Category: Pop

How to Be Well, by Amy Larocca

How to Be Well, by Amy Larocca (Knopf, 291 pages)

At some undefined point between Helen Gurley Brown and Gwyneth Paltrow, women stopped the pursuit of beauty and replaced it with the pursuit of “wellness.” Wellness is an ill-defined concept, a mixture of good health (mental and physical), good vibes and excellent self-esteem, with the goal of becoming The Best Version of You, as the parlance goes. It is a $5.5 trillion dollar industry according to the Global Wellness Institute, encompassing far more than the pursuit of beauty ever did. (Have you checked the price of collagen peptides lately?)

It is also poorly regulated, and as such, women are subject to a barrage of dubious claims about procedures and products that are said to make them ever more well, while in fact the only certainty is that they will be ever more broke.

Journalist Amy Larocca takes one for the team in How to Be Well, venturing into the wellness space with a skeptical eye and a snarky voice. It’s not a spoiler to say that she was not especially impressed with what she found, given that the subtitle of the book is “Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time.” In other words, if you already have the sense that the colonics industry — which amounts to recreational irrigation of your colon — may be oversold as a life-changing procedure, if you’ve ever gone to Paltrow’s Goop website for a chuckle, you will love this book. If you are a devotee of all things Goop, it will only make you mad.

Larocca begins with a brief history of how wellness evolved. In 1979, she wrote, Dan Rather, on the TV show 60 Minutes, said “Wellness. That’s a word you don’t hear every day.” He was reporting on the Wellness Resource Center in California, and during the segment, asked clients if the idea wasn’t something akin to a “middle-class cult.” It seems prescient now, given the range of strange offerings in the genre, but it’s mostly mainstream. The wellness aisle at your drugstore, Larocca writes, may contain everything from mouthwash to lip gloss to nasal spray. Wellness also encompasses incense, apple-cider vinegar and goat yoga. “It’s a brew that has the potential to drive you nuts,” she writes.

She takes us from the Harvard-educated Dr. Andrew Weil to Dr. Frank Lipman, wellness guru to the stars, and Dr. Mark Hyman, a popular podcaster and proponent of “functional medicine,” which focuses on the root causes of illness and disease. (Lipman and Hyman, Larocca writes, “share a commitment to fascia rolling, morning sun exposure and a cold rinse at the end of a hot shower.”) She also introduces us to Robin Berzin, the founder of Parsley Health, a booming functional medicine practice with holistic doctors that sells memberships for $225 a month or $99 a month if you’re in-network. Parsley is a medical practice that presents as a spa; as with an airport lounge, members who live near a physical location in New York and Los Angeles can hang out there, even if they don’t have an appointment. The average American talks to a primary-care physician 19 minutes a year, Larocca writes, while Parsley members talk to a physician 200 minutes a year. Similar practices are rising up all over the country — but be careful, as wonderful as they may seem, Larocca notes that some of the physicians aren’t board-certified, which has long been the standard of care.

That’s only one aspect of wellness, however, which Larocca says “is every bit as much about looking better as it is about feeling better.” The essence is in the word “glow.”

“The term is so prevalent that it sometimes feels as if a simple replace-all function has been applied to the entire beauty marketing machine: Alexa, find ‘skinny’ and replace all with ‘strong’; find ‘beauty’ and replace all with ‘glow.’” Glowing can be achieved with exercise, with dry brushing (a kind of exfoliation), with supplements and gummies, with bone broth. There is, essentially, Larocca says, a “Glow Cinematic Universe.”

The author describes herself as a “secular atheist,” which sets her apart from the majority of Americans and also adds a certain acidic overlay when she is talking about things like prayer and meditation as part of wellness routines and fitness classes as “spiritual centers.” She believes that “the gospel of wellness” is replacing religious life, and that might be a good conclusion for anyone who, like the author, admits that “I don’t know many people with organized religious lives” which can also be interpreted as “I don’t know many people who aren’t like me.” By the time we get to her chapter that is simply titled “Cult,” the reader might get the sense that she’s not just talking about crystals and sound baths (meditation in which people are “bathed” in sound waves), but about any person who professes any kind of spiritual belief.

The only wellness practice she seems to respect throughout her journey is simple meditation — closing her eyes and repeating a mantra silently, twice a day, 20 minutes at a time. “… it was great to be so totally, completely still,” she writes. She also practices the 4-7-8 breathing technique to calm herself: breathe in for 4 seconds, hold your breath for 7 seconds, breathe out for 8 seconds. “There are technical reasons why it works: stress is all sympathetic nervous system; slow breathing stimulates the parasympathetic nerves, calming it all down. It’s simple, logical, direct. For me, it works.”

Summarizing her conclusions at the end, Larocca worries that we are replacing one set of disordered behaviors and practices with another set of disordered behaviors and practices. We don’t know the long-term effects of household chemicals on our health, but we also don’t know the long-term effects of the vitamins and supplements we are being sold today, she writes. What she knows to be true is mostly the stuff we already know: “Drink enough water. Sleep as much as you can. Eat big leafy greens instead of things you can’t pronounce.” And so on. But she also acknowledges, “What is most relevant to my health is my socioeconomic status.”

“What no one wants to say is this: what you really need is to be lucky, and what is often meant by ‘lucky’ is rich.” In other words, wellness might not be the cult of the middle class as Dan Rather once postulated, but the cult of the upper class. B —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 25/05/08

Michael Younker, “So What!” (self-released)

Ack, if you ever need to count your blessings, you can start by being thankful that you aren’t the public relations person who was ordered to tell all us rock journos that this guy is trying to sound like ’70s arena-metal band Thin Lizzy. This advance single from the NYC-by-way-of-Detroit rocker’s upcoming EP sounds nothing like Thin Lizzy at all, but the cool part is that Younker admits he has no idea what Thin Lizzy sounds like to begin with. Now, local bands take note, that’s the kind of sloppiness I like to see, and it always guarantees extra style points, which in this case would have led to an A grade if the song were better than Younker’s single from last year, “Sweet Things,” which sounds like Gang Of Four after listening to wayyy too much ’80s-era Dickies-punk. This one, on the other hand, is awesome, yes, but it’s nevertheless disposable after an ’80s post-punk fashion, like a dangerously drunk Ace Frehley trying a little too hard. What am I even saying? Well, he’s done better, that’s what. B+

This Is It, Message (Libra Records)

The greatest trick a jazz band can pull off is making an improvisational record not sound improvisational, that is to say, not a mass of (more or less) unrehearsed, anything-goes, self-indulgent musical statements. Now, given that this trio’s focus artist, 60-year-old pianist Satoko Fujii, is accompanied here by her life partner (trumpeter Natsuki Tamura) and a world-class percussionist (Takashi Itani), as well as that this record is their third as a group, it’s safe to say that a lot of things that may not sound all that free-jazz-ish came about thanks to scribbled Post-Its the band peeked at during these recording sessions. To interested musicians who don’t know free jazz collaborations from a bunch of toddlers pounding Fisher-Price pianos at the day care center, this is a great intro. There’s mindless-sounding bonk-bonk-bonking here and there, yes, but not much of it at all, and that stuff comes off as preparatory rather than dogmatic; one thing this threesome is great at is settling into extended stretches of peaceful, curiosity-filled expressionism. It’s a very special album. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

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

• Here it is, I’m predicting that this year May 9 will fall on a Friday, and furthermore that there will be albums released that day, because it is a Friday! Whoa, this calendar thing on my computer here verifies it, look at all these albums, I’m definitely a psychic who should have my own reality show and an ultimate Karen haircut! I love that all these new albums will be coming out for your entertainment, I can’t wait to tell you guys all about them, so maybe we should start with, let’s see — WAIT, STOP, go read some other part of this newspaper, nothing to see here, especially not the new album from royally canceled hayloft-indie band Arcade Fire, how did this even get on the list! OK wait, don’t get mad, let me go read these guys’ Wikipedia and see if they got rid of Viagra Magoo or whatever his name is — OK, it says Win Butler (aka “DJ Windows 98,” remember the stunt he pulled at SXSW 2015?) is still with these Cursive-wannabes, probably because it was his stupid band in the first place, even though people accused him of sexual misconduct in a 2022 report by Pitchfork. Anyway, whatever, do we really need to go through with this, all right, fine, the new album is called Pink Elephant, and like many albums it has a title track. By the way, the “pink elephant” concept, according to one of the band’s stans on YouTube (in other words a bot or Butler himself in disguise), “suggests that when an individual intentionally tries to avoid thinking a certain thought or feeling a certain emotion, a paradoxical effect is produced: The attempted avoidance not only fails in its object [sic] but in fact causes the thought or emotion to occur more frequently.” I’ll leave the funny punchlines to you reader-people, but as far as the song goes, he sings like Neil Young on it, and the song is slow and boring and indie. Obviously that’s what all the Fire fans wanted to hear on this comeback album, Neil Young doing a feat on an extra-dreary Interpol song, let’s move on when your stomachs are all settled, that’d be great.

• As you know, Blake Shelton is famous for looking like the guy who played Dr. Bones McCoy on the last few Star Trek movies drunk-marrying random rock star ladies making distressingly commercial country-pop songs, so I assume that his new album, For Recreational Use Only, will not consist of covers of devil-metal songs, just trust my psychic abilities. Ah, here we are, the single is called “Let Him In Anyway,” Ugh, it’s like an indie-infused pop-country ballad you’d hear at Applebee’s, like he’s been listening to a lot of Snow Patrol or something, and yup, there it is, he’s singing in a forced southern accent, which, as we discussed the other week, is really dumb and fake.

• San Francisco-based slacker-indie band Counting Crows is of course responsible for “Mr. Jones,” one of the worst songs in human history, but their two other semi-hits are OK. The band’s new LP, Butter Miracle The Complete Sweets, is their first since 2014’s Somewhere Under Wonderland; it opens with the tune “Tall Grass,” a goofy, droopy weird-beard ballad with ’70s instruments like flutes. It’s worthless.

• Speaking of droopy and ’70s-sounding, we’ll wrap up the week with Los Angeles art-popper Deradoorian’s new album, Ready For Heaven, and its goofy, maudlin single, “Set Me Free,” which is like a sexytime montage song for a really bad B-movie from 1971, like Werewolves On Wheels, have you ever seen it, good, I’d hoped not

Featured Image: Michael Younker, “So What!” and This Is It, Message

Everything is Tuberculosis, by John Green

“It is a strange fact of human history that we tend to focus so little on disease,” John Green writes in his new book Everything is Tuberculosis. In a history class in college, “I learned of wars and empires and trade routes, but I heard precious little of microbes, even though illness is a defining feature of human life.”

Instead, in school, disease is related to medicine and the biological sciences, even though a certain disease, with which Green is currently obsessed, is part of the reason why New Mexico became a state, and one of the reasons that three teenagers were so willing to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, leading to the start of the first World War War.

This disease, in Green’s telling, also indirectly gave us the cowboy hat.

The origin story of the Stetson is the rare light-hearted anecdote in a book about the oldest infectious disease on the planet. Globally, tuberculosis still kills more than a million people a year, even though it’s rarely seen in the U.S. and we don’t vaccinate for it here. When cases do arise — as one did in New Hampshire earlier this year — officials work quickly to contain it, and the patient is usually cured.

Like most Americans, Green, who found fame with his 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars, paid little attention to tuberculosis — until he encountered it while visiting health care facilities in the West African nation of Sierra Leone a few years ago. He writes that he considered TB “a disease of history — something that killed depressive nineteenth-century poets, not present tense humans.”

Even the language of TB, which has long been called consumption, sounds quaint to American ears.

But after Green met a 17-year-old in Sierra Leone who had been stricken with the disease in childhood, tuberculosis had a face. He returned home and started to read about TB, and suddenly, everything was coming up tuberculosis. It turns out that Green even had a relative who died of TB in 1930 at age 29.

Green is the history teacher we wish we’d had in high school. We remember things not by memorizing facts but by hearing stories, and Green has amassed a medicine chest full of stories about tuberculosis, and about the evolution of medicine in general, and he strings them together while, in alternating chapters, introducing us to Henry, the young patient at a TB hospital in Sierra Leone called Lakka.

Green assumed that Henry was much younger than he was because he was so small. His size, however, turned out to be because of chronic malnutrition compounded by TB, which destroys the appetite as it eats away at the body, especially the lungs.

Tuberculosis is curable with the right medication. So why, except when it was briefly displaced by Covid-19, is this still the world’s deadliest infectious disease?

For one thing, people are especially vulnerable to TB if they have a weakened immune system because of diabetes, malnutrition or HIV. It spreads in tight quarters when people cough or sneeze. Most people who are infected will not develop the disease; about 10 percent do, and not everyone with “active” TB will die from it as they commonly did centuries ago.

But because the disease has developed resistance to treatment and proliferates in places with the least resources, it is still causing significant suffering to people like Henry and his mother, whose lives were already cruelly hard before tuberculosis moved in. The mother struggled to feed her two children and at times couldn’t afford to buy rice, Henry and his sister subsisting for a time on milk flavored with spices.

As Green explains, in rich countries with robust health care systems, a person with money or insurance can get testing that pinpoints the specifics of a TB infection, allowing for proper treatment.

In poverty-stricken Sierra Leone, where Ebola killed a sizable number of physicians and nurses during the most recent outbreak, these tests were not available, nor was the most cutting-edge of treatments. Henry’s condition was diagnosed with an X-ray and he was given a general cocktail of pills that were ultimately ineffective. He was trapped in a roller coaster of getting better and then getting worse. By the time Green met him, the teen had been sent to a hospital where patients go to die.

The night before he was transferred, Green writes, mother and son lay together in Henry’s hospital bed “and together they cried through the night.”

The facility to which he was being transferred was the one where he would, by sheer chance, meet Green.

Green takes us through the history of TB, including one of the more bizarre chapters of the disease: the period in the 18th and 19th centuries in which the disease became romanticized and even contributed to long-lasting standards of beauty. “Maybe the nineteenth-century Romantics would die early, but oh, the poems they would write,” was the thinking of the time.

John Keats died of TB at age 25, as did Stephen Crane at age 29; the Bronte sisters had tuberculosis. For a time, “Consumption was believed to bring the creative powers to new levels, helping artists get in deeper touch with the spirit as their worldly bodies literally shrank away,” Green writes. This idea was so prevalent that as TB rates fell in the U.S. at the end of the 19th century some people worried aloud that literature would suffer.

But Keats, who would wake up in the night crying from the pain, put to rest any romantic notions about TB, writing at one point, “We cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”

It is this suffering, apparent in Henry’s story, that Green wants us to remember, as he crafts the book around the question: Will Henry survive?

In less capable hands this could seem like a gimmick, but in fact, as Green makes clear, the odds have never been good for people with TB — one author has estimated that it killed one out of seven people who have ever been alive. It’s a legitimate concern since, even when a best-selling author takes an interest in your case, survival from active TB is never guaranteed. Everything is Tuberculous is full of heartbreaking stories of desperate doctors who were unable to save their own children.

In many ways, technology has made the world’s problems our own, and many people suffer from compassion fatigue, as the needs are so great. One of the privileges of being an American in the past few decades is to not have to think about tuberculosis at all. But maybe, Green suggests, that has been a mistake, and we need to start thinking about tuberculosis again. A —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 25/05/01


Hexenhaus, Awakening (Roar Records)

As a genre, “tech-metal” is one in which I lost interest after the second or third Pendulum album, I forget which, not because it was bad but because it’s so confoundedly perfect all the time. To me, Pendulum got it right the first time, unlike Tool and Linkin Park (the latter of whom has been the subject of endless Facebook-message debate between friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny and myself; he thinks Linkin’s new singer is the bee’s knees, whereas to me she sounds like a particularly feisty America’s Got Talent contestant) et al. (while we’re at it, I’ve always thought A Perfect Circle kind of sucked, but that’s a whole other tedious discussion). And yadda yadda, that brings us to this Swedish five-piece, which has gotten love in the usual metal-fanboy Euro-trash circles (Kerrang, Metal Forces and such) for their more thrashy flavor of robo-metal. So. Whichever Dokken-looking dude writes their songs knows some beginner music theory; intro track “Shadows Of Sleep” doofs around with a spooky augmented arpeggio before windmilling a power-metallish Raging Speedhorn riff, after which “Awakening” tinkers with the idea of Iron Maiden calling out early Slayer (and, later, Anthrax, which is basically the formula throughout). It’s fine, sure, no complaints. A —Eric W. Saeger


Erin LeCount, I Am Digital, I Am Divine (Good As Gold Records)

The husky vocal timbre of Lady Gaga and Florence Welch has obviously had a massive influence on several quasi-pop divas who’ve emerged recently, from Dua Lipa to Lorde to Zola Jesus, the latter of whom would be my pick to offer as a soundalike to this 22-year-old U.K. resident. Like Zola, LeCount drowns her progressive-minded post-goth-pop in ethereal, Christian-begging vibe, instantly branding her as a “reclusive genius” in the manner of Chappell Roan, that is if you believe all the hype, which I don’t, but really, if I weren’t a painfully obvious cynic I’d hope that no one would want to read anything I type (don’t say it). On the other hand I’m always willing to play along with the public relations hucksters who sell us fairy tales (remember when Billie Eilish was reportedly discovered singing near a Dumpster or whatever it was?), so let’s: This girl recorded this EP in her gardening shed, they say, all by herself, adding brilliant layers of sampled harp, mandolin and other things to brighten her already glimmering pop gems, all of which are really well-written. Whatever the case, this is essential if you’re a fan of Florence And The Machine and similar products. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

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

• Yikes, folks, tons of new albums are coming our way this Friday, May 2, and with any luck there’ll be a couple that don’t instantly upset my tummy-tum! We’ll start in Canada’s Manitoba province, specifically the little town of Portage la Prairie, with their idea of a punk band, Propagandhi! The foursome were originally a skate-punk band, then they dabbled with heavy metal, so knowing all that, I assume they sound like Good Charlotte nowadays, but more well-behaved, because Canadian! But let’s not just blindly assume, let me go live-review whatever they’re passing off as a single from their fast-approaching new album, At Peace, because it wouldn’t be fair to tell all you nice folks that Portage la Prairie, Manitoba (teeming with a population of 13,000, less than New Hampshire’s sleepy retirement community of Pelham) wouldn’t know the Ramones from a barbershop quartet, not unless I had hard evidence. So let’s go, fly to the YouTubes, my flying monkeys, and give a listen to the title track, I can hardly wait to get my hands on these little hockey-playing so-and-sos and their — wait a second, flying monkeys, forget it, bring it in, this isn’t bad, for a band from Canadian Pelham! It starts out with a messy, crummy solo guitar line that’s obviously a parody of the guitar doodle that opens Yes’s “Roundabout,” nothing wrong with that at all, good comedy is really hard to find in today’s punk scene. So then it kicks into a triple-speed punk-metal thing with plain vanilla emo vocals spitting lyrics about why it doesn’t pay to be a peacenik these days, which reminds me, aren’t we at war with Canada nowadays, I just haven’t had time to keep up with Buzzfeed?

• By far the most well-known Suzanne Vega song is “Luka,” a haunting tune about child abuse that cemented Vega’s reputation as a pop-rocker who specialized in folk-oriented lyrics, and yes, you could say that it’s all toward a Gordon Lightfoot fashion. Fun Fact 1: in the original 1980s video for “Luka,” the part of the titular character was played by the guy who grew up to portray Jackie Aprile Jr. in The Sopranos. Fun Fact 2: Vega’s hideously famous a capella “doo doo doo doo” vocal in the original version of her 1987 song “Tom’s Diner” earned her the title of “the mother of MP3s” when DNA’s techno remix of the song served as the test subject for formulating MP3 compression. But whatever, you guys don’t care about all that science-y stuff, so let’s see what she’s doing now, with her new album, Flying With Angels, that’d be great. The single, a mellow folk-rocker titled “Speakers’ Corner,” begins with some Aimee Mann-style formalities before settling on a very nice hook. She’s still got it, ladies and germs.

• In the beginning, Car Seat Headrest was a lo-fi solo project by Leesburg, Virginia, slacker Will Toledo, who played trombone in his high school’s marching band. Now it’s an indie quartet whose new album, The Scholars, streets on Friday. The push single, “Gethsemane,” is a mid-tempo dance-punker obviously inspired by Chk Chk Chk’s better moments. I like it, personally.

• And lastly it’s rootin’ tootin’ country-rock singing man Eric Church, with his eighth album, Evangeline vs. The Machine! The single, “Hands of Time,” isn’t annoying in any Rascal Flatts/Big & Rich manner, because it’s mellow and kind of pretty in its way, but the cowboy accent is forced, just like most country music. That’s annoying to people who know about singing, because accents don’t really manifest when someone sings in English, just to tell you Something You Should Know. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Image: Hexenhaus, Awakening & Erin LeCount, I Am Digital, I Am Divine

Tilt, by Emma Pattee

Tilt, by Emma Pattee (Marysue Rucci Books, 227 pages)

If you’ve ever imagined yourself in the middle of a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, where were you when it happened? That’s what Annie, the protagonist of Tilt, is thinking as she frantically makes her way out of a big-box store in Portland, Oregon, moments after the long-predicted “Big One” hits.

“What I’m saying is, my imaginary earthquake did not include IKEA,” Annie says.

Annie is 35 years old and 37 weeks pregnant when the earthquake hits on the very morning that she has finally pushed past her inertia and gone shopping for a crib. Up until this point, the “nursery” in the two-bedroom apartment that she shares with her husband, Dom, consisted of an empty room and a car seat still in its box. To say that she is ambivalent about this pregnancy is an understatement. Also, Annie and Dom are barely solvent, a circumstance that she blames on Dom’s unwillingness to let go of his dream of being a famous actor, even though he is 38 and his latest “big break” is being an understudy for the lead in a local production of “King Lear.”

Annie herself is something of a theater kid, but she has largely abandoned the dream of her younger self to be a playwright, having taken a 9-to-5 job that pays the bills while suffocating her soul. She is on her first day of maternity leave when the earthquake hits the Pacific Northwest. It is the long-feared Cascadia earthquake, one that collapses buildings and bridges and destroys all communications and life as we know it. Annie survives with minor injuries but in her struggle to escape the building she leaves her purse, keys and phone behind. Unsure of what to do, not knowing if her apartment still exists or if her husband is alive, she sets off on foot, in a pair of Birkenstock sandals, planning to walk to the coffee shop where her husband works, some miles away.

It is a precarious journey for anyone, let alone a woman just weeks away from giving birth. Almost everything around her is broken or ablaze, people are dazed and injured or dying, and, as the hours go by, survivors are becoming predatory.

As Annie makes her way through the streets she reflects on a fight she and her husband had the previous night — and tells the story to her unborn child, which she affectionately calls Bean. It was a run-of-the-mill fight, but also one that summarizes the couple’s journey: “Because all fights are about nothing in the grand scheme of things but then also in the grand scheme of things when taken all together, they tell a larger story. Like each fight is a star in the sky and now that I’ve been with your father for a decade or so I can look up at the constellation of all of our arguments and see a shape there, clear as day,” Annie tells her child.

That constellation becomes clear to the reader in a series of flashbacks that alternate with Annie’s real-time journey and also give us snapshots of Annie’s hardscrabble upbringing and her relationship with her late mother. We learn of the bright promise that lit up Annie’s twenties, as she writes and produces a play that led to her meeting and marrying Dom. But as she settles into the monotony of her job as an office manager for a tech company, those dreams “sparkle at us from a distant mountaintop” amid a life consisting of “an infinite amount of time spent unloading the dishwasher and waiting in line at the grocery store.”

She wavers between trying to appreciate her life as it is, and wondering whether she and Bean would be better off on their own. She can’t shake the idea that Dom is failing her. But it is unclear whether he is failing Annie, or whether she is failing him. She grapples with these questions on the journey, in which she forms an unlikely bond with a young mother who is trying to reach the school where her daughter was when the earthquake hit, and as she encounters a variety of memorable characters: a bicyclist whose wife has been seriously injured, a malevolent gang of teenagers, the passing drivers who offer her a ride, a young woman who works with Dom.

Parents, Annie notices, are everywhere. “What is it about parents that you always know they are parents?” she muses. “That look that says I am serious but I also spend lots of time picking up LEGOs. Their hands tense and anxious from constantly cutting apple slices. A kind of hanging flesh around their mouth. A hurried way of walking.”

Ultimately, while this is a novel about the end of the world as we know it, a species of the so-called “apocalypse genre,” it’s also about coming to grips with your life when your life has not turned out as you planned, when you are so dissatisfied with your lot that even an earthquake doesn’t mess up your plans. “Nobody wants to be where they are,” Annie thinks at one point. “So would it really matter so much if the earth swallowed us all?”

But Pattee answers her character with this book, which thrums with tension and is gorgeously written, with scenes and phrases that will long remain with the reader. She describes the blaring of car horns as “honks [that] rise around us like the mating calls of a long extinct species” and Annie’s monotonous existence as “looking for some way to spend a Saturday, all those Saturdays collecting in dusty piles around the house.”

A narrative built around an interior conversation with an unborn child takes a bit of getting used to, but after a while, it works, and gives Annie license to deliver asides like this one, spoken to the child after a remembrance of an exchange the parents had the night before the earthquake:

“Did you hear me say that? Were you listening to all that? Seeing the dusty baseboard, cracked linoleum, and light fixtures from the eighties. Did you look at us in our baggy pajamas, in our untoned bodies, and think, Them? Them?”

Tilt is a remarkable literary debut. Every end of the world as we know it should be this good. A —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 25/04/24

Stella Cole, Stella Cole (Iron Lung Records)

Don’t be fooled by the disposable-template look of the album cover. The world is waiting pretty breathlessly for the follow-up to this Knoxville, Tenn., native’s next album, whenever it comes; for now we’ll have to make do with this, her self-titled debut, an exercise in Great American Songbook standards, oh, and a cover of Billie Eilish’s “My Future.” Would that more of this kind of thing showed up on my desk — I mean, it does, but usually from singers who don’t seem to get that singing songs made famous by people like Judy Garland and such requires more than a little flair, or at least a desire to tell a story, which Cole states was the next-level step at which she’d approached this album after spending too many years sweating over what her voice sounded like (all the necessary trill-drenched panache is present when she covers the Garland-originated “Meet Me in St. Louis”). At 26, Cole’s knack for online self-promotion gained her worldwide recognition; her devotees include Michael Buble, James Taylor and Meghan Trainor, which should definitely tell you something. The Eilish tune, since you’re curious, isn’t steeped in the same torchiness as the original, more like a story, as we discussed. A world-class debut. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

The Crystal Teardrop, The Crystal Teardrop Is Forming (Popclaw/Rise Above Records)

What’s old is new again, again, with this U.K.-based Jefferson Airplane-configured five-piece. You may (or may not, I don’t care which) remember the Paisley Underground of the 1990s, which tried to resurrect the groovy sounds of the late 1960s while retaining some semblance of current relevance, but in case you’d never heard of it (a few of the bands on the soundtrack to The Silence of the Lambs came from that scene, for reference), these guys were at least cool enough to name one of their bangly-jangly flower-power songs after one of the bands that thrived during that short-lived cultural blip (“The Rain Parade”). That really wasn’t necessary, given that this group aims for the rafters as far as authenticity: The totally analog recordings feature a guy on sitar, one on Mellotron and the singer Alexandra Rose’s vocals were captured through an old Leslie speaker, which lends it a nostalgically claustrophobic Byrds/Mamas And Papas sound. Catchy though the music occasionally is, we have here an obvious flash-in-the-pan that I’m sure the Nylon reviewer will find to be a nice, dishwasher-safe distraction from the turmoil of current events; maybe your great-grandfather will dig it, or something. B —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

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

• Well here we are, gang, as I write this we are in the grip of a typical Third Winter, in New England, and guess what, spoiler, it’s freezing again! I had a heat-saving idea so we didn’t have to call the oil delivery guy again, what I did was take all our tax return stuff and put it in the ol’ pot-bellied stove and burn it, which was better than paying my taxes; after all, there’s no one at the IRS anymore to take my check and staple it neatly to their pile of Eric’s Tax Stuff and drop it in someone’s inbox and then go back to their desk and eat the ham sandwich they have every single day, while looking out the window, dreaming of freedom and birdies and super-polite sexytime with someone they work with who actually talked to them once a few years ago! I tore up the check and ordered Captain America #100 from eBay, for my comics collection, and stocked up on cans of beans, for the fast-approaching apocalypse! Anyway, while I shuffle the myriad pages of my giant doomsday prepper grocery list, we should probably talk about the Friday, April 11, batch of new music CDs, in this music CD column, everyone shut up and let me look at the list, oh! Oh! Look guys, it’s sludge-metal heroes Melvins with a new album, Thunderball, wait, why did the Melvins think they could name their new album after a copyrighted James Bond movie (actually I’m kidding, legally they can, they’d only maybe have lawyer problems if they renamed their band “Thunderball,” and besides, anyone who even remembers that there was once a James Bond movie called Thunderball is in a retirement home right now, where all they watch is reruns of Match Game ’77, so I think no one will complain either way), why did they do this? Oh who cares, it’s a Melvins album, let me do the rock journo thingie and listen to something from it. Here it is, a new tune called “Victory Of The Pyramids,” and wait, what are they even doing here, the video starts with crazily flashing images, aren’t the YouTube moderator-goblins supposed to warn people first? Like, suppose I’d just accidentally heard a Van Morrison tune and my stomach was already totally touch and go, I’d probably toss my cookies right now! And waitwhat, the song is awesome of course, but it’s punk-speed, someone tell me what’s going on here with all this crazy nonsense, between “fast Melvins” and “no IRS anymore” and ridiculously high prices for Captain America #100 in “Fine” grade condition, I’m lost, on this silly planet, with all you crazy people! But wait, breaking news, it slows down to normal Melvins speed after a few minutes; it’s doomy and Black Sabbath-y but not crazily insane like Korn. Right, OK, it’s mostly slow, please disperse, nothing to see here, let’s move on.

• But wait, there’s more doom metal, with Insatiable, the new album from Aussie band Divide and Dissolve! Composed of two women, the band doesn’t have a singer, but you’ll probably like them if you like Bell Witch or getting in car accidents.

• Pennsylvania “shoegaze/post-hardcore” band Superheaven releases its self-titled LP on Friday! “Cruel Times” is really cool, kind of like Stone Temple Pilots, a band that was never shoegaze, why are they saying they’re shoegaze? They’re not!

• Lastly this week I’d like to say that experimental indie/world music band Beirut’s new album is called Study Of Losses, and it includes the single “Guericke’s Unicorn,” a woozy and weird but very tolerable modern art-pop thing that sounds like Luke Temple trying to make circus music for cute dogs that like to swim. Just go listen to it, trust me. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Image: Iron Lung, Adapting // Crawling (Iron Lung Records) & Mac Sabbath “Pair-a-Buns” (self-released)

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!