Category: Albums

Michael Des Barres, It’s Only Rock N’ Roll (Rock Ridge Music)

Most old people have heard of this dandy (that’s literally what he is; he inherited the title of Marquis from a 13th-century French ancestor) but are far more familiar with his ex-wife, Pamela, the most famous groupie in rock history. Musically he’s always been something of a non-starter; he was in Silverhead, Detective and a few other bands, and didn’t really make much of a splash before replacing Robert Palmer in Power Station just in time to front the band at the 1985 Live Aid concert. Ladies, he looks nothing like he does on this album cover nowadays, but far better for me to mock his music than that Peter Pan business. We open with “Dyna-Mite” — not the BTS tune but the MUD glam-rocker — and right off the bat I’m thinking Rocky Horror but in serious mode, you know, T. Rex all the way baby. This is supposed to be music from Des Barres’ salad days, but Slade’s “Cum On Feel The Noise” will make 99 percent of the world think of Quiet Riot and he can’t sing it for beans. Alice Cooper’s most boring song ever, “Eighteen,” gets a properly mediocre rendition. Etc. D+

HIM, When Love and Death Embrace The Best of HIM 1997-2003 (BMG Records)

Depending on whom you ask, Finland’s biggest-ever band is (usually) cited as being either Nightwish or Lordi, but this goth-metal act does get its mentions. They’ve been broken up for good since 2017, but it’s just as well I suppose, given that their heyday is celebrated in this comp, and besides, Nightwish has long since taken over their mantle. But what a time it was for these guys, back in the early days, their first one-off American appearance coming by way of none other than skateboarder/Jackass Bam Margera, and the rest is (mostly Finnish) history. Their (very Bauhaus-meets-Marilyn Manson) version of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper” is here, as is their po-faced rub of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” and it’s about at that point that most U.S. audiences check either in or out as far as what they’re familiar with insofar as this band’s oeuvre. If you ever wanted to hear Bauhaus on steroids, it’s this, however that strikes your fancy. A

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• This Friday, Oct. 18, is three days before my birthday, so if the gods are willing, there will be decent albums for me to listen to, so that I can bring you readers glad tidings of stuff you should be listening to, marking a double celebration! Now, you and I both know that the chances of that are pretty slim, like, the last time I checked, there weren’t going to be new albums coming out this week from, say, Wire and Skinny Puppy and Acumen Nation and Pet Shop Boys alongside recently discovered recordings of Al Jolson singing all Groucho Marx-like or Benny Goodman wailing on his clarinet like Jimmy Page before there even was a Jimmy Page, so I will roll the dice, check the list, and prepare myself for the usual nauseating stew of new albums from twerkers and nepo babies. Speaking of the latter, I was in a Target store the other day when what to my bloodshot eyes should appear but a brand new glossy magazine, titled Paris (referring to Auto-Tune-dependent singing-fraud Paris Hilton, of course) subtitled something insane like Pop Icon. I couldn’t believe it, because in the old days it used to take all sorts of payola and whatnot to get an artist on the cover of a nice glossy magazine, like Hit Parader, where rock stars were interviewed in careful fawning depth by drunken journalists so the lumpen masses could discover important things like their favorite rock star’s most-hated grade school teacher, or their favorite Skittles color. But let’s face it, local bands, we’ve entered a horrifying “nepotism era” of rock ’n’ roll, folks, so, for anyone out there with rock ’n’ roll dreams, your task is clear: Unless you are Paris Hilton and can pay Megan Thee Stallion to pretend to like you, or you’re Sabrina Carpenter and can demand a record contract or else your aunt, Nancy Cartwright, will immediately stop voicing the part of Bart Simpson on The Simpsons, you have no choice but to put out 50 albums a year like King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard and all those bands do. It’s either that or just give up and finish your degree or become a plumber if you enjoy doing things like eating food and sitting in a heated dwelling without too much survival anxiety. I did not make up these new rules, guys, and the next local musician who yells at me about it on Facebook is going to get publicly ridiculed in this column, promise not threat. But meanwhile, let’s talk about TV-talk-show houseplant Jennifer Hudson and her new album, The Gift Of Love, since no one else will! Yes, it is supposedly a holiday album, but there are other hilariously over-sung covers here, like “Nature Boy” and Aretha’s “Respect.” Hm, that’s odd, no Bad Brains songs.

• Joe Jonas was the Jonas who was with the girl from Game of Thrones, and they divorced, so apparently his lawyers advised him to make a new album, which is on the way as we speak, titled Music For People Who Believe In Love! But does he, after divorcing Sansa Stark (she actually smiles a lot now)? Who knows, but the title of this album’s first song is “Work It Out,” and it starts with 12-string noodling before descending into a Justin Timberlake romp-along with high-pitched singing. Ack.

• The (it’s threatened) “final album” from noise-rockers Japandroids, Fate & Alcohol, is a bummer, because I wish they weren’t disbanding. “D&T” is a totally cool punk-speed rocker that would make Frank Black jealous. Don’t quit, fellas!

• Finally it’s Kylie Minogue, being impossibly cougar-sexy again, with her new album, Tension II! “Lights Camera Action,” the single, is a euro-trance tune that’s pretty great when she isn’t trying to sing like Ariana Grande, stop that this instant.

The Bruce Lofgren Group, Earthly And Cosmic Tales (self-released)

Apparently it’s already the start of Grammy-voting season, given that I’ve been asked to vote for this record in the first round of the Best Alternative Jazz Album category. It’s very flattering that these people think I have some sort of say in the Grammy process, but if anyone’s listening (no one is), as far as alternative jazz albums go I’d consider this one, sure. Lofgren is a southern California-based guitarist who’s been around for quite a while and built a sturdy following for his very colorful tuneage, which this certainly is. He’s not trying to frame himself as a rock bandleader at all, which is a nice break; the instruments that join him here are legion, including clarinets, fretless basses, vibes and cellos. Rather than break this down track by track I’d prefer to paint the release as something that speaks to the album cover, which has become a lost art these days: if anything, it’s a lot like Spyro Gyra in mellow mode, evincing lush, exotic landscapes rather than smoke-filled rooms. I don’t get many like this dropped on my desk; very pleasurable, deeply thought stuff. A+

Ian Gindes, Rachmaninoff Piano Works (Navona Records)

As you probably assume, classical piano music is the beluga caviar of sound. I grew up with it; my mom would bash away at her baby grand every single day (if you want to know how good she was, go listen to the YouTube of Maria João Pires performing Franz Schubert’s Impromptu D.899, Opus 90 – No. 4. That was a daily staple; mom’s version was close to that, bang-on when she was angry enough). Over the years I’ve grown to love Johann Strauss’ and Vivaldi’s symphonics, but the classical piano works of Sergei Rachmaninoff were never my bowl of Fritos really. Such desperate mawkishness, the depthless agony of the Russian proletariat, hard pass. This SoCal doctor loves him some Sergei, though, so I figured I’d let him know that someone other than the PBS arts critic and the bluebloods who’ve watched him play at Carnegie Hall are out there. Gindes’ playing is exquisite of course, and convinced me not to become an active fan of the virtuoso but to admit that his romances were indeed very pretty, non-depressing and not so angst-ridden (Op. 21: No. 5 in A-Flat Major for instance). Gentle reminder that this isn’t art that exclusively panders to snobs, you guys, it’s for everyone. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Holy vampire bats, Batman, Halloween is on the way, and there are new albums coming out on Friday, Oct. 11, to celebrate Samhain or whatever the goths like to call it when they’re trying to sound worldly! I wanted my holiday to be super special, so for the first time since Covid-19 first appeared on the scene, I contracted it this week during a trip to Concord to try to mine some antiques out of a barn. It’s the absolute worst folks, do your due diligence or you’ll be sorry, I sure am. But anyway, we’re not here to talk about drama in real life, we’re here to chat about albums, so let’s start with Supercharged, the new one from California skate-rock hooligans The Offspring, you remember them, right? No, no, not the ones who did the Malcolm in the Middle song, that was They Might Be Giants, try to keep up even though there’s really no difference at all, that’d be great. (Yes, it has come to this, my next task in this life at this writing is to go listen to a band that’s been completely irrelevant for more than 15 years as I try to fend off the urge to curl up on the couch with my lovely little XEC Covid virus gremlins and dream of being normal and non-cough-y again someday.) No, The Offspring are fine, I remember when emo was a new thing to people who hadn’t been listening to it for years already, let’s go have a listen to this new album; I think we should start with “Light It Up,” a really fast little pure-punk number that has nothing wrong with it, as opposed to the nauseatingly poppy “Make It All Right,” which makes They Might Be Giants sound like Slayer. Good lord, there’s even a Partridge Family-level “Ba ba ba ba baaaa” singalong in there. How did anyone allow this to happen?

• I’d place scary high odds that most times when they hear an Alter Bridge song most people think it’s actually Creed. That’s not a compliment, of course, but the punchline is that during one binge-drinking episode Slash, of Guns N’ Roses fame, hired Alter Bridge’s singing person Myles Kennedy to join his new band, and thus a new wrestler-metal act hit the streets, called “Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators!” I don’t know why Slash thought it would be a good idea to make his new band sound more like Creed, but that’s the state of the genre now, and besides, Kennedy has his own band, whose new album, The Art Of Letting Go, is being loaded into the delivery trucks as we speak! Let’s go see! Right, so the first song to come up in my YouTube is “Nothing More To Gain,” which, oddly enough, is more Guns N’ Roses-like than I ever would have expected, perhaps our hero has learned a lesson about the benefits of not sounding like Creed! Yes, yes, the tune starts off with an unintelligible blues-metal mess, mostly a bunch of random notes that’ll make you think of hairy men in Abraham Lincoln hats, and then Kennedy starts singing like Axl Rose! Funny how the circle of life works, isn’t it, fam?

• The Linda Lindas are an all-girl “punk-pop” band from Los Angeles, but that’s not their fault! The title track of their new album, No Obligation, is surprisingly interesting; unlike the tedious emo nonsense I was expecting, it’s like a cross between Black Flag and Hole. Recommended if you want to tick somebody off for no reason.

• And lastly it’s dream-popper Caroline Sallee, who goes by the stage name Caroline Says, with her latest oeuvre entry, The Lucky One! She covered a Spacemen 3 song once, indicating she likes them, which explains why her new single “Faded And Golden” is strummy, spacey and uneventful.

Randy Ingram, Aries Dance (Sounderscore Record

Often, this Los Angeles-based jazz pianist astutely refers to his playing as “dancing,” a descriptor one could toss out to denote any similar keyboard-meister. Other critics have dubbed his playing “strong,” “personal,” “passionate” and “self-possessed,” adjectives that are also generically accurate when one is trying to paint a picture of a pianist whose mastery evokes ritzy ballrooms as opposed to smoke-filled bars. The thing about this swing-influenced fellow is that he’s devoutly determined to match up well with his drummers, in this case legendary Herbie Hancock/Stan Getz/etc. beat-keeper Billy Hart, who at age 83 doesn’t hold back, and in fact, if I’m forced to quibble with any of the soundscaping on this record, it’d be that Hart’s toms are a tad loud in the mix (usual caveat applies: others would argue that it makes it sound more organic). But anyway, yes, it’s livelier than most of the piano-led trios that wander into my mailbox, and the song selections are first-class, from the almost Beethoven-like interpretation of Wayne Shorter’s “Penelope” to the night-cruising original “Para Milton e Pedro,” it’s an exquisitely elegant trip. A

The Disappearing Act, An Illusion (Happiness [A Record Label])

This on-again-off-again indie band hasn’t released an album since Born to Say Goodbye nine years ago. While researching this outfit I had to check out a few D-tier bands that are cited as RIYL soundalikes, one of them being Motorcade, which do sound like this but with a lot spiffier production values (Apples In Stereo are also mentioned, which couldn’t be farther off). But you don’t want to spend the next three minutes getting caught up with bands that have less than 2,500 YouTube listens and I respect that; the long and short of it is that this sounds like a more animated Pavement that’s on Velvet Underground’s plethora of drugs. As such, if you’re like me — an adrenaline junkie with debilitating ADD — you’ll find that it plods along for the most part, you know, strummy-strum-strum, edgy platitudes piled one on top of the other like it’s a competition, etc. The Beck-begging “Why Is Everybody So Damn Happy” is a sentiment that shows the band isn’t paying attention to all the anxiety and self-hatred on social media nowadays; it’s kind of quaint in that regard. Yucky poo. B-

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Onward we slog, me hardies, onward we slog to this Friday, Oct. 4, when new music albums will wash over our decks and near-drown our persons in twerking butt music, poorly written (on purpose, as we’ve seen) indie rock, nepo baby nonsense and probably tons of metal albums, because those guys never shut up, even for a minute. Oh, well, at least it’s Halloween month, and who better to usher in the festivities than British arena-indie legends Coldplay, with their suuuper-scaaary frontman Chris Martin, who was married to the even scaaarier Gwyneth Paltrow for a week or however long it was. As you may or may not know, Coldplay is widely considered indie-rock’s answer to Creed in too-online circles, in other words not too many people take them seriously. However, the band does have a fan here at the Hippo’s front offices (it’s either Coldplay or Five For Fighting, I’m not really sure, but let’s just proceed), so I will be nice and listen to their forthcoming new album, Moon Music, with an open mind and a full bottle of Southern Comfort, because it’s only fair! In case you’re intelligent and ignore celebrity gossip like most people avoid open elevator shafts, things have changed for Chris Martin! After Gwyneth yelled “Seize him!” and her scimitar-wielding guards threw him out of her weird-smelling mega-mansion, he hooked up with alpha nepo-baby Dakota Johnson of really-bad-movies fame, and that’s where we stand at the moment, waiting for him to announce another thing that’s really strange about him! But in the meantime, this new album is already available on YouTube, let me go check it out and start typing things about it before I bag the whole idea and just find a decent kazoo-and-jaw harp band that’s releasing an album of Metallica covers to review instead of Moon Music. Right, the first song on here is called “feelslikeimfallinginlove,” see what they did there. Ha ha, the video has people hand-dancing like Napoleon Dynamite, and the tune is mellow soccer-parent somnambulism, very polite, appropriately melodic, it’ll be a huge hit on Good Morning America and such. Is Coldplay the Aughts version of The Beatles/Pearl Jam? Discuss.

• Hold the phone, guys, something interesting is here, namely a band called Memorials, with their new album, Memorial Waterslides! Why are they interesting? I’m glad you asked: The band features Electrane’s Verity Susman and Wire’s Matthew Simms, and as you know, I’m one of those inappropriate misfits who loves Wire, so I’ll listen to anything any of those guys puts out, including this, even though Simms only joined the 48-year-old band as their guitarist in 2010. Yikes, there’s like no promotion for these guys, I had to dig around YouTube for an entire eight minutes before I found the single, “Cut It Like A Diamond,” how am I the only person on Earth who cares about Wire? In short, it’s awesome, a psychedelic-art-rock tune that makes like Flaming Lips trying to be David Essex, won’t you people please love this?

• Alicia Keys is a fan of San Diego band Thee Sacred Souls, so they might be good, I don’t know! Their new LP Got A Story To Tell includes a torchy reggae-soul tune called “Lucid Girl,” you’ll probably like it if you dig both Bob Marley and Smokey Robinson. They’ll be at Roadrunner in Boston on Nov. 10.

• Finally it’s Canadian indietronica act Caribou, aka Dan Snaith, with a new album, called Honey! The title track has been around a few months and it’s really quite good, a wub-wubby, jungle-infused IDM track that’ll fit your brain like a pair of thick comfy socks. Very kyewl.

Hayley and the Crushers, Unsubscribe From The Underground (Kitten Robot Records)

You may have noticed that rock bands, particularly older ones, aren’t very good at evincing any sense of internet-savviness when they make a record whose lyrical slant is focused on “what all the kids are doing on social media and whatever.” Hayley Cain, this melodic punk band’s frontlady, defines herself as a “vintage Millennial, the last generation to remember an analog childhood before and after the internet.” Well well. OK, given that my job is playing a hypercritical jerk who’d find fault with Mother Teresa, I take that — as well as a couple of her other quotes — as an admission that she’s actually a GenXer who was never big into online culture (if you don’t know, I’ve written two books about that, so I could get really nasty about this but won’t). Bands, don’t be like this, singing about stuff you don’t know about, and don’t be like the Stones and pay Sydney Sweeney to sprawl around in your video in a cynical attempt to extract a little Zoomer cred just because “Whoa, it’s Sydney Sweeney.” Hopefully two or three of you get what I’m talking about, and mind, I have no deep problem with the music; it’s jumpy, (politely/gently) crazed and rather catchy, even if the bass is almost absent from the mix. Anyway, all the other stuff has needed to be said for decades now. B

Peter Somuah, Highlife (ACT Records)

This album would normally be lumped in the jazz category, but that’d be oversimplifying things. This Ghana-born trumpeter isn’t the Miles/Hubbard disciple some will paint him to be; in fact, he grew up playing Ghanaian “highlife” music (think Afrobeat/ska-tinged reggae or vice versa to grok the basics), and, among other sounds, this record is something of a homecoming to those musical roots, when he’d play all night until no dancer could still stand erect. The album opens with some heavily accented words from highlife legend Koo Nimo on the origins of the genre (“highlife” refers to the style that evolved from the waltz, samba and Western popular music that wealthy British colonizers forced Ghanaian locals to play). “We Give Thanks” fuses ’60s Beatles-booted organ to samba in a tune that evokes both Lawrence Welk and the early James Bond movies; in “Bruce Road,” Somuah’s horn drapes itself over a “Superstition”-like bass beat that touches on bossa nova. “Feel-good stuff” would be one (woefully inadequate) way of describing this. B

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• You have to be kidding me, the next major album-release Friday is this week, Sept. 27, slow your roll, there, calendar, think about the children! OK, children, if you’re reading this award-winning column in your favorite sub shop on Saturday the 28th, grab your uncomfortable molded-plastic desks and gather ’round, so we can learn about experimental punk band Xiu Xiu, whose new album, 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn Grips, just came out yesterday! The band is based in San Jose, California, and over the past 22 years of their existence they’ve undergone some personnel changes. The band is still led by Jamie Stewart, the nepo-baby son of one Michael Stewart, who, back during the days of the American Revolution, won two Grammys for producing such albums as Billy Joel’s breakthrough LP Piano Man. Nowadays the group prominently features longtime member Angela Seo, a singer/multi-instrumentalist, and also they have Tried Unusual Music Things, such as releasing a tribute project to singer/civil rights activist Nina Simone in 2013. As well, their albums usually end up at Pitchfork’s unlistenable music desk, where they always garner rave reviews except when the reviewer didn’t get whole oat milk in his flavorless latte. What does all this mean? It means that this new album will be strange and unusual and will have a lot of girl vocals, duh, so let’s go listen to it for as long as my stomach can stand it. The test-drive track is on their Bandcamp space; it is called “Common Loon,” a loud punky thing that begins as a discombobulated emo tune a la Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy.” Whoa, then it gets really muddy and heavy, and the nepo baby is singing like Buffalo Bill on Silence Of The Lambs, this is getting pretty edgy, folks! Huh, then some epic goth-pop synth comes in, and the whole mess becomes quite listenable, I’m surprised Pitchfork likes these guys at all, but then again, people do eventually grow up a little.

• One of the new albums coming out this week is titled EELS, but funnily enough it wasn’t recorded by the Eels; it’s from an Austin, Texas, band called Being Dead, don’t you hate it when these things happen! Odd, I probably have this album somewhere in my stack of new releases; they are represented by my favorite public relations firm, which only rarely sends me crappy albums, so I am anticipating a pleasant-enough listening experience. Mind you, their songs are said to be always adventurous and genre-bending, so this will be like my taking some random piece out of a generic box of chocolates, and you know how that goes, you always end up with the cherry one and immediately throw the whole box in the trash. Wait though, the sample track, “Van Goes” is post-punk in a very classic sense, combining the rawness of Exene with B-52s-ish poppiness. It is OK!

• Great, jog my memory why don’t you, new release list, the last time I remember even thinking about Maxïmo Park was when they were mentioned every time someone was talking about metrosexuality, do any of you people even remember that nonsense? Good, count your blessings, let’s just skip that and talk about the band’s new album, Stream Of Life! The single, “Your Own Worst Enemy,” is the worst song I’ve heard this year, a hooty, Morrissey-nicking waste of notes. Absolutely awful.

• Lastly, let’s have a look at White Roses My God, the debut solo album from Low co-founder Alan Sparhawk! “Get Still” is Nintendo-driven slowcore, like Figurine on head drugs he’d ingested just to be even more annoying than usual.

The Black Pacific, Here Comes Our Wave (Dine Alone Records)

The long-awaited second album from this side project led by Jim Lindberg (lead singer and songwriter for seminal California skate-punk band Pennywise) is a lot of fun at the beginning, leading off with “I Think I’m Paranoid,” which Lindberg accurately describes as a “panic attack with distorted guitars at 120 beats per minute.” If you’re a visiting Martian, that means it’s legitimately hardcore-fast, but this isn’t just a sk8er record; after a few barn-burners like “No Fun” (about “sociopath dictators around the world inflicting chaos and death on innocent civilians”), and take-no-prisoners rawker “Here We Come” (about the encroaching threat of AI taking everyone’s jobs and all that happy stuff), along comes “Float Away,” which opens as an exquisitely filthy no-wave thing and becomes a Hoobastank-derived emo joint in which he yearns to build a raft and sail away with his wife. This one puts Lindberg’s versatility with different power-rock styles on brilliant display. A+— Eric W. Saeger

Blitz Vega, Northern Gentlemen (FutureSonic Records)

This debut LP is also a posthumous one; as the duo’s remaining member Kav Sandhu has remarked, Smiths bassist Andy Rourke (who died last year of pancreatic cancer) was this band. Where it’ll go from here is anyone’s guess, but it’d be nice to see Sandhu continue in this vein, especially if you’re into ’80s music; there’s some really captivating material here. The album opens with “Disconnected,” which flirts with a Depeche Mode feel while also drawing from Lords Of The New Church. That’s followed by government-issue mid-tempo rocker “Strong Forever,” a junkie-rock dance-along made for post-industrial smoke-filled rooms. “Big Nose” hails to New York Dolls deconstructionism; the jangly “High Gravity” recalls mid-career Wire; “Love City” will make you think of ’70s/’80s-era Jim Steinman (remember, he didn’t just produce Meatloaf but Sisters of Mercy as well). With any luck this project will continue, but the loss of Rourke may well negate any hope of that, which really is a shame. A — Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yuppitty-yup, it’s all downhill from here, the new albums of Sept. 20 are on the trucks and heading to the stores for another freaky Friday of new music, as the snows gather in Canada and our tundra prepares to permafrost! Yes, what I actually mean is that you’ve already heard all about those albums from bootleggers and people who found the one YouTubeToMP3 website that wasn’t crawling with viruses and gleefully downloaded the albums, and you’ve already heard the advice that I’m about to impart, but can you at least pretend that this is news to you, that’d be great. But first, let’s look at the new solo album from Sonic Youth bandleader Thurston Moore, titled Flow Critical Lucidity, that is if he can give us a rest from promoting that Shelly Duvall lookalike girl on his Instagram, what’s even going on there, no don’t tell me I don’t care. Huh, today I learned that Moore and his bandmate/ex-wife Kim Gordon released a collaborative album with Yoko Ono in 2012, which came out at about the same time as my favorite New Yawk City public relations dude started sending me all sorts of spam about a new Yoko Ono album; maybe that collaboration had something to do with people trying to legitimize Yoko and make me write about her, which I did at the time in these very pages unless it was somewhere else (I hated it). No, everything Moore does is considered rad and cool by people who enjoy not-very-good music, but if that is your wont, yes, I shall now sashay over to the YouTube whatsis and have a listen to “Sans Limites,” Moore’s new single, which features guest vocalist/weird French person Laeitia Sadier, of Stereolab! OK, I’m reporting live from the YouTubes, and this song has been shockingly boring for a full minute, a guitar-strummy thing that sounds like your little brother trying to impress his crush, like, sort of a fractal but nothing fascinating going on. Finally Moore starts singing in his serious-mode Nick Cave voice, and the only thing Sadler is doing is breathing sort of melodically. What. Ever.

• Since 2000, Canadian singing lady Nelly Furtado has straddled the lines between pop diva, Latinx pop star and trip-hop princess, aside from her short stint singing that borderline heavy metal song with Bryan Adams at the Olympics, when they gave everyone in the crowd drum-shaped noisemakers, do you even remember that? Well heaven only knows what she’s doing on her seventh album, titled, of course, 7, because she claims that her ADHD drove her to write 500 songs since her last album, 2017’s The Ride, let me go listen to one of them now. Yes, “Corazón” is the opening tune, a tribal-washed reggaeton affair with a deep-diva tonality, it’s pretty interesting.

• Reality talent-show fixture Katy Perry is back with us again, with a new album called 143! She told cardboard-cutout jokeman Jimmy Kimmel that the album is “super high energy, it’s super summer, it’s very high BPM,” which would make sense if it were still summer, but as we know, it is not. Regardless, the lead single from this record, “Woman’s World,” is actually low-BMP, not that I’m trying to be pedantic, and it’s easily the most uninspired thing I’ve ever heard from her, like she hired a hack songwriter who needed immediate money to pay his gardener. Very low-quality stuff, folks.

• Lastly it’s Conor Oberst and his band Bright Eyes, with a new LP titled Five Dice All Threes! The album’s jump-off track, “Rainbow Overpass,” combines snoozy Bonnaroo-ready indie-folk with loud Big Black-style no-wave. Nice idea, but, you know — why? — Eric W. Saeger

Slowdive, “kisses (Daniel Avery Remix)” b/w “kisses – sky ii” [Grouper remix] (Dead Oceans Records)

I haven’t given much love to this English shoegaze band over the years, mostly owing to there always being enough shoegaze bands around to fill a football stadium, and besides, for a time there I thought the genre had peaked with Raveonettes. But sure, they’re fine, despite the fact that they were broken up for 20 years (1995 to 2014), and nowadays they have a sort of hallowed status among Gen Xers and pan-goths in general. The band’s 2003 album Everything Is Alive resulted in crazy levels of love, with the Pitchfork writer padding his review of that album’s single “kisses” with something about how it’s easy to write a good shoegaze song but difficult to write a great one. What a world-smashingly generic utterance; all he really needed to say was that he liked it, with its Cure guitar line and haunting-in-a-good-way, New Order-nicking vocal line (on Neil Halstead’s part anyway). Techno producer Avery’s remix turns it into a spazzing drum ’n’ bass rinseout that’s completely unnecessary, and meanwhile Grouper’s version is drowned in processing. Just stick with the original, folks. Ahem, the thing that’s missing from all this is the fact that the tune borrows a lot of its melodic steez from U2’s “Beautiful Day.” Ahem. C— Eric W. Saeger

Capilla Ardiente, Where Gods Live and Men Die (High Roller Records)

Ah, a doom metal album from a Santiago, Chile-based band. In case you weren’t aware of it, Black Sabbath’s 13 was a terrible album, but unfortunately a lot of young whippersnappers have mistaken it for a worthy template, which seems to be the case here: a lot of slow, meandering grinding signifying not much. To the band’s credit, the singer does as good a Chris Cornell imitation as the guy from Wolves In The Throne Room used to, and boy, the album cover would be as awesome as the one for Nazareth’s Hair Of The Dog if it weren’t for the stupid golden castle in the background. For what it is, it stands as further proof that Chile really rocks, or however the kids say it nowadays — ah, it’s “based,” that’s it — so there’s that anyway. Closeout track “As I Lie on the Summit” is their push single, and it’s OK, but if it isn’t epic metal as opposed to doom, I’m Granny Clampett. B — Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Hey, guys, do you know all the things that have happened on Sept. 13, I mean on that particular calendar date, through the corridors of history? Well, for starters, on Sept. 13, 1899, Henry Hale Bliss became the first recorded person to be unalived in a motor vehicle accident in the United States, specifically in New York City, where else! That’s a very portentous thing, because as for the 2024 version of Sept. 13, we have new albums coming our way to mark the occasion, and the list is pretty freakin’ big, because it’s already holiday gift-buying season, according to, you know, the people in the C suites who want you to buy stuff! If you’re a millennial hipster who hasn’t sold out to The Man and gotten a job (or five) yet because you’re quite comfortable sponging off your parents and eating their chicken tendies, you’re officially still cool and relevant, so I assume you want to know about the upcoming new album from (formerly?) tuneless indie band Snow Patrol, The Forest Is The Path! This band is from Dundee, Scotland, which is basically the most horrible city in the country, and that makes them relevant, so let’s see what they’ve been up to since their Aughts heyday, back when I didn’t quite hate their music but had no idea how anyone could possibly like it, because it was like a Loot Crate version of Lifehouse or whatnot. Of course, they started doing a lot better in the mid-Aughts, with albums like A Hundred Million Suns, but in those days I was really only paying attention to trance DJs and goth bands, so I don’t know. And so, fam, that’s where we stand with Snow Patrol, with me having no idea what I’m even talking about, because for all I know they were as faux-important as the Killers until their 2018 album Wildness, which Pitchfork sort of laughed at, but not cruelly. I have no desire to play catch-up with these fellers; instead I’ll just listen to the new single from this one, the title track. Wait, why does this tune sound like a cross between Sigur Rós and M83, what are they even doing? It’s got a mopey-epic-mopey structure; are the Aughts coming back already, like, am I going to have to start preparing to hear nine million bands that sound like Spacemen 3 and Franz Ferdinand? Why is this being done to me?

• Indie-electronic producer Trentemøller is back again, keeping up the pace, even though he’s 51 now, don’t you feel oooold? Dreamweaver is his first LP since 2022’s Memoria, which barely rated in the U.S. at all, but he’s still big in Denmark and such, mostly because he’s influenced by actually relevant ’80s bands like Joy Division and Siouxsie. The sort-of title track, “Dreamweavers,” is slow, deep shoegaze stuff, with plenty of My Bloody Valentine going on, except quirkier and more electronic. All set here.

• Huh, will you look at that, it’s a new album from well-adjusted 1980s alt-rock figure Nick Lowe, titled Indoor Safari! Ha ha, any of you fellow old people remember when he was relevant, in the ’80s, with the soapy alt-rock hit “Cruel To Be Kind?” Right, I’m trying to forget it too, but the new singles “Trombone” and “Went To A Party” are like Roy Orbison redux, picture Eddie Cochran on sleeping pills. Right, OK, so he had his dumb hit 40 years ago, I really don’t have time for this.

• Lastly it’s Miranda Lambert, the second Mrs. Blake Shelton, i.e. the one before Gwen Whatsername, with her newest LP, Postcards From Texas! The single “Wranglers” is a slow-burn thing combining Dolly Parton and ’80s hair-metal, it’s actually not all that bad, and she’s a real-life nice person, so let’s leave it at that.

— Eric W. Saeger