Tag: 250821

Indoor party

NH Irish Fest returns to Palace

By Michael Witthaus

mwitthaus@hippopress.com

Two shows — one free, another ticketed — will celebrate New Hampshire’s connection to Ireland when the New Hampshire Irish Fest returns to the Palace Theatre. On the big stage, the Spain Brothers, Liam and Micky, host a bill topped by Eileen Ivers with renowned tenor Ronan Tynan, the Screaming Orphans and Mick McAuley.

In the Palace’s Spotlight Room, a free show (reservations required) has a local flavor, with JD & the Stonemasons, Black Pudding Rovers, Marty Quirk and Speed the Plough playing at the top of each hour, beginning at 3 p.m. Since the paid admission event kicks off at 5 p.m., a festival vibe will prevail.

“There will be some overlap between the two,” Liam Spain, who also booked the shows, said by phone recently. “We’re trying to make it more of a festival, having the multiple stages.” At the end of the evening all the musicians will gather to perform a closing song. It’s always a highlight at the event, now in its third year.

Screaming Orphans, a family band, have appeared at all three festivals. The four Diver sisters — Joan, Angela, Gràinne and Marie Thérèse — hail from Bundoran in Ireland’s County Donegal. Their last album, 2023’s Paper Daisies, hit No. 1 on Billboard’s World Music Top 10 and was a fan favorite. “Every track evokes a different feeling,” gushed one.

Called the “Jimi Hendrix of the violin,” Ivers performed a Christmas show at the Rex a few years back, but this will be her first Irish Fest appearance, and Spain is excited.

“She’s a go-to for a lot of contemporary artists that are looking to give that kind of extra spice to whatever they’re doing,” he said.

Tynan first rose to fame in the late 1990s as a member of the Irish Tenors, branching out to a solo career in 2005, with an eclectic repertoire that includes show tunes, standard pop songs and an occasional faith-based piece. Songs in his recent sets range from “My Irish Molly ’O” to “Send in the Clowns” and “Danny Boy.”

A longtime member of Solas, McCauley is a multi-instrumentalist who plays accordion, melodeon, concertina, whistles and guitar who’s contributed to albums by Mary Chapin Carpenter, Patty Larkin, Paul Brennan of Clannad, and he played melodeons in Sting’s autobiographical theater production The Last Ship.

The Spain Brothers debuted a new album last year — Bright & Better Morning, their duo’s first — and released a Christmas EP in tandem with a concert at the Rex Theatre with Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki and his band. That holiday season show will be back in December, Spain revealed in the interview.

The Irish-curious will enjoy the complimentary slate of musicians in the Palace Spotlight Room. Speed The Plough began as a duo in 1981, performing regularly at Jearnie’s End in Goffstown, growing into a quartet playing a range of acoustic music featuring fiddle, banjo, mandolin, guitar, pennywhistle and dulcimer. They’re a trio these days, with three albums.

Black Pudding Rovers, who played the Spotlight Room last year, are an area tradition every St. Patrick’s Day. The band features Mike Becker and Ken Wyman on guitar, with Gary Hunter on woodwinds, playing reels, hornpipes, polkas and Irish ballads, along with covers of tunes by everyone from the Dropkick Murphys to Van Morrison.

JD & the Stonemasons are called “New England’s most rollicking band of traditional musicians” and perform regularly around the region, including a show at The Fells in Newbury with Liz and Dan Faiella on Aug. 27 and at the Lancaster Fair on Aug. 31. Marty Quirk is a mainstay at Shaskeen Pub.

Being a musician booking shows, something he’s done for multiple years, gives Spain an advantage that provides lots of benefits to area fans, particularly with the New Hampshire Irish Music Festival’s lineup.

“We’ve known them for 20-odd years, so I can cater to that, make it more welcoming and make it feel like home for them when they show up,” he said.

NH Irish Festival

Eileen Ivers, Ronan Tynan, Screaming Orphans, Mick McAuley, Spain Brothers
When: Saturday, Aug. 16, 5 p.m.
Where: Palace Theatre, 80 Hanover St., Manchester
Tickets: $44 and up at palacetheatre.org

Free Event – Speed The Plough, Marty Quirk, Black Pudding Rovers, JD and The Stonemasons
When: Saturday, Aug. 16, 3-7 p.m.
Where: Spotlight Room, 96 Hanover St., Manchester
Tickets: Free, reserve at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Eileen Ivers. Photo by Tim Reilly.

The Music Roundup 25/08/21

Local music news & events

• Country girl: With a new single and an album on the way, April Cushman brings her heartfelt mix of country, rock and pop to a new night spot in downtown Concord for two days. On Friday she’ll perform with her full band, playing favorites like the rollicking “Long Haul,” and on Saturday it’s a solo turn, both at the recently opened space by the BankNH Stage and the Friendly Toast restaurant. Friday, Aug. 22, 5:30 p.m., Arts Alley, 20 S. Main St., Concord, aprilcushman.com.

• Teen rockers: A benefit for Nashua Community Music School has Boston ska punk faves Big D & the Kids Table atop the bill, while giving NCMS’s Teen Rock Band a chance to play for a crowd. Bring a lawn chair or picnic blanket to the family-friendly event, which offers food (each ticket includes two tacos) and supports community music. Saturday, Aug. 23, 2 p.m., Anheuser-Busch Biergarten, 221 DW Highway, Merrimack, $40 and up at nashuacms.org.

• Blues power: A guitar-driven band from Western Pennsylvania, Billy The Kid & The Regulators are in the midst of a New England swing that stops in Milford. Led by Billy Evanochko, the group made multiple trips to the International Blues Challenge in Memphis in its early days, and has shared the stage with greats like Shemekia Copeland, Koko Taylor and Joe Louis Walker. Sunday, Aug. 24, 7 p.m., Riley’s Place, 29 Mont Vernon St., billythekidandtheregulators.com.

• Monster bash: Rough and tumble rockers Falling In Reverse bring their God is a Weapon tour to the Lakes Region. Monday, Aug. 25, 6 p.m., BNH Pavilion, 72 Meadowbrook Lane, Gilford, $54 and up at ticketmaster.com.

Sounds Like Love, by Ashley Poston

(Berkley Romance, 362 pages)

Sounds Like Love is a PG13-rated story that, as of this writing, ranks No. 1 in Amazon’s “feel-good fiction.” It has a romance at the heart of it, but is also a story about family and friendship, mostly set during summer at a beach town at North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Thus it qualifies as not just rom-com, but a beach read.

Joni Lark — who goes by Jo — comes from a musical family. Her grandparents owned a music hall, which was passed down to Jo’s parents. Her mother was a performer, and Jo grew up to be a songwriter of note. When we meet her, she’s at a concert of a pop star who shot to fame because of one of Jo’s songs. Although thirty-something Jo has enjoyed professional success, she herself is not famous, and so when she is escorted to a private balcony where a famous singer sits, he assumes she’s seeking a photo or an autograph, and is coldly condescending despite his dreamy blue eyes. He smirks three times in four pages, that’s all you need to know.

But Jo will have none of that, and flirty banter ensues, and also an unexpectedly intimate moment with the man, who used to be part of a boy band and is the son of an even more famous musician.

When Jo leaves the concert in an Uber, we know we will see Sebastian Fell again, even though the logistics are unclear, as she is leaving Los Angeles to visit her family in North Carolina.

Jo isn’t going home for a typical beach visit, however. Her mother has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, and her father has asked her to come for an extended stay so the family can have “one last good summer” before God-only-knows-what sets in. She knows it will be a bittersweet time but soon realizes that it will also be complicated — her best friend, who happens to be dating her brother, has an edge to her that Jo can’t quite figure out, and her parents soon announce that they have decided to retire from the family business, the music hall called the Revelry that was a fixture in the community and had “weathered more hurricanes than years I’d been alive.”

Amid all this, Jo has writer’s block — she hasn’t been able to write a song in weeks and has clients waiting on her. And she has developed the strangest of earworms, strains of a tune that won’t leave her head — along with a man’s voice. Not only does she hear this stranger’s voice clearly, but he can hear her thoughts as well. They can converse silently, like imaginary friends.

OK, Supernatural it isn’t, and yet it sort of is — one of Poston’s other books, 2022’s The Dead Romantics, has been described as “paranormal romance” and her The Seven Year Slip (2023) involves a time-travel relationship. So suspension of disbelief is required with this author, who has built a large and devoted following.

So it’s important to not spend any time thinking about how this could actually be happening, but just go with the flow, as Jo and her new inner friend, Sasha, do. Neither rushes off to a shrink, but they continue about their lives, chatting up each other, and becoming closer as they do, even though they are also trying to figure out how to break this connection.

It is totally weird, this back-and-forth dialogue, until suddenly it isn’t.

Because who among us hasn’t experienced the proverbial voice — or voices — in the head? It’s only when they begin to suggest that we commit a crime that people become concerned. Of course, hearing the thoughts of another person while falling in love with them is a whole other matter, and that is no spoiler, given the title of this book.

Sounds Like Love unfolds in somewhat predictable ways; there are no momentous plot twists that leave the reader gasping. But it’s smart in its own way, and becomes more engaging as the story evolves. It’s not just a romance but an exploration of our unlived lives — what would have happened “If You Stayed” — which is, not uncoincidentally, the name of Jo’s most popular song. It is also the story of the long and poignant goodbye that takes place when a person you love is succumbing to dementia. (Poston says in an author’s note that the book came about, in part, because of her own experience losing someone to dementia, and the pain that comes from having a loved one say, “Who are you?”)

Fans of the romance genre will embrace Sounds Like Love, even more so if they’re into pop music. (Every chapter title is a line from a well-known song.) We don’t just experience songs as the soundtrack of our lives, Poston is saying here, but music is a building block of the people we become. “We were all made up of memories, anyway. Of ourselves, of other people,” Jo reflects at one point. “We were built on the songs sung to us and the songs we sang to ourselves, the songs we listened to with broken hearts and the ones we danced to at weddings.” Sounds like a bestseller, if not a movie.

Featured Photo: Sounds Like Love, by Ashley Poston

Album Reviews 25/08/21

Visions of Atlantis, Pirates II – Armada (Napalm Records)

I’ve had lots of jolly fun on this page making sport of friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny’s fondness for symphonic metal, and oddly enough, when I was literally getting to the actual “record reviews” part of this pirate-joke-filled record-review column, he ba-dinged his way into my Facebook with an immediate demand for me to listen to this pirate-oriented album, the newest (but year-old) one from this Austrian band. Little did Dan know that one of the first records I ever reviewed for any newspaper was these guys’ second full-length, 2004’s Cast Away, which sounded like a LootCrate version of Nightwish, but I thought it was cute and adorable. A lot has changed for this band over the past 21 years, of course, but they’re still a bit kitschy, opening with a maudlin Celtic Woman-tinged ghost-ballad in “To Those Who Choose to Fight,” but then it’s right to business with “The Land of the Free,” which wants to be all Hans Zimmer-soundtrack-y (but with Yngwie Malmsteen guitar sounds) and more or less succeeds as a segue into its usual meat and potatoes shtick: super-gorgeous opera chick with a Helloween-soundalike backing band. It’s fine of course. Oh, while we’re here, the coolest pirate tune ever is Tiesto’s “He’s A Pirate,” which chops up samples of Zimmer’s theme to Pirates Of The Caribbean and turns it into a trance drop for the ages. You simply must hear it, folks. A

Babymetal, Metal Forth (Capitol Records)

Oh fine, as long as this week’s award-winning column has already crashed and burned in a conflagration of pirate jokes and Dan Szczesny’s weakness for girl bands being epic and metal, let’s make it official, since Dan loves this band and I have hott-sexxy-hilarious Stormigee TikToks to watch. Back in June, you may recall, I dubbed the three ridiculously over-choreographed female twentysomething Koreans who front this band “Waifuta, Waifutite and Waifutatta,” which is actually close to what they have for stage names, but if you missed that, both Dan and I hope at least three people in our beloved state have heard of them. If you haven’t, it’s all good; their trip is hyper-speed thrash metal with alternating Munchkin-rapping and catchy pop choruses, a genre known as “Kawaii metal,” or “cute metal,” a Cuisinart of thrash and J-pop. From there we can do the perfunctory: “Ratatata” is a sped-up version of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”; “Song 3” is Cannibal Corpse for techies; “Kon! Kon!” sounds like a cross between Marilyn Manson and the Bakugan theme song (most of them do, really), and now you’ve heard of them, you’re welcome, New Hampshire! A

PLAYLIST

• New albums are being released on Aug. 22, because that’s what always happens on Fridays. Now, I know it’s way past time to address your question, since we’ve known each other so long; you want to know why all the bands and rich nepo baby Autotuned singers release their albums on Fridays, given that people don’t go to the mall to buy albums until Sunday (no one goes to the mall on Saturdays, because that’s the day you spend doing all the un-fun stuff that’s piled up during the week, like cleaning up your office mess and buying and installing that new battery in your car; in ancient Greek, the word “Saturday” means “I should just quit my job and live on a Hawaiian beach, living off pineapples and tourists’ pizza crusts”). Then again, does anyone actually go to the mall at all anymore, except to visit Best Buy, which is always a wasted effort, because you know in your bones that that all-important wire you need so you can run your Sega Genesis for the first time in 30 years isn’t going to be at Best Buy, you silly goose, don’t even bother, even though you definitely will use that hopelessly impossible mission as an excuse to drive to the mall just to see actual people, ha ha, remember those things? But anyway, my invisible AI friend who lives in Google.com says albums are released on Friday “to coincide with the start of the weekend, maximizing potential exposure and engagement. This practice, known as ‘New Music Fridays,’ is a global initiative aimed at standardizing release dates, combating piracy, and aligning with streaming platform updates.” Sure, sounds fine, but you may be wondering how on Earth releasing albums on Fridays “combats piracy.” I wondered that too, so I looked it up and finally found an obscure pirate tradition that was first cited in the year 1589, when the captain of a Welsh pirate ship named the Petunia told his crew of, you know, pirates that it was bad luck to engage in normal pirate activities (aside from singing sea shanties and guzzling rum from jugs) on Fridays. Are you with me so far, so, since record company executives are 100 times worse people than Captain Jack Sparrow, they believe people won’t pirate albums on Fridays, and now you know why I always kick off this multiple-award-winning column with something about Friday. So let’s begin this Friday-centric exercise with the new album from tech-metal dudes Pendulum, a band that’s a lot better than Linkin Park, but since I’m the only one onEarth who seems to know about them, we all live a lie. Inertia is the title of this non-pirate-able-because-it-comes-out-on-a-Friday-don’t-even-try-it album, and the tune “Driver” is insane and frenetic; if The Prodigy went metal, this is what it’d sound like. You’ll definitely like it.

• Ghostface Killah conjures some epic Wu-Tang Clan magic with Supreme Clientele 2 this Friday. Some internet nerds are complaining that sequel albums are stupid (except, they admit, for Ghostface’s first sequel album of course), but leadoff tune “Nutmeg” — guested by NZA, believe it or not — is so badass it’ll shut them up. The techy beat is completely relentless.

• Speaking of believe-it-or-not, my new favorite emo band (only because its name is so long and column-filling) is from Connecticut: The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die! Their fifth album, Dreams Of Being Dust, features “Dissolving,” a really neat track that combines post-punk and art-rock. Me likey.

• Lastly we have the new LP from North Carolina’s Superchunk, Songs In The Key Of Yikes, and its single, “Is It Making You Feel Something,” which is OK! Sounds sort of like Gwen Stefani fronting an early ’80s-indie band, which is cooler than it looks.

Brown Butter Peach Cake

In the late ’70s there was a brief trend of songs that romanticized problem drinking. Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville” springs to mind, of course, and Joe

Filling

1 lb. (450 g) peeled and diced peaches – we have a peach tree in our front yard that is a bit of an overachiever this year

1½ cups (300 g) granulated sugar

½ teaspoon coarse or kosher salt

juice of half a lemon – strain it so you don’t get any seeds in this cake

2 Tablespoons all-purpose flour

Cake

¾ cup (1½ sticks) butter, browned

¾ cup (150 g) brown sugar

¼ cup (50 g) granulated sugar

3 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla

¾ cup (105 g) all-purpose flour

1½ teaspoons coarse or kosher salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon citric acid – this is one of those ingredients that you buy to use in a recipe, then never use it again, and find it a couple of years later living in a yurt in the back of your cupboard; technically this is an optional ingredient, but it adds such a fantastic flavor to this cake that you really owe it to yourself to buy the smallest package of it you can find and try it out

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

Hanging out for a cause

Building community at the Gate City Brewfest

By John Fladd

jfladd@hippopress.com

According to Megan Blongy of the Nashua Police Athletic League, one of the less obvious benefits of the Gate City Brewfest is that the public gets to see a different side of the police.

“I think it gives them a chance to show that they’re good people and they get to show that they’re not scary to walk up to,” Blongy said. “Being able to be at the brew fest and hang out with the community shows people that they’re just regular humans like us.”

Along with the Bellavance Beverage Co. and the Nashua Silver Knights, the Nashua PAL organizes the annual beer festival, which is its biggest fundraiser of the year.

“This year,” Blongy said, “there are going to be strength competitions throughout the day, between the Nashua Fire and Police Departments. We’ll have a Kids’ Zone, which we’ve made bigger this year, and we’re actually going to have Santa there. He’ll be in a Hawaiian outfit to be a summer Santa. So he’s going to be giving out like freeze pops to the kids instead of candy canes, so that’ll be a little bit fun. So those are the two newer things that we’re going to have this year. We still have live music, and a home run derby.”

“And,” she added, “lots and lots of beer to try.”

This will be the 11th annual BeerFest, and Blongy said there will be more than 70 breweries, cider-makers, and beverage producers on hand, with more than 100 products to sample.

Kettlehead on Main Nashua will be one of the breweries on hand. According to Joscelyn Miller, who manages front-of-the-house operations for Kettlehead, there is always a little uncertainty about precisely which beers a brewery will feature at a festival as big as Gate City. It depends largely on what the brewery is making at the moment, she said, and what they have enough of on hand to give everyone at the festival a taste.

“New England-style IPAs are our mainstay,” Miller said, “so we will definitely have one of those with us. They are hazy and citrusy, as opposed to a West Coast IPA that’s going to be more bitter and piney. We have so many choices of beer, though, narrowing them down will be a last-minute decision.”

Erika Anderson is the Marketing Manager for Spyglass Brewing Co. in Nashua. She said Spyglass will definitely bring a couple of IPAs to Gate City, too, but the team will probably bring a lager for balance.

“I would say we’ll have our Double IPA,” Anderson said. “It’s the one that we’re known for. It’s a bit juicy, but not super bitter. It’s ‘hoppy’ in the sense of flavor profile, not ‘hoppy’ in the sense of bitterness. We like to do something like that, that’s just kind of more intense in flavor. And then, yeah, we like to have a lager, like something crisp, light, easy drinking, because everyone likes something refreshing at a festival.”

Matt Young is the founder and co-owner of the Vermont Hard Seltzer Co., of Lyndonville, Vermont. This will be his company’s first year at Gate City.

“We have a total of nine flavors,” Young said. “We’re probably going to bring four or five. We have a couple of them which actually won gold medals in the U.S. Open Hard Seltzer Championship. We have one called Hockey Mom, which is a top seller. It’s a plum seltzer; it’s so good! And then we have Razzle Dazzle, which is a delicious raspberry. Burke Bubbly is a blackberry lemonade.” Vermont Hard Seltzer is currently sold almost exclusively in Vermont, Young said, but “we are currently having conversations with distributors in New Hampshire. And we’re hoping to be picked up by one of them in the near future. So this is like a preview for New Hampshire people. This sounds a little self-serving, but at every brew fest we’ve done, we’ve had the longest lines and the biggest buzz about our products.”

Gate City Brewfest
When: Saturday, Aug. 23, from 1 to 5 p.m.
Where: Holman Stadium, 67 Amherst St., Nashua, 718-8883
Tickets: General admission tickets are $40 in advance, $50 at the gate. VIP tickets are $70 each, while supplies last, and Designated Driver tickets are $15.
More: gatecitybrewfestnh.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

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