Category: Albums

The Grownup Noise, No Straight Line in the Universe (self-released)

The focus of this Boston-based act, which has had a rapidly revolving door-load of short-term members, is bridging the gap between Americana and indie-rock, which, it seems to me, has been handled quite well by Wilco to name just one band. These tunes are full of great sounds and some very deft musicianship, but there’s more twee here than indie, and not enough bluegrass to qualify as high-grade Americana. That pretty much sums up the failure — or resistance — on the part of critics to “classify” them properly, not that that’s as important as being recognized as a band that has great songs, but knowing that these guys are happily well-entrenched in the Boston scene, (still) with all its Evan Dandos and Morphines, should answer some people’s questions. Their fatal flaw is singer Paul Hansen, whose unflustered, bland tenor doesn’t do the songs much justice, but that’s a matter of taste of course. In the end it’s a Boston alt-rock band that’s a cross between Guster and, jeez, I don’t know, Yo La Tengo; I can’t feign enthusiasm for it. B- —Eric W. Saeger

Jennie Arnau, A Rising Tide (self-released)

The middle of the Americana/alt-country road — and I mean right in the middle, where it doesn’t pay to remain very still because a zillion other artists might run you over — is where this New Yorker finds her comfort zone. She’s been out of it for 15 years until this album, which is said to exhibit “southern charm meets New York grit, with a healthy dose of heart,” which might describe Sheryl Crow, to whom Arnau’s been compared, but nah, I’d say the tunes feel like a more organic Waxahatchee. The instrumentation is another matter, an all-hands-on-deck affair that runs the gamut from Sade-tinted yacht-pop (“Sail Away”) to Lucinda Williams cowboy-waltzing (“Mabel”) to Smoke Fairies banjo-folk (“The King”). “Young and Alone,” the pensive but wispy focus track, is an honest labor of love calling into question the broken system that’s resulted in countless school shootings across the country; she’ll be donating proceeds from the song to Everytown for Gun Safety. B+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yay, new albums coming out on Friday, Feb. 20! The new-album race is heating up as we speak, now that the holidays are over and Valentine’s Day is over and the most pathetic Super Bowl performance by the New England Patriots since their 46-10 loss to the Chicago Bears in 1986 is over, like, there’s really no days off for you slackers to look forward to until Memorial Day, unless you choose to finally surrender a few of the 300 comp days you’ve hoarded or, in the case of most workers, just quit your job and move back in with your ex! It’s all good, do whatever feels right is what I say, and maybe a few of these new albums will cheer you up, who knows, but of course the biggest “music news” of February was the Super Bowl halftime show led by Puerto Rican reggaeton-rapper Bad Bunny, because no one could shut up about it on their social media whatevers! For no reason whatsoever, it turned into a controversy, because Bunny sang and rapped in Spanish, which one would normally expect, given that that’s, you know, what he does; to me it was a cool thing for the NFL to do again, recognizing Latin culture as a major component in the country’s DNA, and that’s really about it. I didn’t find the music to be all that groundbreaking, like, there’s all sorts of great reggaeton, merengue, salsa and mambo to be found if you spend a few seconds looking, for instance there’s the five-hour ¡Con Salsa! show on WBUR radio (90.9 FM in Boston) every Saturday starting at 10 p.m. if you could use some perfect afterparty ambience (you can also stream the whole show on the station’s website), but either way the vibe is almost universally positive, so what’s the harm? Sure, some people took the halftime show as an affront somehow, but they probably didn’t mind that Chubby Checker and The Ronettes played at 1988’s halftime show or that Gloria Estefan and Stevie Wonder played 1999’s “Celebration of Soul, Salsa and Swing” halftime show, and so on and so forth. Now, one conservative buddy of mine on Facebook said he simply didn’t like Latin music and could leave it at that, which I commended him for. I mean, in the end, it’s younger people who buy albums, so trotting out the Rolling Stones again like they did in 2006 in order to trigger nostalgic feels in people who can barely remember the last time they had a legitimate Billboard No. 1 hit song (they didn’t come close that year) would be a bit of a disservice to the record-buying public, don’t you think? Whatever, I’m sure people will flip out over whoever plays next year’s Super Bowl halftime show, but for the record I’d be fine if they went country-indie-rock, like, say, with Mumford & Sons as the headliner, since they’re so much more relevant than Kings of Leon now. In fact, the Mumfords release their new LP, Prizefighter, this week, featuring the pretty-epic-pretty title track and “The Banjo Song,” which is similarly sweeping and epic. I like them, the end.

• Florida power-pop band New Found Glory release their 11th album Listen Up this week. They haven’t charted for at least six years, because boring, but the new single “Beer and Blood Stains” has a pretty filthy guitar sound and actually has a pulse.

• Also this week, electroclash icon Peaches releases No Lube So Rude, and of course the title track is awesome. It is made of dubstep, goth-industrial and diva-pop smothered in pure lunacy.

• We’ll close with Hilary Duff, aka Lizzie McGuire to people who are around 35. The new record, Luck Or Something, includes the single “Roommates,” which is pretty and pleasant, sort of like a kinder gentler Alanis Morissette. — Eric W. Saeger

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: The Grownup Noise, No Straight Line in the Universe and Jennie Arnau, A Rising Tide

Amanda McCarthy, Looking For The Light (self-released)

Surely you recognize this country-pop singer-songwriter’s name if you’ve followed New Hampshire music news for any amount of time. After racking up a good number of big-time opening gigs and awards for her winning writing and big-time sound, she left the area for the glitz of Nashville. It sounds to me like she’s on the right track with this album, which is only her second and really just needs to be heard by the right Music City VIP at the right time. This one opens with the instant ear-grabber “Vodka,” whose rich and delicious chorus evokes peak KT Tunstall right from the gate, after which she flexes her bluegrass/Americana muscles with “Normal,” a deep, lush and well-constructed joint that has a slight Wilco flavor to it. “Fine” tells me that she’s been listening to Chappell Roan with an eye toward improving the formula; “LOL WTF” shoots for the Tay-Tay demographic and hits nothing but net while vibe-checking 1990s Wilson Phillips. I have no complaints whatsoever. A+

Maria Schneider, American Crow (ArtistShare Records)

It’s a little unsightly that this EP isn’t listed in the Minnesota composer/jazz orchestra leader’s Wikipedia page, but between crowdfunding her work (ArtistShare was the first crowdfunding site), composing music and wrangling an orchestra, it’s unsurprising that things get lost in the shuffle. Clocking in around 30 minutes, this record is an astonishing achievement, a brilliantly elaborate post-bop big-band effort with touches of rock; it’s one that needs to be heard to experience its symphonic ebbs and flows. Schneider, a multiple Grammy winner who was a 2021 finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in music in 2021, has a deeply organic, breathe-in-breathe-out touch, dedicated to “the art of listening,” as she puts it; Wayne Shorter described her ensemble as rendering “the very stuff of life into music.” This tuneage is brilliantly but unobtrusively listenable, fit for practically any set of ears; the constant sparring between guitarist Jeff Miles and trumpeter Mike Rodriguez is claimed to mimic our post-cooperative world, characterizing “a society at verbal war, screaming from their echo chambers.” Don’t we know it. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Ack, look out, the next Friday-load of new albums will be dumped into your streaming service on Feb. 13, yes, a Friday the 13th, as if my expectations weren’t, as they are every week, already lower than the Earth’s magma layer! Actually there are three Friday the 13ths this year, which is better than five or 12 of them at least, so there’s that; we simply must stay positive in these Lovecraftian end times, or Cthulhu will have beef! Speaking of beef, Charli XCX is said to have a problem with Taylor Swift, according to people who take that nonsense seriously, but never mind that, because this week Charli is releasing the soundtrack to the new Wuthering Heights movie, the (literally) 30th film adaptation of the 1847 Emily Brontë novel to be burped into theaters since 1920, but this one is special because big budget or whatever. Far as that goes, the other day the 2026 film’s star, Margot Robbie, tweeted this after she invited a bunch of her girlfriends to a private screening: “Twenty women were like frothing at the mouth. They were like rabid dogs. There was screaming and sobbing. If Jacob walked in right now, they’d eat him.” See that, folks, this is why it’s difficult to be a man in this timeline, you gals only care about one thing, but anyway, a lady friend replied to that tweet with “This is the kind of press you do when you know your movie is terrible and you are desperate to drum up business,” which I suppose is kind of cynical, but I’ll never know for sure, because if I ever do watch a film version, it won’t be this Barbie one or whatever, it’ll be the most iconic version, the classic 1939 one featuring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, but that sort of depends on whether I ever run out of new episodes of Cheaters, because I know I’ve seen one or two PBS versions, so I already know that it’s just a story about dealing with a boyfriend who kind of sucks, don’t we all? Of course, Charli XCX was a great choice for soundtracking this new remake, because she’s sort of like Chappell Roan except for being like Madonna, just check out the teaser single, “Chains Of Love,” from this album! Naturally it is epic, like if Enya and Lorde recorded a duet, echo-y Celtic drums and gigantic eerie choruses stolen from Highlander or whatever. We bad boyfriends are the source of all art!

• Gogol Bordello, the New York-based Romani/Ukrainian-flavored punk band, isn’t done causing political trouble or whatever their problem is, no sir, because their new album, We Mean It Man, is heading to your Pirate Bay outlets as we speak! The title track is a masterwork of 1980s synths, antique robot vocal effects, and, of course, manic spazzing. I have no idea what they’re even trying to say, but the video’s worth it for the fake eight-bit graphics alone!

• Australian indie band Howling Bells drops their new album Strange Life this week! The single, “Heavy Lifting,” is a sleazy little thing with a shoegaze beat and Karen O-style vocals; it isn’t very special at all in my opinion, but it might be the coolest thing you’ve ever heard, I just don’t know!

• Lastly we have Converge, a metalcore band from Salem, Mass., which means I must be nice to them up to a point. They have been around since 1990 and are said to be very ferocious, with interesting lyrical concepts, but I’ve never listened to anything by them, so I assume they sound like Tool but with more heaviness, not that that’d be difficult, but we’ll find out right now as I preview the title track from their new LP, Love Is Not Enough! Yup, nope, it sounds pretty much like Cannibal Corpse, not Tool, so there it is, folks, the first time I’ve been wrong since 1998.

Featured Photo: Amanda McCarthy, Looking For The Light and Maria Schneider, American Crow (ArtistShare Records)

Transatlantic Radio, “City Of Angels” Midnight Transmission (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

Any time a press release bumbles into my inbox touting a “supergroup,” I take the bait, thinking “We’ll just see about that, won’t we?” In the case of the song in question here, an advance single from this hard-rock/AOR band’s upcoming debut LP Midnight Transmission, “supergroup” feels a bit hyperbolic: For starters, guitarist RJ Ronquillo has a YouTube channel with, I’d assume, eleventy-blah-blah-gorillion subscribers, not that he doesn’t have a great guitar sound; his comes off like a precision chainsaw that kind of wants to be a six-string bass, if you know what I mean. The other dudes are mostly highly paid journeymen, including Chris Reeve, who was drummer number four or five for Filter for a few years. You get the idea; basically they’re a hard-rock version of Toto that wishes they’d thought of Trans Siberian Orchestra’s Christmas-metal trip first (see the connection here, anyone? Trans Siberian/Transatlantic?). OK, fine, if I quibbled over every bit of unoriginality I encountered every week I’d never have room to talk about anything else, but hoo boy, this tune steals the riff from Trans Siberian’s biggest crowd-pleasing rockout, “First Snow.” I mean it’s fine other than that, I guess; Swedish vocalist Mattias Osbäck pulls off a decent Glenn Hughes, but that’s faint praise if I ever — OK, let’s just stop there. C —Eric W. Saeger

The Stripp, Life Imitates Art (self-released)

OK, this one reaches your overworked, overtired eyeballs courtesy of Friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny, who Facebooked me as I was wrapping up this week’s critically acclaimed column. First he tried to get me to talk about Brass Against’s cover version of the Pink Floyd song where the opera lady sings all opera-y, and I was like “Oh, you think that’s an awesome girl singer?!” and sent him a link to Delerium’s “Heaven’s Earth,” and then he melted into butter after the chorus ate his entire head, so I went back in our now mile-long message thread to this album so I could finish this column and go watch my shows and sip my hot Café Vienna toddy. Dan loves this Australian band, who profess to sound like Motorhead, which they don’t at all, firstly because they have a girl singer who’s not possessed of much in the way of je nais sais qua, but secondly because Motorhead’s guitars sound like a bear crashing its way into a museum, not like these guys, whose core sound is more like 1980s-era Black Flag mixed with early Kiss. But! There’s something to be said for early punk and Kiss, so if they get a new singer I’ll give them an A. That is my price, take it or leave it, and now Petunia and I will continue bingeing reruns of The Nanny. B- —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Keep on truckin’, fam, like they used to say when Woodrow Wilson was president, we’re already into February, the last full month of pure frozen misery, I can practically smell the deep-fried botulism wafting from the hilariously undercooked fish at the cheapest beach-food shack I can find when it’s unbearably hot out again and a few of you people actually start posting “I can’t wait for pumpkin-spice everything to get here again” on your Instagrams and Roblox gaming Discords, can we please get to the part where global warming turns New England’s weather into Georgia’s weather like they keep promising! Unfortunately, though, we’re trapped here together, but I’m keeping snug and super-warm buried under all the spam coming into my emailbox from bands and various people pretending to be “important cogs in the music industry,” asking me if I can get down to Austin, Texas, in mid-March for the 40th annual South By Southwest (SXSW) conference, I’m so warm and comfy right now! They all want me to show up and get free tickets, all these bands, and I’ll admit that it makes me feel special, but would I attend this “conference” if my airfare and hotel accommodations and car rental were paid? No, because Wire isn’t playing, and they’re the only band left on Earth that I’d actually sacrifice some American dollars to see, and neither is Mac Sabbath, the joke band that plays Black Sabbath songs while disguised as McDonaldland characters like Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar and whatnot, I told you guys about them, remember? No? Well, I’d go see them too, but no, I have no wish to see any of this year’s SXSW headliners, a list that includes All-American Rejects, Don Toliver, Junior H, and Mau P, but hey man, if you’re going to SXSW and want to co-write this column for an issue, I’ll tell you what, message me on Facebook or Bluesky (I’m barely on Twitter anymore, just like everyone else) and you can send me your thoughts on those four bands, and I’ll listen to them and add my two cents about why I think you’re wrong about them, sound fair? But look at how much we’ve digressed from business, specifically the business of the albums coming out on Feb. 6, for example The Fall-Off, the new one from North Carolina rapper J. Cole! Purported to be his final record, it features a tune designated/titled “Disc 2 Track 2” that features a sunny cheerful beat and (thankfully non-flashy) flows that are pretty masterful.

• Ha ha look, a new album from Nick Jonas, who used to be married to one-note sadgirl actress Sophie Tucker before she had her “what on Earth am I doing marrying a Jonas brother” moment! Oops, wait, this just in, the former Mr. Sophie Tucker was Joe, not Nick; Nick’s married to Priyanka Chopra, management couldn’t care less about the error! Sunday Best is the album, and “Gut Punch” is the single, featuring lightly AutoTuned boyband vocals; it rips off Katy Perry’s “Roar,” not that there’ll be a lot of royalties to grab from a lawsuit.

• L.A.-based emo/dream-pop whatchamallits Silversun Pickups release Tenterhooks this week. “New Wave” is a loud, depressing outburst with math-rock guitars, something you’d hear from Bono if his dog died and he was kind of metal.

• We’ll end this unbelievably disastrous week with Puma Blue, “the alias of artist, producer and romantic, Jacob Allen.” Wikipedia tells me he sings in falsetto, which he does in the title track from his new LP, Croak Dream. It’s pretty cool, jazzy yet street-wise, I don’t hate it at all. He’ll be at the small but great-sounding Crystal Ballroom in Somerville, Mass., on March 6. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Transatlantic Radio, “City Of Angels” Midnight Transmission and The Stripp, Life Imitates Art

KMFDM, Enemy (Metropolis Records)

This Hamburg, Germany-based industrial band has always been mandatory listening for safety-pin goths with aircraft-carrier-sized chips on their shoulders. I consider them Kiss for anarchists: crazy hair, piercingly loud fashions, and an unrelenting desire to smash the western world’s end-stage capitalist system. They’ve nailed the aesthetic with rage anthems before (“Free Your Hate” is still my favorite), but can they still compete in these sociopolitical times, which are obviously so [nervous hysterical laughter]? Well, things don’t get started until a few songs in: The rather childish title track sounds like something they thought would sound anthemic but doesn’t, and then comes “Oubliette,” which futzes around with Judas Priest-style riff-metal, which was never their strong suit. But then comes the echo-y, apocalyptic-sounding “L’Etat,” in which they remember that their biggest competitor is Rammstein; it’s one of the best things they’ve ever done. Resident hot chick Lucia Cifarelli steps in to sing the industrial-pop number “Vampyr,” sounding sweet during the verses and demon-rabid on the breaks of course, and — whoa, just hold it right there, they did get a new guitarist, and he can definitely shred. It’s OK! A-

Ben Rosenblum’s Nebula Project, The Longest Way Round (One Trick Dog Records)

Lot of fun, this one (if a bit scattershot with regard to focus), the latest release from award-winning (an ASCAP Young Jazz Composers award and two Downbeat awards, all in 2010) New York City-based pianist, accordionist and composer Rosenblum. Now, with regard to the parenthetical caveat above, there’s nothing inherently wrong with shifting genres and such in order to cover a crazy-wide spectrum of world music, and I’d chalk Rosenblum’s predilection for it to his eye-popping range of experience: He’s played with Rickie Lee Jones, yes, but also Canadian-Indian singer Kiran Ahluwalia and Brazilian hand percussionist/Late Show Band member Nêgah Santos; his influences are deep and varied, from Brazilian forró to Irish reels and jigs to Bulgarian folkloric songs and Dominican merengue. Yes, there’s accordion on here when it fits the mood, but no mood — or flavor of joyful expressionism, let’s say — is off limits, it seems. One minute you’re madly bouncing around in a hydraulically fitted 1964 Impala, the next you’re being treated to some of the most lively post-bop you’ve ever heard. So the verdict? Open minds will absolutely love this. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Alrighty, my fellow cubicle-imprisoned office colleagues, January’s already almost out of the way, won’t be long before we’re all offline at the beach again, so let’s keep the agile AI synergy circling back and pivot to the new albums “hitting the streets” (prolly with nauseating wet flopping sounds) on Jan. 30, reach out if you want to ping my brains out or just network, my DMs are open! Now, folks, we’ve lost a lot of famous rock stars over the last few months, so let’s chat about it. The worst one for me was Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley, a boyhood hero of mine. I’d really been looking forward to the next time his band played at Tupelo Music Hall so I could mooch some passes and have a serious chat with him about maybe letting me try out to be his lead singer, or at least let me get up and sing some Zeppelin songs with him or something; he knew he was a godawful singer and I figured we would have gotten along since he was as much of a jackass as me and took very few things seriously. O Fortuna, guys, but the most recent one was of course Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, a loss that was the talk of social media for days. Funny story about Bob: Back in the mid-Aughts, I was writing a column for a corporate newspaper on the New Hampshire seacoast that’s nowadays mostly digitally distributed and no longer found in your 7-Elevens and such. Anyhow, I’d written a piece about how electronic music was going to take over sooner rather than later (again, this was a long time ago), and the next day, lo and behold, there was an email in my inbox from Weir, whose band Ratdog was in town. He must have been bored in town, because he mansplained around 900 words at me about how “guitar-based rock wasn’t going to go away,” which wasn’t what I’d said at all, so immediately I got defensive, thinking “who is this guy anyway,” because I knew and still know basically nothing about the Dead, and I assumed he was a second-banana guitarist hack they’d hired in the ’80s or ’90s, in other words I didn’t know that he had been an original founder of the Dead when they were still just a silly Mungo Jerry-style jug band. We had words, folks, angry words, like, I told him I thought the Dead were awful and I’d be embarrassed to be in a band like that, so he got mad and wrote back, “Oh definitely, I want YOUR life, sitting in your mom’s basement telling people to [censored] off.” From there it got really ugly — my editor at the time is the only one who saw the whole thing — and he somehow never invited me to Thanksgiving dinner, but all that aside, I feel bad for his fans, RIP Bob, which brings us to the new album from The Soft Pink Truth, titled Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever! It’s an experimental house music side-project from Drew Daniel, who’s half of the San Francisco duo Matmos, but there’s really nothing danceable at all about the first single “Time Inside the Violet”; it’s a bunch of violins and eerie weirdness, but you might love it, I don’t know.

• James Adrian Brown was the guitarist for the now-defunct U.K. alt-rock band Pulled Apart By Horses, and his debut solo LP is Forever Neon Lights. The single “Generator” is pretty neat, built over a noisy, catchy beat a la Wonky-era Orbital.

• French synthpop bro Sébastien Tellier releases his first album in six years, Kiss The Beast, led by the single “Thrill Of The Night (feat. Slayyyter & Nile Rodgers).” It sounds like early Madonna if that makes you happy.

• We’ll end the week with California-based emo-pop band Joyce Manor, and their new full-length I Used To Go To This Bar. The featured tune, “I Know Where Mark Chen Lives,” sounds exactly like Lit or Hoobastank or Dashboard Confessional etc.

Featured Photo: album covers for KMFDM, Enemy and Ben Rosenblum’s Nebula Project, The Longest Way Round

Djrum, Under Tangled Silence (Houndstooth Records)

It was way past time to cover this one — seven months to be exact — but better late than yadda yadda. According to — OK, most of the people who still profit from being involved in its scene, dubstep isn’t a dead genre at all, and we do need to admit that it really shouldn’t be. This British producer (Felix Manuel) was a music prodigy as a child, and his mastery of the piano is on full display here during many of the intro bits, which give off Beethoven (or Liberace, truth be told — let’s just say “aristocratic,” that’d be fine) vibes before (eventually, at the artist’s discretion) tabling beats that are promoted as “IDM” and whatnot by some but nevertheless owe a lot of their DNA to (you guessed it) Aphex Twin, Skrillex and Burial. Melodic, quirky and wickedly technical, this is the sort of stuff you want in your earbuds when you absolutely, positively must have an out-of-body experience because the professor’s lecture is so boring. Take opening track “A Tune For Us” for starters, comprising piano arpeggios, a ton of light synth layering and, you know, glitch to create the sonic equivalent of a lava lamp. Deeply immersive soundscaping throughout. A+ — Eric W. Saeger

Hoaxed, Death Knocks (Relapse Records)

This all-girl trio from Portland, Oregon, has gotten pretty Sabbath-y since acquiring new bassist/vocalist April Dimmick (from Soul Grinder, in case you track such things). This LP opens with “Where the Seas Fall Silent,” which wields the same tribal “party on, you crazed cannibal zombies” bashing as Sabbath’s “Hole In The Sky,” in other words if you hate it you hate all arena-metal. But this band is no Sabbath wannabe (otherwise Relapse Records wouldn’t have validated their parking stub when they came in to negotiate, trust me). “The Family” is raw, street-smart, and pretty freaking epic for a band that isn’t trying to do orchestra-metal; it’s what you might call “coven-metal,” you know, hard-rock for witches and such, which is my way of saying you should check it out, if not for the (really good) songwriting, than for the band’s tastefully low-rent but powerful sound. They’d probably do great opening for Rasputina or whatnot. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Everyone’s pretty much sobered up from the holidays, not that you can really tell, so it’s time to get down to serious business again, getting you people to buy new CDs and virtual albums, from the great Cloud in the sky! Yes, we’re into the new releases of Friday, Jan. 23, this week, but since one of you hopped into my Facebook to give me guff about what I said about KPop Demon Hunters last week, I watched about half the movie, just so I could feel what it’s like to be part of the audience that consumes — whatever that stuff is. For the sake of journalistic integrity, I wanted to feel what it’s like to be a teenage Generation Alpha music fan, so I prepped myself by eating a half-pound of Trolli Sour Blasting Crawlers, washing them down with a gallon of Mountain Dew Code Red, then ate two bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and a box of flaming chicken tenders, then filmed a TikTok of myself taking the “Skull Breaker Challenge” by getting kicked in the head by a horse (naturally it got only three views, one from my sister, one from my employer and one from a girl I dated in high school). Half-insane from diabetic coma and really really wanting a salad and some aspirin, I felt like I was ready to go all-in on the Hunters, so I went for it. So, OK, it’s not just a giant Lady Gaga ripoff, like, there’s some Katy Perry theft in there too, and I’ll admit it was kind of funny when the girls went ga-ga over the androgynous dudes in the boyband and popcorn started popping out of their eyes, but that joke got overdone fast and I didn’t laugh the second time. The animation was fine, twice as good as Disney’s Aladdin cartoon I’d say, but really, asking me, an award-winning arts critic, to watch KPop Demon Hunters is like expecting Meet The Press to bring on two 4-year-olds to debate whether or not the Federal Reserve board should keep interest rates high: Wasted on refined sugar as I was, I still lacked the supercharged pheromones that are required to find anything interesting about the movie, and no, I won’t eat any more Tide Pods to see if that does the trick. Instead, I’d like to get on with this week’s releases, so we’ll start with British singer-songwriter Louis Tomlinson, a member of (ugh) boyband One Direction! His new album, How Did I Get Here, features a tune called “Palaces” that straight-up steals the vibe from Flock Of Seagulls’ 1980s hit “I Ran” but adds nerdy boyband singing to the recipe, which doesn’t work at all during the first minute or so, but it does prove effective during the hooky chorus. It’s fine for what it is. Groan.

• British-American rapper IDK is said to be “around 80 percent as good as Kanye West” and/or “kind of boring,” but a lot of people think he’s awesome, probably mostly because he seems to pull in a lot of famous guest feats, which he does again in his upcoming new album Even The Devil Smiles, scheduled for release this Friday after a false start a couple of weeks ago. DMX’s estate allowed him to use some (bad-ass as always) vocal tracks on “Start To Finish.”

• Also this week, Washington, D.C.-born R&B singer Ari Lennox releases her third album, Vacancy, as the follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2022 LP Age/Sex/Location. This one’s title track is a bedroom-soul joint spotlighting her Roberta Flack-meets-Da Brat vocal stylings, with some sweary rapping from album producer Jermaine Dupuis.

• And finally we have seven-member Japanese R&B/hip-hop girl-group XG, with their debut full-length The Core. Front-loaded single “Gala” is pretty neat if you like glitch and progressive house beats; it’s pretty ritzy and next-generation if you ask me, which of course you always should. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Alter Bridge, Alter Bridge (Napalm Records) & Diane Coll, Strangely In Tune (self-released)

Bren Holmes, A Rush to the Start Lin (self-released)

Given that this guy is an original member of the Irish rock band The Young Dubliners, I was of course expecting to be deluged by tin whistles and fiddles and whatnot, but this has nothing of the sort. It’s more like something I’d expect from someone who’d eventually placed sixth in a season of The Voice, that sort of thing, evoking vanilla, dishwasher-safe songwriting hackery right off the bat with “Gloria,” which has a lot of Aughts-era echoes of Beach Boys and humdrum Bonnaroo bait. After that singularly unimpressive start we move on to “Don’t Say You Will,” which tacks in a pseudo-country Ryan Adams direction, a tune I suppose some would accept as semi-Irish-sounding only because the tempo would be fine for a jogging mix and the vocals are mildly uppity. “Ordinary World (for Sinéad)” is obviously a paean to Sinéad O’Connor, with lyrics checking off “defiance” and “sleeping eternally”; it’s a deeply pretty tune whose sentiments have aged enough for us to know that it’s a tune he squirreled away quite a long time ago. Aside from that highlight the songwriting is thuddingly average really. C+ —Eric W. Saeger

Crystal Lake, The Weight of Sound (Century Media Records)

This Tokyo, Japan-based metalcore outfit has been around since 2002, which is pretty amazing considering the supernova-level energy they bring to everything they do. They’re joined this time by a whole crowd of singers whose names are renowned in their bubble, leading off with Signs of the Swarm’s David Simonich, whose Chester Bennington precision takes some of the steam off album-opener “Everblack,” but it’s nevertheless a head-crusher, alternating between Dillinger Escape Plan-influenced math-metal and some guitar-sound experimentation that had me going “OK, that’s cool.” Jesse Leach from Killswitch Engage is here also, tasked with the boyband parts to balance out the room-temperature growling of John Robert Centorrino, the band’s full-time singer. At that point a picture emerges of a band that’s interested in expanding their range to symphonic metal or whatever (who isn’t?), but — and this is really my only problem with the album — Centorrino doesn’t possess that gear. That’s a shame. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Onward we press as one, an army of snark-meisters, to Friday, Jan. 16, another Friday dump of new albums! But first things first, I know a bunch of you little monsters have been laughing behind my back for being completely ignorant about the KPop Demon Hunters thing, and it won’t help that I have a written and signed note from my mom that says I’m deathly allergic to the very idea of a literal cartoon bubblegum band, so just to shut you guys up, I listened to some of their songs in direct violation of my doctor’s orders. As I predicted (what we call in the music journalism a “barely cursory review”), it’s catchy but derivative stuff, mostly because the art-hating cacodemons who threw the thing together just took a bunch of old Lorde and Britney Spears beats, hired the first girl singer who could pull off a really accurate Lady Gaga karaoke, and now there they sit, counting piles of money and laughing in their heated indoor swimming pools. As you know, none of that nonsense is my jam, and the only reason I bothered listening to that garbage was that I figured there was a one in a billion chance that there was something positive to be gotten from it, like maybe the “band” actually had an angle that might interest me, like maybe they used obscure vintage instruments, or drew upon influences like Siberian folk songs from the 10th century and simply jazzed them up or whatever. Of course, as always, it was a waste of my time; after 30 seconds of listening to microwaved Gaga tuneage I was like “OK, I know everything I’ll ever need to know about KPop Demon Hunters” and put on a Wire album to get the disgusting taste out of my ears. I plan never to listen to nor mention them again, but now you know how seriously I take my position as the state’s most highly decorated music journalist, that’s right, I do this for you, not to fatten my Patreon, which can be found in my socials. Anyway, subject change, what was I saying last week about old bands releasing eponymous albums, about how it’s a practice that was big during the Aughts and should have gone the way of Milli Vanilli and yet bands are still doing it, oh yes, I said that it was stupid, so, like clockwork, ’80s thrash-metal band Megadeth has decided to do just that with their new one, Megadeth! Now, the lead single, “I Don’t Care,” is something of a watershed moment, as it’s more Ramones-like than anything I’ve heard from them before, meaning it doesn’t have the same old “Metallica but with more Slayer” vibe that’s typified their oeuvre since the Ronald Reagan era, like, in the song’s video, their singer, Dave Mustaine, seriously doesn’t care if the world collapses, everyone should be skateboarding and smashing each other in the face with beer bottles. I concur.

• Speaking of couldn’t care less, Poppy is back to being Poppy after a brief period during which she tried to be Britney Spears or whatever. You may recall last year she did a collaboration with Babymetal for the handful of 13-year-old Snapchatters who hadn’t given up on her; she continues ripping off Meshuggah on her new album, Empty Hands! “Bruised Sky” is the single, and yup, there’s the Godzilla-bending-the-telephone-wires bassline and all the other essential nutrients, let’s move on.

• The title track from Lucinda Williams’ new LP World’s Gone Wrong rips off the beat from Don Henley’s “Heart Of The Matter,” but other than that it’s acceptable.
• Lastly, with their awkward singing, The Format is like a Loot Crate version of Hoobastank, but if you insist on listening to their music you may. Their newest album is Boycott Heaven, which will remind you of Weezer in case you just landed on this planet and have never heard of Weezer. Did I mention Weezer? —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Alter Bridge, Alter Bridge (Napalm Records) & Diane Coll, Strangely In Tune (self-released)