Category: Albums

Caleb Wheeler Curtis & Jason Moran, Incantation

Hellaciously busy experimental jazz, the first two songs on this pairing of sax-man/multi-instrumentalist Curtis with pianist Moran, who are both in their prime at ages 40 and 51 respectively. Lots of skronking, honking and bonk-bonk-bonking that makes it sound like these guys are trying to break their instruments (“Miss Nancy” especially; lots of insolent rage-fueled improv going on here), but then they become a different thing altogether, settling down to impart some pensive, quite brilliant reflection for a couple of songs (“Ain’t No Storm,” “Gangsterism On The River”), both of which offer the listener some otherworldly feels. “One Hundred Years” is a bizarre but somehow agreeable effort, with Moran leveling an eloquent fast-moving-spider-style rhythm at Curtis, who adorns it with some exceedingly pretty sax lines. The final analysis tells us that these two are as focused on percussiveness and scalar experimentation as they are on melody; the net effect is one of pure brilliance. A+

Mastodon, Marrow Deep (Loma Vista Recordings)

It’s obvious that this Atlanta sludge-prog-metal band fired original lead guitarist Brent Hinds last year (he died in a motorcycle accident a few months later); in public, the band waxed regretful whereas Hinds was going around saying stuff like “I won’t miss being in a s–t band with horrible humans.” Either way, it’s a new version of the band, with the instrumental-minded Nick Johnston doing the solo shredding and contributing quite a lot of brilliantly shreddy stuff in “Poisonous Weapons” for starters. More weird exotic/experimental (almost Spyro Gyra-like) sounds in these songs, such as on “Moth and Bone,” which is around where Anthony Fantano says the album runs out of ideas, but as always he’s wrong, given that “A Vampire’s Demeanor” reasserts their relevance as a crew who can bring the sumo-battle-between-tyrannosaurs energy at a moment’s notice. Opening track “Barbarian’s Blood” is a Whitman’s Sampler of coolness, with a death metal part, a grind part, a punk part and surprisingly clean, emotive vocals on the — I don’t know, yacht-rock part. I got more out of this one than 2004’s Leviathan, if you’re feeling like shooting someone an angry Facebook message (grade reflects the highest possible one for a Mastodon album). A

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yow, it’s gettin’ cooold outside, friends and haters, but no worries, the next crop of new albums will show up this Friday, Nov. 6, to warm the cockles and make us all projectile-barf, with refried derivative melodies! It’s that time of year when holiday music is fixing to be everywhere you go, so as you know, the Mariah Carey memes are making the rounds on your computer and your smartphone, like the one where Mariah is encased in a carbonite block like Han Solo in the obscure underground 1980 film The Empire Strikes Back, text me if you’d like that explained, but the point is that the game is afoot, with everyone hoping to avoid Mariah’s stupid 1994 holiday song “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” you hate it too amirite, it’s like Pokemon Go but the opposite, because if you accidentally hear it, your mellow gift-buying mood instantly turns into, you know, poop, that is to say, the object is not to catch it at all, ever, godspeed my friends. But let’s get to the meat of this week’s mushy rotten potato, a sort-of-compilation holiday album from renowned awkward folkie Sufjan Stevens, Worst Christmas Ever! This LP brings together past Stevens’ Christmas tunes like “Sister Winter,” “Christmas in the Room,” his version of “Silent Night,” and of course “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever,” which he released 20 years ago, a banjo-and-fiddle-plucking thingamajig that is mellow and pretty and nice and has never been more timely, what with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse playing rock-paper-scissors to see which of them gets to make us all miserable on Dec. 25, can you hardly wait or what?

• A lot of people in their 40s and 50s totally love Alanis Morissette, and we male music journos all know it isn’t wise to diss her, because we were all bad boyfriends at one time or another and thus deserve all the hate we receive or somesuch etc. Come on, you remember Alanis and her songs about bad boyfriends and anti-religious, “post-Catholic” (her term, not mine) messaging, which of course most of her fans took completely the wrong way, which, I assure you was the whole idea. Whatever, no one ever agrees with me when I’m right, Alanis has a holiday album coming out, Good Weather for Immaculate Conception, what does that even mean? Whatever, the leadoff single from this album, “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem,” is actually a lot like the Sufjan Stevens Christmas tune we just discussed, a slow banjo-plucked bluegrass number that pairs Alanis with folkie Brandi Carlile, but whatever, guess who’s plucking the banjo? Nope, not Bela Fleck, it’s America’s other famous banjo player, comedian Steve Martin, who was very famous in the 1970s and such! Old people will remember when Martin used to go onstage with a fake arrow through his head to pluck his banjo and spit hilarious jokes, and then he made some movies in which he played unfunny characters, the world is such a mystery, you know?

• Aside from their reputation as being a bunch of jerks, the main criticism of Kings of Leon has been that they sucked after their third album, when they abandoned gritty Southern rock and went in a more arena-rock direction. I’ll just see about that with their new one, O My Beloved, by checking out its single “Cold Blue Dawn!” Ack, boy is this boring, a country-western-style joint that sounds like Rascal Flatts, I hate it.

• We’ll bag this week with a glance at the title track from the new Bryan Adams LP, How’s It Goin’! I’ve never hated that guy, this song is OK for a bluegrass-tinged jangle-rocker, better than that stupid Kings of Leon tune anyway.

Featured Photo: Caleb Wheeler Curtis & Jason Moran, Incantation and Mastodon, Marrow Deep

Lightheaded Collective, Inner Frequencies (self-released)

Well, isn’t this a trip, a nine-piece mixed-genre band from the New Hampshire seacoast that seems to have higher aspirations than playing Phish cover tunes at whatever rickety 150-year-old sports bar is serving as the mecca for that stuff these days. Three brothers started this group with the idea of wiring indie-sort-of-tronica to hip-hop, jazz and rock, and their debut LP reveals them as a smart bunch of guys aspiring for sonic relevance in [current year] without turning up their noses at melody like others I could name (cough cough Mitski). Quite a lot goes on here; I could pigeonhole them as Spyro Gyra/Disco Biscuits with Pavement’s singer for tldr purposes, but opening track “Mattapan” flirts with a drum ’n’ bass rinseout (I was expecting them to go full-on Dieselboy for a second there, but it’s more of a prog-rock thing if I were forced to categorize it). Y’all know I can’t stand Pavement, but that lackadaisical vocal delivery does fit here and makes it quite relevant; I could picture this stuff soundtracking quite a lot of different things. A+

Jess Kerber, The World Is Dark But I Want It to Be Funny

From the (more or less) edgier side of unplugged indie comes this Montreal, Canada-based songstress, whose approach to country-tinged slow-mo-chill would fit in any Spotify mix that includes Abigail Washburn, Joni Mitchell and such. Kerber is certainly no flighty moonbat with a guitar acting annoyingly awkward; the tunes are very well-written (think Fog Lake) and her tenor voice is deeply captivating, evoking at turns Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, and Dolores O’Riordan; in short, to be honest, this level of quality doesn’t land on this desk very often. These are nurturing soundscapes of a rare caliber; although she does venture into a more in-your-face flavor of rock (halfway through “Changing,” which recalls Fleetwood Mac in in-your-face mode), it’s a project that wants to be intimate with the listener more than anything, not simply in a parasocial sense but as a sort of bonding. There’s a real groundswell going on with this one, so get on board if you haven’t yet. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, Oct. 30, is the day before Halloween, a day that is spooky and frightening unless you are, like me, spooky and frightening to begin with, in which case you take strange comfort from 80-year-old horror movies, which were sometimes humorously racy if you paid attention. For example, in 1935’s Werewolf of London, at one point the werewolf character (played by Henry Hull) asks the old spinster landlady, Mrs. Moncaster, “What would you say, madam, if I told you I was turning into a werewolf,” and without missing a beat she goes, “I’d say, ho ho ho, I was Little Red Riding Hood!” See what she did there, OK, you had to be there I suppose, but all joking aside, for truly visceral, relentless horror befitting this time of year, nothing beats a new album from Nickelback, so let’s endeavor to swallow our perfectly normal revulsion and give it a chance, what do you say? Surely it can’t be too nauseating; at the very least, whatever intolerable noises I’ll encounter when I sample “Make Me Love You,” the single from new album Everything Under The Sun, will find their way onto this year’s Best Of WWE Wrestler Intro Songs collection, let me get my crucifix and silver bullets, OK all set. Wow, wait a minute, this isn’t a typical wrestling-metal tune, it’s a romantic sexytime power ballad, something that would blare from the stadium loudspeakers right when Chyna or Miss Elizabeth or whoever jumps into the arms of Hulk Hogan or Andre the Giant or whatnot before they drive off into the sunset to body-slam each other forever, I’m such a sucker for true love, aren’t you? If so, you can hear that song and other Nickelbackish nonsense played live at Boston’s TD Garden on Dec. 13.

• OK, now what. Yikes, something I’m actually interested in, a new album from aggro-industrial-metal barbarians Ministry! Now, this is said to be their final studio album, which I think they said four albums ago, but we might as well take bandleader “Buck Satan” at his word and mourn the loss of this band, or however we’re supposed to deal with patently obvious publicity stunts (my over/under for the next Ministry album is three years). Whatever the case, the LP is titled Hate To Go (Take Out Or Delivery), and spoiler alert, the single, “Singularity” is a doomy, wildly aggressive grinder that’s reminiscent of KMFDM but, you know, sicker.

• Stop the presses, the second album in a row that I’m actually looking forward to previewing, this time from British psychedelic-garage rockers Clinic, whose signature move is putting out albums in which half the songs are awesome and the other half are unbelievably boring. For years no one had any idea who these guys actually are because they wear surgical masks all the time, like a few people thought they might be some other band like The Strokes in disguise, but most people thought that was stupid, and eventually it emerged that they were just regular “blokes,” after which all the furor died down. Wild in the Streets, the band’s first album since 2021’s Fantasy Island, features the single “You And I,” a tune that’s as trippy as anything they’ve ever done, with some bizarre Flaming Lips-ish tremolo vocal effects and unconventional loops. It’s OK but not their greatest.

• Last and assuredly least, here’s a blast from the past, Fujiya & Miyagi, a U.K. band that typified the indie scene during the Aughts with pointless un-catchy post-disco krautrock. New Shiny Object is their newest, and the single, “Lowest Common Denominator,” is a dreary funkathon that makes ChikChikChik look like geniuses.

Featured Photo: Lightheaded Collective, Inner Frequencies and Jess Kerber, The World Is Dark But I Want It to Be Funny

She Past Away, Mizantrop (Metropolis Records)

The fun-but-depressing part of covering the goth rock sphere is that the artists can come from anywhere in the world but unfortunately it’s hard to tell where sometimes because of all the verisimilitude of the music. Take this duo for example: They’re from Turkey, but they could be from Poughkeepsie if going by the sound alone, but what’s nice is that the lyrics are in Turkish instead of the broken English that usually comes with these packages. I’m sure the verbiage is very deep, at least in that “Well, exactly how deep did Sisters Of Mercy ever get” sort of way, but OK, they do try to emulate early, low-budget Cure and Bauhaus at once; in other words the aesthetic is danceable Fields of the Nephilim all the way, so whatever you’re picturing after knowing the above is probably very close to the reality of it. That being said, there is indeed an exotic ring to this stuff, something melodically unconventional, which is to say it’s not interminably boring although it kind of wants to be. B+

Ronny North, “Snowflakes of Green (Re-Dux)” (Terror Kitty Music)

The holiday tuneage is already starting to fill my inbox, which is a nice change from years past. I do like to give indie artists a chance to make the sugarplums dance in my head, because if someone can’t pull off a decent-enough Christmas song I don’t feel bad smiting them with the old Negan snark-bat, since it might keep them from quitting their day jobs. This here is a special case, given that this L.A.-based hair-metal guitarist’s website’s home page is a giant mystery-meat graphic of the dude that you need to click on before you get to the stuff that looks like something he designed in Alta Vista in 1996, a bunch of blurbs about how Quiet Riot’s drummer and a dozen other industry bit-players think he’s awesome. Anyway, I muttered my Negan incantation: “Little pig, little pig! Let! Me! In!” and clicked the music clicky, and soon enough there was normal happy instrumental Christmas music, bells and jingles at first, but then it became a shred-athon, with North’s guitar completely (no, I mean completely) drowning out the drums and bass (pro tip for bands: don’t do that, not ever), and yes, he shreds like Randy Rhoads, but what am I even supposed to say about a demo tape meant to get this dude a job with Buckcherry or whatever he’s doing? Sorry, but, well, batter up! D-

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, Oct. 23, comes two days after my birthday, why didn’t you get me anything, but first some analysis. Last month I scribbled a few thoughts about the troubles Ed Sheeran was running into after he fired Macklemore from this year’s tour owing to a political stance (which wasn’t really a political stance, just simply a lose-lose situation that was forced onto Sheeran by peripheral fat cats in the music industry). Now as I write this, the internet’s decided to leave Sheeran alone and chase its latest villain, James Hetfield of Metallica, who made a similar non-statement to a Las Vegas crowd on Oct. 10, to wit: “Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their [baloney]. OK? We are here … no [baloney] … we’re here to forget about all the outside [baloney], OK?” Now, given that Metallica has no morbidly rich dude dictating whom they can or can’t have as guests on their tour, his wisest move would have been to keep his mouth shut and let people process all the sociopolitical stuff they read on the internet on their own time, so of course the non-statement turned him into the internet’s guest of (dis)honor for days. My own takeaway landed on multiple choice: Either Hetfield was honestly trying to keep “politics” out of his music or he was looking to insert himself into the political conversation, which couldn’t hurt, since the band hasn’t put out a decent album in many years now. Either way, like the Sheeran debacle, the blowback revealed the public’s evolving attitude toward celebrities, or at least the parasocial relationships they have with them. Like it or not, the vintage Frank Zappa quote “Shut up and play your guitar” has never felt more relevant than it does now, but let’s stay on track by discussing Shabazz Palaces, a Seattle-based avant-hip-hop group led by Ishmael Butler, who called himself “Butterfly” when he was in the jazz-rap trio Digable Planets. Their eighth album, It’s a Style Sport, is the full-length followup to 2024’s Exotic Birds of Prey, which had something of an Egyptian feel; this album’s lead single “Ahh World (I Won The Alpha Bet)” sounds appropriately bleeding-edgy and, more importantly, underground, cheaply made but robust, if that makes any sense.

• And the cleverest stage name of ever goes to Canadian indie-glam dude Art d’Ecco, whose sixth album, Scheele’s Green, streets this week. The second single is called “Disappear Here,” and if you want to know exactly what it sounds like, imagine Ric Ocasek of The Cars singing for a band that wants to revive the sound of 1969-era Stooges but with a half-assed saxophone solo. Needless to say there is no new ground broken here.

• In case you have a subscription to Us Weekly and thus an interest in celebrity news, before dating Chrissy Teigen, R&B/soul singer/pianist John Legend was allegedly involved with socialite and musician Wafah Dufour according to various internet news sites, the estranged niece of Osama bin Laden, all of which means literally nothing to people who don’t collect weird factoids. Legend’s new album, Muse, was co-written and produced by Pharrell Williams, including the single “Fireflies,” which features a simple, dark-sounding piano loop that I found pretty neat.

• We’ll wrap up the week with Gus Dapperton, a gender-bending, fashion-allergic bedroom-indie singer from Warwick, N.Y. “Don’t Let Me Down,” the featured single from his new full-length 4 Dear Life, is what you’d hear if Kate Havnevik went yacht-techo, it’s very pretty and completely brainless.

Featured Photo: She Past Away, Mizantrop and Ronny North, “Snowflakes of Green

Jess Williamson, A Mile South Of Heaven (Mexican Summer Records)

This country singer-songwriter has had plenty of success since leaving indie rock behind, which beckoned her to Los Angeles and away from the familiar surroundings of her native Texas, which made her think hard about what she really wanted out of life. Cut to now, when she’s finally comfortable with splitting her time between both places, and now that she’s settled in, her voice has become a marvel in a world of airy Kellie Picklers, falling somewhere between Loretta Lynn and Janis Joplin; it perfectly captures the dichotomy she’s been wrestling with since her emergence: One minute she’s waxing wistful/semi-regretful about her old life (“Hum Of The City”), the next she’s Chappell Roan-ing about the joys of being a simple country chick (“High Heels and Blue Jeans”), and all the while, producer Shooter Jennings is squeezing John Schreffler’s pedal steel for everything he can get. A marvelous record that couldn’t be more open-hearted. A+

Death Valley Girls, Welcome To Earth (Mexican Summer Records)

Here on the East Coast, we hear news stories about the seemingly endless fires in California and tend to think, “What, did the last one ever even stop?” But to Californians it’s personal; they know the whens and wheres, such as 2025’s Eaton Fire, a catastrophe that started in the San Gabriel Mountains and was blown by a powerful Santa Ana wind event into such towns as Altadena, which, it’s said, got the worst of it. This indie/post-punk band’s singer-leader Bonnie Bloomgarden lost her home to that fire, a disaster that’s covered here without any subtlety in the Cream-meets-Strawberry Alarm Clock-tinged “How Losing Everything in the Fire Taught Me to Love Myself,” a tune that’s appropriately morose, but elsewhere there be garage-party sounds that come off like The Go-Gos covering an Au Revoir Simone tune (the Lords Of The New Church-reminiscent “Basic Witch”) or vice versa (“Message From the Venus Flower,” in which Sarah Safaie’s saxophone jacks the ’80s vibe into the roof). Nothing in-your-face here but there’s undeniable energy. B+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, Oct. 16, will come and go largely unnoticed aside from the slew of new albums that will be blapped into the zeitgeist, the least interesting of which to me at least is COOKIE HAPPENED (yes, stylized in caps), the new album from Eels, which continues to be the indie-rock solo vehicle for Mark Oliver Everett of Los Feliz, California. Why am I such a jerk about Eels? Because I’ve never understood the appeal at all, which tracks, because I didn’t listen to any of “E’s” music until 2009’s Hombre Loco when I forced myself to review it, which came way after (and even his fans acknowledge this) the band’s peak, meaning his first two albums, a mini-streak that ended with 1998’s Electro-Shock Blues. That one cemented Everett’s legend as an edgy-beardy artist emerging just in time to dazzle Generation Awkward with innovative ways of exploring extreme grief (a couple of family tragedies in his case), which was nice and all, but he’s never really ever changed the formula (quiet-skronky-orchestral-rinse-repeat) in any significant way since. Obviously that isn’t to say he hasn’t been through some terrible stuff (including choosing the totally wrong women from time to time, of course) but it’d be super-great to hear something melodically captivating from him, given that his brand is soft-focused eclecticism with a Beach Boys falsetto. But sure, I’ll give the single “Cap In Hand” a shot, let me wait for YouTube to force-feed me the 9 billionth paid political ad I’ve been subjected to today from either John Sununu or Chris Pappas, which will of course be followed by an ad for the other dude who’s running to represent the Granite State in the U.S. Senate, can you even believe all this endless monstrousness every time you log on or turn on your teevee? Here we go. Oh come on, this tune sounds like a Guess Who graveyard-soul filler track from 1971 (by the way, that’s another criticism Eels fans often level against Everett, that his last 12 albums have been mostly filler), but at least his voice is more croaky and raggedy than ever, like it’s reminding me that I need to put cough drops on this week’s grocery list.

• The Avalanches are an Australian electronic band that specializes in “plunderphonics,” a genre in which music is created patchwork-style by slapping together samples of popular musical pieces (that’s different from a mashup, in case you’re older than 20). Whatever, these guys have a new album, No Bad Memories, spearheaded by the single “Far Away,” which seems fine to me, a crazy-busy drum ’n’ bass rinseout that samples Doug Firebaugh’s “Empty Canvasses” and slathers breakbeats over it, I don’t really mind it at all.

• British singer Rachel Chinouriri likes Lily Allen a lot, let me try to contain my excitement. Her new LP is titled I think I spoke too soon (yes, stylized in lowercase, in order to maintain balance in the universe, or at least in this week’s column). The single is “One Song Away From Crying,” a pleasant “P.Y.T.”-like bubblegum-makeout track that’s got a few interesting things going on with the overlays, though not enough to keep it from sounding like the typical background track you hear when a YouTube influencer is showing off all the free makeup swag she just received in the mail.

• We’ll close with Los Angeles indie band Dummy, whose new album Do You Love The Color Of The Sky includes the slacker-electro-dance single “Full Spectrum Dominance,” whose loopy wah-wah pedal beat gets old after the first minute. Did that sound grumpy, I can never tell.

Featured Photo: Jess Williamson, A Mile South Of Heaven and Death Valley Girls, Welcome To Earth

Remy Wolf, Mud (Island Records)

There’s a possibility that Sia Furler’s voice is too obscure (or dated; after all, it’s been a whole two years and four months since her last record) to be cited as a soundalike for this Palo Alto-bred pop diva; most music journos throw out Lola Young as a reference and call it an article, but either way she’s in the same pew with, you know, Chappell Roan and such. The days when she was singing pure unadulterated bubblegum on 2024’s Big Ideas are long past, never mind her early taste of fame as a teen contestant on American Idol as a high school senior; these days this singer’s trying to cleanse her emotional palate of the taste of tour burnout, addiction problems and a few disastrous relationships; this one focuses instead on something of a soul cleanse. The bloopy, laid-back, Lorde-pilfering, self-body-shaming “Twiggy” is precisely the sort of angst-wringing, swear-filled, arena-ready singalong that’s been the only sort of thing that’s seemingly able to make a buck these days; “Bottle” gets its edge from an acoustic guitar arpeggio that’s not hideously common in the (now ridiculously overcrowded) genre. Another country heard from, as they used to say. A

Foghat, Live & Loud Across The U.S.A. (Foghat Records)

Boomers — the generation that Generation Z only recently stopped making insulting TikToks about, mostly because they’re their doting, cookie-baking grandparents and not their naggy parents, who are mostly Generation X, the generation that’s currently getting no respect at all online despite all the life-triage they’re doing for their whippersnappers — remember this British blues-rock band quite vividly for their 1977 Foghat Live album, which catapulted them into superstar status. Everyone had a copy of the thing, a gigantic record that sounds like all-out war on party poopers: You can practically hear the giant beach balls bouncing off people’s heads while they play hits like “Fool For The City” and “Slow Ride.” Hyper-aggressive blues rock with brain-squeezing guitar solos was the thing back then, and the album was as ’70s as it got, and then time went on. There’s an unfortunate New Hampshire connection to the band’s most recent chapter, namely the death of guitarist Rod Price in Wilton in 2005, according to Wikipedia, whose mastery over slide guitar has never faced a serious challenge until, well, this LP. Along with singer Dave Peverett, Price’s “bottleneck” sound was instantly identifiable, but drummer Roger Earl, the last remaining original member, has done an amazing job putting together a very similar sounding band, led by slide guitarist Bryan Bassett. This collection of live performances takes a minute to explode, but yeah, the same party-up energy is there. I’m not exaggerating, either; their 2023 album Sonic Mojo remained on the Billboard Top 10 Blues Albums chart for 34 weeks, quite deservedly. Give it a shot. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Like a wicker Hobby Lobby cornucopia filled with rotten cabbages (and that reminds me, I need to put an alert on my phone for next year so I don’t miss the five whole weeks of late summer when Bartlett pears are in season, all yellow and soft and tasty, not hard, green, pear-shaped things that taste like someone’s desk), Friday, Oct. 9, will arrive with a smorgasbord of new albums, for your ears! Like every week, there are some that interest me, but let’s get the other stuff out of the way first, starting with the new one from Michigan’s most shameless Led Zeppelin wannabe band, Greta Van Fleet, called Palace For The People! I hope that by now they’ve finally gotten tired of ripping off Zep’s 1975 album Physical Graffiti (back when Zep was ripping off tunes from people like Sleepy John Estes) and have graduated to ripping off Zeppelin in their Led Zeppelin III era (when they were ripping off Stephen Foster and various obscure singers from the 1800s), but I’m sure I’ll be disappointed; I’m betting the new single “Tear It Down” will be what they imagine punk is supposed to sound like, some fast number like Zep’s “Communication Breakdown” or something, but let me go peek. Ah, it sounds pretty cool for the first part, but then it digs around in the trash for some second-generation depleted-soil Zep with a Southern rock flavor, in this case Heart’s “Crazy For You,” and why did they get so cheap with the background vocals? They sound like they were singing through a (totally vintage!) toaster. You know, it’s really lucky for these imbeciles that the real Led Zeppelin guys already own all the medieval castles they could ever want and have been pretending to encourage them, because they could sue them to Jupiter and any judge who’s ever had a radio in their car would throw them in the slammer for eleventy billion years (I’d place a joke about Sammy Davis Jr.’s old “Here Comes The Judge” Laugh-In bit here but all you twerking Bieber brats would just look at me like I stepped on one of your day-glo orange Crocs; trust me, the ’Fleets would probably sound a lot less like a tribute band if they all received a few giant foam-gavel blows to their heads).

• Aaand continuing, ugh, I suppose I could give a listen to the new Sheryl Crow album Pick You Up but I don’t wanna, OK, actually why not, we’ll get to something decent, just chill. The lyrics to the single “Freedom Bus” are completely calorie-free, something about “hate is bad”; form-wise the tune uses the second template of the only three she ever uses, the slow, really boring one where she microwaves something from The Beatles, in this case “Don’t Let Me Down,” will it ever end.

• But without further ado we should move onto something that’s practically guaranteed not to get me reaching for my big gallon jug of Pepto Bismol, because look, it’s A Man From The Future, the newest album from English synth-pop kings Pet Shop Boys, a concept album focused on mathematician Alan Turing! Yup, the single “Let The Music Play” is indeed awesome, a re-drawn low-key/gloom-pop version of the original 1984 neo-disco hit from Shannon, vocals courtesy of 66-year-old Carroll Thompson, known as “the queen of lovers’ rock.” Nothing to hate here.

• We’ll end with British drone/space-rock kooks Gnod, whose new LP, Chronicles of Gnowt Vol 2, will surely appeal to fans of crazed noise-rock. “Old Gold” is a Rickenbacker bass-driven assault on the senses, if that’s your jam.

Featured Photo: Remy Wolf, Mud and Foghat, Live & Loud Across The U.S.A.

Satoko Fujii Orchestra Berlin, Second Attempt (Libra Records)

Jazz artist Fujii is known for her world-class improvisational piano work and finding the best collaborators available, talents that combine here in an oft-unsettling but undeniably musical form of ad hoc aural dada. On paper, a near-full horn section comprises the “orchestral” part of this experiment, but many other sounds come into play as well, including nontraditional ones (reflecting on all the turmoil that’s engulfed the world of late, one of the Lego-like sound-blocks inserted here has newspapers as its “instrument,” that is to say the musicians were tasked with extracting sounds out of them through tearing, crumpling or reading them. Other bizarre things are aboard, of course; in “Part 1” we hear Liz Kosak’s synth emulate humpback whale-song; “Part 2” features the drummer tandem of Michael Griener and Peter Orins futzing around with glitch sounds under a classic-sounding brutalist Japanese cinematic theme reminiscent of Akira Ifukube (of the earliest Godzilla films), all of which eventually starts spiraling into some noisy ad hoc jamming. “Part 3” reaches for a woozy, ethereal, unsettling vibe. As always, “good” improv is in the eye of the beholder; I had no problem dealing with the majority of this. A-

Desolat, People As Idiots & Idiots As Leaders (Reptilian Records/Exotic Fever Records)

To be honest, the things that got me interested enough in this Vienna, Austria “hardcore punk” band’s new LP to put this on the docket were (1) the album title, because come on, and (2) the fact that there are count ’em nine record labels helping to distribute the record worldwide, a factoid I wanted to bring to the attention of local bands who are putting out their own records. The band’s contracted with nine different labels to release this one, you see, including ones in France, Germany, Austria, U.K., Netherlands and two in the U.S., a pretty smart strategy that just wasn’t ever done in the past by DIY bands. Regarding the snarky quotation marks around “hardcore punk,” I wouldn’t say they’re that, more of a raw, stripped-down indie metal band similar to the ones Earache Records was hawking in the Aughts, the shorthand of which would go something like “Boris with no budget whatsoever,” a sound that actually works in our end-times. Put it this way: This was what I’d envisioned “punk metal” evolving into when the term first surfaced in the ’80s; it’s part Black Flag and part Black Sabbath, what one might call “awkward doom.” It’s quite cool. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• No brakes, baby, we’re suddenly into the first CD release Friday of October, on the 2nd! Now, in case you don’t know — and why would you? — Cancel Me (I’m Tired) is the second album by South London seven-piece electro-punk band Fat Dog, a group that could be considered England’s techie answer to The Hives, which means they act crazy and insane on stage, but since they’re from England and play expensive synthesizers that would fritz out if someone barfed on them, they’re more polite, as opposed to The Hives, who are Swedish and therefore don’t care about what Americans think of them, and besides, they have slightly better universal health care than Britain, so they’re just like “Neener America, come beat our heads in, at least we don’t have to sell our houses to pay for a poorly timed chipmunk bite.” So there’s that, and just to clue into what Fat Dog is about, not that it’d ever be on the test in any sane world, I watched one of their live videos, taken at the Pinkpop festival in the Netherlands earlier this year. The band’s two drummers are pretty lively, but the rest of the guys were even more tame than I’d expected, more like Daft Punk or LMFAO, like, you can’t get too wild when you’re plugged into all sorts of electronic gear, you know how it goes (let’s admit it, most soundsystem shows are about as exciting as watching someone try to correct a formula in an Excel spreadsheet). But whatever, the album’s title track is the first single; it’s fun and kind of funky and the vocals have a sort of Gravity Kills bullhorned effect on them, which I’ve never minded.

• That brings us to Walt Disco, a glam-rock/art-pop crew from Scotland that’s been making albums since 2022 and yet almost no one in the U.S. has ever heard of them, let’s change that now shall we, especially since they’re going for broke by making their third album self-titled. Well, will you listen to that, the newest single “Don’t Do This Alone” isn’t bad at all, kind of like a 2020s version of Bowie mixed with The Cure. There’s really nothing wrong with it at all; it definitely has a sleepy-chilly autumnal feel to it, and no, that doesn’t mean that I’ve suddenly stopped hating pumpkin spice, that’s something that’ll never happen, I assure you.

• Much to the disappointment of my first-ever editor from back in the days, I’ve never been big on The Smiths, mostly because I’ve wholeheartedly disliked every song of theirs I’ve ever heard, but that doesn’t mean there might not be something to like about this next one, The Age Of Everything, the fifth solo album from original Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, so I’ll try it. Morrissey isn’t on this record, which bodes well, Yup, the kickoff single, “It’s Time,” is appropriately ’80s and jangly and harmless in the vein of The Alarm or whatnot. It’s got a little energy to it, it’s not bad.

• Alt-country musician Greg Freeman is based in Burlington, Vermont, but is nevertheless on the rise, sort of. If you’re a confirmed hipster you may know him from his 2025 single “Curtain,” in which his voice sounds like a cross between David Byrne and the dude from Clinic, which I don’t mind at all. His new LP All Set The Bone includes the tune “Cahokia,” a high-energy jangle-pop joint that sounds a lot more put together than his previous stuff but his voice is still delightfully off-key here and there.

• And finally it’s Miranda Lambert, who placed third in 2003’s Nashville Star talent competition but probably should have won, not that I’d know. Crisco, her newest album, spotlights the title track, a syrupy Dolly Parton-flavored trifle that combines cowboy-hat slide guitar with ’70s disco just to annoy me.

Featured Photo: The Church, Lacuna & Ibibio Sound Machine, Chopping.