Tag: 200723

The Music Roundup 20/07/23

• One-man band: When all the pieces are engaged, Lee Ross delivers a bold, brassy sound that definitely seems like it’s coming from a crowded stage, not a Boston-based solo performer with a boatload of musical chops. Ross tricks out his keyboards to mimic a rhythm section, plays saxophone and flute, sings and loops it all to amazing effect — the magic of a big band, no social distancing needed. Thursday, July 23, 7 p.m., Penuche’s Music Hall, 1087 Elm St., Manchester. See facebook.com/leerossmusic.

• Salt the rim: Kenny Chesney doppelganger Dan Wray, who’s also front man for No Shoes Nation, a Chesney tribute act now in its fourth year, helps celebrate National Tequila Day. Yes, that’s a thing, and no, it’s not a legal holiday even if it should be. Hits like “Guitars and Tiki Bars” will rev things up, with a giveaway of a Charbroil Smoker, essential equipment for backyard parties, adding to the fun. Friday, July 24, 6 p.m., Village Trestle, 35 Main St., Goffstown. See facebook.com/NoShoesNationBand.

• Join in blues: Bring a guitar, harmonica or voice to a jam hosted by blues band Catfish Howl. The afternoon confab happens outdoors under the tent, with proper space between the players. The Manchester group features Zydeco aficionado Glenn Robertson, and its name comes in part from Professor Catfish Bill, who sings and plays percussive instruments like the washboard. Saturday, July 25, 2 p.m., Area 223, 254 N. State St. (Smokestack Center), Concord. See catfishhowl.com.

• Shell it out: Enjoy al fresco music in the local bandshell with Lunch at the Dump, an inventively named roots band that’s closing in on 50 years together. They began in the spring of 1972 as a loose group of pickers learning to play their guitars, fiddles, banjos and mandolin. Reportedly, a “chance encounter with a carrot cake at the local landfill” prompted their moniker. Tuesday, July 28, 6:30 p.m., Angela Robinson Band Stand, Community Park, Henniker. See facebook.com/Lunch-at-the-Dump.

Music City bound

Amanda McCarthy makes her move

With a combination of innate talent and plucky determination, Amanda McCarthy has become a fixture on the regional music circuit, from the Seacoast to the White Mountains. She’s recorded and released multiple albums of original songs — the latest, Epilogue, arrives in the fall — while performing covers to fuel her dream of being a full-time musician.

Like many before, McCarthy’s time in the trenches playing bars and restaurants led to an inevitable conclusion — that it was time to try her luck in a major market.

“People like my original music in New Hampshire, but there’s not really an original music industry here,” she said in a recent phone interview.

So, after a few more gigs, including a farewell bash with some of her musical friends on Aug. 1 at Long Cat Brewery in Londonderry, Amanda McCarthy is moving to Nashville. The goal, she said, is to live in a milieu that makes her artistic development more possible.

“I love playing for people,” she said. “Even if it’s playing covers, I really, truly enjoy it. But I know in my heart I love writing songs; that’s why I went into music in the first place.”

In the past year, McCarthy’s relationship with U.K.-based Evolved Artists has encouraged her to take the next step.

“I’ve been working with them as a songwriter … sending demos that they’ve been sent off to their contacts,” she said. “I figured if I was lucky enough to land an opportunity like that being in New Hampshire, then what else can I accomplish when I’m actually down there where things are really happening?”

“Here,” a preview track from her new album that will be officially released at the Long Cat farewell show, offers insight into the urgency McCarthy feels about testing the water in that “very big pond” now instead of later.

“All my friends are running off to chase their dreams, from Hollywood to Tennessee, oh but I’m still here,” she sings. “I vow, I’ll make it out of here somehow.”

McCarthy is encouraged by area musicians she’s met who’ve headed south like Tom Dixon, Sam Robbins, Morgan Clark and Stacy Kelleher, along with others she hasn’t.

“I don’t know Brooks Hubbard personally but I know of him,” she said. “I know he’s down there; I’d love to get in touch with him at some point.”

As she begins to wend her way into the Nashville community, McCarthy has the valuable currency of a good story to tell — the one about her close encounter last March with New Hampshire’s most well-known rock star, Steven Tyler. It’s an experience she calls “the second best day of my life after having my daughter.”

As she and her boyfriend drove to her gig at Salt hill Shanty near Lake Sunapee, McCarthy mused that the Aerosmith singer, who owns a home there, might be in the crowd. The two were joking, but things got real as she finished her encore and spotted him at a table with friends.

She had a choice to make.

“I stood there for about 30 seconds,” she said, “then I said into the microphone, ‘I don’t know if this is kosher, but if I don’t do it I’m gonna hate myself,’” and proceeded to play a flawless version of “Angel” — after which she was unable to eat or drink anything.

“I was just literally dumbfounded,” she said. “One, that he was there, and two, that I just did that. At some point I decided I didn’t want to go bother him; I’ve read his autobiography and he really just values being a normal person.”

So she began to pack up and load out, only stopping to send a copy of her Road Trip CD and a note with thanks for being an inspiration over to Tyler’s table.

When she heard Tyler say, “Wait, she’s still here?” McCarthy knew her magical day hadn’t ended yet. He came over and the two had a happy chat.

“He was so kind and down to earth, and he just talked to me; not like I was some dumb kid 40 years younger than him … like a human,” she said. “It was one of the kind of things completely above my expectations.”

Asked what she’ll miss most from her home state, McCarthy quickly replied, “one hundred percent the ocean” — she lived in Hampton for four years. She’ll also treasure the camaraderie of the New England music community.

“From Day 1, when I was 19 years old and didn’t know what I was doing, they gave me a shot and made me feel welcome. Between Penuche’s and people like Paul Costley, they allowed me to be a full-time musician, which was all I really wanted. I’m going to miss being able to do that down there … but I’m hoping it’ll be worth it in the long run.”

Amanda McCarthy & Friends
When: Saturday, Aug 1, 6 p.m.
Where: Long Cat Brewing, 298 Rockingham Road, Londonderry
More: amandamccarthy.com

The Outpost (R)

Film Reviews by Amy Diaz

U.S. Army soldiers operating in a remote corner of Afghanistan find themselves under attack in The Outpost, which is based on a true story told, among other places, in a book called The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor written by CNN’s Jake Tapper.

The movie takes place at what is eventually called Camp Keating, after Capt. Benjamin Keating (Orlando Bloom), the outpost’s commander as the movie opens. It doesn’t take military expertise to understand that this outpost is a bad scene — it is surrounded on three sides by mountains, putting the outpost and its personnel at the bottom of a bowl. Taliban soldiers can easily find a position on the mountains from which they can take easy shots at fighters throughout the camp. And they do, nearly every day, we’re told. For a while, the tension of bullets (and later mortars) entering the camp at any moment relaxes only at night because the Taliban fighters don’t have night vision.

We meet many of the soldiers who man this outpost, attempting to build relationships with the local population. What feels like oodles of people are introduced with on-screen IDs and we learn bits of information about lives back home. Ultimately, the men we probably spend the most time with are Specialist Ty Carter (Caleb Landry Jones), Lt. Andrew Bundermann (Taylor John Smith) and Staff Sgt. Clint Romesha (Scott Eastwood). The camp has a series of commanding captains, whom we also meet, each of whom has a different leadership style that presents a different set of challenges; their introductions serve as sort of chapters to the story as the movie builds to what we’re told from the beginning is definitely coming: the big one. That is how the soldiers refer to the inevitable attack by overwhelming numbers of Taliban using the advantage of the mountains to attempt to overrun the camp.

By the end of The Outpost, I completely understood all the storytelling decisions made in this story, which runs a little more than two hours and begins the most intense action (the predicted “big one”) a little more than an hour in. I feel like there was a version of this movie that could have slid in at fewer than 90 minutes and, similar to Tom Hanks’ recent Greyhound (which The Outpost sort of reminded me of), confined itself to the core of the fight. But Greyhound’s source material is a novel based on World War II events and this is a true story featuring soldiers who are real people, alive and deceased, with still living parents and spouses and children, and I understand why the movie puts such emphasis on having the audience learn everybody’s name and get at least a slice of backstory even when it feels like information overload.

The movie also stays away from having an overt point of view about the war and the larger politics involved. Instead, its criticism is pointed at military decisions made in reference to the outpost from its very existence in this (as the movie describes at the end) “obviously indefensible” location to various bad-call requests and decisions made by military officialdom elsewhere. The story’s focus is on the men, their bravery in their defense of each other and their ability to think on their feet and adapt when what seems like an unwinnable fight begins. B

Rated R for war violence and grisly images, pervasive language, and sexual references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Rob Lurie with a screenplay by Eric Johnson, The Outpost is two hours and three minutes long and distributed by Screen Media Ventures. The movie is available for rent.

Book Review 20/07/23

Parakeet, by Marie-Helene Bertino (224 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The bride, “ethnically ambiguous,” has been banished to a luxurious inn, sent there by the groom a week before the wedding to decompress.

The groom, an elementary school principal, had proposed after five dates. The bride describes him like this: “He will never lie to me and he will never make me howl with laughter.” His family is composed of academics who each look “perpetually poised to ask a question after a great deal of thought.” Of course she said yes.

At the inn on Long Island, there is ambivalence and fear, not the normal pre-wedding jitters, but weapons-grade anxiety, the sort that makes it entirely plausible that a dead grandmother will show up in the form of a bird and make demands of the bride.

She was a “a rueful bird endowed with death’s clarity,” as acerbic in death as in life. She both warbled and cussed, and she soiled the bride’s wedding dress before she left.

Such is the powerful beginning to Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino, a much-lauded writer of fiction who lives up to the hype. A former fellow at MacDowell artist community in Peterborough (no longer “Colony”), Bertino has written one other novel, 2014’s 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas, and a collection of short stories. She’s already sold another novel, set to be published in 2022, pandemic willing.

Parakeet takes place within the span of a week, with occasional flashbacks and one poignant flash forward, to describe the trauma-pocked life of the bride and her brother. It’s astonishing to realize that the bride is never given a name (nor the groom) and this omission does not matter or even seem strange. We don’t need to know her name; we learn everything else that matters.

The “bird-shaped grandmother” that shows up in the bride’s room knows about the impending wedding, but asks the bride to do something that has nothing to do with the ceremony. She/it wants the bride to find her estranged brother, and she makes a cryptic prophecy: “You won’t find him.”

The bride hasn’t seen her brother, Tom, for seven years. He’s a playwright who became wealthy and famous for writing about his sister’s life and then vanished.

“The last time I saw Tom was at his own wedding, where he lay bloody on a gurney, asking me to hold his hand,” the narrator-bride says.

But she loved her grandmother and so sets off to find the brother she doesn’t really want to see, all the while tending to the mundanities of a pre-wedding week, such as dealing with the florist, buying a new dress and seeing her maid of honor, her best friend from childhood, who, as it turns out, isn’t the greatest friend after all.

As the bride describes the relationship, “There’ve been several times in our friendship when Rose and I reached what I feared was its conclusion, when an important update to our subscription to each other had lapsed, and we either had to renew or face the tenuousness of our connection.”

This is typical of Bertino’s writing, which is startlingly original and frequently witty, as in her description of the woman from whom she buys a wedding dress: “Ada doesn’t wax her eyebrows or even trim them in any way I can detect. The courage this requires stuns me.”

Later, the bride describes her “smile so pale and winsome I appear floured.”

The exquisite writing and fresh turns of phrase do not exist to cover up a flan-like plot. The story is rich in its own right, thickened by pain and trauma.

The bride works as a biographer of people who have suffered traumatic brain injuries, compiling the personal details of their lives for juries. (A visit she makes to a man whose brain is so unreliable that he needs to be reminded not to pull out a hot oven rack with his hand is especially poignant.)

But she has her own injuries, too, psychological ones from her mother and physical ones from a random attack. As she navigates the week, we are not sure if what she is experiencing is even real or the desperate imaginings of a brain that is truly broken.

Parakeet is a quiet thriller in that regard, pulsing with mysteries and questions. But it’s also a deeply empathetic portrayal of a woman struggling to discern what is real and right, like a bird banging into a glass window. It’s an excellent antidote to the common vacuous beach read.

A — Jennifer Graham

BOOK NOTES
The Twitter war over J.K. Rowling and her views on transgender people has lately expanded to include other authors, including New Hampshire’s Jodi Picoult.

Picoult, who lives in Hanover on property that has views of both the Green and White Mountains, was asked by a fan to weigh in and tweeted (as did Stephen King) that trans women are women. Rowling, who does not share that view, is getting backlash from fans of her Harry Potter franchise, with some going so far as to have Potter-themed tattoos removed.

Picoult, however, stands to benefit from her tweet, as some Twitter users suggested that people buy one of her books in solidarity. There are plenty to choose; she’s written 27, with another, The Book of Two Ways, coming out in September. (The prologue is on her website if you want a sneak peek.)

Meanwhile, Rowling has a new work called The Ickabog, which she is publishing, one chapter at a time, on a website called theickabog.com. Right now, the extended fairy tale consists of just Rowling’s words, but she is running a contest in both the U.S. and United Kingdom to choose illustrations that will be used when the book is published in the fall. Proceeds will go toward Covid-19 assistance.

For fare less controversial, Jane Austen fans might consider a book published this week: Rachel Cohen’s Austen Years, a Memoir in Five Novels (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages).

The first line: “About seven years ago, not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author.” Sign me up.

Album Reviews 20/07/23

John Carpenter, “Skeleton”/”Unclean Spirit” (Sacred Bones Records)

It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it? I would have loved to hear the put-downs of Carpenter during the 1980s, mumbled during power-lunches with Hollywood executives, when they’d mercilessly tool on the musically untrained Carpenter’s insistence on soundtracking his movies (Halloween, The Thing, They Live, etc.). Of course, they probably ate all those words when he won a Saturn award for soundtracking his 1998 film Vampires, or maybe, more likely, they didn’t, but in any case, his musical style — bouncy, redundant Nintendo-techno — is pretty huge these days. This advance two-song single offers his signature vibe, which of course has seen a rebirth of late (think the theme music to the Netflix show Stranger Things), and voila, music critics have to pretend to be paying attention. “Skeleton” is a rather upbeat offing, entry-level ’80s krautrock with a good amount of heart, whereas the much darker “Unclean Spirit” conjures a cross between “Dies Irae” (the Gregorian chant that opens the movie The Shining) and, oh, something with the usual looping and piano-bonking, let’s say the theme to Halloween. Hey, if he’s happy, it’s fine with me. B+

Peel Dream Magazine, Moral Panics EP (Slumberland Records)

I wrote off this New York crew as the latest tuneless pile of emperor’s new clothes way back, upon hearing a few tunes from their 2018 debut LP Modern Metaphysics. Singer Joe Stevens is so bad that he single-handedly set back the entire hipster-pop movement a gorillion years (the only vocal comparison I can make is Lantern Waste, whose deliriously awful song “200 Miles to York” is often played as a joke by Toucher and Rich on their local 98.5 Sports Hub radio show in Boston). But whatever, here we go again, thankfully just an EP this time. It starts out survivably enough with “New Culture,” a droning stab at borderline no-wave remindful of Superdrag’s “Destination Ursa Major,” in other words amateurishly rendered Foo Fighters. Stevens doesn’t suck as bad as he usually does there, which had me — well, “salivating for more” wouldn’t be it; more like “not retching.” Of course, that attempt at normal music is immediately ruined by the pointless crayon-drawn doofus exercise “Verfremdungseffekt.” These folks have a gift for bad music, I’ll give ’em that. D

Retro Playlist
Eric W. Saeger recommends a couple of albums worth a second look.

As you (hopefully) just read, one signature feature of the pandemic is album release dates being canceled, changed or otherwise messed with. I’ve about given up the delusion that a release announcement consists of reliable information, but the show must go on here.

Another bizarre thing we’ve witnessed is the freezing of trends. In the area of music, after several years of the 1990s being laughed off as the worst decade for music ever (which always happens just before something blows big from the same arena), sure enough, bands were starting to fess up to listening to ’90s bands as a guilty pleasure. It was becoming cool for bands to cite grunge, riot grrl, commercial ska-pop, etc. influences when BS-ing rookie rock writers from Nylon and such. It looked unstoppable.

And then came Covid 19. Like I said somewhere above, at this point people are more occupied with virtue-signaling and fighting on social media and fretting about the apocalypse than reading some hipster dummy’s thoughts on Gwen Stefani’s “edgy” years. It’s as if every artistic rebirth and micro-renaissance that was in queue is in stasis, frozen like Ripley on Alien, waiting for the coast to be clear.

There were good things about the ’90s, at least in my view. Nirvana of course, Rage Against The Machine, Cypress Hill, Moby, Limp Bizkit, Korn, a bunch of other stuff, including many you’ve probably never heard of, bands that helped usher in the ’90s-rock era by releasing albums that were clear warnings of things to come. Transvision Vamp may have been doomed to obscurity from birth, but they were different in a lot of good ways, a sort of commercialized riot grrl thing that presaged sexy android-pop bands of the Aughts like Asteroids Galaxy Tour. In fact, Transvision Vamp peaked and declined at the decade’s turn, unfairly so, because their 1991 full-length Little Magnets Versus the Bubble of Babble was no less sexy and vampy and kickass than their 1988 Pop Art debut. Another one you may have missed was Gaye Bykers on Acid, which, along with a few other bands, almost squashed the grunge movement in favor of the “grebo” scene, which mashed influences from punk rock, EDM, hip-hop and psychedelia. We’d all be so much better off if their 1992 self-titled album hadn’t been lost in a sea of grunge (their 1987 freak-fringe niche-hit “WW7 Blues” is still monstrously cool).

Yeah, a ’90s revival wouldn’t be the worst thing.

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

• Friday, July 24, is ahead, and with it will come albums, some good, some bad, some why-would-anyone-bother-recording-this. To be honest, the list is pretty thin at this writing, which may be due to the fact that all the bands have figured out that people aren’t interested in music anymore, because it’s much more fun and self-fulfilling to argue with people on the internet, just to take the edge off the stir-craziness the coronavirus has wrought. Matter of fact, my usual source of hot new music nonsense, Metacritic, only has two upcoming new records listed, so I’m going by the list on Pause And Play. This means I am out of my comfort zone once again, having to deal with some stupid new website that wants me to fork over my email address and then drop a cookie into my Cookies folder, just so that Pause and Play can send me spam and slow down my “browsing experience” while the cookie tracks every moronic thing I look for on the internet. Does anyone not just click the little “X-close” button when presented with that kind of junk, or should I really just spend an entire afternoon searching Google for “best free spamblocker”? (I won’t do that. I spend a lot of time on the internet, yes, but going to such trouble seems a little obsessive.) Where was I? Right, albums. Most of these look kind of dumb and boring, like the only one I’m actually drawn to is Goons Be Gone, the new album from Los Angeles-based duo No Age! They make noise-rock, which you all know makes me smile, and… oh, come on, the release date changed to last week, according to Amazon! See why I hate using new systems? See why I didn’t want to use Pause and Play? Whatever, I’m listening to the single “Sandalwood” anyway, because the whole rollout here is a hot mess, and maybe it’s coming out on the 24th. Whatever, the tune is cool, noisy and messy, like Mick Jagger jamming with Half Japanese, and that brings us to some actual usable news, the first new album in 27 years from ancient punk band X, called Alphabetland! Ha ha, look how old they are now, like Exene looks like some random Birkenstock Karen who haggles with gift shop owners for price breaks on stinky incense. The title track is like early Ramones except with Exene singing half-heartedly. It’s eh.

• Neck Deep is a power-pop band from Wales, in the U.K. Their fourth album, All Distortions Are Intentional, is on the way as we speak, led by the single “Lowlife,” which is OK but sounds like the last nine billion songs you’ve heard that involve ripping off Weezer in Nirvana mode. So, unless anyone has questions — yes, you, in the back. No, I will never willingly listen to this song again. That it? Good, let’s proceed to the next thingie.

• Country-Americana-folkie Lori McKenna is from Stoughton, Mass., where there are no cowboys. She once received a country Grammy nomination. Her new album, The Balladeer, includes the single “Good Fight,” a strummy folk-pop song that you might like if you dig ’70s radio-pop.

• Time for one more, and I choose Irish singer Ronan Keating’s new album, Twenty Twenty! Did I choose wisely? No, unless you like shuffle-y chill-out Ed Sheeran-ish boy-band pop that would be a perfect fit on the Ellen show. I do not.

The Weekly Dish 20/07/23

• Mobile scoops: The Loudon Firefighters Association (8 Cooper St.) will host a drive-thru ice cream social on Saturday, July 25, from 4 to 8 p.m. Participants can place their order on the South Village Road side of the firehouse before picking up and exiting on the Cooper Street side. Ice cream flavors will include vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, with all kinds of optional toppings, like whipped cream, chocolate syrup, rainbow and chocolate sprinkles and a maraschino cherry. The cost is $5 per dish. See “LFD Drive-Thru Ice Cream Social” on Facebook for more details.

• Keeping it local: The New Hampshire Liquor Commission has launched a “Keep it Local” campaign to support wineries and distilleries in the state, it announced in a press release. From now until Aug. 30, all of the state’s Liquor & Wine Outlet stores are offering 20-percent discounts on purchases of three or more bottles of wines and spirits made, grown or produced in New Hampshire, all sizes, with the ability to mix and match them. “Covid-19 has impacted all industries, and our local wineries and distillers have been hit particularly hard,” NHLC Chairman Joseph Mollica said in a statement. “[This] … initiative helps generate sales, encourages responsible visitation and supports our local partners.” Visit liquorandwineoutlets.com/keepitlocal.

• Quick bites: You can now find pasta salads, homemade whoopie pies, Italian desserts and other quick bites from Angela’s Pasta & Cheese Shop for sale inside the cafe of the Bookery (844 Elm St., Manchester), which has new in-store hours Tuesday through Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. The downtown bookshop also recently introduced additional outdoor seating. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• Farewell to The Foothills: The Foothills of Warner, a longtime staple in town known for its baked goods, including its nearly five-pound cinnamon rolls, has announced its closure as of July 19. “Many factors went into this difficult decision. We want to thank all of our loyal customers for their support over the last 15 years,” read a July 16 post on the restaurant’s Facebook page. “We have made many wonderful friends and we will miss you all very much.” The building has operated as a restaurant for nearly 30 years but was originally housing, dating back to the early 1800s, owner Deb Moore told the Hippo last fall. It has also been a bank and a town post office during its lifetime.

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