Dead Gowns w/ Rick Rude & Footings

How does one cope with the pang of desire? It’s the tender, sometimes volatile question that confronts Genevieve Beaudoin on her debut full-length as Dead Gowns.

A deft lyricist with a sweeping range of poetic color and texture, Beaudoin paints her story in dark romantics, presenting a woman in the high summer of adulthood deciphering life’s capacity to fulfill desires or let them go painfully unmet. These cravings – to be touched, to be known, to have just one more encounter with someone lost to time – are a lacuna Beaudoin prods at insistently throughout the album’s twelve songs.

Though never named outright, Beaudoin’s home in Maine – and its ragged, granite-strewn coastline – is an evocative character inhabiting the album, a force even more implacable than Beaudoin’s emotions. Also present is the acute awareness of time passing. Pulled from an Eileen Miles poem, the album’s title, It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow, evokes a feeling of disorientation and the inevitability of change. External and internal forces charge Beaudoin, her inner world shifting much like the dizzying change of the seasons. “We get swept up in the blizzard, and then we are set down in the hot salty haze of August,” she says, remembering the Maine winters of her childhood.

By the album’s end, Beaudoin holds her longing in the balance, no longer overcome but embodied. And if you listen carefully – these songs will pick you up and put you down again, transformed, raw, and satiated.

New England relationships have the benefit of the seasons to cauterize intimacy. Sometimes that happens between friends over cards at the cleared dinner table, or under a locally handmade blanket. For Rick Rude, it started in a living room in York, Maine in the fall of 2013. Ten years later, Rick Rude continues to bring friends together over a piping hot stew of homemade rock n roll. Jordan Holtz (bass, vox) and Ben Troy (guitar, vox) form the main songwriting team while Chris Kennedy (guitar, vox) and Ryan Harrison (drums) complete the quartet. As time oozes on, Rick Rude released their third studio production Laverne in the winter of 2024, perfect for making new friends, or discovering new depths of love with old ones.

Footings is sometimes a whole band, and other times just Eric Gagne, a journeyman songwriter, singer, and guitarist who has been doing things out in the world since 2003. Under this moniker Eric has released four lps on Sophomore Lounge, Don't Live Like Me, and Feeding Tube Records, toured with Bonnie Prince Billy, Marisa Anderson, The Huntress and Holder of Hands, and is currently winding down lp 5.

Footings is a natural progression from Eric’s earlier folk explorations in Redwing Blackbird and Passerine. He also has made records with Dweller on the Threshold and Death to Tyrants, and has had the honor of opening for Mount Eerie, J Mascis, Diane Cluck, Waxahatchee, Califone, Dredd Foole, Steve Gunn, Mirah, Death Vessel, Leyla McCalla, Myriam Gendron, and many more.The band currently is made up of Eric on guitar / vocals, Clement on guitar / keys / vocals, and Mia Govoni on drums. Jordan Holtz on bass / vocals.

Doors are at 7pm and music will begin at 730 sharp! All ages!

Host or Publisher Nova Arts