Author: Eric Saeger

Djrum, Under Tangled Silence (Houndstooth Records)

It was way past time to cover this one — seven months to be exact — but better late than yadda yadda. According to — OK, most of the people who still profit from being involved in its scene, dubstep isn’t a dead genre at all, and we do need to admit that it really shouldn’t be. This British producer (Felix Manuel) was a music prodigy as a child, and his mastery of the piano is on full display here during many of the intro bits, which give off Beethoven (or Liberace, truth be told — let’s just say “aristocratic,” that’d be fine) vibes before (eventually, at the artist’s discretion) tabling beats that are promoted as “IDM” and whatnot by some but nevertheless owe a lot of their DNA to (you guessed it) Aphex Twin, Skrillex and Burial. Melodic, quirky and wickedly technical, this is the sort of stuff you want in your earbuds when you absolutely, positively must have an out-of-body experience because the professor’s lecture is so boring. Take opening track “A Tune For Us” for starters, comprising piano arpeggios, a ton of light synth layering and, you know, glitch to create the sonic equivalent of a lava lamp. Deeply immersive soundscaping throughout. A+ — Eric W. Saeger

Hoaxed, Death Knocks (Relapse Records)

This all-girl trio from Portland, Oregon, has gotten pretty Sabbath-y since acquiring new bassist/vocalist April Dimmick (from Soul Grinder, in case you track such things). This LP opens with “Where the Seas Fall Silent,” which wields the same tribal “party on, you crazed cannibal zombies” bashing as Sabbath’s “Hole In The Sky,” in other words if you hate it you hate all arena-metal. But this band is no Sabbath wannabe (otherwise Relapse Records wouldn’t have validated their parking stub when they came in to negotiate, trust me). “The Family” is raw, street-smart, and pretty freaking epic for a band that isn’t trying to do orchestra-metal; it’s what you might call “coven-metal,” you know, hard-rock for witches and such, which is my way of saying you should check it out, if not for the (really good) songwriting, than for the band’s tastefully low-rent but powerful sound. They’d probably do great opening for Rasputina or whatnot. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Everyone’s pretty much sobered up from the holidays, not that you can really tell, so it’s time to get down to serious business again, getting you people to buy new CDs and virtual albums, from the great Cloud in the sky! Yes, we’re into the new releases of Friday, Jan. 23, this week, but since one of you hopped into my Facebook to give me guff about what I said about KPop Demon Hunters last week, I watched about half the movie, just so I could feel what it’s like to be part of the audience that consumes — whatever that stuff is. For the sake of journalistic integrity, I wanted to feel what it’s like to be a teenage Generation Alpha music fan, so I prepped myself by eating a half-pound of Trolli Sour Blasting Crawlers, washing them down with a gallon of Mountain Dew Code Red, then ate two bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and a box of flaming chicken tenders, then filmed a TikTok of myself taking the “Skull Breaker Challenge” by getting kicked in the head by a horse (naturally it got only three views, one from my sister, one from my employer and one from a girl I dated in high school). Half-insane from diabetic coma and really really wanting a salad and some aspirin, I felt like I was ready to go all-in on the Hunters, so I went for it. So, OK, it’s not just a giant Lady Gaga ripoff, like, there’s some Katy Perry theft in there too, and I’ll admit it was kind of funny when the girls went ga-ga over the androgynous dudes in the boyband and popcorn started popping out of their eyes, but that joke got overdone fast and I didn’t laugh the second time. The animation was fine, twice as good as Disney’s Aladdin cartoon I’d say, but really, asking me, an award-winning arts critic, to watch KPop Demon Hunters is like expecting Meet The Press to bring on two 4-year-olds to debate whether or not the Federal Reserve board should keep interest rates high: Wasted on refined sugar as I was, I still lacked the supercharged pheromones that are required to find anything interesting about the movie, and no, I won’t eat any more Tide Pods to see if that does the trick. Instead, I’d like to get on with this week’s releases, so we’ll start with British singer-songwriter Louis Tomlinson, a member of (ugh) boyband One Direction! His new album, How Did I Get Here, features a tune called “Palaces” that straight-up steals the vibe from Flock Of Seagulls’ 1980s hit “I Ran” but adds nerdy boyband singing to the recipe, which doesn’t work at all during the first minute or so, but it does prove effective during the hooky chorus. It’s fine for what it is. Groan.

• British-American rapper IDK is said to be “around 80 percent as good as Kanye West” and/or “kind of boring,” but a lot of people think he’s awesome, probably mostly because he seems to pull in a lot of famous guest feats, which he does again in his upcoming new album Even The Devil Smiles, scheduled for release this Friday after a false start a couple of weeks ago. DMX’s estate allowed him to use some (bad-ass as always) vocal tracks on “Start To Finish.”

• Also this week, Washington, D.C.-born R&B singer Ari Lennox releases her third album, Vacancy, as the follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2022 LP Age/Sex/Location. This one’s title track is a bedroom-soul joint spotlighting her Roberta Flack-meets-Da Brat vocal stylings, with some sweary rapping from album producer Jermaine Dupuis.

• And finally we have seven-member Japanese R&B/hip-hop girl-group XG, with their debut full-length The Core. Front-loaded single “Gala” is pretty neat if you like glitch and progressive house beats; it’s pretty ritzy and next-generation if you ask me, which of course you always should. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Alter Bridge, Alter Bridge (Napalm Records) & Diane Coll, Strangely In Tune (self-released)

Bren Holmes, A Rush to the Start Lin (self-released)

Given that this guy is an original member of the Irish rock band The Young Dubliners, I was of course expecting to be deluged by tin whistles and fiddles and whatnot, but this has nothing of the sort. It’s more like something I’d expect from someone who’d eventually placed sixth in a season of The Voice, that sort of thing, evoking vanilla, dishwasher-safe songwriting hackery right off the bat with “Gloria,” which has a lot of Aughts-era echoes of Beach Boys and humdrum Bonnaroo bait. After that singularly unimpressive start we move on to “Don’t Say You Will,” which tacks in a pseudo-country Ryan Adams direction, a tune I suppose some would accept as semi-Irish-sounding only because the tempo would be fine for a jogging mix and the vocals are mildly uppity. “Ordinary World (for Sinéad)” is obviously a paean to Sinéad O’Connor, with lyrics checking off “defiance” and “sleeping eternally”; it’s a deeply pretty tune whose sentiments have aged enough for us to know that it’s a tune he squirreled away quite a long time ago. Aside from that highlight the songwriting is thuddingly average really. C+ —Eric W. Saeger

Crystal Lake, The Weight of Sound (Century Media Records)

This Tokyo, Japan-based metalcore outfit has been around since 2002, which is pretty amazing considering the supernova-level energy they bring to everything they do. They’re joined this time by a whole crowd of singers whose names are renowned in their bubble, leading off with Signs of the Swarm’s David Simonich, whose Chester Bennington precision takes some of the steam off album-opener “Everblack,” but it’s nevertheless a head-crusher, alternating between Dillinger Escape Plan-influenced math-metal and some guitar-sound experimentation that had me going “OK, that’s cool.” Jesse Leach from Killswitch Engage is here also, tasked with the boyband parts to balance out the room-temperature growling of John Robert Centorrino, the band’s full-time singer. At that point a picture emerges of a band that’s interested in expanding their range to symphonic metal or whatever (who isn’t?), but — and this is really my only problem with the album — Centorrino doesn’t possess that gear. That’s a shame. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Onward we press as one, an army of snark-meisters, to Friday, Jan. 16, another Friday dump of new albums! But first things first, I know a bunch of you little monsters have been laughing behind my back for being completely ignorant about the KPop Demon Hunters thing, and it won’t help that I have a written and signed note from my mom that says I’m deathly allergic to the very idea of a literal cartoon bubblegum band, so just to shut you guys up, I listened to some of their songs in direct violation of my doctor’s orders. As I predicted (what we call in the music journalism a “barely cursory review”), it’s catchy but derivative stuff, mostly because the art-hating cacodemons who threw the thing together just took a bunch of old Lorde and Britney Spears beats, hired the first girl singer who could pull off a really accurate Lady Gaga karaoke, and now there they sit, counting piles of money and laughing in their heated indoor swimming pools. As you know, none of that nonsense is my jam, and the only reason I bothered listening to that garbage was that I figured there was a one in a billion chance that there was something positive to be gotten from it, like maybe the “band” actually had an angle that might interest me, like maybe they used obscure vintage instruments, or drew upon influences like Siberian folk songs from the 10th century and simply jazzed them up or whatever. Of course, as always, it was a waste of my time; after 30 seconds of listening to microwaved Gaga tuneage I was like “OK, I know everything I’ll ever need to know about KPop Demon Hunters” and put on a Wire album to get the disgusting taste out of my ears. I plan never to listen to nor mention them again, but now you know how seriously I take my position as the state’s most highly decorated music journalist, that’s right, I do this for you, not to fatten my Patreon, which can be found in my socials. Anyway, subject change, what was I saying last week about old bands releasing eponymous albums, about how it’s a practice that was big during the Aughts and should have gone the way of Milli Vanilli and yet bands are still doing it, oh yes, I said that it was stupid, so, like clockwork, ’80s thrash-metal band Megadeth has decided to do just that with their new one, Megadeth! Now, the lead single, “I Don’t Care,” is something of a watershed moment, as it’s more Ramones-like than anything I’ve heard from them before, meaning it doesn’t have the same old “Metallica but with more Slayer” vibe that’s typified their oeuvre since the Ronald Reagan era, like, in the song’s video, their singer, Dave Mustaine, seriously doesn’t care if the world collapses, everyone should be skateboarding and smashing each other in the face with beer bottles. I concur.

• Speaking of couldn’t care less, Poppy is back to being Poppy after a brief period during which she tried to be Britney Spears or whatever. You may recall last year she did a collaboration with Babymetal for the handful of 13-year-old Snapchatters who hadn’t given up on her; she continues ripping off Meshuggah on her new album, Empty Hands! “Bruised Sky” is the single, and yup, there’s the Godzilla-bending-the-telephone-wires bassline and all the other essential nutrients, let’s move on.

• The title track from Lucinda Williams’ new LP World’s Gone Wrong rips off the beat from Don Henley’s “Heart Of The Matter,” but other than that it’s acceptable.
• Lastly, with their awkward singing, The Format is like a Loot Crate version of Hoobastank, but if you insist on listening to their music you may. Their newest album is Boycott Heaven, which will remind you of Weezer in case you just landed on this planet and have never heard of Weezer. Did I mention Weezer? —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Alter Bridge, Alter Bridge (Napalm Records) & Diane Coll, Strangely In Tune (self-released)

Alter Bridge, Alter Bridge (Napalm Records)

One could argue that this Orlando, Florida, band amounts to nothing more exciting than Creed 2.0, given that three-fourths of the members were in Creed and Myles Kennedy’s vocal sound is basically the same as Scott Stapp’s, i.e. like Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell but with no soul. One could also argue that releasing an eponymous album after having already put out several others was a phase that should have died out in the Aughts, but bless ’em, there are people who love these guys (and professional wrestling intro songs, which is what this stuff is best suited for), and they do try to thrash it up here, with songs like “What Lies Within,” in which Kennedy’s Cornell karaoke is used to decent effect, despite its failure to evoke the extreme-metal gravitas for which it aims. In case you’re the type that plans ahead: They’ll be at Citizens House of Blues in Boston on May 10. C —Eric W. Saeger

Diane Coll, Strangely In Tune (self-released)

It’s probably hellaciously difficult for an Americana-folkie to get noticed these days without resorting to gimmickry (singing like a lost orphan moonbat/deploying obscure instruments, etc.), but this Atlanta native does make an effort. I’ve covered her before in these pages, which is pure luck of the draw; her releases seem to wiggle to the top of my overstuffed emailbox when I’m actively looking for something to write about). Nothing odd goes on here, I assure you; although she does gravitate to using mellotrons and harmoniums, they never detract from the songs, and her real strength — strumming clever open guitar chords — does a lot of the heavy lifting. This time she offers a bigger, wider sound in tunes like “Better Fly Me Right,” a loping, really pretty jangler that evokes Loreena McKennitt trying ’70s radio-pop on for size. “Carolina Wren”’s from-the-mountaintop vibe is a great fit for her Carla Olson-ish vocal range. Plenty of goodness here. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The new albums of Friday, Jan. 9, are being loaded into your Spotifys as we speak, there oughta be a law, you know? As we embark on the blah blah blah of the upcoming new year, I suppose I could give a nod to some of the albums that touched me in 2025, but to be honest, the albums I actually liked were obscure ones, except for the Hives’ new album The Hives Forever Forever The Hives. Actually, whatever, I’ll be honest, friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny had asked me to contribute to his Substack column on The Best 2025 Albums, so in order to oblige him I did put together a short list (sample: “Idle Heirs, Life Is Violence: What it’d sound like if Deftones, Mogwai and Crowbar threw a party and then promptly headed out to destroy the planet”). Now, Dan wanted to know my favorite metal/punk albums of 2025, which was impossible to do; not that I’ve looked very hard, but to my knowledge we haven’t had any real breakthrough metal band since (spoiler) Meshuggah forever ago (Dan’s favorite, Babymetal, is just a weak imitation of Meshuggah as sung by the Powerpuff Girls in my opinion), so if you really want to know what music I liked last year, there were only two things really: every demo song sent to me by local pop/hard-rocker Kris Montgomery Pedersen, and Wayne Wilkinson’s mellow-jazz holiday album Holly Tunes, which I still have in my car as I pen this super-important missive thingamajig (mostly because I’m not ready to move on to the horrors 2026 is going to bring; like, can’t we just pretend it’s still 2025 and we don’t have to reckon with the final bosses that are coming our way in America’s last days?). Sure, Taylor Swift put out an album, but I still haven’t listened to it, nor have I sampled anything from the KPop Demon Hunters movie, given that I assume it’s just the same entertainment matrix that manufactured Babymetal but they’re singing insanely catchy bubblegum tunes. So what do we have to look forward to in 2026, friends? More nepo babies, I’m sure, reflecting the massive wealth-inequality gap that’s characterized everything about our current era, like maybe the lady who does the voice of Bart Simpson on The Simpsons has another relative who can support her niece Sabrina Carpenter on tour so that American art finally hits rock bottom and we can just reboot rock ’n’ roll entirely, maybe starting with bands of marketing dropouts beating logs with dinosaur bones and playing reed flutes completely off-key. I mean, not to be an intolerable nihilist, but wouldn’t that be sooo good at this point?

• English post-punk band Dry Cleaning is mostly known for employing a semi-famous producer, and their newest album Secret Love is no different, because it was produced by Cate Le Bon, who’s famous for — OK, nothing any of you nice people would know. The single “Cruise Ship Designer” is stupid but not annoying, featuring a catchy early Rolling Stones guitar line while some lady, probably Le Bon, whisper-speaks some fashionable nonsense over it.

• Let’s Eat Grandma’s Jenny Hollingsworth’s solo project Jenny On Holiday releases its debut album Quicksand Heart this Friday. “Good Intentions” starts out as a shoegaze tune, then turns into a Belinda Carlisle synthpop song that’s totally ’80s. I liked it well enough.

• Finally it’s U.K.-based pub-indie band The Cribs, with their newest LP, Selling A Vibe. The single, “A Point Too Hard To Make,” is as tuneless as anything you’ve ever heard from Kaiser Chiefs but even worse than that (use your imagination). —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Alter Bridge, Alter Bridge (Napalm Records) & Diane Coll, Strangely In Tune (self-released)

W.E.B., Darkness Alive (Metal Blade Records)

Oh boy, could there be anything more important than making symphonic metal even more “extreme?” That’s what this Athens, Greece-based fivesome is doing, plastering synth-crafted orchestral maneuverings with Cookie Monster vocals from (apparently) a guy and a girl who’re both equally capable of pulling off an exquisite twin-punch karaoke of Bathory and Cannibal Corpse at a kid’s birthday party. This is a live set, just so you know, and thankfully the synthesizer making all the super-epic symphonic sounds didn’t melt down to ruin everyone’s vibe; essentially it’s a barrage of slightly out-of-date thrash metal ravings with bursts of faux-John Williams soundtracking doing epic things here and there. I was promised that “Into Hell Fire We Burn” has a chorus that “will make you want to sing along,” but there’s no melody to it, just demonic chanting over some bonk-bonk-bonk power chords, occasionally interrupted by [place name of literally any thrash band here] hamster-wheel shredding. And people are worried about AI barfing out hilariously disposable music (eyeroll). C —Eric W. Saeger

genCab, “Open Graves” (Metropolis Records)

I can’t come up with a single reason why any self-respecting goth shouldn’t give this dark-techno trio’s new extended single a listen. The driving force behind it is Bucks County, Pennsylvania’s (fine, he obviously wants me to say he’s a Philadelphia-based act, so whatever) own Dave Dutton, a big Elden Ring player who sure loves him some Trent Reznor, at least the harder, more rock-based, Gravity Kills-type stuff. He’s working his way up the ladder, having spent some time in Los Angeles working on various projects and refining his art, which required getting a new computer when his old one kept running out of memory when he was putting tunes together. With regard to the music, yeah, we’re definitely in Trent territory, but he’s an ’80s kid who’s obviously been exposed to tons of synthpop and has a decent sense of song structure; the tune does slap pretty hard in the manner of KMFDM but with much less sampling. Plus he likes Wumpscut, which earned him my rubber stamp from the jump. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• OMG no way, it’s a new year, are we even still standing, holy crow. Jan. 2 is the first new-CD-Friday of 2026, so, as we all try to remember to date our work-email messages with 2026 instead of 2025, it’s a good idea to think about what monstrosities are heading music’s way in the coming — you know, year. Most importantly, it will be a year in which music turns to artificial intelligence (AI) to produce new hit songs and full albums, and many are already complaining about the situation, declaring it somehow bad or “wrong.” In an interview with the Jacobin podcast, overexposed nincompoop and registered mediocre bass player Anthony Fantano, aka “Needle Drop,” professed concern that the “owners” (corporations like Disney and such) of machine-generated music will issue licenses to platforms like Spotify so that said platforms will have the right to use computer-generated voices and songwriting styles at will (which I’m sure will lead to a period when people start rejecting anything AI-generated). As well, like most people who don’t get the point of something, Fantano dismissed last year’s AI-generated song “Walk My Walk” (by the fictitious country-rock artist Breaking Rust, the creation of Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, a semi-anonymous, Burial-like content creator) as having “not actually broken big” because the tune “only” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, a chart that would be “very easy” for bots to mess with. I’ll let you finish your Fritos while you think about how stupid that is (hint: YouTube used to — and probably still does — count views of commercials for Lady Gaga’s singles as actual listens, and we’ve all seen bot-like behavior in YouTube comments sections for disposable divas like Sabrina Carpenter), but in the meantime, yes, the song was digitally created, which Fantano knew, so he knew automatically to write it off as “terrible” and “the most reductive parody of a popular genre you could imagine.” Personally, I’d say T Bone Burnett had already cornered that particular market (the song has a mud-blues sound a la Howlin’ Wolf), but it’s not any more “reductive” or redundant than Burnett’s depleted soil output, especially when he was trying to barf out as much music as he could to capitalize on his Aughts-era period of popularity. So no, we could argue these points all day, but the fact is that AI is coming to replace a lot of workers, including debatably original artists, but what I’m more concerned about is the fact that established rock stars are definitely going to deploy AI themselves to save time producing albums. But that might actually be good in some ways: Lady Gaga ran out of ideas after The Fame Monster, so why wouldn’t she program a robot to produce “something that Cher would sing but that would appeal to fans of Lorde” instead of stealing directly from Madonna like she did on “Born This Way?” Interesting times, eh?

• Devon Allman is the son of Greg Allman, so he’s automatically relevant and I’ll just leave it at that rather than whine about nepo babies again. His new album, Nightvision, is said to be an “alt-rock” album, but it’s actually a prog-rock album, going by advance single “Dead Sea Scrolls,” which is like boring-era Rush but with better guitar shredding.

• Paleface Swiss is a “beatdown hardcore” band from Switzerland with a new EP titled The Wilted. Basically like Fields Of The Nephilim meets Killing Time, it’s OK.

• We’ll wrap it up with Los Angeles-based indie-folk singer Miya Folick, whose new album Erotica Veronica reminds me of Oceanlab and Lisa Loeb: gentle, waifish singing over ambient niceness and strummy ’90s-pop that don’t mix all that well together. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: W.E.B., Darkness Alive and genCab, “Open Graves”

Kris Davis and Lutosławski Quartet, The Solastalgia Suite (Pyroclastic Records)

Canadian pianist/composer Davis won the Best Jazz Instrumental Album Grammy in 2023; she’s known for “intricate, rhythmically complex yet connected compositions” that touch on many genres, including improv, modern jazz, rock and techno. She’s joined here by Poland’s Lutoslawski (string) Quartet, which has no problem keeping up with and elaborating on Davis’ busy-pensive-busy pieces, so much so that busier, more intricate, time-change-riddled pieces like opener “Interlude” would sound mechanical if they weren’t so obviously heartfelt. “Towards No Earthly Pole” is wonderfully unearthly, desolate in spots (recall we’ve got Eastern Europeans on board here) and eerily alien in others; “The Known End” sounds like something that was considered for the edgier scenes of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But wait, folks, it gets more unsettling, with the appropriately titled “Ghost Reefs,” and then the tumultuous “Degrees of Separation,” which demands that the listener acknowledge its presence. Here there be serious, mathematically ambitious stuff, appropriate for absorptive vegging or summoning a creative brainstorm. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Gavial, Thanks, I Hate It. (Exile On Mainstream Records)

Instantly compelling band here from Germany; oddly enough it was sent to me by a public relations crew that usually specializes in thrash metal, and after reading the one-sheet — which promised “minimalism” and things like that — I was expecting something like Boris or even retro like Zodiac Mindwarp, but nothing could be further from the fact. It’s a massive curveball, starting with leadoff track “Control,” comprosed of grunge/noise sounds futzing with a roots-bluesy Moby idea, and yes, I mean like “Honey,” but quite a bit dirtier, in the vein of All Them Witches meets Fantastic Negrito’s Last Days Of Oakland (those references won’t be on the test, no worries, you’ll have to give me a second to compose myself; this is a thousand times more cool than I was expecting). “Koru Mindset” comes next, and it’s even more impressive, combining Trail Of Dead and Nick Cave. As if it wasn’t already pegged enough, the reverb goes to Jerry Lee Lewis level on “Pretender,” the longest tune here, which exposes these guys as Pink Floyd/Spacemen 3 fans. Lot of filthy fun, this one. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• Ho ho ho, it’s the least wonderful time of the year for us music journalists with columns to fill, because I’m sure there are no new albums coming out this Friday, Dec. 26, the day after Christmas, that would be like trying to sell gaily colored eggs on the day after Easter, you know? No, I know I whined about all that last week, but this week’s the worst one of all, let me go on my fool’s mission, armed only with my new best friend, Google’s AI bot, to find new albums! Well look at that, the new album from Busta Rhymes, Dragon Season, will be out on the 26th, I can’t even believe someone who’s that renowned would ever — oh wait, I see, it’s the follow-up to two Dragon Season EPs from back in January, which received some pretty stinky reviews, because boring, so he’s releasing this full-length on the day that everyone’s returning stuff and not buying anything. But you know what, in the spirit of Saint Nick, I will go listen to a track from this probably uneventful album and tell all you nice people about it, eeny meeny miny whatnot, let’s try listening to — OK, it’s all top secret, so there are no advance tracks, and I don’t blame him, because the critics all fell asleep during the two advance EPs, both of which sounded OK to me, except for there being too much Auto-Tune here and there. Have fun discovering the wonders of this boring album, and if you go to one of his shows, don’t say anything about how he looks exactly like Tracy Morgan, because he really doesn’t like that, so don’t.

• Not a lot else going on, but I suppose we could look at the vinyl re-release of John Williams Conducts The Star Wars Trilogy, because these new vinyl versions come in colors, for your favorite Star Wars geek, who will of course never listen to them, because colored vinyl is more valuable than — OK, most everything, but you know how Star Wars geeks roll. The original album was released in 1990, and all the tunes are from the first three movies, which had interesting music but not as cool as the music in 1998’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, there, I said it. Wait, don’t leave, hear me out, nerds: Remember the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when the giant “asteroid beast” (the “Exogorth”) tries to chomp on the Millennium Falcon but misses, and the music is kind of epic but not really? Well, in The Phantom Menace, Williams had 20 years to make that same piece definitely epic, so that’s what he did during the “There’s always a bigger fish” scene. Shut up, it’s the same tuneage, just a million times better, so give me the soundtrack to The Phantom Menace, not the first trilogy, I will delete any hate mail on sight, just saying.

• Next it’s Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso, a hip-hop-EDM singing duo from Argentina, whose new album Top of the Hills actually came out on Saturday, Dec. 20, but I’m including it because I’m desperate it’s interesting maybe, oh whatever just let me watch my shows and eat chocolate Santas. So, at least they’re serious musicians who studied music, and moreover their October 2024 Tiny Desk Concert for NPR went viral, and most importantly, they opened a show for Kendrick Lamar this year. The new album’s teaser track “Gimme More” is a lot of fun, a Latin-infused pop thingamajig with some calliope emulation and plenty of mindless boasts about their decadence.

• We’ll wrap it up with literally the only thing left, the split EP featuring the bands Tsunami Bomb and Hammerbombs, titled Bombs Away! “Things Aren’t Going Well” is a no-wave/oi-infused tune that would’ve slapped harder if Tsunami Bomb’s singer weren’t so vanilla, she sounds like my fifth-grade music teacher. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Kris Davis and Lutosławski Quartet, The Solastalgia Suite and Gavial, Thanks, I Hate It.

Pentatonix, Christmas in the City (Pentatonix Records

Fine with me, there’s plenty of room for more from the flood of holiday albums that washed over this desk this year. This one was brought to my attention by friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny, who was trying to get me to pay attention to a violin-metal band named Silenzium, which had done a Kiss cover for the purposes of getting mindless clicks or something. At any rate, in 2011 this Austin a cappella group won the third season of NBC’s The Sing-Off, a show I’d never heard of, and it turns out that this instrument-less group (which I’d similarly never heard of) had done a bunch of Christmas albums, including this latest one. The scatty title track is annoyingly listenable if you like Miami Sound Machine, but thankfully they cover a few traditional carols, starting with an Andrews Sisters-sounding “Holly Jolly Christmas,” along with a few Irving Berlin staples. There’s an overly busy Great American Songbook medley (“Moody Rudy”) which is obligato with these guys; the originals are mostly awful (I went straight to screensaver 15 seconds into “Elf”). If you’re interested, Wayne Wilkinson’s Holly Tunes, a collection of deeply mellow jazz covers of carols and such, has been the only holiday album I’ve listened to for the past month, please go get it. B- —Eric W. Saeger

Tracy Bonham, “Un-F*k This F*kt Up Christmas” (A Woody Hollow Records)

This Eugene, Oregon, native became a legend of Gen X/late-millennial lore when her first album, 1996’s The Burdens of Being Upright, yielded the slacker anthem “Mother Mother,” which stapled Alanis Morissette existentialist oatmeal to the coda riff from Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” This one-off novelty tune is an unburdening of sorts, addressing 2025’s epic horribleness by peering at it all through a Reality Bites lens, accepting the grim, inescapable facts of the matter, and knowing that even worse is surely coming, so why not deal with it in the blithe, disaffected manner that generational cohort has been perfecting since birth? In less capable hands this could have been pretty — you know, lame, but Bonham bandies the NSFW word around as if it were as common as dirt, which it is nowadays, let’s face it, but the beauty touch is that she apes Billie Burke’s lilting voice from 1939’s The Wizard Of Oz, as if to say “Fiddlesticks! There’s no such thing as a forbidden word!” I got a kick out of it anyway, and you should know by now I never go in for such stuff. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• Public apology for my blurb about the new Peter Criss album last week; Metacritic said quite clearly that it’s coming out Dec. 19, which is our next general CD release Friday, but I messed up, because somehow when you start getting old enough to start taking serious interest in buying a camera-equipped bird feeder, these things happen. I totally regret the error and have already mumbled five Hail Marys as penance, no worries, but what’s worse is that this is the last CD release Friday before Christmas Day, so according to Metacritic no serious band or musician or even William Shatner is putting out an album for me to comment on this week, or until Jan. 9 for that matter. Or are they? As we discovered this year, if there’s anyone who can tell us about new CD releases during freakin’ Christmas week, it’s a robot, so being the consummate professional journalist that I am, I shall now endeavor to blah blah blah with Google’s AI while they still have one, before computer scientists realize how stupid the idea of non-renewable-energy-powered AI was to begin with, let me microwave this mug of English Breakfast tea back into semi-usefulness and see what’s even going on here. Yes, tally ho, here’s one that’s due on Friday, the Her Name Is Love EP by Jamaican singer/DJ Masicka, real name Javaun Fearon, a fixture in the dancehall and reggae genres! His 2012 single “Guh Haad and Done” was a reggaetronica hit in that country owing to its rapid-fire lyrics, which centered on surviving the harsh streets of Kingston. This EP’s lead single, “Deep Love,” has the same sort of ingredients: trap riddims, Auto-Tuned vocals and whatnot, but it’s more soulful at least, if unoriginal.

• According to Genius.com, Megzsoul’s new album The Teenage Tragedy Show actually was set for release on Thursday, Dec. 18, for some idiotic reason, so technically it does belong in this issue, just give me a break already, I don’t even have Peter Criss to laugh at this week, would you prefer I talk about Al Jolson records again, I didn’t think so. OK, actually I probably should devote this space to Al Jolson, because this Megzsoul is obviously a teenager who successfully trolled the ironically named Genius.com into believing she has a legitimate album coming out; the only available information is some lyrical content where she imagines having a boyfriend who pays more attention to her than his TV and then she makes fun of him for becoming obsessed with her, kids these days, am I right folks?

• OK, don’t give up on me yet, here’s a legitimate album from a legitimate music person, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s Thoughts on the Future! She is a Pacific Northwest-based composer/performer who has put out a bunch of albums, including this newest one for Nettwerk Records; she mostly works with old Buchla synthesizers, which were analog modular synths that did all kinds of weird stuff owing to their sensitivity, like if you turned a light on in some other room the synth would respond by making sounds, so it was kind of like a prehistoric Furby in a way, I suppose. There is no music available to hear yet, but she put out another album called Gush a few months ago, which included the track “Everything Combining,” which sounded like Oompa Loompas singing around a Martian campfire, there’s no other way to describe it.

• We’ll end with a remix album from Trensum Tribe, regarded as “Scandinavia’s finest reggae-and-beyond soundsystem,” who futzed around with Axel Boman’s LUZ / Quest For Fire double album. The originals were glitch-techno with Jose Gonzalez vocals; Trensum Tribe’s obsession with dub simply makes the songs, you know, dubbier. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Pentatonix, Christmas in the City and Tracy Bonham, “Un-Fk This Fkt Up Christmas”