Midway Cafe pays the troll toll to Troll 2 on St. Patrick’s Day, 17 March 2023.

Time and Place and The Latchkey Family Band get into the boy’s soul in support.

It’s St. Patty’s Day! That sloppy time of year. Like most American holidays, the single day of celebration has spilled over its borders into the surrounding week and weekend.

Bars across Boston and beyond look to cash in on the boozy brouhaha with a few weird drinks specials and mass-manufactured ornamentation strewn from floor to ceiling.

Midway Cafe was no different, embracing the holiday with a special St. Patty’s Day bill, green Coors-branded schwag, and tiny little leprechaun hats on top of the head of every employee with a sense of humor.

St. Patty’s Day music shows can be hit-or-miss. Like New Year’s Eve shows, sometimes the crowd is too drunk to listen! But if you hit the sweet spot between too drunk and not drunk enough, it makes for a memorable night of music you can still remember.

Another item to watch out for on St. Patty’s Day bills: gratuitous Irish folkiness. Celtic-branded bands that don’t perform all year dust off their guitars and shillelaghs to play tunes from the Old Country for one night only. It’s a beautiful ethnomusicological tradition, no doubt. But are we really honoring the tradition by phoning in ringers who dress the part more than they play it?

Midway Cafe and Tiny Oak Booking made the smart decision to book three Irish folk-adjacent bands. What you lose in shillelaghs, you gain in musicianship. All three bands are regular giggers who’ve performed on bills with a diversity of acts along a musical spectrum of folk, rock, punk, ska, and more. That’s the right way to celebrate a musical tradition, as a living tradition, with its foot in the door of a thousand other genres.

Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh!

The Latchkey Family

Did the Latchkey Family Band used to be called Meaghan Casey and the Latchkey Boys? At some point Meaghan joined the family. As wife, sister, or long lost daughter? Who can say…

The five-piece band has gigged in the Boston area with C.E Skidmore, Trophy Wife, and many more. With two guitars and a funky rhythm section, they can knock out jammy bangers. The fiddler gave them the ability to explore country and folk textures.

If there was a pattern from band to band on the bill, it was the presence of at least one stringed instrument with a connection to pre-electric music-making. Maybe an acoustic guitar, a standup bass, banjo, or fiddle. Something to remind you of the days of yore.

Time and Place

Time and Place have been in the studio during the winter months. New album coming out? Possibly a “very long” LP.

The Boston-based folk punkers have played alongside the likes of Bad Idea USA, Threat Level Burgundy, and more. A loud act used to making noise with other loud acts. The five-piece tossed a standup bass and banjo into the mix. The resultant textures were folk, while the driving energy was all punk.

Shout out to the banjo player. He was plugged into an Orange amp and strumming the five-string like a born-electric six-string. Sweet Petunia would probably have none of it, but there’s no one way to play your ax.

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Troll 2

Any of the three acts could have closed the bill, but Troll 2 was a nice pick for St. Patrick’s Day.

Trolls are kind of like leprechauns, depending on which thread within the pop mythological tradition you follow. Whether it’s the trolls from the titular cult film classic Troll 2 or the pint-sized predator in the Leprechaun horror series, latter day little green men have a menacing visage not unlike demonic trolls. Who knows what happened to the happy Lucky Charms prototype?

More importantly, Troll 2 brought the folk aspect of the evening into full bloom. With an acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle, and a cajón (one of those percussive boxes that you sit on while you play), the band made the strongest connection of the night to the folk musical tradition. Folky, but also hard rocking, having played alongside all sorts of bands around Boston, including The Dreamtoday, Miss Bones, and The Blues Dream Box.

Shout out to five microphones for five musicians. That’s a 1:1 mic to player ratio, which says a lot about the depth of vocal talent and trust in the ensemble.

Troll 2 closed out with a song that invited the crowd to “fuck the police.” Of course, that’s a classic folk punker sentiment, but it also seems like there’s a healthy streak of anti-authoritarianism within the Irish-American community, apropos for the evening. Maybe it goes back to the anti-imperialist motives in the Irish sovereignty movement. Maybe it’s just the green beer talking.