Author: Eric Saeger

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).

We Are The World, Clay Stones [2022 Reissue] (Give/Take Records)

Today I learned that Madonna wasn’t the only artist Lady Gaga stole song ideas from, and that’s about it. An alleged selling point of this “seminal” album from the Los Angeles electro-pop quartet (which, for clarity’s sake, had nothing whatsoever to do with the 1985 famine-relief charity single) is that it was Gaga’s “favorite album” in 2010, thus its 2022 reissue marks a milestone of something or other. I suppose I’ll buy that, given that I just can’t call Gaga right now to vet all this rubbish for myself, so I’ll play along. It’s mainly a ringtone-centric rehashing of the eclectic cultural appropriation Moby hawked with his 1999 Play album; in that vein, the Pitchfork guy basically wrote this off as a ripoff of Knife, which is fine with me, as maybe the Moby reference is a bit dated (you should see my face right now, panicking at the thought of committing such a colossal foul-up). But, yeah, there are unintelligible Baptist preacher-ish chants and creepy voodoo-priestess `ocal lines going on here, all marinating in thick rhythmic samples, and sure, it all sounds like it could have inspired Gaga circa 2010. It’s OK I guess, and if you’ve read this far you have my sympathies. B-

Charming Disaster, Our Lady of Radium (self-released)

Most recent LP from the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based goth-folk duo comprising Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris. She plays ukulele, he guitar, so like anything else they’ve done, it’s a novelty record intended for convention nerds who covet overdone eye makeup, fishnet stockings and vintage weirdness, and for those things I do thank them. The two are really great at welding their voices into fascinating harmonies in the service of songs dedicated to steampunk-ish themes, in this case, Marie Curie. They’re a mishmash of black-clad-but-innocent tropes, paying obeisance to the likes of Edward Gorey and Tim Burton, but given that they’re from the Boroughs, this ain’t no foolin’ around. They strum and busk, busk and strum, warbling on about the subject and going into the deeper ends, like a Curie séance they attended. They’re nothing like Dresden Dolls, so don’t think that; more like an opening act for The Cure at an Addams Family festival. She sounds like Siousxie Sioux when she wants to, if that helps sell you. B-

PLAYLIST

• O, what artistic marvels shall we experience on Feb. 11, when the usual Friday delivery of new albums drops into our music stores and Pandoras and illegal torrent streams? Uh-oh, gang, looky there, it’s Pearl Jam’s singer/surfer Eddie Vedder, gone solo, with a new album called Earthling! LOL, remember when he put out that album Ukulele Songs in 2011, and the only problem with it was that it was a bunch of songs literally played on the ukulele? Boy I do, and I remember that all the annoying hipster bands were playing ukulele around that time too, like I couldn’t just sit and watch a stupid car commercial without some twirp playing a ukulele in the background. But that’s finally over with, so we can cut to now, and this new album, his fourth, which features a single titled “Long Way,” I can’t wait! But wait, ack, ack, what’s this, is he trying to be Tom Petty? This sounds like some strummy nonsense song for bored Uber drivers to play on the radio when they’re driving grandmothers to casinos. Come on, Eddie Vedder, what happened to those stupid lumberjack shirts and an entire generation getting nothing accomplished other than oh, I dunno, making people afraid of Courtney Love? I mean, what happened?

• Ha ha, look, guys, it’s super-old Canadian thrash metal weenies Voivod, with a new album called Synchro Anarchy, that you can buy on Friday when the clock strikes midnight! What’s that? No, I know you won’t, I’m saying you could buy it. If you’re in your 40s, maybe you remember when Voivod was an actual force to be reckoned with in the heavy metal scene, because they had good drawings of monsters on their album covers or whatever the attraction was aside from their (really stupid) band logo, I forget. But whatever, outta my way man, I have to go to YouTube and listen to this new song, “Planet Eaters,” and give you my expert review! Ha ha, look at this video, there’s like an evil Pikachu ball and some other poorly drawn monster-whatever things in a swirling hypnotic mush, and they’re trying to sound like Primus. Hm, now it’s trying to be like Guns N’ Roses, and it’s boring, let’s bag this and just continue.

• Oh, here we go. In its continuing, moronically conceived mission to confuse its readers as much as it can, Pitchfork Media described “Cisgender,” the new single from Shamir, as “Prince masquerading as Camille,” failing to remember that most people who have actual busy lives were never aware that the very existence of Prince’s (unreleased, mind you!) Camille album is nothing more than a weird little footnote to His Purpleness’s career. It annoys me that I had to look that up; the writer could have simply spent a handful of words to explain to their bewildered readers that the Camille concept was to present Prince as a female version of himself, but whatever, I suppose the comparison is more or less apt, given that Shamir’s voice is, as you probably know unless you’re older, very feminine. His new album, Heterosexuality, is on the way and will feature the aforementioned tune, a bizarre noise ballad reminiscent of M83 trying to be epic a la “Skin of the Night”; it’s cool, more or less.

• To close out the week, let’s look at indie-folk band Big Thief’s new one, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You before I fall asleep from all this nonsense. Hm, they wear farmer overalls; I knew someone was still buying those things. The single “Time Escaping” has some weird organic-sounding percussion driving a decent hayloft-pop idea, this is OK I suppose.

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).

Power Paladin, With The Magic Of Windfyre Steel (Atomic Fire Records)

You know, I don’t think I’ve seen the words “Reykjavík, Iceland” in years, or at least since there was talk of the city hosting a biannual Olympics. Oh wait, though, that’s every year, including this one. But before I tangent all my allotted words away, this power metal band is from there, actual Iceland, and, as I fully expected, their childlike enthusiasm is off the charts. I’m sure I’d get along with them personally; not that I’m a Dungeons & Dragons guy, but I’ve never not gotten along with anyone who’s into those dragons-and-elves games, a passion that drives these five or six or however many guys. They’ve confessed to being fans of Dio, Iron Maiden, Hammerfall and Rhapsody, so they obviously have no shame, and that’s refreshing in its way; the true test, though, is the music of course. Toward that, we start with “Kraven The Hunter,” which recalls Motley Crue’s “Kickstart My Heart,” then move to the Savatage-ish “Righteous Fury,” and the title track, a pomp-blasted hit of epic metal. It’s all super tight, and look at how cute this all is; I can’t hate these guys at all, sorry. A

Martin Wind/New York Bass Quartet, Air (Laika Records)

Every time I think I’ve heard it all, something bubbles up from this massive pit of promotional albums and makes me go, “OK, another country heard from.” Picture it: four guys who all play double bass (i.e., the upright acoustic bass guitar), but instead of laying down the low lines for four different bands, they’re in one place, jamming to familiar tunes from various genres. If you need some sort of certificate of authority for this one, Rufus Reid thinks it’s great, as does 84-year-old bass icon Ron Carter, so all that’s really to be done here is listen to some of it. It starts off with the title track, two or three of the players bowing at the high end in a thing that threatens for a second to droop into the maudlin strains of “Whiter Shade Of Pale” but instead turns into J.S. Bach’s immortal ‘Suite No. 3 In D Major: Air’ (you heard it in the movie Se7en, when Morgan Freeman is in the library). It’s an eerie thing to hear, but these supremely talented guys make it sound natural, rather cello-ish. Return To Forever drummer Lenny White also helps turn that arrangement on its head, and later helps to nail down a cover of Weather Report’s “Birdland.” Quite the gold nugget for eclectic tastes here. A

PLAYLIST

• Feb. 4 is here, can you feel the madness creeping in, on little tiny creepy feet? It’s frickin’ freezin’, frantic fam, I hate everything about it, and my seasonal affective disorder (or whatever it’s called, I just don’t like being cold) has me breaking down into teary madness every morning, just waking up and realizing that I still live in the North Pole and this will never end, ever. Other than that I am fine, I hope that you are well as well, as we examine the “slate” (I really hate seeing that word being used by a writer when “set” or “list” wouldn’t tick off half their audience) of new albums that’ll be released on the 4th in the hopes that someone will have one too many drinks and accidentally buy one. Hopefully no one accidentally buys the new album Pompeii from official crazy lady Cate Le Bon, because when she was writing it she was grappling “with existence, resignation and faith. I felt culpable for the mess but it smacked hard of the collective guilt imposed by religion and original sin.” Ha ha, she’s like Bjork but in clown makeup and outfits because she’s so edgy. She told the utterly enthralled, neckbearded writer from Pitchfork Media the album “was written and recorded in a quagmire of unease. Solo. In a time warp. In a house I had a life in 15 years ago.” Yes, Cate Le Bon, but what we really want to know is what snacks did you have? Probably nothing good, I’ll bet, and that’s why she lives a lonely fourth-dimension existence, being weird, all because she doesn’t have tasty shelled pistachios or chocolate cream pies. That’s basically all I eat now, someone should text her that diet tip, but in the meantime let’s see if my stomach can handle the new Cate Le Bon single “Running Away,” I’ll bet it can’t. Hold on, this isn’t so bad, it’s like a poor imitation of Siouxsie And The Banshees, but really, that’s what every band should be doing now, trying to imitate Siouxsie. Every once in a while a decent-enough melody trickles in, then disappears again into the sloppy imitation-’80s muck. Ok, this thing’s getting on my nerves, let’s just go to the next thingie.

• Oh terrific, can we just go back to Fake Siouxsie so I don’t have to listen to anything from Time Skiffs, the new LP from Animal Collective? I mean, all you ever needed to say in an Animal Collective CD review was “Cool fractals” and that was really it, although yes, they changed things up after the hipster crowd decided to abandon the band to the trash folder of college-rock history, so maybe there’s something worthwhile on this new “slab” (another word I hate to see used in a music review, because it makes the writer sound like they’re from the 1950s). I mean, it could happen, so let’s check out their new song “Prester John.” It’s noisy and creepy and slow. Wait, I get it, they’ve obviously been listening to a lot of Massive Attack, because this is just an edgy, grungy ripoff of “Teardrop,” which you know as the opening theme to the old TV show House. Next.

• OK, here we go, it’s a new album from edgy/gross/awesome metal guys, Korn, called Requiem! I’ll bet there’s no way I’ll have anything bad to say about their new tune “Start The Healing.” Whoa, bouncy beat here, my foot is already tapping, and — wait, this is some pretty basic nu-metal, almost kind of pop-punk, or like Tool. What the — oh, whatever, it’s Korn. They’ve earned the right to suck.

• We’ll end the week’s nonsense with indie-punk girl Mitski, because she’s awesome, so “Working for the Knife,” from her new album, Laurel Hell, must be awesome too. Wow, there’s like cowboy guitar in there, and it’s trippy but high-class, your girlfriend will probably like it. You should probably marry her, by the way. — Eric W. Saeger

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).