Category: Albums

Bear McCreary/Sparks & Shadows, God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla (video game soundtrack) (Sony Records)

One thing that’s been hard for non-young people to even wrap our heads around is the endless seriousness with which millennials and Zoomers take video games and their associated peripheral entertainment products. I mean, I (way) overdid it with Descent and Doom and all those games back in the day, but there’s no way I ever would have gone to a Covid-soaked arena to see a concert where the headliner was a DJ spinning tunes from a video game. But it’s a different world now, folks; the kids literally do that, which strikes me as absolutely dystopian, but it is what it is. In this case, we have Bear McCrearey joining forces with a couple of other soundtrackers to jack the bombast straight to Mars for this action-adventure fantasy game’s tuneage, and it’s what you’d expect, lots of Thor-themed choruses, loud epicness, etc. Mind you, this came out last year, but my email is getting pestered about the fact that this LP, “the last musical chapter for Kratos in the Norse saga,” is up for a Grammy in the category of Best Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media. Do with this nonsensical information what you will; all it does for me is remind me that Richard Wagner was a pretty nifty composer, and that Bear McCreary ripped off Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive” when he wrote the main theme to Black Sails. B —Eric W. Saeger

Front Line Assembly, Mechviruses (self-released)

Yep, I’m still an overgrown goth kid, so I do keep track of spooky-ghoulie soundsystems like this Canadian outfit, the brainchild of former Skinny Puppy crony Bill Leeb and his on-again off-again sidekick Rhys Fulber, who is definitely the weirdest guy I’ve ever interviewed, not to detract from his genius. Gothies should know what to expect from this LP for the most part, a lot of Rammstein-lite krautrock-based stomping and some soaring trance-metal. Toward the latter, they still haven’t topped “The Storm” as their best tune (it’s a gasser, folks), but they made a real effort this time, collaborating with such up-and-comers as Encephalon, s:cage, Seeming and a bunch of others to freshen the recipe, and the results are pretty freaking awesome, reminiscent of Gary Numan. The title track chugs along as politely-urgently as anything you’ve heard from them before, but — and I don’t know if Ultra Sunn’s feature has anything to do with this — there are ’80s-pop synth layers that make it really interesting. Oh, and then “Bootblacks” kicks in with some Cure-ish shoegaze guitars. This is exactly what I would have done if I ran this band; these guys are still the kings of this space, no question. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• At this writing, Genius.com tells me there are only two new music albums scheduled for traditional Friday release this week, on Dec. 27, two days after the big pagan holiday, whatever it’s called. No, I’m kidding, I know it’s called “Christmas,” but according to a popular meme that made the rounds this holiday season, Christians once actually tried to get rid of Christmas at one time, wouldn’t that have been a bummer? No, seriously, according to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ website, “In 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted a law called Penalty for Keeping Christmas. The notion was that such ‘festivals as were superstitiously kept in other countries’ were a ‘great dishonor of God and offence of others.’ Anyone found celebrating Christmas by failing to work, ‘feasting, or any other way … shall pay for every such offence five shillings [This would be about $48 today].’” The Commonwealth eventually came to realize what a dumb idea that was, and by 1681 all the witch-burning pilgrims could watch the Grinch again, but even today some musical artists couldn’t care less if it was Christmas or National Possum Day or whatever, they insist on putting out albums. For example, there’s Jorge Rivera-Herrans, a mildly popular playwright, composer, lyricist and actor from Dorado, Puerto Rico. His new record, Epic: The Ithaca Saga, is a po-faced concept album that was released on Christmas; it includes a song called “God Games” that’s racked up more than six million views on YouTube. It comprises opera-based techno-driven nonsense that’s actually kind of brilliant in a technical sense, and a lot of people like it, so I suppose there’s a chance he’ll someday become some sort of male version of Enya for Greek mythology wonks. I mean, I fully expect never to hear anything from him again unless I’m at a sci-fi convention or somesuch, but weird things happen all the time.

• Also on Christmas, K-pop band 2NE1 released a 15-track album titled Welcome Back, which commemorates their ongoing (four years and counting) tour of the same name. Their bouncy, brainless Lady Gaga-style stuff borrows from all sorts of international styles and features a lot of sexytime butt-dancing and all the other stuff that’s been portending the collapse of Western civilization since 2005 or so.

• In normal album-release news, this Friday sees the release of the second album from Harshmxjb (real name Harsh Mishra), a musician from New Delhi, India. This feller is a typical underground culture-jammer, a 19-year-old who’s been exploiting the open-door policy of Spotify, Apple Music and all the other music sites, uploading hip-hop tunes like “Alone,” in which he sings off-key, like a brain-damaged Usher, over a melancholy, non-awful piano-driven beat (that song actually got some love on TikTok and YouTube).

• We’ll wrap up the week with an album that’s neither silly, performatively epic nor K-pop, a new one from singer Robbie Williams, whom you know from British boyband Take That, which was originally triangulated by conniving record company lizard-people as the U.K.’s answer to New Kids on the Block. That was a long time ago, of course; Williams has been a solo art-fraud since 1995, not that American audiences have paid much attention to him, but regardless, the new LP is Better Man (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack). Given that the movie is about Williams’ career, he was probably a good choice to soundtrack it; these things aren’t difficult to figure out.

Kristian Montgomery and the Winterkill Band, Prophets of the Apocalypse (self-released)

When last we left Cape Cod-based bandleader Montgomery I was on the verge of anointing him the Tom Petty of New England, but that feels a little inadequate; local achievement is generally regarded by the public as almost meaningless in comparison to national success no matter the level of enthusiasm from hometown wags. I mean, he’s been nominated for some pretty notable awards, including a (nationally renowned) Josie and a Boston Music Award in 2021, which somehow led to his having beef with the committee owing to his disgust for their lack of recognition for blue-collar artists. He’s a rebel, this guy, and has a ton of working-class cred. In this EP he blends Petty with Florida Georgia Line in the timely blue-collar protest song “American Fire” and country-fies early Kings Of Leon in “Leaving Texas.” He’s a legitimate badass, folks; I literally had to troll him into letting me hear this record in advance, a very rare thing with hungry local bands. Please support this man. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Adam Birnbaum, Preludes (self-released)

This one’s a year old now, but the fellow who’s helping to promote this world-class pianist is trying to break into the upper echelons of the music business, and he’s a nice guy, so here goes. This album spotlights a piano, upright bass and percussion trio taking on a formidable set of Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions, along the way adding elements of jazz, Latin, swing and straight eighth-note, taking liberties with feel and improvisation. There are YouTube videos of these cool customers going at it, and it’s quite a sight; Matt Clohesy playing his bass after a showy, Jaco Pastorius fashion; percussionist Keita Ogawa looking quite comfortable and Birnbaum appearing as if he’d literally invented the piano he’s playing. “Prelude in Db Major” bops right along most ambitiously, all but stripped of its classical nature; “Prelude in C Major” retains much of the latter but does eventually settle into a light, piano-bar groove. Terrific stuff. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• At this writing, Genius.com tells me there are only two new music albums scheduled for traditional Friday release this week, on Dec. 27, two days after the big pagan holiday, whatever it’s called. No, I’m kidding, I know it’s called “Christmas,” but according to a popular meme that made the rounds this holiday season, Christians once actually tried to get rid of Christmas at one time, wouldn’t that have been a bummer? No, seriously, according to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ website, “In 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted a law called Penalty for Keeping Christmas. The notion was that such ‘festivals as were superstitiously kept in other countries’ were a ‘great dishonor of God and offence of others.’ Anyone found celebrating Christmas by failing to work, ‘feasting, or any other way … shall pay for every such offence five shillings [This would be about $48 today].’” The Commonwealth eventually came to realize what a dumb idea that was, and by 1681 all the witch-burning pilgrims could watch the Grinch again, but even today some musical artists couldn’t care less if it was Christmas or National Possum Day or whatever, they insist on putting out albums. For example, there’s Jorge Rivera-Herrans, a mildly popular playwright, composer, lyricist and actor from Dorado, Puerto Rico. His new record, Epic: The Ithaca Saga, is a po-faced concept album that was released on Christmas; it includes a song called “God Games” that’s racked up more than six million views on YouTube. It comprises opera-based techno-driven nonsense that’s actually kind of brilliant in a technical sense, and a lot of people like it, so I suppose there’s a chance he’ll someday become some sort of male version of Enya for Greek mythology wonks. I mean, I fully expect never to hear anything from him again unless I’m at a sci-fi convention or somesuch, but weird things happen all the time.

• Also on Christmas, K-pop band 2NE1 released a 15-track album titled Welcome Back, which commemorates their ongoing (four years and counting) tour of the same name. Their bouncy, brainless Lady Gaga-style stuff borrows from all sorts of international styles and features a lot of sexytime butt-dancing and all the other stuff that’s been portending the collapse of Western civilization since 2005 or so.

• In normal album-release news, this Friday sees the release of the second album from Harshmxjb (real name Harsh Mishra), a musician from New Delhi, India. This feller is a typical underground culture-jammer, a 19-year-old who’s been exploiting the open-door policy of Spotify, Apple Music and all the other music sites, uploading hip-hop tunes like “Alone,” in which he sings off-key, like a brain-damaged Usher, over a melancholy, non-awful piano-driven beat (that song actually got some love on TikTok and YouTube).

• We’ll wrap up the week with an album that’s neither silly, performatively epic nor K-pop, a new one from singer Robbie Williams, whom you know from British boyband Take That, which was originally triangulated by conniving record company lizard-people as the U.K.’s answer to New Kids on the Block. That was a long time ago, of course; Williams has been a solo art-fraud since 1995, not that American audiences have paid much attention to him, but regardless, the new LP is Better Man (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack). Given that the movie is about Williams’ career, he was probably a good choice to soundtrack it; these things aren’t difficult to figure out.

Crayon, Home Safe (self-released)

Lots to unpack from this French producer’s upcoming 2025 debut album, the first thing being the fact that I usually can’t stomach French music and was surprised to like this stuff, the second being that it’s almost painfully art-wonky; if you were at all confused or triggered by the bizarre opening ceremony for the 2024 Olympics, you should stick to something more meat-and-potatoes than this, just trying to help. Toward the latter, the video for the title track is one of the weirdest you’ll ever see, combining performance art and ballet in a presentation that, like the cover art, will surely be misinterpreted by unqualified critics as a shocking glamorization of the KKK (it isn’t at all). Artists gotta art, you see, and this guy’s been lucky enough to be introduced to and seen by the right people; among other things, he’s written platinum hits for French rap artists like Josman. The music itself has haunted house elements, i.e. slow techno exercises that sound like Heligoland-era Massive Attack after the guys drank a gallon of Robitussin. It’s plenty melodic, and to say it’s unapologetically urban would be the understatement of the decade. Perfect stuff for a perfectly broken planet. A

Victoria Monét, A Jaguar II Christmas: The Orchestral Arrangements (RCA Records)

Talk about under the wire; I was sifting through my emailbox for a metal or noise album to review here in order to finish off the week quickly when this one — an actual holiday record! — popped up. If you weren’t aware that AOR-R&B was even still being made by anyone, you can make room in your stack of Anita Baker and Toni Braxton albums for Monét, a multiple Grammy winner who worked her way up from the songwriting bullpen to bathe the world in her own brand of expensive-hotel vibe, with hits like the yacht rock-bordering “On My Mama,” which gets a bedroom-chill overhaul here, as well as subtle “12 Days Of Christmas” interpositions. That kind of thing goes on a lot on this record: Monét is a creative soul, well-versed in symphonics; in the appropriately named “Cadillac Christmas” she inserts snatches of “Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy” into a yacht-hip-hop beat while maintaining her understated street cred (don’t try that at home; it’s a difficult trick). Wonderfully tasteful, this. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yee-ha, our next album-release Friday is Dec. 20, when people like me, CD reviewers with weekly columns that need to be filled with news of new albums, sit in our glittering snow drifts on The Island Of Misfit Toys, with nothing to talk about at all. There aren’t many new CDs that come out this time of year; all the “important” new albums have already come out and we already made fun of them gave them a thorough, professional evaluation, for the edification of you, our faithful readers. And so, like a Charlie In The Box, or a squirt gun that shoots Polaner All-Fruit instead of water, or a toy cowboy who rides an ostrich, I sit alone, in my completely unorganized trash heap of an office, waiting to hear the jingling of sleigh bells, that magical sound that heralds the arrival of Santa Claus, who will, I hope against hope, bring me albums to talk about in this award-winning space. I get so looooonely this time of year, guys, passing the endless hours, with no albums to critique, trying to ignore the urge to have a Skittles-eating contest with myself or just leave this page blank until tomorrow and go back to binging reruns of Match Game ’78 on the Buzzr channel, wasn’t Charles Nelson Reilly a funny fellow? Oh forget it, no one wants a misfit social media-addicted CD reviewer when the music market is oversaturated, good grief, why didn’t I stock up on Kleenex, I just hope none of you nice people ever have to — wait! Do you hear that, folks? And look! A bright red shiny nose-sized light, making straight for me! It’s —! It’s —! It’s — SANTA! Wait, Santa threw me something, wrapped in shiny paper and a nice bow! Yow, I can’t even believe it, it’s a new album, coming out on Dec. 20, for this column! Let’s see, I’m so excited, this album’s from some band I’ve never heard of — of course it is — called Fish in a Birdcage and it is titled Mentors! Well, let me look into this. They’re from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, which probably explains why they’re putting out an album five days before ChristmaHannaKwanzaa, I don’t think they don’t have holidays in Canada except for Guillotine Day or whatever it is, could someone text me the Widipedia deets on that before my hands finish typing this entire column? Wait, no, I get it now, this is an actual band, not a joke YouTube-only hip-hop band like the one I wrote about two years ago, these guys have an actual record contract, with Nettwerk Records, which is literally my favorite record company to receive albums from. What does all this mean? It means they must have been contractually obligated to put out an album before the end of the year or else, you know how it goes! But guess what, this is a good band, judging by the first single, “Badger.” It’s a stompy tune that’s part Strokes, part Billy Squier and part Scottish-ren-faire grog-folk; I’m seriously impressed. Thank you for giving me a holly jolly Christmas, Santa! On, Dasher! On, Whatsyourface!

• Anyway, folks, that’s it for the least happy time of the year for us misfit CD reviewers! I’d like to thank the dude who sold me the nice expensive coffee mugs at World Market in Bedford, N.H., Petunia will definitely love them, and furthermore — wait! Look! One of Santa’s reindeer left me a present! — No, not that, don’t be gross, it’s another album! This one’s from some British “comedy music” kid who calls himself ZEDNED, and it’s titled Do You Think I Give A S—t. No, seriously, it’s an actual album, fam, it’s on Spotify and Apple Music and whatnot, so I’m going to listen to the song “Jake Jake Jake,” which is probably about ZEDNED himself, because his “real name” is Jake Muscles. Let’s see — OK, OK, it’s a joke song, with a totally canned trap-and-wub-wub beat, and he’s talking about gross sexytime stuff. Do not buy.

Candy Whips, Artificial Melodies (Kitten Robot Records)

This northern California fivesome label their stuff ‘’post-glam” or “accidental goth,” the latter of which is more fitting in my opinion. It’s quite angular, this; to me the tldr description would be Gang of Four sitting around smoking joints with Lord Of The New Church, what with the ’80s-cheesing, mellotron-emulating synth; the resolute, minimalist guitar-chonking and the Stiv Bator vocals of (male) vocalist Wendy Stonehenge. Formulaically, the recipe calls for an Aughts-era verse-bridge structure in the vein of early Cure and such, that is to say the tunes want to take us someplace but don’t always arrive, and yet the journey is nevertheless pleasant enough (that’s especially true of “A Drop Will Do,” an alcoholism-admission story that’s the most phoned-in-sounding thing on board). But there are a lot of cool things in this set, such as “Strange Taste,” with its urgent, no-wave-ish anti-riff. Melodically on point, only rarely bogged down with performative subtlety. A

Kilmara, Journey To The Sun (RPM Records)

The rise of “melodic power metal” is in sync with the same epic-ness we hear in nearly every musical genre nowadays (save for indie of course, whose soil’s been depleted since the 1980s owing to the majority of its bands having more disposable recording money than actual artistry). People don’t have time nor patience for buildup anymore; they want the show-stopping mega-melody now or they go back to social media. We’ve heard it for years from emo-rock bands, pop divas, etc. and now it’s even on the big screen: A year from now, no one will remember that aside from “Defying Gravity” the soundtrack to Wicked is pretty awful (a friend remarked on Bluesky that Stephen Schwartz hasn’t written a decent score since 1970’s Godspell). Unlike Wicked, the fifth album from this Barcelona, Spain-based quintet, is wall-to-wall showstoppers, but sorry folks, sometimes you just have to wait for the big hook-gasm. In other words, conceptually and musically, it’s a fine tracing from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra template, but with more speed when they feel like going for it. I could picture some of this stuff bringing a tear to some metal-head’s eye; such a funny, funny world we live in now. A

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• On Dec. 13, a few new albums will come out and be dumped into the Spotifies and the retail stores that carry music CDs for purchase, do stores even do that anymore? I suppose they do, particularly stores that sell vinyl albums for 1890s Victrola record-playing machines, because they know that certain people fancy themselves as “audiophiles”; they enjoy listening to vinyl records so that they can hear mistakes in old recordings, like they like to go “Woop! Hear that, Petunia? Ringo hit the rim of the snare drum, not the head, lolol, he must have been drunk on the reefers, you know?” No, I’m just funnin’ with you vinyl junkies; by now everyone knows that CDs simply can’t capture many frequencies, like the sound of unintentional rimshots by Ringo or the dulcet tones of groupies power-barfing in the booth; instead, all the sounds get squished together in an aural trash compactor, so the only way you can detect that Jimmy Page has too much treble on his guitar (didn’t he always?) is to suffer through the vinyl versions of 55-year-old Led Zeppelin songs! Speaking of Ringo Starr, he has a new country album coming out Jan. 10, called Look Up, but I’ll save the snarky CSI on that for later, since chances are there won’t be much else for me to talk about in this award-winning column during the first two weeks of the new year. In the meantime, we can point and laugh at Snoop Dogg, whose new album is out this Friday. It is titled Missionary, because Snoop actually invented sex during the time of the pharaohs, and it is produced by famous producing producer Dr. Dre, because why not! One of the singles, “Another Part of Me,” features Police bassist and tantric-sexytime man Sting; the tune borrows Outkast’s steez, reimagining the Police’s “SOS” as a shuffle tune with lyrics about living in L.A. and dealing with people shooting at you because they’re bored or whatever. It’s actually a marked improvement over the original (I know, I know).

• Wait, don’t run off yet, here’s one that’s awesome, a posthumous album from a rapping feller I actually like, DMX! We all know that the D-Man was always big into spittin’ about his faith on his first six-or-so albums, but on this new one, Let Us Pray: Chapter X, there’s more prayin’ than rappin’! Grammy award-winning producer Warryn Campbell set DMX’s prayers to music for the first time on this groundbreaking project that fuses hip-hop to gospel; it includes features from Killer Mike, Snoop, LeCrae and MC Lyte. In “Favor,” DMX thanks the lord for blessing him with fame and such; there’s straight-up praying and some trademark rhyming, super cool stuff.

• I assume you may not know much about British indie-dance act Saint Etienne despite their being around for nearly 35 years. Their trip is blending velvet-rope dance stuff with ’60s pop and whatnot, but on “Daydream,” the single for their latest LP, The Night, you’ll hear straight-ahead trance stuff a la Oceanlab. It’s great, you should listen to it.

• We’ll end the week with Rome, the new live album from Cincinnati, Ohio, post-punk revival band The National! Includes a version of the (very) Kings Of Leon-like “I Need My Girl,” a sad and mawkish rawk ballad that may move you, I don’t know for sure.

Kodak Black, Trill Bill (Capitol Records)

This Florida-based rapper boasts the necessary cachet to make him relevant to the current generation of working-class rap fans, a cohort who seemed to have completely lost the thread of whom to be mad at. This, the second mixtape he released in November, pushes the trappy single “News Matt,” characterized by a twin vocal track that’s bluesy, intentionally sloppy and horror-movie-ready in its tonality; his swagger is still there, no worries. Lots of melody here, such as in the arpeggiated piano lines of opener “Cherish The Moment,” the cheese-soaked ’80s-keyboard-driven “Dirty Revolver” and the five-star-hotel-lobby-evoking “Maybach Van.” Not much to report in the way of percussion; nearly every drum line is identical, but that’s of course secondary. As always the idea is to microwave 30-year-old tropes from New Jack City (he even gave away a truck full of turkeys on Thanksgiving, not kidding). B

Calum Scott and Christina Perri, “Kid At Christmas” (Capitol Records)

Oops, looks like I spoke too soon in the Playlist about the end of this year’s new holiday records, although in my defense it’s rare for me to be advised about new ones after the second week of November. This one’s a pop duet between 2015’s Britain’s Got Talent winner Scott and heavily tattooed American singer-songwriter Perri, whose debut single “Jar of Hearts” was featured on American TV’s So You Think You Can Dance in 2010. Bless their hearts, these two wanted to create a single that’d become a “seasonal classic is for the grown-ups out there who still get a certain warm, fuzzy feeling in wintertime” and they do make an effort in this mawkish and (spoiler) vocally muscular happy-ballad. The result is something that’s too nuanced and important-sounding to be dismissed as a throwaway tune sung by the cookie-shop owner and her (hopefully future!) beau in the latest Hallmark Christmas movie, but not by much really. B

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• As far as the retail stores are concerned, it’s been Christmas for many weeks now. On the day after Halloween, the ever-present danger becomes real, rolling itself out slowly: We walk into our Targets and Walmarts and malls just waiting to hear the first strains of Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree.” It’s always that one we hear first, with its half-plugged, anodyne Chuck Berry-ish guitar, an insidious, innocent-sounding ditty bespeaking casual joyfulness, nostalgia-loaded quaintness and buying signals, a warning shot before everything descends into a frenzy, culminating in thunderously metal versions of “Carol of the Bells” while we drive around semi-aimlessly through impossible traffic, searching the stores for that one gift we Simply Must Get. For me this year — and I can talk about this here because my wife probably hasn’t read this column for years now (familiarity does breed inappreciation, not that I’d enjoy discussing my “writing process” every week with some breathlessly gushing admirer) the Simply Must Get is some coffee mugs to replace the ones she loves: Robert Gordon Hug Mugs, the “Blue Storm” pattern in specific. Of the original four she bought years ago, only one survives today; like disposable characters in a slasher film, the other three met their ends in fiendishly clever ways. The next-to-last one expired when the handle simply fell off when I was washing it last week. Given that there’s no way I’m paying $110 to have four new Blue Storm mugs imported from Australia, I’ll start my search this week; I’ll pop into the hilariously overpriced kitchen-and-bath chain stores (funny how those companies never survive more than three years, isn’t it?) and try to find the closest match. I’m hoping to get that mission accomplished before the stores shift into full-blown “last minute/final warning” mode of the holiday shopping season, when every single place you walk into, from Hot Topic to Dollar Tree, has Andy Williams’ “The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year” playing overhead, just to remind you that “you’re out of time, let’s cough it up already, buddy, that’d be great.” Speaking of that, the Christmas album-buying season has pretty much already ended, although the new Netflix special A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter will show up on Friday, Dec. 6, featuring the ridiculously overexposed young diva duetting with Shania Twain among others. Hard pass of course.

• It may be too late for Christmas albums, but it’s never too late for older artists to microwave some Beatles songs for a quick buck or posterity or whatnot! We talked about Americana/country singer Lucinda Williams a few months ago, and I think I also mentioned that Abbey Road is the only Beatles album I can stand, so lucky for me (or someone), Williams will release Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road this Friday, the 6th! Naturally, the song I like the least on that album, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” is the teaser single. It’s kind of noisy, which is a positive.

• If you’d ever wanted a more sedate, epically melodic Prodigy, you may have gravitated to New York art-rock band Geese, and if you like Geese, you may like the first solo album from Geese frontman Cameron Winter, Heavy Metal, but then again maybe not! In the first single, indie piano-ballad “$0,” Winter does a low-voiced nick of a drunken Thom Yorke. I couldn’t deal with it very long but maybe his mom likes it.

• And finally it’s Austin, Texas, garage rockers White Denim, with 12, their 12th album if you don’t count their 2023 collaboration LP with Raze Regal and one or two other releases. Whatever, “Light On” combines the sounds of Relayer-era Yes with Mungo Jerry for no reason whatsoever, not that it’s officially bad.

Blue Moods, Force and Grace (Posi-Tone Records)

American jazz trumpet legend Freddie Hubbard has been gone since 2008, and of course he’ll never be forgotten, especially not by the — let’s just say it, often snobby crowd (mostly composed of deeply obsessed jazz musicians) who can rattle off a mile-long list of his most interesting instrumental maneuvers. This is the third “Blue Moods” release — or curation, if you will — from Posi-Tone, and it aims to address that very disconnect, wherein non-standard originals by various masters are made inaccessible to new fans possessed of an ounce of curiosity about what led to our current age of anything-goes-but-only-up-to-a-point era of jazz. There’s much beauty and whiz-bang-ery here, of course, but the smoothness of the songs is the most striking aspect of the collection; in such compositions as “On The Que-Tee,” the players — a quartet led by sax player Diego Rivera, assisted by an alternating pair of pianists — seem to want to jam forever, and the listener finds themself wishing for exactly that. Sublime and wonderful, this. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Peter Murphy & Boy George, “Let The Flowers Grow” (Metropolis Records)

Now that 2024’s culture-war-rooted election is over, it’s safe to say that this chill-electro single can be listened to with open minds from all corners, particularly since it’s such an exquisite little tune. The story here is that this highly unlikely team-up of ’80s icons (Boy George, who needs no introduction, and Peter Murphy of goth legends Bauhaus) coalesced when Murphy heard a work-in-progress demo of George’s half-finished tune, fell in love with it and finished it up in 20 minutes. It’s a melancholy but hopeful piece of chill-techno balladry with plenty of retro-’80s sound to it, lyrically dedicated to the process of coming out, a reality I experienced recently with someone close to me, someone I’d long casually surmised was gay but from whom I’d never expected to hear an admission thereof. The pair sing of a mother’s tears watering the ground so that flowers can grow, of a father facing an alternate-universe mirror image of himself for the first time. This thing isn’t just powerful, it’s supremely empowering; the video is absolutely amazing. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nov. 29 isn’t just any Friday filled with new album releases, it is a Black Friday, the jolliest time of the year, when all the bands and record companies prepare for a relentless onslaught of random album-buying, from consumers, who have holiday gifts to buy! For people in the music-selling business, it’s that time of year that recalls the scene in the 1975 film Jaws, when all the nice townspeople gather at the town meeting to discuss why they must keep the beaches open even though there’s a humongous shark swimming around looking for human-shaped snacks; in this metaphorical context, the record companies need you people to buy albums even though most of those albums will swallow your aesthetic senses whole, in one bite, nom nom nom, leaving you butt-twerking or believing that bands like Franz Ferdinand are composed of decent musicians! Extending this ridiculous violation of literary license, you can just think of me as Quint: I’ll protect all you nice people from awful bands and DJs and nepo-baby singers named after European cities, but it’ll cost you, and you’ll need to load up my boat with fresh boxes of saltines! OK, let’s put on our rubber diving suits, hop into the totally safe aluminum shark cage, and dive into the blackness to see what we’ll find, maybe there’s something good! Uh oh, here comes a big one, it’s corporate-soundtrack-maker Bear McCreary with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2: Amazon Original Series Soundtrack, when did J.R.R. Tolkien have time to write more stories about Bilbo Baggins, I wonder. I do have Amazon Prime but haven’t watched that show, is it as good as those other Game of Thrones cartoons or whatever they are? I don’t know, but I do know that the leadoff track from this album is “Old Tom Bombadil,” and it features Rufus Wainwright, singing in his folky Bono-meets-Pete Seeger tenor, warbling Tolkien’s words verbatim from the chapters “The Old Forest” and “In the House of Tom Bombadil” from The Fellowship of the Ring. I gather that this denotes a depressing scene in the show, which, again, I have not watched, because I don’t watch sad cartoons about dragons.

• Onward and whatnot, let’s dissect an actual holiday album, Christmas Vacation, from cowboy-hat singer Walker Hayes. This singing man is of course a nepo baby (drink!), the son of a rich U.S. congressperson, but I will not hold that against him, because he likes jingle bells and Santa just like normal people do. Unfortunately, the “Christmas Vacation” in this case has nothing to do with the Chevy Chase movie, it is a twangy country-Christmas joke song about how awkward it is when Grandma brings over her new boyfriend and how it’s so funny that the ashes of her first husband, your grandfather, are kept in an urn and that you have to drink your yearly holiday beer toast with his urn all alone and it’s weird. You know how it is, right?

• Yes, it’s holiday time, a special time for those of you who are so rich you just throw money out your car window. If you’re that rich and you’re also a fan of former Cream guitarist Eric Clapton, you’ll want to know about Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival 2023, a $90 box set featuring every star from Joe Bonamassa to Molly Tuttle playing random songs. Look at this, there’s H.E.R. playing a cover of Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way,” the least uninteresting thing on board.

• Lastly it’s famous indie rock band Wilco with Hot Sun Cool Shroud, an EP featuring six or seven tunes they left off their 2023 Cousin album. “Hot Sun” is a pretty neat mid-tempo thing, utilizing an edgy-poppy-edgy song structure. —Eric W. Saegerr