Category: Albums

Andrew Renfroe, Run In The Storm (self-released)

I’ve come to know dozens of rock guitarists quite intimately over the years. They’re odd, obsessed creatures, in a constant three-way battle with their instrument, their musical desires and their own abilities. I imagine that jazz players must take those conflicts to a whole other level, and when one becomes a master of their own destiny, it’s got to be a sweet thing. This guy’s from New York City, from where he released a Jazz Weekly-lauded EP last year (and no, I don’t know if I’ve literally ever received a jazz EP in all the piles that’ve washed into this office). This is a different sort of thing than I would have anticipated, as Renfroe isn’t just flashy but incredibly tasteful. Sound-wise it’s Weather Channel-ready but remarkably more advanced than that; his statements tend to be highly concise, short and sweet rather than prolonged, and his interplay with sax player Braxton Cook is pure melted butter. One to investigate if your pleasures run to tightly controlled, mellow progginess. A+

James DiGirolamo, Paper Boats (self-released)

This Nashville-based singer-songwriter has piles of notable experience as a session musician and touring sideman, having worked with Mindy Smith, Robby Hecht and the ever-awesome Peter Bradley Adams, along with lots of others. There’s a reason session guys are, you know, session guys, but DiGirolamo does have enough of a songwriting knack to please most soccer parents, his obvious target audience. His chosen niche is mainstream pop that encompasses the Paul McCartney to Simon and Garfunkel space, but he obviously picked up a pretty sweet Americana influence during his time with Adams (“Top Of The World”; elsewhere). Of course, none of that automatically spells smashing success just on face, but this is a decent effort. DiGirolamo’s relaxed tenor is pretty much like Robbie Williams fitted with a certain government-issue Bob Dylan nasality; song structures lean toward more modern anti-hook arrangements. He’s aware indie exists; “On Paper” sounds a bit like a Tin Pan notion of a Bon Iver rough draft, if you can imagine such a thing. B

PLAYLIST

• On July marches, to the 30th, when new albums will, like magic, appear in your stores or wherever you obtain music totally legally like the good upstanding citizen that you are. As all the pre-teens know, weird-haired Billie Eilish will release a new album called Happier Than Ever, and everyone will buy it no matter what I say in this space, so you and I would both probably be better served if I just talked about the feral hijinks of our three abandoned rescue cats, Patches, Rubysmooch and Babypuss, all of whom were lured out of their various drainpipe and rhubarb-plant landing spots because they sensed correctly that I’d overfeed them. But I won’t talk about that, since this is a music column and not the Cheezburger website, so let’s pretend that this new Billie Eilish album will make everyone on the internet forget to cancel her for making xenophobic remarks a few years ago or whatever it was. I can understand that people were permanently damaged by someone saying idiotic things when they were an idiot teenager or early-20something, because at that age, as we all know, humans are fully developed psychologically and have the manners of an Oxford graduate in Anthropology, and never do stuff like eat anything without properly arranged knives, forks and spoons as prescribed by Emily Post. Yes, never in my life have I ever heard a teenager say something that didn’t make me think to myself, “Boy, that’s an important socio-political point; I’m really going to need to marinate my brain in that one for a good while.” Anyway, the new single, “Your Power,” is proof that Eilish has grown up the rest of the way; it’s not a hyper-minimalist bloop-pop thing like all her other nonsense, it’s more like Bat For Lashes doing an Americana-tinged booze ballad. So everyone can just go back to stalking your ex on Facebook and leave Billie alone, because she’s never going to say or do anything stupid again, guaranteed, ever.

• Also ahead this week is proto-punk Alan Vega’s Alan Vega After Dark, which is a posthumous release. Formerly the more interesting half of the duo Suicide, he was 78 when he died in his sleep in 2016. By my count this is his third posthumous record, after two released by his attorney wife Liz Lamere. Suicide tended to cause a lot of violent incidents at the end of their shows; as Wikipedia notes, “They were among the first acts to use the phrase “punk music” in an advertisement for a concert in 1970.” And so he was awesome, like Iggy Pop, and this new album is composed of tunes cobbled together during a session with Pink Slip Daddy members Ben Vaughn, Barb Dwyer and Palmyra Delran. One of the songs, “Nothing Left,” is very, very much like Stooges-era Iggy, so I’d have to like it even if I didn’t, which I don’t.

• Didn’t I just mention a new album from Los Lobos, or am I insane? Native Sons is the new album, featuring the single “Love Special Delivery,” which is awesome, because it’s rockabilly and it has Tex-Mex horns. They should play that acoustic set at Tupelo again, bro.

• To close out the week we have See Me, the new record from R&B singing lady Leela James! The new single, “Put It On Me,” is totally ’70s soul-pop, with Four Tops-style orchestration and some super-deep singing. It’s official, she’s awesome.

Retro Playlist

Twelve years ago it was 2009, just saving you the math, being that math should be abolished. This time that year there were a couple of big things going on in the music world. One was the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, from which sprang a six-CD set called Woodstock: 40 Years on: Back to Yasgur’s Farm, which included 38 previously unreleased tunes “from such crazed drug-heads as the Grateful Dead, The Who, Tim Hardin, Jefferson Airplane and one-hit joke-band Country Joe & The Fish, who ended the Vietnam War.” But wait a minute, you know what else was in the news? That’s right, Michael Jackson had just died, so anyone who had survived the 2008 stock market crash with a car, a chicken coop to live in and $200 in Monopoly money had, at the time, “so many new Jacko releases that Amazon isn’t even bothering anymore to include song lists or explanatory blurbs in the listings, and all you can really do is hope you’re not accidentally buying old Wham! albums disguised as Thriller remixes.” I focused my Jacko-related coverage on an unidentified DVD called Moonwalking – The True Story of Michael Jackson, which may or may not have been a bunch of unauthorized shaky-cam bootlegs released by unemployed accountant-hobos who had simply taped a bunch of ET segments off their TV and spliced them together.

The two focus albums under review that week comprised a mixed bag. I appear to have rather liked Horehound from Dead Weather, the ’70s-hard-rock collaboration between hamburger addict Jack White and Kills singer Alison Mosshart, but looking back, I now know that the more that band released albums, the more I realized they weren’t really doing anything interesting, and have scribbled my thoughts accordingly once or twice since.

There was also Take Off Your Colours, an album from English punk-pop throwaways You Me At Six. The songs, I thought, were decidedly ‘meh,’ viz: “Though they’re too hooky and mature to be lumped in with all the hand-me-down Hoobastank chaff, they’re not 100 percent wheat either.” They sound exactly like every other emo band ever, which we now know has become mandatory for all of them.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Simon Moullier Trio, Countdown (Fresh Sound New Talent Records)

Set of recitations of jazz classics from one of the hottest vibraphonists around, whether or not there’s supposed to be such a thing. To laypeople that means xylophone, but there actually is a difference: the bars of a xylophone are made of wood, whereas a vibraphone uses aluminum bars. You’re probably assuming these are old people playing this stuff, but nope, they look like any trio of twee nerds you’d immediately picture, which means that the vibes are still alive whether you want them or not. As any snobby jazzophile knows by now, my only go-to reference for vibes is Lionel Hampton, but I do like jazz classics (Coltrane’s “Nature Boy” and two Monk songs are here), which these guys treat in fine style. The trio thrums along agreeably, not trying anything funny; the effect is hypnotic, and despite the all-acoustic instrumentation, it does feel electronic. Best bit: Someone (I assume Moullier) often absently scats accompaniment with his voice in very sedating fashion (Charlie Parker’s “The Song Is You” most prominently). A — Eric W. Saeger

Falkner Evans, Invisible Words (Consolidated Artists Records)

Solo outing from the New York City-based jazz pianist, formerly of the Western swing band Asleep At The Wheel and a third cousin to author William Faulkner. The lonely zen of even being involved in the jazz world in the first place is distilled to its very essence here; the record is wholly dedicated to Evans’ wife, Linda, who died by suicide last year. Having been in a relationship for 16 years now, this isn’t pleasant for me to cover; I can vividly imagine what it was like for Evans in the aftermath, fleeing the couple’s Greenwich Village flat to re-gather his life at a relative’s house in Auburn, Mass. He might not have touched a piano again to date, but the relative had a beater in the basement, and suddenly there were three songs, and then a personal covenant, a record he had to complete. Needless to say, gentle, deeply thoughtful soliloquies comprise this album, capturing times spent together at their favorite library; etchings of her very image in sound. God, life is short, isn’t it? A+

PLAYLIST

• The July 23 new-CD-release day approacheth, and with it will come albums, one or two of which are made by artists you actually care about, while the rest will come from bands and singers whom you hope get eaten by Godzilla. I am in that same boat with you, praying for Godzilla, and meanwhile practicing my medieval-knight-speak by using words like “approacheth,” because I figure hey, if ’90s music can make a comeback, so can talking like King Arthur, right? OK, kids, let’s have you all sit down with your Archer lunch boxes and Coco Puffs-flavored vape-pens and have a look at this week’s reading of the cultural obituary column, which we’ll begin with a puzzled sideways glance at Downhill From Everywhere, the new album from ancient arena-pop artifact Jackson Browne! You of course know Browne from giant dentist-office hits like “Runnin’ On Empty,” “Rock Me On The Water,” and the absolutely detestable “Doctor My Eyes,” which is usually only heard at children’s dentist’s offices, because a 1997 Harvard study proved that the song’s sleepy, astonishingly unmelodic refrain was shown to coax 5-year-olds into abandoning any notion of escaping the waiting room and running away to become train-robbers. Like so many other hyper-privileged rock stars, Browne is a former Los Angeles Father of the Year, having dumped his second wife for Daryl Hannah, who once played a one-eyed psychopath in a movie that takes six hours to watch. But what of Downhill From Everywhere? I don’t know, but the title track has music on it, a mixture of Rolling Stones and Steely Dan, with lyrics that are basically a checklist of things Rob Reiner tweets to his parasocial public, such as that we need oceans for some reason and all that stuff. It’s totally woke, guys, it really is.

• Mega Bog is Erin Birgy, a Pacific Northwest avant-pop chick who’s been compared to Bowie, Tim Buckley, Sea And Cake, Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan and a few dozen others. Not sure why she isn’t also compared to Ludwig von Beethoven and whatever, mallard duck calls, you know, anything that makes sounds, but that’s what happens when music critics have no idea what they’re doing and resort to babbling incoherent, obfuscatory crazyspeak, all just so that readers will think they’re in good hands. Whatever, let’s go see if “Station To Station,” the single from her new album, Life and Another, is awesome or awful. Huh, it’s a formula that involves Kate Bush, ’90s-Nintendo-techno and trip-hop, I guess. It sort of — OK, it sucks, is what it does. Anyhow.

• Everyone gather around, it’s mega-old folk-rock mollusk David Crosby. For Free is his new album, and I think everyone reading this should help make the album’s title come true by not buying it and allowing the “record company” to toss the 10 copies they actually manufactured into the dumpster (no way am I previewing any of those dumb songs, so don’t give me those droopy doggie eyes. Nuh uh.).

• Our parting shot this week is California skate-punk band Descendents, with 9th & Walnut, their eighth full-length. “Nightage” is a fine-enough Ramones-style song. Sorry, what? Yes, it took them 50 years to release eight albums. Ahem.

Retro Playlist

Ten years ago this week, room-temperature-IQ Wilco-wannabe TV-dramedy-backgrounders Fountains of Wayne release their fifth nice obedient album Sky Full of Holes. Since you forgot about it three seconds after you read it, I’ll remind you that I said the single “Someone’s Gonna Break Your Heart,” “is a typical example of this easily forgotten outfit’s nonsense, because it sounds like a few extras from Scrubs playing Rock Band to an old Oasis B-side.” Mind you, that was my trying to be as kind as possible, so keep that in mind if you’re going to drag me on social media.

Wait, I take that back; I’m keen on any reason for quitting social media forever and communicating by fax, so do have at it.

But that album wasn’t the big news that week. There were two feature reviews, the first being Days To Recall, from Justin Hines, who was at the time a staple on PBS pledge drives. He was born with Larsen Syndrome, and he’s still around, making music that’s “honky-soulful in the manner of Amos Lee or Jeff Buckley,” his voice no more technically remarkable than your average American Idol fifth runner-up, but he’s pretty special when he rocks out with his “obedient, gospel-tinged blues-rock.”

The other marquee contestant was Australian singer Abbe May, whose Design Desire LP didn’t fare so well. Falsely “touted this as a White Stripes-style blues-rock assault,” it probably would have rated a lot higher if the engineer hadn’t given the impression that he’d just “woken up from an all-nighter with Salem.” It received a rare C+ grade from me (I rarely ever rate things that low, because my mission isn’t to destroy struggling artists), mostly because the reverb on her voice sounded absolutely awful.

So take note, local bands, either produce your records yourself or hire an engineer who isn’t a complete twit.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Assorted Orchids, Assorted Orchids (Whale Watch Records)

Debut album from Boston-based folkie T. McWilliams, whose target audience is the weird-beard acoustic-guitar set that lumps together such debatably disparate acts as Mississippi John Hurt and Nick Drake. He’s lived in a lot of places, including Los Angeles, New York City, Shanghai and Scotland, which would explain the boho feel of these pieces, but it’s nevertheless not a fluffy record at all. There’s real precision in play when McWilliams is plucking his steel and nylon strings and applying his delicate croak to such vivid lyrics as “I entered the garden of scarlet chrysanthemums opening wide” (“The Mighty Kingdom”), and sure, we’ve heard that kind of thing before, but McWilliams’ layering is often divine: It’s not often that one hears incidental finger-picked arpeggios used so decisively that one gets the sense that they’re listening to high-end guitar-tronica, not just another contender for Nick Drake’s throne (not that you’d want to miss this if Drake’s your thing, certainly). Brilliant stuff. A- — Eric W. Saeger

Styx, Crash Of The Crown (UME Records)

If we’re gonna be real about this legendary Chicago arena-rock band, the default diss has always been that they’re a lite version of Yes. But you know what, they do try, and always have, and shut up anyway, because they didn’t have Bill Bruford or Chris Squire, and neither does your band, so chill. I was surprised to see so many other reviewers pointing out that original keyboardist Dennis DeYoung (the guy who sang “Mr. Roboto,” “Come Sail Away” and all the original hits) is gone, being that it’s been 21 years already, but they have their word quotas to fill, and besides, they’re still a fun band to see live. This is their 17th album, and actually quite the inspired effort. Once you get to the middle of the second tune (“The Monster”) you can’t help noticing that this thing is something of an homage to Yes’s Close To The Edge: woozy, busy keyboards; similar level of riffing; epic-gentle vocal harmonies, and hold it, the drummer is doing some very cool stuff. They’re still kickin’, folks. A+

PLAYLIST

• July 16 is the next all-important date for album releases, only I’m not supposed to call them “albums” anymore, because otherwise I’m a boomer. What that means is that I’m simply going to have to keep calling them albums, because the level of senility in my current boomer state allows me, by law, to act in accordance with my own desires, whether it be calling mixtapes “albums” or throwing a fit at the 7-Eleven if someone’s ahead of me in line buying a million lottery tickets. In other words I can start howling at the ceiling and eating a copy of the newest issue of Teen Vogue magazine until the awkward 20-something clerk comes over and asks me if I’m OK, and nothing will happen other than that because I am a boomer who loves hitting pause on the DVR machine so I can read the hundred-billion warnings on every pharmaceutical ad, and I remember when albums were called albums, and music was awesome, like the mellow tunes of Pat Boone and Spanky & Our Gang! I remember Donny and Marie Osmond too, all you 4chan trolls, secretly making fun of my words! Well, let’s see you make fun of all the edgy and groovy words I’m going to use in my first review this week, as I discuss Hideaway, the new album from skinny San Diego hipster trio Wavves! This is their seventh mixtape — oh wait, they call their records “albums,” not mixtapes, silly me, does anyone have a box of prunes I could borrow, for my digestive health? Whatever, I’ve heard a few of their things, but if I recall, their songs are only slightly more compelling than Grizzly Bear, but I may be wrong, because I’m so totally old and crazy! The band’s last record, You’re Welcome, climbed to No. 95 on the Billboard charts, not that that’s much of an achievement, now that there are only 98 people left in the U.S. who still actually buy albums, but congratulations, guys! Wow, check that out, I wasn’t expecting the title track to be jagged and grungy, but it’s definitely cool, sort of like Nevermind-era Nirvana but without Kurt Cobain’s raw/edgy voice. Spoiler alert, what’ll happen here is a bunch of people will read some stupid review in Nylon or whatnot and start to believe Wavves is awesome, and then they’ll hear actual grunge songs from the ’90s and realize they were lied to, because all the writers at Nylon are corporate-paid hacks, and then we’ll see that long-overdue ’90s music revival, while I sit here eating bowls of pudding and pharmaceuticals and cackling like a witch at all of — what was I saying again?

• Canadian indie quartet The Zolas releases Come Back To Life on Friday! It’s taken them five years to put this album out, their first since 2016’s Swooner, so it’s probably awesome! Nope, it isn’t. The title single is like Grizzly Bear trying to sing through kazoos. My stomach is lurching, it really is.

• Oh great, a new Barenaked Ladies album! Boy, how did music ever survive this long without a new mixtape or cassette or whatever from the millionth band to repackage Peter, Paul and Mary and resell it to the ’90s-college-rock crowd? Right, the new LP is Detour de Force, whose single is “New Disaster,” an ornate tapestry of 1980s Police-ripoff stuff. Moving on.

• Finally, it’s John Mayer, with his latest LP, Sob Rock! Teaser single “Last Train Home” rips off everything to do with Blue Oyster Cult’s “Shooting Shark,” but Mayer will get away with it, because anyone who’s old enough to recognize “Shooting Shark” is either in a rest home or babbling erroneous nonsense about mixtapes in this newspaper.

Retro Playlist

Reminiscing back almost-exactly-whatever eight years ago to 2013, the first order of business was giving a quick exam to Gypsy-punkers Gogol Bordello’s then-spanking-new LP, Pura Vida Conspiracy, their seventh. The album’s single, “Lost Innocent World,” is “a rather subdued version of their usual ‘oi oi oi’ spazzings, not that lead singer Eugene Hütz doesn’t sound the same as always, specifically what Serj Tankian would sound like if he were sort of fun.”

That and a few other review-snippets aside, I was forced by job description to deal with an entire album from Kentucky band Seabird, called Troubled Days. I think I disposed of it rather fairly and adroitly, to wit: “More clean-teen mall-indie for the overhead speakers at TGI Fridays. The intentions of these two Kentuckians couldn’t be more obvious; maybe a ‘big time’ Budweiser commercial spot featuring one of their tunes and they’d call it a rock star career, whether it be one of their more Strokes-like tunes or maybe even one of the debatable curveballs, the tricks to which generally involve mildly interesting guitar sounds more than anything else.” In other words you’ve heard this kind of nonsense a billion times at restaurants, and we can start wrapping up here.

The other “attraction,” for lack of a secret code word with which I could handily signify my displeasure to you, was Eric & Magill’s Baggage and Clothes. “Nerd-indie of a sort that deepens the immersive feel of Animal Collective’s trip,” I yawned, spit spraying everywhere, “this accomplished by incorporating a different, more mellow notion of swirly layering and a few elements of Simon and Garfunkel’s mawkish solitude.” (If it’s any consolation to any E&M band members who might be reading, I wouldn’t have ever thought of you again if it hadn’t been for this little stroll down memory lane.)

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

KPT, Obliterate (Give/Take Records)

Any gothies out there remember industrial DJ Terrorfakt? Oh come on, that’s got to jog a few low-tier brain cells if you were in the vampire-club scene around six or 10 years ago. He was quite the badass, making beats that were a little bit like Swans and a lot of bit like Skinny Puppy, thus he was more, well, danceable, for lack of a better word. This Minneapolis dude is somewhat similar but more Throbbing Lobster-ish, tabling noise experiments that are in general not at all danceable but plenty edgy. In fact this loose collection of six tunes is more in the vein of Kurt Vile or Einstürzende Neubauten than any of the usual Metropolis Records-signed suspects, but as I alluded, the binding vibe is Terrorfakt: unhinged darkwave intro bits eventually get taken over by pneumatic-drill pounding that’s super cool if you like it rough and dystopian. Odd factoid about this EP is that all the songs were written as agent/label demos and other such things, and none of them ever panned out. Now that’s what I call bleakness! A

Kenny Garrett, Sounds from the Ancestors (Mack Avenue Records)

Usually I try to avoid talking up a record whose release date is this far away (late August, so they’re saying), but me-oh my-oh, what a sweet album this is, from the veteran post-bop jazz saxophonist/flautist, here reminding everyone that his early days included stints with Miles Davis, Art Blakey and Freddie Hubbard, while wearing his Detroit (and Afrobeat) heritage proudly on his sleeve. The band is Garrett’s go-to quintet, gathered here to pay homage to legendary thises and thats, such as Black American church music (“When the Days Were Different”), Afro-Cuban (the title track) and (more than referentially) Roy Hargrove. Drummer wonks will feel their jaws dropping while trying to comprehend “For Art’s Sake,” in which Ronald Bruner and conga guy Rudy Bird morph into a relentless but gentle polyrhythm machine churning out a concoction of modern jazz and Nigerian Afrobeat. Doesn’t get more urban than this, guys, and the sound engineering is impeccable. A+

PLAYLIST

• All ahead flank and raise the mizzenmast, ya swabs, July 2021 is here, and with it will come bikinis on vacuous Instagrammers, the awesome new strain of coronavirus, and of course, on July 2, a bushel of new, freshly line-caught albums, from musicians, bands, and maybe even a few bored nouveau riche Hollywood imbeciles who have nothing better to do than make horrible albums with starving musicians and washed up “producers” who can be purchased outright with American Express Rewards Points! Ah, here’s one now, a new album, spazzing its way out of the fish barrel and onto my fisherman’s platter, it’s Get Up Sequences Part One, from British band The Go Team! You may have been exposed to their actually cool ravings before, a concoction made of hip-hop, indie, “double-Dutch” jump rope chants and “plunderphonics” (in other words, sound collages made of many familiar songs), but more likely you haven’t, and that’s OK! Throughout their 20-year career, these guys have collaborated with such artists as Deerhoof and Chuck D, had an album nominated for a Mercury Prize, and basically been accused of being incredibly awesome by everyone who’s ever heard them. At this writing, the newest single is “Pow,” a trippy dance track that sounds like a cross between Salt-N-Pepa, 1970s-psychedelica and Sonic Youth, something of that nature.

• I don’t know why anyone would want to, but if you were to go way back in time, specifically 1992, and you were a metal fan, you would have the pleasure of being one of the first people to hear The Red in the Sky Is Ours, the debut album from Swedish death metal band At the Gates! That album is a direct cross between math metal, Venom, and hearing your dad freak and run away from a nest-load of bees. They were gone for a long time, 19 years to be precise, until they resurfaced in 2014, with At War With Reality, and their latest, titled The Nightmare Of Being, is being released as we speak. That’s a lot of coverage I’ve just given these guys, but the fact is that I’m only interested in hearing whether they still sound like early tape-trader-era metal, with boom-box quality. Well, turns out they’re still all about crazed Cannibal Corpse caterwauling and Cookie Monster growl-singing but nowadays they’re also into epic Equilibrium-esque opera-metal, to go by splashdown single “Spectre Of Extinction,” which probably isn’t representative of the bulk of what they’re doing now, but it’s all good.

• Desperate Journalist is a post-punk-revival quartet from England, In other words they’re basically an ’80s band. They’re up to four albums as of Friday, when their newest, Maximum Sorrow, hits the streets! The push single at this writing, “Fault,” isn’t desperately ’80s at all, just a crockpot of Florence Welch, Joy Division and other common edge-rock. Matter of fact, there’s vibe from the first Cult LP too. It’s OK I guess.

• We’ll wrap up with Birmingham, U.K., R&B singer Laura Mvula, whose new record, Pink Noise, is on the way! She is bald, which means she hates conformity, and the new single “Got Me” has the same beat as Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror.” In fact, the song is mostly Thriller throwbackism, which is rather conformist, now that you mention it.

Retro Playlist

’Twas late June 2011, and as always there were new albums all over the place, and I reviewed them here in these pages and tried to make funny jokes, some of which probably rubbed some people the wrong way but I can’t be sure. All the new albums came out on Tuesdays back then, and the July 5 slate was pretty full. There was British stuffed-shirt proggers Yes, who released their first studio album in 10 years, Fly From Here, but there were no advance songs for me to snark about. Nevertheless I forgave them “for not updating their MySpace profile with a teaser track” (it’s been so long that I can’t even remember if MySpace had become a punchline yet, but I’ll assume it was).

As well, I brought up Neon, the third LP from “cow-pie-kicking country star Chris Young,” who had “won top prize on the Nashville Star TV show in 2006, mostly because he doesn’t sound like Toby Keith.” Surely you remember.

One of the two main focuses that week was Devil’s Music, the 2011 from the great soundsystem Teddybears. It was something of a very mild letdown compared to 2006’s Soft Machine, which featured the tune “Punk Rocker,” a masterpiece of shlock-techno featuring none other than Iggy Pop. Only problem with putting something that awesome on an album is that it’s literally impossible to top, but these nutty Swedes were able to get B.o.B. to add his pop-rapping to the street-cruising “Get Mama A House.”

“Generation Ringtone” was what millennials were called before they became hyper-woke Instagrammers later in life. In 2011 they usually ignored and insulted new prog-rock acts (bands like Mars Volta are still treated horribly to this day), but if a band snuck in a little country/folk/Grateful Dead vibe, they usually did get some unwarranted respect (the dreadful Umphrey’s McGee for example). Anyway, White Denim released an LP titled D that week, and it was OK, I summarized: “If you wish ELP had jammed with the Allman Brothers, certainly, buy this album.” That’s actually pretty high praise, technically, come to think of it.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).