Tag: 260618

Field Day

Northlands Festival returns

As John Shields begins a phone interview, he’s also readying a jagged week of travel, a mini-tour that includes a quick show in Wisconsin, followed by his band’s first Bonnaroo, and concluding with the fifth annual Northlands Festival in Swanzey.

“It’s wonky,” he allowed with a laugh, “but the money’s good.”

A decade ago he co-founded the Charleston-based duo Little Stranger with Kevin Shields. Kevin and John aren’t related, but their shared last name has confused fans and strangers alike for years. They’re used to it, though. “Some people say, ‘I was just talking to your brother,’” John said. “At this point I’m like, ‘hell yeah, we’re brothers.’ We’re all brothers, man.”

The two did go to high school together outside of Philadelphia but ran in different circles and played with different bands. They reconnected years later, after John had attended the College of Charleston, played in a local band there, then moved back to Philly. After that, John returned to South Carolina and uncertainty.

Facing a music career playing in a wedding band or cobbling together restaurant gigs, he reached out to Kevin. A carefully composed email — John called it “romantic” — was enough to convince his friend to follow him south.

“I basically courted him to come down and join me in Charleston,” he said. “He did it, and he’s been here since.”

In short order they threw their gear in a Hyundai Sonata and embarked on a years-long grind through bars and clubs. Greg Knight saw them play for 15 fans at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory in 2021 and came away impressed. Now he’s pleased to have them near the top of the bill at the festival he and Seth McNally launched a year later.

For McNally, Little Stranger’s brand of road-tested hustle is exactly what Northlands was created to celebrate.

“Independent festivals are crucial, beating hearts for the live music ecosystem,” he said in an email. “Northlands offers artists a relaxed environment to actually hang out, cross-pollinate, and collaborate with one another in an intimate setting.”

For first-timers at Northlands, McNally promises an experience that feels less like a concert than a community.

“We’ve designed the weekend to feel like a massive family reunion,” he said, “a boutique-style gathering where community, art installations, live muralists, and eclectic local food and craft vendors share the spotlight with the big bands.”

Little Stranger resists easy genre classification. Listeners and critics have variously called them hip-hop, indie, and reggae-adjacent. Shields has come to countenance this ambiguity. “Early on, I worried it would be a liability, but I’ve come to like that, and I think our fan base really enjoys it too.”

Live, Kevin acts as emcee with John live looping on guitar and employing drum and bass pads. A sax and trumpet player joined not long ago. “To beef up the live sound,” Shields explained, adding that shows are varied. “Something funny could happen in the crowd that becomes a thread throughout … we try not to repeat the same set every time.”

A new studio album, Broken Hearted Boys Club, arrives July 17. Little Stranger’s third LP, it includes collaborations with Andy Frasco, whose band The U.N. is playing Sunday at Northlands, along with members of the band’s growing extended musical family. The title refers to how a few of the latter group became John’s roommates.

“Four years ago I went through a bad breakup, and then Damn Skippy went through a bad breakup,” Shields recalled. “I was like, come on, move in, buddy. Then another good friend went through one, so we named the house Brokenhearted Boys Club. That’s where a ton of the music was made.”

Shields believes the new record is their most cohesive to date.

“There’s maybe a little more honesty in the lyrics,” he said. “We always write better when we’re happy, but even the sad songs on this one are kind of upliftingly sad. It’s the homies helping the homies out.”

The production, he continued, is intentionally raw, with fewer vocal edits, less tuning, more first takes. The Frasco collab, “Love You When I’m Sad,” is the third song the two have written together. “We banged it out in an afternoon from scratch at the house,” Shields said. “He’s just easy to write with, always throwing out ideas. He’s a great writer.”

The release will be followed by their biggest tour yet. They’ll play 800- to 1,500-capacity venues and, a far cry from their Hyundai days, travel by bus.

“That’s a big milestone,” John said, giddy. “It’s the first time we’ve truly lined up an album drop with a tour. Our albums always take longer to finish than you’d think. We feel like we nailed the rollout on this one.”

Northlands Festival
When: Friday, June 19, through Sunday, June 21
Where: Cheshire Fairgrounds, 247 Monadnock Hwy., Swanzey
Tickets: $25 and up (single day), $269 and up (three-day pass), northlandslive.com

Festival main performers
Friday, June 19
Dirty Heads, Little Stranger, Mihali, Circles Around The Sun, Ghost-Note, Magoo, Night Zero, and Hayley Jane Band
Saturday, June 20
Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, Dogs In A Pile, Lotus, The Slip, Kanika Moore & the Brown Eyed Bois, and Caylin Costello
Sunday, June 21
Disco Biscuits, Andy Frasco & The U.N., Super Sonic Shorties, Moontricks, Jennifer Hartswick Band, Dizgo, Sqwerv, Annie in the Water and DJ Brownie.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 26/06/18

• Stacked show: A release event for cathartic Providence rockers Valoria’s EP From Me To You is a five-band affair, including the debut performance of the Jared Moore-led Paracress, whose lead single “Waste” shows a lot of promise. Rounding out the bill at the all-ages show are local favorites Paint the Town Dead, Under the Horizon and the cleverly named Good & You? Thursday, June 18, 7 p.m., Bungalow Bar & Grill, 333 Valley St., Manchester, $13, dice.fm.

• String thing: Enjoy an evening of classical-ized rock on a candlelit stage with Blue Violin, a unique tribute act that turns anthems like “Stairway to Heaven” and AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” into orchestral rockers. With live looping and wildly inventive violin solos from conservatory-trained Christopher Vuk, the show has been described as “Ed Sheeran meets Lindsey Stirling.” Friday, June 19, 7:30 p.m., Derry Opera House, 29 West Broadway, Derry, $32 and up, eventbrite.com.

• Grunge gang: Bike Week takes a ’90s rock turn as Small Town Titans hits a Lakeside popup stage that will fold its tent in a few days. With influences like Deep Purple, Audioslave and Foo Fighters, the York, Pennsylvania, trio is known for covering cool songs from the era with a unique touch, like Michael Jackson’s “Black or White,” and its barcode rock TikTok series Will It Riff?. Friday, June 19, 8:30 p.m., Madame’s Bardello, 70 Endicott St. North, Laconia, smalltowntitans.com.

• Happy ha-ha: During the early dark days of the pandemic, Jim McCue found a silver lining when he released a Dry Bar Comedy special and got three million views from quarantined fans looking to laugh. When live events returned, he opened an eponymous club that’s now celebrating a fifth birthday with McCue and many friends who’ve performed there. Saturday, June 20, 8 p.m., McCue’s Comedy Club, 506 Portsmouth Traffic Circle, Portsmouth, $25, eventbrite.com, 21+.

• Scots shot: Since Scotland and their Cop Slide ride is the hit of World Cup-captivated Boston, Cantrip — an Old Scots word for charm — fits the bill for a night of music. The trio includes Dan Houghton on pipes, whistles and guitar, fiddler Jon Bews, and Isle of Lewis-born Alasdair White, who’s played with a bevy of the best-known musicians from Scotland, Ireland and Breton. Saturday, June 20, 7 p.m., Blasty Bough Brewing, 3 Griffin Road, Epsom, $20, cantrip-music.com.

Space!

The summer movie frontier?

Who doesn’t love summer movie space aliens?

(Spoilers ahead — I don’t really know how to proceed without a little bit of secret-spilling.)

It is perhaps a mild spoiler to say that Disclosure Day (PG-13, in theaters now), directed by Steven Spielberg, is about extraterrestrial beings. It is maybe a bigger spoiler to say the movie is specifically about what happens as the existence of those aliens goes from being a secret held by the government for some 80 years to being something that a wider group of people, perhaps even the whole world, knows.

As we see in trailers, TV weatherperson Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is suddenly capable of speaking an unEarthly clicky language, which she breaks into during one of her live broadcasts. Margaret’s moment of on-air strangeness leads her to fear she’s had a medical issue. But we see the reaction that footage of the episode gets from a secretive quasi-government agency run by Noah (Colin Firth), who is already scrambling the troops after one of his tech guys, Daniel (Josh O’Connor), made off with some highly classified video footage. And we see the reaction of a group led by Hugo (Colman Domingo), who seems to be directing Daniel in his heist. As Noah’s people chase Margaret, who doesn’t understand why she’s suddenly a wanted woman any more than she understands why she can suddenly read everyone’s thoughts, and Daniel, the two seem drawn to each other. Fairly early, we learn about the big secret Daniel is so desperate to get out to the public when he shows his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) some of the stolen footage starting with, bestill Fox Mulder’s heart, the Roswell crash in 1947.

I think we’re supposed to be watching basically regular people being pulled into this big secret — how would they handle this information, how would they react to learning the part they are playing, do they think the world can handle knowledge of aliens? There are moments that exemplify this: Jane talks to a nun played by Elizabeth Marvel and they weigh the meaning of aliens, the reaction they’d expect the world to have.

My problem is that these conversations frequently can’t break off the page to feel like a real conversation, these people never quite feel like real people to me. Emily Blunt feels off-key here. It’s as though she was given too many notes about exactly what tone to strike and ends up feeling like two or three character ideas smooshed into one person. Josh O’Connor, meanwhile, feels like he’s just hitting the one character note, just a lump of doe-eyed Big Emotion. Colman Domingo is maybe doing something interesting — isn’t he always? — but it feels like it’s from a different movie. And Colin Firth is just serving up angry British authority, take it or leave it, no side of fries.

For every “that’s an interesting idea” the movie has many story elements that are unnecessary, don’t fully make sense or don’t feel like they were developed beyond the idea stage. A running subplot throughout this movie is that international tensions have the whole world on the brink of war. We see people hoarding gas and buying out supermarkets. This element is maybe meant to heighten tension or underline the destructive tendencies of humans or some other thing I just didn’t get. For me, though, it was one of the extra accessories that Coco Chanel wants you to take off before leaving the house.

There are elements of the chase that are fun and well-constructed, though the movie is never as energetic as its most John Williams-y of John Williams scores seems to want us to think it is. I feel like there are ideas here, things that could have gone in either a more popcorn fun direction or something that felt more like a stripped down gritty sci-fi adventure reminiscent of 1970s Spielberg. For me, though, the movie never pulled together into something that was either a thrilling ride or a compelling thought experiment.

A few days later I rewatched that 1977 grittier Spielberg sci-fi: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (available for rent or purchase and streaming on Peacock). In many ways, this is the spikier, low fi version of Disclosure Day. We get many of the same elements — strange occurrences, the “what’s happening to me,” a chase with officialdom — though there is more chase and a shorter timeline in Disclosure Day. Characters played by Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon see clearly not-from-here crafts flying in the sky and come away from the experience with thoughts of Devil’s Tower National Monument stuck in their heads. Desperate to figure out what they’ve seen and what they’re experiencing, the two unwind — first Dreyfuss’s character as he scares his family (including his wife played by Teri Garr) and then Dillon’s character when her young son, seeing brightly lit “toys,” runs after a UFO and is abducted. I highly recommend this double feature — I think I had more fun thinking about Disclosure Day after watching Close Encounters. The movies are, as your serious film academics might say, in conversation with each other and are both interesting reflections of their times.

I also used the outer space theme of Disclosure Day as an excuse to catch up with March release Project Hail Mary (PG-13, available for purchase). Based on the Andy Weir book, Project Hail Mary is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the team who wrote and directed The Lego Movie and wrote the animated Spider-Verse films, with a screenplay by Drew Goddard, who also wrote Weir’s other book-to-film, The Martian. This movie is exactly as good as all those names promise.

Ryan Gosling here is, similar to Matt Damon in The Martian, the one person working alone for a good chunk of the movie. He plays Ryland Grace, a middle school teacher who is also a molecular biologist and has been kicked out of standard scientific work for some kooky ideas about the conditions required for life to develop. Luckily, Eva Stratt (an excellent performance from Sandra Hüller) is in the kooky ideas business. The head of an international scientific project, Eva is trying to figure out astrophage, a substance that is traveling from Venus to the sun and appears to be dimming the sun’s light. Scientists all over the world are working on the project and she calls Grace in to study a sample of the astrophage gathered on a recent space mission. We watch as Grace joins the project to try to figure out what astrophage is and how they could possibly reverse the potentially world-ending effects it’s having on the sun.

All of this is viewed in flashback as Grace, in the movie’s present, wakes up to find himself alone on a space craft with no memory of much of anything — who he is, where he is, why he’s there, why a robot is trying to shave off his extremely long beard.

Similar to The Martian, Project Hail Mary is a movie of questions and whiteboards and smart people tackling small problems with duct tape and plywood in order to get the information needed to tackle bigger problems. It is optimistic in its view of science and people doing science — this isn’t callous tech-dinguses trying to figure out how to monetize some crappy thing that nobody really needs anyway. It’s people, all curious and fallible, working together, across borders and language barriers, to figure things out with the ultimate aim of saving the world. This might be my favorite brand of save-the-world adventure movie? No magical stuff or superpowers, just middle-aged nerds who can mock things up with Home Depot supplies. This movie does everything right — Gosling’s performance, space visuals, showing people thinking through things and showing Gosling working out a puzzle by himself that includes a really solid vocal performance (by James Ortiz).

Featured photo: Disclosure Day.

Ruins, by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Grand Central Publishing, 389 pages

By her admission, Ember Agni was a weird kid. For fun, she liked to bury things in her backyard and then dig them up over time to analyze the stages of decomposition. Like other children, she had a “penchant for dirt,” but her play had a purpose: observing history in the process of being made.

So of course she became an archeologist, but a frustrated one. When we meet Ember in Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Ruins, she is sleepwalking through her life: stuck teaching faceless students at a university where she’d intended to work for only a few years before returning to the field; stuck in a marriage to a man whose interests and goals seem to grow more distant from hers every day.

But as Ember begins a new semester, a letter arrives from a former student. It informs Ember that the writer, named Ish, has found an artifact, and “It’s as we hoped. Intact. Good condition. A few thousand years? It’s hard to pinpoint. Two? Three?”

And with that, Ember’s world is upended, as the missive tantalizingly dangles a different life, one in which she might finally be able to get funding for an archaeological dig that frees her from the drudgework of the university and from her increasingly tense marriage.

The dig, she believes, has the potential to explode existing narratives about the origins of humanity, which is not a small thing. And yet, also not a small thing, I struggled mightily to care.

That’s because Ember is the worst kind of protagonist: the unlikeable one. We’re told early on that she is “not well liked at the university. By anyone: students or faculty or administrators.” She is hard on her assistant, hard on her husband, hard generally; in part because she’s miserable because of decisions she has made, in part because of her difficult single mother, now dead, “embittered, vain, endlessly critical Ola, who had never hesitated to remind her daughter how costly being a parent was.”

That parenting helped turn Ember into someone who was ambivalent about being a parent herself, which is a problem because her husband, Jerome, finds his joy on the homefront. The difference between the two of them is illustrated by the care he puts into a garden in their backyard; she hasn’t so much looked at it in months. Jerome wants children; Ember wants professional success. She’d made that clear when they met, but he’d thought she would change. To Ember, it is Jerome who is changing. He had, she observes, “become increasingly rigid over the years. Unimaginative. Boring, in fact. By association, she was becoming boring also, as if his desire for the banality of procreation and home improvements and a back garden was leaking into their union, and further, into her.”

The arrival of the artifact that Ish found, however, sends Ember charging down a new path of discovery, one that will reunite her with an important woman from her past and raise questions about her culture’s beliefs about what the societies that came before them. To her this dig is everything, andwe realize early on that the title of the books, Ruins, represents not just Ember’s professional focus but also other aspects of her life.There is nothing subtle about this.

More subtle is the gradual unpacking of mysteries — minor ones, such as the nature of Ember’s relationship with Ish, and major ones, such as the genesis of the “Pre-Crisis” civilization and a “Thermal Epoch” that has occurred. The novel is intentionally vague about where and when it is set; Ember lives in a “Commonwealth” that is most certainly not Massachusetts. And indeed, what we know about Ember’s society we are invited to doubt: An excerpt from her unpublished manuscript says, “The endurance of any given historical narrative is never a function of its factual accuracy but rather, of its utility to those who perpetuate it.”

As is noted in every podcast and article about Ruins, this is a novel that suffers from spoilers, making it difficult to talk about the plotting in detail. Suffice it to say that Brooks-Dalton, whose previous novels include The Light Pirate and Good Morning, Midnight (the basis for the film The Midnight Sky), has described Ember as a “polarizing” woman and the novel as “a rumination on how we uncover, interpret, and teach about ancient civilizations.” Those naturally interested in such things may find it fascinating. For those of us who aren’t, Ruins presents a challenge to remain engaged, even with a consciousness-altering plot twist. B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Ruins, by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Album Reviews 26/06/18

Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes (Atlantic Records)

Said to be the last album from the ’90s ska-punk/reggae-rock juggernaut, this one has Sublime’s fan base more interested in debating whether or not this-or-that lyrical theme is focused on former lead singer Bradley Nowell, who died from a drug overdose in 1996 and left the band a hollowed-out husk of itself. As some have observed, this stuff does sound like it came from an AI bot programmed to make up a bunch of new Sublime songs, which is pretty low for a band that hasn’t produced any new material in 30 years. Indeed it does sound a lot more polished than the music that launched them into the happy-grunge stratosphere and portrayed them as an antidote to the doomer vibes of bands like Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots and all those guys. Nowell’s son, Jakob, handles the vocals here, which adds to the disposability of tunes like the Red Hot Chili Peppers-inspired title track and “Can’t Miss You,” which reads like Andy Grammer trying dancehall on for size. Utterly useless, for completists only. C

Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me (Epic Records)

Sixth full-length from this R&B/hip-hop-diva Californian, who’s sort of becoming the Jeff Ross of random national talent reality shows. She started out on YouTube, after which she won the 2004 season of America’s Most Talented Kid with a rendition of Christina Aguilera’s “Keep on Singin’ My Song,” and then finally broke through in 2010 apparently because she failed to make the top 24 on American Idol (I can’t explain it either, don’t ask). Since then she’s been the titular Masked Singer on that show, mentored a group of American Idol contestants in 2024, etc., always showcasing her belt-it-from-the-mountaintop singing style for the benefit of the few people who still watch that kind of stuff. For this one, though, she’s all about the ’90s, or at least the asphalt-soul ’90s made famous by quasi-R&B street-pop groups like TLC and Salt n Pepa, which is, um, marketable thinking on her part, let’s just say. Whatever, she’s content in her skin here, warbling conversational lyrics in a style that went extinct when the new millennium arrived, but its comfort-food feel will appeal to cul-de-sac-dwelling suburbanites, etc. B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• June 19 is the next “Here, Have Some Random Albums” Friday, and so random albums will be coming to your favorite streaming service, the one you pay for by allowing it to schlurp money out of your bank account every month only because for some reason you’re too paranoid to rip songs from those “YouTube To MP4” apps because some of them are obviously heavily infected by hackers, and yet you trust that Pandora or SoundCloud or whatever will never get hacked by the approximately 12,693,881 MIT undergrads who are at this very moment determined to hack your chosen “trusted music platform” so they can steal your credit card to buy disposable laptops for the darkweb, have you changed any of your passwords in the last nine years, I sure hope you have, you really should. But in positive news (a Constant Reader said my column of two weeks ago was full of positive energy and it made him smile, but I’d caution not to get used to this kind of nonsense), Canadian trio Rush played their first live shows in Inglewood, California, and my social media feeds would absolutely not shut up about it, so I looked at some of the video, and yes, replacement drummer Anika Nilles took one small step for womankind by adding a few of her own touches to the sadly departed Neil Peart’s professorial drumming tricks. That was expected, let’s just say, but what really tugged at people’s heartstrings was her wonderment; she looked like a kid who’d hit the winning homer in Game 7 of the Little League World Series. Now, as a lifelong cynic, of course, what I’d like to know is which fusion and prog-rock drummers refused the offer to join the band; I’m sure there were a few who laughed them off as a glorified version of Styx or a less-capable Yes (you may recall I’d suggested Will Kennedy of The Yellowjackets), but past that sort of rather grim fascination, yes, she “nailed the fills” and whatnot. But anyway, to business, let’s kick off this week with the final album from San Francisco-born folkie Tucker Zimmerman, who died in January at the age of 84. Dream Me A Dream is the new album; the title track is a mawkish bluegrass-tinted affair that saw Zimmerman’s voice reduced to an ineffectual croak, but some people do dig that stuff.

• Canadian producer/musician/idiotic-looking-hat-addict Daniel Lanois couldn’t just give his new sleepy instrumental album a title that would make it easy for me to find one of its songs on YouTube; no, instead he titled it Belladonna Nocturne because he already put out a sleepy instrumental album titled simply Belladonna in 2005, so it’s like, his thing, man, and he also knew it’d force me personally to use extra brain cells to fool the YouTube bot into finding something from this new album instead of the 2005 one. “Warp Sustain” is pretty cool, incorporating some dark, quite noisy elements into its wispy Enya-esque dramatics.

• Pond is a band from Australia that still makes albums, unlike the American band named Pond that was from Oregon and got signed to Sub Pop Records, which led to their getting signed to Sony Records, which of course led to their breaking up when Sony let them go broke so they could write off the loss on their taxes. The title track from new LP Terrestrials is OK for a (dated-sounding) college-rocker, a blend of Supertramp and, oh, I don’t know, Hives.

• And finally we have Hull, U.K.-based BBC darlings Life with their newest album Abstract/Natural. Advance single “The Dollywaggon” is worth checking out if you like ’80s art-rock and Sex Pistols, it’s the best thing I’d recommend this week.

Featured Photo: Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes and Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me

Father’s Day icebox cake

Several years ago, in an action that can only be described as evil and motivated by malice, the National Biscuit Co. (Nabisco) discontinued a classic product, its Famous Chocolate Wafers, which generations of grandmothers and Home-Ec teachers had depended on as the key ingredient in Icebox Cake.

This modified version of icebox cake uses store-bought chocolate chip cookies and is very good — especially for Father’s Day. It only has four ingredients and does not actually involve cooking or baking, so it can be a decent project for kids to make.

One suggestion: When preparing food with small children, measure all the ingredients out ahead of time, and have everything laid out before calling the kids into the kitchen. Just trust me on this.

  • 2 13-ounce packages of chocolate-chip cookies – the crisp kind, not the soft ones with the odd taste
  • 3 cups (1½ pints) heavy cream
  • 8-ounce package of cream cheese
  • 2 Tablespoons powdered sugar

Crush 13 cookies into a bowl or large measuring cup. You could definitely do this in a plastic bag with a rolling pin, but I find it very satisfying to hold a couple of them at a time in my hand and tell them, “Oh, you know what you did,” and crush them by hand. On the seventh go-around, there will be one cookie left. Imagine his level of freak-out as he waits for his fate.

(If your children take a message from this as well, so much the better.)

Pour the heavy cream over the traumatized cookies and stir to make sure they’ve all gotten soaked. Set aside for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, line a loaf pan with plastic wrap. If you are like me, the wrap will flutter around and bond to everything in your kitchen, except the loaf pan, and this will easily take the 10 minutes you’ve set aside for the cookie crumbs to infuse into the cream. Your children will learn some colorful new language. After 10 minutes, strain the cookie/cream mixture. Give the leftover cookie sludge to your least whiny child.

With your electric stand mixer or hand mixer, whip the cream cheese until it is soft and fluffy, about four minutes. Use the mixer’s whisk attachment if you have one. Whisk in the powdered sugar, then drizzle in the cookie-infused cream. You will probably need to stop the mixer after a minute or so and scrape cream cheese from the bottom of the bowl, so it mixes well with the cream. Turn the mixer to its highest setting, and beat the cream cheese/cookie cream mixture, until it forms stiff peaks.

With a large spoon or a silicone spatula, spread two globs of the cream mixture across the bottom of the loaf pan, then lay down a layer of cookies on top of it. You will have to break a few in half or into four pieces to fill any large cookie-gaps. Spread down another layer of the cream mixture, then another layer of cookies. Continue doing this until you’ve used up all the cream mixture. Hopefully, you will have enough for a final creamy layer on the top of the loaf pan.

You will probably have some leftover cookies. Use your own best judgment, but they will go really well with freshly made iced coffee (see the cover story).

Cover the loaf pan with one more piece of plastic wrap, and refrigerate it for at least six hours, to let the cookies and the cream reach a state of détente. An hour before you want to serve this icebox cake, put it in the freezer, which will make it easier to slice into servings.

Featured photo: Icebox cake. Photo by John Fladd.

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