Author: Eric Saeger

Raveena, Asha’s Awakening (Warner Records)

Another Missy Elliott wannabe heard from, more or less, although this diva is more prone to tabling reggaeton and such than Ariana Grande-ish Disney-spazz when she’s in gyration mode. With regard to her reggaeton, her singing on “Rush” has the same fluttery fragility as The Jets’ “Crush on You,” if you remember that one, and “Secret” borders on same, but the beat there is more a general-purpose Shakira thing than anything else. “Mystery” is different, though, a rather straightforward R&B tune with a pretty remarkable amount of bubbly femininity. I wouldn’t want to be trapped in a car driving around with nothing but this album for a few hours, but it’s pleasant enough. And mind you, the LP revolves around a conceptual theme regarding an alien princess “who, through a fantastic journey across the centuries, learns about love and loss, healing and destruction.” So anyhow, that. The closest her tour will bring her to New Hampshire will be on June 15, at Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Mass. A-

Dave Douglas, Secular Psalms (Greenleaf Music)

Quite the Da Vinci Code-tinged curveball here from jazz trumpeter Douglas, who was commissioned by the city of Gent, Belgium, to score music for the city’s 600th anniversary celebration of the creation of a 24-part polyptych (multi-paneled painting) titled “The Adoration Of The Mystic Lamb.” There’s an interesting backstory of course, revolving around the 2012 discovery that the altarpiece had been overpainted around AD 1550, and a couple of pieces are apparently missing, and such and so, all of which served to inspire Douglas and his sextet to work with such components as Latin Mass chanting, medieval folk songs and the work of composers of the period. As well, the band plays unconventional instruments such as a lute and a serpent (a huge, meandering ancestor of the tuba), which takes us to the first track, “Arrival,” a bizarre piece that evokes a William Peter Blatty fever dream. There’s relatively normal stuff as well, some readily accessible modern jazz and such, but chanting and such things do appear from time to time. Like its subject, a unique, rare artwork. A

PLAYLIST

• Onward we slog, my stouthearted ones, to March 25, when the new albums will magically appear in your Spotify, begging for just a little space in your non-existent attention span. Pitchfork will have to talk about these albums, as will YouTube’s resident clue-mosquito “musicologist” Anthony Fantano, a.k.a. “Needle Drop.” As always, in between making up nonsense words in an effort to overanalyze simple rock ’n’ roll songs, Fantana will make super-funny comments and perform two-second skits dressed up as a butler or Haystacks Calhoun or whomever he assumes will entertain his audience of 11-year-olds that day. And once he’s done confusing the young’ns, he’ll either toddle off to say something completely idiotic on some political podcast run by college freshmen who’ve never actually read any political books, or he’ll go shopping for more funny costumes in order to better entertain his fans, who apparently don’t have ears attached to their own heads, so there’s no way they can judge all that awful music for themselves. Needle Drop will definitely ignore the new Cowboy Junkies album, Songs Of The Recollection, because he is fake-edgy and only likes songs he could play his stupid bass to, but you know this album will be OK, because the ole Junkies have always made it a point to make a stop in New Hampshire when they tour, which is pretty cool of them. This year they’ll be at Portsmouth Music Hall on April 12, and the alternative country-folk veterans will surely play a few numbers from this new LP, a collection of cover tunes. There’s a boozy/pretty version of David Bowie’s “Five Years” on board; singer Margo Timmins sounds particularly Melissa Etheridge-ish on it.

• Speaking of Bowie, there’s a new album coming from British pop-punkers Placebo, who benefited greatly when Bowie took them on tour with him in 1996. It’s all well and good by me that they’ve had success; I suppose the world could always use a band that sounds like a weak version of Killers, but such analyses are beyond the scope of this newspaper article, as I’m supposed to discuss this new album, Never Let Me Go, and move on to the next thing. Fine, then, one of the tunes, “Surrounded By Spies,” has the same rhythm as “Cry Little Sister” from the soundtrack to The Lost Boys, like it’s music for dancing slowly and weirdly around a roaring campfire and making googly eyes at people, except the vocals sound like Pet Shop Boys. I have no idea what these guys think they’re even doing these days, but anyway, that.

• What else, what else, what else, oh look, it’s Toronto hardcore punk band F–ed Up, with a new album, called Do All Words Can Do. The title track really is old-school, which is cool, like, it’s really fast and crazed, and it sounds like it was recorded on a boombox and whatnot, but the only reason I even brought this up was that you bands out there really need to stop having swears in your names, because 99 times out of 100 you’ll be ignored by respectable newspapers like this one, because young children would accidentally read it and have questions. It just isn’t done, you see. If you’re looking for a way to make me listen to your music, I’d much rather that you brag about how awesome your band is instead of behaving like a 10-year-old, that’d be great. This has been a public service message; the more you know.

• Let’s wrap up the week with Australian all-girl indie-rock trio Camp Cope, whose new full-length, Running With The Hurricane, is heading your way in trucks right this minute! The title track is really good, evoking Florence & The Machine in a Woodstock frame of mind, you’ll like it, I promise.

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).

Crowbar, Zero And Below (Mnrk Records)

’Twas only by accident that I ever discovered this New Orleans mud-metal band for myself in the first place, and for that, you’ll have to indulge a little inside baseball, apologies in advance. In 2005, around the second year I’d decided to moonlight as a music reviewer, Candlelight Records was sending me every CD they released. Those albums were never any good, and I was just about to swear off them, but I was trying to fill a column and ended up with Crowbar’s Lifesblood for the Downtrodden in my car. I couldn’t believe how awesome it was, Kirk Windstein’s ragged, uniquely badass voice and sludge riffage blasting into my face like a Frankenstein’s monster that had a personal gripe with me. You have to hear these guys to believe it, and the tradition continues here, in their 12th album, starting with “The Fear That Binds You,” a brand-flaunting exercise that sounds like early Mastodon covering Paranoid-era Black Sabbath. Windstein’s voice isn’t as insane-sounding as his “Slave No More” days, but that really shouldn’t stop you; if you’re a rivet-head who’s never heard these guys, your life is incomplete, trust me. A+

Birthday Massacre, Fascination (Metropolis Records)

This Canadian goth-techno band is still, at least to me, the gold standard for spooky 1980s ghost-pop. Some critic wrote that their 2007 full-length Walking With Strangers is the “Sgt. Pepper’s of Dark Wave,” and I’d have to agree; it’s still an unsurpassed mix of Missing Persons and Depeche Mode, the perfect dance tuneage for an ’80s-themed Halloween party. But notice I said it’s still “unsurpassed,” which is a bit of a run, there, because this crew should have surpassed it a long ago, and, well, they haven’t. The band tried some KMFDM stylings that fell flat; singer Chibi is no raging Lucia Cifarelli and should never have tried it on for size, but anyway, that brings us up to date, and to this album, which does start out on a cool-enough note with a sparkling rawk ballad in the title track. Definitely more of a pop edge than on the last few records, which is where they should be; it’s definitely their best since WWS, but all that means is WWS is still, you know, unsurpassed. A

PLAYLIST

• March 18 is our next all-purpose album release date, when you can wait outside the record store for the guy in the truck to dump out all the albums, where they will find homes in people’s cars, where the delicate CDs will eventually wind up getting Wendy’s mayonnaise spilled on them and thrown away, which is what you should do with most of those albums in the first place, use them as little single-serving plates for fast food. So that brings us to Georgia Gothic, the new album from Mattiel, a band from Atlanta that’s fronted by its namesake, Mattiel Brown, who sounds like a cross between Nico and Siouxsie Sioux, not that that means they’re forgiven for making such boring music. Take for example teaser single “Jeff Goldbum,” a tune that sounds like Garbage but without any hook whatsoever, just a medium-tempo Rolling Stones-ish groove that wanders around aimlessly looking for spare change on the street and then, finding none, ends as uneventfully as it began. Punchline to this bit is that the band played this dumb tune on Stephen Colbert’s late night TV show, which proves once and for all that Colbert needs to find some act-bookers who don’t take the first bribe some indie label (ATO Records in this case) extracts from their trenchcoat and slides over to them at the greasy coffee shop. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this would be awesome stuff if it were the first time I’d ever heard music played on an electric guitar, it’s all good, man.

• Midlake is a funny little indie-folkie-ish band from Denton, Texas, and they seem to be something of a big-hitter, an up-and-coming band on the AOR/yacht-rock scene! The band’s new LP, For The Sake Of Bethel Woods, is coming out in just a few hours and features the single “Bethel Woods,” a tune that’s sort of like if Guster had a baby with some sleepy-time 1980s AOR band like Bruce Hornsby, like there’s a sort-of-driving piano line and a hook meant for driving around in the rain looking for a 7-Eleven. It’s boring, in other words, but like I hinted, there’s money behind these guys, so the video for the tune features none other than Hollywood second banana Michael Pena, who’s just walking around the city looking kind of intense, and — wait a second, is that Trinity from The Matrix? Nope, it’s a younger Trinity, and now they’re in a church and there’s a wedding. No, wait, it’s a baptism. Nope, hold it, it’s a funeral, and now Michael Pena’s running around on the streets having memories of being a young boy or whatever. I’d rather peel potatoes for a month than ever have anything to do with this band again, honestly.

• Babeheaven is a pair of British girls who started their career as youngsters, and now no one seems to know what they are exactly. Run a search for the band’s name and you get “they’re R&B,” “they’re dream pop,” and of course Pitchfork’s “bedroom indie,” which does make sense I suppose. Whatever, blah blah blah, they’re “more mature” now, which means they have their own smartphone bills to deal with or something, I guess. The new LP Sink Into Me is kicked off by “Make Me Wanna,” which would have been a cool Portishead-ish chillout, but the tandem appearance of a crummy cheese-synth and none-too-smooth rapper Navy Blue had me bailing after about two minutes. Hard pass.

• We’ll close this out with Sonic Youth’s In/Out/In, which features unreleased tuneage from 2000 to 2010. Keeping in mind that the band peaked in 1983, I was naturally none too thrilled with “In And Out,” which comes off like a Tangerine Dream throwaway, but all the power to you if you’re a Sonic Youth completist; enjoy.

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).

Bye Bye Tsunami, Bye Bye Tsunami (Nefarious Industries Records)

You know, giving this Copenhagen-based noise-rock album any amount of love in this space makes me feel guilty that I haven’t done the same for the couple of weirdo bands who’ve been blowing up my email with demands that I stop “being all corporate and covering national bands,” mostly sent from (I think Boston-based) dada weirdos who’ve been emailing me gigabytes of nonsense that honestly isn’t any more unlistenable than this. And plus, a lot of those “national bands” have no support from their record labels. This one is a messy cacophony, some noise-punk grooves, some sax skronk, a few samples, some absolutely piercing feedback bursts, and so on. Recently been hit in the head with a 90 mph fastball? You might actually love this. C

Away, self:antiself (Boom Records)

Four-track EP from the Los Angeles-based beatmaker, whose biggest inspirations are professed to be Nine Inch Nails, Deftones, and Burial, a compelling trifecta of kickassage if I ever saw one. And kickoff song “Ritual” does possess all those aspects: some heavy electro riffage, a volley of glitch-dubstep and goth-sexytime vocals courtesy of Echos, whose soprano is a cross between Kesha and Evanescence’s Amy Lee. So the formula is inarguably good, but the result? Eh, not so much; it’s vibe more than anything else, something to have blaring in your ear when you’re 99 percent sure your sketchy significant other is cheating on you, that sort of thing. “Help Me” fares a lot worse, outright ripping off NIN’s “Closer” to such an extent that for the first 20 seconds you’ll think it’s a cover of that tune. “Ghostbox” is the winner here, possessed of a mellow-mode Imagine Dragons idea that translates even when the glitch gets a little thick. It’s OK overall. B

PLAYLIST

• March 11 is our next all-purpose album release date, and to help us celebrate the last few weeks of our yearly collective cracking in half Shining-style here in Antarctica, looky there, it’s three-chord pop-metal dunderhead Bryan Adams, with his new album So Happy It Hurts! No, I’m just joshing, he’s not a dunderhead, I really don’t mind Bryan Adams and his tidy, perfect little rock ’n’ roll songs; he’s actually a very good songwriter in my opinion. Remember when he did that three-chord hard rock ballad with Tina Turner? My favorite was when he did that tune “Bang The Drum” with Nelly Furtado at the 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, man was she gorgeous, and he was so funny, dressed like a Blues Brother with that stupid skinny tie and off-the-rack suit, ha ha. Whatever, he had a bunch of catchy songs, and I didn’t hate him, which brings us to the here and now, when I’ll probably hate everything I’m about to listen to from this new album. Right, the title track is a sleepy, strummy bridal-shower-pop ballad that’s probably some old John Cougar song played backward, it’s lame and dumb, but “On The Road” is a lot better, because the guitars are heavier, I don’t really have anything bad to say about — wait, ha ha, you should hear it when he starts singing about “Gettin’ back on the road / is all I’ve ever known.” What a hapless fail, I’m telling you, your uncle who used to play in an AC/DC cover band could think of something cooler than this, honestly. Remember when I made fun of the last David Duchovny album because it was such dad rock? This record would get the same review if I had to review it, the exact same verbiage.

• Now that Marilyn Manson did so much stupid stuff that he got himself kicked off the Loma Vista Records roster, the company sincerely hopes that you’re in the mood to buy the new Ghost album, Impera, which will be out tomorrow! These guys are a veteran hard rock-ish/metal-ish band from Sweden, and they’re kind of weird. In the new single, “Call Me Little Sunshine,” they sound like a cross between ABBA and Whitesnake. Read that again: a cross between ABBA and Whitesnake. The tune wants to be a catchy, epic ballad but it just sort of flops around and looks at you dumbly, hoping that you’ll be interested in it, but then you go off to find a snack and forget you ever heard it; I know I already have.

• The Districts are a stripped-down, minimalist-ish indie band from Pennsylvania, composed of three guys who’ve known each other since high school. They’re up to five albums as of tomorrow, when their latest, Great American Painting, hits the Spotifys and whatever, so I checked out the new single “I Want to Feel It All” to see if there was anything to salvage out of it, and there was, if you like mall-pop with a lot of bloops and whatever. The tune doesn’t really go anywhere but it’s pleasant, as aimless music goes.

• We’ll wrap up this week’s business with an album from Rex Orange County, a disposable English hipster-pop dude whose real name is Alexander James O’Connor; his claim to fame is a “token skinny jeans dude” guest spot on Tyler, the Creator’s Grammy-nominated album Flower Boy. Anyone still paying attention, anyone at all? No? Well that’s fitting, because this fellow’s new album is called Who Cares, featuring the single “Keep It Up,” a tune about unironically puttering around on a little boat or something while pastel ponies dance around, I don’t even know. This dude wants to be Jose Gonzalez really badly but will just end up being forever known as “Whoever, you know, that one dude on that Tyler mixtape.”

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).

The Waymores, Stone Sessions (Chicken Ranch Records)

I’m not big into latter-day “country music” (or so they call it) because it’s usually so awful, evoking noisy tuneage for NASCAR commercials or WWE wrestler entrances, but if you’ve read this space for any amount of time, you know for a fact that I have the utmost reverence for things like genuine bluegrass and such. I’m not a monster; there are hallowed genres that are completely unassailable, and I count traditional C&W in that number, including the vanishing breed of coed duos whose achievements are historic, like Johnny Cash/June Carter and Loretta Lynn/Conway Twitty. This LP aims for a similar down-home honky tonk/country-pop vibe, and though it’s professed to have blues and folk elements, it’s more like a sonic homage, songs about whisky, cheating, road life and all that stuff, and it does nail it with some great songs. “Asleep At The Wheel” fiddler Katie Shore helps out on “Caught.” A

Howless, To Repel Ghosts (Static Blooms Records)

Wow, my favorite new record of this young year, right here. This female-fronted Mexico City quartet offers a noise-pop/dream-pop style that’s part Jesus And Mary Chain, early Cure and New Order, dipped in 24-karat gold production values and — this is the best part — born of a certain innocent, anti-punk Go-Go’s-ish je ne sais quoi. The guitars sparkle like an autumn river over heavily saturated synth layers, all driven by the faraway, shoegaze-ish singing of Dominique Sanchez and Mauricio Tinejro, altogether just the system you’d want if you were trying to resurrect ’80s alt-pop but keep it fresh, gorgeous and no-nonsense. Lyrically it’s about such things as “questioning our place on earth,” “the bitterness of saying goodbye to someone who hasn’t yet left your psyche,” and “human self sabotage” — no dummies, these people, and that’s a rare thing in an indie scene overrun with bored hipsters who just bought their first guitars a week ago. Fantastic stuff all around. A+

PLAYLIST

• March 4 is dead ahead, y’all, and the warm weather isn’t too far away, all you have to do is get through a few weeks more! So let’s get to the albums that will be released on that fateful day, oh great, look, there’s not a lot, but I shall make do with what little nonsense has been handed to me, starting with Oochya, the new LP from Welsh indie-rawk band Stereophonics! You may be familiar with this band from their 2003 single “Maybe Tomorrow,” which rose to No. 5 on Billboard’s U.S. Adult Alternative Songs chart. If you’re not sure what that is, picture Rod Stewart singing the most boring Black Crowes/Train mashup you could imagine, and then picture it being even more tuneless. Yes, that tune, please try to stay awake so we can talk about this new album, which has a single, called “Hanging On Your Hinges.” The video has a bunch of cheap art that’s sort of playing-card oriented, like there are art deco devils and waitresses and whatever this other stuff is, and the music is sort of throwback boogie, like if Jet spent too much time listening to Bo Diddley but was trying to be as cool as The Hives, something like that. As always, there is little in the way of melody here, just empty-calorie music for Uber drivers to fall asleep to while waiting for their fares to get their acts together. The only comparable song that comes to mind is like a rockabilly version of Ramones’ “Freak Of Nature,” but you readers have probably never heard that song — my god, why am I even bothering trying to describe this stupid song, let’s forget this ever happened and move on to something else, anything that isn’t the Stereophonics.

• Oh, no. No. If you could see me right now, you’d see that I am clutching my chest like Fred Sanford from Sanford & Son, because “Elizabeth, I’m comin’ to ya,” things just got even worse: Just when I was recovering from the new Stereophonics album, will you look at this, now I have to pretend to care about Vancouver-based surf-indie Bonnaroo-bums Peach Pit, whose third album, From 2 To 3, is here. OK, let’s calm down, the single “Vickie” isn’t all that bad, it’s jangly and has a stupid tremolo-or-something effect going on in one of the guitar layers, and it’s a happy song about walking around on a sidewalk or something. The singer kind of sounds like Kermit the Frog. You know, if you ever went back in time to the 1980s or before that and played this idiotic waste of musical notes to someone and told them people would be buying this record, you would have been locked up in a padded cell. I can’t believe how much lower the bar goes every single week, people, I mean it’s — haunting. Next.

• Yay, guys, it’s Nilüfer Yanya’s new album, Painless, I’m not kidding! And who is Nilüfer Yanya? I don’t know, let’s find out together! Here it is, she’s a singer from London, and she turned down a gig in a girl-group that was going to be produced by Louis Tomlinson of One Direction. Hm, we may have something here, supposedly she sounds like Siouxsie from Siouxsie and the Banshees, so let’s give a spin to the tune “Stabilize,” maybe it’s like “Hall Of Mirrors” or something else cool. Nope, she doesn’t sound like Siouxsie, she sounds like Lorde but mumbly and sleepy. The beat is spazzy but aimless, like a British grime fan’s idea of Siouxsie if Siouxsie had been into skateboarding and whatever.

• We’ll close with Crystal Nuns Cathedral, the 228th album in the past five months from Guided by Voices, in other words the last bunch of crummy demos from songwriting-addicted Robert Pollard. Yup, as I expected, the single “Excited Ones” is boring and stupid, sounding like an old demo The Cars made and then recorded over because they hated it. If Pollard ever writes a good song I’ll weep with joy.

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).

Mark Stewart VS, Challenge Institutionalized Power (eMERGENCY hearts Records)

Whoa, now we’re getting somewhere. Stewart has been a fixture in the noise-punk scene since he visited New York City in 1980 and got vacuumed into the no-wave vortex, and here he “faces off against” some of his favorite like-minded music-cultural transgressors, but now for some normie-speak. This is literally the most badass thing I’ve heard in months, evoking images of my walking into basically any half-edgy record store and feeling like I’d landed on a hostile planet that was yet somehow home, with the terrifying, epic sounds of Jim Thirlwell or Big Black blasting over the speakers as if the whole place just wanted everyone to leave. Who’s here? Well, Front 242 for one, leading off with a techno assault that’s trying to chase Stewart’s wobbly David Byrne-ish tenor out of town. There’s a face-off with electronic post-punk pioneer Eric Random (“Ghost Of Love”) that’s got dubstep in its DNA and pure anarchy in its heart. If you’ve ever liked any sort of aggressive music, especially one that’s got a lot of techno to it, you have to get this, you simply must. A+

Sataray, Blood Trine Moon (Scry Recordings)

This one-woman dark-ambient project (based in Olympia, Washington) has released a four-song EP here that’s aimed at the goth-est of the goth, meaning people who really think they’re witches or whatnot. It’s something you’d definitely want to have on hand at Halloween to scare the kids away: no cute howling dogs or whimsical mad scientist laughter; this lady wants to instill really ghoulish visions in the listener (think Lovecraft, M.R. James, etc.), and she’s started to make inroads into the convention world, bringing her super-creepy Japanese butoh dance moves to such nerd-fests as the Esoteric Book Conference, Passiontide and ShadowDance. Trippiness abounds here, folks, trust me, with slow, relentless, samples of (probably) gongs, singing bowls and Addams Family organ samples building in intensity until she starts going deep with some Linnea Quigley-circa-Night Of The Demons-worthy half-whispered chants and invocations. Don’t get me wrong, though, this isn’t cheesy in any way; this lady really wants to scare the pants off you, and for what it is, it’s totally rad, sure. A

PLAYLIST

• Next stop Feb. 25, get on board y’all, choo choo, isn’t it great! Yep, that’s when the new albums will come out, for your listening pleasure, and boy, is it great that February’s almost gone or what, am I right? We’ve got a full deck this week, so let’s start with ancient witch lady Judy Collins, whose latest album, Spellbound, is on the trucks, ready for delivery to anyone who can still buy an album and afford $190 for a gallon of milk, or however much it is these days, with all the cows being on strike or whatever the problem is! Collins rose to fame in the 1960s (she’s 82 now) with the song “Both Sides Now,” which her arch-enemy Joni Mitchell wrote while on a plane, reading some boring book about a guy who was in a plane flying over Africa and he saw some clouds. That’s all it was, but whatever, maybe Joni and Judy and their co-arch enemy Carole King will star in a reboot of The Golden Girls where they make hemp necklaces and maybe they’ll have Dolly Parton show up to play the Betty White lady, wouldn’t that be hilarious? Whatever, I think it would, but to the business at hand, Judy — she was the cute one out of the whole bunch, by the way — has a new single that will be on this album, namely “When I Was A Girl In Colorado,” a pretty little country-folkie tune that finds her singing as well as Amy Grant if you ask me, so take that, young people, these super old pop stars are going to be topping the Billboard charts until they’re 150 years old, so don’t bother learning instruments is my advice. And guess what, even though Judy’s super old, she will be on tour in 2022! The closest she’ll get to New Hampshire is Bar Harbor, Maine, on April 23, at the 1932 Criterion Theater! It’s true!

• Ha, if you’re kind of old, you may remember when, in the 1980s, British pop nincompoops Tears For Fears were going around saying they were going to be bigger than The Beatles. I remember it vividly, and I was probably the only one who didn’t think that was stupid, in fact I thought it was kind of awesome. Like, what else would you want to hear from some band that you kind of liked on MTV, “We anticipate having a fairly successful career?” No, if you have to deal with some idiot from MTV, of course you’re going to say something crazy, and for that I thank them. Anyway, their upcoming new album The Tipping Point is their first in 18 years and second in 27 years, meaning half the people reading this are like “Tears for who?,” to which I say they were a decent enough band that had a fairly successful career. The album’s seen a few singles already, but I’ll just check out the tune “No Small Thing.” Hm, it’s kind of like a cowboy-spaghetti song, a little Ennio Morricone and a little Conor Oberst, in other words it doesn’t have any relation to the yuppie-pandering synthpop nonsense they used to do. The hook is weak and depressing and old-sounding, let’s bag this and move on.

• Speaking of 1980s shlock, look guys, it’s bloopy synthpop retirees Soft Cell, with their newest, Happiness Not Included! These guys were one band I always kind of hated, which means that after 35 years they’ve probably written a good song, right? Well, the single “Heart Like Chernobyl” is bloopy and dumb, even worse and more meatless than “Tainted Love.” Repeat: It’s. Even. Worse. Than. “Tainted Love.”

• Time to bounce, fam, but first let’s have a listen to “Love It When You Hate Me” from Avril Lavigne’s new album Love Sux! Holy crow, is it still 2003? This is the exact same song she’s always written, the exact same hook, everything. Hard pass on this.

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).

Neuro No Neuro, Faces & Fragments (Audiobulb Records)

Meanwhile on Neptune — or in Tucson, Arizona, same thing — electronic music tinkerer Kirk Markarian is still at it, making albums of gently demented noise for people who probably need a few drinks before they crack in half. I have too many big-time connections nowadays to ever have to go back to the days when I was the eclectic-music-blogging world’s central repository for albums made by kooks, but I’ve heard this guy’s name enough times to have grown curious to see what the fuss is about. And, well. These experiments are intended to “blurr the connections between vocabulary, memory, and day-to-day processes,” with tracks that illuminate “fragments of memory and speech, as they wander out of focus in the growing aperture of time.” It’s a littered beach of sound, this thing, gentle waves of synth coming in and out of focus while found sounds, snippets of human speech and random clanks drop out of nowhere. Not a party record, but, you know. B-

Hollan Holmes, Emerald Waters (Spotted Peccary Music)

Well, I’ll be darned, it looks like fate’s decided that both of this week’s album-review slots need to be occupied with similar products; let me explain. Right after I wrote the Neuro No Neuro review for this week, I emphatically deleted a thrash metal album download offer from my email, and literally the next thing that popped up was this record, which is indeed related: Where Neuro No Neuro does have an ocean-like ambiance to its weirdness — whether or not that was Markarian’s intent — this LP from Texas music-scaper Holmes is something far more geared to normies. Holmes, a Berlin School-influenced composer, is big into Tangerine Dream, and that’s what you get here, in a broad sense, but sans any goofy krautrock edge. The ocean-like feel (and if you don’t miss that this time of year there’s something wrong with you) is baked into this stuff, its main ingredient lazily sweeping synths that sometimes form into things that recall the progressive trance of Above & Beyond. Deeply agreeable, soul-soothing stuff here. A+

PLAYLIST

• Like it or not, new rock ’n’ roll albums will magically appear in your stores and streaming services on Feb. 18, right in the middle of the worst month of the worst part of the year, not that you should dislike any of those albums for that reason alone (the music will probably be nauseating enough, just sayin’). Our solar system’s sun is a big tease right now, chuckling and yelling “Neener” as it stays too far away from us to give us New Englanders any relief from our North Pole weather, but like I said, there are albums coming out, like Are You Haunted, the fourth full-length from Australian art-indie band Methyl Ethel! I nearly wrote them off as a weak imitation of Tame Impala the first time I heard their 2017 single “Ubu,” but the tune is possessed of an instrumental break that proves they weren’t put on earth just to annoy me, so I’ll proceed with caution in the hope that new single “Proof” is a slight improvement (I don’t know diddly about their third album, Triage, so they’ve had ample time to improve in my eyes). So, the song features vocals from successful-enough singer Stella Donnelly rambling prettily over a polite staccato laptop beat, and then — yup, there it is, a really cool little melodic tangent. Works for me. You know, I have to confess that I always feel a bit funny giving love to Australian bands even today; a lot of them are really good, but it seems to be really difficult for them to break big in America. I mean, they might as well be on Mars, all things considered, but those bands rarely disappoint.

• Hurray for the Riff Raff is the Americana-indie project owned and operated by New Orleans singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra. Her seventh album, Life On Earth, is here, daring to step forward to face my judgment and wrath, coming on the heels of her sleepy 2017 album The Navigator, which I’m pretty sure I tossed into the yard sale pile for its mostly unplugged Natalie Merchant verisimilitude — yes, that’s the one. Whatever, “Rhododendron” is the single, and it does have more of a pulse than I’ve felt from her earlier stuff, not that that’s a rock-solid recommendation, mind you. It’s Bonnaroo-hipster stuff but does have something of a punk edge (every time she sings the word “boys” she sounds like she’s describing rotten eggs, which is oh so novel and edgy). The video is pretty awful — where did they get all that bubblegum? — but I don’t know, maybe someone will get something out of it. I sure didn’t.

• OK, I know I’ve heard of Metronomy, let me go look. Ah, yes, they’re an “English electronic music group formed in 1999.” That didn’t help at all, but I know I’ve heard of them, and I’m too lazy to search my archive, so let’s pretend I liked them before, at the very least to have some more positive news in this week’s thingie. Their new album, Small World, is on the way, featuring the single “It’s So Good To Be Back,” comprising a blip-bloopy elevator-music beat and some happy-but-not-aggravating vocals. Jeez, so happy, but I’m not getting angry. What on Earth is happening to me?

• We’ll pull stakes on this week’s column with the new album from boy-girl indie duo Beach House, whose new album Once Twice Melody is probably a bunch of dream-pop songs, because that’s what Wikipedia says, they do dream-pop. My stomach will be able to tolerate that, I’m sure. Yes yes, it’s like My Bloody Valentine but not messy, like your grandmother probably wouldn’t mind this at all. It’s so polite and listenable that I’m starting to get a little mad, so before I start comparing this to 1960s Spanky And Our Gang records and getting jerkish, let’s end it here.

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).