Author: Eric Saeger

Chris Patrick, The Calm (self-released)

Reflective nine-track project from the New Jersey-born rapper, in which he pays homage to the authentic spirit of the mixtape era, with touchstones that include T-Pain, Earthgang, JID, Smino, and Isaiah Rashad. It sure sounds underground in comparison to today’s corporate hip-hop, and more realistic, too. Patrick spent the first half of 2023 in a really bad place; after losing most of his friends he found himself financially strapped, something most emcees would never cop to, you know how it goes, but his buddy Gutty sent him the desolate piano-driven beat for this mix’s closing track, “The Calm,” at which point this project took off. The tune itself is as real as these things get, inspiring and self-reflective, which was the whole point of this exercise. “Da Beam” is particularly cool, some low-end rubber-band-plucking tabling what feels like a dub/dancehall vibe for the ages. It’s not often you hear something so friendly yet distant in this genre. A+

Camera Obscura, Look to the East, Look to the West (Merge Records)

As you’d probably guess, I was never a big twee fan, or at least its biggest doe-eyed touchstones (Belle & Sebastian is what I mean of course, who recently did a set of cruise-ship shows with the fellow Scots in this band). I didn’t consider this crew to be overly twee and actually quite liked their way with reverb; there was a Cure angle to the beats, and who hates that? This one starts off annoyingly enough, though, with leader/singer Tracyanne Campbell tabling some harmless warbling over what basically amounts to a Postal Service afterthought. Funnily enough, this LP was recorded in the same room where Queen wrote “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which led me to suspect that there’d be more and bigger string and brass sounds and reverb so thick you could cut it with a chainsaw. But no, none of those things are here. The lead single, “Big Love,” reads like Natalie Merchant gone completely cowboy-hat, while “The Light Nights” evokes square-dancing and mimosas. It’s all a bit nauseating to me really. C

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Our next Friday-full of CD releases is April 19, isn’t that the greatest? The first thing to come up is a discussion we’ve had before in these pages: Which is the signature band of the ’90s, the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Pearl Jam? I suppose the answer comes down to taste (oh, and forgetting to include Nirvana), but in my mind I associate the ’90s with grunge, that borderline-metal genre that tried to sound dark and important, which definitely leaves out the Peppers, a band I never really liked, mostly because they sounded too happy and content. This is all something we need to consider, of course, given that the ’90s are starting to come back with a vengeance (the ’80s are so 2015 these days, wouldn’t you say?), and wouldn’t you know it, Pearl Jam has a new album coming out on Friday, titled Dark Matter! It’ll be interesting to see if there are any lead guitar lines on this one; during grunge’s heydey, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain called Pearl Jam a bunch of sellouts for having lead guitar parts on their albums, which was one reason I didn’t take Cobain very seriously, but whatever, why don’t I go listen to the title track from this album, yes, let’s. Well listen to that, it kind of sounds like Black Sabbath, but Eddie Vedder is singing on it, which automatically means that it’s too lyrically deep to be Black Sabbath-ish. But wow, this is pretty heavy indeed, and then suddenly it becomes Pearl-Jammy, with a throwaway bridge part that would have been expected on those old Sub Pop records when these guys were basically hopeless, but here it’s just kind of gimmicky. But mind you, I’ve only listened to it once, so maybe it grows on you, not that I’ll bother listening to it again of my own volition.

• Oh no, no, no, it’s Taylor Swift, with her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, will it ever end? Please lord, let there be something on this album that doesn’t force me to scramble for a “RIYL” reference to tell you guys what it sounds like, that’d be great. When last we left TayTay, she’d won the universe by winning some Grammys the same week her boyfriend Buster Magoo or whatever won that totally fixed Super Bowl by yelling at his coach like a feral lummox. Oh, I can’t riff on this much longer, all I really have to say about Tay is that her producers write all her Britney Spears-like hits because she can only write songs that sound like Jewel, and that’s all fine by me, who cares what I think, I promise not to start another 200-reply thread on Facebook just so people can yell at each other, despite how much fun it is. Alright, let’s get to the doings, I’ll just check out “Lavender Haze,” because it’s the first song on the album, it looks like. Eh, it’s OK, hip-hop-tinged afterparty vibe reminiscent of Alicia Keys and TLC, weren’t we just talking about a ’90s resurgence? She uses the S word a lot in this children’s song, should I even mention that?

• Roots-rock-blues-whatever musician T Bone Burnett is back with his first studio album in 20 years, The Other Side! You may recall that Burnett seemed to be under every rock you overturned a few years ago, producing famous albums and stuff, but here he is, leading a band again. The first single, “Waiting For You,” is a cross between Bon Iver and Simon & Garfunkel, mellow and bummerish and nicely done.

• Lastly it’s the Melvins, the mud-metal band that used to have Shirley Temple’s daughter on bass, with their newest full-length LP, Tarantula Heart. “Working The Ditch” is a really cool song from this album, featuring severely down-turned guitars and an attitude reminiscent of early Ministry. Who could hate that?

Kartell, Everything Is Here (Roche Musique)

Debut LP from this French producer, who broke through in 2012 owing to his distinctly accessible electronic tuneage, which is possessed of warmth, soul and melancholia. The background is that he grew up as a lad listening to his dad’s soul, disco and early house collection, and his early stuff led to a residency at Paris’ velvet-rope Social Club and getting booked globally at all the ritzy places from California to South Korea. Opening track “Space Odyssey” is clamorous and epic, along the lines of M83 when it gets going at around the midpoint; it immediately proves he takes a lot of time cobbling his low-BPM compositions (yes, we need more of that in this world). We also have “Quest,” a disco/LMFAO-inspired afterparty joint featuring St. Lucia artist Poté that’s not near as annoying as it might look on paper. It’s no wonder this guy’s doing so well; this stuff is custom-engineered to fill floors with idle trust-funders. A+

Aves, Transformations (Kieku Records)

Retro futurism-informed album from this three-piece Helsinki, Finland-based outfit, its lyrics encompassing “all change; from man to woman, from adolescence to adulthood, from grief to hope.” Lot of dreamy synth pop goes on here, starting with “Silent Solitude,” a meditative, loop-filled ride built around a cloudy, barely discernible vocal that’ll make some listeners think of Sigur Rós (appropriate, given that all the contributors here — including Icelandic artist JFDR and Danish singer Lydmor — obviously cut their teeth on Nordic pop and adjacent genres); it’s a melancholy, sexless but expansively hopeful thingamajig that’d fit in fine on a neo-hippie coming-of-age film (they’re in talks to write the soundtrack for a film about conversion therapy, while we’re at it). The next song, “Gem Of The Ocean,” starts with the same sort of deep-reverb breathiness as the previous one but then takes a more in-your-face tack, the super-pretty vocal sounding more digitally present. More of this, please. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yikes, Friday, April 12, looks to be a real humdinger of a day for new albums, look at ’em all, folks. Yep, we’re gearin’ up for a hot summer of singles from bubblegum Taylor Swift wannabes, corporate hip-hop bros, disposable indie bands and of course heavy metal bands, because metal never rests, unless it gets too hot to wear suits of armor or whatever they’re doing now! But wait, it’s storytime, because look who has a new album coming out, that’s right, it’s New York City’s perennial arena-band-opening act Blue Öyster Cult, with a new “slab” called Ghost Stories! Yes, the band that gave us the unlistenable dentist-office classic tune “Burnin’ For You” is at it again, and for that I thank them, because they should be out and about making more albums that only five people buy, because they are fun-loving rascals! Years ago I was at some outdoor show in Loudon, New Hampshire, or whatever, where they were opening for Savoy Brown, and my date and I were standing around with the keyboard player and the drummer while some wicked-long-haired dude was trying to sell them a bag of herbs that he claimed would “bring their youth back.” Anyway, Eric Bloom — the guy with the cool voice who sang “Black Blade” and whatnot — comes walking up, grabs the bag and keeps going without paying this feller, and I started cracking up because I knew the guy wasn’t ever going to get paid for his bag of snake-oil lawn clippings or whatever they were. But anyway, I love the BÖC, even though they’ve done some really dumb songs, so I hope this album is totally rockin’, like they say. Ack, oh noes, the opening tune, “Don’t Come Running To Me,” is just a mellow version of “Don’t Fear The Reaper,” their big hit from a hundred years ago when Abraham Lincoln was president. I’m just glad I didn’t have my hopes up.

• Ugh, what else do we have, hopefully something fun, eh wot? Yikes, Bob’s your uncle, it’s that British sax player dude, Shabaka, of Shabaka and the Ancestors! He was in avant-Afrobeat quartet Sons of Kemet and jazz-tronica band The Comet Is Coming, none of which probably means anything to you, but he is an interesting music human, this feller. His debut solo album, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, is out this week, and it is said to highlight his mad skills on such flute-related instruments as the Mayan Teotihuacan drone flute, Brazilian piano, Native American flute and South American quenas. Do you know what this means? I do not, but I’m going to listen to this balderdash right now, because anything’s better than a new Britney Spears album or whatever other horrors are in store this year! Hm, this is actually interesting, the single, “I’ll Do Whatever You Want.” It’s got an early techno vibe to it, some krautrock feel, sort of forlorn and underproduced like Daedelus, and whichever type of flute he’s playing does lend a soothing feel to it.

• Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard is from Cardiff in the U.K., and their newest is titled Skinwalker. Frontman/ and producer Tom Rees says the album is his attempt at “consolidating my 2020 obsession with Sly and the Family Stone with my 2021 obsession with David Bowie’s album Low,” so let’s see how that all panned out, that’d be great. OK, the single, “National Rust,” is a cross between Pavement and ’90s grunge, which, turns out, is a workable recipe. Lazy indie rock for sitting around while unemployed, that’s my take.

• Lastly we have another Englishperson, jungle/drum and bass singer/DJ Nia Archives, with Silence Is Loud. The title track is a rinseout, all right, with some from-the-mountaintop vocals and plenty of melody. I don’t mind this at all.

Altin Sencalar, Discover The Present (Posi-Tone Records)

This jazz leader and his long-time co-trombonist Chris Glassman have been hailed by such major zines as Stereophile, who said they sound like “21st century grandchildren of JJ Johnson and Kai Winding.” That’ll mean very little to folks who aren’t big in trombone-jazz, of course, aside from the obvious, they’ve got a nice setup going on here. There are Latin and Vegas edges to this stuff, most eminently in a cover of Four Tops’ 1970s radio-hit “Ain’t No Woman Like the One I’ve Got,” which is jaw-droppingly clean on the production end. The proverbial fourth wall has been all but obliterated in the Big Tech era; any search for Sencalar brings up his LinkedIn page first and foremost, which kind of struck me funny; it enumerates all the colleges where he’s taught, including some in Japan. That left me with the impression I’d be hearing rote academic renditions of this stuff aimed at a particular niche, but the exuberance is really inspiring throughout. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

The Legless Crabs, “Golden Bachelor” / “Get Down” (Metal Postcard Records)

Meanwhile, somewhere on Alpha Centauri, there are bands that, like Pepperidge Farm, remember. In the case of this band, what’s remembered is the Butthole Surfers, a band I’d bet 99 percent of you folks have heard of but only 0.01 percent have actually listened to. Now, Metal Postcard seems to be something of a prank record label, given that they charge random prices for their records, like, one was $22,890, and you can purchase this band’s entire discography for $264.67 (or just the two-sided single for $2). Boy, that’s some nerve, but these guys are such full-of-baloney popinjays (sample press quote: “If the Legless Crabs had released music in the ’60s they would have been rediscovered in the ’80s and fawned over”) that I can’t think of anything bad to say about them. But yes, these tunes do sound like the Surfers: slow, messy, distorted beats and bullhorned vocals, do you need anything else? Of course you don’t. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday is April 5, and it will mark another Friday of albums for your listening displeasure and whatnot! You know what band we haven’t talked about in a long time is Vampire Weekend, remember them, you guys? They were like a cross between Ben Folds and Paul Simon, doing yacht rock for flat-broke millennials who lived with their parents. How did they ever get so big? No, I’m asking you, how did that band ever happen? OK, fine, the polyrhythms were borderline interesting, if you’re new to this planet and had never heard people playing, you know, drums before, or something? Lyrically, they’re sort of edgy, offering “a dynamic blend between the secular and the religious,” which means zip if you don’t care about lyrics, but you know what else, Barack Obama sought their support for his 2012 re-election campaign, and since they believed that politicians actually had a say in what happens in this country, they gladly accepted. But anyway, they had legitimacy during that mercifully short Aughts era when everyone hated music and was getting their revenge by listening to this band and so many others, so what have they gone and done but recorded a new album! This one, which only came out a few hours ago, is titled Only God Was Above Us.

• For some reason — probably because I don’t really care about either of them all that much — I’m always confusing the Black Lips with The Black Keys, whose new album, Ohio Players, is on the way! No, kidding, I do like how the Lips behave like demented punk rockers, and they can be sort of cool, don’t get me wrong. The Keys, though, I thought that was just a summer thing with the skinny jeans crowd, but it did last, Gawd bless ’em, so, on the occasion of this new album, it’s time once again to try to tell them from Arctic Monkeys or Strokes or whatnot (I never could, Gawd bless ya if you can). Lol, the Black Keys subreddit has some bad reviews of this thing, never mind the stupid kiss-butt bot that pops in to say “Myeahhh, I hope this means they’ll be spending time in Ohio!” Good grief, get me out of this subreddit, why am I even doing this, let’s go listen to one of the new songs, “I Forgot To Be Your Lover.” Ack, they’re trying to be Sam Cooke, or maybe — wait, I get it now — the Ohio Players in ballad mode! Boy, I’ll tell you, I have no use for this at all, but if you’re big into hookless tuneage, go for it.

• Wait, I thought Old 97’s were all done being mean to music, but if so, why am I seeing a new album called American Primitive being released by them this week? Wait, no, forget it, Rhett Miller is still their singer, I’d gotten confused because he was doing solo albums for a few years there and had kind of dumped them, not that I was keeping track. “Where The Road Goes” sounds like something Willie Nelson should be singing, not someone who isn’t 100 years old. It isn’t a very interesting song, is writing interesting songs even part of the typical game plan for bands nowadays? Discuss.

• We’ll end this remarkably uninteresting week of new albums with Phosphorescent’s new one, Revelator. Phosphorescent is the stage name of American indie singer-songwriter Matthew Houck, who is originally from Alabama but now lives in Athens, Georgia, so people will think he’s cool or whatever. The title track has mellow, strummy acoustic guitar, and there’s Spacemen 3 reverb on Houck’s voice, which is pretty much the only thing that’s keeping me from falling asleep while it’s playing. He sounds like a bad karaoke version of José González. What on Earth possesses people to support artists like this, seriously? —Eric W. Saeger

Warlord, Free Spirit Soar (High Roller Records)

Ha ha, I owned a Warlord album once when I was a young heavy metal incel, but I only listened to it maybe three times because it wasn’t all that good, sort of like a cross between Anvil and, I don’t know, maybe Scorpions I guess. Singer Bill Tsamis died in 2021, but original drummer and co-founder Mark Zonder is here.

The promo sheet on this one claims that this U.S. band was an early epic-metal band. Funny it should say that, because album-opener “Behold a Pale Horse” is definitely epic-metal. It has caveman-ren-faire drums a la Corvus Corax, and the singer is really serious, singing about witch-kings and prophets or something. Yeah, no, this stuff has a Savatage bend to it. “Conquerors” is street-metal in the vein of Riot, except the dude’s singing about giant cyclops or something. A

Marc Valentine, Basement Sparks (Wicked Cool Records)

This guy, whom Vive Le Rock magazine anointed as “the new king of British power-pop,” qualifies for that “prize” I suppose, for what it’s worth. This is the follow-up full-length to his debut album from last year, and he comes storming out of the gate on this one, with the They Might Be Giants-like “Complicated Sometimes,” which breaks the emo mold a bit by using a Mister Roboto effect on his voice (you never hear that anymore, not that anyone cares). The overall vibe tenders a cross between Dashboard Confessional and a slightly cartoonish version of eastern European grog-punk bands like Korpiklaani, which means the listener is in for a fun ride (I never understood how people could take “power pop” bands seriously, so it’s refreshing to note that this guy takes a lot of his cues from 1970s glam bands). Speaking of Marc Bolan, the tune “Tyrranical Wrecks” is a ton of fun, with Valentine trying on-the-phone patch on for size. I hope this guy breaks big. A+

Playlist

• Uh-oh, Friday, March 29, is a big day, because it is the last CD release day of our Antarctican winter, meaning that spring is definitely here! Sheryl Crow’s new album, Evolution, is the first one we will laugh look at today; you all remember Crow from her multi-platinum-whatever soccer mom hits, but did you know that she contributed her singing talents to William Shatner’s 2011 joke album, Seeking Major Tom, covering the song “Seeking Major Tom” originally rendered on the K.I.A. album Adieu Shinjuku Zulu, did you even know that? Of course not, who would, but this new one is her 12th album and features the single “Digging in the Dirt,” featuring Peter Gabriel, whom we discussed in this award-winning column just a few weeks ago. He originally released the song (which won the Best Video Grammy) in his 1992 studio album Us. How will Sheryl Crow improve on this song? Will she even try to? Let me go to the YouTube and listen to it, so you don’t have to. OK, it’s basically the same thing except with Sheryl Crow singing all the lines, like, “This time you’ve gone too far” and all that stuff, and every once in a while Gabriel pops in like Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog in order to ensure that it’s as boring as the original. This is a very clever marketing strategy, I have to admit.

• Slovenly chamber-pop singer and Libertines hanger-on Ed Harcourt is back with a new album, called El Magnifico, please stay calm, there will be enough MP3s of this album for all of you to pirate at your favorite pirating website, and no, I have no idea where to find those, because I am an upstanding citizen; now, quiet, you guys, while I try to enjoy the new single, “Deathless,” from this new album. It opens with an indie-folk fractal with some dubstep drums underneath it for some reason, and then it turns into a not-really-bad tune that sounds like Imagine Dragons covering a Conor Oberst B-side. Things could be a lot worse, I suppose, even if the video is really boring, something about standing in a dangerous-looking field of cacti, not that there are any cacti in England, which is where Harcourt is from. And let’s keep moving.

• Brooklyn, N.Y.-based artist Kelly Moran’s music, according to Wikipedia, is a mixture of electronic, jazz, dream pop and black metal, and her record company is Warper Records, which tells me I’m not going to enjoy listening to her new album Moves In The Field at all, not that I’m going into this with a negative attitude or anything of the sort, and besides, she used to play bass for the no-wave punk band Cellular Chaos, so let’s give this LP the benefit of the doubt going in, that’d be great. OK, so the video for the single “Butterfly Phase” features a figure skater interpreting this excitable but sad piano-driven melody, and then it gets sadder and sadder, and all the YouTube commentators are saying they’re crying, and then I started crying myself because I couldn’t understand why a bunch of people were getting emotional over the song, which just sounds like a bummer-piano thing. Maybe they were crying because the figure skater wasn’t doing triple-salchows or pratfalling onto the ice, the latter of which is the only reason people watch figure skating in the first place. I mean, I’m openly sobbing right now.

• Lastly it’s alt-rock band Chastity Belt, from Walla Walla, Washington, and yes, that’s a real place. Live Laugh Love is the all-girl band’s new album, and the single is part folk-indie and part psychedelica. It is gentle and catchy enough; the main verse part is boring, the bridge is OK.

The Church, Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars (Communicating Vessels)

Some things never change, especially when they really should, but different strokes and all that. I’ve never been big into this ’80s-born band, even if The Cure’s Robert Smith stole the dreary, depressing vibe for “Lovesong” from this band’s 1988 tune “Under The Milky Way.” These Aussies have always been a sort of middling punk-influenced rawk band, but despite that, they do try to innovate and otherwise keep things relatively lively. Their last LP, The Hypnogogue, was a concept thing aiming for epicness, which I thankfully don’t have to deal with here. “Pleasure” is pretty uneventful, the same flavor of Lost Boys soundtrack filler they’ve specialized in since the beginning: sparkly guitar, low-end-Bowie vocals, that sort of business. “Song 18” is confounding, a chill-down that nicks Bowie in spaceman mode (yes, there’s a discernible pattern here). They’ll be at Royale in Boston on June 21. A- —Eric W. Saeger

Sam Wilson, Wintertides (Communicating Vessels)

Professed to be a meditation on how landscape and environment inspire her tuneage through her love and empathy for natural places, this is a sparse, gentle release from the jazz guitarist, nestled into a trio setting touching on post-bop. This LP grew organically: In 2020 Wilson made the decision to move out to the rural community of Scotsburn, Nova Scotia. It was a change that would soon prove both trying and isolating as pandemic restrictions came into play — especially once she hit the province’s notoriously grueling winter season. Jen Yakamovich’s drums are smooth and sublime, delivered with a lot of brushed snare; Geordie Hart’s upright bass stretches out now and then for the sake of eerie acoustics. It’s all quite absorbing; the RIYL comparisons here would include Ralph Towner and Michael Hedges. A —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Like every Friday, March 22 will be a day of new album releases, because we love our routines, oh lovely, I get to rant about Tool this week! Yep, look at this, folks, Tool’s singer, Maynard James Keenan, is putting out a new live solo album on Friday, called Cinquanta: A 50th Birthday Celebration For Maynard James Keenan. Cinquanta means “fifty” in Italian. Why did he do that? Well, I’m glad you asked. It’s because he turned the big five-oh and there was a celebration concert for it, and plus he posts about tacos a lot on Instagram, no, I’m not kidding, guys. When I turned 50 I quit butts for my vape. I can’t even believe what butts cost now, like 10 dollars a pack, that’s insane. But you know what else is insane is Tool fans, like, if you don’t like that dumb band, their fans shun you like you kicked their dog or something. Talk about a hilariously overrated band, but even worse is Maynard’s other band, A Perfect Circle, which I’d heard was supposed to be one of those cool goth-industrial bands like Collide, but when I tried to listen to one of their albums I was like, “What’s the big deal here,” and never really tried again. I mean, if you like them, all I have to say is “I don’t care!” the same way Tommy Lee Jones did in The Fugitive when Harrison Ford told him he didn’t moider his wife. Get what I’m saying, see, I’ve never heard a Tool song I liked, but I haven’t listened to all their albums, just the ones that aren’t anywhere near as good as any random Pendulum album, so if you like Tool and didn’t moider anyone, we can still be good friends, just don’t try to get me to go to a Tool concert, see, because I won’t go, even if it’s free, which is about the right price for a Tool concert ticket if you ask me.

OK so anyway, back to Taco Man here, and his new live album, do I really have to do this? Yikes, the cover is Maynard wearing a diaper and yelling in a crib, may I go now? OMG this performance is from 2014, and there’s a live version of Tool’s “Sober.” Huh, I always thought that song was by Live. I never liked it, probably because I’m stupid, right, Tool fans?

• All this yelling about Tool, leaves me barely any room to talk about Tigers Blood, the new album from indie-folk fixtures Waxahatchee. If you can picture Alanis doing a cover of a Bonnie Raitt song you’re in the ballpark with the latest single, “Bored,” a strummy, upbeat, listenable tune that I don’t detest in the least.

• Randomly famous Colombian person Shakira has a lot of fans and isn’t as annoying as P!nk, and that’s all I’ve ever really cared to know about all this. Her new album, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, is on the way. It has an old-school ’80s technopop beat punctuated with her hiccuppy singing and a millennial whoop chorus. It’s catchy.

• Lastly, it’s the one I’ve been waiting for, the new album from British art-rockers Elbow, Audio Vertigo! The band is led by singer Guy Garvey, a working[-class dude who nowadays is also a radio personality on BBC 6. I first got into them in 2011, when they released the LP Build A Rocket Boys; I’ve lost track of them the last few years, so it was nice to hear their new single, “Balu,” with its Coldplay-informed ’80s-goth-ish vibe. The spidery bass line is super-neat. Big ups to this. —Eric W. Saeger

Loreena McKennitt, The Road Back Home (Ume Records)

For most people, hearing the music of this platinum-selling ren-faire folkie evokes thoughts of witch conventions (by the by, we just went to one of those the other week at the Masonic Temple in Manchvegas, and Petunia was selling her witch stuff there); stinky, allergy-triggering incense and homemade “herbal tinctures,” whatever those are. To this day her big hit remains “The Mummer’s Dance,” a lively departure from most of her other fiddle-laden, Celtic Woman-inspired songs, which at least, praise Hepzibah, don’t have much tin whistle in them. This live album features a rendition of “On A Bright May Morning,” a concert-harp-buttressed exercise that’s depressing, lonely and inspirational at the same time, you know the routine. “Mummer” isn’t here, but the violinist gets a right smart workout on “Salvation Contradiction.” “Searching For Lambs” and its bummer cello lines are here too. A —Eric W. Saeger

Devon Thompson, “Poison Me” (Exquisite Feline Records)

Teaser single for an EP that’ll be out this spring from this Los Angeles-based singer, who’s been compared to PJ Harvey and Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano. What we’ve heard from her before has been pretty nice, starting with her 2023 debut single, “Soft Like Water,” whose plinky, vintage-themed guitars must have made plenty of Rasputina fans stand up (phlegmatically of course) and take notice. Then came “Napoleon,” which blended Sheryl Crow and both of the aforementioned ’90s-deconstruction princesses in a borderline cowgirl tune rooted in a Creedence Clearwater Revival vibe. With this new borderline-ballad song, she dabbles with a Siouxsie/Florence Welch sound but her tongue-in-cheek sensibilities lead to moments that make you think of B-52s singer Kate Pierson. She has a knack for sweeping epicness, and I think we’ll hear some remarkable stuff from her in future. But this song isn’t it, probably more a testing of the pop waters. A- —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Like Sam The Sham and The Pharaohs once sang, watch it now, watch it, watch it — here comes March 15, and it has new albums for you! Here it comes, here it comes, look at ’em all, all these new freakin’ albums, what’s a music journo supposed to do with ’em all, someone tell me! Ack, great, here we go, I suppose I’ll have to pretend I’m not mad at arena-blues hacks The Black Crowes, but that’ll be hard. You see, they’ve been very cheap about sending out review copies of their CDs to us CD reviewers, so we can review them in our CD review columns, and even worse, it’s a pain to get them just to let us stream them, like they guard their stupid songs as if they’re Queen Nefertiti’s priceless collection of bejeweled scarabs instead of a bunch of hackneyed songs that pretty much sound like a Jack White side project. You know, while I’m at it, there’s been a trend lately in which bands do all kinds of stupid things to get reviews, and those things often backfire. Like, if you want me to talk about your album, don’t send the whole thing in an email, that’s Rule No. 1. Every week I have to arrange my emailbox by email size and delete all the multi-megabyte emails from public relations people and whatnot who think I have limitless space on my server, it makes me so mad, guys. That’s not the worst, though. The worst is when I just want to review someone’s album and their PR person sends me a link to some obscure streaming service that wants me to register, which I basically never do, but when I do, the page is a horrible, idiotic mess and I have no idea what to click so I can listen to their music. Whatevs, the new album from whatstheirface is Happiness Bastards, and — wait a second, watch it now, watch it, the whole album is available on YouTube right now, so I guess I have to walk back everything I said. They’re not total cheapskates, let me go listen to one of the songs, “Wanting and Waiting.” It’s very stompy, bluesy, mid-tempo and exceptionally boring, same old stuff, a Baptist choir singing every once in a while and such and so. Let’s move along.

• False teen idol Justin Timberlake parlayed his love for being in a famous boy band into marrying Jessica Biel, sounds like a square deal to me. Of course, before he became a boy-bander he was in the actual, literal Mickey Mouse Club, where he met and started dating fellow Mouseketeer Britney Spears, you know, like normal people do. Oh, whatever, I don’t care about this stuff, and you shouldn’t either, so why don’t I mosey on over to the YouTube and check out JayTee’s new album, Everything I Thought It Was, oh let’s do. Ack, the new song, “Selfish,” is really mellow, with some old, vintage-sounding 808 drum loop holding down da beats for a makeout-sexytime song about something or other, and JT is doing the usual boy band thing, trying to sound like Usher and all that nonsense, may I go now?

• Ha ha, it’s indie-rock whatchamacallits Dandy Warhols, with a new album, Rockmaker! 2024 will see these wanton sellouts commemorating the 20th anniversary of Dig!, the documentary covering their bizarre relationship with acid-dropping loons The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Don’t you feel old now, do you still have your skinny jeans and your Pokemon backpack? The single, “Rockmaker,” has a neat 1950s sock-hop groove to it, but wait, that’s just the beginning, let’s see if it gets bad. Hm, the singer thinks he’s Iggy Pop now, that’s cool. The chorus is OK. It’s not completely worthless.

• Finally it’s Lenny Kravitz, also known as “the ex of ex-Mrs. Jason Momoa,” is this dude really still around? The new LP, Blue Electric Light, features the single “TK421.” It sounds like Living Colour trying to be Men Without Hats. How did this even happen? —Eric W. Saeger