Free Range, Lost & Found (self-released)
’Tis the season for music journalists getting inundated with spam from agents and record companies whose artists are scheduled to perform on various stages at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. This year’s conference ends on Saturday, March 15, so if you’re down in Austin reading this remotely, there might still be time to plan a visit to this person’s 8:15 p.m. show on the 15th at the Dear Life Showcase, which’ll be held at All The Sudden. The nym belongs to one Sofia Jensen of Chicago, who previously dazzled listeners with her 2023 album Practice; the overall vibe is easy listening Americana with lots of quirky but eminently listenable indie-weirdness on board. Lots of Norah Jones energy going on here, of course, but with a few vocally acrobatic twists; in the dobro-washed bluegrass tune “Storm” she browses the scale like a savvy farmers market shopper, finding hidden jewels of melody that are pretty unique. Well worth your time. A+ —Eric W. Saeger
Good Looks, Lived Here For A While (Keeled Scales Records)
Also performing on SXSW’s final day is this hometown Austin four-piece, who gravitate to feel-good rock that combines jam band, alt-country and ’90s radio-indie in fun ways. That’s not to say they aren’t serious-minded; the lyrics on this one take jabs at such things as “job creators” (“they’re just stealing our labor”) and that sort of thing, and besides, they’ve got plenty to be existentially discombobulated about; while leaving the venue where they’d just played the record release show for their critically acclaimed 2022 debut LP Bummer Year, lead guitarist Jake Ames was hit by a car crossing the street, fracturing his skull and tailbone. This album almost never happened, in other words, but after a lot of rehab and despair they’ve cobbled a seriously listenable set of songs reminiscent of Barenaked Ladies duking it out with Tom Petty (“If It’s Gone”) and Hank Williams Jr. (“Can You See Me Tonight”) in a dark alley. I couldn’t hate these guys if I tried. A+ —Eric W. Saeger
PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases
• Today we’ll talk about the albums coming out on March 14, because that makes perfect sense, like it wouldn’t be timely or hip to talk about some military coronet album that came out in 1918, now would it? Unfortunately, the first thing we’ll need to talk about here is the fast-approaching 12th album from Nyack, New York’s favorite (because there aren’t any others) progressive-rock band, Coheed and Cambria! That band, as everyone knows, is cut from the same cloth as Mars Volta, Thank You Scientist and Muse, specializing in the sort of arena-rock style invented by Queen, whose albums were mostly comprised of half-written obnoxious filler tunes with one or two overwritten orchestral pieces added into the mix to get musically untrained critics to write nice things about them. Ahem, in the hierarchy of musical genres, Coheed and all those guys occupy the rung that sits just under Tool, Pendulum and Linkin Park; Coheed’s stuff is music for people whose post-grad sensibilities demand that they not get caught listening to actual techie-prog-metal because they don’t want to scare off future employers, so what Coheed does instead is throw a bunch of random musical notes in a blender and hope to attract the sort of listener who takes LinkedIn seriously (have you guys ever watched any of LinkedIn’s user-submitted short videos? They’re all basically “career-promotional videos,” starring and written by people who double-majored in marketing and business, and any time they come within a country mile of criticizing anything about corporate culture that obviously bugs them, a chimpanzee in a power suit zaps ‘em with a taser and they get back to the script). Anyway, if that describes you, and you want to stick with listening to anodyne milquetoast tripe instead of something interesting like Pendulum or Mozart, then Coheed’s new album, The Father Of Make Believe, is for you! Yup, like Billy The Exterminator used to say, I can’t wait to get my hands on this horrible new critter and tell you good folks all about it! So the single, “Searching for Tomorrow,” is like Linkin Park doing power pop, like, if Beavis and Butthead had jobs as human resources directors, they’d totally head-bang to it. If Dashboard Confessional had rabies it’d probably sound something like this (lightbulb moment: I’m going to start calling this band “LinkedIn Park!”).
• Circuit des Yeux is the stage name of Chicago-based singer/songwriter Haley Fohr, whose four-octave vocal range is a big deal to people who don’t like normal singing but instead prefer people who can both squeak like a Munchkin and mumble like Lurch from The Addams Family! While we’re on the subject, I always thought the super-high notes on allegedly four-octave-range-possessing chanteuse Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” were generated by a computer, but this multi-talented blah blah blah person’s new album is called Halo On The Inside, and it spotlights a Trent Reznor-sounding single called “Megaloner” where she sings like the dude from Roxy Music, which is impressive.
• Electronic rock band Courting is from Liverpool, England, which goes to show you that not every band from Liverpool is as famous as The Beatles. Their new album Lust for Life has a single, “Pause At You,” that sounds like Aha meets Gang Of Four meets Hives; it’s OK.
• And finally we have Whatever the Weather, which is what British electronic producer/musician Loraine James likes calling herself in order to confuse old people or something. Whatever The Weather II is her new album, with the single “12°C,” a sluggish noise-electro ambient thingamajig that goes nowhere, but they’re your ears. —Eric W. Saeger
Featured Photo: Free Range, Lost & Found (self-released) & Good Looks, Lived Here For A While (Keeled Scales Records)