Tag: 260122

Bringing the funk

Fox and The Flamingos hit BNH Stage

By Michael Witthaus
mwitthaus@hippopress.com

Female-fronted funk will be in the spotlight when Fox and The Flamingos perform at BNH Stage on Jan. 23, with additional grooves provided by opener Pocket Drop, a music collective that includes a few familiar Concord faces. The showcase is the latest high point for a band approaching its fifth anniversary.

Released in September, “Nowhere But Up” is Fox and The Flamingos’ most recent single, with a title that well describes the Milford quintet’s current trajectory. The upbeat, danceable track is anchored by a solid rhythm section, tasty guitar licks and swirling keyboard, with the soulful voice of front woman Maizy Rae at its heart.

Maizy is a lifelong singer who honed her craft at local gatherings.
“A lot of my friends would throw these parties, and it was always in a basement,” she said. “Just basically a big party that would turn into a big jam session.” At one of those, she met a bass player who invited her to audition for a funk band he and some friends were forming.

She was the first and last singer to audition. The bass player, it turned out, wasn’t a good fit; he only lasted a month. Gary Smith, a veteran on the scene who’s played with Roots of Creation among other acts, was recruited to fill the vacancy. The other band members liked his affinity for what he termed “weird stuff” in a Zoom co-interview with Maizy.

“I’m a jazz nerd,” he said. The interview happened as Smith and Maizy were about to perform a duo set at Forum Pub in Concord as Vaudeville Vixen, their duo side project. “I do looper stuff with my eight-string guitar, and she sings. We do reinterpretations of more modern songs in the jazz vein — ‘Santeria’ and things like that.”

When Smith joined, Fox and The Flamingos included guitarist Tyler Moran, Ryan Pratt on drums, keyboard player Ryan Bossie and Maizy. Bossie left last summer, and Zach Sweetser, who also plays in the Dave Matthews Tribute Band, took his spot. Saxophone player Derek Adams began sitting in last year and is now a full-time member.

The band played its first gig in 2021 at Concord’s now-shuttered Area 23. Smith recalled Maizy as tentative that night, but that didn’t last. “Now, she’s bouncing around on the stage doing whatever,” he said. “Displaying that confidence helps us in getting gigs with the bigger bands. They see us and they’re excited to play with us.”

The group has been gathering fans steadily. In 2024 they beat out five other groups at StrangeCreek Battle of the Bands, and won a cabin set at the festival.

“That was really huge for me personally,” Maizy said. “I’ve been going to StrangeCreek for 10 years…. I think that was crucial to getting our name out there.”

The band released their debut album last year, Spirit Animal. It’s an axiom that a first record takes four years to make and the second takes four months; that looks to be true with this flock. To follow “Nowhere But Up,” the band recently began playing a new song at shows, “Can’t Blame You.” It’s an absolute banger, with more in the works.

“Songs come together pretty quickly,” Smith said. “It’ll either be Maizy saying, ‘I have this melody’ or someone will have a chord progression or a riff. Usually we can get a song together in a rehearsal. It takes us a couple hours to shape them up. We’re getting better at utilizing our time in the studio, but it’s a learning experience for sure.”

Maizy takes inspiration from Betty Davis, a mid-’70s soul singer with a cult following who mixed Tina Turner’s brashness with the style of David Bowie. A key moment happened when she saw Harsh Armadillo, now called Harsh, at their final Wild Woods Festival on a Croydon farm in 2018.

At the time, Harsh was led by Andrea Beladi, who left when the pandemic hit. “It changed everything,” she said. “I’d always been a singer, but it really put it into perspective — like … that’s a thing you can do? I hadn’t really thought about it, because I was just getting into the local live music scene.”

Fox and The Flamingos w/ Pocket Drop
When: Friday, Jan. 23, 8 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $18 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Fox and The Flamingos. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 26/01/22

• Bon voyage: There are changes ahead for Concord jamsters Andrew North & the Rangers. With drummer Dale Grant moving to Colorado, the band gives him a sendoff show. A Facebook post expressed gratitude for Grant’s “eight years of friendship, music, and fun,” calling him “an essential and integral part of our sound” and welcoming him back on the kit anytime he visits. Thursday, Jan. 22, 7 p.m., Pembroke City Limits, 134 Main St., Suncook, pembrokecitylimits.com.

• Prize laughs: Three comics from the New York City-based Ladies of Laughter (LOL) contest showcase their talents — Apollo Theater veteran G.L. Douglas; Ellen Karis, who’s opened for Sebastian Maniscalco, and Maine native Cathy Boyd, Friday, Jan. 23, 8 p.m., Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, $40 at palacetheatre.org.

• Heavy music: Hardcore punk fans felt like it was 1994 all over again when Tree released their first new music in 25 years in early 2024. The band formed in the Boston suburbs in the late ’80s and their first three albums were considered staples among the locals. Catch them with The Negans, Black Hatch and Robotic Hawks. Saturday, Jan. 24, 7 p.m., Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester, facebook.com/treebostonhardwood.

• In triplicate: One of the more unique tribute acts around is Pink Talking Fish, exploring the possibilities of mashing up three classic bands — Pink Floyd, Talking Heads and Phish. They look for commonalities, doing things like dropping Phish’s “You Enjoy Myself” in the middle of Floyd’s “On the Run,” and occasionally segueing music from all three bands together in one wild song. Saturday, Jan. 24, 8 p.m., Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, $40 at nashuacenterforthearts.com.

A Wooded Shore, by Thomas McGuane

(Knopf, 177 pages)

Thomas McGuane’s 18th book, A Wooded Shore, fits nicely on a shelf in a man cave. Comprising eight stories and a novella, the collection is mostly about ordinary men: men striving but failing to rise to the myriad occasions that life presents. The fact that most take place in Montana shouldn’t be a deterrent to anyone in New England.

Take “Slant Six,” my favorite of the bunch. It is a deceptively simple slice-of-life story about a couple, Drew and Lucy, going through common problems of life, like dealing with an aging mother/mother-in-law. The story opens with Drew, a lawyer, stopping by a hardware store. There he runs into a former client trying to figure out what shade of white his wife would want off a color wheel featuring 27 different shades. As the story unfolds, we learn that the couple, despite Drew’s profession, live in a rental with a “tall, lean and Lincolnesque” landlord named Jocko who lives with a parrot named Pontius Pilate and likes to mow the lawn in a thong. “The fact that Jocko was their landlord seemed to stand for everything they hadn’t gotten in life,” McGuane writes.

The fact that Drew and Lucy work hard at being good people, even volunteering to pick up trash along two miles of a highway, seems to offer no karmic benefit. In the seminal scene of the story, the couple go to a party at a client’s house, where they interact with the various people who cross paths in their life. The story concludes with a smart callback to the paint color-wheel scene and an observation by Drew that is haunting and likely universal.

Memorable also is “Balloons,” which has just a little more than eight pages but delivers a surprise punch in the final paragraph. It’s narrated by a doctor who had an affair with a woman, Joan, who “stirred up our town with her air of dangerous glamour and the sense that her marriage to Roger couldn’t last.” That was true: Joan eventually left Roger, leaving her former husband and her former paramour to awkwardly interact with one another, around town and in the examination room. Even after the divorce, the narrator was unsure whether Roger had known about the affair. When he comes to the doctor’s office with news and a surprising request, he doesn’t question the motive. Theirs had seemed an idyllic marriage at the start: The narrator reflects, when looking at the church where they were married, “I had never seen two such good-looking people as Joan and Roger at their peak.”

Some writers of short fiction end their stories so abruptly that it seems they got tired and decided to stop and let the reader figure out where they were going. That’s not the case in this collection; the endings appear well-thought out, even if the story itself drifts a little bit. That’s the case in “Retail,” which introduces us to Roy, an insurance salesman who achieved modest success selling policies to people who owed him something in some way: old classmates, distant relatives, an abusive foster mom. When Roy achieves local stardom by rushing into a burning house to save a child’s cat, his fortunes improve, but he still finds himself managing an unimpressive group of salesmen and trying unsuccessfully to court a widow in an adjacent office.

And so it goes: despair and hope, hope and despair, one foot in front of the other, and occasionally a flash of revelation. Each story can be seen as mildly to enormously depressing, but for the schadenfreude.

There is pain and loss at the heart of these stories, which gives them their depth. McGuane’s extraordinary voice, honed over 85 years of living, gives them their meaning. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: A Wooded Shore, by Thomas McGuane

Album Reviews 26/01/22

Djrum, Under Tangled Silence (Houndstooth Records)

It was way past time to cover this one — seven months to be exact — but better late than yadda yadda. According to — OK, most of the people who still profit from being involved in its scene, dubstep isn’t a dead genre at all, and we do need to admit that it really shouldn’t be. This British producer (Felix Manuel) was a music prodigy as a child, and his mastery of the piano is on full display here during many of the intro bits, which give off Beethoven (or Liberace, truth be told — let’s just say “aristocratic,” that’d be fine) vibes before (eventually, at the artist’s discretion) tabling beats that are promoted as “IDM” and whatnot by some but nevertheless owe a lot of their DNA to (you guessed it) Aphex Twin, Skrillex and Burial. Melodic, quirky and wickedly technical, this is the sort of stuff you want in your earbuds when you absolutely, positively must have an out-of-body experience because the professor’s lecture is so boring. Take opening track “A Tune For Us” for starters, comprising piano arpeggios, a ton of light synth layering and, you know, glitch to create the sonic equivalent of a lava lamp. Deeply immersive soundscaping throughout. A+ — Eric W. Saeger

Hoaxed, Death Knocks (Relapse Records)

This all-girl trio from Portland, Oregon, has gotten pretty Sabbath-y since acquiring new bassist/vocalist April Dimmick (from Soul Grinder, in case you track such things). This LP opens with “Where the Seas Fall Silent,” which wields the same tribal “party on, you crazed cannibal zombies” bashing as Sabbath’s “Hole In The Sky,” in other words if you hate it you hate all arena-metal. But this band is no Sabbath wannabe (otherwise Relapse Records wouldn’t have validated their parking stub when they came in to negotiate, trust me). “The Family” is raw, street-smart, and pretty freaking epic for a band that isn’t trying to do orchestra-metal; it’s what you might call “coven-metal,” you know, hard-rock for witches and such, which is my way of saying you should check it out, if not for the (really good) songwriting, than for the band’s tastefully low-rent but powerful sound. They’d probably do great opening for Rasputina or whatnot. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Everyone’s pretty much sobered up from the holidays, not that you can really tell, so it’s time to get down to serious business again, getting you people to buy new CDs and virtual albums, from the great Cloud in the sky! Yes, we’re into the new releases of Friday, Jan. 23, this week, but since one of you hopped into my Facebook to give me guff about what I said about KPop Demon Hunters last week, I watched about half the movie, just so I could feel what it’s like to be part of the audience that consumes — whatever that stuff is. For the sake of journalistic integrity, I wanted to feel what it’s like to be a teenage Generation Alpha music fan, so I prepped myself by eating a half-pound of Trolli Sour Blasting Crawlers, washing them down with a gallon of Mountain Dew Code Red, then ate two bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and a box of flaming chicken tenders, then filmed a TikTok of myself taking the “Skull Breaker Challenge” by getting kicked in the head by a horse (naturally it got only three views, one from my sister, one from my employer and one from a girl I dated in high school). Half-insane from diabetic coma and really really wanting a salad and some aspirin, I felt like I was ready to go all-in on the Hunters, so I went for it. So, OK, it’s not just a giant Lady Gaga ripoff, like, there’s some Katy Perry theft in there too, and I’ll admit it was kind of funny when the girls went ga-ga over the androgynous dudes in the boyband and popcorn started popping out of their eyes, but that joke got overdone fast and I didn’t laugh the second time. The animation was fine, twice as good as Disney’s Aladdin cartoon I’d say, but really, asking me, an award-winning arts critic, to watch KPop Demon Hunters is like expecting Meet The Press to bring on two 4-year-olds to debate whether or not the Federal Reserve board should keep interest rates high: Wasted on refined sugar as I was, I still lacked the supercharged pheromones that are required to find anything interesting about the movie, and no, I won’t eat any more Tide Pods to see if that does the trick. Instead, I’d like to get on with this week’s releases, so we’ll start with British singer-songwriter Louis Tomlinson, a member of (ugh) boyband One Direction! His new album, How Did I Get Here, features a tune called “Palaces” that straight-up steals the vibe from Flock Of Seagulls’ 1980s hit “I Ran” but adds nerdy boyband singing to the recipe, which doesn’t work at all during the first minute or so, but it does prove effective during the hooky chorus. It’s fine for what it is. Groan.

• British-American rapper IDK is said to be “around 80 percent as good as Kanye West” and/or “kind of boring,” but a lot of people think he’s awesome, probably mostly because he seems to pull in a lot of famous guest feats, which he does again in his upcoming new album Even The Devil Smiles, scheduled for release this Friday after a false start a couple of weeks ago. DMX’s estate allowed him to use some (bad-ass as always) vocal tracks on “Start To Finish.”

• Also this week, Washington, D.C.-born R&B singer Ari Lennox releases her third album, Vacancy, as the follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2022 LP Age/Sex/Location. This one’s title track is a bedroom-soul joint spotlighting her Roberta Flack-meets-Da Brat vocal stylings, with some sweary rapping from album producer Jermaine Dupuis.

• And finally we have seven-member Japanese R&B/hip-hop girl-group XG, with their debut full-length The Core. Front-loaded single “Gala” is pretty neat if you like glitch and progressive house beats; it’s pretty ritzy and next-generation if you ask me, which of course you always should. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Alter Bridge, Alter Bridge (Napalm Records) & Diane Coll, Strangely In Tune (self-released)

Fog Cutter

Here is my take on this classic.

1½ ounces light rum — On this occasion I’ve used Captain Morgan’s Sweet Chili Lime, because I’m wacky that way.

1 ounce cognac

½ ounce London Dry Gin — We want some of that juniperish astringency in this drink to offset so many fruit flavors, so I’m going with a solid standby, Gordon’s.

2 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice

1 ounce fresh squeezed ruby red grapefruit juice

½ ounce orgeat — This is a sweet almond syrup that punches up the fruitiness of a tropical drink

½ ounce dry sherry to float

Add ice to a cocktail shaker, then add the rum, cognac, gin, lime and grapefruit juices, and orgeat. Shake thoroughly while listening to a song about making bad decisions on the beach. I recommend “Una Más Cerveza” by Tommy Alverson. Or anything by Jimmy Buffet.

Strain over crushed ice in a Collins glass. As it happens, I don’t have an ice maker in the door of my refrigerator, so I am forced to crush it myself, like a savage. I wrap a handful of ice cubes in a tea towel and smash it with something heavy.

Pour a float of sherry on the top of the drink with a straw and a paper umbrella.

This is fruity and refreshing, but at the same time boozy enough to get your attention. It goes down easily, but not so easily that it raises any suspicions. One will lead to a second. When you start to make a third Fog Cutter, a responsible person might remind you that you have a big day tomorrow.

The key phrase to remember here is, “Tomorrow’s not the boss of me!”

Featured photo: Cornmeal crepes. Photo by John Fladd.

Like a park, but with cappuccino

Village Play Cafe offers a place for parents and kids to relax

By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com

The target demographic of Village Play Cafe in Manchester is a very specific one: parents of young children who haven’t talked to another grown-up in too long.

You can drink a latte and watch your child play in a safe, soft space, said Kristie Ranahan, owner and founder of Village Play Cafe,

“I always wanted to open a play cafe,” she said. “Eventually I said, ‘I’m going to do it.’ So I hired moms who needed a place to work where they could bring their kids. I had never been a barista before, so I signed up for a class in New Jersey for the SCA, which is the Specialty Coffee Association, and I got certified as a barista …”

One side of the cafe is set up with tables and chairs, as well as a counter to order drinks and pastries. The other half of the space is set up with mats, books and toys for children to play with.

The cafe’s menu is centered around breakfast and lunch items, Ranahan said.

“Everything is made pretty much in house. In the morning we have cereals, muffins, croissants, apple Danishes, that sort of thing. And then for lunch we do soups, salads and sandwiches. My soups are homemade. When I do birthday parties and tea parties and things like that, we’re baking everything.”

In addition to drop-in guests, Village Play Cafe will host birthday parties and special events, like tea parties, with a costumed character who greets the children, and a proper formal tea service for their adults.

“We’re trying to [hold] a character party once a month,” Ranahan said. “In December it was the Grinch.” For the adults, the tea and treats are served on china. “So with clotted cream, jam, and then you have different Danishes and pastries, depending on what I feel like making that week. Children get a take-home cup and two hours of play; parents get a full tea setup. And then we only sell 30 tickets total, including adults, to make it more an environment that is a little quieter, so there’s not too many children running around at one time.”

“We’re really just trying to make more of a community,” Ranahan said, “especially in the winter. The whole purpose is to give moms an outlet where they can meet other moms, socialize and get to help younger children.”

Village Play Cafe
Where: 589 Second St., Manchester (shares a parking lot with Burger King)
Hours: open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
More: 340-5362, villageplaycafenh.com
Frozen Tea Time with Elsa will take place Saturday, Jan. 18, from 2 to 4 p.m.

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