Author: Eric Saeger

Xiu Xiu, Oh No (Polyvinyl Records)

One usually doesn’t associate San Jose with experimental music, but Jamie Stewart has been producing just that out of the area for 19 years at last count. He’s been the only constant, although keyboardist and drum-programmer Angelo Seo has been a constant for several releases now, including this one. If you need some sort of touchstone, producing Stewart’s albums was a guilty pleasure of Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, but Deerhoof-worship sure isn’t what’s afoot here. It’s a mercurial mixed bag of weirdness, in which Stewart sings deconstructionist-savvy duets with a bunch of different singers, including the aforementioned Saunier, Chelsea Wolfe and Alice Bag (Haley Fohr is particularly unlistenable here); his tentative, Norman Bates-style vocal is an acquired taste, as is his fetish for nonsense vocals, but this should work for you if you like things like the Swans when they’re in intelligible mode. Plenty of glitch and industrial noise, and for the most part it comprises billowy clouds of goth-ish mood-fog, but as always with this project, the record’s impossible to nail down in a couple of paragraphs. B

Johnny Thunders, “Chinese Rocks” (Die Laughing/ Golden Robot Records)

Warmup single for the forthcoming exclusive live album Cosa Nostra: Live At The Mudd Club 1983 Gothenburg, a Swedish live set from the former New York Dolls guitarist. Thunders was a tragic figure who grew up a fatherless outsider in Queens, N.Y., turned his back on a promising baseball career and died very mysteriously and way too soon. This song has been a staple anthem of original New York punk rockers for many decades now, written by Richard Hell and Dee Dee Ramone and first appearing on the 1977 album L.A.M.F. by Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers. The lyrics revolve around a drug reference that’s become almost quaint over time in some hyper-hip circles (the guys were trying to out-cool Lou Reed’s “Heroin”), and by the way, it was redone by the Ramones on their End Of The Century album. With regard to the quality of this release, well, it’s less than boombox-level, which one would expect for something this old and that was probably recorded on a cassette recorder by a roadie who never wanted the responsibility. But as such, it’s a priceless artifact. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Where does the time go, I ask non-rhetorically, because look, guys, the next general CD release date is April 16! Since 80 percent of New Hampshirites love them some hard rock, we’ll kick off this week’s episode with none other than Led Zeppelin Mini-Me band Greta Van Fleet, with their new album The Battle At Garden’s Gate! As you know, these guys are nowhere near as adept at repackaging Zep as Fantastic Negrito (I think I heard Negrito won a Grammy this year, but my delicate constitution was, as always, too touchy to sit through all the twerking imbecility of the Grammys, so I’m just going by some headline I scrolled past while looking to poach some Twitter followers), but they sure are the next best thing to Negrito, if by “the next best thing” you mean “not even close, but at least I don’t feel horrible while it’s playing.” But hey, hilarious title, The Battle At Garden’s Gate, huh? There’s some meme that shows a pie graph of Zeppelin songs, showing that 30 percent of them are about sex, 68 percent are about hobbits, and 2 percent are about citrus fruits, and that’s all true, but these guys’ idea of a hobbit-style title — repeat, The Battle At Garden’s Gate — sounds like something you’d receive in a Loot Box when you were actually hoping for a 12-inch action figure of Gandalf just cold taking out a dragon with his light saber bow staff or whatever it is. But wait folks, that’s not all! The first single, “Age of Machine,” pickpockets tuneage from The Pretenders, Zep’s Houses of the Holy album, and some other Zeppelin thing, who cares. Now, granted, they do totally sound like a reincarnated version of Zep from 1971, but a version of Zep that grew up listening to Pennywise and Weird Al, not 1920s blues and whatnot. Oh, we’ve talked about this before, let’s just move it along here.

• Well, looky there, fam, it’s Let The Bad Times Roll, the new album from snotty Poindexter punks The Offspring! You remember them, with all their songs, you know, those songs that all just sound like remixed versions of “Come Out And Play.” (Sorry to bring that up, gang, really. Now the only way you’ll be able to get the line “you gotta keep ’em separated” out of your head is to go into the Apple store and shout it in the face of their Paul Blart at the top of your lungs.) So the title track is basically just the “Keep ’em separated” thing but a version played by a total ska band. Sublime comes to mind. OK, people, stay awake, let’s proceed.

• Until now, London Grammar was known as a dream-pop band, and that may have been true, but the title track from the British trio’s new album Californian Soil is trip-hop, not dream pop. It’s kind of nice, a cross between Mazzy Star and Florence and The Machine, but it’s not dream-pop. The video for the tune is pure Nylon-bait, an empty high-fashion statement with people dressed all spiffy whilst chilling out in scenes of ruin and upside-down people and whatnot.

• Lastly and rest assuredly leastly, it’s mummified video game boss villain Paul McCartney, with something mysteriously titled McCartney III Imagined! What does this all mean? Nothing really, from my seat, like the first single, “Kiss of Venus,” is basically an ’80s-pop song as redone by Justin Bieber, because it has a feat from mini-Bieber Dominic Fike. I can’t imagine anyone will actually dig this aside from the record company’s Like-bots, but have at it if you like.

Retro Playlist

Let’s go back to eight years ago this week or so, when the big news was the release of Life On A Rock, the 16th album from guitar-strumming cowboy person Kenny Chesney. I reported that the leadoff single, “Pirate Flag,” is a “mid-tempo number which has some banjo on there,” a “sleepy nondescript song about being a country boy” but at least wasn’t meant as a “WWE wrestling entrance theme like all the other garbage coming out of Nashville, even if it does remind me a little too much of Tom Petty’s ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance,’” which was OK, as “Chesney’s old and rich enough not to care about unimportant little details like originality, who cares.”

The real meat of that long-ago potato, though, was a look at Paula Cole’s Raven album. The bummer thing about it was that Cole, “a Rockport, Mass., native who studied at Berklee and actually made something out of that training” unlike most, actually had to throw a Kickstarter in order to get enough money to release the album. OK, Cole was never meant to be the next Joni Mitchell or whatever, but she did table a couple of really nice hits, namely “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone” and the Dawson’s Creek theme song “I Don’t Want to Wait.” I do like that lady, and opined that her songs, although a bit long in running time, were “opuses of solitude, and her talent for haunting beauty is still there,” finishing with the bullet “Instant musical oatmeal for discriminating soccer moms.”

The other great one for April 18, 2013, was a world music joint, the self-titled debut from South African beatbox band The Soil. It’s a deeply immersive LP, mostly sung in their native (Sowego) dialect, “a warm, uninhibited set of (barely) rock-tinged a cappella hymns which, the band believes, come directly from God.” I’m too lazy to see if they got a Grammy nod for this record, but it did go well-deserved platinum in their corner of the world.

Kill The Giants, “The Prophet” (Nub Records)

Test-drive title track from the upcoming fifth album from the Saint Albans, U.K.-based genre-mashing band, which is — and I’m told this actually means something — fronted by Mark Christopher Lee of The Pocket Gods. This was buzzed to me as a concoction of “beatbox, classical, world music, rock and EDM,” whereas Irish zine Hotpress said it mixed thrash metal, hip-hop, classical and world music. All told, it looked good on paper, so here we are, me with a little egg on my face. There are some interesting samples (a 1950s big-movie chorus, it sounds like; some sitar, etc.), but where I was expecting something really trippy and hard-ass along the lines of God Lives Underwater or even Pendulum, the choppy, rather amateurish guitar line sounded like something out of a Woodstock retrospective on C-tier warmup bands. So yeah, there are a few influences buzzing around, but they don’t come together to blow minds. I mean, it’s OK, but, you know, whatever. B-

Arthur King, Changing Landscapes [Isle of Eigg] (AKP Recordings)

A little inside baseball: I didn’t get along well with the last public relations person to pitch me albums on the Dangerbird Records label. This person got mad at me when I dismissed one of their stupid albums as “hipster oatmeal” or whatever I said, probably something rotten. That takes us to here, with a new PR guy (whom I really like) and an album from a Dangerbird imprint, AKP Recordings. The deal with the bracketed title is that Arthur King is a mixed-media aggregator who recruits artists, musicians and whatnot to put on immersive shows. The third such production in his Changing Landscapes series is this one, where “participants will enter a spatial interpretation of the Scottish Isle of Eigg,” viewing projected images and such while this soundtrack plays (loudly). Weirdness abounds, friends, yes, weirdness abounds, as first-up track “An Sgurr” combines jagged ear-test sound-age, random conversations and a crowing rooster. That would be fine, but the subwoofer-begging electronic percussion does become literally barf-inducing; it simply digs right into the eardrum and will surely make a few visitors bail on the exhibit. Elsewhere it’s more user-friendly: half-plugged guitars and soothing synth lines leading into Flaming Lips-ish reverb-electro on “Laig Beach,” near-danceable glitch on “Eigg Beach.” B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• I actually have good news with regard to the collection of CDs that will be released on April 9, and it even revolves around one of those super-old bands that should have retired to do AARP commercials years ago. Yes, friends, I speak of 1970s half-joke-band Cheap Trick, whose new album, In Another World, is on the way! You may not know it, but those weirdos have been hanging around with none other than Ministry, helping Papa Al Satan make rebellious albums about smashing the state and whatnot, and guess what, Jello Biafra from Dead Kennedys was on one of those albums as well, all of which means that it’s so cool that your hand would instantly freeze if you touched the jewel case! This is a happy coincidence as well, because my favorite song over the last few weeks has been “Reach Out,” a totally demented tune Cheap Trick contributed to the Heavy Metal soundtrack album. You should go crank it right now, but in the meantime, I’ll go look for a single from this new album in the YouTube swamp, look, there’s one, I sure hope there aren’t 500 stupid commercials before I can dig on “Light Up The Fire!” OK, someone call an ambulance, this is awesome and I am dead, these guys are better than ever. There’s a twangy, bouncy, hard-rock guitar thing, and singer Robin Zander proves he still rules, and then there’s a sweet break in which they sound like Raspberries. How dare these guys be so old and yet so completely awesome.
• Fine, let’s get to the bit where I give up on music again today, as I look at the new Taylor Swift album, Fearless (Taylor’s Version). Guess what, all it is is a re-recorded version of the original Fearless album from 2008, but also with six tunes that had been cut from the original album. I would literally rather watch potatoes bake than deal with this, but here we are, you with an insatiable craving for pop culture and me with space to fill in this multiple award-winning column. So (burp) she redid “Love Story,” with ukuleles and whatever, and it’s instructive if nothing else; now I see that Tay-Tay is nothing more than a glorified version of Natalie Imbruglia. Aren’t you glad we did this, guys?
• Up next we have Montreal-based producer CFCF, with his new album Memoryland, in which he collaborates with Kero Kero Bonito frontwoman Sarah Bonito! The leadoff single “Life Is Perfecto” is actually pretty cool, an incomprehensible-but-danceable cross between Burial’s wingnut glitch-tech and neo-rave following in the footsteps of Aphex Twin or whatever. The 7-minute tune collects an interesting array of smart beats, and now that I have cursed it by recommending it, this CFCF guy will soon be working at Starbucks for the rest of his life.
• Last but not least, it’s another sure-to-be-underrated tech-oriented album, Cheap Dreams, from Small Black! This is a four-man band from Brooklyn, N.Y., but wait, they are not irritating, unless you really hate Wham! and/or Hall & Oates, because those are artists that the album’s intro single, “Duplex,” incorporates to some extent. I like it just fine; there’s a definite ’80s flavor to it, and their singing isn’t just another cheap imitation of Beach Boys, which means these guys know enough not to suck.

Retro Playlist

There’s not a more surefire way to get absolutely no Likes or Shares on your social media post than to post a YouTube video of an old song you like. It’s an instant fail, doomed to crickets chirping in response, the depleted uranium of social media. No one cares that you totawwy wuv some 50-year-old Pink Floyd song, much less that you spent five minutes humming into some stupid app to find out who sang a particular hair-metal ballad, like I did with that old 1983 stunner, “When I’m With You” (I’d had no luck finding it through conventional Googling because I didn’t know any of the lyrics aside from the “Bay-baaayyy” part. I thought it was either from the Raspberries or The Babys, but it was actually done by some obscure Canadian band called Sheriff, whose singer is definitely the Guinness World Record holder for eyebrow size).

There’s always a “but,” of course. Any boomer who posts a Beatles song will get a few Likes, guaranteed. Just my luck, the only Beatles song I can tolerate is “Paperback Writer,” and so I am a Facebook pariah when it comes to music (I’d never dream of revealing my power level on Twitter by linking a Ministry or Acumen Nation video, because it would just be pearls before politics-obsessed swine anyway). Anyhow, I got sick of my childhood buddy Dave posting The Who YouTubes, so I figured I’d try to lure him into the current millennium by turning him on to Minus The Bear, a Seattle band (sadly defunct as of 2018) that sounds like Asia with a slight Limp Bizkit edge. I reviewed their 2010 LP, Omni, when it first came out, and I still like it.

Of course, just because albums are from the Aughts or Aught-teens doesn’t automatically mean they’re good. One of the running jokes at this column’s previous home was that The Darkness’ 2003 album Permission to Land would never be unseated as the worst Led Zeppelin-wannabe album ever. The singer sounds like the guy from Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Must I expound further?

Dave, if you’re out there, go listen to the Minus The Bear tune “Secret Country” all the way through. I am here to help you.

Dan Blake, Da Fé (Sunnyside Records)

Fourth full-length from bandleader Blake, a Brooklyn-based sax player and board member of Buddhist Global Relief here busying himself at contributing something to the full slate of activist movements, including Extinction Rebellion, the Poor People’s Campaign and Show Up for Racial Justice. Sound-wise, Blake tries to emulate 1980s-era Wayne Shorter, and does make a good go of it when things get chaotically urban; you can practically smell the fried asphalt cooling outside. Doesn’t start out that way, though; in the message-sending prologue (“A New Normal”) pianist Carmen Staaf introduces the record with a slow, menacing solo bit whose augmented feel is fit for an old Vincent Price horror movie. It’ll be a bit unsettling to listeners who show up here for the sizzling, stubbornly retro vibes that take hold for pretty much the remainder. Things get the most animated during “The Grifter” (now who on Earth might that be referring to); the band lopes along like a herd of jacked-up gazelles in that boss move. “Doctor Armchair” is the obligato skronk workout. B+

Jazz WORMS, Squirmin’ (Capri Records)

I suppose it’s a given that every major city has a best jazz band in residence, and this five-piece (“WORMS” is an acronym that collects the first letters of the last names of the band members) is Denver’s. Coronet, piano and sax are the major instrumental components here, intertwining nicely in order to table ’60s-ish post-bop-ish advanced lounge stuff that’s simultaneously feel-good and mildly challenging. I know, I know, that pretty much describes approximately seven billion working jazz bands currently in business, but man, these guys are a lot of fun, even when they’re engaging in a workable level of skronk (basically minimal, praise Allah) and allow each member to stretch out without letting things get too wonky or drag on for any uncomfortable amount of time. Lots of experience in this 34-year-old band, including coronet guy Ron Miles’ bandleader releases on the Blue Note label. Just a terrific record all around. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

April 2 will bring our ears new albums, and hopefully some actual hints of actual summer, after this long Covid winter of going quietly insane! We will start with Godspeed You! Black Emperor, whose new album, G_d’s Pee AT STATES END, is on the way! I know nothing about them except for the fact that they’re from Montreal, Canada, and there are nine members. So, ipso facto, even though they claim to be into “space rock” (a made-up genre that means drone-y psychedelic rock), I’ll bet this stuff sucks, because all the band members are, of course, white and quite privileged-looking, and there are, repeat, nine members, and one of ’em plays a fiddle. As well, the band is named after an obscure Japanese movie (so edgy!). Get all that? I am expecting pure horror and barfing as I proceed to the next step of this little write-up, the bit where I actually submit my ears to this unlistenable nonsense. Ready? OMG, this all just got even worse. The teaser song is called, and I quote, “4521.0kHz 6730.0kHz 4109.09kHz.” It is a nonsense song that sounds like noise from a transistor radio that has super-bad reception. No, I’m serious, and one of the whopping seven people who left a comment on the YouTube for this idiocy exclaimed, “I cannot express with words how exited [sic] I am for this.” For my part, I am very excited to exit this part of our show.

• Since we’re on the subject of godspeeding and whatnot, I would also like to bring up an album that I’m sort of excited about, Glasvegas’ Godspeed, which will probably be decent, but there’s always the chance that it will disappoint and I won’t invite them to my Slip n Slide party when it gets warm! The band is from Scotland, and in the past they’ve done some right smart shoegaze-goth music. I just checked in with the second single, “Dying To Live,” which has been around for several months already, while the band got their act together enough to release the album. This is like a cross between U2’s first album and, I don’t know, probably Sisters Of Mercy. I like the tune, even if all it does is wander around acting edgy and not settling on any real melodic line. Your pet toucan might like it, who knows.

• Flock of Dimes, a Baltimore singer lady whose real name is Jenn Wasner, has played with Bon Iver and Wye Oak, and thus she is the most important musician in history in the eyes of people who love that kind of music (I don’t). This project’s third album, Head of Roses, is on my examination table, and boy, the new single, “Two,” sounds kind of like PJ Harvey trying to make something out of a chintzy Figurine cheese-techno line. Eventually it’s successful, but jeez, come on, people.

• To wrap up the week we have Du Blonde, the nom-de-stage of English musician Beth Jeans Houghton, who is also an artist, animator and video director, as well as a frequent wearer of belly shirts; she’s directed and animated music videos for Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ezra Furman, among others. Her third Du Blonde album is called Homecoming. In the video for the single “Medicated,” she has Kiss-style Gene Simmons makeup on, and it’s totally no-wave and grungy and spooky, but aimless. At least it’s irritating, thank heaven.

Jahmed, Armani (Human Re-Sources Records)

I’m pretty much at the point where I rarely read other reviews of rap albums in order to formulate a proper review. It’s a waste of time. Usually, rap reviewers just toss out a random jumble of underground buzzwords that won’t age well, either that or sound ridiculously enthusiastic about something that, upon actual examination, isn’t really groundbreaking. In the case of this 24-year-old Pomona, California, dude, MTV blogged that he “spits like nitrous oxide courses through his veins,” by which I think the writer meant “helium,” being that he has a high voice (he isn’t a mumbling MF Doomer, either, far from it). No, this is really slick stuff, easy on the trap, heavy on the bass, and whatever wrongs he’s trying to address here, you root for him to get through it all. Feats are from Freddie Gibbs and Suga Free, if that means anything to you, but whatevs, if you like older underground vibe with a good amount of depth, I’m sure you’ll like this. A

Motörhead, Louder Than Noise: Live In Berlin (Silver Lining Music)

Motörhead has never been any notably present part of my listening diet, so much so that I almost didn’t bother futzing with Microsoft Word in order to find an “o umlaut“ and thus correctly spell the band’s name for this story. That said, all bets are off now, in this time of young people actually listening to bands that use xylophones and five-dollar Casio keyboards without any irony whatsoever, and so Lemmy, the band’s Hells Angels-looking leader, is missed in more ways than one. So either you like these guys or not, and we can just go over the basics. It’s a live show from December 2012, held at the Berlin Velodrom, and everything is in order: “Ace of Spades,” “Overkill,” “Over the Top,” and the crowd of drunken Germans sounds enthusiastic. Anything I’ve missed, please sign in to my Patreon, pay the (very reasonable) fee, and hurl vitriol to your heart’s content. A-

Retro Playlist

Let’s go back to almost exactly or somewhat near eight years ago — no, you have no say in the matter, and besides, it’s all just in the context of this column’s back issue files, not necessarily stuff that was “hot” and “dope” at the time. I wouldn’t force anyone to relive that. Ploonk-and-babble-indie weirdos Vampire Weekend were about to release Modern Vampires of the City, their third album, and at the time, somewhere around March 21, 2013, the only advance music was a live version of “Unbelievers,” which they performed on Jimmy Kimmel’s hilariously unfunny show. That “hookless song came off like Everly Brothers trying Tully-style twee-punk on for size, i.e. it’s a step backward.” Ah well, all things do return to the dust from whence they blah blah blah, don’t they?

Anyway, I was still something of a gothie dude back then, and was hence excited to hear the advance of Kunst, the 2013 album from industrial-monster-stompers KMFDM, because those guys kind of rule. But, ah, no. Like all the albums they’d released after 2005’s Hau Ruck, this was yet another “variation on that LP’s blueprint, a weird (and hole-filled) duality comprising a few songs’ worth of furious White Zombie ass-kickage that gets nulled out when second-banana singer Lucia wraps herself around those snaking fire-dance darkwave-vs.-hardfloor joints that always make them sound like a bunch of newbies trying to be Skinny Puppy.” Omnia est consummare, like the Latin nerds say.

Subject change. Back then, house music was getting irritating, as buzz-lords Justice were still king. The other album I talked about eight years ago was, however, a welcome break from the wub-wub stuff, the second full-length from Italian DJ Alex Gaudino, Doctor Love. “The whole album blinks its eyes at the velvet-rope beach-dance scene,” I said, and embraced neo-disco on the Jordin Sparks-guested ‘Is This Love,’ “a swirling-fog vehicle that’s pretty much all hook.” Cool record, but there was a little wub on there for balance (“Miami Penthouse”).

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• And on the fifth day, the Lord said, “Today will be a day of new music albums, in order to test the patience and gastronomic endurance levels of those who trade in Snark.” And so it comes to pass that this Friday, March 26, will be a fancy hobo stew of new phonograph records and CDs, from singers and bands and unemployed William Shatners and whatever. So let’s strap ourselves in, and see which of us will barf first, you or me (I have $20 riding on me), as we begin with Swedish hipster-folkie girl duo First Aid Kit, whose new album, Who By Fire, is in the delivery trucks, set to be dropped off at the boarded up Strawberries store. This new album is composed of covers of Leonard Cohen songs (you know how much I love Leonard Cohen, of course, nudge-wink-barf), so I’ll wager that the advance teaser sounds like something I would never buy. Yep, it’s basically like Billie Eilish doing a cover of some irritating, maudlin pop song thing that had me wishing I were a skeleton, so pay up, yo, I demand my Pulitzer this instant.

• Whoa, I’d never heard of The Antlers, so my brain automatically assumed they were either room-temperature hipsters like Deerhoof or shoegaze also-rans like Deerhunter, you know, because I associate antlers with animals who scatter when they hear annoying noises. But behold, this is a German black metal band, a fact that I predict you will forget in exactly five seconds, as I certainly will. But as long as we’re here, the new Antlers album is titled I Green To Gold, and the single is called “Solstice.” But wait, droppin’ the needle on this slab shows that the band has totally given up on black metal, as this is totally a shoegaze ballad, like Raveonettes, big guitars with huge reverb and all that stuff. Of course, maybe that’s the new thing with black metal bands, like, do a ballad that’s slow shoegaze, and then go back to yelling about goat monsters or whatever their deal is these days. Should I investigate further, or do we just assume these guys have gone shoegaze? You don’t care, you say? Wait, hold it, this thing here says these guys aren’t the German black-metal Antlers, it’s the Brooklyn indie band that sounds like Deerhunter. OK, my bad, my perfect record of encyclopedic omniscience about all things music has finally been broken, maybe, but I still want my Pulitzer (scowls, looks at invisible wrist watch).

• Uh oh, here’s something I can’t sling any hate at, it’s tech-mud-rockers Tomahawk, with Tonic Immobility, their new album! These guys have real problems, and so I like them, remember to follow my Twitter for more fast and simple recipes! The roll-out single, “Tonic Immobility,” is already here, if you want to swipe it with one of those YouTube-to-MP3 programs that you should totally not use, especially if it hurts billionaire greed-monsters like Paul McCartney. FYI, “tonic immobility” is basically the smart-person way to say “playing possum,” but this tune sure isn’t. It’s a little like Battles, with a heavy Jane’s Addiction-style groove, and then it’s sort of like Rage Against The Machine. If I could go back in time, I would join this band, no question.

• Lastly, it’s sexy opera-metal stalwarts Evanescence, with The Bitter Truth, an album whose single, “Yeah Right,” kicks butt, but politely and opera-y. This band should have soundtracked that last awful Wonder Woman movie, which, come to think of it, is, unintentionally, faint praise, so never mind.

Kristian Montgomery and the Winterkill Band, Prince of Poverty (self-released)

Catching up with a couple of local-ish releases, things that have sat in my Facebook messages for a while, mostly because there’s always a hassle dealing with local guys. Take note, bands, just send direct links, OK, because I hate Dropbox, and now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at this (very good) album from Montgomery, a Danish alt-country-hippie who’s now based in Boston, working as a fisherman in Brewster, Mass. Although the biographical materials claim the album’s a genre-goulash, I didn’t find that to be true, more like something between ’70s country-pop and Hank Williams III, i.e. there’s a discernible punk influence afoot. Lots of throwback southern rock going on here, too: The LP starts out with “American Fire,” which will immediately have you thinking of The Outlaws, a sound, when done well, that’s always welcome at this desk. And so on and so forth, some things that evoke Amos Lee, Rascal Flatts in afterparty mode, stuff like that, all of it memorable and never annoying. A+

Amber Dust, Nothing Is Lost (self-released)

Another local release, this time a sort-of-compilation album (actually an audiophile’s take on the movie Boyhood, in many ways) from Sandown-based Jesse Nickerson, whom we’ve talked about before. Nickerson’s obviously a gentle soul, and his nicely lived life is documented here in the form of a sequence of alt-Americana tunes that were written for friends and family and such. For the most part, the record Krazy-Glues your basic Sufjan Stevens patter to Steve Winwood-level notions of songwriting, which means you’ll hear billowy melodies spiced with Wilco-ish experiments that are guaranteed not to get on your nerves. The music itself was salvaged from a personal collection of cassettes, spanning from 1985 to 2000; it all had to be digitally rescued, and thus it’s hilariously casual overall, with songs often introduced by background chatter from various bystanders and cohorts. I particularly liked “Tethered,” wherein a ’70s stun-guitar line matches up nicely with a trashcan-bashing drum line during one segue. A

Retro Playlist

In this space 10 years ago today, I wrote about America’s favorite Honey Boo Boo singing lady Britney Spears and her then-new album, Femme Fatale. Back then, it was de rigueur for pop divas to use trance techno in their beats. Remember those days? It was like the three hacks who write all the lousy, interchangeable pop songs for America’s smarmy, Nerds-gobbling tweens were listening to nothing but Tiesto, and life wasn’t all that bad. I’m sure you’ve forgotten by now, but “Till the World Ends” was the single, and it was pretty decent, except for this one stupid “hiccuping” Auto-Tune effect that was added to her voice, an unsurprising move by the corporate Borgs who’ve ruined everything else in music to date.

Ho ho ho, know what else was released that week? The soundtrack to the famous TV show NCIS, delivered in the form of a CD titled NCIS: The Official TV Score. My Stupid-O-Meter had to be put in the shop for a week after that one, but before the poor device fritzed out I was able to get off a quick “it’s such cheesy horrible music that I automatically went to the kitchen to make a horrible cheese sandwich when I heard it just now.”

It was a tough week, that week. I had to pretend to give a fair examination to The King Of Limbs, the album Radiohead had just put out. I have no problem admitting that I absolutely detest Radiohead, probably just as much as does fellow music snarkician Dr. David Thorpe, former editor of the “Your Band Sucks” page on the Something Awful site. Thorpe once commented that, oh-so-fittingly, Radiohead’s singer, Thom Yorke, has two superfluous letters in his name. And so on, hate hate hate. My take on the album was that along with a couple of Aphex Twin-style moves, most of the sounds “came from the same old pit of eye-rollingly mournful slowbie-slug nonsense in which they traditionally wallow.”

The other album on the slab that week was Grails’ Deep Politics, a band that’s essentially a work in progress, given that they have no singer. Nonetheless, I submitted, “If you’re into penny stocks, there’s actual potential here.” (I may have been lying, though, just to keep the PR person from getting too bummed out.)

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Blessed be, y’all, blessed be, because guess what, new albums are coming out this Friday, March 19! I love seeing what’s in the weekly list, guys. It’s a surprise every week, like going into a haunted house at the circus, except the ghosts and goblins and mummies who used to play bass for REO Speedwagon and assorted talentless hipster phonies are real, and they’ll totally get me if I don’t have my trusty snark-hammer at the ready, and I am fully prepared to smite them! Now take my hand, random person who’s reading my genius at the diner, yes, take my hand, strap yourself in for safety, and let’s see what’s goin’ on, in the crazy haunted house world of rock ’n’ roll and whatever! Yikes, looky there, folks, the first creature to pop out from behind the spooky gnarled trees is ancient cowboy-hat sorceress Loretta Lynn, whose new album, Still Woman Enough, is on the way! This is her 50th album, and no, I’m not kidding, she’s made 50 albums, not even including her duet albums with Conway Twitty. How does she do it? I don’t know! But I’ll bet she’s got to be playing thrash metal by now, so let’s see what the dilly is with the new single — wait, stop the ride, there’s no single! There’s just a “trailer” that’s 20 seconds long. If there’s anything on earth I detest to the core, it’s album trailers! But there’s banjo being plucked slowly, and she rap-sings about being a coal miner’s daughter, so it’s safe to say she still sounds like Reba McEntire. OK, that’s it, the first stop is always a fail in these cheap haunted houses, so keep your arms and legs safely inside as we press onward!

• Hope you took your heart medication, guys, because look, the next stop in our ride through the poorly maintained ghost house is a Canadian act, some indie-rock imbecile named Chad VanGaalen! Look out, it’s a moose with a knife, ha ha, so scary! The new album is World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener, and maybe you’ve already heard the single, “Samurai Sword.” If so, I’ll bet you wish you hadn’t; I mean, I sure didn’t need to hear this numbskull sing really bad harmony with some edge-lady girl he probably met on TikTok through some “Really Bad Music” search. They literally sound like they’re drunk, or just really stupid, and the beat is a rickety messy joke, like something the Rolling Stones recorded just to troll their manager into thinking they’d lost their minds. OK, next stop, gang, choo choo!

• Here we are at the spooky graveyard part of the ride, guys, with an album from Bell Orchestre, called House Music! The horror angle here is that this is a six-piece “avant-garde” band from Montreal, and there are fiddles and other trappings used by hayloft bands that have never been inside an actual hayloft. These guys opened for Arcade Fire early on, and the first single here is called “V: Movement.” It is, of course, awful, sort of Eno-style ambient, with some disparate layers, like belled trumpet, cheap synth, and bad singing. Moving on.

• Last stop, kids, with the big showstopping gorilla monster, Sting, and his new album, Duets, which, I’ll bet you anything, doesn’t include a duet with anyone who doesn’t own a few Ferraris. Italian singer dude Zucchero adds his voice to a clunker song called “September.” It’s almost OK, but then it turns into a song you swear you’ve heard before on every lousy Sting album. OK, out, everybody out, single file, let’s go.

Decouplr, Digital Bonfire (self-released)

Debut LP from this boy-girl electronic music duo, who, I’m advised, have been duking it out on the “DIY scene” in Philadelphia for a decade or so (I could be a real jerk with regard to translating that particular claim to fame, but let’s just proceed). Singer Bailey Walker’s soprano is chill and breathy, sort of a cross between Goldfrapp and Billie Eilish, not something you haven’t heard before, but mildly interesting in the settings in which it basks, a series of low-intensity, subterranean trip-hop beats that pulse, twinkle and cross rhythms here and there. There’s nothing here that has the sheer depth of Portishead, let’s say that, but by the same token the songs hold their own and do aim for the same sort of broke-down subway ambiance as Dummy, an album that’s — my stars, around 27 years old now. Much as I’d love to recommend it, then, the record seems a little, I dunno, underdone. B+

King Yosef and Youth Code, A Skeleton Key in the Doors of Depression (self-released)

Given that I’m all up into horror-techno in general and KMFDM in particular (with caveats), I was pleasantly surprised by this collaborative EP from a trio of underground industrial/hip-hop artists. Portland, Oregon-based Yosef (real name Tayves Yosef Pelletier) has produced songs for Billboard Hot 100-charting rap artists like the late XXXTentacion and Ski Mask the Slump God, while Youth Code is a boy-girl pair-up from Los Angeles. The latter act’s singer Sara Taylor is the broken-glass-gargling singer in front here, sounding every bit the Lucia Cifarelli worshipper, and maybe even better, and the grinding, crazily angered beats are up there with Terrorfakt, if you have any idea who that is. The Skinny Puppy/Front Line Assembly cabal is big into them too; having Pelletier along to provide a little underground-rap sensibility makes this a tough one to top, I don’t care who you are. When you absolutely, positively have to get everyone on Elm Street running for the safety of the shops. A+

Retro Playlist

Wow, exactly (almost) 10 years ago, we had a couple of real doozies to talk about on this page, and the Playlist stuff was full of big-album news too. There was F.A.M.E., the then-new LP from Rihanna’s ex, Chris Brown. Ha ha, remember that one, with the song “Yeah 3X,” where Brown tried super-hard to dance like Michael Jackson? Unfortunately for me, it wasn’t that bad, and there wasn’t even a lot of Auto-Tune on there, so I really didn’t have anything bad to say about it, except for, of course, “ha ha, look, it’s Chris Brown!”

Anyway, of the two albums I talked about in this space the week of March 14, 2011, Angles, the album from The Strokes, was the biggest disappointment. Granted, the band ran into a ton of problems during the making of Angles, not the least of which was singer Julian Casablancas’ total absence from the planning of it, but nevertheless some critics claimed to think the album was good, a “return to form” (what, they’d actually left the form at some point?). The press’s praise, I noticed, was of the sort parents gush in the direction of their kids on Christmas morning, when the little dears finally break down and put on the pink bunny pajamas Grandma sent them. But I was free. I wasn’t trying to sell my opinion to Rolling Stone or Nylon editors, so I was able to snark at will: “Five years it took these guys to barf out what amounts to Second Impressions of Earth? Five years?” And etc., viewer discretion advised.

Now, the other album that week, Pet Shop Boys’The Most Incredible Thing, was another matter entirely. “There’s likely no band other than PSB,” I blowharded back then, “more culturally credentialed and intellectually licensed to combine techno and classical toward the creation of a modern ballet, as this is — the stage production is a modernization of the Hans Christian Andersen story, which grew from his disgust with the pointless conflict of his own time, the Franco-Prussian War.” Yes, it was a technopop/classical “soundtrack” album of sorts, from, yes, the same guys whose first hit single, “West End Girls,” substantially lowered the bar for pop music in 1984. My, what a terrific band those guys grew up to be, really.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The next general CD release date is this Friday, March 12, and now for a message about the rumors of my selling out to the corporate matrix! For months I’ve been amusing myself with a mutual dragging contest over email, with a mysterious cabal of underground-music guys, all of whom have a nicely warped sense of humor but who don’t seem to understand that you can’t ask for publicity in this fine upstanding newspaper while also remaining completely anonymous and — here’s the key — not having an actual, official album/mixtape/EP/single available for sale (or whatever, free download, I don’t care, anything that loosely resembles a finished product). In other words, to tweak the old, stale Game Of Thrones meme, “One does not simply send Uncle Ewic an email demanding coverage for a music release that is not a release and then spazz about the fact that he doesn’t take you seriously.” We’ll start with Zach and Emily, an “artist-promoting” couple who, under the corporate name of Cupcake Kamikaze, promote bands that are, you know, different. When last I heard from them, they were pushing a “band of meatheads” from Maine, The Imbosills, which had just released The Imbosills Sing Your Favorite Marvel Theme Songs on YouTube only. This fine collection kicks off with some joke song about Marvel superhero Scarlet Witch, and I had to shut it off about 30 seconds in, because it sounded like two 4channers singing in joke voices over a boombox recording of a guitar riff and nothing else. They also sent along a demo of “all-disco versions” of King Crimson songs that weren’t horrible, which isn’t to say they were good. So there you have it, guys, whoever you are; you have officially gotten some press in the Hippo. If this is all a troll, I technically won, because you spent a lot more time making these nonsense-songs than I did writing about them. I. Win.

• There’s really not a lot else to chat about this week, but we can discuss Louisiana sludge-metal band Eyehategod’s first LP in seven years, A History Of Nomadic Behavior, just so I’ll have a reason to go listen to them, which I’ve avoided doing for years. Ah, yes, here we are, the first single, “High Risk Trigger.” The band is like Crowbar with Trent Reznor singing. OK, moving along.

• Wow, more fringe-metal, might as well: it’s Rob Zombie, with new LP The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy! I haven’t cared about this dude since his “Drag-U-La” days, but maybe this is good, I’ll go listen to his new song, “The Triumph of King Freak.” Whoa, this is cool, an Arabian-metal trip, sort of like Ministry’s “Khyber Pass” (the tune at the end of Hurt Locker). It is OK!

• We’ll wrap up this week with alt-blues/folk singer Valerie June’s The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers, in specific its single, “Call Me A Fool [feat. Carla Thomas].” It’s a nice little soccer mom song, sort of like “Blue Bayou,” a decent vehicle for June’s Kate Havnevik-ish sour-pickle voice. Norah Jones fans would like this I think.