Album Reviews 20/08/13

My Morning Jacket, The Waterfall II (ATO Records)

I tend to associate this Louisville band with their neighbors to their southern border, Tennessee’s Kings Of Leon, who’ve similarly carved a lucrative niche for themselves by tossing depleted-soil mystery-meat 1970s-rock into a blender, hipstering it up a little, and trying not to come off too rock-starry lest they’re abandoned en masse by the last few millennial-pandering blogs that might be interested in them. Where Kings are more like a rebooted, radio-centered Allman Brothers, MMJ are more blatantly Lynyrd Skynyrd-like, which won’t mean much to most of you, not that you should believe Last.FM’s assessment that they’re similar to Wilco and Spoon (good grief already). Whatevs, MMJ is at this point just a very good rock band, as we heard in 2015’s The Waterfall, from whose sessions these new songs sprang. “Tropics” had its Blue Oyster Cult side to it but was still uniquely epic, while here, album opener “Spinning My Wheels” flirts with early Yes throughout its breezy, windswept duration; it’s pure yacht-rock really. “Still Thinkin’” touches on Beach Boys, then we get some twee (“Climbing the Ladder”), some faux-Jamie Liddell soul interpolating a monster guitar interlude (“Magic Bullet”) and a bunch of similar things, the biggest departure being “Wasted,” the token Flaming Lips-ish jam-out. Harmless vacation listening, not that they should be doing that, but it’s their career. B

VOS, Rise EP (Cammo Music)

Not big on mawkish, wildly overacted gospel-pop myself, but hey, plenty of people love them some network talent-show bombast, and this is as good as any, I guess. VOS stands for “Voices Of Service,” a foursome (a woman and three guys) of African American singers who placed fifth in Season 14 of America’s Got Talent; all of them are military, two active, two not. You can easily picture Howie Mandel or whoever bowing and mugging it up with “I worship you as music gods” in the face of this angst-racking four-song effort, but that’s fine with me. After all, “Brother” has more in common with Ten Tenors/Celtic Woman than it does with any shlubby awards-show tribute to Aretha Franklin; it’s not horrifically overdone, and does have a lot of melody to it. “Choke” is the ballad, such as it is, unplugged guitar accompanying refried but boldly delivered breakup sentiments that spotlight each singer’s strengths. All the best of luck to these folks. A

Retro Playlist

Eric W. Saeger recommends a couple of albums worth a second look.

Last night, with literally nothing else on TV, I wound up watching the last two-thirds of Bohemian Rhapsody, the movie about the 1970s superstar rock band Queen. It’s a fairly forgettable biopic, not all that believable at times (trust me, no band has ever stopped in the middle of a high-drama fight to go “Say, that’s a cool bass line!” and suddenly start jamming out). That sort of thing aside, Rami Malek (playing Freddie Mercury) did a good job of convincing me that he was experiencing genuine distress over coming out as gay and upending his entire life.

Maybe I’m “too online,” but in my view, the LGBTQIA community hasn’t benefited all that much from the “Social Justice Warrior” (SJW) craze that’s swept over Twitter and such for the last decade or so. Instead of helping to spread real understanding and empathy between gays and repressed types who can’t get over their generalized fear of things that weren’t de rigueur in 1950s culture, it’s served as a popularity (and, let’s face it, money)-generating machine for B-list celebrities, self-obsessed nobodies and wannabe philosophers. The only online personality I trust (and have learned a lot from) is American trans woman Natalie Wynn, a philosophy major whose YouTube channel Contrapoints is must-see stuff. The short of it is that she’s actually had more support from conservative types (many of whom she’s taught to adjust their worldviews) than from certain rigid SJW gangs.

As a music critic and cis male, I tend to view gay-made and/or gay-centered music as simply another form of world music, a glimpse into a different culture. For the record, I don’t lump Queen as a “gay band” and never really thought much of them; aside from “Bohemian Rhapsody,” that tune’s rather uninteresting follow-up “Millionaire Waltz,” and a few sections of certain songs (they were/are annoyingly modular in their song structures), I don’t like them, really. I do like New York glam-disco band Scissor Sisters, whose album Night Work I talked about here in reverent tones way back in 2010. I was thrilled by it, a fun, jubilant set of really great songs.

I admire trans singer (for the band Against Me!) Laura Jane Grace’s courage, if not her music so much. In 2014 I may have been a little too enthusiastic with my praise for the band’s album Transgender Dysphoria Blues, which was pretty disposable. But she’s a hero to many, and I’d never detract from that.

Before I toddle off to read your hate mail, does anyone remember the local Nashua band Billie Dare, the punk band that used to play all the gay clubs in Boston? The girl singer used to wear a giant “diamond” on her ring finger? No? I loved 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. Email [email protected] for fastest response.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The coronavirus marches on, and so I must fill this page with music news and snark, so that I can hopefully elicit a little half weep-giggle from you, as you sit sniffling back all the tears you’re shedding over having nothing left to watch on Netflix other than gross, badly overdubbed police dramas from Norway. Maybe you’ve even given up all hope and actually watched Tiger King, like, it’s gotten that bad. But for now, shut up, it’s time for your bowl of snark-berry cereal, this time focused on the music nonsense-albums that will hit the SoundClouds and your little brother’s totally hacked dark web laptop on Aug. 14, starting with Motherhood, the new album from Canadian shoegaze band No Joy.They hit the big time when they opened for Grant Hart of Husker Du, and he was like, “wow, two hot blonde chicks totally shredding it,” and that’s the whole story! I’m listening to “Birthmark,” the rollout track from this new album, and it’s got a lot of semi-interesting syncopation, and gentle sexless shoegaze singing. It’s kind of like a cross between Kylie Minogue and Goldfrapp but more interesting. The video has a UFO flying around in interstellar space, interspersed with some hipster doing a 1990s breakdance, but other than that, awesomeness does abound, and I approve.

• Yikes, it’s Scottish metrosexual-metal whatevers Biffy Clyro, with A Celebration Of Endings, their new album! I guess they’re sort of emo now, judging by the new single “End Of.” Wait, the guitars have been cool for a few seconds. Nope, forget it, it’s just boyband rawk wearing a scary Halloween mask. Seriously, do people buy albums like these, or do they take the advice of their older brothers and broaden their horizons away from this kind of recycled Weezer-meets-Papa Roach garbage? I need answers, fam.

• Dum de dum, oh look, someone I’ve never even heard of, Kathleen Edwards. Isn’t she the weather lady who replaced Al Kaprielian on local cable? I’m almost interested to find out. Nope, she’s a Canadian alternative-folkie who plays guitar, bass and violin. She once wrote a song called “Hockey Skates,” in case you didn’t believe she’s Canadian. Who cares, her new album, Total Freedom, is on the way right this minute, led by the single “Options Open,” whose opening chords were ripped off from the fadeout to Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn,” a.k.a. the national anthem of Hannaford Supermarket. Yadda yadda, boring verse, two-note chorus that was probably written by a bot. We’ll do one more and bag it, guys.

• To close out, we have somehow-still-relevant Doors guitarist Robby Krieger, whose resume includes the lame solo to “L.A. Woman,” a song I detest with the power of a thousand suns. The Ritual Begins At Sundown is his new “platter,” and it includes a tune called “The Drift” that sounds like Pat Metheny, which means it’s awesome. I forgot he’s into jazz now, sue me. This isn’t bad. — Eric W. Saeger

Local bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Album Reviews 20/08/06

Fantastic Negrito, Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? (Cooking Vinyl)

In a sense, Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz, a.k.a. Fantastic Negrito, reminds me of filmmaker Spike Lee, a Black man finding greatness in a white world. Like Lee, Negrito possesses an ultra-rare, universally accessible level of creativity that’s essential to getting his points across. We last left Negrito laying to waste every last Led Zeppelin wannabe with (to invoke Lee again) his musical answer to Do The Right Thing, 2018’s Please Don’t Be Dead, an LP that was a complete 180-degree turn from his Prince/roots-blues debut. Here, he nails the middle ground, strutting and owning his Blackness again, starting with the Stevie Wonder-on-rohypnol “Chocolate Samurai,” then (on the Tank-guested “I’m So Happy I Cry”) blasting a full 17-cannon broadside against Moby’s “Honey,” and no, I’m not imagining it. Even his Prince shtick returns, just because (“Searching for Captain Save a Hoe”). Just go buy this album, would you please? A+ — Eric W. Saeger

Bear Grillz, “Fire” (Dim Mak Records)

By its very nature, electronic dance music is a genre constantly in flux. By the same “progress-for-the-good-of-all” token, it’s rarely a violent uprising. But from the sound of this advance single from Bear Grillz’ upcoming EP, the entire genre may be under construction, or demolition, take your pick. The story here is that when Covid-19 shut down the world, Denver-based DJ/producer Grillz reached out on Twitter to any rapper willing to record a few syllables to be used on songs to come, and Salt Lake City native Atari answered (he sings and raps on two other tracks to be released later). I imagine most critics wouldn’t associate this with EDM at all, more like very aggressive dubstep; the main thrust is an Islamic call-to-prayer vocal over a menacing stun-guitar line, then build-up to chaotic drop, with a few lines laid down here and there. Maybe it’s official, then, that the lines of all electronic genres have blurred; I’m sure that’d be fine with fans who’ve grown quite tired of trying to keep up with designations-of-the-week.
A

Retro Playlist

Eric W. Saeger recommends a few songs worth another listen.

Millennials (adults aged 22 to 38) (um, 38 now?!) are about to inherit the world. The lovely starter kit God has chosen to bestow upon them includes such wonderful gifts as the coronavirus, a wild west internet filled with fake news and constant invasions from brigades of sockpuppet trolls, a failing climate, and “Past Shock,” a societal malady I coined in my book to describe the horrors that deeply tech-savvy younger people regularly experience when having to deal with outdated financial, political and other systems that are still rooted in backward, Industrial Age technology (or non-technology — why on earth should anyone have to show up in person at the Department of Motor Vehicles, ever?).

One of the culture wars raging nowadays is one in which “Zoomers” (a.k.a. “Generation Z,” i.e., the 21-and-unders) are blaming millennials for a lot of the world’s problems. It’s an unfair rap, really. Millennials have never gotten a break. Too many of them had to live with their parents because there were no jobs. Drowned in college debt, they abandoned all hope of ever owning homes. And why have children when the world’s literally on fire?

Even in the music world, they just can’t win. No fictional “Council of Millennial Tastemakers” ever voted for the “Millennial Whoop” to be identified as their core pop music sound. In fact, the “Millennial Whoop” — the same musical notes as in the children’s playground taunt “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah” — has been a go-to melody in pop forever. Wikipedia cites “Jungle Love” (1983) by Morris Day and the Time, and Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” but it’s been around a lot longer, in Cheap Trick’s “Surrender” (sneakily) and Queen’s “We Are The Champions” (blatantly) for starters.

Millennial-centric bands have done epic things with the Whoop, or at least its two dominant notes. It’s all over Kings of Leon’s “Use Somebody,” “Kings & Queens” by Thirty Seconds to Mars (I reviewed their 2009 LP This Is War here), and was even used by Green Day, whose “Oh Yeah” single lifts from Joan Jett’s “Do You Wanna Touch Me.”

Moral? We need to ease up on millennials already. They’ve done some cool things with their Whoop. Let them have that at least.

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. Email [email protected] for fastest response.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Bands, singers and various random art-frauds will release new records this Friday, Aug. 7, including mummified arena-rockers Deep Purple, whose new album’s title, Whoosh!, has an exclamation point at the end of it, just like this sentence, which automatically makes you read it harder! Before you ask, no, guitarist Richie Blackmore is not in this band anymore, and hasn’t been since 1983. All the other original members are here, except for organ player Jon Lord, who is deceased. The video for the new album’s tire-kicker single, “Man Alive,” starts out with an orchestral background while some astronaut dude walks around in slow motion against a background of stars exploding or galaxies being formed or whatever; it reminded me a lot of how much I hated the movie Ad Astra, for being pretentious, boring and nonsensical, much like this song’s intro. But then the 1980s-Purple hard rock kicks in with a rumbling riff, and Ian Gillan starts singing about a Life After People scenario in which a guy washes up on a beach, and then there’s some esoteric spoken word nonsense, and that’s really it. Maybe it’s a concept album, but if so, is the guy in the video supposed to be a gill-breathing Waterworld dude, or just some lonely castaway “last man on Earth” who gets to draw a moustache on the Mona Lisa just because he can and he’s bored? I’m sort of intrigued, aren’t you? No?

• I’m going to assume yep, Wikipedia says I’m right — that California hardcore punk band Death by Stereo named themselves after the line Corey Haim spoke in The Lost Boys after killing the vampire with the Jennifer Connelly hair. That is actually a point in their favor as far as I’m concerned, so I will keep an open mind as I toddle off to listen to “California Addiction,” the single from their forthcoming new album We’re All Dying Just in Time, their first official full-length since 2012’s Black Sheep of the American Dream. Wait, they’re supposed to be “hardcore punk,” but this just sounds like old Slayer, like the guitar riff is fast and kind of complicated, and the singer sounds like Tom Araya. You will like it if you like misidentified hardcore punk or Slayer. Does that help?

• U.K.-based psychedelic art-pop fellas Glass Animals actually made quite the splash in the U.S. with their 2016 album, How to Be a Human Being, appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live to play the song “Life Itself,” which had a pretty cool tribal beat, an LMFAO-style hook, and a really stupid video. The title track from their new album, Dreamland, is quite different from “Life Itself” in that the singer sounds like Bon Iver; it’s light and pleasant, with trip-hop elements and a hook that makes it non-sucky.

• To close out the week, we have country singer Luke Bryan, who wrote Billy Currington’s 2007 single “Good Directions,” among other things, before striking out on his own and becoming too big for his britches. His latest LP, Born Here Live Here Die Here, has as its single the title track, an instant cowboy-hat classic hoedown-ballad whose lyrics start with “Bunch of buddies in John Deere hats, a little crazy but they got my back.”

Anyone need further explanation? Good.

Local bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Album Reviews 20/07/30

Boris, NO (self-released)

Already charter members of the cool kids club, the Japanese experimental bliss-metal trio are completely indie as of a year or so ago; this LP was released through the direct artist-to-consumer service Bandcamp. Not to get too inside-baseball with it, but that tells me they weren’t deliriously happy with Jack White’s Third Man Records imprint, but regardless, the band’s 27th album is up. As always a self-indulgent joint, NO’s obligato forked-finger-salute song-intro comes at the Motorhead-like speed-punk tune “Anti-Gone,” a welcome departure from album-opener “Genesis,” which treads a middle ground between Sunn(((O))) ringout-drone and singer-less Pelican riffing that had me wondering why I was bothering with the record. Don’t get me wrong, bandleader Wata still reigns as Japan’s answer to Iggy, but I was far more entranced by the absolutely spastic “Temple of Hatred,” the slow-mo black-metal dooming of “Zerkalo” and the Misfits-nicking “Fundamental Erorr” than that sad excuse for a leadoff track. Oh whatever, fine, it’s awesome, don’t mind me. A+

The Clientele, It’s Art Dad (Merge Records)

To hear Pitchfork tell it, this Monkees-twee band should have called it quits 10 years ago; it was a bit odd reading the ravings of the nerd who got assigned 2017’s Music for the Age of Miracles, who actually complained about that’s album’s overabundance of complacent cheeriness (I was like, now I’ve heard everything, literally). Forgive that segue, as there’s really not much to complain about here, particularly if your tastes run to Columbia House Record Club fodder from the 1960s, or if you ever wanted a more melodically astute Field Mice, but then again, this is composed of old tunes from the first half of the 1990s, which may mean that the band took such criticism to heart, one never knows. The crew does have, as alleged by critics, a dream-pop/shoegaze aspect, mostly due to the Alasdair MacLean’s Spacemen 3-level fetish for drowning his voice in reverb (sometimes he even plugs his microphone into a guitar amp for a modicum of extra weirdness), but other than that, it’s antique radio Britpop mellowness with quite a few hooks. A

Retro Playlist

Eric W. Saeger recommends a few of albums worth a second look.

At this point, it doesn’t feel like we’ll ever see another blockbuster movie in an actual movie theater. And that stinks, at least for me; the wife and I have accumulated around $200 worth of free movie passes at last count, once-valuable swag that feels like worthless Monopoly money now. It’s unfair. The loss of big-screen escapism isn’t only felt by “cinema” nerds; music fans feel the void as well. After all, soundtrack albums have been a big sell for many decades, starting with the very first one, Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938. And deservedly so —‌ soundtrack albums allow us to relive awesome cinematic and theatrical experiences.

I’ve only bought two, ever. The first one was the soundtrack to the 1987 vampire film The Lost Boys. Around 75 percent of the songs are still awesome: Lou Gramm’s “Lost In The Shadows” (in which the guys bomb around trails on motorcycles), saxophone hack Tim Cappello’s “I Still Believe” (the bit with the beach concert), the two Jimmy Barnes tunes, even Roger Daltry’s cover of Elton John’s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” (if you can make it to the end, you’ll be treated to a solo guitar playing the riff to “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting,” which is so cool it makes me sweat just thinking of it).

The other one was a film score. I’m not big into scores, although The Hunt For Red October and The Usual Suspects had some great moments. My software-tech friends were all into The Lion King soundtrack in the early ’90s, which really made me worry for humanity. But yeah, I did buy one, the soundtrack CD to Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Yeah, yeah, I know, “hurr durr, Jar Jar sucks,” but the version of the main theme on that album was and is the best one ever, loud, unabashed and relentless, a reckoning. The battle droid war theme is cool; the music to the “there’s always a bigger fish” scene is awesome, and so are several other pieces.

Now, as for “Duel Of The Fates” (the “Darth Maul vs. the two Jedi dudes” battle), I didn’t really like it. Too contrived. Like, why not just have the choir singing “Look! It’s the Devil!”

(I’m anticipating hate mail for that last part, but don’t do it: You’ll only become more like me if you allow the Dark Side to grow in you.)

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. Email [email protected] for fastest response.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The next traditional CD release day is July 31, when, among several others, the new album from Creeper, called Sex Death & The Infinite Void, wings its way into the stores and Soundclouds. I wasn’t aware of the Southampton, England-based band, but I’d heard of AFI and Alkaline Trio, two bands they are usually compared to, which means we are dealing with some sort of emo concoction here. But — and here’s where you really need to stop paying attention — the boys of Creeper consider themselves a “horror punk” band, which means that they are not only emo but scary emo, which is actually an oxymoron, because there’s nothing scary about emo except when your little brother is playing it cranked to 11 and your mom won’t let you throw him and his stupid emo CD out the window. Oh, let’s just get this over with, because I’m still trying to find something decent on Netflix and have already wasted at least two hours by selecting a movie that looks cool but then, after I start it, I find out it has subtitles, because it was made in Turkey or Zanzibar, don’t you totally hate that? This new Creeper album has a single called “Annabelle,” and it isn’t “horror punk” or anything of the sort, it’s more like My Chemical Romance, in other words “listenable emo that isn’t completely awful.” Actually it’s more like old Cheap Trick than regular stupid emo, so maybe these guys are actually OK, but to be honest, my stomach is feeling really fragile from my last 10-hour binge of stuffing my face with random food as a way to cope with coronavirus boredom, like there’s no way my body could deal with a “decent emo” record while also trying to figure out what to do with some Saku takeout and Ruffles cheddar and sour cream chips and Stonewall Kitchen blackberry jam on Ezekiel sprouted grain bread, which can only be bought, apparently, at Whole Foods. Yes, I’m fragile right now, sorry.

• The band Land of Talk is an indie band from Montreal, so I automatically hate them, but they have a girl singer, so maybe they aren’t awful, I just don’t know yet. The band’s new LP, Indistinct Conversations, has an annoying title, but other than that, I don’t know if the music itself is annoying, because for that, I will need to visit YouTube and see what the song “Compelled” is about. So the first two parts of the song are mellow, ’90s-ish and not terribly annoying, but there is of course, haha, nothing hooky, and then it goes into some messy chillout part that made me run for the bathroom. (Really man, does every indie band in Montreal suck this badly? Serious question for the floor. My God, my God.)

Steve Howe, the guitarist from arena-prog band Yes, may be 73, but he still makes albums, because he just must, you know? His 21st album, Love Is, contains a song called “The Headlands.” It starts off like some awful old Motels tune, but then he plugs in his guitar gizmos and it suddenly becomes rather awesome, and he does some solos, but after three minutes there’s no singing, so I gave up on it.

• Our last target-bot this week is the new Fontaines DC LP, A Hero’s Death! The video for the title track stars tertiary Game of Thrones mandarin-dude Aidan Gillen as Conan O’Brien, while the singer babbles some stream-of-consciousness nonsense in a Cockney accent over art-punk guitars. It is OK. — Eric W. Saeger

Local bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Album Reviews 20/07/02

Limousine Beach, Stealin’ Wine + 2 (Tee Pee Records)

More than any other record company that sends me stuff, the Tee Pee imprint is the most like a box of chocolates, at least as far as the noisiness goes. They’ve released LPs from Warlocks, High on Fire and Brian Jonestown Massacre, to name a few, and that’s a pretty diverse spread if you think about it. As for this little three-songer (and I do mean little, clocking in at six minutes total), it’s something fresh, at least as far as its throwback nature. It’s three lead guitarists from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, trying to make the genre “sizzle rock” catch on. Thing is, this sound already caught on 45 or so years ago. Their spazzy but precise vibe recalls Sweet more than anything else (sidetrack: did anyone ever decide if that band was supposed to be called “The Sweet” or just “Sweet,” not that it matters anymore?), but I suppose you could always throw Manchester Orchestra into the discussion, mostly because the recording is comparatively low-rent. It’s Electric Light Orchestra-level fun for its entire shrimpy duration, anyway; I’d be interested in hearing more. A- — Eric W. Saeger

Permanent Collection, Nothing Good Is Normal (Strangeway Studios)

You’ve heard of musicians branching out to painting and film, but this is a new one for me, a guy who’s so thoroughly, well, human, that you can find a review of him as an apartment tenant from one of his past landlords in Oakland. This is only the second full-length in seven years from Jason Hendardy’s one-man Permanent Collection project, as he’s been tied down with running his Strangeway imprint (all the company’s records, mostly 7” EPs and cassettes, are out of print), doing video stuff, showing his bum on Impose magazine’s site, and generally being rad. This LP starts out with a doom-metal bliss figure made of pure fuzz, which had me expecting some sort of Sunn(O) trip, but then it suddenly became awesome, dousing me in unkempt Big Black drone-metal with a black-metal guitar sound and “In Bloom”-mode Kurt Cobain vocals with the reverb absolutely pegged. What I’ve just described is something too cool for human ears, and it’s that way through the whole set. If the songs weren’t so melodically repetitive, I’d be this thing’s most wild-eyed groupie. A- — Eric W. Saeger

Retro Playlist
Eric W. Saeger recommends a couple of albums worth a second look.

I opened a can of worms the other month when I accepted a certain PR person’s request to send me jazz material. Like all soldiers at the front lines of jazz publicity, she is absolutely overloaded with new albums of which she wants to raise the public’s awareness. Over the past few weeks, my snail-mailbox has been crammed with her stuff.

As I’ve said many times here, jazz players have a tough enough time as it is. Trying to get the attention of an American public that gains alarmingly little (if any) musical training in public schools is a tough nut to crack when your product — jazz music — is geared toward well-rounded palates. It doesn’t help that many jazz records are too cookie-cutter, of course, a handicap common to all musical genres but completely untenable in jazz. It’s always better to hear something that’s actually new, at least to me, like Jean Chaumont’s 2018 LP The Beauty of Differences, whose greatest power stems from the guitarist’s non-standard setup, specifically a close-miked Eastman hollow-body guitar armed with steel and nylon strings. The tunes themselves are nice too, chilly modern doodles that don’t strain themselves.

Last year I mentioned Subtone’s then-new album Moose Blues, another one worth revisiting for the piano lines of the seemingly everywhere Florian Hoefner alone. Even if you aren’t a fan of ’70s-era post-bop, you still have to hand it to them for the insane amount of touring the band puts in. That kind of thing really makes a crew appreciate their studio time, which is very evident here.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Email [email protected] for fastest response.

PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Oh great, the next general release date for albums is July 3, and at this writing I’m going to have to dig deep to find new records that’ll come out that day. Like basically at this point, it’s just Paul Weller (no, he didn’t play Robocop, that was Peter Weller), whom I know nothing about, and Willie Nelson, so who wants to hear about new albums made by rich people when there’s no work, and plus, coronavirus, can’t we all just move to communes and forget about mowing the lawn? But whatever, since no one but Willie and Not The Robocop Guy is releasing CDs, it’s the perfect time to fill this space with a retraction, for an error I made weeks back! Yes, the impossible did happen, and my friend Gary P. noticed it, because he actually reads these words instead of doing what you do, going right to Amy’s movie reviews and then the Sudoku, and then it’s time to wash the plague germs off your hands again, and then you forget that I might actually be worth reading because I have won two awards for writing snark grenades. What did I mess up? Well, the other week, I wrote in my expert-level, Pulitzer-worthy review of Suzi Quatro’s new album that she played Pinky Tuscadero on Happy Days, but I was wrong, and it bummed Gary out, because Suzi Quatro actually played Leather Tuscadero, not Pinky. So he texted me, all like “Dude!” and I was like, “This is how much I care about this career-destroying error: See that atom-sized dust-mite foot on your screen? No, next to the super-teeny spot of old Taco Bell slime, to the left.” It was wicked tense, but then we had a laugh about it.

• So, right, Willie Nelson has a new one coming out on the 3rd, called First Rose of Spring! I dunno, I don’t know anyone who buys Willie Nelson albums, do you? Usually people just Spotify his one-off duets with whoever, Johnny Cash or Death Grips, isn’t that right? No? Well, then, I will now see how much I can tolerate of this billion-year-old’s new song, the title track. Bet you anything it starts with slow acoustic guitar. Yup, it does, and sleepy dobro. He’s singing about a girl, and butterflies and flowers. There’s harmonica, and dobro, and Willie sounding a billion years old, and it just makes me think of the scene in Blazing Saddles when the guys are eating beans and passing gas. Aren’t fart scenes the funniest? I wonder if people would buy an album of Willie burping while playing harmonica and dobro. I bet they would.

• Jane, stop this crazy thing, let’s just wrap up this week with On Sunset, the new LP from Paul Weller! Oh for cripes sake, we already talked about this album the other week, so the release date was moved, and that’s why you couldn’t buy it on June 12. Only other new music to talk about is London punk band Dream Wife’s So When You Gonna, and its single “Sports,” a riot-grrrl type song that’s awesome and bratty, like you will love this band if you are a girl who enjoys randomly breaking stuff. — Eric W. Saeger

Local bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Album Reviews 20/07/23

John Carpenter, “Skeleton”/”Unclean Spirit” (Sacred Bones Records)

It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it? I would have loved to hear the put-downs of Carpenter during the 1980s, mumbled during power-lunches with Hollywood executives, when they’d mercilessly tool on the musically untrained Carpenter’s insistence on soundtracking his movies (Halloween, The Thing, They Live, etc.). Of course, they probably ate all those words when he won a Saturn award for soundtracking his 1998 film Vampires, or maybe, more likely, they didn’t, but in any case, his musical style — bouncy, redundant Nintendo-techno — is pretty huge these days. This advance two-song single offers his signature vibe, which of course has seen a rebirth of late (think the theme music to the Netflix show Stranger Things), and voila, music critics have to pretend to be paying attention. “Skeleton” is a rather upbeat offing, entry-level ’80s krautrock with a good amount of heart, whereas the much darker “Unclean Spirit” conjures a cross between “Dies Irae” (the Gregorian chant that opens the movie The Shining) and, oh, something with the usual looping and piano-bonking, let’s say the theme to Halloween. Hey, if he’s happy, it’s fine with me. B+

Peel Dream Magazine, Moral Panics EP (Slumberland Records)

I wrote off this New York crew as the latest tuneless pile of emperor’s new clothes way back, upon hearing a few tunes from their 2018 debut LP Modern Metaphysics. Singer Joe Stevens is so bad that he single-handedly set back the entire hipster-pop movement a gorillion years (the only vocal comparison I can make is Lantern Waste, whose deliriously awful song “200 Miles to York” is often played as a joke by Toucher and Rich on their local 98.5 Sports Hub radio show in Boston). But whatever, here we go again, thankfully just an EP this time. It starts out survivably enough with “New Culture,” a droning stab at borderline no-wave remindful of Superdrag’s “Destination Ursa Major,” in other words amateurishly rendered Foo Fighters. Stevens doesn’t suck as bad as he usually does there, which had me well, “salivating for more” wouldn’t be it; more like “not retching.” Of course, that attempt at normal music is immediately ruined by the pointless crayon-drawn doofus exercise “Verfremdungseffekt.” These folks have a gift for bad music, I’ll give ’em that. D

Retro Playlist
Eric W. Saeger recommends a couple of albums worth a second look.

As you (hopefully) just read, one signature feature of the pandemic is album release dates being canceled, changed or otherwise messed with. I’ve about given up the delusion that a release announcement consists of reliable information, but the show must go on here.

Another bizarre thing we’ve witnessed is the freezing of trends. In the area of music, after several years of the 1990s being laughed off as the worst decade for music ever (which always happens just before something blows big from the same arena), sure enough, bands were starting to fess up to listening to ’90s bands as a guilty pleasure. It was becoming cool for bands to cite grunge, riot grrl, commercial ska-pop, etc. influences when BS-ing rookie rock writers from Nylon and such. It looked unstoppable.

And then came Covid 19. Like I said somewhere above, at this point people are more occupied with virtue-signaling and fighting on social media and fretting about the apocalypse than reading some hipster dummy’s thoughts on Gwen Stefani’s “edgy” years. It’s as if every artistic rebirth and micro-renaissance that was in queue is in stasis, frozen like Ripley on Alien, waiting for the coast to be clear.

There were good things about the ’90s, at least in my view. Nirvana of course, Rage Against The Machine, Cypress Hill, Moby, Limp Bizkit, Korn, a bunch of other stuff, including many you’ve probably never heard of, bands that helped usher in the ’90s-rock era by releasing albums that were clear warnings of things to come. Transvision Vamp may have been doomed to obscurity from birth, but they were different in a lot of good ways, a sort of commercialized riot grrl thing that presaged sexy android-pop bands of the Aughts like Asteroids Galaxy Tour. In fact, Transvision Vamp peaked and declined at the decade’s turn, unfairly so, because their 1991 full-length Little Magnets Versus the Bubble of Babble was no less sexy and vampy and kickass than their 1988 Pop Art debut. Another one you may have missed was Gaye Bykers on Acid, which, along with a few other bands, almost squashed the grunge movement in favor of the “grebo” scene, which mashed influences from punk rock, EDM, hip-hop and psychedelia. We’d all be so much better off if their 1992 self-titled album hadn’t been lost in a sea of grunge (their 1987 freak-fringe niche-hit “WW7 Blues” is still monstrously cool).

Yeah, a ’90s revival wouldn’t be the worst thing.

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. Email [email protected] for fastest response.

PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, July 24, is ahead, and with it will come albums, some good, some bad, some why-would-anyone-bother-recording-this. To be honest, the list is pretty thin at this writing, which may be due to the fact that all the bands have figured out that people aren’t interested in music anymore, because it’s much more fun and self-fulfilling to argue with people on the internet, just to take the edge off the stir-craziness the coronavirus has wrought. Matter of fact, my usual source of hot new music nonsense, Metacritic, only has two upcoming new records listed, so I’m going by the list on Pause And Play. This means I am out of my comfort zone once again, having to deal with some stupid new website that wants me to fork over my email address and then drop a cookie into my Cookies folder, just so that Pause and Play can send me spam and slow down my “browsing experience” while the cookie tracks every moronic thing I look for on the internet. Does anyone not just click the little “X-close” button when presented with that kind of junk, or should I really just spend an entire afternoon searching Google for “best free spamblocker”? (I won’t do that. I spend a lot of time on the internet, yes, but going to such trouble seems a little obsessive.) Where was I? Right, albums. Most of these look kind of dumb and boring, like the only one I’m actually drawn to is Goons Be Gone, the new album from Los Angeles-based duo No Age! They make noise-rock, which you all know makes me smile, and… oh, come on, the release date changed to last week, according to Amazon! See why I hate using new systems? See why I didn’t want to use Pause and Play? Whatever, I’m listening to the single “Sandalwood” anyway, because the whole rollout here is a hot mess, and maybe it’s coming out on the 24th. Whatever, the tune is cool, noisy and messy, like Mick Jagger jamming with Half Japanese, and that brings us to some actual usable news, the first new album in 27 years from ancient punk band X, called Alphabetland! Ha ha, look how old they are now, like Exene looks like some random Birkenstock Karen who haggles with gift shop owners for price breaks on stinky incense. The title track is like early Ramones except with Exene singing half-heartedly. It’s eh.

Neck Deep is a power-pop band from Wales, in the U.K. Their fourth album, All Distortions Are Intentional, is on the way as we speak, led by the single “Lowlife,” which is OK but sounds like the last nine billion songs you’ve heard that involve ripping off Weezer in Nirvana mode. So, unless anyone has questions — yes, you, in the back. No, I will never willingly listen to this song again. That it? Good, let’s proceed to the next thingie.

• Country-Americana-folkie Lori McKenna is from Stoughton, Mass., where there are no cowboys. She once received a country Grammy nomination. Her new album, The Balladeer, includes the single “Good Fight,” a strummy folk-pop song that you might like if you dig ’70s radio-pop.

• Time for one more, and I choose Irish singer Ronan Keating’s new album, Twenty Twenty! Did I choose wisely? No, unless you like shuffle-y chill-out Ed Sheeran-ish boy-band pop that would be a perfect fit on the Ellen show. I do not.

Album Reviews 20/07/16

Jeff Cosgrove, History Gets Ahead of the Story (Grizzley Music)
This album is pretty niche indeed, combining a few things I tend to avoid (improvisational jazz, old-school classic organ, like, I mean right out of Lawrence Welk) with something I do appreciate regardless of setting, namely top-drawer musicianship. The story behind this (I assume) one-off is a bit convoluted; Cosgrove is a Washington, D.C.-based drummer leading a bass-free trio (himself along with organist John Medeski and sax player Jeff Lederer) in a tribute to bassist William Parker, who’s still alive. Got that? No bass playing in an album of tunes written by a jazz bassist (who, incidentally, played in a trio with Cosgrove until 2015). So, an odd duck indeed, but it gets odder; both Cosgrove and Parker love them some ad-libbing, so on the whole the record could be categorized as “skronk-coffeehouse,” if you will, a roller coaster ride of precision and spazzing. Some stellar organ-noodling on “Gospel Flowers”; adept modal sax things on “Moon”; even some noise on “Little Bird” (I had to double-check to see if a guitarist wasn’t messing around with pick-scraping in there or something; I still can’t guess what the sound is). Anyway, that; it is what it is. B — Eric W. Saeger

Skeleton, Skeleton (20 Buck Skin Records)
Debut LP from a crew of Austin, Texas-based guys who stalk a middle ground between old-time black metal and neo-street metal a la High On Fire. I have no idea why this isn’t more of a thing in the metal scene, but then again, any bunch of Air Max-wearing suburban dudes whose sole mission in life is impressing the barista girls at Starbucks knows that the quickest route to being able to brag that “we got a record contract” is to play some boring, pedestrian emo through a Mesa Boogie amplifier that’s been made wimpy and useless through too much processing. No, these guys have better riffing than any ’70s-revivalist band that I’ve heard lately (The Sword can sit down now), and it’s cut with Venom-style spazz-outs that keep listeners on their toes, or at least listening. I like everything about this one, but wait, there’s more, folks: the singer sounds like he ran out of enthusiasm for doing a scary-devil-guy Quorthon imitation the minute he got in the studio. A giant leap for mankind, in short. A+ — Eric W. Saeger

Retro Playlist

Erik W. Saeger recommends a couple of albums worth a second look.

With a new renaissance of thought and cultural realism dawning, I’m surprised that heavy metal hasn’t made a massive comeback. (Note that by “heavy metal,” I mean crazily angry music of a type that should, by all rights, be soundtracking the cultural transformations that are in the air everywhere, at least in an in vitro sense on social media.)

One of the things that may annoy you about me is the fact that I tend to ignore what’s happening in the area of “middle-of-the-road metal.” To clarify, that’s a pretty loose catchall I use to describe a wide range of bands, from mildly dangerous-sounding metalcore bands (Bullet For My Valentine, et al.) to nu-metal nonsense like Avenged Sevenfold. In contrast, my tastes gravitate to things that make Everymen feel their true power levels.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Like, for some, death metal peaked with Slayer (along with the 127,287,558 bands that sound like them) and it does the trick for them. Older folks just want some Black Sabbath. But for me it’s Ministry or bust. Their 1996 LP Filth Pig is an F5 tornado of rebellion; if you haven’t ever cranked that album’s “Dead Guy” to the point of permanent hearing loss, please do so now.

Zoomers, if you ever want to be as unstoppable as Greta Thunberg as a group, you need angry, uncompromising instrument-driven anthems, that is to say, riffs. Black Veil Brides is a cool band, but they’re literally too good in a politely melodic sense. Know what you really need, Gen Z? Sweaty fat guys with awesome, awesome guitar riffs, like Bachman Turner Overdrive. On their 1974 album Not Fragile, the title track may not have been the cleverest or most innovative use of a Marshall amp in history, but it’s perfectly conceived. The riff is exquisitely played; way past fed-up; boiling over with stubborn, overconfident resolve; and only really effective with the volume knob set to 11.

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. Email [email protected] for fastest response.

PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases
• The next traditional date for new album releases is Friday, July 17, and, as seems to be common these days, I must eat a few stupid words I said before. The Chicks’ new album Gaslighter is out on that day; it wasn’t released on March 4 as I previously reported. That was just the title-track single. It is a great song; otherwise there’s no way on Earth I’d have ever copped to this oversight, like, as if, and I blame Metacritic.com anyway, so feel free to send hate mail to them, because it’s all their fault.

• I reviewed Gang of Four’s EP This Heaven Gives Me Migraine back in February, but guess what, there is another Gang of Four EP coming out, called Anti Hero, on the 17th. If you recall, and you probably don’t, I did like Heaven, even though it was just a bunch of reruns of past GoF tunes that Andy Gill wanted to get off his chest while he was dying of pneumonia. There’s a similar downer history to this EP, a short collection of the last songs Gill was working on from his hospice bed; the story is that he was working on new tuneage until the very last. The kickoff single, “Forever Starts Now,” is an above average post-punk song, with art-wave elements borrowed from Talking Heads. By now you’ve either made up your mind about the band or avoided them like the plague, so in honor of Gill’s memory I’ll just keep my wise mouth shut about this one.

• Like everyone else on Earth, The Pretenders have something to say about the unspeakable train wreck that is the current American sociopolitical environment, but since it’s Chrissie Hynde putting in her two cents, I’ll actually pay attention, because Chrissie is my rock ’n’ roll waifu, accept no substitutes. But wait, the band’s new LP, Hate For Sale, isn’t some sort of political statement, it’s actually a tribute to The Damned, because Chrissie thinks they’re awesome, which only means that Chrissie is even more awesome than ever before. HFS is their first release since 2016’s Alone, and guess what, the original release date was May 1, but then there was the coronavirus, and here we are, it’ll finally be out at Strawberries or Tower Records or whatever store’s open. Hey, wanna know something hilarious, of course you do, they were supposed to do a five-month tour this summer with — you’ll die, I swear — Journey, of all the bands in the world. To me, that’s the ’80s-rock equivalent of Imagine Dragons touring with Black Lips, but anyway the new single, “You Can’t Hurt a Fool,” isn’t a tribute to The Damned, it’s a ’60s-Motown-influenced chill song about being in a stupid relationship, or maybe a diss of J-Lo (listen to the words), I don’t know for sure.

• To close out the week, we have Florida band Surfer Blood, with a new album, Carefree Theatre! Like so many milquetoast-indie bands, despite their scary name, these guys specialize in, you know, milquetoast-indie, but the single “Karen” is kind of loud, a little bit, and would almost be art-rock if it didn’t sound like Death Cab For Cutie with their volume accidentally cranked. It would make a great closing song for a trite hipster movie about a bunch of hipsters who are on an endless quest for an unused pair of 1971 PF Flyer sneakers, and one of the hipsters smokes weed all the time, which hurts his chances for ever finding true love, except for maybe with the crazily shy girl who works at Whole Foods and likes Perry Como records, and then it thankfully ends. — Eric W. Saeger

Local bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

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