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.