Author: Eric Saeger

Candy Whips, Artificial Melodies (Kitten Robot Records)

This northern California fivesome label their stuff ‘’post-glam” or “accidental goth,” the latter of which is more fitting in my opinion. It’s quite angular, this; to me the tldr description would be Gang of Four sitting around smoking joints with Lord Of The New Church, what with the ’80s-cheesing, mellotron-emulating synth; the resolute, minimalist guitar-chonking and the Stiv Bator vocals of (male) vocalist Wendy Stonehenge. Formulaically, the recipe calls for an Aughts-era verse-bridge structure in the vein of early Cure and such, that is to say the tunes want to take us someplace but don’t always arrive, and yet the journey is nevertheless pleasant enough (that’s especially true of “A Drop Will Do,” an alcoholism-admission story that’s the most phoned-in-sounding thing on board). But there are a lot of cool things in this set, such as “Strange Taste,” with its urgent, no-wave-ish anti-riff. Melodically on point, only rarely bogged down with performative subtlety. A

Kilmara, Journey To The Sun (RPM Records)

The rise of “melodic power metal” is in sync with the same epic-ness we hear in nearly every musical genre nowadays (save for indie of course, whose soil’s been depleted since the 1980s owing to the majority of its bands having more disposable recording money than actual artistry). People don’t have time nor patience for buildup anymore; they want the show-stopping mega-melody now or they go back to social media. We’ve heard it for years from emo-rock bands, pop divas, etc. and now it’s even on the big screen: A year from now, no one will remember that aside from “Defying Gravity” the soundtrack to Wicked is pretty awful (a friend remarked on Bluesky that Stephen Schwartz hasn’t written a decent score since 1970’s Godspell). Unlike Wicked, the fifth album from this Barcelona, Spain-based quintet, is wall-to-wall showstoppers, but sorry folks, sometimes you just have to wait for the big hook-gasm. In other words, conceptually and musically, it’s a fine tracing from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra template, but with more speed when they feel like going for it. I could picture some of this stuff bringing a tear to some metal-head’s eye; such a funny, funny world we live in now. A

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• On Dec. 13, a few new albums will come out and be dumped into the Spotifies and the retail stores that carry music CDs for purchase, do stores even do that anymore? I suppose they do, particularly stores that sell vinyl albums for 1890s Victrola record-playing machines, because they know that certain people fancy themselves as “audiophiles”; they enjoy listening to vinyl records so that they can hear mistakes in old recordings, like they like to go “Woop! Hear that, Petunia? Ringo hit the rim of the snare drum, not the head, lolol, he must have been drunk on the reefers, you know?” No, I’m just funnin’ with you vinyl junkies; by now everyone knows that CDs simply can’t capture many frequencies, like the sound of unintentional rimshots by Ringo or the dulcet tones of groupies power-barfing in the booth; instead, all the sounds get squished together in an aural trash compactor, so the only way you can detect that Jimmy Page has too much treble on his guitar (didn’t he always?) is to suffer through the vinyl versions of 55-year-old Led Zeppelin songs! Speaking of Ringo Starr, he has a new country album coming out Jan. 10, called Look Up, but I’ll save the snarky CSI on that for later, since chances are there won’t be much else for me to talk about in this award-winning column during the first two weeks of the new year. In the meantime, we can point and laugh at Snoop Dogg, whose new album is out this Friday. It is titled Missionary, because Snoop actually invented sex during the time of the pharaohs, and it is produced by famous producing producer Dr. Dre, because why not! One of the singles, “Another Part of Me,” features Police bassist and tantric-sexytime man Sting; the tune borrows Outkast’s steez, reimagining the Police’s “SOS” as a shuffle tune with lyrics about living in L.A. and dealing with people shooting at you because they’re bored or whatever. It’s actually a marked improvement over the original (I know, I know).

• Wait, don’t run off yet, here’s one that’s awesome, a posthumous album from a rapping feller I actually like, DMX! We all know that the D-Man was always big into spittin’ about his faith on his first six-or-so albums, but on this new one, Let Us Pray: Chapter X, there’s more prayin’ than rappin’! Grammy award-winning producer Warryn Campbell set DMX’s prayers to music for the first time on this groundbreaking project that fuses hip-hop to gospel; it includes features from Killer Mike, Snoop, LeCrae and MC Lyte. In “Favor,” DMX thanks the lord for blessing him with fame and such; there’s straight-up praying and some trademark rhyming, super cool stuff.

• I assume you may not know much about British indie-dance act Saint Etienne despite their being around for nearly 35 years. Their trip is blending velvet-rope dance stuff with ’60s pop and whatnot, but on “Daydream,” the single for their latest LP, The Night, you’ll hear straight-ahead trance stuff a la Oceanlab. It’s great, you should listen to it.

• We’ll end the week with Rome, the new live album from Cincinnati, Ohio, post-punk revival band The National! Includes a version of the (very) Kings Of Leon-like “I Need My Girl,” a sad and mawkish rawk ballad that may move you, I don’t know for sure.

Kodak Black, Trill Bill (Capitol Records)

This Florida-based rapper boasts the necessary cachet to make him relevant to the current generation of working-class rap fans, a cohort who seemed to have completely lost the thread of whom to be mad at. This, the second mixtape he released in November, pushes the trappy single “News Matt,” characterized by a twin vocal track that’s bluesy, intentionally sloppy and horror-movie-ready in its tonality; his swagger is still there, no worries. Lots of melody here, such as in the arpeggiated piano lines of opener “Cherish The Moment,” the cheese-soaked ’80s-keyboard-driven “Dirty Revolver” and the five-star-hotel-lobby-evoking “Maybach Van.” Not much to report in the way of percussion; nearly every drum line is identical, but that’s of course secondary. As always the idea is to microwave 30-year-old tropes from New Jack City (he even gave away a truck full of turkeys on Thanksgiving, not kidding). B

Calum Scott and Christina Perri, “Kid At Christmas” (Capitol Records)

Oops, looks like I spoke too soon in the Playlist about the end of this year’s new holiday records, although in my defense it’s rare for me to be advised about new ones after the second week of November. This one’s a pop duet between 2015’s Britain’s Got Talent winner Scott and heavily tattooed American singer-songwriter Perri, whose debut single “Jar of Hearts” was featured on American TV’s So You Think You Can Dance in 2010. Bless their hearts, these two wanted to create a single that’d become a “seasonal classic is for the grown-ups out there who still get a certain warm, fuzzy feeling in wintertime” and they do make an effort in this mawkish and (spoiler) vocally muscular happy-ballad. The result is something that’s too nuanced and important-sounding to be dismissed as a throwaway tune sung by the cookie-shop owner and her (hopefully future!) beau in the latest Hallmark Christmas movie, but not by much really. B

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• As far as the retail stores are concerned, it’s been Christmas for many weeks now. On the day after Halloween, the ever-present danger becomes real, rolling itself out slowly: We walk into our Targets and Walmarts and malls just waiting to hear the first strains of Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree.” It’s always that one we hear first, with its half-plugged, anodyne Chuck Berry-ish guitar, an insidious, innocent-sounding ditty bespeaking casual joyfulness, nostalgia-loaded quaintness and buying signals, a warning shot before everything descends into a frenzy, culminating in thunderously metal versions of “Carol of the Bells” while we drive around semi-aimlessly through impossible traffic, searching the stores for that one gift we Simply Must Get. For me this year — and I can talk about this here because my wife probably hasn’t read this column for years now (familiarity does breed inappreciation, not that I’d enjoy discussing my “writing process” every week with some breathlessly gushing admirer) the Simply Must Get is some coffee mugs to replace the ones she loves: Robert Gordon Hug Mugs, the “Blue Storm” pattern in specific. Of the original four she bought years ago, only one survives today; like disposable characters in a slasher film, the other three met their ends in fiendishly clever ways. The next-to-last one expired when the handle simply fell off when I was washing it last week. Given that there’s no way I’m paying $110 to have four new Blue Storm mugs imported from Australia, I’ll start my search this week; I’ll pop into the hilariously overpriced kitchen-and-bath chain stores (funny how those companies never survive more than three years, isn’t it?) and try to find the closest match. I’m hoping to get that mission accomplished before the stores shift into full-blown “last minute/final warning” mode of the holiday shopping season, when every single place you walk into, from Hot Topic to Dollar Tree, has Andy Williams’ “The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year” playing overhead, just to remind you that “you’re out of time, let’s cough it up already, buddy, that’d be great.” Speaking of that, the Christmas album-buying season has pretty much already ended, although the new Netflix special A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter will show up on Friday, Dec. 6, featuring the ridiculously overexposed young diva duetting with Shania Twain among others. Hard pass of course.

• It may be too late for Christmas albums, but it’s never too late for older artists to microwave some Beatles songs for a quick buck or posterity or whatnot! We talked about Americana/country singer Lucinda Williams a few months ago, and I think I also mentioned that Abbey Road is the only Beatles album I can stand, so lucky for me (or someone), Williams will release Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road this Friday, the 6th! Naturally, the song I like the least on that album, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” is the teaser single. It’s kind of noisy, which is a positive.

• If you’d ever wanted a more sedate, epically melodic Prodigy, you may have gravitated to New York art-rock band Geese, and if you like Geese, you may like the first solo album from Geese frontman Cameron Winter, Heavy Metal, but then again maybe not! In the first single, indie piano-ballad “$0,” Winter does a low-voiced nick of a drunken Thom Yorke. I couldn’t deal with it very long but maybe his mom likes it.

• And finally it’s Austin, Texas, garage rockers White Denim, with 12, their 12th album if you don’t count their 2023 collaboration LP with Raze Regal and one or two other releases. Whatever, “Light On” combines the sounds of Relayer-era Yes with Mungo Jerry for no reason whatsoever, not that it’s officially bad.

Blue Moods, Force and Grace (Posi-Tone Records)

American jazz trumpet legend Freddie Hubbard has been gone since 2008, and of course he’ll never be forgotten, especially not by the — let’s just say it, often snobby crowd (mostly composed of deeply obsessed jazz musicians) who can rattle off a mile-long list of his most interesting instrumental maneuvers. This is the third “Blue Moods” release — or curation, if you will — from Posi-Tone, and it aims to address that very disconnect, wherein non-standard originals by various masters are made inaccessible to new fans possessed of an ounce of curiosity about what led to our current age of anything-goes-but-only-up-to-a-point era of jazz. There’s much beauty and whiz-bang-ery here, of course, but the smoothness of the songs is the most striking aspect of the collection; in such compositions as “On The Que-Tee,” the players — a quartet led by sax player Diego Rivera, assisted by an alternating pair of pianists — seem to want to jam forever, and the listener finds themself wishing for exactly that. Sublime and wonderful, this. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Peter Murphy & Boy George, “Let The Flowers Grow” (Metropolis Records)

Now that 2024’s culture-war-rooted election is over, it’s safe to say that this chill-electro single can be listened to with open minds from all corners, particularly since it’s such an exquisite little tune. The story here is that this highly unlikely team-up of ’80s icons (Boy George, who needs no introduction, and Peter Murphy of goth legends Bauhaus) coalesced when Murphy heard a work-in-progress demo of George’s half-finished tune, fell in love with it and finished it up in 20 minutes. It’s a melancholy but hopeful piece of chill-techno balladry with plenty of retro-’80s sound to it, lyrically dedicated to the process of coming out, a reality I experienced recently with someone close to me, someone I’d long casually surmised was gay but from whom I’d never expected to hear an admission thereof. The pair sing of a mother’s tears watering the ground so that flowers can grow, of a father facing an alternate-universe mirror image of himself for the first time. This thing isn’t just powerful, it’s supremely empowering; the video is absolutely amazing. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nov. 29 isn’t just any Friday filled with new album releases, it is a Black Friday, the jolliest time of the year, when all the bands and record companies prepare for a relentless onslaught of random album-buying, from consumers, who have holiday gifts to buy! For people in the music-selling business, it’s that time of year that recalls the scene in the 1975 film Jaws, when all the nice townspeople gather at the town meeting to discuss why they must keep the beaches open even though there’s a humongous shark swimming around looking for human-shaped snacks; in this metaphorical context, the record companies need you people to buy albums even though most of those albums will swallow your aesthetic senses whole, in one bite, nom nom nom, leaving you butt-twerking or believing that bands like Franz Ferdinand are composed of decent musicians! Extending this ridiculous violation of literary license, you can just think of me as Quint: I’ll protect all you nice people from awful bands and DJs and nepo-baby singers named after European cities, but it’ll cost you, and you’ll need to load up my boat with fresh boxes of saltines! OK, let’s put on our rubber diving suits, hop into the totally safe aluminum shark cage, and dive into the blackness to see what we’ll find, maybe there’s something good! Uh oh, here comes a big one, it’s corporate-soundtrack-maker Bear McCreary with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2: Amazon Original Series Soundtrack, when did J.R.R. Tolkien have time to write more stories about Bilbo Baggins, I wonder. I do have Amazon Prime but haven’t watched that show, is it as good as those other Game of Thrones cartoons or whatever they are? I don’t know, but I do know that the leadoff track from this album is “Old Tom Bombadil,” and it features Rufus Wainwright, singing in his folky Bono-meets-Pete Seeger tenor, warbling Tolkien’s words verbatim from the chapters “The Old Forest” and “In the House of Tom Bombadil” from The Fellowship of the Ring. I gather that this denotes a depressing scene in the show, which, again, I have not watched, because I don’t watch sad cartoons about dragons.

• Onward and whatnot, let’s dissect an actual holiday album, Christmas Vacation, from cowboy-hat singer Walker Hayes. This singing man is of course a nepo baby (drink!), the son of a rich U.S. congressperson, but I will not hold that against him, because he likes jingle bells and Santa just like normal people do. Unfortunately, the “Christmas Vacation” in this case has nothing to do with the Chevy Chase movie, it is a twangy country-Christmas joke song about how awkward it is when Grandma brings over her new boyfriend and how it’s so funny that the ashes of her first husband, your grandfather, are kept in an urn and that you have to drink your yearly holiday beer toast with his urn all alone and it’s weird. You know how it is, right?

• Yes, it’s holiday time, a special time for those of you who are so rich you just throw money out your car window. If you’re that rich and you’re also a fan of former Cream guitarist Eric Clapton, you’ll want to know about Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival 2023, a $90 box set featuring every star from Joe Bonamassa to Molly Tuttle playing random songs. Look at this, there’s H.E.R. playing a cover of Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way,” the least uninteresting thing on board.

• Lastly it’s famous indie rock band Wilco with Hot Sun Cool Shroud, an EP featuring six or seven tunes they left off their 2023 Cousin album. “Hot Sun” is a pretty neat mid-tempo thing, utilizing an edgy-poppy-edgy song structure. —Eric W. Saegerr

Peggy Lee and Cole Schmidt, Forever Stories of: Moving Parties (Earshift Music)

Meanwhile, out past Pluto into the Kuiper Belt, we arrive on the asteroid I usually don’t bring up in this space, experimental pan-jazz that no one knows about and mostly never will. For the most part, as you may know, jazz is at its heart a “conversational” art, which, in our capitalist context, usually involves one-upsmanship, but this sort of borderline-avant expressionism is a whole other duck, capturing the musicians’ moods at the time of recording. Peggy Lee (cello) and the hilariously overextended Cole Schmidt (Sick Boss’s guitarist) are from Vancouver, and this is their first effort as co-leaders. There are electronics afoot here, as well as guest contributors playing such instruments as bassoon, violin, trumpet and piano to various effects. “Blame” opens the record on a genial note, evoking not the rather dark titular subject but a friendly group walk to an urban coffee shop that’s preparing to close for the night. “It Will Come Back” has a lot of melodic appeal past its borderline dissonant intro; “Absences” offers more sonic schizophrenia, a mixture of afterparty steez and gaslit oddballness. Surprisingly listenable. A

DQFI, “Changes” (Nub Music)

This Saint Albans, U.K.-based band’s acronym signifies “Don’t Quite Fit In,” does that sound familiar to anyone who’s ever stanned a rock band before, anyone at all? I committed to giving this release a look-see before discovering it’s a single and not an LP, so I took it as an exercise in self-punishment and “at least you’ll learn something out of it,” like, I knew there wasn’t going to be much going on. And there isn’t. The band’s trip is sounding exactly like The Runaways did in the 1970s, but with a twist: They’re into positivity, man, because there’s so much, you know, negativity in the world! Have you heard about that? OK, OK, I’m not going to douse all you nice eyeball-equipped people in redundant nihilism; after all, the Brady Bunch band was singing “Sunshine Day” in 1972, the year the Watergate scandal broke and the Olympics were interrupted by a rather unsightly terrorist incident, so why not sing about “holding up a light” and building unity in a world where _____ and ____. I mean, why not, Ben Kweller’s a millionaire, so that old broken clock in the sky is completely right twice a day, you know? B

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Time to go buy your frozen turkey and hope it’ll be thawed within the next few days, folks, because this Friday, Nov. 22, is the last Friday before Thanksgiving, when you and your uncle will yell at each other about politics and your dog will amble over to the den to get away from it, because although Rover avoids reading any decent, informative political books just like you two do, he chooses not to start trouble over it! Awful, isn’t it, but the good news is that Ice T is back with his rap-metal band, Body Count, remember when their first album was the coolest thing in the world, before the ole Ice-man became a car insurance salesman on the teevee? Merciless is this album’s title, and — OMG, OMG, this is simply too awesome, it includes a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” but because the Ice Monster is awesome, it starts with the cool guitar solo instead of making us sit through any boring preliminary nonsense, and then he starts rapping low and menacingly about how tough it is in the hood, like, you know how it is when your local Whole Foods doesn’t have any [censored] organic avocados and you [censored] have to walk out empty-handed, with your teevee car salesman money still in your Gucci wallet, don’t you [censored] hate that [censored] [censored]!

• If you ever take a drive to Cancelville and take a walk downtown, mayhaps to stroll around the hilly, well-kept paths of Harvey Weinstein City Park or pop into Cosmo Kramer’s Tast-E Freeze to grab a yummy chocolate frappe, chances are good that you will run into one or more celebrities who can no longer show their faces in public or post things on social media without getting yelled at by everyone who sees them! Why? Because all those celebrities are canceled, like industrial-pop circus clown Marilyn Manson, who, all you ’90s kids will recall, (allegedly) stole his “monster-dude-on stilts” gimmick from Skinny Puppy, without ever asking permission. He was (allegedly) never sued for that, but it doesn’t matter because, as all you People magazine readers know, he eventually got his, but good: He got in so much trouble for all the stupid stuff he (allegedly) did to his former girlfriends that he had to move into the Motel 6 on Johnny Depp Boulevard until he could find new digs, in Cancelville’s tony upper east side! But the plight of celebrities who (allegedly) came out as morons and got mightily canceled by people on the internet is not why we’re here, we’re here to talk about Marilyn’s new album, One Assassination Under God – Chapter 1, please try to be civil! His big record contract was voided because, you know, obviously (allegedly!), so now he is on Nuclear Blast Records, an indie label that also puts out albums from, um, well, Green Lung and 100 other bands you’ve never heard of, it’s all so sad, fam. The single I’m listening to is “Sacrilegious,” a tune that tries to revive the glory days of “Beautiful People” but just sort of flops around, and he doesn’t sound very enthusiastic, but neither would you if your next-door neighbor was Kevin Spacey.

• Irish arena-pop band U2 has a new record, How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, which is a “shadow album” of 10 discarded songs from 2004’s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. “Country Mile” is one of these new songs, a microwaved meatloaf of uninteresting ideas that only serves to prove that even the mighty U2 can write amazingly boring songs, as if we didn’t know.

• Lastly it’s Kim Deal’s new album, Nobody Loves You More, which features the single “Crystal Breath,” a perfectly fine no-wave grinder, do go listen to it.

Ron Carter & Art Farmer, Live At Sweet Basil (Arkadia Records)

This release, newly pressed in 180-gram premium virgin vinyl, captures a dream band of jazz legends jamming at the famed New York City club, which they did in order to tick a more-or-less mandatory checkbox in the band’s “We Played Here” list; everyone had played shows there from its mid-1970s opening onward. This 1990 performance finds the players at the top of their respective games: Ron Carter on bass, Art Farmer on trumpet and flumpet, Cedar Walton on piano, and Billy Higgins on drums. Each member wrote at least one tune for this album, which kicks off with one of Carter’s, “It’s About Time,” wherein Farmer immediately moves into trumpet-soloing mode while Carter noodles underneath most expressively. That’s just for starters; for another thing, a 10-minute rendering of “My Funny Valentine” finds the band taking their deliciously sweet time with the melodies. Walton and Higgins had a long coworking history, as evidenced by their flawless, seemingly preternatural canoodling, but the whole smash is deep-stewed for timelessness. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Hattie Webb, Wild Medicine (self-released)

Here’s to the semi-obscure side musicians: This Kent, U.K.-bred singer and harpist, along with her sister, Charley, just finished a tour with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, the sort of elite-level gig that’s nothing new to them (in the past they’ve joined bands like Lumineers and Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, and even performed for Queen Elizabeth II once). This solo album finds Hattie playing the role of a lilting goddess, opening with “Shakespeare’s Shores,” which, at least in a syncopatic sense, is a distant cousin to Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” (hey, man, I always do try to provide some point of reference, regardless of propriety). Despite the obvious ren-faire ambiance that comes with this territory, there’s nonetheless an Americana vibe wafting through these pieces; I swear I heard a dobro in there, but it certainly could have been my cat’s snoring. Either way, you get the gist — the freaking Queen rocked out to this stuff, guys — it’s intended for ruminating, sipping tea, and other putterings. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• What’s up, guys, I hate to remind you, but I hope you’re not doing anything silly with your money these days, like buying cans of ramen noodle packs just to keep your weight up in these hilariously broke times, because guess what’s coming, that’s right, it’s the holidays! What does it all mean? It means you have to start seriously thinking about buying presents for people who won’t appreciate them, unless they actually want one of the albums that’s coming out in time for the holiday season, maybe for example one of the albums that are coming out this Friday, Nov. 15! Holy Toledo, look at all these new albums, coming for your “discretionary spending money” (ha ha, remember that crazy stuff?) like a flock of geese who want you to give ’em your stale old Pop-Tarts! Yes, sorry, folks, why not get it out of the way now and buy one of these albums before the inevitable $800 car repair bill comes up, just like it does every year when you least want it to happen, so let’s look at your choices, I am here to help you, my little elves! Oops, let me start by donning my Stetson hat, adjusting the spurs on my boots, and throwing a case of toxic-smelling American beer in the back of my Chevy pickup, as we start off the week with Reboot II, the new album from cowboy troubadours Brooks & Dunn! You may have heard of this country duo, given that they get literally billions of YouTube views and sell gorillions of albums, which could probably be chalked up to the fact that the band makes sure we music journalist bros can’t escape them, like, they’ve probably sent me 200 albums over the years. Not saying they like me personally; they never include an introductory letter or anything, they just expect me not to be stupid and to know who they are, which is good marketing I suppose, like, if The Beatles put out a new album, they’d just send it to me with no note saying, “Hello Eric, I hope that you are doing OK in these apocalyptic times” and simply expect me to write about it, in this multiple-award-winning newspaper column! Well, let me tell you, I won’t be treated like some nobody who’s never won an award. In fact, I’ll — oh never mind, let’s just get this over with, by listening to the new single, a re-recording of one of their previous hits, “Play Something Country!” The guest singer for this rerub is Lainey Wilson, who does her yodel-singing routine over this old ZZ Top-like tune, like, if ZZ Top heard this, they’d probably sue these guys for copyright infringement, not that I’m trying to cause any trouble!

• Former interesting person Gwen Stefani is nevertheless still groovy and “swell” in the opinion of all you crazy rock ’n’ roll fans out there, right? Well, no matter, she has a new album out this Friday, Bouquet, whose cover photo depicts her in a cowboy hat, like we were just talking about, in case you already forgot! She is married to Blake Shelton nowadays, so it’s no surprise she’s going in a country direction. The single, “Somebody Else’s,” is a Sugarland-tinged semi-rocker in which Stefani sounds like every other lukewarm diva out there, kind of just clocking in. You know.

• Alt-metal band Linkin Park has entered a new era after the passing of Chester Bennington. Their first LP since 2017, From Zero, streets this week and features the aggressive La Roux-like vocals of new co-lead singer Emily Armstrong! The single, “Over Each Other,” is loud, melodic and catchy, you may very well like it!

• And finally it’s hip-hop-soul legend Mary J. Blige, with her new album, Gratitude, which includes the single “Breathing,” guested by stoned-sounding spitter Fabolous! Its sweeping background vocals make its vanilla trap beat palatable. —Eric W. Saeger

CULT, DW-05 (Drum Workouts Records)

OK, this is actually great, an EP from an Irish DJ who’s part of a purported new wave of classically influenced producers. If you keep track of such things, he’s received love from X-Coast, DJ Stingray and IMOGEN, among others, which is as workaday as getting a review blurb from Stephen King for your new horror novel, but in this case I’m hopping on board, absolutely. In truth there’s really only a perfunctory modicum of “classical” in this stuff, so don’t be put off; mostly it’s a hybrid of drum ’n’ bass and deep house if that makes any sense (it certainly should, I’d imagine). Put more succinctly, the beats lope and (gently) stampede, chasing their layers around aural racetracks, while ’80s and ’90s hip-hop-centric vocal lines and assorted toasts keep pace. If it isn’t the current state of the velvet rope club in places like Ibiza I’d be surprised and a bit disappointed. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Caleb Wheeler Curtis, The True Story of Bears and the Invention of the Battery (Imani Records)

Hope you’re into Thelonious Monk if you’re thinking of indulging in this one, because this Brooklyn multi-instrumentalist sure loves him some of that; matter of fact the songs are, it’s suggested by this thing I’m reading here, explorations of Monk’s ideas, particularly on the second disc of this double LP, appropriately subtitled Raise Four: Monk the Minimalist. It sounds that way, too, lots of honking and wildly adventurous post-bop explorations, what I usually think of as high-test, dark-roast jazz if you will. Curtis switches back and forth between trumpet and three saxophone types, “stritch” (alto), sopranino and tenor, and he’s supported most ably on this double album by two rhythm sections, bassist Sean Conly and drummer Michael Sarin on the first disc and bassist Eric Revis and drummer Justin Faulkner on the second. Obviously, Monk is an acquired taste, not one I’ve ever developed with any seriousness, but this is surely a great workout for your noggin if you have the time and space to indulge in it. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Our next Friday-load of new albums is Nov. 8, or so this thing’s telling me, but this week we’re going to start with something decidedly not rock ’n’ roll at all, specifically super-old music played by 24-year-old Dutch recorder wunderkind Lucie Horsch! If you’re the type of listener who only knows about comedy albums and crunk singles, you’re probably wondering what a “recorder” is, so let’s dig into that before you lose interest completely! A recorder is a vaguely flute-like wind instrument, basically a glorified “flutophone” (an easy-to-play thingamajig we old people had to play in grade-school music class or we’d get yelled at). Lucie’s new album is The Frans Brüggen Project: Orchestra Of The Eighteenth Century, and it features her own wunderkind-centric renderings of music written by composers in the 1700s. The selections on this album were originally created by Haydn, Bach and all those guys in wigs, and the angle here is that she plays these wicked old tunes on antique recorders that were previously owned by this Frans Brüggen feller, who was sort of wunderkind-ish himself. Case in point: If you want awesomeness, on her recording of Marcello’s “Oboe Concerto in D Minor, S. Z799: II. Adagio (Performed on Recorder),” Lucie plays a recorder that was made in the year 1720, way before the first Hives album came out. Ha ha, look at this, Lucie caught flak on Facebook (where else) for calling her advance recording of the aforementioned concerto a “single,” like, some guy yelled at her for calling it a “single” instead of a “movement”; it was as if she’d asked the guy “would you please pass the jelly” when she’d actually wanted him to pass the Polaner All-Fruit, and it made him lose it completely! Anyhow, the Marcello single or Polaner Blueberry Snob Spread or whatever is very pretty and bucolic and whatnot; she’s supported by a string section, so it’s music that’s perfect for relaxing in a forest glade, nibbling on psychedelic skunk cabbage leaves or whatever people used to do for entertainment before there was My Cat From Hell and such.

• And now back to our regularly scheduled rundown of music from this abysmal century, starting with Scottish indie-rock band Primal Scream’s new album, Come Ahead! They have been around since 1982, spotlighting the bland vocals of former Jesus and Mary Chain drummer Bobby Gillespie, and he’s still here, bringin’ the LootCrate-level singing to these neo-psychedelic/garage tunes, like the new single from this album, “Deep Dark Waters,” a mid-tempo snoozer that sounds kind of off-key to me, but what would I know, I’ve only been a rock critic since Walter Mondale was president!

• Albany, New York,-based emo band State Champs is back, dumping another of their Dashboard Confessional-soundalike albums on my hopelessly messy desk, and surprise, this one’s self-titled, for no reason whatsoever! “Too Late To Say” is catchy, after a watered-down emo fashion. Do people still listen to this kind of stuff?

• Last but not least (unless I find that it actually is), it’s experimental metal duo The Body, with their new LP, The Crying Out Of Things! They are from Portland, Oregon, but they are nevertheless awesome, going by their new single, “End Of Line,” a deconstructionist’s dream that would have fit in fine with all the other fine products from Throbbing Gristle and all that stuff, back when planet Earth was still a smoldering ball of lava and the nepo babies hadn’t taken over. It is highly recommended! —Eric W. Saeger