Author: Eric Saeger

George Strait, Cowboys And Dreamers (MCA Nashville Records)

At 72, Strait has been around a billion years, having been instrumental in pioneering “neotraditional country” music in the ’80s, a style that emphasizes what the instruments are doing, an approach that was a reaction to the blandness that had overcome country music after the urban cowboy fad. In that, you could call it an OG resurgence I suppose, being that artists like Strait, Toby Keith and Reba McEntire tend to dress in midcentury fashions and sing in a more traditional country style. Strait’s new LP doesn’t deviate from the neotraditional formula, but you’ll hear things you probably weren’t expecting, such as on opener “Three Drinks Behind,” in which his radio-announcer-style baritone warbles its obvious sentiments over mildly edgy guitar strumming and mandolin lines that fit like a glove. “The Little Things” is a mawkish love ballad, buoyed by (spoiler alert) dobro as Strait’s voice explores croaky mode. “MIA Down In MIA” is a curveball that’s obviously an amalgam of Jimmy Buffett’s lifetime catalog. Friendly, authentic stuff here. A+

Yes, Drama (MCA Nashville Records)

Continuing my quixotic efforts to educate Zoomer normies about classic arena-rock bands: The first thing to understand about Yes is that most people never really understood their trippy approach in the first place. I was at their Deep Purple-headlined show in Gilford a couple weeks ago and was psyched to see Yes opening their set with “Machine Messiah,” the opening tune from this album, which I’ve always liked even though original singer Jon Anderson was gone, replaced by Trevor Rabin, whose faux-soprano sounds exactly like Anderson’s. Like any prog-rock album, this one is musically complicated, but the math and the riffing are a lot more user-friendly than that of their earlier ones, serving as a very listenable (often hard-rock influenced) precursor to the commercial stuff they tabled in 90125 (whose big hit was “Owner Of A Lonely Heart”). Prior to this LP, Going For The One was a great one too, but Drama found the fellas in a less fluffy mood, perhaps even looking over their shoulders at Rush, who were doing the same kind of thing at the time. “Roundabout” isn’t the only thing this band ever accomplished, is what I’m getting at here, and this one is criminally overlooked. A+

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Sept. 6 will see the next Friday-load of CD releases from burnt-out rock stars, twerking bubblegum divas and assorted swindlers, so, all you pumpkin spice people, let’s just do this “oh no, it’s gonna be freezing in New England any minute now” thing, because I can hardly wait! Yay, I guess we can start with a few off-the-cuff riffs on Pink Floyd, a band that never really appealed to me aside from a select few random songs (“Sheep” and maybe “Run Like Hell,” as I’ve said before), because look at this, guys, it’s their guitar dude, David Gilmour, with a new album, Luck And Strange! I figured it’d be best if I spun the track “Between Two Points,” since Gilmour’s daughter Romany handles the singing on it, but wait a minute, I’ll not indulge you nepo-baby haters in this case, because I don’t mind her breathy soprano at all. She sounds a lot like famous British trance singer Justine Suissa; in fact she’s a dead ringer. As for the tune’s music, it’s a slow Pink Floyd-ish snoozer, with Gilmour in lazy-strummy mode, in line with most of the stuff he did with Floyd back in the olden days. It’s fine really.

• OK, very funny, I really don’t have any time for a good punking, what with trying to sell my new book, talk to my Twitter followers and respond to Friend-Of-The-Hippo Dan Szczesny’s enthusiastic Facebook personal messages about Korean all-girl speed-metal bands. But sure, for the sake of somesuch, let’s say you’re serious, that none other than observably untalented nepo-baby Paris Hilton is actually “releasing a new album called Infinite Icon” tomorrow and I have to talk about it. Now fess up, are you just telling me this to upset me, because it won’t work; I’m permanently upset enough over many things in this world these days, so my listening to this hyper-privileged dunce sing some (off-key) nonsense about her latest bad-choice boyfriend over some microwaved Kylie Minogue beat from 1993 or whatever she’s doing these days isn’t going to strain the camel’s back, who on Earth cares? I have to admit, I’d actually much prefer talking about Babymetal so that at least someone would be happy, but I’ve put it off long enough, let me go have a listen to “I’m Free,” because I have to. Oh how cute, it’s pure Ariana Grande ripoff-ism, beach-chill with not much going on other than ringtone-ready romance, but you want to know the worst part, of course you do, she sings through Auto-Tune through the whole stupid thing, and no, I’m not kidding. Rina Sawayama is the feat. guest, delivering a phoned-in vocal that’s nowhere near her best work, but at least everyone is happy, here in nepo land, can we move on from this please.

• Here we go again, another ’80s new wave band resurfacing from out of nowhere to have a go at the last few drops of glory that can be shlurped from the Gen X resurgence. I speak of course of British post-punkers The The, which is still singer/songwriter/sole-constant Matt Johnson’s baby; Ensoulment is this band’s first proper studio album in, holy cats, 24 years! “Cognitive Dissident” is the feature single, and it’s a pretty good one, combining INXS swagger with Ennio Morricone spaghetti sauce, it’s actually very cool. The closest the band’s new tour will come to you reader folks will be the Orpheum Theatre in Boston on Oct. 19.

• We’ll wrap up the week with Madrid, Spain-based indie band Hinds, whose new full-length, Viva Hinds, will feature three or four songs sung in Spanish! Several tunes have already made the rounds, including “Boom Boom Back,” which features a contribution from Beck; it’s a riot grrrl-flavored thing that’s like The Waitresses recycling a beat from Red Hot Chili Peppers, it is fine.

Bill Leeb, Model Kollapse (Metropolis Records)

If you’re an OG techno-goth who gave up on this column owing to the lack of love I’ve showered on your favorite genre for many months now, it’s me, not you (or goth); my email box is nowadays a hopeless trash heap of messages in bottles from bands and labels looking for a little attention, and as far as goth goes I have no idea how many emails from Metropolis I’ve unintentionally missed. This is a great one for playing catch-up, though. Leeb is of course the prime mover behind Front Line Assembly and all the other stompy Skinny Puppy-ish bands you know and love (including Skinny Puppy itself), so what I was looking for here was a little risk-taking on Leeb’s part after so many years of lording over the space. Fat chance, of course, turns out. There’s Rammstein jackboot-stomping on the Shannon Hemmet-assisted “Terror Forms,” and tribal, Last Rites-era Skinny Puppy stuff on “Demons,” etc.; it’s all very nice but formulaic (I hate to burst any bubbles, but that’s of course not a shocking development). I mean, if you’re looking for kickass background ambiance for playing Wolfenstein: The New Order, you can’t go wrong here, and I’d prefer to just leave it at that if you don’t mind. B

Marquis Hill, Composers Collective: Beyond The Jukebox (Black Unlimited Music Group)

This Chicago-based jazz trumpeter is big on mixing genres; he views jazz, hip-hop, R&B, Chicago house and neo-soul as essential cogs in the African-American creative context. “It all comes from the same tree,” quoth Hill, “they simply blossomed from different branches.” Of course, promises are one thing, delivering on them is another, but he certainly does right out of the gate with “A Star Is Born,” a refreshingly courageous genre-salad that deftly moves from a timbales-driven (or sample thereof) shuffle to a sparklingly clean post-bop horn exercise with a dubstep drumbeat underneath it. Next is “Joseph Beat,” featuring guest sax guy Josh Johnson helping decorate a stubbornly rhythmic pattern that’s too sophisticated for Weather Channel backgrounding but wouldn’t be terribly out of place as some sort of 1970s game-show incidental riff. “Pretty For The People” is a dazzling, prog-referencing slow-burn; “Enter The Stargate” is an ambitiously nimble bit showcasing the understated abilities of drummer Corey Fonville. A relaxing, fun, terrific record. A+

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• I give up, the summer’s over, the next Friday haul of new CDs will arrive on Aug. 30, which is tomorrow, according to this newspaper’s publishing schedule!

The first one we should probably talk about, not that we have to, is the 18th studio album from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, titled Wild God. Cave has always been something of an acquired taste that I never, you know, acquired, but even if you don’t like his proto-goth baritone voice or any music he’s ever done, one thing’s for sure: It’s usually expressive and revealing in some way. Far as that goes, I reviewed his Ghosteen album in this space in 2016; the album was dedicated to the memory of his son Arthur, who slipped and fell off a cliff while under the influence of LSD. It was a very impressive album that, you may dimly recall, was strong enough to tie Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly album on Metacritic’s scorecard that year. Before that, a short-lived relationship with PJ Harvey — actually its breakup — inspired the 1997 album The Boatman’s Call. As for Wild God, Cave is enthusiastic about it, saying that the band was “happy” when they put it together. That’s usually a bad sign in my experience, like it’s always better when the main songwriters are going through a breakup or some other trauma, not that I’d ever wish such things on anyone, but it is what it is. Now, despite the fact that the band was feeling happy, the title track is haunting, moody and occasionally sweeping; it starts out with a vanilla mid-tempo beat, Cave’s Sisters Of Mercy-prototype vocalizing leading into a noisy bliss-out that’s interesting enough I suppose.

• OK, and with Nick Cave out of the way, it’s out of the frying pan and into the art-rock fire, let’s look at American avant-garde lady Laurie Anderson’s new album, Amelia! If you’re old and tried a lot of different drugs in the early ’80s you’re probably familiar with Anderson’s 1982 sort-of-hit “O Superman,” an eight-minute-long exercise consisting of two notes, some vocoder-tweaked singing and some normal, minimalist warbling from Anderson. You probably have no idea what that song even is, but like I said, it was a surprise hit that year, and people still remember it; in fact it was used in one of the alternative endings to the 2018 interactive Netflix film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. OK, so now we know where this is going, let’s go have a listen to one of the tunes, “India And On Down to Australia feat. Anohni.” So OK, this is a soft, tastefully decorated, electronically enhanced joint that’s got a tinge of Enya to it. It’s quite soothing and pretty; I don’t hate it.

• London, England-based pan-continental underground band Los Bitchos specialize in instrumental music in the style of 1970s/1980s “cumbia,” a folklore-based dance genre from Colombia. It is danced in pairs with the couple not touching one another as they “display the amorous conquest of a woman by a man,” in other words it’s basically twerking except Americans can’t understand what’s actually going on. Talkie Talkie is the band’s new album, which leads off with “Don’t Change,” a dance-y beachy folk instrumental that may remind you of Tangerine Dream with a little bit of prog in there.

• And finally it’s John Legend, Chrissy Teigen’s husband, with a new album of children’s music, called My Favorite Dream! Apparently Chrissy uploaded a video of Legend playing and singing “Maybe” on a Fisher Price piano to one of their kids and then somehow Sufjan Stevens got involved, whatever. “L-O-V-E” is annoyingly happy, not Nick Cave-level happy or anything, more like Raffi/Barney-dinosaur-level happy, which makes me really unhappy.

Bek, Derby Girl [EP] (Amber Blue Recordings)

This mononymed DJ is a well-established player in the (reportedly vibrant) Hamburg, Germany, velvet-rope scene. He’s steadily made a name for himself as a producer as well, releasing tracks on such imprints as Traum, What Happens, Ohral and Natura Viva, and back in 2015 he won the Mixmag + ANTS Ibiza DJ competition over 300 other participating DJs. With all the resume nonsense out of the way, we can proceed to what’s on this four-songer (actually three, but the label owners added a remix to the second track, “Cannibal Licornes,” a Calvin Harris-style joint that doesn’t do much other than make you wish you were sipping mai tais in the Maldives, not that we don’t need more of that sort of vice in this loveless world). The title track is a lightly syncopated bounce-along whose (actually pretty raucous) drop comes halfway though its six minutes; overall it’s a lot more experimental than what I expected. Sure, this is fine. A–

Alison Moyet, Key (Cooking Vinyl Records)

As a celebration of 40 years of releasing records, this is one for the books, a mix of reworked songs with only a pair of new ones, but the rerubs are reflective of the changes she’s undergone personally over the years. In fact, she’s outgrown some of the tunes since her days releasing her first solo record, Alf, as a 22-ish-year-old. Like Siouxsie Sioux, Moyet’s distinctive contralto has probably been mistaken for a male tenor on many an occasion; Andy Bell mainlined her music while preparing to audition for Erasure, a RIYL name-check relative to her sound. Here, she reshapes her most famous track, “Is This Love” (from the 1986 album Raindancing and featured in the film All of Us Strangers), as an epic chillout ballad as opposed to the (very) ’80s slow-dance track it’d originally been. Major hits “All Cried Out” and “Love Resurrection” are here, updated for the times; newcomer songs “Such Small Ale” and “Filigree” are nice-enough slowbie bringdowns. A+

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• A Friday is ahead, specifically the one that falls on Aug. 23, and you know what that means: People will be crowding the malls to buy all the new albums! Yes yes, your friends will be dressing up just like the cool but awkward kids in Pretty In Pink and making fun of all the mall cops (aren’t adults so stupid, lol) and buying plenty of albums, for your Sony Walkman audio devices, aren’t you glad Stranger Things made the ’80s come back? Right, I have no idea where I’m going with this, I’m just waiting for the ’90s-rock echo boom to take over from this tedious ’80s wave once and for all, until we’re all sick of hearing bands that sound exactly like Nirvana and Indigo Girls (I’m way ahead on both scores), and in the meantime, let’s try to ease our suffering by finding something that might be relevant to our current era of music, that’d be great. We’ll start with Philadelphia electro-psych/slowcore band Spirit Of The Beehive, which releases You’ll Have To Lose Something on Friday! They’re on a post-indie trip and insist on being weird, so the video for the first single, “Something’s Ending / I’ve Been Evil,” is moderately annoying. As for the song itself, it’s a slapdash slowcore mess that’s somehow listenable, and like many bands are doing nowadays, there’s a dubstep layer in there that serves pretty well as a sort of binding force. The vocals are faraway and over-reverbed, in other words there’s government-issue oldschool-shoegaze afoot in this business but despite the performative, androgynous gloom there’s a hint of 1960s Spanky And Our Gang sunshine-pop at work as well. If all this sounds good to you, you can catch them live at Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Mass., on Sept. 24.

• Wow, it’s the first album in 24 years from Pacific Northwest-based minimalist indie-pop/cuddlecore duo The Softies, isn’t that special? I hadn’t realized I sort of missed hearing about them, and come to think of it, I never did, but I will listen to something from their new album, The Bed I Made, because I am an equal opportunity hater, just let me pop a few Dramamine to settle my stomach first. Ack, I used to confuse these guys with The Swirlies for obvious reasons; an AllMusic reviewer nailed it on the head when he said The Softies’ stripped-down, two-voices/two-guitars aesthetic was too boring to build entire albums around. But hey, maybe they’ve added some layering, who knows, let’s go listen to the single, “I Said What I Said.” Yep, it’s twee-pop, happy and upbeat and catchy in its way, and jangly and minimalist and decidedly dated, and one of the girls is wearing nerd glasses, and both girls are wearing the spring line equivalent of Christmas sweater fashion. But like I was saying, you’d better get used to this vanilla-frappe-blooded nonsense, because it’s gonna be everywhere before you can say “Oh no, please don’t, I beg of you.”

• New York City-based industrial metal/noise-rock fivesome Uniform release their fifth album, American Standard, this Friday! They’re my kind of dark-futurist-type guys, having used samples of gunshots and explosions to produce rhythm tracks, why haven’t more bands done stuff like that? The single, “This Is Not A Prayer,” is psychotic, deranged and awesome, like “Stumbo” from Jim Thirlwell’s Wiseblood project. That’s another thing, why haven’t more bands ripped off Wiseblood?

• Lastly let’s check out Sabrina Carpenter, a nepo singing person who used to be on the Disney Channel series Girl Meets World; her aunt is Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson on The Simpsons. “Espresso,” the single from her new LP, Short n’ Sweet, is disposable Britney bubble-pop. I’m sure 6-year-old girls would like it, aren’t they growing up so fast these days (world’s loudest eyeroll)?

Dummy, Free Energy (Double In Mind Records)

I’m usually not a big fan of bands that shift genres within albums, as it makes it hard for listeners to settle in; it’s not like we’re living in a terribly cerebral zeitgeist, more like a seriously dysfunctional era of art in which noise is often confused with signal. But this one grabbed me from the beginning and held on, starting with “Intro – UB,” a peaceful EDM joint that evokes Orbital and Aphex Twin while tabling some in-your-face drum sampling. I’d been warned through the informational one-sheet that there was some My Bloody Valentine vibe on here, which obviously isn’t wildly compatible with 1990s/Aughts techno, but it’s exactly that sort of bliss that happens next on “Soonish,” which, as it proceeds, may remind you of some of the harder stuff on Wire’s 2013 LP Change Becomes Us but with an REM tint to it. I really like what these folks are doing. A+

Egosex, 15 Minutes Of Fame [EP] (self-released)

Originally from Lagos, Nigeria, Wekaforé Jibril leads this Afro-tech wetwork outfit, which, it’s said, weaves an “abstract narrative that delves into the heart of modern society’s narcissistic obsession with recognition.” This ain’t your daddy’s Fela Kuti-style Afrobeat, of course, but it does have some deep roots in it, and those tendrils can be felt all through this release. I’m saying that it does have a deeply African sound, but when you turn up the vibe-ometer to see what Afrobeat has become in modern times, we hear Black Eyed Peas lurking around the corner (listen to “Yes We Are In Love” for proof), egging us on to dance blissfully, encouraging us to accept that our era’s sound may be rooted in ringtone-brained individualism but that there are good points to that. The trance- and dubstep-adjacent beats settle into hip-hop-infused tribal jams (“Can U Make Me Feel”) that feel urban-fashion-minded, which makes sense, given that Wekaforé is pushing his own clothing line. Relevant tuneage for hip outlet malls. A+

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The brand new CD releases of Friday, Aug. 16, are upon us, guys, so it’s off to Metacritic we go, to see what unlistenable swill new music we will be subjected treated to this week, as the summer winds down and the autumn eyes us with its awfulness and threatens to unleash early ice storms and such! I am not sure what all my New Hampshire neighbors are listening to these days (I assume twerking music and Led Zeppelin). But as for me, for the past week, I’ve been back to listening to 1930s big band music from the likes of Al Jolson and Paul Whiteman, because I’ve been out and about driving far away to estate sales in such quaint New Hampshire towns as West Lebanon and New London, and there’s nothing more appropriate than 90-year-old tuneage playing in your jalopy when you’re hunting antiques! Oddly, while visiting these bucolic towns, where chickens and goats run around loose in the streets, I didn’t see WMUR’s Fritz Wetherbee hanging around at any general store. Remember last year when I wanted to ask him if I could co-host his New Hampshire Chronicle segments and a few people on the internet actually tried to help me add “TV star” to my resumé? My offer still stands, for the record, but what we must address now is F-1 Trillion, the new album from nice-enough person Post Malone! The teaser single, “Pour Me A Drink,” features a guest artist, of course, and — nope, it’s not Snoop Dogg — no, not Kendrick Lamar either, let me finish, it’s actually country music star Blake Shelton! This song is not your typical hip-hop fare, more like a honky-tonk song for drunken cowboy rappers; it’s so hated by undergrounders that some YouTuber named @BigPacVsAllYall went right to work releasing a diss track, cleverly titled “Diss Track,” in which he “spits rhymes” about how Post “hasn’t actually rapped in seven years” and is now “wearing farmer jeans” and a bunch of other hurtful stuff! It’s all dumb, I know, but chances are good that Post will catch wind of it, because somehow, BigPacVsAllYall was able to get his song to the very top of YouTube’s search results if one searches for “Post Malone F1 Trillion!” That, my friends, is trolling at its finest, you have to admit; you can hate the game but not the playah!

• Good lord, anyway, what’s next, what could possibly — OMG, ha ha, look everyone, it’s last decade’s indie-pop darlings Foster The People, you can stop checking WhosAliveAndWhosDead.com, because they are very much alive! Their fourth album is Paradise State Of Mind, their first since 2017’s Sacred Hearts Club, which (if you were even aware it ever existed) stalled at No. 47 in the Billboard and received a lowly Metacritic score of 56, but who cares, let me go listen to something from this new album, which is said to be in line with Sacred in that it’s inspired by “late 1970s music with elements of disco, funk, gospel, and jazz.” Yep, the album starts with “Take Me Back,” a totally funky-poppy thing that’s too uncool for Jamie Lidell or even David Guetta, but your grandchildren might like it, I don’t know.

• Beabadoobee, aka Beatrice Laus, is a Filipino-born space-rocker who opened for label-mates The 1975 a few years ago. Her new LP, This Is How Tomorrow Moves, starts with “Ever Seen,” a really nice, poppy little number that combines Jewel-style acoustic guitar-pop with spazzy anime soundtracking. Normal people will like it.

• We’ll end the week with Brooklyn, N.Y.-based power poppers Charly Bliss, whose new album, Forever, includes the song “Waiting For You,” a ’90s-chick-pop-tinged tune that’s actually catchier than anything I’ve heard from Sleater-Kinney, which is the obvious motivation behind this.

Blue Öyster Cult, Secret Treaties (Columbia Records)

Last week I riffed on Sweet’s Give Us A Wink album as a public service to Zoomers and millennials who’re interested in expanding their knowledge of old-school, pre-ringtone-oriented rock; this time it’s Blue Öyster Cult’s third (1974) effort, the BÖC album I’d recommend if you were going off-grid. As a friend noted, BÖC was/is a bunch of New York slackers who could barely believe their luck in getting a big record contract in the ’70s; they uniquely straddled a line between serious hard rock outfit and joke band, which sort of continued here, with their usual acid-trip lyrical forays (“Harvester Of Eyes”) and such and so. But beneath their Dadaist conceptual approach there was some serious beauty (“Astronomy” is a perfect song for any decent baritone to try wrapping their voice around), some badass hard rock (“Dominance and Submission”) and a chaotic take on life with the German Luftwaffe circa end-stage WWII (“ME-262”). This LP was pivotal in setting the stage for 1976’s Agents of Fortune, which of course yielded their biggest hit, “Don’t Fear The Reaper.” By the way, the origins of the antique music-box recording of “Waves of the Danube” used in the intro to “Flaming Telepaths” remain unknown to this day, a tidbit I find seriously cool. A great snapshot of a band that was happily/painfully exiting adolescence. A+

StrateJacket, Bad Start (Edgeout Records)

Like so many others, the proper release of this album was in purgatory for a couple of years while America waited for Covid to become accepted as the endemic danger it is today, but all systems do appear to be go for an Oct. 11 street date, so here goes. This is a northern California trio that wants to be Green Day, which I can deal with I suppose (my inbox is always so overstuffed with Dashboard Confessional clones that really anything else feels refreshing and innovative at this point) but when I say they want to be Green Day, I mean they really want that. It helps that their stuff is catchy, of course; the title track has an infectious-enough holler-along chorus built for awkward incel culture (“A small brain, a big heart, a shut mouth, a bad start”), but unfortunately there’s a texted-in quality to other songs, like “Be My Drug,” which is actually kind of — and I’d never use this word without just cause — cringey. Another suburban rawk band heard from, I suppose. C

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Gather ’round with your tankards of smelly grog and let us sing a Song of Ice and Fire, ladies and gentlemen, because new CD releases, having recently been forged in the furnaces of Mordor, are now poised to spread their (debatably) musical horribleness over the land of etc. etc! Ack, ack, barf barf barf, August is slipping away from us, and with it the summer, I haven’t been to the beach enough times this year, why don’t we all just put up our holiday decorations and deploy our inflatable Santa Clauses right now and get it over with! Yes, fam, the next traditional CD release date is Friday, Aug. 9, and relatedly, I’ll bet there are holiday albums due out soon, like, has Cannibal Corpse ever done one, and if not isn’t it way past time? But wait, hark, the Frost Gods be praised, there’s another new album dropping from acid-dropping metal-or-whatever jackasses King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, called Flight b741, fortune has smiled upon me once again this year, given that their band name takes up so many column inches that I’ll be back to watching World War II In Color in no time! I hope all the young scamps reading this are aware that American music has become so awful and hopeless of late that the mantle of loud rock ’n’ roll has been taken up by bands from far more deserving British penal colonies, specifically New Zealand and Australia, the latter of which is home to this band, to whom I’d refer as “the Gizzes” to save space, but that’ll never happen! Am I making any sense? No, because I am talking about King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, a band that has never made any sense, for example, let’s go listen to their new single, “Le Risque,” and see if it’s the same sort of trippy joke-music they release literally every two months! Yup, it’s kind of like what you’d hear if Steely Dan and Flaming Lips had a baby and your cousin who’s an accountant thought it was the coolest thing they’d ever heard, which makes you feel sorry for that cousin but sad for them at the same time! There is no real reason for this song to exist, but if they keep putting out albums at this clip they’ll accidentally create a mega-hit at some point, just you wait.

• Japanese composer, pianist, record producer and actor Ryuichi Sakamoto died of cancer last year at the age of 71, leaving behind a lifetime of being rad as heck, doing things like hanging out with Devo, scoring films like The Last Emperor and The Revenant, acting alongside David Bowie and a bunch of other stuff. Opus is a posthumous album derived from a performance film of the same name, directed by his son, featuring Sakomoto playing solo acoustic piano. The test-drive track is “Tong Poo,” a pensive, heart-tugging but highly accessible pop-tinged piece that was originally recorded by Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sakomoto’s former band.

• Yee-hah, if there’s anything that happens almost as frequently as a new album release from King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, it’s San Francisco garage rockers Orinoka Crash Suite (now known as Osees, formerly The Ohsees and whatnot) changing their band name again “in order to annoy the press!” Personally I’m not annoyed by it; it just makes me ignore them, so let me go listen to “Cassius, Brutus & Judas Single,” a song from the band’s new album, I SORCS 80. Wow, it’s buzzy, cool no-wave, too bad I’ll forget I ever liked it and simply resort to riffing on their stupid band name gimmick again next time.

• Lastly it’s lo-fi jazz-funk bro Louis Cole’s new LP, Nothing, which includes the song “These Dreams are Killing Me,” a great little tune that sounds like Justice trying to be a normal soundsystem. It has my approval. —Eric W. Saeger

Vaux Flores, Dawn Chorales (Audiobulb Records)

My 2024 Word Salad Of The Year award goes to this person for their unintelligible PR one-sheet, and I quote: “Travis Johns is a sound artist residing in Ithaca, N.Y., whose work includes performance, interactivity, installation, and printmaking, often incorporating eco/bio-based themes and electronic instruments of his own design.” That’s just the first paragraph, but what this all tells me is that this “Vaux Flores,” aka Johns, is a musical experimentalist with a serious case of OCD, not that one could tell by the compositions themselves, which are Tales From Topographic Oceans-style exercises in self-indulgence. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course, particularly if your jam is movie soundtracking, for which this stuff would work (think Arrival), and the synth work is indeed pretty deep, which is of course half the battle. And besides, he does go off on some EDM-ish tangents, producing beats that are almost danceable. It’s interesting, let’s leave it at that. A-

Kris Davis Trio, Run The Gauntlet (Pyroclastic Records)

On this new LP, Grammy-winning jazz pianist Davis pays tribute to six of her heroes, pianists who’ve inspired her over the years. In specific we’re talking Geri Allen, Marilyn Crispell, Angelica Sanchez, Sylvie Courvoisier, Renee Rosnes and, in no-brainer news, Carla Bley. This new trio features bassist Robert Hurst and drummer Johnathan Blake, both of whom have plenty of room to stretch out. I got quite a jolt out of this one; if you compare jazz albums to scotch, this is no drinkable-enough, off-the-shelf Johnnie Walker special blend; it’s the top-dollar stuff, mathematically and physically ambitious, darkest-possible-roasted art that challenges the senses. Davis bonks, pounds, diddles and stress-tests the keyboard as if she’s trying to get it prepped to start its Ph.D. dissertation. In that, it’s obviously not for jazz-heads who just want to feel good that they’re listening to basic genre stuff; it’s enormously brainy while not indulging in an academic exercise. Yowza. A+

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Aug. 2 is the next Friday on which you will feel pressure from your Spotify to remain plugged into our horrible excuse for an arts zeitgeist! The record companies will unleash terabytes of new-album spam, and it’ll be everywhere you look, and you will feel pressure to listen to many songs that have no redeeming aesthetic whatsoever to them. But you will be assimilated, and before you know it you’ll be part of the problem, like my boomer friends on Facebook, who enjoy arguing with me about how I should be listening to and publicly praising 60-year-old albums from the likes of Cat Stevens and Harry Chapin, artists that I ignore for no other reason than to trigger easily triggered people on the Facebook! Yes, I am a rascal, I was born this way, stop being intolerant of rascals, it’s not nice. In fact, let’s just drop the whole subject of my personal taste in music (regular readers will recall that when last we left the subject of my musical taste it had shifted to 1950s greaser-rock like Sha Na Na and Eddie Cochran, which is still current) and focus on the here and now, starting with the new album from endlessly irritating ’90s band The Smashing Pumpkins, titled Aghori Mhori Mei, a phrase whose actual meaning is being argued over by Pumpkins fans on Reddit as we speak, that is when they’re not complaining about Rick Rubin sticking his big fat nose into one of the album’s singles. It is basically a nonsense phrase, unless we interpret it as a purposely idiotic misspelling of the Latin phrase “agori mori mei,” meaning, as one r/SmashingPumpkins redditor explained, “I am about to die” or “I am working on my death.” OK, and with that, my real friends can tell by now that I already hate this album, but regardless, I will go through the motions and mention that the band hasn’t released any of the new songs to the public at this writing, so there’s nothing for me to report, and they are touring with Green Day this year. The internet has decided that the presence of an orchestra in one promo shot is evidence that there will be a symphonic angle to this rock ’n’ roll music album, while other folks are hoping that the band will go back to the rockin’ roots of their early days, when they inspired such wannabe acts as Live. I ever tell you about the time Petunia and I mooched passes to see Blues Traveler open a show with Live and Collective Soul and we left before Live came on to ruin everything? It’s true, we barely escaped in time. Anyway.

• Yow, L.A. punk legends X have been around for 47 years, guys, Forty. Seven. Years. Smoke & Fiction is their upcoming new LP, and I heard a live version of the title track, which is appropriately awesome in a Loreena McKennit-meets-Hole manner. Thankfully, Exene sings off-key through the mellow parts, who would want it any other way? (Side note to new punk-music listeners: Unlike Smashing Pumpkins, X will not be opening for Green Day, because they are still actually relevant.)

• Activist and two-time Grammy winning singer-songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello releases her zillionth full-length record on Friday! It is called No More Water: The Gospel Of James Baldwin, and the first track, “Love,” is a cool, laid-back, bass-driven soul track with a ton of harmonizing and some 70s steez. Full, thick, wide sound, good stuff here.

• Last but not least (depending on factors, of course) on our list this week is Stampede, the new album from country singer Orville Peck, whose gimmick is that he never shows his face, a stunt no musical artist has ever pulled, save for Kiss, Deadmau5, The Residents, Clinic and millions of others. His new tune is a cover of Ned Sublette’s 1981 Texas waltz joke song, “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other,” an ode to, well, gay cowboys, which is always a timely subject.