Author: Eric Saeger

KO Mini, Chef’s Kiss (self-released)

We’re seriously just about at the point where there’s almost no need to list a music release’s record label when writing about its merits or lack thereof, given that so many artists are completely independent (if the vampires at Ticketmaster and such could be prevented from buying up concert tickets and scalping them we’d be even better off). Anyway, what drew me to this little X-rated bubblegum EP was its tease that the single, “stoptryingtohavesexwithme,” “pushes the boundary of how much blunt humor and simultaneous sex appeal you should put into a song.” In a word, I was anticipating something funny, which it isn’t; it’s more about cruel rejection, not that most leering, overstepping incels don’t deserve anything better, but the beat is cool enough, a lot of earthquakey Ed Banger booms going on underneath. It’s a club-banging, Lolita-voiced break from the usual trap oatmeal, which, I’m sure you know by now, I absolutely cannot stand. The playful, fluttering/soaring “Sorry In Advance” is definitely worth checking into if you have some spare Spotify space. A

Escuela Grind, DDEEAATHHMMEETTAALL (MNRK Heavy Records)

I didn’t mean to riff on yet another metal release this quarter, but seriously, folks, this time of year I get sent like 50 of them every five minutes, and as well in my defense, at least this one’s from a New England-based band, well, half of it’s from Pittsfield, Mass., anyhow, go Patriots, amirite fam? The roster is three boys and two girls, one of the latter being singer Katerina Economou, who sounds like the dude from Cannibal Corpse, sort of, but more like Quorthon, like one of those raspy mini-sized cave-monster guys from the Hobbit movie, and the music is, as promised, very grindcore, like the sort of music you picture your pet tarantula humming to itself while it walks across the table to surprise your mom. It’s pretty epic for what it is, I suppose, not that I’d ever want these people to get mad at me, and thus I may be lying. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Hello, everyone, how was your late/second Thanksgiving, mine was fine except for when I completely ruined the turkey gravy by following a recipe I found online, at the Betty Crocker website, believe it or not, and it basically said I should combine equal parts flour and butter/turkey/whatever slime, but I took the recipe seriously and basically ended up with a cake that tasted like turkey; I’ve decided to cut this horrible disaster into a bunch of small compact cakes and sell them as “Gobbler Twinkies,” watch this space for my initial public stock offering and get a prime seat on the victory train! In the meantime, Friday, Dec. 8, is the next date for new CD releases, and look at that, there are actual albums listed on my private, secret metacritic.com web page, a source that only professional music journalists like me are allowed to access unless you have a web browser! I’ll stick to tradition and get the album I don’t really want to even talk about out of the way first, that being Before And After, the ninety-bazillionth album from horrible-voiced Woodstock charlatan Neil Young! No, I’m kidding, you guys, his song “Ohio” was OK, I thought, and it’s still OK even though it came out before SnapChat or the macarena or even electricity for that matter, and “Rockin’ In The Free World” is pretty epic, despite the fact that his guitar solo, as always, sounded like a duck trying to imitate the Storage Wars auctioneer dude (hey, let me have a little fun while I still can, I’ll be spending the next two or three columns complaining about the fact that there are no new albums coming out aside from box sets and hamster-wheel-metal albums from Finland)! OK, let’s see if my stomach can even deal with this new album, which is composed of acoustic versions of his old songs, like “Burned” from when he was in Buffalo Springfield during the days of the Thomas Jefferson administration, and “Mother Earth” from his 1990 album, Ragged Glory. Here, let me check out his re-rub of his famous song “Birds” and give you my expert analysis: Ah, I’ve got it, it’s an acoustic version of it and is absolutely no better than the original. Aaand moving on.

• Oh, great, time again for me to pretend I know anything about modern bubble-pop or divas or gigantic twerking butts or whatever the 11-year-olds listen to when they troll each other on SnapChat, because look folks, Nicki Minaj is back with a new album, called Pink Friday 2! There’s an advance single here, called “For All The Barbz,” and it features Drake and Chief Keef! The rhymes Nicki contributes are mindlessly pornographic, which adds to the je ne sais quoi, you feel me, and one of the dudes is using Auto-Tune, because it’s still 2002, right? So glad I’m living in a timeline that favors quality over redundant quantity, I have to say.

• Just a second now, this might be OK, the new LP from Alison Goldfrapp, The Love Reinvention! You might know that she got her start by being featured on the 1994 Orbital album Snivilisation, meaning she was one of the first electronic guest-princesses; I have to hand it to her. The new single, “Every Little Drop,” is understated warehouse-rave fodder, which I’m always glad to hear, just prettiness and sexytime romping, but there are no gigantic twerking butts and porn lyrics, what’s a critic supposed to do with this.

• And finally it’s California metalcore band Atreyu, with their new full-length, The Beautiful Dark Of Life! Wow, I have no idea what they’re even doing on the new tune, “[i],” it’s like some sort of Echosmith chillwave thing, I don’t mind it.

CrowJane, Bound To Me (Kitten Robot Records)
I’d thought it’d happened a lot more recently, but it turns out I haven’t heard from this Los Angeles kook lady since the release of her Mater Dolorosa EP in October 2020, which I described using RIYL comparisons like Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten. In this new five-songer she’s aiming for Siouxsie Sioux’s brand of weirdness, or so it says on the thing in front of me, and that sort of ’80s-goth-pop epicness is prominent in the works here, helped out by some pretty sweeping orchestral layers and Blue Man Group-ish drum-thumping (I should probably also mention that it’s a really captivating, super-nice tune). Elsewhere we have “Ides Of March,” which is like Siousxsie in metal mode, just an outstanding wreck-stuff rockout that’s got a bit of KMGDM to it. I hadn’t detected such a high level of accessibility in her earlier EP, but this one is remarkably good, well worth checking out. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Maddi Ryan, Growing Pains (self-released)
In this EP I’m hearing a cross between Amy Grant and [place random anti-diva like Lorde here] undergirding the voice of this Boston-area singer, who racked up Country Act of the Year nominations at count-’em-three New England Music Awards events. Enough Kellie Pickler/Taylor Swift wannabes have dropped CDs on this desk that I’ve forgotten what real disappointment feels like, but stop the presses, this five-song EP is proof that this particular cowboy-booted Insta princess knows her way around a studio, or at least whom to seat at the mixing booth’s least rickety chair, whichever the case. “Wilderness” opens things with some Swift-in-Jewel-mode crooning atop an acoustic guitar line, her soprano aiming for the angsty, hormone-bending vibe that usually leads to a boring chorus, but instead she stays on top of it, adding a truly pleasing vocal harmony, then some floaty dobro and similar layerings as it eventually morphs into Norah Jones-ish Americana. She’s a serious contender, I kid you not. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, Dec. 1, is the next CD release day, ermagersh, where did the summer go, what are we even doing here, and now let’s riff on ancient legendary arena-rock band Genesis for a minute, because one of the new rock ’n’ roll CD releases you can buy this week is I/O, from original Genesis singing person Peter Gabriel, his first since, holy catfish, 2011! Like his Genesis-singing successor, Phil Collins, Gabriel is famous for writing dishwasher-safe AOR-pop for dentists’ offices and Dollar Tree stores, and he’s most famous for being the singing person in the song trenchcoat-wearing kickboxing-slacker John Cusack was playing on his boombox during the famous “why aren’t the cops grabbing that guy” scene in the 1989 movie Say Anything. That alone elevated his cred far higher than that of Popeye-The-Sailor-lookalike Phil Collins, whose 1980s hits were horrible enough, but in order to ensure his ”Worst Song Of All Time” achievement award — and most Xers and Boomers have subconsciously erased all this from memory — Collins participated in a duet with really bad singer Philip Bailey on the song “Easy Lover” from Bailey’s 1984 LP Chinese Wall. The only ’80s rock music fail that came anywhere close to unseating that tune as the, you know, Worst Song Of All Time, was Eddie Murphy’s hilariously hubristic fish-out-of-artistic-water laughingstock, “Party All The Time,” which saw the first time a record company ever called an emergency Auto-Tune guy to come in and clean up Murphy’s transparently off-key vocal, and let’s not forget the video for Billy Squier’s “Rock Me Tonight,” in which he pranced around a bedroom like a preteen girl overdosing on Flintstones vitamins, a cringe-gasm so explosive that Squier’s career instantly tanked faster than the Lusitania. But yes, Gabriel has always been borderline listenable in my book, like, “Games Without Frontiers” was OK, mostly because I, like everybody else, thought it was either Psychedelic Furs or Echo And The Bunnymen, who even knew, you know? But anyway, whatever, “Turn It On Again” was a cool Genesis song, even though Peter Gabriel wasn’t there at the time, so here we go, let’s have a look at what’s on this new Peter Gabriel album, and wait a second, two remixed versions of the kickoff single song, “Panopticom,” have been released thus far: the “Bright Side Mix” (done by Mark “Spike” Stent), and the “Dark Side Mix” (mixed by Tchad Blake), both of which were released in January of this year. The Bright Side Mix is OK; the song is important-sounding in a first-world-problems sort of way, studious Gabriel nonsense that’s kind of a chore to listen to, same as always.

• Love Minus Zero is a new collaborative project between electro-revival producer Tiga and Scottish producer Hudson Mohawke, who was part of the “wonky” techno scene (think slo-mo dubstep with a lot of distorted, wobbly dance beats) until the end of the Aughts. L’Ecstasy is their forthcoming debut full-length, which spotlights “Love Minus Zero,” a track that’s a few years old, a really cool, hypnotic dance joint combining dubstep, trance and tribal, you’d probably like it.

• We Owe is the solo project of Swans’ Christopher Pravdica, whose new LP Major Inconvenience uses such things as autoharp and djembe to make off-kilter tunes like the new “Time Suck,” a woozy, discordant, Throbbing Lobster-ish experiment.

• Lastly we have yet another Bandcamp mess to decipher: When No Birds Sang, a joint-effort album between grindcore outfit Full Of Hell and heavy shoegaze dudes Nothing. “Spend The Grace” is a skronky, apocalyptic, blissed-out noise exercise, but other than that it’s probably fine for bouncy-house parties.

Gale Forces, Highlights Of Existence (self-released)

Well, I don’t mind this at all. As often as I’ve been disappointed by the last few months’ worth of Los Angeles bands darkening my door, there’s a lot of cred here, starting with the roster, which includes ex-members of Engine Kid and This White Light, along with a guy who’s still in AWOLNATION. The raucous music that’s on this LP isn’t hard to describe; there’s a lot of Aughts-era stoner rock to it, buoyed by a “brown” sort of guitar sound that typifies Trail Of Dead, and frontman Jade Devitt’s voice (he collaborated with someone from (((Sunn O))), by the way) evokes U2’s Bono on Nick Cave juice; that is to say it’s energetic but not hopelessly commercially shrinkwrapped. The end result is a bunch of tunes that are too cool for sports-bar rock but still quite accessible; SST Records would have loved this stuff as a companion product to Redd Kross and bands like that. A

dreamTX, Living In Memory Of Something Sweet (self-released)

Dallas, Texas,-based multi-instrumentalist and producer Nick Das is looking into techno reinvention after spending a few years chasing Drag City Records cred the way his fellow Texans do. He hatted out for Woodstock, New York, to inhale the spiritual air, promptly finding himself roasting in July without air conditioning, so this collection obviously has some trippy life stories behind it. “Get Around” has a tribal bend to it, evoking sunburnt neo-hippies jumping and dancing crook-legged; it’s celebratory, yes, but it’s also pretty gothic in its way, and I definitely like the muzzled no-wave guitar sound. “Elated” aims for the same sort of emotional bliss; like a sort of shoegaze 2.0, it’s sexless but rave-y, with multi-tracked faraway chant-like vocals begging the listener just to let go and be elated over something, whatever it might be. I’m sure a lot of writers will file this under dream-pop for the convenience of it, but it’s more than that, a very listenable mystery-meat I found particularly blissful really. A+

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nov. 24 is the day after Thanksgiving, aka Black Friday, and wouldn’t you know it, as always, even though Black Friday is the holiest of shopping days, very few albums will be released, assumedly because all the bands and artists and record company Men In Black know that people won’t be buying albums, they’ll be trapped at the mall, in the Apple and T-Mobile stores, trying to buy just the right glorified Tamagotchi for their ungrateful little Jacobs and Marissas, waiting around for some store clerk (who knows even less stuff about smartphones than they do, if that’s even possible) to take pity on them and answer their technical questions, like “Where’s the ‘on’ button?” (By now I’ve probably given away the fact that I hate smartphones; being an OG software engineer I see them as nothing more than walkie-talkies that tell you the weather). But anyway, Friday is a day that ends in ‘y’ and that means incorrigible songwriting addict Robert Pollard has written enough sort-of-songs to release a new Guided by Voices album whether I want him to or not! When last we left Pollard, federal agents were unable to confiscate his recording equipment owing to an obscure constitutional clause called “artistic freedom,” and so, for what, the 10th time this year, I’m again tasked with peering through an electron microscope at his latest songwriting outburst, an LP titled Nowhere To Go But Up, in an effort to find something to like about it. When last we left this nonsense, it was July and our intrepid hero had just released Welshpool Frillies, which had a song that I said was OK, not that I can remember anything about it, so I’ll have to take my word for it. OK, aaaand I’m riffing, let’s listen to the new single, “For The Home,” there it is, on YouTube. It starts out with some unplugged Led Zeppelin III weirdness, which would have been fine if Pollard had simply left it at that and maybe yodeled over it, but no, here we go, he rips off Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in The Sky,” hoping that there are three people left on the planet who’ve never heard that song and they’re Guided By Voices fans. It’s cool enough but pointless.

• British indie band Spector enjoy making borderline pub-rock for sports bars, you know, that goop that sounds important and edgy even though it’s not, and suddenly you’re saying to the waitress, “Sure, I’ll try the extra-hot wings,” and then you regret it. Their bandleader, Fred Macpherson, is influenced by ’80s/90s swill like OMD, Spandau Ballet and Ultravox, but I’m going to listen to the new single “Driving Home for Halloween,” from their fast-approaching new album Here Come The Early Nights, nevertheless. Oh lol, this is so gross, the tune’s faux-punk AOR hook is something you want to get out of your head as soon as it catches hold, it’s like a gothy version of the worst Kaiser Chiefs song you’ve ever heard, and there’s no escaping it. Absolutely terrible.

• Take That is a British dance-pop band that’s won zillions of British music awards, meaning that no American has ever heard of them except for me, just now. This Life is their ninth studio album, and the title track is — aw, I can’t snark at this, it’s nice and dancey, a dumb piano-pop thing, sort of like Andy Grammer or Billy Joel, and at least the video doesn’t have a runway model in it pretending to be a normal person.

• We’ll end with all y’all putting on cowboy hats, because country dude Chris Stapleton releases his new one, Higher, this week! He’ll be at the Bank of NH Pavilion for three days next August, tickets are going fast, and in the torchy new single “I Think I’m In Love With You” he sounds like a cross between Bon Scott and Peabo Bryson! Yee-haw, you have to love it!

Sick Boss, Businessless (Drip Audio Records)

Brandishing not just post-rock but indeed post-apocalyptic sound adventures a la That F-king Tank, the meanderings of this Vancouver, B.C., six-piece outfit are mostly loud and sinister, nicking from Jimi Hendrix, 1970s-spaghetti-crime flicks, Primus and really anything they can wrap their instruments around. Slotted into the fusion jazz category for reasons of convenience, this bunch is led by guitarist Cole Schmidt and includes trumpeter JP Carter (who’s collaborated with Destroyer), as well as a violin guy and a cellist; all six of them are terrific improvisers when they’re called upon to put in two cents toward realizing the noise-stomp-meets-Ennio Morricone ideas put forth. Par for the course for any outstanding group of this sort, static-noise jams give way to passages of beauty and vice versa; there are hard riffs, proto-emo chill-outs (“CJ Blues”) and other related-or-not things that complete a picture of a very interesting instrumental group that’ll be around a while with any modicum of luck. A+

Art Feynman, Be Good The Crazy Boys (Western Vinyl Records)

Art Feynman is an alter ego of producer Luke Temple, and it’s a lucky thing I even found that out when I skimmed the press release for this LP; anyone who reads this column knows that I’ve had a soft spot for the Salem, Mass., native since I first heard him years ago and likened him to another artist you’ve never heard of, one Winston Giles (I’m waiting for just one reader to finally get into Giles and express their eternal gratitude in sonnet form in my Facebook messages). This one was recorded live in the studio with a full band, a first for Temple; the record’s nervous but basically carefree feel recalls Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, which was a touchstone in the writing process. The tunes are meant to touch on “the part of the modern collective consciousness that’s struggling to maintain balance in a toxic, chaotic world,” but it’s a lot lighter-hearted than that; “In CD” feels like a Vampire Weekend demo intended for approval by B-52s. Infectious, massively accessible, genius-level stuff. A+

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nov. 17 will be a day of new CD releases, try to stay calm, with regard to all the new music! It’s almost Thanksgiving, fam, and in order to honor that pumpkin-spiced holiday in the most appropriate way possible, Hollywood released a movie named after it, and the soundtrack was done by one Brandon Roberts, who handled the soundtracking for a bunch of other nonsense-horror movies, including A Quiet Place and The Woman in Black. At present the soundtrack isn’t available, probably because no one would buy a CD of a soundtrack about serial-killer turkeys or whatever it is, but, just saying, I did look into it for you. In fact, I’m a little surprised that there was an actual professional soundtrack for that movie, but you just never know what’ll happen when those Hollywood guys start drinking at Spago’s, you know?

• If you spend a lot of time on Twitter or basically any other social media site that isn’t Facebook and is thus possessed of a little bit of street credibility, you know that Dolly Parton is now Taken Seriously by Serious Internet Posters because she’s rattled off a few virtue-signaling posts about something or other, which resulted in a noticeable uptick in her cred! Yes, her coolness factor is now at Tom Jones level, and all sorts of younger musical artists are hopping on the gravy train, like when Lady Gaga recorded the duet with Tony Bennett for no rational reason whatsoever, but good for her! Yikes, just look at the roster of rockers who contributed to her fast-approaching new album, Rockstar: her version of “Let It Be” features the last two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Magoo or whatever his name is; it basically just sounds like Dolly Parton doing a Vegas version of that tune, in case you ever wanted to hear such a thing. But wait, folks, there’s more, Rob Halford from Judas Priest and Nikki Sixx from Motley Crue appear on the third single, “Bygones,” and it’s pretty funny but serious, like you end up thinking “why did they let Dolly Parton start randomly singing on a disposable heavy metal song,” not that she doesn’t do as good a job as you could ever hope for with it; she sounds wildly out of place, but yes, she does keep pace, singing fast over the metallic riffing, boy did I land on the wrong planet.

• Ah yes, Smoke Fairies, we’ve dealt with them before, to a most pleasant outcome in spite of the fact that the indie-folk ladies rose to fame mostly owing to the fact that famous hamburger-gobbling person Jack White decided they were cute and he simply had to have them on his record label! Who cares, either way, yes, they’re cute, toward an Emily Perkins I-am-the-world’s-weirdest-dorm-mate fashion, so I welcome the chance to hear them sing new songs about ghosts or whatever it is. Carried In Sound, their new album, is on the trucks headed to the stores as we speak, and it will feature a new single, called “Vanishing Line,” a haunting tune that combines Loreena McKennitt’s ren-fair shtick with Enya’s multi-tracked technique. You know, if you’re a pale-skinned goth who’s never listened to these gals, do yourself a favor and check ‘em out; they’re completely crazy but don’t let that stop you.

• We’ll end the week with Salvage Enterprise, the new album from The Polyphonic Spree, a huge-ass “choral rock band” from Dallas, Texas! On Nov. 17, they released the single, “Shadows On The Hillside,” a really pleasant tune that’s pure ’70s acid-AOR, recalling Nilsson and, quite frankly, The Who’s Tommy album. It’s pretty deep and wide, well worth checking out.

Newmoon, “Fading Phase” (self-released)

Funnily enough I was just watching a long documentary about shoegaze bands for no real reason, luckily for me. Newmoon, based in Antwerp, Belgium, has already released a couple of albums to “critical acclaim” (which, let’s be honest, in some cases may pretty much mean that one of the band’s friends said “it’s awesome” on Instagram), and this single will lead off their third when it drops in March 2024; it’s mastered by Simon Scott of shoegaze legends Slowdive. That last bit is important, because if there ain’t no plasma-blob immersiveness to the guitars it simply ain’t shoegaze. Toward that, the guitars are pretty bright and, well, tropical as the tune rolls out, until of course the inevitable noise-chaos appears two-thirds of the way through. I’m definitely more of a My Bloody Valentine guy than a Glasvegas fan, but all the ingredients fit, from the sexless faraway Q Lazzarus-like vocals to the ludicrous reverb level. It’s fine. A-

Dokken, Heaven Comes Down (Silver Lining Music)

Once you little Zoomer rascals get off my lawn, I’ll tell you the story of way back in the 1980s, when I completely ignored this Los Angeles-based glam/hair-metal band, mostly because my guitarist at the time thought they were awesome; he and I shared a strained, awkward mutual respect. I preferred bands that had a pulse and obvious brain damage, like Slade, Wasp and Alcatrazz, where Dokken had a weird rep as some sort of borderline prog-rock thingamajig but was really just about getting dates, which is of course the only reason anyone starts a metal band in the first place (raises hand). OK whatever, the LP kicks off with “Fugitive,” a decent speedster that’s decorated with either a 12-string or sitar that makes it sound important, and then the main riff kicks in and yep, it’s good, making the listener want to punch someone in the face out of adrenaline overload. Singer Don Dokken is as boring as ever, which really drags things down during obligato lonesome-male filler tune “Is It Me Or You.” The band’s the same as ever, folks, pseudo-epic slow-burn tunes (“I’ll Never Give Up”) yadda yadda. A-

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nov. 10 will be a day marked by the release of many new albums, because Friday is the traditional day of the week when all the bands and artistes release their new records in the hope that people will buy them! Hello to all the new readers out there, I’m your host for this journalistic exercise, in which, every week, I try my darnedest to find something nice to say about albums that should never have seen the light of day. Just so’s you know, I actually do try to wax positive about all the bands and sonically creative types that send things to my physical and virtual mailboxes in the usually misplaced hope that I’ll be in good enough of a mood to say something positive, which, my longtime readers know, is like expecting the famous groundhog Punxsutawney Phil to neither confirm nor deny that he saw his shadow but instead to start singing “Vesti la giubba” from the classic opera Pagliacci in such a perfect tenor that people begin weeping uncontrollably on the spot. No, kidding, I’m usually really nice to bands, especially local ones, not that that ever gets me anywhere.

Yow, here we go, look at that, I had all but forgotten the the early Aughts had ever even happened (I’d need 50 pages of space in this paper to list all the reasons), so it was quite a trip when I noticed that the Cold War Kids have a new album coming out. The LP is self-titled, which is such a late-Aughts thing to do, but I liked those guys; they had Spoon-level songwriting, even if they were too catchy and commercial-sounding for the snobs at Pitchfork Media (which is actually a selling point in the opinion of most people, let’s be honest). Anyhow, the Kids have a new single, of course, and it’s called “Run Away With Me,” let’s listen to its YouTube version. Wow, it’s energetic and bouncy and poppy, Pitchfork would hate it, and at the moment I’m trying to find a reason not to do the same. It’s disco-y and works a Weeknd/LMFAO angle, but — OK, here’s the chorus. Right, it’s cool, try to picture the Strokes having a Some Girls period, that’s what this is. I physically can’t hate these guys.

• Pinkpantheress is a British 22-year-old who had viral success on TikTok; when our civilization is gone, TikTok success will be something that will puzzle archaeologists. She’s into bedroom pop and two-step garage, and thus her new single, “Capable of Love,” is a lot more listenable than Ariana Grande, there, I said it.

• We’ll end with Beirut’s new one, Hadsel, because why not. The band is led by trumpet/ukulele dude Zach Condon, and the new single “So Many Plans” is a plodding weird-beard tune that crosses Sigur Ros with Carolina Chocolate Drops; it’s liveable.

E-Garbage, LLM (Dee Dee’s Picks Records)

Swiss artist & engineer Eric Nardini is more commonly known in techno circles under the pseudonym E-Garbage, which points to his penchant for the raw techno that he creates through the use of trash electronics, random objects, modular synthesis, and “the DIY ethos of the punk scene in Geneva” such as it is. The “recommended if you like” list includes Drexciya, Unit Moebius, Legowelt and Terrence Dixon, not that there’ll be a quiz later, but what it means is that you’ll encounter the usual periods of self-indulgent noise, much of it basically white, that you’re expected to relate to, and some IDM DJ stuff that’s rather pleasant, albeit not groundbreaking (as found in the track “Glitched Token E,” an unfocused joint that also fronts some pretty-much-breakbeats, a style I thought I’d never hear again, not that I mind it). “Stochastic Parrot E” is mildly industrial krautrock that at least sticks to its subject for a while. B — Eric W. Saeger

Best Ex, With A Smile (Iodine Recordings)

For being a married person, this quirk-pop indie lady sure sings about how much men suck, not that we don’t know that we do; with this she takes up post-riot-grrrl gauntlets against a lot of things, like inattentive boyfriends and the dudes who run the music business (I can’t imagine anyone being surprised to learn that those guys suck even worse than the average Joe). The overall sound here is Taylor Swift on a low-ish budget, but there are some arena-stomping Imagine Dragons-style moments if you stick around for the middle of the single “Tell Your Friends,” a tune about a breakup that’s led to zen moments in a car with the window open and blah blah blah, in other words no real lessons come of it, just B-grade disaffection. “I Promise To Ruin Your Life” lifts the basic recipe from Ingrid Michaelson’s “Be OK” and doubles down on the teen-pop attitude, not that I’m saying no one should do that. It’s catchy. A- — Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Jane, stop this crazy thing, the next general-CD-release Friday can’t be Nov. 3, it just can’t! Great, that means it’s Thanksgiving in a few minutes, so now I have to figure out which family members and friends are still classified as “the non-crazy people” by my preferred crazy family members so I can invite them to Thanksgiving, that’s if I can even find creamed onions for a Thanksgiving side dish, does anyone even know if they stopped making those forever or what? But I’m getting ahead of myself, I need to just face one nightmare at a time, so I’ll put aside Thanksgiving for now and try to see if there’s anything in this pile of new album releases that won’t get my stomach roiling and lurching and dancing the macarena! Hm, here we go, we’ll start with The Struts, an English glam-rock band that’s from Derby, in Derbyshire, U.K., a “township” located due west of East Derby in East Derbyshire, U.K., if I know my British geography, which I don’t at all. I’m sure I’ll be fine with this band’s rock ’n’ roll, because glam rock is what everyone should be listening to now, and literally nothing else; after all, Slade was/is/whatever the greatest U.K. glam band in history, so maybe these guys just sort of absorbed some of Slade’s greatness just by being from the only island in the west where the owners of the place unironically wear crowns. Pretty Vicious is whatstheirface’s new album, and it features the title track, which was made by taking the interesting parts of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” throwing them in a randomizer and coating it in British glam that isn’t even close to being as interesting as Slade’s worst song. Other than that, I am genuinely excited about this album release.

• Ack, everybody duck, here it comes, right on too-soon-time, the flood of posthumous releases from Jimmy Buffett, the first of which is Equal Strain On All Parts! Look at you, getting ready to be mad at me for saying something mean, but surprise, I will honor Mister Cheeseburger’s memory by listening closely to whatever song his agent found in 1/2-inch tape reel form in Jimmy’s trash can, whatever tune the record company’s Men In Black will front as the single from this — wait, no, I’m told this is an actual, official album, one that was completed only two months ago, no rush, amirite? Anyhow, the single, “Bubble Up,” is a basic country-pop chillout that most listeners will think is a Willie Nelson song until the accordion comes in, which, point of order, doesn’t make it an actual zydeco song, but of course whichever “music journalist” hack reviews it for Nylon or Buzzfeed or whatnot will say it’s a zydeco song. I cannot do anything about that inevitable nonsense, but yes, I would if I could.

• Irish musician Hilary Woods is a solo artist, previously the bass player of the vastly underrated jangle-grunge band JJ72, which dissolved in 2006 just to get on my nerves. Woods’ current trip is “nocturnal keyboard-based songs” largely inspired by “filmmakers, electronic artists, experimental noise, and folk music traditions.” In other words she’s kind of weird, as exemplified by her forthcoming new album Acts Of Light. This set of songs is based on “a fugue comprised of nine slow hypnotic dirges,” in other words it’s probably kind of weird, but let me go visit the YouTube machine and find out for sure. Ugh, yes, the tire-kicker single “Where The Bough Has Broken” is definitely weird, a miserable, morose ambient exercise that drags on forever, but don’t let that stop you.

• We’ll close with Little Bit Of Sun, the new full-length from Minnesota post-grunge trio Semisonic! I don’t mind the title track at all; it sounds like what would happen if Amos Lee tried to sound like Coldplay and Tom Petty at the same time. Good stuff. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured photo: E-Garbage, LLM (Dee Dee’s Picks Records) and Best Ex, With A Smile (Iodine Recordings)