Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes (Atlantic Records)
Said to be the last album from the ’90s ska-punk/reggae-rock juggernaut, this one has Sublime’s fan base more interested in debating whether or not this-or-that lyrical theme is focused on former lead singer Bradley Nowell, who died from a drug overdose in 1996 and left the band a hollowed-out husk of itself. As some have observed, this stuff does sound like it came from an AI bot programmed to make up a bunch of new Sublime songs, which is pretty low for a band that hasn’t produced any new material in 30 years. Indeed it does sound a lot more polished than the music that launched them into the happy-grunge stratosphere and portrayed them as an antidote to the doomer vibes of bands like Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots and all those guys. Nowell’s son, Jakob, handles the vocals here, which adds to the disposability of tunes like the Red Hot Chili Peppers-inspired title track and “Can’t Miss You,” which reads like Andy Grammer trying dancehall on for size. Utterly useless, for completists only. C
Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me (Epic Records)
Sixth full-length from this R&B/hip-hop-diva Californian, who’s sort of becoming the Jeff Ross of random national talent reality shows. She started out on YouTube, after which she won the 2004 season of America’s Most Talented Kid with a rendition of Christina Aguilera’s “Keep on Singin’ My Song,” and then finally broke through in 2010 apparently because she failed to make the top 24 on American Idol (I can’t explain it either, don’t ask). Since then she’s been the titular Masked Singer on that show, mentored a group of American Idol contestants in 2024, etc., always showcasing her belt-it-from-the-mountaintop singing style for the benefit of the few people who still watch that kind of stuff. For this one, though, she’s all about the ’90s, or at least the asphalt-soul ’90s made famous by quasi-R&B street-pop groups like TLC and Salt n Pepa, which is, um, marketable thinking on her part, let’s just say. Whatever, she’s content in her skin here, warbling conversational lyrics in a style that went extinct when the new millennium arrived, but its comfort-food feel will appeal to cul-de-sac-dwelling suburbanites, etc. B
PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases
• June 19 is the next “Here, Have Some Random Albums” Friday, and so random albums will be coming to your favorite streaming service, the one you pay for by allowing it to schlurp money out of your bank account every month only because for some reason you’re too paranoid to rip songs from those “YouTube To MP4” apps because some of them are obviously heavily infected by hackers, and yet you trust that Pandora or SoundCloud or whatever will never get hacked by the approximately 12,693,881 MIT undergrads who are at this very moment determined to hack your chosen “trusted music platform” so they can steal your credit card to buy disposable laptops for the darkweb, have you changed any of your passwords in the last nine years, I sure hope you have, you really should. But in positive news (a Constant Reader said my column of two weeks ago was full of positive energy and it made him smile, but I’d caution not to get used to this kind of nonsense), Canadian trio Rush played their first live shows in Inglewood, California, and my social media feeds would absolutely not shut up about it, so I looked at some of the video, and yes, replacement drummer Anika Nilles took one small step for womankind by adding a few of her own touches to the sadly departed Neil Peart’s professorial drumming tricks. That was expected, let’s just say, but what really tugged at people’s heartstrings was her wonderment; she looked like a kid who’d hit the winning homer in Game 7 of the Little League World Series. Now, as a lifelong cynic, of course, what I’d like to know is which fusion and prog-rock drummers refused the offer to join the band; I’m sure there were a few who laughed them off as a glorified version of Styx or a less-capable Yes (you may recall I’d suggested Will Kennedy of The Yellowjackets), but past that sort of rather grim fascination, yes, she “nailed the fills” and whatnot. But anyway, to business, let’s kick off this week with the final album from San Francisco-born folkie Tucker Zimmerman, who died in January at the age of 84. Dream Me A Dream is the new album; the title track is a mawkish bluegrass-tinted affair that saw Zimmerman’s voice reduced to an ineffectual croak, but some people do dig that stuff.
• Canadian producer/musician/idiotic-looking-hat-addict Daniel Lanois couldn’t just give his new sleepy instrumental album a title that would make it easy for me to find one of its songs on YouTube; no, instead he titled it Belladonna Nocturne because he already put out a sleepy instrumental album titled simply Belladonna in 2005, so it’s like, his thing, man, and he also knew it’d force me personally to use extra brain cells to fool the YouTube bot into finding something from this new album instead of the 2005 one. “Warp Sustain” is pretty cool, incorporating some dark, quite noisy elements into its wispy Enya-esque dramatics.
• Pond is a band from Australia that still makes albums, unlike the American band named Pond that was from Oregon and got signed to Sub Pop Records, which led to their getting signed to Sony Records, which of course led to their breaking up when Sony let them go broke so they could write off the loss on their taxes. The title track from new LP Terrestrials is OK for a (dated-sounding) college-rocker, a blend of Supertramp and, oh, I don’t know, Hives.
• And finally we have Hull, U.K.-based BBC darlings Life with their newest album Abstract/Natural. Advance single “The Dollywaggon” is worth checking out if you like ’80s art-rock and Sex Pistols, it’s the best thing I’d recommend this week.
Featured Photo: Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes and Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me
