Category: Albums

Chuck Bergeron, Bass & Face: Duets With Ten Premier Vocalists (Summit Records)

The ever-polite All About Jazz describes bassist Bergeron as “one of the most active and innovative musicians working in the field of jazz,” not that I’ve ever seen a review from them that went something like, “Boy, this lazy putz should just quit polluting the airwaves,” you know? I mean, I kid, he’s assembled, as described, an elite group of jazz singers that includes Manhattan Transfer’s Janis Siegel; Deborah Silver, who was Grammy-nominated for her 2025 collaboration with the Count Basie Orchestra, and the appropriately named Kevin Mahogany, whose rich, knurled baritone positively floats over Bergeron’s deftly bowed acoustic bass interpretation of Duke Ellington’s “Sound of Love.” Overall this record feels like a comfortable, casual pair of socks, not a novelty release aimed at bass wonks; the funnest moment is Nicole Yarling’s unapologetically urban rendition of “Audubon Zoo/Iko-Iko,” which anyone with ears will recognize as the Mardi Gras singalong from the 1988 film Rain Man. Plenty to like here. A+

Alden Hellmuth, Tether (Leiter Verlag GmbH Records)

Just to reassure regular readers, no, I’m not turning this into an all-jazz column; fact is, over the past few months I’ve been absolutely buried in new jazz releases — physical copies too, not just empty-brained emails with links to confounding whiz-bang download pages that require a master’s degree in IT just to get to the part where one actually listens to stuff — and at this point I’m feeling guilty that I haven’t been able to get to many of them (there are so few music publications covering jazz nowadays). I wasn’t going to let that happen with this imported 12” vinyl LP, which was Fedexed to me from Germany (do you have any idea how much that costs?); its subject is an avant garde saxophonist with a casual fetish for noise. Ipso facto, this one’s obviously from the more experimental space, but New Yorker Hellmuth is as interested in brain-dazzling melody as she is in Mingus bonking; she goes into a deep, center-of-midtown reverie in “Witness,” the best on board here. Fascinating album. A+

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• July 10 would be a great day for some new albums to appear, and lo, thus it shall be, unto us, and yadda yadda. Yikes, look at all the albums that are coming out this week, I wonder if any of those albums will do something more than get on my nerves, let me look. Well, at least the 80-year-olds are still “rockin’ out,” like they say in Kansas, given that The Rolling Stones have a new one, called Foreign Tongues, which isn’t a strictly bad thing I suppose. I mean, they did turn the studio into a giant party, with people like Robert Smith, Steve Winwood, Paul McCartney and the drummer from Red Hot Chili Peppers dropping in to help out, not that the Stones need any help. For example, on “Rough and Twisted,” a loud, loutish blues-rawk tune that name-checks Muddy Waters in the band’s most Muddy Waters-ish tune ever, the Stones’ singer, whatever his name is, plays harmonica, and it doesn’t suck. I don’t know, I’ve never really cared about the Stones but never actively disliked them either, like, my high school friends who liked them were all confirmed druggies, so I just associate the band with drugs, which is what rock ’n’ roll is supposed to be about, or at least it was until it became a distinctly un-fun genre in which Berklee-dropout guitarists showed off the scant few jazz chords they’d learned in school and sang songs about Trump and being awkward around their exes or whatever everyone’s deal is now. I mean, yes, there’s literally no need for a new Rolling Stones record, but at least they’re singing about cocaine and one-night stands at that age, where most people would just be singing about adult diapers. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? I don’t know, you tell me, America.

• I always get a nice short burst of Facebook un-friendings when I mention that I always hated Queen, like when I state that their News Of The World album was a low point in arena rock that will never be matched. I only mention that because Adam Lambert, Queen’s kind-of-replacement for singer Freddie Mercury, has a new album streeting this week, cleverly titled ADAM, in capital letters, because wouldn’t you if you were him? OK, I wouldn’t either, but whatever, we shall talk about this new album, from the one-time American Idol runner-up, because if we didn’t, the 10 people who’ll be buying the stupid thing might feel abandoned, and I wouldn’t want that. O, what horrors will be on this record, OK, at least it isn’t a bunch of covers like the last one, the first single is titled “UNDER THE RHYTHM,” in capital letters, see what he did there, but it isn’t bad if you like Michael Jackson/Bruno Mars-type singing; it’s very busy and well-done, and this is without a doubt the last time you’ll see this album mentioned in any media outlet, ever.

• Release the kraken of hamburger jokes, because it’s a new album from famous burger-eating human Jack White, called Frozen Charlotte! Now, my guess is that the music on this album will be Led Zeppelin-esque, because isn’t it always, but this human Ronald McDonald is at the “One Never Knows What I’ll Try Next” stage of his career, so this may just be heavy metal versions of 1930s polkas, so let’s just do the dutiful and find out. Yup, nope, “Dollar Bill” pilfers the drunken guitar noodling of Zep’s “In My Time Of Dying,” you get the idea, right, let’s move on.

• And finally it’s fashion model/actress/singer/future ex of Robert Pattinson Suki Waterhouse, with Loveland, her third album. Single “Back In Love” regurgitates the breathy, amateurish sound of Aughts bands like Au Revoir Simone, I don’t care for it.

Featured Photo:

Ow! Live at The Penthouse, Johnny Griffin and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis (Reel To Real Records)

It’s summer in New England, when we hardscrabble Yankees regroup and take a look at things we may have missed over the past year. My problem is that so many albums get dumped into my virtual and non-virtual mailboxes that I tend to run years behind, which means a lot of releases never get the attention they deserve, case in point this one, which originally streeted on Record Store Day in 2019 as an exclusive, and then in standard form a couple of weeks later. Put simply, it’s a master class in hard bop jazz, spotlighting two amazingly gifted tenor saxophone players; it really show-stopped my music-listening life the first time I heard it and it’s become a staple in my car over the past couple of months. Recorded live over two nights at the Penthouse jazz club in Seattle in 1962, it features both guys (who were dubbed the “Tough Tenors” for their fast-motion interplay) in peak form, blazing (in an uncharacteristically gentlemanly way, as opposed to the one-upmanship observable in their other Prestige Records outings) through such improv-begging tunes as Count Basie’s “Tickle Toe,” at mind-boggling speeds. Advanced post-bop is everywhere here; if you buy one vintage jazz record this year, this should be it. A+

Gandalf Murphy and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams, A Very Unusual Head (Storm Kings Records)

Like I always say sometimes, if you can’t make the Who’s Who, try for the What The Hell Was That, where these guys are situated comfortably with a bullet. At first glance I was expecting steampunk: stovepipe hats, facial hair courtesy of 1971, suits louder than Godzilla after stubbing his toe on a school bus, etc., but this 30-plus-year veteran crew of upstate New Yorkers is usually found at folkie festivals, which makes sense, given their sound, but only a little. More accurately, their trip is usually described as “hillbilly Pink Floyd,” and when I found that out I was filled with dread (you all know what a jerk I am about Floyd, and obviously everything about these guys screams joke band). But whattaya know, opening tune “Beez (I Know Where The Beez Have Gone)” is very listenable and really very epic; if there was anything you liked about Dark Side Of The Moon, it’s distilled here. No, I’m being serious, the sound is very big, even when it gets a little weird thanks to the presence of hayloft/jackass instruments like ukuleles, melodicas, flutes and theremins. This is simply a great band of songwriters who happen to dress like Randy “Macho Man” Savage. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• OK, the summer’s already moving along too fast; the next new-CD Friday is this one, July 3, the day before this country’s 250th birthday, which means that everyone you know will be spending their time gathering together dangerous quantities of liquor and fireworks, not thinking about buying albums, but new albums will come nonetheless, and you can listen to them, while you shoot off fireworks, safely drunk, unless you hate George Washington! According to Metacritic, which has been proving itself increasingly worthless of late with regard to telling me about new albums, there are only two, but Google’s AI (the one everybody’s already using for free, which means it’s totally destined to win the AI wars, which will bankrupt companies like Microsoft and Oracle and bring on the Apocalypse, but not to worry, because something-something) found several more! The most “important” album comes from 58-year-old British hard-rock band Deep Purple, and it is titled SPLAT! Now, I don’t know how these fellas are even still alive, but I’m certain I’ll be impressed by their ability to keep up with the times and street a record that sounds fresh and innovative, let’s go find out! Yes, yes, the new single “Guilt Trippin’” is basically the same thing as their 54-year-old song “Space Truckin,’” except that 80-year-old singer Ian Gillan is trying to sound funny, like Butthead from Beavis and Butthead, so if you enjoy hearing five 80-year-old men pretending to be a joke band, I highly recommend that you consider purchasing this album!

• Two weeks ago, Happy Mag reported that Madonna wanted an “extortionist’s sum” to fund her biopic Who’s That Girl, and not even Netflix would pay for it. Says here that the script, which she wrote herself, would demand a blockbuster budget, so it’s on hold until further notice, meaning it will probably never happen, which is a bit unfair I suppose; as Happy observed, “[A Bob Dylan movie] gets [a gigantic budget]. Bruce gets one. Michael gets one. But Madonna? Apparently the industry forgot who invented half of pop culture.” Well, as far as I’m concerned — and not to minimize the fact that women are treated horribly by the music industry — I’d remind the Happy writer that we already had a Madonna documentary in 1991, titled Truth Or Dare, whose most non-boring moment was when she pretended to barf when Kevin Costner appeared backstage, but either way, Madge has a new album out this week, called Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II, which harkens back to her space-disco days, with hypnotic progressive-house elements, random sexy whispering, etc. It’s fine.

• Next is Anton Pearson, guitarist for U.K. band Squid, which is, according to the band’s subreddit, “focused on post-punk, jazz-rock, ambient and krautrock,” meaning they’re, you know, totally unfocused, not that that’s always a bad thing. Pearson’s debut solo LP, Driving Through Belgium, is ambient stuff; I listened to two tracks, one that was cheesy Daedalus-type stuff, and another that sounded like an electric shaver getting pressed against a stainless steel pot; I’d cite the song titles but I already forgot them, mercifully.

• And finally we have Atlanta rapper/producer Ken Carson with his newest album, Xperiment, a 22-track affair that lays melodically competent AutoTuned rhymes over rage-y, distorted, experimental beats. I would give you the deets on one tune in particular, but given that all he’s made available for preview is a collection of snippets, I assume he couldn’t care less about my desire for exhibiting any journalistic professionalism whatsoever, bravo.

Featured Photo: Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes and Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me

Pussy Riot, CYKA (self-released)

It was quite a surprise for me to find that this was the Russian protest-punk group’s debut album, given that they’ve been playing well-publicized shows, pulling all sorts of anarchic stunts and getting arrested for 14 years now, but yes, that’s what it is, the first proper full-length from Moscow’s answer to the Dead Kennedys, after a fashion (most of the band members are in exile nowadays at the behest of Vladimir Putin for all the rabble they’ve roused). In a way, it qualifies as world music, of a certain bent: While many Americans are accustomed to protesting our own government’s actions in the Middle East and such (at least online) this is a, well, almost refreshing view from another world entirely, where citizens — especially mindful, news-junkie types like these girls — are in a permanent, rabid state of outrage over events in Ukraine. It’s a striking juxtaposition if you’re an American who’s spent a lot of time on Twitter/Bluesky et al. over the last few years. Lots of angry Poppy-like caterwauling goes on here, of course, but the band had a lot of help from different corners of the industry, which led to some unexpected results, such as the sexy TLC-like cooing in the “Putin-guested” title track. In the no-surprise department, Avenged Sevenfold volunteers their nu-metal weaponry to “Candy Dopamine.” A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Tesla, Homage (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

In the moment I’m writing this, I couldn’t name one song from this Sacramento, California, ’80s-hair-metal band if I had to save a million kittens, so luckily I don’t. I threw it on this week’s list because it seemed timely, given that Tesla Inc. owner Elon Musk just became America’s first trillionaire-on-very-flimsy-paper, and wisely enough the band leads off their home page with an announcement that they are indeed the band, not the automaker. Anyhow, they’ve actually been more of a bland-tasting mainstream rock band than anything else, which is the chart where they’ve historically made some dents, but for everything they do that sounds like Black Crowes there’s some room-temperature hard rock that’s in the vein of Europe and that sort of thing. They’re big into the Stones and Beatles, not that you can tell much from the cover songs they recite on this record; Supertramp’s absolutely awful “Give A Little Bit” gets a reading that replaces the original’s falsetto with the nasal bleating of an annoying nitwit like the dude from Buckcherry. Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” gets a particularly revolting turn, which was where I tapped out on this nonsense. They’ll be in Gilford at the BankNH Pavilion on July 24. C —Eric W. Saeger

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Moving right along with this totally forgettable year — or at least we’d like to forget it for five minutes, but the amount of alcohol required for that level of psychic anesthesia would bankrupt most countries – the next jumble of albums will come out on June 26, so we must talk about them, I’ll take an adequately barrel-aged tequila straight up please, with a nice lime wedge! Oh, but first, it’s time once again to remind musicians who are in local bands and want to get reviewed by me in this multiple award-winning newspaper section that the only sure-fire way to contact me is by messaging me at my Facebook and/or Twitter/Bluesky thingamajigs, at the addresses mentioned elsewhere on this page. The only thing I ask is that you include a graphic of your album/EP/mixtape cover and a brief “biography,” that is to say a description of your act, any interesting factoids, the official release date of your record, and, most importantly, who you are and where your band/act is based, meaning what specific town. I know I’m repeating myself, but in the old days, that used to be a no-brainer, like, bands automatically sent “press kits” with their albums, but nowadays, with the rise of things like Banksy and Burial and all sorts of other popular figures pretending not to want any recognition (any way we can stop that yet, pretty please with sugar on top?), it’s like pulling teeth for us art-scene journos to get straight answers to our basic questions, and it’s massively, massively annoying. For example, if you’re from Nashua, New Hampshire, don’t jump in my messages saying “my band is from the Boston area,” because it gives me a skin rash. Be concise, tell me why your act is awesome, and for extra points tell me whom you think your band/act sounds like. The easier you make my job, the more nice I will be to your album-or-whatever on this page, that’s how this works. I mean, not to brag, but I get about 300 emails a week from bands and publicists seeking press for new records, and given that I like to sit around eating Fig Newtons and watching Netflix documentaries as much as you do, you should keep in mind that there are always 300 other bands — some of them famous! — that want the publicity if you don’t. I am here to help you, same as how I am here to let people know that British folktronica lady Beth Orton has a new album coming out this Friday, titled The Ground Above. You may know Orton from the Aughts era, when she was something of a techno “It Girl,” collaborating with Chemical Brothers and such. The album’s title track features Orton singing rather badly over a sublime trip-hop beat in the vein of Portishead. She’ll be at the Crystal Ballroom in Somerville, Mass., on Sept. 19.

• For some reason, whenever I hear the name Chanel Beads I always think of taking a bubble bath, do you think that’s dumb, my sense of self-worth hinges on your answer. It’s the stage name of New York indie dude Shane Lavers, whose new album Your Day Will Come includes the cool, sparse, percussive dance(ish) track “Police Scanner.” He’ll perform at The Sinclair in Cambridge, Mass., on Sept. 13.

• I’ll just assume you know Aughts-indie favorites The Strokes; they release their newest LP Reality Awaits this Friday. What I heard of it was all fine, of course, starting with album opener “Psycho Sh-t,” made of their usual edgy, angular Romantics-meets-Interpol ingredients.

• Lastly we have The Pretty Reckless with an album called Dear God, whose title track sounds like Ani DiFranco trying to be Nine Inch Nails-ish, please make it stop. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes and Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me

Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes (Atlantic Records)

Said to be the last album from the ’90s ska-punk/reggae-rock juggernaut, this one has Sublime’s fan base more interested in debating whether or not this-or-that lyrical theme is focused on former lead singer Bradley Nowell, who died from a drug overdose in 1996 and left the band a hollowed-out husk of itself. As some have observed, this stuff does sound like it came from an AI bot programmed to make up a bunch of new Sublime songs, which is pretty low for a band that hasn’t produced any new material in 30 years. Indeed it does sound a lot more polished than the music that launched them into the happy-grunge stratosphere and portrayed them as an antidote to the doomer vibes of bands like Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots and all those guys. Nowell’s son, Jakob, handles the vocals here, which adds to the disposability of tunes like the Red Hot Chili Peppers-inspired title track and “Can’t Miss You,” which reads like Andy Grammer trying dancehall on for size. Utterly useless, for completists only. C

Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me (Epic Records)

Sixth full-length from this R&B/hip-hop-diva Californian, who’s sort of becoming the Jeff Ross of random national talent reality shows. She started out on YouTube, after which she won the 2004 season of America’s Most Talented Kid with a rendition of Christina Aguilera’s “Keep on Singin’ My Song,” and then finally broke through in 2010 apparently because she failed to make the top 24 on American Idol (I can’t explain it either, don’t ask). Since then she’s been the titular Masked Singer on that show, mentored a group of American Idol contestants in 2024, etc., always showcasing her belt-it-from-the-mountaintop singing style for the benefit of the few people who still watch that kind of stuff. For this one, though, she’s all about the ’90s, or at least the asphalt-soul ’90s made famous by quasi-R&B street-pop groups like TLC and Salt n Pepa, which is, um, marketable thinking on her part, let’s just say. Whatever, she’s content in her skin here, warbling conversational lyrics in a style that went extinct when the new millennium arrived, but its comfort-food feel will appeal to cul-de-sac-dwelling suburbanites, etc. B

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• June 19 is the next “Here, Have Some Random Albums” Friday, and so random albums will be coming to your favorite streaming service, the one you pay for by allowing it to schlurp money out of your bank account every month only because for some reason you’re too paranoid to rip songs from those “YouTube To MP4” apps because some of them are obviously heavily infected by hackers, and yet you trust that Pandora or SoundCloud or whatever will never get hacked by the approximately 12,693,881 MIT undergrads who are at this very moment determined to hack your chosen “trusted music platform” so they can steal your credit card to buy disposable laptops for the darkweb, have you changed any of your passwords in the last nine years, I sure hope you have, you really should. But in positive news (a Constant Reader said my column of two weeks ago was full of positive energy and it made him smile, but I’d caution not to get used to this kind of nonsense), Canadian trio Rush played their first live shows in Inglewood, California, and my social media feeds would absolutely not shut up about it, so I looked at some of the video, and yes, replacement drummer Anika Nilles took one small step for womankind by adding a few of her own touches to the sadly departed Neil Peart’s professorial drumming tricks. That was expected, let’s just say, but what really tugged at people’s heartstrings was her wonderment; she looked like a kid who’d hit the winning homer in Game 7 of the Little League World Series. Now, as a lifelong cynic, of course, what I’d like to know is which fusion and prog-rock drummers refused the offer to join the band; I’m sure there were a few who laughed them off as a glorified version of Styx or a less-capable Yes (you may recall I’d suggested Will Kennedy of The Yellowjackets), but past that sort of rather grim fascination, yes, she “nailed the fills” and whatnot. But anyway, to business, let’s kick off this week with the final album from San Francisco-born folkie Tucker Zimmerman, who died in January at the age of 84. Dream Me A Dream is the new album; the title track is a mawkish bluegrass-tinted affair that saw Zimmerman’s voice reduced to an ineffectual croak, but some people do dig that stuff.

• Canadian producer/musician/idiotic-looking-hat-addict Daniel Lanois couldn’t just give his new sleepy instrumental album a title that would make it easy for me to find one of its songs on YouTube; no, instead he titled it Belladonna Nocturne because he already put out a sleepy instrumental album titled simply Belladonna in 2005, so it’s like, his thing, man, and he also knew it’d force me personally to use extra brain cells to fool the YouTube bot into finding something from this new album instead of the 2005 one. “Warp Sustain” is pretty cool, incorporating some dark, quite noisy elements into its wispy Enya-esque dramatics.

• Pond is a band from Australia that still makes albums, unlike the American band named Pond that was from Oregon and got signed to Sub Pop Records, which led to their getting signed to Sony Records, which of course led to their breaking up when Sony let them go broke so they could write off the loss on their taxes. The title track from new LP Terrestrials is OK for a (dated-sounding) college-rocker, a blend of Supertramp and, oh, I don’t know, Hives.

• And finally we have Hull, U.K.-based BBC darlings Life with their newest album Abstract/Natural. Advance single “The Dollywaggon” is worth checking out if you like ’80s art-rock and Sex Pistols, it’s the best thing I’d recommend this week.

Featured Photo: Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes and Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me

Kristian Montgomery and the Winterkill Band, Soul Family (self-released/Bandcamp)

We’ve talked about this local musician before, including how he lost his home and all his belongings in a fire last year, and about his ongoing battles with the elements that lord over the Boston rock scene. We’re more than casual acquaintances now, online at least, where I heard some rough demos of the songs on this album while they were still babies. Anyhow, as always, there’s a lot of great stuff to be heard here, beginning with opener “This Is How We Roll,” which he’s sculpted into a really amazing tune that combines the beat from The Outfield’s “Your Love,” adds some Allmans hubris and tops it off with a pseudo-Millennial whoop for good measure. That tune also signals a leaning toward riff rock and less Tom Petty pop than we’ve heard before, which we hear in “Brotherhood Of Ghosts,” a cross between Zep’s “Black Dog” and early Mountain. On the lighter side, ballad-adjacent Cajun-rocker “The Last Time I Loved You” floats an instantly hummable verse and some techy layering; “Home” is pure Gregg Allman-style Southern bombast. Sooner or later this guy’s hitting on a hit, I assure you. A+

Rich Willey, Laid Back Vol. 1 featuring John Swana (self-released/CDBaby)

Just in time for the hot weather comes this appropriately named if imperfect collection of seven jazz compositions from trumpet/tuba player Willey and his band of 11 guys, whose sound is slightly bigger than that number would indicate. As far as vibe, you should be thinking Caribbean, Spyro Gyra, reggae and that sort of thing, perfectly innocuous, but it’s not quite as simple as that, given that some of the sounds are a little, well, unconventional, starting with Paul Mutzabaugh’s antiquated-sounding B3 organ, but more to the point is the presence of Swana, the wild card in the deck: He plays an “electronic valve instrument” (EVI), of which Willey is apparently a fan, unfortunately. Where Geof Bradfield and Jim Gailloreto’s saxes fit quite well with the trumpet played by Willey and Carey Deadman, the bizarre, often high-pitched, alien sounds from the EVI become something of an unwelcome distraction and would work much better in a more, I don’t know, progressive setting. Willey loves the thing, though, and wants it to become a more commonplace sound within jazz, which is noble, but, again, I wouldn’t have used it on this album. B-

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Look out everyone, the next New CD Release Friday looms over us like a, you know, a looming loomosaurus, June 12 to be specific! As you know, I’ll try anything once, and that includes pop divas who want to turn our schoolchildren into twerking zombies. I will give anyone a chance, because I am a professional at this, and professionalism requires constant sacrifice, so for the moment my mission is to try to see why the new Olivia Rodrigo album is more musically profound than the ones from the last few child-ruiners, like Ariana Grande or Sabrina Carpenter. Why do I do things like this? Mostly because when people send me hateful Facebook messages yelling at me for selling out and writing about corporate pop music instead of obscure bands who purposely try to sound weird just to get attention from their former college roommates, I learn things, and it also provides me the opportunity to practice my yelling at people over the internet, which will be a very marketable skill when the AI bots take all our jobs. But I also have a certain curiosity about popular culture, so it’s nice to know what people like Ms. Rodrigo sound like, given that they are hip and groovy and important to our children, sort of like how Cyndi Lauper was in 1986 and Annette Hanshaw in 1934. I do try to spot new pop trends too, not that there’s been much to do in that regard since Madonna discovered trance music and put a bunch of it on her 1998 (where does the time go, I ask you) album Ray Of Light, after which most of the new shrinkwrapped, corporate-molded pop divas copied her, the way all the divas ape Chappell Roan (who’s basically a humorless Cyndi Lauper, if you think about it) these days. Anyway, the new Olivia Rodrigo album is titled You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love, a Chappell Roan-inspired title if I ever saw one, but apparently there is depth to this vacuousness, as the LP is divided into two parts: One side is dedicated to first love, and the second half is about how being in love won’t solve your anxieties and personal problems (such depth, folks! I’ll tell you, if my first love had been that introspective at age 20, my life would have turned out differently, that is unless it wouldn’t’ve). The single “Drop Dead” starts out all slow-techno-y, like Chappell Roan, then the epic chorus comes in and it totally rips off Chappell Roan’s “Casual” but all the children will be too scared to say anything, so all this derivative nonsense will continue until further notice.

• On the older pop diva front, now that Bebe Rexha has reached her mid-30s she’s adopting a “cool auntie” (not my expression, by the way) attitude for her new album Dirty Blonde, her first record to be distributed independently under Empire Distribution. Free at last to do whatever she wants, her main goal is to “sound unlike anyone else,” so let’s go see about that. The second single, “Sad Girls,” features Rexha teaming up with boring house producer David Guetta but nevertheless it is good, mostly because it sounds like half the songs trance soundsystem Above & Beyond did during the Aughts (anyone noticing a pattern yet?).

• Until now, Fruit Bats albums have mostly comprised Eric Johnson playing over click tracks, but the new one, The Landfill, features his actual band. The title track actually does have a pulse, sort of like Smashing Pumpkins meets Train.

• Lastly we have prog legends Yes, with Aurora, an album whose seven-minute title track showcases some fairly cool guitar bits from sole original member Steve Howe, some orchestra stuff from the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, and some particularly lifeless vocals from Jon Davison, whom the band should fire.

Featured Photo: Kristian Montgomery and the Winterkill Band, Soul Family and Rich Willey, Laid Back Vol. 1 featuring John Swana

Aaron Bilodeau, Lid Licker (self-released/Bandcamp)

So here is a fellow from Milford, N.H., whose trip is experimental art-rock, unless he’s pulling my leg, but I’m now pretty much convinced he isn’t. The latter bit I have to mention because this was nothing like I’d expected in the area of loudness (let’s admit it, New Hampshirites, most of our local bands don’t know how to be really noisy) or seriousness, but this guy does seem to be on a mission, bless him. He apparently has a lot of projects, but this is him unfiltered, and by the way, he’s currently looking for Milford-area musicians to do some live shows with this collection of tunes, so look him up on Bandcamp if you’re interested. Anyway, the music is fun in its way, very hard to pinpoint at first, but in the end it evokes a three-way cross between Blue Oyster Cult, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Captain Beefheart. To wit, there’s a lot of blues-rock going on here (turbo-powered by a Deep Purple-style Hammond organ and the usual guitars and such), some (a bit too polite) spazzing and a healthy dose of alternative weirdness. I personally think he’s on to something that might really work with the right collaborators, so please give him a shout. B

Midge Ure, A Man Of Two Worlds (Chrysalis Records)

Let me scramble the usual lead-in: What can one say about this 72-year-old Scotsman that someone who was born in the last 40 years should even know? OK, he was in legendary New Wave band Ultravox, but he was also in Thin Lizzy, let’s start there; he hasn’t released an album since 2014, and “Midge” is his real name, Jim, pronounced backward. So he’s a firebrand and a loose cannon, as you now know, but he’s also an elite-level songwriter (he co-wrote the charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas” for the Band Aid project in 1984) who hasn’t lost his edge or writing ability at all; in fact he’s upped it by embracing his maturation. Half of this all-new double-LP set showcases his songwriting for vocalists, with single “Just Words” reaching for the show-stopping epicness usually reserved for new-jack divas like Taylor Swift, whereas the other half delves into commercial instrumental tuneage that sometimes gets a little mawkish (“The Space In-Between”). Put it this way, don’t pretend to understand what old people grew up listening to without knowing thing one about this guy. A

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• June 5 is when we’ll see the next bunch of new music CDs hit our Soundclouds, but first this message about the Manchvegas music scene! Some of you know that during the Precambrian era, when we were all just amoebas with only slightly less artistic taste than we have now, I was in a punk-metal band that made some records. This was before we amoebas crawled ashore and became humans, at which point I decided I liked money, so I gave up making records and became a software guy, then got totally sick of having any money at all and wrote some books. Anyway, when I was a simple amoeba, making records and playing at local clubs like the Granite Rock Club in Nashua, we played several shows with a local Manchvegas fellow who called himself Jonny (sometimes spelled “Johnee” or “Jonhee”) Earthquake. Now, let me tell you little twerking brats about the Manchester, New Hampshire, rock ’n’ roll scene back when Abraham Lincoln was president, it was a dangerous place, like half the bands were associated with the immortal and hilariously insane punk rocker GG Allin, who used to go on stage and — well, never you mind what he used to do on stage. Fine, I’m getting to it, so, we played around nine million shows with Jonny Earthquake when he was also making albums, and all I knew about him was that he loved Nick Cave the way you kids love Justin Bieber and Raffi today. Back then, Jonny dressed like a pirate everywhere he went, with a Captain Hook hat and coat and the whole works, so if anyone had asked me two weeks ago, “Is Jonny still around,” I would have assumed he’d either become a software engineer, bought an Arby’s or decided to become an actual pirate and moved to Aruba or whatnot. Funny thing, I was in the Manchester Market Basket (pronounced “MAH-kit bass-kit”) the other day and spotted a literal pirate buying some stuff just as I was leaving. There he was! It’s official, Johnee is alive, folks, I had no idea, and he still dresses like — you know, Jack Sparrow, around Manchvegas! We made some small talk about Nick Cave and the corporate greed Apocalypse and I told him who I was, the music-journo dude at this fine family newspaper, and he was like, “Oh. You.” Apparently Jonnee hates my taste or something, or maybe the fact that I’ve never mentioned his band, but I am making amends now! Ahem, OK, kids, put away your Roblox soundtrack albums and go buy a Jonee Earthquake album at Newbury Comics if they have any, that’d be great, support your local pirates bands! And that deftly and sublimely segues us over to the new album from Death Cab for Cutie, a band that’s about as punk as a Lawrence Welk polka marathon! This album, I Built You A Tower, features the single “Riptides,” which I was prepared to hate, which is good, because it’s like a 1970s Bob Welch B-side that doubles as a sleeping aid.

• The title track to Lizzo’s new LP Bitch interpolates the bratty 1997 Meredith Brooks pop hit that everyone thought was Alanis. There are swears and rapping, because of course there are.

• Liminal, the new album from avant garde London, U.K., composer Poppy Ackroyd, features a piano-driven instrumental titled “The Unknown” that reads like next-generation soundtracking, very nice stuff.

• Lastly, Modest Mouse releases their eighth full-length, An Eraser And A Maze, on Friday. Leadoff single “Look How Far” is pretty berserk, like if Strokes were possessed by Captain Beefheart, I don’t mind it at all.

Featured Photo: Aaron Bilodeau, Lid Licker and Midge Ure, A Man Of Two Worlds