Tag: 260326

Not a mellow cello

Rocking up a staid stringed instrument

According to common wisdom, one way to deal with stage fright is to imagine the audience is naked. But what if they’re in the buff already? That’s what cellist Rebecca Roudman and her bandmates in Dirty Cello were thinking when they played at a nudist resort a few years back.

The Northern California quartet has toured the world with a revved-up brand of rock, blues and bluegrass that’s driven by Roudman’s cellist talents. Songs like “Dream On” by Aerosmith and AC/DC’s “Long Way to the Top” are transformed into grassified booty-shakers, and their originals are also stellar.

Luckily for the naked crowd that day, Roudman was the opposite of shy, as she worked her carbon fiber cello like Hendrix on a Strat. Nonetheless, guitarist Jason Eckl, who’s also Roudman’s husband, recalled in a recent Zoom interview with the couple that the gig was still a bit distracting.

“We’re playing our groovy music and people are dancing, which is funny,” he said. “Then all of a sudden without thinking about it I call out a very fast bluegrass song, and the dancing just kicks into high gear. The hula hoops are coming out, and Rebecca’s giggling through the whole thing.”

The gig was one of the few available during the social distancing days of the pandemic, but it put Dirty Cello on a special speed-dial list.

“We keep getting hired to go play at naked people places,” Eckl said. “But we always like to say we keep our clothes on.”

Roudman had a lifetime playing classical music in symphony orchestras when she decided to push the cello’s boundaries.

“I wanted to let my hair down, do something else,” she said. “I’d started performing with a blues band, and one day they asked me to solo and improvise on the blues. I didn’t know how, and I realized this is a skill that I wanted to learn.”

While her cello-playing stays front and center, Roudman has a powerful voice, one reason why Dirty Cello convincingly rocks songs like Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.” But she never planned on being a singer, and deflected a compliment that compared her vocal style to Heart’s Ann Wilson.

“I always consider myself just a cellist but thank you very much,” she said, explaining that the band hired a singer or two, but none of them could keep up. “Jason encouraged me. He said, ‘Look, you can sing, you should sing with the band.’ I was very stubborn, but after a while I was like, ‘OK, well I guess I’ve got to do it.’ … Now I’m very comfortable.”

Beginning with the 2018 release By Request, Dirty Cello has made five albums; the latest, By the Seat of Our Pants, came out in late February. Cello-fied covers include a version of “Sympathy for the Devil” with a female Lucifer, Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine,” and “Run Through the Jungle,” a Creedence Clearwater Revival deep cut.

They balance the record out nicely with solid songs of their own. Despite its title, “Go Slow” moves along at a heady clip, while “Feelin’ Frisky in Frisco” is a nod to the band’s home base. “Further Down the Road” closes out the album. A blues rocker that also ends many of their shows, it’s a barn-burner.

Though cellists like Rushan Eggleston and Ben Sollee have redefined the instrument in the recent past, Roudman didn’t look to them for cues when pivoting from classical to more raucous, rousing music. “I wanted to be completely different,” she said.

With Dirty Cello, Roudman decided to “focus more on rock and blues, and maybe throw in some bluegrass and Americana … be the Swiss Army knife of cello-playing. So when people come to our shows, they’re going to hear a whole bunch of stuff reimagined on the cello. We wanted to stand out and be unique, and it’s been working for us.”

Dirty Cello
When: Sunday, March 29, at 3 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $34 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Dirty Cello. Courtesy photo.

Album Reviews 26/03/26


Flesh Field, On Enmity (self-released)

Some of you may remember the goth phase I was processing in these pages back in the Aughts. In those days I was always thrilled to get a new pile of CDs from Metropolis Records, until I wasn’t, when the same-sameness of the label’s artists began to wear me out. Unfortunately for this guy — an American industrial DJ who (and I didn’t know this until just now) earned a master’s degree in international policy studies with a focus on counter-terrorism (!) — his 2004 album Strain came in for review when I was kinda sick of goth. Not that the album was bad, it simply didn’t have quite enough sonic variety for it to stand out. This one, however, is different. The ideas are similar, borrowed from the usual suspects, such as Gravity Kills, Rammstein and of course Depeche Mode, but there’s some pretty cool experimentation afoot. Opener “Omnicide” gallops and rolls in the vein of Marilyn Manson but actually harder, whereas tracks like “Indestructible” lean on sounds made famous by Trent Reznor while nevertheless sounding fresh. I’d expect the folks at Manchvegas’ Resurrection “goth night” show at Jewel nightclub would be into this (yes, I’ll be checking that place out hopefully soon, so stay tuned). A+

Big Harp, Runs to Blue (Saddle Creek Records)

Prior to bringing their act (and marriage) to Los Angeles, this alt-country duo had been active in bands on the Omaha, Nebraska, indie scene: Chris Senseney was in the group Art in Manila, while Stefanie Drootin played with names that were more household-y, including none other than Bright Eyes, Azure Ray, and She & Him. Their approach is low-key and intimate, focused on poignant songwriting that centers on Senseney’s unstressed, bottom-dwelling baritone, whilst Drootin supplies the helium with bluegrass-tinted harmonies. I could tell you that it’s lazy campfire-oriented stuff, but remember that they’ve been in the big leagues for a while, so their past cover of The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” wasn’t out of the question for their repertoire, nor was it too Los Angelized. No, the net effect here is basically like having Josh and Jennifer Turner serenade you in their living room while something pleasantly slow-cooks in the oven. Definitely manna for the Bonnaroo crowd. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Onward, my trolls, to Friday, March 27, and its slate of new rock ’n’ roll albums, for all you “coolios” out there, or however you identify yourselves these days! At this writing we just survived the 70-degree days of “fake summer” and are presently watching the snow melt Up To A Point as winter resurfaces like Jason from Friday The 13th, bringing abject despair back to our hinterlands, so some decent music jump-scaring everyone from the blackness of our great cultural Crystal Lake would be great for taking the edge off, wouldn’t it? And look at that, a new album from José González, titled Against The Dying Of The Light, is on the docket, so I am mildly excited, or at least not completely disappointed. Maybe you know this soft-voiced Swedish singing man from his solo hits, like “Heartbeats,” or perhaps when he was in the band Junip, but to me, he’ll always be associated with Zero 7, when he sang a few tracks on their 2006 album The Garden; its music was like a cross between Massive Attack and whatever that meatless yacht rock stuff was that used to play over K-Mart’s loudspeakers during the 1970s and ’80s. Do you remember the weird smell in those K-Mart stores? It smelled like a mixture of melted Barbie dolls and human desperation, but nevertheless I miss having other stores besides Walmart or Target to visit when I needed to buy something I knew nobody would have, back when there were other retail choices before Amazon.com took over all of U.S. retail except for those two stores. Those were the days, weren’t they, boomers and X’ers, with Bradlees and Ames and whatnot, but no more, now everybody just buys everything online from Jeff Bezos, the actual real-life Grinch, who refuses to let his Amazon delivery drivers eat any hobo beans until they’ve made sure everyone on their route has had all their floo-floovers, Who-hoopers, and trum-tookas delivered straight to their door instead of having to go outside and touch grass and maybe even accidentally see their neighbors for the first time in months, which would of course pose the mortal danger of citizens actually talking to each other, whereupon the question of whether or not we actually like never having to leave the house for any reason whatsoever might come up. But I digress, because there are column inches to befoul with nonsense, so, circling back to José González, I assume most of you young twerking coolios have never even heard of Zero 7 and instead know him from some other project, but I’ll bet you the title track from this album sounds either like Zero 7 or “Heartbeats” and — yup, it’s a warm, mellow song with a psychedelic Spacemen 3 chorus. There’s nothing wrong with it; you may take that as a breathless rave from this correspondent.

• Flea is the bass player from Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band that, I was delighted to find recently, has a lot of fellow haters with whom I developed fast friendships. But rather than dwell on that, let’s see if I can stomach “Traffic Lights,” from his upcoming new album, Honora! Ack, The bass work is fine, and there are random Vegas-jazz horns, but Thom Yorke from Radiohead is singing, which would ruin any decent vibe.

• The New Pornographers are an indie band from Vancouver, which is promising. Their new LP, The Former Site Of, features “Votive,” an interesting little tune that combines Guided By Voices with literally any electro band that’s more interesting than Guided By Voices (that’s all of ’em Katie). They’ll be at The Wilbur in Boston on April 22.

• Lastly it’s Swedish electro-popper Robyn with her new Sexistential album! The title track is bratty and sexy and threatens to drop-explode like Orbital’s “Wonky” but basically gives up and just sits around being, you know, bratty and sexy, big whoop.

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

Featured Photo: Flesh Field, On Enmity and Big Harp, Runs to Blue.

Old-fashioned rice pudding

  • 5½ cups (1,250 g) whole milk – We don’t want this pudding to be too fatty or not fatty enough. Whole milk brings just the right amount. If you want to make a vegan version of this, substitute a plant milk with around a 4 percent level of fat.
  • ½ cup (99 g) sugar – This doesn’t seem like enough. It is.
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • Heaping ½ cup (120 g) medium-grained rice – Why medium-grain? We’re counting on the rice to throw off threads of starch to help give the pudding its texture. Short-grained rice – sushi or Arborio rice – would give off so much starch that the individual grains would start to collapse into mush. Regular jasmine or long-grain rice won’t throw off as much starch as we’re looking for, giving the final pudding a looser texture.
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla – to bring depth and deliciousness
  • Ground cinnamon, or nutmeg, or cardamom to sprinkle on top (very optional)

In a large saucepan, bring the milk, sugar and salt to a boil, stirring occasionally.

Crash the heat to its lowest setting, and stir in the rice. This will cool the mixture down slightly, so stay with it, stirring occasionally, until it comes to a gentle simmer. This means that the surface of the liquid will be moving around, thinking about bubbling, but not quite committing to a full boil.

Leave the pudding to simmer for about an hour. If you’re a nervous cook, go get a chair, and sit near the stove reading a martial arts magazine or doing a crossword puzzle. If you are more relaxed about such things, set a timer, and go into the next room to catch up on your binge-watching. Set a timer for about half an hour to remind you to go stir the pudding, but otherwise leave it to find its own way.

After 50 to 60 minutes, check on the pudding. If it is still pretty liquidy, let it cook a little longer. Maybe goose the temperature a tiny bit. You are looking for a consistency like that of yogurt. If it seems thick enough, kill the heat, stir it once or twice, and leave it to cool.

Eventually, come back to your cooled pudding, and stir the vanilla into it. Because vanilla evaporates at fairly low temperatures, taking vanilla-y flavor compounds with it, you’ll get more bang for your buck vanilla-wise if you add it to cool or cooling foods.

At this point the pudding will have a firm, proud texture. It would welcome being eaten right away but would also be perfectly happy to be chilled. It depends on whether you are a warm rice pudding person, a chilled rice pudding person, or somewhere in between.

When you are ready to serve the pudding, you might want to stir in a small amount of additional milk to loosen it up. Or not. Rice pudding wants what you want. It only seeks your comfort and happiness.

Featured photo: Rice pudding. Photo by John Fladd.

Giant pretzels for the win

Fisher Cats get ready for another season of baseball and eats

One of the most challenging aspects of being responsible for the food and drinks at a ballpark is to serve fun and surprising foods to the fans, but at the same time to make sure that the staff is never surprised themselves.

According to Brad McClennan, the Fisher Cats’ new Director of Food and Beverage, there has been a change to the team’s approach to feeding fans.

“We’ve had an opportunity to run our production now ourselves,” he said. “We are part of DBH, Diamond Baseball Holdings, which is our ownership group. It is the largest minor league baseball owner in the country with 48 clubs, soon to be 49 actually. And many of the clubs this year have decided to produce our food in-house, so we are now a DBH concession.” He hopes having so many minor league clubs working together on their catering will mean the food at all the clubs will always be of a high standard. The hot dogs will always be good hot dogs. Popcorn will be consistently fresh, crisp and warm from the popper, regardless of which ballpark a fan visits.

Nobody is unhappy about getting consistently good food, McClennan said, but that creates its own challenges. How can a ballpark maintain its individuality and not serve the exact same food as all the other teams in the same group?

The whole identity of a minor league team, McClennan said, is to make each team an expression of its home community. The individual food experience at each park is part of the local culture.

“The goal [of working together with other teams in the Fisher Cats’ group] from creation was always to create a network for resources and tools but to keep local local. The menus at different parks will be very different. There will be ballpark classics and staples at every park, of course. You never want to not be able to get a hot dog or a bag of peanuts somewhere — and a cold beer — in a game.” But at the same time the Fisher Cats want to be able to represent New Hampshire through the food at Delta Dental Stadium.

“You’ll see a much better tie-in to some of our local [beer] distributors, for instance,” McClennan said, “like Amoskeag and Kettlehead. You’ll also start to see some products from LaBelle Winery, which we’re very excited about. On the food side you’ll see some fun new desserts. We’re keeping most of the specific items close to the vest, but one item that we’re proud of is a 24-ounce Bavarian pretzel that’s the size of a large pizza. We want people to see it and gasp. It is going to be a showcase; I personally can’t wait to see a 10- or 12-year-old walking around trying to eat that whole thing…. It’s really, really cool.”

There are plans underway to have food and drink specials specific to particular celebrations or to reflect visiting teams, McClennan said.

“We definitely take into consideration our opponents, “ he said, “because I think there’s some really fun, natural synergies you can promote with, especially with some of our local rivals, like right up the road in Portland. It’s kind of fun to have such a team that close; it’s a blast.” There will be food and drink specials to reflect games played by the Fisher Cats’ alter egos, the Chicken Tenders or the Space Potatoes.

“There are a lot of different synergies with the Tenders, of course, but we’ll also have Brandon and Lauren from [Manchester restaurant] The Potato Concept back this year again. They’ll be joining us back again for Space Potato weekends, which will be … kind of spread out throughout the year.”

Play ball, eat pretzels
The New Hampshire Fisher Cats will open the 2026 season on Friday, April 3, with a home game against the Binghamton Rumble Ponies beginning at 6:03 p.m.

Baking for the weekend

Sunflower Bakery offers sweet and savory treats

Brittani and Jake Randall own the Sunflower Bakery and Cafe in Nashua. They bake every day, but the bakery itself is only open on weekends. The couple are very deliberately building their business, one small step at a time. “We’ve had people try to bully us into opening during the week,” Brittani said, “but our attitude is ‘We’ll get there when we get there.’ Would we like to be open on Fridays? Sure, but we sell out of everything on Saturdays and Sundays already. We push ourselves as hard as we can all week to get ready just for the weekend, and then we are wiped out of everything. We probably work 17-hour days on Saturdays and Sundays, and that’s just restocking for the next day. So we’re working on [extending our opening hours],” but we don’t want to do it until we’re ready — until we can make sure that we’re putting out the same products, and people are happy. We’re being consistent.”

“So we’re going slow,” Jake said, “but I think we sell out a lot But you know, I would rather sell out and have the quality be as top tier as possible than try to just be open more days, to get more product out, to try to get as much money as possible. The whole reason we wanted to do this was to try to provide quality food out in the community.”

“I think our biggest strength,” Jake continued, “our No. 1 item, is actually our range. A lot of people ask us, ‘What’s your signature product?’ And I will say, there’s some stuff we do that nobody around here does, that have gotten really popular, I think, for that reason. Like we do kouign-amann, which is essentially like a butter croissant but the last two layers are folded inward with a thin layer of sugar so it caramelizes a little bit.”

“So we do those,” Brittani said, “and we do bialys, which are like Polish bagels. They’re fermented and then boiled. They have caramelized onion in the middle, but they don’t have holes like a traditional bagel. We started making them because we had a person say, ‘Hey, I see you have bagels. Do you do bialys?’ And I was like, ‘I can look into it’. And then after that, people were obsessed with them. So I was like, ‘All right, I guess we’ll just keep doing them.’“

Like many bakeries, the Sunflower serves breakfast sandwiches, but only until they sell out, and not the same types of sandwiches that customers would be used to seeing.

“We change those every weekend,” Brittani said. “We do bring back a pulled pork one pretty often. We actually ran it during the Super Bowl, and people really liked it. So I brought it back, and it keeps selling out, which is great. So far, all the specials have been really well received, even when we get creative. I was surprised that one went because, you know, brie isn’t everyone’s favorite, and blueberry/red onion jam is like kind of out there. I didn’t think anyone was really going to be into it. But we sold out. I was like, ‘OK….’”

The Randalls said they spend the week leading up to Saturday and Sunday baking for a few wholesale accounts but mostly stocking up on baked goods for their weekend customers.

“We make pies,” Brittani said. “A lot of pies. We do fresh doughnuts; we have glazed and we do different filled ones. Sometimes we do a specialty one depending on how crazy the week is. We do a variety of different glazes and then we do yeasted filled doughnuts. We always do Boston cream and then our lemon curd lemon doughnut is super popular. Everything’s completely from scratch, including lemon curd. People often tell us it’s the best doughnut they’ve ever had.”

“I feel like the longer we’ve been here, the more our customers are willing to try stuff that they normally wouldn’t,” Jake said. “If you get here at the beginning of the day, you can have free rein of anything. But if you get here later and things are sold out, if you take a chance on something random, it’s still going to be really good.”

Sunflower Bakery and Cafe
Where: 50 Broad St., Nashua, 505-0794, thesunflowerbakerycafe.com
When: open Saturdays and Sundays, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Weekly Dish 26/03/26

• New pie: The new brick and mortar iteration of Slightly Crooked Pies (1209 Elm St., Manchester, 661-4575, slightlycrookedpies.com) will open with a ribbon cutting Thursday, March 26, at 1 p.m. Pie will be served.

• New Manchester liquor store: In a March 12 press release the New Hampshire Liquor Commission announced the opening of a new Liquor & Wine Outlet in downtown Manchester. “The 12,000-square-foot Manchester Outlet offers more than 4,000 wines and spirits,” the announcement read, “after NHLC transformed the former Rite Aid building at 1631 Elm Street. This North End location is the third NH Liquor & Wine Outlet serving New Hampshire’s largest city.” This store replaces the NH Liquor & Wine Outlet previously located at 1100 Bicentennial Drive at North Side Plaza in Manchester.

• Lions Club pancake breakfast: On Sunday, March 29, the Amherst Lions Club will hold its 52nd Annual Pancake Breakfast at Wilkins School (80 Boston Post Road, Amherst) from 8 a.m. until noon. According to a March 12 press release, the breakfast will include a children’s coloring contest with prizes in three age groups, balloon creations by Pammy the Balloon Twister, visits from Amherst Fire & Rescue, Police and CERT, showcasing their vehicles, a spring raffle featuring a basket containing $100 worth of scratch tickets, and free eye screenings offered to all ages. Visit e-clubhouse.org/sites/amherstnh.

• Smoothing over a crumby Easter: There will be a special Easter-themed cookie decorating workshop by Confections by Kate (723-5187, confectionsbykatenh.com) Wednesday, April 1, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Wine on Main (9 N. Main St., Concord, 897-5828, wineonmainnh.com). Learn the ins and outs of cookie decorating, while tasting four different wines. Tickets are $71.21 through the Confections By Kate website.

• Greek pastries from scratch: Learn to make spanakopita and tyropitakia rounds by hand, Sunday, March 29, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Ya Mas Greek Taverna & Bar (275 Rockingham Park Blvd., Salem, 635-4230, yourmythbeginsatyamas.com). Tickets include samples of spanakopita and tyropitakia and a two-course brunch, and cost $81.88 through eventbrite.com.

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