More than Dio

Tribute act opens with original rock

One of many tribute acts to form in the aftermath of Ronnie James Dio’s death in 2010, Seattle band Rising moved from imitation to emulation six years ago. Renamed RivetSkull, with singer Chad McMurray, Mark Plog on guitar, bass player Michael Robson and Mark Hopkins on drums, began playing out, and released an album of original songs in 2022.

Trail of Souls: Samsara and 2024’s follow-up Absence of Time hewed musically to the spirit of Dio’s career, which ranged from Rainbow to Black Sabbath and finally the eponymous group he led until stomach cancer claimed him. For example, the roiling, frenetic “Hellbound,” which opens their most recent LP, has clear Sabbath and Dio influences.

While they enjoy playing original material, in the time since switching over, RivetSkull has considered returning to Dio’s music. Recently they found a solution that works on both fronts: opening with their own songs, then doing an extended set of tribute music. On May 3, they’ll appear at Rock n Roll Meatballs in Manchester.

As Chad McMurray explained in a recent phone interview, “basically [we] open for ourselves, let people experience what RivetSkull is as an original band, and then also treat them to something that we did pretty well at,” he said, “which was the music of Ronnie James Dio.”

The decision was both artistic and practical, McMurray continued. “We were joking occasionally about doing a Dio show again. We started running through some of the songs again, and it was like, man, this feels pretty good, you know? And so we said, hey, well, what if we do a thing where we go out and basically try to do two things?”

They did a couple of test market shows, “and people showed up,” he continued. “So we’re like, ‘hey, OK, this could be fun.’ We can actually kill two birds with one stone, and keep Dio’s music and legacy out there live a little bit for people that never got to ever experience that, and turn people on to what we’re doing.”

The business part made even more sense for the indie metal band.

“It’s tougher to make a splash these days … get attention, get publicity, get people to show up at a show even, especially if you’re not on a label or being promoted,” he said. “But tribute acts have always managed to do fairly well. I’ve done a fair amount of those over the years.”

In addition to Rising, McMurray, who studied Bel Canto opera with the maestro who trained Ann Wilson, Geoff Tate and Layne Staley, played Bruce Dickinson in a band called Maiden Seattle. He began in the tribute world singing and playing bass as Geddy Lee in a Rush-centric band.

He also spent two decades playing bass, keyboards and mandolin in a Led Zeppelin tribute act. “John Paul Jones, as most people know, is the unsung hero of the band. So it was always fun to chill out and do the role that he did,” he said. But the multi-instrumentalist enjoys the spotlight.

“I love being out front as well,” he said. “When I got back into the singing as more of a full-time gig of what I do, then it was like, OK, the bug came back and I’m fine. I love interacting with the crowd, and I love keeping my vocal chops up.”

The upcoming show isn’t a complete revival — the pivot from RivetSkull to Dio is different from their Rising days. “Back when we were doing the tribute, we were trying for a reenactment of the stage show … we built sets,” he said. “This time, it’s just us doing our thing, and then giving a kick-ass night of music.”

Asked for the story behind the band’s moniker, McMurray said guitarist Plog chose RivetSkull. “That was his baby,” he said. “To him, it was … synonymous with metalhead; he always wanted to have a band called that. When we decided to branch off and do the original thing, he said, ‘Hey, what do you think about this name?’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, let’s go for it.’”

Dio Celebration: RivetSkull Performs Ronnie James Dio Classics
When: Saturday, May 3, 8 p.m.
Where: Rock n Roll Meatballs, 179 Elm St., Manchester (formerly Angel City Music Hall)
Tickets: $20 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo. RivetSkull. Photo by Savoia Photography Live.

The Music Roundup 25/05/01

Local music news & events

Sibling sound: Sixteen years since their bracing major-label debut album, The Avett Brothers are still strong. A recent California show mixed “jittery punk bluegrass, Americana, roots rock and acoustic ballads … and a few jiggers of ragtime that could have come right out of Disneyland’s old Country Bear Jamboree,” wrote Leslie Dinaberg of the Santa Barbara Independent. Thursday, May 1, 8 p.m., Whittemore Center, 128 Main St., Durham, $72 and up at themusichall.org.

Welcome back: One harbinger of spring’s arrival is the return of First Friday at Belknap Mill. Martin & Kelly perform the kickoff outdoor show in Rotary Park. Jilly Martin and Ryan Brooks Kelly combine for a first-rate country sound. The event also features works from artist Ignacio Cisneros, who blends abstract and realist painting and sculpture. Attendees should bring chairs and blankets. Friday, May 2, 5 p.m., Belknap Mill, 25 Beacon St. East, Laconia, belknapmill.org.

Natural man: Few singer-songwriters espouse the need to commune with the Earth like Brett Dennen. On the title cut from his 2021 record See The World, he sings, “You don’t have to be rich to get around / There are mansions growing out of the ground.” It’s a reflection of the years he spent camping in the Sierra Mountains with his dad, who he remembers on his latest LP, If It Takes Forever. Saturday, May 3, 8 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $35 at tupelohall.com.

Here’s Johnny: The last time Rodney Brunelle brought his Counterfeit Cash tribute to town, the show sold out, so he’s playing a double this time. He’s also upping the ante music-wise. Along with recreating hits from The Man In Black’s early days, up to the Rick Rubin years and his cover of “Hurt,” there will be guest tributes to Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and others. Saturday, May 3, at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, $33 and up at palacetheatre.org.

Coffee songs: Along with offering a deep dive into the bean scene, the New England Coffee Festival has an impressive slate of performers curated by New Hampshire Music Collective. Day 1 has blues band Walk That Walk, and Dwayne Haggins. Next up is country singer Whitney Doucet, Piped Music and Whatsername. DJ Ron See spins on both days. Friday, May 2, and Saturday, May 3, at 11 a.m., Eastern Propane Stage (Hotel Concord), 11 S. Main St., Concord, northeastcoffeefestival.com.

Locked (R)

Bill Skarsgård picks the wrong car to steal from in Locked, a fun example of simplified concept horror.

Eddie (Skarsgård) is behind on his child support, is behind on picking up his young daughter from school and doesn’t have the cash to pay for all of his van’s repairs. And, as a delivery person, he needs his van to work and pick up his daughter and make money to pay child support. To find the cash to cover repairs, he buys a few scratch-offs, he hits up unreceptive friends to borrow money (most of whom hang up on him) and then he nicks a wallet and starts trying the door handles of parked cars. The movie conveys that he’s not a bad guy per se — his thievery is nonviolent and when he’s barked at by a dog locked in one of the cars, he offers the hot pup some water. Then he sees a sleek SUV that is unlocked. He gets in, admires the car’s very lux interior but finding nothing worth stealing decides to leave. But he can’t; the doors are locked. Attempts to push open, kick out and even hit out the windows with a crowbar go nowhere. He even attempts to take a door apart, ignoring the constant ringing of the car’s built-in phone. Eventually, when attempts to call 911 or get the attention of someone walking by fail, he gives in and answers the phone. I am William (Anthony Hopkins) and this is my car, says the voice. And thus do days begin to pass — William can send an electrical shock through the seats, blast the air conditioner or the heat and play yodeling at full volume when Eddie upsets him. He berates Eddie for committing crimes, he rails against society, he drops information about a daughter who we gather was a victim of something worse than a car break-in. Eddie meanwhile tries everything to escape. He learns the hard way that the car is bulletproof. He eats what little food he has, he runs out of water, he fantasizes about a McDonald’s order. He argues with William about the economic inequality of the city, and pleads with William that he is sorry for his crimes. And he is horrified to learn that William can drive the car by autopilot.

Eddie is no dummy. His arguments with William go to a literary place about guilt and morality while William, a wealthy man and a doctor, is actually pretty “kids these days” and “this city has gone to seed.” Hopkins gives William a touch of Hannibal Lecter — sadistic and amoral even as he’s going on about justice. It’s a solid concept for a movie, well-executed and acted, and offers solid suspense and a kind of “hell is other people” horror. B Available for rent or purchase.

Havoc (R)

Tom Hardy is a cop with problems in Havoc, a movie that is 78 percent shooting.

So much shooting that it starts to take on a “heavy rainstorm” kind of white noise quality. This is Netflix, so if you fall asleep during the scene where one group of bad guys mows down another group of bad guys and then wake up during a scene when a third group of bad guys is mowing down them, you can always rewind. You can also not rewind because the who and why are kind of irrelevant to the point of these scenes, which is shooting.

Homicide detective Walker (Tom Hardy) is every single cliché of a TV or movie anti-hero — estranged from wife and child, living in a cruddy apartment, basically a walking mess of a person. He is mired in trauma from a thing that he and other detectives did that “went too far” and has caused his wife to refer to his offer of help as “blood money.” He grumps his way through his night shift, riding along with officer Ellie (Jessie Mei Li), a rookie who seems to find his Whole Thing off-putting.

Walker and Ellie are called to a massacre at a bad guy hangout where Walker learns that Charlie (Justin Cornwell), son of city developer and corrupt political guy Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), is one of the main suspects. Because of some security footage, the police think Charlie and his girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) are responsible for mowing down the head of the local Chinese gang. Unfortunately for Charlie, the dead gang leader’s bad-ass mother (Yeo Yann Yann) also thinks he’s to blame. She and her efficient gang of killers are looking for him so Beaumont, who I guess has many police officers on his payroll, tells Walker to find and safeguard Charlie. Meanwhile, Walker’s fellow group of homicide detectives — played by two guys who aren’t Timothy Olyphant and one guy who is Timothy Olyphant — are also mixed up in the massacre, which is related to a shipment of drugs that were hidden in washing machines, one of which wound up being thrown on a cop car during a chase earlier in the movie.

But I’ve made it sound like there’s a lot of story here when really there are just little wisps of story and whole lots of shooting, with a thousand bullets fired for every one that hits somebody. And all of this is situated in a city that feels like the grimmest version of Gotham but without Batman or any costumed bad guys. And it’s at Christmastime, to make everything feel extra sad.

And yet, Tom Hardy almost, not really but almost, makes a good part of this work. He wears down-at-his-heels hopeless-guy well and makes you feel the guilt that his character drags around. C+ Streaming on Netflix.

Everything is Tuberculosis, by John Green

“It is a strange fact of human history that we tend to focus so little on disease,” John Green writes in his new book Everything is Tuberculosis. In a history class in college, “I learned of wars and empires and trade routes, but I heard precious little of microbes, even though illness is a defining feature of human life.”

Instead, in school, disease is related to medicine and the biological sciences, even though a certain disease, with which Green is currently obsessed, is part of the reason why New Mexico became a state, and one of the reasons that three teenagers were so willing to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, leading to the start of the first World War War.

This disease, in Green’s telling, also indirectly gave us the cowboy hat.

The origin story of the Stetson is the rare light-hearted anecdote in a book about the oldest infectious disease on the planet. Globally, tuberculosis still kills more than a million people a year, even though it’s rarely seen in the U.S. and we don’t vaccinate for it here. When cases do arise — as one did in New Hampshire earlier this year — officials work quickly to contain it, and the patient is usually cured.

Like most Americans, Green, who found fame with his 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars, paid little attention to tuberculosis — until he encountered it while visiting health care facilities in the West African nation of Sierra Leone a few years ago. He writes that he considered TB “a disease of history — something that killed depressive nineteenth-century poets, not present tense humans.”

Even the language of TB, which has long been called consumption, sounds quaint to American ears.

But after Green met a 17-year-old in Sierra Leone who had been stricken with the disease in childhood, tuberculosis had a face. He returned home and started to read about TB, and suddenly, everything was coming up tuberculosis. It turns out that Green even had a relative who died of TB in 1930 at age 29.

Green is the history teacher we wish we’d had in high school. We remember things not by memorizing facts but by hearing stories, and Green has amassed a medicine chest full of stories about tuberculosis, and about the evolution of medicine in general, and he strings them together while, in alternating chapters, introducing us to Henry, the young patient at a TB hospital in Sierra Leone called Lakka.

Green assumed that Henry was much younger than he was because he was so small. His size, however, turned out to be because of chronic malnutrition compounded by TB, which destroys the appetite as it eats away at the body, especially the lungs.

Tuberculosis is curable with the right medication. So why, except when it was briefly displaced by Covid-19, is this still the world’s deadliest infectious disease?

For one thing, people are especially vulnerable to TB if they have a weakened immune system because of diabetes, malnutrition or HIV. It spreads in tight quarters when people cough or sneeze. Most people who are infected will not develop the disease; about 10 percent do, and not everyone with “active” TB will die from it as they commonly did centuries ago.

But because the disease has developed resistance to treatment and proliferates in places with the least resources, it is still causing significant suffering to people like Henry and his mother, whose lives were already cruelly hard before tuberculosis moved in. The mother struggled to feed her two children and at times couldn’t afford to buy rice, Henry and his sister subsisting for a time on milk flavored with spices.

As Green explains, in rich countries with robust health care systems, a person with money or insurance can get testing that pinpoints the specifics of a TB infection, allowing for proper treatment.

In poverty-stricken Sierra Leone, where Ebola killed a sizable number of physicians and nurses during the most recent outbreak, these tests were not available, nor was the most cutting-edge of treatments. Henry’s condition was diagnosed with an X-ray and he was given a general cocktail of pills that were ultimately ineffective. He was trapped in a roller coaster of getting better and then getting worse. By the time Green met him, the teen had been sent to a hospital where patients go to die.

The night before he was transferred, Green writes, mother and son lay together in Henry’s hospital bed “and together they cried through the night.”

The facility to which he was being transferred was the one where he would, by sheer chance, meet Green.

Green takes us through the history of TB, including one of the more bizarre chapters of the disease: the period in the 18th and 19th centuries in which the disease became romanticized and even contributed to long-lasting standards of beauty. “Maybe the nineteenth-century Romantics would die early, but oh, the poems they would write,” was the thinking of the time.

John Keats died of TB at age 25, as did Stephen Crane at age 29; the Bronte sisters had tuberculosis. For a time, “Consumption was believed to bring the creative powers to new levels, helping artists get in deeper touch with the spirit as their worldly bodies literally shrank away,” Green writes. This idea was so prevalent that as TB rates fell in the U.S. at the end of the 19th century some people worried aloud that literature would suffer.

But Keats, who would wake up in the night crying from the pain, put to rest any romantic notions about TB, writing at one point, “We cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”

It is this suffering, apparent in Henry’s story, that Green wants us to remember, as he crafts the book around the question: Will Henry survive?

In less capable hands this could seem like a gimmick, but in fact, as Green makes clear, the odds have never been good for people with TB — one author has estimated that it killed one out of seven people who have ever been alive. It’s a legitimate concern since, even when a best-selling author takes an interest in your case, survival from active TB is never guaranteed. Everything is Tuberculous is full of heartbreaking stories of desperate doctors who were unable to save their own children.

In many ways, technology has made the world’s problems our own, and many people suffer from compassion fatigue, as the needs are so great. One of the privileges of being an American in the past few decades is to not have to think about tuberculosis at all. But maybe, Green suggests, that has been a mistake, and we need to start thinking about tuberculosis again. AJennifer Graham

Album Reviews 25/05/01


Hexenhaus, Awakening (Roar Records)


As a genre, “tech-metal” is one in which I lost interest after the second or third Pendulum album, I forget which, not because it was bad but because it’s so confoundedly perfect all the time. To me, Pendulum got it right the first time, unlike Tool and Linkin Park (the latter of whom has been the subject of endless Facebook-message debate between friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny and myself; he thinks Linkin’s new singer is the bee’s knees, whereas to me she sounds like a particularly feisty America’s Got Talent contestant) et al. (while we’re at it, I’ve always thought A Perfect Circle kind of sucked, but that’s a whole other tedious discussion). And yadda yadda, that brings us to this Swedish five-piece, which has gotten love in the usual metal-fanboy Euro-trash circles (Kerrang, Metal Forces and such) for their more thrashy flavor of robo-metal. So. Whichever Dokken-looking dude writes their songs knows some beginner music theory; intro track “Shadows Of Sleep” doofs around with a spooky augmented arpeggio before windmilling a power-metallish Raging Speedhorn riff, after which “Awakening” tinkers with the idea of Iron Maiden calling out early Slayer (and, later, Anthrax, which is basically the formula throughout). It’s fine, sure, no complaints. A —Eric W. Saeger


Erin LeCount, I Am Digital, I Am Divine (Good As Gold Records)

The husky vocal timbre of Lady Gaga and Florence Welch has obviously had a massive influence on several quasi-pop divas who’ve emerged recently, from Dua Lipa to Lorde to Zola Jesus, the latter of whom would be my pick to offer as a soundalike to this 22-year-old U.K. resident. Like Zola, LeCount drowns her progressive-minded post-goth-pop in ethereal, Christian-begging vibe, instantly branding her as a “reclusive genius” in the manner of Chappell Roan, that is if you believe all the hype, which I don’t, but really, if I weren’t a painfully obvious cynic I’d hope that no one would want to read anything I type (don’t say it). On the other hand I’m always willing to play along with the public relations hucksters who sell us fairy tales (remember when Billie Eilish was reportedly discovered singing near a Dumpster or whatever it was?), so let’s: This girl recorded this EP in her gardening shed, they say, all by herself, adding brilliant layers of sampled harp, mandolin and other things to brighten her already glimmering pop gems, all of which are really well-written. Whatever the case, this is essential if you’re a fan of Florence And The Machine and similar products. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

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

• Yikes, folks, tons of new albums are coming our way this Friday, May 2, and with any luck there’ll be a couple that don’t instantly upset my tummy-tum! We’ll start in Canada’s Manitoba province, specifically the little town of Portage la Prairie, with their idea of a punk band, Propagandhi! The foursome were originally a skate-punk band, then they dabbled with heavy metal, so knowing all that, I assume they sound like Good Charlotte nowadays, but more well-behaved, because Canadian! But let’s not just blindly assume, let me go live-review whatever they’re passing off as a single from their fast-approaching new album, At Peace, because it wouldn’t be fair to tell all you nice folks that Portage la Prairie, Manitoba (teeming with a population of 13,000, less than New Hampshire’s sleepy retirement community of Pelham) wouldn’t know the Ramones from a barbershop quartet, not unless I had hard evidence. So let’s go, fly to the YouTubes, my flying monkeys, and give a listen to the title track, I can hardly wait to get my hands on these little hockey-playing so-and-sos and their — wait a second, flying monkeys, forget it, bring it in, this isn’t bad, for a band from Canadian Pelham! It starts out with a messy, crummy solo guitar line that’s obviously a parody of the guitar doodle that opens Yes’s “Roundabout,” nothing wrong with that at all, good comedy is really hard to find in today’s punk scene. So then it kicks into a triple-speed punk-metal thing with plain vanilla emo vocals spitting lyrics about why it doesn’t pay to be a peacenik these days, which reminds me, aren’t we at war with Canada nowadays, I just haven’t had time to keep up with Buzzfeed?

• By far the most well-known Suzanne Vega song is “Luka,” a haunting tune about child abuse that cemented Vega’s reputation as a pop-rocker who specialized in folk-oriented lyrics, and yes, you could say that it’s all toward a Gordon Lightfoot fashion. Fun Fact 1: in the original 1980s video for “Luka,” the part of the titular character was played by the guy who grew up to portray Jackie Aprile Jr. in The Sopranos. Fun Fact 2: Vega’s hideously famous a capella “doo doo doo doo” vocal in the original version of her 1987 song “Tom’s Diner” earned her the title of “the mother of MP3s” when DNA’s techno remix of the song served as the test subject for formulating MP3 compression. But whatever, you guys don’t care about all that science-y stuff, so let’s see what she’s doing now, with her new album, Flying With Angels, that’d be great. The single, a mellow folk-rocker titled “Speakers’ Corner,” begins with some Aimee Mann-style formalities before settling on a very nice hook. She’s still got it, ladies and germs.

• In the beginning, Car Seat Headrest was a lo-fi solo project by Leesburg, Virginia, slacker Will Toledo, who played trombone in his high school’s marching band. Now it’s an indie quartet whose new album, The Scholars, streets on Friday. The push single, “Gethsemane,” is a mid-tempo dance-punker obviously inspired by Chk Chk Chk’s better moments. I like it, personally.

• And lastly it’s rootin’ tootin’ country-rock singing man Eric Church, with his eighth album, Evangeline vs. The Machine! The single, “Hands of Time,” isn’t annoying in any Rascal Flatts/Big & Rich manner, because it’s mellow and kind of pretty in its way, but the cowboy accent is forced, just like most country music. That’s annoying to people who know about singing, because accents don’t really manifest when someone sings in English, just to tell you Something You Should Know. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Image: Hexenhaus, Awakening & Erin LeCount, I Am Digital, I Am Divine

Mint Julep Cookies

Cookies

  • Large handful (20 g) fresh mint leaves
  • 1½ cups (320 g) white sugar
  • ½ cup (1 stick) butter
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup (227 g) sour cream
  • 1 Tablespoon bourbon
  • 2¾ cups (330 g) all-purpose flour
  • ½ teaspoon baking soda
  • ½ teaspoon baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon salt

Frosting

  • ¾ cup (1½ sticks) butter
  • Small handful (10-15 g) fresh mint – stems are OK
  • 3 cups (342 g) powdered sugar
  • 3 Tablespoons bourbon

Cookies:

Combine the large handful of mint and the white sugar in your blender and grind together. In a mixer, cream the minty sugar and the butter together. Add the eggs, one at a time, scraping down the sides of the bowl. Mix in the sour cream and 1 Tablespoon of bourbon.

Add the dry ingredients, a little at a time, at low speed to avoid poofing yourself with flour.

Chill the cookie dough for at least one hour. Preheat your oven to 425°F.

Scoop 1- to 2-teaspoon blobs of dough onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a silicone mat about 2 inches apart. Tell the blobs how pretty they are; they might feel insecure. (Not for nothin’, but this is some of the most delicious unbaked cookie dough you are likely to run across anywhere legal.)

Bake one sheet at a time for about 8 minutes, then swap out for a new tray. Let each batch of cookies cool on the baking sheet. If you run out of baking sheets, gently pull the parchment paper or silicone mat from the baking sheet, then blob out the next batch of cookie dough.

When the cookies have cooled, remove them to a large plate or baking sheet, then frost them.

Frosting:

Melt the remaining 1½ sticks of butter in a small saucepan. Stir in the rest of the fresh mint, and spread it out so that it makes as much contact as possible with the melted butter. Remove the pan from heat, and set it aside for 30 to 45 minutes. Go work on a crossword puzzle.

While you are out of the room, the mint will be infusing into the butter. Fats and alcohol both do a really good job of stripping flavor compounds from herbs and spices. In this case, the butter is taking on the flavors of fresh mint — not a candy caney minty flavor but the taste of actual fresh mint. After the mint and the melted butter have had an opportunity to really get to know each other, strain the butter into the bowl of your mixer and add the powdered sugar and bourbon to it. Starting on the mixer’s slowest speed, beat the frosting ingredients together faster and faster, until they are fluffy.

If the frosting seems a little too soft, refrigerate it for 10 to 15 minutes.

Use a small spatula or the back of a spoon to frost the cookies. If you are taking them somewhere — a Kentucky Derby party — let the frosting firm up for about half an hour before loading them in a single layer in a pizza box. Otherwise eat them with an actual mint julep and wonder what the poor people are doing this afternoon.

By themselves, these cookies are nice but surprisingly standoffish — gently minty, with a very faint background flavor of bourbon. The frosting, on the other hand, is very in-your-face and emphatic and pairs beautifully with its more subtle partner.

Featured photo: Mint Julep Cookies. Photo by John Fladd.

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