Author: Eric Saeger

Treedeon, New World Hoarder (Exile On Mainstream Records)

Recently I watched an interview with former Black Sabbath singer Ronnie James Dio. In it, he said that it was “ridiculous” for a band to take a couple of years to finish an album. I’m reminded of that owing to the fact that this German sludge-metal band hasn’t put out an album in five years. I suppose there are reasons for that; making albums sure isn’t a way to make money if you’re unknown, but come on guys, five years? So, given the circumstances, I expected Melvins- or Boris-level mud-rock from this one, but that’s certainly not what this is. OK, maybe there’s a little Boris in there, but that’s not what they’re aiming for, it’s more a Neurosis-meets-Sunn(((O))) trip. It’s super-slow, made of white noise, bliss ringouts that last forever, and some schlocky vocal effects that made me think of the sort-of-funny devil scenes in that old show Sleepy Hollow, to be honest. It is most decidedly meh. B

Kiji Suedo, Hosek (Hobbes Music)

The tuneage of this Osaka, Japan-raised techno DJ cater to an adult audience, but not quite as mature as his most common (and definitely overused) Recommended-If-You-Like comparison, Theo Parrish, whose Detroit “beatdown” style has more soul to it. Some less refined listeners will probably write this off as a bit too noisy, but if you’re not tired of the same-same 20-year-old house-bomp sounds that have lately been microwaved for use by Britney Spears and all those people, you might want to re-evaluate your taste as it is. On the other hand, if you can deal with glitch (or acid jazz, while I’m at it), you should pick this up right away, as the overall feel is elite-level deep house with electronic ratchets, clonks and fat-but-not-too-fat bass lines all coming together to produce euphoric rhythms that are only barely robotic. The grooves morph as they go, evoking fractals moving in slow motion; this is truly advanced stuff. B

Playlist

• Like every Friday, March 10 will be a day for new albums to appear like magic, bringing messages of joy and hope and melodic mediocrity to the masses! It feels like longer than two years since we’ve heard anything from melancholia-pop chanteuse Lana Del Rey, but there it is, this thing here says Blue Banisters came out in 2021, and her upcoming ninth album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard, is indeed coming out this week. Nothing remarkable about this one; Jack Antonoff (a.k.a. Bleachers) is involved, as always, and there are curveball guests again, such as Jon Batiste (the creative director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem), SYML (formerly of the indie band Barcelona), Riopy, Father John Misty and rapper Tommy Genesis. In 2019 Billboard included Del Rey’s smarmy 2011 song “Born to Die” as one of the 100 songs that defined the 2010s (seems incredibly far away already, doesn’t it, like the music industry could already do a rebirth movement just to see if anyone had been paying attention in the first place). Anyhow, here we are, staring down the barrel of this album’s title track, which finds our heroine plumbing the lower echelons of gloom with a slow piano line, some sexlessly torchy stream-of-half-consiousness vocalizing, and all the other ingredients that will lead to her eventually contributing a title song for a James Bond film. (No, knock it off, there’ll be another James Bond movie, you can’t seriously believe they won’t, just try not to forget that Adele did the best one.) (And no, Lana Del Rey is no Adele, and never will be.)

• But wait, there’s another Rey, but this one’s a “Ray,” namely Fever Ray, with their new full-length, Radical Romantics! Ray is of course the stage name of Swedish singer Karin Elisabeth Dreijer, a long-standing trip-hop/electropop fixture who tends to bore people to tears, for instance the poor sap who had to sit through the film Dirty Diaries, “a collection of feminist pornographic short films,” which they soundtracked. “Appropriate but repetitive,” said the writer from Swedish newspaper Smålandsposten, in between snores, but that’s all water under the bridge, let’s just check out this new set of songs, specifically the single, “Kandy,” the video for which features Ray wearing Riff Raff makeup. The song is sort of a tribal-electro thing, basically bereft of any melodic direction, but do go add it to your Spotify if you don’t like nice things.

• Barf barf barf, it’s all-time fedora-rock champion Van Morrison, with Moving On Skiffle, his first album since oh who cares, may I remind you people that this human is fully responsible for the song “Brown-Eyed Girl,” also known as the national anthem for corporate human resources personnel who can’t dance. I know that I will not like his new single, “I’m Movin’ On,” but nevertheless I’ll — wait a second, this isn’t all that bad, actually, sort of like a cross between Bo Diddley and the “Banana Boat” song, like, someone’s playing a rasp, and Van is singing like he’s casually looking for big black tarantulas in his bowl of fruit.

• Ha ha oh come on, Miley Cyrus has a new album, titled Endless Summer Vacation, and I, a seasoned journalist, am supposed to talk about it? Here? Yep, looks like that’s how we’ll wrap up this week’s column, by talking about a Miley Cyrus record. Right, so is she trying to be Metallica again, or is she back to being an emotionally cracked pop diva again? Well, somewhere in the middle, it looks like: “Flowers” is your basic Lorde tuneage with a sample from “I Will Survive.” Why do people encourage this, seriously?

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Mona Mur, Teen Icon (Give/Take Records)

Having kicked off her rebelliously edgy career during the punk explosion of the ’80s, this German-born sort-of-icon has, through the years, collaborated with such artists as FM Einheit, Marc Chung and Alex Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten, which places her in the position of fronting as an early prototype of Zola Jesus, or a female aggro-industrial William Shatner, take your pick. She put out an album called Snake Island last year, which had some good S&M club vibes, not that it takes a huge amount of talent to cobble together something that sounds Rammstein-ish, and that takes us to now, and this two-sided single, wherein she covers two songs, Nirvana’s “Smell Like Teen Spirit,” and Siouxsie And The Banshees’ “Icon.” Just quickly, the latter tune goes down easier than the former, as the slowed-down “Teen Spirit” is about two minutes too long. The Siouxsie tune works better, what with its being buried in effects. This is a novelty record for goths, basically. B

Ledfoot & Ronni Le Tekrø, Limited Edition Lava Lamp (TBC Records)

I had Ledfoot (a.k.a. Tim Scott or Footless), an American singer-songwriter and 12-string guitarist who’s had tunes covered by Bruce Spirngsteen and Sheena Easton, confused with current Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Rickey Medlocke, mostly because they look quite alike, scrawny, older scarecrow dudes with gray hair. Meanwhile, Le Tekrø is the Norwegian guitarist who founded the hair-metal band TNT. I was expecting a lot of blues-rawk that was long past its sell-by date, but no, apparently what brought these guys together was a love of Dire Straits, or maybe Stealers Wheel, seeing as how this record’s opening track, “Little Rosie,” brings a vibe that’s as close to “Stuck in the Middle with You” as anything I’ve heard in, well, ever. I mean, this is a mixed bag of vintage AM radio stuff, with “Crying’” checking in with a sound that combines Willie Nelson with Roy Orbison. A valiant effort, and I’m sure they enjoyed themselves. A

Playlist

• A whole wagonload of CDs will hit your stores and pirate radio stations this Friday, March 3, so beware the Ides of March, as we enter into literally the worst month of the year, with its teaser warm days that suddenly turn into “one last howling blizzard” that’re always followed by 10 straight days of rain, sleet, grayness, and the realization that you didn’t have enough money to pay all your February bills, and so you eat nothing but Beefaroni for a few weeks and everything feels hopeless and then suddenly the Easter Bunny shows up and you heave a sigh of relief, knowing that it’s just about warm enough to say “who cares about rent anyway” and pack a knapsack and go live under the Interstate 93 overpass.

You know how it is, am I right, but meanwhile there are albums to mention, like Ignore Grief, from Xiu Xiu, the three-person California-based experimental art-rock band whose oeuvre is up to 13 albums now, as of this one, which is the band’s first sine 2021’s Oh No, a record made up entirely of weird duets, for whatever reason. Anyhow, they have a new band member as of now, namely David Kendrick, who was formerly with Sparks and Devo, which is probably why he looks as old as Santa Claus. But never mind that, let’s see if I can tolerate more than a minute of the teaser single “Maybae Baeby,” I doubt it but let’s just see. OK, this is just noise nonsense, a bunch of clanging wind-chime things or whatever, all while some lady recites some deconstructionist manifesto about how everything is sooo confusing and awful. I’d expound further on all this, but my stomach’s had about enough of it for today.

• OK, very good, so next up is The National Parks, with their fifth album, 8th Wonder. This American folk-pop band is from Provo, Utah, a slightly underrated city that’s known for — well, Mormonism and a few pockets of enthusiastic anarchists to balance things out. For the last couple of years the band has gone in a more pop direction, but meanwhile they also embarked on a “Campfire Tour” in which they played intimate shows in small venues, all to prove that they haven’t made up their minds as to what they want to be when they grow up, or some such. Right, so I’m listening to the title track from this new album, and it’s very light and wimpy, like if Guster were possessed by Ben Kweller. It has all the rebellious antiestablishmentarian gravitas of the Brady Bunch Band, but that’s OK, because we can always use a band that begs to be ignored.

• Kali Uchis, a Virginia-born R&B-reggaeton-whatever diva whose real name is Karly-Marina Loaiz, is releasing her third full-length on Friday, Red Moon In Venus. Uchis guested on a couple of Gorillaz songs on their 2017 Humanz album, and her second, Sin Miedo, album did pretty well. The new tune, “I Wish you Roses,” would fit in fine in your Spotify between Lana Del Rey and Mitski; it’s OK overall.

• We’ll close with — good grief, what even is this, Daisy Jones & The Six is a fictional band in a real TV show of the same name, about a Fleetwood Mac-style band in the 1970s, except there’s a real album out, called Aurora, which has a plodding, maudlin single titled “Another Love.” The dude singer sounds like Peabo Bryson a little. Have fun with this nonsense, haters of good music.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Nite Skye, Vanishing (Sonic Ritual Records)

I’m like 100 percent positive I’ve talked about this father-son duo before, unless it was someone else. This is their debut album, which doesn’t jibe with my (probably faux) memory, but anyway, here they are, ex-Film School vocalist-guitarist Nyles Lannon and his 12-year-old boy Skye on the drum kit, stomping out the shoegaze/dream-pop vibes. You may have heard of Film School but I haven’t; they were a shoegaze act back in the day, so Nyles is a good dad for Skye to have picked, no question. Some very listenable stuff, particularly if your outdated tastes run to Tangerine Dream sans any krautrock elements, which is what album opener “Dream State” is about. “Guided By A Hand” is even more ’80s-ish, like Raveonettes without all the annoying performative noise. “Doing Time” finally brings us to the shoegaze subject that the record was supposed to be about in the first place; it’s not a wildly original tune but like everything else here it’s got plenty going for it. A

Charming Disaster, Super Natural History (Sonic Ritual Records)

This year’s full-length entry from the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based goth-folk duo, with Ellia Bisker on ukulele and Jeff Morris on guitar. I liked their 2022 record, Our Lady of Radium, a concept album focused on Marie Curie’s ghost, and that’s how they remain here, inspired by the gothic humor of Edward Gorey and Tim Burton, the noir storytelling of Raymond Chandler, traditional murder ballads and old-time cabaret. I like that these two really take their trip seriously; they’re releasing an “oracle deck” of cards similar to a tarot deck, which is brilliant strategy when you’re singing about monsters and ghosts like they do here again, although they have more musicians helping this time around, which makes for a more Built To Spill- or Lou Reed-style vibe, all told, more of a lo-fi post-punk thing. It’s goth-con stuff of course; they’ve opened for such good fits as Dresden Dolls and Rasputina. Nothing wrong here. A

Playlist

• Our next general CD-release date is this Friday, Feb. 24, as the awful winter starts running out of gas forever. LOL, remember when we thought January was just going to be an early spring and some of you were walking around in cargo shorts, remember that? And then it was a frozen ice storm the week of the 24th, and each shovelful of slush weighed 80 pounds? I can’t wait for that to be over, but in the meantime, there are albums we need to discuss, and we’ll start with the one that needs the least introductory verbiage, Adam Lambert’s new album High Drama, heading our way this very minute! Lambert is of course the Star Search version of Freddie Mercury in the current lineup of the classic rock band Queen, sort of; he has to share the singing duties with Paul Rodgers, who sang for Bad Company before they started putting out decent tunes like “No Smoke Without A Fire,” the only “Bad Co” song I like. Where were we, right, so Lambert is considered by many non-singing producers and non-singing musicians to be one of the best singers in the world, and I refuse to get trolled into an argument about that, so let’s have a listen to what’s on the new album, his first since 2020’s Velvet, which gave us “Feel Something,” a crooner ballad that’s so antiseptic that it sounded as if it had to get approval from some random Today show audience before it was released to the five people who actually bought the album. I’m hoping to hear a little originality in his new single, which is — wait, it’s a cover song, “Holding Out for a Hero,” that old Bonnie Tyler tune. He sings good, of course, and he dressed his band in Daft Punk helmets for some reason, maybe just so he’d have a reason to use a Daft Punk-y beat on a song from Footloose that should have been forgotten in 1985. But do have at it, whoever buys this dude’s albums.

• Radiohead drummer Philip Selway releases a new album on Friday, titled Strange Dance. That’s the only neutral thing I have to say on the matter, given that I can’t stand Radiohead, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and do the dance anyway with this thing, because I am a professional at this. The single, “Check For Signs Of Life,” starts off with a slow, rainy, melancholy acoustic piano line — good lord this guy has an awful voice — and leads me to think that he had Zero 7 or maybe Portishead in mind when he wrote this song, and then it slowly becomes a ripoff of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” but more upbeat (what isn’t?). Anyway, no idea why anyone would want to make an album with this song on it, but voila.

• English singer and bass player Gina Birch founded post-punk rock band The Raincoats in 1977, right after she saw a Slits concert (today I learned that The Slits have been around since forever, how about that). Her new solo album, I Play My Bass Loud, is on the way this Friday. The title track is interesting and survivable enough, fitted with a subterranean, urban groove, some agreeable ’80s-ish art rock, and a weird, mocking vocal line from Birch that’s all doused in patch effects and that kind of thing. It’s not hard stuff like The Slits, if you’re wondering, but it’s still no-wave in my book, and besides, I doubt she’s shooting for actual punk these days anyway.

• And finally we have Gorillaz, a cartoon band whose appeal never struck me, not that I feel guilty about it. Cracker Island is the band’s new album, and the title track has a pretty neat electro beat, kind of goth-krautrock-buzzy, to be more specific. I’ve heard worse.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Dudes, Eternal Is The Fruit (Dudes Music)

OK, so I wasn’t even aware there was any such thing as a “Scandirock scene,” which is no surprise, given that I’ve never been to any of those countries. But it’s a thing, at least to those people, and a little digging reveals Norwegian glam-punk band Turbonegro as a leading light of this nonsense, fronting their classic hit “All My Friends Are Dead” as the sound’s gold standard (it’s like Kiss meets Anthrax, but emo, and with blazey guitar solos). These guys (Dudes) are heavy into that band and, they claim, The Hives, but this is a different kind of spazz-rock, like AC/DC welded to Animal Boy-era Ramones. I mean, these guys really want their minions to break stuff, as they bring a sense of eastern-European folk-metal into the mix but leave a Hives element in there to make it more or less dishwasher-safe. American bands should really be doing this kind of thing, given the dystopian circumstances, let’s be real. A

Florencia & the Feeling, Birthday (self-released)

Pop-funk fusion with four-part harmonies, hints of jazz, and Latin roots is the skinny on this one, released by a five-piece band led by singer-guitarist Florencia Rusiñol, who was raised in East Tennessee by Argentine parents who “instilled in her a love of Latin American music from an early age.” Comparison bands include Vulfpeck, Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan, the latter of which is definitely the closest as far as what I heard; there’s a lot of gently tendered, lazy syncopation over which Rusiñol practices her vaguely Natalie Merchant-ish mid-range-soprano, to no really thrilling effect, not that it’s bad or anything. The rub is that these jumpy songs were written while Rusiñol was working through a nasty breakup, which results in an odd combination of lines like “I can erase your pictures from the internet but not from my head” being sung over phoned-in Spyro Gyra semi-jazz. Best case, they wind up opening for some 70-year-old superstar in Las Vegas, is what I think. B

Playlist

• Friday, Feb. 17, is on the way, and so is a plethora of new music albums, which I only mention because I’ve never used the word “plethora” in the multiple-award-winning column prior to today! In hot news, Dallas, Texas-based alternative rock bros Secret Machines are releasing their fifth studio LP, The Moth, The Lizard, And The Secret Machines, this week, and it will probably be big in the U.K., because that’s where they’re really popular, which explains why you’ve never heard of them. Actually they’re more of a progressive-ish rock band, not wildly technical but just enough to impress Kerrang! writers, you know, how bands like Marillion used to get popular for being sort of like Genesis, like, not really progressive but not fun bands like Slade and all those guys. But here I am droning on about something I know nothing about, because, like you, I know these guys exist but for all I know they play nursery rhymes on kazoos. So the task at hand is to try to find out what they sound like, and we’ll do that right now by surfin’ over to YouTube to give a listen to the band’s new single, “There’s No Starting Over.” It’s really slow and draggy, but somewhat interesting. OK, you know what this song is, it’s something that was inspired by M83 when these fellas went on tour with them. Like, the tune is epic in some ways and just awkward and weird in others, and the synth layers give it a good amount of heft. Matter of fact, after it gets going it’s pretty good, with some big vocal layers, some noisy percussion and such and so, but the bottom line is that it’s totally like M83, kind of “Kim and Jesse”-ish. Nothing wrong with that, other than the fact that a lot of writers who are much meaner than me will write it off as derivative. Anyway, OK, very good, moving on.

• One pop diva I’ve never really paid any attention to is P!nk, mostly because she makes me think of lady wrestlers. Her new album is Trustfall, her first since 2019’s Hurts 2B Human, but she’s apparently pretty busy all the time, doing non-diva stuff like writing music; for example, she wrote the songs “I Walk Alone” and “Lie to Me” for Cher’s 2013 album Closer to the Truth, which I didn’t know, did you? Anyway, her new single “Never Gonna Not Dance Again” sees her entering the out-of-ideas phase of her career; the tune is a half-formed bubblegum radio bit that everyone will think is Kesha probably, and the hook sucks. Other than that I love it.

• According to this web thingie here, Anna B Savage is a London singer-songwriter whose songs are “stark, skeletal paintings of moods and reflection, using a palette of mainly voice and guitar. Most prominent is her voice — strong and sonorous, yet with a vulnerability that feels as if she’s in the same room as you.” What does this mean in actual words? Well, to me it means she’s more annoying and unintelligibly hyperbolic than Ani Difranco, meaning no, I don’t own any of her albums by choice. Her second album, in|FLUX, follows her 2021 debut, A Common Turn, and the title track is crummy Nintendo-techno with her creepy voice singing creepy words about sex. I really dislike it.

• And finally we have funny-looking Canadian folk-pop dude Ron Sexsmith, hawking his 17th full-length, The Vivian Line. In 2010, Paperny Entertainment made a documentary about this guy, called Love Shines, about his attempt to gain worldwide fame for an album that was produced by Bob Rock; apparently it didn’t work because this is the first I’ve heard of him. “Diamond Wave” is a good song, ’70s-radio-ish a la Jim Croce, something like that. It’s decent.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Nervous Eaters, Monsters + Angels (Wicked Cool Records)

If you’re old enough to have been part of the Boston rock scene when the success of The Cars lured in all the drugged-out saps, um, I mean record company reps to check out every band in the city, or even if you just listened to a lot of WBCN FM back then, there was no way to avoid this local band’s most popular hit, “Loretta” (you know, the one that went “when I talk to Loretta, cool slacks and sweater”). This Steve Cataldo-led roots-punk quartet nailed down a major label deal with Elektra Records in 1980, and that was about it; the LP was widely dissed as “not very punk for a punk record,” but in retrospect, the New York Dolls’ vibe was roughly in the same ballpark. Anyhow, this album is their first record since a 1986 EP, and the push single seems to be “Hop Sing Said,” a mellow-ish mid-tempo tune that’s kind of Dinosaur Jr.-ish. “Wild Eyes” recalls early Stones, “Superman’s Hands” is oldschool jangle-pop; “Last Chance” is pure ’80s radio-bubblegum. At worst, the songs are good and it sounds like they had fun doing this. A

ASCO, “Lacrimosa” (CAOS Records)

You know, it’s a wonder these Beatport-begging techno DJs get any press outside of 5 Magazine, Traxsource and whatnot. I say that because there’s always very little information to be found about them, which would be fine with me if all the artists wanted to remain anonymous or semi-anonymous, but I don’t think they all do. That goes double for this guy, the search for whose biography wore me out after 10 minutes and now I don’t care anymore: Ooh, you’re such an edgelord, whoever you are! But that’s not to detract from this guy’s music, don’t get me wrong. He’s been cruising along quite well over the last few months with a couple of neo-disco tracks (“Born Slippy” and “Fortuna”), and now this, a future-rave-style rendition of one of the most famous classical choir pieces in history, a part of the Dies Irae sequence in the Roman Catholic requiem mass. A real orchestra and choir help out here; it’s half orchestral and half buzzy-beetle-noise-electro, with no recognizable drop. Not my kind of jam but times have, unfortunately, changed. A

Playlist

• We’ll see a whole bunch of hot new rock ’n’ roll albums hit the streets on Feb. 10, as we draw ever closer to kissing this winter goodbye, can you even believe how fast it’s gone? And look, bonus, it’s a new album from acid-dropping loons Brian Jonestown Massacre, called The Future Is Your Past. I’m actually pretty happy about that. I think the last music I heard from these guys was either 2016’s Third World Pyramid or more probably 2010’s Who Killed Sgt Pepper, but it’s all good. The band is still led by Anton Newcombe, whose hobbies include hiring/firing every musician he meets and making the Dandy Warhols feel uncomfortable, and this is his, um, I mean the band’s, 20th album, a milestone no one would ever have predicted. You never know what you’ll hear from this band; usually it’s noisy neo-psychedelica, and a quick run-through of the album’s title track is pretty much what you’d expect: slow, dank, jangly early-’60s acid-rock, sort of like Donovan, that kind of thing. At least there’s normal-ish singing on this tune, and there you go, that’s about it for the 411 on this one, because Anton couldn’t care less if he made any money from his music, and that’s why he’s rich.

• Hey, man, what is this, an aughts-indie revival? Look there, gang, it’s New Jersey-based indie rockers Yo La Tengo, with their new album This Stupid World! I’ve owned a few Yo La Tengo albums over the years and have never really listened to any of them more than once; there’s synergy going on right now in this column, because this band uses roughly the same basic ingredients as Brian Jonestown Massacre — noise-pop, shoegaze, etc. — but the output is usually boring. At this writing the latest teaser tune is “Aselestine,” a lazy, sort-of-folk-ish song that’s sort of like Wilco meets Guster. I know, I probably should have posted a trigger warning before saying such a thing, but anyway, there you have it.

• Dutch dream-pop lady Annelotte de Graaf goes by the stage name Amber Arcades, and she’ll be releasing her fourth album, Barefoot On Diamond Road, in just a few hours! Interestingly, she holds a master’s degree in law, and worked as an assistant for war crimes tribunals at the United Nations; as of 2016 she held a position “assessing the claims of refugees granted asylum in the Netherlands who are seeking to have their families brought over.” The single, “Just Like Me,” is a weird little minimal techno joint that sounds like Aimee Mann after listening to way too much Aphex Twin.

• We’ll bag it for the week with the latest from Kelela! She is a former telemarketer from Washington, D.C., who got a spiffy record contract from the ever-trippy Warp Records, so she is now an alternative-R&B singer with a second album, Raven, out this week! She first hit the sort-of-big-time with 2005’s Hallucinogen, an EP that goes over all the disturby nonsense that happens during the beginning, middle and end stages of a relationship, except it’s all in reverse chronological order. Anyhow, this new album, which I’m required by law to take seriously because it’s on Warp Records, of course, is, artistically, intended as “a reaction to feeling alone as a black femme working within dance music,” which, granted, is probably pretty difficult, I mean, just look at what Steve Aoki gets away with just because he’s a white male. Whatever, she might get more love for this album if the rest of the songs aren’t like the title track, which is basically afterparty glitch-tech improv that makes no sense, but no one likes good music anymore, so who knows.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Meg Baird, Furling (Drag City Records)

This singer and drummer is well-known in the indie/retro-folk scene, having helped to form the psychedelic rock supergroup Heron Oblivion after a several-album stint with Espers. The New Jersey-born, San Francisco-based hipster has other projects on her resumé, too, including three albums with her sister Laura as the Baird Sisters, and one with harpist Mary Lattimore, titled Ghost Forests, that reached No. 3 on the Billboard New Age chart. This one starts with “Ashes, Ashes,” an appropriately titled tune recalling Dark Side of the Moon-era Pink Floyd in its somber, piano-driven, slow-march-to-oblivion po-facedness; thankfully layered with cool things, it’s made quanta more fascinating through Baird’s use of ghostly, wordless warbling. “Star Hill Song” carries on similarly but on a more folk-pop bent; it’s here we first encounter her Joan Baez-ish soprano, a thing that’s about as folkie as it gets. This stuff is great Coachella bait, but it’s a lot more compelling that what one usually gets from that crowd. A+

Scott Crow, Of Everything and Nothing (Emergency Hearts Records)

This Texan is becoming something of a Hunter S. Thompson of the alternative politics scene. A long-time anarchist author and activist in the anti-fascist, environmental and mutual aid movements, Crow presents here a mishmash some of his first musical recordings since 1992, a collection of recent collaborations, some of which feature guest appearances from other artists and producers recorded in 2016 and up through the present. He’s had several projects over the years, ranging from darkwave to noise rock, but this one opens with a surprisingly melodic New Wave/art-rock tune, “Stardust Supernova,” that recalls New Order’s late-’80s recipe. “Crown Slow 2.0” is a dirgey drone-a-thon that’s more in a Swans vein; the very pretty “R34L Falling Into Sleep” is super-refined krautrock if you ask me. Really impressive, nearly all of this, save for several remixes tabled by Portland, Oregon-based producer Televangel, whose technique is a bit messy-muddy for my tastes, even if many would probably hear a lot of Throbbing Lobster in them. A

Playlist

• It’s your boy here, takin’ a jaundiced look at the stinky batch of music CDs coming out on Feb. 3, regardless of whether or not they should! Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante is releasing two albums, but it’s complicated, ready? The albums are different versions of the same album, one for vinyl and the other for CD and digital. The former, . I : (pronounced ‘one’), spans seven tracks, while : II . (pronounced ‘two’) spans 10. OK, did you get all that? He wrote the music while he was listening to experimental artists like Oren Ambarchi, Klara Lewis and Ryoji Ikeda, and the melodic parts take inspiration from John Lennon, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Jimi Hendrix and Brian Eno. I say all this only for the interest of RHCP fans, who wouldn’t care if the tunes were all inspired by the background music to Pac Man Cereal commercials (did you know that one of the Batmans, Christian Bale, was in one of those?), because as long as it’s RHCP, with the real Flea actually playing bass and the music is sort of like Frank Zappa but not actually funny at all, forget it, it’ll be a huge album for RHCP completists to buy and put away carefully without ever listening to. Just my luck, of course, there are no advance singles to listen to, but it’ll be ambient stuff, according to what I’m reading on the internet, and it’s likely there’ll be some jungle rinseouts, because he’s into that kind of thing these days, literally for no reason whatsoever.

• So you thought Shania Twain had given up singing goopy Top 40 songs and retired to some 50-acre horse farm to grow petunias and count hundred-dollar bills, did you? Well you’re wrong, those petunias and horsies cost a lot of hundred-dollar bills, so she’s putting out a new album this Friday, called Queen Of Me! Her 1990s heyday is over, so she’s been playing at Caesar’s Palace for mobsters and all those kinds of people, then she went through a horrible divorce with her producer, Mutt Lange, so the producer for this album is not Mutt Lange. But before I run out of room, let’s go take a listen to “Waking Up Dreaming,” since it’s probably the push single, given that it already has 2.5 million YouTube views from bots and people who accidentally landed on the video while searching for “We Will Rock You” or whatnot. The song starts off with a “Footloose”-style drumbeat, and then Shania starts singing, sounding kind of bored, for which I wouldn’t blame her, because as feisty and catchy she wants this song to be, it isn’t, it’s just kind of phoned-in and limp, which means she’ll probably sing it on some daytime TV show, causing IQ levels to drop worldwide, and that’s the only time you’ll ever hear it again, not that the song is completely worthless. OK, it is, but where would we be with hilariously disposable pop art, you tell me.

• British six-piece indie-rock band The Go! Team are releasing their newest full-length, Get Up Sequences Part Two, this week. The entire album is available to listen to on YouTube right now in one big lump without separation between song titles, and the first song is kind of dumb, like Flaming Lips but with a full brass band. I hate it, but your mileage may vary, lord help us.

• We’ll call it a column by checking out British pop songstress Ellie Goulding, whose new LP, Higher Than Heaven, has a single, called “Let It Die.” It’s an OK tune, like Avril Lavigne for soccer parents, not too energetic or listenable, just right for cranking in the minivan while you drop the kid off for practice, where the other kids will give you funny looks for being cringe.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).