Watch Quichenight at The 5 Spot Ahead of ‘Waterville & Surf’

Check out a performance filmed at the Five Points venue, get ready for the album release party — also at The 5 Spot

Dust off that toque, chef: It’s time for another quiche night! Er, rather, make that a new Quichenight record. Following a string of singles, Brett Rosenberg’s wry and witty pop-rock project is getting ready to release its first new LP since 2023, Waterville & Surf, on Wednesday, Oct. 14. He and his band will be celebrating with a show at The 5 Spot on Oct. 13.

Longtime followers of local music will know what to expect. The overall Quichenight recipe is catnip to folks like me who enjoy original work that draws on or shares some commonalities with artists like The Beach Boys, Lou Reed, Alex Chilton, R. Stevie Moore, Todd Rundgren — even Gram Parsons and the Grateful Dead. Whether you’ve been on the Quichenight train since 2011’s Quichenight I or this is the first you’re hearing of Rosenberg, you’ll get a kick out of a live set filmed in August at The 5 Spot.

He always puts together a fantastic band, and for the gig in the video it’s producer-engineer Eric McConnell on bass and Brian Kotzur on drums. The set includes Quichenight favorites like “Fjord Tortoise” (from The Minor Sea, released in 2015) and ends with a mighty tasty jam on “Right to Be Confused” (Room Temperature, 2014).

“Saratoga,” the grooving opener to Waterville & Surf, is here too. You’ll also see guest appearances from songsmith extraordinaire Ziona Riley and rising Nashville pop champion Stargurl, fresh from the release of her EP Premarital Hex. Rosenberg plays drums in Stargurl’s band, and she’ll open the show when they return to the Fiver on Tuesday. (While it’s quite likely Rosenberg will have the same band as in the video, variations are always possible.)

Since his most recent record Insane at Any Speed, Rosenberg has been busy with lots of other projects, including lending his considerable guitar chops to “Electric Lizard,” a standout song on Angela Autumn’s Believer. Though he hadn’t written a lot of his own new material in a bit, he began to work up demos for a project that ultimately didn’t come together. In that process, he stumbled on a tape of songs he recorded when he was in high school circa 1996, and decided to rework three of them with the benefit of three decades of additional experience. One of those is “Sentimental Heart Attack,” a bittersweet tune that — simpilfying it a whole lot — sounds like late-’70s Dead covering Alex Chilton, complete with absolutely ripping Mu-Tron leads. Quichenight contains multitudes: That sits next to “My Biggest Organ,” a nervy disco-funk workout that takes Rosenberg into territory he has most often visited in short instrumental interludes rather than fully realized songs.

Like much of Rosenberg’s work, he recorded all the parts on Waterville himself, working hard to make it feel like a band playing together in the studio. Meagan Lawson produced, and Kenny Woods mixed the record. It’ll be available digitally and as a limited-edition cassette, which you can snag on Bandcamp.