No stranger to local rock 'n roll, Sean Carlson ran Just Another Scene as a resource on independent music across New England from 1998 until 2005. He now runs his own consultancy, and his writing has been published in The Irish Times, Boston Globe Magazine, New York Daily News and elsewhere.
At a recent record-release concert in Providence, Rhode Island, MorganEve Swain teased a nearly full house that her band The Huntress and Holder of Hands was the “most fun grief band around.” This grief, and the process of grieving, has been a driving force behind Swain’s songwriting for more than a decade. As half of […]
From one former industrial site to another, New Harvest Coffee Roasters has expanded from humble beginnings in Rumford (East Providence) to become a cornerstone for coffee in RI. Today, the business employs more than 20 employees, serves roughly 130 wholesale accounts, and includes a roastery and cafe at 10 Sims Ave. in Providence. In the […]
Over the past year, The Grind has gleamed as one of Rhode Island’s coffee gems. Set up at Crook Point Brewing Company (65 Massasoit Ave., East Providence), the espresso bar opened when baristas Madi Peck and Anthony Gesa set up shop after their former employer, The Bakeshop, shuttered its sun-streamed two-level in Warren. (The closure […]
Quite some time ago, I read a quip that the art of diplomacy is how to tell a man to go to hell and have him enjoy the trip. If true, then the abstract expressionism of Sheila Isham offers an inverse corollary, as the diplomacy within her art suggests an inquiry toward the heavenly. Born […]
After nearly a decade of songwriting in a gothic-folk tradition often tinged with early ’90s grunge, Keith J.G. McCurdy drew from a deeper well in crafting Vudu Sister’s 2021 EP, Burnt Offerings. As a Classics and English double major with a minor in Medieval Studies at the University of Rhode Island, he empathized with the […]
Seeing himself as a “roadie in training for a very, very long time”—having supported his mother’s country and classic-rock cover band, Roadhouse Band, on Long Island since childhood—lighting designer William Succoso first found himself mesmerized by the visual effects created by the lighting systems at summer concerts on Jones Beach. He tried his own hand […]
As the house lights dimmed on a nearly sold-out crowd of 3,000 at the Providence Performing Arts Center on January 29, the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra, silhouetted in silence on stage, anticipated the arrival of singer-songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov at the foreground. Under a shadow cast by a backlight stepped Isakov, with his solitary croon […]
In Sleepwalker, a one-man show created and performed by Andy Russ and stage managed by Ollie Crowe, at the Wilbury Theatre Group in Providence, an open-air cell claims center stage. Absent walls except for a floor panel, the metallic frame of the cube suggests an imprisonment while allowing for permeability. Its bars segment the blankness […]
After paving a distorted pathway in the early ’90s with three albums on Sub Pop Records, the band Earth — bearing a name chosen in homage to Black Sabbath’s original moniker — marked their emergence from an extended period of recovery with the 2005 release of Hex; Or Printing the Infernal Method. The album saw […]
Mirah’s second full-length, Advisory Committee (K Records, 2002), came out during the spring of my freshman year at Boston University. While the album’s title perhaps suggested some homage to academia, the songwriting mostly revealed a study of contrasts. Spartan and robust, serious and mirthful, soft and assertive, literal and symbolic, the singer-songwriter Mirah Yom Tov […]