Author: Eric Saeger

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.

La Battue, Get Set, Go! (Parapente Records)

Second EP from this off-kilter but quite accessible group, which consists of a brother-sister duo from Rennes, France, and Korean musician Yurie Hu. Their first EP, Search Party, was more lo-fi, a cheese-fest in the tradition of Figurine and whatnot, but this release finds them upping their game to an encouraging degree. Their cited influences are Beach Boys, Steve Reich and Radiohead, and all that stuff is still here, if by “Beach Boys” they mean Grizzly Bear and all those other Aughts-era bands (I didn’t hurt myself falling backward in my chair when the shock hit me). It’s glitchy and buzzy when it lets the software trip out on busy Animal Collective-style fractals, and singer Ellie James’s floaty, non-goofy soprano is a nice departure from the male falsetto cringe I’d expected to hear. In other words, it’s pretty cool in a mellow way. Main quibble is that the first two songs are so similar that I can’t help but scold them for making such a rookie mistake, but again, it’s fine for what it is. B

Tombstones In Their Eyes, Looking For A Light (Kitten Robot Records)

Now here’s some pretty badass shoegaze if you’re into that stuff. This quartet is from Los Angeles, of course, home of — you know, basically everybody, because it’s the perfect place to work on songs that possess a vibe conflating slow-motion surfboard highlight-reel sensibilities with visions of apocalypse. OK, whatever, that’s what it evokes to me, with its fuzzed-out guitars, totally ghostly vocals and messy-enough engineering. Yeah, I’d be at least mildly psyched to receive a new Raveonettes promo album (as long as it comes all at once, not like the discombobulated, one-song-per-month fail of 2016’s Atomized), but while you’re waiting, this will do the trick. It’s like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club but with less petrochemical leakage, that is to say it’s less buzzy in a bar-band way. It’s pretty hooky throughout, too, intended for stoners who love watching a beach bonfire twinkle its reflection in the waves, which is basically a mindset everyone could use right now. A+

PLAYLIST

• The world keeps turning, gang. In fact, it turns so fast that every Friday, a bunch of brand new albums get jiggled loose and dumped into Spotify and Pirate Bay! And such will be the case on May 28, when albums such as Moby’s Reprise will hit the streets. You all know Moby from his Wally Cox-level good looks and all those old ’90s rave songs on his big album, Play, but nowadays he mostly enjoys pretending to be an expert political pundit, at least for TV viewers who believe Buzzfeed is an underground communist blog! This new album, his 19th, is, as the title implies, a bunch of rerubs of old tunes, recorded with the help of a string quartet and the Budapest Art Orchestra, because nothing says “afterparty ambiance” than string sections and a bunch of weird musicians who are probably related to Dracula. Oh, where were we, yes, that big hit of his, “Honey,” isn’t on here, but you can still rave it up with dumb, overblown versions of “Go” and “Extreme Ways,” and look, Kris Kristofferson adds guest vocals to a new version of “The Lonely Night!” I’ll admit that I don’t totally hate the version of “Porcelain” that’s on here; the tune was always glorified elevator music anyway, so mellowing it down a tad doesn’t dull its “autumn leaves falling in a park” vibe, although the guest singing from My Morning Jacket’s Jim James is (spoiler alert) absolutely awful. But don’t let that stop you.

• Well here’s a pretty kick-butt band, if you like the Allman Brothers and Southern rock and whatever, Blackberry Smoke! They’re an Atlanta quintet that’s been putting out albums since 2003, and what’s really cool about them is that, despite their radio-ready sound, they’re still a genuine independent band, having released records on upstanding indie labels like Rounder Records and Earache Records, which I had presumed dead long ago, but they’re still around. The band’s new album, You Hear Georgia, will be on 3 Legged Records, but once again it sounds super pro; the title track is loud-ass Americana-tinged throwback-blues-rawk, so if you’re sick of all your Charlie Daniels records, you should give these guys a chance.

• Man, I could’ve sworn I just talked about a new k.d. lang album, but this search feature gizmo in my Windows 95 MacIntosh machine says I didn’t, so we’ll take a quick look at her latest, Makeover! Wait a minute, what is this, another comp album, like that stupid Moby thing we were just chatting about? Yeah, it’s a bunch of redo versions of her older songs, kicking off with “Miss Chatelaine (St. Tropez Mix).” So dumb, it’s the same song as before, just with more of a Caribbean beat, what a ripoff, and OMG she’s such a fantastic singer, let’s just forget the whole thing.

• Our final contestant is Moon Drenched, the new record from Bent Arcana, a messy experimental nonsense band from — let’s see — OK, I can’t find it, who cares, they’re from somewhere. “The War Clock” is one of their disjointed, dissonant, brain-damaging songs, maybe you’ll love it if you like bands like the Books or Captain Beefheart, or if you’d love the sound of a monkey playing Bowie albums backwards while screeching random monkey-talk in your ear.

Alchemy Sound Project, Afrika Love (Artists Recording Collective)

I assume you know by now that I try to steer readers away from dissonant, disagreeable jazz. I roll like that mostly because purposely annoying runs, no matter the level of talent, go through me like a nail. In other words, I am not a hawker of Charles Mingus et al; I think I’ve only covered one of his live albums here, purely for the sake of humanity (and to keep the remastered Blue Note albums coming in, like you couldn’t have guessed). So this one, from a scarily talented quintet of bandleaders (on trumpet, woodwinds and piano on the prime-mover side), does start with some dis-ambiance (“The Fountain”), and I was about to commence to barfing, but then it just flies off into hyperspace with the immensely complicated “Dark Blue Residue”: You’re at once overwhelmed by the band’s depth of musicianship; I mean it’s Jedi-level. And accessible as well. Mind, I’m just trying to help the genre, not scold anyone for liking skronky nonsense, but I’d recommend this to anyone exploring jazz. A

Living Wreckage, “Breaking Point” (self-released)

I’m sure we can dispose of this quickly, the teaser single from a quote-unquote “superstar metal band consisting of vocalist Jeff Gard (Death Ray Vision), guitarists Jon Donais (Anthrax, Shadows Fall) and Matt LeBreton (Downpour), bassist Matt Bachand (Shadows Fall, Act of Defiance) and drummer Jon Morency (Let Us Prey). Their goal is to make “good ol’ hard rock/metal that fits somewhere between Skid Row and Pantera.” Now, the only thing I know for sure is that I’ve always considered Anthrax to be the Pepsi to Metallica’s Coca-Cola within the ’80s thrash-metal sphere, like Anthrax wanted to be DRI so badly that they even named a song after that band. Pretty hurtin’, huh? Now, that’s not to say these guys aren’t going to be the next (place name of “superstar thrash band” that everyone forgot about in three months here), because who knows, maybe this tune’s combination-ripoff of Meshuggah, Nine Inch Nails and Metallica will be the key to unleashing speed-metal again upon our unsuspecting world, this time for a permanent reign. But I doubt it. B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• May 21 sounds like a great Friday for new CDs, am I right? Well, tough Tootsie Rolls, frantic fam, because here they come anyway. Let’s have a look at the list of albums coming out tomorrow, shall we? Right, blah blah blah, Georgia Anne Muldrow, don’t like her; Blake Shelton, never heard of him, unless that was the guy who tried to sell me a used Corolla in 1996 — ah, here’s something I can actually get excited about (you wouldn’t believe how short that list is these days, guys): It’s none other than goth king Gary Numan, with his new album, Intruder! You may know that this vampire-techno vanguard, he of the swirling fog and and the spooky tunes that are so awesome they’re probably illegal in the Midwest, has had himself a few setbacks, like the time he was supposed to collaborate with Trent Reznor but it just turned into Nine Inch Nails doing a cover of Numan’s “Metal,” and Numan is self-diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, and he has a really crazy girlfriend (which of course only means he’s in a band, but whatever). Anyway, even though everyone expected him (because he announced such) to just buy a farm and retire after his big 1980s hit “Cars,” he stuck with it, and his last bajillion albums are the gold standard for post-Bauhaus vampire rock, and I’m sure I’ll listen to this single, “Now And Forever,” from Intruder and will pronounce it awesome. Yes, I will be doing just that. It has a weird, scratchy Nine Inch Nails style beat, but when you add Numan’s half-yodeling voice it becomes instantly awesome. I have no idea why he isn’t more popular than Reznor, but whatever.

• The Monkees are a long-gone band and TV show that was huge in the mid-1960s, because they were basically The Beatles with more accessible songs and lots of sight gags involving chimpanzees and hot girls named Mary and Sandra, because those were the official hot girl names of that generation. There are only two Monkees still alive now (and yes, I had to check that they’re still alive), namely Micky Dolenz (the goofy, chimp-like drummer) and Mike Nesmith, the slacker guitarist. Since these guys still have to make a living playing music, there is a new album on the way, called Micky Dolenz Sings Nesmith, which should be self-explanatory if unexciting news to Monkees fans, because none of those guys were allowed to write songs for the original TV show, so I assume the song snippets I just heard were random songs written by Nesmith, jingly ’60s-pop trifles that are happy and catchy, whatever, and Dolenz can still actually sing, which is the weird part.

• Columbus, Ohio, alternative hip-hop duo Twenty One Pilots will release their sixth full-length, Scaled And Icy, on May 21. You’ll know them from the Eminem-meets-boy-band hit “Stressed Out,” or maybe you somehow don’t, which doesn’t mean that you aren’t cool anymore, it just means that you never bother to Shazam the songs you hear at fashionable outlet malls (if so, send me a Friend request). The pair’s latest single is “Shy Away,” which starts off like bloopy Billie Eilish electropop, then becomes emo, then tries to sound like a Smashing Pumpkins B-Side. Your dog might like it, I don’t know.

• We’ll put this week in the books with a quick listen to eclectic techno-whatever dude Nicholas Krgovich, whose new LP, This Spring, consists of a bunch of cover songs originally done by Canadian experimental wingnut Veda Hille. “LuckLucky,” the first single, sounds like Orbital in mellow mode. It’s OK.

Retro Playlist

You might think of me as a closed-minded punk/noise/metal guy, given all the love I’ve heaped on the louder genres and my constant bashing of half-plugged fedora and indie bands. But there’s a soft side to my W.C. Fields-ness that’s surfaced recently: I’ve become completely obsessed with Fleetwood Mac.

There’s an explanation. I did the math the other week, and between this newspaper and all the other magazines, papers and blogs to which I’ve “contributed,” I have written, to date, at the very least, around 4,500 CD reviews. Do you have any idea how much damage all that bad music could do to a human cerebrum? I kidded around about that in my book and sometimes mention it here, but never did I realize that my experiencing all that horror would actually lead to something positive.

Announcement: I have become convinced that Fleetwood Mac is the greatest pop-songwriting unit in history. I say all this for the benefit of young music-searchers, of course; old folks know how divine the band’s Rumours album is. There’s “Dreams,” “Go Your Own Way,” and all that stuff.

I’m also grimly fascinated by how bloody weird the band members were. Sara Fleetwood, who stole drummer Mick from Stevie Nicks and married him, has (maybe) posted all sorts of insider groupie details over at the blog songfacts.com. As with any potential troll, it’s impossible to determine if she’s real or not, but sure, I believe it, and besides, whether it’s fake or not, Sara’s got to be completely crazy by now.

That Sara person may have been the inspiration for the only great song (the suspiciously named “Sara”) on the band’s absolutely awful 1979 album Tusk. The stunted yin to Rumours’ yang, Tusk was written almost exclusively by guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, who, in a drugged-up panic, was desperate to make people forget that the band made epic pop-rock. The critics sure did, after Tusk flopped its way into the stores.

But regardless, “Sara” — obviously a rough sketch for “Gypsy,” which came later — is a magnificent touchy-feely song. If you’re young, add that to your playlist, as well as anything else either of the two women wrote back then.

Rain Rabbit, Rain Rabbit (self-released)

So some guy from Chicago named Kyle Brauch sent me a random email to try to get some attention for his new, totally done-it-himself album. Usually I only focus on such things when it’s a local band, but what got me was his politely excited overuse of exclamation points (“Don’t hesitate to contact me if there’s anything else I can provide!”). Enthusiasm is always just grand, isn’t it, folks? No? Well, it’s better than when newbie bands tell me they’re trying to “garner reviews from great writers such as yourself.” I want to ask them, “‘Garner’, you say? Are you an awesome band, or are you literally trying to ‘raise my ire’?” But regardless, this is actually a decent album, sort of an advanced approach to ’80s radio-pop, starting with opener “Holding On” and — well, everything else. There’s a Hall & Oates/Aldo Nova side to this stuff that was believed extinct. At least by me, I mean. Oh, you get the picture. It’s great for what it is. A

Bedroom, Stray (self-released)

Droopy but basically palatable weird-beard-pop album from Noah Kittinger, who launched this project when he was 16. The main selling point is Kittinger’s voice, which touches on Grizzly Bear and whatever other Beach Boys-dipped Aughts-era album you might be able to stomach, but his go-to vocal sound is more akin to that of Junip’s José González (who I believe is much more renowned for guesting on Zero 7’s 2007 album The Garden, not that I’d ever fight someone over it), or, if you’re old, Gilbert O’Sullivan (of the 1972 mega-hit “Alone Again [Naturally]”). That’s a nice sourball sound, and it literally rescues something like half of these songs, which are glitch-chill with not enough glitch. I mean, it’s fine with me if an artist wants to interrupt songs with irritating demonstrations of beginner-level synth-edginess, but that stuff doesn’t increase its shelf-life, not when there are plenty of bands that go all-out with it and still remain melodic. May I be excused now? B-

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• May 14 is the next general CD release day, and so I must depart the safety and people-shunning zen of my underground lair and venture out once again into the realm of new albums, in the hope of locating some music that isn’t refried, remixed, derivative, contrived or just plain awful. There are many hipsters afoot this week, so let’s first stop and try to gauge what Akron, Ohio-based garage band Black Keys are trying to accomplish with Delta Kream, their upcoming 10th album! Ah, it is a collection of “hill country blues” cover songs, which makes sense. I mean, if you were a skinny jeans-wearing, Reddit-browsing band from Ohio, really the only music you would be familiar with is music from America’s hill country, a region of northern Mississippi bordering Tennessee, am I right? No? Whatever, let’s just go with it; I’m seeing semi-famous names being bandied about here, such as R. L. Burnside’s guitarist Kenny Brown, as well as separate entries from Junior Kimbrough and his bassist Eric Deaton. What, you haven’t heard of them either? OK, that’s a win-win, let’s wrap this up quickly, then, but remember, old songs about mud and snakes and whatever are really cool, because — well, you know, because. There are covers of John Lee Hooker songs, including his version of “Crawling Kingsnake,” which is pretty awesome as far as throwback-chill-blues go. The video was filmed in front of Jimmy Duck Holmes’ Blue Front Café, which is the oldest active juke joint in America. You don’t care? Well that isn’t very awesome of you, but OK, moving on.

• Mind the rocky terrain, Rocinante’s Fail, my backside already hurts from this quest for decent music, and in fact if you’ll stop for some nice water and oats or whatever donkeys eat, I’ll investigate more hipsterism, from this new Chills album, Scatterbrain! These guys are a jangle-pop indie band from New Zealand, and they break up pretty often, which means they are good, because jangle-pop bands should break up as often as possible. What’s this then, the latest single is called “Destiny.” In a nutshell, it’s Belle & Sebastian but with whatsisname’s masculine, half-whispered voice. At least it’s analog, but then again, who could make sleepy Buddy Holly-sounding music with digital equipment, am I right? It would accidentally sound like Tiesto, I think, don’t you?

• I know I just recently talked about a Juliana Hatfield album in Retro Playlist, but she has a new one coming out soon, titled Blood. Yes, she is cool, because she was in The Lemonheads and she’s done records with Paul Westerberg, but let’s listen to the new single, “Mouthful Of Blood” and check in! Well wow, it is an OK song, jangly and mildly riot-grrrl-ish. No, she doesn’t actually sound very edgy, but if you like bands like Dinosaur Jr. or whatever, you’ll probably like this.

• Wrapping up the week is Seattle indie-schlub Damien Jurado’s new LP The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania, led off by a single called “Helena!” This guy looks like an accountant and sings like one too; this is shuffle-y folkie chill, sort of like Sun Kil Moon but more awkward and accountant-y.

Retro Playlist

Exactly 10 years ago this space was focused on a bunch of new albums, including Give Till It’s Gone, which at the time was the new one from weird-beard-culture icon Ben Harper. Putting all snark aside, I tried to assure my readership that the album “was totally not rushed out to help pay Harper’s legal bills in his divorce from pointy-nosed David Lynch muppet Laura Dern,” because if I’d said it actually was rushed out in order to pay some L.A. lawyer, people would have started distrusting the entertainment industry, maybe even taken a long look at why anyone would buy a Ben Harper album in the first place (“The hard-rockin’ Neil Young-inspired kickoff single “Rock N Roll Is Free” highlights the Joey Ramone aspects of Harper’s voice, because you should always put your weakest foot forward.”).
But all was not baseless trolling of unfairly popular indie-folk-whatevers that week. The main thrust involved two albums, one of which was an emo thing, Yellowcard’s When You’re Through Thinking Say Yes. My review of that one was a random jumble of hatred for their usual freshly showered “power pop” (I really need to take a few minutes someday and just write a quick software program that writes reviews of emo albums, all of which would be variations on what I said about this one: “… there is, as always, little to say about this sort of album aside from ‘at least such-and-so is a good song’). My one-line closer was pretty good, though, if I say so myself: “Beach music for future stars of Teen Mom.”
There was also an arena-dinosaur band on tap, namely old Scottish butt-kickers Nazareth, with Big Dogz. I think this was the band’s last LP before singer Dan McCafferty died, and it was a valiant effort, if a bit too (predictably) bluesy, like the fellas were trying to recapture the non-magic of the muddy, truck-drivin’ bar-band nonsense of their (not awesome) older albums, the ones they made before (the totally awesome) Hair Of The Dog. Nevertheless, McCafferty did turn in a couple of badass rockouts (OK, actually one, “Lifeboat”), and in the end it’s a nice, messy, caterwauling effort.

Slinky Vagabond, King Boy Vandals (self-released)

The core of this punk-pop (in the real, actual sense) crew comprises Keanan Duffty (a fixture in the NYC punk underground who helped to style David Bowie, Sex Pistols and others) and Italian producer/rock musician Fabio Fabbri. Something like 100 years of punk/’80s/whatnot experience went into this, and it gets pretty nasty (in a good way), alternately evoking early David Bowie space-ballads (“The Beauty In You”), barely tamed New York Dolls-ish raunch-blues welded to Killers post-arena-rawk (“Prima Donna”), ’70s roots-punk experimentation (“Old Boy”) and so on. If you’re young, one RIYL touchstone would be Guided By Voices, being that there’s that Beatles edge to the singing, but it’s all delightfully messy really. All told, there’s really nothing an OG-punk purist could possibly dislike about this thing. It would probably translate a million times better on vinyl, true, but its analog purity emerges even through digital media, with fuzzy guitars bleeding right into the sloppily miked hi-hat and such. Like the LOLCats say, moar plaese. A+

Cheap Trick, In Another World (BMG Records)

As everyone knows, 99.9 percent of the albums released by old-school 1960s-1980s arena-rock bands have been embarrassingly bad. But then there’s this American four-piece, fronting like an actual living coelacanth in an ocean carpeted with extinct dinosaur fossils, not because they can still “rock out” (in other words, add way too much blues-rock to a recipe that became invalid the minute the earliest tech/rap groups crawled out of the primordial ooze) but because their songwriting formula, strictly aimed at the Billboard charts as ever, is eternal. There’s a trick to it, you see, writing perfect, simple pop music for general taste, and Cheap Trick’s leader, Rick Nielsen, is a Picasso at it. This isn’t Live At Budokan, but we’re not living in 1977, so it’ll just have to do, a thick patchwork quilt of melodic perfection that I’d envision reading like complicated prog-rock to Zoomers, an endless parade of summer-hormonal joy. Singer Robin Zander is still goofily brash, stressing the long “R” sounds on his lines like an idiot (“Here Comes The Summer”), but that’s part of the magic. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, May 7, is the next day when we would traditionally see a bunch of new CD releases from awesome bands and whatever twerking Roombas you troublemaking Zoomers have convinced yourselves should count as music. But who knows, maybe there will be no new albums at all, and we can compare Rice Krispies Treats recipes while we wait for the next five Covid variants to pass through town and keep us all stuck at home forever, trying to find something that doesn’t suck on Netflix (ha ha, there is no such thing). Nope, there are albums, the first of which is Van Weezer, from geek-rock superstars Weezer! The band’s leader, Rivers Cuomo, has said that Weezer’s audience is “probably ready for some shredding again,” a fact he gleaned by finally noticing that the crowd would freak whenever he played a totally shreddy guitar solo during live performances of “Beverly Hills,” and that’s how the whole idea of totally rocking out with new nerd-metal music came to be. I can’t wait to hear it, although I think I already talked about this stuff when the first variant of Covid was still leaving people confused about whether or not it was airborne and all that stuff. Ho ho ho, remember those days, when we didn’t know anything, and we were all watching the movie Contagion on endless loop just to freak ourselves out, so much family fun! Whatever, the newest single. “Hero,” is your basic mid-tempo AC/DC b-side, and actually, you know what’s weird, a lot of the time on this song, Cuomo sings like the dude from Goo Goo Dolls. It’s OK I suppose, not the They Might Be Giants-style hard-emo I was expecting.

• And speaking of hard-rock whatevers, in a weird scene, Nancy Wilson, the guitarist from million-year-old arena-rawk-band Heart, sort of broke up the band when she had some sort of problem with her sister (and original Heart singer) Ann’s son and made a scene. There was angry-emoji drama, and now Nancy has a solo album, called You And Me, coming out this week. Will it be old-school Heart, like when they were into Freudian symbolism and hobbits, or latter-day Heart, like when they tried to be female Michael Boltons? I don’t know, which is why I’m going to go to YouTube and listen to the album’s title track. Hm, the song is a Zeppelin III-ish folk-rock ballad. It is OK, but she needs to end her beef with her sister, because Nancy can’t sing very well. That’s not to say she’s a bad person.

• For people who still remember actual dancing in smelly clubs, look, there’s a new album called When God Was Great from The Mighty Mighty Bosstones! I love their spazzy music, it’s so perfect for watching family-friendly high-jinks like Gritty the Philadelphia Flyers mascot throwing pies at little kids and weighing in on political subjects he cares nothing about, just like everyone else on this uninhabitable planet! I’m sure their new song “The Final Parade” is spazzy and spittle-flecked — yes, it is, not like their big idiotic ska-punk-whatever hit “The Impression That I Get,” but nevertheless it is perfect for drinking and throwing pies, absolutely.

• In closing I’d like to say that there is a new Van Morrison album coming out, called Latest Record Project: Volume 1. If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s this guy’s fedora-hat accountant-pop, so I will recuse myself from talking about whatever stupid nonsense is on this stupid album and tell you to enjoy!

Retro Playlist

Retro-ing back to this week in 2013, Atlanta-based indie band Deerhunter was about to release their sixth LP, Monomania, and the first sighting, the title track, boded well. The title-track teaser was like the previous album’s single “Coronado” on angel dust, “totally wigged-out Iggy-garage craziness that’s almost like Warlocks but without the skronk — no, it’s almost like the first Horrors album but without the speed.” I posited that most indie dweebs would “probably run and hide behind [their] stacks of twee records, but this song will eventually find you and get you drunk.”

Anyway, one of the two featured CDs that week was one that — and you won’t believe this — is still kept in my car in case the missus and I are in the mood for a little goth. That one is Ministry of Love, the debut (and unfortunately only) full-length from Los Angeles boy-girl industrial-shoegaze duo Io Echo, which opened for Nine Inch Nails, toured with Bloc Party and Garbage, and did other fun things. Sort of like Asteroids Galaxy Tour but a lot more heavy on the shoegaze, the album opens with “Shanghai Girls,” a slow, methodical, epic shot of shock and awe, evoking nothing less than the queen of outer space come to take hold of our planet. But that’s not all. “’When the Lilies Die’,” I blathered, “is an even better song than that, just … alien, for lack of a better word, and thus one can’t help but notice that the duo’s band name isn’t just for show, it’s about aural integrity.” RIP, awesome band. I just can’t ever win.

New York hipsters Postelles were also under the microscope that week, with their third-or-whatever LP, And It Shook Me. This dreary slog of a band actually formed at a New York City prep school. You can probably guess how it went. “The hooks aren’t subtle, they’re boring,” spat I, “though not hopelessly bubblegummy, a debatable saving grace when everything here sounds like it came from a bunch of politely tiresome potential boyfriends from your basic episode of Girls working out their manias du jour.” Ayuh, pretty hurtin’.