Author: Eric Saeger

Ashes And Diamonds, Are Forever (Cleopatra Records)

I’ve probably missed out on the last 40 records from the Cleopatra Records indie label, but only because my emailbox looks like the Brooklyn city dump the week after Christmas. I did, however, catch this goth-rock gem, due out on Halloween day; it features Bauhaus co-founder Daniel Ash, Bruce Smith of Public Image Limited and — excuse me, the bassist for Sade, as in literally the “Smooth Operator” lady. Ash uses an “e-bow” (an electronic device that emulates a bow, you know, like a violin bow) on his guitar (Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien uses one on songs like “My Iron Lung”); the gizmo brings a sort of “wub-wub” effect to these proceedings on songs like “Teenage Robots,” which reads like Trent Reznor with a fetish for throwback electro, if that makes any sense to you (it won’t be on the exam; think of it as a woofer-trashing Nine Inch Nails with a low-but-not-too-low budget). Elsewhere we have “Boy Or Girl,” which is fiercely goth, in the vein of Rammstein (or more accurately Combichrist). In short: It’s wrecky, buzzy, no-wavey, and well worth your time. A —Eric W. Saeger

Crayon, “Kill Your Idols” (Erased Tapes)

Crayon is a terminally hip Parisian music fixture who’s dominant both in jazz and electronic, and there’s a lot of futurism at work here, which some might choose to eschew, given that it’s almost too relevant to the times. OK, I’m being unintelligible, sorry, how about this: You remember when Moby’s Play first appeared and took over the planet by blending electronica with roots, downtempo and whatnot? Well, what this guy does is a next-level version of that. I’d love to tell you more, but his debut LP, Home Safe, isn’t out until Oct. 24; all I can reveal past this teaser track is that it proves that music technology has evolved far beyond Portishead. The tune in question here (it’s message isn’t violent, more a plea to the listener to be themself) features a casual but highly immersive, backward-masked beat over which painter-turned-singer Lossapardo lays some down-pitched vocal lines that reminded me of Tricky on grape drank. If this one does make the rounds it’ll be huge, I assure you, and I do hope it does. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

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• Another week of albums is upon us, specifically the typhoon of new albums that will be released verily unto thy Pirate Bay and AOL Music and such-and-so apps on Aug. 29! Into the breach we go; the blank Microsoft Word page stares back at me, begging me to fill it full of stuff about albums, for your edification and amusement, so let’s just do it by first taking a gander at something I assume I won’t hate, the new album from The Hives, The Hives Forever Forever The Hives! The Hives are from Sweden and therefore eat herring at every meal, except when they’re eating “fermented dairy products,” which sounds like “cheese” to me, but I don’t know a lot about what the day-to-day life of a Swede is like, so for all I know, their version of a “fermented dairy product” is a half-gallon of milk after it’s been sitting in the sun for a day or so, and the only reason they consume such horrific junk is so that they’ll automatically have to take a day off from work in order to go to the emergency room, where they revel in taking selfies and posting them on their Facebooks just to taunt Americans about how great it is for Swedes, having excellent soup-to-nuts health care that barely costs them anything, neener. Now, if you’re one of those pesky millennial kids who needs to get off my lawn, you know The Hives as the greatest garage band on Earth, not only because their music is a loud sloppy mess but also because their singer, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist, will do anything for publicity, like the time in 2023 when he stood around on Hollywood Boulevard holding protest signs written in fluent broken-English that said “The Hives Must Album Now!” and “Honk If You Want a New The Hives Album.” I’ll tell you, folks, that’s a showman after my own heart; that kind of thing is something I’d love to see a local New Hampshire band do, like, set up their gear some Saturday night outside one of the restaurants that serves all-you-can-eat pulled pork and sing songs about how much they hate Dave Matthews and Judas Priest, whatever, I think it’d be funny anyway, so let’s see what these lunatics are singing about these days. Ah, here’s the video for the title track: The five band members are walking around in some dumb castle, dressed up like King Henry VIII, and then they sit down to eat giant mushrooms, but all the while the song is playing, and it sounds like Gang Of Four covering a Billy Idol song from his “Dancin’ With Myself” era. They are smiling playfully in the video because they have wonderful health care.

• Once upon a time in the 1980s, when punk rock was starting its inevitable decline, there was an all-girl band called The Go-Gos, which was led by the bass player, and she wanted to have a hot-looking singer, so they hired Belinda Carlisle, whose talent for singing off-key eventually became the stuff of legend. Belinda’s new album, Once Upon A Time In California, is composed of cover tunes, including a rub of the Youngbloods’ hippy anthem “Get Together,” in which Belinda tries to sound like either Marianne Faithfull or Sam Kinison, I can’t really tell.

• Sabrina Carpenter is still relevant until the next harvest moon or whatever, so she’s releasing a new album, Man’s Best Friend! The single, “Manchild,” sounds like Chappel Roan singing a cover of Hall & Oates’s “Kiss On My List,” and its video is getting a lot of hate on YouTube, which is just mean, you know?

• And finally it’s ’70s-arena-rock throwbacks Wolf Alice, with their fourth LP, The Clearing! “The Sofa” rips off Roberta Flack’s 1974 hit “Feel Like Makin’ Love” in basically every way, take from that what you will. They’ll be at Citizens House of Blues in Boston on Sept. 20, good luck getting tickets. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Ashes And Diamonds, Are Forever (Cleopatra Records) & Crayon, “Kill Your Idols” (Erased Tapes)

Visions of Atlantis, Pirates II – Armada (Napalm Records)

I’ve had lots of jolly fun on this page making sport of friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny’s fondness for symphonic metal, and oddly enough, when I was literally getting to the actual “record reviews” part of this pirate-joke-filled record-review column, he ba-dinged his way into my Facebook with an immediate demand for me to listen to this pirate-oriented album, the newest (but year-old) one from this Austrian band. Little did Dan know that one of the first records I ever reviewed for any newspaper was these guys’ second full-length, 2004’s Cast Away, which sounded like a LootCrate version of Nightwish, but I thought it was cute and adorable. A lot has changed for this band over the past 21 years, of course, but they’re still a bit kitschy, opening with a maudlin Celtic Woman-tinged ghost-ballad in “To Those Who Choose to Fight,” but then it’s right to business with “The Land of the Free,” which wants to be all Hans Zimmer-soundtrack-y (but with Yngwie Malmsteen guitar sounds) and more or less succeeds as a segue into its usual meat and potatoes shtick: super-gorgeous opera chick with a Helloween-soundalike backing band. It’s fine of course. Oh, while we’re here, the coolest pirate tune ever is Tiesto’s “He’s A Pirate,” which chops up samples of Zimmer’s theme to Pirates Of The Caribbean and turns it into a trance drop for the ages. You simply must hear it, folks. A

Babymetal, Metal Forth (Capitol Records)

Oh fine, as long as this week’s award-winning column has already crashed and burned in a conflagration of pirate jokes and Dan Szczesny’s weakness for girl bands being epic and metal, let’s make it official, since Dan loves this band and I have hott-sexxy-hilarious Stormigee TikToks to watch. Back in June, you may recall, I dubbed the three ridiculously over-choreographed female twentysomething Koreans who front this band “Waifuta, Waifutite and Waifutatta,” which is actually close to what they have for stage names, but if you missed that, both Dan and I hope at least three people in our beloved state have heard of them. If you haven’t, it’s all good; their trip is hyper-speed thrash metal with alternating Munchkin-rapping and catchy pop choruses, a genre known as “Kawaii metal,” or “cute metal,” a Cuisinart of thrash and J-pop. From there we can do the perfunctory: “Ratatata” is a sped-up version of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”; “Song 3” is Cannibal Corpse for techies; “Kon! Kon!” sounds like a cross between Marilyn Manson and the Bakugan theme song (most of them do, really), and now you’ve heard of them, you’re welcome, New Hampshire! A

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• New albums are being released on Aug. 22, because that’s what always happens on Fridays. Now, I know it’s way past time to address your question, since we’ve known each other so long; you want to know why all the bands and rich nepo baby Autotuned singers release their albums on Fridays, given that people don’t go to the mall to buy albums until Sunday (no one goes to the mall on Saturdays, because that’s the day you spend doing all the un-fun stuff that’s piled up during the week, like cleaning up your office mess and buying and installing that new battery in your car; in ancient Greek, the word “Saturday” means “I should just quit my job and live on a Hawaiian beach, living off pineapples and tourists’ pizza crusts”). Then again, does anyone actually go to the mall at all anymore, except to visit Best Buy, which is always a wasted effort, because you know in your bones that that all-important wire you need so you can run your Sega Genesis for the first time in 30 years isn’t going to be at Best Buy, you silly goose, don’t even bother, even though you definitely will use that hopelessly impossible mission as an excuse to drive to the mall just to see actual people, ha ha, remember those things? But anyway, my invisible AI friend who lives in Google.com says albums are released on Friday “to coincide with the start of the weekend, maximizing potential exposure and engagement. This practice, known as ‘New Music Fridays,’ is a global initiative aimed at standardizing release dates, combating piracy, and aligning with streaming platform updates.” Sure, sounds fine, but you may be wondering how on Earth releasing albums on Fridays “combats piracy.” I wondered that too, so I looked it up and finally found an obscure pirate tradition that was first cited in the year 1589, when the captain of a Welsh pirate ship named the Petunia told his crew of, you know, pirates that it was bad luck to engage in normal pirate activities (aside from singing sea shanties and guzzling rum from jugs) on Fridays. Are you with me so far, so, since record company executives are 100 times worse people than Captain Jack Sparrow, they believe people won’t pirate albums on Fridays, and now you know why I always kick off this multiple-award-winning column with something about Friday. So let’s begin this Friday-centric exercise with the new album from tech-metal dudes Pendulum, a band that’s a lot better than Linkin Park, but since I’m the only one onEarth who seems to know about them, we all live a lie. Inertia is the title of this non-pirate-able-because-it-comes-out-on-a-Friday-don’t-even-try-it album, and the tune “Driver” is insane and frenetic; if The Prodigy went metal, this is what it’d sound like. You’ll definitely like it.

• Ghostface Killah conjures some epic Wu-Tang Clan magic with Supreme Clientele 2 this Friday. Some internet nerds are complaining that sequel albums are stupid (except, they admit, for Ghostface’s first sequel album of course), but leadoff tune “Nutmeg” — guested by NZA, believe it or not — is so badass it’ll shut them up. The techy beat is completely relentless.

• Speaking of believe-it-or-not, my new favorite emo band (only because its name is so long and column-filling) is from Connecticut: The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die! Their fifth album, Dreams Of Being Dust, features “Dissolving,” a really neat track that combines post-punk and art-rock. Me likey.

• Lastly we have the new LP from North Carolina’s Superchunk, Songs In The Key Of Yikes, and its single, “Is It Making You Feel Something,” which is OK! Sounds sort of like Gwen Stefani fronting an early ’80s-indie band, which is cooler than it looks.

Friendly Rich, The Birds of Marsville (We Are Busy Bodies Records)

It’s not often that I mumble “Oh shut up” at a record, but the spoken introduction to the first of these two 18-minute experimental-cabaret tracks had me doing that. Once the babbling (mostly chatter about how he’s — Rich Marsella — chasing a Ph.D. in musicology and how bizarre his music is, etc.) finally stops, the tuneage reveals itself to be something the steampunk crowd will go wild over. I’ll make it even easier: This guy is the Captain Beefheart of steampunk, and I won’t be surprised in the least if I happen upon him someday at some nerd convention and get mad at myself for not remembering how on Earth I first heard of him. Contents: Calliope (you know, the mechanical organ stuff you hear on a merry-go-round), tempos changing with no rhyme or reason, Hammer horror frightwig soundtracking, spastic Bride Of Chucky ballistics, bell-and-whistle stuff out of Monty Python, you get the idea. He’s gathering a following, fair warning. B

Still in Love, Recovery Language (Church Road Records)

Always cracks me up to be presented with an informational one-sheet from a hardcore punk or extreme-metal band, and when it gets to the stuff about the musical messaging, the verbiage suddenly starts looking like an ad for a yoga retreat. In this case, I’m informed their new album “delves into themes of personal struggle, resilience, and emotional catharsis, offering a sonic journey through the complexities of the human experience,” all of which is, I suppose, more elegant than just writing “GRAHHH” in 52-point font, which would be more succinct. Either way, yes, more of this please. The band is something of a supergroup, composed of members of the biggest (for want of a better word) hardcore bands stomping stages and breaking stuff in the U.K., and boy are they out to break stuff. Two-minute songs that aren’t speed races, no gimmicky screamo yowling, no nonsense, and the guitar sound is absolutely filthy. A+

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Wuh-oh, frantic fam, the new albums of Aug. 15 are afoot (and I assume that’s what most of them are going to smell like when I go check them out in a minute), but in the meantime I’m sure that parenthetical segue will only serve further to convince my small platoon of haters (they’re out there, folks, and I mean that in more ways than one) that the only music I actually like is made by noise bands from Boise, Idaho. As someone once said to me, “Just what the world needs, a music column written by someone who hates music,” after I’d mentioned that I thought AC/DC has been hilariously overrated since Day 1 (obviously your mileage may vary, but I don’t really want to know about it), but either way, that’s not part of my actual mission statement. I don’t view this column as a platform for me to change people’s minds but instead to find and promote the occasional artist/band I find worthy or interesting. This isn’t a Nylon column written by a 23-year-old intern who lives for getting free CDs from the big record companies; if I think something’s dumb, I can say so, and in the meantime, sending me a Facebook message in ALL CAPS that’s basically the music-related equivalent of “Maybe if you weren’t such a poopyhead you’d appreciate the exotic, tantalizing flavor of a freshly made peanut butter and guacamole sandwich” isn’t going to change my mind any more than my strapping you into a chair and forcing you to listen to Kiss albums is going to make the lights come on in your attic. OK, with that completely unaccomplished, let’s turn our attention to this week’s slate of decent things and peanut butter and guacamole sandwiches, and there’s tons of ’em, so let’s start with the big one, Maroon 5’s Love Is Like! Ha ha, I totally changed my mind about Maroon 5 and love them now ever since the other week, when they put that AI CEO guy in an old pickle by shining the Kiss Cam on him and his “Chief People Officer” lady friend while their spouses waited for them to finish “working late,” wasn’t that the stupidest — oops, wait, someone in my earphone just informed me that that wasn’t Maroon 5, it was Coldplay, my bad, doesn’t Andy Grammer sing for both those bands anyway, nothing to see here! Whatever, the new single, “Priceless” is a bootylicious yacht-hip-hop tune featuring Lisa Manoban from the South Korean girl group Blackpink, who does a fantastic job sounding exactly like Kesha, but wait, there’s more, OK actually there isn’t.

• Recently divorced nepo baby Chance the Rapper shows he can still rhyme in half-speed-reggae-triplet-rhythm just like everyone else on the planet on the title track from his second full-length album, Star Line! His fans are hoping this LP is a lot better than The Big Day; the tune is pretty edgy but there are so many people who can’t wait to diss the album he probably should have just had Lil Wayne guest-rap on the whole thing or at least just stuck to mixtapes.

• I’ve gushed over bluegrass/Americana artist Molly Tuttle before; she’s won awards for her “clawhammer” guitar-picking style and for being awesome in general. However, the single “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark” from her new album So Long Little Miss Sunshine is pretty basic, sounding like a cross between Amy Grant and Reba McEntire, but if that sounds great to you, well, peanut butter and guacamole it is, you do you.

• Ending this week’s exercise on a positive note, synthpop/trip-hop singer Alison Goldfrapp releases her second LP as a solo artist, Flux! “Reverberotic” is an electropop single in the tradition of Britney Spears and ’90s-era Madonna, nothing too innovative but it’s, you know, nice.

Tulip Tiger, Da Meanz of Production (self-released)

This collection of (purportedly) throwback Aughts-era electronica comes to us from Los Angeles sound-artisan Augustus Watkins, who attempts here to combine big-beat (Chemical Brothers/Prodigy etc.) explosiveness with “genre-shaping soundtracks from films like The Matrix and Blade.“ Or so he’s said, but once you get past that mission statement, what this experiment proves is that the latter vibe tends to cancel out the former, which some might find appealing. I could be wrong of course (that did happen once in 1993 or 1995, I forget), especially given that these beats aren’t block-rockin’ (insert snobby production-nerd comment here); I’m saying that it’s probably better suited to movie soundtracking than dance floors. And that’s OK if you really liked the soundtrack to 1987’s The Running Man (there’s plenty of cheese afoot here, so if I were to concur with Watkins’ info-sheet and tell you people it’s 1998-reminiscent that’d be a disservice). No, my impression is that it’s variations on the first Terminator’s soundtrack with some Meat Beat Manifesto stuff in there. The producers of Stranger Things would probably love it. B

Maia Sharp, Tomboy (self-released)

This singer-songwriter, the daughter of Grammy-winning country songwriter Randy Sharp, is, like her dad, one of those largely unsung folks who’ve racked up a pretty near endless list of behind-the-scenes credits over the decades, having collaborated with such artists as Cher, Carole King and, interestingly enough under the circumstances, fellow note-Tetris-ing wonk Bonnie Raitt, who’s one of her influences. The title track of this one is quite ’70s-radio in its way, with some smooth intricate vocal work you’d rather listen to while relaxing than try singing along with, which is to say that it comes off as slightly academic but in a very colorful, deeply unworried manner, a la late-career Otis Redding and that sort of thing. “Counterintuation” is a clever one that’ll appeal to Norah Jones fans, and in fact there are hints of a Jones tune in there that I can’t think of at the moment, not that that detracts from the richness of the songwriting. The record ends on a hauntingly pretty note, a Joni Mitchell-ized version of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” A

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Oh, look, it’s the pile of new albums coming out on Aug. 8, isn’t that awesome, rock fans? We’ll get right into this week’s morass with a look at the new album from white-rapper-turned-Dashboard-Confessional-wannabe Machine Gun Kelly, he of someone-with-way-too-many-tattoos and unironically-being-from-Cleveland fame. No seriously, this fellow — whose real name is Colson Baker, how gangsta can you get — was all up in the hip-and-hop for his first few mixtapes; why, he even got into a war of diss tracks with his fellow white rapper, Eminem, a fact of which you’re well aware if you’re a fan of mindless displays-of-media-manipulating opportunism corporate hip-hop. That tedious little fake beef put our boy Colson on the map, but then one day someone in his totally gangsta hip-hop crew fell asleep while he was supposed to be keeping people out of the studio, and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker snuck in and started randomly producing Colson’s Tickets To My Downfall album, and then Halsey let herself in to “help out” and so did emo-rapper Trippie Redd, and suddenly Colson was no longer just a bargain-bin Eminem but some guy with an idiotic amount of tattoos who couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be Weezer or the Killers. At that point, Transformers actress and terminally insecure person Megan Fox entered the picture: Hypnotized by Colson’s impressive number of tattoos and the fact that Colson’s career was launched by none other than insane sex felon Puff Daddy, Megan unwisely stretched their first date into a four-year relationship. Are you with me so far I don’t care either, so here we are with the new MGK album, Lost Americana, a record that I can’t hate because it has an awesome single: “Vampire Diaries” (no, I’m serious, I really like it, what is even happening in this world)! The tune is like what would happen if Amos Lee got married to Good Charlotte and didn’t do anything stupid. The video is chef’s-kiss too, guys.

• Ack, speaking of famous Maryland-born emo-cretins Good Charlotte, they’ve also got a new one coming out this Friday, Motel Du Cap! Now, it must be said that unlike Machine Gun Kelly, these guys are content to stick to their original genre, and their devotion to their craft has resulted in yet another classic emo song, “Rejects.” I’d say it’s their best ever, except for the little problem with its being nothing more than a cleverly disguised ripoff of Weezer’s “Beverly Hills,” but that being said, it might nevertheless impress the last few toucan-god-worshipping Amazonian tribespeople who somehow still haven’t ever heard that song before, so by all means, a heartfelt “godspeed” to Good Charlotte from everyone at this newspaper!

• Oh, gross, I’ve never heard a song by The Black Keys that didn’t make me not want to be listening to it, but such is my lot, checking out their new one, No Rain, No Flowers! The synth lines are really thick in the aimless title track, which will, I hope, lead to many music journos following my lead and finally writing those guys off as a cheap imitation of MGMT once and for all, I mean can we talk for Pete’s sake?

• We’ll wrap things up with New York City-based chiptune-rock band Anamanaguchi, whose new one, Anyway, doesn’t sound very chiptune-ish if by “chiptune-ish” you mean music that sounds like it was made using 8-bit electronic devices, as opposed to basic unlistenable indie rock. Unfortunately, the new single “Rage” sounds like Pavement with a huge budget and one of those big-name producer dudes. Aaaand we’re barfing.

Tchotchke, Playin’ Dumb (self-released)

So I said to the public relations lady, three cute 23-year-old babes from New York City on a retro 1960s-pop tip, where do I sign, and 10 minutes later there it was, in my emailbox, this, their second album. Their 2022 debut full-length was a little scattershot, a mishmash of everything from the aforementioned era, from beehive-hairdo girl-group to random Dolly Parton/Harry Nilsson-influenced radio stuff, all with too much cheese in its sound, but this is a little more serious, or at least as serious as you’d want from a pop-vocal-oriented trio who think life must have been a lot more fun when Nixon was president (probably was, given that it was merely the beginning of the end for America). This is more 1970s-centric, beginning with “The Game,” in which the group drapes intricate ELO-like harmonies over Randy Newman-style piano-pop lines, and then it’s “Did You Hear,” a listenable but too flatly produced glam-influenced thingamajig that will make your grandparents think of Big Star and Sweet. “Kisses” is twee-ish proto-pop in the manner of Ben Kweller meets Versus, and so on; altogether the effect is like Au Revoir Simone with three singers who don’t suck. Not to be an annoying production-snob, but someone text me when they grow up, stop obsessing over filling the Brooklyn nightclubs and get an actual studio budget, that’d be great. C+

John Yao, Points In Time (See Tao Recordings)

Sorry that I’m a little lost here; I’m informed I gave this elite New York-based trombonist/bandleader a big thumbs-up in your Hippo for one of his recent albums but I can’t find it for the life of me. That’s OK, though, because he and his 17-count-’em accomplices are all about big-band jazz, a genre that’s always guaranteed a glowing review on this page unless I sense the slightest bit of incompetence, which I don’t at all here. This full-length reflects upon what Yao’s learned and experienced (and stars many of the musicians he’s accumulated) over the 20 years that’ve passed since his first big-band album, Flip-Flop, which All About Jazz pronounced, in their inimitable obfuscatory writing style, as heralding the arrival of “a strong compositional voice and effective band-leader able to use his 17-piece band to paint across a wide spectrum and infuse his complex…” blah blah blah (someone needs to introduce AAJ’s writer-nerds to the word “awesome”). So yeah, this is awesome, from the pensive “Early Morning Walk” to the irrepressibly upbeat “Song for Nolan”; if you like big band (and you should, I tell you), you’ll definitely want this. A+

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• This week’s “new CD release Friday” falls on Aug. 1, summer’s just about over and it happened so fast, why did we even bother, and now for a mindless tangent in which I congratulate myself for reviewing Black Sabbath’s second-worst album, Never Say Die, the other week, given that the band’s been a trending internet topic for what feels like 40 years now, between the farewell concert and then the tragic passing of the band’s singer Ozzy Osbourne just a couple-three weeks later. I feel like I deserve a gold sticker for indulging in current-month’s hottest pop-culture-trending thing, which, as you know, I don’t usually do, but in this case, Sabbath was my favorite band during my boyhood days. I’ll have you know I even commented on social media about his passing, which I also never do, considering that everyone does that so I feel like I can’t; as a wise person once said (and I’m editing this quote for consumption by a more general audience), “Every time a celebrity dies, Twitter turns into 5,000 people trying to flush the same gum wrapper down the same toilet.” I mean, it’s not illegal to be the zillionth person to post “thoughts and prayers” about someone they never met even if it should be, but what amazed me was how all sorts of people leapt out of the woodwork five seconds after Ozzy’s death announcement to condemn him for his politics (seriously, go look). I sympathize with his critics for what they were trying to illuminate, but honestly, one would think we’ve got more important fish to fry these days than trying to posthumously cancel a fellow who once bit into an actual fruit bat for the entertainment value of it, but you do you, and meanwhile I digress, because we need to talk about The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life, the second album from Nigerian-Canadian techno artist Debby Friday, who in 2023 won Canada’s Polaris Music Prize, which comes with a lump-sum cash award of $50,000, did you even know what a Polaris Music Prize is, I didn’t either! Arcade Fire won it in 2011, which is something of an unsettling omen for Ms. Friday, but regardless, let me try to get my train back onto its rickety tracks by listening to this album’s new single, “Lipsync.” Hm, I don’t mind it, it’s like a cross between Goldfrapp and some underground goth band — yikes, the more I listen to it, the more it sounds like Birthday Massacre covering a Kylie Minogue song. It’s pretty boring, but the overall feel is okey-dokey.

• Reneé Rapp is an actress-singer who played the part of Regina George in the 2019 Broadway musical version of Mean Girls and starred in last year’s film adaptation of same, all of which is news to me, why didn’t any of you people inform me about all that nonsense? Bite Me, her second album, spotlights its title track, a drank-addled sleaze-a-thon whose video features scantily clad models having a pillow fight, in case you’ve never seen anything remotely like that in all the years you’ve been online.

• The Armed is an experimental hardcore punk band whose members are anonymous, but they’ve had so many famous guests on their albums (people who are well aware of who they are, obviously) that they might as well drop that whole “anonymous” shtick, don’t you think? The band’s new LP, The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed, includes the single “Well Made Play,” a messy mess of a tune that combines black metal and ad-lib noise just to be weird.

• Lastly it’s Australian hip-hop miscreants Hilltop Hoods with their new album, Fall from the Light. Focus track “Don’t Happy Be Worry” is a fun-enough tune.

Jens Kuross, Crooked Songs (Woodsist Records)

The first time musician/politician Hayden Pedigo heard this folkie’s music he pronounced it a cross between Arthur Russell and Harry Nilsson, but that was before Kuross, a Los Angeles-to-Idaho refugee, put aside his synthesizer and followed Pedigo’s advice to make this minimalist, ambient half-plugged-guitar record. The short description of this one is Jeff Buckley with Chris Martin’s Marvin The Martian-esque voice, unhurried slices of life that’ll be perfect for sipping scotch in quietude by your end-of-summer campfire. What’s great about this is that Kuross had all but given up on ever making any splash in the music business prior to running into Pedigo; he’d retreated to Boise and become a cabinet maker. Ironically enough, that’s precisely the sort of authenticity any L.A. music scout would max out a few AmExes to find, so one can’t help wishing this guy the best when this record streets at the end of August. I mean, Bonnaroo types who are always bemoaning Buckley’s loss really need to put this on their radar. A+

Gayle Young and Robert Wheeler, From Grimsby To Milan (Farpoint Recordings)

Pardon the setup, there’s some unpacking to do here before we drill too deep into this experimental album. First item to note with regard to this duo is the presence of Robert Wheeler, the great-great-grandnephew of Thomas Alva Edison, as well as a member of 50-year-old Cleveland-based art-punk band Pere Ubu since 1994 (that band has been somewhat obscure through the decades, only charting once with 1989’s “Waiting For Mary,” a Joy Division-meets-Captain Beefheart-sounding tune). Meanwhile, in her spare time, Canadian concert musician Gayle Young builds her own instruments, including the “amaranth,” a complicated-looking stringed instrument that vaguely resembles a bongo drum that’s been sawed in half; that’s the thing she noodles around with here whilst Wheeler makes a bunch of flatulent noises with a vintage ElectroComp 101 (made by EML during the late 1960s). The twosome probably got some therapy out of making this record; most of it is like ASMR for mud-dwelling snapping turtles, as in one can practically smell the skunk cabbage. A curiosity for noise wonks. B

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, July 25, will see a jumble of new music releases dumped upon humanity, not that we aren’t still traumatized by the last jumble, you folks had better toughen up, let me see your war face! Now surely all you older Americans reading this remember Madonna, but for those of you who are younger, just think of Lady Gaga wearing stripper outfits from the 1930s, or if you don’t even know who Lady Gaga is because you’re really young, maybe just imagine a cross between a non-funny Chappell Roan and Cardi B. Are you with me so far, good, I’d hoped not, but anyway, in the ’90s, Madonna stopped doing normal 1980s techno-pop songs in order to become a trance-techno diva, which resulted in the album Ray Of Light, cementing her as, you know, the next Cher. Now, if you’ve never heard of Cher, ask your grandmother, because like all boomers, she owned a copy of Cher’s early-1970s vinyl single “Gypsies Tramps And Thieves” and she’ll be glad to explain Cher to all you young 4channers, since I don’t want to. I apologize for that, since I know for a fact that people get a kick out of my reporting on the doings of really super-old pop stars. How do I know that? Because a local-to-Manchester Jehovah’s Witness pastor showed up at my house to give me pamphlets and tell me about the fast-approaching Apocalypse (which, duh, it’s already here isn’t it) but anyway — and this is a true story — he asked me excitedly if I was indeed “that Eric Saeger,” and when I told him I was, he started giggling schoolgirlishly and telling me how much he loved this column because it cracks him up when I make fun of prehistoric arena bands and mummified pop stars who are somehow still around despite spending most of their days bathing in formaldehyde. And so this section of this week’s multiple-award-winning column is dedicated to that pastor, let’s go see what on Earth Madonna is even doing on her brand new album, Veronica Electronica! By the title I assumed it’s got AutoTune on it, but nope, it’s composed of previously unreleased remixes from Ray Of Light, doesn’t that sound unnecessary? I have to pick a tune; how about Johnny Madder’s “Oriental Hindu Mix” of “Shanti/Ashtangi,” since I haven’t been to a yoga class in forever and kind of miss it (I’m lying of course). Yes, it’s even more yogic than the original, but the vibe is ruined; it sounds like there’s a sample of a jaw harp in the beginning. In the trash it goes.

• My new pastor bro will also be delighted to know that famous performing Halloween clown Alice Cooper has a new album coming out this week, The Revenge Of Alice Cooper, I assume this’ll be absolutely dreadful, except maybe during some of the parts where Alice isn’t singing. But wait, this is the first album in 51 years from the original Alice Cooper band (the four who are still alive I mean)! Features the tune “Black Mamba,” wherein Alice does his creepy guy shtick and the band sounds like 1960s-era Traffic with a wah wah pedal. Apocalypse, take me away!

• Chicago-based psychedelic rockers Post Animal’s fourth LP, IRON, includes the tune “What’s A Good Life.” This doesn’t sound psychedelic at all, more like a throwaway demo from José González singing over a 1982 Casio keyboard. Hitting “Delete” now before I forget.

• We’ll wrap up this apocalyptic week in music with underrated folk-rocker Patty Griffin, whom some of you know as “Not Shawn Colvin, The Other One, Whatsername.” Crown Of Roses is her new album; its single is “Back at the Start,” a KT Tunstall-ish number that’s very nice but packs all the excitement of a Home Depot paint-swatch book.