Category: Pop

The Summer Pact, by Emily Giffin

The Summer Pact, by Emily Giffin (Ballantine, 352 pages)

For the Love of Summer, by Susan Mallery (MIRA, 400 pages)

Neither The Summer Pact nor For the Love of Summer — despite their titles’ insinuations and their beach-vibe covers — is about summer, the season. The titles both refer to a character named Summer. So cute. Because both authors had this clever idea, and because I read them one after the other and felt equally annoyed by their bait-and-switch covers, I figured I would share their other downfalls.

Emily Giffin’s The Summer Pacthas a trigger warning before the novel begins announcing that difficult themes, including suicide, are present. If you read the jacket cover carefully, it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going to happen — and it does, in the first 10 pages of the book, so this is not a spoiler but rather the basis of the story. After their college friend Summer dies by suicide, Hannah, Lainey and Tyson make a pact to be there for each other if they are ever in crisis. A decade later, Hannah’s engagement ends abruptly, and she finds herself reaching out to Lainey and Tyson for support.

They each agree that they should embark on a trip together, a journey meant for healing and self-discovery. Instead, it seemed like a messy, depressing coming-together of three people who do not make sense as friends — and not in the quirky, we’re-so-different-it’s-funny kind of way, but in a forced, uncomfortable way.

It might have helped if Giffin had spent more than a few pages at the very beginning on the origins of their friendship, the solid foursome that existed before Summer died. But 10 years post-college, they seemingly have nothing in common other than this pact that they made.

It’s hard to even like or care about most of the characters, especially Lainey, who seems to be on a mission of self-destruction and generally comes across as selfish and immature.

The way Lainey reacts when she meets her half-sister for the first time is just childish. She was wronged by her dad, yes, but she confronts them as if she’s an angry 13-year-old with absolutely no filter or ability to communicate like an adult. When her other half-sister later tries to connect with her, Lainey refuses to have anything to do with her.

Hannah is the meek one of the group. The way she reacts to her fiance’s infidelity is pitiful. It’s infuriating to watch a main character not stand up for herself — and when she finally does, it’s at the prompting of her friends, in their presence, under false pretenses, because she couldn’t confront her cheating fiance on her own.

I didn’t have a problem with Tyson, other than he seemed to be Giffin’s attempt at racial inclusivity, with a lot of focus on the fact that he’s a Black man and not much other character development. That makes it hard to believe the romance subplot that Giffin throws in toward the tail end of the story.

I’ve been an Emily Giffin fan for years and have read all of her previous novels, so this was a disappointment for me.

I wish I had read For the Love of Summer first, because I probably would have appreciated Giffin’s writing a bit more – she, at the very least, does not repeat the same messages over and over again, the way Susan Mallery does in her “summer” novel.

The plot of Mallery’s book is cute: Allison’s husband gets sent to jail, and her stepdaughter — Summer — feels bad for her because she’s got a toddler and a baby on the way and no money, so Summer begs her mom, Erica, to let them move in. New wife living with ex-wife — could be fun, right?

Sadly, somehow, most of the book comes across as depressing and negative, with the exception of Summer, who is so positive and hopeful and empathetic that she’s actually unbelievable. This is another example of a cover that’s made for marketing and not representative of what the book is actually about.

The amount of repetition is maddening — the book easily could have been 100 pages shorter (yes, we know Allison is broke, pregnant and raising a toddler alone – we don’t need every character to think and say this over and over). There’s also at least one significant editing issue, where Mallery uses the wrong character’s name. Both of these issues may be the result of Mallery churning out multiple books a year, because it certainly felt hastily written.

With both of these books, I obviously cared enough to finish reading and find out what happened, which is something (honestly, though, I almost gave up on For the Love of Summer because I was so tired of so many words when so little was happening). If you want to give one of them a try, my vote is for The Summer Pact. But if you’re looking for light, fun, well-written beach reads, don’t let these covers fool you. The Summer Pact, B-; For the Love of Summer, C

Album Reviews 24/07/25

Sweet, Give Us A Wink (Capitol Records)

I’m still kicking myself for forgetting to mooch press passes to this seminal arena-rock band’s recent appearance at the Tupelo Music Hall (all the original members save Andy Scott are deceased), but this album still merits a few paragraphs for the edification of Zoomers and millennials, who need to understand that the ’70s weren’t just about Zeppelin and Skynyrd. It was 1976 and seemingly everything was under the influence of LSD, from the bands to the Lipton Noodle Zoopman; this album’s vaguely Zep-like sound was a new thing, heavy and progressive but the instruments were played so mechanically and succinctly that I’d describe it as a predecessor to today’s hard-electro, like that of Pendulum for example. The octave-level, Munchkinesque vocal harmonies took a little getting used to, although people were well-accustomed to them after their prior hit “Ballroom Blitz,” a more generic rawk tune that was nothing like the ones on this album, like the spazzing “White Mice” and “Healer,” their answer to Zep’s “Kashmir.” Anyway, this is one you’d want to be familiar with if you’re at a pool party and the old folks are waxing nostalgic about the days “when music didn’t suck.” A+

Brian Ray, My Town (Wicked Cool Records)

Decent rock ’n’ roll musicians are born swindlers, musical roustabouts whose importance exists only in their own minds; the trick is to get everyone else to believe in their trip. This 69-year-old guitarist’s papers check out; he parlayed his 1970s stint with Bobby Pickett (of “Monster Mash” fame) into a reputation that allowed him to troll his way into Etta James’ band and then Paul McCartney’s in 2002. As you’d guess, the credits on this record are decidedly too-long-didn’t read; Smokey Robinson, Michael des Barres and Gia Ciambotti turn in vocal contributions, just for starters, and I could go on, but as far as the demographic this might appeal to? I don’t know, maybe people who’ve never heard a Rolling Stones record before? I mean, that’s what it is, tempo- and vibe-wise; the guitar sound alternates between grunge and Kinks, which is fine, and at times the sound wants to be Weezer-ish (Scott Shriner is here, by the way), but ultimately it’s background patter for an ’80s action movie, and bloody disengaged at that. B-

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• At this writing the temperature is exactly one million degrees outside, here in sunny Manchvegas, New Hamster, and I have melted into a puddle of snark, so fair warning, all you new albums coming out on Friday, July 26, you’d better be good, or I’ll — why, I’ll — well, just you wait, ’enry ’iggins, I have plenty of outraged rage I’d love to direct at the wrong places, Given that my new book about social media and politics, My Year In The Online Left, just dropped a bit in the bestseller list, which means I can’t afford a trip to the North Pole! Yes yes, in my melted, snarky, basically liquefied state I am a loose cannon, and all I’ve been able to tolerate listening to lately is old — as in old — music, like, I made a mixtape for my car that has songs from Outlaws, Andrew Gold and Ace Frehley on it, and those are the most modern artists on the CD! The rest of it comprises stuff from the 1950s like Jerry Lee Lewis, The Dovells and Eddie Cochran, stuff that all the bros used to have playing in their souped-up ’32 Ford Coupes when they drove over to pick up Petunia and take her “parking” [nudge, nudge]. Yessir, 1950s greaser rock is all my delicate constitution has been able to tolerate lately, like, this week, Petunia wanted to catch up on the most recent season of Yellowjackets, and when I heard that stupid, sad, morose Radiohead song playing in the background during that one awful, disturbing, horrible scene, well, that was it, fam, something broke inside me and suddenly I had to hear “Sweet Little Sixteen” or I knew I would crack in half! But wait, don’t flip to Amy’s film reviews quite yet, I can still be as “groovy” as any other music journo; here, watch this, as I take a listen to the new Ice Spice single “Did It First,” from the TikTok/Nickelodeon princess’ fast-approaching new album, Y2K! Spoiler, it’s about romantic cheating and hawk tuah-ism, as always, but at least the beat is sci-fi and noise-garage-y, not that stupid wimpy trap stuff, like, this thing would totally shred the woofers in your totally keen souped-up Toyota Corolla to tatters if you cranked it while heading over to pick up Petunia and take her to the Twerk-O-Rama to watch her do her subtle, seductive mating dances! OK, may I go back to listening to The Silhouettes’ “Get A Job” now!

• OK, spread out, let’s stop making fun of twerking princesses and get down to the real meat of the era, namely bands that are kind of fun in a Mungo Jerry sort of manner, you know, amateurish bands led by broke, smelly millennial NEETS (which stands for “not in employment, education, or training,” have you heard this 15-year-old expression yet?), for instance Los Angeles outfit Alex Izenberg & The Exiles! Yes, they are in my “You should talk about this band” list, but they aren’t recommended, because they are broke and slovenly, so let’s be rebellious and talk about the band’s new single, “Drinking the Dusk Away,” from their new self-titled album! Wow, I have to report that although the song is appropriately moronic to fit the times, the vocal harmonizing is pretty concise, and they use an actual dobro. It’s on Domino Records, which is all you really need to know; i.e., it’s good.

• When he’s not having anxiety attacks on stage, North Carolina dance DJ Porter Robinson releases albums, like his new one, SMILE! 😀! The tune I listened to, “Knock Yourself Out XD,” combines a Nintendo beat with emo and Beatles. It is OK!

• We’ll call it a column with New York twee/dream-pop band Cults, whose new LP To the Ghosts features the tune “Left My Keys,” which sounds like Bon Iver with a (slight) pulse, or a really uninteresting M83, take your pick.

This Ordinary Stardust, by Alan Townsend

This Ordinary Stardust, by Alan Townsend (Grand Central Publishing, 261 pages)

The most nourishing soil in the world, Alan Townsend writes, starts with disaster:

“Pyroclastic explosions of ash and lava slam into hillsides and streams, obliterating trees and boiling fish alive in their water. Or massive glaciers suddenly pulverize everything in their path … then unleash a catastrophic flood for good measure. The aftermath is a horror — a moonscape of ruin. It is also a beginning.”

That’s all well and good when talking about geological processes, but what of more personal kinds of disasters, the kind that explode your life, as when both your wife and your 4-year-old daughter get diagnosed with brain cancer within the same year?

Townsend, a tattooed scientist and dean of the college of forestry and conservation at the University of Montana, is much too intelligent to offer platitudes in such a situation. This Ordinary Stardust is no ordinary memoir of a health crisis, as Townsend and his wife, Diana, are no ordinary people.

They are both brilliant scientists who have traveled extensively doing interesting work — when we meet Townsend he’s doing research in the Amazon on how to prevent deforestation, Diana is planning an excursion to collect bacterial samples in Antarctica when she gets sick.

But with the twin diagnoses, the couple is thrust into the strangest world yet, going from the world of the healthy to the world of the sick with frightening speed.

Little Neva’s diagnosis came first, and Townsend writes movingly of how hard it is to watch your child endure MRIs and IVs and CT scans at Colorado Children’s Hospital. At one point, her parents take Neva to a hospital cafe for ice cream, and the child asks if she can have more. “Hell yes, I thought,” Townsend writes. The child, like her parents, is stoic and tough, and a scene where Diana takes a team of residents and medical students to task for their callous treatment of Neva is a Tiger Mother master class in assertiveness.

Diana brings the same defiance to her own treatment. We already know the kind of woman she is from a story Townsend tells about how she badly injured her ankle while the two of them were running on a trail together in Costa Rica, where they were working. The next evening, though her ankle was still badly swollen, Townsend found her wrapping the ankle with strips of an old T-shirt and duct tape. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Going running,” she replied. He writes, “She had a look that challenged me to say more.”

This is also a woman, as Townsend says, who “couldn’t stop talking about bacteria,” who loved science so much that it was all she wanted to talk about on their runs.

When Diana starts having strange symptoms and is ultimately diagnosed with two tumors in her brain, she grumbles that they’d better not stop her going on her expedition to Antarctica the next year. She continues to run throughout her treatment, and even wins her age division in a road race. But glioblastoma is almost always deadly; just 5 percent of patients survive five years. It is not a spoiler to say that Diana is not among the 5 percent since the book jacket blurb reveals that she dies. By this point, we love her as much as her husband does, and the story of her passing is gut-wrenching, but also oddly beautiful.

Townsend writes the book at his wife’s request — she wanted others to learn from their story — and although he confesses up front that he is not a Christian or a church-goer, the story is wrapped in spiritual themes. Science, he writes, can nurture the soul; it offers hope “that life on earth can make its way through the eye of any needle, that our individual choices matter, and that love can bring us back from the brink of annihilation.”

He does not address any issues related to the possibility of an afterlife except in terms related to the title. It’s said that our physical bodies are composed of primordial atoms, elements formed in stars and possibly dating to the Big Bang. Townsend has been fascinated with this idea since he heard a professor talk about how we exchange this “stardust” with each other continually.

“When viewed in our most elemental form, people are trillions of outer-space atoms, moving around temporarily as one, sensing and seeing and falling in love. Then those atoms scatter, joining one new team for a bit, then another. Far from depressing,” he writes. In other words, we might only exist in this form for a short time, but “No matter what happens, we’re still here. And we will always be.”

That’s a far cry from the eternal life promised by some religions, but is still, as he writes, “profoundly comforting.” Grief can co-exist with wonder, Townsend finds on his family’s journey, and his memoir is both poignant and thought-provoking. B+

Album Reviews 24/07/18

Phish, Evolve (JEMP Records)

If you’ve ever read this column for comprehension, you know that I detest fedora-hat bands in general and jam bands in particular, but I’ve had a change of heart of late. This happened after I discovered that my favorite acid-jazz-fusion wingnuts Weather Report took in a lot of guys from Frank Zappa’s bands, which caused me to reassess my prejudgments about Zappa (most of which were based on listening experiences). No, I’m not saying the Mothers or Weather Report were jam bands, but they incorporated extended stretches of improvisation in their tunes, and since I’m looking to expand my listening sphere I figured I’d see what’s going on right now with this Vermont crew of Grateful Dead lampreys (no, I will never give the Dead another chance, no worries). In brief: This LP is, of course, about white-guy groove, pseudo-funk in desperate need of a jolt from cardiac paddles. “Hey Stranger,” for starters, is a politely bouncing, listenable-enough thing that had me going “OK, OK, I get it” 30 seconds into its uneventful five minutes (the drum sound is good, at least). “Everything’s Right” is 12-count-’em minutes of (I swear) the same tiresome ’70s-blaxploitation beat as “Hey Stranger,” and that’s where I gave up. There’s some decent noodling from guitarist Trey Anastasio, which I’m sure seems highly impressive to people who have no guitar player friends who insist on giving impromptu living room concerts to their unhappily captive audiences. B

IDRIS & Una Rams, “Go Deeper” (Defected Records)

Wow, I’ve been unplugged from the velvet-rope circuit for so long (no thanks to my local Manchvegas music scene — will we ever get a proper dance club in this town or what?) that I wasn’t aware that actor Idris Elba was a DJ of significant note. In fact, his music is, I’m told, dominating the scene, which is just another notch in the belt for the guy, who was voted People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2018 and starred in such movies as Pacific Rim and Prometheus. OK, granted, anyone, even the sexiest guy in the world, could futz with ProTools and make a dance beat, so what’s so special about this, his latest track? Well, it’s the authenticity, really. Maybe you’re already used to the tribal house of DJs like Oscar G and whatnot, a sound that kept me interested in covering the beachside club beat for a couple of years, but this is definitely a step beyond that. Rams, Elba’s accomplice here, is a Grammy-winner from Makwarela, South Africa, and he adds some thick vocalizing to a track that would have been a bit pedestrian without it. As is, it’s otherworldly and completely immersive. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Like a relentless tsunami of cultural inertia, a fresh storm of music-albums will bum-rush our cockeyed zeitgeist on July 19, scrabbling and shrieking for attention from a citizenry that’s no longer paying any attention whatsoever to “what’s hot” in the milieu, since the only thing that’s generated any mainstream rock ’n’ roll headline activity for months has been people arguing on social media over whether or not Taylor Swift’s last album, Whatever-its-name-who-cares, is a good thing. The weighing-in continues unabated; the other week, Dave Grohl from Foo Fighters told insinuated during a concert that Taylor lip-synchs during her shows, according to assorted media.

Past all that, like I said, there are new albums to deal with this week, including one from mummified ’70s arena-rock band Deep Purple, which uses an actual church organ in their heavy metal tuneage for some reason, don’t ask me why. The title of this new album is =1, which is funny, because =1 has never been recognized as an official internet emoticon like 🙂 or =^). I can guarantee you it’s not, because I asked Google’s “artificial intelligence” if =1 is an emoticon and it told me to go jump in the lake. But whatever, let’s keep in mind that the fellas in Deep Purple are all in their 80s and thus probably all have Earthlink email addresses; let’s just proceed to listen to “Portable Door,” the band’s hot new single! Wow, drummer Ian Paice, bassist Roger Glover and singer Ian Gillan are still here! Ha ha, Gillan looks like Bill Murray does today, but belay all that, ya swabs, this isn’t a bad song at all if you ever liked Deep Purple, like, the main riff does have a pulse. I give it a =) emoticon reaction and want to remind you that Ritchie Blackmore hasn’t been in the band for decades now because he is literally one of the worst people ever born.

• Rapper Childish Gambino initially earned his fame for his tertiary role on the endlessly irritating TV show 30 Rock, do any of you people even remember when network television was relevant, do I really even have to talk about this dude? Fine, whatever, his new album, Bando Stone & The New World, is the soundtrack to an upcoming same-named film. It is the final Childish Gambino album, because Donald Glover (his real name) is as sick of the joke as everyone else and hence he’s retiring the moniker. I don’t know, the movie trailer seems fine, it’s an apocalyptic comedy that I’d watch, and his joke hip-hop songs aren’t any worse than recent serious ones.

• Los Campesinos! (remember 15 years ago when indie bands used dumb punctuation in their band names?) are back, with a new LP, All Hell. The single, “kms,” sounds like a drunk Aubrey Plaza singing with Pavement. Yes, it’s literally that awful.

• Finally we have Glass Animals, an English indie band whose 2020 boyband-chillout single “Heat Waves” went viral on TikTok. The guys’ new album I Love You So F***ing Much features the wistful “Creatures in Heaven,” which reads like an Imagine Dragons arena-ballad, not that I’m trying to discourage you.

The Lost Letters from Martha’s Vineyard, by Michael Callahan

The Lost Letters from Martha’s Vineyard, by Michael Callahan (Mariner Books, 293 pages)

The quintessential beach read doesn’t have to have a beach in the title or cover art, but it helps. Just ask Elin Hilderbrand, the queen of beach reads, who recently announced she’s retiring from the genre because she has “run out of really good ideas.” Maybe Michael Callahan can step into the void.

Callahan, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, seems an unlikely author to produce a beach read, but that’s what The Lost Letters from Martha’s Vineyard is, despite its aspiring to be a Gone Girl-like thriller. It checks all the boxes: Island in the title. A beach on the cover. Plucky heroine, “roguish” love interest. Chowdah. Plus dueling timelines that go back and forth between the 1950s and 2018, just to make sure we’re paying attention.

The premise is intriguing enough: Kit O’Neill is a single woman who works for a TV star in Manhattan. After her parents died, she and her older sister were raised by the grandmother they called Nan in a roomy suburban colonial in Westchester County. The young women adored their grandmother and were devastated when she died, but it has fallen to them to clean out her house and ready it for sale, which they are reluctantly doing.

Cleaning out the attic, Kit works through the usual stuff of attics — dusty boxes filled with Christmas ornaments, old curtains and bills, yellowed photographs, all familiar. And then she finds a box full of curious things: a playbill from a 1959 production at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse featuring an actress called Mercy Welles, a couple of matching shells, a prize ribbon, and a photo of her grandmother with her arm around a man that Kit doesn’t recognize.

Intrigued, Kit takes the box downstairs and does a Google search for Mercy Welles — and among the results, she finds an article called “The Strange and Curious Case of Mercy Welles,” which detailed the mysterious disappearance of a Hollywood actress at the start of a promising career. There was a photo of this Mercy Welles: It was Kit’s grandmother, Nan.

Before Kit can recover from the shock, the author swoops us back to May 1959 to meet Mercy, a winsome young woman from the Midwest whose real name was Edith. “She was twenty-six but feared she looked 30. The industry did that to you. With her green eyes, pale skin, and wavy, honey-blond hair, she knew she was objectively pretty. It did little to assuage the paranoia.”

For all her insecurities, Mercy had gone to Los Angeles seeking a career and quickly became a success, getting engaged to a film producer and nominated for an Oscar as a best supporting actress within three years. But things weren’t good with the fiance, and at the suggestion of a friend, she made plans for the two of them to take a short vacation in New England. Mercy knew nothing about Martha’s Vineyard but imagined a week there in spring to be something like a travel brochure: “a fireplace, steaming mugs of cider, soft cashmere sweaters, a walk hand in hand by the water.”

Then she found her fiance at a hotel with another woman. The romantic vacation was off, but Mercy went to Martha’s Vineyard anyway to figure out her next steps. And within days, she had rented a cottage on the island for the entire summer and was befriending the locals.

Back to the future, in 2018, Kit turns investigator, thanks in part to the celebrity journalist she works for, who is intrigued by the story and is fine with Kit taking off to Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Massachusetts to try to unravel the mystery of how her grandmother sneaked out of fame’s glare and took to raising kids in anonymity in Rye, New York.

With some lucky breaks, she tracks down an old roommate of her grandmother’s, with whom Mercy had corresponded while she was in Martha’s Vineyard. (Not only was there no internet, but there was also not even an analogue telephone in her cottage, leading Mercy to write to the friend, “we’ll have to communicate the old-fashioned way, via correspondence. How very Jane Austen it all will be!”)

Then we’re back to Mercy, who was not quite as anonymous as she thought she would be on Martha’s Vineyard, as many of the islanders had seen the film for which she’d earned an Oscar nomination. As her summer unfolds, we learn about those mementos that her granddaughter will eventually find, as she becomes friendly with a gruff oysterman and with a young Black musician and playwright, and eventually becomes entangled in a crime involving the most famous family on the island.

And on it goes, back and forth between young Mercy and young Kit, as the riddles of the story are somewhat blandly unspooled. The author spent time at a writers’ colony on the island, and knows it well — perhaps too well, as at times he seems driven to mention every village and restaurant. Perhaps he plans to do for the Vineyard what Hilderbrand has done for Nantucket.

As beach reads go, The Lost Letters from Martha’s Vineyard does not disappoint, but it does in the places where striving to be something more. B- —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 24/07/11

The Mystery Lights, Purgatory (Daptone Records)

This Salinas, California,-based band aims for a mid-’60s Kinks and Easybeats-inspired sound, which is evident from the start of this, their fourth album. They’ve been around the block many times, first with a few independently released EPs, and then a single on Daptone’s rock imprint, Wick, in 2015, and that should suffice for the inside baseball nonsense; the upshot is that they could certainly give Black Lips a run for their money, given that they incorporate Howlin’ Wolf, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and (of course) Creedence Clearwater Revival into their unabashedly ’60s-rock chi. Their brains are in their pants, which is admirable these days, at least in my book, starting with album opener “Mighty Fine & All Mine,” with its bouncy and boneheaded two-chord shuffle, just what the doctor ordered. “In The Streets” fuses Gang Of Four angularity with Bon Scott-era AC/DC transgressiveness’ “Sorry I Forgot Your Name” is prehistoric rockabilly the way the Pixies would have built it. Obviously very fun stuff. A

Matt Wilson’s Good Trouble, Good Trouble (Palmetto Records)

Whole lot of fun, this album from jazz drummer Wilson’s new quintet, which features players who, unless I’m mistaken, have all been featured on this page as bandleaders. Wilson likes swing, but it’s also obvious he’s spent a good amount of time digging on more proggy groups like Pat Metheny and whatnot; a lot goes on here. Tia Fuller’s alto sax holds down the upper-middle end of the mix in glorious style, while Dawn Clement’s piano stands just to the right of it, alternately doodling and bonking at the right moments — OK, what I’m saying is that the mix is exquisite and expansive. We’ve talked about clarinetist Jeff Lederer here before of course; here he adds a lot to the complicated but relatable twists and turns, thickening them out in unique and friendly fashion. On “Be That As It May,” Clement adds a vocal that far surpasses the phoned-in performances I hear constantly within this genre. A great one for summer drives. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• July 12 is approaching, like a cat in the night, preparing to steal off with half the summer, we’re already halfway done with it before the winter comes, guys! Adding to my misery is the fact that I need to talk about one album in particular that’s streeting on that date, specifically a new album of caterwauling nonsense from 1990s annoyance Ani DiFranco, titled Unprecedented Sh!t (yes, that’s her actual clever censoring of the title, so much for freedom of speech, folks!). If you can’t tell yet, I am not a fan of Ms. DiFranco, which makes me sort of normal, given that I’m not the only person to have written about her super-annoying music; I could cite articles from Reddit, MetaFilter, ilXor and dozens of others that support my position, but you either already know all about it or you only enjoying listening to annoying music, which means you might like her. She is a nepo baby of sorts, born to a couple of rich MIT grads, but the little ingrate hated being told what to do by her parents, so much so that she left her mom’s apartment in 1985 to become an emancipated child at age 15, does anyone remember that hilarious ’80s trend? Anyhow, despite her being an unemployed teenager, she was somehow able to sell enough Girl Scout cookies to start her own record company, Righteous Babe Records, through which she’s released all of her “art,” including this new album. Oh, well, at least she uses some of her riches to back various grassroots cultural and political organizations, supporting causes ranging from abortion rights to gay visibility, like, at least we know she’s not just another Gwyneth Paltrow or Ghengis Khan. So, if possible, let’s belay all the hating for the moment and go check out the first tune from this album, “Spinning Room,” so we can just move past all this. It’s a gently rolling number, led by a monotonously bonking piano, the beat waxing Beatlesque. A lot of people might actually like this, and I have no control over that.

• El Paso, Texas, is home to dream-pop band Cigarettes After Sex, whose singer, Greg Gonzalez, has a very androgynous voice. The band’s new album, X’s, is on the way to your Soundclouds and whatnot, and I heartily recommend it if you like Portishead, because that’s what the leadoff single “Baby Blue Movie” kind of sounds like, although it’s even more squishy and dream-poppy. Others have used words like “ethereal” and “limerent” to describe this band, so today I learned that “limerent” means holding “romantic feelings for another person, and typically includes intrusive, melancholic thoughts, or tragic concerns for the object of one’s affection.” Usually I just say “hopelessly hormonal,” but you do you.

• Cassandra Jenkins is an ambient/folk-pop singing lady from Brooklyn, N.Y. Her new album is My Light, My Destroyer, sounds a bit conflicted, wouldn’t you say? In 2022 she opened for Mitski in a few U.K. shows, which is encouraging; her dooming habit is that she takes way too long between albums. This is only her third in eight years, but forget that, music is more about quality than quantity; the single “Delphinium Blue” is like a cross between Enya and Goldfrapp, anyone who’s normal would probably like it.

• We’ll end the week with a look at an artiste who was talented enough to get on TV. In 2014, while she was a senior in high school, Palo Alto, California,-born singer Remi Wolf appeared as a contestant on American Idol but didn’t win. Her second album, Big Ideas, is slated for a Friday release, and the LP’s first song, “Toro,” is pretty neat, combining Janet Jackson with Ke$ha. It’s OK!

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