Category: Pop

Tough Broad, by Caroline Paul

Tough Broad, by Caroline Paul (Bloomsbury, 264 pages)

In her 2016 book The Gutsy Girl, Caroline Paul drew from her own experiences as a firefighter, pilot and outdoorswoman to urge 8- to 13-year-old girls to live a life of “epic adventure.” It was the sort of book that many older women bought for their daughters and nieces, but along the way they read it, too — and loved it. Numerous reviews detail how women much older than the target audience made changes in their own life after reading the book.

Now Paul is back with a book written especially for much older women. In Tough Broad, she urges women past the half-century mark (and even nearing the century mark) to forget their age and head outdoors for their own epic adventures. These adventures, the subtitle warns, include boogie boarding and wing walking, which as the cover photo shows is exactly what it sounds like: moving along the outside of a small airplane in flight, and I suppose I should add intentionally, not because your plane malfunctioned.

Maybe our grandmothers secretly yearned to do that and didn’t have the societal permission, I don’t know. But wing walking at any age seems a bit, well, out there. But Paul argues that exhilarating outdoor adventures are not the result of having a positive attitude toward aging but “the integral gateway” to feeling good about this stage of life. This matters because numerous studies have shown a strong correlation between how we feel about aging and how we fare physically and cognitively. This is not to say that happy aging erases the physical insults and deterioration, but rather, as one 80-year-old scuba diver told Paul, “You can be a couch potato, or you can decide that whatever ails you is insignificant.”

Then 57, Paul is the youngster in this book, although she often talks older than she is. In the opening chapter, for example, she is meeting friends at Yosemite National Park but is thwarted at the gate by rangers who won’t let her drive in because her friend, who obtained the car pass, isn’t with her. Undaunted, she parks away from the gate, puts on a helmet, retrieves her electric skateboard from the car trunk and tries again. The bemused rangers, after “they all stutter-step away from me as if I’m about to wipe out their entire squadron of youthful shins,” let her in.

But she’s not there to skateboard but to meet up with another friend in her 50s who plans to BASE jump (illegally) from the top of the El Capitan monolith.

And so it goes. Paul, who clearly did not get enough adventure in 14 years of working for the San Francisco Fire Department, goes from adventure to adventure, often with people much older and fitter than she is. Meeting a 93-year-old hiker, for example, Paul has to beg off the 5-mile trek that the older woman wants to take because of previous injuries. The hiker reluctantly agrees to downgrade to just 3 miles, telling Paul at one point, “I’m an ageist. I don’t like old people.”

What she means is that she doesn’t like people who use age as an excuse for not getting outside and doing things that are challenging. And while there are plenty of stimulating things one can do inside, like read books or play chess, Paul argues that outside adventures are unique in bringing us to life, and she doesn’t mean just your backyard or a county park. “The less urban the environment you stroll in, the more well-being you feel,” she writes.

While a few of the activities that Paul covers here are much more staid than illegal BASE jumping — birdwatching makes an appearance, for example — the book’s most fascinating women are the ones doing the wildest things. Take the 71-year-old wing walker, who Paul discovers through a video that her children posted on the internet with the caption “MAMMA WENT WING WALKING! Without a word about it to us kids.” When Paul tracks her down, she learns that the wing walker had breast cancer and a mastectomy, chemo and radiation at age 64 and wanted to do something to celebrate her recovery. She’d learned about wing walking when she typed in “Something fun to do here” on Google. She didn’t just jump on the plane, but worked out for six months in preparation, without saying a word to her family.

Paul later tries it herself and realizes that it isn’t just the physical challenge that is so empowering, but what it does for one emotionally. She writes: “I realize how perfectly wing walking primes us for awe: there is the majestic view at thirty-five hundred feet that feels almost religious; there is the total disequilibrium of doing something so antithetical to every survival instinct; there is the exhilaration of twirling and ricocheting and falling in a vast sky.”

True, she notes, a person can experience awe during, say, a walk in a forest, but it’s “psychological disequilibrium” that keeps the neurons firing. We hear a lot about the benefits of sleep and meditation and lowering stress; less so about the need for novelty and challenge. But Paul writes, when she signs up to learn to fly a gyrocopter, she is helping her brain to remain elastic and nimble. “Embrace disequilibrium,” she exhorts us.

Just as Paul’s previous book, meant for young girls, appealed to older women, Tough Broads, though meant for older women will likely inspire women decades younger — and those whose goals are much more modest than walking on a plane mid-flight. In one chapter Paul accompanies a 59-year-old woman to a swimming lesson; the woman has tried multiple times over the years to learn to swim and never could, becoming more and more terrified of drowning each time. But she is determined to master her fear. She regrets that “there’s an entire area of life that I can’t participate in” and dreams of scuba diving somewhere exotic with her family. She is still dreaming — her story turns out not to be quite as inspirational as the others, but the moral is the same: that growth comes from trying, whether or not we succeed.

Paul, who is the twin sister of the actress Alexandra Paul, shares a poignant story about her mother, whose own mother had been anxious and overprotective, making her become risk averse. But at age 54 Paul’s mother tried skydiving and for the first time considered herself brave, and this courage set her off on new adventures. At 84 she told her daughter wistfully, “What I would give to be 60 again.” Paul concludes, “do it now, before you can’t.” That’s good advice for any woman, or man, at any age. A —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 24/04/25

Gryphon Rue, 4n_Objx (self-released)

Traditionally, my desk has been a dumping ground for noise and avant releases of all types, which I’ve never minded; the only thing that gets on my nerves is impromptu jazz that uses badly matched acoustic instruments, like, say, a fiddle with a clarinet. I mention all that merely as preface for this, which is decidedly not acoustic at all; in fact it’s a very techy and quite accessible blend of electroacoustic, field recordings, tropicalia psych and krautrock. There’s an underwater, deeply textural feel to all the contents, which unexpectedly shift into bizarre royal-trumpet parts like the soundtrack from The Cell (the J-Lo one I mean) and then gradually move back to more aquatic, graceful spaces. Rue is a New York City kid, and this isn’t his first LP; I’m sure he’ll be a soundtrack force in future. I almost hate to call it experimental, since that tends to scare people off, but yeah, these are doodlings, but high-end ones. A+

—Eric W. Saeger

Caldwell, Caldwell (Popclaw/Rise Above Records)

New Orleans-based rocker Kevan Caldwell is a member of The Planchettes, which probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but you should check them out, because they were like a ’60s garage/horror rock New York Dolls, like, if three subway rats formed a band and got booted out of every place they played, they would have sounded like The Planchettes. This dude is sort of a chicken-fried Nick Cave, evident from the wah-pedal groove of opener “No Flowers Today” and the breezy, acoustic-fronted pop idealism of “Love Confessions,” to the tripped-out nursery rhyme strut of “Picturesque Self Portrait,” this is an album of endless curveballs, one that any psychedelic garage lover should consider investigating. He was big into the Kinks at the time of writing this LP (Covid lockdowns informed it as well), so it’s a peek into this guy’s soul, which seems to be a welcoming place. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Just like every other Friday, we’ll see a relentless storm of new CDs on April 26, can you hardly even wait or what, folks? Like every week, I’m about to look at my super-secret list of new CDs, a list that only professional music journalists can see at metacritic.com, after I’m done whispering prayers to Odin that every CD on the list won’t be annoying. Wait, we have a nice start for once, with a new Pet Shop Boys album, called Nonetheless! Over the years, Pet Shop Boys have become a secret, guilty pleasure for people who don’t like all the really bad music that’s been put out for decades now (OK, fine, maybe they aren’t so secret, given that they were listed as the most successful duo in U.K. music history in the 1999 edition of The Guinness Book of Records, can you just not argue with me for once, that’d be great) and prefer music that makes them feel good, not that they started out that way. Like, their first hit single in the ’80s, “West End Girls,” used to get on my nerves and make me think of creepy incels, but 15 years ago their PR person sent me a copy of their album Yes, and I was all like, “Wait, when did these guys become the greatest duo in U.K. music history?” But putting that aside, all I can hope is that their newest single, “Loneliness,” is unequivocally awesome, so that I can make fun of myself again for being so wrong about this successful U.K. duo! Oh darn it all, it’s awesome, a really mellow krautrock-infused thing with a rubber-band beat and way-toned-down vocals, excuse me while I’m once again forced to recite 50 “Hail Odins.”

• Wolfgang Tillmans is a really famous photographer from Germany, which somehow led to his believing that he’s also a musician, and so he has done Music Stuff, including having one of his tracks sampled by Frank Ocean on his video album Endless. Yes, there is much postmodernism going on here, which is annoying to people like Jordan Peterson but enticing to others who are art-challenged. I cannot choose, so I’m going to let Tillmans’ music do the talking and listen to “Here We Are,” which is apparently included in Tillmans’ new album, Build From Here. OK, it starts out annoying, with a droopy krautrock intro synth-line that drags on forever, and then it becomes a David Bowie thing. Boring. Oh wait, here’s another tune that’s on the album, called “Where Does The Tune Hide,” and Tillmans sings on it. Ack, gross, it’s like Haujobb (if you even know them) but it’s super stupid, a bunch of pretentious New Age nonsense. This is not my favorite record of all time.

• Lol, I remember way back in the mid-2010s, when bands were giving themselves names that had two V’s in them, do any of you people even remember that doomed little mini-trend, like Wavves? Well, I’m here to report that there is a new band that does that, called Hovvdy, whose self-titled album is here, for my expert examination, get on my doctor table, little album, and let’s have a look at ya. Hm, the doctor chart here says they’re an American indie-pop duo from Austin, Texas, I’ll bet it sounds like Guster, let’s go check out the single, “Forever.” Yup, ding ding ding, it sounds like Guster but with a little Vampire Weekend syncopation but not enough to register an actual pulse. Holy cats, folks, let’s wrap this week up.

• Lastly we have famous French tech-house producer duo Justice, with their newest album, Hyperdrama! You remember these guys, with their asphalt-grating Ed Banger sound that’s gone the way of the McDLT, but the new single is “Generator,” made of typical edgy noise-electro, like soundtrack music for a live-action Pokemon movie, so nothing’s changed. They’re coming to the MGM Music Hall in Boston on Aug. 2. —Eric W. Saeger

Help Wanted, by Adelle Waldman

Help Wanted, by Adelle Waldman (W.W. Norton, 274 pages)

When a manager in Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted is transferred to a store in West Hartford, Connecticut, it’s a promotion and his colleagues are stunned and impressed.

Which tells you everything you need to know about Potterstown, New York, a once-thriving town that unraveled when its major employer left town, leaving behind people “who walked around with something of a shell-shocked look as if modernity itself had caught them unawares.”

For all its economic troubles, however, Potterstown still has Town Square store #1512, a big-box store full of “mass-produced knockoffs of trendy boutique-type items” that is a few steps higher on the big-box social scale than Walmart. And it is the “roaches” of Town Square — the hourly workers who come in each morning at 3:55 a.m. to stock the store, then scatter before opening time — that are the subject of Help Wanted, the latest in a genre best described as late-capitalism novels.

It is obvious from the first pages of Help Wanted that the flawed heroes of this story are the nine workers who comprise the department called “Movement,” and that their supervisor is the bad guy. “Movement” is the trendy upgraded name for the department that used to be called “Logistics” — despite concern in some quarters that it made it sound like “they worked for a yoga studio or laxative company.” At any rate, in the pecking order of Town Square employees, Movement is the department for workers who are seen as “not customer facing” or “ready for prime time” because their social skills aren’t up to par.

These protagonists include Nicole, a 23-year-old with $30 in her checking account whose main goal in life is to buy a car so she doesn’t have to drive her mom’s dented sedan, the Dingmobile; Diego, a Black man from Honduras who immigrated to the New York with his father as a teen and (whose phone is currently shut off for nonpayment), and Milo, a would-be comedian with a YouTube account dreaming of a girlfriend and a place to live that isn’t a friend’s house.

The one thing the Movement workers have in common beyond their financial misery is their dislike of their perpetually obtuse manager, Meredith, who regularly comes in late, denies leave requests and micromanages the team. And so when the store manager, Big Will, gets promoted to West Hartford, the Movement team spots a way out of their collective misery. If Meredith gets promoted to store manager, she will no longer directly supervise them. And there’s a chance that one of them will get her job.

This fills members of the team, who, like caged birds, generally dwell in a state of learned helplessness, with excitement. Each one privately is hoping that they will be the person to be promoted and get a guaranteed salary and benefits, but they know that even if that isn’t the case, their lot would improve if Meredith disappeared. So they devise a furtive plan they dub “pro-Mer” — promote Meredith — in order to make this dream happen. Meanwhile, Meredith herself is ecstatically planning for her future promotion and getting the store ship-shape before the arrival of the Town Square executives who will conduct interviews and make the decision.

One by one, we learn of the circumstances of each worker’s life, and why the promotion — which is, frankly, not one that most people would write home about — is so important to them. Unfortunately, despite these asides into the team members’ lives, Waldman’s decision to make the story about all of them requires the reader to work hard to keep up with each of nine workers’ circumstances. While these circumstances are substantively different — one has a food stamp card that has not reloaded, one was evicted, one has an unexpected medical problem that consumes the money he’d planned on using for his child’s birthday party — they are all troubled by the same core problems: lack of education, lack of money, lack of opportunity, and a business that cares more about the bottom line than about them.

Most of the workers desperately want more hours (not all, because some have multiple jobs), and the store has plenty of work that isn’t getting done, but the company is content to sacrifice even customer satisfaction so long as sales keep steadily going up. In one example of corporate deceit, Town Square posts “help wanted” signs all over the store, even though they’re not hiring — the implication being that any lack of staff on hand was a function of the tight labor market and/or a lazy populace’s unwillingness to work service jobs.

At one point, when a couple of Town Square corporate executives meet with Big Will about his replacement, they wonder about the suspiciously excellent reviews that the Movement workers give Meredith. Is it really possible that this crew, some of whom didn’t finish high school, was smart enough to have planned a sort of coup? They think not. “It’s worth remembering,” one of the executives says, “that the people who work these jobs aren’t like you and me. We’re people who value stability, who worked hard to achieve it for ourselves.”

Having been primed for sympathy and affection toward the Movement team, it is a horrible indictment, not of the workers but of the executive. Still, in crafting this group of characters, Waldman did not venture far outside the box, giving us workers who have predictable troubles, like the shut-off electricity, the tendency to drink and the kid in jail. There is a sort of monotony to their lot that does not necessarily reflect the real world. Crummy jobs are held by all sorts of people, for diverse reasons.

Although in one of her funnier lines Waldman (who does have great comic timing) says that the ethnic diversity of Movement would make the dean of a private school proud, the team is not really that diverse except in age, gender and skin color. But the main problem with this story, dedicated to “all retail workers,” is its unnecessary complexity and its persistent gloominess. The novel takes place over just six weeks, but like a never-ending workweek, it feels like 600. C

Album Reviews 24/04/18

Chris Patrick, The Calm (self-released)

Reflective nine-track project from the New Jersey-born rapper, in which he pays homage to the authentic spirit of the mixtape era, with touchstones that include T-Pain, Earthgang, JID, Smino, and Isaiah Rashad. It sure sounds underground in comparison to today’s corporate hip-hop, and more realistic, too. Patrick spent the first half of 2023 in a really bad place; after losing most of his friends he found himself financially strapped, something most emcees would never cop to, you know how it goes, but his buddy Gutty sent him the desolate piano-driven beat for this mix’s closing track, “The Calm,” at which point this project took off. The tune itself is as real as these things get, inspiring and self-reflective, which was the whole point of this exercise. “Da Beam” is particularly cool, some low-end rubber-band-plucking tabling what feels like a dub/dancehall vibe for the ages. It’s not often you hear something so friendly yet distant in this genre. A+

Camera Obscura, Look to the East, Look to the West (Merge Records)

As you’d probably guess, I was never a big twee fan, or at least its biggest doe-eyed touchstones (Belle & Sebastian is what I mean of course, who recently did a set of cruise-ship shows with the fellow Scots in this band). I didn’t consider this crew to be overly twee and actually quite liked their way with reverb; there was a Cure angle to the beats, and who hates that? This one starts off annoyingly enough, though, with leader/singer Tracyanne Campbell tabling some harmless warbling over what basically amounts to a Postal Service afterthought. Funnily enough, this LP was recorded in the same room where Queen wrote “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which led me to suspect that there’d be more and bigger string and brass sounds and reverb so thick you could cut it with a chainsaw. But no, none of those things are here. The lead single, “Big Love,” reads like Natalie Merchant gone completely cowboy-hat, while “The Light Nights” evokes square-dancing and mimosas. It’s all a bit nauseating to me really. C

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Our next Friday-full of CD releases is April 19, isn’t that the greatest? The first thing to come up is a discussion we’ve had before in these pages: Which is the signature band of the ’90s, the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Pearl Jam? I suppose the answer comes down to taste (oh, and forgetting to include Nirvana), but in my mind I associate the ’90s with grunge, that borderline-metal genre that tried to sound dark and important, which definitely leaves out the Peppers, a band I never really liked, mostly because they sounded too happy and content. This is all something we need to consider, of course, given that the ’90s are starting to come back with a vengeance (the ’80s are so 2015 these days, wouldn’t you say?), and wouldn’t you know it, Pearl Jam has a new album coming out on Friday, titled Dark Matter! It’ll be interesting to see if there are any lead guitar lines on this one; during grunge’s heydey, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain called Pearl Jam a bunch of sellouts for having lead guitar parts on their albums, which was one reason I didn’t take Cobain very seriously, but whatever, why don’t I go listen to the title track from this album, yes, let’s. Well listen to that, it kind of sounds like Black Sabbath, but Eddie Vedder is singing on it, which automatically means that it’s too lyrically deep to be Black Sabbath-ish. But wow, this is pretty heavy indeed, and then suddenly it becomes Pearl-Jammy, with a throwaway bridge part that would have been expected on those old Sub Pop records when these guys were basically hopeless, but here it’s just kind of gimmicky. But mind you, I’ve only listened to it once, so maybe it grows on you, not that I’ll bother listening to it again of my own volition.

• Oh no, no, no, it’s Taylor Swift, with her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, will it ever end? Please lord, let there be something on this album that doesn’t force me to scramble for a “RIYL” reference to tell you guys what it sounds like, that’d be great. When last we left TayTay, she’d won the universe by winning some Grammys the same week her boyfriend Buster Magoo or whatever won that totally fixed Super Bowl by yelling at his coach like a feral lummox. Oh, I can’t riff on this much longer, all I really have to say about Tay is that her producers write all her Britney Spears-like hits because she can only write songs that sound like Jewel, and that’s all fine by me, who cares what I think, I promise not to start another 200-reply thread on Facebook just so people can yell at each other, despite how much fun it is. Alright, let’s get to the doings, I’ll just check out “Lavender Haze,” because it’s the first song on the album, it looks like. Eh, it’s OK, hip-hop-tinged afterparty vibe reminiscent of Alicia Keys and TLC, weren’t we just talking about a ’90s resurgence? She uses the S word a lot in this children’s song, should I even mention that?

• Roots-rock-blues-whatever musician T Bone Burnett is back with his first studio album in 20 years, The Other Side! You may recall that Burnett seemed to be under every rock you overturned a few years ago, producing famous albums and stuff, but here he is, leading a band again. The first single, “Waiting For You,” is a cross between Bon Iver and Simon & Garfunkel, mellow and bummerish and nicely done.

• Lastly it’s the Melvins, the mud-metal band that used to have Shirley Temple’s daughter on bass, with their newest full-length LP, Tarantula Heart. “Working The Ditch” is a really cool song from this album, featuring severely down-turned guitars and an attitude reminiscent of early Ministry. Who could hate that?

Cool Food, by Robert Downey Jr. and Thomas Kostigen

Cool Food, by Robert Downey Jr. and Thomas Kostigen (Blackstone Publishing, 320 pages)

The actor Robert Downey Jr. was at a bookstore in London when he asked a clerk where to find the books on climate. The clerk’s reply: “Oh, the bummer section? It’s over there.”

When Downey later told this story to the writer Thomas Kostigen, with whom he was developing a TV show, Kostigen responded, “We need to do a food book and make it fun.”

An ordinary person not immersed in climate activism might wonder what climate and food have to do with one another. But the growing of food and the tending of animals that will become food are almost as large a part of this conversation as fossil fuel, because, well, carbon.

And to Downey and Kostigen, one way to combat a warmer planet is to eat cooler food — “cool” food is climate-friendly food, they say. And to promote it, they’re out with a bulky, hard-to-hold cookbook that doubles as a climate manual, irritatingly populated with cartoon-style sketches of themselves. Cool Food isn’t sure if it wants to be a cookbook, a graphic novel, a fourth-grade science book or a press release, and so there are elements of all four.

To be fair, I am a boomer, and not the target audience of this book — in fact, to climate change activists, my generation is the villain. And young readers of physical books prefer manga and graphic novels, recent studies have shown. So that concludes my grumbling about the physical presentation of the book, and we can move onto the actual content, which is — not terrible. Well, it’s also not great, but as Books Written By Celebrities With Co-Authors go, Cool Food is surprisingly useful at times. I learned things, things which you may already know, but somehow I did not: like what the numeric codes on produce at the grocery store tell us other than the price (five-digit codes that begin with 9 indicate the produce was organically grown and codes that begin with 8 indicate genetic modifications) and where I could buy jellyfish and how to cook one if I were inclined to eat one for dinner. (I am not.)

Also, I learned that in New Mexico there are Native American restaurants, and apparently nowhere else, and that 95 percent of yams are grown in Africa while most sweet potatoes in U.S. supermarkets were grown in North Carolina.

The first half of the book focuses on foods that the authors say are climate-friendly because of how they are harvested or grown: ancient grains, fruits, vegetables, sea vegetables (yes, they will tell you how to grow your own seaweed), nuts and, most important for New Hampshire residents, syrup, although the authors are shilling for Vermont syrup here.

Also this section of the book gave me a lot of new things to worry about that I’ve never known I should be worrying about, such as whether grain crops are seasonal or perennial. “When a seasonal crop is harvested, it loses all of its carbon intake and depletes the soil of 40 percent of its carbon content. All that carbon is released into the air, adding significantly to climate change,” the authors write.

We’re hearing a lot about regenerative agriculture these days, but a lot of the foodstuff mentioned here was unfamiliar to me: kernza flour, loquat fruit and pigeon pea shrubs. Nothing you find at your typical drive-thru. The recipes, accompanied by color photographs, run the gamut from intriguing (maple and chili glazed sweetcorn) to the bizarre (cashew stir-fry with puffed amaranth, which contains something called vegan fish sauce).

It was a relief to move on to the second section of the book, which contains no small amount of proselytizing about things like the farm-to-table movement, eating seasonally and organically, and cutting down on food waste. Not until the end does Cool Food address in any serious way whether all these foods are good for the human body — most of the talk is about what foods are good for the planet. When the authors finally give a nod to this, it’s in an effective takedown of the federal government’s dietary guidelines, once known as the food pyramid, now known as MyPlate. Well, actually, it’s Harvard University’s takedown, but they reprint it here in a chart that points out what the government says are healthy foods and ideal portions, and what Harvard nutritionists say. Let’s just say that there must be government lobbyists for potatoes and hot dogs.

The authors did not want to write a “bummer” climate book, and have largely succeeded at that. They have instead created an eating manual for climate worriers (which is pretty much all of us after this “winter”) and may struggle to find an audience outside of the most fervent activists and Robert Downey Jr. superfans. That said, the future is on their side; labeling that indicates the carbon footprint of foods — e.g., the amount of greenhouse gasses released in their production — is already cropping up on menus and food for sale. Those labels, Downey and Kestigen say, offer “the biggest promise for change.” But also, eat more jellyfish. C

Album Reviews 24/04/11

Kartell, Everything Is Here (Roche Musique)

Debut LP from this French producer, who broke through in 2012 owing to his distinctly accessible electronic tuneage, which is possessed of warmth, soul and melancholia. The background is that he grew up as a lad listening to his dad’s soul, disco and early house collection, and his early stuff led to a residency at Paris’ velvet-rope Social Club and getting booked globally at all the ritzy places from California to South Korea. Opening track “Space Odyssey” is clamorous and epic, along the lines of M83 when it gets going at around the midpoint; it immediately proves he takes a lot of time cobbling his low-BPM compositions (yes, we need more of that in this world). We also have “Quest,” a disco/LMFAO-inspired afterparty joint featuring St. Lucia artist Poté that’s not near as annoying as it might look on paper. It’s no wonder this guy’s doing so well; this stuff is custom-engineered to fill floors with idle trust-funders. A+

Aves, Transformations (Kieku Records)

Retro futurism-informed album from this three-piece Helsinki, Finland-based outfit, its lyrics encompassing “all change; from man to woman, from adolescence to adulthood, from grief to hope.” Lot of dreamy synth pop goes on here, starting with “Silent Solitude,” a meditative, loop-filled ride built around a cloudy, barely discernible vocal that’ll make some listeners think of Sigur Rós (appropriate, given that all the contributors here — including Icelandic artist JFDR and Danish singer Lydmor — obviously cut their teeth on Nordic pop and adjacent genres); it’s a melancholy, sexless but expansively hopeful thingamajig that’d fit in fine on a neo-hippie coming-of-age film (they’re in talks to write the soundtrack for a film about conversion therapy, while we’re at it). The next song, “Gem Of The Ocean,” starts with the same sort of deep-reverb breathiness as the previous one but then takes a more in-your-face tack, the super-pretty vocal sounding more digitally present. More of this, please. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yikes, Friday, April 12, looks to be a real humdinger of a day for new albums, look at ’em all, folks. Yep, we’re gearin’ up for a hot summer of singles from bubblegum Taylor Swift wannabes, corporate hip-hop bros, disposable indie bands and of course heavy metal bands, because metal never rests, unless it gets too hot to wear suits of armor or whatever they’re doing now! But wait, it’s storytime, because look who has a new album coming out, that’s right, it’s New York City’s perennial arena-band-opening act Blue Öyster Cult, with a new “slab” called Ghost Stories! Yes, the band that gave us the unlistenable dentist-office classic tune “Burnin’ For You” is at it again, and for that I thank them, because they should be out and about making more albums that only five people buy, because they are fun-loving rascals! Years ago I was at some outdoor show in Loudon, New Hampshire, or whatever, where they were opening for Savoy Brown, and my date and I were standing around with the keyboard player and the drummer while some wicked-long-haired dude was trying to sell them a bag of herbs that he claimed would “bring their youth back.” Anyway, Eric Bloom — the guy with the cool voice who sang “Black Blade” and whatnot — comes walking up, grabs the bag and keeps going without paying this feller, and I started cracking up because I knew the guy wasn’t ever going to get paid for his bag of snake-oil lawn clippings or whatever they were. But anyway, I love the BÖC, even though they’ve done some really dumb songs, so I hope this album is totally rockin’, like they say. Ack, oh noes, the opening tune, “Don’t Come Running To Me,” is just a mellow version of “Don’t Fear The Reaper,” their big hit from a hundred years ago when Abraham Lincoln was president. I’m just glad I didn’t have my hopes up.

• Ugh, what else do we have, hopefully something fun, eh wot? Yikes, Bob’s your uncle, it’s that British sax player dude, Shabaka, of Shabaka and the Ancestors! He was in avant-Afrobeat quartet Sons of Kemet and jazz-tronica band The Comet Is Coming, none of which probably means anything to you, but he is an interesting music human, this feller. His debut solo album, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, is out this week, and it is said to highlight his mad skills on such flute-related instruments as the Mayan Teotihuacan drone flute, Brazilian piano, Native American flute and South American quenas. Do you know what this means? I do not, but I’m going to listen to this balderdash right now, because anything’s better than a new Britney Spears album or whatever other horrors are in store this year! Hm, this is actually interesting, the single, “I’ll Do Whatever You Want.” It’s got an early techno vibe to it, some krautrock feel, sort of forlorn and underproduced like Daedelus, and whichever type of flute he’s playing does lend a soothing feel to it.

• Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard is from Cardiff in the U.K., and their newest is titled Skinwalker. Frontman/ and producer Tom Rees says the album is his attempt at “consolidating my 2020 obsession with Sly and the Family Stone with my 2021 obsession with David Bowie’s album Low,” so let’s see how that all panned out, that’d be great. OK, the single, “National Rust,” is a cross between Pavement and ’90s grunge, which, turns out, is a workable recipe. Lazy indie rock for sitting around while unemployed, that’s my take.

• Lastly we have another Englishperson, jungle/drum and bass singer/DJ Nia Archives, with Silence Is Loud. The title track is a rinseout, all right, with some from-the-mountaintop vocals and plenty of melody. I don’t mind this at all.

Transient and Strange, by Nell Greenfieldboyce

Transient and Strange, by Nell Greenfieldboyce (W.W. Norton & Co., 211 pages)

The science writer Nell Greenfieldboyce has worked for NPR since 2005 and is a bit of an outlier. She doesn’t use social media much, lets her kids call her “Nell” and adopted a combined yet unhyphenated last name. She also has, until recently, resisted talking about her personal life in her writing. That changed a decade ago when a friend convinced her to write about a spider in her kitchen with which she had become entranced. And once that door was opened, a sort of floodgate opened from which Transient and Strange emerged.

“Transient and strange” is a phrase from a Walt Whitman poem about meteors, and meteors streak across the cover of Greenfieldboyce’s book, which combines science writing and memoir with a poignancy rarely seen in the genre. The author links discoveries undergirding disparate topics — tornados, black holes, spiders, fleas — to events in her own life, including her parenting mistakes, her parents’ physical decline and her husband’s health issues. The book is revelatory in every sense of the word.

The book begins with a sweet mildness that belies what is to come. She’s lying in bed with her children, when her 6-year-old shares that he’s been thinking about tornados, having listened to an audiobook that mentions one. At first, Greenfieldboyce is excited about introducing her children to this wondrous thing: “a spinning column of clouds snaking down to the ground.” But after watching her children’s eyes as they watch a short video, she realizes that she’s introduced not wonder, but fear, and indeed, both children, ages 3 and 6, become obsessively worried about a tornado hitting their home.

This leads Greenfieldboyce into her natural territory: making science relatable for a mass audience. Her attempts to calm her children’s fears lead her to call a University of Oklahoma scientist whose research led to the 1996 film Twister, then to read a book he’d read as a child, to learn about the development of Doppler radar, and the devastating tornado that hit Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1953, killing 94 people and displacing 10,000.

But then, she suddenly slips in some devastation of her own, a traumatic experience from her childhood that sends her to seek counseling as adult. Like a tornado, we don’t see this coming, and Greenfieldboyce skillfully weaves her own story with happened to the families in Worcester, as their ordinary lives were upended, then there was an eerie calm, and then the storm slammed into them again.

One of the more interesting details that she shares about the Worcester tornado is of survivors who described potatoes and eggs floating in the air as the tornado approached — a phenomenon caused by the wave of low pressure.

The story then easily flows into a visit with her hospitalized father, which leads into a discussion about — wait for it — meteors. Admittedly, this is no ordinary family. Greenfieldboyce has long been interested in extraterrestrial rocks; she wears a chunk of one as a pendant, and she’d just bought her father a piece of a moon rock as a Christmas present. (Maybe not as strange as it seems, even though it had wound up in a drawer; he’d once worked for NASA.) She takes us on a whirlwind journey of famous rocks (the revered Black Stone in Mecca) and improbable rocks (the meteor fragments that hurtle to Earth) and reminds us that what we take for granted today was practically heretical just a few centuries ago. Thomas Jefferson, for example, reportedly mocked Yale scientists who said rocks they’d collected had come from space, saying, “It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.”

Walt Whitman muscles his way into this story, as Herman Melville does later, and Greenfieldboyce’s own words hold their own with these literary stars, even as she tells stories that involve several unsavory characters, like the man who tried to seduce her when she was 12. For someone who for 30 years was intent on not writing about herself, she writes with a shocking amount of candor, most of all when she writes about what she calls “my eugenics project.”

At 23, she fell in love with the man she would eventually marry. He had a genetic condition called polycystic kidney disease that would one day result in his needing a kidney transplant. Although she was in love and committed to him, she writes, “I didn’t think an organ transplant at the age of thirty or forty, and then years of taking drugs to suppress the immune system was anything to just shrug off.” And just as her boyfriend had inherited the disease from his mother, who had inherited it from her father, there was a chance that their children would inherit it too.

All this thrust the young couple into the world of genetic counseling and artificial reproductive techniques. He was against the “reproductive industrial complex”; she thought they’d be crazy not to avail themselves of scientific methods that might allow them to have a baby free of the worrisome gene. Their struggle to conceive a child — taking place at the same time that he is preparing to have a kidney transplant — takes the reader deep into the couple’s most intimate spaces. And quite by happenstance, it does so at a time when the nation is newly engaged in a conversation about in vitro fertilization and the ethics of frozen embryos.

Theirs is a deeply moving story, as is the book overall. Greenfield has said that she wrote the essays independently, not knowing what would become of them, but they flow beautifully, like water. She may not have all the answers to her questions — or ours — but the questions she raises are fascinating. Transient and Strange is neither; it is elegant, thoughtful writing that will endure in your thoughts. A —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 24/04/04

Altin Sencalar, Discover The Present (Posi-Tone Records)

This jazz leader and his long-time co-trombonist Chris Glassman have been hailed by such major zines as Stereophile, who said they sound like “21st century grandchildren of JJ Johnson and Kai Winding.” That’ll mean very little to folks who aren’t big in trombone-jazz, of course, aside from the obvious, they’ve got a nice setup going on here. There are Latin and Vegas edges to this stuff, most eminently in a cover of Four Tops’ 1970s radio-hit “Ain’t No Woman Like the One I’ve Got,” which is jaw-droppingly clean on the production end. The proverbial fourth wall has been all but obliterated in the Big Tech era; any search for Sencalar brings up his LinkedIn page first and foremost, which kind of struck me funny; it enumerates all the colleges where he’s taught, including some in Japan. That left me with the impression I’d be hearing rote academic renditions of this stuff aimed at a particular niche, but the exuberance is really inspiring throughout. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

The Legless Crabs, “Golden Bachelor” / “Get Down” (Metal Postcard Records)

Meanwhile, somewhere on Alpha Centauri, there are bands that, like Pepperidge Farm, remember. In the case of this band, what’s remembered is the Butthole Surfers, a band I’d bet 99 percent of you folks have heard of but only 0.01 percent have actually listened to. Now, Metal Postcard seems to be something of a prank record label, given that they charge random prices for their records, like, one was $22,890, and you can purchase this band’s entire discography for $264.67 (or just the two-sided single for $2). Boy, that’s some nerve, but these guys are such full-of-baloney popinjays (sample press quote: “If the Legless Crabs had released music in the ’60s they would have been rediscovered in the ’80s and fawned over”) that I can’t think of anything bad to say about them. But yes, these tunes do sound like the Surfers: slow, messy, distorted beats and bullhorned vocals, do you need anything else? Of course you don’t. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday is April 5, and it will mark another Friday of albums for your listening displeasure and whatnot! You know what band we haven’t talked about in a long time is Vampire Weekend, remember them, you guys? They were like a cross between Ben Folds and Paul Simon, doing yacht rock for flat-broke millennials who lived with their parents. How did they ever get so big? No, I’m asking you, how did that band ever happen? OK, fine, the polyrhythms were borderline interesting, if you’re new to this planet and had never heard people playing, you know, drums before, or something? Lyrically, they’re sort of edgy, offering “a dynamic blend between the secular and the religious,” which means zip if you don’t care about lyrics, but you know what else, Barack Obama sought their support for his 2012 re-election campaign, and since they believed that politicians actually had a say in what happens in this country, they gladly accepted. But anyway, they had legitimacy during that mercifully short Aughts era when everyone hated music and was getting their revenge by listening to this band and so many others, so what have they gone and done but recorded a new album! This one, which only came out a few hours ago, is titled Only God Was Above Us.

• For some reason — probably because I don’t really care about either of them all that much — I’m always confusing the Black Lips with The Black Keys, whose new album, Ohio Players, is on the way! No, kidding, I do like how the Lips behave like demented punk rockers, and they can be sort of cool, don’t get me wrong. The Keys, though, I thought that was just a summer thing with the skinny jeans crowd, but it did last, Gawd bless ’em, so, on the occasion of this new album, it’s time once again to try to tell them from Arctic Monkeys or Strokes or whatnot (I never could, Gawd bless ya if you can). Lol, the Black Keys subreddit has some bad reviews of this thing, never mind the stupid kiss-butt bot that pops in to say “Myeahhh, I hope this means they’ll be spending time in Ohio!” Good grief, get me out of this subreddit, why am I even doing this, let’s go listen to one of the new songs, “I Forgot To Be Your Lover.” Ack, they’re trying to be Sam Cooke, or maybe — wait, I get it now — the Ohio Players in ballad mode! Boy, I’ll tell you, I have no use for this at all, but if you’re big into hookless tuneage, go for it.

• Wait, I thought Old 97’s were all done being mean to music, but if so, why am I seeing a new album called American Primitive being released by them this week? Wait, no, forget it, Rhett Miller is still their singer, I’d gotten confused because he was doing solo albums for a few years there and had kind of dumped them, not that I was keeping track. “Where The Road Goes” sounds like something Willie Nelson should be singing, not someone who isn’t 100 years old. It isn’t a very interesting song, is writing interesting songs even part of the typical game plan for bands nowadays? Discuss.

• We’ll end this remarkably uninteresting week of new albums with Phosphorescent’s new one, Revelator. Phosphorescent is the stage name of American indie singer-songwriter Matthew Houck, who is originally from Alabama but now lives in Athens, Georgia, so people will think he’s cool or whatever. The title track has mellow, strummy acoustic guitar, and there’s Spacemen 3 reverb on Houck’s voice, which is pretty much the only thing that’s keeping me from falling asleep while it’s playing. He sounds like a bad karaoke version of José González. What on Earth possesses people to support artists like this, seriously? —Eric W. Saeger

Never Been Better by Leanne Toshiko Simpson

Never Been Better by Leanne Toshiko Simpson (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 288 pages)

If you don’t know what it’s like to struggle with mental illness, Never Been Better offers a fresh perspective with a fun plot and a good amount of humor — which, fair warning, veers toward the dark side at times. If you have experienced mental illness, or been close to someone who has, you’ll likely relate to many of the messages in this book.

The protagonist is Dee Foster, a woman with bipolar disorder who hesitantly agrees to travel to Turks and Caicos to attend the wedding of her best friends, Matt and Misa, then decides that as long as she’s there she might as well let Matt know she’s in love with him — and has been since the three of them met in a psychiatric ward.

I think it’s important to note that, although this is fiction, author Leanne Toshiko Simpson has bipolar disorder, so her characters are drawn in part from her own experiences — which, for me, was important to know, because some of the dark humor might have felt disingenuous, almost flippant, if it had been written by someone who hadn’t lived these thoughts and feelings. And using humor to cope is certainly not uncommon. (“I’m glad depression gives me the sex drive of a ham sandwich,” Dee replies when Tilley points out an attractive man and comments that she’s glad she wore her push-up bra.)

I should mention that I’m a (relatively new) therapist, so I read Never Been Better from that perspective, as well as the perspective of someone who has dealt with depression and anxiety. I respect that Toshiko Simpson doesn’t shy away from the very real challenges that mood disorders can present, even as life goes on and people plan weddings and love triangles ensue. The story somehow feels both deeply heavy and blissfully light.

Dee’s sister Tilley plays a solid part in that lightness; she’s wild, bold and fiercely dedicated to protecting Dee. She also embodies the challenges of loving someone with a mood disorder, navigating the slippery slope between emotional accommodations and tough love. In one scene, Dee is struggling hard to get up for an early-morning barre class at the resort they’re staying at, thanks in no small part to the side effects of her medications. But this is nothing new to her, or to Tilley.

“‘After this many years of living in the same house, I should have earned a damn black belt in helping you wake up,’ said Tilley. ‘Just today I’ve pulled all the sheets off your body, turned all the lights on, licked the side of your face…’ More footsteps, then Tilley dumped a full glass of water over my head.”

As Dee struggles openly and honestly, she feels some resentment toward Misa, whose wealthy family doesn’t know she met Dee and Matt in the psychiatric ward, because she never told them she was there as a patient and continues to conceal her mental illness from them, presumably because it doesn’t “fit” into their tidy, proper world.

“Misa went on to run an entire golf tournament dedicated to bipolar disorder without happening to mention her [own bipolar disorder]. … What I really wanted was for her to … be messy in her illness, like I was in mine.”

Good days for Dee are the ones where she doesn’t crave a depression nap, she can get across town on a bus without having a panic attack, or she can make it through a first date without the guy asking, before she’s about to spend the night, whether she’ll be the same person when she wakes up in the morning. So getting through this destination wedding is all kinds of hard, as she navigates her feelings about Matt (while also trying to figure out how to confront him after she finds out he’s stopped taking his meds) and her feelings about Misa, who she felt so close with when they were in the hospital but feels so distant from now.

Along with those considerable issues, Dee is fighting to keep up with the daily pre-wedding activities among Misa and Matt’s friends and family — a whole other fun cast of characters that bring levity to this book, from a kindhearted grandma to a spunky but wise cousin.

This is the debut novel for Toshiko Simpson, who, awesomely, also co-founded a reflective writing program at Canada’s largest mental health hospital. Though at times Never Been Better edges a little too close to the line between mirth and despair, in Toshiko Simpson’s understanding hands it comes together as a heartfelt story of persevering time and time again in the face of mental illness. A-

Album Reviews 24/03/28

Warlord, Free Spirit Soar (High Roller Records)

Ha ha, I owned a Warlord album once when I was a young heavy metal incel, but I only listened to it maybe three times because it wasn’t all that good, sort of like a cross between Anvil and, I don’t know, maybe Scorpions I guess. Singer Bill Tsamis died in 2021, but original drummer and co-founder Mark Zonder is here.

The promo sheet on this one claims that this U.S. band was an early epic-metal band. Funny it should say that, because album-opener “Behold a Pale Horse” is definitely epic-metal. It has caveman-ren-faire drums a la Corvus Corax, and the singer is really serious, singing about witch-kings and prophets or something. Yeah, no, this stuff has a Savatage bend to it. “Conquerors” is street-metal in the vein of Riot, except the dude’s singing about giant cyclops or something. A

Marc Valentine, Basement Sparks (Wicked Cool Records)

This guy, whom Vive Le Rock magazine anointed as “the new king of British power-pop,” qualifies for that “prize” I suppose, for what it’s worth. This is the follow-up full-length to his debut album from last year, and he comes storming out of the gate on this one, with the They Might Be Giants-like “Complicated Sometimes,” which breaks the emo mold a bit by using a Mister Roboto effect on his voice (you never hear that anymore, not that anyone cares). The overall vibe tenders a cross between Dashboard Confessional and a slightly cartoonish version of eastern European grog-punk bands like Korpiklaani, which means the listener is in for a fun ride (I never understood how people could take “power pop” bands seriously, so it’s refreshing to note that this guy takes a lot of his cues from 1970s glam bands). Speaking of Marc Bolan, the tune “Tyrranical Wrecks” is a ton of fun, with Valentine trying on-the-phone patch on for size. I hope this guy breaks big. A+

Playlist

• Uh-oh, Friday, March 29, is a big day, because it is the last CD release day of our Antarctican winter, meaning that spring is definitely here! Sheryl Crow’s new album, Evolution, is the first one we will laugh look at today; you all remember Crow from her multi-platinum-whatever soccer mom hits, but did you know that she contributed her singing talents to William Shatner’s 2011 joke album, Seeking Major Tom, covering the song “Seeking Major Tom” originally rendered on the K.I.A. album Adieu Shinjuku Zulu, did you even know that? Of course not, who would, but this new one is her 12th album and features the single “Digging in the Dirt,” featuring Peter Gabriel, whom we discussed in this award-winning column just a few weeks ago. He originally released the song (which won the Best Video Grammy) in his 1992 studio album Us. How will Sheryl Crow improve on this song? Will she even try to? Let me go to the YouTube and listen to it, so you don’t have to. OK, it’s basically the same thing except with Sheryl Crow singing all the lines, like, “This time you’ve gone too far” and all that stuff, and every once in a while Gabriel pops in like Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog in order to ensure that it’s as boring as the original. This is a very clever marketing strategy, I have to admit.

• Slovenly chamber-pop singer and Libertines hanger-on Ed Harcourt is back with a new album, called El Magnifico, please stay calm, there will be enough MP3s of this album for all of you to pirate at your favorite pirating website, and no, I have no idea where to find those, because I am an upstanding citizen; now, quiet, you guys, while I try to enjoy the new single, “Deathless,” from this new album. It opens with an indie-folk fractal with some dubstep drums underneath it for some reason, and then it turns into a not-really-bad tune that sounds like Imagine Dragons covering a Conor Oberst B-side. Things could be a lot worse, I suppose, even if the video is really boring, something about standing in a dangerous-looking field of cacti, not that there are any cacti in England, which is where Harcourt is from. And let’s keep moving.

• Brooklyn, N.Y.-based artist Kelly Moran’s music, according to Wikipedia, is a mixture of electronic, jazz, dream pop and black metal, and her record company is Warper Records, which tells me I’m not going to enjoy listening to her new album Moves In The Field at all, not that I’m going into this with a negative attitude or anything of the sort, and besides, she used to play bass for the no-wave punk band Cellular Chaos, so let’s give this LP the benefit of the doubt going in, that’d be great. OK, so the video for the single “Butterfly Phase” features a figure skater interpreting this excitable but sad piano-driven melody, and then it gets sadder and sadder, and all the YouTube commentators are saying they’re crying, and then I started crying myself because I couldn’t understand why a bunch of people were getting emotional over the song, which just sounds like a bummer-piano thing. Maybe they were crying because the figure skater wasn’t doing triple-salchows or pratfalling onto the ice, the latter of which is the only reason people watch figure skating in the first place. I mean, I’m openly sobbing right now.

• Lastly it’s alt-rock band Chastity Belt, from Walla Walla, Washington, and yes, that’s a real place. Live Laugh Love is the all-girl band’s new album, and the single is part folk-indie and part psychedelica. It is gentle and catchy enough; the main verse part is boring, the bridge is OK.

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