Category: Pop

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

Album Reviews 25/05/29

Smut, Tomorrow Comes Crashing (Bayonet Records)

From Cincinnati, Ohio, comes this pleasingly melodic but quite loud post-Riot grrrl outfit combining fat, shreddy guitars and top-drawer female singing toward an effort to concoct something that’s like an alternative-universe epic metal, if you will. The focus track, “Syd Sweeney,” could indeed be a fourth-wave feminist treatise for all I could tell from the barely discernible lyrics in its Blair Witch Project-like video, but the main riff has a noise part that’s really neat. Opening tune “Godhead” has a little shoegaze feel to it, but its urgency and decidedly non-androgynous attitude isn’t native to that genre; “Dead Air” is an even more complicated genre-mix, given its gauzy guitars and overly reverbed vocals giving way to pure grunge. This is all a major departure from their previous dream-pop approach; it’s more like a cross between Garbage and a grown-up Avril Lavigne, would be the shorthand. It’s pretty great really. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Ryan Truesdell, Shades of Sound: Gil Evans Project Live at Jazz Standard, Vol. 2 (Outside in Music)

Truesdell, a winner of multiple Grammys, has a deep fascination with the work of Canadian-American pianist-composer Gil Evans; this is his second dive into the extensive catalog of Evans, who died in 1988 after having an influential hand in the evolution of free jazz, fusion and other associated sounds. Suffice it to say that if you like horns you’ll love this; some of New York’s finest jazz musicians are here, including trombonist Ryan Keberle, who’s been featured on this page, and sax player Donny McCaslin (ditto), both of whose frenetic ramblings are held in check by drummer Lewis Nash. Aside from “The Ballad Of The Sad Young Men,” there’s honestly not much space for the listener to relax here, not that anyone would want that in a vital jazz release; wildly talented singer Wendy Gilles is the frosting on the cake, elaborately decorating such things as the Big Band-evoking “Laughing At Life.” You don’t want to miss this, seriously. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Like a big stupid iceberg that’s about to harsh my mellow, here comes Friday, May 30, with all its new albums, I’m dinging the warning bell as hard as I can but you people just keep shopping, oblivious to the danger, sad-face emoji! This Friday sees the biggest haul of albums in quite a while, where on Earth were all these people around Christmastime when I was sucking wind trying to fill this space and all I had to talk about were nonsense albums. Boy, you should see this huge pile of new albums, everyone on Earth is trying to get a jump on the summertime makeout-music market, it’s overloaded with new stuff I have no interest in whatsoever, but wait, my stomach might be able to handle this new album from Garbage, titled Let All That We Imagine Be The Light, my wife likes them anyway, let me see what’s even going on here, get your Doritos and let’s do this, folks. This album is reported to be “thematically more optimistic and less socio-political” than their previous ones, which is actually a nice break; personally I couldn’t care less what some rock star thinks about Trump or whatnot, everyone has their minds made up about these things one way or another depending on their lamestream media of choice, let me go listen to the record’s opening track, “There’s No Future In Optimism.” Yikes, it sounds like Madonna for the first few bars, and then comes the familiar asphalt-burning post-punk vibe Garbage fans have known and loved since the Sphinx was being built, I’m sure they’ll approve. They’ll be at the Roadrunner in Boston on Sept. 18, start saving your DoorDash tips now, because tickets start at $100, yes, you read that right, can you believe how out of control tickets prices have gotten? I was just watching an old interview with Kurt Cobain where he was shocked that Madonna was charging $50 (this was back during the Grover Cleveland administration) and Nirvana was only charging $17. Crazy, isn’t it? And it’s bad, too, because according to a recent internet story that made the rounds for a day or so, regularly going to concerts adds years to your life, not that I believe it. Do you?

• Oh no, this can’t be happening, someone with more money than brain cells decided to do a documentary about Pavement, the band I literally detest most in the world; I never bought the line that they were “the slacker version of the Rolling Stones for the 1990s,” I just thought they were awful. But hey, that might not be you, and so there’s nothing I can do but report that the documentary, Pavements, has a soundtrack, performed by that awful band, and it comes out Friday. Spoiler, all the sample tuneage sounds like your drunk uncle playing bad chords on his Flying V guitar through a second-hand Peavey amp and making up random songs about existentialism or women who didn’t want anything to do with him when he was 15, are those guys really relevant anymore? (Reminder: Dr. David Thorpe totally agrees with me.)

• Also on Friday, garage rock revivalist Ty Segall releases his 17th album, Possession, featuring the title track, a palatable-enough ’70s-pop-rock thing that sounds like Joe Walsh if he could sing, doing understated boogie/whatnot.

• Lastly we have former pop diva of the month Miley Cyrus, with her new one, Something Beautiful. This is said to be a “visual album showcasing her love for fashion,” which I took to mean, you know, the videos would be visually interesting, but the video for the title track isn’t, it’s just Miley made up like a Hunger Games judge, singing torch-style, like she wants to be Amy Winehouse this month (fat chance), but at least she’s not trying to be Black Sabbath again, am I right gang? —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Image: Malphas, Tales from the Olden Realm (self-released/Bandcamp) & Ches Smith, Clone Row (self-released)

The Art of Winning, by Bill Belichick

The Art of Winning, by Bill Belichick (Avid Reader Press, 289 pages)

It is challenging to approach Bill Belichick’s new book on its literary merits, considering all the news coverage given its publicity tour (sample from the Washington Post: “Bill Belichick, Jordan Hudson and the making of a PR disaster”). There is also the matter of the acknowledgments.

Let’s just say that when the author thanks 4½ pages of people, and the media focuses on one person he does not thank, it’s fair to wonder if anyone is interested in the actual book, except for maybe Tom Brady, who promises in a cover blurb that The Art of Winning will bring out the best in all of us. And who, besides Robert Kraft, doesn’t want that?

So I began the book with an open mind, right up to the point where Belichick started yelling at me.

I’m not sure whose idea it was to, at the end of each chapter, have two pages of all-caps commands barking at the reader in white type on black pages, but it is shocking the first time you come across it, and each subsequent time it’s just annoying. (Wondering if I was overreacting, I showed a couple of pages to my college-age daughter and said, “Don’t read the words, just tell me how you react to this.” She didn’t know anything about the book or author. “Scared,” she said.)

This effect is not mitigated even when Belichick is screaming at us on the page to “TREAT PEOPLE WITH KINDNESS, RESPECT, AND DIGNITY WHENEVER YOU ARE MAKING A DECISION THAT INVOLVES THEIR LIFE OUTSIDE OF WORK.” Or “HONESTY IS GOOD. THERE IS A PLACE FOR SPEAKING SOFTLY, AND A PLACE FOR SPEAKING FORCEFULLY.”

OK, Yoda.

This is, at times, a book of platitudes, albeit platitudes written down by the winningest coach in football when he was between jobs. We were warned of that by the title, which is not especially original. (See: Amazon.)

That is not to say that there are not interesting stories in the book; there are plenty, including one involving the bromance that developed between Tom Brady and Antonio Brown when the troubled wide receiver was a New England Patriot for 13 days in 2019. Belichick reveals that AB sent TB12 a gift of bison and some sort of special milk that was $500 a bottle and was shipped in from the West. Though nobody apparently was at fault, it got left outside Brady’s locker for a night, and as Belichick tells it, on the eve of a big game, “we were all crying over spoiled milk” and management wound up reimbursing Brown $3,500.

“Think about it this way: Would you spend $3500 to ensure the best person on your team gave their best performance when it mattered most? Would you pay twice that to immediately relieve your star employee of a depressive episode, no matter how head-shaking? Absolutely, and you know it. Your job is not to psychoanalyze. Your job is to put people in a position to win.”

Anybody who followed the Patriots under Belichick for even a few years recognizes the patterns he lays out here. Practice matters. So does consistency. The process is king. (“Every day does not revolve around closing a big deal or scoring a big new client. But those days when the stakes are very high should feel exactly like every other day.”) All this is fine, and yes, might be helpful to some. There are worse self-help books out there, for sure.

It’s just we can’t help thinking, is this really all he’s got for us?

Like a Belichick press conference, even the big stories seem brusque. This is disappointing, especially when he begins with a line like “Falcons fans, you have fair warning. I’m going to talk about 28-3.”

That refers, of course, to the 2017 Super Bowl when the Falcons led by that score in the third quarter. The Pats went on to score 31 unanswered points. Surely, this will be a great story? Nope. It’s one page describing one play; then he’s on to the importance of preparation. (PREPARATION IS NEVER WASTED, REGARDLESS OF OUTCOME.)

Also, he never even tells us what animal or plant that ridiculous $500 milk came from.

He does give us some insight into the men who were influential in his life, including father Steve Belichick, who was also a football coach and a scout and passed on to his son the importance of working every day, not just to get a paycheck or even to win football games, but to improve at everything. (“Am I working toward something? Or am I just working?”)

“I suspect that the quest for improvement is not not quite so ubiquitous in the world outside sports,” Belichick writes, explaining how being laser focused on improvement is the crux of his famous phrase “On to Cincinnati,” which was uttered after a tough loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football.

To be fair, there are some parts to this book that are genuinely funny, including Belichick’s “free motivation trick” involving Rob Gronkowski: “Whenever you feel lazy, close your eyes and imagine Gronk walking into your office and swatting you aside and taking your job. What’s he doing? How hard is he doing it? Does he seem depressed to be working hard? Or did he just spike your coffee mug on your head after sending that email you were too overwhelmed to type?”

He also tells a couple of revealing Tom Brady stories, which help to explain why Brady was so magnanimous in the blurb.

The Art of Winning is insider baseball, so to speak, in that the Gronkowski story means nothing at all to anyone who knows nothing about Gronk. Many of Belichick’s stories won’t mean much to anybody who doesn’t speak football, and they will appeal even less to anyone who doesn’t love the New England Patriots (meaning much of the country). As inspirational books go, even at its best, it’s self-limiting in its reach. And Jeff Benedict and Michael Holloway have written more engagingly about the Patriots.

So the greatest coach of all time (which actually remains to be seen — we’ll see how he does in North Carolina) isn’t the greatest writer of all time, nor should we expect him to be. It’s just Belichick on paper: Billy GOAT Gruff. C

Album Reviews 25/05/22

Sparks, MAD (Transgressive Records)




The press notes for this nearly 60-year-old band’s 26th album start with this: “If the world is a cafe, its ridiculous patrons babbling ridiculously all day long, then Ron Mael is the guy on his own in the corner that you don’t notice, quietly sipping his coffee.” From there it proceeds ad nauseum, painting the two Mael brothers (Sparks’s only constants over the decades) as geniuses of postmodern pop music and stagecraft, largely owing to their yin-and-yang hyper/reserved stage personas. To be embarrassingly honest, I came to them from the 1985 seriocomic vampire movie Fright Night, which I’ve seen approximately 2,825 times, a film whose soundtrack included their song “Armies Of The Night,” a technopop bauble that was so naïvely upbeat and European-sounding that I had no idea the brothers are American until, well, an hour ago (the band has gone to some lengths to make the world forget that song ever happened; it’s not mentioned on their Wikipedia page for one thing). This album, coming on the heels of their winning an AIM Outstanding Contribution to Music award, is mostly a mixed patchwork of subdued, not-really-danceable messaging but it does have its moments, for instance “Do Things My Own Way,” which is quite a bit like “Armies Of The Night” in its silly Pet Shop Boys-ish accessibility (translation: it’s fun). They do have their fans, obviously, who’ll be glad to know that they’ll be at Boston’s Berklee Performance Center on Sept. 11. B


Cautious Clay, The Hours: Morning (Concord Records)

Impressive third album from Clay, real name Joshua Karpeh, a native Ohioan of Kru (Liberian) ethnicity, whose breezy indie/R&B sensibilities tend to read as a form of yacht rock; for example, if the Weeknd were more AOR-minded, “Father Time (10 am)” would be something you’d hear from him, and if that’s not clear enough, I could certainly suggest Seal as a similar artist (it’s really time for people everywhere to admit that nearly all of us have a favorite yacht-rock song, isn’t it?). The record label’s bots have been busily boosting that particular song on YouTube, although one oddly cynical human stumbled upon it and remarked that it sounds like Big Wreck, which is completely false; “Tokyo Lift (5 am)” is proof positive that this guy is aiming for Seal’s happily contented bedroom-pop space, but with a deeper (and quite a bit more resonant, honestly) vocal range, so I’d urge you to find out for yourself. It’s seriously listenable. He’ll be at The Sinclair in Cambridge, Mass., on Sept. 30. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Here come the new CDs of Friday, May 23, annoying everyone in sight with its springtime vibe and happy bunny rabbit face, don’t you just hate May? We all know where this is heading, soon enough it’s going to be hot and roasting with no end in sight, someone get these happy springtime bunnies off me before I love them and pet them, that’d be great. Ohh, what have we even got today, let’s see, we’ll start with a blast from the past, our old buddies from the U.K., Stereolab, who’ve been around since — gulp, holy crow — 1990, fun-time’s over, late-born Gen Xers, enjoy grandparenthood! Yes, you old fossils remember Stereolab, mostly from back in college when you had to explain to your dorm-mate why you thought they were awesome and played them one of the band’s motorik-driven milquetoast hits, then watched in horror as your dorm-mate fell asleep out of boredom, you remember those days, right? Well, we are gathered here today to see if Stereolab is still trying to revive their preferred sound, 1950s French mall-shopping music, and pass it off as something even vaguely relevant, let’s do the searchy thing in the YouTube box and see what’s on the band’s new album, Instant Holograms On Metal Film! Right, here’s something, a tune called “Aerial Troubles,” which begins with a pseudo-Sigur Ros part and then becomes — I don’t know what you would even call this, Supertramp as a lo-fi band? The boy-girl harmonizing is deliciously amateurish and off-key, what more could you ask for? Now may I go?

• Wait, I know, let’s try something interesting, wouldn’t that be novel? Chances are you’ve never heard of British post-rock band These New Puritans, an act solely operated by Jack and George Barnett, twin working-class brothers who taught themselves to play musical instruments. Their sound was once described by someone at Another Man as an attempt to blur “the distinction between rock, classical, electronic and experimental,” which sounds like half the bands on Earth at the present moment, but suppose we just belay the snark and check out their new album, Crooked Wing, and its single “A Season In Hell,” are y’all down for that? OK, this tune is quite nice, undergirded by military snare-drum patterns over which a slow-burning psychedelic trip starts to take shape, with some from-the-mountaintop effects on the vaguely Pink Floyd-ish singing. It’s all more vibe-focused than eventful, which (all together now) sounds like half the bands on Earth at the present moment, but the old-school organ does provide it with a lot of casual gravitas. It’s the kind of thing that’s too cool for American bands, let’s just say that.

• The good news continues, with a collaboration between Taj Mahal & Keb’ Mo’, titled Room On The Porch. If anyone still takes blues-guitar music seriously, this is about as important as it could possibly get, a meeting of the minds between two of the genre’s all-time masters, 82-year-old Mahal and 73-year-old Keb’ Mo’ (Kevin Moore). Given all that, we need to investigate how self-indulgent (or, conversely, how nauseatingly commercial) this is, so let’s. Nope, the title track is harmless and delightful, featuring the Randy Newman-like voice of Ruby Amanfu. There’s plenty of bluegrass vibe and a bottomless supply of innocent positivity, very nice.

• Lastly it’s grungy Britrock band Skunk Anansie (just so you know where you are, they covered The Stooges’ “Search and Destroy” for the soundtrack of the movie Sucker Punch), weighing in with the seventh studio LP in their 30-year history, The Painful Truth, featuring “Lost and Found,” a quiet-loud-quiet song that switches back and forth between dub/trip-hop and nu-metal. It’s neat, if self-indulgent.

Featured Image: Malphas, Tales from the Olden Realm (self-released/Bandcamp) & Ches Smith, Clone Row (self-released)

Homestand, by Will Bardenwerper

Homestand, by Will Bardenwerper (Doubleday, 301 pages)

Batavia is a small city in western New York that most people have never heard of, even if they pass it on the New York Thruway on the way to or from a vacation. Like a lot of cities its size, Batavia is remarkable mostly for its reasonably priced homes and comforting sense of community, the latter of which is often derived from sports.

In Homestand, Will Bardenwerper examines what happens when that sense of community is under threat — in Batavia’s case, when the city loses its minor-league baseball team when the MLB decides to scale down its farm teams. It’s a topic that is close to the author’s heart, his warmest childhood memories involving backyard baseball with his brother, under his grandfather’s watch, and his adult experience of being part of a tightly knit Army battalion deployed to Iraq after 9/11.

When he returned home, Bardenwerper writes, “… after those many months living as a member of a small tribe who did everything together, I couldn’t wrap my head around what the ‘real’ world looked like when I returned, face-to-face, real human interactions increasingly giving way to soulless virtual contact.”

Increasingly concerned about how disconnected Americans are becoming from each other, he was also troubled by what was happening economically, with private equity becoming more of a player in everything from housing to baseball. When Major League Baseball restructured the minor leagues in 2021, cutting 40 teams, Bardenwerper saw it through this lens: What the loss of a team would mean for a place like Batavia, where community life was heavily invested in its beloved team, the Muckdogs.

Batavia, however, didn’t go gently into a baseball-less night. It got a new team to play in Dwyer Stadium, one composed of college players who each paid $1,500 for the opportunity to sharpen their skills while enjoying an enthusiastic, ready-made fan base. Bardenwerper decided to join their ranks in the name of journalism, buying a season ticket and traveling from his home in Pennsylvania to embed himself for a season in Muckdogmania.

“I wanted to find out for myself what we, as a country, risked losing, and whether there was any chance it might be saved,” he writes.

Much of the book is structured by games: the Muckdogs versus, say, the Elmira Pioneers, the Syracuse Salt Cats, the Utica Blue Sox and, my personal favorite, Jamestown Tarp Skunks, which honestly makes me want to move to Jamestown, New York, just because, well, Tarp Skunks.

It is an interesting scaffolding for the book, which works except for the fact that, like baseball itself, this narrative lends itself to plodding. Bardenwerper takes us deep into the life of this community and its inhabitants, sometimes deeper that the reader wants to go. We are warned of this at the start of the book, when a list of “Dramatis Personae” tells us that the people we are about to meet include octogenarian season ticket holder Dr. Ross Fanara; Bob Brinks, the popcorn maker at the Elmira stadium’s concessions stand; and Ernie Lawrence, “musician, hospice volunteer, rosary maker.”

Let’s just say that by the end of Homestand you will know a lot about small towns in the Empire State and their inhabitants. And also about why baseball is so important in small-town America.

Coming together to cheer on a team, Bardenwerper writes, makes everyone’s life a bit better at the moment. “The real magic,” he says, is not happening in the diamond, no matter how exciting a game may be, but “found in the bleachers, among the fans.”

This is a romanticized notion of fandom, to be sure; sometimes fans are falling from the stands, ripping balls out of a player’s mitt, throwing things on the field. But to know and love a community is to have spent time in it and gotten to know its people through shared experiences. As a local author (and fellow season ticket holder) that Bardenwerper got to know in the stands, Bill Kauffman, wrote of Batavia, “This is such an unlovely place, yet I love it with all my heart. To visitors, it is a charmless Thruway stop on the Rust Belt’s fringe; to me, it is the stuff of myth and poetry, and of life weighed on the human scale — the only measurement that counts.”

While Homestand is a love letter to community and to baseball, it has its villains: the money counters in MLB, private equity companies that profit at the expense of ordinary Americans, and, increasingly of concern to Bardenwerper, the extraordinarily well-paid professional ballplayer.

At one event in which children with disabilities were playing ball with the Muckdogs, causing everyone around to swell with emotion, Bardenwerper started thinking about how “just a few hundred miles to the southeast, the New York Yankees’ Gerrit Cole would soon go to work to earn his $36 million salary. On this day he would give up nine hits and four runs in a 6-3 loss to the Baltimore Orioles.”

He notes, however, that Cole’s salary was eclipsed by the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, who had signed what was then the largest MLB contract: $700 million over 10 years. (Juan Soto of the New York Mets has since signed a deal that gives him $765 million over 15 years.)

Bardenwerper acknowledges that many fans aren’t troubled by athletes making money like this, but says he has come to believe that “the extreme economic inequality personified by Major League Baseball (and all professional sports) was corrosive to a healthy society — and, for me at least, was becoming an almost insurmountable obstacle to my desire to remain a fan.”

The more he gets to know the people of Batavia and the devoted minor-league baseball fans in nearby cities —in Elmira, a man now in his 90s has been sitting in the same seat since 1974 — the more Bardenwerper is troubled by the cost-cutting decisions made by wealthy people who live far away. “Baseball,” he says, “has already begun to resemble yet another extractive industry where dollars are transferred from small towns to big-city owners and investors.”

In some ways, Homeland is a follow-up dirge to a book that Bill Kauffman wrote about Batavia in 2003, Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive. For a small, unremarkable city, Batavia gets remarked upon a lot. It might yet survive, as might baseball.

The Muckdogs of 2022 can be quite a long season for the casual reader, but Homestand pays off for those who love baseball — and aren’t prone to fidgeting when the game runs long. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 25/05/15

Malphas, Tales from the Olden Realm (self-released/Bandcamp)

From the murkiest depths of Michigan comes this sixth album from a one-man black metal band who calls himself Lord Moloch (you know how those guys like to roll by now I’m sure; it’s all fine by me). He’s been quite prolific in the manner of Bathory’s dear departed Quorthon, but he tends to tack in a more sword-and-sorcery direction; his raison d’être involves incorporating much slower tempos than Bathory toward an effort to put a more legitimate “epicness” into his “epic black metal.” His vocals sonically alternate between Quorthon’s spastic-demon squalling, your basic Cookie Monster and, well, David Byrne, to be honest, which isn’t as ridiculous as you might think. Lyrically, where Quorthon unleashed Hell’s hordes upon humanity, Moloch reads as more inspired by the art of Frank Frazetta and such, that is to say heavily muscled Conan-ish barbarians fighting crusades for such-and-so. Melodically it’s quite good; Moloch certainly isn’t shy about testing creative boundaries, as heard in his side project Vetust, which released a World War I-focused album titled 1914-1918 that I’d put up there with some of the most ferocious stuff coming out of Relapse Records. Tons of raw potential here. A —Eric W. Saeger

Ches Smith, Clone Row (self-released)

Eclecticism, thy name is Ches Smith, a San Diego-based drummer who’s spent his life concocting his own bizarre pan-jazz/world patchwork styles, incorporating such things as Haitian Voodoo music in order to produce all-but-unclassifiable records that read like Martian mash-ups. Wayne Coyne has nothing on this guy, which you’ll notice if you test drive any of these tunes, for example “Ready Beat,” where alternative-universe dubstep is combined with the sort of skittish, near-unintelligible guitar noodlings heard at the beginning of Yes’s “Close To The Edge.” This all isn’t to say he’s a lonely kook; after all, he’s collaborated with Nels Cline (granted, I’m at the point now where I automatically think “who hasn’t?” when I see that on an avant garde musician’s resumé), Vijay Iyer, Xiu Xiu and a cast of dozens of others who’ve been mentioned in this column. No, there is a very unique accessibility to this stuff if you’re up for a challenge; if I had a lot more leisure time I’d happily get to know this album more intimately. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• May 16 is awash in new albums, I’m up to my neck in stuff to review: The height of the summer is in sight, when it will be roasting and singularly uncomfortable, and so all the rock stars and wannabes are pelting us rock journos with new albums to talk about, or so they hope, look at them all, begging for word-scraps from my table, thinking that if I mention their new records it will help them, when, little do they know, it probably won’t because, as you know, my tastes are eclectic even if some people think I’m a sellout to corporate record companies. Yes, the life of a brutally honest (and multiple award-winning) arts critic is a lonely one, which is how we like it; it sure beats having to pretend that Elbow, Wire and Skinny Puppy (whatever’s left of them) aren’t the only good bands out there, which would surely lead to my bonding with people, so let’s get started, by talking about the newest album from transgender art-popper Ezra Furman, Goodbye Small Head. To be honest, I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Furman over the last many years, probably because every time I turn around I’m getting spammed by her handlers, who want me to know about some local show she’s playing in Portsmouth’s Press Room (I’ve only been there once, for the record) or in Lowell, Mass. (you just missed her there in April at the Town and The City Festival) or whatever, I’ve honestly lost track. I’m told that she’s got a real punk edge to her stuff, so I shall now listen to something from this upcoming new album, on the YouTube box, for your edification. Right, at this writing the newest advance track is “Power of the Moon,” and it’s indeed decent, but not in the least punky, that is if by “punky” you mean something that sounds punk-rock-y, because this doesn’t, not that that means it’s bad. Well, it’s peripherally punky, awkward, jangly and frazzled, like if Clinic were trying to sound even more ’60s than they do in their most annoying moments, without the Doors-style organ in there (I really wish they wouldn’t do that). What does all this mean? It means I like it enough to recommend it to hipsters and nothing more.

• Maryland rapper Rico Nasty is interesting and, well, nasty, and definitely more punky. Her third studio album, Lethal, is on the way, featuring the single “TEETHSUCKER (YEA3X),” a supremely bratty track consisting of muddy Melvins-sounding guitars, some thankfully understated trap and enough over-the-top Joan Jett attitude that I won’t even bother researching her history of beefs, if one exists, because sometimes it doesn’t matter. She’s a badass, folks, just look at her nails.

• Also on Friday, the godfather of rap, Chuck D, releases Enemy Radio: Radio Armageddon, which includes the advance track “New Gens,” a call-out to Zoomers built atop an absolutely filthy noise-beat that I loved at first listen. How does that guy stay so awesome, someone please let me know this instant.

• Finally it’s British indie-rock kid Matt Maltese with his sixth LP, Hers. The lead single “Always Some MF” is a vehicle for his hilariously soft, languid voice; it’s something you’d picture playing from the boombox while you floated around in a raft on a frog pond. As always, he makes Bon Iver sound like Screaming Lord Sutch. —Eric W. Saeger

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

Featured Image: Malphas, Tales from the Olden Realm (self-released/Bandcamp) & Ches Smith, Clone Row (self-released)

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!