Everyone's Irish when Angels perform

By LAURA CARROLL
VIEW STAFF WRITER
August 2007


sara Tramiel/ViewKillian?s Angels members Beth Mullaney, left, and Adrienne Lefebvre perform at Brendan?s Irish Pub inside The Orleans on June 16. The group will perform on Aug. 20 at the Rainbow Library Amphitheater, 3150 N. Buffalo Drive, 8-10 p.m.

With the ladies from Killian's Angels, valley residents can catch Irish fever any time of the year at Brendan's Irish Pub inside The Orleans.

The band, made up of Beth Mullaney, Lisa Viscuglia, Dolly Coulter, Ginger Bruner, Nan Fortier, CJ Borden and Adrienne Lefebvre, keeps audiences lively with Irish drinking songs, rock and roll covers and original music written by Mullaney.

During their performances, the female musicians transform many popular songs into something altogether different, giving classic rock songs an Irish edge. "That all came out of her head," said Viscuglia of Mullaney.

"I grew into my Irish name big time," Mullaney said. "It works well for us because it's so varied, you can do whatever."

Known for their instrumentation, the ladies of Killian's Angels play an assortment of music-making devices, including a harmonica, a melodica (a modified harmonica with a small keyboard on it), a keyboard, a violin, drums, guitars and the "rock and roll tuba."

"We all have different things that we do musically," Mullaney said.

These things include Bruner's strolling tuba act, which extends to unassuming slot players outside of Brendan's, where she frequently gets thrown back into the bar by hotel security. During an Angels' performance, audience members can expect multiple Irish toasts and lots of wise cracking, but really it's the way the ladies switch between so many different instruments and play to one another that seems to get the crowd pumping song after song.

"She's actually a band in a box," Viscuglia said of Mullaney.

"We're very versatile," Coulter added. "I get to stretch out and play more instruments."

While some aspects, like the toasts and seeing many instruments, are standard at a Killian's Angels performance, other things, like what songs they play, are not.

"I cannot stand doing the same set list even twice," Mullaney said.

"We have songs we haven't done in years," Bruner agreed.

Don't bank on every Angel being at a performance, either, because the women are busy, and you never know who's going to make an appearance. "We kind of roll the dice to see who shows up," Bruner joked.

For instance, the band has three or four substitute drummers, and Viscuglia's substitute, Lefebvre, may show up on a night when Viscuglia is there, making for an interesting fiddle performance between the two ladies.

"I have the most fun playing with these people," said Viscuglia, who's played with musicians like Elton John and Stevie Wonder.

Coulter agreed and said the band, which has been together since 2001, is probably one of the best things that ever happened to her.

Killian's Angels also has a die-hard fan base who, according to the band members, even make them cookies.

"As the newbie in the group, I think rarely do you find a band that's so engaging with the audience," Lefebvre said. "They're very transparent with their gifts."

"We've had letters from all types of people saying that we made them feel welcome. That makes me feel really good," Mullaney said.

"Everyone who walks in there falls in love with them," Lefebvre added.

As for the Angels' future, Bruner wants to play more festivals, and Mullaney hopes to have the band do some traveling, if their busy schedules permit.

The group has recorded two CDs, which are available online at Amazon.com, CD Baby and the band's Web site, www.killiansangels.com.

The group also can be hired to do personal performances.

Killian's Angels will perform on Aug. 17 and 18 inside Brendan's at The Orleans, 9 p.m. to 1 a.m., and on Aug. 20 at the Rainbow Library Amphitheater, 3150 N. Buffalo Drive, 8-10 p.m.

Las Vegas Sun

Today: May 07, 2007 at 7:14:20 PDT

John Katsilometes captures a moment at the Orleans when a figure from old Vegas gave up an E-string to save a band

The request from the stage was both urgent and unlikely. "We have an emergency: Does anyone in the audience have an E string for a violin?" Killian's Angels frontwoman Beth Mullaney asked Saturday night during the band's appearance at its regular haunt, Brendan's Pub at the Orleans.

The scene reminded of when Monty Hall used to ask contestants on "Let's Make a Deal" for odd items in exchange for cash: "Anyone with a plastic fork gets $50! Anyone carrying a pair of tweezers gets $75!" As the crowd chuckled, the Irish-tilted quintet's violinist, Adrienne Lefebvre (standing in for Lisa Viscuglia, who is also a member of the "Monty Python's Spamalot" orchestra) scrambled to find a replacement for the string she had just snapped.

It seemed a lost cause as the all-female band slipped into the requisite jokes about having no spare E-strings, but plenty of G-strings. But at Mullaney's plea, a dapper, silver-haired figure in the back of the club took action. Longtime Vegas musicians know the man well: he is venerable violinist Sasha Semenoff, who has been performing in town for at least 50 years. Semenoff's quartet was a fixture at the Dunes in the mid-1960s, and he played the orchestra leader on the "Aces High" TV show in the film "Casino" (he also had a cameo as a waiter in "Honeymoon in Vegas"). I met Semenoff in November 2005 when he performed during a wedding ceremony for Margaret Nixon and Francis Murphy of Defiance, Ohio, the couple who exchanged vows while seated in motorized scooters at the drive-thru "Tunnel of Love" at the Little White Wedding Chapel.

Semenoff retrieved a string from his violin, which was in his car at the casino, presented it to Lefebvre and, like a king of life-saving apparition, faded from the scene. Lefebvre was still shaking her head at the end of the show, saying that she would never forget to pack spare strings again. Mullaney added, "I just asked as kind of a joke. How crazy is that?" Very, and it was an old Vegas moment money can't buy.
 
NOISE: Calling All Angels

Killian's Angels brings culture to the lounge scene
By Josh Bell

Where: Fremont Street Experience
When: 7-9 p.m., March 13; 7-11 p.m., March 17
Tickets: Free
Info: www.vegasexperience.com 


Killian's Angels
Where: Minstrel's Lounge at the Excalibur
When: 9:30 p.m.-1:30 a.m., Mondays
Tickets: Free
Info: 597-7600
It's one in the afternoon, and the women of Killian's Angels are having breakfast. We're at the Sherwood Forest Café inside the Excalibur, where lead singer and guitarist Beth Mullaney, bassist Ginger Bruner and drummer Nan Fortier are working their way through coffee, eggs, hash browns and a pancake. Yes, one pancake between the three of them.

The trio, along with Satomi Hofmann, Dolly Coulter and Lisa Viscuglia, constitute the aforementioned all-female, Celtic bar band. But their music is more than just Celtic, they've got aspirations outside the bar scene, and they may even welcome a male into their ranks in the near future (only temporarily, of course).

The Angels have played everywhere from your standard-issue Irish pubs to a lumberjack convention at the Rio ("That was a weird gig, man," Bruner says), and they're booked Mondays for the rest of the year at the Excalibur's Minstrel's Lounge, bringing their mix of Irish folk, rock, pop and country to unsuspecting tourists from around the globe. Just don't call them a lounge act.

"We're bringing Killian's Angels to the lounge, instead of bringing the lounge to Killian's Angels," Mullaney says. They're still playing various other shows around town, and they'll be busy on St. Patrick's Day, with sets heavy in traditional Irish music at the Fremont Street Experience.

Just as they're not a typical lounge act, the Angels aren't your typical bar band, either. Although an average set includes covers of everything from Alanis Morissette and The Proclaimers to Van Morrison and The Waterboys, the band also has a whole repertoire of originals, represented on their recent 12-track, self-titled CD.

"We don't want to not do any of the original stuff," Mullaney says, so they throw in quite a few of their own tunes even at the lounge gigs. "People respond well to it, they really do. It gets to be that fun thing where they're singing along."

There's even an Angels fan by the name of Robert Valentine who's been to every single show save one—when his mother died. "We've had people just be walking by, stop in their tracks, come in, sit down, and then tell us afterwards that we saved them a lot of money at the tables," Bruner says.

It's that kind of appeal that sets the Angels apart, and puts them just as much at home playing for the culturati at First Friday as for vacationing families from Nebraska. While most band members have day jobs (not, however, ones that prevent them from eating breakfast at 1 p.m.), they see the Angels as their top priority. Bruner recently quit KNPR after 17 years because the station wanted to switch her to a time slot that would conflict with the band's gigs. Fortier, who drums for the Blue Man Group, is taking 10 months off to help launch the new Blue Man show in Berlin, but she'll be back. "Nan's our drummer," Mullaney says simply, though a replacement (the aforementioned potential male) will of course be necessary in the interim. Mullaney jokes that they will make the new drummer wear a dress, regardless of gender.

A few days later, I catch the band in their native habitat, the ubiquitous Vegas Irish pub ("It's the sports bar of the aughts," Bruner says). At Brendan's inside the Orleans, even short a member, the Angels fill the bar with their eclectic music. You could add "multi-instrumentalist" to each member's job description, since they all play several instruments, sometimes during the same song. Although the place is full of chatter, when a song ends, everyone cheers. A friend of mine keeps requesting "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)," and to the band's great credit, they refuse to play it. There seems to be more camaraderie between the band and patrons than with the average bar band. Valentine sits front and center.

If anyone can bridge local culture and tourist culture, it's Killian's Angels. They may not be there yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some hipsters start filtering into the Excalibur to catch the band's set. "I would love to get more people to come there on Mondays and have it be this weird thing that can kind of start," Mullaney says, "where people are going to a Vegas lounge on the Strip, and seeing something very unusual."
Friday, November 15, 2002

Music

A night with the Angels: Killian's Angels make Celtic-tinged rock fun

By Gregory Crosby

Killian's Angels

When Wednesdays, 9 p.m.

Where Fado's Irish Pub at Green Valley Ranch Station

Admission free

Info 702-617-7777

The opening scene

Sunlight streams through a dark, wood-paneled office somewhere in Las Vegas. Five gorgeous women crowd around a huge oak desk, listening intently as a male voice with a thick Irish brogue crackles out of a speaker phone. "Top of the morning, Angels!"

"Morning, Killian!" reply the Angels in unison.

"Your assignment is to make it safe for people to menjoy their pints by playing good Celtic music with snap, sizzle and sparkle!"

"Don't we do that every week?" says one Angel, and the others laugh.

The other opening scene

As a matter of fact, they do indeed do that every week, currently at Fado, the Irish pub inside Green Valley Ranch Station. But there's no mysterious, musical mastermind from Galway directing them. "We needed a name when the band turned from a three-piece into a five-piece," says the Angels' bassist, tuba chick and raconteur Ginger Bruner. "We were playing at J.C. Wooloughan's at the time, and there was a poster for Killian's Irish Red above our heads while we were discussing it. Somebody said 'Killian' and somebody said 'Angels' and that was that."

Thus, Las Vegas' finest all-girl Celtic band was born. "I think we're the only all-girl Celtic band in Vegas," says Lisa Viscuglia as she warms up on her violin.

She doesn't have much room to do so. The real opening scene every week answers that age old theological question: How many Killian's Angels can dance on the head of a pin? The pin in this case is Fado's tiny stage, and the Angels wind up doing a great deal of close dancing as they maneuver their instruments and equipment into place. Each Angel seems to be a musical double or triple threat, playing multiple instruments and excelling on them all: guitars, banjos, mandolins, keyboards, fiddles, bass guitars, tubas, percussion, harmonica and spoons all prepped and ready.

The music

Lead vocalist Beth Mullaney, a singer/songwriter who has performed solo and in a Celtic duo at the Excalibur for many years, tunes her mandolin while wearing a decidedly un-angelic Devil Girl T-shirt, then switches back to guitar as Viscuglia launches into a fast-paced Irish vamp to get the evening going. Between them, Satomi Hofmann (vocals, guitars, piano) joins in, while to Mullaney's right Dolly Coulter (vocals, guitars, keyboards), her eyes hidden for a moment beneath a battered cowboy hat, swings into action on her guitar as well. Within minutes the crowd is swept up in the speeding train of rhythm the band lays down.

But it's the diversity of talents that make Killian's

Angels more than just another Irish bar band. Rock, folk, country, R&B and pop all work their way into the band's Celtic sensibility, and even the casual listener who's only dropped in for a Guinness is struck that the band could do anything, tailoring their rich store of musical lore to the venues they play. Mullaney, Coulter and Hoffman all trade off on lead vocals, giving each song, whatever its style, a personal stamp.

"Here's a little mix of countries and types, starting with a jig," announces Mullaney, and soon enough the Irish-style reeling and rocking is transmuted into a comical version of "Bad Moon Rising," with Mullaney singing "There's a bathroom on the right" in places.

Next comes the musical question "What shall we do with a drunken sailor?" which each Angel answers in her own inimitable way. By the time the band hits an unlikely but rousing cover of Chumbawumba's "Tubthumping," the crowd is theirs.

Next week's episode

More of the same. Killian's Angels, with their awesome array of musical talent, sense of fun, and eclectic takes on songs, is the best reason to make the long trek out to Green Valley Ranch Station on a Wednesday night, even better than that pint you've been dreaming of. Oh, and did we mention they're all gorgeous to boot? How many Irish bands can you say that about?

Copyright 2002 Las Vegas City Life

Las Vegas Mercury

 


Fado
2300 Paseo Verde Parkway (in Green Valley Ranch Station)

Hours: Sun.-Wed.: 11 a.m.-2 a.m. (Thurs.- Sat. until 3 a.m.)

Do you really speak Gaelic?: Bless the Babel Fish and Chips.

Indian-Style Chicken Curry?: Yes, just like the Leprechauns love.

Homemade Shepard's Pie?: That's more like it.

Green Valley Ranch Casino? Named after the salad dressing?: Cool and creamy.
STINKY DREAMS

I lived in the suburbs for two months.
It was nice. A creamed jean.
People powerwalked.
I drank Italian sodas.
Women cruised strip malls in lovely ensembles.
Drive-by no graffiti. Ethnicity is user-friendly.
No sirens except ice cream trucks
and the occasional heart retiree being carted away.

Soylent Green is Purple,
Sweat Suit.

I lived in the suburbs for two months,
then the methamphetamine kicked in.
Burning holes through the tops of my shoes.
My breath became heavy dust.
I couldn't make the rent.

Thursday, July 04, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Gut Reactions: Pub-a-dub-dub

By Dayvid Figler

Oh, joy. One more opportunity to bemoan our populace's perpetual expansion to the mountains. Well, at least with no end in sight until the juggernaut of development abuts the immovable forces of rock and hits the "forbidden zone." Have you not heard of the forbidden zone? Somewhere behind Black Mountain is the land where apes rule the desert. Where the old El Rancho hotel sign is buried halfway in the sand. The skeletons of mob songbirds and ancient Binion card cheats strapped to make-shift crosses like Blair Witch. Each day we inch closer to encroachment on this land that time forgot. Prepare for the monkey rebellion, dear friends, and the doom that will encrust our valley.

On a brighter note, the food at Fado in Green Valley Ranch Station is delicious. Easy to dismiss as yet another chain-run Irish pub, Fado (pronounced Lynyrd Skynyrd) maintains the elements of traditional Gaelic feasting, but with a new twist. I think they call it food fusion, but really, it's more confusion. Take the "boxty." According to the menu, the boxty is a "traditional dish common to rural parts of Ireland which comprises of a potato pancake, rolled and stuffed with a filling." What would Ruaidhhri an Einigh (Rory the Hospitable) and Pilib na Tuaighe (Philip of the Battleaxe) think of a boxty filled with portobello and cajun spice, or another tossed in a sweet hoisin sauce, topped with pesto aoili and jicama slaw? Personally I dub the Seafood Boxty filled with yellow rice, salmon, cod, shrimp and mussels ($11.95, garnished with a zippy black bean and sweet corn relish) hiontach (Gaelic for wonderful). Dare I say (and with apologies to any battle axe-wielding Irishman) change isn't always a bad thing.

The crew and I (you know, my peeps, posse, what do the kids call it today?) popped into Fado on a recent Wednesday night and (to sum up quickly so I can talk about something else altogether) everyone enjoyed their meals, the pints were flowing (Harp Lager, Stel Artois, Murphy's Irish Amber) and the service was right on (our waitress even had a cute, Irish brogue--fake or not, you decide). At some point, much Bush Mills Irish Whiskey was consumed. Oh, yes, to immerse oneself in another culture in the safe and recognizable confines of a hotel-casino. Fado looks the part, tastes good and blah, blah--it's an Irish Pub--check it out, especially on Wednesday nights from 9 until midnight when the free entertainment takes center stage.

Killian's Angels is an all-female collective of absolutely beautiful and extraordinarily talented musicians belting out both drinking ditties and pop songs with equal aplomb. So well-received, it was recently announced that the pub has extended their contract throughout the year. It's no wonder. In addition to their unique estro-heavy component, each member brings with her a unique flavor and a penchant for intriguing instrumentation and arrangement. Take bass player Ginger Bruner (disclaimer: I was once in a punk rock polka band called Tippy Elvis with the incomparable Frau Bruner). Ginger (to many, the voice of public radio KNPR) is equally adept on bass guitar as swinging tuba. Lead singer Beth Mullaney, familiar to anyone who's wandered into the Excalibur and spied the lovely Mullivan's Edge, lists guitar, mandolin, harmonica and bodhran as her musical specialities. The vivacious Satomi Hofmann is angelic on harmonies (not to mention wicked on the spoons) and known for her work on the Strip in numerous production shows. Hot-shit violin virtuoso Lisa Viscuglia is one of the top string players in Nevada, and plucky Dolly Coulter can strum a gee-tar like the devil herself. So please trek to Fado (if you don't live close by) for goodness sake.

That said, why oh why must the valley be stretched so thin? (Yes, I'm back on that). Imagine if we were more densely packed...if all the rich people and retirees lived in harmony in the city proper, too. Would there be a call for more intellectually and culturally interesting projects? Would a performing arts center be such a Herculean endeavor? Would there be more centralized acts of charity benefiting the children and the homeless alike? Could the city take the shape of the dreamers of the '50s making a desert into a livable oasis? Nah! This is Vegas, buddy. Enjoy your faux suburbs and your "authentic" Irish pubs while you can. Things implode. Stretch to the mountains. Stretch to L.A. Stretch until you're paper thin and the wind whistles through your skin. Here come the monkey monkeys.