Category: Pop

Album Reviews 25/06/19






The New Eves, The New Eve is Rising

Couple of advance singles from this U.K.-based all-female art-whatever band; I wanted to get to this before I forgot, not because the band’s upcoming (Aug. 1) full-length LP The New Eve Is Rising is a “who’s who”-level release, more of a “what the hell is that” that I think your super-awkward roommate should know about so she takes a break from talking to you. Weird, edgy recipe here: Visuals from the Flower Power era but with one foot firmly planted in The Blair Witch Project (seriously, go look); ritualistic, sometimes polyrhythmic chant-along tuneage that’s borderline tuneless unless you’re into Rasputina when she’s in certifiably crazy mode — I’m sure this stuff is inspired by some sort of goth-faire band or some such, but either way these girls are alright. The video for the flute- and Peavey-plugged guitar-driven “Rivers Run Red” looks like found footage of the Manson girls before they did their thing and it does fit, even their gobbling bowls of strawberries and dancing their pagan crook-leg summoning of Cthulhu or whatnot. “Highway Man” isn’t as nutty, more or less combining No Nos with Romeo Void. The Go-Go’s on acid is the bullet version. B

The Wildmans, “Highway Man”/”Rivers Run Red” (Transgressive Records)

I have a Twitter friend I absolutely adore, an Appalachian-bred woman who was adopted into a hilariously hardscrabble life and is nowadays chugging right along with a career in political knowledge work. She inspired me to take Appalachian folk music seriously, and it’s a genre I’ve come to like quite a bit, which brings us directly to this brother-sister act from the lush hills of a burg called Floyd, Virginia, population 449. They’re on the way up, having already shared stages with Bela Fleck, Billy Strings and Steep Canyon Rangers, not a bad resumé given that they’re in their early 20s. Guitarist/mandolinist Elisha has a Linda Ronstadt quality to her voice, a good match for these stubbornly country songs as well as the harmonizing of her fiddle-playing brother Aila, who won the 2018 Best All Around Performer award at the Galax Old Fiddlers Convention in their home state. Lots of depth and prettiness to be found here, primarily focused on balladry, I didn’t hear any cutting-loose here but there’s plenty of time. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, June 20, will bring us, guess what, new albums, because that’s what Fridays do for us, whether we need new albums or not. The number of albums released by humans is now in the trillions of gorillions, but our appetite for new albums cannot ever be sated, because we instinctively know that a trillion monkeys putting out a trillion albums in the 2020s will, by anyone’s logic, eventually result in an album that’s just great and awesome without being derivative, and no, I’m not referring to Chappell Roan, because all she really did was gussy up top-drawer Madonna/TayTay-style tuneage with Ed Banger beats, which I told you people in February, but did you listen for yourselves to find out I’m right? Mind you, if you’re in a band and trying to write new songs, it’s almost impossible not to be the teensiest bit derivative; when I was putting out records with my own punk-metal band years ago, I tried to force-feed myself music that I wouldn’t have normally listened to in the hope that it’d somehow influence my punk-metal music, which is really how you should really approach songwriting if you have a serious band with record label interest (in case you didn’t know, that’s all Led Zeppelin did when they started, rip off Willie Dixon et al. songs from the early ’60s). At the time, a really old DJ dude had given me a big box of 45-rpm singles from the 1970s, including Kool & The Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” — this was before the tune became famous for its inclusion in the Pulp Fiction soundtrack — and I listened to that nonsense constantly, hoping that all that weird antique disco stuff would worm into my brain and influence my punk-metal songs and — oh, you guys don’t care about this, except for the serious musicians out there, you just want to hear about the latest news from totally derivative artists like Cardi B or Vanilla Ice or whatever you’re doing here, let me go look at the list and see if there’s anything that isn’t horribly derivative and/or generally stupid, fat chance, let me look. OK, here we go, let’s start with the three sisters who comprise the soft-rock band Haim, and I’ll try not to ruin everything by mentioning that they’re basically the Zoomer version of Fleetwood Mac, because they don’t like when people do that, so stop thinking about Fleetwood Mac you guys, come on. Their new LP is called I Quit and features the fun little single “Down To Be Wrong,” which totally doesn’t sound like Fleetwood Mac at all except for the Lindsay Buckingham guitar parts, the carefully sculpted ’70s harmonies, and the subtle country-pop aroma to it that you only detect on Fleetwood Mac songs, look, just forget it, I need you guys to knock it off right this minute.

• English alt-rock singer Yungblud claims to have been “diagnosed with ADHD at a young age,” but in my opinion ADHD is a sign of normality in our TikTok world. His new album Idols is here and starts with “Lovesick Lullaby,” a cross between Eminem and Blur. It’s very cool and totally completely a derivative mashup, let’s move on.

• Straight-laced pop-rocker Benson Boone wisely left the 2021 American Idol competition before the show’s vapid judge-monsters voted him out for sounding like a lame version of Billy Squier. American Heart, his new album, spotlights “Young American Heart,” a tune that evinces his talent for totally not ripping off Bryan Adams, OK, it does, but that’s fine by me, next.

• Lastly, like any band that’s on Third Man Records, New York City’s Hotline TNT has a story about the time hamburger-addict Jack White decided to sign them. Their forthcoming full-length Raspberry Moon includes “Julia’s War,” which takes their usual shoegaze-ish formula and retrofits it with Foo Fighters-ness. Real dumb video, but hey.

Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream, by Nicholas Morgenstern

Madeline Hill wasn’t looking to expand her family when a stranger in a PT Cruiser pulled up to her farm stand in Tennessee and announced that he was her half-brother. At 32, she’d settled into a life she’d built with her mother after her father left them 20 years earlier with no explanation and no future contact. Maybe it wasn’t her best life, but it also wasn’t a bad one. They ran an organic farm that had won acclaim for their meat, eggs, produce and cheese, and had even been featured in magazines. True, it was a largely solitary life, but Mad, as she was known, was comfortable in it. A sibling was not part of her life plan.

Enter Reuben Hill, or Rube, as he is known. The stranger in the PT Cruiser tells Mad that they shared a father, and he had a whole other life in Boston before he ran out on Rube’s family and took up with Mad’s mom. As an adult, Rube wanted to learn more about his father, and so he hired a private investigator who found a mysterious pattern: The man that Rube knew as Chuck Hill, a New England insurance salesman and author of detective novels, had reinvented himself as Charles Hill, a organic farmer in the deep South. But he hadn’t stopped there. There were, apparently, other families that their dad created and left.

In another writer’s hands, this storyline might be overwrought, but in the hands of Kevin Wilson, it’s comedy gold. In Run for the Hills, Wilson’s sixth novel, he sends Mad and Rube on the world’s weirdest road trip, in which they trace their father’s domestic settlements from Tennessee to California and meet their other half-siblings, in the hopes of figuring out what, exactly, their father was thinking, as he continually reinvented himself at the expense of others.

It’s an absurd story, as absurd as the PT Cruiser that Rube showed up in for a road trip. (It’s what the rental-car company gave him, he explains to a bemused Mad.) But it has a raw and poignant center — how this man had shaped his children’s lives, not by his presence, but by his absence, as Wilson writes.

Mad and Rube had built successful lives for themselves, despite the trauma that their father’s abrupt disappearance had inflicted upon their families; Rube had even followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a mystery writer. Another sibling that they tracked down was a star college basketball — in the iteration of himself that the father gave that family, he had been a basketball coach who went by the name Chip Hill.

Curiously, despite the coldness of his departures, when he was living with the families their father was, by all accounts, a good father. Which made his willingness to abruptly remove himself from his children’s lives all the more a mystery.

What caused him to behave that way — and where he is now — are the central questions driving the narrative of Run for the Hills, but it’s the blooming relationships between the quirky half-siblings that give the story its heart. Mad at first is suspicious of Rube and his motives, and reluctant to even invite him into her house as a guest. Guests, she thinks, are an inconvenience: “They showed up and created work for you. They asked about your feelings, your day. They asked if maybe you had a beer in the fridge.They asked if you could adjust the air-conditioning just, like, two degrees. They asked if you knew the location of any legal papers that might speak to the true identity of the father you had not seen in over twenty years.”

Rube, whose mother recently died, is an excruciatingly polite and lonely man who wears his longing for a family on his Oxford shirt sleeve. He is gay and has been in relationships, but like Mad, had never married and is afraid of being left again. “Half of it is that Dad messed me up by leaving. And half of it is that my mom messed me up by staying but being so damn sad that I never forgot about it,” he tells Mad. He is hoping that he can make some lasting connection with these half-siblings, while Mad is hoping just to figure out the mystery and get home to her real life as soon as possible.

They track down the third child, Pepper (who goes by Pep — their father was very fond of nicknames) at the University of Oklahoma, where she was about to play in a championship game. Then it’s off to find a son in Salt Lake City, before the crowded car ultimately crosses into California, where they hope to find the father of them all.

Interspersed throughout the novel are descriptions of video the father had taken of all the children — Pep playing basketball, Mad feeding chickens, Rube playing with a paper airplane. The interludes are meant to show us Hill’s loving interactions with his children, adding to the mystery, and their meaning is more clear near the end of the book. But they don’t work — they are distractions to the natural flow of the story. As is Wilson’s inexplicable fondness for the word “offered” as a synonym for “said.” There are more offerings in this book than at a tent revival in the deep South.

But these are small quibbles with a genuinely fun novel that strikes the right balance between poignancy and comedy, no small task given the subject matter. Wilson has famously written about family dysfunction in his other novels, which include The Family Fang (made into a movie), Nothing to See Here and Now is Not the Time to Panic. If Hollywood options this too, I’ll be at the theater on opening day. A- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream, by Nicholas Morgenstern

Album Reviews 25/06/12



Lüt, “Opp Ned” (Indie Recordings)

Well here’s a filthy, ear-grabbing burner, the final advance from this Norwegian post-emo band’s third, apparently as yet untitled LP. I’d love to tell you more about them, since I really like everything I’ve heard from them so far, but we’re in the era of Anonymous, when bands and various other artistes — Banksy, for instance — keep their identities secret, or force prospective fans to do their own research if they want to know more about them. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich loves these guys, if that’s of any import to you, and they’ve played at a good number of unpronounceable European festivals, but all you really need to do is hear one of their better songs, like this one. This song’s hook is absolutely epic, for one thing, but the ingredients list for their vibe is uniquely awesome: the attitude of The Hives, a guitar sound that binds ’80s goth-rock to no-wave (think Taking Back Sunday, for shorthand), and the boisterous energy of Dropkick Murphys. If that doesn’t interest you, go check your pulse. Seriously, give this a shot. A+ —Eric W. Saeger


Noah Haidu, Standards III (Infinite Distances Records)

One of New York’s finest active jazz pianists here, a guy on his way up, jamming his third set of standards with count-’em two different rhythm sections. A busily simmering “Yesterdays” opens the album in fine black-tie style, followed by a bustling version of Rodgers and Hart’s “Lover” that’ll make wonks’ heads spin. Of course, jazz isn’t all about showing off technical skill, so we move into slowbies at that point with a bouncily phlegmatic take on Mercer Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be” and a lovingly rendered essay on Thad Jones’s “A Child Is Born” that reveals Haidu’s boundless capacity for turning melodies inside out. The more melodically sticky things come from the pop world, with the appropriately soulful “Stevie W,” and then from Chappell Roan’s (yes, that Chappell Roan) “Casual,” which is presented not as the stunning park-and-make-out mega-anthem that it is, but yet another scalar place to explore surgically (interpret that as you wish, but, reluctant as I am to admit it, sometimes Taylor Swift-flavored bubblegum is its own guilty reward). A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nothing like a Friday the 13th, am I right guys, and as far as the new albums that are coming out that day, what could be more apropos than a new album from Van Morrison, my least favorite fedora-wearing pop musician, not that there are any fedora rockers that I’ve ever liked in this life? Yes, it’s as if I walked under a ladder and had five black cats cross my path on my way to my house, where I promptly opened an umbrella when I walked in and then broke a mirror, because I know there’s like five of you who’d flip out and message me on Facebook, yelling misspelled epithets in ALL CAPS if I neglected to mention this dude’s new album Remembering Now, so save it, I was already prepared for this disaster, because I was in the Mahket Basket the other day buying my week’s supply of Cheetos when there it was, assaulting me over the store’s evil loudspeakers, the song “Mister Jones,” which I’ve always hated, not because I thought it was a Van Morrison song (which it isn’t, it’s actually the biggest hit by Counting Crows) but because it makes me want to join the marines and volunteer to sweep for forgotten landmines in Afghanistan just so I’ll never hear it again. Whatever, I think I’ve heard a couple of Van Morrison songs that were OK, so I shall sally forth and click the clicky to hear — let’s see, the first song, “Cutting Corners,” I do these things only for you people. Oh, this isn’t all that bad if you like country music that sounds like it’s being sung by a mechanic from upstate New York, because that’s what it sounds like, there’s Slim Pickens-style dobro and fiddle, and at least it doesn’t sound at all like “Domino,” the dreadful Van Morrison song that obviously inspired “Mister Jones,” nor does it sound like the even-worse “Brown Eyed Girl,” which, as I’ve mentioned before, is the national anthem for accountants who can’t dance. So carry on with your sort-of country music, Van Morrison, until we meet again or whatnot.

• Now that that’s over with, we can turn our attention to my literal favorite Australian band, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, whose name takes up almost a whole line of column space, thanks for being insane, guys! Phantom Island is the name of this month’s King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard album, just in time, because I’ll tell you, I’d actually been worried for a few weeks that they weren’t going to put out an album like they usually do literally every other month, so here it is! When last we left our heroes, on whichever album it was, they were fully committed to making nonsense acid-pop, refusing to bother with stupid boring music-nerd stuff like hooks, instrumental interplay or song structure, so why don’t we just mosey on down to the YouTube corral, Van Morrison style, and take a gander at the latest blah blah blah from these blotter-acid-gobbling turkey-people, yes let’s. Lol, listen to the band’s funny singing man on the new single, “Grow Wings and Fly,” making no sense, something about hanging out in Shanghai, and then — wait, now it’s an actual good ’70s radio-pop song! What are they even doing! Help!

• But wait a minute, we’re not out of the woods yet, because look who it is, Buckcherry with their new album, Roar Like Thunder! The title track comes off like AC/DC, as always, but in arena-punkabilly mode. Ha ha, who buys these albums?

• Last but not least this week is British grime-rapper AJ Tracey, with the appropriately hip-hoppishly titled Don’t Die Before You’re Dead, aren’t you already scared of this hip-hop fellow? “Friday Prayer” recycles/steals from some old Otis Redding beat, and then we get some above-average grime-rapping, as advertised (hilarious note: the band’s Like-bots made no attempt to disguise themselves on the YouTube page for this one, it’s so cute). —Eric W. Saeger

Run for the Hills, by Kevin Wilson

Madeline Hill wasn’t looking to expand her family when a stranger in a PT Cruiser pulled up to her farm stand in Tennessee and announced that he was her half-brother. At 32, she’d settled into a life she’d built with her mother after her father left them 20 years earlier with no explanation and no future contact. Maybe it wasn’t her best life, but it also wasn’t a bad one. They ran an organic farm that had won acclaim for their meat, eggs, produce and cheese, and had even been featured in magazines. True, it was a largely solitary life, but Mad, as she was known, was comfortable in it. A sibling was not part of her life plan.

Enter Reuben Hill, or Rube, as he is known. The stranger in the PT Cruiser tells Mad that they shared a father, and he had a whole other life in Boston before he ran out on Rube’s family and took up with Mad’s mom. As an adult, Rube wanted to learn more about his father, and so he hired a private investigator who found a mysterious pattern: The man that Rube knew as Chuck Hill, a New England insurance salesman and author of detective novels, had reinvented himself as Charles Hill, a organic farmer in the deep South. But he hadn’t stopped there. There were, apparently, other families that their dad created and left.

In another writer’s hands, this storyline might be overwrought, but in the hands of Kevin Wilson, it’s comedy gold. In Run for the Hills, Wilson’s sixth novel, he sends Mad and Rube on the world’s weirdest road trip, in which they trace their father’s domestic settlements from Tennessee to California and meet their other half-siblings, in the hopes of figuring out what, exactly, their father was thinking, as he continually reinvented himself at the expense of others.

It’s an absurd story, as absurd as the PT Cruiser that Rube showed up in for a road trip. (It’s what the rental-car company gave him, he explains to a bemused Mad.) But it has a raw and poignant center — how this man had shaped his children’s lives, not by his presence, but by his absence, as Wilson writes.

Mad and Rube had built successful lives for themselves, despite the trauma that their father’s abrupt disappearance had inflicted upon their families; Rube had even followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a mystery writer. Another sibling that they tracked down was a star college basketball — in the iteration of himself that the father gave that family, he had been a basketball coach who went by the name Chip Hill.

Curiously, despite the coldness of his departures, when he was living with the families their father was, by all accounts, a good father. Which made his willingness to abruptly remove himself from his children’s lives all the more a mystery.

What caused him to behave that way — and where he is now — are the central questions driving the narrative of Run for the Hills, but it’s the blooming relationships between the quirky half-siblings that give the story its heart. Mad at first is suspicious of Rube and his motives, and reluctant to even invite him into her house as a guest. Guests, she thinks, are an inconvenience: “They showed up and created work for you. They asked about your feelings, your day. They asked if maybe you had a beer in the fridge.They asked if you could adjust the air-conditioning just, like, two degrees. They asked if you knew the location of any legal papers that might speak to the true identity of the father you had not seen in over twenty years.”

Rube, whose mother recently died, is an excruciatingly polite and lonely man who wears his longing for a family on his Oxford shirt sleeve. He is gay and has been in relationships, but like Mad, had never married and is afraid of being left again. “Half of it is that Dad messed me up by leaving. And half of it is that my mom messed me up by staying but being so damn sad that I never forgot about it,” he tells Mad. He is hoping that he can make some lasting connection with these half-siblings, while Mad is hoping just to figure out the mystery and get home to her real life as soon as possible.

They track down the third child, Pepper (who goes by Pep — their father was very fond of nicknames) at the University of Oklahoma, where she was about to play in a championship game. Then it’s off to find a son in Salt Lake City, before the crowded car ultimately crosses into California, where they hope to find the father of them all.

Interspersed throughout the novel are descriptions of video the father had taken of all the children — Pep playing basketball, Mad feeding chickens, Rube playing with a paper airplane. The interludes are meant to show us Hill’s loving interactions with his children, adding to the mystery, and their meaning is more clear near the end of the book. But they don’t work — they are distractions to the natural flow of the story. As is Wilson’s inexplicable fondness for the word “offered” as a synonym for “said.” There are more offerings in this book than at a tent revival in the deep South.

But these are small quibbles with a genuinely fun novel that strikes the right balance between poignancy and comedy, no small task given the subject matter. Wilson has famously written about family dysfunction in his other novels, which include The Family Fang (made into a movie), Nothing to See Here and Now is Not the Time to Panic. If Hollywood options this too, I’ll be at the theater on opening day. A- —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 25/06/05

Kurt Deimer, And So It Begins (Bald Man Records)

From the fringes of arena-metal stardom comes this Cincinnati, Ohio-based actor (a die-on role in the 2018 soft reboot of Halloween), rocker (this album, his first) and filmmaker (the upcoming slasher flick Hellbilly Hollow), who specializes in a highly accessible sort of Buckcherry meets power-metal vibe with a southern-fried side of Widespread Panic. He’s made a few influential friends as a frontman, including Queensryche’s Geoff Tate, who guest-sings here on “Burn Together,” and, in strange bedfellow news, Bon Jovi lead guitarist Phil X, who co-wrote four of these songs, including the focus track “Hero,” which nicks Marilyn Manson’s early sound pretty heavily. As you go along with the record there’s nothing really wrong aside from a little scalar verisimilitude between the songs, which could have been solved with (all together now) some interesting samples, but nevertheless it’s got a lot of crunchy riffing if that’s your thing. He’ll open for Tesla at the Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom this Friday (June 6) and Saturday (June 7). A-

Avicii, Avicii Forever (Pinguettes/Universal Records)

The world lost Swedish EDM/electro genius Tim Bergling, aka Avicii, in 2018, but his tracks are permanently seared into the memory banks of club-goers worldwide, for instance the bouncing, trance-adjacent “Levels,” with its NHL hockey-rink-rinsing ambiance, and the infectiously urgent “Wake Me Up,” a country-tinged dance joint that you’d definitely recognize from having heard it somewhere (he made several successful attempts to fuse country and techno, this being his most successful, peaking at No. 4 on the U.S. dance chart). What we have here is a career compilation of sorts; all the aforementioned songs are found on this set, as well as the buzzing shock-treatment electro hit “Sunshine,” a collaboration with David Guetta that was his debut into elite DJ society. This guy was gone way too soon; luckily for most fans this one is one-stop shopping. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• We’re into the new June music releases now, guys, the albums of Friday, June 6, to be precise, and there’s a metric ton of new ones coming out, all scrambling around like feral puppies, doing little clown dances as they compete for your hard-earned dollars if you have any (and haven’t figured out how to use YouTubeToMP3 yet)! I’m pretty sick of all the mixtapes I burned for my car, but since I left the daily-grind workforce, my entire weekly commuting time is down to about 20 minutes, just back and forth from the Elm Street Market Basket when Petunia and I run out of waffles and assorted other health foods, so it’s all good, but maybe there’ll be something in this week’s list that won’t instantly put me in a sour mood, let’s go have a look and hope for the best. Ugh, not an enticing start for me, a new album titled I Forgive You from Cynthia Erivo, who won the role of Elphaba in Wicked for having ridiculously long and dangerous fingernails and having the most piercings in human history won tons of Grammys and Tonys and whatnot, which is fine, because at least the part of the Good Witch didn’t go to Amanda Seyfried, who left the TV show Big Love to make seriously bad movies, which is one thing she definitely excelled at in her post-teen years! This is Erivo’s second album, said to be a “reintroduction” to her world-class style, and I found that everything on it (at least what I heard, anyway) has an epic romantic-tearjerking quality to it, in which she makes Adele look like a complete amateur, there’s really no contest. She’ll be on a very limited tour in August; the closest venue to New England will be in Syracuse, N.Y.

• After a four-month rollout that’s driven his fans insane, famous hip-hop man Lil Wayne resurfaces this Friday with Tha Carter VI. He is known for being one of the greatest rappers of all time, the inspiration for such luminaries as Nicki Minaj, Kendrick Lamar and such, but there’s no consensus at the moment in online sewing circles like the HipHopHeads subreddit as to whether or not he’ll make any sense onstage, in interviews or anyplace else as he promotes this new one, owing to years of opiate abuse. His last one, Funeral, came out in 2020 and was met with “mixed to positive” reviews; there’s an advance sample of this one in which he sounds, as always, like a nasty version of Skee-Lo, not to influence the buying decision you’ve already made.

• Since this musical decade has no idea what it’s doing or what it even is, the latest knuckleball in the works is the new album from Cypress Hill & London Symphony Orchestra, titled Black Sunday Live At The Royal Albert Hall, because why not. What’s that? No, I’m serious, you can go to YouTube right now and hear this album’s version of “I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That” before it drops on Friday. Spoiler, the 31-year-old song gets the symphonic treatment, and the band couldn’t sound more bored, but do with that information what you will.

• If you’re a boomer, you’ll recall the Doobie Brothers being one of your favorite pop-rock bands, but then they decided to let Michael McDonald take over the singing for “What a Fool Believes” and most people couldn’t believe how lame it was compared to their earlier hits. Be that as it may, the band’s new LP, Walk This Road, is on the way, and original singer Tom Johnston is back with them, but the (spoiler) blues-based title track features McDonald singing in his Airedale terrier voice, oh well, whatever.

• And finally it’s Pittsburgh’s own psychedelic-indie band Black Moth Super Rainbow with a new album, Soft New Magic Dream, featuring the single “Open the F—ing Fantasy,” an annoyingly catchy down-tempo thingamajig, its unintelligible vocals piped through a 1970s voice modulator for no reason whatsoever.

Featured Image: Kurt Deimer, And So It Begins (Bald Man Records) and Avicii, Avicii Forever (Pinguettes/Universal Records)

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (Berkley, 432 pages)

Cracking open a new Emily Henry novel is like settling into a beach chair, soaking up the warmth of the sun as you sink your feet into the cool sand and savor the moment of calm, unbothered bliss. And then it’s better than that, knowing you’ll be in this state of bliss for as long as the story lasts, rather than for a few minutes before the sun gets too hot and you start sweating and wishing you’d brought an umbrella.

That’s the experience I’ve had with all of Henry’s novels, and Great Big Beautiful Life was no exception — at first. That initial feeling of euphoria was real; as always, Henry’s engaging writing drew me right in and I was totally on board with the story, of two writers vying for a job to write the biography of a reclusive heiress who disappeared years ago following a series of tragedies and a lifetime of public scrutiny.

I love the premise. I’m a fan of the novel’s protagonist, Alice, a serial optimist, and her rival/love interest, Hayden, a serial pessimist. I even liked Margaret Ives, the mysterious octogenarian heiress.

So I was all in, at first, for Henry’s departure from her typical rom-com. But then the sun got too hot, so to speak. Because just as Alice and Hayden’s romance starts to heat up, Margaret’s telling of her “juicy” life story takes over and the focus shifts to her extensive family history.

And I do mean extensive. Even Alice notes some frustration when Margaret starts her story several generations back, rather than diving into the more recent past.

I already don’t love the story-within-a-story framework, because I almost always like one story more and feel antsy when I’m reading the “other” story, waiting to get back to the good stuff. In this case, I was by far more interested in Alice and Hayden. I loved their interactions and wanted more of them, to watch their relationship develop more explicitly.

Margaret’s family’s decades of secrets and deceptions? I really wanted to care, but it all felt so convoluted. I kept forgetting who was related to whom and in what way. And the element of mystery that permeates the Ives’ family history, that presumably the general public cares enough about to read a Margaret Ives biography, isn’t all that exciting.

I was hoping when we got to Margaret’s hyped-up romance with another briefly famous person, Cosmo, there would be similar vibes to Alice and Hayden’s story. But even that fell flat for me.

I truly believe that the cover of Great Big Beautiful Life is a disservice to what the novel actually is: more “women’s fiction” than rom-com. Every time I picked the book up, I could not align the cover image with the words inside — but only if I was on a Margaret chapter. The Alice/Hayden plot fit the cover perfectly. It’s like Henry wanted to try something more serious but also didn’t want to let go of the genre she does best, ultimately creating a disjointed reading experience.

All that being said, Emily Henry’s writing is so lovely, and I appreciate her attempt to step out of her comfort zone. I can’t help wondering, if Henry had written a book solely about the Ives family — and marketed it accurately, as women’s fiction rather than a rom-com — whether I would have been more invested, knowing that I’d be reading a historical family saga.

Likewise, I think Alice and Hayden’s story has more to offer, both their relationship and their individual stories. Alice as a character is refreshing in that she is so positive in a way that could be annoying but somehow is not. Hayden is the grumpy male character that’s been written plenty of times before, but there’s something about him that seems sincere from the beginning and more real than the average grump-turned-lover rom-com character. They also both have intriguing pasts that could have used more fleshing out.

Great Big Beautiful Life is two mostly good stories that just don’t mesh well. But it’s still worth the read. Henry’s writing is a warm hug, no matter what she’s writing about, so as long as you’re not expecting straight-up rom-com vibes, this is a few hours well spent. B —Meghan Siegler

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