Author: Eric Saeger

The Writeful Heirs, The Writeful Heirs (self-released)

Big fan of the New Boston, N.H., area, which is where this boy/girl songwriting duo (they’re older, so “boy/girl” is a bit inaccurate, but whatevs) is based. Their trip is undergirded by Americana, and the bio sheet rattles off a few other influences, namely psychedelica, classic rock, ’80s stuff and alt-rock, which I trust is all totally true, but either way, these two have obviously spent a lot of time rehashing and refining these songs. Former Club Iguana songwriter John Montalto handles the guitar and bass here, with newcomer Sunny Barretto, a hippie lady who handles lyrics and background singing. This business starts off with “Jupiter in July,” a Guster-ish thing that’d be more of a Peter Bradley Adams endeavor if it were a bit more mellow, not that it’d hurt a fly as is. Tons of layering enhances the smoothness of the sounds; Amos Lee would certainly be an accurate RIYL name-check for this very well-done record. A

James Brown, We Got to Change (Universal Music)

A little rock ’n’ blues archaeology for you here, kids, an unreleased single from the Godfather of Soul (or, of course, whatever else people like to call him these days, often epithets that aren’t really nice, in line with all the #MeToo business that’s surfaced in recent years). This is an old relic, recorded Aug. 16, 1970, at Criteria Studios in Miami, a pivotal period for Brown in that longtime members of his famed James Brown Orchestra had walked out a few months earlier. The replacement band, called The J.B.’s. (anchored by two young brothers from Cincinnati, Ohio, in the persons of guitarist Phelps “Catfish” Collins and bassist William “Bootsy” Collins), boasted a harder edge, as heard on such singles as “Get Up (I Feel Like Being) a Sex Machine,” “Super Bad,” “Soul Power,” and this tune, a typical foreboding, urban grumbler that starts with bongos, then adds some staccato guitar before Brown starts preaching in his signature fashion, which of course prompts the usual Vegas choir-and-brass pomp. Three versions appear here. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• OK, look alive everyone, the next all-in CD release day is Friday, Feb. 23, who’s got the remote, I want to fast-forward three months so we can get past all this ridiculous “too cold to go swimming but too warm to make popsicles just by putting a cup of fruit juice outside for 10 seconds” weather. Don’t you hate this? I do too, but I cannot plead insanity and refuse to do my duty by listening to bad albums today, there are just too many bad albums out there in my new-release list, all looking up at me like a laundry-load of kittens, begging me to put aside my deepest-possible hatred for this stupid month and just pay attention to their awful songs, aren’t they so cute? Yikes, I have to tell you, I thought I was going to get to hear and review a new album from Elbow today, but that one doesn’t come out until March, so we’ll begin this week’s exercise with some band called Hurray for the Riff Raff, whose new album, The Past Is Still Alive, is in my ruggedly handsome face right this second! The leadoff single, “Snake Plant,” sounds like a cross between Reba McEntire and Sinead O’Connor, and no, I have no explanation for that, but it isn’t completely horrible.

• A long time ago in a rock ’n’ roll galaxy far, far away, four glam-metal hacks from Los Angeles realized that the fastest way to become famous (despite having no talent for writing songs whatsoever) would be to combine room-temperature Danzig-style faux-punkishness with a few Kiss elements, like face makeup, random explosions, guitar riffs that any 6-year-old could play after one lesson, and — well, OK, everything else, except for catchy choruses, and lo, Mötley Crüe was born. The only thing the band was really good for was giving metal-radio DJs a break from playing Ratt, which was a win for them and in fact all humanity. After a time, no one liked hair metal anymore, which was Nirvana’s fault, so the Crüe’s drummer totally accidentally released the sexytime part of a video he was filming with his Ph.D. physicist wife, Pamela Anderson, a film that was originally intended as an instructional video on nautical navigation for sailors stranded at sea. And then, whatever, the singer left for a while after releasing a sexytime video of his own, and then he came back, to no one’s surprise. Cut to now, where da Crüe’s guitarist, Mick Mars, was all like “I’m sick of this place,” so he has also quit for the moment, and, until he realizes that he’s going to be broke unless he rejoins da Crüe, he will release solo albums, of which his brand new one, The Other Side Of Mars, is the first. See what he did there, with that album title, and the first single from this Loot Crate version of Ace Frehley is called “Loyal to the Lie.” Stop the presses, folks, it’s not a bad song at all if you liked Gravity Kills way back before Ben Franklin invented the VCR. I can deal with it, sure.

• Nadine Shah is a British avant-pop singer who used to be friends with Amy Winehouse. Now that Shah is out of rehab, she is releasing albums, starting with this new one, Filthy Underneath. The single, “Twenty Things,” has a super-cool art-rock edge to it, and her vocals will appeal to Bowie fans for sure. It’s decent enough.

• Lastly we have Aughts-indie cool kids MGMT, whose new LP, Loss Of Life, features a tune called “Mother Nature.” It’s got a ’60s-pop slant to it, a la The Beatles, if you’ve ever heard of those guys. Actually, no, you know what, it sounds like Oasis quite a bit, up to the sad-happy chorus bit. Yes, that’s it, the tune wants to be “Wonderwall,” but, because it’s MGMT, it has to have a nicely shot but utterly pointless cartoon as its video, you know how this goes.

Becky Hill, Believe Me Now? (Astralwerks Records)

As you know, I complain about a lot of things, but to be honest, Astralwerks Records has never sent me something I didn’t like. This zillion-seller British dance-pop queen isn’t a household name here in the States, although chances are good that you’ve heard her 2019 Meduza and Goodboys-guested single “Lose Control” someplace. Like a souped-up Kylie Minogue, she’s all about the sexytime stuff, tinkering with drum ‘n’ bass, anthemic house, techno and atmospheric trance. Liftoff single “Side Effects” features Lewis Thompson, not that there’s much he does to improve on the bouncy club-kitten beat purring underneath. I really like “Disconnect,” with its buzzy, woofer-zapping rinseout noodlings holding Hill’s early-Katy Perry-style voice aloft, and p.s., the absolutely stunning hook should come with a Surgeon General’s warning. “Never Be Alone” is the ballad, spotlighting the Lorde/Adele sort of timbre that puts her voice at the top of her class. If anything, this stuff is too perfect. A+

The Philosophers, Vartamana (self-released)

Here we have a France-based sextet whose deeply mellow style more or less evokes a Weather Report-informed Miami Sound Machine, in other words the ’70s jazz-pop vibe is strong in this one. Replace Chuck Mangione’s trumpet with a sax and you’d be in the ballpark, but it leans more toward Sade in its level of chillness. It’s the latest project from guitarist Mark Bullock, a British transplant who simply wanted to put together a group in which each musician’s abilities were at least mildly tested. The project is ambitious enough, the standout piece being Alain Szpiro’s sax, which tables some fine runs that sound as though they cost a lot more to record than they likely actually did. Bullock’s guitar keeps the tunes centered and balanced when he’s not noodling away with some lead passages; singer Emeline Gouban strives for a mixture of bedroom/lounge ambiance, which she accomplishes sublimely, fitting in well enough with the rest of it. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, Feb. 16, is on the way, and new albums are coming with it, so let’s slog forward and get winter over with, shall we, folks? Actually, let’s slog back to the Aughts era, when indie rock was so awful that many albums came stamped with a Surgeon General’s warning that listening to their music would turn you into a toad, remember those days, fam, when college-rock taste was dictated by white Brooklyn scenesters, and it was all a big plot to legitimize Captain Beefheart or whatever the idea was? Ha ha, it was so awful, except for a brief part of the nu-rave scene, but other than that it was artists like El Perro del Mar, which is the stage name of Swedish singer Sarah Assbring, whose new album, Big Anonymous, is out this week! I literally hadn’t heard any of this person’s annoying music since around 2005, when I reviewed her self-titled debut LP in these very pages, so I’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do. Right, the last thing I heard from her was that album’s minor hit, “Here Comes That Feeling,” a mixture of French ’60s girl-group unlistenability and Assbring’s Betty Boop vocals. Listening to it now, I hope I trashed that stupid album from stem to stern most righteously, but chances are that I didn’t, given that back then I was a relatively new player in the whole “making fun of bad bands in city newspapers” game, so I probably praised it just so that people would like me. Given that I no longer care about people liking me (there will always be haters no matter what, so what’s the point), I shall now head over to the YouTube to see if Assbring still sucks as badly as she did 19 years ago. Oh come on, I’m listening to the new single, “Kiss of Death,” and it’s just a Sigur Ros-ified Lana Del Rey bringdown, slow and mildly shoegazey. The only good thing about it is that it’s musical in its way, I wish she’d just give up. The video is gross and disturbing too, something about someone committing a moidah, and there’s fake blood on the actress. This is what it’s all come down to, folks, mediocrity and fake blood, let me try to forget I paid any attention to this nonsense.

• Lolol, it’s Jennifer Lopez, with a new album, can you believe it, folks? Last I knew she was trying to lead a progressive house resurgence, or was that Britney, or was it all of them? Ha ha, who’s she re-married to now, Ben Affleck or that rotten egomaniacal baseball man, A-Rod? You know she’s just going to get re-divorced to whichever of those cheating alien clowns she’s with, like, there’ll be a spicy story in National Enquirer any minute now, even it’s just completely misconstrued nonsense, a few pix of Affleck paying some Domino’s driver for a pizza so he can “bulk up” in order to play the movie version of Broderick Crawford, get where I’m going with this? No? Well it doesn’t matter, the point is that I have to go listen to something off J-Lo’s new album, This Is Me … Now. Yup, the title track is trance-infused Ke$ha. Whatever.

• Uh-oh, it’s California-based indie-rock band Grandaddy. I never liked anything I heard from them nor understood why they had so many fans. This should be a load of fun, because I forget what they sound like. Their new album, Blu Wav, is on YouTube, yes, the whole thing, so that’s nice of them. I’m listening to the single, “Cabin In My Mind,” and, ah, there we go, nowww I remember, their trip is sort of like a Guster-tinged Spacemen 3. Yesss, that’s why hipsters liked them, because they’re tedious.

• We’ll wrap it up with Adult Contemporary, the new LP from Chromeo, an electro-funk duo from Montreal, Canada; I never liked these guys either. This’ll probably be ’90s garage-house, their new single, “Personal Effects.” Nope, it’s their same old milquetoast trash, Weeknd meets Kool and the Gang. Spoiler alert: I totally hate it.

Ekkstacy, Ekkstacy (United Masters Records)

This Vancouver, British Columbia-based singer is a mildly odd bird, extracting inspiration from a wide range of dark 1980s bands and SoundCloud rappers like XXXTentacion. I figured this’d be an unapologetic gesture of obeisance to his more gothy influences after hearing the Jesus and Mary Chain-begging opener, “I Don’t Have One of Those,” which, as you’d guess, turns in a half-asleep, very ’80s shoegaze effort, its beat straight out of the Cure’s earliest days. But there’s a more quickened pulse to be found here: “Luv of My Life” reads like a kinder, gentler Buzzcocks, or, sure, Pink Flag-era Wire, meaning that any Gen-Xer who wasn’t one of the popular kids will be feeling comforted by all they’ve heard of the album thus far. The guitars are jangly and bright, and the from-the-mountaintop reverb setting is right where you’d want it to be, and then suddenly he’s innovating rather nicely, as found in things like the shoegaze-twee experiment “I Guess We Made It This Far.” Very listenable stuff overall. A —Eric W. Saeger

Wisp, “See You Soon” (Interscope Records)

The latest Residents-style mystery artist is this one, allegedly a 19-year-old woman about whom no one knows anything. There are big things planned for this person, obviously, being that Interscope is the record label pushing it, not to mention the fact that there’s a writeup in Nylon, meaning that the intended audience is older zoomers who go to hair stylists, which is pretty much the only kind of place you’ll ever see that magazine, aside from maybe Sam Goody’s. The angle that’s being pushed is that there exists somewhere an army of young artists who want to resurrect shoegaze, or at least get briefly famous on TikTok for throwing together a tune like this one-off single, which, like her previous ones, is being offered without any explanation, background or anything else. If you think the whole thing sounds a bit odd, it is, but the guitars on this song are, I’ll admit it, completely divine, sloshing over the listener like an island wave at dusk. That’s the clean guitar layer anyway; the rest of it could be Raveonettes for all most listeners would guess. But sure, carry on, mystery TikTok person. A- —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Tally ho, there will be new albums released this Friday, Feb. 9, because that’s how it’s done around here! Winter is sure setting in, with random snowstorms and “frost heaves,” I wonder who made up that phrase, an abominable snowman after drinking a few too many Jagermeisters? Bop! I’ll be here all week, folks, no need to worry, but let’s get to some music stuff, starting with Part Time Believer, the new album from alleged alt-country band The Strumbellas, who are from Ontario, Canada! I listened to one of their older tracks, “Holster,” and it’s a decent curveball, nice and bouncy, sort of like what Guster would sound like if they had a pulse, but the lyrics are dumb, which is OK! As for this new album, it starts out with “Running Out of Time,” which is part ’80s-synthpop and part Jackson Browne ’70s-radio-mawkishness; it’s nice overall. The singer does sound a lot like Jackson Browne, which is why I mentioned him, but it gets better with “My Home is You,” which is obviously influenced by Kings of Leon — wait, here comes the chorus, yes, yes, definitely a Kings of Leon obsession here. There’s even a variation of the Millennial Whoop in there to remind you that the guys in the band are getting old; this’ll probably come out pretty cool when they play it live. See that, I don’t hate everything, now let’s move along and get back to normal, I’m sure I’ll get triggered as we proceed.

• Oi there, Bob’s your uncle, Declan McKenna is an English chap who won the Glastonbury Festival’s Emerging Talent Competition in 2015, that after he self-released a tune called “Brazil,” which was a protest song critical of FIFA’s deciding to hold the World Cup in Brazil in 2014, which made for bad optics. FIFA is of course the international soccer federation, but don’t call it soccer or they won’t know what you’re talking about, you must refer to it as “football,” please nobody tell them that football is actually about the Super Bowl and funny commercials, not soccer, because this ongoing national troll has been funny for decades now. McKenna’s new LP is titled What Happened To The Beach, and the leadoff single from this one is “Nothing Works.” The beat sounds like a cross between The Beatles and Devo, all tempered by Weeknd-ish dance-electro. It’s mildly catchy and definitely disposable.

• I’m sure you were wondering who actually cleared a path for the emergence of Poppy, and here she is, Sacramento, California-based singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe! She blends a lot of harder-edged genres into her tunes, stuff like goth-rock, doom metal and noise, which makes her officially relevant. Her new album, Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She, features a couple songs of note, starting with “Dusk,” a slow-burn noise-athon in which Wolfe tenders a yodelly Alanis Morissette vocal over the sonic equivalent of a goth lava flow. As well, there’s “Whispers In The Echo Chamber,” which combines scratchy Trent Reznor S&M-goth and Lana Del Rey whisper-pop. I really have no problem with this stuff at all.

• Lastly, it’s Zara Larsson, a Beyoncé-influenced dance-pop singer who got her start in 2008, after winning the second season of Talang, the Swedish version of all that America’s Got Talent stuff; she’s famous for tweeting such tweets as “Man hating and feminism are two different things. I support both,” because she is a little rascal. Venus is her forthcoming new LP; famous music producer and overrated fraud David Guetta had a hand in the single “On My Love,” so it’s probably dumb, but I’ll go check it out if you insist. Yup, it sounds like Rihanna singing over a house beat from 2008. I remember those days and why the whole thing flopped. —Eric W. Saeger

Diane Coll, Old Ghosts (self-released)

This Chicago-based singer-songwriter puts a decent-enough foot forward with this album, but the cascading verisimilitude of the songs and the lack of any experimentation left me feeling pretty uninterested. But as is the case with genres that I actually like, Coll’s strummy Americana is aimed a particular demographic and isn’t meant to rope in fans who’ve never heard Norah Jones before, which isn’t to imply that her bluegrass-tinged attempts at window-gazing acoustic chill sound all that modern. What I’m hearing is ’70s B-movie incidental music best suited for older hippies, which she obviously is, not that I have any call (or any other excuse, for that matter) to wax ageist. I’m probably her age in the first place, after all, but I did see one reviewer refer to her lyricism as “wisened,” an adjective that would fit here if the critic were being overly generous. I’d be more inclined to go with “wizened” owing to the archaic feel of the stuff. She does seem nice, though. C —Eric W. Saeger

India Gailey, Problematica (People Places Records)

Yikes, look at the calendar, it’s time for weird chicks with cellos, but this time we’re not talking about Rasputina, no sir. This Canadian-American gal’s trip is more in line with the self-indulgent explorations of certified wingnut Mabe Fratti, but in Gailey’s case — at least for this outing — there are no weird hippie dudes making faces and making incidental sounds. Instead we’re, ah, treated to a set of compositions that were written by other people on some sort of commission basis. The festivities begin with a tune written by one Sarah Rossy, an obscurity who’d probably be a big at sci-fi cons if she were encouraged to investigate such opportunities. The opening tune, “I Long,” showcases Gailey’s knack for noise as well as her often-captivating vocal talents, even if the first half of the song is pretty dissonant and indeed punctuated here and there with notes that sound, at least to ignorant peasants like yours truly, off-key. Nicole Lizée’s appropriately titled “Grotesquerie” is an exercise in funereal, unsettling noise if that floats your boat. B- —Eric W. Saegerr

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, Feb. 2, will be an epic day of albums, with new albums coming out of nowhere, dropping from the sky, onto our heads, with loving messages of rock ’n’ roll, corporate hipdy-hop and death metal! Some of you are old enough to remember Dinosaur Jr, a band that was led by J Mascis. The band members were from Amherst, Mass., where they helped to invent the indie rock that’s tormented us for decades now. His new album is What Do We Do Now and its rollout single, “Can’t Believe We’re Here,” is a hard jangle-rock thing spotlighting Mascis’s usual post-punkabilly drawl, and it all works well enough. Why, there’s even some decent lead guitar parts in there, you might like it.

• In the competition to be this year’s 4 Non Blondes or Kate Havnevik or Lana Del Rey or whatever, look guys, it’s Vera Sola, a singer, songwriter and mildly edgy nepo baby whose dad, the famous, overrated “conehead” comedian Dan Akykroyd, probably had nothing to do with her getting a big record contract, there’s just no way, so don’t even start. Her first album, Shades, got a lot of press love in France (you know what that means), and she’s here with her second full-length, Peacemaker. The first single, “The Line,” is decent enough, basically a metal-tinged no-wave tune without metal guitars or no-wave honesty, but nevertheless it’s good overall; if you like Garbage or any bands like that, you might be into this for a week or so before you regret spending $16 on it.

• U.K. electro-pop songbird L Devine was born and raised in Whitley Bay, a coastal town near Newcastle upon Tyne in England, Europe. Supposedly, when she was 7 years old she loved the Clash and The Sex Pistols so much — regardless of the fact that neither band played electro-pop — that she started a band called the Safety Pins, which I totally believe, because everything you read in a public relations announcement is always 100 percent true and never intended to make an artist look 100 times cooler than they actually are. Anyway, this person will release an album on Friday, titled Digital Heartifacts, which is, I think, a clever title, although I’m sure it won’t sound like the Clash at all, more like an album of bubblegum trinkets for people who wear Hello Kitty backpacks all the time, but let’s just go see what this nonsense is, shall we, yes, let’s. Yup, it sounds like Lorde, but it’s got a little kick to it, have fun with this, whoever you are out there.

• And finally, it’s Kirin J. Callinan, an Australian art-pop nerd who sounds just like the dude from the ’80s band ABC, you remember them, right? No, no, not Boy George, I said ABC, the skinny tie band that did “When Smokey Sings,” back when Reagan was the emperor of our land and all the boomer hippies had taken to behaving like grown-ups so they wouldn’t get in trouble with Reagan’s anointed pope, Jerry Falwell, I suppose you had to be there. OK, subject change, Callinan’s new LP is titled If I Could Sing, which doesn’t bode for the title of an album on which someone is singing, don’t you think? But no, you don’t have to worry about that, because the new single, “Eternally Hateful,” does indeed evoke an ABC filler song, except that there are some glitchy samples in there. In the video he’s getting the business from some medieval executioners, which he thinks is funny; your mileage may vary.

Oneohtrix Point Never, Again (Warp Records)

Recently I had a sudden burst of people messaging me on Facebook, writing hundreds of words berating me as a music snob. I’m really not. I’ve earned my wings by reviewing so many horrible albums over the years, and lately I’ve been listening to a ton of old Kiss, which makes me the diametric opposite of a music snob. Music snobs are sick in the head, like the fictional Loudermilk from the same-named Prime show. My wife shot me a “don’t you start” after I cursed upon hearing Sam (whom I love for the most part) say he liked Pavement. Pavement sucks so loud it deafens aliens on Alpha Centauri, and so does this dude, Daniel Lopatin, a bleep-and-bloop electronic “experimentalist” who, if he weren’t on the crazily pretentious Warp Records label, would be totally un-freaking-known. There are moments of melody here, “remembered from his childhood,” but sorry, it’s all dumb, intended for wannabe music snobs who are actually music haters. This album can go bake itself in a pie, and don’t write me for saying it because I’ll just yell right back at you. F —Eric W. Saeger

Afro Peruvian New Trends Orchestra, Cosmic Synchronicities (Blue Spiral Records)

This instrumental music project of multi-project artist Corina Bartra is multi-rhythmic and multidimensional, filled with swing and danceable South and Latin American rhythms. Corina Bartra originals, a majestic, Afro-Peruvian Festejo modulating to a swing groove, “Osiris,” the exuberant, Amazon-inspired “Ecstasy Green,” the moving Landó Ballas “Purple Heart,” “Bailan Todas las Razas” and “Ebano Sky” are full of beautiful melodies, exciting and colorful rhythms. “Baila y Goza” modulates between a Cuban Guajira and an Afro-Peruvian Festejo. The Cuban-inspired “Vinilo y Café” and “Latino Blues” are composed of catchy, danceable hooks, while “Far Away” tables a Brazilian-inspired tune doused in swing rhythm, a breath of fresh air full of pleasantly surprising moments. There are also three tracks that feature the Marinera style of Peruvian Creole music: an original (“Marinera Jazz”), a traditional (“Palmero Siguayayay”) and a medley from Chabuca Granda. For the smartypants out there, there’s “Tun tun tun,” filled with challenging grooves and rhythms to play, which all these top-notch players handle with relative ease. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Tons of new rock ’n’ roll CDs come out this Friday, Jan. 26, because you demanded it! Holy cats, guys, look at ’em all, where were all these music CDs a month ago, when I had literally nothing to talk about in this space, except for metal albums, metal albums and did I mention metal albums? But those days are gone, at least until next year, when I will once again suck wind in public, praying that King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard will release some album with a super-long title, comprised of a bunch of nonsense druggie songs that took them two hours to write and record while they were on drugs, so I can fill up half this space with words simply by repeating the title a few times! Yes, but for now I am safe, just look at all these freakin’ albums, fam, let’s start with a few words about Ty Segall’s forthcoming new album, Three Bells! I know I’ve written a few thousand words about that guy, but for the life of me I can’t remember anything about him or his music. You see, when you’ve reviewed thousands of CDs over your lifetime, selective amnesia sets in, and every week it feels like you’re Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates, rediscovering the special or horrible qualities of bands and artistes whose names ring bells but you can’t for the life of you remember a gosh darn thing about them, which is usually for the best! Anyway, Whatsisname here is one of those people, so I’m sure this’ll be an exercise in disappointment, as I sally on yonder to the YouTube and try to find out what in tarnation this album is about. OK, the first song on this LP is “My Room,” let’s run it down, fam. It’s sort of Nilsson-ish but really boring and un-tuneful; neo-’70s claptrap that would probably be borderline OK if the video had a cheap, trippy cartoon to watch, maybe. OK, that’s it, Ty Segall everyone, that oughta take care of — wait, wait, come back everyone, the next song on the album is called “Eggman,” and it features Whatsisface, dressed as a clown, sitting at a table eating an entire gigantic bowl of eggs! The music is loud and skronky and not completely boring! And plus, a one-man egg-eating contest! I approve of this message!

• You know, faced with a band named Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes, I expected to see a bunch of rib-eating-contest winners from Alabama, but no, this is an English punk band! Predictably, as if I weren’t already feeling anxious about that, it turned out Carter was in a band called Pure Love with a guitarist named Jim Carroll, who, it turns out, wasn’t the Jim Carroll, you know, the “People Who Died” singer from the 1980s, and yes, I’m so old that I had to do some journalism research whatever work and make sure of that, and now I feel like Rip Van Winkle, I hope you rotten little scamps are all happy. Dark Rainbow is the new album from this band, and the single, “Man Of The Hour,” is, of course, totally not punk, more like Spandau Ballet, you know, gentle cocktail lounge pop. I have no idea what these people are even doing, honestly.

• Wait a second, it’s not-completely-awful emo band Alkaline Trio, with a new album, Blood Hair And Eyeballs! Huh, maybe it’s because of the video, but the title track is OK, if you like Hoobastank etc. You do, right? No? OK, that’s OK.

• We’ll end the week with Baltimore-based synthpop band Future Islands, whose new LP, People Who Aren’t There Anymore, should be decent, please lord, let me have something nice to say. Wow, the opening track, “The Fight,” is cool, the singer sounds like the guy from Elbow, which makes up for the disposable Fright Night-soundtrack-style tuneage. It’s OK! —Eric W. Saeger

Friko, Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here (ATO Records)

A hard one to classify, this Chicago indie band’s first album for ATO Records, although it was finished before they signed with the company. Vocalist/guitarist Niko Kapetan’s voice is awkward, shaking like a vintage glass tray on the mantel during an earthquake near your grandmother’s house, which makes this whole thing an acquired taste from the beginning, but these guys do come up with some interesting song structures. For instance, there’s “Where We’ve Been,” which starts out as a ’70s beach-time radio-pop thing, then begins to pulsate and crumble in waves of noise, then reassembles itself and ends in unplugged Bonnaroo folk. Kapetan’s Conor Oberst side comes out for “Crimson to Chrome,” a mid-tempo semi-rocker that flirts with no-wave (or post-punk, depending on your point of reference) relevance (nice loud guitar sound at the break, me likey). “Chemical” is pure shoegaze, and when you take it all together you realize the band is a coherent Brian Jonestown Massacre. Worth your time, absolutely. A

Nicky, by (PRAH Recordings)

Point of order, the Nicky Harris under scrutiny here is a composer, pianist and singer inspired by London’s queer performance scene, not the South Carolina dude who’s done some Vegas-begging records featuring his Elvis-like baritone. Ryuichi Sakamoto, Duval Timothy, Anohni and Perfume Genius are cited as similar artists, as are The Carpenters (!), but for general audience purposes, I’d say it’s more like a cross between Nick Cave and the Eels, or Ben Folds on downers. This person is obviously a good pianist; given the rather casual noises they allowed into the recordings, I assume most of the tunes that ended up on the record were first takes, which I have no problem with whatsoever. It’s made for a very intimate album filled with a certain warmth despite Harris’s creepy singing; hearing Harris tap their foot and pop off a few random spoken lines keeps things interesting to say the least. It’s a tour de force of something, even if I’m not exactly sure what. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, Jan. 19, will see buckets of new rock ’n’ roll CDs dumped into the stores by guys with trucks, that’s how it works, folks! I can safely predict that a few trucks will be filled to bursting with the new Green Day album, Saviors, when it comes out this Friday, so that 35-year-olds will buy them and relive the days of skateboarding and having no clue whatsoever what punk really means, good times, amirite folks? Yes, yes, I was there, when they first arrived on the scene, and all the old punks were like “OK, it’s official, punk is dead,” but I was in a cover band at the time, and the bass player wanted to do “Longview” (I guess because maybe he thought that somehow an 8-year-old who actually liked Green Day would somehow end up in one of the adults-only clubs we played at), so I had to learn the lyrics to that dumb song, and every time we played it I’d have to go wash out my ears with some Ramones or Buzzcocks just to keep my stomach calm. Anyhoo, FYI, when anyone asked me whether or not I actually liked Green Day, I’d always change the subject to sports (all the Boston teams were losers back then, sort of like they are now) so I wouldn’t have to admit that I was just singing the Green Day song for money from drunks, but in retrospect I forgive the band for destroying punk once and for all, because I actually did like one of the songs, I forget which — oh, “American Idiot,” that one. It’s sort of like ’80s Joan Jett but with guys singing, and, just like that, I’ve digressed. Since there’s no way punk could be destroyed any more than it is, I suppose I’ll trudge over to the YouTube and see what they’re yammering about now, in the opening song “The American Dream Is Killing Me.” Ack, why would anyone in a band even want to play this song, it’s just “Longview” except the guitars have about 50 overdubs, and, as usual it isn’t actually punk, it’s something for Nylon to write about and promptly forget forever. It basically sounds like Weezer trying to be Foo Fighters or something. All set with this, barf barf barf.

• If you put Versus and Sheryl Crow into a Mixmaster and flipped the switch, you’d have “Honey,” the leadoff single from the upcoming Packs album, Melt the Honey. This Canadian slacker-indie band, led by Madeline Link, has been compared to Best Coast, though I don’t know why; they tend to write generally hookless tunes and throw them out on their Bandcamp space without much ado, a practice I’m fine with overall, I suppose, but I’d almost rather subject myself to a Pavement LP (I’m kidding, there’s literally nothing worse than Pavement, as you probably know) than investigate this disposable nonsense, but for its part at least it isn’t shapeless musical tapioca like Broken Social Scene (sorry, did that sound grumpy? I can never tell).

• Today I learned that feminist-indie band Sleater-Kinney took its name from a road in Lacey, Washington. I also found out that they’ve still got it, because their new LP, Little Rope, is actually pretty good. You can listen to the whole thing on YouTube, if that’s your wont, and if you do, you’ll hear some sturdy, interesting, Wire-like art-rock on “Say It Like You Mean It,” and “Hell” will probably remind you of the No-Nos. Best stuff I’ve heard from them, anyway.

• We’ll wrap things up with a seriously casual shoegaze band from Bristol, U.K., The Fauns, whose new LP, How Lost, is their first in 10 years! The title track’s guitar line evokes Modern English’s “I Melt With You” and the lady’s singing is neck-deep in reverb. Yup, it’s a shoegaze band all right, end of mini-review!