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With winter challenges ahead, now the best time to support breweries during Small Brewery Sunday this weekend MATTHEW TOTA
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comet impact. The Army of Broken Toys is a big band, with lots of moving parts, sometimes it gets hard to isolate particular instruments or players. For instance, jojo Lazar’s flute becomes a fleeting light rising from the song’s embers, before disappearing again, but ultimately, it’s the fusion that matters, how everything fits together to make something coherent and palpable from so many disparate pieces. Perhaps that’s why the song “OPM” – read the letters out loud – is so remarkable. It adds even more players to the mix, and still nothing is lost. Here, we have Eric Ortiz of Devils Twins on trumpet, Andy Reiner on fiddle, Joy Adams on banjo and Erica Spyres on fiddle, and the result is something that resembles bluegrass on the edge of the apocalypse. It’s a mad fusion that feels both folksy at moments and
surreal and psychedelic on others. Soon though, we’re at the penultimate song, “Doomsday Disco,” which is also the opening number of the band’s previous album, “Hexaphones.” It’s a grounded barroom brawler of a song, one that faces the impending apocalypse with curled fists and a boxer’s stance. Much of the album is spent in sort of otherworldy musical spaces, but here, as in the opening number, we’re back in the real world and staring the extinction in the eye. That ephemeral something is still there, though. That flash of light on the periphery of vision. It’s something that resembles hope, and that’s a rare commodity at the end of everything. The album comes to a conclusion with “Battle Witches,” featuring a performance by Worcester rapper Ghost of the Machine. “Every single day I’m waking up in a bad dream,”
listener, shaking them out of their skin, until the song is subsumed by the subsequent track, the blistering blast of rock ‘n’ roll, “Lonely Children.” It’s here a pattern becomes apparent. In the title song, the persona fears sending a child to school, a place where they should feel safe. In “Witchcraft,” the listener is instructed to “Sleep with devils/entreat with animals/tired little animals.” Here, Sickert sings, “Lonely children follow us into the sea/lonely children sing a sad song with me/lonely children dance along to the beat.” The music offers both comfort and warnings of danger in the same breaths, and lays bare the fact that we’re all the lonely children, all the tired little animals. We are all scared and vulnerable,
sings Sickert, “I don’t even know when I fall asleep … they will love you/as long as they can control you.” Ghost, in his verse, comes to that spirit of defiance from a different direction: “Traveled to the same block that I was auctioned off,” he raps, “drying tears on my face/holding a Molotov … I’d rather die free/after burning all the hate.” Ghost exhibits a sense of vocal control here, his flow measured, his tone emotionally evocative. It quivers with humanity against the onslaught of the band’s refrain, “isn’t it time we burned it down?” The answer to the question is implied in the question itself, but beneath the caterwaul, that light still burns, silently countering the question with one of its own, the one it’s been asking all along: Who do you want to be when the world ends? The listener has to answer that for their self.
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and Sickert, in his wisdom, seems to understand both the allure and dangers of a Pied Piper in such moments. Something sinister lurks behind the soothing notes and cathartic rock. It’s a feeling that sits with the listener throughout the following song, the slow burn “Animals Like Me.” Even love here is dangerous – maybe especially love – “It’s you I love,” sings Sickert, with Widow’s effervescent harmonies and a touch accordion from Edrie, “not the knives in your hands.” It’s a moment of Morticia and Gomez from one angle, something deeply disturbing from another. Again, we have a portrait of danger where one should be safe. Everything then turns on the paean to extinction, “Dino Domina.” The viola again becomes the touch of light in a crash of guitars and percussion, rising out of the song’s
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operations are going to be few and far between in January in Massachusetts. COVID is lingering, and there won’t be nearly as many tools to keep revenue flowing this winter. We’re going to see a lot of challenges
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arly in the spring, Massachusetts brewers did not have much time for hope. They had to react fast, amid constant confusion, to losing their taprooms. So when the Massachusetts Brewers Guild started unpacking the results of a survey it sent members then, in the early days of the state’s lockdown, it expected the data to paint a dire picture. Roughly 23% of the more than 200 breweries in the state did not expect to survive beyond 2021, given how new restrictions brought on by the coronavirus pandemic had already crippled business. Most reported sharp declines in revenue, in many cases over 50%. Then the weather got warmer. The chaos gave way to focus and innovation. Brewers took advantage of Paycheck Protection Program loans. They increased the amount of beer brewed for distribution, bottled and canned more for to-go sales and expanded options for outdoor drinking. Some even started delivering. Breweries more than survived. Many did better than expected, according to guild president Sam Hendler. But winter is around the corner, and Hendler can’t help but
tions, like requiring they serve food in order to open. On Sunday, let’s make a point to make a reservation at a nearby taproom; the weather may be chilly, but bundle up and order something warming like a stout or heavy Belgian ale. There’s also beer for pick-up or delivery – buy a glass or even a shirt while you’re at it. We don’t even need to buy directly from a brewery: at package stores, just scan the cooler for something local. The Massachusetts Brewers Guild has no formal plans for Small Brewers Sunday other than making sure we know when to celebrate it. Last year, Hendler admitted even he didn’t know such a holiday existed. Breweries were enjoying relatively high times then, and it seemed frivolous to toast their own achievements. All that has changed over the last 11 months. “It couldn’t be a more perfect thing to be talking about, because small brewers need consumer support right now,” he said. “If we can make sure we still have a path to getting beer in front of our supporters and them coming out en masse and voting with their wallet, we can survive this.” N O V. 26 - D E C . 2, 2 0 2 0
feel the same dread he did in March and April. “We’re going into the teeth of it here,” he said. “We’re going into an environment where package store sales go down, outdoor hospitality
for breweries early in 2021.” Ever since breweries reopened for draft beer, even I have found myself forgetting how hard things were for them in the spring. They were pleading with us for help. That desperation, though, seemed to fade in the summer sun. Now beer gardens are closing, outdoor reservations are drying up, and many breweries won’t have enough space available in their taprooms to safely invite customers inside, or serve enough of them to justify opening at all. Looming over all of this is the threat of another state shutdown. Small Brewery Sunday arrives this weekend at the perfect time for brewers. The national beer holiday, in its second year, will remind us that, despite the boost in business they got over the summer, brewers are facing perilous days ahead. They’ll need our support now more than ever. With Small Business Saturday coming the day before, breweries will get to double dip. And why not? They may only be second to restaurants in terms of how badly the state botched their reopening. Breweries were forgotten, then mischaracterized as bars, then restricted with arbitrary stipula-
