Author: Eric Saeger

Julian Loida, “Giverny” (Gratitude Sound)

Preview title track from the album of the same name, which will be out in a couple of weeks. Art wonks will recognize Giverny as the small town outside of Paris where Claude Monet lived and worked, a place and feel that jazz/ambient percussionist/composer Loida tries to conjure through talkative piano lines, some well-placed string breaks, vocal chanting and a generally peaceful feel. Loida’s one of the good ones, his work spanning genres; he collaborates with dancers to compose scores for their performances and has partnered with visual artists and musicians from all walks. His eclectic geniality has extended into the area of community service as well: For more than two years Loida ran the Children’s Program for Shelter Music Boston, “bringing music and trauma-informed educational programming to children and families experiencing homelessness and financial insecurity in Greater Boston.” The full-length LP will be one to look forward to for certain. A

Champlin Williams Friestedt, Carrie (Sound Pollution Records)

OK, so this is a throwback-AOR supergroup of sorts, featuring Toto singer Joseph Williams, Chicago singer (for 25 years!) Bill Champlin and Swedish guitarist-producer Peter Friestedt, who released two LA Project albums that Billboard magazine, naturally, liked. Now before you confuse the title track with the old hair-metal Europe ballad, it’s not, it’s more of a happy-ass yacht-rock joint, co-written by Grammy Award-winning songwriter Randy Goodrum and features Champlin duetting with the another guy who fronted Chicago, Jason Scheff. Boy, I’ll bet there was some awkward vibes in the recording studio when they tried to fit those two egos into the booth, but it’s a very nice song, if 30 years past its sell-by date (I expected to hear Jack Paar’s “Man In Motion” song from St. Elmo’s Fire in followup just to complete the mummified feel). “The Last Unbroken Heart” pickpockets the ding-donging electric piano sound from ’80s Whitney Houston for the LP’s worst, most mawkish moments, and so it goes throughout, music to eat lobster with granny and grampy by. A

Playlist

• May 12 is on the way, bringing with it albums galore, ye, albums as far as the eye can see, like the classic biographical children’s tale One Fish Two Fish, except with albums, and I’m so excited to see if there’s anything good in this big pile! Looky there, it’s Alison Goldfrapp, who used to be in a band called Goldfrapp that featured the singing of one Alison Goldfrapp, so apparently she quit her own band to start a new one with herself? I don’t know, and let’s not dive into the Wikipedia over something so dumb (OK, I did, Goldfrapp is a duo with some keyboard player dude, I hope he’s not super-mad at her for making it obvious that she thinks he’s worthless in front of the entire planet), let’s just have a look at her new album, The Love Invention, because that’s what’s on the flames for us to talk about and blah blah blah. I have one of her albums — oops, I mean just a plain Goldfrapp album, and listened to it a few times, but it never really stuck. It was easy-time techno, which I can always deal with, but it wasn’t super-sexy or all that melodic — OK, it kind of sucked, not trying to be mean or anything, but I’ll do the dutiful and pick a random song from this new album, because the whole thing is available on YouTube right now! “So Hard So Hot” uses the same dreadful kind of keyboard sound Paul McCartney used on “Wonderful Christmastime,” so that’s a big minus right off the jump. Eh, then it smooths out and turns into a decent afterparty deep-house tune. Nothing really innovative, just decent enough technopop.

• British alt-rock/darkwave trio Esben and the Witch is named after a Danish children’s book, and let’s see, what else does Wikipedia know about them — hm, nothing really, just that they got together at some point and decided to play rock ’n’ roll songs together, which is how bands form, in case you weren’t sure. Their song “Marching Song” was used on TV shows like Beavis and Butt-head and Ringer, and so on. Hold Sacred, the band’s new LP, includes songs, one of which is “The Well.” The singer kind of sounds like Siouxsie Sioux, but not as much as Florence Welch does. The song’s kind of droopy and sad, with lots of reverb, it’s OK I guess.

• BC Camplight is the stage name of New Jersey-based singer-songwriter Brian Christinzio, who lived in Philadelphia, Pa., for a while, where he lived in an abandoned church, then moved to the U.K., where he got his act together, and then the po-po in England banned him from the country for some reason. He’s been on the straight and narrow since then; maybe you heard his 2015 single “Just Because I Love You” (not to be confused with the Anita Baker song, of course), a Smoky Robinson-meets-Brian Wilson sort of bedroom-soul tune that did OK with critics but, like basically everything else he’s done, didn’t really make him much money in record sales. That brings us to the here and now and his new album, The Last Rotation Of Earth, due out Friday. The title track is sort of like what would happen if Jr Jr could write good songs, or at least ones that would have a snowball’s chance of getting on commercial radio without annoying people. It has an enthusiastic piano line, over which Christinzo lays some subdued Beck-like college-rock vocals to decent effect.

• We’ll call it a column with Wilderness Within You, the new album from Parker Millsap, who is actually not related to Ronnie Milsap, so just stop that right now. The title track features Gillian Welch (who probably only showed up because she thought this guy’s related to Ronnie Milsap). The tune is really nice, steeped in unplugged bluegrass finder-picking, you might like it.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Bobcat Goldthwait, Soldier for Christ (PGF Records)

So, an album featuring ’80s/’90s/whatever comedian Bobcat Goldthwait performing a standup set recorded last year at Lincoln Lodge in Chicago. Like Gallagher with his watermelon-smashing Sledge-O-Matic (which has been outdone by approximately 367,000 YouTube prank videos last time I looked), Goldthwait has had a shtick going back decades, mildly funny jokes delivered in a hiccupping, “what kind of drugs is he on” voice. Reading this record’s informational one-sheet, I saw that Goldthwait has put away the cocaine and has a kid now, which gave me horrible flashbacks of Chris Rock’s most recent comedy special. Yet, I persisted. Jokes include making fun of a guy in a wheelchair for dissing Biden; the intrinsic sadness of Mylar Spongebob balloons; and trusting the government for the first time ever, upon hearing last year’s announcement that UFOs are real. It’s OK for what it is, this LP; there wasn’t much that tickled me any harder than those Jimmy JJ Walker commercials on MeTV where he’s trying to scam old people out of their Medicare. B

Fights, Scampirock (Lie Laga Records)

OK, OK, I give up, the genre of “Scandirock” is happening, and, owing to its roots being, you know, rooted in the Hives’s approach to melodic hardcore, it’s protected from on high by the prince of melodical dumbness, in other words this is even harder to hate than Finnish folk-metal. We talked about the Oslo, Norway-based Scandirock band Dudes a couple of months ago, but this fivesome is a lot more raw, and definitely more unhinged. I mean, you have to put a listen to opening track “Good Morning Neil Armstrong” on your bucket list, as the riff is up there with the Yngwie Malmsteem hammer-on madness that shot Alcatrazz’ single “God Blessed Video” into the stratosphere in the ’80s. But wait, there’s more, the vocal is sung in a scratchy-throated math-metal style I wasn’t expecting; in fact it’s probably the coolest rock tune I’ve heard in years. Buy buy buy. A+

Playlist

• Here it comes, gang, it’s already May 5, and you know what that means! Well, nothing really, unless it’s your birthday month, because you won’t really have any reason to go to the beach until June, but we can work with what we’ve got I suppose.

Ed Sheeran, – (which will eventually become known as Subtract, but for now, let’s just all pretend that this neckbearded indie-pop fraud will be super-famous forever and currently isn’t so drunk with cred that he thinks he can get away with a dumb, unpronounceable album title every year without some permanently annoyed rock critic pointing out how dumb it is)! I’ve never been able to tell that dude from that ginger prince in Britain, whatever his name, but there is no escape this time, because if I’m ever going to get this column off to my editing queens I’m going to have to stop stalling and go listen to something from this idiotically titled album. OK! The single, “Eyes Closed,” is the sort of Weeknd/Bruno Mars-style confection you’d hear if you hung around in the electronics section of Target for too long; it uses a chicken-plucking guitar-or-whatnot in order to attract listeners who don’t really like music, and then it’s millennial whoop-ish oatmeal burnishing the slightest possible variation on the same junk you’ve been hearing on bubblegum-radio for how many years now? 70? Oh, what am I even doing, let’s move it along, I don’t know how people can listen to this stuff without going completely daft. Talk about Groundhog Day, OMG.

• Yes, yes, but hark, the really stupid album names continue this week, courtesy of the Jonas Brothers, whose new album is titled The Album, no, I’m serious. Hold it, one of those Jonases is married to a British princess if I’m not mistaken. No, Wikipedia says I got it wrong, he’s actually married to a Westeros princess, the girl who was on the HBO show about dragons where all the good guys met pointless, gratuitously disgusting comeuppances, the adult CGI cartoon that was based on those books by that dude with the really stupid bosun’s mate hat, or maybe it’s a cab driver’s hat, who knows or cares. You know, somewhere in these boxes I have a specially signed CD of the Jonases’ first album, back when their record company was trying to make sure every critic in the country was talking about them. I’ll have to remember to list it for sale on Amazon at some point as a super-collectible item or something, but anyway, let’s all just calm down and talk about this new stupidly titled album. Look how grown up those boys look, my stars, and how they look so haunted after all those years of being yelled at by record company lackeys when they just wanted to play Donkey Kong, tsk tsk. The opening song is called “Sucker” (I won’t say it) and OMG it’s like that Ed Sheeran song I just talked about except the beat is more bloopy, and whichever Jonas is singing like Bo Diddley meets Prince and it’s even more bubblegummy. Ha ha, all the YouTube comments are from bots, it’s so obvious.

• The Lemon Twigs are two singing brothers from Long Island and they have a rich mommy. Thus far they’ve sort of wavered between indie, emo and glam, which might be a good direction, depending on what the new single from their upcoming album, Everything Harmony, sounds like. Ack, gag me, it’s 1960s twee, like the Young Rascals, get this trash out of my face this instant.

• We’ll end this exercise with LA Priest, whom I’ve heard about before, but there’s no Wikipedia page for him, just one for his old band, Late of the Pier. Whatever, his new space-pop LP, Fase Luna, features the tune “It’s You,” Ack, gag me, it sounds like Beck trying to be Mungo Jerry, we’re done here.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

T3nors, Naked Soul (Frontiers Records)

Had a weird little exchange the other day, on either Facebook or Twitter, I forget, where this one guy was saying that every album put out by Frontiers Records sounds the same as all the others. I can’t say I concur with that, only because basically all indie labels tend to sign bands that fall into that same trap, like, you won’t hear a Metal Blade-released LP that has much character past Slayer, for example. This one’s somewhat unique in that it features three successful AOR-style singers, Kent Hilli of Perfect Plan along, with Robbie LaBlanc and Toby Hitchock, both of whom have been in bands that specialized in Whitesnake/Jefferson Starship rawk. Spoiler, the result is a bunch of Toto-style radio nuggets with a few Scorpions-ish moments here and there, which is code for “this band has no sense of humor at all and is completely unaware that it’s not 1985 anymore.” That doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means that wiseasses like me have no patience for it. B

Dust Prophet, One Last Look Upon The Sky (self-released)

Local-to-Manchester, N.H., guy Otto Kinzel continues to prove himself to be a fiercely independent warrior in the worst industry in the world, the music business. Right on time, a new album from guitarist/singer/label-runner/floor-mopper Kinzel, bass player/keyboardist Sarah Wappler and drummer Tyler MacPherson has landed, aimed at expanding on the apocalyptic verism they tabled in a teaser single a little while back, accomplishing that by pouring on classical lit-goth imagery from John Milton, Flannery O’Connor and such. Wappler kicks things off in style with a ghostly contrapuntal piano line serving as an intro, which leads us into “When The Axe Falls,” easily the best thing I’ve ever heard from Kinzel, a doom-speed Metallica joint made more delightfully indie by some guitar rawness. Riff-wise, “Dear Mrs. Budd” evokes next-level Obsessed, featuring a waltz-time bit that’s instantly memorable. New Hampshire, you really need to help these people get to their rightful place in the underground metal hierarchy, I’m serious. A+

Playlist

• Here we go, my precious trolls, just like every Friday, April 28 will be a day on which new rock ’n’ roll albums will appear magically, in your Spotify, because that’s how things are done, in these United States! The first thing that jumped out at me in this week’s list was an album titled Signs of Life, from Neil Gaiman, the human who wrote Sandman and all those other Lovecraft-meets-X-Men books and comics or whatever his trip is, I’ve never really gotten into any of that stuff. But wait, why would an esteemed author make an album when he doesn’t have to? In this case I’ll bet it’s because he’s sick of watching his wife, Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, make all the albums in the family. I would definitely do that too, like, if Petunia were an author of romance novels, I’d definitely drop the nonfiction book about social media that I’m working on right now and write a book about smooches and sexytimes just to keep her on her toes and get a nice sweet $2,000 advance from Harlequin Romance And Sexytime Book Co. and spend it on a used copy of Spider-Man No. 3 or whatever, as opposed to a signed copy of Sandman No. 1 or whatnot, you feel me? Anyway, folks, Gaiman is not a one-man band, so his music album needed actual musicians, and so he hired a group of instrument-playing slackers he knows, who call themselves the FourPlay String Quartet (see what they did there?), and those people play on this (probably completely pointless) album. I’ll now meander over to the YouTube box and listen to one of the tunes, “Bloody Sunrise,” which I selected because it looks like there’s a hot vampire girl in the video. Yup, it’s a cute vampire girl, and she’s singing a quirky comedy number about crawling out of her coffin and hanging around with bats and owls and trying to get a boyfriend, and oops, there’s the string quartet, and the vampire girl sings decently enough, like a third-place finisher on The Voice, something like that. There’s a random TV in the graveyard, and every once in a while Neil Gaiman (I think) appears on the TV and starts harmonizing with the vampire girl. This would be something for the Neil Gaiman completist on your holiday shopping list, because why wouldn’t they want to see proof that Neil Gaiman once did something incredibly dumb?

• If you’re like me at all, you’d given up on Canadian art-rock bands after the first one you ever heard, but you actually held a little hope for Braids, whose new LP, Euphoric Recall, has a very worthwhile little single, “Evolution.” Overall, it evokes an understated-electro version of Lisa Loeb’s “Stay,” something that Sia would definitely do. It’s a good one.

• Believe it or not, there are bands in Cincinnati, Ohio, friends, and one of them, The National, recorded a single that former President Barack Obama named as one of his favorite songs of 2017, namely “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness,” which was indeed jagged, slightly aggressive and cool overall. The band’s new album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, leads off with the song “Eucalyptus,” an art-rock thingamajig that combines the sounds of late-’80s Wire and Guster to create a slightly cowboy-ish atmosphere. It’s perfectly fine.

• Lastly it’s Canadian folk-rockers Great Lake Swimmers, with their new album, Uncertain Country! They’ve released albums on the Nettwerk Records label, which is code for “they’re consistently good.” The new single “Moonlight, Stay Above” is way too Bon Iver-y for my tastes, but other than that is shimmery and peaceful and blah blah blah.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Messa, Live At Roadburn (Svart Records)

Meanwhile, back in the doom-metal sphere, we have this new four-song LP from an Italian crew whose unlikeliest press quote came by way of Spin magazine: “If you’ve ever longed for an album that could reconcile Stevie Nicks at her witchiest with the sublime gloom of How the Gods Kill-era Danzig, this is the LP of your dreams.” Anyhow, these guys have a girl singer, which works when the (always slow) music is new-age-y or folky, but when it goes more in the direction of raw, blissed-out, Candlemass/Kyuss-tinted doom metal, it’s a bit of a reach, at least with her vocals, which, although strong overall (she sounds more like Florence Welch than Stevie Nicks, point of order), sound a little overwhelmed in the context. I’m sure she’d rather be in a Nightwish-type epic-metal band, but she’ll figure that out at some point. It’s a different kind of trip, I can assure you of that. A

Ric Wilson, Chromeo, & A-Trak, Clusterfunk (Free Disco Records)

Collaborative, highly accessible nine-song EP from a bunch of guys I remember covering (or ignoring) during my days covering velvet-rope club techno back in the mid-aughts. And that was probably to my detriment; I keep hearing about this or that going on with A-Trak and Wilson, but I don’t like Chromeo, as you may have noticed in these pages, and probably never will. Suffice to say, though, that this record is a pretty big deal, there are lots of semi-famous names on board this often catchy funk/hip-hop/spoken-word fricassee, such as King Louie (who tables some cool weirdo-rap on the ’90s-prostrating “Whisky In My Coffee”), Felicia Douglass of Dirty Projectors (in the Kool & The Gang-sounding “Everyone Moves To LA”), STIC.MAN of Dead Prez (on the record’s most fascinating dance-funk track, “Git Up Off My Neck”), Kiéla Adira and Mariame Kaba, whose spoken-word rant on the criminal justice system is pretty priceless. A

Playlist

• This Friday is April 21, which means we’re pretty much done with this stupid delayed-action winter, unless Mother Nature has plans to dump 20 feet of snow on us just to see if we’re paying attention. Ha ha, remember in January, there was no snow, and it was kind of warm, and everyone was like, “yeah, wow, talk about a lame winter” but suddenly in March (my least favorite month to begin with) good old “MoNat” (that’s the celebrity hip-hop name for Mother Nature) realized she’d lost all track of time playing Candy Crush, and she suddenly turned into Oprah Winfrey, yelling “Yikes, here you go, you get a driveway covered in a foot of frozen vanilla Slushy, and you do too” and whatnot, and all that massively heavy, dense-packed hatefulness sent 8,000 people to the hospital with chest pains and dislocated elbows? Well, folks, it’s almost over, it almost is, but first we must talk about a few albums that will be streeting this week. I’ve decided that we’ll start the week with Atum, a new album from comically overrated ’90s band The Smashing Pumpkins, because that’s what’s crackalackin’, home skillets, look at the ’90s rebirth that’s happening all around us, it’s all that and a bag of chips, I tell you! Can you even believe it, a new Pumpkins platter, and the band is still fronted by that Uncle Fester dude. I keep seeing all kinds of tweets and stuff saying, “Man, I loved the Pumpkins back in the shizniz, they were so fly, booyah,” and no one gets into an argument with them because they feel so sad for them. Anyway, I’ll bet this music will be absolutely awful if it’s anything like old Pumpkins, so I suppose I should trudge off to the YouTube box and see what the new single, “Beguiled,” is about. OK, here’s the video, and the tune is pretty much like Megadeth-metal at first, and ha ha, look at Billy Uncle Fester, all dressed up like the crazy dream-villain from that Jennifer Lopez movie The Cell, but it’s 100 times worse than ever before, like he’s really trying to channel that Cell dude. You shouldn’t let your kids watch this video. Huh, now there are ballerinas doing Swan Lake stuff, in Uncle Billy’s creepy Cell world. The song is OK if you like mid-tempo ’90s metal. Hm, now a bunch of people are doing fancy modern dances and stuff. One of the guys looks like Jim Carrey’s alter ego from The Mask. The ’90s are coming back, folks, there is no escape. Pray for us all.

• No way, a new album from The Mars Volta, with their most transgressive title yet, Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon, which translates to “May God curse you my heart.” Lol whatever, I’ve made fun of — um, I mean, reviewed some of their previous albums, like, their music has always struck me as freeze-dried low-grade prog-rock that’s missing its flavor packet, but let’s not go there, I’ll go have a listen to the title track and be normal. Wow, it sounds like Latin-radio stuff, which is a lot better than anything these guys have ever done. Maybe there’s hope, fam.

• Frenetic and spazzy flamenco guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela are releasing their new album, In Between Thoughts A New World, this week. Hopefully it won’t be a bunch of metal covers again, please oh please oh please. OK, the single, “Descending To Nowhere” is normal, but then a bunch of spiffy Spyro Gyra layers appear and it starts to sound like polite Weather Channel jazz. Kinda dumb but it’s OK.

• Lastly, it’s ’90s-radio-poppers Everything But The Girl, with their newest full-length, Fuse. The rope-in track is “Nothing Left To Lose,” a trippy, percussive, trance-pop dealie that sounds like Roxy Music reborn as afterparty patter. It’s perfectly fine.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Dan Montgomery, Cast-Iron Songs and Torch Ballads (Fantastic Yes Records)

The overall takeaway from “Start Again,” the opening tune from the New Jersey-bred singer-songwriter’s seventh full-length record, is, if you ask me, redolent of Iggy Pop singing for Bread. So it’s vintage-sounding, taxicab-radio stuff, which is apparently the way he started his career, fresh from his teenage years, which were spent, from the age of 14, playing Grand Funk and Bad Company covers in bars, followed by a stint busking at coffee houses and such. The story here is that he “came into possession of a Danelectro [vintage type of guitar], plugged it into an amp and new songs immediately came pouring out,” which is sometimes all it takes to come up with a very inspired-sounding album. To pinpoint the music a little better, it’s floating-on-a-cloud Americana-rock, with some diversions into ’80s-pop-rock (the Dire Straits-ish “In For A Penny”), cowboy-hat jam-band grooving (“Lonesome Train”), early Bad Company (“Beaumont”) and things of that nature. It’s too sturdy (and sometimes too muddy) to be labeled a fedora-rock joint, so I’m down for it for what it is. A

Various Artists, Remmah Rundown (Remmah Records)

Just when I thought I was out of the techno club scene, they drag me back in, I tell you. This compilation comes to us from Northern Irish DJ, producer and label head Hammer, a.k.a. Rory Hamilton, who wants to clue us in to the electronic music scenes in Glasgow and Ireland, or at least the parts he’s familiar with. Like with basically any decent club mix, there’s plenty here to make your chillout experience better, which brings us to the part where I try to differentiate this stuff from early Diplo and all that kind of thing. I could fib for effect and say it’s jaw-droppingly innovative, these average-tempo dance beats, but let’s not bother; I’ve heard wub-wub like Hammer’s “Sickwave” before, and Rohypnol-glitch-tech like Remmy’s “I Know,” for that matter, and so have you, but Hamilton obviously isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, just remind people it exists. Solid all around. A

Playlist

• April 14 is a Friday, which means that you will have an extra day or so before you have to send Uncle Sam the money you owe him for taxes, or at least I think that’s how it works, I mean, you do you, I don’t think the IRS really cares anyway, but let’s kick off this week right away, because there’s a lot to get to, starting with 80-year-old bikini lady Ann-Margret, who was mostly famous for hanging around in Las Vegas with none other than Elvis, as well as being lasciviously ogled by Johnny Carson every time she appeared on the Tonight show during the ’60s and ’70s. No, I’m not kidding, Ann-Margret has a new album coming out this Friday, Born To Be Wild, which may or may not be a reference to the Steppenwolf song that came out when Thomas Jefferson was president, or maybe earlier, I honestly forget. You know, I’m just checking the Metacritic.com aggregate score for all of Ann-Margret’s films, and it’s dead even at this writing. Critics thought some of her movies were really dumb, like The Villain and The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, whereas they liked some of her other movies, for instance 1975’s Tommy, which featured Jack Nicholson and Keith Moon. But I digress, which usually happens when I’m reviewing albums from 1960s pinup girls, so let’s get to the gettin’ on and have a listen to the title track, come on, don’t be shy. Ack, her backing band on this tune is the Fuzztones, and it’s not completely horrible. OK, it is, but she’s on key for a few bars, unless I’m hearing things. Other notes: The Who’s guitarist Pete Townshend can be heard on this album’s cover version of the Everly Brothers’ classic “Bye Bye Love”; other guests include Joe Perry, Steve Cropper, Rick Wakeman and Chip Z’Nuff.

• No way, bro, a new Metallica album, called 72 Seasons, I’m totally down with that! Say, has anyone ever noticed that the band’s drummer and leader, Lars Ulrich, is like the Elon Musk of heavy metal, like, remember when they did the 5.98 EP just to remind folks that they were still edgy and punk, even though they were just about to get rid of guitar solos for a few albums in order to be like Papa Roach, because people don’t want complicated music, man, they just want to be stupid, and now we have two million bands that sound exactly like Bury Your Dead? No? Well it’s all Metallica’s fault that metal sucks now, but let’s try to get past that and go listen to a new song from this Metallica album, “If Darkness Had a Son,” before the album premieres in cinemas on the 13th (no, I’m not kidding)! Hm, it’s got a cool syncopated riff, it’s not completely horrible, well, at least before the vocals come in, all dishwasher-safe. Iron Maiden fans would like this, I guess.

• Ack, just when you thought you’d never have to hear aughts-era Canadian indie-pop ever again, look, it’s Feist, with her new album, Multitudes! Lol, remember when she lent her song “1234” to that iPod Nano TV ad and said something like “Well hey man, at least it wasn’t a preconceived marketing ploy” or whatever? Classic stuff, but the new single, “Hiding Out In The Open,” finds Feist in unplugged Joni Mitchell mode. The song isn’t completely horrible, which isn’t to say it’s terribly catchy or whatnot.

• We’ll end with Fruit Bats, remember those guys from a few years ago? That’s cool, I don’t remember a thing about them other than the fact that their PR people were demanding that I write about them. Their new LP, A River Running To Your Heart, includes a song called “Rushin’ River Valley,” sort of a cross between Decemberists and Guster, it’s breezy and nice, it’s fine by me.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Poh Hock, Gallimaufry (self-released)

According to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, the definition for the word “gallimaufry” is “a confused jumble or medley of things.” That tracks with respect to this EP, as Poh Hock Kee’s latest songwriting foray blends jazz, prog, classic rock, soul and disco. This one launches with a spazzy bang with “Forward,” a light-speed tune that sounds like Al di Meola invading a Tonight show band rehearsal, and that leads into something even more show-stopping, “Another One Of Those Times,” which combines straight-ahead Return To Forever-ish prog rock with a highly melodic pop vocal that would have fit fine with peak-career Janet Jackson (Debo Ray does the honors on the singing end). But wait, there’s more, “I Don’t” reads like Eddie Van Halen jamming with Talas but much bigger-sounding and more sweeping. Whatever, I have no idea where this guy’s been, but this is truly groundbreaking stuff, demonstrating a deep love for wonky experimentation without ever getting bogged down with academic tedium. If you’re a prog guitarist, get on this immediately, this guy’s a genius. A+

Glorious Bankrobbers, Back on the Road (Sound Pollution Records)

“Swedish sleaze-rock,” these guys call what they do, but first we should talk about how this band would have made a few thousand bucks, maybe enough for a second-hand 1982 Toyota Corolla or a nifty barbecue smoker-barrel, if their manager hadn’t sold all their promotional freebie records in secondhand stores for beer money, which (spoiler) resulted in this band being denied any reviews or radio airplay, and of course they broke up soon after the release. It’s awful what happens to nice, totally innocent dudes who just want to get drunk and steal girlfriends, it’s just the worst, it’s almost like no one cares about us, but anyway, the guitar sound pulled me in for a second here, and I was expecting to hear some sort of New York Dolls vibe, which always gets props in this newspaper column, you guys know the drill by now. But no, this is basically a Poison clone band, as in the singer sounds exactly like Brett Michaels, which means the overall effect isn’t all that sleazy, but I get what they mean. All righty then. B-

Playlist

• Like every Friday, a new batch of albums will appear this Friday, April 7, whether you plan to buy them or not. This is a devilish plot that hatches every week because the record companies know that you’re going to have to spend all your money someplace on Fridays, so they figure that if you happen by chance to see new albums, you’ll buy them, even if they’re from Van Morrison or someone who used to be in the Smiths, because you can’t control yourself. But enough of that sort of talk, let’s dig in to this week’s foul-smelling pile and see what we — ah, look, it’s an album from Thomas Bangalter, who is one half of the former French house music duo Daft Punk, whom you know as weird techno nerds in motorcycle helmets. I was honestly never big into Daft Punk, preferring instead to listen to more traditional deep house stuff as well as being a bit allergic to Auto-Tuned singing in general and bands hiding their faces for no reason whatsoever in particular, not to mention the fact that if there’s any band I can’t stand, it’s Phoenix, but anyway, you get the picture. Bangalter’s debut solo album, Mythologies, comprises the score of a 90-minute ballet of the same name, which premiered in July 2022, featuring direction and choreography by Angelin Preljocaj. All I’ve heard so far from this record is “L’Accouchement,” which isn’t in waltz time so I doubt there’s much dancing, it’s just really melancholy sad-face sturm und drang. Hard pass from this critic.

• Heather Woods Broderick is a singer-guitarist who’s originally from Maine, which is near New Hampshire; otherwise I probably wouldn’t be giving her any free publicity in this column. She has released solo material under her own name, as well as having been a member of Efterklang, Horse Feathers and Loch Lomond. She has a new album coming out this Friday title Labyrinth, which includes the push-single “Crashing Against The Sun,” a very nice, lush slow-burner that has a shoegaze tint to it while rooted in something along the lines of Lana Del Rey as far as woozy, halcyon vibe. It’s decent, even if the keyboards sound like they came from 1993.

• If you’re a GenXer who hates to feel old, don’t read the rest of this sentence, because it will tell you that the very first Mudhoney album came out 34 years ago. That band is sort if the Ed McMahon of ’80s/’90s grunge, like, basically they were awful, but because they were from Seattle, like Nirvana and Soundgarden and all those guys, they were given recording contracts and studio time and groupies, just as long as they didn’t blow up really really bigly, not that there was ever any danger of that actually happening. So, right, the band’s new LP, Plastic Eternity, is led off by the single “Almost Everything,” which is decent insofar as having a no-wave/noise-rock feel to it, like it sounds like Michael Stipe doofing around with a garage band that has a deep love for neo-psychedelica a la Brian Jonestown Massacre. That genre’s been done to death, sure, but this is a pretty good attempt.

• For my last trick, look, it’s Billie Marten, a British singer-songwriter and musician from Ripon in North Yorkshire, whatever that’s supposed to designate in the British language. She first appeared on the acoustic folk scene at the age of 12, when a YouTube of her singing attracted thousands of views, or so it’s claimed (seriously, go look, Wikipedia doesn’t quite believe it but it’s still in her Wiki page). Drop Cherries, her new album, includes a tune called “This Is How We Move,” an unplugged bit powered by guitar and a string section. It’s kind of Joni Mitchell-ish, if that’s your jam; it didn’t immediately grab me but it’s OK.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).