Daily Hampshire Gazette - Arts Section

“A Rare musical space: A teenage band carves its own Celtic sound”

BY SEAN REAGAN, STAFF WRITER

    Somewhere between the acoustic lilt of traditional Celtic music, the rowdy brawl of Irish pub songs and the punk sensibilities of the Pogues lies a Hilltown gem called Malachite.

    Malachite - a semi-precious stone with bands of light and dark green, oft-favored for Irish claddagh rings - is also the moniker four Hilltown teenagers have adopted for their almost 3-year-old band.

    Malachite's music runs the gamut from classic fiddle tunes to at least one U2 cover. Their hearts are in the British Isles, but their ears have been everywhere - a brief list of influences includes diverse performers from Rush to Enter the Haggis to Johnny Cash.

    The result is a sound in which electric and acoustic fiddles keep time with distorted electric guitars, where the percussion might be a bodhran or African djambe or full-fledged drum kit, where the vocals switch from throaty howls to melodic croons in the space of a single verse and all of it punctuated by a penny whistle.

    "Basically it's Celtic rock," says Cole Bishop, a homeschooler, who at 17, is the band's senior member. "When you do it right, it's really good. We would never have this much fun playing in a so-called regular rock band."

    The band brings its Irish tunes with a twist to Brennan's Inn in West Cummington on Saturday.

    Fun seems to be the order of the day during their recent interview at the Creamery in Cummington. They've played live here several times - Bishop also works part-time behind the counter. They consider the Creamery their Reeperbahn, that Hamburg, Germany, thoroughfare where the Beatles cut their musical teeth before storming the world.

    "I think this community is the best," says drummer and percussionist Aidan Talbot, 15, of Cummington. "We could play on pots and pans and smash violins over each other's heads and people here would be - " he mimics an enthusiastic audience clapping and cheering. "It's a really good foundation for any band to have."

    Community might be a pillar of Malachite's foundation but the other is friendship. Over bagels and quiche and chocolate milk, they finish each other's sentences, argue about what the band's biggest argument has been (the volume of Cole's guitar, they decide), and sometimes spontaneously break into song.

    How the band started is a dense story that involves Bishop knowing 15-year-old Jolie Lobrose of Plainfield, because they were both homeschoolers. They both knew Lyle Hawthorne, 15, also of Plainfield, a black-clad fiddler who was listening to the CD "Folk in Hell" at age 7.

    They dwelt in a rare musical space. On the one hand, they all enjoyed the traditional musical taste of their peers - Green Day, say - but they were all steeped in the centuries-old world of jigs and reels and waltzes and ballads. You could drop them into Dublin or the Hebrides and at least from a musical perspective, they'd fit right in.

    So one day, over a casual jam, the three decided it might be fun to be in a band. "This was when she still hated me," said Bishop, giving now-girlfriend Lobrose a gentle nudge.

"She hated me, too," says Hawthorne, helpfully, to which Lobrose replies cheerfully, "I hated all of you."

    And she then yields an orange-and-yellow plastic hammer known affectionately in Malachite as "the squeaky hammer." Its appearance is always a sign that whatever discussion or debate is underway has to conclude, and fast. "It was the music that was happening," says Bishop. "That was really the thing. It just sounded right to us."
    So they played an intermission gig at a Binghamton, N.Y., square dance. When they returned to the Hilltowns, they recruited Aidan Talbot, 15, of Cummington to anchor them. Talbot, who has sung professionally with the Berkshire Opera Company during a summer work gig, said the band was an easy fit.
"I just love it," he says. "We all have musical backgrounds in the British Isles so there's lots of stuff we can do. It just all came together."

    Malachite practices weekly at the Hawthorne's family home in Plainfield, though they fantasize about "a big honking room where we can fit all our stuff," as Bishop puts it. The process by which they arrive at song lists and styles happens more or less the same way they do interviews. Everybody talks at once and somewhere between laughter and the squeaky hammer, they arrive at a consensus.
    Though they don't say so explicitly, they all seem bent on pushing boundaries. They'll play a slow waltz fast, or throw a few tiers of distortion into classic ballads. Confounding expectations pleases them.

    They also like a musical challenge - songs that force them to stretch their abilities. In fact, when the band covers U2's "With or Without You," Hawthorne refuses to play an instrument because the bass line is childishly simple. Instead, he sings the notes and pretends that he's playing the bass.

"It's like only three notes," he says. "It's so boring. I had to do something to it."

    The only time their voices briefly fall into silence is when the prospect of college, and its potential to wildly disperse them, is raised. Bishop allows that he's thinking about the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Talbot and Hawthorne, currently students at Berkshire Arts and Technology Charter School and Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School, respectively, have only begun considering those options. Lobrose says she'll go to college, but only if she can take her horses with her. That rules out Boston.
The thought of dissolving Malachite clearly doesn't sit well with the four. They're simultaneously charming and cocky about their potential to make it big, and it's hard for them to imagine an obstacle they can't negotiate on their own terms.
    So for now, they don't spend a lot of time worrying the question. They're recording an album; they've got a few gigs lined up. They agree that regardless of where Malachite goes, they'll remain friends.

    But it's fun for them to consider growing together as a band. In five or six years, says Bishop, their sound would be more stripped down.

"I honestly believe (the band) could be anything," says Talbot. "I really think we could bring ourselves to be a blues band or a jazz band. Wherever we want to go we could take ourselves there."

"It might be punk flamenco reggae for all we know," adds Bishop. It's a remark that triggers affectionate laughter - ever a Malachite hallmark - and it is, for now, the perfect note for them to end on.