Author: Eric Saeger

Save Ferris, “Xmas Blue” (self-released)

This one came in too late to be included in the pre-HannuChistmaKwanzaa column. This teaser single from a 2024 LP from the Orange Country, California, ska band comes with some interesting sidebars for us to go over, the first being the song’s background itself. It’s a girl-sung rootsy dancehall track that does have a Christmas-y feel to it; it’s not some sort of annoying ’90s-ska phone-in at all, but anyway, the lonely-at-the-holidays-steeped lyrics revolve around the trials of a friend of singer Monique Powell who “went through a hard divorce, and even two years later was still so obsessed with his ex-wife that it was borderline stalking.” Sucks that anyone has to be without a love connection any time of the year, but another thing to know is that this is the band’s first release under the newly launched music community platform We Are Giant, which, local musicians should note, helps give a social media edge to unknown bands who could use a boost, this by connecting more intimately with fans. Good for them, I say. A —Eric W. Saeger

Patrick Wolf, A Circling Sky (self-released)

Unbeknownst to most, this 40-something British singer-songwriter is one of the most talented and idiosyncratic musicians of his generation, with a run of critically hailed albums, notably Lycanthropy in 2003 and Lupercalia in 2011, the latter of which saw him incorporating viola, Celtic harp, dulcimer, baritone ukulele, piano, harpsichord, analog synthesizers and re-sampled field recordings in his music and collaborating with the likes of Marianne Faithfull, Tilda Swinton, Patti Smith and others. Imagine what you’d get if Mark Oliver Everett from The Eels wanted to make tuneage for steampunk conventions and you’re pretty close, at least going by this set of B-sides and rarities, which includes the front-facing “Godrevy Point,” a gently apocalyptic track full of from-the-mountaintop reverb propelling the odd little collection of instruments on board. Nick Cave is another touchstone here, if that’s your bag. A —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nice, way to hurry things along, 2024, the first general-issue CD release Friday of the year is Jan. 5! It is an election year, fam, and at this rate it’ll be the last one before the whole system melts down, so it was sure nice knowing ya, but whatever, there are albums on trucks headed to stores, including a new one from British grime rapper Ghetts, On Purpose With Purpose. You hip American kids probably know him from his days with the grime collectives The NASTY Crew and The Movement, but nowadays — wait, what, you’ve never heard of NASTY Crew or The Movement or any grime collectives to begin with? I’m kidding, of course you haven’t, bands and artists from the U.K. might as well be from the planet Neptune for all American listeners care, even though garage-grime has been a lot more fun and cool than American hip-hop for, what, 10 years now? Twenty? But that’s OK, when did American hip-hoppers ever get anything wrong, aside from all the PR stunts they fell for, in other words, absolutely, don’t pay attention to grime, just because it’s better than U.S. corporate hip-hop in every single way. Wait, don’t get mad, here, forget I said anything, let me go check out this album and report my findings, for your reading pleasure! So, the LP starts out with “Daily Duppy,” comprising a dream-time beat and Ghetts’ impeccably enunciated British blatherings; it has a little trap-drumming going on there so American audiences can understand that it’s some sort of rap or hip-hop or whatnot, be sure to listen to it with a parent or guardian in case you have any questions.

• LastWorld is a band whose music is targeted at “fans of Journey, Bon Jovi, Night Ranger, Alias & The Storm,” got that, guys?, and what that means is — wait, what does it mean, I’ve never heard of “Alias & The Storm,” am I being trolled (OK, I looked, there’s no such band, so they probably mean a band called Alias and another one called Storm, oh forget it)? Whatever, LastWorld, a two-piece consisting of Jim Shepard (all instruments) and David Cagle (all vocals) will release a new album titled Beautiful Illusion this Friday. The kickoff single, “Never Gonna Let You Go,” is a big bouquet of hair-rawk hooks that blends Journey, Bon Jovi, Night Ranger, and — wait, we already talked about this. Right? No, seriously, if you liked White Lion, a band that wrote all their songs to “Billboard specifications,” you’ll like this, probably.

• Hannah Kaminer is an Americana group from Asheville, North Carolina. They want people to stop saying they’re an Americana band and instead tell all their friends that they’re a country music band, which I refuse to do because of my journalistic principles, and because I am a jerk most days. The band’s third studio album, Heavy On The Vine, is on the way, and you can check out the title track on YouTube. The song is an Americana take on the typical Mazzy Star B-side, with lots of slidey dobro, a synth that sounds like dobro, a fiddle, and a drummer on a drum set that has like three pieces to it. It’s very pretty and dreamy for a totally Americana song.

• And finally we have someone from Florida recording under the stage name Tegu, with a new album titled Forest Hills, which was recorded in one 24-hour block of lo-fi improvisational mayhem. It features an ingredients list consisting of, and I quote, “field recordings, tape loops, vocal haze, FX, and thrifted Yamaha keys.” Given that, you already know pretty much what it sounds like: breezy soundtrack-ish stuff, with hazy synths, bluebirds chirping, etc. It’s OK. —Eric W. Saeger

Morbid Saint, Swallowed By Hell (HR Records)

Still a lot of metal in the pipeline, folks, so let’s look at some of it, specifically from this Wisconsin band. This one comes to us “more than 30 years after their second LP, ‘Destruction System,’ was recorded but not finished, only to be officially published recently.” And so they’ve been very not-busy of late, these fellas, but the only thing that resulted from their hilariously long hiatus is that, well darn, they’ve gotten pretty good, to be honest. If you’ve ever really loved Slayer you’ll like this for sure; singer Pat Lind is still on board, tabling Tom Araya dead-ringer soundalike bellowing. The title track is rooted in Aughts-era black metal, which I’m sure you’ll want playing in your baby’s nursery; “Bloody Floors” is power metal, and such and so. They’ve got a great sound if you like this kind of thing. A

Mary Tominy, Untame The Tiger (Merge Records)

This Washington, D.C., lady has been a fixture in the indie-rawk world for 30 years, playing with such bands as garage-pop power trio Ex Hex and post-punk troupe Autoclave. Although her voice is still a bit awkward, she’s refined her style to a really noticeable degree; if you stick with album opener “No Thirds,” you’ll encounter some really stunning symphonics that put her in the same ballpark as Natalie Merchant. It’s jangly, vaguely hopeful and easily accessible. “Summer” comes off like a Versus A-side, which means it has no commercial hope whatsoever, not that that’s a bad thing of course, but in the meantime she does add something of a Sheryl Crow break to it. “Looking For The Sun” is pretty trippy, for sure; imagine Chrissie Hynde going through a ’70s Donovan phase, is how I’d put it. Overall she’s aging like a fine wine that won’t appeal to all palates, not that she cares about that by now, I’m sure. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yay, groan, New Year’s Eve is on the way, one of my least favorite days of the year, when my Grinch heart has to endure people looking all happy awaiting the mass amateur drinking contest that is the reason for the season, and we marrieds stay up until midnight, pretending to be relevant for whatever reason, watching all the Dua Lipas and Ricky Martins as they honk their Who-Flonkas and bash their Who-Bombas, and then they’ll sing and sing and sing, and then comes the thing I hate worst of all, watching Ryan Seacrest and Anderson Cooper doing their potted houseplant imitations while wearing actual ties in order to “check in” on concerts from Poppy and Taylor Swift and the Beibs or whatnot, which is of course your kids’ cue to run to their rooms in order to avoid catching a bad case of “Responsible Adult Cooties,” where they’ll listen to death metal and crunk and text their little friends about things you really don’t want to know about. I have no idea why we celebrate New Year’s Day; I mean, it’s the last gasp of the holidays that started on Halloween with everyone dressing up as sexytime monsters and rolls of paper towels or whatever they do, so really, what’s to celebrate? It’s just going to be freezing and slushy for the next few months, and all that New Year’s alcohol will be long worn-off by February. But let’s put that aside for a second while I take a look at the (I’m so sure) tons of new albums coming out on Dec. 29. If there are two I’ll be lucky to get through this column, maybe by riffing on a few other things, like the fact that I couldn’t find actual candy canes for my HannuKwanzzMas tree literally anywhere for a day or so. Right, right, what do we have here, literally no albums except for stompy German band Lord Of The Lost, whose stupidly titled covers album, Weapons Of Mass Seduction, is on its way! These goth-metal frauds like to dress up like the glittery, certifiably crazy dude in The Cell, and in this one they cover songs from Billy Idol, Bronski Beat, Judas Priest and — well, you know, Sia, because those bands always have to do stuff like that. The teaser single is a Rammstein-ized version of Cutting Crew’s “I Just Died In Your Arms” that’s just as bad as you’re imagining it, like they have a girl singer who has all the nuance and originality of a McDonald’s french fry, and the male singer just sings the same nonsense an octave lower than her, and there are ’80s synths in there. Ack, let’s move on, if there’s any place to move on to.

• Ack, ack, it’s another metal band, called Dominum, with their new one, Hey Living People, but you know who’ll want to know about this is famous local author and friend of the Hippo Dan Szczesny, because the leader of this euro-trash band used to be in the symphonic-metal band Visions of Atlantis. This band’s trip is sort of like a zombie-centric version of Abney Park, with zombie stuff instead of steampunk stuff. “Patient Zero” is awesome if you like bad acting and (actually good) sympho-metal.

• Ten years ago Irish indie-folkie Ciaran Lavery didn’t get enough attention for his album Not Nearly Dark, so he has re-rubbed the whole thing under the title Not Nearly Dark (10 Years Later). It’s stupid that the Bonnaroo crowd didn’t get into him, he’s like a cross between Jeff Buckley and Rod Stewart, so snooze on him this time, that’d be great.

• We’ll end the last column of 2023 (good riddance, am I right?) with Mexican oi band Malcría! This one is tough and loud and punkish, and it’s titled Fantasías Histéricas, which even I could roughly translate.

Dollyrots, “Auld Lang Syne” (Wicked Cool Records)

I absolutely hate New Year’s Eve. It’s the last celebratory moment before everything freezes here in New England for a good four or fifty months, and in honor of that, the lowest-tier 20something-age drinkers are out and about, having fun while we marrieds try to stay awake till midnight as if we’re somehow relevant. I’m basking in a little joy here, though: Finally a holiday record darkens my emailbox, after I’d given up hope (I probably missed like 20 of them, and I do apologize to any PR person who sent me news about one I absentmindedly deleted), and look at this, it’s a husband-wife punk team (the lady plays bass and sings, hubby does the guitars) who used to be on Joan Jett’s Blackheart Records label, doing everyone’s — OK, my, after “O Holy Night” and “Feliz Navidad” — least favorite holiday song. It starts out semi-seriously, as tedious as any other rock version you’ve heard, then it moves to a sort-of-fast tempo, nothing too wild, just something they’re probably hoping will make it onto a rom-com soundtrack, mostly to be annoying. I have no idea why I bothered with this at all. C

Various “Artists,” Yule Log Jamz: The World’s Hottest Wood Burning Sounds (Pretty Good Friends Records)

Fine, if I’m going to get trolled, I’m passing it along to my thousands of readers. This looked to me like a holiday record, but actually it’s a variation on the virtual “Yule log,” or “crackling fireplace” that can be found on Netflix and elsewhere. Pretty Good Friends is a comedy label, not that I can for the life of me remember reviewing one of their comedy albums, and I’m (all together now) too lazy to look, but yeah, it’s kind of funny in its way. This consists of videotapes of 11 different log fires from different countries, with no talking or anything, including “the party-pumping flames of Germany, the polite crackles of Canada, and the hygge-hysterical hotness of Sweden. Plus New Zealand lit up some Manuka wood like you’ve never heard it before!!” Anyway, you can find it at prettygoodfriends.com/fire, where you can pay $5 to own it forever, or just be normal and cheap and simply stream the YouTube version at their channel. They also offer a festive “Smells Like Something’s Burning” soy candle if you have $15 that you don’t figure you’d ever otherwise use under any circumstances whatsoever ever. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Oh by gosh by golly, it’s time for no new CDs to come out on Friday, Dec. 22, just like every year on the last Friday before ChristmaKwanzaKkah! I’ll tell you, hopelessness abounds, fam, hopelessness abounds, I’ll bet there are like zero new albums coming out for me to talk about here, and I’ll have to resort to riffing about how I couldn’t find candy canes at Walmart the other week to put on my HannuChristmaKwanazaa tree! There were literally none, which was insane, but if you want to read the whole story you’ll have to “friend” me on Facebook, but be patient; I usually only get around to checking my Facebook notifications once a month, as long as the month has a full moon in it somewhere. Oh, forget it, it’s no use, I’m going to do the dutiful and look for some albums to write about for all you good little boys and girls, you deserve a big huge ChrisHannuKwan cookie of snark, and by the gods, I will deliver, you’re just going to have to give me a minute to find something! (20 minutes later) Ack, ack, there’s nothing anywhere! Let me check Amazon, maybe Jeff Bezos isn’t too busy building his giant toy NASA to let us poor music journos know about some new albums! Wait, here’s one, from Conway the Machine and Wun Two, whoever in tarnation that is, it’s a new album, titled Palermo! This project unites Buffalo, N.Y., rapper Conway the Machine and German lo-fi producer Wun Two. The sample track I decided to, you know, sample, was “Brick By Brick,” a good example of awkward downtempo weirdness, over which Conway spits a bunch of venomous but unadventurous prattle while rapping like he’s eating a meatball sub. It’s cool, don’t get me wrong.

• I’ll tell ya, folks, for ultimate weirdness, you can’t do much better than Louisville, Kentucky’s Bo Daddy Harris, who as a kid wanted to grow up to become a superstar of something-anything. Hey, man, like I always say, if you can’t make the Who’s Who, you can always try for the What-The-Heck-Was-That, and guess what, he succeeded, folks! He continues his tradition of What-The-Heck-Was-That-ness on his new album, It’s a Southern Thing, and it’s always trippy to see him do his thing, singing his weird country tunes in that — voice of his. The closest experience I can think of to watching him sing one of his old-school country songs in his super-low weirdo voice — which you’d never expect to hear coming out of him, being that he looks like a typical Zoomer incel who’s employed at an Apple store talking to boomers about technology despite the fact that he wouldn’t know an embedded operating system from Jethro Clampett — was the first time I saw Gomer Pyle sing opera like Placido Domingo, but that’s OK! He tried doing comedy but that didn’t pan out, so obviously he was born for this, being a cross between Hank Williams Sr. and Tom Waits. Seriously, go check out one of his YouTubes, you’ll melt down completely.

• Ack, ack, there’s nothing but metal albums left, fam, except for some other CD that we’ll get to in a minute. Let’s see, we have the snobbily named Colombian thrash band Funeral Vomit, with their new album, Monumental Putrescence, which I guarantee would make a great gift for your grandma, and U.K. act Ulfarr, with their new one, Orlegscaeft! Ulfarr wears spooky eye makeup, so proceed with caution!

• We’ll vamoose for the week after one more, This Is New Tone, the new compilation LP from Bad Time Records! One of the sample tracks is “Better Home” by We Are The Union; it’s a frenzied ska-punk track that will appeal to millennials who thought Sublime were too wimpy and boring, which, of course, they were.

Asha Jefferies, Ego Ride (Nettwerk Records)

Debut album from this Australian pop-princess, steeped in queer sensibilities, aimed at the straight-ahead alt-pop demographic that gravitates to Liz Phair and such, and look, it’s on the Nettwerk Records label, which always promises goodness. I’m way ahead of the curve on this one, which isn’t out until April, but Katy Perry did pretty much the same thing with her first LP, like I was already sick of hearing about her months before her LP came out. I’ll leave it to you to grok the parallels there, but in the meantime, this one’s a winner from the word go. “Stranger” starts off in a casual Portishead-ish direction, triple-layered with lazy synths, slow-bonked piano and orchestral statements, and even before Jefferies adds her Sarah McLachlan semi-yodel to it you’re already envisioning its future as a roll-credits fadeout to a major movie, something of that sort. The artiste’s people want me to talk about the single, “Keep My S—t Together,” a master-class mid-tempo chick-rocker a la Sheryl Crow, and so here goes: It’s pretty dreamy too. A+

Tutu Puoane, Wrapped in Rhythm (SoulFactory Records)

Another far-in-advance notice that’s well worth the wait. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, and a resident of Belgium since the early Aughts, this theatrical singer has collaborated with the Brussels Jazz Orchestra, Bert Joris, the Flemish Philharmonic, Tineke Postma, John Clayton, Metropole Orkest and Black Lives – from Generation to Generation. Her lilting soprano, which you’ll find here nestled among typical smoky room-jazz components like belled trumpets and such, is of the Toni Braxton variety, at least when she’s in a more or less post-bop groove, but as well — and this should come as no shock — she’s got a world-music side to her, half-singing about esoteric concepts like the promises the Earth made to her forebears and how she feels them in her feet. This is a lot more advanced than what Braxton fans have become accustomed to over the years, but Braxton is without a doubt the touchstone here. The passages glide and swoop and become more irresistible by the minute. A+

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Ack, ack, I’m supposed to be writing about albums coming out this Friday, Dec. 15, but I’ll bet you there aren’t any on my go-to critics’ cheat sheet! Yup, nope, just one, an LP titled One Wayne G, the sixth one from Canadian jangle-pop annoyance Mac DeMarco, but since I’d rather go get a root canal than — wait, never mind, he’s a cat person, he made a video about his cat, Pickles, who died recently, so in honor of Pickles I’ll go check out whatever YouTube has on this album. Huh, looks like he named all this album’s songs after the dates he wrote them. Here’s one of the dumb things, titled “20180512.” It’s really mellow and upbeat and he thankfully doesn’t sing; it’s like what you’d hear if Spyro Gyra wrote an elevator music song for a yoga retreat, so forget all this nonsense, I’ll look for something kind of normal at a little-known CD-release-information website called Amazon.com. Well well, the first thing I see is a soundtrack thing, titled Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street 2023 Broadway Cast Recording. Now I know what you’re thinking, you want to watch me predict what I think this album will sound like, as if I’m just here for your entertainment. Well, to heck with it, I’ll tell you, I predict it sounds like bad but important-sounding music from a Broadway play that people stopped going to see back in 2011. Et voila, that’s exactly it, the same music they played on the super-boring 2007 Stephen Sondheim/Johnny Depp film that was based on Christopher Boyd’s 1970 play. Josh Groban sings the Sweeney Todd parts in this one, not that it helps any.

• There are so few new CD releases coming out as the “countdown to Christmas” winds down that I think we may as well just talk about new country & western albums for the remainder of the column, because that’s all I’m really seeing. But before that, if you’re wondering why you don’t have as much fun during Christmas as you did when you were 11, it’s probably because the mass media wants you to think there really is a “countdown,” like you’re not actually having fun or experiencing the joy of camraderie yet, because the countdown is still going on. Or at least that’s what “they” want us to think. The truth is that the journey is the fun part. In fact, when HannuKwanzmas day actually arrives, that’s when the fun ends, you know? That’s when things really get stressful as you run around trying to get your relatives out of your house, returning gifts and whatever. So enjoy the season, fam, and in the meantime you might consider buying country singer Riley Green’s new LP, Ain’t My Last Rodeo. Green is of course a Jon Pardi wannabe, sounding sort of like Thomas Rhett or a tin-plated Merle Haggard, but at least it’s not Rascal Flatts, so count your blessings, cowpokes!

• Sticking with this week’s country music tangent, Earned It is the new album by Larry Fleet, who sounds like every modern male picker-grinner, and plus, he has a ZZ Top beard, at least at this writing. The title track is really bluegrass-y, which I respect, like, if Larry the Cable Guy could hold a tune it’d probably sound like this.

• We’ll wrap up this week’s horse-ropin’, chicken-pluckin’, pig-scramblin’ column with the new full-length from Nashville’s most famous “nepo baby,” Rosanne Cash! The album is called The Wheel, and the title track is actually pretty good, some busy finger-picking guitar-tronica. Imagine Wilson Phillips trying to be seriously country and you’d be in the ballpark.

KO Mini, Chef’s Kiss (self-released)

We’re seriously just about at the point where there’s almost no need to list a music release’s record label when writing about its merits or lack thereof, given that so many artists are completely independent (if the vampires at Ticketmaster and such could be prevented from buying up concert tickets and scalping them we’d be even better off). Anyway, what drew me to this little X-rated bubblegum EP was its tease that the single, “stoptryingtohavesexwithme,” “pushes the boundary of how much blunt humor and simultaneous sex appeal you should put into a song.” In a word, I was anticipating something funny, which it isn’t; it’s more about cruel rejection, not that most leering, overstepping incels don’t deserve anything better, but the beat is cool enough, a lot of earthquakey Ed Banger booms going on underneath. It’s a club-banging, Lolita-voiced break from the usual trap oatmeal, which, I’m sure you know by now, I absolutely cannot stand. The playful, fluttering/soaring “Sorry In Advance” is definitely worth checking into if you have some spare Spotify space. A

Escuela Grind, DDEEAATHHMMEETTAALL (MNRK Heavy Records)

I didn’t mean to riff on yet another metal release this quarter, but seriously, folks, this time of year I get sent like 50 of them every five minutes, and as well in my defense, at least this one’s from a New England-based band, well, half of it’s from Pittsfield, Mass., anyhow, go Patriots, amirite fam? The roster is three boys and two girls, one of the latter being singer Katerina Economou, who sounds like the dude from Cannibal Corpse, sort of, but more like Quorthon, like one of those raspy mini-sized cave-monster guys from the Hobbit movie, and the music is, as promised, very grindcore, like the sort of music you picture your pet tarantula humming to itself while it walks across the table to surprise your mom. It’s pretty epic for what it is, I suppose, not that I’d ever want these people to get mad at me, and thus I may be lying. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Hello, everyone, how was your late/second Thanksgiving, mine was fine except for when I completely ruined the turkey gravy by following a recipe I found online, at the Betty Crocker website, believe it or not, and it basically said I should combine equal parts flour and butter/turkey/whatever slime, but I took the recipe seriously and basically ended up with a cake that tasted like turkey; I’ve decided to cut this horrible disaster into a bunch of small compact cakes and sell them as “Gobbler Twinkies,” watch this space for my initial public stock offering and get a prime seat on the victory train! In the meantime, Friday, Dec. 8, is the next date for new CD releases, and look at that, there are actual albums listed on my private, secret metacritic.com web page, a source that only professional music journalists like me are allowed to access unless you have a web browser! I’ll stick to tradition and get the album I don’t really want to even talk about out of the way first, that being Before And After, the ninety-bazillionth album from horrible-voiced Woodstock charlatan Neil Young! No, I’m kidding, you guys, his song “Ohio” was OK, I thought, and it’s still OK even though it came out before SnapChat or the macarena or even electricity for that matter, and “Rockin’ In The Free World” is pretty epic, despite the fact that his guitar solo, as always, sounded like a duck trying to imitate the Storage Wars auctioneer dude (hey, let me have a little fun while I still can, I’ll be spending the next two or three columns complaining about the fact that there are no new albums coming out aside from box sets and hamster-wheel-metal albums from Finland)! OK, let’s see if my stomach can even deal with this new album, which is composed of acoustic versions of his old songs, like “Burned” from when he was in Buffalo Springfield during the days of the Thomas Jefferson administration, and “Mother Earth” from his 1990 album, Ragged Glory. Here, let me check out his re-rub of his famous song “Birds” and give you my expert analysis: Ah, I’ve got it, it’s an acoustic version of it and is absolutely no better than the original. Aaand moving on.

• Oh, great, time again for me to pretend I know anything about modern bubble-pop or divas or gigantic twerking butts or whatever the 11-year-olds listen to when they troll each other on SnapChat, because look folks, Nicki Minaj is back with a new album, called Pink Friday 2! There’s an advance single here, called “For All The Barbz,” and it features Drake and Chief Keef! The rhymes Nicki contributes are mindlessly pornographic, which adds to the je ne sais quoi, you feel me, and one of the dudes is using Auto-Tune, because it’s still 2002, right? So glad I’m living in a timeline that favors quality over redundant quantity, I have to say.

• Just a second now, this might be OK, the new LP from Alison Goldfrapp, The Love Reinvention! You might know that she got her start by being featured on the 1994 Orbital album Snivilisation, meaning she was one of the first electronic guest-princesses; I have to hand it to her. The new single, “Every Little Drop,” is understated warehouse-rave fodder, which I’m always glad to hear, just prettiness and sexytime romping, but there are no gigantic twerking butts and porn lyrics, what’s a critic supposed to do with this.

• And finally it’s California metalcore band Atreyu, with their new full-length, The Beautiful Dark Of Life! Wow, I have no idea what they’re even doing on the new tune, “[i],” it’s like some sort of Echosmith chillwave thing, I don’t mind it.

CrowJane, Bound To Me (Kitten Robot Records)
I’d thought it’d happened a lot more recently, but it turns out I haven’t heard from this Los Angeles kook lady since the release of her Mater Dolorosa EP in October 2020, which I described using RIYL comparisons like Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten. In this new five-songer she’s aiming for Siouxsie Sioux’s brand of weirdness, or so it says on the thing in front of me, and that sort of ’80s-goth-pop epicness is prominent in the works here, helped out by some pretty sweeping orchestral layers and Blue Man Group-ish drum-thumping (I should probably also mention that it’s a really captivating, super-nice tune). Elsewhere we have “Ides Of March,” which is like Siousxsie in metal mode, just an outstanding wreck-stuff rockout that’s got a bit of KMGDM to it. I hadn’t detected such a high level of accessibility in her earlier EP, but this one is remarkably good, well worth checking out. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Maddi Ryan, Growing Pains (self-released)
In this EP I’m hearing a cross between Amy Grant and [place random anti-diva like Lorde here] undergirding the voice of this Boston-area singer, who racked up Country Act of the Year nominations at count-’em-three New England Music Awards events. Enough Kellie Pickler/Taylor Swift wannabes have dropped CDs on this desk that I’ve forgotten what real disappointment feels like, but stop the presses, this five-song EP is proof that this particular cowboy-booted Insta princess knows her way around a studio, or at least whom to seat at the mixing booth’s least rickety chair, whichever the case. “Wilderness” opens things with some Swift-in-Jewel-mode crooning atop an acoustic guitar line, her soprano aiming for the angsty, hormone-bending vibe that usually leads to a boring chorus, but instead she stays on top of it, adding a truly pleasing vocal harmony, then some floaty dobro and similar layerings as it eventually morphs into Norah Jones-ish Americana. She’s a serious contender, I kid you not. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, Dec. 1, is the next CD release day, ermagersh, where did the summer go, what are we even doing here, and now let’s riff on ancient legendary arena-rock band Genesis for a minute, because one of the new rock ’n’ roll CD releases you can buy this week is I/O, from original Genesis singing person Peter Gabriel, his first since, holy catfish, 2011! Like his Genesis-singing successor, Phil Collins, Gabriel is famous for writing dishwasher-safe AOR-pop for dentists’ offices and Dollar Tree stores, and he’s most famous for being the singing person in the song trenchcoat-wearing kickboxing-slacker John Cusack was playing on his boombox during the famous “why aren’t the cops grabbing that guy” scene in the 1989 movie Say Anything. That alone elevated his cred far higher than that of Popeye-The-Sailor-lookalike Phil Collins, whose 1980s hits were horrible enough, but in order to ensure his ”Worst Song Of All Time” achievement award — and most Xers and Boomers have subconsciously erased all this from memory — Collins participated in a duet with really bad singer Philip Bailey on the song “Easy Lover” from Bailey’s 1984 LP Chinese Wall. The only ’80s rock music fail that came anywhere close to unseating that tune as the, you know, Worst Song Of All Time, was Eddie Murphy’s hilariously hubristic fish-out-of-artistic-water laughingstock, “Party All The Time,” which saw the first time a record company ever called an emergency Auto-Tune guy to come in and clean up Murphy’s transparently off-key vocal, and let’s not forget the video for Billy Squier’s “Rock Me Tonight,” in which he pranced around a bedroom like a preteen girl overdosing on Flintstones vitamins, a cringe-gasm so explosive that Squier’s career instantly tanked faster than the Lusitania. But yes, Gabriel has always been borderline listenable in my book, like, “Games Without Frontiers” was OK, mostly because I, like everybody else, thought it was either Psychedelic Furs or Echo And The Bunnymen, who even knew, you know? But anyway, whatever, “Turn It On Again” was a cool Genesis song, even though Peter Gabriel wasn’t there at the time, so here we go, let’s have a look at what’s on this new Peter Gabriel album, and wait a second, two remixed versions of the kickoff single song, “Panopticom,” have been released thus far: the “Bright Side Mix” (done by Mark “Spike” Stent), and the “Dark Side Mix” (mixed by Tchad Blake), both of which were released in January of this year. The Bright Side Mix is OK; the song is important-sounding in a first-world-problems sort of way, studious Gabriel nonsense that’s kind of a chore to listen to, same as always.

• Love Minus Zero is a new collaborative project between electro-revival producer Tiga and Scottish producer Hudson Mohawke, who was part of the “wonky” techno scene (think slo-mo dubstep with a lot of distorted, wobbly dance beats) until the end of the Aughts. L’Ecstasy is their forthcoming debut full-length, which spotlights “Love Minus Zero,” a track that’s a few years old, a really cool, hypnotic dance joint combining dubstep, trance and tribal, you’d probably like it.

• We Owe is the solo project of Swans’ Christopher Pravdica, whose new LP Major Inconvenience uses such things as autoharp and djembe to make off-kilter tunes like the new “Time Suck,” a woozy, discordant, Throbbing Lobster-ish experiment.

• Lastly we have yet another Bandcamp mess to decipher: When No Birds Sang, a joint-effort album between grindcore outfit Full Of Hell and heavy shoegaze dudes Nothing. “Spend The Grace” is a skronky, apocalyptic, blissed-out noise exercise, but other than that it’s probably fine for bouncy-house parties.