“Everybody’s got a gun-jam story,” Avenue raps on the title track of his gripping May release Mass Ave & Lenox. He’s got a few. Born James Fitzpatrick, he grew up at that junction of the South End and Lower Roxbury, hustling on the basketball court, where he helped Cathedral High School win a 2009 state championship, and on the street, experience that fuels his second full-length album, which includes gritty vignettes about the drug trade.
“The project symbolically was just a way to pay an ode to how the neighborhood was,” Avenue says. “For me, it was just community, a community that would stick together. Everybody knew everybody.” That dynamic has shifted, however, due to gentrification. “A lot of the same things go on, a lot of the same tensions, but for the most part, it has changed a lot,” says Avenue, who moved south of town to raise his young son but regularly returns to his old stomping grounds.
The track “27 Reasons” refers to a raid where 27 people—many of them his friends—were arrested for gang activity. “I always had something that I thought the people in the street didn’t have, that provided another outlet,” Avenue says, “whether it was school or success from basketball.” He pursued both at Merrimack College but was kicked out for selling marijuana.
But music offered an outlet too. His father, who has his own stories about addiction and dealing but now counsels at local prisons, imparted a love for Motown, and he was drawn to Michael Jackson’s soulful early music as a kid. Then came the influence of harder-edged storytelling from Jay-Z’s 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt. “Music was one of those things that I’d play with, but I wouldn’t really let people know that I did music,” Avenue says. “I was writing poetry as a kid.”
His mesmerizing roll matches Mass Ave & Lenox’s dark, cinematic music layered with soul and jazz samples. Largely produced by the Cooking to Kill team of Frank the Butcher and the Arcitype, the album also features guest rappers from Royce Da 5’9” to Avenue’s childhood friend Mwase.
“It’s a mixture of a lot of the music I grew up with,” Avenue says, acknowledging its contrast with what’s popular today. “With Boston rap, I feel like we have artists that are starting to gain their own identity. For the longest time, that was our struggle.”
Listen Up!
By Paul Robicheau | Photo credit: Joanna Chattman | July 21, 2017
Each year, the Boston music scene percolates with bands striving to reach the next level of creativity and recognition. Some artists break out of the gate. Others take a few years to hit their stride, dropping records and live performances that can’t be ignored. Here are 10 local acts making those waves.
The Suitcase Junket
Matt Lorenz knows how to manipulate junk to worthy musical ends.
Even as a student of experimental composition at Hampshire College in the early ’00s, Lorenz delved into adaptive instrument design. He once assembled pulleys and bicycle brake cables that allowed a drummer whose leg was amputated above the knee to play a bass drum.
“That did inform this future that I’m in now,” says Lorenz, who lives in the woods near Amherst. “I am in that same world of creating devices to make sounds.”
As one-man band the Suitcase Junket, he augments a dumpster-found guitar with rhythms and accents from his mostly metallic menagerie of percussion. That includes a gas can, a pot, a circular saw blade and a box of bones and silverware, plus a hi-hat and a suitcase kick drum. They’re all controlled by pedals that he taps with his heels and toes. Lorenz also whistles split tones through throat singing and just added a small, primitive keyboard, feeding everything through dual mics and amps to flip between clean and distorted sounds.
“Take something, ‘throw it across the room’ and see what it does,” the Vermont native says of his approach. “That’s true of the objects and the songs as well.”
Those songs range from the arty grunge of “The Next Act” and punk-blues stomp of “Evangeline” to the fingerpicked “Busted Gut” and the uplifting “Mountain of Mind,” its support for people in transition sealed by a catchy wordless chorus. They appear on Pile Driver, his fourth album and April debut on Signature Sounds, the same label that launched Lake Street Dive.
But it’s on stage that the Suitcase Junket truly shines, aided by the well-traveled Lorenz’s skills as a troubadour, including his witty rapport with audiences. He’s grown locally from tiny stages like Atwood’s Tavern to headlining the Sinclair.
One fan in Wisconsin even followed a post-show chat by leaving a raccoon penis bone under his windshield to grace his box of bones. “It took me a few days to open the envelope,” Lorenz says of the odd gift. “I was pretty nervous about it.”
By Paul Robicheau | Photo Credit: Chris “Biff” Rodden
Terence Ryan
The polished production and vocal clarity on Terence Ryan’s stunning June debut, Don’t Panic, belies the fact that the soulful pop singer recorded much of the album in his Honda Accord while he was homeless for several weeks during an LA sojourn.
“Police were checking me out, seeing what I was doing, because I had a car full of stuff and out-of-state plates, and I was looking a little dirty,” the Pembroke native says. When he wasn’t hassled, Ryan would charge his laptop with a car adapter, hang a condenser mic from the rear-view mirror and stuff towels in the window cracks. Then he’d stop the engine—and air conditioning—to record vocals.
“It would get like 120 degrees in there,” he says of his makeshift studio. “I’d be sweating, dying, and I would turn the car back on and bump the AC a bit to get cooled off. Then I’d turn it back off and do another take.”
Ryan had headed west with a publishing deal in hand and a desire to chase a dream. But he eventually realized there was more to the family-rooted routine that he left behind. “You don’t see the value of something until it’s gone out of your life,” he says. “I realized it was time to go home.”
Home was where he’d spent long days working in the warehouse of his family’s door-hinge business and long nights recording in his parents’ basement. “I definitely drove them a little mad with the metronome clicking and the bass going until three in the morning,” says Ryan, who also played guitar, keyboards and an 808 drum machine. He was inspired by Kanye West—and many of the rapper’s collaborators, particularly Bon Iver, Frank Ocean and Coldplay. Yet, Ryan says, “I’ve only been able to actually kind of sing in the past two years. Before that, it was fake singing. I never liked my voice or had confidence in it.”
Not surprisingly, the track that resonates most, with its simple message and its focus on his voice and acoustic guitar, is “To Live and Die in New England,” where Ryan sings, “Come back home to the ones who raised you.”
A video with New England scenes—including ones at the warehouse and around his family’s Maine fishing house, both of which he used to record other tracks—offers a postcard to working-class life that could entice a chamber of commerce. But Ryan reveals his own dream for “To Live and Die in New England.” Much like the Red Sox have “Sweet Caroline,” he hopes that the Patriots come calling.
By Paul Robicheau | Photo Credit: Simon Simard
Hayley Thompson-King
The daughter of a Florida horse trainer, Hayley Thompson-King rode from a young age in a place where cowboy hats and country music ruled. “That’s what you were around all the time,” she says, “when you’re at the barn, at the show, in my dad’s truck.”
However, Thompson-King owned a big voice full of vibrato and took the unlikely path to becoming an opera singer. She earned a master’s in opera performance from New England Conservatory—though she couldn’t even speak on her first day, the result of vocal nodes that led to surgery by Dr. Steven Zeitels, who later treated Adele and Steven Tyler. After NEC, she studied in New York with a private teacher from the hallowed Metropolitan Opera. “She’d be dressed as a Valkyrie, and we’d have our voice lesson,” Thompson-King says of her dressing room experiences. “We would sing for hours, and then I’d get to go sit in the back and watch her.”
Yet Thompson-King ultimately decided that opera wasn’t in her cards. “I can’t let my art and my life be in someone else’s hands,” she says. “I had to start writing.”
Returning to Boston, she hit the clubs, launching the garage-country combo Banditas, then joining psych-rock stalwarts Major Stars. But again, Thompson-King wanted to establish her own project, which comes to fruition with the Sept. 1 release of her solo debut, Psychotic Melancholia.
The album lurches from shriek-laced, ramshackle garage-rockers “No Room for Jesus” and “Lot’s Wife” (Thompson-King refers to the record as a “Sodom and Gomorrah concept album”) to the haunting, psychedelic “Melencolia I” and lush country weeper “Old Flames.” She’s joined by producer Pete Weiss on guitar and her usual live rhythm section of drummer Jonathan Ulman and Human Sexual Response bassist Chris Maclachlan, who helped rearrange Schumann’s “Wehmut” to close the album with a surprise inclusion of her pure opera voice.
“I know stylistically it’s not right and people may hate it,” she says. “[But] I’m being super honest and genuine, so why not?”
By Paul Robicheau | Photo Credit: Duncan Wilder Johnson (DWJ Creative)
Diablogato
If you want a group where the personality of each member stands out, Diablogato is glad to engage. Scally-capped singer Drew Indingaro roars while fellow guitarist Chuck MacSteven rattles hollow-body rockabilly licks. Johnny Custom balances on top of his acoustic bass like a surfer on his board, while Kim Kendricken blows a baritone sax. And Jesse Mayer, aka Jesse Von Kenmore, bashes a drum kit affixed with Diablogato’s three-eyed cat logo.
“It’s one of the things I hated about grunge,” says Mayer, the real veteran of the band, going back to late-’80s rockers Shake the Faith. “Be entertaining or be gone.”
For its part, Diablogato mashes together rockabilly, garage-punk and gothic Southern soul without singular allegiance. “We’re not those things, and that’s exactly what we are,” Mayer says, citing such wide-ranging inspirations as the Replacements, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and X. “If you’re not ripping off Little Richard,” he adds, “you’re doing it wrong.”
Diablogato unleashed its self-titled debut last year and recorded two new songs for vinyl release this fall: “Take the Ride” (after Hunter S. Thompson’s line “Buy the ticket, take the ride”) and “Paint the Devil,” which Mayer suggests as Diablogato’s best song yet. “Chuck had the old expression ‘Don’t paint the devil on the wall,’ and I was like, ‘It’s cooler if you do.’ And it comes out as the story of a guy who’s gonna blow his brains out in a motel room,” he says. “It has every element of other Diablogato songs. It’s got the rockabilly, but it’s also got the creepy.”
It’s also kicked up a notch onstage, where the black-clad combo flashes serious tattoos, including that crazy cat logo on Mayer’s neck. However, the drummer—a classic-car nut along with bassist Custom—counters, “You put us in the room with a bunch of hot-rodders or punk-rock people, and everybody looks the same.”
By Paul Robicheau | Photo Credit: Michael D. Spencer
Ali McGuirk
Ali McGuirk almost timidly takes the stage, as if she’s a little shy or unsure of her place, glancing around at her fellow musicians. But when she opens her mouth, people stop and take notice, captivated by her swooping, honeyed voice, which sometimes brings Norah Jones or Susan Tedeschi to mind.
“I wish I were a rhythm-section musician, where you can just listen and be in the zone,” the singer/guitarist says. “The music is what we’re here for, not necessarily me as an individual. I have a hard time pushing myself into that Ali-ego world.”
In her own quiet way, the Concord native has steadily pushed forward on her chosen path. McGuirk began singing in a cafe a decade ago as a music minor at UMass Amherst (her major was social thought and political economy). Then she spent almost four years traveling in Central America and doing gigs in Mexico, Greece and Hong Kong before resettling in Boston a few years ago.
This summer, she’s been warming up new songs—and a new electric guitar—as she records her full-length debut, set to include material from a well-received EP out last fall as well as a song posted to Bandcamp on Inauguration Day, titled “What Have We Done?”
The song harks back to her UMass major, reflecting on race, class and gender. “I hope to write more songs like that, where I can express a political sentiment in a somewhat unpolitical way,” says McGuirk, who’s donating half of the track’s Bandcamp proceeds to Showing Up for Racial Justice. “That’s my white-guilt song,” she says. “It’s not black people’s responsibility to explain racism to white people anymore.”
Like most of her album due this fall, “What Have We Done?” features McGuirk’s core band of bassist/singer Cilla Bonnie, drummer Brandon Mayes and soul-jazz veteran Jeffrey Lockhart, whose liquid guitar notes leave a sonic signature. She might also include horns, which trumpeter Alex Lee-Clark arranged for a song on her EP and a recent Lizard Lounge tribute to the late jazz singer Abbey Lincoln, who joins Aretha Franklin and Sheila Jordan in McGuirk’s pantheon of influences.
“Like being inward with my stage presence, I’m kind of inward with my career,” McGuirk says. “I want the peak of my career to be when I’m 40, because I like building on it and want to keep playing with better musicians.”
By Paul Robicheau | Photo Credit: Skylar Coons
The Rupert Selection
Manchester-by-the-Sea spawns more than the dysfunctional relationships depicted on the silver screen. Take the Rupert Selection. Guitarist/singer Reilly Somach, bassist Peter Crofton and drummer Zak Brown met in the sixth grade and launched the band after high school in 2011. It’s a union rich in chops-heavy chemistry.
“We’d lock ourselves in Zak’s parents’ garage, and we’d practice three or four days a week or more, four hours at a time—it was insane,” Somach says. “It’s all kind of unspoken… We don’t write anything down. We don’t know [music] theory.”
He’d been into alt-rock (the Nirvana influence remains) before getting into Phish and psychedelic rock with Crofton, while Brown was more of a metal guy. Add the influence of prog-rockers like Porcupine Tree, the Mars Volta and Frank Zappa, and you have the genre-shifting sonic fights of the Rupert Selection.
“We all get bored easily, so we try to write stuff that keeps us excited and makes it fun,” Somach says. “We were always too heavy for a certain group or too jammy for another—and over the years have managed to blend everything together.”
They even made the finals of the Rock & Roll Rumble in April, a month after the release of the trio’s five-song EP Baseball Practice. Less classically psychedelic than the band’s 2015 debut single, “Funeral Party,” the record spans the nightmarish instrumental “Tree Hands” (“I really like abstract guitar sounds,” Somach says) and the stop-start rush “Sacred Geometry,” a showcase for Brown’s dynamic drumming.
As for the band’s mysterious name, Somach demurs, “Zak had this story about a friend’s cat who selected us to be in a band together.” Smart cat, that Rupert.
By Paul Robicheau | Photo Credit: Steve DiCecco
Avenue
“Everybody’s got a gun-jam story,” Avenue raps on the title track of his gripping May release Mass Ave & Lenox. He’s got a few. Born James Fitzpatrick, he grew up at that junction of the South End and Lower Roxbury, hustling on the basketball court, where he helped Cathedral High School win a 2009 state championship, and on the street, experience that fuels his second full-length album, which includes gritty vignettes about the drug trade.
“The project symbolically was just a way to pay an ode to how the neighborhood was,” Avenue says. “For me, it was just community, a community that would stick together. Everybody knew everybody.” That dynamic has shifted, however, due to gentrification. “A lot of the same things go on, a lot of the same tensions, but for the most part, it has changed a lot,” says Avenue, who moved south of town to raise his young son but regularly returns to his old stomping grounds.
The track “27 Reasons” refers to a raid where 27 people—many of them his friends—were arrested for gang activity. “I always had something that I thought the people in the street didn’t have, that provided another outlet,” Avenue says, “whether it was school or success from basketball.” He pursued both at Merrimack College but was kicked out for selling marijuana.
But music offered an outlet too. His father, who has his own stories about addiction and dealing but now counsels at local prisons, imparted a love for Motown, and he was drawn to Michael Jackson’s soulful early music as a kid. Then came the influence of harder-edged storytelling from Jay-Z’s 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt. “Music was one of those things that I’d play with, but I wouldn’t really let people know that I did music,” Avenue says. “I was writing poetry as a kid.”
His mesmerizing roll matches Mass Ave & Lenox’s dark, cinematic music layered with soul and jazz samples. Largely produced by the Cooking to Kill team of Frank the Butcher and the Arcitype, the album also features guest rappers from Royce Da 5’9” to Avenue’s childhood friend Mwase.
“It’s a mixture of a lot of the music I grew up with,” Avenue says, acknowledging its contrast with what’s popular today. “With Boston rap, I feel like we have artists that are starting to gain their own identity. For the longest time, that was our struggle.”
By Paul Robicheau | Photo Credit: Coleman Rogers
Carissa Johnson
The last slot of the night is usually considered an advantage in the Rock & Roll Rumble, but that changed in April when a fire alarm emptied the ONCE Ballroom in the middle of Carissa Johnson’s finals set. When the crowd was readmitted, singer/bassist Johnson, guitarist Steph Curran and drummer Nick Hall only cranked harder, unleashing a cover of the Dead Boys’ punk gem “Sonic Reducer” and closing with a three-way tribal drum bash into their final chords.
“It tested me,” Johnson says of the interruption that became a triumph, as she led the first female-fronted band to win the contest since Amanda Palmer’s Dresden Dolls in 2003. “A lot of women came up to me at the end, like ‘You did this for all the girls!’ I can’t believe it’s the first time in 14 years. That’s crazy.”
Johnson hails from Andover. (“There’s no music here at all,” she says. “It’s such a sports town.”) She got her start in high school by joining local band Left Hand Blue, building her confidence by playing an all-ages club across the New Hampshire border. And while she cites both Palmer and 1983 Rumble winner Aimee Mann (then of ’Til Tuesday) as influences, her main inspiration is clearly punk rock.
“It means independence to me, freedom, being yourself, standing for what you believe in,” Johnson says, naming Joan Jett and the Ramones among her idols. “That’s when I really found myself, when I started listening to that music.”
Her melodic drive nonetheless adds luster to the pop-punk, borne on her second album, 2016’s Only Roses, and standout April single “You Lost You,” about waiting for friends who need to go their own way to figure things out. Aided by Rumble studio prizes, she’s working on her next full-length album and has spent July touring the West Coast, either with her band or alone with an acoustic guitar.
“It’s kind of a weird transition,” says Johnson, who writes everything on guitar but plays bass both in her band and with grunge-rockers Swivel. “When I do solo acoustic shows, I can be more intimate with the crowd and try out new songs, [but] if I do two weeks straight of solo shows, I start to really miss the band, that power.”
By Paul Robicheau | Photo Credit: Hive Studio
Schooltree
There’s no question who released the year’s most ambitious album on the local scene. That would be Lainey Schooltree, who conjured the 24-song art-rock opus Heterotopia, inspired by ’70s concept albums like the Who’s Quadrophenia and especially Genesis’ Peter Gabriel-era The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
“I wanted to do something absurdly grandiose,” the classically trained singer/pianist says of the March release, which took four years to complete and spawned an elaborate libretto, plus an illustrated book to follow in September.
“The writing process was a lot of trial and error, because I’d never written a story before,” says Schooltree, citing the influence of writings by Plato, Jung, Orwell and Tolkien as well as classic rock and prog, notably producer-artists Kate Bush (whose ethereal sound she most evokes) and Todd Rundgren. “I wanted to put every idea I ever had about society and humanity in there, and it just didn’t fit.”
Like its concept-album models, Heterotopia follows a protagonist—in this case a rocker named Suzi—on a fantastical journey. She traverses a shadowy parallel world called Otherspace to retrieve her lost body from a “collective unconscious,” as Schooltree calls it. “It ultimately boils down to a quest.”
There’s a political subtext too. “Culturally, we are disassociating from our bodies,” says the Rhode Island native, once a vaudevillian cabaret performer. “Especially for women, it comes to mind [with] the whole battle for reproductive rights.”
What could be a convoluted mess in less skillful hands glides into an even-toned adventure, both lyrically and musically. Producer/singer Peter Moore (Count Zero, Think Tree) helped her mold different vocal approaches, including a Greek chorus as narrator. Band arrangements prove streamlined, and while it may take time for a listener to distinguish between tracks, some rise above, like “The Abyss” (where her soprano shines in spiraling choruses) and the enchanting “Turning into the Strange.”
A multimedia performance of the entire album, aided by a grant from the Boston Foundation, was a success at Oberon this past spring and will be reprised there by Schooltree’s band on Sept. 29. And now she faces an age-old dilemma: “Do I try to top this or do something in a completely different direction?”
By Paul Robicheau | Photo Credit: AJ Rebecchi
Rebuilder
Sal Medrano fought anxiety and depression as a quiet kid who stayed home and played drums during his middle and high school years. Then, at age 16, he began going to punk shows. “That was the first time in my life where I felt ‘This is where I belong,’ ” says Medrano, who recalls one Kicked in the Head bill with the Goonies at a Knights of Columbus hall. “All the songs were everything I was feeling. And I was like ‘Holy shit, this is what I want to do forever!’ ” He attended so many Kicked in the Head shows that he signed on to sell the band’s merchandise on tour.
Eventually, he started his own punk band, Dead Ellington, and sold merch for the Dropkick Murphys, pestering the group for a chance to open a St. Patrick’s Day show. When the invite came in 2013, Dead Ellington had broken up, but that didn’t stop Medrano from reshuffling former members to launch Rebuilder for that gig.
Medrano’s fellow Framingham native Craig Stanton moved from drums to guitar and now shares singer/songwriter duties, while Brandon Phillips set aside his own guitar to drive the drum kit alongside the bass-pumping Daniel Carswell. And in a further effort to build melody and emotion beyond Dead Ellington’s skate-punk aggression, Rebuilder added a keyboardist, a spot now held by Patrick Hanlin.
In September, Rebuilder releases Sounds from the Massachusetts Turnpike, an EP even more bracing than the band’s 2015 debut album, Rock & Roll in America. Stanton may have forged the group’s best anthem yet in “Mile or an Inch” (with its cathartic line “Swinging for the fences!”). And with “Anchoring,” a song about a failed relationship, Medrano again examines anxiety. But he’s come full circle. “I’ve had people come up to me to say ‘I feel that exact same way’ from a song,” Medrano says. “If I can do that for someone else, that’s such a big thing.”
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