Author: Eric Saeger

I See Orange, “Wine Boy” (self-released)

Eh, this is fine, if not exactly groundbreaking. This three-piece buzz-band is from the U.K., where they’re slowly rolling out what’s expected to be a major debut album. They’ve done showcases at New York City’s New Colossus Festival and Austin’s SxSW, catapulting their brand of “post-grunge” (in other words grunge) rock into the hype stratosphere, but for now we’re relegated to just a few tunes, including this one, whose lyrics focus on Mexican-born singer/bassist Giselle Medina’s fascination with the popular consumption of red wine in the U.K., where it’s considered a casual social drink, as opposed to Mexico, where it’s enjoyed in a more refined, serious manner. As for the sound, it’s choppy, paint-by-numbers Dave Grohl stuff; guitarist Cameron Hill adjusted all the knobs on his Marshall stack to bring maximum earache potential, while Medina’s wispy, moonbatty soprano tries to make things interesting but only succeeds in conjuring a metal version of the average Gilmore Girls soundtrack tune. This band will go far, I’m sure, but it doesn’t deserve it really. C+

Jon Anderson, Survival And Other Stories (Frontiers Music)

This one’s for Yes completists only, a vinyl-and-CD re-release of the singer’s 2011 LP, which was widely rejected by fans for its lack of progressive rock; Anderson’s focus at the time of this release was on New Age feel-good vibes, given that he had just had a health scare. But it’s not hopeless at all; the fact is that Yes did a lot of stuff like this back in their early days, stuff that the strummy, upbeat “New New World” resurrects, and yes, I’m talking about the mellower moments of Close To The Edge, not to put too fine of a point on it. But OK, “Understanding Truth” jumps the hippy-dippy shark for me, with its unplugged guitar and Anderson’s helium-filled, totally-not-falsetto-it’s-true vocals settling all the good yogis down around the campfire. Speaking of yoga class, “Unbroken Spirit” reads like Christopher Franke’s 1996 pseudo-soundtrack to The Celestine Prophecy, a record that had plenty of similarly nice, pleasant, loping stuff on it. In the end, as I implied, it’s for superfans, reiki practitioners, etc. B+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Our next album-dump Friday is April 3, two days after April Fool’s Day, a national holiday whose origins are uncertain but likely stem from a mix of European traditions. One popular theory blames France’s 1564 adoption of the Gregorian calendar, which moved New Year’s Day from April 1 to Jan. 1 (which is kind of dumb if you ask me, since one is more likely to die of frostbite after passing out drunk from multiple New Year’s toasts in January than in April), and people who were slow to adapt were mocked as “April fools,” isn’t that kind of transgressive? Well, whatever, nowadays in America pranking people is a national pastime of which I fully approve, especially when it involves someone dumping unwelcome news on me and then going “April fools, no, dummy, Creed isn’t releasing an album with Justin Bieber, so you don’t have to listen to and review any such thing, had you going though, didn’t I?” In that vein, I hope I’m not getting trolled by telling you people that Grammy-winning American bassist Thundercat releases his fifth album, Disappointed, this week! This one includes feats from A$AP Rocky, WILLOW, Channel Tres, Lil Yachty and Tame Impala, the latter of which appears on the tune “No More Lies,” which I only listened to because focus single “I Wish I Didn’t Waste Your Time” rubbed me the right way in a breezy yacht-techno sense. That hinted that the Tame Impala appearance would be even cooler than usual, given that I’ve liked Tame Impala’s mellow-but-edgy approach since the first time I heard them. However, “No More Lies” is slightly louder and more soul-infused than “I Wish…,” deep-fried in reverb, like what MGMT would have sounded like if they’d been around in 1974. If you’re trying to parse all this information, I’m saying that it’s good and you should go check it out.

• Seattle-based drone band Sunn O))) is at it again, with a new, self-titled album, because it’s so cool to self-title one of your albums after you’ve already been around for 28 years! If you are totally unaware of these guys you’re excused, because their stuff is largely unfollowable on purpose; they specialize in overly long metal-guitar ringouts that go on forever. They’re basically a metal version of Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans, an infamous exercise in self-indulgence, but some people have convinced themselves that they get something out of listening to Sunn O))), so I will not argue about it but will instead toddle off to YouTube to listen to the rollout track, “Glory Back,” and report back about how self-indulgent it is. Yup, I’m back, a full 10 minutes later, to report that it’s tedious, consisting of like five chords played very slowly, but with the guitar tuned so low that it feels like being digested by a tyrannosaurus rex. No, imagine if your little brother bought a vintage Marshall amp and was warming up to play something from Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality, but that’s all he ever did, strum a few chords as if trying to summon Cthulhu, that’s all this is.

• Cripes what’s next. Charley Crockett is a cowboy-hat singer from Texas who sounds like a cross between Jim Croce and Buck Owens on the twangy, lazy single “Kentucky Too Long” from his new LP, Age Of The Ram. Why do country music artists always have to have at least one song on every album that name-checks a southern state in the title? No, seriously, text me, because I really want to know.

• We’ll call it a week with U.K.-based R&B-popper Arlo Parks’s new one, Ambiguous Desire! “Impurities” is a very listenable trip-hoppish chillout featuring a full palette of ’80s-pop sound; her high-pitched singing fits in pleasantly in the yadda yadda. She’ll be in Boston at the Royale on Sept. 1.

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: I See Orange, “Wine Boy” and Jon Anderson, Survival And Other Stories

Flesh Field, On Enmity (self-released)

Some of you may remember the goth phase I was processing in these pages back in the Aughts. In those days I was always thrilled to get a new pile of CDs from Metropolis Records, until I wasn’t, when the same-sameness of the label’s artists began to wear me out. Unfortunately for this guy — an American industrial DJ who (and I didn’t know this until just now) earned a master’s degree in international policy studies with a focus on counter-terrorism (!) — his 2004 album Strain came in for review when I was kinda sick of goth. Not that the album was bad, it simply didn’t have quite enough sonic variety for it to stand out. This one, however, is different. The ideas are similar, borrowed from the usual suspects, such as Gravity Kills, Rammstein and of course Depeche Mode, but there’s some pretty cool experimentation afoot. Opener “Omnicide” gallops and rolls in the vein of Marilyn Manson but actually harder, whereas tracks like “Indestructible” lean on sounds made famous by Trent Reznor while nevertheless sounding fresh. I’d expect the folks at Manchvegas’ Resurrection “goth night” show at Jewel nightclub would be into this (yes, I’ll be checking that place out hopefully soon, so stay tuned). A+

Big Harp, Runs to Blue (Saddle Creek Records)

Prior to bringing their act (and marriage) to Los Angeles, this alt-country duo had been active in bands on the Omaha, Nebraska, indie scene: Chris Senseney was in the group Art in Manila, while Stefanie Drootin played with names that were more household-y, including none other than Bright Eyes, Azure Ray, and She & Him. Their approach is low-key and intimate, focused on poignant songwriting that centers on Senseney’s unstressed, bottom-dwelling baritone, whilst Drootin supplies the helium with bluegrass-tinted harmonies. I could tell you that it’s lazy campfire-oriented stuff, but remember that they’ve been in the big leagues for a while, so their past cover of The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” wasn’t out of the question for their repertoire, nor was it too Los Angelized. No, the net effect here is basically like having Josh and Jennifer Turner serenade you in their living room while something pleasantly slow-cooks in the oven. Definitely manna for the Bonnaroo crowd. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Onward, my trolls, to Friday, March 27, and its slate of new rock ’n’ roll albums, for all you “coolios” out there, or however you identify yourselves these days! At this writing we just survived the 70-degree days of “fake summer” and are presently watching the snow melt Up To A Point as winter resurfaces like Jason from Friday The 13th, bringing abject despair back to our hinterlands, so some decent music jump-scaring everyone from the blackness of our great cultural Crystal Lake would be great for taking the edge off, wouldn’t it? And look at that, a new album from José González, titled Against The Dying Of The Light, is on the docket, so I am mildly excited, or at least not completely disappointed. Maybe you know this soft-voiced Swedish singing man from his solo hits, like “Heartbeats,” or perhaps when he was in the band Junip, but to me, he’ll always be associated with Zero 7, when he sang a few tracks on their 2006 album The Garden; its music was like a cross between Massive Attack and whatever that meatless yacht rock stuff was that used to play over K-Mart’s loudspeakers during the 1970s and ’80s. Do you remember the weird smell in those K-Mart stores? It smelled like a mixture of melted Barbie dolls and human desperation, but nevertheless I miss having other stores besides Walmart or Target to visit when I needed to buy something I knew nobody would have, back when there were other retail choices before Amazon.com took over all of U.S. retail except for those two stores. Those were the days, weren’t they, boomers and X’ers, with Bradlees and Ames and whatnot, but no more, now everybody just buys everything online from Jeff Bezos, the actual real-life Grinch, who refuses to let his Amazon delivery drivers eat any hobo beans until they’ve made sure everyone on their route has had all their floo-floovers, Who-hoopers, and trum-tookas delivered straight to their door instead of having to go outside and touch grass and maybe even accidentally see their neighbors for the first time in months, which would of course pose the mortal danger of citizens actually talking to each other, whereupon the question of whether or not we actually like never having to leave the house for any reason whatsoever might come up. But I digress, because there are column inches to befoul with nonsense, so, circling back to José González, I assume most of you young twerking coolios have never even heard of Zero 7 and instead know him from some other project, but I’ll bet you the title track from this album sounds either like Zero 7 or “Heartbeats” and — yup, it’s a warm, mellow song with a psychedelic Spacemen 3 chorus. There’s nothing wrong with it; you may take that as a breathless rave from this correspondent.

• Flea is the bass player from Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band that, I was delighted to find recently, has a lot of fellow haters with whom I developed fast friendships. But rather than dwell on that, let’s see if I can stomach “Traffic Lights,” from his upcoming new album, Honora! Ack, The bass work is fine, and there are random Vegas-jazz horns, but Thom Yorke from Radiohead is singing, which would ruin any decent vibe.

• The New Pornographers are an indie band from Vancouver, which is promising. Their new LP, The Former Site Of, features “Votive,” an interesting little tune that combines Guided By Voices with literally any electro band that’s more interesting than Guided By Voices (that’s all of ’em Katie). They’ll be at The Wilbur in Boston on April 22.

• Lastly it’s Swedish electro-popper Robyn with her new Sexistential album! The title track is bratty and sexy and threatens to drop-explode like Orbital’s “Wonky” but basically gives up and just sits around being, you know, bratty and sexy, big whoop.

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: Flesh Field, On Enmity and Big Harp, Runs to Blue.

Cactus, Temple Of Blues II (Cleopatra Records)

With his Pedro Pascal looks, Carmine Appice (the actual pronunciation of which is “app-uh-cee,” a riddle that’s confused rock journos for decades now, probably because his equally famous brother Vinnie says it differently) has been one of rock’s premier drummers since the Flower Power days, when he was with Vanilla Fudge. This LP and its predecessor, 2024’s Temple Of The Blues, boast some of arena-rock’s biggest GOATs, shredding away at (you guessed it) blues tunes that would feel as antiquated as a Richard Nixon speech if they were performed by (almost) anyone else. On the whole, the sound is monstrously heavy after an old-school fashion, but it comes from a rotating stage of players who’ve all been around. The proceedings start with Eric “Raw Dog” Gales aiming his world-renowned guitar at anything that moves in a cover of Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man” (yes, the same tune covered by The Doors on their 1967 debut album), and things just get crazier from there: Older dudes who read Guitar Player magazine “for the articles, nudge-wink” have plenty to lose their minds over, including feats from Pat Travers, Ty Tabor and Bumblefoot, but the bass roster is also stacked: Billy Sheehan, Rudy Sarzo and Jimmy Haslip. Old-timers will love every second of this. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Gary Lucas, The Edge Of Heaven, Vol 2 (self-released)

Follow-up collection of midcentury (mostly 1930s and ’40s) Chinese pop music from the trio of guitarist Lucas, singer/Chinese-stringed-instrument virtuoso Feifei Yang, and multi-instrumentalist Jason Candler. This one caught my eye because my wife has been completely immersed of late in antique Chinese fiction; it’s not what my pathetically Americanized ears were expecting at all, at least not until the third track, “New Pair Of Flowers,” a classic Chinese pop number that was most famously performed in the ’30s by Chow Hsuan, aka “The Golden Voice of China.” Yang’s two-stringed erhu colors the whole thing, evincing the playful joy with which its high-pitched, oft-typecasted sound is most often associated by Westerners. You’ll also find plenty of modern jazz-inflected melodies, but everything here is intended to mark the record’s release date, Feb. 7, the start of the Year of the Fire Horse in Chinese culture. Other artists celebrated here are Bai Kwong (a sensual, husky-voiced singer known as the “Mae West of China”) and Yao Lee (ironically, an instrumental version of her “Rose Rose I Love You”; Lee’s dubbed vocals were lip-synched by various Chinese actresses in the movies from the 1940s on). A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The next Friday-load of new albums will arrive on March 20, and now for your periodic reminder that you shouldn’t ever feel compelled to force-feed your ears a particular band’s music just because your friends seem to like them. Case in point: A dear Facebook “friend-quaintance” admitted to me recently that he “felt pressured to like” Postal Service, one of the worst bands I’ve ever heard. He was having trouble with it, so I tried talking him out of it. Now, I know that a lot of you people can relate to losing precious days or hours “trying to like” this or that band, maybe because the music you actually like is considered dated and you think your brain needs an upgrade. I would tell you this: If you listen to a good-enough number of songs by a band and all you get out of it is alienation and a desire never to hear them again, you should simply give up and go back to trying new bands or just stick with your favorites. Enjoying music isn’t a competition. It’s OK to be like the character Juno MacGuff in the movie Juno, when she tells her boyfriend she thinks Sonic Youth sucks, because honestly, a lot of people loved that moment, when she finally made it safe for people to point out the fact that they have sucked since Day 1. Same goes for almost every single “indie” band that’s emerged from Boston since the Lemonheads (Mission Of Burma, anyone?). Am I qualified to discuss this nonsense? Yes, but you are too, which is the point of this segue. Twenty-two years ago I started doing actual music review columns for actual newspapers and I have been forced to “try to like” entire genres ever since. Now, in our example, Postal Service is an easy one to dissect. Quite simply, they put out nothing but total suckage. The fact that Gibbard took Jimmy Figurine seriously enough to collaborate with him in Postal Service is irrefutable proof that Death Cab has a fatal flaw in its DNA, not that it hasn’t always been totally obvious.

Years ago, a Hippo writer lumped Postal Service and Clinic together, partly in order to dismiss certain indie bands as horrible, which many are. I disagreed with him in that particular instance, because to me, despite the fact that they screw up their song structures on purpose, Clinic’s very noisy core sound is awesome, with the doctor masks and the horribly distorted guitars. So if you want to post about why you hate indie music, it’s best to leave Clinic out of it. Just do a little research: A billion bands have tried to sound like The Strokes and failed, so pick one of those losers or be brave and just go with Arctic Monkeys. It’s not hard to find a lousy indie band, just do the research. OK, at any rate, speaking of force-feeding myself music I don’t care about, Kanye West, now known as Ye, releases his new album Bully this week, or maybe the next, according to some Redditors who hate him and don’t think it’ll ever drop, no one really knows. An advance song had some stupid AI stuff on it, which, surprise, made his haters hate him even more. Anyway, that.

• I’ve liked most of the music I’ve heard from British electronic band Ladytron in the past, and their new album Paradises didn’t disappoint — much, anyway. The disposable but very listenable single “Kingdom Undersea” is ’80s all the way, part Depeche Mode, part Pet Shop Boys.

• Superstar K-pop boyband BTS releases Arirang this week, and every snippet I’ve heard from it has been so overly epic it makes M83 look like a kazoo band.

• We’ll call it a week with cowboy-hat singer Luke Combs, who is from Huntersville, North Carolina. His new LP, The Way I Am, is a sexytime dobro-powered makeout song for cowboys and the heavily twanging gals who put up with them. —Eric W. Saeger

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: Cactus, Temple Of Blues II and Gary Lucas, The Edge Of Heaven, Vol 2

Quinsin Nachoff, Patterns From Nature (Whirlwind Recordings)

This New York-based saxophonist and composer has earned a rep for “moving fluidly between jazz and classical worlds through stirring yet intricately cerebral compositions,” to borrow some promotional verbiage I’d never use myself to describe anyone’s music but which isn’t too shabby overall. Nachoff does use a wide spectrum of sounds to render these soundscapes, which are meant to describe precisely what you’d expect from the title, i.e., a fractal, ever-expanding aural depiction of nature at work (there’s a companion video that was designed with the help of a physicist). There’s even a musical saw at work in the opening track, “Branches,” a sighing, often mopey exercise that borrows the creepy nervous tension from Jonny Greenwood’s avant garde soundtrack to There Will Be Blood, in which warring strings dance around their own dissonance without ever providing real closure, while elsewhere we have bouncy nature-documentary cuteness (“Cracks”) and so on. A highly intellectual engagement that took 10 years to complete, well worth your time. A+

Rivers of Nihil, Rivers of Nihil (Metal Blade Records)

I’m really not trying to be the Chuck Eddy of New Hampshire rock journalism, sticking to heavy bands and ignoring others; really the only reason I’m reviewing a metal record for the second week in a row is that Metal Blade Records was kind enough to send me a 12-inch vinyl copy of this one (yes, I can be bought cheap, please take note; I miss the days when I’d get stacks of vinyl from SST and all the other indie labels, so chalk up this hiccup to a desire on my part to relive my 20s). This one just came out in “bleach and ammonia” colored vinyl (gray/black marble), which is cool, and their music is cool too in its way. The band markets itself as a progressive/extreme metal thingamajig, and yeah, there’s a lot of both genres going on: Instead of a bunch of gear-changes from Cookie Monster thrash to epic metal, these guys simply layer those things together like a peanut butter cup, using the Cannibal Corpse stuff as a drone device, which is pretty freaking clever, and, of course, brutal. I’m not surprised that the thrashers have been loving these guys. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Like every other Friday, March 13 will be a day of new albums, yadda yadda. It is another Friday the 13th, because we had one last month, which is how March always rolls 75 percent of the time because the Gregorian calendar was a silly idea to begin with, but either way we can start with the new album from Daniel Romano & The Outfit, a project that usually features Canadian indie-slacking musician/poet Romano, but this time it doesn’t, which I’ll blame on Gregorian calendars because there’s no one else I can think of to yell at. The album is titled Preservers Of The Pearl, and once again it will focus on “underground rock” because that’s what Romano wants the five people who show up at his shows to think it is, but there are several songwriting collaborators on board for this exercise in mediocrity, namely Outfit band members Ian Romano, Carson McHone, and new guy Tommy Major, all of whom were probably ready to quit if Daniel didn’t let them write some songs, you know how it goes. Supposedly they are trying to follow in the footsteps of (their words, mind you) “underground rock trailblazers like Mystery Lights, Sheer Mag, Shadow Show, and Uni Boys,” but my first encounter with this album was the tune “Cardinal Star,” which is the most boring, decidedly non-underground song I’ve heard all year, like it’d be too boring for Sheryl Crow to include on one of her albums, but believe it or not there’s a little hope here, thanks to the lead single “Autopoiet,” which, if it had a little more punk in its vibe, would be almost as interesting as your basic Parquet Courts tune, if you remember those guys, but anyway, what I’m getting at is that The Outfit is no more “underground” than eating a tuna fish sandwich in the park, but if Romano wants to insist that this is something rebellious, I can nod, walk away slowly, and simply allow this band to fade into oblivion, no harm done.

• Speaking of overhyped bands and musicians who’ve gotten away with spectacular mediocrity, look, gang, it’s Sonic Youth’s bass player Kim Gordon, with a new album, Play Me, another Friday The 13th arrival she probably timed just to be random and hip. Now look, I have my reasons for never having liked anything by Gordon or Sonic Youth or Thurston Moore, the main one being that I’ve never felt the urge to burn any of their songs to a mixtape because eww, but note that this doesn’t mean that I never liked any indie bands from the ’80s and ’90s, just the really popular hipster ones; I mean, back then the record industry was taking the Boston indie scene seriously out of sheer desperation. But who knows, maybe I’ll hear Gordon’s new single “Not Today” and think it’s so cool that I can forgive her for once literally claiming that her dream three-band concert would feature John Cage, Neil Young and Yoko Ono (that wasn’t easy to get over, and don’t think I didn’t try). Oh let’s just roll it and let me barf in peace. Eh, it’s not awful, lots of distortion, some Romeo Void-style singing, it’s OK as a post-No Wave song, may I be excused now?

• Oh great, it’s The Black Crowes, whom I’m still mad at after all these years for not sending me an advance of that one album, whatever its name was. Their new LP A Pound Of Feathers includes the song “It’s Like That,” which sounds like Whitesnake trying to be relevant. They’ll be at the Xfinity Center in Mansfield, Mass., on June 19, but I shall not mooch passes to be in attendance, so don’t look for me.

• Lastly it’s U.K. band The Orielles, with Only You Left, featuring the single “Three Halves,” an interesting enough combination of shoegaze vocals and extreme-metal guitars, all overdone.

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo:

IT’sALIE, Wild Games (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

I know it’s lazy of me to write about arena-metal bands, given that I was in one for about 14 years and know the genre and all its predictable, hare-brained tropes like the back of my hand, but I think it’s been a long enough while since I last wrote up an LP from the Frontiers record label, which I always affectionately refer to as “Frontiers Mercy Hospital,” given that they remain committed to releasing records from bands whose musical growth stopped at either Judas Priest or Iron Maiden. The band’s name isn’t a misprint, they’re not “It’s A Lie,” but they’re Italian, so what do they care (it makes me think of all the Americans out there who’ve gotten tattoos with “genuine Chinese characters” that actually read something like “If tent parakeet for” or whatnot). These guys say they like Lynch Mob, Dio–era Sabbath, and Southern Rock,” how adorable, let’s go. OK, it’s a girl singer whom they tout as having Janis Joplin chops, which she doesn’t, more like if your aunt sang for a Skid Row cover band, which is what the first song (“Waiting For The Rain”) sounds like. The next soggy tune sounds like Buckcherry, zzz I am getting shleeeepy, nothing to see here but yay for these guys, sure. B- —Eric W. Saeger

Onelight, Autobody (self-released)

Finally something I can sink all four of my canines into, from a French R&B-experimental hybrid-electronic DJ/producer who’s gotten love from DJ Mag, Complex, and Rinse FM, I’m all over this. Dude looks like a cross between Borat and the U.S. Olympics goalie, and I simply can’t be arsed to try Googling up his real name, but he’s got more soul in him than a dozen Jamie Liddells or (lord help us all) Steve Aokis. He kicks things off with a glitchy dubstep-adjacent curveball (“Starter”) that had me expecting a showoff-y, unreadable noise filibuster, but it settles into a wickedly relatable groove that’ll be the envy of a lot of EDM guys. A lot of stuff goes on here, folks, from Mariah Carey diva-twee (“Let It Be,” featuring the helium-inflated vocals of Nikki Ariel) to bong-bubbling reggaeton (the title track) to Martian bloop-tech (the Tristan Price-guested “Keep Your Heart Alive”). I have absolutely nothing bad to say about this record, it’s truly a beauty. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Oh great, here comes another Friday, specifically the one on March 6, which spells new albums for your ears! We’ll start this week with very old U.K. New Wave band Squeeze, who tortured human ears in the 1980s with jangle-pop nugget “Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)” and the even more awful
proctologist-waiting-room standard “Tempted,” which had xylophone in it, before xylophones became cool again in the Aughts for whatever reason! The band’s revolving door membership once included singer Paul Carrack, who was in Mike And The Mechanics for a while, but either way, during their early ’70s breakout era, Allmusic hailed the band’s songwriting core of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook as “the heirs to Lennon and McCartney’s throne,” that is to say, they were the next Beatles, a compliment critics have doled out over the years to, let’s see, The Bee Gees, The Monkees, Oasis, and the Bay City Rollers just to name a few (in the Reagan era, Tears For Fears skipped the middleman and just came right out and said they were the new Beatles, that’s telling ’em!). Whatever, Squeeze has a whole new incarnation these days, built around Difford and Tillbrook, including Dirty Vegas singer Steve Smith. This all brings us to the band’s new album Trixies, their 15th. The project features songs written by the duo in 1974 when they were teenagers (19 and 16, respectively), long before their first official record, which is as things should be, given that the chill-pop single, “You Get The Feeling” sounds like it was written by two teenagers who had just discovered the guitar arpeggio, how useless!

• New Jersey-born R&B/pop singing man Charlie Puth shoots for his fourth straight Top 10 album this week with Whatever’s Clever! He is really going for it this time: Instead of settling on feats from nobodies like Meghan Trainor, Boyz II Men, Blackbear or Jungkook again, he’s corralled a Who’s Who of super-famous 1980s names to turn in guest appearances, for instance Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins and Jeff Goldblum, wait what, why is Jeff Goldblum on an album, what is even going on here, pop culture! There have already been two singles from this album; the latest one, “Cry,” features pop saxophonist Kenny G, who once tried to make jazz safe for normies with no taste, but we won’t get into that. The tune has a yacht rock vibe stolen from Toto’s “Africa”; it is very nice and pretty, perfect for the overhead speakers at Bed Bath & Whatever, I don’t really mind it.

• Before I landed at your illustrious Hippo Press, I was on a team of snarkmeisters at a seacoast-area newspaper that has basically been banished to online-only publication these days. Now, my editor there was a big fan of Morrissey, who used to be in The Smiths, whom she also liked very much, and she’d get all over my case if I made fun of either band in my column, because I couldn’t stand them. Much good-natured ribbing ensued, which usually ended with my messaging something cleverly mean, but either way, I’m sure she’ll be buying Morrissey’s new album, Make-up Is A Lie, just to upset me. But an open mind is important, so I will listen to the title track single, just to upset myself. Yes, it is a tuneless mishmash of French café vibe, 1960s fashion statements and hotdog water, get this nonsense away from me this instant.

• And lastly it’s Kentucky freak-folk fixture Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, with his latest album-load of Bonnaroo bait, We Are Together Again. The single “They Keep Trying To Find You” is like James Taylor if James Taylor couldn’t sing all that well. — Eric W. Saeger

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: The Grownup Noise, No Straight Line in the Universe and Jennie Arnau, A Rising Tide

Namasenda, Limbo (YEAR0001 Records)

This one’ll be out in May, when it’ll be used to soundtrack some backseat romancing most wonderfully. This girl is Swedish, and when I was told her stuff was blissfully pop-oriented my mind naturally expected ABBA, which this is in a way, after a purely house/trance fashion, but you should be thinking more Kylie Minogue for the shorthand. She’s been around the Swedish techno underground for a while, breaking through with an EP in 2017; here, she fixates on a sound that I’d characterize as the passion of the AutoTune, a tool that’s all over this thing, but not to the detriment of its sexy mission. Like I alluded to, it’s Kylie for increasingly tech-accustomed ears; neo-trance track “Ultra Bomb” delivers a polite-enough drop composed of pure prettiness, a la Above & Beyond, if you’re familiar. “Cola” combines subdued reggaeton with super-refined pop sugar; “Heaven” gives us similarly innocuous dubstep. Clubgoers won’t want to miss this one. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

U2, Days Of Ash [EP] (Interscope Records)

Not knowing this six-songer was even coming, I received this on (appropriately enough) Ash Wednesday, the day it came out. I hadn’t followed U2’s doings at all since their disastrous co-branding event with Apple in 2014, when 500 million iTunes users found the U2 album Songs Of Innocence rudely shoved into their devices for free, whether they wanted it or not. I liked the band’s first two albums, back in the late Cretaceous, but Bono’s irrepressible epicness got on my nerves upon hearing The Joshua Tree, and I haven’t been back until now, when this album’s Soundcloud stream link was rudely shoved into my emailbox. Now, this is serving as an advance for a full-length album due later this year; the songs focus on headline items like Minneapolis vs. ICE and things like that, with Bono delivering some horribly apathetic vocal lines (sample: “I love you more than hate loves war” in the plodding, apathetically titled “American Obituary,” a tune that microwaves so many old U2 melodies it feels like a medley). The rest of this thing just sucks, like “Song Of The Future,” which convinces the listener that U2 regrets not being more like Flock Of Seagulls or something. Not trying to be edgy or anything, I swear, this is just a really stupid record, fact not opinion. F —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yikes, here comes Friday, Feb. 27, with a bunch of spanking new albums for us to laugh at together, don’t hog the popcorn, I’m only going to say it once! No, I’m kidding, I’m full of love for all bands and music, what would we do without it, but do I really have to include Mitski, who is this generation’s Yoko Ono? Seriously, as with Yoko, you either like Mitski’s awful music or you pretend that it’s viable, and we’re only in this mess because during Yoko’s first appearance in 1972 on The Mike Douglas Show, when Yoko sang a duet with Chuck Berry that sounded like a yowling match between two alley cats, no one dragged her off the stage in a butterfly net. Cut to now, where we have Mitski playing the part of a super-important avant-garde artiste, writing nonsense songs about existentialist whatever, and if your college roommate likes her, there’s no escape unless you decide to quit college. But anyway, she has a new album coming out this week, titled Nothing’s About To Happen To Me, and I’m going to “live review” the title track right now, let me take my tummy medicine and go do this. OK, the video starts out with our heroine being all softcore-sexytime but appropriately slovenly; the beat is mellow French café-style chill but with too much bass and dissonant melody, and then she starts singing, which of course never works out too well, but wait, it’s not all that bad. I think she’s trying to be Portishead, but there’s nothing very cool going on here. Ack, now she’s fooling around with a magnifying glass, making her mouth look huge only because she doesn’t care what anyone thinks of that, and she’s dressed like Rasputina in a poofy Victorian-era dress. OK, this just in, she moved the magnifying glass up to one of her eyes so it looks big. From there nothing much else goes on; to sum up, it’s sort of like 1970s radio pop, a lot better than her last album, not that there’s any music out there that isn’t. At some point I fully expect her to become a Vegas act meant to entertain millennials who had, you know, bad college roommates.

• Oh how adorable, looks who’s back and being all Satan-y, it’s Rob Zombie, who sings about gross devil stuff and Frankensteins and Night Of The Living Dead stuff, the only song I ever really liked from him was “More Human Than Human” because it ripped off Gravity Kills so exquisitely. Naw, I don’t actually hate Rob Zombie; he’s sort of like a heavy metal Herman Munster who watches too many 1980s horror B movies, and I don’t expect much deviation from that template on this new LP, The Great Satan, which opens with “(I’m a) Rock ‘N’ Roller.” Yup it starts with weird Martian sounds, and then it becomes evil and doomy and industrial, like Skinny Puppy for dummies. I don’t mind it, nope.

• British “virtual band” Gorillaz are back again, with more collaborations and cartoon antics and music I don’t personally like, on “their” new album, The Mountain! If you like ’80s krautrock with Aughts-era falsetto vocals, you’ll love the new single “The Happy Dictator,” which includes a feat from Sparks, believe it or not.

• We’ll round out the week with Bruno Mars, you remember him, from back when you were in junior high just a couple of years ago, when there was still some faint semblance of hope for humanity. Yes, his new album is The Romantic, which spotlights the title track, in which he does all sorts of Bone Thugs And Harmony scat-singing over a poppy 1970s-pseudo-jazz beat that evokes Drake covering an Otis Redding song or whatnot. It’s OK! —Eric W. Saeger

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: The Grownup Noise, No Straight Line in the Universe and Jennie Arnau, A Rising Tide