Author: Eric Saeger

Jonny Kosmo, Pastry (Feeding Tube Records)

I don’t know if you know a lot of people who’ve studied psychology, but the theory I’ve subscribed to since I was a 20-year-old bundle of idiotic angst was that you can always tell how fragile and/or damaged a person is by how long they’ve studied psychology. I was a teenage psych major myself but abandoned ship on that stuff after one semester, so I think I’m pretty stable pertinent to this subject. I mean, just look at this Los Angeles rocker, who did finish school but gave up a career as a therapist in order to dress like a drunken Batman villain and put out weird pop/funk/techno albums that focus on things like the “metanarrative of personal and communal change.” He’s a kook, savvy? But that’s OK, because this metanarrative and blah blah blah stuff is, it seems, proffered as a form of therapy, and that’s patently obvious, what with songs like “Sugar On Top,” a breezy, what-me-worry ’70s shlock-pop trifle that could have been a 10CC or Maria Muldaur B-side, take your pick. Eh, it’s all fun: “Firefly” is soul-laden funk-pop for joke-Twitter chatbots; “How High” is acidic asphalt-steez that could have fought as disposable bar music in an episode of Starsky & Hutch. None of it’s painful, which to me is always the important thing. A

Hannes Grossman, To Where the Light Retreats (self-released)

Boy, did I step in it this time. I was drawn to this LP owing to its professed “tech-death” classification, but even more so because the project is led by a drummer, so I figured, you know, there’d be some cool drums here and there. Instead it basically reads like Tool with some monster-devil Cookie Monster dude on vocals, and, well, that’s about the whole scoop on this. I mean, there are moments of math-metal that almost evoke Dillinger Escape Plan and such, but in the main it just flops and flounces around like a toddler shark whose baby teeth all fell out recently, you know? Right, there are literally quadrillions of metal albums that could be written off that way, but the production is good, and it might appease math geeks, especially guitarist dudes who favor chromatic style over melodic substance, but, oh, it’s really just tacky, which of course — wait, the guitarist actually just used an actual phase-shifter from 1978 in an actual song — just means that your mileage may vary. B

PLAYLIST

• Heaven help us all, it’s actually June, and there will be new albums for you to listen to on June 4, because capitalism! Before we continue, I keep forgetting to let everyone know that I do vet these albums, to make sure there are no messages from Lucifer, before mentioning them here. You are safe, my friends, to listen to the albums I mention here, and even if I disagree with your decision to listen to them, it’s OK, because let’s face it, music is basically free anyway. Anyone under the age of 35 knows that bands only make money from tours (oh wait) and T-shirts, because there are little Pirate Bay 4Chans all over the place, but if you’re scared of getting hacked at one of those places, you can always just rip the songs off YouTube (that’s basically every song ever made, ever) and just enjoy ’em. But let’s proceed, because you know that I’m an Officially Licensed Snark Dispenser, who is here to help you, and I will warn you about albums you should either “buy” or avoid, so that you can save a few precious seconds and just move on to tweeting Instagrams of your little brother getting multiple bone-bruises from his stupid skateboard. So let’s start with a new album even your parents might like, Hardware, from Billy Gibbons! Ha ha, you know who this person is, he was the guitarist with the 3-foot beard in the moronic blues-rock band ZZ Top, which used to play in arenas, back when people actually liked music. Don’t get me started on ZZ Top, but OK, if you insist, they were basically Led Zeppelin for your parents’ dumbest high school friends, like, they were contractually obligated to play only three different chords in their songs, but nevertheless, they had fans who went to their shows at the Worcester Centrum, and afterward they’d wear their “Eliminator Tour” T-shirts to English class, which got them automatic F’s from their English teachers. Got all that, Zoomers? No? Don’t worry, here, here are the lyrics from “West Coast Junkie,” Gibbons’s new single: “Rollin’ my Camino down Route 66, thinkin’ ‘bout my girl.” No, seriously, but it’s the music you should be avoidin’, like it’s basically the sort of 1950s blues-rock you hear when Svengoolie has that 90-year-old rock ’n’ roll dude as a guest, in other words it’s like Bo Diddley, except this stuff has raunchy-sounding guitars. There, now you know; consider the above snark to be like the warning on a pack of Marlboros, but in a musical sense. Anyone still reading?

• Turning to news for 40-year-old wombat-girls, look, everyone, it’s hyper-privileged Connecticut phony Liz Phair, with a new album, called Soberish! She is working on an autobiographical memoir right now, called Horror Stories (anticipated excerpt: “I’m telling you, the Perrier came with no diced strawberries!”). Whatever, the single, “Spanish Doors,” is like any polite ’90s grrrl-pop tune you’ve ever heard.

• Next up is Australian/whatever jangle-indie poppers Crowded House, with their new LP Dreamers Are Waiting. Is the single “To The Island” anywhere near as good as their mega-hit “Don’t Dream It’s Over?” Nope, it’s a silly almost-joke song, but thanks for guessing!

• We’ll close the week with Atreyu’s new album, Baptize, because maybe its single “Underrated” is good! OK, it is, if you like your World Wrestling entrance themes to be structured in the vein of Panic! At The Disco bit into extreme metal yowling into Papa Roach junk. You don’t? Well bless your heart.

Retro Playlist

Let’s hop into our wacky time machine and go back exactly 10 years, where we find Between the Devil & The Deep Blue Sea, the then-latest album from Black Stone Cherry, a band I couldn’t take seriously at all, viz: “southern rock’s answer to Nickelback, in other words one of the worst bands you could possibly imagine.” Pretty rotten of me, I know, but pound-for-pound, I’d say I was pretty nice to Death Cab For Cutie’s Codes and Keys. That warrants a brief explanation: I forget where it was published, but a few years ago I saw a super-snarky article from (I think) some British music blog, aiming to shoot down wimpy twee-hipster music like Death Cab forever. The rub was that, as much as hipster bands seem inclusive and proper and such, no one ever — until this article pointed it out — called out the whole scene for being composed almost exclusively of all-white musicians (who, kicker, were also mostly men). Whatever, since I was still unaware of that stuff at the time, I was nice to “You Are A Tourist,” Codes‘s lead single, saying it was OK, at least musically: “tons of layers,” “pop rock in the manner of bands like Smiths, Suede and whatnot.”

One of that week’s column’s main thrusts was an album from Brooklyn bluegrass band Sweetback Sisters, titled Looking For A Fight. Much as a phrase like “Brooklyn bluegrass band” would automatically send readers scampering off to the safety of Amy’s movie reviews, some of you did learn that it wasn’t a bad record at all, according to me: “A no-brainer” that featured a cover of Laurie Lewis’s “Texas Bluebonnets” came off like a cross between “Dixie Chicks and a mariachi band possessed by Gogol Bordello.”

Speah-Ahh, Eastern Conference Champions’ next-to-last album, was also present. Overall it was “classy, like an Americana-tinged Coldplay, most prominently on album opener ‘Attica,’” but like I alluded, the band only lasted one more album, as the relative fame they’d achieved after having their tune “Million Miles an Hour” included in the Twilight: Eclipse movie soundtrack vanished in a puff of emo-vampire smoke.

La Battue, Get Set, Go! (Parapente Records)

Second EP from this off-kilter but quite accessible group, which consists of a brother-sister duo from Rennes, France, and Korean musician Yurie Hu. Their first EP, Search Party, was more lo-fi, a cheese-fest in the tradition of Figurine and whatnot, but this release finds them upping their game to an encouraging degree. Their cited influences are Beach Boys, Steve Reich and Radiohead, and all that stuff is still here, if by “Beach Boys” they mean Grizzly Bear and all those other Aughts-era bands (I didn’t hurt myself falling backward in my chair when the shock hit me). It’s glitchy and buzzy when it lets the software trip out on busy Animal Collective-style fractals, and singer Ellie James’s floaty, non-goofy soprano is a nice departure from the male falsetto cringe I’d expected to hear. In other words, it’s pretty cool in a mellow way. Main quibble is that the first two songs are so similar that I can’t help but scold them for making such a rookie mistake, but again, it’s fine for what it is. B

Tombstones In Their Eyes, Looking For A Light (Kitten Robot Records)

Now here’s some pretty badass shoegaze if you’re into that stuff. This quartet is from Los Angeles, of course, home of — you know, basically everybody, because it’s the perfect place to work on songs that possess a vibe conflating slow-motion surfboard highlight-reel sensibilities with visions of apocalypse. OK, whatever, that’s what it evokes to me, with its fuzzed-out guitars, totally ghostly vocals and messy-enough engineering. Yeah, I’d be at least mildly psyched to receive a new Raveonettes promo album (as long as it comes all at once, not like the discombobulated, one-song-per-month fail of 2016’s Atomized), but while you’re waiting, this will do the trick. It’s like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club but with less petrochemical leakage, that is to say it’s less buzzy in a bar-band way. It’s pretty hooky throughout, too, intended for stoners who love watching a beach bonfire twinkle its reflection in the waves, which is basically a mindset everyone could use right now. A+

PLAYLIST

• The world keeps turning, gang. In fact, it turns so fast that every Friday, a bunch of brand new albums get jiggled loose and dumped into Spotify and Pirate Bay! And such will be the case on May 28, when albums such as Moby’s Reprise will hit the streets. You all know Moby from his Wally Cox-level good looks and all those old ’90s rave songs on his big album, Play, but nowadays he mostly enjoys pretending to be an expert political pundit, at least for TV viewers who believe Buzzfeed is an underground communist blog! This new album, his 19th, is, as the title implies, a bunch of rerubs of old tunes, recorded with the help of a string quartet and the Budapest Art Orchestra, because nothing says “afterparty ambiance” than string sections and a bunch of weird musicians who are probably related to Dracula. Oh, where were we, yes, that big hit of his, “Honey,” isn’t on here, but you can still rave it up with dumb, overblown versions of “Go” and “Extreme Ways,” and look, Kris Kristofferson adds guest vocals to a new version of “The Lonely Night!” I’ll admit that I don’t totally hate the version of “Porcelain” that’s on here; the tune was always glorified elevator music anyway, so mellowing it down a tad doesn’t dull its “autumn leaves falling in a park” vibe, although the guest singing from My Morning Jacket’s Jim James is (spoiler alert) absolutely awful. But don’t let that stop you.

• Well here’s a pretty kick-butt band, if you like the Allman Brothers and Southern rock and whatever, Blackberry Smoke! They’re an Atlanta quintet that’s been putting out albums since 2003, and what’s really cool about them is that, despite their radio-ready sound, they’re still a genuine independent band, having released records on upstanding indie labels like Rounder Records and Earache Records, which I had presumed dead long ago, but they’re still around. The band’s new album, You Hear Georgia, will be on 3 Legged Records, but once again it sounds super pro; the title track is loud-ass Americana-tinged throwback-blues-rawk, so if you’re sick of all your Charlie Daniels records, you should give these guys a chance.

• Man, I could’ve sworn I just talked about a new k.d. lang album, but this search feature gizmo in my Windows 95 MacIntosh machine says I didn’t, so we’ll take a quick look at her latest, Makeover! Wait a minute, what is this, another comp album, like that stupid Moby thing we were just chatting about? Yeah, it’s a bunch of redo versions of her older songs, kicking off with “Miss Chatelaine (St. Tropez Mix).” So dumb, it’s the same song as before, just with more of a Caribbean beat, what a ripoff, and OMG she’s such a fantastic singer, let’s just forget the whole thing.

• Our final contestant is Moon Drenched, the new record from Bent Arcana, a messy experimental nonsense band from — let’s see — OK, I can’t find it, who cares, they’re from somewhere. “The War Clock” is one of their disjointed, dissonant, brain-damaging songs, maybe you’ll love it if you like bands like the Books or Captain Beefheart, or if you’d love the sound of a monkey playing Bowie albums backwards while screeching random monkey-talk in your ear.

Alchemy Sound Project, Afrika Love (Artists Recording Collective)

I assume you know by now that I try to steer readers away from dissonant, disagreeable jazz. I roll like that mostly because purposely annoying runs, no matter the level of talent, go through me like a nail. In other words, I am not a hawker of Charles Mingus et al; I think I’ve only covered one of his live albums here, purely for the sake of humanity (and to keep the remastered Blue Note albums coming in, like you couldn’t have guessed). So this one, from a scarily talented quintet of bandleaders (on trumpet, woodwinds and piano on the prime-mover side), does start with some dis-ambiance (“The Fountain”), and I was about to commence to barfing, but then it just flies off into hyperspace with the immensely complicated “Dark Blue Residue”: You’re at once overwhelmed by the band’s depth of musicianship; I mean it’s Jedi-level. And accessible as well. Mind, I’m just trying to help the genre, not scold anyone for liking skronky nonsense, but I’d recommend this to anyone exploring jazz. A

Living Wreckage, “Breaking Point” (self-released)

I’m sure we can dispose of this quickly, the teaser single from a quote-unquote “superstar metal band consisting of vocalist Jeff Gard (Death Ray Vision), guitarists Jon Donais (Anthrax, Shadows Fall) and Matt LeBreton (Downpour), bassist Matt Bachand (Shadows Fall, Act of Defiance) and drummer Jon Morency (Let Us Prey). Their goal is to make “good ol’ hard rock/metal that fits somewhere between Skid Row and Pantera.” Now, the only thing I know for sure is that I’ve always considered Anthrax to be the Pepsi to Metallica’s Coca-Cola within the ’80s thrash-metal sphere, like Anthrax wanted to be DRI so badly that they even named a song after that band. Pretty hurtin’, huh? Now, that’s not to say these guys aren’t going to be the next (place name of “superstar thrash band” that everyone forgot about in three months here), because who knows, maybe this tune’s combination-ripoff of Meshuggah, Nine Inch Nails and Metallica will be the key to unleashing speed-metal again upon our unsuspecting world, this time for a permanent reign. But I doubt it. B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• May 21 sounds like a great Friday for new CDs, am I right? Well, tough Tootsie Rolls, frantic fam, because here they come anyway. Let’s have a look at the list of albums coming out tomorrow, shall we? Right, blah blah blah, Georgia Anne Muldrow, don’t like her; Blake Shelton, never heard of him, unless that was the guy who tried to sell me a used Corolla in 1996 — ah, here’s something I can actually get excited about (you wouldn’t believe how short that list is these days, guys): It’s none other than goth king Gary Numan, with his new album, Intruder! You may know that this vampire-techno vanguard, he of the swirling fog and and the spooky tunes that are so awesome they’re probably illegal in the Midwest, has had himself a few setbacks, like the time he was supposed to collaborate with Trent Reznor but it just turned into Nine Inch Nails doing a cover of Numan’s “Metal,” and Numan is self-diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, and he has a really crazy girlfriend (which of course only means he’s in a band, but whatever). Anyway, even though everyone expected him (because he announced such) to just buy a farm and retire after his big 1980s hit “Cars,” he stuck with it, and his last bajillion albums are the gold standard for post-Bauhaus vampire rock, and I’m sure I’ll listen to this single, “Now And Forever,” from Intruder and will pronounce it awesome. Yes, I will be doing just that. It has a weird, scratchy Nine Inch Nails style beat, but when you add Numan’s half-yodeling voice it becomes instantly awesome. I have no idea why he isn’t more popular than Reznor, but whatever.

• The Monkees are a long-gone band and TV show that was huge in the mid-1960s, because they were basically The Beatles with more accessible songs and lots of sight gags involving chimpanzees and hot girls named Mary and Sandra, because those were the official hot girl names of that generation. There are only two Monkees still alive now (and yes, I had to check that they’re still alive), namely Micky Dolenz (the goofy, chimp-like drummer) and Mike Nesmith, the slacker guitarist. Since these guys still have to make a living playing music, there is a new album on the way, called Micky Dolenz Sings Nesmith, which should be self-explanatory if unexciting news to Monkees fans, because none of those guys were allowed to write songs for the original TV show, so I assume the song snippets I just heard were random songs written by Nesmith, jingly ’60s-pop trifles that are happy and catchy, whatever, and Dolenz can still actually sing, which is the weird part.

• Columbus, Ohio, alternative hip-hop duo Twenty One Pilots will release their sixth full-length, Scaled And Icy, on May 21. You’ll know them from the Eminem-meets-boy-band hit “Stressed Out,” or maybe you somehow don’t, which doesn’t mean that you aren’t cool anymore, it just means that you never bother to Shazam the songs you hear at fashionable outlet malls (if so, send me a Friend request). The pair’s latest single is “Shy Away,” which starts off like bloopy Billie Eilish electropop, then becomes emo, then tries to sound like a Smashing Pumpkins B-Side. Your dog might like it, I don’t know.

• We’ll put this week in the books with a quick listen to eclectic techno-whatever dude Nicholas Krgovich, whose new LP, This Spring, consists of a bunch of cover songs originally done by Canadian experimental wingnut Veda Hille. “LuckLucky,” the first single, sounds like Orbital in mellow mode. It’s OK.

Retro Playlist

You might think of me as a closed-minded punk/noise/metal guy, given all the love I’ve heaped on the louder genres and my constant bashing of half-plugged fedora and indie bands. But there’s a soft side to my W.C. Fields-ness that’s surfaced recently: I’ve become completely obsessed with Fleetwood Mac.

There’s an explanation. I did the math the other week, and between this newspaper and all the other magazines, papers and blogs to which I’ve “contributed,” I have written, to date, at the very least, around 4,500 CD reviews. Do you have any idea how much damage all that bad music could do to a human cerebrum? I kidded around about that in my book and sometimes mention it here, but never did I realize that my experiencing all that horror would actually lead to something positive.

Announcement: I have become convinced that Fleetwood Mac is the greatest pop-songwriting unit in history. I say all this for the benefit of young music-searchers, of course; old folks know how divine the band’s Rumours album is. There’s “Dreams,” “Go Your Own Way,” and all that stuff.

I’m also grimly fascinated by how bloody weird the band members were. Sara Fleetwood, who stole drummer Mick from Stevie Nicks and married him, has (maybe) posted all sorts of insider groupie details over at the blog songfacts.com. As with any potential troll, it’s impossible to determine if she’s real or not, but sure, I believe it, and besides, whether it’s fake or not, Sara’s got to be completely crazy by now.

That Sara person may have been the inspiration for the only great song (the suspiciously named “Sara”) on the band’s absolutely awful 1979 album Tusk. The stunted yin to Rumours’ yang, Tusk was written almost exclusively by guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, who, in a drugged-up panic, was desperate to make people forget that the band made epic pop-rock. The critics sure did, after Tusk flopped its way into the stores.

But regardless, “Sara” — obviously a rough sketch for “Gypsy,” which came later — is a magnificent touchy-feely song. If you’re young, add that to your playlist, as well as anything else either of the two women wrote back then.

Rain Rabbit, Rain Rabbit (self-released)

So some guy from Chicago named Kyle Brauch sent me a random email to try to get some attention for his new, totally done-it-himself album. Usually I only focus on such things when it’s a local band, but what got me was his politely excited overuse of exclamation points (“Don’t hesitate to contact me if there’s anything else I can provide!”). Enthusiasm is always just grand, isn’t it, folks? No? Well, it’s better than when newbie bands tell me they’re trying to “garner reviews from great writers such as yourself.” I want to ask them, “‘Garner’, you say? Are you an awesome band, or are you literally trying to ‘raise my ire’?” But regardless, this is actually a decent album, sort of an advanced approach to ’80s radio-pop, starting with opener “Holding On” and — well, everything else. There’s a Hall & Oates/Aldo Nova side to this stuff that was believed extinct. At least by me, I mean. Oh, you get the picture. It’s great for what it is. A

Bedroom, Stray (self-released)

Droopy but basically palatable weird-beard-pop album from Noah Kittinger, who launched this project when he was 16. The main selling point is Kittinger’s voice, which touches on Grizzly Bear and whatever other Beach Boys-dipped Aughts-era album you might be able to stomach, but his go-to vocal sound is more akin to that of Junip’s José González (who I believe is much more renowned for guesting on Zero 7’s 2007 album The Garden, not that I’d ever fight someone over it), or, if you’re old, Gilbert O’Sullivan (of the 1972 mega-hit “Alone Again [Naturally]”). That’s a nice sourball sound, and it literally rescues something like half of these songs, which are glitch-chill with not enough glitch. I mean, it’s fine with me if an artist wants to interrupt songs with irritating demonstrations of beginner-level synth-edginess, but that stuff doesn’t increase its shelf-life, not when there are plenty of bands that go all-out with it and still remain melodic. May I be excused now? B-

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• May 14 is the next general CD release day, and so I must depart the safety and people-shunning zen of my underground lair and venture out once again into the realm of new albums, in the hope of locating some music that isn’t refried, remixed, derivative, contrived or just plain awful. There are many hipsters afoot this week, so let’s first stop and try to gauge what Akron, Ohio-based garage band Black Keys are trying to accomplish with Delta Kream, their upcoming 10th album! Ah, it is a collection of “hill country blues” cover songs, which makes sense. I mean, if you were a skinny jeans-wearing, Reddit-browsing band from Ohio, really the only music you would be familiar with is music from America’s hill country, a region of northern Mississippi bordering Tennessee, am I right? No? Whatever, let’s just go with it; I’m seeing semi-famous names being bandied about here, such as R. L. Burnside’s guitarist Kenny Brown, as well as separate entries from Junior Kimbrough and his bassist Eric Deaton. What, you haven’t heard of them either? OK, that’s a win-win, let’s wrap this up quickly, then, but remember, old songs about mud and snakes and whatever are really cool, because — well, you know, because. There are covers of John Lee Hooker songs, including his version of “Crawling Kingsnake,” which is pretty awesome as far as throwback-chill-blues go. The video was filmed in front of Jimmy Duck Holmes’ Blue Front Café, which is the oldest active juke joint in America. You don’t care? Well that isn’t very awesome of you, but OK, moving on.

• Mind the rocky terrain, Rocinante’s Fail, my backside already hurts from this quest for decent music, and in fact if you’ll stop for some nice water and oats or whatever donkeys eat, I’ll investigate more hipsterism, from this new Chills album, Scatterbrain! These guys are a jangle-pop indie band from New Zealand, and they break up pretty often, which means they are good, because jangle-pop bands should break up as often as possible. What’s this then, the latest single is called “Destiny.” In a nutshell, it’s Belle & Sebastian but with whatsisname’s masculine, half-whispered voice. At least it’s analog, but then again, who could make sleepy Buddy Holly-sounding music with digital equipment, am I right? It would accidentally sound like Tiesto, I think, don’t you?

• I know I just recently talked about a Juliana Hatfield album in Retro Playlist, but she has a new one coming out soon, titled Blood. Yes, she is cool, because she was in The Lemonheads and she’s done records with Paul Westerberg, but let’s listen to the new single, “Mouthful Of Blood” and check in! Well wow, it is an OK song, jangly and mildly riot-grrrl-ish. No, she doesn’t actually sound very edgy, but if you like bands like Dinosaur Jr. or whatever, you’ll probably like this.

• Wrapping up the week is Seattle indie-schlub Damien Jurado’s new LP The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania, led off by a single called “Helena!” This guy looks like an accountant and sings like one too; this is shuffle-y folkie chill, sort of like Sun Kil Moon but more awkward and accountant-y.

Retro Playlist

Exactly 10 years ago this space was focused on a bunch of new albums, including Give Till It’s Gone, which at the time was the new one from weird-beard-culture icon Ben Harper. Putting all snark aside, I tried to assure my readership that the album “was totally not rushed out to help pay Harper’s legal bills in his divorce from pointy-nosed David Lynch muppet Laura Dern,” because if I’d said it actually was rushed out in order to pay some L.A. lawyer, people would have started distrusting the entertainment industry, maybe even taken a long look at why anyone would buy a Ben Harper album in the first place (“The hard-rockin’ Neil Young-inspired kickoff single “Rock N Roll Is Free” highlights the Joey Ramone aspects of Harper’s voice, because you should always put your weakest foot forward.”).
But all was not baseless trolling of unfairly popular indie-folk-whatevers that week. The main thrust involved two albums, one of which was an emo thing, Yellowcard’s When You’re Through Thinking Say Yes. My review of that one was a random jumble of hatred for their usual freshly showered “power pop” (I really need to take a few minutes someday and just write a quick software program that writes reviews of emo albums, all of which would be variations on what I said about this one: “… there is, as always, little to say about this sort of album aside from ‘at least such-and-so is a good song’). My one-line closer was pretty good, though, if I say so myself: “Beach music for future stars of Teen Mom.”
There was also an arena-dinosaur band on tap, namely old Scottish butt-kickers Nazareth, with Big Dogz. I think this was the band’s last LP before singer Dan McCafferty died, and it was a valiant effort, if a bit too (predictably) bluesy, like the fellas were trying to recapture the non-magic of the muddy, truck-drivin’ bar-band nonsense of their (not awesome) older albums, the ones they made before (the totally awesome) Hair Of The Dog. Nevertheless, McCafferty did turn in a couple of badass rockouts (OK, actually one, “Lifeboat”), and in the end it’s a nice, messy, caterwauling effort.

Slinky Vagabond, King Boy Vandals (self-released)

The core of this punk-pop (in the real, actual sense) crew comprises Keanan Duffty (a fixture in the NYC punk underground who helped to style David Bowie, Sex Pistols and others) and Italian producer/rock musician Fabio Fabbri. Something like 100 years of punk/’80s/whatnot experience went into this, and it gets pretty nasty (in a good way), alternately evoking early David Bowie space-ballads (“The Beauty In You”), barely tamed New York Dolls-ish raunch-blues welded to Killers post-arena-rawk (“Prima Donna”), ’70s roots-punk experimentation (“Old Boy”) and so on. If you’re young, one RIYL touchstone would be Guided By Voices, being that there’s that Beatles edge to the singing, but it’s all delightfully messy really. All told, there’s really nothing an OG-punk purist could possibly dislike about this thing. It would probably translate a million times better on vinyl, true, but its analog purity emerges even through digital media, with fuzzy guitars bleeding right into the sloppily miked hi-hat and such. Like the LOLCats say, moar plaese. A+

Cheap Trick, In Another World (BMG Records)

As everyone knows, 99.9 percent of the albums released by old-school 1960s-1980s arena-rock bands have been embarrassingly bad. But then there’s this American four-piece, fronting like an actual living coelacanth in an ocean carpeted with extinct dinosaur fossils, not because they can still “rock out” (in other words, add way too much blues-rock to a recipe that became invalid the minute the earliest tech/rap groups crawled out of the primordial ooze) but because their songwriting formula, strictly aimed at the Billboard charts as ever, is eternal. There’s a trick to it, you see, writing perfect, simple pop music for general taste, and Cheap Trick’s leader, Rick Nielsen, is a Picasso at it. This isn’t Live At Budokan, but we’re not living in 1977, so it’ll just have to do, a thick patchwork quilt of melodic perfection that I’d envision reading like complicated prog-rock to Zoomers, an endless parade of summer-hormonal joy. Singer Robin Zander is still goofily brash, stressing the long “R” sounds on his lines like an idiot (“Here Comes The Summer”), but that’s part of the magic. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, May 7, is the next day when we would traditionally see a bunch of new CD releases from awesome bands and whatever twerking Roombas you troublemaking Zoomers have convinced yourselves should count as music. But who knows, maybe there will be no new albums at all, and we can compare Rice Krispies Treats recipes while we wait for the next five Covid variants to pass through town and keep us all stuck at home forever, trying to find something that doesn’t suck on Netflix (ha ha, there is no such thing). Nope, there are albums, the first of which is Van Weezer, from geek-rock superstars Weezer! The band’s leader, Rivers Cuomo, has said that Weezer’s audience is “probably ready for some shredding again,” a fact he gleaned by finally noticing that the crowd would freak whenever he played a totally shreddy guitar solo during live performances of “Beverly Hills,” and that’s how the whole idea of totally rocking out with new nerd-metal music came to be. I can’t wait to hear it, although I think I already talked about this stuff when the first variant of Covid was still leaving people confused about whether or not it was airborne and all that stuff. Ho ho ho, remember those days, when we didn’t know anything, and we were all watching the movie Contagion on endless loop just to freak ourselves out, so much family fun! Whatever, the newest single. “Hero,” is your basic mid-tempo AC/DC b-side, and actually, you know what’s weird, a lot of the time on this song, Cuomo sings like the dude from Goo Goo Dolls. It’s OK I suppose, not the They Might Be Giants-style hard-emo I was expecting.

• And speaking of hard-rock whatevers, in a weird scene, Nancy Wilson, the guitarist from million-year-old arena-rawk-band Heart, sort of broke up the band when she had some sort of problem with her sister (and original Heart singer) Ann’s son and made a scene. There was angry-emoji drama, and now Nancy has a solo album, called You And Me, coming out this week. Will it be old-school Heart, like when they were into Freudian symbolism and hobbits, or latter-day Heart, like when they tried to be female Michael Boltons? I don’t know, which is why I’m going to go to YouTube and listen to the album’s title track. Hm, the song is a Zeppelin III-ish folk-rock ballad. It is OK, but she needs to end her beef with her sister, because Nancy can’t sing very well. That’s not to say she’s a bad person.

• For people who still remember actual dancing in smelly clubs, look, there’s a new album called When God Was Great from The Mighty Mighty Bosstones! I love their spazzy music, it’s so perfect for watching family-friendly high-jinks like Gritty the Philadelphia Flyers mascot throwing pies at little kids and weighing in on political subjects he cares nothing about, just like everyone else on this uninhabitable planet! I’m sure their new song “The Final Parade” is spazzy and spittle-flecked — yes, it is, not like their big idiotic ska-punk-whatever hit “The Impression That I Get,” but nevertheless it is perfect for drinking and throwing pies, absolutely.

• In closing I’d like to say that there is a new Van Morrison album coming out, called Latest Record Project: Volume 1. If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s this guy’s fedora-hat accountant-pop, so I will recuse myself from talking about whatever stupid nonsense is on this stupid album and tell you to enjoy!

Retro Playlist

Retro-ing back to this week in 2013, Atlanta-based indie band Deerhunter was about to release their sixth LP, Monomania, and the first sighting, the title track, boded well. The title-track teaser was like the previous album’s single “Coronado” on angel dust, “totally wigged-out Iggy-garage craziness that’s almost like Warlocks but without the skronk — no, it’s almost like the first Horrors album but without the speed.” I posited that most indie dweebs would “probably run and hide behind [their] stacks of twee records, but this song will eventually find you and get you drunk.”

Anyway, one of the two featured CDs that week was one that — and you won’t believe this — is still kept in my car in case the missus and I are in the mood for a little goth. That one is Ministry of Love, the debut (and unfortunately only) full-length from Los Angeles boy-girl industrial-shoegaze duo Io Echo, which opened for Nine Inch Nails, toured with Bloc Party and Garbage, and did other fun things. Sort of like Asteroids Galaxy Tour but a lot more heavy on the shoegaze, the album opens with “Shanghai Girls,” a slow, methodical, epic shot of shock and awe, evoking nothing less than the queen of outer space come to take hold of our planet. But that’s not all. “’When the Lilies Die’,” I blathered, “is an even better song than that, just … alien, for lack of a better word, and thus one can’t help but notice that the duo’s band name isn’t just for show, it’s about aural integrity.” RIP, awesome band. I just can’t ever win.

New York hipsters Postelles were also under the microscope that week, with their third-or-whatever LP, And It Shook Me. This dreary slog of a band actually formed at a New York City prep school. You can probably guess how it went. “The hooks aren’t subtle, they’re boring,” spat I, “though not hopelessly bubblegummy, a debatable saving grace when everything here sounds like it came from a bunch of politely tiresome potential boyfriends from your basic episode of Girls working out their manias du jour.” Ayuh, pretty hurtin’.

Subterranean Masquerade, Mountain Fever (Sensory Records)

As you’d guess by a band name like Subterranean Masquerade, we have an oddball foreign act on tap here. It’s the fourth full-length from an Israel-based seven-piece billed as a progressive metal band with world overtones, all of which is true, a straightforward power-metal thingamajig with Middle Eastern plug-ins. The Spinal Tap-ish shtick I expected didn’t run too late, but that’s not necessarily to infer that your average metal-head wouldn’t be into this, particularly anyone who thinks of bands like Bury Your Dead as high art, or digs, on the swirling sandstorm front, Dracovallis. It’s not opera-metal for sure, either, although I can tell these guys would love it to be; no, it’s more po-faced, think ’80s Michael Schenker Group with (take a wild guess) Serj Tankian as its sensei. Like any metal album, I’m sure that if you cranked this to physically dangerous levels, it, you know, probably cranks, and I didn’t detect anything stolen from Scorpions or any of those other old bands, so who knows, you might like it. B

Poppy, “Eat” (as yet unreleased)

Doing something different here, adding a little hype to a pile that’s fast building around this Boston-based singer, whose performance of this up-till-now-unreleased single was about the only thing indicative of a pulse at the last Grammys. The 24-year-old YouTuber is further (unnecessary) proof that we’ve entered a new, post-Gaga era of rock stardom, one that revolves around not just making cool songs and videos but also engaging directly with audiences on a daily basis by being, well, absolutely demented. Fans at home can play too, because as you know, nowadays, the concept of DIY isn’t just for bands with a few dollars with which to rent a studio but for basically anybody to become whatever they want. This song isn’t as remarkable as a few of her earlier tunes (go watch the video for “I Disagree” if you want to hear a cross between older Nine Inch Nails, Meshuggah and riot-grrrl-on-crazy-juice), but it does stick with her genre-squishing mission statement. It’s an undeniably accessible but hellaciously heavy noise-whirlwind, like KMFDM jamming with (spoiler) Meshuggah (she obviously looooves those guys). The only thing surprising is that it took so long for something like this to bust out of the gate. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Well would you look at that, guys, the new-release list for April 30 actually has interesting stuff on it, not just a bunch of refried hacky nonsense that makes me want to become a hardened day-drinker. I know that very few people reading this know a lot about indie bands, but Atlanta-based Manchester Orchestra is one you might want to look into, unless you are a typical hipster who only indulges in really bad, smelly junk like Pavement or Versus or whatever. The caveat, though, is that I haven’t listened to a new Manchester Orchestra song in something like five years, so for all I know The Million Masks Of God is going to be one of the worst listening experiences a human could have, and so we’ll get this out of the way first, so that if it makes me barf I’ll have time to recover. So I’m checking out “Bedhead,” the new single, and nope, thou shalt not barf, because it is like what you’d hear if Trent Reznor teamed up with someone like Front Line Assembly to do a soundtrack piece for Stranger Things. It has a buzzy noise-rock side but also a veneer of classic ’80s-technopop, with goofy synths that sound kind of neat. The singer still has that Conor Oberst throat-lozenge sound, which has always been cool. I don’t know if they meant to go goth-pop, but that’s what this is really. It’s OK!

• Oh, no, it’s Guided by Voices again, with another freakin’ album, just because it’s a month that doesn’t end with a “J” or whatever rule bandleader Robert Pollard goes by. I mean, we’ve talked about him before, how he puts out albums all the time, and here I am again, getting suckered into giving him some press love only because I forgot that he doesn’t deserve any. But it’s those things you forget, you know? Like, every time I swipe through the Netflix releases I actually stop to read the description for I Am Not Okay With This and then quickly remember it’s stupid and I’ll never watch it (Netflix really needs to add an option to remove stupid movies from lists to save people some time) (OK, if they’ve already done that and I just don’t know it yet, I applaud your genius-level technical acumen and urge you to apply to NASA to help them build better space shuttles). Oh, where were we. Yes, Earth Man Blues, album number eleventy trillion from this stupid band. One of Pollard’s million new songs is “Trust Them Now.” Spoiler, it’s boring, like Ramones but with a singer who was in some ’60s psychedelic band, and (double spoiler) it doesn’t have a hook. Would y’all groovy trippy cats like to shag now, or shag later, my God I hate this band.

• Yow, my little Zippys, looky there, it’s Boston-sports-affiliated Irish-oi band Dropkick Murphys, with their new “slab,” called Turn Up That Dial! You bet your shamrocks there’s a new single, to lure you in, and it’s called… wait, I can’t repeat the title in a family newspaper, so how about the other song, “Middle Finger!” Will there be penny-whistles and Titanic-lower-deck accordions and mentions of Bobby Orr? Yup, same old thing, sea-shanty kazoo or whatever at the beginning, then some thrash-punk. At least they’re consistent (burp).

• OK, let’s end this miserable exercise with Scottish sludge-emo band Teenage Fanclub, whose new album Endless Arcade will have “Used — Like New” prices on Amazon in like a week. The single, “Home,” is wimpy strummy twee-pop, not grunge-indie or whatever. My faith is deeply shaken, folks.

Retro Playlist

It was 10 years ago this week in this very space when I felt it necessary to explain why I wasn’t going to write a proper review of the then-new Gorillaz album, The Fall. I forget what my problem was, but either way, that virtual band has never done it for me, nor have any of their skinny-jeans cohorts, you know, MGMT, Modest Mouse and whatever. For some idiotic reason, most of the guys in The Clash guested on that record, but nevertheless, a lot of critics didn’t like it. I saved us all some time: “I’ve heard the samples, and my instincts tell me that downloading the other 45 minutes of it ‘to get the full effect’ will yield disappointment.” Disclaimer that I don’t — and you should be well aware of this by now — hate everything that came out in the Aught-10s, but oddly enough, that was when I became an adamant, immovable 1930s/1940s big-band fan. Yes, rock ’n’ roll had become that messed up and worthless. For the most part.

But there was some joy in Mudville that so-long-ago week. Undeveloped, a darkwave/techno-goth album from Skinny Puppy frontman Ohgr, was on the docket, so I ranted spastically about how awesome it was (“’Nitwitz is my favoritest song ever, for today”), not that that meant it was perfect. Even with longtime Skinny Puppy engineer Mark Walk helping out, there was some weirdness that was too much, specifically in “Crash,” a denouncement of U.S. health care (the actual 911 call that came in when Michael Jackson died).

Magnetic Man, the dubstep all-star team of Benga, Skream and Artwork, were also in the process of releasing their self-titled debut that week. It was way cool and deserved better than the C+ grade I slapped on it, but as a techno work, yeah, there were some bothersome things. Overall, it came across as “a term paper for Ableton Hipness 101,” boasting only one legitimate club-slammer (“I Need Air”). Consisting of “Salem-style haunted house, drum-n-bass, Justice hard-glitch and euro-club orchestrations in a manner less consistent with melodic appropriateness than with decorum,” it apparently bothered me then a lot more than it does now. Oopsy daisy.

Robots Of The Ancient World, “Mystic Goddess” (Small Stone Records)

As you know, I’ve been disappointed many times by bands advertised as “doom metal” or “stoner” acts. It’s always the same: I press play on the promo record hoping to hear something that’s even half as crazed (and mildly proggish) as Black Sabbath’s Sabotage album, but it’s never that; it’s either hipster-barfed Queens Of The Stone Age nonsense, Candlemass mollusk-gloom or Wino Weintraub-level Ozzy karaoke (Wolves In The Throne Room was one rare exception). This, though, is cool. I’m jumping the gun here by writing up the title track single (the album’s due May 21), but that right-arrow “play” button was too tempting for me to resist. This Seattle-or-thereabouts-based quintet aren’t as prog as mid-’70s Sabbath, but they do want to impress the metal dudes with their arms crossed in the back row, which they accomplish through a next-level feel for polyrhythms a la Jane’s Addiction, but with more poly to the rhythm. Their first album was great, so I have every expectation that the balance forward on this one will be pretty neat-o as well. A+

Hugh Manwell, Guidance (self-released)

This came to my attention from my jazz-promotion space, but it comes off more like an attempt at an a capella indie project. Manwell, a New York City multi-instrumentalist, is responsible for every sound on this album, all the drums, trumpet, saxophone, bass, guitar, piano and synths. He’s capable enough at all of them, and you have to hand it to him for the effort. But while the line on this record promised a “big band” style effort, it’s mostly far from that, even if opening tune “Welcome To The Show” does have an overarching vibe of torchy, Night They Raided Minsky’s burlesque to it. The balance forward is a mesh of many things, though, very little of it big band. Manwell obviously digs stuff like J Dilla, Gorillaz, 1970s-period Miles Davis, probably even Steely Dan; his mercurial attention wanders to so many different retro urban influences that the record eventually emerges as one that wants to be something completely different. Toward that, it’s certainly ambitious, put it that way. B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Hey guys, what the heck’s the name of that stupid TV show where a crew of fishermen go out on a boat during weather that’s right out of The Perfect Storm, where they laugh and punch themselves in the face and keel-haul each other while pulling up giant nets crawling with 3-foot lobsters and man-eating devil-crabs? Oh right, it’s the Deadliest Catch show. For me, that’s basically what every week is like, but in a musical sense, when I look through my emails. Just like those crab dudes, every week, I hold my nose, punch myself in the face, and go see what new albums are coming out, just so you rotten little trolls can point and laugh while tedious trust-fund hipster-crabs pinch my ears and dreadful thrash-metal lobsters just cold clamp down on my you-know-what. We’ll start this week’s ill-fated expedition with Sweep It Into Space, the new album from ancient semi-retired semi-punks Dinosaur Jr, streeting on April 23! I was never into punk bands that weren’t really all that punk-sounding, so you’ll have to forgive my not being able to identify which old “relevant era” Dinosaur Jr tune the new single, “I Ran Away,” rips off. After a loping, jangly intro part, an uneventful chorus part comes in, which of course follows the formula of every song written in the ’90s.

• Also for April 23, famous Las Vegas singing organism Tom Jones is still around, which means there’s hope for humanity, because he saved everyone in Mars Attacks, and whatever, I think he’s awesome. Check it, yo, he’s 80 years old but looks like a teddy bear version of Larry Ellison, maybe even Robert Downey Jr. Since he’s not really a songwriter, his new album, Surrounded by Time, will mostly feature cover songs, including a rub of Todd Snider’s “Talking Reality Television Blues,” a six-minute opus about pop culture nonsense and whatnot. Jones mostly does a William Shatner on this one, not really singing, just trying to talk-sing like Johnny Cash, you know the deal. Yes, it’s epic.

• Field Music is an art-rock/prog-pop type of band from England that’s counted in its ranks members of such acts as Maxïmo Park and The Futureheads. Oh, whatever, they’re sort of like Todd Rundgren or Prefab Sprout, so if such names trigger a Pavlovian response in your physiology, by all means go and drool on a Field Music CD, just not in front of me please (many people dig them, of course, which is probably why they broke up for a few years). Flat White Moon is their latest album, and — whoa, I’ve always wanted to say this: Stop the presses! The single “Orion From The Street” is like what you’d get if Wire rewrote Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere.” This is so awesome I can’t even stand it. Holy expletive. You should pay actual money for this.

• We’ll end this week’s torment with the second album from Porter Robinson, called Nurture, and now I’ll read the Wiki to see if I shouldn’t have just skipped this bit. Hm, blah blah blah, he’s an electronic musician. He has a new single, called “Musician,” if this stupid ad with Ryan Reynolds will ever — ah, here we are. It’s bloopy and chopped, with unintelligible chipmunk vocals, basically your average Orbital album-filler song.

Retro Playlist

Ten years ago this week, the thrust of this column was aimed at a couple of big-name albums, which we’ll get to in a second, but there was a local boy making good as well, namely Hampton singer-guitarist dude Doug Wheaton, who had just released a self-titled solo album for his Slow Burn project. I was mildly sucked in from the start, when his press sheet asked, “Tired of wimpy emo guys in tight pants playing sensitive, quirky ballads on beaten up acoustic guitars? Need more power chords in your life? Then the nine songs I have posted are right up your alley.” It’s still around on his ReverbNation space, including the tune “24 Hours,” which sounds sort of like what would happen if David Byrne was in Los Lobos.

That week I also talked about the new Airborne Toxic Event album, All At Once, which found those rawk dudes casting off their Arcade Fire-ish indie shackles and just cold going for it. I noted “if Cold War Kids had been an ’80s band that dug Joy Division, this could’ve easily come of it.” It was nice to see that they had “reinvented themselves as a cultural vacuum cleaner bag, touching on Bruce, Neil Diamond, Lords of the New Church, Gavin Rossdale, U2, Goo Goo Dolls, Big Country, and Simple Minds, [i.e.] almost everyone who’s ever ‘mattered’, while wafting a somewhat dark edge.”

There was also a new k.d. lang album afoot that week, called Sing It Loud. After explaining how she’s basically a female Roy Orbison, I pronounced that this record found her “not just channeling but actually becoming Orbison, in a way, which isn’t all that strange.” Lots of organic feel to this record, which made it super nice. “Easily the most stunning thing on the album,” I stanned breathlessly, “is the deep-and-rich refrain of the banjo-dotted ‘Habit of Mind,’ which is too divine for the soccer-mom niche it’ll be pointed at.”

Xiu Xiu, Oh No (Polyvinyl Records)

One usually doesn’t associate San Jose with experimental music, but Jamie Stewart has been producing just that out of the area for 19 years at last count. He’s been the only constant, although keyboardist and drum-programmer Angelo Seo has been a constant for several releases now, including this one. If you need some sort of touchstone, producing Stewart’s albums was a guilty pleasure of Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, but Deerhoof-worship sure isn’t what’s afoot here. It’s a mercurial mixed bag of weirdness, in which Stewart sings deconstructionist-savvy duets with a bunch of different singers, including the aforementioned Saunier, Chelsea Wolfe and Alice Bag (Haley Fohr is particularly unlistenable here); his tentative, Norman Bates-style vocal is an acquired taste, as is his fetish for nonsense vocals, but this should work for you if you like things like the Swans when they’re in intelligible mode. Plenty of glitch and industrial noise, and for the most part it comprises billowy clouds of goth-ish mood-fog, but as always with this project, the record’s impossible to nail down in a couple of paragraphs. B

Johnny Thunders, “Chinese Rocks” (Die Laughing/ Golden Robot Records)

Warmup single for the forthcoming exclusive live album Cosa Nostra: Live At The Mudd Club 1983 Gothenburg, a Swedish live set from the former New York Dolls guitarist. Thunders was a tragic figure who grew up a fatherless outsider in Queens, N.Y., turned his back on a promising baseball career and died very mysteriously and way too soon. This song has been a staple anthem of original New York punk rockers for many decades now, written by Richard Hell and Dee Dee Ramone and first appearing on the 1977 album L.A.M.F. by Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers. The lyrics revolve around a drug reference that’s become almost quaint over time in some hyper-hip circles (the guys were trying to out-cool Lou Reed’s “Heroin”), and by the way, it was redone by the Ramones on their End Of The Century album. With regard to the quality of this release, well, it’s less than boombox-level, which one would expect for something this old and that was probably recorded on a cassette recorder by a roadie who never wanted the responsibility. But as such, it’s a priceless artifact. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Where does the time go, I ask non-rhetorically, because look, guys, the next general CD release date is April 16! Since 80 percent of New Hampshirites love them some hard rock, we’ll kick off this week’s episode with none other than Led Zeppelin Mini-Me band Greta Van Fleet, with their new album The Battle At Garden’s Gate! As you know, these guys are nowhere near as adept at repackaging Zep as Fantastic Negrito (I think I heard Negrito won a Grammy this year, but my delicate constitution was, as always, too touchy to sit through all the twerking imbecility of the Grammys, so I’m just going by some headline I scrolled past while looking to poach some Twitter followers), but they sure are the next best thing to Negrito, if by “the next best thing” you mean “not even close, but at least I don’t feel horrible while it’s playing.” But hey, hilarious title, The Battle At Garden’s Gate, huh? There’s some meme that shows a pie graph of Zeppelin songs, showing that 30 percent of them are about sex, 68 percent are about hobbits, and 2 percent are about citrus fruits, and that’s all true, but these guys’ idea of a hobbit-style title — repeat, The Battle At Garden’s Gate — sounds like something you’d receive in a Loot Box when you were actually hoping for a 12-inch action figure of Gandalf just cold taking out a dragon with his light saber bow staff or whatever it is. But wait folks, that’s not all! The first single, “Age of Machine,” pickpockets tuneage from The Pretenders, Zep’s Houses of the Holy album, and some other Zeppelin thing, who cares. Now, granted, they do totally sound like a reincarnated version of Zep from 1971, but a version of Zep that grew up listening to Pennywise and Weird Al, not 1920s blues and whatnot. Oh, we’ve talked about this before, let’s just move it along here.

• Well, looky there, fam, it’s Let The Bad Times Roll, the new album from snotty Poindexter punks The Offspring! You remember them, with all their songs, you know, those songs that all just sound like remixed versions of “Come Out And Play.” (Sorry to bring that up, gang, really. Now the only way you’ll be able to get the line “you gotta keep ’em separated” out of your head is to go into the Apple store and shout it in the face of their Paul Blart at the top of your lungs.) So the title track is basically just the “Keep ’em separated” thing but a version played by a total ska band. Sublime comes to mind. OK, people, stay awake, let’s proceed.

• Until now, London Grammar was known as a dream-pop band, and that may have been true, but the title track from the British trio’s new album Californian Soil is trip-hop, not dream pop. It’s kind of nice, a cross between Mazzy Star and Florence and The Machine, but it’s not dream-pop. The video for the tune is pure Nylon-bait, an empty high-fashion statement with people dressed all spiffy whilst chilling out in scenes of ruin and upside-down people and whatnot.

• Lastly and rest assuredly leastly, it’s mummified video game boss villain Paul McCartney, with something mysteriously titled McCartney III Imagined! What does this all mean? Nothing really, from my seat, like the first single, “Kiss of Venus,” is basically an ’80s-pop song as redone by Justin Bieber, because it has a feat from mini-Bieber Dominic Fike. I can’t imagine anyone will actually dig this aside from the record company’s Like-bots, but have at it if you like.

Retro Playlist

Let’s go back to eight years ago this week or so, when the big news was the release of Life On A Rock, the 16th album from guitar-strumming cowboy person Kenny Chesney. I reported that the leadoff single, “Pirate Flag,” is a “mid-tempo number which has some banjo on there,” a “sleepy nondescript song about being a country boy” but at least wasn’t meant as a “WWE wrestling entrance theme like all the other garbage coming out of Nashville, even if it does remind me a little too much of Tom Petty’s ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance,’” which was OK, as “Chesney’s old and rich enough not to care about unimportant little details like originality, who cares.”

The real meat of that long-ago potato, though, was a look at Paula Cole’s Raven album. The bummer thing about it was that Cole, “a Rockport, Mass., native who studied at Berklee and actually made something out of that training” unlike most, actually had to throw a Kickstarter in order to get enough money to release the album. OK, Cole was never meant to be the next Joni Mitchell or whatever, but she did table a couple of really nice hits, namely “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone” and the Dawson’s Creek theme song “I Don’t Want to Wait.” I do like that lady, and opined that her songs, although a bit long in running time, were “opuses of solitude, and her talent for haunting beauty is still there,” finishing with the bullet “Instant musical oatmeal for discriminating soccer moms.”

The other great one for April 18, 2013, was a world music joint, the self-titled debut from South African beatbox band The Soil. It’s a deeply immersive LP, mostly sung in their native (Sowego) dialect, “a warm, uninhibited set of (barely) rock-tinged a cappella hymns which, the band believes, come directly from God.” I’m too lazy to see if they got a Grammy nod for this record, but it did go well-deserved platinum in their corner of the world.

Kill The Giants, “The Prophet” (Nub Records)

Test-drive title track from the upcoming fifth album from the Saint Albans, U.K.-based genre-mashing band, which is — and I’m told this actually means something — fronted by Mark Christopher Lee of The Pocket Gods. This was buzzed to me as a concoction of “beatbox, classical, world music, rock and EDM,” whereas Irish zine Hotpress said it mixed thrash metal, hip-hop, classical and world music. All told, it looked good on paper, so here we are, me with a little egg on my face. There are some interesting samples (a 1950s big-movie chorus, it sounds like; some sitar, etc.), but where I was expecting something really trippy and hard-ass along the lines of God Lives Underwater or even Pendulum, the choppy, rather amateurish guitar line sounded like something out of a Woodstock retrospective on C-tier warmup bands. So yeah, there are a few influences buzzing around, but they don’t come together to blow minds. I mean, it’s OK, but, you know, whatever. B-

Arthur King, Changing Landscapes [Isle of Eigg] (AKP Recordings)

A little inside baseball: I didn’t get along well with the last public relations person to pitch me albums on the Dangerbird Records label. This person got mad at me when I dismissed one of their stupid albums as “hipster oatmeal” or whatever I said, probably something rotten. That takes us to here, with a new PR guy (whom I really like) and an album from a Dangerbird imprint, AKP Recordings. The deal with the bracketed title is that Arthur King is a mixed-media aggregator who recruits artists, musicians and whatnot to put on immersive shows. The third such production in his Changing Landscapes series is this one, where “participants will enter a spatial interpretation of the Scottish Isle of Eigg,” viewing projected images and such while this soundtrack plays (loudly). Weirdness abounds, friends, yes, weirdness abounds, as first-up track “An Sgurr” combines jagged ear-test sound-age, random conversations and a crowing rooster. That would be fine, but the subwoofer-begging electronic percussion does become literally barf-inducing; it simply digs right into the eardrum and will surely make a few visitors bail on the exhibit. Elsewhere it’s more user-friendly: half-plugged guitars and soothing synth lines leading into Flaming Lips-ish reverb-electro on “Laig Beach,” near-danceable glitch on “Eigg Beach.” B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• I actually have good news with regard to the collection of CDs that will be released on April 9, and it even revolves around one of those super-old bands that should have retired to do AARP commercials years ago. Yes, friends, I speak of 1970s half-joke-band Cheap Trick, whose new album, In Another World, is on the way! You may not know it, but those weirdos have been hanging around with none other than Ministry, helping Papa Al Satan make rebellious albums about smashing the state and whatnot, and guess what, Jello Biafra from Dead Kennedys was on one of those albums as well, all of which means that it’s so cool that your hand would instantly freeze if you touched the jewel case! This is a happy coincidence as well, because my favorite song over the last few weeks has been “Reach Out,” a totally demented tune Cheap Trick contributed to the Heavy Metal soundtrack album. You should go crank it right now, but in the meantime, I’ll go look for a single from this new album in the YouTube swamp, look, there’s one, I sure hope there aren’t 500 stupid commercials before I can dig on “Light Up The Fire!” OK, someone call an ambulance, this is awesome and I am dead, these guys are better than ever. There’s a twangy, bouncy, hard-rock guitar thing, and singer Robin Zander proves he still rules, and then there’s a sweet break in which they sound like Raspberries. How dare these guys be so old and yet so completely awesome.
• Fine, let’s get to the bit where I give up on music again today, as I look at the new Taylor Swift album, Fearless (Taylor’s Version). Guess what, all it is is a re-recorded version of the original Fearless album from 2008, but also with six tunes that had been cut from the original album. I would literally rather watch potatoes bake than deal with this, but here we are, you with an insatiable craving for pop culture and me with space to fill in this multiple award-winning column. So (burp) she redid “Love Story,” with ukuleles and whatever, and it’s instructive if nothing else; now I see that Tay-Tay is nothing more than a glorified version of Natalie Imbruglia. Aren’t you glad we did this, guys?
• Up next we have Montreal-based producer CFCF, with his new album Memoryland, in which he collaborates with Kero Kero Bonito frontwoman Sarah Bonito! The leadoff single “Life Is Perfecto” is actually pretty cool, an incomprehensible-but-danceable cross between Burial’s wingnut glitch-tech and neo-rave following in the footsteps of Aphex Twin or whatever. The 7-minute tune collects an interesting array of smart beats, and now that I have cursed it by recommending it, this CFCF guy will soon be working at Starbucks for the rest of his life.
• Last but not least, it’s another sure-to-be-underrated tech-oriented album, Cheap Dreams, from Small Black! This is a four-man band from Brooklyn, N.Y., but wait, they are not irritating, unless you really hate Wham! and/or Hall & Oates, because those are artists that the album’s intro single, “Duplex,” incorporates to some extent. I like it just fine; there’s a definite ’80s flavor to it, and their singing isn’t just another cheap imitation of Beach Boys, which means these guys know enough not to suck.

Retro Playlist

There’s not a more surefire way to get absolutely no Likes or Shares on your social media post than to post a YouTube video of an old song you like. It’s an instant fail, doomed to crickets chirping in response, the depleted uranium of social media. No one cares that you totawwy wuv some 50-year-old Pink Floyd song, much less that you spent five minutes humming into some stupid app to find out who sang a particular hair-metal ballad, like I did with that old 1983 stunner, “When I’m With You” (I’d had no luck finding it through conventional Googling because I didn’t know any of the lyrics aside from the “Bay-baaayyy” part. I thought it was either from the Raspberries or The Babys, but it was actually done by some obscure Canadian band called Sheriff, whose singer is definitely the Guinness World Record holder for eyebrow size).

There’s always a “but,” of course. Any boomer who posts a Beatles song will get a few Likes, guaranteed. Just my luck, the only Beatles song I can tolerate is “Paperback Writer,” and so I am a Facebook pariah when it comes to music (I’d never dream of revealing my power level on Twitter by linking a Ministry or Acumen Nation video, because it would just be pearls before politics-obsessed swine anyway). Anyhow, I got sick of my childhood buddy Dave posting The Who YouTubes, so I figured I’d try to lure him into the current millennium by turning him on to Minus The Bear, a Seattle band (sadly defunct as of 2018) that sounds like Asia with a slight Limp Bizkit edge. I reviewed their 2010 LP, Omni, when it first came out, and I still like it.

Of course, just because albums are from the Aughts or Aught-teens doesn’t automatically mean they’re good. One of the running jokes at this column’s previous home was that The Darkness’ 2003 album Permission to Land would never be unseated as the worst Led Zeppelin-wannabe album ever. The singer sounds like the guy from Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Must I expound further?

Dave, if you’re out there, go listen to the Minus The Bear tune “Secret Country” all the way through. I am here to help you.

Dan Blake, Da Fé (Sunnyside Records)

Fourth full-length from bandleader Blake, a Brooklyn-based sax player and board member of Buddhist Global Relief here busying himself at contributing something to the full slate of activist movements, including Extinction Rebellion, the Poor People’s Campaign and Show Up for Racial Justice. Sound-wise, Blake tries to emulate 1980s-era Wayne Shorter, and does make a good go of it when things get chaotically urban; you can practically smell the fried asphalt cooling outside. Doesn’t start out that way, though; in the message-sending prologue (“A New Normal”) pianist Carmen Staaf introduces the record with a slow, menacing solo bit whose augmented feel is fit for an old Vincent Price horror movie. It’ll be a bit unsettling to listeners who show up here for the sizzling, stubbornly retro vibes that take hold for pretty much the remainder. Things get the most animated during “The Grifter” (now who on Earth might that be referring to); the band lopes along like a herd of jacked-up gazelles in that boss move. “Doctor Armchair” is the obligato skronk workout. B+

Jazz WORMS, Squirmin’ (Capri Records)

I suppose it’s a given that every major city has a best jazz band in residence, and this five-piece (“WORMS” is an acronym that collects the first letters of the last names of the band members) is Denver’s. Coronet, piano and sax are the major instrumental components here, intertwining nicely in order to table ’60s-ish post-bop-ish advanced lounge stuff that’s simultaneously feel-good and mildly challenging. I know, I know, that pretty much describes approximately seven billion working jazz bands currently in business, but man, these guys are a lot of fun, even when they’re engaging in a workable level of skronk (basically minimal, praise Allah) and allow each member to stretch out without letting things get too wonky or drag on for any uncomfortable amount of time. Lots of experience in this 34-year-old band, including coronet guy Ron Miles’ bandleader releases on the Blue Note label. Just a terrific record all around. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

April 2 will bring our ears new albums, and hopefully some actual hints of actual summer, after this long Covid winter of going quietly insane! We will start with Godspeed You! Black Emperor, whose new album, G_d’s Pee AT STATES END, is on the way! I know nothing about them except for the fact that they’re from Montreal, Canada, and there are nine members. So, ipso facto, even though they claim to be into “space rock” (a made-up genre that means drone-y psychedelic rock), I’ll bet this stuff sucks, because all the band members are, of course, white and quite privileged-looking, and there are, repeat, nine members, and one of ’em plays a fiddle. As well, the band is named after an obscure Japanese movie (so edgy!). Get all that? I am expecting pure horror and barfing as I proceed to the next step of this little write-up, the bit where I actually submit my ears to this unlistenable nonsense. Ready? OMG, this all just got even worse. The teaser song is called, and I quote, “4521.0kHz 6730.0kHz 4109.09kHz.” It is a nonsense song that sounds like noise from a transistor radio that has super-bad reception. No, I’m serious, and one of the whopping seven people who left a comment on the YouTube for this idiocy exclaimed, “I cannot express with words how exited [sic] I am for this.” For my part, I am very excited to exit this part of our show.

• Since we’re on the subject of godspeeding and whatnot, I would also like to bring up an album that I’m sort of excited about, Glasvegas’ Godspeed, which will probably be decent, but there’s always the chance that it will disappoint and I won’t invite them to my Slip n Slide party when it gets warm! The band is from Scotland, and in the past they’ve done some right smart shoegaze-goth music. I just checked in with the second single, “Dying To Live,” which has been around for several months already, while the band got their act together enough to release the album. This is like a cross between U2’s first album and, I don’t know, probably Sisters Of Mercy. I like the tune, even if all it does is wander around acting edgy and not settling on any real melodic line. Your pet toucan might like it, who knows.

• Flock of Dimes, a Baltimore singer lady whose real name is Jenn Wasner, has played with Bon Iver and Wye Oak, and thus she is the most important musician in history in the eyes of people who love that kind of music (I don’t). This project’s third album, Head of Roses, is on my examination table, and boy, the new single, “Two,” sounds kind of like PJ Harvey trying to make something out of a chintzy Figurine cheese-techno line. Eventually it’s successful, but jeez, come on, people.

• To wrap up the week we have Du Blonde, the nom-de-stage of English musician Beth Jeans Houghton, who is also an artist, animator and video director, as well as a frequent wearer of belly shirts; she’s directed and animated music videos for Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ezra Furman, among others. Her third Du Blonde album is called Homecoming. In the video for the single “Medicated,” she has Kiss-style Gene Simmons makeup on, and it’s totally no-wave and grungy and spooky, but aimless. At least it’s irritating, thank heaven.