Author: Eric Saeger

Practice, Not A Game (self-released)

Practice is the stage name of one Michael Tapper, a New Yorker who’s played drums for We Are Scientists, Bishop Allen and a couple of other bands. The nom is an in-joke that I suppose is funny to some; the backstory is that NBA great Allen Iverson kept repeating the word during an interview to troll the gathered press corps who were on his case for not showing up for team practices. And that’s about as deep as things get these days with one-man one-offs, not that I’m trying to put a hex on Tapper if he’s going to go further with this project, a sometimes-deep-but-mostly-not stab at Hot Chip-ish house. It doesn’t hurt that Tapper’s voice sounds similar to that of TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe in mellow mode a lot of the time; with all the from-the-mountaintop reverb the beats get, a voice like that makes everything more downright approachable. Weird, when he harmonizes with himself it sounds like Duran Duran. A

Asiahn, The Interlude (Since The 80s Records)

Imagine Toni Braxton evoking Lorde on a Smoky Robinson tip. Then imagine that sort of #BlackLives-steeped vibe finding a home on a soul-centric record label that’s trying to be the polar opposite of Motown in the area of artist-exploitation. That’s a logical direction in which to turn for any singer, let alone one who’s written tunes for Pitbull, Drake, Lil Wayne and so on, someone who wants a solid platform for the out-and-proud songs she’s held in reserve for however long now. Rather than beating the silly love song horse to death, the theme of this EP is self-care expressionism, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t romantic or whatnot. In fact it is, which is of course quite fitting in these times of endless isolation and second-guessing everything we do. “My World” kicks off the festivities with a 1970s-bedroom-radio miasma; “Gucci Frames” mixes understated trap beats with megaphone-whispered nothings muttered into the void; “Messed Up” tables waterlogged post-bling afterparty ambiance. A

Retro Playlist

This week we revisit a couple of albums I covered exactly six years ago, in 2015. Back then, the albums I was actually kind of psyched about included Colin Hay’s Next Year People. Hay used to be in Men At Work, so I was mildly excited to see if he could recreate the “magic” of their ’80s hit “Down Under,” but of course he couldn’t, because if he had I would have found joy for a few moments. No, instead it was a lame Van Morrison type song which, obviously, warrants no further examination.

Anyway, the main focus that week was the usual two-album tandem, first focused on Hyperview, an album from Pennsylvania band Title Fight. The short-version takeaway was “sometimes a band’s sound changes so much they should really just change their name,” being that the band had suddenly sworn off the Drive Like Jehu roots-emo approach of their first album and gone almost totally Joy Division. Today, I have no idea why I said that the switch was a display of good judgment, seeing as how plenty of people actually like Drive Like Jehu. Maybe I was trying to tick those people off, which is a pretty safe bet, but then again, maybe my stomach was, at that time, fully capable of tolerating yet another band that ripped off Joy Division. I really have no idea.

The other defendant that week was a buzz band from Los Angeles called Street Joy, with their self-titled EP. Not that I don’t have more important things to do than Google the band to see if they’re still together, but there was promise, at least with the opening song, “Wandering in Your Mind.” The idea there was “BRMC-meets-Strokes lo-fi garage-raunch, decorated nicely enough with some old-school Iggy hollering.” Another song, “Moon,” sounded “like Strokes doing a slow, bullhorn-powered version of something Alice Cooper left off the Billion Dollar Babies album.” In other words it was mostly Strokes pickpocketing, which was, I stated, “worthy of placement on a Ford Focus commercial, if that sells you.”

Given that I haven’t heard a peep from the band since 2015, they probably didn’t even soundtrack a My Pillow commercial, which is just sad.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• On Friday, Feb. 5, all the latest CDs come out! Remember when that used to mean something, when all the new records would come out on Tuesdays, and your edgy, hip record store would write all the new albums in erasable Sharpie on a whiteboard, and when the clerk wasn’t looking you’d draw little skulls and other edgy transgressive things on the whiteboard, and it was all so fun and exciting, and then everything went online and rock ’n’ roll died its last death? Oh, well, Tower Records and Strawberries and all those things are all gone, converted into Dave & Buster’s and emergency soup kitchens or whatever, but I’ll have you know that there are still several record stores in New Hampshire, like Bull Moose in Portsmouth, Metro City and Music Connection in Manchester, Pitchfork in Concord, and four different Newbury Comics. To be honest, I haven’t been in a record store for a year, because of the plague, but anyway, some or all of our local record stores will be blessed with brand new stuff on the 5th, starting with Medicine At Midnight, the newest “slab” from corporate grunge charlatans Foo Fighters! Supposedly the band recorded this album in a haunted house, like weird things kept happening during the recording sessions. The weirdest thing I can imagine is my actually being impressed by the album’s second single, “No Son of Mine,” but here we go, it’s queued up on the YouTube. Eh, it’s OK, a punkish, grindy tune that’s part WWE entrance theme and latter day Jello Biafra. Pointless but OK.

• British rapper Slowthai has finally gotten around to releasing his second album, Tyron, which is on the way and scheduled for a Feb. 5 release date. The lead single, “Mazza,” features A$AP Rocky as the main guest, adding his usual spit-takes to Slowthai’s agile Eminem imitation. The beat is made of creepy, Postal Service-like minimalist weirdness, if that floats your boat.

• Haha, I thought the whole “John Carpenter making albums” thing was just a passing meme, but here’s another one, titled Lost Themes III: Alive After Death. The idea behind this is that Carpenter didn’t use all the two-note songs he wrote for his movies, like the two-piano-note theme to Halloween, the murky mess he wrote to soundtrack The Thing, you know, all those things that sounded like Keyboard Cat but in real life, not a meme. The sort-of-title track, “Alive After Death,” is just spooky and whatnot, the backdrop to an animated film. It’s like the intro to that movie Creepshow but not with Scooby Doo-level animation.

• Finally this week, it’s The Weather Station’s new album, Ignorance, hot off the presses and whatnot! If you’re the type who likes decent-enough folktronica and whatever, you might enjoy this album, because frontwoman Tamara Lindeman is like a cross between Sia and Aimee Mann. “Tried To Tell You,” the single, isn’t bad at all, like a low-budget Lana Del Rey with a pulse.

Cyrrca, Cyrrca (self-released)

By now, you’re probably in the habit of heading for the hills whenever I start talking up an ambient album, but in this case I’d encourage you to stick around, as this isn’t just composed of a bunch of accidental “hey, that sounds kind of neat” finds. I mean, yeah, it’s that too, but what electronic record isn’t these days, and besides, this is actually based on the mononymed artist’s world travels over the last several years, to Turkey, Ireland and other places, toward the goal of “spiritual enlightenment.” Wait, don’t laugh at that bit, we could all use it, for sure, after a year like the last one, and it doesn’t hurt that he threw together a few one-off collaborations while journeying, guest feats that included rappers, weird instrumentalists and all that stuff. No, it’s not some soundtrack to a movie that’ll never be made (all of the songs have videos, while we’re here), more of a high-end sonic affair in the vein of Aphex Twin, Moby, Massive Attack, that sort, but at a more un-funked, chill level. There’s an art book that goes with it, by the way. A+

Everdawn, Cleopatra (Sensory Records)

Every time a new girl-fronted symphonic-metal album comes barreling in here, I get to wondering if the tunes might actually possess the power to inspire their listeners to buy actual opera CDs, like “Cavalleria Rusticana” and “Pagliacci,” the two most-often-paired-up operas when you go to, you know, the opera. I know that might sound a little crazy, but if you’d buy this album more for Alina Gavrilenko’s soaring soprano than the polite Wayne’s World-style power-metal on board, face it, bub, you might want to go all the way and drop a few hundred to take your date to see good ole “Cav and Pag” at the Boston Opera House, if the current horror ever ends, of course. Aside from that, there’s really very little to add here in the way of music reviewin’ per se. If you’ve heard Trans Siberian Orchestra or Visions Of Atlantis, you’ve already been here, and, fact is, Alina’s capable but not remarkable. But don’t let that stop you; all I’m trying to accomplish is to get you to think for just five seconds about how cool it would be to brag to your gamer friends about going to an actual opera. Try it, man! (Ha ha, their Facebook has one of the guys getting his picture taken with the actually-named Nicko McBrain from Iron Maiden. Hee HEE, he’s giving a thumbs up, an expression of approval commonly exhibited by humans!) B

Retro Playlist

Two up from the Way-Back Machine, this time from 2015, which seems like a million years ago, doesn’t it? That was the same year as Bob Dylan’s Shadows In The Night and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly. Now do you remember? Ha ha, I don’t.

This week in 2015, I covered two albums, the first of which was Black Coffee Sigh, the second album from Boston-based bar band Sunshine Riot. It’s hard-ish rock, not all that well-produced, but, as I alluded to back then, they are/were something of an area band, and “I only write about albums like this when they’re from decent local artists, not because I expect big-production guitar-rock to overthrow trap-snap diva-bling anytime soon, even if the fantasy is comforting to some.”

Anyhow, the band’s was taking on “the doomed mission of bringing back rootsy bar-band rock, specifically southern-rock, more or less,” and I was pretty nice to them overall. There was opening tune “Black Coffee Sigh Side A,” “a doomy/crunchy thing that makes like a Ministry warmup,” but from there the record becomes an amalgam of Hank Williams Jr. quasi-cowboy-punk (“This Is a Raid”), sweetly rendered Allmans nicking (“Better Days”), Doobie Brothers head-drug-pop (“Liz Stone”) and blissy but faceless ’70s filler (“Dead Baby Cocaine Blues”). A band you might like to see live, I suppose.

The other one that week was The Mindsweep, the then-new LP from U.K.-hard-rawk outfit Enter Shikari, a record I did actually like, more or less. That album was their fourth and found the crew “comfortably at ease with their ingredients, a unique mishmash of grime-rap, bass-driven Meshuggah-style death-metal and, well, screamo, if you must know.”

But don’t let the screamo bit scare you away, I tried to say. The album is “a vision of early-aughts Linkin Park reborn as a po-faced limeys, with a tightness that would give Pendulum night sweats if they ever had to face them at a metal-palooza.”

The fact that Enter Shikari is awesome is probably old news to you, if you’re into neo-metal-ish rock, but, anyway, that

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The next catchall date for CD releases is Friday, Jan. 29, a day that will live in infamy, because oh noes, I have to deal with Revolutionary Love, the newest LP from rabies-frothing grunge-folk howler-gibbon Ani DiFranco! You all know this Buffalo, N.Y.-born busker’s story, like, she became emancipated at age 15, leaving her mom’s to strike out into the great Unknown, which is super-hard when you’re the child of MIT grads who were actually happy to just be able to watch The Price Is Right in peace without having to deal with Ani’s constant barking at postmen and meter-readers and whatnot. I haven’t had the pleasure of dealing with her last few albums, all of which, like the ones before them, were released on Ani’s own record label, with crayon album-cover art or whatever, but don’t knock it, because it’s not everyone who can just simply produce and release and market their own albums, especially with only the support of MIT-grad parents to count on, so you shut up right this minute while I go and damage my brain to the strains of the album’s title track. It is a slow song, like a warped outtake from a 1980s Dionne Warwick album, and the lyrics are about dealing with anger and empowering oneself. Good heavens, this dumb song is over seven minutes long, and I must shut it off right now.

• Speaking of the ’90s, Goat Girl is a new-ish all-girl post-punk band from England that sounds like Hole, but with less throwing stuff, not that their 2018 semi-hit “The Man” wasn’t somewhat edgy. On All Fours, their newest, streets on the 29th, led by the single “Sad Cowboy,” an eclectic little ’90s-chill song that has elements of Natalie Merchant, Calexico and, for no reason whatsoever, an occasional break interpolating 1970s disco drums. It’s not as annoying as I just made it sound, so go listen for yourself if you’re even slightly curious.

• Dum de dum, boom boom kapoosh. Huh, what’s this, it’s Americana singing person Langhorne Slim, who literally named himself after the town he was born in. Now there’s an idea, I’m changing my name to Westford Saeger. Slim was in the band Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. Any of you guys remember when I was twisting myself into funny Rold Gold pretzel shapes trying to review one of that band’s albums, and you could just tell I was bored out of my skull? Doesn’t matter, because Slim’s new full-length, Strawberry Mansion, is here, with a decent-enough song, called “Mighty Soul.” His yodel-y voice is perfect for this kind of chill but grungy folkie-pop. He’s like a cross between Conor Oberst and Cat Stevens. Some readers will salivate uncontrollably over that description, and others will simply continue coughing up pesky hairballs.

• Finally we have Chicago-born gloom-indie songstress Lia Ices, who’s been compared to Feist, Bat for Lashes, etc. Her fourth LP, Family Album, is out imminently and features the tune “Young on the Mountain.” Her voice sucks but the ’60s-radio-pop vibe is OK.

M Ward, Think of Spring (Anti Records)

Sorry I missed the PR email when this CD came out officially on Dec. 11, but better late than never, I always say. I assume you’re aware of Ward’s collaborations with Monsters of Folk, Norah Jones, Bright Eyes and all that, but maybe you’ve passed on his solo stuff, which does have a tendency to be a bit sparse. Good news is that sparse is the perfect way to be if one wants to cover Billie Holiday’s entire Lady In Satin album and be somewhat edgy at the same time. That record was her final one, released in 1958, and it, like other examples of her output, was a big inspiration to Ward, who pays a sort of alternate-universe tribute to it. Ward’s mumbly voice is nothing compared to Holiday’s, of course, and the production is not much beyond boombox level, but poignance and sincere reverence do drip from his stabs at “It’s Easy To Remember” and “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” among all the others. There’s an odd sort of verisimilitude at work either way; Holiday’s version came out when her voice was largely trashed, whereas Ward’s voice has always been, you know, a non-starter or whatever. B+

The Avalanches, We Will Always Love You (Astralwerks Records)

Another bit of catch-up here, the most recent LP from the criminally underreported (at least in the U.S.) Australian electronic duo, who’ve counted none other than Baltimore-based rapper Spank Rock as one of their touring members. These guys originally came up in the late ’90s, hoping to make it big (if you count bands like Drive Like Jehu as “big”) in the OG-emo scene, and those roots are part of why they’re so rich and delicious: They’re mildly noisy, in fact no-fi at times, but still a good choice for afterparty vibe. This time, guests include Orono, MGMT, Neneh Cherry and — wait, what — former Clash band member Mick Jones. As you can tell, it’s one of those Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World-style cameo-fests, and the vibes are, by and large, up to the task. The title track is old-school Moby-ish pseudo-soul stuff; “We Go On” is throwback disco as put through a deep house filter; “Until Daylight Comes” gives us a broke-down trip-hop effort from a perfectly placed Tricky. A+

Retro Playlist

Exactly 10 years ago to the week, I covered a couple of albums that were actually in my sweet spots, even if they were a bit disparate in their target audiences. Of the Jan. 18, 2011, release from Decemberists, The King Is Dead, I blathered, “With the one-off ‘concept album’ experiment from Decemberists that was 2009’s Hazards of Love now in the books, the band turns again to the hayloft-indie space while claiming that three-minute pop songs are more difficult to put together than conceptual magnum opuses.” What I was implying with that little mouthful was that they were trying to edge toward more commercial things, but — wait, calm down, I didn’t hate the band for selling out a little. I was pretty nice to this album, actually. Aside from not outright complaining about Peter Buck’s completely unnecessary guest shot, I also gave them props for the album’s curve balls: “a grog-and-whaling accordion/fiddle break in the wry mining storyteller ‘Rox in the Box’; a nod to Jimmy Buffett in the sedate, Christmasy ‘January Hymn’; and some not-unlikeable NASCAR bluegrass (‘All Arise’). It’s an OK album, see, even if half your friends will assume it’s an Arcade Fire joint and judge it accordingly.

The other bit that week was Tao of the Dead, from And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead. Now there’s a band I can only like so much, which isn’t to say I dislike them, just that nowadays I find them about as compelling as a PBS workout video. Sure there were moments of heaviness, which, come on, is their real selling point (“The sounds spring from ideas Blue Oyster Cult, Offspring, Foo Fighters and Minus the Bear could have had, meaning you stubborn old-schoolers will have to allow for Hello Kitty-fied half-punk whimsy between the walls of noise, which are, I assure you, psycho-heavy at times [‘Weight of the Sun’].” But in the end, the band itself is their biggest problem; their indie-ness is an obvious handicap, as I alluded to later: “…imagine Foo Fighters trying to write a sequel to Tommy while being very mindful of their limits in both technical aptitude and imagination, but a little more interesting than that.”

Both albums, then, belonged in the “better luck next time” bin.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The Jan. 22 general-CD-release-date is just about here, which can only mean one thing: some indie band from Canada is about to break it big, if by “big” we mean city bus fare totally covered and enough money to take the whole fam to Burger King. No, I’m kidding, this band called Kiwi Jr., which is from Toronto, was probably in Nylon magazine, and if so, the reviewer put down their vape pen just long enough to go straight into glitch-mode and make up some nonsense words to describe the band’s first album, whatever it was called. But now this weirdo band is on Sub Pop Records, so all of us actual critics have to put down our vape pens in an elegant, refined manner and pretend we’re paying attention to the band’s upcoming new album, Cooler Returns, because otherwise we’ll be considered hacks who don’t know what we’re talking about, as if we ever do. They have a weird stream-of-consciousness trip going on, although to be honest the weirdness mostly appears to stem from stupid nonsensical lyrics (“Throwing dead birds into the air, singing howdy neighbours how’d you like my new ride?”). I mean, the title track is nice and jangly and stupid, like, if you like hopeless college-rock nonsense like Parquet Courts or Franz Ferdinand you might dig it, and at least there’s a dated-sounding stun-guitar solo at the end that might impress you, if you’re impressed that the guitarist for a hipster band would even learn how to play a guitar solo.

• Speaking of sophomore albums I’m not particularly excited to have to deal with, Austin, Texas, soundsystem Thee Conductor is releasing Spirit Of A Ghost this week. I call this twosome a soundsystem because it’s basically two guys, a producer and an engineer, and that’s it, but this time they have help on the vocal end from Bonnie “Prince” Billy (a.k.a. Will Oldham), on the single “Tsk Tsk,” a track steeped in slow finger-picked acoustic guitar and made more than palatable by Oldham’s voice. The fadeout is decent, as the guitar is suddenly drowned in UFO noise, but not before the thing has sort of taken hold of your brain as a chill earworm. I don’t hate it in any way, which automatically makes this column a rare collectible that you should pass on to your grandchildren.

• Delving further into the paltry amount of new albums to talk about his week, the mostly obscure electronic dance guy known as TRZTN is New Yorker Tristan Bechet, whose new album, Royal Dagger Ballet, is on the Walmart trucks for delivery as we speak. The album cover is deconstructionist and kind of gross, but that only means that it’s Important, but remember, if you ever hope to be cool, learn to love art that grosses you out. Jonathan Bree guests on the single “Mirage,” a sexytime deep-techno joint made out of faraway-sounding vocals and pseudo-’80s Stranger Things vibe.

• Finally, we have James Yorkston And The Second Hand Orchestra’s new LP, The Wide Wide River, a pretty cool record if you like emo for grown-ups, a la Elbow and such. Album opener “Ella Mary Leather” has a bonky but tasteful piano line, a bit like Ben Folds, of course, but more refined.

Frank Sonic & L-Ex, “Talamanca Beach, Ming (Ger) Remix” (Amber Blue Recordings)

As if I don’t mention it every other month, I’m always up for some velvet-rope techno, especially Above & Beyond-style trance, in other words “trance that’s actually too slow to be properly considered ‘trance’ but whatever.” That’s Frank Sonic’s trip, at least on this track, which isn’t a chest-thumping floor-stomper, more one of those countless odes to the crazily decadent island of Ibiza, in this case a specific beach that struck his fancy when he visited on tour. No, Sonic isn’t in the same class as Tiesto or any of those DJs with “Van” in their name, at least here in the States. But he’s been a fixture in Germany for 20 years, and stuff like this would do just fine for me if the right club ever opened up in these parts. The tune builds and swirls and dive bombs like an overly confident seagull, hitting on the right vibe to remind us that travel sure was a fun thing back before the plague hit, you know? A

Trillionaire, Romulus (Nefarious Industries Records)

I hesitate to dub this band a supergroup, but it does have all the markings of some sort of mutant hard-rock Toto, being that it brings together a bunch of guys who’ve been through the ringer for a collective period of many decades. If you’re hip to bands like Inter Arma, Fuligin, A F—ing Elephant and such, you may have been exposed to parts of this whole, which reads like a tech-savvy (in a Linkin Park sense) version of Metallica (in a the-singer-sounds-like-Hetfield sense). No, it’s not a lot like Tool, so get that out of your head before you decide prematurely to bail on this, and besides, I can’t stand Tool. No, it’s like if Mastodon had gone in a near-emo direction, but no, it’s not emo either. The riffing is sharper than a paper cut, befitting a band that’s been together a really long time, but they haven’t. The tracks were passed around from and recorded in Boston, Seattle, Richmond and Nashville, thus it’s a Covid baby, and quite the great one, in fact. A

Retro Playlist

Weird coincidence, but if you noticed my talking about the Cheatahs in the weekly rundown, here they are again, coming up in a search for old stuff I haven’t talked about in a dog’s age. Their 2013 album Extended Plays was actually a rollup of the band’s earliest EPs, showcasing the initial volleys in the British indie-shoegaze-pop foursome’s attempts to take over the world. That hasn’t happened, to date, and they’re way overdue for a new album these days; their second LP, Mythologies, came out in 2015. With regard to my first exposure to them, I described them as “Foo Fighters on Drive Like Jehu’s budget, but it’s beyond that; these guys are fantastic riff-writers, as heard in album opener “The Swan”, which rides one hellaciously awesome guitar line for most of the tune and then stops to riff something even more cool, after a Sabbath-y Foo Fighters-ish fashion.” As for the last album, it rated a 73 on Metacritic’s aggregate score, meaning they were considered pretty freaking good. To be honest, it wasn’t until I was today years old that I finally caught up with Mythologies, or at least some quick samples thereof; it’s a bit more formulaic than their older stuff but still worth a stream if you’d be down with clean, blissy, over-reverb-ed shoegaze sung by a dude who’s trying to nick Simple Minds (who wouldn’t?).

Not so awesome was Buckcherry’s Confessions album, which I reviewed that same week in 2013. They were doomed in my eyes from the start anyway; I don’t trust throwback hard-rock bands that can’t come up with riffs to save their lives, and these L.A.-based imbeciles were lucky I didn’t throw the book at ’em and give them an F grade for being “very much like 3 Doors Down if that band had been exposed to too much Papa Roach.” Did it help that the singer, Whatsisname, ripped off Staind’s stupid sourball inflection? No, it did not.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Jan. 15 arrives this week, on a Friday, which can only mean one thing: New albums will be arriving in the Pandoras and whatever, to soothe your aesthetic sensibilities and of course make you wish good music were coming out instead! Take for example Suckapunch, the seventh album from English pop-punk/post-hardcore (could we possibly dispense with all the superficial, superfluous genre-labeling this year and just call all this stuff “emo” whether the band likes it or not?) band You Me At Six! They are certainly likeable enough for what they do; they sound sort of like Fall Out Boy, but with nothing new to add, so you might like them, I have no idea whatsoever. I could have sworn I’d written these guys up before, but maybe I didn’t, who cares, like, I thought they were a tiresome hipster-indie band until I went back and listened to their biggest songs, which were like Fall Out Boy. Whatever, and then I checked to see if some WWE wrestling dude had used one of their songs as an “entrance theme,” you know, the sophisticated part where the wrestler runs out of the arena tunnel and starts barking at the moon and throwing chairs at the referee. Anyway, the title track is actually OK, like a cross between Coldplay and Linkin Park (please don’t pretend you couldn’t possibly imagine what that would sound like, seriously, I beg you), even if the video is just a trope-dump of sci-fi nonsense, like first there’s a random Darth Maul dude, and then they get unplugged from their Matrix brain implants, blah blah blah. You might like it, like I said. I do not know.

• Hmm, let’s see what else is here. Wait, guys, this looks interesting, some British indie band called Shame, with their second album, Drunk Tank Pink, this might actually be cool, because NME takes them seriously. Yep, on their first album, Songs Of Praise, they were sort of like a drunk version of Elbow that was trying to sound a bit like the Hives, like a mutant strain of oi-indie. The new single, “Water in the Well,” is like old Madchester yell-pop, a lot cooler than Gang Of Four (is that OK to infer, or am I risking my critic’s license?). I like these guys and would be most keen on joining them if they ever assemble a flash mob with the intent of invading a big electronics store and throwing golf balls at everything that looks expensive.

• Midnight Sister, you say? Never heard of them? Hmm, neither has Wikipedia. Eh, maybe it’s cool, given that their record label is Jagjaguwar Records, which has sent me good records in the past, or am I thinking of the Cheatahs? I swear, my brain is like an episode of Hoarders, except everything in my packed-to-the-ceiling guest room is nothing but boxes of bad, redundant albums without any redeeming artistic qualities. Meanwhile, this new album, Painting The Roses, has a new single, called “Foxes,” a cabaret-rock tune that’s sort of like 1970s Electric Light Orchestra. I don’t hate it, does that help any?

• Wrapping up, let’s look at “Mork & Mindy,” the new single from Spare Ribs, the latest LP from Sleaford Mods! OK, it’s awesome, like imagine a brain-damaged Cockney “punter” rapping gently over a wicked cool EDM chill beat. No, I’m serious, this is cool, in its way!

Laraaji, Moon Piano (self-released)

In news from the weird, we present this New York pianist, an 80-year-old cult artist whose forte is sparse ambiance for New Agers who’d like their brains to kindly stop for a second. Apparently the big sell is that these slow, deserted improv pieces were recorded in a Brooklyn church, but quite honestly, that’s an effect that could have come by way of a few decent knob twists on the part of an engineer, not to harsh anyone’s mellow about it, particularly if you love whatever he’s done before. I mean, a well-played acoustic piano is a sound to behold; my parents were both M.A. graduate pianists of New England Conservatory, so I was spoiled absolutely rotten in that regard, and therein lies my rub: This is, in the end, a one-man jam session focused on careful, reflective non-songs, largely minor key experimentations comprising various series of notes that will appeal to not overly cultured art-freaks. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but for me, regardless of this guy’s training/pedigree/whatever, it’s non-eventful. B

Hunter, 1960 (self-released)

Hunter Stamas is a Portsmouth-by-way-of-Nashua singer who’s led her band through a few albums now, this one being the latest. It’s stunningly polite, this stuff, heavy on the guitar jangle, squeaky clean vocal tracks that could certainly amaze young YouTube addicts and the fedora-hatted denizens of your favorite bars and eateries (opening soon, I hope, dear God). To dispense with the vulgarities, the production values are decent (a lot more pro-sounding than most of the local material that gets flopped onto this desk) and the songs generally stick to a specific formula (ditto), making it something of a contender you might place in your SoundCloud queue between the first Miley Cyrus album and basically anything by Bonnie Raitt. I know that might sound a bit weird, but from my seat it’s not unusual at all; Stamas is a commercial-oriented songwriter who’s come close here; there’s a ’60s Yardbirds/girl-group vibe at work that’s actually pretty unique. B+

Retro Playlist

Jazz comes in all sorts of flavors, not that you’re required to know even that much about the genre if you’re a budding newbie aficionado of it. Sometimes jazz guys will throw different genres into their recipe, as I discussed six years ago, in January 2015, when I wrote about Three Rivers, an LP from Richie Goods and Nuclear Fusion. A Pittsburgh Jazz Hall of Fame bass player, Goods has toured with Whitney Houston and Christina Aguilera, which speaks to a pedigree he earned after studying under legendary Blue Note Records legend Ron Carter in New York. With regard to his own (original) stuff, I’d anticipated mellow-ish fusion a la Spyro Gyra, but it was really more a modernized Return to Forever, although in some cases not so modernized when considering the outright hard rock workouts found in such tunes as the title track. There’s definitely a heavy influence afoot here; album opener “Soul Glow” has, as I put it back then, “a suspended-animation riff that proves he can restrain himself from going all-out Pelican-metal, but the desire is there,” as indicated by every plonk of his Rickenbacker, not to mention the grungy sounds of guitarist Ben Butler, “a real treasure who punches up every guitar sound from Al di Meola to Blue Oyster Cult on that one track alone.”

Speaking of Ron Carter, he released a full-length on Blue Note Records in 2007, Dear Miles, which was discussed in this space. With a resume packed with guest spots on – get this – over 3,500 albums, Carter had more than earned the right to rely on his past association with Miles Davis, who kept Carter on for most of his 1960s output. It was harmonically uncomplicated, I noted: “With Roger Squitero on board strictly to fortify percussion, the only harmonic instrument within this outing’s four-piece framework is the piano of Stephen Scott, who is kept crazy-busy with the job of re-creating various Miles Davis grooves for this sort-of-tribute LP (ex: in order to shrink the big band sound of ‘Gone’ from the Evans/Miles Porgy & Bess collaboration into these confines, Scott takes on the horn parts).”

Obviously a great one for wonks of both Miles and bass in general.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Way kool, everything’s back to normal, with plenty of new albums coming out on Jan. 8! Or so I thought, it doesn’t really look like a ton of stuff, but at least there’s something, starting with the new album from Barry Gibb, called Greenfields! Gibb is, of course, one of the founders of that old disco band The Bee Gees. He was the pretty-handsome one who looked like God’s idea of a male Farrah Fawcett, but now, guess what, he looks like a trucker who’d beat you up for driving a sissy electric car. But that’s what happens to all of us, like one time years ago, my boy-ees and I were walking around near the Worcester Centrum, and these three girls came up to me and insisted I was Michael Hutchence from INXS, and it took forever to convince ‘em otherwise, up to and including my refusal to speak in an Australian accent, but nowadays … well, never you mind about nowadays, and that’s what happens, so don’t get old, I’m serious. Oh whatever, we’re supposed to be talking about this old disco has-been, who became a “knight” in England, like, can you imagine if 10-foot-tall alien monsters landed here and demanded to fight our planet’s “knights,” so we had to trot out Paul McCartney, Elton John and this dude? We’d be doomed, just like this album’s lead single, “Words Of A Fool,” is doomed to be mistaken for a Matthew McConaughey cover of a Willie Nelson song. It sucks, let’s move on.

• Swedish post-punk ruffians Viagra Boys release their second LP, Welfare Jazz, any minute now. The single “Ain’t Nice” is terrific, a grungy, messy soundsystem thing that krazy-glues Chainsmokers to Big Black. It’s awesome.

• British folk-rock dude and former busker Michael Rosenberg goes by the stage name Passenger because he knows that no hipster kids would buy an album by someone with a ridiculous name like Michael Rosenberg, you know? I wonder how long the person-who-goes-by-a-band-name trend will continue, don’t you? If it does continue for much longer, I hope these “bands” will start thinking of cool “band names,” like if I were going to use a band name as my own name, I’d probably call myself, er, I mean my band, something like Tell Grandma It’s Polka And Watch Her Epic Reaction When The Crazy Kicks In. Cool, huh? Oh, I don’t care if you think that, and besides, that Van Halen tribute band I talked about forming a few weeks ago never materialized, so no bands for me, just writing in this latest column about this one-dude-band here and his new album, Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted. I’m watching the video for the tune “A Song For The Drunk And Broken Hearted,” and it’s pretty dumb, like he’s sort of cosplaying as the Joaquin Phoenix version of The Joker, and the six or eight people in the crowd are razzing him, and then he launches into the song, a strummy, harmonica-powered ditty that sounds like Conor Oberst trying to sound like Bob Dylan. It is very “meh,” if that’s your thing.

• Lastly we have Dangerous: The Double Album from cowboy-hat singing dude Morgan Wallen, who got arrested for public drunkenness outside Kid Rock’s gross bar in Nashville. On the title track he sings-raps like a total redneck, like the guy from Primus but not joking around. It’s kind of cool I suppose.

Real Numbers, Brighter Then (Slumberland Records)

…Or at least the two advance singles from the third EP from this Minneapolis-based jangle-pop band, as they couldn’t seem to send over the full five tunes (not that I really cared either way, but point of order, the other three include a reprise version of one of the songs we’ll go over here). Anyhoo, the guitar line on the title track is crazy bright and, of course, jangly, with gentle amateurish singing so deeply buried in reverb that half the shoegaze bands of the Aughts are probably lining up to sue them. In other words, yeah, it’s like if Glasvegas covered a Byrds song (and who wouldn’t be into such a novel, experimental thing, in case you’re from Neptune or whatnot and had never heard the 22 billion other bands who tried the same thing). OK, I don’t mean for it to sound like I hate this stuff; I definitely don’t, it just feels like its expiration date has long passed. Meanwhile, “Darling” is super cool if you can handle shoegaze-twee, like if Brian Jonestown Massacre covered a Belle & Sebastian song, or vice versa. B+

All Who Wander, Daylight (self-released)

From the wilds of Amherst comes this four-piece, consisting of Matthew Fiffield and four other guys, two of them having the surname Mavrogeorge, which leads me to assume they’re brothers, unless this super-weird year has recently taken up the hobby of dumping bizarre coincidences in my lap. Anyway, one drop of the cyber-needle on this emo-hard-rock conflagration had me sold: Where I’d basically expected the usual bit involving some gamer kids doofing around with a boombox and a few Minecraft samples just to troll me, the sound is as big as it gets, like latter-day Black Veil Brides, Panic! At The Disco, and so on and so forth, with some technically precise Linkin Park bits and big Minus The Bear-style angles that don’t rely solely on guitars. No, I’m not jerking you around, this one is for real, like these guys need to drop everything and spend a month in New York trying to find the right agent. Seriously, if you’re a forward-thinking power-pop-head, go find this on Spotify, iTunes or whatever, just freaking do it. A+

Retro Playlist

Eleven years ago this week, MySpace was a thing. There was even a “MySpace Records” imprint of sorts, and so without any trace of irony I brought to your attention Qu, an album by the band Sherwood. What was it? It was something that was OK but not wildly brilliant. “Happy-face subtropical surf-indie safely reminiscent of Reliant K and Hansen,” said I. “Not much for herd-thinkers to stress about with regard to where this fits in the grand scheme of ‘alternative’ pop things when one of the tunes here once pattered around helping to background MTV’s College Life.” It was eminently radio-ready, or wanted to be; in many places there’s a hook they just can’t seem to wring out of the correctly chosen bunches of notes gathered at the choruses (that is unless you like a dab of Springsteen B-sides with your boy-band fetishism, in which case you’d probably love this LP from start to what-me-worry finish). The curveball consists of soccer-stadium roars trading blows with Cuban timbales drums in “Not Gonna Love,” but aside from that it’s harmless, finger-snappy all around. Put it this way, their slot at the Warped Tour was probably the point in the festivities when it was time to sit in the grass indulging in ice cream and blank stares.

The same week, I also dissected DYSE’s Lieder Sind Bruder Der Revolution, an album that was, on paper at least, a German response to Cro Mags. The hmm-that’s-somewhat-cool part is that this is/was a two-man operation, a welcome trend that historically took hold not so much out of any blind obeisance to White Stripes but more out of basic necessity, that is to say a dearth of local talent. In practice, DYSE are like an undiscovered entry in the SST catalog or whatnot, something from when post-punk hated radio, i.e. there’s quite a bit of Nick Cave, Redd Kross and Minutemen in the air. Thing is, and this is a problem often heard in European bands, DYSE doesn’t seem fully possessed of that aura of genuine deconstructive craziness common to bands from the States or England, unless of course you’re German, in which case, sure, maybe they sound like they’re ready to smash wedding cakes or copy something they saw in an old Iggy video, whatever denotes crazy underground punk-tude nowadays. Pretty typical underground-record-store vibe, not that I have any problem with that.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• I know what you’re thinking: Hooray, 2020 is over, no more murder hornets or news stories about Sean Connery passing away and whatever else happened during Literally The Worst Year In History. But it’s only Jan. 1, or at least that’s the next scheduled general album release date, as if any band or artist would put out a new album on New Year’s Day. It’d probably be more interesting if I just filled this space with pictures of clowns throwing cream pies at each other, but for the sake of Odin and Poseidon and whatnot I shall go forth, forthwith, for duty and humanity, in search of crazy people who decided to put out albums while everyone is sleeping off the end of 2020. Toward that, I’ve started at Metacritic, which tells me there is an album coming out from The Dirty Nil, called F— Art. And thus the cosmic jokes continue even into the new year, when I have to censor the title of whatever stupid music thing this is. Wiki says that the band won the Juno Award for Breakthrough Group of the Year at the Juno Awards of 2017, which means they’re from Canada, which means they’ll be annoyingly proper and PC despite the album’s edgelord title. Whatever, here’s the new song, “Doom Boy,” and — guys, this is so cute, it’s like emo (in other words power pop, and yes, it used to be that Google would only find articles by me if you searched for “emo band,” but now everyone calls trashy tuneage like this “emo,” which means I should be monetarily remunerated for inventing a term for something I detest, which is usually how the remunerations process works when you’re a veteran writer, someone please tell me how to use the Patreon)! There’s some metal riffing that goes on, but don’t worry, in this case your little brother won’t go on to buying actual cool music with his allowance, because it’s been washed and scrubbed in soapy suds, with all traces of Ministry and Slayer and Meshuggah completely gone. No worries, mom and dad!

• Gick, what else do we have, I can barely stand it. Since there’s literally no one else dumb enough to put out an album on National Hangover Day, we’ll fast-forward to Monday, Jan. 4, when we get Querencia, the debut album from Kim Chung-ha, better known mononymously as Chungha, the South Korean singer, dancer, songwriter and choreographer! The first single, “Tell Me That You Will,” was on TikTok; the song is pretty standard house-infused technopop, nice enough, sexytime grinding in the video, blah blah blah. Supposedly the whole album is sung in Korean, but this isn’t. Anyway, that.

• We’ll wrap up this week’s horror with J.T., the new LP from Steve Earle & The Dukes, which also streets on Jan. 4. It’s the 21st album from the Texas-born hayseed-rocker, and the single, “Harlem River Blues,” isn’t bad at all! It’s high-end bluegrassy chill-folk containing elements of zydeco, like, I’d dance to it if I were drunk at a Deerfield Fair pig scramble afterparty, and I wouldn’t even insist on a partner. Maybe I’d dance with one of those black billy goats. Do people do that at Deerfield Fair afterparties or would it just be awkward?

H.P. Lovecraft (read by Andrew Leman), The Festival (Cadabra Records)

I’d be more than happy to make part of this space’s regular praxis reviews of horror-story readings, but my PR feed is like a box of chocolates, usually composed of gross strawberry-coconut bonbons, of course, and almost never cool caramel-cookie-filled slam-dunks like this. You may recall last year, or whenever it was, we went over an album that captured a reading of one of M.R. (Montague Rhodes) James cherished ghost stories; I’m pretty sure it was also released through Calabra Records, but who cares, I was glad to be apprised of this one either way. It’s a limited vinyl release, read by actor Andrew Leman, who’s a member of the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Leman may sound a bit bookwormy, which isn’t necessarily bad (Anthony Heald’s commercial reading of the Jurassic Park-related novel The Lost World was a lot more hateful than this), and he obviously has deep reverence for the matter, as did the album’s soundtrack guy, horror composer Fabio Frizzi. The story itself is set during the holidays, but don’t let that stop you; Lovecraft’s crazily bizarre world is always fascinating, and this 30-minute escape pod is a very special treat for new and old fans. A+

Pete Ellman Big Band, For Pete’s Ache (Cadabra Records)

Just what it looks like, a jazz band with a more than adequate sense of style. This now-11-year-old contingent comes to us from Illinois, where Ellman is a vital cog in the annual Naperville Big Band Jazz Festival (which of course hasn’t a prayer of running this year); he retired from the 566th Air Force Band around 2009 and promptly fired this outfit up to burn on all cylinders. Along the way, the band’s been joined by such greats as Wayne Bergeron, Jeff Coffin, Wycliffe Gordon, John Fedchock and Peter Erskine, just to drop a few names, who all must have had a blast with this nimble, razor-sharp crew. Lots of originals here, starting with the noir-esque “High Speed Pursuit,” during which you can practically feel the pavement shake as the tune busies itself conjuring Al Capone’s Cadillac V16 trying to outrun the cops. This is top-drawer stuff if, a lot of it original, always with its heart in the right place. A+

Retro Playlist

Over the years this space has covered a seemingly uncountable number of oddball releases. In case it wasn’t obvious, I do take pains to avoid heavily funded corporate-produced albums, as it’s a recipe for nothing but trouble: Readers will either get mad that I failed to notice some minor redeeming quality about a record, or they’ll get upset that I failed to notice something that automatically, in their eyes, made the album suck. Toward all that, I hold out perpetual hope that everyone who’s ever taken a pop music group seriously has eventually grown up to be an upstanding, valuable citizen, perhaps by volunteering for the Peace Corps or something of that sort.

Nobody’s perfect, in case that’s news. Let’s go back almost six years, to February 2015, when a certain public relations firm trolled me into reviewing Enter, the debut EP from a purported “goth/trip-hop” band called Temple Invisible. The band is/was from Romania, and they were promised to be a cross between Massive Attack, Portishead and Depeche Mode. “The only way this could be more enticing CD-reviewer-bait,” I wiseassed back then, “is if the promo came with a free robot girlfriend.” As you’d guess, it was quite the disappointing listen, far from the rich and delicious industrial chill-tech I’d expected. There was goth-metal riffage, though, in some of the tunes, if that’s your thing, like “Disappearance,” which was basically “half Aphex Twin and half Lacuna Coil, in other words it sounds like Collide.” Edgy neo-’80s goth-pop is seemingly everywhere now, so I expect this band is doing OK, if all the members haven’t abandoned ship.

A few months later I made like Wile E. Coyote for the umpteenth time with regard to Portal/Well, an album from Bee and Flower’s Dana Schechter, stumping under the name Insect Ark. A former metal chick, Schecter’s indie cachet was nonetheless impeccable, being that she formed the band Angels of Light with Swans leader Michael Gira in the early ’90s. And so, Schecter had partaken of too much freak-pop Kool-Aid, and this LP turned out to be a fairly typical trip down whack-job lane, viz: “roiling wetworks made of organic and synthetic drums, heavy ringouts and faraway lead-guitar figures, [all] creating murals evocative of Mount Doom lava flows and war wreckage.”

I’ll be falling for the “wait, no, seriously, an awesome album from someone associated with Swans” trap until further notice, just saying.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Ha ha, the next general-release day is Christmas Day, which means that even if any bands are crazy enough to wait until this week to release their stupid album, no one will be able to buy it on the traditional Friday date! So what the heck is my play here, you’re probably wondering. Well, I have no idea, but if there are any polka-metal bands with a nice shiny new release coming out on or around the 25th, I will find them, and I will snark them. Ready, here I go, into the Google void, with my trusty fishing reel, zzzzing, plop, into the slimy ooze it goes, and wait, ho ho ho, we have a winner, the AlbumOfTheYear website claims that some comedy rapper dude named Lilnedbigby is releasing his second mixtape, ingeniously titled Mixtape 2, on The Most Wonderful Day Of The Year [void where prohibited]! Hmm, the only Lilnedbigby I’m seeing is some kid on Twitter who’s babbling some nonsense about “politics” (if you actually consider the last election cycle “politics” and not cage wrestling), and he has two followers on Twitter. Maybe he’s a troll. Nope, some other Twitter Twit claims he might be the only Lilnedbigby fan in the world, and there are other people tweeting at Lilnedbigby. OK, whatever, I found a lyric site on Genius.com, with a bunch of Lilnedbigby lyrics. No music, so I used my journalistic superpowers to take the next step, visiting YouTube while wearing a fake beard and not dressed in a T-shirt for once. Wup, there he is, he’s probably 15 if that, and the music is random hangry venting about R Kelly, some girl who wants nothing to do with him, and, I think, trying to get his mom to take him to McDonald’s or something. This is actually a pretty smart move, because no one would release an album on a Friday Christmas unless they were insane. So, thanks, insane kid, for saving my column!

• Huh, I thought that was going to be it for the week, like, no other albums to talk about, but hark, some Bad Santa guy just came down my chimney and handed me an album announcement from someone named Emily Finchum, whose Morbid Curiosity album/mixtape/whatever comes out on Thursday the 24th! A quick expert analysis of social media finds her on Facebook, where we discover that she’s 18 years old, a human from Washington state, and that all her songs are always released on Facebook first. Weird, though, she hasn’t released anything on Facebook in months, but the song “Morbid Curiosity” is on YouTube. It’s OK, basically a Billie Eilish ripoff, but it’s kind of ’80s-ish, bouncy and happy. Maybe she should get together with Lilnedbigby, the guy I just talked about up there. What sort of music would they create? I do not care.

• Anyway, so yeah. The next release Friday is on Christmas, this is completely hopeless. Well, wait a moment, look, at the last minute, Genius.com says there’s some band called ¡MAYDAY! releasing a new EP, titled Minute to Midnight 00:59 coming out on Christmas Day! Supposedly they’re a hip-hop band, and their single “Flatline” does kind of sound a bit like someone from Cypress Hill let their little brother into the studio to do some swearing and rapping over an old Stooges riff. It’s cheap-sounding but actually kinda cool, like something you’d hear on the soundtrack to a Deadpool movie. I’ve heard worse, like every single day.

Sculptor, Untold Secrets (Frontiers Music)

Is “melodic death metal” an oxymoron, a shameless way to sell out, or a sure sign that a band doesn’t belong together owing to artistic differences? This quintet is from Brazil, here tabling their debut album, which is released through one of the few record labels that actively seeks out this kind of stuff, specifically Evanescence-level power-metal sung by guys whose preferred vocal style is totally Cookie Monster. Well, maybe not strictly Cookie Monster; there’s black-metal devil-monster caterwauling too, and rainy gloom-death riffing if you tend to keep score when listening to this kind of album, not that I ever do. I mean, good luck to these dudes, is what I say, not that a Brazilian death metal band that sounds kind of like In Flames would need extra help in the form of best wishes from a critic as detached from the genre as I am — São Paulo is where I’d want to be personally if I were playing in a band like this. B- — Eric W. Saeger

Deafkids, Ritos do Colapso (self-released)

I honestly had no intention of turning this week’s column into a central repository of Brazilian doom-music, but that’s how the dice rolled, first with Sculptor’s debut album and then with this one, which basically caught my fancy after discovering that this slightly experimental ambient-noise-techno band landed a spot on the soundtrack for Cyberpunk 2077, a dystopian role-playing video game starring none other than Keanu Reeves (it seems Australia has some sort of problem with the game’s messaging, which means it’s probably fun in some way). Whatever, this digital-only EP reads like a Whitman Sampler of experimental spazz-beats, starting with two dubstep-ish rinseouts that were apparently played on real drums. That’s a pretty cool trick, but “Tentáculos” is a lot more interesting, a creepy blend of tribal rhythm and random snake-taming bizarreness that would have fit in well on the Hurt Locker soundtrack. Like I said, strictly experimental, but cool; nicely organic, undoubtedly with an eye toward more soundtracking gigs. A

Retro Playlist

I have to admit, sometimes I’ve gotten it right the first time. For those who’ve subjected themselves to this column for the last 15 years plus, you may remember the bit in 2009 when I talked about New Orleans band Stanton Moore/Garage A Trois’s then-new All Kooked Out album, and how there was “nothing wrong with you” if you’d never heard of him. On this one-man effort, I posited, Moore was trying to be “Spyro Gyra and That F–ing Tank in the same album,” a recipe for commercial failure if ever there was one, or, just as possibly, a spazzy version of Charles Mingus’ least listenable records. As you’d guess, the random fricassee of honking, clattering and Wayne Shorter-style sax suddenly stopped about a third of the way in, for a decent-enough tune called “Purgatory,” and then a rather mellow version of Roberta Flack’s “The Closer I Get To You.” As well, there was “Fragile,” which sounded like the E Street Band trying to weird each other out, and “Electric Door Bell Machine,” a look at what Weather Report might have sounded like if they’d been really idiotic hipsters. Nevertheless, believe it or not, in my review of the album, I didn’t cover Moore in snark gravy and bake him at 350 for an hour. I was pretty nice to the dude.

At times I’ve experienced the joy of dissing multiple artists at a time, when unwary compilation albums come in. But it’s not always mean-spirited claptrap I spew; in fact I was quite genial to the various artists featured on 2014’s Le Sigh, Vol II. Le Sigh is/was an online zine based in Brooklyn, supporting women in the arts. In order to prove they were serious, the editors threw together a couple of female-punk comp albums, which gathered together such bands as Slutever, Fleabite and Alice. Soundalike touchstones ranged from X-Ray Spex to The Waitresses, but it was all good fun, really, with more attitude than a 13-year-old girl threatened with losing her iPhone if she doesn’t wear the cute bunny pajamas Grandma sent for Christmas.

Moral: I can be nice at times. It really depends on the quality of our current dinner leftovers, to be honest.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• OMG, it’s totally the last-minute holiday rush, when those 14 million newly unemployed Americans, all snug in their warm cardboard refrigerator-box condominium complexes comfortably located somewhere under the overpass, need direction as to where to spend that stray $20 bill they found skittering across the parking lot at Whole Foods! Well, I’m here to help, homies, with the latest albums you can buy, all of which are coming to your stores and whatnot, on Dec. 18! As you’d guess, there is basically nothing new coming out except for metal albums and reissues from rich bands and whatever, and trust me, I already looked. First thing that jumped out at me was a 50th anniversary of The Kinks’ eighth album, Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, a fine album that was released in 1970, in case you’re deficient in math skills like I am! I have to confess that I was never the biggest Kinks fan, like they were basically the prototype for every joke-band ever put together, but this album did have one awesome song on it, I’d be the first to admit it. No, I don’t mean the titular “Lola,” a song I could literally live forever without ever hearing again; it’s in fact “Apeman” to which I refer, a joke song about alienation or whatnot, and it was kind of ahead of its time. Check out these lyrics: “I think I’m so educated and I’m so civilized / ‘Cause I’m a strict vegetarian / But with the over-population and inflation and starvation / And the crazy politicians / I don’t feel safe in this world no more.” Cool, huh? Anyway, there you go, fam, the Kinks, with a new-old album, you are now free to go pay good money for whatever you’re going to get out of it, maybe extra cowbell or whatever.

• If you can stand the suspense and wait until Saturday the 19th, there is a new EP from hip-hop guy Letoa coming out that day, called Glocstarr V1! There is already a user review (not a review from an actual music critic, in other words) on the Album Of The Year website, from someone identified as mIlk, and that person says it’s awful. Actually they didn’t say anything, they just left a one-star rating and wrote “0” as a comment. All that goes to prove is that no one really uses the Album Of The Year website except for rock critics who are desperately trying to find albums coming out at the last minute, because nearly a half-million people have streamed at least one of the tunes, called “Ice Cold.” The beat sounds like some incidental theme music from Lord of the Rings, except for the beginner-level haunted house bass and the stupid trap drums. Can I shut this off now?

• OK, I give up, there’s nothing else coming out this week, and I refuse to talk about whichever black-metal bands are only putting out records because they either hate Christmas or don’t even know when it is, so we’re going to wrap up with chillwave/ambient techno guy Tycho! It’s not that he even has a real album coming out, just a remix album, called, appropriately enough, Weather Remixes, based on his 2019 Grammy nominated LP Weather. That one was great, a little bit guitar-tronic and a little indie-rock, so I’m sure all the remixes are good as well, if they’re even half as decent as the gorgeous remix of “Japan” by Satin Jackets. Awesome stuff.

The Myrrhderers, The Myrrhderers Sleigh Christmas (self-released)

It was with great sadness that I read last week there’d be no live Trans Siberian Orchestra shows coming to the area, just a streaming thingamajig instead. I looked to the universe, hoping to be cheered up, and lo, hark, behold, a wonderful holiday EP from a bunch of trolling punks declaring themselves to be a “North Pole punk-rock supergroup,” made up of members of “Dead Kringles, Prancid and Sleigher.” I immediately decided that the record would receive an A+ grade, then listened to all five songs, which literally only required 12 minutes out of my life. It’s all actually quite good if you like Good Charlotte demos and junk like that; their rub of “Deck The Halls” could actually be Green Day in Santa beards for all I know. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” is straightedge-leaning punk-pop lunacy, and so on. These guys aren’t just pikers with an eight-track recorder from 1991, but I didn’t deduct points for their decent production quality. Very tolerable. A+

Deep Sea Diver, Impossible Weight (ATO Records)

This album being so good, I think I’ll pass on listening to their last couple of records, as the consensus seems to be that they’re not as ambitious. The quartet is led by Seattleite Jessica Dobson, who in the past has played with a who’s-who of indie royalty (Shins, Spoon, Beck, others), experiences that have helped to shape her into the closest thing to a millennials’ Chrissie Hynde that I’ve heard to date. There’s a palpable grunge edge to this stuff; “Lights Out” sounds like a cross between Yeah Yeah Yeahs (with regard to the vocal approach) and Superdrag (relative to the mashed-potato guitar sound), but she’s obviously got a jones for trip-hop, by the afterparty steez emanating from “Shattering The Hourglass.” So that’s all well and good, and the tunes, regardless of their disparate influences, sound like they belong together, but the killer bit is that Dobson’s songwriting is outstanding. Well worth your stream time. A+

Retro Playlist

Merry corona-mas everyone, as the science nerds like to say down at CDC headquarters! There’s still plenty of time to order holiday music CDs, so today I’ll look at albums this page has covered in the past, but first it’s your reminder of the festive songs I can’t stand in the least, like “Feliz Navidad,” “O Holy Night” and of course Billy Squier’s “Christmas Is A Time To Say I Love You,” which, yes, I already harped on a couple of weeks ago, but wait, go listen to it again, if your stomach can handle it. Isn’t his voice super-annoying, like, doesn’t he sound like some sort of post-punk WC Fields, as though he wants to say “Go away kid, ya bother me” after every line? I mean, sure, I’d rather be subjected to Billy Squier’s dumb song than “O Holy Night” while I’m in line at Walgreens buying some stupid last-minute thing, like my hatred for that song isn’t bone-marrow level the way it is with John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Christmas,” but — oh, you get the point.

For more tolerable holiday sounds, let’s go all the way back to 2006 for til Tuesday front-lady Aimee Mann’s Another Drifter In The Snow. It’s a mellow, very listenable collection, and her choices were all good: Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song”; a bearable “Winter Wonderland” and for (polite) laughs, a rip of “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”

In 2008 there was the charity-driven A Princeton Christmas: For The Children Of Africa album, by Princeton Choirs. Beautiful, reflective stuff for those quiet holiday nights, featuring donated tracks sung by The American Boychoir, The Westminster Concert Bell Choir and several others. Fun fact for cynics: Despite all the holiness baked into the tracks, there nevertheless exists a one-star review on Amazon submitted by someone who freaked out over the fact that the Princeton Theological Seminary Choir wasn’t brought into the mix. I really don’t need to expound on that, I’m sure.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yee hah. It’s a landslide of new releases, vying for your Hanukkwaanzmas dollar! I feel totally blessed this time of year, what with all the new albums coming out on Dec. 11, but honestly, this year I may not have enough snark left to deal with it all! I mean, just look, it’s a double-live album from Belle and Sebastian, called What To Look For In Summer, can you even stand it? Fifty million hipsters totally love dancing their happy irony dance to BS’s gentle, inoffensive twee-pop, and they only dance harder when the song is so boring and unlistenable that all their friends give up on them forever, like all that stuff from Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant (they played the whole album during their headlining stint at the Boaty Weekender festival, the famous gathering place for rich people with boats and stock options, and some of those live versions are on this album). The album starts off with a version of the Scottish beer-guzzling singalong “The Song of the Clyde,” isn’t that so awesome? I’m totally going to listen to this album on my schooner as I chase that devil Moby Dick all over the seven seas, with my ironic hipster bos’n mates who all have mad harpoon skills and bunny tattoos!

• Wait, fam, look, we don’t just have young millennial hipster deck-swabs to talk about, because thar she blows, a new album from Paul McCartney, titled McCartney III! I totally can’t remember the name of his old band, something like Herman’s Hermits, or Len, or whatever, but either way, this guy, whose eyelift surgery makes him look like Carol Channing at closing time at an after-hours bash, is at it again, just cold bringin’ the guitar-pop music, to teach you crazy Death Grips listeners how it’s done! Boy, I can hardly wait to dig my ears into the new version of “Coming Up,” any of you boomers remember that awful song? Ah, here it is. It sounds like it’s sung by drunken Ewoks who don’t know how to use their cheap downloadable music-making software. Gack, it’s even more horrible than the original, so let’s put this aside for now and press on.

• Continuing our excursion to find musical coolness whilst sailing on board the Pequod, Canadian folkie duo Kacy & Clayton have been around since 2011, doing their part to bring good folkie-fied feels to the hipster whaling community and all young people who watch shows like Archer just to annoy their roommates. Their new album is Plastic Bouquet, a collaboration of sorts with New Zealand musician Marlon Williams! No, I have no idea who that is either, but whatever, yay Marlon Whastisname! The lead single, “I Wonder Why” mostly sounds like Roy Orbison, but it’s mostly an acoustic guitar thing, so there’s a rootsy Hank Williams feel to it as well. It’s OK.

• Lastly, we should probably take a quick listen to whatever’s going on in the new M. Ward album, Think Of Spring, specifically the single “For Heaven’s Sake.” Spoiler: It’s a wispy, dreamy unplugged-strummy-guitar tune with way too much reverb on his voice. I suppose I’d love it if I were a salty hipster whaleboat swab born in 1987 instead of never-you-mind-all-that, and had never listened to Simon & Garfunkel, because that’s kind of what it’s like, except it’s bare-bones. But I wasn’t, so I hereby rudely dismiss this song, with extreme prejudice.

• Finally we have Tucson-based Tex-Mex-indie stalwarts Calexico, with their new LP, Seasonal Shift! Huh, how do you like that, it’s a holiday album! The first single is called “Hear The Bells,” in which the boy-eez sing about drinking mescal and selling something or other by the side of the road, I don’t know. Sounds like a cross between Everly Brothers and your least-favorite pop band from the 1980s, if that helps any.

Life in a Blender, Satsuma (Telegraph Harp Records)

So here’s this New York long-time quirk-rock guy, David Rauf, leading his band on their million-billionth release, a six-song EP that’s only slightly unpredictable (he’s not doing yelly punk or anything like that nowadays). The Rosetta stone here is anything David Byrne’s ever done (meaning everything), but I found this record to be slightly — I don’t know, comforting. Imagine Electric Six with NRBQ horns and you’re pretty much there, not that Rauf’s voice is Jello-Biafra-level crazy or anything like that, and the lyrics wouldn’t be conducive to that sort of thing anyway. On “Soul Deliverer,” for example, our hero yammers in a disaffected but volatile Byrne-like baritone about how he’s regretting drinking coffee at lunch (or whatever) and swearing to switch to water. But where was I — oh yes, comforting. I mean, I could picture these guys as a musical opening act for a comedian in Vegas, and not one of the unfunny ones like Jimmy Fallon or whatnot. No, I think Doug Stanhope would be a fit. A

Ilsa, Preyer (Relapse Records)

Sludge-doom metal isn’t my cup of tea unless it’s done really well and with some variation in speed, like, with Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality as its sentai. Kyuss is OK, for example, but Candlemass and St. Vitus aren’t, and Sleep is a bit too off-Broadway, if you get my drift. As with any genre, there are tons of others we could cover here, but this Washington, D.C., outfit reads like a tyrannosaur cage-match, relying on crazed, wounded bellowing on the vocal end, and not a lot of imagination with regard to the guitar riffing, which isn’t actually riffing but mostly four-chord mud ringouts (imagine Sunn(((O))) with a purpose in life). The subject matter is pretty dark even for my beloved homies at the Relapse imprint, and I’ll mercifully leave out the particulars in that regard. There are some straight-up black-metal passages that feel more like obligato checklist sign-offs, which isn’t to say there’s nothing at all innovative here, but, well, you know. B

Retro Playlist

As we await our Very Special Covid Christmas, let’s step into the Way-Back Machine and go over a few albums that may have been written about a little unintelligibly the first time around, and no, I don’t mean unintelligibly in the way that most of my stuff is written, I mean reviews that even confused me.

In February 2015 I unwisely took it upon myself to check out stoner band Jeremy Irons & The Ratgang Malibus and their Spirit Knife LP. This resulted in such run-on messes as “Alright, they’ve mostly been doing singles and comps, but what intrigues me is that they’re adamantly indie, using distributors like Carrot Top (local bands, you should really be taking notes if you’re releasing your own stuff) and AEC, all to push bands who are friends with owner Scott Hamilton, who is not the figure skater, in the same manner as no one in this band is the duckling-lipped actor you’re thinking about. Everybody lost? Cool.”

All I was saying there is that this capable-enough Boris-like outfit was using independent distributors. I’d have expounded further on the music, but it was pretty disposable, so I didn’t. Suffice to say that if you love metal, by all means, seek this one out, so that you can listen to it once and promptly forget you ever did so.

I’ve got a million of ’em, I tell ya. That same week, there was O Shudder, by the British quirk-prog crew Dutch Uncles. I actually liked that album, come to think of it, despite its indecisiveness over whether they wanted to rip off Vampire Weekend or Muse. It’s a weird but very good record, not that I probably enticed any of you nice folks by spitting takes like what I said about opening tune “Babymaking”: “…its winding, skeletal beat evoking Spandau Ballet after a marathon Orb listening bender.”

Pitchfork sort of liked them too, but I got over it. Meantime, I promise I’ll try to be less confusing in future. No guarantees, of course.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

The new CD releases are coming hard and fast, looking for your holiday dollar — you should see all this stuff coming up! Now that we’ve dispensed with the worst Thanksgiving ever, which you mostly spent on the phone, trying to get Grandma to install the right video driver on her 2006 Windows XP computer so it could seize up while you tried to Zoom video her eating cranberry sauce, it’s down to the serious stuff, with the batch of new junk coming out on Dec. 4! For holiday gift-giving, I’d recommend the new White Stripes compilation, The White Stripes Greatest Hits, because it’s not horrible. OK, maybe it is, like, their fanboys will be all like “Why isn’t such-and-so song on here?” But who cares, because “Seven Nation Army” will probably be on there (the final tracklist hasn’t been released yet), and what else do ya need?

• Gahh, aside from the aforementioned greatest hits thing, the new release list is freaking full of live albums, comps, and rich musicians just asking for fans to send them beer money. Just looky there, it’s Arctic Monkeys, with their new album Live At The Royal Albert Hall, a title that also speaks for itself! Remember years ago when I was an Arctic Monkeys hater? You do, right? Well, whatever, if you like them, I can’t do anything about it, so like them all you want, with my Christmas blessings.

• OMG, even hipster-black-metal fraudsters Deafheaven are getting in on the live/comp gravy train, with their live collection, 10 Years Gone! Yes, there’s nothing I’d rather hear than a live version of this band’s typical songs, which always goes like this: blissy Sunn(((O))) part → metallically doomy Boris-or-Cannibal Corpse part → Bathory part. And now you know everything about Deafheaven and can brag about it to your little brother, who will be amazed by your cultural acumen.

• It turns out that not everything is old news and boring box sets or whatever, unfortunately for me! Depressing Icelandic hipster-dingbats Sigur Rós release their new studio album Odin’s Raven Magic this Friday! Now there’s an album title I can love; it sounds like the title of an episode of The Witcher, so it’s got to be cool! I couldn’t wait to hear what dreary hipster slop these crazy kids had cooked up for 2020, so off I went, first to discover that Odin’s Whatever is simply a recording of the band’s 2002 orchestra-accompanied tune, which is set to the Icelandic poem “Hrafnagaldr Óðins.” You guys know that one, right? It’s an anagram that spells “The Hamburglar Did It” sideways. As for the song, it’s just a slow, morose indie-rock joint comprising boring samples and a completely unnecessary orchestra, and it sounds like Vikings mourning an iPhone that got hacked by a bored troll from 4chan. Enjoy!

• Finally we have Tucson-based Tex-Mex-indie stalwarts Calexico, with their new LP, Seasonal Shift! Huh, how do you like that, it’s a holiday album! The first single is called “Hear The Bells,” in which the boy-eez sing about drinking mescal and selling something or other by the side of the road, I don’t know. Sounds like a cross between Everly Brothers and your least-favorite pop band from the 1980s, if that helps any.