Author: Eric Saeger

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

Album Reviews 20/6/18

Sara Serpa, Recognition: Music for a Silent Film (Biophilia Records)

Serpa, a jazz singer from Portugal, has been a fixture for years, applying her elite-level voice to music that’s always just palatable (and dada) enough to keep influencers on their toes; she even won the No. 1 spot on Downbeat’s 2019 Rising Star Female Vocalist poll, which is, to me, amusing. Her shtick involves “wordless singing,” that is to say there are no recognizable words, just her voice uttering random vowel/consonant sounds. She does this gently and without electronic assistance, instantly captivating anyone in earshot who doesn’t have somewhere else to be. Her sparse but powerful 10th album, probably her most out-there work, is meant to backdrop a documentary she also put together, consisting of Super 8 footage of various scenes of life in 1960s Angola while under Portuguese colonial rule. An odd but ultimately fascinating work offered in memory of the victims of a long-forgotten injustice. A

Used Cassettes, Used Cassettes (Loose Union Records)

This is the purported final album from the surf-garage quartet, which finally disbanded for the same reason that they got together: they’re not from South Korea. You see, the members are from randomly different places — Detroit, South Africa and Canada — and met near Gangnam, where they were probably as surprised as their parents to find massive fame in the country, one highlight of which was starring in their own comic book, which was read by millions. The breakup weighed on their minds while recording this; finality is everywhere in these none-too-upbeat songs, all of which feature their trademark sound (think Coldplay with Raveonettes guitars), downtempo-ed to mark the occasion. It’s not like America didn’t have an opportunity to clue in to these guys; there were pieces in Spin and plenty of other places, but regardless, their legacy does live on as they go about their new lives, once again scattered to the winds (the bassist went off to build a beach hut in Sri Lanka – not shabby, friends). A

Retro Playlist

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

In a local music scene almost solely composed of fedora-hat bar-bands that happily and unironically play “Brown Eyed Girl” for fun during rehearsals, my never-ending quest to find a halfway decent techno artist/band has come up bupkis, save for Otto Kinzel’s yeoman efforts to put some industrial-metal-tinged tuneage up on the board. In February I talked about his new single “I Bleed for You” here, a dark but very listenable song with addictive acoustic piano lines and a boss guitar solo.

Since you asked, what would get me really jacked is receiving a message from a local musician or soundsystem who’s released an album or EP that sounds even the remotest bit like something a respectable artist would put out, mindfully rendered both vocally and beat-wise. Maybe I’m missing an act that’s done stuff on one of the Facebook “NH Musicians” or whatnot groups, but to date, I remain unaware of any. You must come unto me, lambs, or I can’t help you get famous.

That reminds me, I totally spaced Tricky’s new EP, 20,20, when it came out on March 6. These three new tunes from the trip-hop pioneer were about as slow as you can go without flatlining, bare bones and morose but nevertheless brimming with, I don’t know, comfort? Opener “Hate This Pain” is an instant classic, driven by a lazy, Jelly Roll Morton-ish piano doodle and a string of expletive-riddled existential mumblings lovingly delivered by Tricky and his backup singer Marta.

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

• June 19 is a Friday, meaning brand new music releases, for your brain! Any self-respecting curator of such a weekly announcement list would naturally start this week’s proceedings with Rough and Rowdy Way, the new album from wizened folkie mummy Bob Dylan, so we’ll do that, just to be normal for once. If you don’t know what Dylan sounds like — hey, I once had a girlfriend who couldn’t name one Beatles song, so you just hush — think of Tom Petty with no vocal range whatsoever. If you start there, you must move on to his renown as a poet, and take that on face. A lot of critics have put this album’s advance tunes under a microscope, mostly the 17 interminable minutes of Murder Most Foul, a 17-minute ballad about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which actually comes off more as a cultural reference name-checking exercise, wherein he mentions Shakespeare, Stevie Nicks, Charlie Chaplin, Jelly Roll Morton and A Nightmare on Elm Street, among others. I couldn’t care less about anachronistic laissez-faire folkies preaching to politically unaware comfortably settled boomer choirs about the ever-mounting perils of this era, but if someone derives a little fleeting comfort from mildly imaginative hot takes lifted from mainstream-media-pundits, like “The age of the antichrist has just begun / it’s 36 hours past judgment day,” I shan’t grumble but simply continue stocking up on Angel Soft and bottled water. I mean, Dylan did stop the Vietnam war, or was it that President Johnson’s enthusiasm ran out after the Tet Offensive? So confusing!

• Whew, I’m sure glad we’re done with that bit, because if we had to revisit some more ’60s flower-power music, I swear I’d … GAHHH, barf, looky there, fam, it’s a new album from shaky-voiced great-great-grandparent Neil Young, called Homegrown (get it?), and this one isn’t even about hot new takes on the current apocalypse, it’s about old hot takes from the old apocalypse, because this was recorded in 1974! I mean, I thought “Ohio” and “Southern Man” were cool songs when I was young enough to ignore his dreadful guitar solos, but I just don’t know if I can take this. Oh well, I suppose it’ll be cool to see what he was doing after he sold out completely in 1972 and released the wussy cowboy-rock single “Heart of Gold,” even while there were all sorts of other apocalypses that were apocalypsin’, and plus, Richard Nixon. Ha ha, the video for the single “Try” starts out with this dude in a yellow shirt and a giant bird in sunglasses — oh wait, that’s a “Limu Emu” car insurance commercial. So this tune is super slow and boring, really heavy on the dobro guitar, like I have this weird urge to chew tobacco, but I’ll bet I wouldn’t really like it.

• Thank goodness, finally a band this week that wasn’t making records during the Abraham Lincoln administration, Protest the Hero, with their new LP, Palimpsest! All progressive-metal heads know that their last album, 2013’s Volition, was a big deal, reaching No. 1 on the U.S. charts, but will this new song, “From the Sky,” be awesome? Huh, I like the drums. It sounds like Pendulum played at double speed. The singer’s too loud in the mix. I like Gogol Bordello a million times more than this, but whatever.

• Finally, fedora-rocker Jason Mraz’s new “slab” Look for the Good is also on the way; let’s see if my Tums has kicked in enough to handle the title track. So in the video he’s chilling in the forest, watching a magic laptop showing guys working at horrible jobs, but in slow-motion so it’s OK, and the lyrics are Brady Bunch platitudes about nice people. The song has a one-drop beat that makes me think of Raffi, not Bob Marley. I think Tums may be the answer here, guys. — Eric W. Saeger

Album Reviews 6/11/2020

Bird Friend, I Am the Hand (self-produced)

Desolate but hopeful hipster-chill direct from Manchester, New Hampshire, here, mainly an unplugged-guitar solo project for chef-cook-bottle-washer Geoff Himsel with some help from his girlfriend, Carson Kennedy. The entry point here would be Sufjan Stevens, but it’s of course more raw and quirky than that; throw a little Eels in the crockpot and that oughta do it. Himsel is a fan of fingerpick-style guitarists like Neil Young and John Fahey, which explains the rather full sound of this mildly quirky bareness; this sort of thing is a snapshot of an artist getting things off his chest, redolent of movie opening-credit scenes depicting world-weariness, animations drawn in crayon. You get it, I’m sure, but don’t be scared of this just because the guy’s a local; there’s some nice creativity here, as heard in such things as a segue consisting of recorded rain and train station sounds; some not-cheap-sounding handclaps (“Ohio”); a reed line played on a clarinet or somesuch (“Cuando Era Caballero”) and so on. All told then, Pitchfork wouldn’t necessarily throw this out of bed unless the writer broke his vape pen. There’s a psychedelic angle to this that needs to be mentioned, like a twee version of Wooden Shjips or whatnot. He knows what he’s doing, is what I’m saying. A

The Brazilian Gentleman, L & L (Internet & Weed Records)

Meanwhile on the dwarf planet Pluto, we have this New Yawk City collective of underground scene veterans with weird record collections, banded together to make what amounts to a Throbbing Gristle-ized version of Battles. To translate that depthlessly annoying music-wonk-ese, there’s a lot of gently rendered industrial noise here woven into the very listenable melodies, and that will surely lead a good number of critics to tag it as an EDM project and bag it just to get away from it. I wouldn’t be wildly surprised to hear something like this from The Orb, but it does get disconcerting, evoking the feeling of having boarded the wrong galactic battle cruiser (“Star Stuck in It”). But it’s not supposed to be an easy ride, as becomes plain in the hooted and dentist-drilled “Metals,” which is a pure let’s-ride-the-subway-and-disorient-the-straights earbud trip. “All Natural” is chill drone pocked with world-music-ish loops; “You’re Boring” explores some Frank Ocean-ish fever-dream bliss. A-

Retro Playlist

On the quarantine goes, and for that, the only remedy is focusing on good stuff, like criminally underrated British art-rock bands.

After so many years, I’m convinced I’m the only “bloke” in New Hampshire who’s a huge fan of Wire, a four-piece that’s been around since the 1970s. They were more noise-punk back in the day, but then college rock happened in the late ’80s and their comparatively mellow album A Bell is a Cup Until It is Struck was suddenly rising in something resembling an actual Top 20 chart. I babbled about their 2013 album Change Becomes Us in this space, and I still absolutely love it, from the skronky, nonsensical “Eels Sang” to the soul-healing “Reinvent Your Second Wheel,” both sung by their permanently weird bassist Graham Lewis. I’ve met and hung out with rock stars before, but he’s the only one who’d reduce me to a puddle of uncool if I ever got a chance to meet him.

Another band I always try to sell to anyone who can’t escape my presence is Elbow, from the town of Bury in Manchester, U.K. In 2011, I told you guys about their then-new Build a Rocket Boys! LP, which, as usual for the band, was shortlisted for a Mercury Prize, this time on the strength of tunes like “Lippy Kids,” a hauntingly gorgeous rock ballad that made you rethink all those scary kids in hoodies, who are, I assure you, just as scared as you. Try it, you’ll like it.

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

PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases
• The next general-release date for CDs is Friday, June 12, when you can buy To Love is to Live, the debut album from Jehnny Beth, the lead singer from Savages! No, not the DJ, you know, Savages! No, come on, not Screaming Lord Sutch’s old backup band; we’re talking about the way-cool Savages, the one made up of girls, and they’re pretty cool, like this Jehnny Beth lady sounds a lot like Siouxsie Sioux, and their music is all post-punk, noisy, deconstructionist and awesome. That leaves only one question: Is there any earthly reason for Jehnny Beth to make a solo album when she’s in such an awesome band? Well, by cracky, I’m going to toddle off to YouTube to see if this is worth anything. Ah, here we are, a single called “Heroine.” It’s got an understated jazzy 1970s drum track with grooving bass, some spooky sampling, and Jehnny Beth’s Siouxsie karaoke going full force. It’s not something I’d picture Siouxsie singing, but come on already, this isn’t a Siouxsie song, just an OK tune that Siouxsie probably wouldn’t sing, because it’s largely uneventful until the literal last five seconds. I don’t know, am I being too picky here? Be honest.
• Wait, this should be a good one, the new album from Norah Jones, Pick Me Up Off the Floor! This will be her eighth full-length, and she is officially a folk-jazz goddess, because she is awesome, and at least she’s not trying to become a media conglomerate like everybody else who lucks into a hit record, like, the only real acting she’s done was on the 2010 indie film Wah Do Dem, which only got made because the director won cruise ship tickets (back then, the Village Voice called it nothing more than “a glorified vacation video”). Sounds good to me, because hopefully now we won’t have to worry about Norah Jones doing anything more than playing herself on Sesame Street and 30 Rock and spending most of her time singing, which she does on the title track of this new album, a torchy, feathery, very slow, Maria Muldaur-like piano-crooner.
• Paul Weller was the frontman for the mod-punk band The Jam during the 1970s and early 1980s, but only people in England cared, but then they had an annoying ska-punk hit in the U.S. called “Start,” which was created simply by recycling the Beatles’ “Tax Man,” and then it was basically over, everyone recite the Funeral Prayer, and then the Beastie Boys sampled the tune for the song “Alive.” But wait, here is Paul Weller again, with a solo album, called “Sunset,” which means you’re probably wondering if there’s a song on there that sounds like that Beastie Boys song or whatever. I sure am, so I shall endeavor to stomach the new single, “Village.” Wow, it’s wicked ’70s-chill-funk, and he sounds like Peabo Bryson somewhat. There’s wicked mellow electric piano in there, like your grandparents could probably “get reacquainted” with this song playing in the background, nudge-wink. Talk about sassy!
• To end this week with our sanity hopefully intact, let’s go investigate the new Built to Spill album, titled Built to Spill Plays the Songs of Daniel Johnston! I can’t imagine what this will sound like, probably fluffy, despicable, hipster versions of equally aggravating Daniel Johnston songs. Yes, here’s one, “Bloody Rainbow.” Sounds like a twee version of a Roy Orbison B-side. I do not like this, Sam I Am.

Album Reviews 6/4/2020

OTR, Lost at Midnight (Astralwerks Records)
Well wow, I got back into the Astralwerks system just in the nick of time, because I’ve found your go-to summer-drive-to-the-beach album, right here. OTR is the producer-nom of Ryan Chadwick, who was studying aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati, where, just as he was about to write his master’s thesis, the department sort of imploded, and he dumped the whole thing to sit and chill to the sounds of two-guy soundsystem Odesza. That led to his futzing around on his own answer to that style of beauty-dripping, trance-tinged techno, which eventually led to this absolutely hypnotic debut LP. We’ve seen the way-overdue rise of prog-house and trance being incorporated into pop, starting way back with Madonna’s “Ray of Light” and then on to Britney et al, but this is the closest thing you’ll find to Above & Beyond served as a pop venture. That means that it’s less caustic than Odesza can tend to get; it’s more like a mutant hybrid of Bon Iver and mellow-mode Tiesta. You will love this record. A+

Bitter Pill, Desperate Times on the New Hampshire State Line (self-released)
We talked about this New Hampshire-based band a few weeks ago, relative to the tire-kicker single from this full-length. Turns out they’re from Somersworth, or at least Billy, the dad, is. He’s the prime mover for this quintet, which also features his daughter Emily on ukulele and the Billie Holiday and Patsy Cline imitations that are found randomly shuffled into the tracklist here. These are old souls, these people; I don’t know if they’re ever tasted real poverty, but the raw, half-jokey tunes that Billy sings bespeak a life in which broken-mirror-level stretches of luck were probably commonplace, which means they’re pretty cool as far as I can tell. I suppose I’ll have to see for myself at one of their shows if the timing is right. Their trip ranges from punkabilly to Zappa-meets-Amy Winehouse at its most alluring; to give you an idea, I expected their “Land of the Lost” to be a chill cover of the kids’ show from the 1970s, but it’s actually like Patsy jamming with Hank Williams Sr. in a perfect storm of fearless bluegrass. They’ve got a studious banjo player in Michael McKay, who gets a solo turn at one point. Listen — no, don’t be cheap, buy the full-length at bitterpill.bandcamp.com/album/desperate-times-on-the-new-hampshire-state-line. A

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

Though live music is starting to reemerge in outdoor spaces, one of the many dreadful things about the coronavirus shutdown has been the absence of live music shows. They were replaced by remote “concerts” performed online, where band members, dutifully staying in place in their respective homes, jam together while streaming over Zoom or FaceTime or whatnot.

What I wondered about was some of the older bands, particularly the hair-metal bands, largely composed of guys whose careers had peaked way before the digital age. You may have noticed that once in a while I like to give them some love here in this space, especially the bands that have had recent albums put out by such record labels as Nuclear Blast (Accept, Agnostic Front and Anthrax, just to cover the ones beginning with the letter A) and of course SPV, which I often refer to lovingly as “SPV Mercy Hospital” or “The SPV Home For Retired Metal Acts.” Those record companies will put out basically anything as long as the band had some modicum of fame during the 1970s or 1980s. In April of last year we chatted about Suzi Quatro’s then-new album Mettavolution, and I realized then that I hadn’t heard her name in exactly 4,189 years. A bassist, she not only ran her own band but touched TV stardom, playing Fonzie’s tough-chick female-bro Pinky Tuscadero on Happy Days. Anyway, Mettavolution is full of your typical ’80s bar-rock dross, but she added a real brass section in the tunes “Strings,” which made the album interesting enough. Poor Suzi, I couldn’t find any streaming shows in her schedule, but she does have a few German shows in queue.

The other person I was worried about was former Hanoi Rocks singer Michael Monroe, who recently revealed his softer but totally metal side in a streaming chat video by holding and smooching his horrifying but beloved hairless cat while speaking to fans in his native Finnish. We last left Monroe in 2015, when he had released his solo album Blackout States, which I pronounced “a rowdy but slightly corporatized amalgam of Lords of the New Church meets Dropkick Murphys throwbacking that gets plenty of style points.” If you like New York Dolls, and who couldn’t, you won’t hate this album, and he did demonstrate an ability to go with the flow of this awful new reality by streaming an acoustic show on April 23 through the Finnish music platform Ruutu.

You see, I worry about these people, I really do.

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

PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Here comes the next general-release Friday, June 5, when your rock ’n’ roll dreams will come true and so on and so forth, with the help of new albums! The first new LP we’ll chat about is from Dion, whose new album, Blues with Friends, is on the way! I know, he’s super old, but come on, that’s what makes him awesome! All those old tunes your grandmother dances to at the hot dogs and beans supper, like “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer” and “Come Go With Me”? Yeah, that’s Dion DiMucci, and after he did those songs he did a cover of Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” just to bum out all the straights who thought he was safe to be around, but then he got so disgusted with blotter-acid-hippies and whatnot that he started doing Christian rock, but he got sick of that, and now he has a new album, which would definitely get an automatic A+ grade in my award-winning review column if I had received the album from his PR guys. But whatever, I could probably just extrapolate and make up something, because as we’ve discussed, it’s titled Blues with Friends, which means it’s a bunch of blues songs with guest singers like the barking Bowser dog-man from Sha Na Na and whatnot, whoever’s still alive, let’s go see! Wait, whoa, this isn’t just a bunch of dead guys, Bruce Springsteen and his wife are guests on the song “Hymn to Him,” and look, guys, it’s loony bearded loon Billy Gibbons, from ZZ Top, on the song “Bam Bang Boom!” That song’s wicked cool, if you like old 12-bar blues, beards and hot chicks! This is AWESOME.

• The 10th album from Norwegian indie-folk dude Sondre Lerche is titled Patience. Mayhaps you know him from his quiet-loud-quiet Brooklyn-hipster song “Bad Law,” which was adamantly “eh,” but it’s a new year, and he’s no longer a tedious Brooklyn hipster; now he’s in Los Angeles, doing shots with all the sleazy L.A. promoters who laugh behind his back. The new single is “Why Would I Let You Go,” a sucky, pointless unplugged guitar tune that comes off like Bon Iver without the reverb cranked to 11. There’s no loud part, so I might use it to deal with my insomnia.

• LA Priest is the stage name of Samuel Eastgate, an Englishman who is in the band Late of the Pier, a ska/prog/dance-punk-style Strokes-wannabe band that managed to put out an entire one album in 12 years of existence. His new album, GENE, is in your pirate radio and includes the single “What Moves,” a mildly funky quirk-chill trip that’s a little bit Jamie Lidell and a little bit Gorillaz. You might like it if you’ve recently undergone a lobotomy, and stuff.

• Lastly, it’s Australian indie-rock band Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, whose sound has been compared to fellow Australians The Go-Betweens. The new album, Sideways to New Italy, includes a song called “She’s There,” which sounds like Smashing Pumpkins trying to be a boyband. It’s OK for what it is, as far as meatless sports-bar-rock goes; at least it’s not Kaiser Chiefs.

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