Author: Eric Saeger

Ted Lucas, Images of Life [Disc 1: Strange Mysterious Sounds (1965-1970)] (Third Man Records)

Forgive me for being overly complicated in this bit: What we have here is disc 1 of a three-LP (vinyl) set covering the life’s work of one Ted Lucas, a fixture in the Detroit music/counterculture scenes of the 1960s and ’70s; disc 2 was released the other week, and the third won’t be released until the whole thing comes available on May 22. Everyone with me? OK, so for some reason — probably something to do with cultural preservation of early Motor City psychedelic-cum-proto-punk music, or possibly owing to the fact he felt Lucas was “unfairly” obscure — Jack White (who owns Third Man Records) wanted to release this compilation, which includes music from three of Lucas’ bands, Spike Drivers, The Misty Wizards and The Horny Toads. As well, White unearthed some rare live appearances and whatnot to complete the package. Like I hinted at earlier, it’s a historical artifact, its target taste most certainly acquired during that particular decade. To be honest — and I don’t say this just to help meet my self-imposed yearly quota of making fun of Jack White — the stuff on this set sounds as dated as first-album-era Jefferson Airplane, like, it’s trying so hard to be trippy it comes off as self-mockery — think the “Bat Dance” from the 1966 episode of Batman when Adam West couldn’t stop dancing with the hippie girl. For all I know this would be manna to 75-year-olds who miss the good old days (and sitars), but past that I have no idea what to tell you. D

Holy Wars, Shadow Work / Light Work (Pale Chord Records)

Time once again for another lady-fronted epic-metal album recommended by friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny, one that’s been in the queue since he first flipped over this Los Angeles band’s first one, after which his Substack-column co-writing daughter “Little Bean” made email-friends with Kat Leon, the band’s singer. Usually when a bandwagon-jumping L.A. outfit clambers onto my desk I can expect two things: great musicianship (bad musicians find out just how bad they are after, like, two days in that city and give up quickly) and a lack of originality (anyone remember when L.A. band Gliss tried to be relevant in the shoegaze space? Anyone at all?). The first part gets a checkmark (if anything it sounds overly tight, typical for the genre); however, I wouldn’t write off these guys as Cassyette/Evanescence clones; Leon does have a distinctive flourish to her vocal lines that matches her ’tude, which is less untouchable Amy Lee dom-princess vibe and more bemused Natasha Lyonne “where even am I” puzzlement. Stronger songs than I’d anticipated, too. A

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Come sail away with me, my legion of drunken scamps who still believe in rock ’n’ roll for some inexplicable, intricately convoluted reason, come have a gander at the new albums of Friday, May 8, through our mud-colored Jagermeister goggles! First up in our list of abject disappointments new records is Look For Your Mind, the latest from Long Island, N.Y., jangle-poppers The Lemon Twigs, a band semi-famous for collaborating with Bread-worshipping mope-popper Weyes Blood and perpetually unexciting veteran dude Todd Rundgren! Knowing those facts, I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from these guys’s new single “My Golden Years,” but I’ll admit that they did make a valiant effort to resurrect the ’70s-radio-bubblegum sound of The Raspberries, down to the Beatles guitars and creamy, sugar-frosted vocal lines. Much of the song is spent trying to re-create Eric Carmen’s way with a hook, which of course doesn’t happen, but like I said, they did try, which counts for — well, nothing really, but I’ll pretend it does if someone out there feels it’s necessary. Now, if you happen to be in a neo-jangle-pop band and want to sound like The Raspberries, the fastest way to create those tunes is by (A) being a decent songwriter, and (B) not even bothering to try doing it at all, since our current timeline in rock ’n’ roll has an unquenchable thirst for mediocrity, which these guys possess in big bucket-loads. I predict that they will do more songwriting with Todd Rundgren, which will deplete even more from their oeuvre, and they will eventually give up and become part of the problem, working in the music business as “talent scouts” and signing random bands to contracts they don’t deserve, but that’s enough inside baseball for today.

• Now, like I just kind-of said, being in a band that would like to try to sound like Raspberries is evidence of having good intentions at least, which I’ve never accused Canadian milquetoast-hipster clowns Broken Social Scene of harboring, but here they are, with a new album, Remember the Humans. Aside from giving us a couple of debatably decent songs from charter member Leslie Feist, Broken Social Scene has mastered the art of bland, un-catchy music, and we music critics have had to pretend to like them forever now, mostly because catchy music is bad for people’s ears because — well, it just is, never even mind why (it’s like the Aughts have never ended as far as overrated indie bands like Broken Social Scene are concerned). But fine, cut to now, and the new single “Not Around Anymore,” which sounds like a Strokes (of course) filler track that’s been put through a Jamie Lidell modulator and just aspires to be, you know, a really bad song. Let’s continue.

• Lykke Li is a Swedish dream-pop/dance-pop singer, songwriter, model and actress, because hot-looking people should never have to settle on just one attention-seeking specialty, amirite folks? Her forthcoming sixth LP, The Afterparty, is claimed to be her final one; there’s no explanation for that as far as I could find on my ’puter, but she recently had her second child and wanted to explore darker “themes of the lower self, including revenge, shame and despair,” and that’s fine with me. “Knife In The Heart” sounds like ABBA trying to be Sigur Ros, which isn’t as bad as it might look.

• And finally we have British emo/noise-rock/soft-grunge band Basement with Wired, their fifth album and first since 2018’s Beside Myself. I expect this to be good, let’s go see. Yup, nope, “Be Here Now” is just Foo Fighters’ “My Hero” in a fake beard and sunglasses, I hope this has edified you.

Featured Photo: Ted Lucas, Images of Life [Disc 1: Strange Mysterious Sounds (1965-1970)] and Holy Wars, Shadow Work / Light Work

Khun Narin Electric Phin Band, “Sut Sanaen”/“Poet Wong Pt. 1” (Innovative Leisure Records)

This multi-generational psychedelic ensemble from rural Thailand is known for ecstatic performances that have accumulated the group a global cult following of sorts. Their forté is electrified phin music, that is to say its lead instrument is a sort of electric phin, which is similar to a lute but with a distinctive-looking head (the upper part where the tuning keys are). A full album, titled III, is due out May 15, but the two YouTube-accessible singles covered here will give the curious a fine idea of what their sound is about. The most recent, “Sut Sanean,” is the band’s take on one of the foundational melodic patterns in the musical tradition of the Isan people from Northeastern Thailand, which will probably ring no bells to readers, but suffice to explain that it sounds like it’d be right at home soundtracking an opium-den scene in a 1970s episode of Hawaii Five-O; there’s a perpetuity to the meandering soloing that’s comforting in its way. “Poet Wong Pt. 1” is slower, more tribal and melodically enchanting, characterized by soloing that would turn Jimmy Page green with envy. Fascinating stuff. A+

April + Vista, Traditional Noise (Third & Hayden Records)

Formed in Washington, D.C., in 2014, this electronic duo has refined a sound “rooted in curiosity, experimentation, and emotional candor,” this promo sheet tells me, whilst refusing to assign them a genre. Such elite-level publications as Newsweek and The Fader have also punted on classifying these guys, with the former going with “[they meld] electronic, classical, hip hop and ambient influences into something distinctly their own.” Now, I’d like to try my hand, since I don’t see any difficulty: It’s new-jack bleeding-edge trip-hop. There’s some classical in there, sure, and some Sadé and a whole host of different influences, but altogether it honestly doesn’t spell a new sound, just a (truly amazing and gorgeous) fricassee of sound that recalls such usual suspects as Zero 7, Portishead, Tricky and Massive Attack. To be sure, these two are master chefs at it, using only the best ingredients they can find, from soft bubble-dynamic incidentals to exquisite, subtle loops, all of which are pure heaven when April’s vocals weave into them. It’s electronic music for humans, a stuff that everyone needs to know about (and hopefully will). A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Awesome, we’ve already escaped the month of April with our lives, so it’s time to look at the first Friday-load of albums to be released in May, on May 1 to be precise! But first: I was a bit remiss in not mentioning the 25th Coachella music festival that went on during mid-April, which I mostly ignored, not because I wasn’t seeing any news about it (quite the contrary, since late March, half the stuff in my emailbox’s recycle bin has been from promoters, bands and public relations hacks telling me about Coachella appearances — like the one from disposable techno singer Lisa that I got trolled into talking about in the April 16 issue) but because I had almost no interest in the artists whatsoever. This year’s Coachella was — um, eventful, in case you missed it; Justin Bieber dragged an uncomfortable-looking Billie Eilish onstage to lip-synch “One Less Lonely Girl” at her; there was an appearance from Nine Inch Noize (i.e., Trent Reznor & Co. with Boys Noise, the latter of whom added nothing more interesting to goth anthem “Closer” than an over-extended electro-drop), and Karol G become the first Latina to headline one of the main stage’s nights. Other than that it was a Nylon-directed clickbait affair, with two headlining nights from Hollywood’s 2026 Nepo Baby Of The Year Sabrina Carpenter, whose 15 minutes should hopefully be up soon (she had awkward guest appearances from a bizarre array of A-List actors that included Will Ferrell, Susan Sarandon, Samuel L. Jackson, Geena Davis and, um, Sam Elliot; the whole thing came off like it was cooked up by the entire editorial staff of Billboard sitting around plotting in a smoke-filled hall, eating nothing but leftover cafeteria meatloaf until they came up with the right names). Sets from Röyksopp, Armin van Buuren and Yamagucci would have interested me, though not enough to give up my snacks for two weeks, so I didn’t attend, not that the trust fund crowd would have left me any VIP passes anyway (those sold out in minutes, which tells you about the bougie crowd that shows up at that thing and buys $12 Cokes), and P.S., I’m not expecting to be there next year either. And that brings us to North Carolina mixed-genre-pop-folkies Hiss Golden Messenger, whose new album I’m People spotlights the single “Shaky Eyes,” an AOR-geared tune that sounds like Guster possessed by ’70s-era Fleetwood Mac, or vice-versa; it’s the sort of tune someone would fall asleep to while waiting for their kid to try on new jeans at K-Mart, if there were still K-Marts around.

• Speaking of music to nod off to, Akron, Ohio, fedora-hatted bar-pop duo The Black Keys are at it again with a new album, titled Peaches, which opens with “Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire,” a tune that will make you think of Calexico if they had no pulse at all.

• Next it’s certifiably crazy ’90s alt-pop queen Tori Amos, whom we last encountered in 2025 when she surprise-released the Music of Tori and the Muses album as a companion work to her illustrated children’s book Tori And The Muses. Her new LP In Times Of Dragons includes the single “Shush,” which is of course composed of loud, overly bombastic piano cranked to 11 and a funereal vocal line that sounds like something Wednesday Addams would sing if her tarantula died. Allll set with this.

• Lastly it’s Fort Worth, Texas-based grunge-punk band Toadies with their first album in nine years, The Charmer. You young whippersnappers probably know as much about Toadies as you do Everclear, and no one could blame you. The new album’s title track is rugged, noisy, punkish and basically as unlistenable as ever.

Featured Photo: Khun Narin Electric Phin Band, “Sut Sanaen”/“Poet Wong Pt. 1” and April + Vista, Traditional Noise

Hollan Holmes, Inside the Sound of Decay (self-released)

Nice surprise here. Usually when an album waddles in here claiming to be “ambient,” I expect to hear something chintzy and low-rent like Daedalus or whatnot (if you don’t know who Daedalus is, count your blessings), but wow, this Texas-based producer is doing a lot here, so much so that such zines as Sonic Immersion and Ambient Visions have sat up and taken notice. Yes, there’s a lot of barely filled space in the tuneage, but this is no Tales From Topographic Oceans; in fact I got the sense that Holmes was constantly ready to start rocking out, which he does almost in clockwork fashion every couple of minutes or so, tabling some next-level video game-soundtracking-ish gravitas, retro Tangerine Dream techno, or even more retro-sounding Return To Forever ’80s prog. Matter of fact, toward the latter, I’d say that’s what this record evinces more than anything else, a nod to ’80s snob-rock, not that there’s anything wrong with that at all, particularly given the state of the art. A+

Reba McEntire, “One Night In Tulsa” (Nine North Records)

OK, stay calm, hipsters, there’s a gag in here somewhere. Reba is something of a running joke in my household, given that my wife’s from Texas (I can get her to start twanging like a complete hillbilly if I walk around the house doing my Foghorn Leghorn-meets-Deliverance-guy imitation for a few minutes); like, whenever there’s nothing even mildly interesting on cable (when is there?) I ask her if she wants me to put it on Reba on CMT. Anyway, this (of course) overblown, over-produced, Celine Dion-style yell-ballad single is pretty freaking good if you enjoy having your lacrimal glands squeezed like lemons (I don’t, but the last Wicked movie did have me sniffling through most of it, which was somehow soul-enriching). But the funny bit here is that along with this tune, she’s releasing a bunch of new singles and mini-EPs and such over the next couple of weeks, which is evidence that the music industry is taking its product-release-schedule ideas from the rap world. Now, if that’s not hilarious, I don’t know what is. A

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The new music albums scheduled to be released this Friday, April 24, are on the docket, and, as always, I am full of hope that at least one will be decent when I preview them for you in this multiple award-winning music-preview column. Speaking of that, a lot of people message me with questions like, “Hey, man, what is your writing process, like, how does your tummy withstand all the horrible music you expose yourself to on a weekly basis, and plus also, P.S., I hate you forever because of what you said about the new ___ album, why are you so stupid?” Well, that’s a two-part question, so after endeavoring to triangulate the hypotenuse of the biscuit, I’ll reveal my writing process, which is a simple one: You see, ever since I was old enough to construct a run-on sentence — I think I was in second grade — every time I see a blank page, be it physical sheet of ink-ready whatever, like a priceless ancient Egyptian scroll, or a virtual void like a Word document window that’s empty except for a popup bubble of Progressive Insurance spam, I feel compelled to fill it with stuff. That’s the secret, folks. Born writers — and I consider myself to be one, given that I’ve published two obscure books and “penned” (now there’s a word that needs to die) a music column for 23 years now — don’t know what “writer’s block” is even like. Now as to the second segment of the question, the answer can be found within the verbiage of the first segment: I’d be a lot less stupid if 98 percent of the music I listen to every week in order to fill this space with stuff weren’t so bloody awful, boring and/or derivative. While I’m at it, I may as well go full meta with a confession: Like most weeks, today I tried to write most of the opening riff of this multiple award-yadda yadda before even looking at the list of new albums I’ll cover here. So let’s do that now, look at the list. Ah, here’s one that’ll make a nice curveball, put on your cowboy hats, fam, it’s Georgia blockhead Jason Aldean with his 12th LP, Songs About Us! Will there be a politically annoying video for the new single, “Dust On The Bottle,” like when he did the blockheaded video for his 2023 tune “Try That in a Small Town,” or is the new one just a normal drinking song? Yup, it’s the latter, they’re sitting on stools, just pickin’ and grinnin’, you know how it goes, the tune rips off the riff from Electric Light Orchestra’s “Do Ya,” and it’s about drinking, what more do you people even need?

• Meghan Trainor, now there’s a familiar name, the gal who did the novelty twerking song “All About That Bass,” were you aware of that silly thing or were you gainfully employed and happily existing without twerking songs? She grew up in Nantucket, Mass., which automatically qualifies her as a nepo baby; her parents are jewelers, on Nantucket, do you have any idea what a string of plastic Mardi Gras beads costs in a Nantucket gift shop, probably $8,000 plus Massachusetts tax! But wait, she’s not just a nepo baby, she’s also a one-hit wonder who hasn’t broken the Top Ten since “…Bass,” but maybe “Still Don’t Care” from her new album Toy With Me will break the spell — nope, it’s just “All About The Bass” if The Corrs had done it. Avoid.

• Is it OK to talk about Foo Fighters again (not that I want to) or is Dave Grohl still canceled for being creepy? Whatever, their new one, Your Favorite Toy, includes its title track, which is pretty neat if you ever liked No Wave music, and I hope you did.

• We’ll call it a multiple award-winning column with Canadian indie band Metric, whose new LP, Romanticize The Dive, features the single “Time Is A Bomb,” a listenable-enough song that’s part Garbage and part Echosmith, I don’t hate it.

Featured Photo: Hollan Holmes, Inside the Sound of Decay and Reba McEntire, “One Night In Tulsa”

The Alarm, Transformation (Twenty First Century/Virgin Records)

This may or may not be the final album from this Welsh new-wave band under its original name, whose tuneage I’ve previously described as a kinder, gentler Clash or a more aggressive U2. Last year, bandleader Mike Peters finally lost his battle with the cancer that had been attacking him for 30 years; Peters’ son Evan is now fronting the band as “The Alarm Presented by Evan Peters,” while original bassist Eddie McDonald is leading “The Alarm 2.0,” but whatever, this may be it for The Alarm proper, a band that was maligned since birth in the British press for being derivative and pretentious and only scored one hit in the U.S. (“Sold Me Down the River,” which ripped off “Bang A Gong,” for the Gen Xers who can remember all that stuff). This one leads off with “New Life,” which, um, derivatively enough, is basically a jam-out version of Gary Glitter’s “Rock n Roll Part 2.” But most of the other songs are fine, like “Chimera,” a stadium-ready protest-stomper that’s a lot better than that U2 EP I reviewed here the other week, if you’re a fan who needs to read some faint praise. B

Anyma and Lisa, “Bad Angel” (Interscope Records)

You know, if there’s anything that gets on my nerves about the current timeline with regard to the music-tastemaking space, it’s the blinding array of collaborations between (mostly disparate) artists. I mean, I get that we’re in a post-band/post-album world, but every other day it seems like there’s a new pair of strange bedfellows barfing out a single that wants to squeeze money out of today’s youth, a cohort that’s of course more concerned with preserving what’s left of their mental health than maintaining their hipness level. Records like this one remind me of the one-off Marvel Team-Up comic books of my youth, which were cynically intended to, among other things, expose regular Iron Man readers to the improbable world of the Silver Surfer, that sort of thing. This tune, with its dark, melodic techno, could have just as easily been promoted as an “Anyma feat Lisa” joint and added to his next ÆDEN album or whatnot; Lisa’s just got more ethereal reverb/next-gen-Autotune effectage on her vanilla-diva voice here than usual. It’s not any more interesting than Chris Avantgarde’s stuff, let’s say, and furthermore — oh, wait, I get it, she’s headlining Coachella this year, that’s what this is about. Well played, Interscope, well played (eyeroll emoji). D+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, April 17, is almost here, my dudes, so what will you do to advance the cause of rock ’n’ roll in our republic on that album release day? Just look at all the new albums that are coming out that day, the bigly-est albums ever in the history of the universe, until next Friday! Look at all these new albums, and never even mind that it’s already too late to talk about The World Is To Dig, the new one from famous Weezer-for-dummies children’s band They Might Be Giants, who did the Malcolm in the Middle song at the dawn of the Aughts, before the last flickers of hope for humanity began to falter, remember those days, and all the faltering? Yup, it’s too late to talk about this new They Might Be Giants album, because that one actually came out on Tuesday, even though Tuesdays stopped serving as the traditional album release weekday in 2015, according to this pesky spamming Google AI bot, who says “Tuesdays officially stopped being the traditional day for album releases in the United States on July 10, 2015, when the industry shifted to ‘Global Release Day’ (or New Music Fridays) to align releases with Fridays in more than 45 countries, reducing music piracy and syncing with streaming culture.” Of course, that tradition has been obsolete for years now, now that everyone simply uses YouTube-to-MP3 sites to rip music for their mixtapes, naïvely expecting their virus protection software to — you know, protect them from viruses, which it can’t when people are practically begging to get hacked, but can’t we just stick to Global Release Day Fridays anyway? Is nothing sacred anymore, but belay that patently naïve question, nothing has been sacred since Walmart started making their people work on Thanksgiving starting in the 1980s (that is until 2020, when even Walmart realized how stupid that was). But let’s just pretend They Might Whatever weren’t the Walmart of children’s emo bands and were putting out their new album this Friday, what would I say about their new single, “Wu-Tang?” Well, I’d probably say that it was an uninteresting, strummy, mid-tempo children’s singalong that has no Wu Tang guest-feats on it, but it’s too late to talk about it, so let’s just move along.

• Canadian DJ/producer Tiga releases “Hotlife” this week. As always, “Hot Wife” is a fun and silly track, but this time it is slow and stompy and makes use of the “Bugatti snare” drum sound, which impressed one YouTube commenter enough to make a fuss about it, which was kind of stupid to see. The tune is a collaboration with German producer Boys Noize, who’s usually pretty selective about whom he collaborates with (which is neat and everything, but I’m sure if the Muppets called he’d be on the next flight. See how the Matrix works?).

• Honey Dijon (Honey Redmond) is a renowned Black American DJ, producer and fashion icon with an energetic DJ style that leans heavily on “golden-era disco, techno and house,” so maybe her new single “The Nightlife” from her new album Nightlife will be fun to listen to and have nothing to do with the old 1978 Alicia Bridges song, because my nerves can only handle so much today. Nope, this song is a torchy sexytime thing in the vein of Kylie Minogue, I don’t mind it.

• And finally it’s Canadian alt-rock band Arkells with a new LP titled Between Us. “Next Summer” is a pretty neat tune, catchy, the singer is really good in an old-school way, like a cross between Michael Bolton and the dude from The Outfield (just Google them, guys).

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

Featured Photo: Anyma and Lisa, “Bad Angel” and The Alarm, Transformation

Lee & Dr. G, Girl For Me (self-released)

Although they both cut their teeth in different parts of the country, these two blues-guitar brothers-from-other-mothers, Lee Durham and Brandon Gauthier, have built a sizable following in New Hampshire, where they met and joined forces in 2023. They’ve logged hundreds of shows in the area, culminating in this debut album’s release show at Concord’s Bank of New Hampshire stage in December, a bullet point that should tell you they’re serious about putting the state on the record industry map, at least so they don’t have to go back to slugging it out in L.A. or Nashville, where they did have some success individually. Their net vibe is, as Hippo’s own Michael Witthaus observed, a sort of “psycho-delic” approach to blues, one part Chuck Berry to one part jam-band-meets-Pink Floyd immersion, with looong rootsy passages being driven into your brain until you can’t help but — admire the sound, whether as a musician or a fan. No, there’s something here for sure, at the very least a combination of selflessness between two wonderfully talented guitar soloists and a desire to rebirth their 70-year-old genre, no easy trick. They absolutely deserve your support, so get out there, would you? A+

Neurosis, An Undying Love For A Burning World (Neurot Recordings)

I’m not a fan of this vanguard sludge-metal band, and, um, uh, never really was, but nevertheless I figured it was as good a time as any to see how my tummy would react to this new album, given that some of you are under the mistaken impression that just because I’ll review other self-indulgent doom-soundscapers like Sunn(((O))) it means I approve of this kind of thing. I don’t, but they’re your ears, and if you really like the idea of hearing a blitzed caveman roaring over endless wall-of-sound extreme-metal ringouts, that’s on you. The ever-ridiculous YouTuber Needle Drop reviewed this and took issue with some chord changes here and there but praised it for something or other (does anyone really watch that guy’s videos for the purpose of musical edification?); I was more struck by the guitar solos, some of which are pretty musical but which convey the same comically depressing, angsty vibe as the rest of the tuneage, like every record that the Earache label put out in the Aughts. But knock yourself out, you have my blessing. B-

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Moving right along, the warmer weather is coming quick, in fits and starts and total fake-outs, so naturally new albums are beginning to pile up, all of them hoping to soundtrack your summer. Let’s pretend you have expendable income and can buy one or all of the albums releasing this Friday, April 10, which one(s) to choose? Maybe it’s the new one for all you Generation X grandparents, Hope And Fury by Joe Jackson, who was famous in the 1980s for the incel national anthem, “Is She Really Going Out With Him,” which everybody thought was Elvis Costello because it sounded exactly like him (and, well, half the songs that came out from pub-pop bands in the ’80s). He also had a hit with the almost as awful “Look Sharp,” but what I remember most from that dude was a totally ignored song from the Look Sharp album, called “Fools In Love,” because back in those days I was a young rock singer on a mission, the wildly idiotic sort of mission that only 20-year-olds who hate college take on: For a year straight, I tried out for every single band in the Boston area that put out an ad for one, and I mean literally every single one, and got an offer from all of them because apparently there were no other singers in the city. Now, because they were all Boston bands, they were mostly unworkable, in fact there was only one band I actually thought was kind of neat. Unfortunately I can’t say their name in this family-oriented newspaper, but they really did have some cool songs, but no way was I going to drive from my apartment in Nashua, New Hampshire, to Stoughton, Mass., three nights a week for a band with no record contract and no hope of ever getting one because stupid band name, but I almost did, but anyway, right, Joe Jackson, so there was a band composed of really good musicians in (I think) Medford, Mass., sort of a joke band, but they were good, and they made me learn “Fools in Love,” a really stupid ska/reggae tune that totally ripped off Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives,” but somehow I didn’t mind it and still remember most of the words to this day, and that is my Joe Jackson story. Anyhow, I’m going to check out what this Elvis Costello clone person is doing these days right now by listening to the advance single “Welcome to Burning-By-Sea,” which sure looks like something British oi-rock, I’m sure it’s dumb. Yup, he’s doing this cockney comedy act during the intro, nope, it’s through the whole song, he’s singing about stuff like fish and chips and getting into bar fights, it’s kind of fun, with a tribal beat and cockney yelling, but I won’t ever listen to it again.

• Ah, another Chappell Roan wannabe heard from, this time it’s British singer Holly Humberstone, with her new album Cruel World, whose title tune is flirty and awkward and sounds exactly like, you know, Chappell Roan, big deal, next.

• Wow, English electronic-music dude and showoff-y bassist Squarepusher is still around? His new album Kammerkonzert includes a new tune called “K2 Central” that’s sort of acid-jazz-y and I suppose pretty neat if you like to hear a lot of really busy bassplaying and mindless prog experimentation.

• We’ll close with Jessie Ware, who’s also British, like everyone mentioned in today’s column, bob’s your uncle! Superbloom is her new full-length; its single, “I Could Get Used To This” sounds like Mariah Carey trying to be Lana Del Rey, which is pretty — marketable I suppose.

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

Featured Photo: Lee & Dr. G, Girl For Me and Neurosis, An Undying Love For A Burning World

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