Category: Pop

What I Ate in One Year, by Stanley Tucci

What I Ate in One Year, by Stanley Tucci (Gallery, 348 pages)

Fame enables so much. If you or I were to propose a book in which we jot notes about what we’ve eaten over the past year, along with occasional asides about what our kids will or won’t eat, and how an airline has once again made flying unbearable, and the friends we’ve had over recently, we’d be pitched in the slush pile. But then again, our friends probably aren’t Robert Downey Jr. and Colin Firth.

And so Stanley Tucci, whose list of credits in Hollywood over the past 40 years has made him more connections than even Kevin Bacon, does get to write such a book, even though it comes on the heels of one that was much more substantial: 2021’s Taste: My Life Through Food. That book was a memoir; his latest is more a journal, and, at first glance, seems kind of scammy. Here’s an actual excerpt from page 90: “I had oatmeal in the [airport] lounge and some orange juice and a croissant. I tried the tater tot things again and they were crisper this time. … Arriving at the hotel, I ordered poached eggs, toast, and sausage, and it was delicious.”

I wish I could say that there were fascinating stories woven around those two meals, but there were not. And yet. The mind-numbing conceit of this book — a foodie records what he eats and doesn’t care whether you find it interesting or not — kind of, sort of, almost works. This is, after all, one of the most likable character actors in Hollywood, who has in recent years become associated with good eating by playing Julia Child’s husband in a film (Julie and Julia) and eating his way through Italy in a documentary (Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy). He has co-owned a restaurant and has written two other cookbooks (The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table).

Maybe he’s just run out of foodie things to say, and the publisher said just keep a journal next year and we’ll buy that. And it isn’t terrible — in fact, in places, it is poignant and heartwarming, particularly when he talks about his interactions with his aging parents. And there are a couple of short, stand-alone essays that are memorable and perfectly timed, including one in which Tucci describes a fan coming up to him in a restaurant and telling him how he used to watch Searching for Italy with his wife, who had recently passed. Tucci, who lost his first wife to breast cancer, knows about grief, and uses the occasion to write beautifully about how is it absorbed:

“It would always be there. Always. But soon, it would become less prevalent. In time her presence would slip into his body, his heart, and his thoughts, sometimes gently, sometimes joltingly, but it would never last for as long as it would today. Eventually, years from now, it would alight on the tip of his soul for just a second or two, carrying with it a shiver of the past and a glimpse of a future that might have been. And then it would disappear again.”

Also, as someone who travels broadly (though tries never to be away from home for more than two weeks at a time), Tucci has a vast and alarming knowledge of things people eat outside of American food courts. The faint of heart may need to skip over the sections about the man who poached a bucket of snakes (“one of the best cooking videos I’ve ever seen,” Tucci says), and about the Italian dish he loves that features a sauce “made with the intestine of a baby calf that is slaughtered while the mother’s milk is still inside of it.” (The name, should you wish to make sure you never accidentally eat this while you are in Rome, is pasta con pajata di vitello a latte. Personally, I’m for making it illegal.)

And on it goes. We get to know Tucci’s wife and children, as well as his parents and some of his extended family, and learn that his daughter doesn’t eat much of anything other than pasta with butter and Parmigiano cheese, which doesn’t bother him because “It has pleased picky eaters and comforted the ailing and the anxious for as long as those three ingredients have been around, which is probably pretty f—ing long. Why? Perhaps because it’s so simple it helps us focus on what is necessary: comfort and health. Eating a simple dish gives one clarity. Pasta with butter and cheese laughs in the face of our complex lives.”

Many of the recipes that Tucci shares here are similarly simple: spaghetti con tonno (with tuna), minestrone soup, and rainbow chard, for example, then he smacks us upside the head with risotto with mushrooms and rabbit legs. All the while, as we read about his trip to Williams Sonoma and a bout with Covid-19 and how he first encountered wild garlic, we are never unaware of the fact that this is a journal — ABOUT WHAT SOMEBODY ATE:

8:30 a.m.: Star pasta with butter, Parmigiano and scrambled egg

10:30 a.m.: Leftover minestrone with a piece of toast

1:30 p.m.: Toasted pita bread stuffed with sheep’s cheese, tomato, and sauteed peppers and onions.

Also, the man never stops eating, and must have the metabolism of those unlucky rabbits.

There is, mercifully, some order to the year, which was, in fact, a complete year, running from Jan. 2, 2023, to Jan. 2, 2024. But it’s difficult to find the big, crinkly bow in which to tie this journal up neatly and to say, “ah, this is why I just read a journal about what a family ate.” I still don’t really know. I learned some things, such as that the British call ground beef mince, and that I will never eat a dish in Rome that ends with a latte. But beyond that, it’s a mystery why it was written, and why I read every word. And it’s a testament to Tucci’s utter likeability that I don’t want those hours of my life back. B-

Album Reviews 24/11/21

Peggy Lee and Cole Schmidt, Forever Stories of: Moving Parties (Earshift Music)

Meanwhile, out past Pluto into the Kuiper Belt, we arrive on the asteroid I usually don’t bring up in this space, experimental pan-jazz that no one knows about and mostly never will. For the most part, as you may know, jazz is at its heart a “conversational” art, which, in our capitalist context, usually involves one-upsmanship, but this sort of borderline-avant expressionism is a whole other duck, capturing the musicians’ moods at the time of recording. Peggy Lee (cello) and the hilariously overextended Cole Schmidt (Sick Boss’s guitarist) are from Vancouver, and this is their first effort as co-leaders. There are electronics afoot here, as well as guest contributors playing such instruments as bassoon, violin, trumpet and piano to various effects. “Blame” opens the record on a genial note, evoking not the rather dark titular subject but a friendly group walk to an urban coffee shop that’s preparing to close for the night. “It Will Come Back” has a lot of melodic appeal past its borderline dissonant intro; “Absences” offers more sonic schizophrenia, a mixture of afterparty steez and gaslit oddballness. Surprisingly listenable. A

DQFI, “Changes” (Nub Music)

This Saint Albans, U.K.-based band’s acronym signifies “Don’t Quite Fit In,” does that sound familiar to anyone who’s ever stanned a rock band before, anyone at all? I committed to giving this release a look-see before discovering it’s a single and not an LP, so I took it as an exercise in self-punishment and “at least you’ll learn something out of it,” like, I knew there wasn’t going to be much going on. And there isn’t. The band’s trip is sounding exactly like The Runaways did in the 1970s, but with a twist: They’re into positivity, man, because there’s so much, you know, negativity in the world! Have you heard about that? OK, OK, I’m not going to douse all you nice eyeball-equipped people in redundant nihilism; after all, the Brady Bunch band was singing “Sunshine Day” in 1972, the year the Watergate scandal broke and the Olympics were interrupted by a rather unsightly terrorist incident, so why not sing about “holding up a light” and building unity in a world where _____ and ____. I mean, why not, Ben Kweller’s a millionaire, so that old broken clock in the sky is completely right twice a day, you know? B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Time to go buy your frozen turkey and hope it’ll be thawed within the next few days, folks, because this Friday, Nov. 22, is the last Friday before Thanksgiving, when you and your uncle will yell at each other about politics and your dog will amble over to the den to get away from it, because although Rover avoids reading any decent, informative political books just like you two do, he chooses not to start trouble over it! Awful, isn’t it, but the good news is that Ice T is back with his rap-metal band, Body Count, remember when their first album was the coolest thing in the world, before the ole Ice-man became a car insurance salesman on the teevee? Merciless is this album’s title, and — OMG, OMG, this is simply too awesome, it includes a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” but because the Ice Monster is awesome, it starts with the cool guitar solo instead of making us sit through any boring preliminary nonsense, and then he starts rapping low and menacingly about how tough it is in the hood, like, you know how it is when your local Whole Foods doesn’t have any [censored] organic avocados and you [censored] have to walk out empty-handed, with your teevee car salesman money still in your Gucci wallet, don’t you [censored] hate that [censored] [censored]!

• If you ever take a drive to Cancelville and take a walk downtown, mayhaps to stroll around the hilly, well-kept paths of Harvey Weinstein City Park or pop into Cosmo Kramer’s Tast-E Freeze to grab a yummy chocolate frappe, chances are good that you will run into one or more celebrities who can no longer show their faces in public or post things on social media without getting yelled at by everyone who sees them! Why? Because all those celebrities are canceled, like industrial-pop circus clown Marilyn Manson, who, all you ’90s kids will recall, (allegedly) stole his “monster-dude-on stilts” gimmick from Skinny Puppy, without ever asking permission. He was (allegedly) never sued for that, but it doesn’t matter because, as all you People magazine readers know, he eventually got his, but good: He got in so much trouble for all the stupid stuff he (allegedly) did to his former girlfriends that he had to move into the Motel 6 on Johnny Depp Boulevard until he could find new digs, in Cancelville’s tony upper east side! But the plight of celebrities who (allegedly) came out as morons and got mightily canceled by people on the internet is not why we’re here, we’re here to talk about Marilyn’s new album, One Assassination Under God – Chapter 1, please try to be civil! His big record contract was voided because, you know, obviously (allegedly!), so now he is on Nuclear Blast Records, an indie label that also puts out albums from, um, well, Green Lung and 100 other bands you’ve never heard of, it’s all so sad, fam. The single I’m listening to is “Sacrilegious,” a tune that tries to revive the glory days of “Beautiful People” but just sort of flops around, and he doesn’t sound very enthusiastic, but neither would you if your next-door neighbor was Kevin Spacey.

• Irish arena-pop band U2 has a new record, How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, which is a “shadow album” of 10 discarded songs from 2004’s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. “Country Mile” is one of these new songs, a microwaved meatloaf of uninteresting ideas that only serves to prove that even the mighty U2 can write amazingly boring songs, as if we didn’t know.

• Lastly it’s Kim Deal’s new album, Nobody Loves You More, which features the single “Crystal Breath,” a perfectly fine no-wave grinder, do go listen to it.

Bambi, by Felix Salten

Bambi, by Felix Salten (Knopf, 211 pages)

If all you know of Bambi is what Disney served up, you don’t know Bambi.

With many of Disney’s early movies, the stories weren’t written in-house — Snow White came from a German fairy tale, attributed to the Brothers Grimm, and Pinnochio was written by an Italian journalist in the 19th century. The source material for Bambi, which Disney released as an animated film in 1942, was a slim novel by the same name written by Felix Salten. It’s been re-released this year as a gold-embossed hardcover book, part of Alfred A. Knopf’s “Children’s Classics” series — which is fine, so long as this elegant, disturbing little book doesn’t fall into a child’s hands. This is not your 5-year-old’s Bambi, and Thumpers in the rear-view mirror are not as they seem.
That said, Salten’s Bambi, subtitled “A Life in the Woods,” is better than Disney’s, and I love that the foreword is the original one from 1928, which concludes, “I particularly recommend it to sportsmen.”

Like George Orwell with Animal Farm and E.B. White with Charlotte’s Web, Salten created characters who are fully animal but at the same time quite human. The book opens with an exchange between Bambi’s mother, exhausted from giving birth, and a magpie who keeps chattering about its own life. “Pardon, I wasn’t listening,” Bambi’s mother says after a while, and the magpie flies away thinking, “A stupid soul. Very nice, but stupid,” which, fair or unfair, could encapsulate a lot of conversations we all have in a grocery store line.

Soon enough, as Bambi enjoys his solitary time with his mother they encounter a ferret that has killed a mouse. And a “vast, unknown horror clutched at his heart” as the fawn gets a blurry view of some unknown horror that exists beyond his idyllic life. But his mother is not yet ready to speak of it, trying to keep Bambi innocent as long as possible while teaching him about the joys of the meadow, where “he rejoiced with his legs and with his whole body as he flung himself into the air,” and gazed at the sky, where “he saw the whole heaven stretching far and wide and he rejoiced without knowing why.”

He is introduced to three other deer, one of which, Faline, will become his mate, and catches his first glimpse of his father, who passes the cluster of deer with another proud stag without acknowledging them. Crushed, Bambi asks his mother why; she replies, “They don’t ever stay with us, only at times. … And we have to wait for them to speak to us. They do it whenever they like.”

Bambi’s mother herself grows increasingly colder to her son as he matures, once snapping at him, “Go away and let me be.” When he cries for her, a stag appears and tells him, “Your mother has no time for you now.” And this is before we ever get to the cruelty of man, the hunter, who is described throughout simply as “He.”

The word “Bambi” itself has become Bambi-ized, more associated with cartoon characters and porn stars than its source. But Saltzer’s book, while simply written, is gritty with the hard reality of animal life in which fear and death are constants. In one interaction with a squirrel, Bambi inquires about the rodent’s father, and the squirrel replies, “O, the owl caught him a month ago.” One chapter is a conversation between two autumn leaves, clinging to the top of a tree, contemplating their mortality. (“Can it really be true, that others come to take our places when we’re gone and after them still others, and more and more?”)

All this is to say, perhaps this was a “children’s” book when it was first published, five years before antibiotics were discovered and when many people still slaughtered their own meat and death had not been sanitized and swept aside to nursing homes and hospitals. Now, it’s nightmare-inducing stuff, particularly with the running theme of abandonment by parents, and a scene in which Bambi’s “Friend Hare” — which Disney named Thumper — is terrified and writhing in a trap.

In the end Salter’s Bambi is both a coming-of-age story and circle-of-life story, as the deer matures and accepts his role in the forest. Like every good story, it has a clear villain — the human — who is threaded with complexity. He both terrorizes the forest creatures and provides a safe and loving home for his dog, and even cares for an injured deer.

In one scene, a hunting dog and his wounded prey, a fox, have an emotionally charged conversation, the fox calling the dog a turncoat and renegade, since they are genetically brothers. The dog replies, “Do you think you can oppose Him, poor creatures like you? He’s all powerful. He’s above all of you. Everything we have comes from Him.”

And just when you think you’ve got the book’s theological implications figured out, Salter goes elsewhere, because this is, at its heart, a morality tale.

Stephen King once called Disney’s Bambi the first horror movie he ever saw because of its effect on him as a child. That genre doesn’t describeSalter’s Bambi the book, except maybe for vegans. But it’s a deeply affecting little book that, like A Christmas Carol and Animal Farm, shows that the impact of a book has nothing to do with its length. A —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 24/11/14

Ron Carter & Art Farmer, Live At Sweet Basil (Arkadia Records)

This release, newly pressed in 180-gram premium virgin vinyl, captures a dream band of jazz legends jamming at the famed New York City club, which they did in order to tick a more-or-less mandatory checkbox in the band’s “We Played Here” list; everyone had played shows there from its mid-1970s opening onward. This 1990 performance finds the players at the top of their respective games: Ron Carter on bass, Art Farmer on trumpet and flumpet, Cedar Walton on piano, and Billy Higgins on drums. Each member wrote at least one tune for this album, which kicks off with one of Carter’s, “It’s About Time,” wherein Farmer immediately moves into trumpet-soloing mode while Carter noodles underneath most expressively. That’s just for starters; for another thing, a 10-minute rendering of “My Funny Valentine” finds the band taking their deliciously sweet time with the melodies. Walton and Higgins had a long coworking history, as evidenced by their flawless, seemingly preternatural canoodling, but the whole smash is deep-stewed for timelessness. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Hattie Webb, Wild Medicine (self-released)

Here’s to the semi-obscure side musicians: This Kent, U.K.-bred singer and harpist, along with her sister, Charley, just finished a tour with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, the sort of elite-level gig that’s nothing new to them (in the past they’ve joined bands like Lumineers and Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, and even performed for Queen Elizabeth II once). This solo album finds Hattie playing the role of a lilting goddess, opening with “Shakespeare’s Shores,” which, at least in a syncopatic sense, is a distant cousin to Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” (hey, man, I always do try to provide some point of reference, regardless of propriety). Despite the obvious ren-faire ambiance that comes with this territory, there’s nonetheless an Americana vibe wafting through these pieces; I swear I heard a dobro in there, but it certainly could have been my cat’s snoring. Either way, you get the gist — the freaking Queen rocked out to this stuff, guys — it’s intended for ruminating, sipping tea, and other putterings. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• What’s up, guys, I hate to remind you, but I hope you’re not doing anything silly with your money these days, like buying cans of ramen noodle packs just to keep your weight up in these hilariously broke times, because guess what’s coming, that’s right, it’s the holidays! What does it all mean? It means you have to start seriously thinking about buying presents for people who won’t appreciate them, unless they actually want one of the albums that’s coming out in time for the holiday season, maybe for example one of the albums that are coming out this Friday, Nov. 15! Holy Toledo, look at all these new albums, coming for your “discretionary spending money” (ha ha, remember that crazy stuff?) like a flock of geese who want you to give ’em your stale old Pop-Tarts! Yes, sorry, folks, why not get it out of the way now and buy one of these albums before the inevitable $800 car repair bill comes up, just like it does every year when you least want it to happen, so let’s look at your choices, I am here to help you, my little elves! Oops, let me start by donning my Stetson hat, adjusting the spurs on my boots, and throwing a case of toxic-smelling American beer in the back of my Chevy pickup, as we start off the week with Reboot II, the new album from cowboy troubadours Brooks & Dunn! You may have heard of this country duo, given that they get literally billions of YouTube views and sell gorillions of albums, which could probably be chalked up to the fact that the band makes sure we music journalist bros can’t escape them, like, they’ve probably sent me 200 albums over the years. Not saying they like me personally; they never include an introductory letter or anything, they just expect me not to be stupid and to know who they are, which is good marketing I suppose, like, if The Beatles put out a new album, they’d just send it to me with no note saying, “Hello Eric, I hope that you are doing OK in these apocalyptic times” and simply expect me to write about it, in this multiple-award-winning newspaper column! Well, let me tell you, I won’t be treated like some nobody who’s never won an award. In fact, I’ll — oh never mind, let’s just get this over with, by listening to the new single, a re-recording of one of their previous hits, “Play Something Country!” The guest singer for this rerub is Lainey Wilson, who does her yodel-singing routine over this old ZZ Top-like tune, like, if ZZ Top heard this, they’d probably sue these guys for copyright infringement, not that I’m trying to cause any trouble!

• Former interesting person Gwen Stefani is nevertheless still groovy and “swell” in the opinion of all you crazy rock ’n’ roll fans out there, right? Well, no matter, she has a new album out this Friday, Bouquet, whose cover photo depicts her in a cowboy hat, like we were just talking about, in case you already forgot! She is married to Blake Shelton nowadays, so it’s no surprise she’s going in a country direction. The single, “Somebody Else’s,” is a Sugarland-tinged semi-rocker in which Stefani sounds like every other lukewarm diva out there, kind of just clocking in. You know.

• Alt-metal band Linkin Park has entered a new era after the passing of Chester Bennington. Their first LP since 2017, From Zero, streets this week and features the aggressive La Roux-like vocals of new co-lead singer Emily Armstrong! The single, “Over Each Other,” is loud, melodic and catchy, you may very well like it!

• And finally it’s hip-hop-soul legend Mary J. Blige, with her new album, Gratitude, which includes the single “Breathing,” guested by stoned-sounding spitter Fabolous! Its sweeping background vocals make its vanilla trap beat palatable. —Eric W. Saeger

Counting Miracles, by Nicholas Sparks

Counting Miracles, by Nicholas Sparks (Random House, 368 pages)

I love a good Nicholas Sparks book, so much so that I’m on my library’s automatic waitlist for his new releases. I’ve read them all, and usually I know what I’m going to get: romance, a healthy dose of drama, and possibly a few tears. There is always love, and there is sometimes loss.

Sparks’ latest, Counting Miracles, explores love and loss to the extreme. There are two storylines, very loosely woven together at first and uniting in the end, as such stories do. They’re told in chapters that alternate from the points of view of Tanner, Kaitlyn and Jasper. Tanner and Kaitlyn’s storyline is one — that’s the romance — and Jasper’s is a story all his own.

The book starts with Tanner, a middle-aged veteran, stepping up to help a teenage girl, Casey, who appears to be in trouble with a boy. Moments later Tanner helps her again after she crashes into his car. He kindly drives her home, and his good deeds are rewarded as he meets Casey’s single mom, Kaitlyn, and instantly falls in strong like.

Tanner’s purpose for being in town is to potentially find his birth father after getting a cryptic clue from his grandmother when she was on her deathbed. He still works on that goal, though it’s somewhat put on the back burner for a while as he obsesses over Kaitlyn.

Then there’s Jasper, an older man with a host of health problems and a long history of tragedy. He’s connected to Kaitlyn because he is teaching woodcarving to her son Mitch. When he’s not doing that, he’s living alone in a cabin with his dog Arlo and no family or friends to speak of. When the town is abuzz with news that a rare white deer has been seen in the forest, Jasper makes it his new mission to save that deer from poachers.

The premise of Counting Miracles is finding hope in times of despair, of moving forward when there doesn’t seem to be anything to move toward. It’s uplifting in theory, but Counting Miracles is so heavy on despair that it was hard to push through to get to the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Yes, Sparks can obviously tell a good story if he’s making me feel all the feels, but I found myself skimming the darker chapters because they were uncomfortably depressing.

Plus, the darker chapters were the Jasper chapters, and I wasn’t all that interested in reading about his deer-saving adventures, especially since sitting in the woods for long periods of time led to a lot of reflection on the aforementioned tragic past.

Perhaps most off-putting for me in Jasper’s story is the heavy Bible influence. At one point Jasper recalls a tornado that took out his pear tree farm — his source of livelihood. In the present, he recalls staring at the toppled trees and thinking of the ninth verse in the fourth chapter of Job: “By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of His anger they come to an end.” But then he reminds himself that “the Lord works in mysterious ways and thought about 1 Corinthians 10:13, which promised that ‘God is faithful, and He will not let you be tested beyond your strength.’” He was losing sleep at that time due to financial worries and considered declaring bankruptcy but instead thought about Psalm 37:21, which says “the wicked borrows and does not pay back.”

All three of the above-quoted Bible passages occur in the space of one page. That’s a lot, and it continues throughout his story as he recalls experiencing, and seemingly continues to experience, the worst life has to offer.

Kaitlyn and Tanner, meanwhile, are going through the typical highs and lows of a potential new relationship. Tanner has never settled down and has plans to leave the country again soon; Kaitlyn knows that and tries not to get attached, and he does the same, but of course they just can’t ignore their infatuation.

You kind of have to suspend reality to fall for a Sparks love story, because his romances often happen quickly. Kaitlyn and Tanner can’t wait to spend time together; their first date is a day at the zoo that Kaitlyn had planned with Mitch, and she asks him to join them. As a single mom myself, I was a little surprised by this, and then annoyed because they didn’t pay much attention to Mitch and instead had deep conversations while following him around. But all Tanner has to do is throw the kid a frisbee later in the date and Mitch is as smitten as his mom.

Casey, on the other hand, is a great foil to their relationship. She’s very 16 and has the attitude to prove it, but ultimately she’s a good kid who wants her mom to be happy — even if she doesn’t always show it.

I was rooting for Kaitlyn and Tanner throughout their ups and downs because they’re likable characters. I wish we heard a little more of Kaitlyn’s backstory and a little less of Tanner’s, because he did a lot of the talking in their conversations, and I felt like I never fully got to know her.

And maybe that’s one of the reasons why I was always disappointed to leave Kaitlyn and Tanner behind at the end of a chapter to re-join Jasper. I wanted more of their story and less of his. But I know that’s a personal thing; I prefer light and romantic over sad and tragic. And I think a lot of people will enjoy the duality of this novel and how it comes together in the end. It wasn’t my favorite Sparks novel, but definitely worth the read. B —Meghan Siegler , and wilder than I had a right to ask for.” A

—Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 24/11/7

CULT, DW-05 (Drum Workouts Records)

OK, this is actually great, an EP from an Irish DJ who’s part of a purported new wave of classically influenced producers. If you keep track of such things, he’s received love from X-Coast, DJ Stingray and IMOGEN, among others, which is as workaday as getting a review blurb from Stephen King for your new horror novel, but in this case I’m hopping on board, absolutely. In truth there’s really only a perfunctory modicum of “classical” in this stuff, so don’t be put off; mostly it’s a hybrid of drum ’n’ bass and deep house if that makes any sense (it certainly should, I’d imagine). Put more succinctly, the beats lope and (gently) stampede, chasing their layers around aural racetracks, while ’80s and ’90s hip-hop-centric vocal lines and assorted toasts keep pace. If it isn’t the current state of the velvet rope club in places like Ibiza I’d be surprised and a bit disappointed. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Caleb Wheeler Curtis, The True Story of Bears and the Invention of the Battery (Imani Records)

Hope you’re into Thelonious Monk if you’re thinking of indulging in this one, because this Brooklyn multi-instrumentalist sure loves him some of that; matter of fact the songs are, it’s suggested by this thing I’m reading here, explorations of Monk’s ideas, particularly on the second disc of this double LP, appropriately subtitled Raise Four: Monk the Minimalist. It sounds that way, too, lots of honking and wildly adventurous post-bop explorations, what I usually think of as high-test, dark-roast jazz if you will. Curtis switches back and forth between trumpet and three saxophone types, “stritch” (alto), sopranino and tenor, and he’s supported most ably on this double album by two rhythm sections, bassist Sean Conly and drummer Michael Sarin on the first disc and bassist Eric Revis and drummer Justin Faulkner on the second. Obviously, Monk is an acquired taste, not one I’ve ever developed with any seriousness, but this is surely a great workout for your noggin if you have the time and space to indulge in it. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Our next Friday-load of new albums is Nov. 8, or so this thing’s telling me, but this week we’re going to start with something decidedly not rock ’n’ roll at all, specifically super-old music played by 24-year-old Dutch recorder wunderkind Lucie Horsch! If you’re the type of listener who only knows about comedy albums and crunk singles, you’re probably wondering what a “recorder” is, so let’s dig into that before you lose interest completely! A recorder is a vaguely flute-like wind instrument, basically a glorified “flutophone” (an easy-to-play thingamajig we old people had to play in grade-school music class or we’d get yelled at). Lucie’s new album is The Frans Brüggen Project: Orchestra Of The Eighteenth Century, and it features her own wunderkind-centric renderings of music written by composers in the 1700s. The selections on this album were originally created by Haydn, Bach and all those guys in wigs, and the angle here is that she plays these wicked old tunes on antique recorders that were previously owned by this Frans Brüggen feller, who was sort of wunderkind-ish himself. Case in point: If you want awesomeness, on her recording of Marcello’s “Oboe Concerto in D Minor, S. Z799: II. Adagio (Performed on Recorder),” Lucie plays a recorder that was made in the year 1720, way before the first Hives album came out. Ha ha, look at this, Lucie caught flak on Facebook (where else) for calling her advance recording of the aforementioned concerto a “single,” like, some guy yelled at her for calling it a “single” instead of a “movement”; it was as if she’d asked the guy “would you please pass the jelly” when she’d actually wanted him to pass the Polaner All-Fruit, and it made him lose it completely! Anyhow, the Marcello single or Polaner Blueberry Snob Spread or whatever is very pretty and bucolic and whatnot; she’s supported by a string section, so it’s music that’s perfect for relaxing in a forest glade, nibbling on psychedelic skunk cabbage leaves or whatever people used to do for entertainment before there was My Cat From Hell and such.

• And now back to our regularly scheduled rundown of music from this abysmal century, starting with Scottish indie-rock band Primal Scream’s new album, Come Ahead! They have been around since 1982, spotlighting the bland vocals of former Jesus and Mary Chain drummer Bobby Gillespie, and he’s still here, bringin’ the LootCrate-level singing to these neo-psychedelic/garage tunes, like the new single from this album, “Deep Dark Waters,” a mid-tempo snoozer that sounds kind of off-key to me, but what would I know, I’ve only been a rock critic since Walter Mondale was president!

• Albany, New York,-based emo band State Champs is back, dumping another of their Dashboard Confessional-soundalike albums on my hopelessly messy desk, and surprise, this one’s self-titled, for no reason whatsoever! “Too Late To Say” is catchy, after a watered-down emo fashion. Do people still listen to this kind of stuff?

• Last but not least (unless I find that it actually is), it’s experimental metal duo The Body, with their new LP, The Crying Out Of Things! They are from Portland, Oregon, but they are nevertheless awesome, going by their new single, “End Of Line,” a deconstructionist’s dream that would have fit in fine with all the other fine products from Throbbing Gristle and all that stuff, back when planet Earth was still a smoldering ball of lava and the nepo babies hadn’t taken over. It is highly recommended! —Eric W. Saeger

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