Author: Eric Saeger

B.F. Raid, Raided Again (self-released)

For years now I’ve tweeted invitations for bands to hit me up and give them a review in this space, but this is only the third or so occasion in which a non-hopeless band jumped into my Twitter messages (we’re never going to call it “X,” not ever). This punk-metal (in the most pragmatic sense) outfit, more formally known as Boston’s Final Raid, is of course from Boston, well, Malden to be precise, and they’ve been around since 1981, per the loquacious one-sheet bio I’m reading. I’m fine with this stuff, to be honest; their approach is decidedly NWOBHM (that is to say, these fellers probably grew up listening to a lot of Maiden and Prieeest, but then again, who didn’t), and when you take into account that the recording is low-but-not-too-low-budget, there’s a strong hint of early Riot to it. This full-length opens with “Angel,” a shred-fest with some fine Dio-esque singing and all that sort of thing, then moves into “Becky,” which tosses a little Jello Biafra spice into a Stiv Bators fricassee. These guys could certainly pitch this record to a few overseas metal labels for foreign distribution, if they don’t really care about getting paid of course. A —Eric W. Saeger

Lucy Kalantari and the Jazz Cats, Creciendo (self-released)

The Grammys will be awarded on Feb. 2, and you don’t need to read the list to assume the Record Of The Year contenders: Taylor Swift, Charlie XCX and so forth. In the meantime, I’m having to purge my emailbox on an hourly basis from all the spam reminding me about niche Grammy nominees, including children’s music albums, which is what this is. The record’s title translates to “growing up” in Spanish, a language Kalantari has wanted to deploy on an LP for many years now, and now here it is. She’s well-known in the space, having contributed to the Dora series on Paramount+ as well as having her tunes appear on PBS Kids Jam, Universal Kids, and SiriusXM Kids Place Live. Given her goofy attitude and flair for all types of world music, the default adjective we music journos are using is “charming,” and we don’t mean it in a Barney or Raffi sense; it’s not mindless, repetitive cutesiness, more a thing that will (hopefully) lead growing brains to become interested in more intelligent tuneage. For example a brash Yiddish folk segue pops up during a Cab Calloway-style stomp-jazz number (“El Sonido de los Vientos”). Fun, brainy stuff. A —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Jan. 10 is the next Friday when new albums will be released, or “unleashed,” like they used to say in Hit Parader magazine, when it was common practice among rock journalists to insinuate that rock music albums could literally beat people up or claw at them like wild tigers (in case you’re not sure, no, they can’t). And I am ready for some unleashing after several weeks of nothing but Edward Skeletrix wannabes releasing joke albums for review, I’ll tell you that much, but oops, look at the time, it’s time to mention how little I care about The Beatles again, because look who’s releasing a new album, none other than the world’s second-least-interesting drummer after Charlie Watts. Yes, we’re talking about Ringo Starr, who replaced Pete Best 150 years ago as the band’s drummer in 1962! Boy, if I had the time-traveling DeLorean car from Back To The Future, that’s the year I’d program into it, so that I could buy 500 copies of Amazing Fantasy #15, the first comic book in which Spider-Man appeared; one copy sold for 3.6 million buckaroos in 2021, did you know? But the gods don’t want me to have any fun, so instead of sitting around trying to spend 1.8 billion buckaroos, I have to talk to you people about Ringo Starr, let’s get into it. Ringo was the Peter Tork “comedy relief” person of The Beatles, singing such unlistenable joke songs as “Octopus’s Garden” and “Yellow Submarine” before he became the “How did someone who looks like that marry Barbara Bach” guy. He was lucky to get there at all, because The Beatles’ manager distrusted Ringo’s ability so much that he hired a session hack to play drums on the first Beatles single, “Love Me Do.” Another thing I thought was — oh, look at you guys, scrolling through your AOL or whatever, I feel like Carmela Soprano trying to make idle conversation about Beatles drummers with her grumpy son Anthony Jr. over dinner, fine, let’s just forget it, I don’t care about Beatles trivia either and never did. So OK, blah blah blah, since the breakup of The Beatles, Ringo has busied himself supporting things like Brexit and generally being funny looking and worthless, all while not having a single in the U.S. charts since 1981’s “Wrack My Brain,” remember that one, neither do I. Nowadays he indulges an obsession he shares with most Britons, namely cowboy hats and country-and-western songs! This historic fraud’s new album, Look Up, kicks off with a duet with perennial second-banana Alison Krauss, titled “Thankful,” in which the Ring Man allows some sleepy, pleasant-enough dojo-washed bluegrass to play for a few bars before he barges in with his Ringo-voice to sing about (spoiler) romantic regret or something, and as always, instead of sounding like a singer, he comes off like some stuffy British bloke trying to figure out how to order a cheeseburger. Next please.

• Oh cripes, Franz Ferdinand, also known as “Not The Strokes By Any Measure,” has a new one coming your way, The Human Fear! As always, the song “Audacious” is basically Gang Of Four but boring, you might like it; I hope not.

• If you like Amyl And The Sniffers, and who doesn’t, you might very well like British girl-noise band Lambrini Girls, whose 2023 song “Boys In The Band” addressed sexual abuse culture in the music industry, which, as we all learned last year, is quite widespread. Their new LP is Who Let The Dogs Out, featuring “Love,” a speed-noise joint that makes Foo Fighters look like the Brady Bunch Band (no, I know).

• Lastly it’s South African poet-singer Moonchild Sanelly with her third LP, Full Moon! The single, “Do My Dance,” is awesome, like Blackpink or whatnot futzing around with dubstep. More ladies should be doing this kind of thing, really. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: B.F. Raid, Raided Again (self-released), Lucy Kalantari and the Jazz Cats, Creciendo (self-released)

Bear McCreary/Sparks & Shadows, God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla (video game soundtrack) (Sony Records)

One thing that’s been hard for non-young people to even wrap our heads around is the endless seriousness with which millennials and Zoomers take video games and their associated peripheral entertainment products. I mean, I (way) overdid it with Descent and Doom and all those games back in the day, but there’s no way I ever would have gone to a Covid-soaked arena to see a concert where the headliner was a DJ spinning tunes from a video game. But it’s a different world now, folks; the kids literally do that, which strikes me as absolutely dystopian, but it is what it is. In this case, we have Bear McCrearey joining forces with a couple of other soundtrackers to jack the bombast straight to Mars for this action-adventure fantasy game’s tuneage, and it’s what you’d expect, lots of Thor-themed choruses, loud epicness, etc. Mind you, this came out last year, but my email is getting pestered about the fact that this LP, “the last musical chapter for Kratos in the Norse saga,” is up for a Grammy in the category of Best Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media. Do with this nonsensical information what you will; all it does for me is remind me that Richard Wagner was a pretty nifty composer, and that Bear McCreary ripped off Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive” when he wrote the main theme to Black Sails. B —Eric W. Saeger

Front Line Assembly, Mechviruses (self-released)

Yep, I’m still an overgrown goth kid, so I do keep track of spooky-ghoulie soundsystems like this Canadian outfit, the brainchild of former Skinny Puppy crony Bill Leeb and his on-again off-again sidekick Rhys Fulber, who is definitely the weirdest guy I’ve ever interviewed, not to detract from his genius. Gothies should know what to expect from this LP for the most part, a lot of Rammstein-lite krautrock-based stomping and some soaring trance-metal. Toward the latter, they still haven’t topped “The Storm” as their best tune (it’s a gasser, folks), but they made a real effort this time, collaborating with such up-and-comers as Encephalon, s:cage, Seeming and a bunch of others to freshen the recipe, and the results are pretty freaking awesome, reminiscent of Gary Numan. The title track chugs along as politely-urgently as anything you’ve heard from them before, but — and I don’t know if Ultra Sunn’s feature has anything to do with this — there are ’80s-pop synth layers that make it really interesting. Oh, and then “Bootblacks” kicks in with some Cure-ish shoegaze guitars. This is exactly what I would have done if I ran this band; these guys are still the kings of this space, no question. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• At this writing, Genius.com tells me there are only two new music albums scheduled for traditional Friday release this week, on Dec. 27, two days after the big pagan holiday, whatever it’s called. No, I’m kidding, I know it’s called “Christmas,” but according to a popular meme that made the rounds this holiday season, Christians once actually tried to get rid of Christmas at one time, wouldn’t that have been a bummer? No, seriously, according to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ website, “In 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted a law called Penalty for Keeping Christmas. The notion was that such ‘festivals as were superstitiously kept in other countries’ were a ‘great dishonor of God and offence of others.’ Anyone found celebrating Christmas by failing to work, ‘feasting, or any other way … shall pay for every such offence five shillings [This would be about $48 today].’” The Commonwealth eventually came to realize what a dumb idea that was, and by 1681 all the witch-burning pilgrims could watch the Grinch again, but even today some musical artists couldn’t care less if it was Christmas or National Possum Day or whatever, they insist on putting out albums. For example, there’s Jorge Rivera-Herrans, a mildly popular playwright, composer, lyricist and actor from Dorado, Puerto Rico. His new record, Epic: The Ithaca Saga, is a po-faced concept album that was released on Christmas; it includes a song called “God Games” that’s racked up more than six million views on YouTube. It comprises opera-based techno-driven nonsense that’s actually kind of brilliant in a technical sense, and a lot of people like it, so I suppose there’s a chance he’ll someday become some sort of male version of Enya for Greek mythology wonks. I mean, I fully expect never to hear anything from him again unless I’m at a sci-fi convention or somesuch, but weird things happen all the time.

• Also on Christmas, K-pop band 2NE1 released a 15-track album titled Welcome Back, which commemorates their ongoing (four years and counting) tour of the same name. Their bouncy, brainless Lady Gaga-style stuff borrows from all sorts of international styles and features a lot of sexytime butt-dancing and all the other stuff that’s been portending the collapse of Western civilization since 2005 or so.

• In normal album-release news, this Friday sees the release of the second album from Harshmxjb (real name Harsh Mishra), a musician from New Delhi, India. This feller is a typical underground culture-jammer, a 19-year-old who’s been exploiting the open-door policy of Spotify, Apple Music and all the other music sites, uploading hip-hop tunes like “Alone,” in which he sings off-key, like a brain-damaged Usher, over a melancholy, non-awful piano-driven beat (that song actually got some love on TikTok and YouTube).

• We’ll wrap up the week with an album that’s neither silly, performatively epic nor K-pop, a new one from singer Robbie Williams, whom you know from British boyband Take That, which was originally triangulated by conniving record company lizard-people as the U.K.’s answer to New Kids on the Block. That was a long time ago, of course; Williams has been a solo art-fraud since 1995, not that American audiences have paid much attention to him, but regardless, the new LP is Better Man (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack). Given that the movie is about Williams’ career, he was probably a good choice to soundtrack it; these things aren’t difficult to figure out.

Kristian Montgomery and the Winterkill Band, Prophets of the Apocalypse (self-released)

When last we left Cape Cod-based bandleader Montgomery I was on the verge of anointing him the Tom Petty of New England, but that feels a little inadequate; local achievement is generally regarded by the public as almost meaningless in comparison to national success no matter the level of enthusiasm from hometown wags. I mean, he’s been nominated for some pretty notable awards, including a (nationally renowned) Josie and a Boston Music Award in 2021, which somehow led to his having beef with the committee owing to his disgust for their lack of recognition for blue-collar artists. He’s a rebel, this guy, and has a ton of working-class cred. In this EP he blends Petty with Florida Georgia Line in the timely blue-collar protest song “American Fire” and country-fies early Kings Of Leon in “Leaving Texas.” He’s a legitimate badass, folks; I literally had to troll him into letting me hear this record in advance, a very rare thing with hungry local bands. Please support this man. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Adam Birnbaum, Preludes (self-released)

This one’s a year old now, but the fellow who’s helping to promote this world-class pianist is trying to break into the upper echelons of the music business, and he’s a nice guy, so here goes. This album spotlights a piano, upright bass and percussion trio taking on a formidable set of Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions, along the way adding elements of jazz, Latin, swing and straight eighth-note, taking liberties with feel and improvisation. There are YouTube videos of these cool customers going at it, and it’s quite a sight; Matt Clohesy playing his bass after a showy, Jaco Pastorius fashion; percussionist Keita Ogawa looking quite comfortable and Birnbaum appearing as if he’d literally invented the piano he’s playing. “Prelude in Db Major” bops right along most ambitiously, all but stripped of its classical nature; “Prelude in C Major” retains much of the latter but does eventually settle into a light, piano-bar groove. Terrific stuff. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• At this writing, Genius.com tells me there are only two new music albums scheduled for traditional Friday release this week, on Dec. 27, two days after the big pagan holiday, whatever it’s called. No, I’m kidding, I know it’s called “Christmas,” but according to a popular meme that made the rounds this holiday season, Christians once actually tried to get rid of Christmas at one time, wouldn’t that have been a bummer? No, seriously, according to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ website, “In 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted a law called Penalty for Keeping Christmas. The notion was that such ‘festivals as were superstitiously kept in other countries’ were a ‘great dishonor of God and offence of others.’ Anyone found celebrating Christmas by failing to work, ‘feasting, or any other way … shall pay for every such offence five shillings [This would be about $48 today].’” The Commonwealth eventually came to realize what a dumb idea that was, and by 1681 all the witch-burning pilgrims could watch the Grinch again, but even today some musical artists couldn’t care less if it was Christmas or National Possum Day or whatever, they insist on putting out albums. For example, there’s Jorge Rivera-Herrans, a mildly popular playwright, composer, lyricist and actor from Dorado, Puerto Rico. His new record, Epic: The Ithaca Saga, is a po-faced concept album that was released on Christmas; it includes a song called “God Games” that’s racked up more than six million views on YouTube. It comprises opera-based techno-driven nonsense that’s actually kind of brilliant in a technical sense, and a lot of people like it, so I suppose there’s a chance he’ll someday become some sort of male version of Enya for Greek mythology wonks. I mean, I fully expect never to hear anything from him again unless I’m at a sci-fi convention or somesuch, but weird things happen all the time.

• Also on Christmas, K-pop band 2NE1 released a 15-track album titled Welcome Back, which commemorates their ongoing (four years and counting) tour of the same name. Their bouncy, brainless Lady Gaga-style stuff borrows from all sorts of international styles and features a lot of sexytime butt-dancing and all the other stuff that’s been portending the collapse of Western civilization since 2005 or so.

• In normal album-release news, this Friday sees the release of the second album from Harshmxjb (real name Harsh Mishra), a musician from New Delhi, India. This feller is a typical underground culture-jammer, a 19-year-old who’s been exploiting the open-door policy of Spotify, Apple Music and all the other music sites, uploading hip-hop tunes like “Alone,” in which he sings off-key, like a brain-damaged Usher, over a melancholy, non-awful piano-driven beat (that song actually got some love on TikTok and YouTube).

• We’ll wrap up the week with an album that’s neither silly, performatively epic nor K-pop, a new one from singer Robbie Williams, whom you know from British boyband Take That, which was originally triangulated by conniving record company lizard-people as the U.K.’s answer to New Kids on the Block. That was a long time ago, of course; Williams has been a solo art-fraud since 1995, not that American audiences have paid much attention to him, but regardless, the new LP is Better Man (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack). Given that the movie is about Williams’ career, he was probably a good choice to soundtrack it; these things aren’t difficult to figure out.

Crayon, Home Safe (self-released)

Lots to unpack from this French producer’s upcoming 2025 debut album, the first thing being the fact that I usually can’t stomach French music and was surprised to like this stuff, the second being that it’s almost painfully art-wonky; if you were at all confused or triggered by the bizarre opening ceremony for the 2024 Olympics, you should stick to something more meat-and-potatoes than this, just trying to help. Toward the latter, the video for the title track is one of the weirdest you’ll ever see, combining performance art and ballet in a presentation that, like the cover art, will surely be misinterpreted by unqualified critics as a shocking glamorization of the KKK (it isn’t at all). Artists gotta art, you see, and this guy’s been lucky enough to be introduced to and seen by the right people; among other things, he’s written platinum hits for French rap artists like Josman. The music itself has haunted house elements, i.e. slow techno exercises that sound like Heligoland-era Massive Attack after the guys drank a gallon of Robitussin. It’s plenty melodic, and to say it’s unapologetically urban would be the understatement of the decade. Perfect stuff for a perfectly broken planet. A

Victoria Monét, A Jaguar II Christmas: The Orchestral Arrangements (RCA Records)

Talk about under the wire; I was sifting through my emailbox for a metal or noise album to review here in order to finish off the week quickly when this one — an actual holiday record! — popped up. If you weren’t aware that AOR-R&B was even still being made by anyone, you can make room in your stack of Anita Baker and Toni Braxton albums for Monét, a multiple Grammy winner who worked her way up from the songwriting bullpen to bathe the world in her own brand of expensive-hotel vibe, with hits like the yacht rock-bordering “On My Mama,” which gets a bedroom-chill overhaul here, as well as subtle “12 Days Of Christmas” interpositions. That kind of thing goes on a lot on this record: Monét is a creative soul, well-versed in symphonics; in the appropriately named “Cadillac Christmas” she inserts snatches of “Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy” into a yacht-hip-hop beat while maintaining her understated street cred (don’t try that at home; it’s a difficult trick). Wonderfully tasteful, this. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yee-ha, our next album-release Friday is Dec. 20, when people like me, CD reviewers with weekly columns that need to be filled with news of new albums, sit in our glittering snow drifts on The Island Of Misfit Toys, with nothing to talk about at all. There aren’t many new CDs that come out this time of year; all the “important” new albums have already come out and we already made fun of them gave them a thorough, professional evaluation, for the edification of you, our faithful readers. And so, like a Charlie In The Box, or a squirt gun that shoots Polaner All-Fruit instead of water, or a toy cowboy who rides an ostrich, I sit alone, in my completely unorganized trash heap of an office, waiting to hear the jingling of sleigh bells, that magical sound that heralds the arrival of Santa Claus, who will, I hope against hope, bring me albums to talk about in this award-winning space. I get so looooonely this time of year, guys, passing the endless hours, with no albums to critique, trying to ignore the urge to have a Skittles-eating contest with myself or just leave this page blank until tomorrow and go back to binging reruns of Match Game ’78 on the Buzzr channel, wasn’t Charles Nelson Reilly a funny fellow? Oh forget it, no one wants a misfit social media-addicted CD reviewer when the music market is oversaturated, good grief, why didn’t I stock up on Kleenex, I just hope none of you nice people ever have to — wait! Do you hear that, folks? And look! A bright red shiny nose-sized light, making straight for me! It’s —! It’s —! It’s — SANTA! Wait, Santa threw me something, wrapped in shiny paper and a nice bow! Yow, I can’t even believe it, it’s a new album, coming out on Dec. 20, for this column! Let’s see, I’m so excited, this album’s from some band I’ve never heard of — of course it is — called Fish in a Birdcage and it is titled Mentors! Well, let me look into this. They’re from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, which probably explains why they’re putting out an album five days before ChristmaHannaKwanzaa, I don’t think they don’t have holidays in Canada except for Guillotine Day or whatever it is, could someone text me the Widipedia deets on that before my hands finish typing this entire column? Wait, no, I get it now, this is an actual band, not a joke YouTube-only hip-hop band like the one I wrote about two years ago, these guys have an actual record contract, with Nettwerk Records, which is literally my favorite record company to receive albums from. What does all this mean? It means they must have been contractually obligated to put out an album before the end of the year or else, you know how it goes! But guess what, this is a good band, judging by the first single, “Badger.” It’s a stompy tune that’s part Strokes, part Billy Squier and part Scottish-ren-faire grog-folk; I’m seriously impressed. Thank you for giving me a holly jolly Christmas, Santa! On, Dasher! On, Whatsyourface!

• Anyway, folks, that’s it for the least happy time of the year for us misfit CD reviewers! I’d like to thank the dude who sold me the nice expensive coffee mugs at World Market in Bedford, N.H., Petunia will definitely love them, and furthermore — wait! Look! One of Santa’s reindeer left me a present! — No, not that, don’t be gross, it’s another album! This one’s from some British “comedy music” kid who calls himself ZEDNED, and it’s titled Do You Think I Give A S—t. No, seriously, it’s an actual album, fam, it’s on Spotify and Apple Music and whatnot, so I’m going to listen to the song “Jake Jake Jake,” which is probably about ZEDNED himself, because his “real name” is Jake Muscles. Let’s see — OK, OK, it’s a joke song, with a totally canned trap-and-wub-wub beat, and he’s talking about gross sexytime stuff. Do not buy.

Candy Whips, Artificial Melodies (Kitten Robot Records)

This northern California fivesome label their stuff ‘’post-glam” or “accidental goth,” the latter of which is more fitting in my opinion. It’s quite angular, this; to me the tldr description would be Gang of Four sitting around smoking joints with Lord Of The New Church, what with the ’80s-cheesing, mellotron-emulating synth; the resolute, minimalist guitar-chonking and the Stiv Bator vocals of (male) vocalist Wendy Stonehenge. Formulaically, the recipe calls for an Aughts-era verse-bridge structure in the vein of early Cure and such, that is to say the tunes want to take us someplace but don’t always arrive, and yet the journey is nevertheless pleasant enough (that’s especially true of “A Drop Will Do,” an alcoholism-admission story that’s the most phoned-in-sounding thing on board). But there are a lot of cool things in this set, such as “Strange Taste,” with its urgent, no-wave-ish anti-riff. Melodically on point, only rarely bogged down with performative subtlety. A

Kilmara, Journey To The Sun (RPM Records)

The rise of “melodic power metal” is in sync with the same epic-ness we hear in nearly every musical genre nowadays (save for indie of course, whose soil’s been depleted since the 1980s owing to the majority of its bands having more disposable recording money than actual artistry). People don’t have time nor patience for buildup anymore; they want the show-stopping mega-melody now or they go back to social media. We’ve heard it for years from emo-rock bands, pop divas, etc. and now it’s even on the big screen: A year from now, no one will remember that aside from “Defying Gravity” the soundtrack to Wicked is pretty awful (a friend remarked on Bluesky that Stephen Schwartz hasn’t written a decent score since 1970’s Godspell). Unlike Wicked, the fifth album from this Barcelona, Spain-based quintet, is wall-to-wall showstoppers, but sorry folks, sometimes you just have to wait for the big hook-gasm. In other words, conceptually and musically, it’s a fine tracing from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra template, but with more speed when they feel like going for it. I could picture some of this stuff bringing a tear to some metal-head’s eye; such a funny, funny world we live in now. A

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• On Dec. 13, a few new albums will come out and be dumped into the Spotifies and the retail stores that carry music CDs for purchase, do stores even do that anymore? I suppose they do, particularly stores that sell vinyl albums for 1890s Victrola record-playing machines, because they know that certain people fancy themselves as “audiophiles”; they enjoy listening to vinyl records so that they can hear mistakes in old recordings, like they like to go “Woop! Hear that, Petunia? Ringo hit the rim of the snare drum, not the head, lolol, he must have been drunk on the reefers, you know?” No, I’m just funnin’ with you vinyl junkies; by now everyone knows that CDs simply can’t capture many frequencies, like the sound of unintentional rimshots by Ringo or the dulcet tones of groupies power-barfing in the booth; instead, all the sounds get squished together in an aural trash compactor, so the only way you can detect that Jimmy Page has too much treble on his guitar (didn’t he always?) is to suffer through the vinyl versions of 55-year-old Led Zeppelin songs! Speaking of Ringo Starr, he has a new country album coming out Jan. 10, called Look Up, but I’ll save the snarky CSI on that for later, since chances are there won’t be much else for me to talk about in this award-winning column during the first two weeks of the new year. In the meantime, we can point and laugh at Snoop Dogg, whose new album is out this Friday. It is titled Missionary, because Snoop actually invented sex during the time of the pharaohs, and it is produced by famous producing producer Dr. Dre, because why not! One of the singles, “Another Part of Me,” features Police bassist and tantric-sexytime man Sting; the tune borrows Outkast’s steez, reimagining the Police’s “SOS” as a shuffle tune with lyrics about living in L.A. and dealing with people shooting at you because they’re bored or whatever. It’s actually a marked improvement over the original (I know, I know).

• Wait, don’t run off yet, here’s one that’s awesome, a posthumous album from a rapping feller I actually like, DMX! We all know that the D-Man was always big into spittin’ about his faith on his first six-or-so albums, but on this new one, Let Us Pray: Chapter X, there’s more prayin’ than rappin’! Grammy award-winning producer Warryn Campbell set DMX’s prayers to music for the first time on this groundbreaking project that fuses hip-hop to gospel; it includes features from Killer Mike, Snoop, LeCrae and MC Lyte. In “Favor,” DMX thanks the lord for blessing him with fame and such; there’s straight-up praying and some trademark rhyming, super cool stuff.

• I assume you may not know much about British indie-dance act Saint Etienne despite their being around for nearly 35 years. Their trip is blending velvet-rope dance stuff with ’60s pop and whatnot, but on “Daydream,” the single for their latest LP, The Night, you’ll hear straight-ahead trance stuff a la Oceanlab. It’s great, you should listen to it.

• We’ll end the week with Rome, the new live album from Cincinnati, Ohio, post-punk revival band The National! Includes a version of the (very) Kings Of Leon-like “I Need My Girl,” a sad and mawkish rawk ballad that may move you, I don’t know for sure.

Kodak Black, Trill Bill (Capitol Records)

This Florida-based rapper boasts the necessary cachet to make him relevant to the current generation of working-class rap fans, a cohort who seemed to have completely lost the thread of whom to be mad at. This, the second mixtape he released in November, pushes the trappy single “News Matt,” characterized by a twin vocal track that’s bluesy, intentionally sloppy and horror-movie-ready in its tonality; his swagger is still there, no worries. Lots of melody here, such as in the arpeggiated piano lines of opener “Cherish The Moment,” the cheese-soaked ’80s-keyboard-driven “Dirty Revolver” and the five-star-hotel-lobby-evoking “Maybach Van.” Not much to report in the way of percussion; nearly every drum line is identical, but that’s of course secondary. As always the idea is to microwave 30-year-old tropes from New Jack City (he even gave away a truck full of turkeys on Thanksgiving, not kidding). B

Calum Scott and Christina Perri, “Kid At Christmas” (Capitol Records)

Oops, looks like I spoke too soon in the Playlist about the end of this year’s new holiday records, although in my defense it’s rare for me to be advised about new ones after the second week of November. This one’s a pop duet between 2015’s Britain’s Got Talent winner Scott and heavily tattooed American singer-songwriter Perri, whose debut single “Jar of Hearts” was featured on American TV’s So You Think You Can Dance in 2010. Bless their hearts, these two wanted to create a single that’d become a “seasonal classic is for the grown-ups out there who still get a certain warm, fuzzy feeling in wintertime” and they do make an effort in this mawkish and (spoiler) vocally muscular happy-ballad. The result is something that’s too nuanced and important-sounding to be dismissed as a throwaway tune sung by the cookie-shop owner and her (hopefully future!) beau in the latest Hallmark Christmas movie, but not by much really. B

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• As far as the retail stores are concerned, it’s been Christmas for many weeks now. On the day after Halloween, the ever-present danger becomes real, rolling itself out slowly: We walk into our Targets and Walmarts and malls just waiting to hear the first strains of Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree.” It’s always that one we hear first, with its half-plugged, anodyne Chuck Berry-ish guitar, an insidious, innocent-sounding ditty bespeaking casual joyfulness, nostalgia-loaded quaintness and buying signals, a warning shot before everything descends into a frenzy, culminating in thunderously metal versions of “Carol of the Bells” while we drive around semi-aimlessly through impossible traffic, searching the stores for that one gift we Simply Must Get. For me this year — and I can talk about this here because my wife probably hasn’t read this column for years now (familiarity does breed inappreciation, not that I’d enjoy discussing my “writing process” every week with some breathlessly gushing admirer) the Simply Must Get is some coffee mugs to replace the ones she loves: Robert Gordon Hug Mugs, the “Blue Storm” pattern in specific. Of the original four she bought years ago, only one survives today; like disposable characters in a slasher film, the other three met their ends in fiendishly clever ways. The next-to-last one expired when the handle simply fell off when I was washing it last week. Given that there’s no way I’m paying $110 to have four new Blue Storm mugs imported from Australia, I’ll start my search this week; I’ll pop into the hilariously overpriced kitchen-and-bath chain stores (funny how those companies never survive more than three years, isn’t it?) and try to find the closest match. I’m hoping to get that mission accomplished before the stores shift into full-blown “last minute/final warning” mode of the holiday shopping season, when every single place you walk into, from Hot Topic to Dollar Tree, has Andy Williams’ “The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year” playing overhead, just to remind you that “you’re out of time, let’s cough it up already, buddy, that’d be great.” Speaking of that, the Christmas album-buying season has pretty much already ended, although the new Netflix special A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter will show up on Friday, Dec. 6, featuring the ridiculously overexposed young diva duetting with Shania Twain among others. Hard pass of course.

• It may be too late for Christmas albums, but it’s never too late for older artists to microwave some Beatles songs for a quick buck or posterity or whatnot! We talked about Americana/country singer Lucinda Williams a few months ago, and I think I also mentioned that Abbey Road is the only Beatles album I can stand, so lucky for me (or someone), Williams will release Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road this Friday, the 6th! Naturally, the song I like the least on that album, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” is the teaser single. It’s kind of noisy, which is a positive.

• If you’d ever wanted a more sedate, epically melodic Prodigy, you may have gravitated to New York art-rock band Geese, and if you like Geese, you may like the first solo album from Geese frontman Cameron Winter, Heavy Metal, but then again maybe not! In the first single, indie piano-ballad “$0,” Winter does a low-voiced nick of a drunken Thom Yorke. I couldn’t deal with it very long but maybe his mom likes it.

• And finally it’s Austin, Texas, garage rockers White Denim, with 12, their 12th album if you don’t count their 2023 collaboration LP with Raze Regal and one or two other releases. Whatever, “Light On” combines the sounds of Relayer-era Yes with Mungo Jerry for no reason whatsoever, not that it’s officially bad.