Cure for Pain: The Mark Sandman Story

By Chelsea Spear

Photo © Mark Ostow

Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Mark Sandman cut a wide swath through the Boston music scene. His first band, Treat Her Right, scored a local radio hit with the deadpan, eerie single “I Think She Likes Me.” The various bands with whom Sandman played—most notably Supergroup, Candybar, and Morphine—played two sets a night at the shoebox-shaped bar Plough and Stars. Even as Morphine ascended to a renowned trio with a devoted following, Sandman could be found playing at the annual Central Square World’s Fair, talking with elementary school classes about his handmade musical instruments, converting his loft apartment into a recording studio, or just hanging out in the back booth at the Middle East nightclub. His sudden, tragic death in Italy in 1999 left a huge hole, both in the music world where he made his mark, and within the Boston arts community. (more…)

Bird In Flight: Theresa Andersson

By Chelsea Spear

TT The Bears, Cambridge MA
June 17, 2012

It’s no surprise that Theresa Andersson is drawn to aviary lyrical imagery. Live, the singer/songwriter cuts a figure like the birds she evokes on her breakthrough album Hummingbird, Go! A flurry of activity, she plays several instruments and loops her vocals, arrangements, and samples before a live audience, swirling about like a blur in a diaphanous bat-wing blouse.

The thrush had come north to TT The Bears, a careworn bar tucked away on a side street in Cambridge, on a tour to support her latest album, Street Parade. This show marked her first live performance in our fair city, and her hour-long set served as an introduction to both her music and her unorthodox live show.
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Dent May, Do Things

By Chelsea Spear

Over the past few years, the ukulele has become to pop music what corn syrup is to soft drinks—a cloyingly sweet element used to thicken and over-sweeten a product of questionable quality. In comparison to his brodora-rocking peers, Dent May’s music is a glass of raw sugar-sweetened lemonade on a hot summer afternoon. His music shares a catchy, melodic quality, but his cracked baritone, lo-fi production values, and grounded lyrical perspective give his music a tart, refreshing quality.
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A Crash Course in Maddinalia

By Chelsea Spear

Guy Maddin carries on the tradition of deeply idiosyncratic experimental Canadian film from such forebears as David Cronenberg, Ryan Larkin, and Patricia Rozema. His work blends a voluptuous silent film aesthetic with fractured memories, mild body horror, and autobiographical details. His films contain gorgeous images, and the deliberate pacing draws in and engages viewers.

Maddin’s prolific filmmaking schedule serves as both a sop to his diehard fans, and an intimidation to those potentially interested in his work. When contemplating an IMDB profile that features over forty films, where do you start? A crash course in Maddin’s bizarre and wonderful oeuvre is in order.
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Dave Martin, Natural Selection

By Chelsea Spear

In the ’80s and ’90s, Dave Martin cut his teeth as a member of the beloved Boston rock band O Positive. His role as a sort of band factotum—in which he played numerous instruments and worked on the band’s onstage sound—filled out the quintet’s angular, shimmering, new wave arrangements. Since O Pos disbanded in 1995, Martin has put forth a prolific solo career, recording a trio of solid, folk rock-influenced solo records. His most recent album, Natural Selection, mines the contemplative vein of his previous albums, and also finds him introducing some new sounds and arrangements.
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Theresa Andersson, Street Parade

By Chelsea Spear

Theresa Andersson’s 2008 breakthrough album Hummingbird, Go! was no small accomplishment. Serving as a one-woman band, Andersson spun hummable, soulful tunes brimming with hard-won optimism. The straightforward production and elaborate arrangements became even more impressive once listeners knew that she’d performed all the instruments herself, using effects pedals to create loops. (The video for her song “Na Na Na,” in which she demonstrates her one-woman band setup, attracted 1.2 million views on YouTube.) How do you top a left-field critical and artistic success like this?
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Maggie and Terre Roche, Seductive Reasoning (Reissue)

By Chelsea Spear

One could pinpoint 1975 as one of the first years of “The Woman in Rock.” Patti Smith’s Horses had just hit the racks; Heart released their first single and began recording their debut album; and The Runaways and Blondie had just formed. All these artists and bands created fierce and highly idiosyncratic rock, and their various images—tough, cathartic, slightly cartoonish—would inspire many girls to start making music.
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X: The Unheard Music: The Silver Anniversary Edition DVD

By Chelsea Spear

To the layperson in the early ‘80s, punk rock was an atonal mess of a sound made by destructive adolescent boys with an all-consuming hunger for amphetamines and an allergy to shirts. In the documentary X: The Unheard Music, director W.T. Morgan and the punk band X challenge these stereotypes by focusing on the creative process and the day-to-day experiences of a working band trying to find their audience.
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Top Five 1970s Films Directed by Women

By Chelsea Spear

If your knowledge of the American New Wave begins and ends with the studio films of the era and Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, you may regard 1970s Hollywood as a roiling cauldron of testosterone. The pictures of the day may have featured more complex female protagonists, and may have ushered in an era of unconventional actresses like Shelley Duvall, Ellyn Burstyn, and Barbara Streisand. However, the exploits of Altman, Bogdanovich, Hopper, and Scorsese and their second-string peers left little room for emerging distaff talent.

As any good artist does, however, the female directors of the 1970s found a way around the system and were able to make feature films. Many of these saw distribution at mainstream houses, while others languished, undiscovered until recently. Here are five features helmed by intrepid lady lensers during the Easy Riders/Raging Bulls era.
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Blinded By Library Science: Michael J. Epstein Memorial Library/Nervous But Excited

By Chelsea Spear

Club Passim, Cambridge MA
November 6, 2011

Photo © Kelly Davidson

What has 18 legs, 15 instruments, eight pairs of cat-eye glasses, and one handlebar mustache? No, it’s not the latest electronic edition of Paste or the next Diablo Cody movie, but rather the Michael J. Epstein Memorial Library.

Boston music wunderkind Michael J. Epstein has assembled a chamber ensemble to perform his opulent, melodic cache of tunes. Live performances by the MJEML take the “memorial library” concept to its logical extreme by populating the stage with eight comely lasses in red, black, white, and bifocals, shushing a talkative audience in unison and reminding their listeners that “You might get a ticket for speeding . . . but you won’t get a ticket for reading.”
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