Author: Eric Saeger

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

The Grownup Noise, No Straight Line in the Universe (self-released)

The focus of this Boston-based act, which has had a rapidly revolving door-load of short-term members, is bridging the gap between Americana and indie-rock, which, it seems to me, has been handled quite well by Wilco to name just one band. These tunes are full of great sounds and some very deft musicianship, but there’s more twee here than indie, and not enough bluegrass to qualify as high-grade Americana. That pretty much sums up the failure — or resistance — on the part of critics to “classify” them properly, not that that’s as important as being recognized as a band that has great songs, but knowing that these guys are happily well-entrenched in the Boston scene, (still) with all its Evan Dandos and Morphines, should answer some people’s questions. Their fatal flaw is singer Paul Hansen, whose unflustered, bland tenor doesn’t do the songs much justice, but that’s a matter of taste of course. In the end it’s a Boston alt-rock band that’s a cross between Guster and, jeez, I don’t know, Yo La Tengo; I can’t feign enthusiasm for it. B- —Eric W. Saeger

Jennie Arnau, A Rising Tide (self-released)

The middle of the Americana/alt-country road — and I mean right in the middle, where it doesn’t pay to remain very still because a zillion other artists might run you over — is where this New Yorker finds her comfort zone. She’s been out of it for 15 years until this album, which is said to exhibit “southern charm meets New York grit, with a healthy dose of heart,” which might describe Sheryl Crow, to whom Arnau’s been compared, but nah, I’d say the tunes feel like a more organic Waxahatchee. The instrumentation is another matter, an all-hands-on-deck affair that runs the gamut from Sade-tinted yacht-pop (“Sail Away”) to Lucinda Williams cowboy-waltzing (“Mabel”) to Smoke Fairies banjo-folk (“The King”). “Young and Alone,” the pensive but wispy focus track, is an honest labor of love calling into question the broken system that’s resulted in countless school shootings across the country; she’ll be donating proceeds from the song to Everytown for Gun Safety. B+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yay, new albums coming out on Friday, Feb. 20! The new-album race is heating up as we speak, now that the holidays are over and Valentine’s Day is over and the most pathetic Super Bowl performance by the New England Patriots since their 46-10 loss to the Chicago Bears in 1986 is over, like, there’s really no days off for you slackers to look forward to until Memorial Day, unless you choose to finally surrender a few of the 300 comp days you’ve hoarded or, in the case of most workers, just quit your job and move back in with your ex! It’s all good, do whatever feels right is what I say, and maybe a few of these new albums will cheer you up, who knows, but of course the biggest “music news” of February was the Super Bowl halftime show led by Puerto Rican reggaeton-rapper Bad Bunny, because no one could shut up about it on their social media whatevers! For no reason whatsoever, it turned into a controversy, because Bunny sang and rapped in Spanish, which one would normally expect, given that that’s, you know, what he does; to me it was a cool thing for the NFL to do again, recognizing Latin culture as a major component in the country’s DNA, and that’s really about it. I didn’t find the music to be all that groundbreaking, like, there’s all sorts of great reggaeton, merengue, salsa and mambo to be found if you spend a few seconds looking, for instance there’s the five-hour ¡Con Salsa! show on WBUR radio (90.9 FM in Boston) every Saturday starting at 10 p.m. if you could use some perfect afterparty ambience (you can also stream the whole show on the station’s website), but either way the vibe is almost universally positive, so what’s the harm? Sure, some people took the halftime show as an affront somehow, but they probably didn’t mind that Chubby Checker and The Ronettes played at 1988’s halftime show or that Gloria Estefan and Stevie Wonder played 1999’s “Celebration of Soul, Salsa and Swing” halftime show, and so on and so forth. Now, one conservative buddy of mine on Facebook said he simply didn’t like Latin music and could leave it at that, which I commended him for. I mean, in the end, it’s younger people who buy albums, so trotting out the Rolling Stones again like they did in 2006 in order to trigger nostalgic feels in people who can barely remember the last time they had a legitimate Billboard No. 1 hit song (they didn’t come close that year) would be a bit of a disservice to the record-buying public, don’t you think? Whatever, I’m sure people will flip out over whoever plays next year’s Super Bowl halftime show, but for the record I’d be fine if they went country-indie-rock, like, say, with Mumford & Sons as the headliner, since they’re so much more relevant than Kings of Leon now. In fact, the Mumfords release their new LP, Prizefighter, this week, featuring the pretty-epic-pretty title track and “The Banjo Song,” which is similarly sweeping and epic. I like them, the end.

• Florida power-pop band New Found Glory release their 11th album Listen Up this week. They haven’t charted for at least six years, because boring, but the new single “Beer and Blood Stains” has a pretty filthy guitar sound and actually has a pulse.

• Also this week, electroclash icon Peaches releases No Lube So Rude, and of course the title track is awesome. It is made of dubstep, goth-industrial and diva-pop smothered in pure lunacy.

• We’ll close with Hilary Duff, aka Lizzie McGuire to people who are around 35. The new record, Luck Or Something, includes the single “Roommates,” which is pretty and pleasant, sort of like a kinder gentler Alanis Morissette. — 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

Amanda McCarthy, Looking For The Light (self-released)

Surely you recognize this country-pop singer-songwriter’s name if you’ve followed New Hampshire music news for any amount of time. After racking up a good number of big-time opening gigs and awards for her winning writing and big-time sound, she left the area for the glitz of Nashville. It sounds to me like she’s on the right track with this album, which is only her second and really just needs to be heard by the right Music City VIP at the right time. This one opens with the instant ear-grabber “Vodka,” whose rich and delicious chorus evokes peak KT Tunstall right from the gate, after which she flexes her bluegrass/Americana muscles with “Normal,” a deep, lush and well-constructed joint that has a slight Wilco flavor to it. “Fine” tells me that she’s been listening to Chappell Roan with an eye toward improving the formula; “LOL WTF” shoots for the Tay-Tay demographic and hits nothing but net while vibe-checking 1990s Wilson Phillips. I have no complaints whatsoever. A+

Maria Schneider, American Crow (ArtistShare Records)

It’s a little unsightly that this EP isn’t listed in the Minnesota composer/jazz orchestra leader’s Wikipedia page, but between crowdfunding her work (ArtistShare was the first crowdfunding site), composing music and wrangling an orchestra, it’s unsurprising that things get lost in the shuffle. Clocking in around 30 minutes, this record is an astonishing achievement, a brilliantly elaborate post-bop big-band effort with touches of rock; it’s one that needs to be heard to experience its symphonic ebbs and flows. Schneider, a multiple Grammy winner who was a 2021 finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in music in 2021, has a deeply organic, breathe-in-breathe-out touch, dedicated to “the art of listening,” as she puts it; Wayne Shorter described her ensemble as rendering “the very stuff of life into music.” This tuneage is brilliantly but unobtrusively listenable, fit for practically any set of ears; the constant sparring between guitarist Jeff Miles and trumpeter Mike Rodriguez is claimed to mimic our post-cooperative world, characterizing “a society at verbal war, screaming from their echo chambers.” Don’t we know it. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Ack, look out, the next Friday-load of new albums will be dumped into your streaming service on Feb. 13, yes, a Friday the 13th, as if my expectations weren’t, as they are every week, already lower than the Earth’s magma layer! Actually there are three Friday the 13ths this year, which is better than five or 12 of them at least, so there’s that; we simply must stay positive in these Lovecraftian end times, or Cthulhu will have beef! Speaking of beef, Charli XCX is said to have a problem with Taylor Swift, according to people who take that nonsense seriously, but never mind that, because this week Charli is releasing the soundtrack to the new Wuthering Heights movie, the (literally) 30th film adaptation of the 1847 Emily Brontë novel to be burped into theaters since 1920, but this one is special because big budget or whatever. Far as that goes, the other day the 2026 film’s star, Margot Robbie, tweeted this after she invited a bunch of her girlfriends to a private screening: “Twenty women were like frothing at the mouth. They were like rabid dogs. There was screaming and sobbing. If Jacob walked in right now, they’d eat him.” See that, folks, this is why it’s difficult to be a man in this timeline, you gals only care about one thing, but anyway, a lady friend replied to that tweet with “This is the kind of press you do when you know your movie is terrible and you are desperate to drum up business,” which I suppose is kind of cynical, but I’ll never know for sure, because if I ever do watch a film version, it won’t be this Barbie one or whatever, it’ll be the most iconic version, the classic 1939 one featuring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, but that sort of depends on whether I ever run out of new episodes of Cheaters, because I know I’ve seen one or two PBS versions, so I already know that it’s just a story about dealing with a boyfriend who kind of sucks, don’t we all? Of course, Charli XCX was a great choice for soundtracking this new remake, because she’s sort of like Chappell Roan except for being like Madonna, just check out the teaser single, “Chains Of Love,” from this album! Naturally it is epic, like if Enya and Lorde recorded a duet, echo-y Celtic drums and gigantic eerie choruses stolen from Highlander or whatever. We bad boyfriends are the source of all art!

• Gogol Bordello, the New York-based Romani/Ukrainian-flavored punk band, isn’t done causing political trouble or whatever their problem is, no sir, because their new album, We Mean It Man, is heading to your Pirate Bay outlets as we speak! The title track is a masterwork of 1980s synths, antique robot vocal effects, and, of course, manic spazzing. I have no idea what they’re even trying to say, but the video’s worth it for the fake eight-bit graphics alone!

• Australian indie band Howling Bells drops their new album Strange Life this week! The single, “Heavy Lifting,” is a sleazy little thing with a shoegaze beat and Karen O-style vocals; it isn’t very special at all in my opinion, but it might be the coolest thing you’ve ever heard, I just don’t know!

• Lastly we have Converge, a metalcore band from Salem, Mass., which means I must be nice to them up to a point. They have been around since 1990 and are said to be very ferocious, with interesting lyrical concepts, but I’ve never listened to anything by them, so I assume they sound like Tool but with more heaviness, not that that’d be difficult, but we’ll find out right now as I preview the title track from their new LP, Love Is Not Enough! Yup, nope, it sounds pretty much like Cannibal Corpse, not Tool, so there it is, folks, the first time I’ve been wrong since 1998.

Featured Photo: Amanda McCarthy, Looking For The Light and Maria Schneider, American Crow (ArtistShare Records)

Transatlantic Radio, “City Of Angels” Midnight Transmission (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

Any time a press release bumbles into my inbox touting a “supergroup,” I take the bait, thinking “We’ll just see about that, won’t we?” In the case of the song in question here, an advance single from this hard-rock/AOR band’s upcoming debut LP Midnight Transmission, “supergroup” feels a bit hyperbolic: For starters, guitarist RJ Ronquillo has a YouTube channel with, I’d assume, eleventy-blah-blah-gorillion subscribers, not that he doesn’t have a great guitar sound; his comes off like a precision chainsaw that kind of wants to be a six-string bass, if you know what I mean. The other dudes are mostly highly paid journeymen, including Chris Reeve, who was drummer number four or five for Filter for a few years. You get the idea; basically they’re a hard-rock version of Toto that wishes they’d thought of Trans Siberian Orchestra’s Christmas-metal trip first (see the connection here, anyone? Trans Siberian/Transatlantic?). OK, fine, if I quibbled over every bit of unoriginality I encountered every week I’d never have room to talk about anything else, but hoo boy, this tune steals the riff from Trans Siberian’s biggest crowd-pleasing rockout, “First Snow.” I mean it’s fine other than that, I guess; Swedish vocalist Mattias Osbäck pulls off a decent Glenn Hughes, but that’s faint praise if I ever — OK, let’s just stop there. C —Eric W. Saeger

The Stripp, Life Imitates Art (self-released)

OK, this one reaches your overworked, overtired eyeballs courtesy of Friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny, who Facebooked me as I was wrapping up this week’s critically acclaimed column. First he tried to get me to talk about Brass Against’s cover version of the Pink Floyd song where the opera lady sings all opera-y, and I was like “Oh, you think that’s an awesome girl singer?!” and sent him a link to Delerium’s “Heaven’s Earth,” and then he melted into butter after the chorus ate his entire head, so I went back in our now mile-long message thread to this album so I could finish this column and go watch my shows and sip my hot Café Vienna toddy. Dan loves this Australian band, who profess to sound like Motorhead, which they don’t at all, firstly because they have a girl singer who’s not possessed of much in the way of je nais sais qua, but secondly because Motorhead’s guitars sound like a bear crashing its way into a museum, not like these guys, whose core sound is more like 1980s-era Black Flag mixed with early Kiss. But! There’s something to be said for early punk and Kiss, so if they get a new singer I’ll give them an A. That is my price, take it or leave it, and now Petunia and I will continue bingeing reruns of The Nanny. B- —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Keep on truckin’, fam, like they used to say when Woodrow Wilson was president, we’re already into February, the last full month of pure frozen misery, I can practically smell the deep-fried botulism wafting from the hilariously undercooked fish at the cheapest beach-food shack I can find when it’s unbearably hot out again and a few of you people actually start posting “I can’t wait for pumpkin-spice everything to get here again” on your Instagrams and Roblox gaming Discords, can we please get to the part where global warming turns New England’s weather into Georgia’s weather like they keep promising! Unfortunately, though, we’re trapped here together, but I’m keeping snug and super-warm buried under all the spam coming into my emailbox from bands and various people pretending to be “important cogs in the music industry,” asking me if I can get down to Austin, Texas, in mid-March for the 40th annual South By Southwest (SXSW) conference, I’m so warm and comfy right now! They all want me to show up and get free tickets, all these bands, and I’ll admit that it makes me feel special, but would I attend this “conference” if my airfare and hotel accommodations and car rental were paid? No, because Wire isn’t playing, and they’re the only band left on Earth that I’d actually sacrifice some American dollars to see, and neither is Mac Sabbath, the joke band that plays Black Sabbath songs while disguised as McDonaldland characters like Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar and whatnot, I told you guys about them, remember? No? Well, I’d go see them too, but no, I have no wish to see any of this year’s SXSW headliners, a list that includes All-American Rejects, Don Toliver, Junior H, and Mau P, but hey man, if you’re going to SXSW and want to co-write this column for an issue, I’ll tell you what, message me on Facebook or Bluesky (I’m barely on Twitter anymore, just like everyone else) and you can send me your thoughts on those four bands, and I’ll listen to them and add my two cents about why I think you’re wrong about them, sound fair? But look at how much we’ve digressed from business, specifically the business of the albums coming out on Feb. 6, for example The Fall-Off, the new one from North Carolina rapper J. Cole! Purported to be his final record, it features a tune designated/titled “Disc 2 Track 2” that features a sunny cheerful beat and (thankfully non-flashy) flows that are pretty masterful.

• Ha ha look, a new album from Nick Jonas, who used to be married to one-note sadgirl actress Sophie Tucker before she had her “what on Earth am I doing marrying a Jonas brother” moment! Oops, wait, this just in, the former Mr. Sophie Tucker was Joe, not Nick; Nick’s married to Priyanka Chopra, management couldn’t care less about the error! Sunday Best is the album, and “Gut Punch” is the single, featuring lightly AutoTuned boyband vocals; it rips off Katy Perry’s “Roar,” not that there’ll be a lot of royalties to grab from a lawsuit.

• L.A.-based emo/dream-pop whatchamallits Silversun Pickups release Tenterhooks this week. “New Wave” is a loud, depressing outburst with math-rock guitars, something you’d hear from Bono if his dog died and he was kind of metal.

• We’ll end this unbelievably disastrous week with Puma Blue, “the alias of artist, producer and romantic, Jacob Allen.” Wikipedia tells me he sings in falsetto, which he does in the title track from his new LP, Croak Dream. It’s pretty cool, jazzy yet street-wise, I don’t hate it at all. He’ll be at the small but great-sounding Crystal Ballroom in Somerville, Mass., on March 6. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Transatlantic Radio, “City Of Angels” Midnight Transmission and The Stripp, Life Imitates Art