Author: Eric Saeger

Assorted Orchids, Assorted Orchids (Whale Watch Records)

Debut album from Boston-based folkie T. McWilliams, whose target audience is the weird-beard acoustic-guitar set that lumps together such debatably disparate acts as Mississippi John Hurt and Nick Drake. He’s lived in a lot of places, including Los Angeles, New York City, Shanghai and Scotland, which would explain the boho feel of these pieces, but it’s nevertheless not a fluffy record at all. There’s real precision in play when McWilliams is plucking his steel and nylon strings and applying his delicate croak to such vivid lyrics as “I entered the garden of scarlet chrysanthemums opening wide” (“The Mighty Kingdom”), and sure, we’ve heard that kind of thing before, but McWilliams’ layering is often divine: It’s not often that one hears incidental finger-picked arpeggios used so decisively that one gets the sense that they’re listening to high-end guitar-tronica, not just another contender for Nick Drake’s throne (not that you’d want to miss this if Drake’s your thing, certainly). Brilliant stuff. A- — Eric W. Saeger

Styx, Crash Of The Crown (UME Records)

If we’re gonna be real about this legendary Chicago arena-rock band, the default diss has always been that they’re a lite version of Yes. But you know what, they do try, and always have, and shut up anyway, because they didn’t have Bill Bruford or Chris Squire, and neither does your band, so chill. I was surprised to see so many other reviewers pointing out that original keyboardist Dennis DeYoung (the guy who sang “Mr. Roboto,” “Come Sail Away” and all the original hits) is gone, being that it’s been 21 years already, but they have their word quotas to fill, and besides, they’re still a fun band to see live. This is their 17th album, and actually quite the inspired effort. Once you get to the middle of the second tune (“The Monster”) you can’t help noticing that this thing is something of an homage to Yes’s Close To The Edge: woozy, busy keyboards; similar level of riffing; epic-gentle vocal harmonies, and hold it, the drummer is doing some very cool stuff. They’re still kickin’, folks. A+

PLAYLIST

• July 16 is the next all-important date for album releases, only I’m not supposed to call them “albums” anymore, because otherwise I’m a boomer. What that means is that I’m simply going to have to keep calling them albums, because the level of senility in my current boomer state allows me, by law, to act in accordance with my own desires, whether it be calling mixtapes “albums” or throwing a fit at the 7-Eleven if someone’s ahead of me in line buying a million lottery tickets. In other words I can start howling at the ceiling and eating a copy of the newest issue of Teen Vogue magazine until the awkward 20-something clerk comes over and asks me if I’m OK, and nothing will happen other than that because I am a boomer who loves hitting pause on the DVR machine so I can read the hundred-billion warnings on every pharmaceutical ad, and I remember when albums were called albums, and music was awesome, like the mellow tunes of Pat Boone and Spanky & Our Gang! I remember Donny and Marie Osmond too, all you 4chan trolls, secretly making fun of my words! Well, let’s see you make fun of all the edgy and groovy words I’m going to use in my first review this week, as I discuss Hideaway, the new album from skinny San Diego hipster trio Wavves! This is their seventh mixtape — oh wait, they call their records “albums,” not mixtapes, silly me, does anyone have a box of prunes I could borrow, for my digestive health? Whatever, I’ve heard a few of their things, but if I recall, their songs are only slightly more compelling than Grizzly Bear, but I may be wrong, because I’m so totally old and crazy! The band’s last record, You’re Welcome, climbed to No. 95 on the Billboard charts, not that that’s much of an achievement, now that there are only 98 people left in the U.S. who still actually buy albums, but congratulations, guys! Wow, check that out, I wasn’t expecting the title track to be jagged and grungy, but it’s definitely cool, sort of like Nevermind-era Nirvana but without Kurt Cobain’s raw/edgy voice. Spoiler alert, what’ll happen here is a bunch of people will read some stupid review in Nylon or whatnot and start to believe Wavves is awesome, and then they’ll hear actual grunge songs from the ’90s and realize they were lied to, because all the writers at Nylon are corporate-paid hacks, and then we’ll see that long-overdue ’90s music revival, while I sit here eating bowls of pudding and pharmaceuticals and cackling like a witch at all of — what was I saying again?

• Canadian indie quartet The Zolas releases Come Back To Life on Friday! It’s taken them five years to put this album out, their first since 2016’s Swooner, so it’s probably awesome! Nope, it isn’t. The title single is like Grizzly Bear trying to sing through kazoos. My stomach is lurching, it really is.

• Oh great, a new Barenaked Ladies album! Boy, how did music ever survive this long without a new mixtape or cassette or whatever from the millionth band to repackage Peter, Paul and Mary and resell it to the ’90s-college-rock crowd? Right, the new LP is Detour de Force, whose single is “New Disaster,” an ornate tapestry of 1980s Police-ripoff stuff. Moving on.

• Finally, it’s John Mayer, with his latest LP, Sob Rock! Teaser single “Last Train Home” rips off everything to do with Blue Oyster Cult’s “Shooting Shark,” but Mayer will get away with it, because anyone who’s old enough to recognize “Shooting Shark” is either in a rest home or babbling erroneous nonsense about mixtapes in this newspaper.

Retro Playlist

Reminiscing back almost-exactly-whatever eight years ago to 2013, the first order of business was giving a quick exam to Gypsy-punkers Gogol Bordello’s then-spanking-new LP, Pura Vida Conspiracy, their seventh. The album’s single, “Lost Innocent World,” is “a rather subdued version of their usual ‘oi oi oi’ spazzings, not that lead singer Eugene Hütz doesn’t sound the same as always, specifically what Serj Tankian would sound like if he were sort of fun.”

That and a few other review-snippets aside, I was forced by job description to deal with an entire album from Kentucky band Seabird, called Troubled Days. I think I disposed of it rather fairly and adroitly, to wit: “More clean-teen mall-indie for the overhead speakers at TGI Fridays. The intentions of these two Kentuckians couldn’t be more obvious; maybe a ‘big time’ Budweiser commercial spot featuring one of their tunes and they’d call it a rock star career, whether it be one of their more Strokes-like tunes or maybe even one of the debatable curveballs, the tricks to which generally involve mildly interesting guitar sounds more than anything else.” In other words you’ve heard this kind of nonsense a billion times at restaurants, and we can start wrapping up here.

The other “attraction,” for lack of a secret code word with which I could handily signify my displeasure to you, was Eric & Magill’s Baggage and Clothes. “Nerd-indie of a sort that deepens the immersive feel of Animal Collective’s trip,” I yawned, spit spraying everywhere, “this accomplished by incorporating a different, more mellow notion of swirly layering and a few elements of Simon and Garfunkel’s mawkish solitude.” (If it’s any consolation to any E&M band members who might be reading, I wouldn’t have ever thought of you again if it hadn’t been for this little stroll down memory lane.)

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).

Velvet Insane, Rock ‘n’ Roll Glitter Suit (Sound Pollution Records)

Wait, can it be something cool for a change? I mean, it’s not like a few dozen old-school blues-based records don’t waltz into my email every month, and sure, I usually just send them straight to Trash, knowing in my bones that none of them will be the next New York Dolls or Kiss (come on, millennials and Zoomers, get in touch with your generational disgruntlements already), or, on occasion, I’ll listen to one out of misguided benevolence and pay the price by experiencing black-hole-level suckage I never would have imagined being physically possible. This one had promise, a Swedish band that was somehow able to “entice” former Kiss fixture Bruce Kulick into hopping a flight and shredding some lead guitar in the studio (yes, I did keep in mind the fact that everyone in the arts has their price — remember when German hack filmmaker Uwe Boll fooled Ben freaking Kingsley into joining the cast of BloodRayne?). The results? Well, it’s basically Poison for dummies. Opener “Driving Down The Mountain” had me going for a second, like I thought it was going to be a punkabilly thing, but then it turned into Trixter or whatever. Great ambiance for your backyard barbecue for when you want the kiddies to spazz all over the place and annoy your spouse. B- — Eric W. Saeger

Blood Honey, Blood Honey EP (self-released)

Debut release for a Los Angeles boy-girl ’80s-technopop duo which, as is so common these days, comes with a couple of interesting backstories (his: he was studying cognitive neuroscience but ultimately dropped out of a Ph.D. program to make records; hers: tragic story about surviving ovarian cancer). Not saying they get a free pass or anything, but at the very least, their collective level of personal bravery does help explain their rather soothing, eminently mature take on ’80s-mania: this stuff isn’t just another Simple Minds/Flock Of Seagulls slam-dunk. It’s quite apparent that they’ve listened to Human League, probably even Roxette, and not just out of basic necessity but for deeper study. The song structures are almost experimental compared to all the other Stranger Things prostration that’s being released every five minutes while the gravy train is still on its tracks (“Favorite Fever” starts with eerie darkwave and slowly settles into a Mummy Calls-ish chillout). Oddly comforting; above average songwriting for sure. B —

PLAYLIST

• July 9 is bearing down on us, bringing with it its usual “Ha ha, neener, summer’s half over, and before you know it you’ll be shoveling whatever crazy amount of snow is set to fall this year!” I usually like to take a bunch of four-day weekends during the summer, and that’s my deal again this year; it’s a million times better than torching a couple of separate weeks of vacation all at once and then having to sit there, going quietly insane on the final Sunday, beating myself up for not having single-handedly inspired world peace and cured cancer like I’d planned all year. No, gimme four-day weekends every other week for the entire summer and I won’t even take all of them, because I start feeling sorry for my co-workers, having all those glorious Fridays and Mondays off every other week. I mean, three-day weekends are stupid, aren’t they? All I end up doing is running around on Friday doing all my Saturday catch-up nonsense, and then spending Saturday dreading that I only have two days to chase the cats around the house and do “me stuff,” such as listening to new albums from such “essential artistes” as The Wallflowers, whose new album Exit Wounds is on my to-do list. A prime example of the joys of nepotism in the music business, Wallflowers is the solo project of Jakob Dylan, the son of a fashion model lady and some struggling hack named Bob. One of the new singles, “Roots And Wings,” shows us just what Jakob is made of, basically doing a Rich Little impersonation of his dad over a folk-rock beat that’s sort of like Train but with less going on (I know, mind-blowing concept, but try, really try, to picture it). (Please bear in mind that my distaste for nepotism in any endeavor only comes from my appreciation for Aristotle, that guy who used to be in Monty Python or whatever it was.)

• Yay, so pumped, I wonder what other rich and delicious goodies are in store this week — oh looky, it’s Mythopoetics, from Half Waif, whoever they are! I only added the “whoever they are” part because most music critics won’t admit when they have no idea what some band is about, and my mission is to fix the entire music critic industry if it’s the last thing I do, and plus, I literally haven’t heard of Half Waif, ever, like, I didn’t know “the band” is just some girl named Nandi Rose Plunkett, she was in the band Pinegrove, and she’s from Mass. The single, “Sodium & Cigarettes,” is like Lana Del Rey but fortified with some P!nk-level dramatics. The tune isn’t bad at all; it actually has a pretty cool crescendo, meaning it’s well-written, meaning it will be ignored, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing or whatever, in these times.

• Next we have Australian indie-twee-pop trio The Goon Sax, with Mirror II, their new album! Actually, their rubric isn’t ’80s-indie-twee-pop, it’s a genre called “dolewave,” which just means “’80s-indie-twee-pop’, but spoken in an Australian accent by a random music critic blowhard.” “Psychic” is the teaser tune, and it’s actually kind of awesome, despite sounding like Depeche Mode trying to be Simple Minds. You’d probably like it, honestly.

• We’ll wrap up this week’s nonsense with Museum of Love’s Life Of Mammals, a project headed by LCD Soundsystem’s drummer, Pat Mahoney! The new song is “Cluttered World,” yet another stab at ’80s-pop by random pikers who can’t write songs (think Thomas Dolby collaborating with Tears For Fears, and no, I would never encourage such a thing).

Retro Playlist

So four score and however-many blah blah blah whatever, it was somewhere around this same week 10 years ago that I was blatantly using this space to brag about the fact that I’d been offered Katy Perry tickets to her TD Garden show. This was before she suddenly became about as cool as tapioca served at a Ladies auxiliary club meeting. Anyone remember when Katy Perry was edgy? No? Well, whatever, at one time, she was cool, and so was I, which led some public relations guy to think it made sense to offer me tickets, which I refused, because I would have maxed out my hypocrisy allowance for like the whole year. I’m easy, not sleazy, guys.

One of the albums getting the treatment that week was Happeners, an album from White Wives, a Pennsylvania pub-punk band that, I wrote, sounded like — and try to contain yourself — “Kaiser Chiefs upfitted with good songs and a case of Four Loko,” a bunch of not-entirely-bad musicians whose aim was ”conjuring a vision of what a young Springsteen would be if he had to make a name for himself today.” There was some early Clash going on in “Paper Chaser,” but overall the key to the entire album was “Sky Started Crying,” a Bruce-ized ripoff of Airborne Toxic Event’s “The Kids Are Ready to Die,” an angsty melody that pops up constantly throughout the record. I guessed that it would make the band famous, and permeate “every corner of date-night backgrounding, from Cineplex lobbies to Red Lobsters.” I was wrong, for the first time ever, in my entire life. I’m still getting over my error in judgment, so if we can just drop it at this point, that’d be great.

The only other thing of any note that week was Rocket Science, from Bela Fleck and The Flecktones. My review was obviously texted-in, with bons mots like “at the very least we can say that Fleck is to banjo what Chick Corea is to piano” and “a roots return of sorts for Fleck, providing listeners with a simultaneous dose of pure bluegrass and pure jazz fusion, unique stuff that’d serve as perfect backgrounding to long summer drives into the wilderness.” Guys, I really feel bad about not caring about hipster-banjo albums, I really do.

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).

KPT, Obliterate (Give/Take Records)

Any gothies out there remember industrial DJ Terrorfakt? Oh come on, that’s got to jog a few low-tier brain cells if you were in the vampire-club scene around six or 10 years ago. He was quite the badass, making beats that were a little bit like Swans and a lot of bit like Skinny Puppy, thus he was more, well, danceable, for lack of a better word. This Minneapolis dude is somewhat similar but more Throbbing Lobster-ish, tabling noise experiments that are in general not at all danceable but plenty edgy. In fact this loose collection of six tunes is more in the vein of Kurt Vile or Einstürzende Neubauten than any of the usual Metropolis Records-signed suspects, but as I alluded, the binding vibe is Terrorfakt: unhinged darkwave intro bits eventually get taken over by pneumatic-drill pounding that’s super cool if you like it rough and dystopian. Odd factoid about this EP is that all the songs were written as agent/label demos and other such things, and none of them ever panned out. Now that’s what I call bleakness! A

Kenny Garrett, Sounds from the Ancestors (Mack Avenue Records)

Usually I try to avoid talking up a record whose release date is this far away (late August, so they’re saying), but me-oh my-oh, what a sweet album this is, from the veteran post-bop jazz saxophonist/flautist, here reminding everyone that his early days included stints with Miles Davis, Art Blakey and Freddie Hubbard, while wearing his Detroit (and Afrobeat) heritage proudly on his sleeve. The band is Garrett’s go-to quintet, gathered here to pay homage to legendary thises and thats, such as Black American church music (“When the Days Were Different”), Afro-Cuban (the title track) and (more than referentially) Roy Hargrove. Drummer wonks will feel their jaws dropping while trying to comprehend “For Art’s Sake,” in which Ronald Bruner and conga guy Rudy Bird morph into a relentless but gentle polyrhythm machine churning out a concoction of modern jazz and Nigerian Afrobeat. Doesn’t get more urban than this, guys, and the sound engineering is impeccable. A+

PLAYLIST

• All ahead flank and raise the mizzenmast, ya swabs, July 2021 is here, and with it will come bikinis on vacuous Instagrammers, the awesome new strain of coronavirus, and of course, on July 2, a bushel of new, freshly line-caught albums, from musicians, bands, and maybe even a few bored nouveau riche Hollywood imbeciles who have nothing better to do than make horrible albums with starving musicians and washed up “producers” who can be purchased outright with American Express Rewards Points! Ah, here’s one now, a new album, spazzing its way out of the fish barrel and onto my fisherman’s platter, it’s Get Up Sequences Part One, from British band The Go Team! You may have been exposed to their actually cool ravings before, a concoction made of hip-hop, indie, “double-Dutch” jump rope chants and “plunderphonics” (in other words, sound collages made of many familiar songs), but more likely you haven’t, and that’s OK! Throughout their 20-year career, these guys have collaborated with such artists as Deerhoof and Chuck D, had an album nominated for a Mercury Prize, and basically been accused of being incredibly awesome by everyone who’s ever heard them. At this writing, the newest single is “Pow,” a trippy dance track that sounds like a cross between Salt-N-Pepa, 1970s-psychedelica and Sonic Youth, something of that nature.

• I don’t know why anyone would want to, but if you were to go way back in time, specifically 1992, and you were a metal fan, you would have the pleasure of being one of the first people to hear The Red in the Sky Is Ours, the debut album from Swedish death metal band At the Gates! That album is a direct cross between math metal, Venom, and hearing your dad freak and run away from a nest-load of bees. They were gone for a long time, 19 years to be precise, until they resurfaced in 2014, with At War With Reality, and their latest, titled The Nightmare Of Being, is being released as we speak. That’s a lot of coverage I’ve just given these guys, but the fact is that I’m only interested in hearing whether they still sound like early tape-trader-era metal, with boom-box quality. Well, turns out they’re still all about crazed Cannibal Corpse caterwauling and Cookie Monster growl-singing but nowadays they’re also into epic Equilibrium-esque opera-metal, to go by splashdown single “Spectre Of Extinction,” which probably isn’t representative of the bulk of what they’re doing now, but it’s all good.

• Desperate Journalist is a post-punk-revival quartet from England, In other words they’re basically an ’80s band. They’re up to four albums as of Friday, when their newest, Maximum Sorrow, hits the streets! The push single at this writing, “Fault,” isn’t desperately ’80s at all, just a crockpot of Florence Welch, Joy Division and other common edge-rock. Matter of fact, there’s vibe from the first Cult LP too. It’s OK I guess.

• We’ll wrap up with Birmingham, U.K., R&B singer Laura Mvula, whose new record, Pink Noise, is on the way! She is bald, which means she hates conformity, and the new single “Got Me” has the same beat as Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror.” In fact, the song is mostly Thriller throwbackism, which is rather conformist, now that you mention it.

Retro Playlist

’Twas late June 2011, and as always there were new albums all over the place, and I reviewed them here in these pages and tried to make funny jokes, some of which probably rubbed some people the wrong way but I can’t be sure. All the new albums came out on Tuesdays back then, and the July 5 slate was pretty full. There was British stuffed-shirt proggers Yes, who released their first studio album in 10 years, Fly From Here, but there were no advance songs for me to snark about. Nevertheless I forgave them “for not updating their MySpace profile with a teaser track” (it’s been so long that I can’t even remember if MySpace had become a punchline yet, but I’ll assume it was).

As well, I brought up Neon, the third LP from “cow-pie-kicking country star Chris Young,” who had “won top prize on the Nashville Star TV show in 2006, mostly because he doesn’t sound like Toby Keith.” Surely you remember.

One of the two main focuses that week was Devil’s Music, the 2011 from the great soundsystem Teddybears. It was something of a very mild letdown compared to 2006’s Soft Machine, which featured the tune “Punk Rocker,” a masterpiece of shlock-techno featuring none other than Iggy Pop. Only problem with putting something that awesome on an album is that it’s literally impossible to top, but these nutty Swedes were able to get B.o.B. to add his pop-rapping to the street-cruising “Get Mama A House.”

“Generation Ringtone” was what millennials were called before they became hyper-woke Instagrammers later in life. In 2011 they usually ignored and insulted new prog-rock acts (bands like Mars Volta are still treated horribly to this day), but if a band snuck in a little country/folk/Grateful Dead vibe, they usually did get some unwarranted respect (the dreadful Umphrey’s McGee for example). Anyway, White Denim released an LP titled D that week, and it was OK, I summarized: “If you wish ELP had jammed with the Allman Brothers, certainly, buy this album.” That’s actually pretty high praise, technically, come to think of it.

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).

Lara Hope And The Ark-Tones, Here to Tell the Tale (Sower Records)

From the Catskills comes this oddball rockabilly thingamajig, featuring our intrepid heroine, totally making $10 mail-order red cat-eye spectacle frames a thing again for all you lonely NASA incels out there. Oh, I know, I’m a jerk, but that’s literally a checkbox on the job application, and whatever, someone had to do something like this, mildly feisty eight-bar ’50s-rock sung by, you know, a cute girl with a fashion Achilles heel that’s truly epic. Where were we, oh yes, rockabilly. These people have opened for Brian Setzer Orchestra, which is about as big as this genre can get these days, but wait, there’s more, Ms. Hope won an Ameripolitan Best Female Rockabilly Artist award in 2017, so these ain’t no pikers (I assume). Standard stuff on board here of course, songs about falling in love with idiots, being an idiot in love, and, spoiler, drinking alcohol; Hope’s voice nasally befits her stage look, but wait, act now because the bass player plays an upright bass. A

Maria Grand, Reciprocity (Biophilia Records)

If you’ve ever wanted to hear a top-drawer saxophone player try to put her pregnancy into musical expression, that’d be this, the second full-length from this avant edge-lady. Supported only by bass and drums, Grand nevertheless keeps listeners on their toes and paying attention, as it’s hard to guess what she’ll try next. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind my echoing the AllAboutJazz.com reviewer and inferring that these pieces are textures more than songs, loaded up with impossible runs (and a few moments where Savannah Harris’s drums really stand out) and yes, some googly-eyed, Bjork-like weirdness (“Fundamental Pt. 1,” “Prayer”), but that’s something of an oversimplification. Despite all the controlled chaos, it’s still very musical, and one does find one’s ears trying to keep pace. “Creation: Interlude” is particularly compelling, utilizing a stop-and-start pattern to great effect; “Now Take Your Day” stands out as a trademark clinic in effortless virtuosity. A

PLAYLIST

• Fonzie just said to me “Eyyy, Saeger, how about you lay those bad albums on me like a hepcat,” and so I am here to oblige, with all the new albums slated for a June 25 release date that (at this writing) seem noteworthy enough to motivate me to dream up a few expert-level critiques and insults! But we won’t get to the dissin’ quite yet, unless Dark In Here, the upcoming new album from hilariously overrated hipster band The Mountain Goats, is massively disappointing (and trust me, we’re talkin’ about a really low bar here, folks)! They’re from Claremont, California, a suburban city near Los Angeles, and they’ve been the talk of the Pitchfork cognoscenti, even after the band allowed fewer weird tunes onto their second 2020 album, Getting Into Knives. In other words, they’re basically this year’s Grizzly Bear or whatever; going by their (debatably) most popular tune, “No Children,” which was about all I could stomach from them in 2015, I’ve always thought of them as a cross between Violent Femmes and Deep Blue Something, a joke band of sorts but one we’re supposed to take seriously because, you know, whatever. Anyway, the latest single from the new album is called “Mobile,” and it’s basically what you’d expect to hear from Crash Test Dummies doing a folk-pop song, a little bit twee and a lotta bit unlistenable. This too shall pass, of course, and hopefully quickly.

• Speaking of tedious folkie-hipster bands, I’m almost positive that one of my public relations pests is pushing me to listen to Durham, N.C.-based Hiss Golden Messenger, but since it’s nowadays pretty stupid for them to waste time sending me emails instead of social media DMs, I can’t find hide nor hair of it, meaning any announcements/download links were probably deleted, so I’ll just start from scratch with regard to “their” forthcoming new LP, Quietly Blowing It. The “band” is basically just singer-songwriter MC Taylor and whatever random dudes end up playing onstage with him in exchange for cans of Hobo Beans and Dinty Moore or whatever. The new single, “Glory Strums (Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner),” has bad harmonica, a 1970s-pop vibe (think sleepy radio nonsense like Ambrosia), and Taylor’s decent-enough Bob Dylan-style voice. I do not hate it.

• Next we have Gang Of Four wannabes Modest Mouse, with their new album, The Golden Casket! I know, it’s been too long since their 2015 full-length Strangers To Ourselves, an album that was dissed by some hack Spin critic as “rudderless,” not that there were any Modest Mouse fans even remaining on the planet who hadn’t yet grown up and taken to pushing baby carriages; the band’s strategy appears to be “do an album and wait seven years before doing another,” which, any musician could tell you, is super dumb. The new single, “We Are Between,” starts with a Joy Division part, then turns into a Sting B-side. It’s actually OK, if you’ve even bothered reading this far.

• We’ll wrap things up with Boy From Michigan, the new LP from ironic synthpop guy John Grant! The title track is basically Madonna’s “True Blue” in a fake beard, although Grant’s mush-mouthed Jose Gonzalez imitation will probably appeal to you if you have bad taste in music.

Retro Playlist

Let us cast off these chains of pandemic discontent and harken to the year 2013, almost exactly eight years ago this week, when Massachusetts-based band Scud Mountain Boys officially became un-defunct upon the release of their fourth album, Do You Love The Sun. Having been exposed to their intensely uninteresting version of the preview single, a rub of the Cher classic “Gypsies Tramps and Thieves,” I feigned anticipation, noting that I could hardly wait to be lulled into blissful unconsciousness by the band’s next “bundle of Statler-Brothers-on-Quaaludes boring-itude,” and was, of course, not disappointed.
One of the featured records that week was The Terror, from LSD-powered wingnut band Flaming Lips. Normal people who read this space for whatever reason have for 15-or-so years watched in gleeful delight as I’ve tried to suppress my feelings for this band, but I’m glad to announce today that I really can’t stand them and never really could. Hence I was bald-faced lying when I said that it was “great for what it is,” possibly because I feared some sort of backlash from the five brain-damaged Americans who actually listen to Flaming Lips for the music instead being like everyone else and only cranking that crummy nonsense in order to annoy their grandmothers. I really should have stopped trying to appear interested after I noted that “there aren’t nearly as many Boredoms-style noise-wave moments nor graspable grooves as 2009’s Embryonic” with regard to this album, but I didn’t. But now I can rectify that error: I absolutely detest the Flaming Lips. Come at me, 98-pound weaklings.
Ha ha, the other “slab” I had on the coroner’s table that week was Deafheaven’s confounding breakthrough album, Sunbather. For those who’ve forgotten — and I always love telling this story — the San Francisco fivesome were somehow able to take their wearisome extreme-metal tuneage and convince the Grizzly Bear/Animal Collective-loving dingbats of the early-Aughts Brooklyn Vegan crowd that they’d invented something new and kooky, when in fact their music was just (and here’s my favorite part of the story) 1980s Bathory black-metal, but really boring. I’m seriously surprised there’s never been a class-action suit against those guys.

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).

Kleiman, Toltech EP (AlpaKa MuziK)

It’s been a really long time since I felt like an international techno scene influencer like I was back in my New Times Media (RIP) days, but here and there a release will pop up out of nowhere, usually one that’s so minimalist and/or cheesy that I end up feeling like an idiot for giving it any attention in this space, like, jeez, I could do better than this with a 1989 Casio keyboard. Yeah, it’s either that or the artist is a newbie with like 24 Beatport likes, which is what I’d expected here, but it turns out Mexican producer Gabriel Kleiman is an actual player in his country’s techno-festival scene, acting as an organizer for the Ometeotl Festival for one thing. This shortie is two new songs and a remix from German minimalist Lampe, the latter serving as a tracklist-padding add-on of the core track, a cleverly syncopated beach-chill nicety with a Yello “Oh Yeah”-style bomp-bomp vocal and a polite but elegant drop. That really leaves only the original mix of “Smoking Mirror” left to examine; that one’s made of a robotically buzzy dance vibe and one sample that loops around like a drunken housefly. It’s cool with me. A

Information Society, Oddfellows (Hakatack Records)

Due out in August, this is only the eighth-or-so album from the Minneapolis–Saint Paul synthpop band, which made its biggest splash with its self-titled 1988 record, whose most famous song, “What’s on Your Mind (Pure Energy),” was the impetus for two zillion fashion victims asking each other “bro, isn’t this a remix of Duran Duran’s ‘New Moon on Monday’?” at the dance clubs. Forget Stranger Things and whatnot, these guys are the real Eighties deal; in fact, their 2016 LP Orders of Magnitude was filled almost halfway with covers from such bands as Human League and Sisters Of Mercy (along with an inexplicable rub of Exile’s “Kiss You All Over”). Whatevs, it’s now [current year], and we should talk about their new tunes, for instance “Bennington” (New Order meets Gary Numan), “Would You Like Me If I Played A Guitar” (buzzed-up neo-goth sort of like Front Line Assembly) and “Room 1904” (chockablock with all the Flock Of Seagulls/Simple Minds vibe you could want). It’s like they haven’t missed a beat; a nice cozy foray into today’s ’80s-nostalgic zeitgeist. A

PLAYLIST

• Patiently but relentlessly, the sands of time keep slipping through life’s hourglass, and blah blah blah poetic stuff, which brings us to the present, when, on June 11, new albums will appear, to entice you to either buy some of them, or retreat back to your Fortnite Tamagotchi Discord server and wait for a decent album to come out so that you can post your enthusiasm to your favorite AOL chatroom or whatever platform you use when awkwardly attempting to communicate with humans. Like most of the time, there are a few albums to choose from this week, and so, like the Jim Carrey version of the Grinch, I shall first give all these new albums a preliminary one-second mini-review before we get to it, a la “Hate … hate, hate … loathe entirely,” etc., but wait, maybe Path Of Wellness, the new album from Olympia, Washington-based Sleater-Kinney, will be OK, I just don’t know at the moment, but I’m assuming they abandoned their riot grrrl trappings long ago and just sing edgy versions of “Kumbaya” these days. You do, of course, know these girls; there’s whatsername, and there’s also Carrie Brownstein, one of the stars of Portlandia, the mildly-amusing-at-best nerd-centric sketch-comedy show that never fails to come off like Woody Allen trying too hard and therefore paradoxically being even less funny than real thing. But I digress, which is a necessity, of course, because elsewise this column would be very short and always end in “loathe entirely,” so let’s go on to the goings-on, which involves listening to the new single “Worry With You.” It’s OK, slow-ish Weezer-rock with a Pavement aftertaste, and the hooky chorus is fairly decent, nothing to hate but really nothing to remember either.
• Speaking of subdued riot grrrls, look gang, it’s Garbage, with a brand new album, No Gods No Masters! You know Shirley Manson and her gang of post-punk knaves from such unmemorable nonsense as “Stupid Girl” and “I Think I’m Paranoid,” but now we’ll see if they can still pull off sleepy edgy bar-band steez with their new title-track single! It’s actually not bad, basically a cross between early Cure and Devo, cheap Mario Brothers synths and everything in place, for your ’80s throwback party or whatever you people do to keep sane nowadays.
• Gee, look at the time, another five minutes has elapsed, which means it’s time for Australian stoner-indie goofballs King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard to release a new album, this time titled Butterfly 3000! For once, the band is keeping all the relevant details close to the vest, and there are no advance songs available to listen to at this writing, but whatever songs are on this album, they’re probably loud and psychedelic. I know that doesn’t help much, not that I’ve ever been much of a help in the first place, but I can tell you that a new video based on the last eleventy-gorillion Gizzard albums was just released on YouTube, by some gamer grrrl named Josephine Paquette! It’s basically gameplay from a random video game, and then some edited video of the opening theme from The Sopranos, and then a few lines from the Gizz album “Infest the Rat’s Nest.” What’s that? No, my life’s trajectory has not been changed by these developments either.
• We’ll bag this week with a quick look at Maroon 5’s new single, “Beautiful Mistakes,” from their new LP, Jordi! The guest feat is Megan Thee Stallion, and it is so awesome, if you like late-career Coldplay, boy band emo, guys in ’90s tracksuits and people named Megan!

Retro Playlist

Let’s turn back the clock to 10 years ago this week, back to all the horror that was going on before all the quantum levels of horror that we have now. Naturally, the horror I had to deal with then was in the form of albums, for instance the self-titled album from Wisconsin-bred alt-chill feller Bon Iver. It wasn’t his first album, but it was indeed self-titled. Do you remember when that was a thing, and I’d just sit here guzzling Jagermeister and making jokes about annoying hipster bands that Stephen Colbert had to pretend he liked because it’s part of his job? I do. Anyway, that album contained his latest slow, faraway bummer tune, “Calgary,” which, I diagnosed, “sounds like Pink Floyd holding their noses while they sing, for ‘effect.’”
Wait, don’t leave yet, the two featured albums were both good. There was Total, the first full artist album from Bosnian producer SebastiAn, who at the time had been hawking his (arguably) darker side of the Ed Banger sound for going on seven years. There were 22 songs that were like Hot Chip but a hundred times more buzzy, with melted retro-disco (“Love in Motion” recalls Hot Chocolate’s “Everyone’s a Winner”), along with, as you’d more or less expect, some dubstep headbanging on the wild-ass title track. If you think of the Ed Banger sound, one of the first things that leaps to mind is, of course, the French Justice duo, and in fact one of those guys (Gaspard Auge) helped out on “Tetra,” which wasn’t what anyone would have expected but instead “actually a chill curve, proffering fake classical in and around its unhurried beat.”
The other LP under the coroner’s lights that week was Between Us, from Americana pop-folkie Peter Bradley Adams. I rank that dude in the same class as Amos Lee and Norah Jones, like, if you hate his music there’s literally something wrong with you. Compared to his earlier stuff, this album featured more drums and mandolin and whatnot, “as though there was a directive from on high that he start phasing out [his] lone-spotlight busker image.” But the slightly higher noise level only evidenced a broader range to his really unbelievable songwriting ability. (Cameron Crowe also loves the guy’s stuff, if that means anything to you.)

Jonny Kosmo, Pastry (Feeding Tube Records)

I don’t know if you know a lot of people who’ve studied psychology, but the theory I’ve subscribed to since I was a 20-year-old bundle of idiotic angst was that you can always tell how fragile and/or damaged a person is by how long they’ve studied psychology. I was a teenage psych major myself but abandoned ship on that stuff after one semester, so I think I’m pretty stable pertinent to this subject. I mean, just look at this Los Angeles rocker, who did finish school but gave up a career as a therapist in order to dress like a drunken Batman villain and put out weird pop/funk/techno albums that focus on things like the “metanarrative of personal and communal change.” He’s a kook, savvy? But that’s OK, because this metanarrative and blah blah blah stuff is, it seems, proffered as a form of therapy, and that’s patently obvious, what with songs like “Sugar On Top,” a breezy, what-me-worry ’70s shlock-pop trifle that could have been a 10CC or Maria Muldaur B-side, take your pick. Eh, it’s all fun: “Firefly” is soul-laden funk-pop for joke-Twitter chatbots; “How High” is acidic asphalt-steez that could have fought as disposable bar music in an episode of Starsky & Hutch. None of it’s painful, which to me is always the important thing. A

Hannes Grossman, To Where the Light Retreats (self-released)

Boy, did I step in it this time. I was drawn to this LP owing to its professed “tech-death” classification, but even more so because the project is led by a drummer, so I figured, you know, there’d be some cool drums here and there. Instead it basically reads like Tool with some monster-devil Cookie Monster dude on vocals, and, well, that’s about the whole scoop on this. I mean, there are moments of math-metal that almost evoke Dillinger Escape Plan and such, but in the main it just flops and flounces around like a toddler shark whose baby teeth all fell out recently, you know? Right, there are literally quadrillions of metal albums that could be written off that way, but the production is good, and it might appease math geeks, especially guitarist dudes who favor chromatic style over melodic substance, but, oh, it’s really just tacky, which of course — wait, the guitarist actually just used an actual phase-shifter from 1978 in an actual song — just means that your mileage may vary. B

PLAYLIST

• Heaven help us all, it’s actually June, and there will be new albums for you to listen to on June 4, because capitalism! Before we continue, I keep forgetting to let everyone know that I do vet these albums, to make sure there are no messages from Lucifer, before mentioning them here. You are safe, my friends, to listen to the albums I mention here, and even if I disagree with your decision to listen to them, it’s OK, because let’s face it, music is basically free anyway. Anyone under the age of 35 knows that bands only make money from tours (oh wait) and T-shirts, because there are little Pirate Bay 4Chans all over the place, but if you’re scared of getting hacked at one of those places, you can always just rip the songs off YouTube (that’s basically every song ever made, ever) and just enjoy ’em. But let’s proceed, because you know that I’m an Officially Licensed Snark Dispenser, who is here to help you, and I will warn you about albums you should either “buy” or avoid, so that you can save a few precious seconds and just move on to tweeting Instagrams of your little brother getting multiple bone-bruises from his stupid skateboard. So let’s start with a new album even your parents might like, Hardware, from Billy Gibbons! Ha ha, you know who this person is, he was the guitarist with the 3-foot beard in the moronic blues-rock band ZZ Top, which used to play in arenas, back when people actually liked music. Don’t get me started on ZZ Top, but OK, if you insist, they were basically Led Zeppelin for your parents’ dumbest high school friends, like, they were contractually obligated to play only three different chords in their songs, but nevertheless, they had fans who went to their shows at the Worcester Centrum, and afterward they’d wear their “Eliminator Tour” T-shirts to English class, which got them automatic F’s from their English teachers. Got all that, Zoomers? No? Don’t worry, here, here are the lyrics from “West Coast Junkie,” Gibbons’s new single: “Rollin’ my Camino down Route 66, thinkin’ ‘bout my girl.” No, seriously, but it’s the music you should be avoidin’, like it’s basically the sort of 1950s blues-rock you hear when Svengoolie has that 90-year-old rock ’n’ roll dude as a guest, in other words it’s like Bo Diddley, except this stuff has raunchy-sounding guitars. There, now you know; consider the above snark to be like the warning on a pack of Marlboros, but in a musical sense. Anyone still reading?

• Turning to news for 40-year-old wombat-girls, look, everyone, it’s hyper-privileged Connecticut phony Liz Phair, with a new album, called Soberish! She is working on an autobiographical memoir right now, called Horror Stories (anticipated excerpt: “I’m telling you, the Perrier came with no diced strawberries!”). Whatever, the single, “Spanish Doors,” is like any polite ’90s grrrl-pop tune you’ve ever heard.

• Next up is Australian/whatever jangle-indie poppers Crowded House, with their new LP Dreamers Are Waiting. Is the single “To The Island” anywhere near as good as their mega-hit “Don’t Dream It’s Over?” Nope, it’s a silly almost-joke song, but thanks for guessing!

• We’ll close the week with Atreyu’s new album, Baptize, because maybe its single “Underrated” is good! OK, it is, if you like your World Wrestling entrance themes to be structured in the vein of Panic! At The Disco bit into extreme metal yowling into Papa Roach junk. You don’t? Well bless your heart.

Retro Playlist

Let’s hop into our wacky time machine and go back exactly 10 years, where we find Between the Devil & The Deep Blue Sea, the then-latest album from Black Stone Cherry, a band I couldn’t take seriously at all, viz: “southern rock’s answer to Nickelback, in other words one of the worst bands you could possibly imagine.” Pretty rotten of me, I know, but pound-for-pound, I’d say I was pretty nice to Death Cab For Cutie’s Codes and Keys. That warrants a brief explanation: I forget where it was published, but a few years ago I saw a super-snarky article from (I think) some British music blog, aiming to shoot down wimpy twee-hipster music like Death Cab forever. The rub was that, as much as hipster bands seem inclusive and proper and such, no one ever — until this article pointed it out — called out the whole scene for being composed almost exclusively of all-white musicians (who, kicker, were also mostly men). Whatever, since I was still unaware of that stuff at the time, I was nice to “You Are A Tourist,” Codes‘s lead single, saying it was OK, at least musically: “tons of layers,” “pop rock in the manner of bands like Smiths, Suede and whatnot.”

One of that week’s column’s main thrusts was an album from Brooklyn bluegrass band Sweetback Sisters, titled Looking For A Fight. Much as a phrase like “Brooklyn bluegrass band” would automatically send readers scampering off to the safety of Amy’s movie reviews, some of you did learn that it wasn’t a bad record at all, according to me: “A no-brainer” that featured a cover of Laurie Lewis’s “Texas Bluebonnets” came off like a cross between “Dixie Chicks and a mariachi band possessed by Gogol Bordello.”

Speah-Ahh, Eastern Conference Champions’ next-to-last album, was also present. Overall it was “classy, like an Americana-tinged Coldplay, most prominently on album opener ‘Attica,’” but like I alluded, the band only lasted one more album, as the relative fame they’d achieved after having their tune “Million Miles an Hour” included in the Twilight: Eclipse movie soundtrack vanished in a puff of emo-vampire smoke.