Author: Eric Saeger

Todd Herbert, Captain Hubs (TH Productions)

Herbert, an Evanston, Illinois-bred jazz saxophonist, has been a top-level performer out of New York City for many years now, serving as a member of the Freddie Hubbard Quintet, Jimmy Cobbs Legacy Band, and the Charles Earland Quartet, among others. As great as this album is, it does feel a little sparse all told, but only because Herbert’s only traditional-style cohort here is pianist David Hazeltine, whom I’ve talked about here now and then. The sax runs are gold for the most part, but the excitement, along with the sound levels, drops considerably when Herbert’s seemingly tireless workouts suddenly stop and Hazeltine steps in with his smoke-filled-room tinkling. I say this only to point out that this isn’t a whiz-bang sax-jazz album but a duo collaboration, which some would admittedly find wildly appealing. John Weber’s bass is flawless, as is Louis Hayes’s drumming, and the selections are good; the bombastic title track that opens the record was originally written for Hubbard and is a definite keeper. Wayne Shorter’s “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum” and John Coltrane’s “Straight Street” are here, so it’s worth investigating, sure. A-

The Belair Lip Bombs, Again (Third Man Records)

Here we have the first Australian band to be picked up by Jack White’s Third Man Records label, and strangely enough it’s not the most amazing Australian band I’ve ever heard, not by a long shot. It’s a female-fronted indie band that makes the right noises, with their scratchy-raunchy ’90s-tinged guitar sound betraying a fetish for Big Black and things of that sort, but singer Maisie Everett’s voice rarely pushes past the tepid Sheryl Crow range that’s well into her comfort zone. I’m saying that the band’s noise level is up there with Amyl And The Sniffers, maybe even more aggressive than that, but Everett doesn’t quite fit in, save for when they try snoozy pub-pop oatmeal on for size (“Cinema”; “If You’ve Got The Time,” which includes an incidental heavy-ass Queens Of The Stone Age riff for no logical reason). “Hey You” reads like Au Revoir Simone, while we’re at it; I literally have no idea what these guys are trying to accomplish, to be honest. C

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday is Oct. 3, a day that will live in infamy because my sister was born that day (she’s a dog person and I’m a cat person, so Thanksgivings are super-hard and usually end in yelling and Facebook-unfriending until the next time). And speaking of unfriendings and harmless, mindless drama, look who’s got another album coming out, it’s none other than Taylor Swift, the subject of half the internet fights a few months ago, for really no good reason whatsoever! This one is called The Life Of A Showgirl, and it is produced by, you guessed it, ubiquitous Swedish pop-music-oligarch Max Martin, whom I’ve talked about before. He’s written, among other modern super-hits, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” Celine Dion’s “That’s the Way It Is,” Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time” and TayTay’s “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space,” in other words he’s written the second-most No. 1 singles in history, behind only Paul McCartney, so if you want to write Facebook posts about how much modern music stinks, always be sure to blame it all on that dude. Along with Max, this album is co-produced by his producer-bro partner, Shellback, another overexposed Swede, so I know I am about to listen to something so unbelievably novel that I will explode, so here’s the title track, a diva ballad that sounds like Mariah Carey for a while and then she starts hitting high notes kind of like Celine Dion in yell mode. A lot of people will like this, because it is a single-ladies’ angst overload but not as intolerable as Adele.

• Rachael Yamagata is an adult alternative singing lady who hasn’t dented the U.S. charts since 2003, which means that I’ll probably like what she’s doing on her new album, Starlit Alchemy. Ugh, forget that, her voice is too breathy on the advance single, “Birds,” like a female Peabo Bryson, or Ani DiFranco trying not to be too annoying. It is a piano-driven ballad; I imagine you’ll probably see it on Good Morning America or whatnot and think “well that’s kind of pretty,” and then never think about it again.

• Sparks, a band we talked about a few months ago, is releasing an EP, titled MADDER! Funny story about Sparks, someone read my review of their last album, Mad, in this newspaper and sent me a private Facebook message asking me to write about a Sparks-related art project they were doing, and that was the only time I’d ever mentioned Sparks on Facebook. But then, oddly enough, I started getting spammed by Facebook about Sparks’ Sept. 11 show at Boston’s Berklee Performance Center, meaning Facebook is reading people’s private messages in order to spam them. Isn’t that disgusting, but anyway, the new single is “Porcupine,” a really dumb thing that sounds like Devo trying to be elevator music, go hear it for yourself.

• Lastly and somewhat apropos for early Halloween, Canadian alt-folk/country band The Deep Dark Woods releases their 11th album, The Circle Remains, this Friday! They are from Saskatoon, the biggest city in Saskatchewan, whose closest U.S. city is Portal, North Dakota, all of which means that it’s basically like living on Pluto except it’s much colder. Saskatchewan, which means “Great, how did we end up here anyway” in Native Canadian, doesn’t field a professional hockey team, so they root for the Edmonton Oilers, who have lost the last two Stanley Cup Finals series in a row, which is very sad, so I anticipate that this album will be full of sad songs from these Plutonians, whose team cannot win the Stanley Cup, let’s go listen to some of their mournful wailing on kickoff single “The Circle Remains Unbroken.” So yeah, it’s droopy and soft and vaguely funereal but not really sad, with slow-strummed acoustic guitar and a vintage-sounding organ doing annoying things. The singer sounds like Burl Ives, if that does it for you.

Featured Photo: Shiner, BELIEVEYOUME (Spartan Records) & Patrick Wolf, Better Or Worse [EP] (Appaport/Virgin Music)

Shiner, BELIEVEYOUME (Spartan Records)

This one came to my attention by way of friend-of-the-Hippo and fellow underreported author Dan Szczesny, but wait, don’t flip to the movie reviews yet, this time it’s not another opera-metal band but instead a post-prog/polite-math-rock foursome from Kansas City, Missouri. They’re quite good, these guys, able to shift gears rather seamlessly; we’ll randomly start with “So Far So,” a mid-tempo rockout evoking a harder-edged, art-rock-infused Kasabian (please tell me you’re familiar with Kasabian, I’m at the end of my rope, I swear, but if you haven’t, think Gang Of Four Krazy-glued to Alice in Chains), and then move on to the one they spent the bulk of their video-filming money on, “Asleep In The Trunk,” which launches with an obtrusive, somewhat Rush-like bass line and then shoplifts a few ideas from Muse. That brings us to “The Alligator,” a song that’s reminiscent of Live, or more accurately Collective Soul in radio-wimp-pop mode. I told you a ’90s-rock resurgence was coming, which is what this is, just please don’t shoot the messenger. A- —Eric W. Saeger

Patrick Wolf, Better Or Worse [EP] (Appaport/Virgin Music)

About time I got a record in here that sounds like the musicians wear funny European shoes. This South London, U.K.-based multi-instrumentalist is a folktronica/baroque-pop-grounded genre-tinkerer with a growing cult following; he’s played viola for Arcade Fire and Chicks On Speed among other interminably artsy acts. We find him here experimenting with largely agreeable, pub-friendly sounds, not in the stuffy unplugged fedora sense but in the manner of a crew of heathens adding pop elements to Irish jigs and sounds of that nature. The title track is an odd but very listenable duck, with its M83-style from-the-mountaintop verse, Simple Minds chorus and brightly strummed mandolin. Irish-traditional cover “She Didn’t Dance” reads like a pop-minded ode to the TV show Black Sails, combining boisterous Nick Cave belting with mournful zydeco sounds; “Mejora O Empeora” is a windows-down cruiser with world-music sensibilities. He’ll perform at Center of The Arts Armory in Somerville, Mass., on Nov. 10. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Sept. 26 is your next new-album-release Friday, so a lot of albums are making their way to your Spotifies and Napsters, which brings us to the latest update in my totally informal Manchester Nightlife series, in which I try to find stuff to do in New Hampshire’s “Queen City,” which should actually be called the King City, as everyone knows! When last we left this exercise, I asked you scamps where a regular fella like me could go to do a little twerking to the latest hip-to-the-hop music from Ye and Kendrick and Skee-Lo, but no one responded, and after much informal polling past that, I’m going to assume that there is a small faction of 21- to 32-year-olds who know of such a dance club, but they’re keeping it on the DL, because they know I’m the best twerker in the state and they don’t want to be embarrassed when they “bust a move.” In the meantime, however, there is an excellent, super-friendly indie-arts community to be found here in town, namely the Slam Free Or Die slam-poetry series, operated by a super-nice bro named Christopher Clauss! It’s a nicely attended open-mic event, held at Stark Brewing Co. at 500 Commercial St. in Manchester on Thursday nights, where you can get a brewski and a burger or other pub food (the fish and chips is a very good buy) or just munch on ketchup packets if you’re broke, then, if you want to, get up in front of all these super-cool people and read a poem (or vaguely rhyme-y rant) that you wrote! It’s a great time, an opportunity to offload a little of your existential angst over the coming Apocalypse, maybe meet a celebrity (actress Amber Tamblyn spoke there once) and yes, there’s beer, so why not give your parrot a little break from watching you misery-browse through Facebook and Twitter and go hang out with some actual people, in our arts community, who want to hear your words, no matter how weird or swear-y! In the meantime, I’ll resume searching for a local twerking club, or just see what the Wild Rover is like nowadays, anyplace where I might be able to perform my hypnotic come-and-get-it mating dance in time to something from Here For It All, the new album from former important person Mariah Carey! The single, “Type Dangerous” is perfect for slow-twerking, with its afterparty hip-hop-soul-meets-new-jack-jazz beat and disposable pop flourishes, my tail is wagging as we speak!

• Robert Plant was the singer for Led Zeppelin, but then he got tired of having enough money to buy random Scottish castles and struck out on his own with some really captivating rockabilly-tinted beach-pop albums in the 1980s, and then shoved Alison Krauss in our face for a while. His new LP (and band) is named Saving Grace, featuring vocalist Suzi Dian, who plays accordion. They’re said to be a psychedelica band, but there’s a (spoiler) polka-Western edge to it, going by opening single “Everybody’s Song.” They’ll be at the Shubert Theatre in Boston on Nov. 6.

• Biffy Clyro is a Scottish alt/prog band that sounds like Braid or Reuben or a busier, feistier Killers, you get the idea, and they’re releasing their 14th album, Futique, this week. The last time I talked about them at all was probably 15 years ago, so this will be as new to me as it is to you. Yuh, new tune “Hunting Season” sounds like Reuben, the end.

• We wrap up the week with a bougie, quirky comedian who’s never made me laugh, as in not once, ever, Portlandia’s Fred Armisen and his new comedy album, 100 Sound Effects. There is no advance sample for me to critique, but one of the titles is “Romanian Crowd At Rock Club Shouting For An Encore,” isn’t that so droll (eyeroll emoji)? —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Shiner, BELIEVEYOUME (Spartan Records) & Patrick Wolf, Better Or Worse [EP] (Appaport/Virgin Music)

Beat, Beat Live (Inside Out Records)

In my never-ending quest to be a people-pleaser, I cover basically every genre on Earth in this space, and yes, I know how obvious it is. I’ll pick a random record, start listening, and the words start zapping out of my fingers automatically. I really only have a tough time with newest-hottest indie bands, because they’re almost always ridiculously overrated, but another genre that’s out of my wheelhouse is “wildly creative” prog-rock a la Zappa, because I don’t ever get the point. In that vein, King Crimson is another band I’ve never liked at all, but this isn’t all that bad, even though it’s rendered by a supergroup consisting of two Crimson members (Adrian Belew and Tony Levin) along with the guitar wonk’s guitar wonk, Steve Vai, and Tool drummer Danny Carey. Their mission: “re-imagine” three Crimson albums, namely Discipline, Beat and Three of a Perfect Pair, thus it’s obviously for Crimson fanatics. The results are all very tech-prog-sounding, like a wacky Spotify mix comprising random entries from Disco Biscuits, Styx, Talking Heads and Return To Forever, with occasional departures into Captain Beefheart nonsense. What can I diplomatically say other than come and get it, King Crimson completists, yee-hah. A

Bill Brennan and Andy McNeill, Dreaming In Gamelan (self-released)

Wonderfully peaceful “fourth world music”-based collaboration between two Canadian multi-instrumentalists/composers. They deal in “Sundanese Gamelan,” a sound created with gongs and chimes and associated elements, instruments that are manufactured under local conditions in towns in the Indonesian province of West Java, such as Bogor and Bandung. At its core, the music is an Indonesian tradition practiced by the West Javanese ethnic group known as the Sundanese, but here, as you’d naturally expect, the melodic patterns are geared more toward Western tastes. Electric violinist Hugh Marsh (on leave from Loreena McKennitt) adds a layer to the sonic depth, but whether or not that’s really needed is probably a matter of taste; the violin is more an undergirding than anything that ever gets busily melodic. The chimes and gongs have a “singing bowls” effect that sounds simultaneously planned and completely spurious, that is when it isn’t exhaling exquisite ambiance. The tldr: It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to hear at a wildly pricey spa or advanced yoga center, etc. A+

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• Like almost every Friday since the fall of Rome or whatever, Sept. 19 will find us covered in new albums, clawing our way to safety, away from all the albums that want us to buy them! Since Christmas is a mere 98 days away, I have a Mount Vesuvius-load of albums to deal with this week, so instead of going into anything obscure right off the bat I’m going to talk about the new one from Sarah McLachlan, Better Broken! She’s my all-time favorite Lilith Fair fixture, but you may better know her as the lady who interrupts your TV show to ask you to donate to abandoned pets, which of course you definitely should do, don’t be a cheapskate (I can’t watch those commercials, like, the minute one shows up on the teevee when I’m watching my shows I change the channel at top speed, which I deserve to do because I’ve rescued enough cats in my lifetime. In fact, it’d be really nice if the Humane Society would give me some sort of special Xfinity code that would block commercials starring starving cats and dogs automatically, you know, maybe show me a nice happy video of skunks and raccoons frolicking in the forest instead, but then again, I’d end up being all like “You know, I should start rescuing abandoned skunks and raccoons,” even though every wildlife expert advises people not to, so don’t do it). Where were we, oh yes, Sarah McLachlan, she’s the best, let’s go lend an ear to the album’s title track, the first single from this new album! It is a deep, mellow tune, starting out with a trip-hop drumbeat reminiscent of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop,” which means she hasn’t changed much; the verse is mature and awesome, then it moves into an addictive little hook that flirts with brazen catchiness before folding into a yodel-filled chill-art piece that’s as good as anything else I’ve heard from her before. Some things never change, and in this case that’s actually a good thing!

• Hark, it’s the sound of rapidly twerking butts, who else could it be but New York rapper Cardi B, twerking away like a demented terrier! Cardi’s new album, Am I the Drama, is out this week; mayhaps you’ve heard the title track if you have small twerking children (I was going to say that you may have heard it at a local Manchvegas club, but now that the local club scene is changing and there’s basically no local place to twerk as far as I know — someone message me on one of my “socials” if I’m wrong of course, that’d be great — you’re better off just having kids if you want to stay hip to twerking and Humpty Dancing or whatnot) (yes, I’m being serious, send me your local club spam. At present I assume the Manchester dance club scene is nowadays the same as Portsmouth’s, just dudes in fedoras doing Bob Dylan covers). OK, this Cardi tune is, of course, a glossy yacht-rap song with lots of swearing, for your kids, who secretly just want you to give them guidance, love, discipline and money for tattoos.

• Yikes, I thought I was going to have to slog through another new Black Keys record, but thankfully it’s just everyone’s favorite demented stoner-indie band Black Lips, with their new LP, Season Of The Peach! “Tippy Tongue” is of course awesome, like early Rolling Stones but 100 times more interesting, meaning it’s nothing like Black Keys.

• And finally it’s nerdy chillwave artist Toro y Moi, with Unerthed: Hole Erth Unplugged, his new album! I hate to name-check José Gonzalez two weeks in a row, but “CD-R” is like his stuff with Zero 7, lazy and techie, but with a dobro in there, which makes it Americana-ish. It’s very nice and yadda yadda.

Featured Photo: Parcels, Loved (ANTI- Records) & Chameleons, Arctic Moon (Metropolis Records)

Parcels, Loved (ANTI- Records)

This Australian band describes itself as “sort of a blend between electropop and disco-soul” with a lot of ’70s and ’80s influences, which immediately had me thinking, “How adorable, they’ve invented either Daft Punk or Scissor Sisters.” Oddly enough, Daft Punk produced this group’s 2017 hit “Overnight,” which was basically the former’s Kool & The Gang-inspired “Get Lucky” in a fake beard and Sherlock Holmes hat (it was also the last song Daft Punk ever produced, take note) (yes, “Overnight” is all new to me, but give me a break, there hasn’t been a legitimate dance club in Manchvegas since when, the 1960s?). Anyway, let’s take care of this: “Summerinlove” is like a cross between Sade and Jamie Lidell with a sleep-inducing José González vocal that makes it mildly listenable; “Yougotmefeeling” (yes, every song uses that no-spaces gimmick) is Klaxons with an iron deficiency; “Safeandsound” is antiquated AM radio makeout tuneage for smoke-filled taxi cabs. It’s decent-enough chillout stuff I suppose; again, the singer’s González-like tenor makes it more or less worthwhile. B- —Eric W. Saeger

Chameleons, Arctic Moon (Metropolis Records)

Speaking of stuff I missed out on in the past, I dearly hope I’m the only one who slept through this British dark-post-punk band (if my buddy Gary is reading this, investigate these guys immediately). They made a good (and well-deserved) dent in the U.S. charts with their 1986 Geffen-issued LP Strange Times, which was full of agitated, haunting melody; think the Cure mixed with Bauhaus/Lords Of The New Church and fronted by David Byrne — what a rare treat their wall-of-sound was to find. Cut to now, since we must, where we find two-fifths of the band carrying on, led as always by bassist/singer Mark “Vox” Burgess and guitarist Reg Smithies. Although it’s transparently more commercial-minded than what they were doing in the ’80s (and one critically acclaimed album in 2001), it’s all seriously hummable, adventurous stuff. What a crime it is that these guys haven’t done anything in 24 years; they’d surely be as much of a household name as The Damned. Hop on this one, I beg all you Gen Xers. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

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• Hold thine hands, my hardy and valiant trolls, and let us sing a song of Sept. 12, the second new-CD-release Friday as our 14 crazily frozen post-summer months commence, I hope you can get to your snowshoes quickly as the descent into frostbite season begins! Let’s try not to think about it and proceed right to the albums, where we find a new one from famous folk-pop ginger Ed Sheeran, who is part British and part Ewok (the Ancestry.com sequencer eventually gave up trying to sequence his DNA, but not before wild-guessing that he also might be part Teen Wolf). Whatever he is, he has a new album out this week, which he titled Play just to make Moby realize that he hasn’t been relevant since Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office. This non-Moby Play album leads off with a tune called “Sapphire,” an arena-indie jam with a reggaeton beat that is of course very catchy and everyone will like it. I’m sure it rips off Bruno Mars and/or Imagine Dragons, but Sheeran’s already getting a lot of hate on the internet for, among other things, and I quote, “Doing nothing more than making up words and putting music to them.” I must confess that I was under the naïve impression that that’s how one is supposed to write songs, so really, if there are other newfangled rules of rock ’n’ roll that I’ve been missing, I do hope one of you SnapChat kids will contact me soon so I’ll understand how all this music stuff works.

• In positive news, Canadian techno lady Kara-Lis Coverdale isn’t a nepo baby, since she’s not related to David Coverdale, which was what I’d expected to find. What’s even cooler is that she’s been releasing albums for 12 years now, but all of them have gone unnoticed by the public! But her new LP, Series Of Actions in A Sphere Of Forever, has changed that even before its release, because at least Wikipedia has made the album’s title a separate hyperlink on her biography page. Now that’s all well and good, but something’s gnawing at me about the album’s push track, “Turning Multitudes,” oh, I know what it is, it’s because Coverdale bills herself as an alternative/dance musician, but this tune is a sparse, melancholy, downtempo number that’s more like a modern classical-piano piece than anything else. OK, since we can’t do anything about that, let’s move on.

• Sacramento, California,-based math/post-hardcore band Dance Gavin Dance releases their 11th album, Pantheon, this week. The single, “Midnight at McGuffy’s,” is a pretty fierce little jam, an amalgam of Black Veil Brides, Panic [sorry, I won’t add the silly punctuation mark] At The Disco and early emo, all mixed into a Dillinger Escape Plan slow cooker. What this means is that it’s fast, aggressive and complicated in spots, with enough Thursday-ish melody in there to maybe entice one or two actual girls into attending one of their shows, but they’ll promptly leave after one song when they realize there’s nothing even remotely My Chemical Romance-ish about the band.

• We’ll call it a week with an indie-pop nepo baby, Mikaela Mullaney Straus, who goes by the stage name King Princess! Her obligatory nepotism connection is having Isidor Straus as her great-grand-pop, the guy who owned Macy’s and died on the Titanic, if you’ve ever heard of that incident, so if you don’t buy this new album (no one bought her last one, but her first one did OK) she might sic the IRS on you, just sayin’. Her new album, Girl Violence, features the tune “RIP KP,” a song that starts out like a Chappell Roan ripoff and then turns into Nine Inch Nails (no, I don’t know why).

Featured Photo: Parcels, Loved (ANTI- Records) & Chameleons, Arctic Moon (Metropolis Records)

The Beths, Straight Line Was A Lie (ANTI- Records)

This Auckland, New Zealand-based band has made a name for itself in the twee/rock space over the years, serving up gentle-awkward but mildly aggressive tunes that made them a good fit as an opening band for Pixies, the Breeders and Death Cab For Cutie. After the critical success of the band’s 2022 LP Expert In A Dying Field, leader Elizabeth Stokes found herself out of song ideas, so she hung out in Los Angeles, immersing herself in Akira Kurosawa movies and listening to Drive-By Truckers, The Go-Go’s, and Olivia Rodrigo. The first two bands are vibe-checked here, toward a Pavement/versus fashion anyway, in the title track (she even rips off the “Round and round and round” bit from “We’ve Got The Beat”), but it works better when those influences aren’t crazily obvious but definitely close (“Mosquitoes” sounds like something that was left off an Aimee Mann or Michelle Branch album, so yeah, her approach to this one was pretty lazy. Better luck next time). C —Eric W. Saeger

Prayer Group, Strawberry (Reptilian Records)

We turn our gaze to Richmond, Virginia, the home of this noise band, who’re responsible for this (quite rushed, if I’m reading between the lines correctly here, not that that’s a big deal when the band is, you know, a noise band) seven-song 10” mini-LP. The “related-if-you-like” list includes Big Black and Jesus Lizard, which is accurate in its way (a heavy dose of drone, lots of yelling, and bashing stuff), but a look under the hood finds some Jello Biafra worship and plenty of things that make it more comparable to Swans, various Throbbing Gristle projects and so forth. To the uninitiated, this might sound like three or four twentysomethings trying their hardest to get their band evicted from their parents’ basement, but in that alone there’s some real authenticity, take it or leave it. If you have the slightest, foggiest idea what Adebisi Shank sounds like, there’s a similar amount of technical ability on board here, but the guiding influence is 1980s Steve Albini for sure. A —Eric W. Saeger

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• Gross, it’s September again, and new albums will be released on Friday, Sept. 5, summer’s officially over already, life isn’t fair. I’m not looking forward to all the pumpkin spice stuff being shoved in my face on my “socials,” but we all know it’s the worst on Facebook; people are so happy that it’s getting cold, so they get to wear sweaters and make their houses smell like cinnamon witch brooms and toadstools, all of which brings out my inner curmudgeon because really folks, I don’t like it (OK, except for those sunny, early October days when all the leaves have color and haven’t yet covered the streets in their colorfulness, where they begin to decay into a slippery, moldy mass of worm-slime, I should really just move to Hawaii). In any event, albums: Some of you were adult-ish in the 1980s and remember the salad days of New Wave, a musical fashion statement that saw bands like The Motels and Television and Romeo Void sing about the exact same lovey-dovey nonsense as Stephen Foster did in the 1800s, except with lots of hairspray. Know who else was big back then was Devo, and if any of you rotten Zoomer children want to know how cool that band was, there’s a new documentary on Netflix that’s awesome and hilarious (fun fact: Devo was a mixed-art project that didn’t firmly decide to become an actual band until they realized it was the most effective way to annoy as many people as possible), you should watch that show, but another rebellious fixture of the New Wave scene was David Byrne, whose new album, Who Is The Sky, comes out this week! The album’s songs all began their lives as rudimentary concepts and were fleshed out by the Ghost Train Orchestra ensemble; the first single, “Everybody Laughs,” is an upbeat dance tune remindful of Blondie’s “The Tide Is High”; it examines how people aren’t as unique as they think they are, which reveals more about Byrne than anything else, really.

• Here’s one for your nerdy friend who’s the only person you know who reads Guitar Player magazine (I know, I know, guitar nerds really just buy it for the hott sexxy pics of Flying Vs and Stratocasters, you know how creepy those guys get), the type of guy who insists that Jeff Beck is the greatest rock guitar player ever because, you know, just because, even though two of his fellow guitar gods, Jimmy Page and Tony Iommi, have sold, to date, a grand total of 252,963,481 more albums than him. Yes, I’m going somewhere with this, because we’re talking about Chosen, the new album from similarly geek-worshipped singer/bassist Glenn Hughes, formerly of Trapeze (no, I’ve never heard a Trapeze song either, so don’t feel inferior), who is much more famous for being the temporary frontman for Deep Purple and Black Sabbath in their darkest hours than singing for Trapeze. No, I kid Glenn Hughes, two of the songs on Sabbath’s Seventh Star album are good, let’s just leave it at that. Chosen’s title track is half ’90s-grunge-metal and half hair metal, for those who, ahem, can’t decide whether they feel like listening to Foo Fighters or Thin Lizzy.

• English rock band Suede is similar to Savage Republic, specializing in noisy/surfy post-psychedelica; they had only one hit in the U.S., the forgettable “Metal Mickey” in 1992. The band’s new LP, Antidepressants, includes the tune “Disintegrate,” which isn’t too bad if you like early Wire (translation: it’s rough, noisy and bored-sounding).

• We’ll wrap it up this week with Moments, the new album from Australian goth-adjacent synth-poppers Cut Copy. The new single, “When This Is Over,” nicks its yacht-’80s essence from Duran Duran and has a kids’ chorus for no reason whatsoever.

Featured Photo: The Beths, Straight Line Was A Lie (ANTI- Records) & Prayer Group, Strawberry (Reptilian Records)

Ashes And Diamonds, Are Forever (Cleopatra Records)

I’ve probably missed out on the last 40 records from the Cleopatra Records indie label, but only because my emailbox looks like the Brooklyn city dump the week after Christmas. I did, however, catch this goth-rock gem, due out on Halloween day; it features Bauhaus co-founder Daniel Ash, Bruce Smith of Public Image Limited and — excuse me, the bassist for Sade, as in literally the “Smooth Operator” lady. Ash uses an “e-bow” (an electronic device that emulates a bow, you know, like a violin bow) on his guitar (Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien uses one on songs like “My Iron Lung”); the gizmo brings a sort of “wub-wub” effect to these proceedings on songs like “Teenage Robots,” which reads like Trent Reznor with a fetish for throwback electro, if that makes any sense to you (it won’t be on the exam; think of it as a woofer-trashing Nine Inch Nails with a low-but-not-too-low budget). Elsewhere we have “Boy Or Girl,” which is fiercely goth, in the vein of Rammstein (or more accurately Combichrist). In short: It’s wrecky, buzzy, no-wavey, and well worth your time. A —Eric W. Saeger

Crayon, “Kill Your Idols” (Erased Tapes)

Crayon is a terminally hip Parisian music fixture who’s dominant both in jazz and electronic, and there’s a lot of futurism at work here, which some might choose to eschew, given that it’s almost too relevant to the times. OK, I’m being unintelligible, sorry, how about this: You remember when Moby’s Play first appeared and took over the planet by blending electronica with roots, downtempo and whatnot? Well, what this guy does is a next-level version of that. I’d love to tell you more, but his debut LP, Home Safe, isn’t out until Oct. 24; all I can reveal past this teaser track is that it proves that music technology has evolved far beyond Portishead. The tune in question here (it’s message isn’t violent, more a plea to the listener to be themself) features a casual but highly immersive, backward-masked beat over which painter-turned-singer Lossapardo lays some down-pitched vocal lines that reminded me of Tricky on grape drank. If this one does make the rounds it’ll be huge, I assure you, and I do hope it does. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

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• Another week of albums is upon us, specifically the typhoon of new albums that will be released verily unto thy Pirate Bay and AOL Music and such-and-so apps on Aug. 29! Into the breach we go; the blank Microsoft Word page stares back at me, begging me to fill it full of stuff about albums, for your edification and amusement, so let’s just do it by first taking a gander at something I assume I won’t hate, the new album from The Hives, The Hives Forever Forever The Hives! The Hives are from Sweden and therefore eat herring at every meal, except when they’re eating “fermented dairy products,” which sounds like “cheese” to me, but I don’t know a lot about what the day-to-day life of a Swede is like, so for all I know, their version of a “fermented dairy product” is a half-gallon of milk after it’s been sitting in the sun for a day or so, and the only reason they consume such horrific junk is so that they’ll automatically have to take a day off from work in order to go to the emergency room, where they revel in taking selfies and posting them on their Facebooks just to taunt Americans about how great it is for Swedes, having excellent soup-to-nuts health care that barely costs them anything, neener. Now, if you’re one of those pesky millennial kids who needs to get off my lawn, you know The Hives as the greatest garage band on Earth, not only because their music is a loud sloppy mess but also because their singer, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist, will do anything for publicity, like the time in 2023 when he stood around on Hollywood Boulevard holding protest signs written in fluent broken-English that said “The Hives Must Album Now!” and “Honk If You Want a New The Hives Album.” I’ll tell you, folks, that’s a showman after my own heart; that kind of thing is something I’d love to see a local New Hampshire band do, like, set up their gear some Saturday night outside one of the restaurants that serves all-you-can-eat pulled pork and sing songs about how much they hate Dave Matthews and Judas Priest, whatever, I think it’d be funny anyway, so let’s see what these lunatics are singing about these days. Ah, here’s the video for the title track: The five band members are walking around in some dumb castle, dressed up like King Henry VIII, and then they sit down to eat giant mushrooms, but all the while the song is playing, and it sounds like Gang Of Four covering a Billy Idol song from his “Dancin’ With Myself” era. They are smiling playfully in the video because they have wonderful health care.

• Once upon a time in the 1980s, when punk rock was starting its inevitable decline, there was an all-girl band called The Go-Gos, which was led by the bass player, and she wanted to have a hot-looking singer, so they hired Belinda Carlisle, whose talent for singing off-key eventually became the stuff of legend. Belinda’s new album, Once Upon A Time In California, is composed of cover tunes, including a rub of the Youngbloods’ hippy anthem “Get Together,” in which Belinda tries to sound like either Marianne Faithfull or Sam Kinison, I can’t really tell.

• Sabrina Carpenter is still relevant until the next harvest moon or whatever, so she’s releasing a new album, Man’s Best Friend! The single, “Manchild,” sounds like Chappel Roan singing a cover of Hall & Oates’s “Kiss On My List,” and its video is getting a lot of hate on YouTube, which is just mean, you know?

• And finally it’s ’70s-arena-rock throwbacks Wolf Alice, with their fourth LP, The Clearing! “The Sofa” rips off Roberta Flack’s 1974 hit “Feel Like Makin’ Love” in basically every way, take from that what you will. They’ll be at Citizens House of Blues in Boston on Sept. 20, good luck getting tickets. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Ashes And Diamonds, Are Forever (Cleopatra Records) & Crayon, “Kill Your Idols” (Erased Tapes)