The Music Roundup 20/08/27

• Artful: A free courtyard concert by River Sister offers a wonderful blend of folk traditions and jazz rhythms, pure harmony married to musical complexity. It’s part of the Currier’s Art After Work event, which includes happy hour drink specials and a full menu for purchase outdoors. Timed tickets are available in advance, and highly encouraged. Thursday, Aug. 27, 5 p.m., Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester, currier.org/event/art-after-work.

• Tribute: With big tours on hold for now, tribute acts like Pink Houses are getting a lot of action. The band recreates John Mellencamp’s extensive catalog, led by singer-guitarist Doug Hoyt as the Hoosier’s doppelganger, with drummer Jeffrey Brayne, bass player Ken Lloyd and guitarist Justin Carver. The Arts In The Park concert is held adjacent to Belknap Mill, which is sponsoring the event. Friday, Aug 28, 6 p.m., Rotary Riverside Park, Beacon St. East, Laconia, facebook.com/belknapmill.

• Forceful: While you can’t catch Metallica in person, a filmed concert by the iconic band screens at a local drive-in, with opening act Three Days Grace. Each carload ticket includes four digital downloads of S&M2, a new live album chronicling their reunion with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra last year, which opened that city’s new (and currently dormant) Oracle Arena. Saturday, Aug. 29, 8 p.m., Milford Drive-In Theater, 531 Elm St., Milford. Tickets $115 at ticketmaster.com.

• Authentic: After postponing an appearance last month, Nick Drouin performs at a downtown country themed bar/restaurant. The drummer turned front man has a well-tuned instinct for crafting good songs, as exemplified by “Small Town,” an autobiographical paean to growing up in Candia recorded in Nashville with Jason Aldean’s III Kings rhythm section. Saturday, Aug. 29, 9 p.m., Bonfire Restaurant & Country Bar, 950 Elm St., Manchester, facebook.com/nickdrouinmusic.

At the Sofaplex 20/08/27

*Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado (TV-14)
You don’t have to know who Walter Mercado was to understand his place in the 1990s TV ecosystem, thanks in part to clips presented here of his appearances on shows hosted by Sally Jessy Raphael and Sinbad. And that’s just for English-language American audiences; the movie also helps to explain his far greater fame among Latin Americans (both living in the U.S. and in the rest of the hemisphere). An astrologer, Mercado had a wardrobe Liberace might envy and projected a love for all of his viewers that had an almost Mister Rogers-like tone. Certainly, fans meeting him shortly before his death in 2019 seemed to be filled with a kind of giddy awe mixed with childhood nostalgia. As one fan (Lin-Manuel Miranda) explains, his show was the stuff of afternoons spent with grandma and a general aura of unconditional love. Fans, friends and business associates (including one who eventually sued Mercado for use of his own name) explain the legend and the impact of Walter Mercado in this jolly documentary. Even if you aren’t a Walter Mercado fan going in, you will be when the movie is done. A Available on Netflix.

Boys State (PG-13)

Film Reviews by Amy Diaz

Teenage boys who might be some degree of embarrassed by this movie when they are older spend a week giving a pretty good demonstration of modern American politics in the documentary Boys State.

The opening credits remind you of where you’ve likely heard of the week-long, American Legion-sponsored government camp Boys State before: that iconic photo of Boys State try-hard teenage Bill Clinton, shaking hands with President Kennedy at Boys Nation (whose participants are chosen from Boys State). Other notable participants, as the movie highlights, include Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh and Samuel Alito (also Cory Booker). As we are introduced to the participants in 2018’s Texas Boys State we meet kids who seem like fitting heirs to that list. In particular, hit-the-ground-politicking Robert MacDougall feels like exactly the sort of kid who would introduce himself by saying he’s the future governor of Texas. We also met Ben Feinstein, a teen who lost both his legs to meningitis as a preschooler. He has worked hard to achieve and, he explains, that has shaped a very “up by your bootstraps” mindset. The big prize of Boys State is to get yourself elected governor (or, as becomes Ben’s goal, be the teen-behind-the-curtain for the kid who does get elected).

“Oh, their poor mothers” I found myself thinking about the crop of boys who are absolutely certain in their world views (so many opinions about abortion!). We also meet kids who arrive ready for a challenge: René Otero and Steven Garza come to Boys State aware that many of their fellow participants are likely more politically conservative than them but they are eager to make their mark nonetheless. Watching them figure out how to work themselves into the boy-created power structure is probably the most compelling action of the early part of the documentary.

Then, about halfway through this movie when I was wondering why Girls State wasn’t chosen as the focus (girls unleashed to be aggressive political animals feels like something more ripe for examination and suited to this moment in history than boys yelling into mics about masculinity), the movie makes a little turn and shows you a story of kids really caring about really making a difference — and really, aggressively playing politics the way you would if your formative political experience was 2016.

Though the documentary clearly anoints its heroes, I don’t really think it turns other kids (and these are just kids, kids who I hope are OK with how this movie shakes out) into villains. You see people with political viewpoints and also political instincts and a desire to win. The movie demonstrates why this is a worthwhile program and not just a resume-burnisher; we see boys care, and care deeply and watch them become genuinely respectful of their peers. It’s a fascinating little study of what this moment in American history means to the practice of politics and how it’s being learned by the next generation of politicians and activists. B+

Rated PG-13 for some strong language, and thematic elements, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Amanda McBane and Jesse Moss, Boys State is an hour and 49 minutes long and distributed by A24. It is available on Apple TV+.

Clean, The New Science of Skin

by James Hamblin (Riverhead, 253 pages)

He was a doctor with questionable judgment, or so it seemed, when he gave up medicine to become a journalist and, at roughly the same time, decided to stop showering.

So why isn’t Dr. James Hamblin’s new book called “Unclean”?

It’s because there’s an increasing body of evidence that we are doing our bodies no favors with all the soap, deodorant, moisturizers and exfoliants to which we daily subject our skin. Skin isn’t just a covering; it’s the body’s largest organ, and it teems with more organisms than there were residents of New York City before the pandemic.

Meet, for example, the demodex, a microscopic arachnid that lives in your facial pores and eats your dead skin cells.

That seems a good reason to shower hourly, but like the gut flora that keep our intestinal tract happy, it appears that these organisms are there to help, and we are becoming unhealthier by scrubbing them away. “Research into the microbiome seems poised to overturn even our most basic assumptions about how to take care of our skin,” Hamblin writes.

So Hamblin, who was downsizing anyway when he moved from Los Angeles to New York, decided to delve into “the new science of skin” while going three years without washing his face. Before you dismiss him as kooky, know that this is an emerging trend. The internet is full of people who have stopped showering regularly and people who simply rinse off with water, who swear that not using soap and shampoo made their skin and hair healthier. They also insist that they don’t stink.

Hamblin weaves his own journey to becoming one of the “Great Unwashed” with the history of cleanliness, from the Romans’ public baths to Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap. Especially fascinating is how cleanliness became a sign of social status after germ theory was introduced, and an unkempt and soiled person came to be seen as dangerous. “To appear ungroomed suggested that you could not afford to wash, and that your toilets were the excrement pits in alleys adjacent to your tenement. You may be one of the disease carriers.”

That led to a new standard, in which people were required to do more than simply not look or smell gross; “a person was to smell actively good” to signal that they didn’t harbor germs or fleas. Then capitalism, which Hamblin says “sells nothing so effectively as status,” took over, and something human skin had done without for thousands of years — soap — became a necessity. Until late in the 19th century, soap was primarily used for laundry, in part because it was so harsh, such as the combination of lye and animal fat that early colonists made.

In the most compelling chapter, “Lather,” Hamblin tells the origin story of iconic brands such as Dr. Bronner’s, Ivory, Dove and Camay. (Fun fact: Wrigley’s chewing gum was developed to help sell soap that William Wrigley Jr. made. The gum sold better than the soap, which is why Chicago has Wrigley Field. Also, the Dr. Bronner of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps “was not a doctor, nor particularly tethered to scientific reality.”

Hamblin is a staff writer for The Atlantic, and some of the content in Clean will seem familiar to the magazine’s readers. He wrote about his no-showering policy in 2016, and I remembered a catchy couple of lines I’d read just a few weeks earlier in The Atlantic: “In October, when the Canadian air starts drying out, the men flock to Sandy Skotnicki’s office. The men are itchy.”

I encounter these reruns with no resentment, however, because Hamblin’s voice is, frankly, delightful. The line about the itchy men and Canadian air could be set to rap music, and we’d all nod along. Hamblin is one of a genre becoming known as “media doctors” and is the best in the burgeoning field. His explanation of how soap is made will make you wish he’d been your high-school chemistry teacher, and he strikes just the right balance of being funny enough to entertain while being wonky enough to trust as a source of medical information.

Which brings us to an elephant in the room, which is the pandemic. Hamblin finished the manuscript in January, before anyone foresaw the horror that is 2020, and his publisher had to worry that a book that suggests we clean ourselves less frequently might raise some eyebrows and serious questions. He addresses this in one paragraph of the prologue, saying “the stories and principles I share are no less relevant in this new era of pandemic awareness, as we recover from one and brace for the next.”

I’m not so sure about that as I survey the supply of soap and hand sanitizer at Hannaford. But Hamblin never says we shouldn’t be washing our hands. And he says that he’s never been one to touch his face. So carry on as you were in that department, but consider his invitation not to scrub every inch of your body so zealously, and with so many products. Your friendly neighborhood demodex will thank you.

A

BOOK NOTES
The ink was still wet on the World Health Organization’s declaration of a pandemic when enterprising writers started churning about the novel coronavirus.

On Amazon, you can find books with titles like The Covid-19 Catastrophe, The Coronavirus Prevention Handbook, God and the Pandemic, and (Expletive) Off, Coronavirus, I’m Coloring, many of them self-published.

Enough time has elapsed, however, for other titles appropriate to the global trainwreck called 2020 to emerge, and two are notable this week.

First, Flatiron is reissuing How to Survive a Pandemic by Dr. Michael Greger. He’s a vegan-lifestyle advocate who has built a brand around the words “How Not To.” His previous books include How Not to Die and How Not to Diet. The new paperback (592 pages) is the timely expansion of a book first released in 2006. Greger, who runs the website Nutritionfacts.org, says he donates all book proceeds to charity.

A more lighthearted title to be released Sept. 8 is The Lake Wobegon Virus (Arcade, 240 pages), your enjoyment of which may have much to do with whether you’ve forgiven Garrison Keillor for the transgressions that led to his canceling. It’s been three years since he was fired by Minnesota Public Radio for inappropriate behavior, and his publisher must believe he’s been punished enough, because there are two titles scheduled from him this fall. (The other is a memoir, This Time of Year, set for release Nov. 17.)

The Lake Wobegon Virus sounds fun. The description, provided by the publisher: “A mysterious virus has infiltrated the good people of Lake Wobegon, transmitted via unpasteurized cheese made by a Norwegian bachelor farmer, the effect of which is episodic loss of social inhibition.”

Not nearly as fun as that coronavirus coloring book, though.

Album Reviews 20/08/27

Rudresh Mahanthappa, Hero Trio (Whirlwind Recordings)

Jazz sax legend Charlie Parker is often referred to by his nickname “Bird,” which explains the title of this Princeton jazz director’s widely acclaimed 2015 album Bird Calls. If you’re familiar with Parker, you know he had the ability to dazzle with his bebop stylings, and so has Mahanthappa, who viewed this LP as an opportunity to pay rapt obeisance to Parker, his biggest and most obvious influence. But whatever, my goal here, as always, isn’t to lay out some eggheaded synonyms for the benefit of solemn aficionados whose record collections are 20-feet-wide end-to-end, but to rope in the odd stray who’s thinking of taking a dip in the depthless pool that is jazz. The long and short of this business here is that I can’t recommend this album highly enough if you’re wanting to be blown away by technical wizardry; most of its contents are extremely busy, effecting to cover the listener in bright musical glitter, but the touchstone knuckleball’s a beauty too, a rub of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” that plays with the modal subject like a dolphin with a beach ball. Nice one to have around. A-

The Milwaukees, The Calling (Mint 400 Records)

You can imagine how many times the great cosmic metaphorical Lucy van Pelt has pulled away the football just when I’m about to pronounce a straight-ahead rock record something special, leaving me tripping hilariously and landing on my duff, holding a half-written review that has to get sent to the recycle bin. It’s happened a lot. No, if your band wants to sound like Goo Goo Dolls with a side of Foo Fighters and get your local following of working stiffs to pay actual attention, this is what you want to sound like. As demonstrated here, decent guitar riffage is only one tool on hand, not the whole box; these guys prove that there’s still a place for non-indie hooks in our world, even if the most common place for hearing such stuff — sports bars — seems to be gone for good in the face of Covid. This is the sixth full-length from a crew of New Joisey die-hards who’ve worked their formula to the point that anyone would be convinced they were paper-trained by Bryan Adams. Some really catchy, heartfelt stuff here. A+

Retro Playlist
Eric W. Seager looks back at hip-hop.

Now that the Covid virus has left us all marooned on our own domestic desert islands, any elephant in the room is getting close examination. The elephant in the room regarding my 16-year-old column here is, of course, the fact that I don’t cover a lot of hip-hop. No reader has ever complained to me about it; I’ve posted the occasional Lil Wayne review and whatnot, but you and I both know I largely avoid the genre.

Fact is, I’m at the point where I find basically all corporate hip-hop quite tedious to write about. I was the first kid on my block to buy a Run-DMC cassette, I’ll have you know, and quite frankly, I decided that after Public Enemy’s 1990 masterpiece Fear of a Black Planet, there was nowhere to go but down for the entire genre.

I tell you, I’ve tried, and yeah, I’ll continue to. I paid some lip service to Swedish rapper Yung Lean’s recent LP Stranger, but now that we’re all friends here, lazily tossing peanuts at Dumbo, I can say that I think the guy just sucks. No, I was more hopeful about white-guy indie-rap in 2006, upon hearing Astronautalis’ The Mighty Ocean & Nine Dark Theaters (some truly immersive beats there), but to be honest, to me, if it isn’t Chuck D-level angry, I don’t have time for it. Same as I like DMX a hundred times more than Ludacris, I like Death Grips a hundred times more than Kendrick Lamar. Make sense?

One reason I mostly avoid corporate rap is because the reviews always end descending into reams of in-crowd nonsense about this or that tweet or Instagram beef. Gag me. As far as indie rap, I’m down, like I’d be big into giving some press love to a local artist who’s got some beats, if one even exists.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Email [email protected] for fastest response.

PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• One more round of new CDs for August comes at us on the 28th, and then it will be September, and I’m just going to shut up about what comes next, because surely nothing good will come of it, unless you are an abominable snowman or a ski buff, neither of which I’ve ever had an interesting conversation with. Self-taught musician Angel Olsen is from St. Louis, Missouri, and her deal is art-pop/indie folk. She received the most love for her 2016 album My Woman, because she successfully tried to get away from being pigeonholed as a lo-fi indie artist (pro tip for local musicians: Don’t play lo-fi indie if you want to avoid said pigeonhole). Pitchfork liked that one and, as usual, wrote way too many wordy words to indicate same (“congeal” was in there) but that’s Pitchfork for you, and the PopMatters review was poorly written, but that guy loved it too, all of which then presented a double-edged sword, because now all the hipsters were used to her not being a sad, privileged gloom-girl anymore, so all the critics hedged their bets on her next album, Phases, which covered songs from Bruce Springsteen and Roky Erickson, and gave it middling grades. That sort of brings us to now, and her new one, Whole New Mess, which comprises a bunch of songs from her 2018 album, All Mirrors, but supposedly these are more “intimate” versions, which tells me that if this stuff isn’t going to sound lo-fi and gloom-girl, I’m a monkey’s uncle in a striped suit. Yeah, yep, the title track is all gloomy, and I think one of her guitar strings is a little out of tune, which will bring joy to anyone who loves their music crappy. She’s a good singer, a little like k.d. lang, but gloomy and redundant. Come and get it, three-toed sloths.

• Toni Braxton is trapped in fame purgatory these days, now that she’s more of a reality show oddity than what she was originally, a cool bedroom-soul lady who was name-checked by a Spike Lee character in Do The Right Thing. Whatever nonsense is on her upcoming new album, Spell My Name, I’m sure it’s decent as long as she hasn’t switched over to doing Slim Whitman covers, but come on, isn’t there footage of her tripping over a Gucci bag and skinning her knee, or whatever happened on her reality show? Right, I’m supposed to take this seriously? Fine, I will, I’ll listen to her new single, “Dance,” and if I barf, it’s on you. Right, it isn’t bad, sort of like Sade but with more soul. Some gentle 1980s UFO bloops, a 1970s-radio orchestra section. Ha, now it’s getting all excitable toward the fadeout, and the overall effect is like a disco dance scene from The Love Boat. Let’s just forget this ever happened, fam, and move on to our next tale of terror.

• I know I’ve talked about Toots & the Maytals in the past, in this award-winning column, but I totally forget/don’t care what they do, so this’ll be like that movie where Drew Barrymore forgets where she is every day upon waking up. Wait, here we are, they’re a Jamaican ska/rocksteady band, maybe I was thinking of someone else. The band’s new album, Got to Be Tough, is coming, and the title track is pretty standard one-drop chill with a cool guitar part. The lyrics are about caring, which obviously nails the current zeitgeist.

• We’ll end this week’s parade of shame with another soul singer, Bettye LaVette, who, to her credit, doesn’t have a stupid reality show. Blackbirds is the new album, “I Hold No Grudge” the single. OK, now this is authentic and awesome, torchy soul, electric piano, and her voice is all croaky and old. Nice.

Local bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Beach-time porters

Drink these beers now

Look, I know, when you think beach time and summertime, you don’t think about porters and stouts. I don’t either, except sometimes I do.

From May through September beer enthusiasts are drinking and talking about beers that are crisp, fresh, light and bright, and that’s great. I’m all for it. Most of the time in the summer, that’s what I want too.

You have to shake things up, though. You just do. Sometimes things just get a little too crisp and a little too bright, and nothing resets your palate in summer quite like a rich porter or stout.

Now, OK, I’m not suggesting that you crack open a Guinness at 1 p.m. on a blazing hot summer day at the beach. You’d regret that move. Not every day is a blazing, hot summer day at the beach, though. Especially in New England — though admittedly perhaps not this summer — you have plenty of days at the beach or at the lake or in the mountains where cool breezes stand out more than the fiery sun, so seize those moments and treat yourself to something a little richer.

Imagine taking in the summer sunset on a cool, clear New Hampshire evening with a decadent coffee stout. It’s truly hard for me to imagine something more relaxing and more satisfying than that. I want that experience right now and I think you should want it too.

This notion really came to me a week or so ago when I was on vacation enjoying a porter called “Portah” by Barnstable Brewing of Hyannis, Mass. The deep richness and complexity was unlike anything I’d drunk recently and it was invigorating as I, wait for it, took in the sunset at the beach.

Here are four stouts and porters you should try this summer.

Granite Stout by 603 Brewery (Londonderry)

This is big on chocolate and coffee and I really do think that’s what the doctor ordered. I think summertime is about enjoying something a little extra. Maybe you say yes to that ice cream run on a Tuesday night because it’s summer. Or maybe you have this decadent, delicious brew instead of the ice cream. (Or you have both.) At 8 percent ABV, this is one you can savor over the course of an evening.

Campfire by Throwback Brewery (North Hampton)

This is a smoked robust porter, which, yes, makes it the perfect accompaniment to a campfire or to hearty, grilled meats and barbecue, so says the brewery. This brew is in fact robust, but at 6.4 percent ABV this is much more palatable in terms of its heft than you might be thinking. You’ll pick up smoky notes for sure, along with pronounced rich malts, but again, neither is overpowering. In addition to grilled meats, I think this would pair well with a wide range of foods.

Draken Robust Porter by Kelsen Brewing Co. (Derry)

While the roasty, toasty malts are the defining characteristic here, I think you get a bit more sweetness on this one than you might expect. To that point, the brewery says, it has flavors of dark fruit and raisins, in addition to coffee, chocolate and caramel. This one has layers of complexity to appreciate and savor.

Black Cat Stout by Portsmouth Brewery (Portsmouth)

If you get this on tap, the brewery uses nitrogen, which produces a thick, rich, creamy brew boasting big flavors of chocolate and coffee. This one is pretty dry, and I mean that in a good way. I wouldn’t really refer to a stout as refreshing but this is very easy to drink and one I wouldn’t hesitate to order on a summer day or evening.

What’s in My Fridge
Things We Don’t Say by Wandering Soul Beer Co. (Beverly, Mass.) This was tremendous. Just one of those beers that makes you say, “Yup. That’s real good.” This is a “New England Double IPA brewed with flaked oats, white wheat, and aggressively dry hopped,” according to the brewery. It’s got the citrusy burst that you want, coupled with a balanced finish — and not overly bitter. Find this one for sure. Cheers!

Featured photo: Don’t overlook stouts and porters in summer. Courtesy photo.

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