the mouth-feel of this one, maybe that’s because this one was made with bread as opposed to this one made with panko breadcrumbs,’ and things like that. So we were able to kind of tweak and zero in on it and that’s what we did.”

Even after the kinks in a recipe have been ironed out, there’s still no guarantee that it will work on the restaurant’s menu. Which brings us back to the vegetarian meatball.

Rock ‘n Roll Meatballs’ menu is centered around five core meatballs: a standard red-sauce one, a Swedish meatball in a creamy sauce, a brisket-macaroni and cheese one, a “Thanksgiving” meatball made with ground turkey and stuffing, and a chicken Parmesan one.

One of the biggest surprises, though, was an appetizer that sold well from opening day onward. “The escargot is great,” Cornish said, a bit perplexed. *It’s a very simple dish, and it’s selling great.”

Rock n Roll Meatballs
179 Elm St., Manchester, 931-3654, rocknrollmeatballs.com
Open seven days a week: Monday through Thursday 4:30 to 9 p.m., Saturday noon to 10 p.m., and Sunday noon to 9 p.m. There will be live music twice monthly. Visit facebook.com/RnRMeatballs for notice of upcoming events.

Featured photo: Swedish Meatballs. Courtesy photo.

Treasure Hunt 25/02/13

Hello, Donna,

Have enjoyed your column for years in the Hippo. The photos will show a carving of some type that my grandfather bought back from France during WWI in 1919. It appears to be ivory or marble. It’s approximately 5 inches in diameter. The frame is a dark hardwood with a curved glass top. Any idea on rarity or value?

Thanks.

Gene

Dear Gene,

Thank you for reading the Hippo and my column.

What you have is a Victorian era (last part of the 1800s) carved meerschaum in a convex glass frame. Meerschaum is a form of clay that was used for lots of smoking pipe carvings.

Your carving is of a religious subject and most ones I found to compare it to ran in the $200 range. I found some in a higher range but on average the ones marketing were in that range. Some of the meerschaum carvings that had other subjects and details also brought more. Value depends on the condition of the inside carving, glass and frame.

Thank you for sharing and I hope this helped.

The Weekly Dish 25/02/13

News from the local food scene

• Chocolate and raspberries: The martini-and-cupcake pairing at Copper Door (15 Leavy Drive, Bedford, 488-2677, or 41 S. Broadway, Salem, 458-2033, copperdoor.com) for February is a Chocolate Raspberry Martini, made with double chocolate vodka, dark creme de cacao, raspberry liqueur, cream, raspberry puree, and chocolate syrup, garnished with a glittered raspberry, for $14.75, and a Red Velvet Cupcake, with red velvet cake, a raspberry preserve filling, and cream cheese frosting, garnished with a white chocolate cup and glittered berries for $11.

• Investing in kettle corn: Ken and Meredith Thomas, the owners of Ken’s Corn (68 Chester Road, Derry, 208-661-0282, kenscorn.com), have announced an unusual investment strategy to expand their kettle corn business. Using Honeycomb Credit (honeycombcredit.com) the Thomases are asking individuals to lend them expansion money, to be paid back with interest, rather than working through a traditional bank. Contact Ken’s Corn at [email protected].

• Extremely good ports in the storm: WineNot Boutique (25 Main St., Nashua, 204-5569, winenotboutique.com) will host a Grand Port Tasting Thursday, Feb. 13, from 6 to 8 p.m. Explore seven distinct styles of Portuguese ports, from youthful ruby to aged tawny, in an evening of rich flavors. Tickets are $50, through eventbrite.com.

• Bottle your own wine: Join the winemakers at Averill House Vineyard (21 Averill Road, Brookline, 244-3165, averillhousevineyard.com) Sunday, Feb.16, for a special Valentine’s Sunday Bottle Your Own experience, which includes a two-hour tasting, tour and bottle-your-own event. One bottle of wine is included, and additional bottles may be filled and purchased. Note: The wine being bottled is pre-selected by the vintner based on the weekly bottling schedule. Included will be a charcuterie board with chocolate, cheese, nuts and meats. Tickets are $69 per person, through exploretock.com.

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