Author: Eric Saeger

Frank Sonic & L-Ex, “Talamanca Beach, Ming (Ger) Remix” (Amber Blue Recordings)

As if I don’t mention it every other month, I’m always up for some velvet-rope techno, especially Above & Beyond-style trance, in other words “trance that’s actually too slow to be properly considered ‘trance’ but whatever.” That’s Frank Sonic’s trip, at least on this track, which isn’t a chest-thumping floor-stomper, more one of those countless odes to the crazily decadent island of Ibiza, in this case a specific beach that struck his fancy when he visited on tour. No, Sonic isn’t in the same class as Tiesto or any of those DJs with “Van” in their name, at least here in the States. But he’s been a fixture in Germany for 20 years, and stuff like this would do just fine for me if the right club ever opened up in these parts. The tune builds and swirls and dive bombs like an overly confident seagull, hitting on the right vibe to remind us that travel sure was a fun thing back before the plague hit, you know? A

Trillionaire, Romulus (Nefarious Industries Records)

I hesitate to dub this band a supergroup, but it does have all the markings of some sort of mutant hard-rock Toto, being that it brings together a bunch of guys who’ve been through the ringer for a collective period of many decades. If you’re hip to bands like Inter Arma, Fuligin, A F—ing Elephant and such, you may have been exposed to parts of this whole, which reads like a tech-savvy (in a Linkin Park sense) version of Metallica (in a the-singer-sounds-like-Hetfield sense). No, it’s not a lot like Tool, so get that out of your head before you decide prematurely to bail on this, and besides, I can’t stand Tool. No, it’s like if Mastodon had gone in a near-emo direction, but no, it’s not emo either. The riffing is sharper than a paper cut, befitting a band that’s been together a really long time, but they haven’t. The tracks were passed around from and recorded in Boston, Seattle, Richmond and Nashville, thus it’s a Covid baby, and quite the great one, in fact. A

Retro Playlist

Weird coincidence, but if you noticed my talking about the Cheatahs in the weekly rundown, here they are again, coming up in a search for old stuff I haven’t talked about in a dog’s age. Their 2013 album Extended Plays was actually a rollup of the band’s earliest EPs, showcasing the initial volleys in the British indie-shoegaze-pop foursome’s attempts to take over the world. That hasn’t happened, to date, and they’re way overdue for a new album these days; their second LP, Mythologies, came out in 2015. With regard to my first exposure to them, I described them as “Foo Fighters on Drive Like Jehu’s budget, but it’s beyond that; these guys are fantastic riff-writers, as heard in album opener “The Swan”, which rides one hellaciously awesome guitar line for most of the tune and then stops to riff something even more cool, after a Sabbath-y Foo Fighters-ish fashion.” As for the last album, it rated a 73 on Metacritic’s aggregate score, meaning they were considered pretty freaking good. To be honest, it wasn’t until I was today years old that I finally caught up with Mythologies, or at least some quick samples thereof; it’s a bit more formulaic than their older stuff but still worth a stream if you’d be down with clean, blissy, over-reverb-ed shoegaze sung by a dude who’s trying to nick Simple Minds (who wouldn’t?).

Not so awesome was Buckcherry’s Confessions album, which I reviewed that same week in 2013. They were doomed in my eyes from the start anyway; I don’t trust throwback hard-rock bands that can’t come up with riffs to save their lives, and these L.A.-based imbeciles were lucky I didn’t throw the book at ’em and give them an F grade for being “very much like 3 Doors Down if that band had been exposed to too much Papa Roach.” Did it help that the singer, Whatsisname, ripped off Staind’s stupid sourball inflection? No, it did not.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Jan. 15 arrives this week, on a Friday, which can only mean one thing: New albums will be arriving in the Pandoras and whatever, to soothe your aesthetic sensibilities and of course make you wish good music were coming out instead! Take for example Suckapunch, the seventh album from English pop-punk/post-hardcore (could we possibly dispense with all the superficial, superfluous genre-labeling this year and just call all this stuff “emo” whether the band likes it or not?) band You Me At Six! They are certainly likeable enough for what they do; they sound sort of like Fall Out Boy, but with nothing new to add, so you might like them, I have no idea whatsoever. I could have sworn I’d written these guys up before, but maybe I didn’t, who cares, like, I thought they were a tiresome hipster-indie band until I went back and listened to their biggest songs, which were like Fall Out Boy. Whatever, and then I checked to see if some WWE wrestling dude had used one of their songs as an “entrance theme,” you know, the sophisticated part where the wrestler runs out of the arena tunnel and starts barking at the moon and throwing chairs at the referee. Anyway, the title track is actually OK, like a cross between Coldplay and Linkin Park (please don’t pretend you couldn’t possibly imagine what that would sound like, seriously, I beg you), even if the video is just a trope-dump of sci-fi nonsense, like first there’s a random Darth Maul dude, and then they get unplugged from their Matrix brain implants, blah blah blah. You might like it, like I said. I do not know.

• Hmm, let’s see what else is here. Wait, guys, this looks interesting, some British indie band called Shame, with their second album, Drunk Tank Pink, this might actually be cool, because NME takes them seriously. Yep, on their first album, Songs Of Praise, they were sort of like a drunk version of Elbow that was trying to sound a bit like the Hives, like a mutant strain of oi-indie. The new single, “Water in the Well,” is like old Madchester yell-pop, a lot cooler than Gang Of Four (is that OK to infer, or am I risking my critic’s license?). I like these guys and would be most keen on joining them if they ever assemble a flash mob with the intent of invading a big electronics store and throwing golf balls at everything that looks expensive.

• Midnight Sister, you say? Never heard of them? Hmm, neither has Wikipedia. Eh, maybe it’s cool, given that their record label is Jagjaguwar Records, which has sent me good records in the past, or am I thinking of the Cheatahs? I swear, my brain is like an episode of Hoarders, except everything in my packed-to-the-ceiling guest room is nothing but boxes of bad, redundant albums without any redeeming artistic qualities. Meanwhile, this new album, Painting The Roses, has a new single, called “Foxes,” a cabaret-rock tune that’s sort of like 1970s Electric Light Orchestra. I don’t hate it, does that help any?

• Wrapping up, let’s look at “Mork & Mindy,” the new single from Spare Ribs, the latest LP from Sleaford Mods! OK, it’s awesome, like imagine a brain-damaged Cockney “punter” rapping gently over a wicked cool EDM chill beat. No, I’m serious, this is cool, in its way!

Laraaji, Moon Piano (self-released)

In news from the weird, we present this New York pianist, an 80-year-old cult artist whose forte is sparse ambiance for New Agers who’d like their brains to kindly stop for a second. Apparently the big sell is that these slow, deserted improv pieces were recorded in a Brooklyn church, but quite honestly, that’s an effect that could have come by way of a few decent knob twists on the part of an engineer, not to harsh anyone’s mellow about it, particularly if you love whatever he’s done before. I mean, a well-played acoustic piano is a sound to behold; my parents were both M.A. graduate pianists of New England Conservatory, so I was spoiled absolutely rotten in that regard, and therein lies my rub: This is, in the end, a one-man jam session focused on careful, reflective non-songs, largely minor key experimentations comprising various series of notes that will appeal to not overly cultured art-freaks. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but for me, regardless of this guy’s training/pedigree/whatever, it’s non-eventful. B

Hunter, 1960 (self-released)

Hunter Stamas is a Portsmouth-by-way-of-Nashua singer who’s led her band through a few albums now, this one being the latest. It’s stunningly polite, this stuff, heavy on the guitar jangle, squeaky clean vocal tracks that could certainly amaze young YouTube addicts and the fedora-hatted denizens of your favorite bars and eateries (opening soon, I hope, dear God). To dispense with the vulgarities, the production values are decent (a lot more pro-sounding than most of the local material that gets flopped onto this desk) and the songs generally stick to a specific formula (ditto), making it something of a contender you might place in your SoundCloud queue between the first Miley Cyrus album and basically anything by Bonnie Raitt. I know that might sound a bit weird, but from my seat it’s not unusual at all; Stamas is a commercial-oriented songwriter who’s come close here; there’s a ’60s Yardbirds/girl-group vibe at work that’s actually pretty unique. B+

Retro Playlist

Jazz comes in all sorts of flavors, not that you’re required to know even that much about the genre if you’re a budding newbie aficionado of it. Sometimes jazz guys will throw different genres into their recipe, as I discussed six years ago, in January 2015, when I wrote about Three Rivers, an LP from Richie Goods and Nuclear Fusion. A Pittsburgh Jazz Hall of Fame bass player, Goods has toured with Whitney Houston and Christina Aguilera, which speaks to a pedigree he earned after studying under legendary Blue Note Records legend Ron Carter in New York. With regard to his own (original) stuff, I’d anticipated mellow-ish fusion a la Spyro Gyra, but it was really more a modernized Return to Forever, although in some cases not so modernized when considering the outright hard rock workouts found in such tunes as the title track. There’s definitely a heavy influence afoot here; album opener “Soul Glow” has, as I put it back then, “a suspended-animation riff that proves he can restrain himself from going all-out Pelican-metal, but the desire is there,” as indicated by every plonk of his Rickenbacker, not to mention the grungy sounds of guitarist Ben Butler, “a real treasure who punches up every guitar sound from Al di Meola to Blue Oyster Cult on that one track alone.”

Speaking of Ron Carter, he released a full-length on Blue Note Records in 2007, Dear Miles, which was discussed in this space. With a resume packed with guest spots on – get this – over 3,500 albums, Carter had more than earned the right to rely on his past association with Miles Davis, who kept Carter on for most of his 1960s output. It was harmonically uncomplicated, I noted: “With Roger Squitero on board strictly to fortify percussion, the only harmonic instrument within this outing’s four-piece framework is the piano of Stephen Scott, who is kept crazy-busy with the job of re-creating various Miles Davis grooves for this sort-of-tribute LP (ex: in order to shrink the big band sound of ‘Gone’ from the Evans/Miles Porgy & Bess collaboration into these confines, Scott takes on the horn parts).”

Obviously a great one for wonks of both Miles and bass in general.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Way kool, everything’s back to normal, with plenty of new albums coming out on Jan. 8! Or so I thought, it doesn’t really look like a ton of stuff, but at least there’s something, starting with the new album from Barry Gibb, called Greenfields! Gibb is, of course, one of the founders of that old disco band The Bee Gees. He was the pretty-handsome one who looked like God’s idea of a male Farrah Fawcett, but now, guess what, he looks like a trucker who’d beat you up for driving a sissy electric car. But that’s what happens to all of us, like one time years ago, my boy-ees and I were walking around near the Worcester Centrum, and these three girls came up to me and insisted I was Michael Hutchence from INXS, and it took forever to convince ‘em otherwise, up to and including my refusal to speak in an Australian accent, but nowadays … well, never you mind about nowadays, and that’s what happens, so don’t get old, I’m serious. Oh whatever, we’re supposed to be talking about this old disco has-been, who became a “knight” in England, like, can you imagine if 10-foot-tall alien monsters landed here and demanded to fight our planet’s “knights,” so we had to trot out Paul McCartney, Elton John and this dude? We’d be doomed, just like this album’s lead single, “Words Of A Fool,” is doomed to be mistaken for a Matthew McConaughey cover of a Willie Nelson song. It sucks, let’s move on.

• Swedish post-punk ruffians Viagra Boys release their second LP, Welfare Jazz, any minute now. The single “Ain’t Nice” is terrific, a grungy, messy soundsystem thing that krazy-glues Chainsmokers to Big Black. It’s awesome.

• British folk-rock dude and former busker Michael Rosenberg goes by the stage name Passenger because he knows that no hipster kids would buy an album by someone with a ridiculous name like Michael Rosenberg, you know? I wonder how long the person-who-goes-by-a-band-name trend will continue, don’t you? If it does continue for much longer, I hope these “bands” will start thinking of cool “band names,” like if I were going to use a band name as my own name, I’d probably call myself, er, I mean my band, something like Tell Grandma It’s Polka And Watch Her Epic Reaction When The Crazy Kicks In. Cool, huh? Oh, I don’t care if you think that, and besides, that Van Halen tribute band I talked about forming a few weeks ago never materialized, so no bands for me, just writing in this latest column about this one-dude-band here and his new album, Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted. I’m watching the video for the tune “A Song For The Drunk And Broken Hearted,” and it’s pretty dumb, like he’s sort of cosplaying as the Joaquin Phoenix version of The Joker, and the six or eight people in the crowd are razzing him, and then he launches into the song, a strummy, harmonica-powered ditty that sounds like Conor Oberst trying to sound like Bob Dylan. It is very “meh,” if that’s your thing.

• Lastly we have Dangerous: The Double Album from cowboy-hat singing dude Morgan Wallen, who got arrested for public drunkenness outside Kid Rock’s gross bar in Nashville. On the title track he sings-raps like a total redneck, like the guy from Primus but not joking around. It’s kind of cool I suppose.