Author: Eric Saeger

Hollan Holmes, Inside the Sound of Decay (self-released)

Nice surprise here. Usually when an album waddles in here claiming to be “ambient,” I expect to hear something chintzy and low-rent like Daedalus or whatnot (if you don’t know who Daedalus is, count your blessings), but wow, this Texas-based producer is doing a lot here, so much so that such zines as Sonic Immersion and Ambient Visions have sat up and taken notice. Yes, there’s a lot of barely filled space in the tuneage, but this is no Tales From Topographic Oceans; in fact I got the sense that Holmes was constantly ready to start rocking out, which he does almost in clockwork fashion every couple of minutes or so, tabling some next-level video game-soundtracking-ish gravitas, retro Tangerine Dream techno, or even more retro-sounding Return To Forever ’80s prog. Matter of fact, toward the latter, I’d say that’s what this record evinces more than anything else, a nod to ’80s snob-rock, not that there’s anything wrong with that at all, particularly given the state of the art. A+

Reba McEntire, “One Night In Tulsa” (Nine North Records)

OK, stay calm, hipsters, there’s a gag in here somewhere. Reba is something of a running joke in my household, given that my wife’s from Texas (I can get her to start twanging like a complete hillbilly if I walk around the house doing my Foghorn Leghorn-meets-Deliverance-guy imitation for a few minutes); like, whenever there’s nothing even mildly interesting on cable (when is there?) I ask her if she wants me to put it on Reba on CMT. Anyway, this (of course) overblown, over-produced, Celine Dion-style yell-ballad single is pretty freaking good if you enjoy having your lacrimal glands squeezed like lemons (I don’t, but the last Wicked movie did have me sniffling through most of it, which was somehow soul-enriching). But the funny bit here is that along with this tune, she’s releasing a bunch of new singles and mini-EPs and such over the next couple of weeks, which is evidence that the music industry is taking its product-release-schedule ideas from the rap world. Now, if that’s not hilarious, I don’t know what is. A

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The new music albums scheduled to be released this Friday, April 24, are on the docket, and, as always, I am full of hope that at least one will be decent when I preview them for you in this multiple award-winning music-preview column. Speaking of that, a lot of people message me with questions like, “Hey, man, what is your writing process, like, how does your tummy withstand all the horrible music you expose yourself to on a weekly basis, and plus also, P.S., I hate you forever because of what you said about the new ___ album, why are you so stupid?” Well, that’s a two-part question, so after endeavoring to triangulate the hypotenuse of the biscuit, I’ll reveal my writing process, which is a simple one: You see, ever since I was old enough to construct a run-on sentence — I think I was in second grade — every time I see a blank page, be it physical sheet of ink-ready whatever, like a priceless ancient Egyptian scroll, or a virtual void like a Word document window that’s empty except for a popup bubble of Progressive Insurance spam, I feel compelled to fill it with stuff. That’s the secret, folks. Born writers — and I consider myself to be one, given that I’ve published two obscure books and “penned” (now there’s a word that needs to die) a music column for 23 years now — don’t know what “writer’s block” is even like. Now as to the second segment of the question, the answer can be found within the verbiage of the first segment: I’d be a lot less stupid if 98 percent of the music I listen to every week in order to fill this space with stuff weren’t so bloody awful, boring and/or derivative. While I’m at it, I may as well go full meta with a confession: Like most weeks, today I tried to write most of the opening riff of this multiple award-yadda yadda before even looking at the list of new albums I’ll cover here. So let’s do that now, look at the list. Ah, here’s one that’ll make a nice curveball, put on your cowboy hats, fam, it’s Georgia blockhead Jason Aldean with his 12th LP, Songs About Us! Will there be a politically annoying video for the new single, “Dust On The Bottle,” like when he did the blockheaded video for his 2023 tune “Try That in a Small Town,” or is the new one just a normal drinking song? Yup, it’s the latter, they’re sitting on stools, just pickin’ and grinnin’, you know how it goes, the tune rips off the riff from Electric Light Orchestra’s “Do Ya,” and it’s about drinking, what more do you people even need?

• Meghan Trainor, now there’s a familiar name, the gal who did the novelty twerking song “All About That Bass,” were you aware of that silly thing or were you gainfully employed and happily existing without twerking songs? She grew up in Nantucket, Mass., which automatically qualifies her as a nepo baby; her parents are jewelers, on Nantucket, do you have any idea what a string of plastic Mardi Gras beads costs in a Nantucket gift shop, probably $8,000 plus Massachusetts tax! But wait, she’s not just a nepo baby, she’s also a one-hit wonder who hasn’t broken the Top Ten since “…Bass,” but maybe “Still Don’t Care” from her new album Toy With Me will break the spell — nope, it’s just “All About The Bass” if The Corrs had done it. Avoid.

• Is it OK to talk about Foo Fighters again (not that I want to) or is Dave Grohl still canceled for being creepy? Whatever, their new one, Your Favorite Toy, includes its title track, which is pretty neat if you ever liked No Wave music, and I hope you did.

• We’ll call it a multiple award-winning column with Canadian indie band Metric, whose new LP, Romanticize The Dive, features the single “Time Is A Bomb,” a listenable-enough song that’s part Garbage and part Echosmith, I don’t hate it.

Featured Photo: Hollan Holmes, Inside the Sound of Decay and Reba McEntire, “One Night In Tulsa”

The Alarm, Transformation (Twenty First Century/Virgin Records)

This may or may not be the final album from this Welsh new-wave band under its original name, whose tuneage I’ve previously described as a kinder, gentler Clash or a more aggressive U2. Last year, bandleader Mike Peters finally lost his battle with the cancer that had been attacking him for 30 years; Peters’ son Evan is now fronting the band as “The Alarm Presented by Evan Peters,” while original bassist Eddie McDonald is leading “The Alarm 2.0,” but whatever, this may be it for The Alarm proper, a band that was maligned since birth in the British press for being derivative and pretentious and only scored one hit in the U.S. (“Sold Me Down the River,” which ripped off “Bang A Gong,” for the Gen Xers who can remember all that stuff). This one leads off with “New Life,” which, um, derivatively enough, is basically a jam-out version of Gary Glitter’s “Rock n Roll Part 2.” But most of the other songs are fine, like “Chimera,” a stadium-ready protest-stomper that’s a lot better than that U2 EP I reviewed here the other week, if you’re a fan who needs to read some faint praise. B

Anyma and Lisa, “Bad Angel” (Interscope Records)

You know, if there’s anything that gets on my nerves about the current timeline with regard to the music-tastemaking space, it’s the blinding array of collaborations between (mostly disparate) artists. I mean, I get that we’re in a post-band/post-album world, but every other day it seems like there’s a new pair of strange bedfellows barfing out a single that wants to squeeze money out of today’s youth, a cohort that’s of course more concerned with preserving what’s left of their mental health than maintaining their hipness level. Records like this one remind me of the one-off Marvel Team-Up comic books of my youth, which were cynically intended to, among other things, expose regular Iron Man readers to the improbable world of the Silver Surfer, that sort of thing. This tune, with its dark, melodic techno, could have just as easily been promoted as an “Anyma feat Lisa” joint and added to his next ÆDEN album or whatnot; Lisa’s just got more ethereal reverb/next-gen-Autotune effectage on her vanilla-diva voice here than usual. It’s not any more interesting than Chris Avantgarde’s stuff, let’s say, and furthermore — oh, wait, I get it, she’s headlining Coachella this year, that’s what this is about. Well played, Interscope, well played (eyeroll emoji). D+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, April 17, is almost here, my dudes, so what will you do to advance the cause of rock ’n’ roll in our republic on that album release day? Just look at all the new albums that are coming out that day, the bigly-est albums ever in the history of the universe, until next Friday! Look at all these new albums, and never even mind that it’s already too late to talk about The World Is To Dig, the new one from famous Weezer-for-dummies children’s band They Might Be Giants, who did the Malcolm in the Middle song at the dawn of the Aughts, before the last flickers of hope for humanity began to falter, remember those days, and all the faltering? Yup, it’s too late to talk about this new They Might Be Giants album, because that one actually came out on Tuesday, even though Tuesdays stopped serving as the traditional album release weekday in 2015, according to this pesky spamming Google AI bot, who says “Tuesdays officially stopped being the traditional day for album releases in the United States on July 10, 2015, when the industry shifted to ‘Global Release Day’ (or New Music Fridays) to align releases with Fridays in more than 45 countries, reducing music piracy and syncing with streaming culture.” Of course, that tradition has been obsolete for years now, now that everyone simply uses YouTube-to-MP3 sites to rip music for their mixtapes, naïvely expecting their virus protection software to — you know, protect them from viruses, which it can’t when people are practically begging to get hacked, but can’t we just stick to Global Release Day Fridays anyway? Is nothing sacred anymore, but belay that patently naïve question, nothing has been sacred since Walmart started making their people work on Thanksgiving starting in the 1980s (that is until 2020, when even Walmart realized how stupid that was). But let’s just pretend They Might Whatever weren’t the Walmart of children’s emo bands and were putting out their new album this Friday, what would I say about their new single, “Wu-Tang?” Well, I’d probably say that it was an uninteresting, strummy, mid-tempo children’s singalong that has no Wu Tang guest-feats on it, but it’s too late to talk about it, so let’s just move along.

• Canadian DJ/producer Tiga releases “Hotlife” this week. As always, “Hot Wife” is a fun and silly track, but this time it is slow and stompy and makes use of the “Bugatti snare” drum sound, which impressed one YouTube commenter enough to make a fuss about it, which was kind of stupid to see. The tune is a collaboration with German producer Boys Noize, who’s usually pretty selective about whom he collaborates with (which is neat and everything, but I’m sure if the Muppets called he’d be on the next flight. See how the Matrix works?).

• Honey Dijon (Honey Redmond) is a renowned Black American DJ, producer and fashion icon with an energetic DJ style that leans heavily on “golden-era disco, techno and house,” so maybe her new single “The Nightlife” from her new album Nightlife will be fun to listen to and have nothing to do with the old 1978 Alicia Bridges song, because my nerves can only handle so much today. Nope, this song is a torchy sexytime thing in the vein of Kylie Minogue, I don’t mind it.

• And finally it’s Canadian alt-rock band Arkells with a new LP titled Between Us. “Next Summer” is a pretty neat tune, catchy, the singer is really good in an old-school way, like a cross between Michael Bolton and the dude from The Outfield (just Google them, guys).

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: Anyma and Lisa, “Bad Angel” and The Alarm, Transformation

Lee & Dr. G, Girl For Me (self-released)

Although they both cut their teeth in different parts of the country, these two blues-guitar brothers-from-other-mothers, Lee Durham and Brandon Gauthier, have built a sizable following in New Hampshire, where they met and joined forces in 2023. They’ve logged hundreds of shows in the area, culminating in this debut album’s release show at Concord’s Bank of New Hampshire stage in December, a bullet point that should tell you they’re serious about putting the state on the record industry map, at least so they don’t have to go back to slugging it out in L.A. or Nashville, where they did have some success individually. Their net vibe is, as Hippo’s own Michael Witthaus observed, a sort of “psycho-delic” approach to blues, one part Chuck Berry to one part jam-band-meets-Pink Floyd immersion, with looong rootsy passages being driven into your brain until you can’t help but — admire the sound, whether as a musician or a fan. No, there’s something here for sure, at the very least a combination of selflessness between two wonderfully talented guitar soloists and a desire to rebirth their 70-year-old genre, no easy trick. They absolutely deserve your support, so get out there, would you? A+

Neurosis, An Undying Love For A Burning World (Neurot Recordings)

I’m not a fan of this vanguard sludge-metal band, and, um, uh, never really was, but nevertheless I figured it was as good a time as any to see how my tummy would react to this new album, given that some of you are under the mistaken impression that just because I’ll review other self-indulgent doom-soundscapers like Sunn(((O))) it means I approve of this kind of thing. I don’t, but they’re your ears, and if you really like the idea of hearing a blitzed caveman roaring over endless wall-of-sound extreme-metal ringouts, that’s on you. The ever-ridiculous YouTuber Needle Drop reviewed this and took issue with some chord changes here and there but praised it for something or other (does anyone really watch that guy’s videos for the purpose of musical edification?); I was more struck by the guitar solos, some of which are pretty musical but which convey the same comically depressing, angsty vibe as the rest of the tuneage, like every record that the Earache label put out in the Aughts. But knock yourself out, you have my blessing. B-

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Moving right along, the warmer weather is coming quick, in fits and starts and total fake-outs, so naturally new albums are beginning to pile up, all of them hoping to soundtrack your summer. Let’s pretend you have expendable income and can buy one or all of the albums releasing this Friday, April 10, which one(s) to choose? Maybe it’s the new one for all you Generation X grandparents, Hope And Fury by Joe Jackson, who was famous in the 1980s for the incel national anthem, “Is She Really Going Out With Him,” which everybody thought was Elvis Costello because it sounded exactly like him (and, well, half the songs that came out from pub-pop bands in the ’80s). He also had a hit with the almost as awful “Look Sharp,” but what I remember most from that dude was a totally ignored song from the Look Sharp album, called “Fools In Love,” because back in those days I was a young rock singer on a mission, the wildly idiotic sort of mission that only 20-year-olds who hate college take on: For a year straight, I tried out for every single band in the Boston area that put out an ad for one, and I mean literally every single one, and got an offer from all of them because apparently there were no other singers in the city. Now, because they were all Boston bands, they were mostly unworkable, in fact there was only one band I actually thought was kind of neat. Unfortunately I can’t say their name in this family-oriented newspaper, but they really did have some cool songs, but no way was I going to drive from my apartment in Nashua, New Hampshire, to Stoughton, Mass., three nights a week for a band with no record contract and no hope of ever getting one because stupid band name, but I almost did, but anyway, right, Joe Jackson, so there was a band composed of really good musicians in (I think) Medford, Mass., sort of a joke band, but they were good, and they made me learn “Fools in Love,” a really stupid ska/reggae tune that totally ripped off Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives,” but somehow I didn’t mind it and still remember most of the words to this day, and that is my Joe Jackson story. Anyhow, I’m going to check out what this Elvis Costello clone person is doing these days right now by listening to the advance single “Welcome to Burning-By-Sea,” which sure looks like something British oi-rock, I’m sure it’s dumb. Yup, he’s doing this cockney comedy act during the intro, nope, it’s through the whole song, he’s singing about stuff like fish and chips and getting into bar fights, it’s kind of fun, with a tribal beat and cockney yelling, but I won’t ever listen to it again.

• Ah, another Chappell Roan wannabe heard from, this time it’s British singer Holly Humberstone, with her new album Cruel World, whose title tune is flirty and awkward and sounds exactly like, you know, Chappell Roan, big deal, next.

• Wow, English electronic-music dude and showoff-y bassist Squarepusher is still around? His new album Kammerkonzert includes a new tune called “K2 Central” that’s sort of acid-jazz-y and I suppose pretty neat if you like to hear a lot of really busy bassplaying and mindless prog experimentation.

• We’ll close with Jessie Ware, who’s also British, like everyone mentioned in today’s column, bob’s your uncle! Superbloom is her new full-length; its single, “I Could Get Used To This” sounds like Mariah Carey trying to be Lana Del Rey, which is pretty — marketable I suppose.

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: Lee & Dr. G, Girl For Me and Neurosis, An Undying Love For A Burning World

I See Orange, “Wine Boy” (self-released)

Eh, this is fine, if not exactly groundbreaking. This three-piece buzz-band is from the U.K., where they’re slowly rolling out what’s expected to be a major debut album. They’ve done showcases at New York City’s New Colossus Festival and Austin’s SxSW, catapulting their brand of “post-grunge” (in other words grunge) rock into the hype stratosphere, but for now we’re relegated to just a few tunes, including this one, whose lyrics focus on Mexican-born singer/bassist Giselle Medina’s fascination with the popular consumption of red wine in the U.K., where it’s considered a casual social drink, as opposed to Mexico, where it’s enjoyed in a more refined, serious manner. As for the sound, it’s choppy, paint-by-numbers Dave Grohl stuff; guitarist Cameron Hill adjusted all the knobs on his Marshall stack to bring maximum earache potential, while Medina’s wispy, moonbatty soprano tries to make things interesting but only succeeds in conjuring a metal version of the average Gilmore Girls soundtrack tune. This band will go far, I’m sure, but it doesn’t deserve it really. C+

Jon Anderson, Survival And Other Stories (Frontiers Music)

This one’s for Yes completists only, a vinyl-and-CD re-release of the singer’s 2011 LP, which was widely rejected by fans for its lack of progressive rock; Anderson’s focus at the time of this release was on New Age feel-good vibes, given that he had just had a health scare. But it’s not hopeless at all; the fact is that Yes did a lot of stuff like this back in their early days, stuff that the strummy, upbeat “New New World” resurrects, and yes, I’m talking about the mellower moments of Close To The Edge, not to put too fine of a point on it. But OK, “Understanding Truth” jumps the hippy-dippy shark for me, with its unplugged guitar and Anderson’s helium-filled, totally-not-falsetto-it’s-true vocals settling all the good yogis down around the campfire. Speaking of yoga class, “Unbroken Spirit” reads like Christopher Franke’s 1996 pseudo-soundtrack to The Celestine Prophecy, a record that had plenty of similarly nice, pleasant, loping stuff on it. In the end, as I implied, it’s for superfans, reiki practitioners, etc. B+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Our next album-dump Friday is April 3, two days after April Fool’s Day, a national holiday whose origins are uncertain but likely stem from a mix of European traditions. One popular theory blames France’s 1564 adoption of the Gregorian calendar, which moved New Year’s Day from April 1 to Jan. 1 (which is kind of dumb if you ask me, since one is more likely to die of frostbite after passing out drunk from multiple New Year’s toasts in January than in April), and people who were slow to adapt were mocked as “April fools,” isn’t that kind of transgressive? Well, whatever, nowadays in America pranking people is a national pastime of which I fully approve, especially when it involves someone dumping unwelcome news on me and then going “April fools, no, dummy, Creed isn’t releasing an album with Justin Bieber, so you don’t have to listen to and review any such thing, had you going though, didn’t I?” In that vein, I hope I’m not getting trolled by telling you people that Grammy-winning American bassist Thundercat releases his fifth album, Disappointed, this week! This one includes feats from A$AP Rocky, WILLOW, Channel Tres, Lil Yachty and Tame Impala, the latter of which appears on the tune “No More Lies,” which I only listened to because focus single “I Wish I Didn’t Waste Your Time” rubbed me the right way in a breezy yacht-techno sense. That hinted that the Tame Impala appearance would be even cooler than usual, given that I’ve liked Tame Impala’s mellow-but-edgy approach since the first time I heard them. However, “No More Lies” is slightly louder and more soul-infused than “I Wish…,” deep-fried in reverb, like what MGMT would have sounded like if they’d been around in 1974. If you’re trying to parse all this information, I’m saying that it’s good and you should go check it out.

• Seattle-based drone band Sunn O))) is at it again, with a new, self-titled album, because it’s so cool to self-title one of your albums after you’ve already been around for 28 years! If you are totally unaware of these guys you’re excused, because their stuff is largely unfollowable on purpose; they specialize in overly long metal-guitar ringouts that go on forever. They’re basically a metal version of Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans, an infamous exercise in self-indulgence, but some people have convinced themselves that they get something out of listening to Sunn O))), so I will not argue about it but will instead toddle off to YouTube to listen to the rollout track, “Glory Back,” and report back about how self-indulgent it is. Yup, I’m back, a full 10 minutes later, to report that it’s tedious, consisting of like five chords played very slowly, but with the guitar tuned so low that it feels like being digested by a tyrannosaurus rex. No, imagine if your little brother bought a vintage Marshall amp and was warming up to play something from Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality, but that’s all he ever did, strum a few chords as if trying to summon Cthulhu, that’s all this is.

• Cripes what’s next. Charley Crockett is a cowboy-hat singer from Texas who sounds like a cross between Jim Croce and Buck Owens on the twangy, lazy single “Kentucky Too Long” from his new LP, Age Of The Ram. Why do country music artists always have to have at least one song on every album that name-checks a southern state in the title? No, seriously, text me, because I really want to know.

• We’ll call it a week with U.K.-based R&B-popper Arlo Parks’s new one, Ambiguous Desire! “Impurities” is a very listenable trip-hoppish chillout featuring a full palette of ’80s-pop sound; her high-pitched singing fits in pleasantly in the yadda yadda. She’ll be in Boston at the Royale on Sept. 1.

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: I See Orange, “Wine Boy” and Jon Anderson, Survival And Other Stories

Flesh Field, On Enmity (self-released)

Some of you may remember the goth phase I was processing in these pages back in the Aughts. In those days I was always thrilled to get a new pile of CDs from Metropolis Records, until I wasn’t, when the same-sameness of the label’s artists began to wear me out. Unfortunately for this guy — an American industrial DJ who (and I didn’t know this until just now) earned a master’s degree in international policy studies with a focus on counter-terrorism (!) — his 2004 album Strain came in for review when I was kinda sick of goth. Not that the album was bad, it simply didn’t have quite enough sonic variety for it to stand out. This one, however, is different. The ideas are similar, borrowed from the usual suspects, such as Gravity Kills, Rammstein and of course Depeche Mode, but there’s some pretty cool experimentation afoot. Opener “Omnicide” gallops and rolls in the vein of Marilyn Manson but actually harder, whereas tracks like “Indestructible” lean on sounds made famous by Trent Reznor while nevertheless sounding fresh. I’d expect the folks at Manchvegas’ Resurrection “goth night” show at Jewel nightclub would be into this (yes, I’ll be checking that place out hopefully soon, so stay tuned). A+

Big Harp, Runs to Blue (Saddle Creek Records)

Prior to bringing their act (and marriage) to Los Angeles, this alt-country duo had been active in bands on the Omaha, Nebraska, indie scene: Chris Senseney was in the group Art in Manila, while Stefanie Drootin played with names that were more household-y, including none other than Bright Eyes, Azure Ray, and She & Him. Their approach is low-key and intimate, focused on poignant songwriting that centers on Senseney’s unstressed, bottom-dwelling baritone, whilst Drootin supplies the helium with bluegrass-tinted harmonies. I could tell you that it’s lazy campfire-oriented stuff, but remember that they’ve been in the big leagues for a while, so their past cover of The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” wasn’t out of the question for their repertoire, nor was it too Los Angelized. No, the net effect here is basically like having Josh and Jennifer Turner serenade you in their living room while something pleasantly slow-cooks in the oven. Definitely manna for the Bonnaroo crowd. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Onward, my trolls, to Friday, March 27, and its slate of new rock ’n’ roll albums, for all you “coolios” out there, or however you identify yourselves these days! At this writing we just survived the 70-degree days of “fake summer” and are presently watching the snow melt Up To A Point as winter resurfaces like Jason from Friday The 13th, bringing abject despair back to our hinterlands, so some decent music jump-scaring everyone from the blackness of our great cultural Crystal Lake would be great for taking the edge off, wouldn’t it? And look at that, a new album from José González, titled Against The Dying Of The Light, is on the docket, so I am mildly excited, or at least not completely disappointed. Maybe you know this soft-voiced Swedish singing man from his solo hits, like “Heartbeats,” or perhaps when he was in the band Junip, but to me, he’ll always be associated with Zero 7, when he sang a few tracks on their 2006 album The Garden; its music was like a cross between Massive Attack and whatever that meatless yacht rock stuff was that used to play over K-Mart’s loudspeakers during the 1970s and ’80s. Do you remember the weird smell in those K-Mart stores? It smelled like a mixture of melted Barbie dolls and human desperation, but nevertheless I miss having other stores besides Walmart or Target to visit when I needed to buy something I knew nobody would have, back when there were other retail choices before Amazon.com took over all of U.S. retail except for those two stores. Those were the days, weren’t they, boomers and X’ers, with Bradlees and Ames and whatnot, but no more, now everybody just buys everything online from Jeff Bezos, the actual real-life Grinch, who refuses to let his Amazon delivery drivers eat any hobo beans until they’ve made sure everyone on their route has had all their floo-floovers, Who-hoopers, and trum-tookas delivered straight to their door instead of having to go outside and touch grass and maybe even accidentally see their neighbors for the first time in months, which would of course pose the mortal danger of citizens actually talking to each other, whereupon the question of whether or not we actually like never having to leave the house for any reason whatsoever might come up. But I digress, because there are column inches to befoul with nonsense, so, circling back to José González, I assume most of you young twerking coolios have never even heard of Zero 7 and instead know him from some other project, but I’ll bet you the title track from this album sounds either like Zero 7 or “Heartbeats” and — yup, it’s a warm, mellow song with a psychedelic Spacemen 3 chorus. There’s nothing wrong with it; you may take that as a breathless rave from this correspondent.

• Flea is the bass player from Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band that, I was delighted to find recently, has a lot of fellow haters with whom I developed fast friendships. But rather than dwell on that, let’s see if I can stomach “Traffic Lights,” from his upcoming new album, Honora! Ack, The bass work is fine, and there are random Vegas-jazz horns, but Thom Yorke from Radiohead is singing, which would ruin any decent vibe.

• The New Pornographers are an indie band from Vancouver, which is promising. Their new LP, The Former Site Of, features “Votive,” an interesting little tune that combines Guided By Voices with literally any electro band that’s more interesting than Guided By Voices (that’s all of ’em Katie). They’ll be at The Wilbur in Boston on April 22.

• Lastly it’s Swedish electro-popper Robyn with her new Sexistential album! The title track is bratty and sexy and threatens to drop-explode like Orbital’s “Wonky” but basically gives up and just sits around being, you know, bratty and sexy, big whoop.

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: Flesh Field, On Enmity and Big Harp, Runs to Blue.

Cactus, Temple Of Blues II (Cleopatra Records)

With his Pedro Pascal looks, Carmine Appice (the actual pronunciation of which is “app-uh-cee,” a riddle that’s confused rock journos for decades now, probably because his equally famous brother Vinnie says it differently) has been one of rock’s premier drummers since the Flower Power days, when he was with Vanilla Fudge. This LP and its predecessor, 2024’s Temple Of The Blues, boast some of arena-rock’s biggest GOATs, shredding away at (you guessed it) blues tunes that would feel as antiquated as a Richard Nixon speech if they were performed by (almost) anyone else. On the whole, the sound is monstrously heavy after an old-school fashion, but it comes from a rotating stage of players who’ve all been around. The proceedings start with Eric “Raw Dog” Gales aiming his world-renowned guitar at anything that moves in a cover of Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man” (yes, the same tune covered by The Doors on their 1967 debut album), and things just get crazier from there: Older dudes who read Guitar Player magazine “for the articles, nudge-wink” have plenty to lose their minds over, including feats from Pat Travers, Ty Tabor and Bumblefoot, but the bass roster is also stacked: Billy Sheehan, Rudy Sarzo and Jimmy Haslip. Old-timers will love every second of this. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Gary Lucas, The Edge Of Heaven, Vol 2 (self-released)

Follow-up collection of midcentury (mostly 1930s and ’40s) Chinese pop music from the trio of guitarist Lucas, singer/Chinese-stringed-instrument virtuoso Feifei Yang, and multi-instrumentalist Jason Candler. This one caught my eye because my wife has been completely immersed of late in antique Chinese fiction; it’s not what my pathetically Americanized ears were expecting at all, at least not until the third track, “New Pair Of Flowers,” a classic Chinese pop number that was most famously performed in the ’30s by Chow Hsuan, aka “The Golden Voice of China.” Yang’s two-stringed erhu colors the whole thing, evincing the playful joy with which its high-pitched, oft-typecasted sound is most often associated by Westerners. You’ll also find plenty of modern jazz-inflected melodies, but everything here is intended to mark the record’s release date, Feb. 7, the start of the Year of the Fire Horse in Chinese culture. Other artists celebrated here are Bai Kwong (a sensual, husky-voiced singer known as the “Mae West of China”) and Yao Lee (ironically, an instrumental version of her “Rose Rose I Love You”; Lee’s dubbed vocals were lip-synched by various Chinese actresses in the movies from the 1940s on). A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The next Friday-load of new albums will arrive on March 20, and now for your periodic reminder that you shouldn’t ever feel compelled to force-feed your ears a particular band’s music just because your friends seem to like them. Case in point: A dear Facebook “friend-quaintance” admitted to me recently that he “felt pressured to like” Postal Service, one of the worst bands I’ve ever heard. He was having trouble with it, so I tried talking him out of it. Now, I know that a lot of you people can relate to losing precious days or hours “trying to like” this or that band, maybe because the music you actually like is considered dated and you think your brain needs an upgrade. I would tell you this: If you listen to a good-enough number of songs by a band and all you get out of it is alienation and a desire never to hear them again, you should simply give up and go back to trying new bands or just stick with your favorites. Enjoying music isn’t a competition. It’s OK to be like the character Juno MacGuff in the movie Juno, when she tells her boyfriend she thinks Sonic Youth sucks, because honestly, a lot of people loved that moment, when she finally made it safe for people to point out the fact that they have sucked since Day 1. Same goes for almost every single “indie” band that’s emerged from Boston since the Lemonheads (Mission Of Burma, anyone?). Am I qualified to discuss this nonsense? Yes, but you are too, which is the point of this segue. Twenty-two years ago I started doing actual music review columns for actual newspapers and I have been forced to “try to like” entire genres ever since. Now, in our example, Postal Service is an easy one to dissect. Quite simply, they put out nothing but total suckage. The fact that Gibbard took Jimmy Figurine seriously enough to collaborate with him in Postal Service is irrefutable proof that Death Cab has a fatal flaw in its DNA, not that it hasn’t always been totally obvious.

Years ago, a Hippo writer lumped Postal Service and Clinic together, partly in order to dismiss certain indie bands as horrible, which many are. I disagreed with him in that particular instance, because to me, despite the fact that they screw up their song structures on purpose, Clinic’s very noisy core sound is awesome, with the doctor masks and the horribly distorted guitars. So if you want to post about why you hate indie music, it’s best to leave Clinic out of it. Just do a little research: A billion bands have tried to sound like The Strokes and failed, so pick one of those losers or be brave and just go with Arctic Monkeys. It’s not hard to find a lousy indie band, just do the research. OK, at any rate, speaking of force-feeding myself music I don’t care about, Kanye West, now known as Ye, releases his new album Bully this week, or maybe the next, according to some Redditors who hate him and don’t think it’ll ever drop, no one really knows. An advance song had some stupid AI stuff on it, which, surprise, made his haters hate him even more. Anyway, that.

• I’ve liked most of the music I’ve heard from British electronic band Ladytron in the past, and their new album Paradises didn’t disappoint — much, anyway. The disposable but very listenable single “Kingdom Undersea” is ’80s all the way, part Depeche Mode, part Pet Shop Boys.

• Superstar K-pop boyband BTS releases Arirang this week, and every snippet I’ve heard from it has been so overly epic it makes M83 look like a kazoo band.

• We’ll call it a week with cowboy-hat singer Luke Combs, who is from Huntersville, North Carolina. His new LP, The Way I Am, is a sexytime dobro-powered makeout song for cowboys and the heavily twanging gals who put up with them. —Eric W. Saeger

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: Cactus, Temple Of Blues II and Gary Lucas, The Edge Of Heaven, Vol 2