Tag: 221110

Friendly fusion

Eclectic band Annie In The Water hits Manchester

The music of Annie In The Water is a contagious hybrid of rock, funk and rhythm infused with a feel-good reggae groove. It’s the kind of sound that’s kept Michael Franti bouncing around the globe for decades, done with capability and verve.

For many years the band was a duo; singer-guitarists Michael Lashomb and Bradley Hester met while attending college in upstate New York in 2006. When a female friend fell into a lake trying to tie up her boat, they found a name, and gigged steadily in the region.

Ten years later, Lashomb and Hester began assembling what would grow into a six-piece band. One of their recruits was drummer Josh West, then at a crossroads when his longtime band decided to forego touring for local shows. West stuck around for a couple of years, departing to work on his own record; the collection of songs, completed during the pandemic, will drop next spring.

West returned to the group last summer. In an interesting twist, he replaced the original drummer of Lucid, the band he’d been in before joining the first time. Along with Hester, Lashomb and West, members now include bassist Chris Meier, Matt Richards on keyboards, and percussionist Brock Kuca.

It’s a big sound, West agreed in a recent phone interview.

“We’re really taking the time to explore what it means to play in a band with that many people and all these layers, and make sure that we’re not overplaying,” he said. He’s known Richards since his days in Formula Five and Meier from his earlier band Space Carnival. “We hadn’t really done much playing together; but we’re friends… we’ve respected each other’s musical abilities.”

Influences for the group come from a myriad of sources. West is a big fan of drummer Bernard Purdy, who played with Steely Dan and others, along with Carlton Barrett of the Wailers. He also names Snarky Puppy and Ghost Notes as favorite bands. Others in the group cite festival mainstays like Grateful Dead and Phish, along with ’90s alt rock.

A recent Halloween show was indicative of the group’s wide-ranging oeuvre. “We’re playing everything from Prince to Blink-182 to Red Hot Chili Peppers to Radiohead, to Daft Punk,” West said. “A big eclectic kind of influence there, but I think all these songs really speak lyrically and are kind of timeless pieces.”

When it first came together, the band was mainly a vehicle for the original duo’s material. A debut album, Time To Play, “was pretty much all songs that Brad and Mike had written 10 years ago,” West said. The second studio effort was more collaborative; though he wasn’t on the sessions for this year’s The Sun At Dawn, West called it evolutionary. “Since I’ve been back, that kind of energy has carried over.”

West recalled a recent songwriting session at a hunting camp in northern Vermont, where the band is now based. “We each brought a song to the table, and on top of that, we all have little parts,” he said. “It’s really a very democratic process, [with] open and equal energy… which is very inspiring.”

The newest lineup is already poised to follow up Sun At Dawn.

“We’ve got pretty much a new record of songs that we’ve written in the last three months,” West said. “We’re getting ready to hit the studio for this winter.”

That energy has translated to the stage. “The camaraderie in the band between members is at an all-time high; we’re firing on all cylinders right now,” West continued. “Pretty much every show we’ve been playing lately, the energy is tangible in the room; it’s just something you gotta come check out.”

Jordan Paul’s JigsMusic agency booked the band’s Veterans Day show at Shaskeen Pub in Manchester.

“I’m so excited to bring Annie in the Water back to the Granite State,” Paul said in a recent text message. “We haven’t seen them since before the pandemic. I know they’ve been picking up a lot of steam with their new lineup and I’m very excited to see this new chemistry everyone’s been talking about.”

Annie In The Water w/ DJ SP1
When: Friday, Nov. 1, 9 p.m.
Where: Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: $10 at the door
More: See facebook.com/annieinthewater

Featured photo: Annie In The Water. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 22/11/10

Local music news & events

• Billy double: Piano player Ben Eramo, who fronts tribute act Cold Spring Harbor, began playing at age 4 and became enamored of Billy Joel at 11 when his teacher gave him a copy of “My Life” to learn. He did so quickly, then soaked up the rest of his songbook. He and a friend formed a duo dedicated to Joel’s music in middle school. Since then, the now four-piece band has become one of the region’s favorites. Thursday, Nov. 10, 6:30 p.m., LaBelle Winery, 345 Route 101, Amherst, $35 at labellewinery.com.

• Key difference: A band that regularly leads an open mic in a music-friendly restaurant, Andrew North & The Rangers kicks off the weekend there with a free show. They’re in fine form of late, evidenced by a pre-Halloween set at Feathered Friend Brewing that included covers of “Werewolves of London” and “Ghostbusters” along with sneaky nods to “Thriller” and Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein.” Check it out on archive.org. Friday, Nov. 11, 7:30 p.m., Area 23, 254 N. State St., Concord. See andrewnorthandtherangers.com.

• Comic relief: Now that autumn leaves and campaign signs are gone, it’s a good time to laugh, and Comedy Night with three well-known standups provides such an opportunity. Paul Nardizzi is a regional favorite who appeared on the Conan O’Brien Show and Comedy Central. Jody Sloane got her start entertaining tourists while driving a Duck Boat tour bus in Boston. Dave Decker opens the bring-your-own-food affair. Saturday, Nov. 12, 8 p.m., VFW Post 1670, 143 Court St., Laconia, $20 at venue or call 524-9725.

• Sunday swing: Two local treasures join up as The Freese Brothers Big Band and Alli Beaudry perform an afternoon show. Formed in 1982 to “support and encourage the development of the musical talents of the public” and foster music appreciation, the family troupe dates back to the 1930s; their shows highlight the Golden Era of Big Band. Manchester-born Beaudry is an effervescent singer, songwriter, and booster of her home city. Sunday, Nov. 13, 2 p.m., Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, $29 at palacetheatre.org.

• Dynamic duo: This week’s alt comedy night is a special one, with Eddie Pepitone and JT Habersaat sharing the stage. Whoever first said, “you can take the boy out of NYC, but you can’t take NYC out of the boy” most likely had Pepitone in mind. The Staten Island native moved to L.A. over two decades ago for a part in Old School and became a mainstay in clubs there. Habersaat just wrapped his annual Altercation Fest in Austin. Wednesday, Nov. 16, 8 p.m., Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester, shaskeenirishpub.com.

Enola Holmes 2 (PG-13)

Enola Holmes 2 (PG-13)

The case-solving younger sister of Sherlock Holmes returns in Enola Holmes 2, a very satisfying second chapter of this story.

Enola (Millie Bobby Brown) is trying to break out as a working detective on her own but her would-be clients seem surprised to see how young and female she is — is her brother (Henry Cavill) available? Just as she’s about to abandon Victorian London to return to the family home in the country, young girl Bessie (Serrana Su-Ling Bliss) shows up to hire Enola to search for her sister. Sarah Chapman (Hannah Dodd), a big sister-type whom Bessie lived with and worked at the match factory with, has gone missing, and Bessie dearly wants her back. Enola quickly takes the case, going undercover at the factory and trying to figure out what secrets Sarah had uncovered just before she disappeared.

As Enola digs into her case, Sherlock has a stumper of his own, and the two frequently cross paths, especially once Enola gets tangled up in the death of another matchgirl.

And then there’s Tewkesbury (Louis Patridge), the noble Enola befriended during her search for her vanished mother, Eudoria Holmes (Helena Bonham Carter) in the first movie (Eudora, you may remember, turned out to be a suffragette who had been cleverly siphoning family money to pay for the cause). Tewkesbury is now a progressive member of the House of Lords. Enola might not return his letters but she has been watching him walk to Parliament fairly regularly even if she won’t admit to having more than friend-y feelings for him.

Enola Holmes 2 is a big, yummy slice of cake — pretty and tasty frosting, lots of flavorful sponge and a thin layer of tartness in between the layers. There is actual there there in terms of the history — a real Sarah Chapman organized a strike of matchgirls over working conditions in 1888. And we have nice further development in terms of character relationships — Enola and Sherlock’s oddballs-with-mutal-respect-and-affection, Enola and Eudoria’s daughter-mother bond, Enola and Tewkesbury’s growing romance. We also get the beginnings of some canonically important Sherlock relationships as well, one with a really nice bit of backstory. It’s all well drawn, with each mini story getting just enough depth, just enough little moments that we can enjoy the characters as well as their adventure.

Brown remains the excellent star at the center of this solar system. She makes Enola plucky without being cartoonish and believable in her blend of confidence and occasional moments of uncertainty.

It was a joy to get to know these characters in the first movie and just as much fun to revisit them. I don’t usually say this but here’s hoping for Enola Holmes 3. A

Rated PG-13 for some violence and bloody images, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Harry Bradbeer with a screenplay by Jack Thorne (based on the books by Nancy Springer), Enola Holmes 2 is two hours and 10 minutes long and is available on Netflix.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (TV-14)

Weird Al Yankovic gets a — biopic I guess? with the excellent Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, which is streaming on the Roku Channel of all places, a fact which is kind of perfect, tonally.

Little Alfie Yankovic (Richard Aaron Anderson as a kid, David Bloom as a teen and a super game Daniel Radcliffe as an adult) grew up loving Mad magazine and the Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson) radio show and sneaking Hawaiian shirts. His parents (Julianne Nicholson, Toby Huss) just wanted him to stop doing all the things he wanted to do and being the way he was so he could grow up and get a sensible job at the factory, like Al’s dad. But Al fell in love with the accordion and dreamed of one day writing his own lyrics for other people’s songs. Even after getting caught at a polka party as a teen — you know how teens like to peer pressure each other into playing polka — and incurring his father’s extreme wrath, Al never gave up. He moved out and started playing his music for audiences and eventually saw enormous success, even when he moved from parodies to writing completely and totally original songs, as the movie emphatically and repeatedly states, like “Eat It.”

Other things that happen in Weird Al’s life: He has a passionate relationship with Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood, who is having a blast), he is offered the role as the new James Bond, he sells more albums than The Beatles, he is an international assassin maybe. And through it all, what he really wants is the love of his father, whose violent reaction to accordions comes with a surprising backstory.

Weird is both the dumbest movie I’ve seen in a long time (and I mean that as a compliment) and possibly the only correct way to make a biopic of a living person. It isn’t just Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, it’s Walk Hardest — so committed to its own delightful stupidity that you can’t help sharing in the delight. This movie contains a requisite dark period where Weird Al basically turns into Jim Morrison. There is a running subplot involving Pablo Escobar. There is a Gallagher reference (kids, ask your dorkiest grandparent).Thomas Lennon has a small part as a door-to-door accordion salesman who is basically The Music Man’s Harold Hill. And everybody here, including the oddly buff Daniel Radcliffe, is playing everything absolutely unblinkingly straight. It is marvelous, in that it is a marvel to behold this much unfiltered ridiculousness in one movie, one Roku movie produced by Funny or Die Productions (which made a trailer for a Weird Al biopic as a bit nearly a decade ago).

Everyone here is a delight, from Conan O’Brien as Andy Warhol to Quinta Brunson’s Oprah Winfrey, but it is truly Radcliffe who wins the Just Going For It award. He is earnestly unhinged and it is great. A

Rated TV-14. Directed by Eric Appel and written by Weird Al Yankovic and Eric Appel, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is an hour and 48 minutes long and is available on the Roku Channel.

Featured photo: Enola Holmes 2

Album Reviews 22/11/10

Hellsingland Underground, Endless Optimism (Sound Pollution Records)

So the deal with this album is it’s the latest from a bunch of old Swedish rock ’n’ roll guys who don’t care if you make fun of them for being old. They’ve done a ton of albums and have finally gotten tired of loud guitars, so they “decided to add more piano, synthesizers and atmosphere instead.” Admirable, isn’t it? And they wrote their press blurb sheet themselves, which is cool. Like, after a lot of blah blah blah, it says here, “We also fired our drummer Patrik Jansson, but found a new one in Johan Gröndal. He is fantastic.” So, yeah, I like these guys personally, and they admit to hating Mötley Crue, which means they’re normal, but is the music any good? Actually yes, yes it is, especially if you’re into Starz, Bowie, things like that, arena-rock tempered with honky tonk and such. They have my full blessings. A

Spell, Tragic Magic (Sound Pollution Records)

The core of this Vancouver, Canada-based throwback-prog-metal act is just two guys, guitarist Cam Mesmer and drummer Al Lester, although they’re supported here by an array of temps who should probably go permanent if they want this to be a serious project, just my two cents. Influenced by such bands as Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Rush and (purportedly) old-school Mercyful Fate, which is slightly hard to pinpoint here, but Triumph and Rush-style stuff isn’t. Some pretty different riffing here, odd time signatures, really good engineering values and all that; in fact this might have made something of a splash back in the days when a slightly occult-ish vibe was desirable. But it does get a little hokey when they’re phoning in some obvious filler (“Ultraviolet” for example, despite its being something of an apparent push track). But anyway, there you are, something that blows away bands like The Darkness without being too obvious about it. A

Playlist

• Ho ho ho, kiddies, there’s nothing like a little early holiday cheer, which will (hopefully) be provided this week by a bunch of new albums that are officially due out on Friday, Nov. 11! The biggest news this week is something for our mainstream rock fans out there, a new album from living fossil man Bruce Springsteen, called Only The Strong Survive! Here’s a fun fact: Did you know that Bruuuce’s guitarist Steven Van Zandt (also known as Little Steven or Miami Steve or That No-Neck Dude From The Sopranos) is from Winthrop, Massachusetts? See, you learn something new every week just by checking in here! Ack, ack, whatever, furball, here we go, another full length album of rock ’n’ roll from Bruuuce and his boyeez, I can’t wait to get disappointed by the latest rock music single from this working-class hero dude who could buy a few Hilton hotels out of the loose change in his couch, let’s go see what the hubbub is all about this time (which will hopefully be better than last time, lol, remember how much people hated that last album?). But wait a minute, folks, this first single, “Do I Love You,” is pretty cool overall, especially if you’re old and often enjoy 1960s girl groups like the Supremes. Ha ha, look at Bruuuce, getting’ down with the rock and soul, just cold partying while three sets of Josie And The Pussycats dancers rock out and dance to the brass and xylophone. I’m totally inspired, I have to admit, Bruuuce has finally given up the whole “political rock” nonsense, put down his guitar and accepted his role as a really white version of James Brown and plus girl dancers! Buy buy buy!

• Gold Panda is the stage name of English electronic record producer and songwriter Derwin Schlecker, who loves making weird electro music in genres that have short or non-existent shelf-lives, like “post dubstep” and “micro-house,” don’t you love it when techno dudes just make up a genre that might loosely describe their beats, which usually just come from random loops that came out of their playing with their ProTools or whatever for 10 seconds? But wait a minute, hold up homies, forget everything I just said because I’m listening to “The Corner” from the new Gold Panda album The Work, and it’s pretty usable and kind of neat or groovy or whatever they say nowadays. The beat is a trippy ’70s sample, sounds like, and the dude’s voice is a dead ringer for the singer from Pet Shop Boys.

• British singer Louis Tomlinson originally rose to fame as a member of the English-Irish boy band One Direction. Faith In the Future is his new album; “Bigger Than Me” is its tire-kicker single, basically Hoobastank without any training wheels (or originality for that matter, but it’s OK).

• We’ll end with certified weird person Jimmy Edgar, a conceptual artist and sound designer from Detroit, Michigan. This dude is influenced by minimalism, Yves Klein and Immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist. Would that that were actually correct and this guy’s new album, Liquids Heaven, weren’t staring me in the face right now, but here it is, so let’s get this over with. Right, right, so the first “single” is “Slip n Slide,” a tattered electro mess with a lot of wub-wub vibe. Starts out kind of dumb but then becomes workable enough. If you like weird cyborg-pop patter this would be the place.

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. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Survival of the Richest, by Douglas Rushkoff

Survival of the Richest, by Douglas Rushkoff (W.W. Norton, 212 pages)

Five years ago, Douglas Rushkoff was offered a large sum of money (half of what he makes each year as a professor) to give a speech at a secluded resort somewhere in the West. He arrived expecting his audience to be “a hundred or so investment bankers” who wanted to hear his thoughts on the future of technology. Instead, he had an audience of five hedge-fund billionaires, and they were only peripherally interested in technology. What they really wanted to talk about was how they can better survive the coming apocalypse.

Writing about this experience in 2018 on Medium, Rushkoff said that the billionaire preppers didn’t have a particular apocalypse in mind, just a general collapse of the world as we know it, which they called “the event.” “That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.”

The men were already building their apocalypse-proof compounds, but needed guidance on how to protect themselves from people: not only the mobs who would want to get in, but the security forces they’ve already hired and have on standby at this very moment. How do they keep their post-apocalypse employees from turning on them? How will they deal with the uncomfortable moral dilemma of shutting doomed people out?

It’s a safe bet that Rushkoff hasn’t been invited back for a follow-up session, as he takes a dim view of the billionaires’ worldview and suggests that some of their business practices are what make an apocalypse possible in the first place. He expounds on that criticism in Survival of the Richest, the book-length expansion of that initial Medium essay. It’s a relatively short but compelling look inside the apocalypse industrial complex, even if it does make your bug-out bag look woefully insufficient and the billionaires look morally bankrupt. (For the record, he’s not talking Musk and Bezos billionaires, but “low-level” billionaires, meaning they’re probably guys we wouldn’t have heard of even if Rushkoff had named them.)

There are, living among us, people whose everyday lives are all about imminent annihilation — not for them maybe, but for the rest of us. In New York, for example, there’s a venture called American Heritage Farms that is designed as communities where people can thrive after a grid collapse. In Texas, a company called Rising S is selling luxury underground bunkers in which people who can afford the $8.3 million can ride out a nuclear strike with their own underground pool and bowling setup. And perhaps weirdest of all, there’s an entire “aquapreneur” subset of billionaire preppers who are planning a Waterworld-type escape by living on their own seagoing city-states. “Why fear rising oceans if you’re already living on the ocean?” Rushkoff asks.

Rushkoff, who is a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens/City College of New York, explains his theory of how the billionaire prepper mindset evolved contrary to the promise of the internet, which was supposed to unite humanity. Instead, he argues, it created the techno-bubble that drove us further apart, not only in terms of income inequality but also in how we see the world and our place in it. The billionaires, he says, see themselves as uniquely valuable, which forms the moral basis for their plans for self-preservation. “The would-be architects of the human future treat the civic sector as antagonistic to their grand designs. They believe they can do it better,” Rushkoff writes. As an example, he devotes one chapter to the “Great Reset” promoted by World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, who promotes sweeping technological changes such as biometrics, mass surveillance and geoengineering in order to repair the sins of capitalism. Some of our political and technological overlords, he argues, are not only preparing for doomsday but actively trying to bring it on.

Despite the grand talk of building a better world with or without a life-as-we-know-it-altering event, Rushkoff says the billionaires see the rest of us as “little more than iron filings flying back and forth between the magnetic poles set up by the rich and powerful.”

But he doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook. All of us suffer to some degree from the apocalypse-now mindset. “We either mirror the mindset or rebel in a way that reaffirms it,” Rushkoff writes.

It’s only in the last pages that he offers hope: “We are not yet over the cliff. We still have choices,” he writes, then throws out a few pages of suggestions, many of which seem to have nothing to do with the various doomsday scenarios at the fore of the conversation today. (It’s hard to see how “buy local” and “promote the rights of gig workers” relate to Vladimir Putin launching nukes at Ukraine.) But he has a powerful message in his indictment of the billionaires whose strategy for armageddon is leaving the rest of us behind. “Our nervous systems do not operate independently but in concert with other nervous systems around us. It’s as if we share one collective nervous system. Our physical and mental health is contingent on nurturing those connections. Leaving others behind is futile and stupid.”

It’s a bit of a kumbaya ending to a generally incisive book. More hopeful is a quote he includes from an interview with aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta, who said, “Apocalypses are never just complete extinction, you know. My people have been through heaps of apocalypses and they’re quite survivable, as long as you’re still following the patterns of the land and the patterns of creation. As long as you’re in touch and moving with the landscape.” So even if you can’t afford an underground bunker, there’s hope. B+

— Jennifer Graham

Apple parfait

It is almost “eating season”, which is what I call the time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. It seems that every weekend, as well as a good number of weekdays, is filled with food-centric events. While it’s fun to indulge, I also try to keep things healthy. All that being said, I still crave a sweet treat. That’s where these parfaits become the answer.

These apple parfaits are really healthy and incredibly easy to make. Even better, they can help use all the apples you have left from your orchard trip earlier this fall. Any apple will work; base your recipe on the variety you prefer or whatever you have on hand. I used brown sugar in this recipe to add a caramel note, but if you’re in a pinch, granulated sugar will work. Vanilla yogurt is key to this recipe, as it adds sweetness without overpowering the apples. Greek vanilla yogurt is my preferred option, as it makes for a richer parfait. You can substitute regular vanilla yogurt, if needed.

The most difficult decision for this recipe is what container you use. I served mine in brandy snifters, but there are so many options. Half-pint canning jars, martini glasses or wine glasses could be used. If at all possible, use a clear dish so you can see the layers.

Now you have a beautiful, healthy way to quench those dessert cravings!

Apple parfait
Makes 4

3 medium-sized apples peeled, cored and diced
1½ tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2⅔ cups vanilla Greek yogurt

Heat a nonstick skillet over medium heat.
Add apples, and sauté for 1 minute.
Add sugar and cinnamon, and sauté for an additional minute.
Transfer apples to a plate to cool, about 10 minutes.
Place ⅓ cup yogurt in the bottom of each individual serving container.
Place ⅛ of cooked apples in each glass.
Add ⅓ cup yogurt to each glass.
Top with remaining apples.

Featured Photo: Apple parfait. Photo by Michele Pesula Kuegler.

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