Author: Eric Saeger

Melissa Auf der Maur, BASS WOMB ROOM: My ‘90s 4-Track Demos x Field Recordings (Envision Records)

Pointless postmodern self-indulgence ahoy, cripes do I not have the stomach for this, not that I enjoy sounding like a Jordan Peterson-worshipping fuddy-duddy which, I assure you, I am not. I’m not saying this Canadian-born ’90s-indie It girl hasn’t racked up a formidable resumé over the years, having toured with and played bass for Hole and Smashing Pumpkins, but I fail to see the point in this collection of tuneage that’s basically an aural diary for her own amusement. What have we even got here: A recording of a leisurely Hole crowd-warmup in which Courtney Love babbles something (“Courtney Chimes In”); a Captain Beefheart-flavored exhibition of off-key vocals and instrumentation (“Desire Is Critical”); a tiresome two-note display of bass effects whose time is kept by a dripping faucet (“Water Wars”); a Throbbing Lobster-begging noise loop from a Pumpkins show (“Bill Seoul Crowd”) and other self-congratulatory nonsense. I really don’t know if there’s a selling point to any of this at all except to maybe a Hole/Smashing Pumpkins completist. F

Soft Cell, Danceteria (Republic of Music Records)

Kids today would be amazed at the plethora of entry-level jobs that were available to us older folks back in the 1980s. Let’s see, there was restaurant work, oddball manufacturing positions, and telemarketing for starters, and for the brave few who wanted to learn COBOL and BASIC, data entry jobs. I was a manufacturing flunky doing all sorts of awful tasks as the New Wave dawned, and my memories of this U.K. band’s then-alternative-radio hit “Tainted Love” are all blue-collar work-related and awful; none of the hoodlums I hung out with would have been caught dead voluntarily listening to it on the radio, but over the years my tastes have evolved to where I lump this band in with Pet Shop Boys, which means I like them just fine as synth-poppers go. This will be Soft Cell’s last album; original co-founder Dave Ball passed in 2025, which leaves singer Marc Almond not wanting to continue the operation but nevertheless desiring to go out with a bang. The vibe derives from the hedonistic Manhattan club scene of the group’s heyday, where they hobnobbed with the likes of Andy Warhol and Madonna, an atmosphere captured succinctly in the pure disco, vocoder-affected title track. Thus it goes, with things like “The Space Inside,” a sad-blissy krautrock-oriented joint, and its twin, “Times Square,” and on and on. This could have come out in the ’80s, which is both the good and the bad news. F

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• This week’s all-in CD-release Friday falls on Sept. 11; hopefully we’ll have some good music to cover this week (hope does spring regardless of the stubbornly repeated precedent that’s been in place of late), so anyway, as I’ve groused about a zillion times now, I’m on basically every music industry-related spam list in existence, which this year includes the one for the U.S.-based Unsigned Only Music Awards, a yearly event whose deadline for 2025 submissions passed a couple of months ago, but it’d be something for bands to keep in mind for next year; you’ll be able to sign up for the 2026 competition sometime in December by visiting unsignedonly.com, where you can enter as many songs as you want as long as you’re willing to cough up a $25 entry fee for each one (if you’re under 18, you’ll need a parent’s signature). Of course, usually such things are nothing but scammy, meme-worthy nonsense meant to line the pockets of sketchy industry outsiders, but this one is real: This year’s artist of the year was the first blues-man ever to win, Artur Menezes, a Brazilian guitarist based in Los Angeles, and the judges this year included Aimee Mann and The Cure’s Robert Smith. Since it’s a legitimate affair, I was interested in knowing how they’d be handling “AI artists,” meaning I was hoping they’d simply ignore them as they should, regardless of the fact that AI is holding the sword of Damocles over the entire world’s economy (industry player Anthropic recently announced that their “addressable target market” is $30 trillion, basically the same size as the United States’ gross domestic product, in case you were wondering how catastrophic the next stock market crash is going to be). With regard to that stuff, people in charge of these awards do prohibit the use of AI-generated vocals, instrumental performances, or live accompaniments, but they do allow the use of AI tools for production support (e.g., mixing assistance, mastering, or sound design) and songwriting (melodies, chord progressions, lyrics, and arrangements). Personally I’m OK with the first part of that but not the second, but admittedly the reality is that no one could reliably detect an AI-written song if the artist gussied it up enough, and that’s something we’re all going to have to live with going forward. If anything it’ll be a net positive, given that there’ll be far fewer popular songs that sound too much like something that’s been done before, and speaking of that, Welsh indie rockers The Tubs have a new LP out this week titled Hard Life, whose single is “Who’s Gonna Love You Now,” which sounds like someone asked an AI to make a tune that sounds like a cross between Elvis Costello, Imagine Dragons and New Order; it’s as unexciting but mildly listenable as it looks.

• Wow, we haven’t chatted about U.K.-based art-punk legends Bloc Party in a while, have we? You know them from their 20-year-old Police-nicking hit “Banquet”; their newest album, Anatomy Of A Brief Romance, features the single “Coming On Strong,” a robotically danceable number with a bassy, pretty neat rubber-band beat.

• This Is Lorelei is the stage name of Vermont singer Nate Amos. His band’s new full-length is The Singer In My Band; the single “Billy Came Back” does nothing for me but it might do for you if you always wanted to hear an Aughts-aware version of Guster. They’ll be at The Sinclair in Cambridge, Mass., on Nov. 2.

• Last of all is London, U.K., electronic afro-funk octet Ibibio Sound Machine with their sixth album, Chopping Mountain. Leadoff single “Concept Of Love” is a club banger composed of wub-wub, ’70s soul vocals and a big fat horn section, it’s awesome.

Featured Photo: Stryper, Throne Of Thorns and Brennan Wedl, Brennan Wedl

Swae Lee, Same Difference (Eardrama/Interscope Records)

Aw, there’s nothing horribly wrong with this LP, the second one perpetrated by the California rapper who’s one half of the Mississippi-based hip-hop duo Rae Sremmurd, which he formed in 2010 with his older brother Slim Jxmmi, who naturally gets a feat here (on “Working Remote”). Mostly the complaints are coming from people who thought the album was delayed for too long before its April release, which is kind of a whiny thing to fixate on, while others are of the opinion that Side 2 kind of sucks. But critical opinions of music do reflect the attitude of the critic, and it seems like many haters — OK, actually there hasn’t been a whole lot of hate, just accusations that Lee’s delivery is “lazy” (which they should have expected after his chart-topping duet with Post Malone in “Sunflower”), which I suppose is fine if you define focusing on decent, non-AutoTuned singing and having a genuine interest in substance over style as lazy. Nah, it’s probably more about the fact that he’s got a pretty bright future, what with Interscope being involved in all this. We’ll see, won’t we. A

Knots & Chains, Lone Assembly (Metropolis Records)

I really didn’t think this album, the first from Metropolis’s newly signed dark-synth quartet, was going to land any punches I haven’t heard before, but it actually does. For the first few minutes of opener “Call of the Swift” it’s fairly standard goth fare, heavy on the Depeche Mode, but by squinting my ears a little I caught a definite aura of Fields Of The Nephilim in there as well as some Bauhaus, and suddenly, then came the hook, a wide, epic affair that was a bit too morose for me to take too seriously but does work for what it is. What these guys are good at is introducing a tune as a stripped-down, Factory Records-ready gloom-dance exercise and then pouring on the synth layers to make pretty freaking sparkly choruses. They compare themselves to The Editors, which I didn’t really hear; for example the push single “In The Open,” while far from a songwriting masterpiece, comes off like something that was left off the soundtrack for The Lost Boys. They’re definitely on the right track and have played at enough big European festivals to help them know what they want. A

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The next Friday for new music releases is this one, Sept. 4, a great day for throwbacks, like Dexys (formerly Dexys Midnight Runners), a band I’d assumed had fallen into a tar pit in the 1980s sometime after harshing everybody’s clubgoing experience with one of the dumbest songs in radio-pop history, “Come On Eileen,” you may remember it but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. The singer had a voice like an actual horse, a whinny that no other singer reproduced until the guy from The Darkness showed up to put the kibosh on the arena-metal resurgence that was gathering strength during the Aughts, and then Greta Van Fleet crawled out of some Dearborn, Michigan, swamp to finish the job, shamelessly ripping off random bits of Led Zeppelin’s oeuvre without adding a single atom of originality, and that takes us to now, with bluesy arena-metal having been destroyed again a la Jason Voorhees from the Friday The 13th films, until the next doomed reboot. Ironically enough, Dexys has a guy in their band who looks a lot like the singer from Greta Van Fleet, or at least he did before the band got old and gray and plush, nowadays all those guys look like famous TikTok dad-joke specialist Dan McFarland, the guy who does gag loops like bringing his own tape measure to Home Depot and the one when everyone in the family ducks for cover behind couches and chairs when he sneezes, because when an old dad wearing comfy New Balance lawn-mowing sneakers sneezes it produces Super Typhoon-level winds (nowadays if the missus and I are in Hobby Lobby for some ungodly reason and I have to sneeze, I rear back like Daenerys Targaryen’s dragon from Game Of Thrones and see if I can make all the unpainted birdhouses on the shelves rattle). Right, where were we, oh, the band goes by simply “Dexys” nowadays, and has since 2003, after founder Kevin Rowland failed twice to revive the band, which had broken up in 1985. Maybe there’s some character to be found somewhere on the band’s fast-approaching new album, LOVE, let me listen to the new single, “You’ve Got The Love.” Yikes, this sounds like Paul Anka covering a 1970s disco song in Las Vegas, why doesn’t the singer sound like a horse, what is even going on in this world anymore.

• As everyone knows, the Hannaford supermarket chain has not one but two national anthems. Every time you go into one of those places it’s like you suddenly went back in time 25-plus years, as you’re guaranteed to hear them both: Natalie Imbruglia’s 1997 anxiety-triggering hit “Torn,” followed by Michelle Branch’s 2001 angst-a-thon “All I Wanted” shortly afterward. There’s some sort of behavioral experiment involved there, maybe some subliminal message meant to convince us that we should buy organic avocados or something, and it’s really gotten dated-sounding, so hopefully they’ll switch to something from Algorithm, Imbruglia’s new album, due out Friday. Right, the title track has the same beat as Men Without Hats’ “Safety Dance” and sounds like it was left off Madonna’s “Vogue” album, so probably forget it.

• Black Bananas is a trio founded by former Royal Trux singer Jennifer Herrema. The band’s first LP in 10 years is Bad Bunch, whose single “Turkey Burgers” has the same sweeping vibe as M83’s “Jessie And Kim” if you like that kind of stuff.

• We’ll close with Australian indie-folk siblings Angus & Julia Stone’s sixth album, Karaoke Bar. This one’s title track is slow and gloomy, sort of like if Bon Iver and Sigur Ros had a baby, I can’t stand it myself, but you do you.

Featured Photo: Stryper, Throne Of Thorns and Brennan Wedl, Brennan Wedl

Stryper, Throne Of Thorns (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

Oh, sure, I remember these guys from their hair-metal heyday in the ’80s. I never believed a word of their claiming to be a “Christian metal” band, given that when I was in the business myself I almost got trolled into co-creating such an act myself: A demented, incorrigible heathen in the Manchvegas hard rock scene wanted to get some backing for us to do a record, and we both agreed that the fastest way to get things going would be to get a rich Christian fundamentalist to throw us a bucket of money to “rock out for the Lord” and we could be as derivative as we wanted, which Stryper was at their peak. I remember listening to them once and noting that they sounded like low-rent Iron Maiden wannabes, which brings us to now, and voila, the title track opens the record up with a thinly disguised ripoff of Mayyy-den’s “Where Eagles Dare,” Michael Sweet’s amateurish vocals leading the charge. “Here In Your Heart” follows, re-establishing their masterful way with uninspiring mid-tempo Accept-ish schlock rock. Absolutely nothing new here; these guys still couldn’t write an interesting riff if Satan himself were threatening to boil them alive. C

Brennan Wedl, Brennan Wedl (ANTI- Records)

Sure, this self-described “Nashville wench rocker” is fine for what she is, in case you can’t bear another minute without a new Sheryl Crow album. Because that’s who this Minnesota native sounds like, although she does try to emphasize the sassy side of country-tinged jangle-rock (lots of nasty mugging with her tongue out and such), a habit she developed while co-piloting the queercore outfit Dazey & The Scouts in the mid-2010s. Her eventual failure will be that she sounds way too much like Crow, which is too bad, given that her songwriting is actually quite good, as demonstrated in “Let’s Be Models,” and she does have a rockout side, which we hear in “Pretty Little Fantasy,” its blocky guitar line recalling scratchy old Mountain records from the 1960s. Actually, “Two Dollar Pistol” is decent, too, for a strummy rocker that sounds like, you know, Sheryl Crow; in the end what’s missing is more dobro and pedal steel, which is tendered in a few Bonnaroo-worthy spots from journeyman Colin Croom, but not enough to distract from the 30,000-pound elephant in the room. B

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The new CD releases of Friday, Aug. 28, are here, the summer is over, can I get a do-over on the whole thing before we’re back to freezing water pipes and polar bears going through the trash again? OK, now think back, remember when Alabama Shakes first appeared on the scene and the mainstream press wouldn’t shut up about them for five seconds? I mean, there was good reason for it, given that singer-guitarist Brittany Howard is a world-class frontperson and the band’s music is like an alternative-universe Dave Matthews in which songs are mildly interesting, but I still don’t get what the fuss was/is; the press made it sound like the band was a slovenly, deeply rootsy DIY act a la Cigar Box Serenaders, which they are not. At any rate, their new LP I Must Be Dreaming includes the ’70s-soul-tinted single “I Feel Hope Coming,” a cross between Roberta Flack and Sadé. On Sept. 5 they’ll be playing at Koussevitzky Music Shed in Lenox, Mass.

• Interesting character, this Ty Segall guy, no relation to Steven Segal, given that his last name is spelled differently. He’s a garage/stoner-rocker from Laguna Beach, California, and is on record complaining that MTV’s stupid-brained mid-Aughts reality TV series Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County drove out all the interesting hippies and surfers and whatnot who made the place awesome, because suddenly it was too expensive to live there. Learning that reminded me of a newspaper article I wrote in my Portsmouth Herald weekly column in 2003 about the sudden inexplicable appearance of horrible greed-monsters in the Port City buying up apartment buildings where one used to be able to rent a 400-square-foot place for $450 a month and then partitioning them into hilariously cramped little “condos” and selling them to tedious yuppie families from Boston, which drove every last cool person in the city north to Ogunquit, Maine, such a terrible timeline. So recently Segall had a burst of creativity, which is usually a bad thing, but in this case it isn’t, as his trip is no-wave-adjacent and quite loud; he’s releasing two things this Friday, an EP titled Love Fuzzz and an album called Chrome. The reason for this mini-flood of music product is that he’s very happy with his new band, as he should be; the guitar sound on the latter release’s doomy “Running To Nowhere” is so filthy and groovy it would make Queens Of The Stone Age run for the hills. I approve of its message.

• If you’re cool, or you unironically read music magazines like Nylon, a vice that lowers your coolness level significantly, I’m sure you’ve heard of LA Priest, real name Sam Eastgate, of the British dance-glam-prog band Late Of The Pier, which broke up in 2010. Oh what am I even doing, none of this will be on the test, most Americans haven’t taken a British band seriously since Oasis, let me just go listen to the title track from Eastgate’s new album, Into The Sky. Well isn’t this special, zoomy 16-bit-video-game music fit for Gran Turismo or whatnot, something Daft Punk might have thrown together in three minutes to soundtrack the unveiling of the iPhone Pro Max 18 at whatever insufferable Apple conference, where they’ll also mention that the upgrade price will be going up again even though Apple got two billion dollars as a “tariff rebate” that should have gone to their customers. Big whoop.

• And finally we have Aughts-indie darlings Interpol with their newest LP, This Mirror Weighs A Ton. If you’re a fan of theirs, you’ve probably already heard the first single, “See Out Loud,” a dark, tuneless, ’80s-jangling trifle; the album opens with “Iron City,” a tune that sounds like Coldplay after listening to too much Depeche Mode.

Featured Photo: Stryper, Throne Of Thorns and Brennan Wedl, Brennan Wedl

Miguel Zenón & Luis Perdomo, El Arte del Bolero Vol. 3 (Miel Music)

Relevance check: The Hispanic and Latino community is a rapidly growing demographic in Manchester, N.H., making up approximately 13.5 to 14 percent of the city’s total population, or more than 15,000 residents, making it one of the largest and most vibrant multicultural communities in the state. Bolero and tango are two major components of the citizenry’s musical heritage, and this, the third full-length collection from sax player Zenón and pianist Perdomo, is, along with its unbridled romp into pure artistry, something of an archaeological expedition. These two have played together in Zenón’s quartet for 27 years, and the second volume in this series resulted in their winning a Grammy in 2024 for Best Latin Jazz Album; in other words there’s no questioning their qualifications, which here table sweeping, clever and above all romantic renderings of pieces like “El Día Que Me Quieras,” co-written by Argentinean music idol Carlos Gardel, renowned for defining the tango genre in the early 1900s. This wasn’t what I expected at all; it focuses on Latin music’s melodic patterning as opposed to its familiar percussion-driven vibe. A+

Anthony Moore with AKA & Friends, On Beacon Hill (Drag City Records)

There’s a renewed push for this November 2025-released album, so I leapt at the chance to get the vinyl version sent to me, not because I know Moore from SpongeBob SquarePants but because casual investigation showed that it was indeed unfairly overlooked and, in short, Something Important. At 77, Britisher Moore has a formidable CV, having collaborated with Pink Floyd (three co-writer credits on 1987’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason and “Wearing the Inside Out” on The Division Bell’) and Julian Lennon (on Help Yourself). The songs here are rerubs of tunes he’s recorded over the decades, including the single “World Service” from 1981 and other period pieces; thus it serves as both reminiscence and introduction, revealing the Floyd collaboratorship as logical: The songs are slow, saddish but not mawkish, i.e. there’s a psychedelic element at work, but fans of Nick Cave — especially his most morose records, like Ghosteen — will assuredly get a lot out of this. A-

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, Aug. 21, what can you even say? Not only is it a day of new album releases for you, it marks many historic events in rock ’n’ roll history! For example, on Aug. 21, 1965, the Rolling Stones scored their first U.S. No. 1 album with Out of Our Heads, an album I’d never heard of until today, because I never cared! Let me look, OK, aside from “Heart Of Stone” and some other song I’m not familiar with, the album consisted of cover versions of old blues songs from people like Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke and waitwhat, Sonny Bono, from Sonny and Cher! Well, it actually makes sense, because back in those days, before the internet or cars or fire, Sonny Bono was a songwriter, not the sad television clown you all know him as, if you’re kind of old. OK, if you’re definitely old, but enough history filler, what you really want to know is what’s going on with Brandon Flowers, the singer from Killers, but there’s not much to tell, since he doesn’t get into beefs, because he is Mormon, who even knew. His third solo album is titled THRASHER, yes, in all caps, because whatever; it is a concept album serving as follow-up to the Killers’ 2021 album Pressure Machine. Like that one, this new one is a triptych of Flowers’ childhood growing up in Nephi, Utah, and is influenced by vintage artists like Johnny Cash, which explains the gospel-singalong-ish Grand Ole Opry vibe of leadoff single “Paradise.” He’ll be at Roadrunner in the snobby Brighton neighborhood of Boston on Sept. 23.
• Vermont native Grace Potter used to be in Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, but then she fell in love with her record producer, which caused her bandmate-husband Matt Burr to go “oh no you didn’t” and the band broke up, but before you start, she did end up marrying the producer guy. She is on her own these days, currently hawking her sixth album, Trespasser. The single “Love Me Not” is a rather interesting slow-rocker combining sounds remindful of both KT Tunstall (when she still had a few songwriting ideas) and Melissa Etheridge (because that’s who Potter usually sounds like, in other words half the songs you thought were Etheridge were actually done by this lady, and vice versa). Her 2026 tour will come very close to our state on Sept. 12 at River Ruckus in Haverhill, Mass.

• Ah yes, Weezer, the voice of an awkward, horribly mistreated generation, they are releasing their 20th album this week, once again titled Weezer, but this time everyone will refer to it as The Gold Album. If you’re one of the band’s fans, you’ve likely already heard the initial single, “Shine Again,” featuring a decent doomy-grungy guitar line that rips off Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy,” which is of course itself a ripoff of most Weezer songs; the second single was “We Might as Well Be Strangers,” featuring a guest spot from shoegaze-slacker band Wednesday. That song is unbelievably lifeless and sounds completely phoned in, but for all I know you will relate to its message of suburban misery or whatever the guy who looks like Rick Moranis is singing about. These guys will play at TD Garden in Boston on Sept. 27.

• We’ll stick a fork in this exercise with Mystery Jets, an indie-pop/post-punk band from Eel Pie Island, situated in the River Thames in London; the people of that island are constantly bombarded with noise because the island is in the flight path of lots of flights coming in and out of Heathrow Airport, which is essentially how they invented their band name. A Hole To See The Sky Through, the band’s seventh LP, includes the title track, which is really cool, like Yes in rockout mode, or Supertramp if they didn’t suck.

Featured Photo: Miguel Zenón & Luis Perdomo, El Arte del Bolero Vol. 3 and Anthony Moore with AKA & Friends, On Beacon Hill

Litvar, Being Here (self-released)

As anyone who’s ever tried to achieve it knows, going internet-viral in a positive way through a song or a TikTok isn’t nearly as easy as becoming infamous for doing or saying something so stupid that it goes viral simply for setting all humankind acringe simultaneously. Luck is a major factor in that nonsense; years ago I lost track of all the doomed-to-obscure songs I’d encountered that were so good they actually rewired my head, so nowadays I’ve just accepted the fact that some artists couldn’t buy a break for all the wintergreen Skoal in Alabama. Add this Connecticut-based Americana-meets-emo band to that tragic list: Four years ago these guys released a single, “No One Tastes Like You,” that combined the jangle of Tom Petty’s “American Girl” with Hoobastank’s face-punchiness, and amazingly no one’s heard about it. In this one, instead of throwing up their hands and going in a straightforward emo direction like most bands would have, they want to be Goo Goo Dolls-ish, which works half the time and not the rest. The songs are fine, but more layering and another couple of months futzing in the studio would have added more to the songs; this feels like a demo for label interest, which it may well be, and if that’s the case, then bravo. B–

Stare Away, In Absence (á La Carte Records)

Oh, how this New York City dude (Ben Nelson) wants it to be the ’80s again, not that anyone could blame him when there’s so much corporate-designed, 3D-printed suckage in the pop sphere. Problem for Nelson is that the goth-rock world has, for better or worse, a massive array of sounds to choose from nowadays and therefore doesn’t need a teardown-rebuild; it’s not enough to try sounding exactly like The Cure, which this record accomplishes during its first four songs, with quite a bit of verisimilitude over the first two, droning churners that are fast and kind of neat but start wearing out their welcome when it becomes obvious not a lot is going to happen. Then along comes the fifth entry, “Midnight Martyr” (oh come on already, goths, for once, try not to sound like you get all your ideas from early Aughts manga comics), in which Nelson remembers that he loves Depeche Mode too, oh, and Dead Or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round,” let’s go disco! At least his heart is in the right place, OK? B-

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• And on we trudge to the new CD releases of Friday, Aug. 14, what am I even doing, I’ve only been to the beach once this summer, what about you? I’m kind of surprised I haven’t been alerted to any upcoming new holiday albums yet, but there’s still time, 134 days to be specific, until Christmas, will there even be one this year, or will we be randomly bombing the Zagros mountains totally winning the war in wherever-it-is again that week? It’s too early to tell, but what I do know is that we have albums to discuss, starting with Comes In Waves, the 24th album from one of America’s most well-known nepo babies, Carly Simon, daughter of Richard, co-founder of publishing giant Simon & Schuster, don’t you love how giant piles of money can make someone into a famous singer even though their voice sounds like an ostrich yelling for saltines? No, I do have to hand it to her, though; even though Carly is at the stage of her career when most of her formaldehyde-pickled A-list peers are doing all-duet albums with people like Engelbert Humperdinck and Ed Sheeran and Pope Leo XIV and actual Santa Claus, this album is just another one in which she palms off a bunch of songs she actually wrote or bought or whatever she usually does, like the only guest feat is from Andreas Vollenweider, a Swiss guy who won a Grammy for playing the harp at yoga conferences or whatever his deal is. But all snark aside, I always liked some of her songs, “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” in particular, and she’s still a very good songwriter, evidenced by the new single “Howl,” sounding as 1970s-radio as ever aside from Carly’s voice, which is about 80 percent gone, like she sounds like a female Willie Nelson, not that she doesn’t have every excuse for that.
• Cool, let’s keep it going with something else that doesn’t actually suck for once, the new one from Pasadena, California, folktronica lady Phoebe Bridgers! The record is called Lost Weekend, and it showcases the multiple Grammy winner at the top of her game; she started out with Brooklyn-based avant-rock band Sloppy Jane before hatting out on her own, which led to feats on tracks from Taylor Swift, The Killers, Kid Cudi and others. So yeah, folktronica, indietronica and guitar-tronica tuneage usually rubs me the right way, and that goes for the sample track from this one, “Lost Boys,” a joint that combines Fleetwood Mac and acoustic-mode Taylor Swift, powered by a chorus that’s so lush and wide it almost makes me want to say nice normal things. She’ll be at TD Garden in Boston on Oct. 6.

• Aaand so much for this week’s streak of decent songs, but your mileage may vary with regard to You Say I Romanticize, the new LP from Sweeping Promises, a female post-punk duo originally from Boston and now based in Kansas. This new album features a song called “Cocoon,” which will make you think of early Cars, Lydia Lunch, New Order and Gang Of Four all at the same time, or at least it did to me. It’s grungy and slovenly and angular enough, which is nice, but there’s a Pavement element that turned me off. They’ll be at Deep Cuts (formerly Carroll’s) in Medford, Mass., on Nov. 6.

• We’ll put a bow on this week’s mixed bag with Australian chanteuse Grace Cummings, whose influences include Irish folk music, Townes Van Zandt, Bob Dylan and Lucinda Williams in case you’re curious (I’m sure none of this stuff sounds like any of those people, that’s what always happens). Bloodhorse is the album, the push single is “I’m Not Crazy,” just imagine Lana Del Rey trying krautrock on for size and you’ll know whether you can stand it or not, I certainly can’t.

Featured Photo: Litvar, Being Here and Stare Away, In Absence

Ian Sweet, Shiverstruck (Polyvinyl Records)

I get it, the Chappell Roan copycatting will continue until morale improves, or something to that effect, but stay tuned, because this Los Angeles-based indie singer hasn’t quite settled on a sound, it looks like. She (real name Jillian Medford) started out by making interesting records; her first album, Shapeshifter, was an amalgam of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Raveonettes and a few other good things, and Stereogum loved it, and then she went in a Mazzy Star direction in 2021 with Show Me How You Disappear, which I suppose is a relatively similar sound to the Roan worship we hear on focus single “Wild Heart,” but admittedly it isn’t without some of the Jay Som-with-a-pulse ideas she’s tried before. What does that word salad mean? Well, think Karen O meets Roan, and with regard to the latter, she’s put together some seriously angsty atmospherics that are so vibrant they’ll probably fool many people into thinking it is Roan. This all isn’t to say it’s not good stuff; there’s nothing wrong with being doubly derivative. Either way, she’ll be at The Press Room in Portsmouth on Oct. 15. B

Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, Ellington Masterworks (MCG Jazz Records)

Huge-sounding collection of Ellington obscurities tendered by this (depending on the day) 17-member Washington, D.C.-based outfit. That’s refreshing, given that usually such homages are larded with well-known chestnuts like “Prelude to a Kiss” and of course “Sophisticated Lady.” So this one’s a more or less chronologically arranged set of (verified) rarities (the band had around a thousand tunes to choose from that Ellington had written during his half century of work), beginning with 1940’s “The Flaming Sword,” a number derived from “Panama” (no, not the Van Halen song), a thumping, Latin-infused swing joint that recalls (obviously) Benny Goodman. Clocking in at over 12 minutes, 1948’s “Tattooed Bride” rises from a slow-burn to take the listener on what feels like a speedboat ride over busy waves, “built into a W-shape” with irregular phrasing. I noticed that some of the individual songs, though obscure, have inspired academics to give them the full wonk treatment; there are no poor choices here. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Aug. 7 is this Friday, which means new CD releases, which means we have stuff to talk about, as long as there are some new CDs coming out! It just so happens that there are, but first, you’ve seen me talk before about my favorite joke band, Mac Sabbath, the Los Angeles-based outfit the Village Voice called “Hieronymus Bosch meets My Little Pony,” which isn’t something I’d have written, but I haven’t contributed to the Voice family of newspapers for many years now, if there even is one anymore. No, in case you forgot (recommended), this band — comprising Ronald Osbourne, Slayer MacCheeze, Grimalice and Catburglar — plays Black Sabbath covers dressed up as Ronald McDonald, the Hamburglar and whatnot, but they futz with the lyrics, turning them into political screeds disguised as rants about fast food. I think it’s hysterical; Ronald McDonald has seen other dark parodists through the years, like YouTube’s RakkaRakka guys, who portray Ronald as a demented homicidal lunatic, I suppose you’d have to see it to appreciate it. Anyway, I was pleased to hear that this band is on tour and will be in Worcester, Mass., at The Palladium on Dec. 9, I might actually go to it myself. Now, turning to (only slightly) less comedic news, widely hailed California indie-folk band The Mountain Goats are back this week, with their count-em 24th LP, Days, which is said to be a not-very-serious look back at previous cultural tropes through the last few decades, for example the lead single “Charlie Sheen Reaches Out to the Feds,” an examination of Sheen’s “tiger blood” period. The tune is a thrumming, no-wave-ish tune that sounds like something Pavement might do if they were trying to be punky and weren’t one of the worst bands in history, I like it just fine.
• OK what’s this, I’ve never heard of The Anchoress, have you? Of course you haven’t, she’s popular with edgy people in England, so nobody in this country knows she even exists. Possessed of a Ph.D. in literature and queer theory, her real name is Catherine Davies; she wrote a book about epic poetry titled Whitman’s Queer Children, and when she’s not doing stuff like that, she’s producing her own indie-pop albums, like her new one, As We Once Were! You might like the single “Throw Over Your Man” if you like Kate Bush and/or Florence + The Machine; I like them myself and admire that this lady is trying to sound cool, but as with most New Music Express-approved bands from the U.K., the song really goes nowhere. And now you know why you’ve never heard of her.

• Oh yay, here we go again, another album from filmmaker John Carpenter, who directed such films as The Thing and Halloween. In case you missed it, this is a regular thing: Once every year, this film-directing man puts out an album mostly made of synth cheese that might have been relevant in 1981, and no one’s been able to stop him (if you want to know what I’ve had to endure from this guy for the last few albums, most of the amateurish three-chord music in his films was written by him). And so, like Charlie Brown running to kick the football Lucy’s going to yank away, I’ll go listen to something called “Lord of the Underground” from his new album, Cathedral! Yikes, it’s ’80s monster metal, like slow King Diamond, but no singing, just some evil choral stuff! Does anyone buy his records?

• And finally it’s Canadian indie band Kiwi Jr. with their fourth album, Blowin’ Up, whose title track sounds like They Might Be Giants covering a Cars song, it’s OK.

Featured Photo: Ian Sweet, Shiverstruck and Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, Ellington Masterworks.