Author: Eric Saeger

Hayley and the Crushers, Unsubscribe From The Underground (Kitten Robot Records)

You may have noticed that rock bands, particularly older ones, aren’t very good at evincing any sense of internet-savviness when they make a record whose lyrical slant is focused on “what all the kids are doing on social media and whatever.” Hayley Cain, this melodic punk band’s frontlady, defines herself as a “vintage Millennial, the last generation to remember an analog childhood before and after the internet.” Well well. OK, given that my job is playing a hypercritical jerk who’d find fault with Mother Teresa, I take that — as well as a couple of her other quotes — as an admission that she’s actually a GenXer who was never big into online culture (if you don’t know, I’ve written two books about that, so I could get really nasty about this but won’t). Bands, don’t be like this, singing about stuff you don’t know about, and don’t be like the Stones and pay Sydney Sweeney to sprawl around in your video in a cynical attempt to extract a little Zoomer cred just because “Whoa, it’s Sydney Sweeney.” Hopefully two or three of you get what I’m talking about, and mind, I have no deep problem with the music; it’s jumpy, (politely/gently) crazed and rather catchy, even if the bass is almost absent from the mix. Anyway, all the other stuff has needed to be said for decades now. B

Peter Somuah, Highlife (ACT Records)

This album would normally be lumped in the jazz category, but that’d be oversimplifying things. This Ghana-born trumpeter isn’t the Miles/Hubbard disciple some will paint him to be; in fact, he grew up playing Ghanaian “highlife” music (think Afrobeat/ska-tinged reggae or vice versa to grok the basics), and, among other sounds, this record is something of a homecoming to those musical roots, when he’d play all night until no dancer could still stand erect. The album opens with some heavily accented words from highlife legend Koo Nimo on the origins of the genre (“highlife” refers to the style that evolved from the waltz, samba and Western popular music that wealthy British colonizers forced Ghanaian locals to play). “We Give Thanks” fuses ’60s Beatles-booted organ to samba in a tune that evokes both Lawrence Welk and the early James Bond movies; in “Bruce Road,” Somuah’s horn drapes itself over a “Superstition”-like bass beat that touches on bossa nova. “Feel-good stuff” would be one (woefully inadequate) way of describing this. B

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• You have to be kidding me, the next major album-release Friday is this week, Sept. 27, slow your roll, there, calendar, think about the children! OK, children, if you’re reading this award-winning column in your favorite sub shop on Saturday the 28th, grab your uncomfortable molded-plastic desks and gather ’round, so we can learn about experimental punk band Xiu Xiu, whose new album, 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn Grips, just came out yesterday! The band is based in San Jose, California, and over the past 22 years of their existence they’ve undergone some personnel changes. The band is still led by Jamie Stewart, the nepo-baby son of one Michael Stewart, who, back during the days of the American Revolution, won two Grammys for producing such albums as Billy Joel’s breakthrough LP Piano Man. Nowadays the group prominently features longtime member Angela Seo, a singer/multi-instrumentalist, and also they have Tried Unusual Music Things, such as releasing a tribute project to singer/civil rights activist Nina Simone in 2013. As well, their albums usually end up at Pitchfork’s unlistenable music desk, where they always garner rave reviews except when the reviewer didn’t get whole oat milk in his flavorless latte. What does all this mean? It means that this new album will be strange and unusual and will have a lot of girl vocals, duh, so let’s go listen to it for as long as my stomach can stand it. The test-drive track is on their Bandcamp space; it is called “Common Loon,” a loud punky thing that begins as a discombobulated emo tune a la Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy.” Whoa, then it gets really muddy and heavy, and the nepo baby is singing like Buffalo Bill on Silence Of The Lambs, this is getting pretty edgy, folks! Huh, then some epic goth-pop synth comes in, and the whole mess becomes quite listenable, I’m surprised Pitchfork likes these guys at all, but then again, people do eventually grow up a little.

• One of the new albums coming out this week is titled EELS, but funnily enough it wasn’t recorded by the Eels; it’s from an Austin, Texas, band called Being Dead, don’t you hate it when these things happen! Odd, I probably have this album somewhere in my stack of new releases; they are represented by my favorite public relations firm, which only rarely sends me crappy albums, so I am anticipating a pleasant-enough listening experience. Mind you, their songs are said to be always adventurous and genre-bending, so this will be like my taking some random piece out of a generic box of chocolates, and you know how that goes, you always end up with the cherry one and immediately throw the whole box in the trash. Wait though, the sample track, “Van Goes” is post-punk in a very classic sense, combining the rawness of Exene with B-52s-ish poppiness. It is OK!

• Great, jog my memory why don’t you, new release list, the last time I remember even thinking about Maxïmo Park was when they were mentioned every time someone was talking about metrosexuality, do any of you people even remember that nonsense? Good, count your blessings, let’s just skip that and talk about the band’s new album, Stream Of Life! The single, “Your Own Worst Enemy,” is the worst song I’ve heard this year, a hooty, Morrissey-nicking waste of notes. Absolutely awful.

• Lastly, let’s have a look at White Roses My God, the debut solo album from Low co-founder Alan Sparhawk! “Get Still” is Nintendo-driven slowcore, like Figurine on head drugs he’d ingested just to be even more annoying than usual.

The Black Pacific, Here Comes Our Wave (Dine Alone Records)

The long-awaited second album from this side project led by Jim Lindberg (lead singer and songwriter for seminal California skate-punk band Pennywise) is a lot of fun at the beginning, leading off with “I Think I’m Paranoid,” which Lindberg accurately describes as a “panic attack with distorted guitars at 120 beats per minute.” If you’re a visiting Martian, that means it’s legitimately hardcore-fast, but this isn’t just a sk8er record; after a few barn-burners like “No Fun” (about “sociopath dictators around the world inflicting chaos and death on innocent civilians”), and take-no-prisoners rawker “Here We Come” (about the encroaching threat of AI taking everyone’s jobs and all that happy stuff), along comes “Float Away,” which opens as an exquisitely filthy no-wave thing and becomes a Hoobastank-derived emo joint in which he yearns to build a raft and sail away with his wife. This one puts Lindberg’s versatility with different power-rock styles on brilliant display. A+— Eric W. Saeger

Blitz Vega, Northern Gentlemen (FutureSonic Records)

This debut LP is also a posthumous one; as the duo’s remaining member Kav Sandhu has remarked, Smiths bassist Andy Rourke (who died last year of pancreatic cancer) was this band. Where it’ll go from here is anyone’s guess, but it’d be nice to see Sandhu continue in this vein, especially if you’re into ’80s music; there’s some really captivating material here. The album opens with “Disconnected,” which flirts with a Depeche Mode feel while also drawing from Lords Of The New Church. That’s followed by government-issue mid-tempo rocker “Strong Forever,” a junkie-rock dance-along made for post-industrial smoke-filled rooms. “Big Nose” hails to New York Dolls deconstructionism; the jangly “High Gravity” recalls mid-career Wire; “Love City” will make you think of ’70s/’80s-era Jim Steinman (remember, he didn’t just produce Meatloaf but Sisters of Mercy as well). With any luck this project will continue, but the loss of Rourke may well negate any hope of that, which really is a shame. A — Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yuppitty-yup, it’s all downhill from here, the new albums of Sept. 20 are on the trucks and heading to the stores for another freaky Friday of new music, as the snows gather in Canada and our tundra prepares to permafrost! Yes, what I actually mean is that you’ve already heard all about those albums from bootleggers and people who found the one YouTubeToMP3 website that wasn’t crawling with viruses and gleefully downloaded the albums, and you’ve already heard the advice that I’m about to impart, but can you at least pretend that this is news to you, that’d be great. But first, let’s look at the new solo album from Sonic Youth bandleader Thurston Moore, titled Flow Critical Lucidity, that is if he can give us a rest from promoting that Shelly Duvall lookalike girl on his Instagram, what’s even going on there, no don’t tell me I don’t care. Huh, today I learned that Moore and his bandmate/ex-wife Kim Gordon released a collaborative album with Yoko Ono in 2012, which came out at about the same time as my favorite New Yawk City public relations dude started sending me all sorts of spam about a new Yoko Ono album; maybe that collaboration had something to do with people trying to legitimize Yoko and make me write about her, which I did at the time in these very pages unless it was somewhere else (I hated it). No, everything Moore does is considered rad and cool by people who enjoy not-very-good music, but if that is your wont, yes, I shall now sashay over to the YouTube whatsis and have a listen to “Sans Limites,” Moore’s new single, which features guest vocalist/weird French person Laeitia Sadier, of Stereolab! OK, I’m reporting live from the YouTubes, and this song has been shockingly boring for a full minute, a guitar-strummy thing that sounds like your little brother trying to impress his crush, like, sort of a fractal but nothing fascinating going on. Finally Moore starts singing in his serious-mode Nick Cave voice, and the only thing Sadler is doing is breathing sort of melodically. What. Ever.

• Since 2000, Canadian singing lady Nelly Furtado has straddled the lines between pop diva, Latinx pop star and trip-hop princess, aside from her short stint singing that borderline heavy metal song with Bryan Adams at the Olympics, when they gave everyone in the crowd drum-shaped noisemakers, do you even remember that? Well heaven only knows what she’s doing on her seventh album, titled, of course, 7, because she claims that her ADHD drove her to write 500 songs since her last album, 2017’s The Ride, let me go listen to one of them now. Yes, “Corazón” is the opening tune, a tribal-washed reggaeton affair with a deep-diva tonality, it’s pretty interesting.

• Reality talent-show fixture Katy Perry is back with us again, with a new album called 143! She told cardboard-cutout jokeman Jimmy Kimmel that the album is “super high energy, it’s super summer, it’s very high BPM,” which would make sense if it were still summer, but as we know, it is not. Regardless, the lead single from this record, “Woman’s World,” is actually low-BMP, not that I’m trying to be pedantic, and it’s easily the most uninspired thing I’ve ever heard from her, like she hired a hack songwriter who needed immediate money to pay his gardener. Very low-quality stuff, folks.

• Lastly it’s Conor Oberst and his band Bright Eyes, with a new LP titled Five Dice All Threes! The album’s jump-off track, “Rainbow Overpass,” combines snoozy Bonnaroo-ready indie-folk with loud Big Black-style no-wave. Nice idea, but, you know — why? — Eric W. Saeger

Slowdive, “kisses (Daniel Avery Remix)” b/w “kisses – sky ii” [Grouper remix] (Dead Oceans Records)

I haven’t given much love to this English shoegaze band over the years, mostly owing to there always being enough shoegaze bands around to fill a football stadium, and besides, for a time there I thought the genre had peaked with Raveonettes. But sure, they’re fine, despite the fact that they were broken up for 20 years (1995 to 2014), and nowadays they have a sort of hallowed status among Gen Xers and pan-goths in general. The band’s 2003 album Everything Is Alive resulted in crazy levels of love, with the Pitchfork writer padding his review of that album’s single “kisses” with something about how it’s easy to write a good shoegaze song but difficult to write a great one. What a world-smashingly generic utterance; all he really needed to say was that he liked it, with its Cure guitar line and haunting-in-a-good-way, New Order-nicking vocal line (on Neil Halstead’s part anyway). Techno producer Avery’s remix turns it into a spazzing drum ’n’ bass rinseout that’s completely unnecessary, and meanwhile Grouper’s version is drowned in processing. Just stick with the original, folks. Ahem, the thing that’s missing from all this is the fact that the tune borrows a lot of its melodic steez from U2’s “Beautiful Day.” Ahem. C— Eric W. Saeger

Capilla Ardiente, Where Gods Live and Men Die (High Roller Records)

Ah, a doom metal album from a Santiago, Chile-based band. In case you weren’t aware of it, Black Sabbath’s 13 was a terrible album, but unfortunately a lot of young whippersnappers have mistaken it for a worthy template, which seems to be the case here: a lot of slow, meandering grinding signifying not much. To the band’s credit, the singer does as good a Chris Cornell imitation as the guy from Wolves In The Throne Room used to, and boy, the album cover would be as awesome as the one for Nazareth’s Hair Of The Dog if it weren’t for the stupid golden castle in the background. For what it is, it stands as further proof that Chile really rocks, or however the kids say it nowadays — ah, it’s “based,” that’s it — so there’s that anyway. Closeout track “As I Lie on the Summit” is their push single, and it’s OK, but if it isn’t epic metal as opposed to doom, I’m Granny Clampett. B — Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Hey, guys, do you know all the things that have happened on Sept. 13, I mean on that particular calendar date, through the corridors of history? Well, for starters, on Sept. 13, 1899, Henry Hale Bliss became the first recorded person to be unalived in a motor vehicle accident in the United States, specifically in New York City, where else! That’s a very portentous thing, because as for the 2024 version of Sept. 13, we have new albums coming our way to mark the occasion, and the list is pretty freakin’ big, because it’s already holiday gift-buying season, according to, you know, the people in the C suites who want you to buy stuff! If you’re a millennial hipster who hasn’t sold out to The Man and gotten a job (or five) yet because you’re quite comfortable sponging off your parents and eating their chicken tendies, you’re officially still cool and relevant, so I assume you want to know about the upcoming new album from (formerly?) tuneless indie band Snow Patrol, The Forest Is The Path! This band is from Dundee, Scotland, which is basically the most horrible city in the country, and that makes them relevant, so let’s see what they’ve been up to since their Aughts heyday, back when I didn’t quite hate their music but had no idea how anyone could possibly like it, because it was like a Loot Crate version of Lifehouse or whatnot. Of course, they started doing a lot better in the mid-Aughts, with albums like A Hundred Million Suns, but in those days I was really only paying attention to trance DJs and goth bands, so I don’t know. And so, fam, that’s where we stand with Snow Patrol, with me having no idea what I’m even talking about, because for all I know they were as faux-important as the Killers until their 2018 album Wildness, which Pitchfork sort of laughed at, but not cruelly. I have no desire to play catch-up with these fellers; instead I’ll just listen to the new single from this one, the title track. Wait, why does this tune sound like a cross between Sigur Rós and M83, what are they even doing? It’s got a mopey-epic-mopey structure; are the Aughts coming back already, like, am I going to have to start preparing to hear nine million bands that sound like Spacemen 3 and Franz Ferdinand? Why is this being done to me?

• Indie-electronic producer Trentemøller is back again, keeping up the pace, even though he’s 51 now, don’t you feel oooold? Dreamweaver is his first LP since 2022’s Memoria, which barely rated in the U.S. at all, but he’s still big in Denmark and such, mostly because he’s influenced by actually relevant ’80s bands like Joy Division and Siouxsie. The sort-of title track, “Dreamweavers,” is slow, deep shoegaze stuff, with plenty of My Bloody Valentine going on, except quirkier and more electronic. All set here.

• Huh, will you look at that, it’s a new album from well-adjusted 1980s alt-rock figure Nick Lowe, titled Indoor Safari! Ha ha, any of you fellow old people remember when he was relevant, in the ’80s, with the soapy alt-rock hit “Cruel To Be Kind?” Right, I’m trying to forget it too, but the new singles “Trombone” and “Went To A Party” are like Roy Orbison redux, picture Eddie Cochran on sleeping pills. Right, OK, so he had his dumb hit 40 years ago, I really don’t have time for this.

• Lastly it’s Miranda Lambert, the second Mrs. Blake Shelton, i.e. the one before Gwen Whatsername, with her newest LP, Postcards From Texas! The single “Wranglers” is a slow-burn thing combining Dolly Parton and ’80s hair-metal, it’s actually not all that bad, and she’s a real-life nice person, so let’s leave it at that.

— Eric W. Saeger

George Strait, Cowboys And Dreamers (MCA Nashville Records)

At 72, Strait has been around a billion years, having been instrumental in pioneering “neotraditional country” music in the ’80s, a style that emphasizes what the instruments are doing, an approach that was a reaction to the blandness that had overcome country music after the urban cowboy fad. In that, you could call it an OG resurgence I suppose, being that artists like Strait, Toby Keith and Reba McEntire tend to dress in midcentury fashions and sing in a more traditional country style. Strait’s new LP doesn’t deviate from the neotraditional formula, but you’ll hear things you probably weren’t expecting, such as on opener “Three Drinks Behind,” in which his radio-announcer-style baritone warbles its obvious sentiments over mildly edgy guitar strumming and mandolin lines that fit like a glove. “The Little Things” is a mawkish love ballad, buoyed by (spoiler alert) dobro as Strait’s voice explores croaky mode. “MIA Down In MIA” is a curveball that’s obviously an amalgam of Jimmy Buffett’s lifetime catalog. Friendly, authentic stuff here. A+

Yes, Drama (MCA Nashville Records)

Continuing my quixotic efforts to educate Zoomer normies about classic arena-rock bands: The first thing to understand about Yes is that most people never really understood their trippy approach in the first place. I was at their Deep Purple-headlined show in Gilford a couple weeks ago and was psyched to see Yes opening their set with “Machine Messiah,” the opening tune from this album, which I’ve always liked even though original singer Jon Anderson was gone, replaced by Trevor Rabin, whose faux-soprano sounds exactly like Anderson’s. Like any prog-rock album, this one is musically complicated, but the math and the riffing are a lot more user-friendly than that of their earlier ones, serving as a very listenable (often hard-rock influenced) precursor to the commercial stuff they tabled in 90125 (whose big hit was “Owner Of A Lonely Heart”). Prior to this LP, Going For The One was a great one too, but Drama found the fellas in a less fluffy mood, perhaps even looking over their shoulders at Rush, who were doing the same kind of thing at the time. “Roundabout” isn’t the only thing this band ever accomplished, is what I’m getting at here, and this one is criminally overlooked. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Sept. 6 will see the next Friday-load of CD releases from burnt-out rock stars, twerking bubblegum divas and assorted swindlers, so, all you pumpkin spice people, let’s just do this “oh no, it’s gonna be freezing in New England any minute now” thing, because I can hardly wait! Yay, I guess we can start with a few off-the-cuff riffs on Pink Floyd, a band that never really appealed to me aside from a select few random songs (“Sheep” and maybe “Run Like Hell,” as I’ve said before), because look at this, guys, it’s their guitar dude, David Gilmour, with a new album, Luck And Strange! I figured it’d be best if I spun the track “Between Two Points,” since Gilmour’s daughter Romany handles the singing on it, but wait a minute, I’ll not indulge you nepo-baby haters in this case, because I don’t mind her breathy soprano at all. She sounds a lot like famous British trance singer Justine Suissa; in fact she’s a dead ringer. As for the tune’s music, it’s a slow Pink Floyd-ish snoozer, with Gilmour in lazy-strummy mode, in line with most of the stuff he did with Floyd back in the olden days. It’s fine really.

• OK, very funny, I really don’t have any time for a good punking, what with trying to sell my new book, talk to my Twitter followers and respond to Friend-Of-The-Hippo Dan Szczesny’s enthusiastic Facebook personal messages about Korean all-girl speed-metal bands. But sure, for the sake of somesuch, let’s say you’re serious, that none other than observably untalented nepo-baby Paris Hilton is actually “releasing a new album called Infinite Icon” tomorrow and I have to talk about it. Now fess up, are you just telling me this to upset me, because it won’t work; I’m permanently upset enough over many things in this world these days, so my listening to this hyper-privileged dunce sing some (off-key) nonsense about her latest bad-choice boyfriend over some microwaved Kylie Minogue beat from 1993 or whatever she’s doing these days isn’t going to strain the camel’s back, who on Earth cares? I have to admit, I’d actually much prefer talking about Babymetal so that at least someone would be happy, but I’ve put it off long enough, let me go have a listen to “I’m Free,” because I have to. Oh how cute, it’s pure Ariana Grande ripoff-ism, beach-chill with not much going on other than ringtone-ready romance, but you want to know the worst part, of course you do, she sings through Auto-Tune through the whole stupid thing, and no, I’m not kidding. Rina Sawayama is the feat. guest, delivering a phoned-in vocal that’s nowhere near her best work, but at least everyone is happy, here in nepo land, can we move on from this please.

• Here we go again, another ’80s new wave band resurfacing from out of nowhere to have a go at the last few drops of glory that can be shlurped from the Gen X resurgence. I speak of course of British post-punkers The The, which is still singer/songwriter/sole-constant Matt Johnson’s baby; Ensoulment is this band’s first proper studio album in, holy cats, 24 years! “Cognitive Dissident” is the feature single, and it’s a pretty good one, combining INXS swagger with Ennio Morricone spaghetti sauce, it’s actually very cool. The closest the band’s new tour will come to you reader folks will be the Orpheum Theatre in Boston on Oct. 19.

• We’ll wrap up the week with Madrid, Spain-based indie band Hinds, whose new full-length, Viva Hinds, will feature three or four songs sung in Spanish! Several tunes have already made the rounds, including “Boom Boom Back,” which features a contribution from Beck; it’s a riot grrrl-flavored thing that’s like The Waitresses recycling a beat from Red Hot Chili Peppers, it is fine.

Bill Leeb, Model Kollapse (Metropolis Records)

If you’re an OG techno-goth who gave up on this column owing to the lack of love I’ve showered on your favorite genre for many months now, it’s me, not you (or goth); my email box is nowadays a hopeless trash heap of messages in bottles from bands and labels looking for a little attention, and as far as goth goes I have no idea how many emails from Metropolis I’ve unintentionally missed. This is a great one for playing catch-up, though. Leeb is of course the prime mover behind Front Line Assembly and all the other stompy Skinny Puppy-ish bands you know and love (including Skinny Puppy itself), so what I was looking for here was a little risk-taking on Leeb’s part after so many years of lording over the space. Fat chance, of course, turns out. There’s Rammstein jackboot-stomping on the Shannon Hemmet-assisted “Terror Forms,” and tribal, Last Rites-era Skinny Puppy stuff on “Demons,” etc.; it’s all very nice but formulaic (I hate to burst any bubbles, but that’s of course not a shocking development). I mean, if you’re looking for kickass background ambiance for playing Wolfenstein: The New Order, you can’t go wrong here, and I’d prefer to just leave it at that if you don’t mind. B

Marquis Hill, Composers Collective: Beyond The Jukebox (Black Unlimited Music Group)

This Chicago-based jazz trumpeter is big on mixing genres; he views jazz, hip-hop, R&B, Chicago house and neo-soul as essential cogs in the African-American creative context. “It all comes from the same tree,” quoth Hill, “they simply blossomed from different branches.” Of course, promises are one thing, delivering on them is another, but he certainly does right out of the gate with “A Star Is Born,” a refreshingly courageous genre-salad that deftly moves from a timbales-driven (or sample thereof) shuffle to a sparklingly clean post-bop horn exercise with a dubstep drumbeat underneath it. Next is “Joseph Beat,” featuring guest sax guy Josh Johnson helping decorate a stubbornly rhythmic pattern that’s too sophisticated for Weather Channel backgrounding but wouldn’t be terribly out of place as some sort of 1970s game-show incidental riff. “Pretty For The People” is a dazzling, prog-referencing slow-burn; “Enter The Stargate” is an ambitiously nimble bit showcasing the understated abilities of drummer Corey Fonville. A relaxing, fun, terrific record. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• I give up, the summer’s over, the next Friday haul of new CDs will arrive on Aug. 30, which is tomorrow, according to this newspaper’s publishing schedule!

The first one we should probably talk about, not that we have to, is the 18th studio album from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, titled Wild God. Cave has always been something of an acquired taste that I never, you know, acquired, but even if you don’t like his proto-goth baritone voice or any music he’s ever done, one thing’s for sure: It’s usually expressive and revealing in some way. Far as that goes, I reviewed his Ghosteen album in this space in 2016; the album was dedicated to the memory of his son Arthur, who slipped and fell off a cliff while under the influence of LSD. It was a very impressive album that, you may dimly recall, was strong enough to tie Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly album on Metacritic’s scorecard that year. Before that, a short-lived relationship with PJ Harvey — actually its breakup — inspired the 1997 album The Boatman’s Call. As for Wild God, Cave is enthusiastic about it, saying that the band was “happy” when they put it together. That’s usually a bad sign in my experience, like it’s always better when the main songwriters are going through a breakup or some other trauma, not that I’d ever wish such things on anyone, but it is what it is. Now, despite the fact that the band was feeling happy, the title track is haunting, moody and occasionally sweeping; it starts out with a vanilla mid-tempo beat, Cave’s Sisters Of Mercy-prototype vocalizing leading into a noisy bliss-out that’s interesting enough I suppose.

• OK, and with Nick Cave out of the way, it’s out of the frying pan and into the art-rock fire, let’s look at American avant-garde lady Laurie Anderson’s new album, Amelia! If you’re old and tried a lot of different drugs in the early ’80s you’re probably familiar with Anderson’s 1982 sort-of-hit “O Superman,” an eight-minute-long exercise consisting of two notes, some vocoder-tweaked singing and some normal, minimalist warbling from Anderson. You probably have no idea what that song even is, but like I said, it was a surprise hit that year, and people still remember it; in fact it was used in one of the alternative endings to the 2018 interactive Netflix film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. OK, so now we know where this is going, let’s go have a listen to one of the tunes, “India And On Down to Australia feat. Anohni.” So OK, this is a soft, tastefully decorated, electronically enhanced joint that’s got a tinge of Enya to it. It’s quite soothing and pretty; I don’t hate it.

• London, England-based pan-continental underground band Los Bitchos specialize in instrumental music in the style of 1970s/1980s “cumbia,” a folklore-based dance genre from Colombia. It is danced in pairs with the couple not touching one another as they “display the amorous conquest of a woman by a man,” in other words it’s basically twerking except Americans can’t understand what’s actually going on. Talkie Talkie is the band’s new album, which leads off with “Don’t Change,” a dance-y beachy folk instrumental that may remind you of Tangerine Dream with a little bit of prog in there.

• And finally it’s John Legend, Chrissy Teigen’s husband, with a new album of children’s music, called My Favorite Dream! Apparently Chrissy uploaded a video of Legend playing and singing “Maybe” on a Fisher Price piano to one of their kids and then somehow Sufjan Stevens got involved, whatever. “L-O-V-E” is annoyingly happy, not Nick Cave-level happy or anything, more like Raffi/Barney-dinosaur-level happy, which makes me really unhappy.

Bek, Derby Girl [EP] (Amber Blue Recordings)

This mononymed DJ is a well-established player in the (reportedly vibrant) Hamburg, Germany, velvet-rope scene. He’s steadily made a name for himself as a producer as well, releasing tracks on such imprints as Traum, What Happens, Ohral and Natura Viva, and back in 2015 he won the Mixmag + ANTS Ibiza DJ competition over 300 other participating DJs. With all the resume nonsense out of the way, we can proceed to what’s on this four-songer (actually three, but the label owners added a remix to the second track, “Cannibal Licornes,” a Calvin Harris-style joint that doesn’t do much other than make you wish you were sipping mai tais in the Maldives, not that we don’t need more of that sort of vice in this loveless world). The title track is a lightly syncopated bounce-along whose (actually pretty raucous) drop comes halfway though its six minutes; overall it’s a lot more experimental than what I expected. Sure, this is fine. A–

Alison Moyet, Key (Cooking Vinyl Records)

As a celebration of 40 years of releasing records, this is one for the books, a mix of reworked songs with only a pair of new ones, but the rerubs are reflective of the changes she’s undergone personally over the years. In fact, she’s outgrown some of the tunes since her days releasing her first solo record, Alf, as a 22-ish-year-old. Like Siouxsie Sioux, Moyet’s distinctive contralto has probably been mistaken for a male tenor on many an occasion; Andy Bell mainlined her music while preparing to audition for Erasure, a RIYL name-check relative to her sound. Here, she reshapes her most famous track, “Is This Love” (from the 1986 album Raindancing and featured in the film All of Us Strangers), as an epic chillout ballad as opposed to the (very) ’80s slow-dance track it’d originally been. Major hits “All Cried Out” and “Love Resurrection” are here, updated for the times; newcomer songs “Such Small Ale” and “Filigree” are nice-enough slowbie bringdowns. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• A Friday is ahead, specifically the one that falls on Aug. 23, and you know what that means: People will be crowding the malls to buy all the new albums! Yes yes, your friends will be dressing up just like the cool but awkward kids in Pretty In Pink and making fun of all the mall cops (aren’t adults so stupid, lol) and buying plenty of albums, for your Sony Walkman audio devices, aren’t you glad Stranger Things made the ’80s come back? Right, I have no idea where I’m going with this, I’m just waiting for the ’90s-rock echo boom to take over from this tedious ’80s wave once and for all, until we’re all sick of hearing bands that sound exactly like Nirvana and Indigo Girls (I’m way ahead on both scores), and in the meantime, let’s try to ease our suffering by finding something that might be relevant to our current era of music, that’d be great. We’ll start with Philadelphia electro-psych/slowcore band Spirit Of The Beehive, which releases You’ll Have To Lose Something on Friday! They’re on a post-indie trip and insist on being weird, so the video for the first single, “Something’s Ending / I’ve Been Evil,” is moderately annoying. As for the song itself, it’s a slapdash slowcore mess that’s somehow listenable, and like many bands are doing nowadays, there’s a dubstep layer in there that serves pretty well as a sort of binding force. The vocals are faraway and over-reverbed, in other words there’s government-issue oldschool-shoegaze afoot in this business but despite the performative, androgynous gloom there’s a hint of 1960s Spanky And Our Gang sunshine-pop at work as well. If all this sounds good to you, you can catch them live at Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Mass., on Sept. 24.

• Wow, it’s the first album in 24 years from Pacific Northwest-based minimalist indie-pop/cuddlecore duo The Softies, isn’t that special? I hadn’t realized I sort of missed hearing about them, and come to think of it, I never did, but I will listen to something from their new album, The Bed I Made, because I am an equal opportunity hater, just let me pop a few Dramamine to settle my stomach first. Ack, I used to confuse these guys with The Swirlies for obvious reasons; an AllMusic reviewer nailed it on the head when he said The Softies’ stripped-down, two-voices/two-guitars aesthetic was too boring to build entire albums around. But hey, maybe they’ve added some layering, who knows, let’s go listen to the single, “I Said What I Said.” Yep, it’s twee-pop, happy and upbeat and catchy in its way, and jangly and minimalist and decidedly dated, and one of the girls is wearing nerd glasses, and both girls are wearing the spring line equivalent of Christmas sweater fashion. But like I was saying, you’d better get used to this vanilla-frappe-blooded nonsense, because it’s gonna be everywhere before you can say “Oh no, please don’t, I beg of you.”

• New York City-based industrial metal/noise-rock fivesome Uniform release their fifth album, American Standard, this Friday! They’re my kind of dark-futurist-type guys, having used samples of gunshots and explosions to produce rhythm tracks, why haven’t more bands done stuff like that? The single, “This Is Not A Prayer,” is psychotic, deranged and awesome, like “Stumbo” from Jim Thirlwell’s Wiseblood project. That’s another thing, why haven’t more bands ripped off Wiseblood?

• Lastly let’s check out Sabrina Carpenter, a nepo singing person who used to be on the Disney Channel series Girl Meets World; her aunt is Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson on The Simpsons. “Espresso,” the single from her new LP, Short n’ Sweet, is disposable Britney bubble-pop. I’m sure 6-year-old girls would like it, aren’t they growing up so fast these days (world’s loudest eyeroll)?