Category: Pop

Brightly Shining, by Ingvild Rishøi

Brightly Shining, by Ingvild Rishøi (Grove Press, 192 pages)

It’s been 181 years since A Christmas Carol was published, and so it’s past time for another author to give us a compact, memorable holiday book that becomes as much a part of the season as shopping and eggnog. The Dickens classic was a marvel of brevity, coming in at just about 30,000 words, which is surely one reason it remains popular. No one has time to read, say, Richard Powers in December.

Three years ago, I had hopes for Small Things Like These, a slim novel written by the Irish novelist Claire Keegan, which turned up as Oprah Winfrey’s book club pick this month even though it was published in 2021. That book (Grove Press, 118 pages) wasn’t about Christmas, per se, but is set around Christmastime and has, at the heart of its deeply affecting story, a working-class man who was born to a teenage housekeeper. Furlong never knew who his father was, and yet grows up to be happily married with five daughters and becomes a sort of social justice warrior by accident when he makes a disturbing discovery while delivering coal, a reliable staple of Christmas stories.

Small Things Like These has a Truman Capote “A Christmas Memory” vibe to it, in the telling of Furlong’s back story, with passages like this:

“On Christmas morning, when he’d gone down to the drawing room [his mother’s employer] occasionally let them share, the fire was already lighted and he’d found three parcels under the tree wrapped in the same green paper: a nailbrush and a bar of soap were wrapped together in one. The second was a hot water bottle … And from Mrs. Wilson, he’d been given A Christmas Carol, an old book with a hard red cover and no pictures, which smelled of must.”

Or maybe that is a Little Women vibe. At any rate, there are letters written to Santa, and a Christmas Mass, and an ending with the kind of wild and irrational hope befitting a good Christmas story. A Christmas Carol it’s not, but it was Dickensonian enough that I decided to add the book to my Christmas collection when I finished it last year.

Now Grove Press has published another slim Christmas-themed novel, Brightly Shining, by the Norwegian author Ingvild Rishoi (translated into English by Carolina Waight). In Norway, where the book was published in 2021 under the title Stargate, the author has been compared to Dickens and also Hans Christian Andersen (who, lest we forget, gave us “The Little Mermaid” before Disney did).

Brightly Shining is the story of a 10-year-old girl (who, in Victorian times, would have been characterized as a waif) and her struggle to maintain hope in seemingly hopeless circumstances. Ronja lives with her 16-year-old sister Melissa, in an impoverished household ostensibly headed by their father, who is addicted to alcohol, has trouble holding down a job, and is usually failing to provide support of any kind for his daughters. Most of the time, there is nothing for the girls to eat but cereal, and there is no mother in the home, although Melissa tries as best as she can to be a mother to her sister.

One day, a caretaker at Ronja’s school, who is aware of the situation, points out a flier advertising a job selling Christmas trees, and she takes it home to her father. After at first dismissing it as “a job for country bumpkins,” he relents and is hired, giving wings to Ronja’s hopes: that there might be enough money for food and gifts and a Christmas tree of their own. Her biggest dream, though, is that the family may one day have a cabin of their own in the woods.

As Ronja, the narrator, recounts: “ ‘Miracles do happen,’ the caretaker used to say. ‘Sometimes there just isn’t any other way out, and that’s when a miracle happens.’”

But that’s not how things transpire. Old patterns repeat, and Melissa takes over the job selling Christmas trees, with Ronja showing up at times just to watch, and eventually getting involved in the operation.

A bully of a boss turns into the story’s villain, and Ronja befriends a widowed man living in their building, leading to one of the book’s most poignant scenes, at a holiday pageant at Ronja’s school. The old man, Aronsen, does what he can to help Ronja, feeding her a real breakfast, ironing a dress for the school pageant and even buying greenery at the Christmas tree lot, but his efforts, and Melissa’s, cannot make up for the loss of functioning parents in the child’s life, even though, as she says, “I can’t not hope. That’s just the way my brain is.”

As in Small Things Like This, Brightly Shining attempts to give us the happiest ending possible while being honest about reality, which is to say, it’s not really a happy ending at all, especially after all the talk about miracles. Let’s just say it’s as happy an ending as O’Henry gave us in “The Gift of the Magi,” meaning it requires aggressive spin to cast either book as a feel-good Christmas story.

Not to say that both books aren’t beautifully crafted — they are. Not to say that they’re not memorable — they are. It’s just that I’ve been forever ruined by the last chapter of A Christmas Carol and seek that level of merriment in my Christmas reads, which Brightly Shining and Small Things Like These refuse to supply. God bless them, anyway. B+

Album Reviews 24/12/12

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.

North Country land struggle

Filmmaker looks at colonial territories

Jay Craven is an award-winning veteran New England filmmaker. He spoke with the Hippo about his 10th narrative feature film, Lost Nation. Craven is known for making Northern New England Westerns. His titles include Where the Rivers Flow North with Rip Torn and Michael J. Fox, Disappearances with Kris Kristofferson, and Northern Borders with Bruce Dern. He has taught for 25 years at Marlboro College in southern Vermont as well as Sarah Lawrence College. At Marlboro he educates students on how to make movies by involving them in the movie-making process. Lost Nation will kick off a series of New Hampshire screenings at Red River Theatres on Friday, Dec. 13, running through Thursday, Dec. 19. Craven will be appearing at select showings that opening weekend. Visit redrivertheatres.org for more information.

Would you like to give a brief overview of the film?

It’s basically a historical action drama and it’s set in the North Country during the period of the American Revolution. It involves the fact that the huge territory that is now considered Vermont was contested territory at that time between New York and the territory. Meanwhile, a scrappy and some could argue somewhat corrupt New Hampshire governor, Benning Wentworth, started issuing titles to poor farmers and settlers coming out of southern New England, New York claimed. It precipitated an intense struggle between the settlers who were settling the land and New York, which late in the game decided they’d better start settling the land or else it was going to disappear.

A drama unfolded where the New Hampshire grants holders, led by Ethan Allen and others — Ethan Allen considered sort of a founding father of Vermont — resisted New York encroachments on the land that they were settling. It’s the drama of this land conflict between New Hampshire and New York, led by the settlers on the New Hampshire grants. Ethan Allen is a central character, and also Lucy Terry Prince, who was a pioneering Black poet who settled with her family on a New Hampshire grant in southeastern what is now Vermont, Guilford, near Brattleboro, an area that was a stronghold of New York sentiment. It was a very turbulent setting for them to try to both settle their homestead, also as Black people. The film captures the drama of land and freedom — in the case of Ethan Allen, on a huge scale, involving the entire state of Vermont, which frankly he and his brother ended up owning 200,000 acres, because they were land speculators, too. And on a smaller scale, the Prince family, which was trying to simply secure and develop their 100-acre homestead using a New Hampshire grant. It’s a historical action drama around the high-stakes land struggle between New Hampshire and New York, which resulted in that contested territory becoming at first the independent republic of Vermont and later the state of Vermont.

Would you want to go more in depth on Lucy Terry Prince?

Yeah, Lucy Terry Prince was enslaved at the age of 3 to a family in western Massachusetts for 30 years, serving that family, but she also was a poet, and only one of her poems actually survives, which is called ‘Bars Fight,’ about the 1746 Deerfield Massacre, where indigenous fighters allied with the French attacked settlers in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Her poem told the story and was known far and wide and was passed on orally, but it’s the first known work of African American literature. And she was known for convening sort of story soirees on the porch of the family that she was working for, of their house, and would bring by storytellers and poets and people making up stuff as they went along. Another former slave, Abijah Prince, married her and bought her freedom with money that he earned fighting in the French and Indian War, and he was gifted this 100-acre plot of land in Guilford, and over five years developed [it] and brought his family here. When they brought their family here, their closest neighbor became an antagonist, wanting their land and also just sort of harassing them and making their life very difficult. You know, spoiling their crops and scattering their feed to the wind and letting their animals loose and, you know, attacking and beating them and burning their hay rake and stuff like that, so Lucy developed a strategy essentially to defend her family in the moment but more so in court all the way to what was called in Vermont the governor’s supreme council. [She] prevailed, you know, which would have been extremely unusual, frankly, for a woman, let alone a Black woman, to accomplish during this time. She was smart, and she was not going to take it lying down, and she, in what was already a very turbulent, deeply divided political situation, was able to push through and assert her family’s rights and two of her sons fought the American Revolution. Only one of her poems survives, but … she was definitely known as a storyteller and to a certain extent a visionary. … So it’s two different stories of the struggle for land and freedom, one on a big scale, one on a small intimate scale, but they are parallel and they overlap briefly.

With Ethan Allen, could he be considered a founding father of New Hampshire as well?

Well, he was working under New Hampshire jurisdiction when he started the struggle, so absolutely he would have been considered a New Hampshire pioneer because it was New Hampshire territory that he was defending against New York, so in some ways Vermont was born out of New Hampshire and was born out of a sort of, we could call solidarity, generosity, imagination, greed, whatever you want to call it. But no, there’s no question that when Ethan began his land struggle against New York, he was doing it on behalf of the New Hampshire granted territory.

How did this whole specific situation arise?

Benning Wentworth, the New Hampshire governor, commissioned 131 towns in that territory and he kept parcels of land in each town that were his, but they were running a pretty active land business. If it weren’t for this land struggle, the territory of Vermont would be New York. Although, what we also show in the movie is that when things got tough in this land struggle, Ethan Allen and his brother entered negotiations with the British during the American Revolution to actually deliver that territory to the British. So it could have also ended up part of Canada because there were some attacks coming from Quebec into Vermont. The Americans were not defending them and the Continental Congress did not like what Ethan was doing, because New York had a lot of power in the Continental Congress, including the fact that Alexander Hamilton was a representative from New York. Likewise, the governor of New York, George Clinton, was a very powerful figure. Ethan went to the Continental Congress twice begging the case of vermont or the territory against New York and was rejected.

What area of land is this referencing? What would it have made the United States look like today?

Well it would have been the whole state of, the area that is currently the whole state of Vermont would have been New Hampshire, all the way over to Lake Champlain. Because it’s interesting, New Hampshire Gov. Benning Wentworth, the New Hampshire governor, claimed he settled it first and established political control on the entire western part of the state. So it was odd. The area that was closest to New Hampshire was controlled by New York. The area that was closest to New York was controlled by New Hampshire. … I mean, it was intense. But then the film goes over how all the colonies came into their own statehood. —Zachary Lewis

Books to give

Looking to gift a book? Here are some of the books our reviewers loved this year:

William, by Mason Coile I don’t like horror, but I loved this absorbing, disturbing little book. —Jennifer Graham

Funny Story, by Emily Henry This isn’t all fluff and love, and I don’t think I rolled my eyes once. It is definitely funny, but it’s so much more than that, too: It’s a story of human relationships and all of the messiness and intensity that come along with them, how they can start and end in the most unpredictable ways, and how we all have the capacity to overcome heartbreak and learn to love again. —Meghan Siegler

Playground, by Richard Powers This novel wants us to to think deeply about the unintended consequences of the development of AI and human dominance of the planet as we wade through the events of each character’s life, laid out in constantly changing points of view. For those willing to rise to the challenge Playground is a wholly immersive experience [that] gives the reader a mental workout. —JG

The Women, by Kristin Hannah Hannah superbly blends the heaviness of war with the frailty of humans at their most vulnerable — and often at their best. —MS

Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, by Priyanka Mattoo Mattoo’s writing is exquisite …. It’s been a while since I enjoyed a collection of essays so much. —JG

The Demon of Unrest, by Erik Larson Larson tells stories that explain the onset of the Civil War better than any AP history course ever could. Nobody does it better when it comes to putting readers in the trenches of history, in this case with cannonballs whizzing over our heads. —JG

And here are a few more recent releases that may make good gifts.

What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World’s Most Famous Bird, by Sy Montgomery (96 pages) Montgomery is also the author of The Soul of an Octopus and other books about animals. She lives in New Hampshire.

Heartbreak is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music, by Rob Sheffield “An impassioned dissertation on (almost) all things Swiftian,” says the Washington Post of this book by a veteran Rolling Stone writer.

Atlas Obscura: Wild Life, by Cara Ciaimo and Joshua Foer A guide to giant Gippsland earthworms, hot springs snow monkeys, vampire finches and other amazing creatures of the world. “The perfect tome to get lost in on a rainy day,” said Taste of Home. Check out AtlasObscura.com.

Webb’s Universe, by Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock A catalog of images from the James Webb Space Telescope along with backstory on the science behind them, from a British space scientist.

Faithful Unto Death, by Paul Koudounaris

Faithful Unto Death, by Paul Koudounaris (256 pages, Thames & Hudson)

Traveling in rural Ecuador a few years ago, I looked out the car window to see a woman throw the corpse of a dog into a fire in her front yard. It wasn’t an act of cruelty — the dog was clearly dead — but it was still shocking to see an open-air cremation about to take place.

It was likely the best and cheapest option the woman had, faced with a decision that has confronted families ever since we started viewing animals as companions: What do we do with their bodies? In Faithful Unto Death, Paul Koudounaris walks us through the macabre history, making clear that what seems like the obvious answer — bury or cremate them — wasn’t often an option.

In Europe in the 19th century, many people took deceased dogs to rending sites where the bodies were broken down with chemicals, along with dead livestock. Terrible as that sounds, other people opted to throw their deceased animals into rivers. “In Paris, about five thousand dogs a year wound up in the Seine, the tragedy for their owners compounded by the civic cost, with the bodies polluting the river and resulting in 4,000 francs in annual cleanup fees,” Koudounaris writes.

When the rare individual tried to confer dignity on a deceased pet, things could get ugly. In 1855, a woman in Glasgow tried to inter her beloved cat in a cemetery plot she owned; an outraged mob gathered and broke open the cat’s little coffin, and police had to be summoned. It was considered blasphemous to think animals warranted the same burial customs as human beings.

But cremation wasn’t the answer either, as even for humans cremation was not yet widely accepted. So when an English family lost their beloved Maltese in 1881, they pleaded with the gatekeeper at a local park where they used to walk the dog and convinced him to let them bury him in his backyard garden. Word spread, and others began to make the same request. “Slowly his little plot was transformed into something that not only London, but also the entire Western world, had been unaware that it desperately needed.” Eventually there were more than 300 graves, animal corpses stacked on top of each other, in the gatekeeper’s garden, and he kept up the burying until he himself died in 1899.

Around the same time, pet cemeteries began cropping up in other places in Europe. In the United States, the problem of what to do with animal bodies was not so pressing, since there was plenty of undeveloped land, and you could bury anything you wanted on the frontier. Still, by the 1920s the U.S. had more than 600 pet cemeteries, and the U.S. today has more than the rest of the world combined, Koudounaris says — including one that is, bizarrely, only for coon hounds.

Some people are so enamored of their pets that they want to treat them like humans, even after death. Koudounaris tells the story of a mortician who was hired to embalm a dog that had been hit by a carriage (apparently streets were just as dangerous for dogs before cars) and bury him in a mahogany casket with a glass top. And at a mausoleum in New York, a metal box once came open, revealing not human remains but those of a parrot.

Earlier this year the New York Times published a fascinating piece about how a woman came to be buried at one of America’s most famous pet cemeteries, which is in Hartsdale, New York. Hartsdale is among the pet cemeteries that Koudounaris looks at, along with Pine Ridge, in Dedham, Massachusetts, where the fox terrier of South Pole explorer Richard Byrd is buried. The dog’s name was Igloo, appropriately enough, and his gravestone, larger than that of most humans, is shaped like an iceberg. Pine Ridge is also the resting place of three Boston terriers owned by Lizzie Borden.

Some of the most interesting stories in Faithful Unto Death, however, aren’t told in words but through photographs of monuments and epitaphs: “In remembrance of Smut, for 12 years, our much beloved cat”; “Alas! Poor Tiplet”; “Scott, who really smiled when pleased, faithful friend, guard of Anne”; “Witt – Best friend I ever had, died June 1895”; “In memory of a loving pet, Judy, killed by a tractor”; “Bingo, 1934-1950 – Let a little dog into your heart and he will tear it to pieces.”

In fact, anyone who still harbors grief for a long-gone pet may be brought to tears in solidarity with the animals memorialized here. That said, there are also some pictures I would rather not have seen, such as the mummified corpse of a dog that was found stuck inside a tree by loggers. “Stuckie” is now a tourist attraction in Georgia.

Toward the end of the book Koudounaris takes a look at what happens to pets of celebrities and animals that are celebrities in their own right. You’d think the dog that was Toto in The Wizard of Oz would have had one of those glass-topped mahogany caskets, but in fact the cairn terrier was buried at the home of her trainer, which later was razed when the Hollywood Freeway was built. “Cars now speed by above the gravesite, which is trapped under tons of concrete,” Koudounaris writes.

Grumpy Cat, the internet sensation who died in 2019, fared better and has a memorial (with a photo) at Sunland Memorial Park in Sun City, Arizona. (Even in death, Grumpy Cat has 1.4 million followers on X.)

Credit is due to Koudounaris for taking this macabre subject matter and making it engrossing; the only thing perplexing about the book is its presentation: It’s a heavy doorstop of a book, dictionary-like in heft, and maybe not the thing most people would want to display on a coffee table. That said, for people with good arm strength who don’t mind encountering a photo of a dead animal every now and then in a book, it’s a surprisingly compelling read. Kleenex recommended. B —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 24/12/12

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.

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