Category: Pop

Album Reviews 26/05/14

Toadies, The Charmer (Spaceflight Records)

I mentioned this album the other week in mindless passing, which is of course how I roll in the Playlist column. Mind you, for the record, the column’s review snippets reflect cursory, usually distracted first glances as opposed to overly long Pitchfork-style essay contest research; after all, the Playlist thingies mostly focus on advance singles, which often do suck, as any reader who has any musical taste whatsoever knows only too well. So yeah, I wasn’t impressed with this album’s title track, and am still not, but sure, there’s a lot here to like. If you don’t know, the band’s from Fort Worth, Texas, where they started as a late-’80s grunge act with a rugged, brazen southern twist, and they still have a pretty fierce following (which has nothing to do with why I gave this one a more thorough examination; that has more to do with an odd sequence of events). Any-freakin’-way, they’re usually accused of sounding like Nirvana (which I don’t agree with at all) or Pixies (slightly more accurate), but overall, I’d characterize them more as a three-way between Danzig, Pennywise and Pavement, the latter sound of which explains why I didn’t like the title track. Not exactly my jam, but on second glance it’s hard and raw and slovenly enough that I must dutifully rubber-stamp their hall pass. A-

Slim Volume, Off The Grid (self-released)

You know, folks, it’s about time I started getting some albums from serious local-to-NH bands like this one, who, like Lee & Dr. G (an arena-blues band whose album I reviewed last month), did a big album-release gig in Concord at the BNH Stage. I mean, not to make this column about me (which, OK, it really is), but yeah, it’s been very weird for me not to be inundated with promo stuff from local bands trying to get some love in this newspaper. Of course, I attribute all the shunning I’ve received to the fact that New Hampshirites have a fierce allergy to anything from Massachusetts, which includes me (I must admit the feeling’s been mutual for years, ever since the half-decade I spent in Portsmouth, N.H., where I was routinely exposed to some of the most boring fedora-hatted bar bands ever put together). So yeah, I’ve been snobby, but these guys, like L&DG, do have some potential to bring in some actual big-time record company interest (I mean come on, it happened in Seattle, so it conceivably could happen here). OK, anyway, these guys. Regular shows at Strange Brew in Manchvegas to start, where they refined their sound, which isn’t fedora-hatted at all but assuredly is deeply and accurately commercial. There’s some Tom Petty in their sound, which any idiot could identify, and some Michael McDonald yacht rock, but there’s also a northernized Kings Of Leon/Mumfords edge to it, some Minus The Bear, and (I could hardly believe this) songwriting that’s on the level of one of my favorite-ever Boston-area bands (sans the prog), The Vital Might (please go listen to their 2006 tune “Mist Of Crystals” all the way through, I beg of you, please do). These guys are right in the ballpark, and you absolutely must support them. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• This Friday, May 15, will bring with it a host of new albums, as nearly all Fridays do. But this Friday is a special one, given that college graduation season is starting to heat up, meaning that it’s time to have ChatGPT tweak your Claude-written resumé, so your Gemini AI can “target” jobs that are nearly all just fictitious “roles” created by corporate AIs for info-gathering purposes so they can send you car insurance spam, don’t you feel sooo special, in these final days of the human species? I sure do, but we’re not here to talk about that because too depressing, let’s just instead talk about all the recent music-release news that public relations AI bots have sent to my emailbox, like for instance Same Fangs, the new album from Wolf Parade/Moonface singer Spencer Krug, from Canada! Krug claims that the test-drive single, “Timebomb,” is “a song about a song about a band on tour, or rather, about the failed revision of that song, upon sadly realizing that its original message no longer rings true,” in other words it revolves around total bummer subjects, so the tune’s bummer vibe is apropos: The slow, redundant three-chord riff that composes 90 percent of the song is played on a piano with the distortion level set to Melvins, which actually makes it sound a lot more interesting and dangerous than it is, and so it actually works pretty well. Registered weird person Elbow Kiss guests on the track, which makes it a little less boring, but the net effect is like listening to two giant clams discussing their favorite acts at this year’s SXSW conference. That’s not necessarily to say I didn’t like it; I’ve heard a lot worse in just the past half-hour.

• OK, help me out, twerker people: Drake, is he in or is he out? My AI is waffling on the subject, so let’s please just move along to his new record, which is totally-not-ironically titled Iceman, like the book about the mafia contract killer guy! No, I’m sure it’s all just a misunderstanding, and besides, the publicity stunt meant to announce the release date of this album (yes, it’s officially been termed an album and not a mixtape) was a master stroke of nonsense that tapped into a rich vein of stupid in the corporate rap-pop world: Drake rented a hotel parking lot in Toronto and had a 25-foot wall of actual ice built there, and when it was finally melted by Toronto firefighters who were sick of getting yelled at by people who wanted their parking spaces back, there it was, the release date, May 15 (not to be out-stupided, Pitchfork interviewed an actual quantum physicist to predict when they’d be able to read the date)! Will this get any stupider? Yes, it is safe to assume so.

• Oklahoma-based emo-indie rockers All-American Rejects release their first album in 14 years, Sandbox, this week! The title track is catchy and weird and Van Halen-ish, and the video is even cooler, with fake Muppets committing R-rated acts of violence on the band. I approve of this message.

• And last, it’s Florescence, the new LP from British singing-songwriting waif Maisie Peters, who’s often described as sounding like Taylor Swift, which she doesn’t at all on this record’s first single, “Kingmaker,” more like a tween trying to sound like Gracie Abrams really. Mindless pastel patter for people who loved the Juno soundtrack.

Featured Photo: Slim Volume, Off The Grid and Toadies, The Charmer

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

Get twice the princesses, twice the Bowsers, more sidekick-y characters, more video game beep-boops and big loud everything in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which is fine, cute even at times.

You get even more callbacks to Super Mario game play here but also a “kitchen sink cookie”-like jumble of beats that feels very Lego Movie and Star Wars and even a little Frozen. It feels a little more like one of those Oreo Reese’s candy mashups than a whole new thing unto itself.

Mario (voice of Chris Pratt) and Luigi (voice of Charlie Day) are now sort of interworld fix-it guys, which is how they meet Yoshi (voice of Donald Glover), one of the many “more characters, less time with any specific character” additions here. Meanwhile, Princess Peach (voice of Anya Taylor-Joy) is still curious about her origins. Elsewhere, a similar-looking Princess Rosalina (voice of Brie Larson), mother to a bunch of those star thingies similar to that gleefully nihilistic star in the first movie, has been kidnapped by Bowser Jr. (voice of Benny Safdie), who is looking to redeem the legacy of his father, Bowser (voice of Jack Black), who, as the movie begins, is still in his pet-turtle-sized tiny incarnation and is trying to “work on himself” and has also taken up painting.

The Bowser family is probably the most kooky-fun element of this movie even though it does fall into the “twice as much and somehow less” overall feel of the movie. The movie has a fun visual sensibility, between the color and the sort of winking malevolent cuteness of everything. It walks up to the line of that kind of cleverness overall but never quite manages the quirky zaniness of, say, a Lego Movie that would push it into the territory of a movie with all-ages appeal. It is an engaging candy mashup fully enjoyable for kids and mostly tolerable for their adults. C+ maybe even a B- if you were a Mario player or are a kid just looking to be entertained or are a parent looking to zone out during something loud and pleasant. In theaters now and slated for a VOD release May 19.

The Christophers (R)

Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel star in what plays out like a slow-motion art heist in The Christophers, a Steven Soderbergh-directed movie.

Sallie (Jessica Gunning) and Barnaby (James Corden) are the children of artistic great Julian Sklar (McKellen). Or at least he was a great, back in the day, but his talent and drive seem to have faded away and he hasn’t painted anything in decades. Deep in the attic of one of his London townhouses is a series of half-finished paintings that would be valued in the millions if they were sold as finished, never-seen-before works. Sallie attempts finishing one, resulting in a painting that resembles that church fresco that was “restored” and ended up looking more monkey than man. They turn instead to Lori Butler (Cole), a friend of Sallie’s from art school who has talent in her own right but who is also skilled at capturing the work of other painters. Lori is meant to work as Julian’s assistant, while also finding the missing “Christophers,” as the paintings are called, and finishing them to then return them to the attic for them to be “discovered” after Julian’s death. And clearly Sallie and Barnaby, who have a terrible relationship with their self-centered father, are hoping that end comes sooner rather than later. Their interest in “The Christophers” has, however, pushed the paintings into the front of Julian’s mind, and Julian would prefer to see them destroyed than sold. Lori, a one-time fan of Julian’s, seems conflicted about what the fate of the paintings should be.

Both Cole and McKellen can at times feel like they’re doing one-person shows that bump into each other, but wow is it fun to watch them work. Cole keeps Lori’s feelings close to the vest with silences and subtle facial expressions; McKellen hides how Julian really feels in long self-important monologues which of course he delivers with impeccable dry humor. Together they push against each other’s defenses, annoying each other and also drawing the other person out. You can at times forget that there is a forward-moving plot in all this, it’s easy just to enjoy two great actors doing great acting playing off each other. B+ In theaters and slated to come to VOD in May.

Normal (R)

Bob Odenkirk plays yet another regular-joe guy who finds himself needing to kick butt in Normal, a totally fine example of this genre.

It ranks, I think, between the two Mr. Nobodys — not quite as good as the first, better than the second.

After a career- and soul-shaking incident in his hometown where he was a longtime police officer, Ulysses Richardson (Odenkirk, also a co-writer according to IMDb) has become a traveling interim sheriff. He’s wound up in small town Normal, Minnesota, where he stays in a grimy motel and leaves his estranged wife long internal-monologue-ish messages. Normal is as advertised — with most of Ulysses’s work being pulling apart townsfolk fighting over something stupid. But generally, people are friendly and life seems to be going well, perhaps a little better than you’d expect for a small rural town here in the mid-2020s. And this small police department seems to have a weirdly well-stocked armory. Ulysses, policing in kind of a pleasant, semi-disinterested funk, is helpful to all, including to Lori (Reena Jolly), who turns out to be half of a duo, with Keith (Brendan Fletcher), of bank robbers. That the whole town freaks out when its local bank, which appears to have only a small wad of cash and a handful of coins, is robbed is one of many clues that all in Normal is not, well, normal. (The first clue is the movie’s opening scene featuring an unhappy Yakuza boss.)

I appreciate how this movie has a short story approach to its action, keeping us mostly in the here and now and mostly resisting the urge to load up on back stories or telling us how every single thing works out. Ulysses eventually gets a sort of sidekick in Alex (Jess McLeod), the grieving adult-kid of the previous, recently-deceased sheriff, and their partnership adds a nice plucky little element to the story. Normal is exactly what its trailer promises — a blend of low-volume humor and theatrical violence that makes for an enjoyable time. B In theaters now and slated to hit VOD in May, according to Forbes.com.

Featured photo: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival, by Trina Moyles

(Pegasus Books, 297 pages)

When she was 5, Trina Moyles’ father brought home a black bear. A wildlife biologist in Alberta, Canada, he often took possession of orphaned wildlife while trying to place the animals with zoos and rehabilitation facilities; the 3-month-old cub had lost its mother to a forester’s excavator. As the cub tumbled around the family’s basement, Moyles and her older brother looked on, entranced.

The memory stayed with her and shaped her into a girl who played with toy bears instead of Barbies, and later a woman whose fascination with bears grew as she took a job monitoring forests in a fire tower.

In her new memoir, Moyles entwines her knowledge of bears with the deeply personal story of her tumultuous relationship with her drug-addicted brother. The pair, just three years apart, were close in childhood even though Brendan was an extrovert, “collecting friends the same way I sought the company of books.” Moyles was naturally reserved but willing to be led on risky adventures by the brother she revered.

Theirs was a wildish childhood: building forts out of tree limbs in the woods, jumping off boulders into rivers, grouse hunting with their dad. When Moyles was a teenager she bought a horse with money she earned working at her town’s rec center; on one afternoon trail ride with a friend, they encountered a cinnamon bear (a subspecies of black bear), standing upright. “It was,” she writes, “the first time I’d ever come face to face with a bear in the wild. Everything my dad had taught me couldn’t prepare me for the shock of it. My mind and body flooding with fear and awe.”

She would soon come to another kind of fear, however, after Brendan moved out and she watched from afar his descent into alcohol and drug abuse. Hard partying was, she writes, a common pastime for young people in their area, and she herself edged close to the thin line between recreational use and full-blown addiction. But Moyles was able to stop before crossing that line; her brother did not, despite a car accident, a family intervention, AA and finally a spell of sobriety during which Moyles hoped she’d finally gotten the brother she loved in childhood back after a period of complete estrangement.

When Brendan had a baby daughter with his girlfriend, Moyles was the first person he texted, writing, “You had to be the first to know, Treen.”

All the while, Moyles was getting more obsessed with bears as she worked as a lookout at a 100-foot-high fire tower in northwestern Alberta, at a location so remote that she and her dog had to be flown in by helicopter. There was an electric fence around the cabin to keep bears out, although the bears occasionally broached it and she became familiar with them, even giving them names.

She begins to draw parallels between them and her own life.

When, for example, she observes an enormous bear dubbed Oscar rub against a tree, imbuing it with his scent and ostensibly increasing the chance he will find a mate, she reflects on her romantic prospects, or lack thereof. “As a woman in her mid-thirties, I’d been choosing to live alone in the forest, removing myself from civilization, from letting my scent be trailed by potential mates in grocery store aisles and cafe lineups, from parties and potlucks, from swiping left or right on dating apps.”)

When she encounters a bear hibernating in a ditch not far from where she is living, she approaches the den, hoping to hear the bear snoring. Later that night, she writes, “I felt comforted by knowing that the bear was there, so close, burrowed into the road. As I climbed beneath the covers of my duvet, I thought of the bear, curled in her den, and my loneliness softened.”

As her bear encounters multiply, Moyles learns of their curiosity toward humans, but she maintains a healthy fear of what they can do. One of the more distressing aspects of the memoir is the recounting of fatal and near-fatal bear encounters — there is no more dangerous bear than a mother with cubs, we all know, but Moyles writes that there is such a thing as a “good bear” — bears that exist peacefully alongside humans without conflict. She has such a relationship with a bear she observes for years, and a friend remarks at one point the bear, which she named Osa, probably knows Moyles better than she knows herself.

Brendan, who works in the oil industry, comes and goes in the narrative but returns with devastating effect at the end, and Moyles must come to terms with their loving but troubled relationship. It seems to take a very long time to get here; one must have a lot of interest in bears to stay with this story, and a high tolerance for tales of bear romance.

Most of us will never encounter a bear in the wild or in our yard, but if we do we’ll be better equipped to deal with it for having read this book. Far more of us know someone struggling with addiction and will relate to not just Moyles’ observations, but her pain. B

Featured Photo: Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival, by Trina Moyles

Python’s Kiss, by Louise Erdrich

(Harper, 222 pages)

The titular short story in Python’s Kiss is ostensibly about a dog named Nero whose job is to guard the 8-year-old narrator’s grandparents’ grocery store. The grandfather sleeps beyond locked doors “with my grandmother on one side and a loaded gun on the other. This is not a place where a child got up at night to ask for a glass of water.” The 8-year-old is staying there because her mother is about to have a baby, and she forms a bond with the dog. Nero, however, is infatuated with a cocker spaniel who belongs to a woman the narrator’s uncle is infatuated with. As events unfold, they intersect with the narrator’s memory of a traveling show of exotic, dangerous animals that went amok at her school.

This story, like the others in this imaginative collection, offers a smorgasbord of memorable characters. They are ordinary people in strange circumstances, often with an animal involved.

In “The Feral Troubadour” we meet a man enamored of poetry and stray cats. He lives alone in an apartment where he is decorating the bathroom with black and white tiles on which he writes excerpts from poems with a permanent marker. One day, like the narrator of “Python’s Kiss,” he receives what he perceives to be a sign from the universe, this one telling him “You must change your life.” The events that transpire are a confluence of absurdities that, against all odds, ends on a positive note. Not every story does, so enjoy it while you can.

In “Wedding Dresses,” four dresses stored in a basement closet are ruined by mold after a water pipe bursts, and their owner is confronted by her visiting niece: Why were there four wedding dresses? Who had she married and why did they divorce?

“This was suddenly like being a real parent. Having to explain her own past to a child, and do it in a way that would have little impact, either negative or perhaps overly positive.” The four-time bride goes through the story of each dress. Along the way we learn what she tells her niece and what she doesn’t. It’s a brilliant bit of storytelling.

In “Domain,” there is an afterlife controlled by corporations, which charge people for the privilege of uploading their consciousness into the one of their choice, or rather, the one they can afford. The narrator has been injured in a free-climbing accident and applied for early admission to an afterlife called Asphodel (also the name and subject of another story in the collection). When she arrives there, she sees what’s left of her carcass, but it’s not upsetting because “I have a new body now and it’s made of thought.” And she now has one overwhelming thought: how to find and eliminate — for good — her father, who she holds responsible for the death of her son.

The final story, “The Stone,” is as strange and riveting as the rest. It involves a woman who found a large, smooth stone as a child and adopted it as a kind of talisman, taking it with her to college, carrying it with her to concerts when she became a famous pianist. Stroking the stone gives her a sense of calm — until the day she has something that resembles a quarrel with the stone, and it breaks in two. As she slips from its emotional grip, we see the highlights of the stone’s existence over a billion years, the other lives it’s been part of.

There are 13 stories here, of which seven were previously published, in The New Yorker and elsewhere, but for anyone unfamiliar with Erdrich’s work this collection is a gateway drug to more. They are a great distraction from the everyday world, if there’s anything going on that you’d like to tune out for a while. A

Featured Photo: Python’s Kiss, by Louise Erdrich

Album Reviews 26/05/07

Ted Lucas, Images of Life [Disc 1: Strange Mysterious Sounds (1965-1970)] (Third Man Records)

Forgive me for being overly complicated in this bit: What we have here is disc 1 of a three-LP (vinyl) set covering the life’s work of one Ted Lucas, a fixture in the Detroit music/counterculture scenes of the 1960s and ’70s; disc 2 was released the other week, and the third won’t be released until the whole thing comes available on May 22. Everyone with me? OK, so for some reason — probably something to do with cultural preservation of early Motor City psychedelic-cum-proto-punk music, or possibly owing to the fact he felt Lucas was “unfairly” obscure — Jack White (who owns Third Man Records) wanted to release this compilation, which includes music from three of Lucas’ bands, Spike Drivers, The Misty Wizards and The Horny Toads. As well, White unearthed some rare live appearances and whatnot to complete the package. Like I hinted at earlier, it’s a historical artifact, its target taste most certainly acquired during that particular decade. To be honest — and I don’t say this just to help meet my self-imposed yearly quota of making fun of Jack White — the stuff on this set sounds as dated as first-album-era Jefferson Airplane, like, it’s trying so hard to be trippy it comes off as self-mockery — think the “Bat Dance” from the 1966 episode of Batman when Adam West couldn’t stop dancing with the hippie girl. For all I know this would be manna to 75-year-olds who miss the good old days (and sitars), but past that I have no idea what to tell you. D

Holy Wars, Shadow Work / Light Work (Pale Chord Records)

Time once again for another lady-fronted epic-metal album recommended by friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny, one that’s been in the queue since he first flipped over this Los Angeles band’s first one, after which his Substack-column co-writing daughter “Little Bean” made email-friends with Kat Leon, the band’s singer. Usually when a bandwagon-jumping L.A. outfit clambers onto my desk I can expect two things: great musicianship (bad musicians find out just how bad they are after, like, two days in that city and give up quickly) and a lack of originality (anyone remember when L.A. band Gliss tried to be relevant in the shoegaze space? Anyone at all?). The first part gets a checkmark (if anything it sounds overly tight, typical for the genre); however, I wouldn’t write off these guys as Cassyette/Evanescence clones; Leon does have a distinctive flourish to her vocal lines that matches her ’tude, which is less untouchable Amy Lee dom-princess vibe and more bemused Natasha Lyonne “where even am I” puzzlement. Stronger songs than I’d anticipated, too. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Come sail away with me, my legion of drunken scamps who still believe in rock ’n’ roll for some inexplicable, intricately convoluted reason, come have a gander at the new albums of Friday, May 8, through our mud-colored Jagermeister goggles! First up in our list of abject disappointments new records is Look For Your Mind, the latest from Long Island, N.Y., jangle-poppers The Lemon Twigs, a band semi-famous for collaborating with Bread-worshipping mope-popper Weyes Blood and perpetually unexciting veteran dude Todd Rundgren! Knowing those facts, I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from these guys’s new single “My Golden Years,” but I’ll admit that they did make a valiant effort to resurrect the ’70s-radio-bubblegum sound of The Raspberries, down to the Beatles guitars and creamy, sugar-frosted vocal lines. Much of the song is spent trying to re-create Eric Carmen’s way with a hook, which of course doesn’t happen, but like I said, they did try, which counts for — well, nothing really, but I’ll pretend it does if someone out there feels it’s necessary. Now, if you happen to be in a neo-jangle-pop band and want to sound like The Raspberries, the fastest way to create those tunes is by (A) being a decent songwriter, and (B) not even bothering to try doing it at all, since our current timeline in rock ’n’ roll has an unquenchable thirst for mediocrity, which these guys possess in big bucket-loads. I predict that they will do more songwriting with Todd Rundgren, which will deplete even more from their oeuvre, and they will eventually give up and become part of the problem, working in the music business as “talent scouts” and signing random bands to contracts they don’t deserve, but that’s enough inside baseball for today.

• Now, like I just kind-of said, being in a band that would like to try to sound like Raspberries is evidence of having good intentions at least, which I’ve never accused Canadian milquetoast-hipster clowns Broken Social Scene of harboring, but here they are, with a new album, Remember the Humans. Aside from giving us a couple of debatably decent songs from charter member Leslie Feist, Broken Social Scene has mastered the art of bland, un-catchy music, and we music critics have had to pretend to like them forever now, mostly because catchy music is bad for people’s ears because — well, it just is, never even mind why (it’s like the Aughts have never ended as far as overrated indie bands like Broken Social Scene are concerned). But fine, cut to now, and the new single “Not Around Anymore,” which sounds like a Strokes (of course) filler track that’s been put through a Jamie Lidell modulator and just aspires to be, you know, a really bad song. Let’s continue.

• Lykke Li is a Swedish dream-pop/dance-pop singer, songwriter, model and actress, because hot-looking people should never have to settle on just one attention-seeking specialty, amirite folks? Her forthcoming sixth LP, The Afterparty, is claimed to be her final one; there’s no explanation for that as far as I could find on my ’puter, but she recently had her second child and wanted to explore darker “themes of the lower self, including revenge, shame and despair,” and that’s fine with me. “Knife In The Heart” sounds like ABBA trying to be Sigur Ros, which isn’t as bad as it might look.

• And finally we have British emo/noise-rock/soft-grunge band Basement with Wired, their fifth album and first since 2018’s Beside Myself. I expect this to be good, let’s go see. Yup, nope, “Be Here Now” is just Foo Fighters’ “My Hero” in a fake beard and sunglasses, I hope this has edified you.

Featured Photo: Ted Lucas, Images of Life [Disc 1: Strange Mysterious Sounds (1965-1970)] and Holy Wars, Shadow Work / Light Work

Album Reviews 26/04/30

Khun Narin Electric Phin Band, “Sut Sanaen”/“Poet Wong Pt. 1” (Innovative Leisure Records)

This multi-generational psychedelic ensemble from rural Thailand is known for ecstatic performances that have accumulated the group a global cult following of sorts. Their forté is electrified phin music, that is to say its lead instrument is a sort of electric phin, which is similar to a lute but with a distinctive-looking head (the upper part where the tuning keys are). A full album, titled III, is due out May 15, but the two YouTube-accessible singles covered here will give the curious a fine idea of what their sound is about. The most recent, “Sut Sanean,” is the band’s take on one of the foundational melodic patterns in the musical tradition of the Isan people from Northeastern Thailand, which will probably ring no bells to readers, but suffice to explain that it sounds like it’d be right at home soundtracking an opium-den scene in a 1970s episode of Hawaii Five-O; there’s a perpetuity to the meandering soloing that’s comforting in its way. “Poet Wong Pt. 1” is slower, more tribal and melodically enchanting, characterized by soloing that would turn Jimmy Page green with envy. Fascinating stuff. A+

April + Vista, Traditional Noise (Third & Hayden Records)

Formed in Washington, D.C., in 2014, this electronic duo has refined a sound “rooted in curiosity, experimentation, and emotional candor,” this promo sheet tells me, whilst refusing to assign them a genre. Such elite-level publications as Newsweek and The Fader have also punted on classifying these guys, with the former going with “[they meld] electronic, classical, hip hop and ambient influences into something distinctly their own.” Now, I’d like to try my hand, since I don’t see any difficulty: It’s new-jack bleeding-edge trip-hop. There’s some classical in there, sure, and some Sadé and a whole host of different influences, but altogether it honestly doesn’t spell a new sound, just a (truly amazing and gorgeous) fricassee of sound that recalls such usual suspects as Zero 7, Portishead, Tricky and Massive Attack. To be sure, these two are master chefs at it, using only the best ingredients they can find, from soft bubble-dynamic incidentals to exquisite, subtle loops, all of which are pure heaven when April’s vocals weave into them. It’s electronic music for humans, a stuff that everyone needs to know about (and hopefully will). A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Awesome, we’ve already escaped the month of April with our lives, so it’s time to look at the first Friday-load of albums to be released in May, on May 1 to be precise! But first: I was a bit remiss in not mentioning the 25th Coachella music festival that went on during mid-April, which I mostly ignored, not because I wasn’t seeing any news about it (quite the contrary, since late March, half the stuff in my emailbox’s recycle bin has been from promoters, bands and public relations hacks telling me about Coachella appearances — like the one from disposable techno singer Lisa that I got trolled into talking about in the April 16 issue) but because I had almost no interest in the artists whatsoever. This year’s Coachella was — um, eventful, in case you missed it; Justin Bieber dragged an uncomfortable-looking Billie Eilish onstage to lip-synch “One Less Lonely Girl” at her; there was an appearance from Nine Inch Noize (i.e., Trent Reznor & Co. with Boys Noise, the latter of whom added nothing more interesting to goth anthem “Closer” than an over-extended electro-drop), and Karol G become the first Latina to headline one of the main stage’s nights. Other than that it was a Nylon-directed clickbait affair, with two headlining nights from Hollywood’s 2026 Nepo Baby Of The Year Sabrina Carpenter, whose 15 minutes should hopefully be up soon (she had awkward guest appearances from a bizarre array of A-List actors that included Will Ferrell, Susan Sarandon, Samuel L. Jackson, Geena Davis and, um, Sam Elliot; the whole thing came off like it was cooked up by the entire editorial staff of Billboard sitting around plotting in a smoke-filled hall, eating nothing but leftover cafeteria meatloaf until they came up with the right names). Sets from Röyksopp, Armin van Buuren and Yamagucci would have interested me, though not enough to give up my snacks for two weeks, so I didn’t attend, not that the trust fund crowd would have left me any VIP passes anyway (those sold out in minutes, which tells you about the bougie crowd that shows up at that thing and buys $12 Cokes), and P.S., I’m not expecting to be there next year either. And that brings us to North Carolina mixed-genre-pop-folkies Hiss Golden Messenger, whose new album I’m People spotlights the single “Shaky Eyes,” an AOR-geared tune that sounds like Guster possessed by ’70s-era Fleetwood Mac, or vice-versa; it’s the sort of tune someone would fall asleep to while waiting for their kid to try on new jeans at K-Mart, if there were still K-Marts around.

• Speaking of music to nod off to, Akron, Ohio, fedora-hatted bar-pop duo The Black Keys are at it again with a new album, titled Peaches, which opens with “Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire,” a tune that will make you think of Calexico if they had no pulse at all.

• Next it’s certifiably crazy ’90s alt-pop queen Tori Amos, whom we last encountered in 2025 when she surprise-released the Music of Tori and the Muses album as a companion work to her illustrated children’s book Tori And The Muses. Her new LP In Times Of Dragons includes the single “Shush,” which is of course composed of loud, overly bombastic piano cranked to 11 and a funereal vocal line that sounds like something Wednesday Addams would sing if her tarantula died. Allll set with this.

• Lastly it’s Fort Worth, Texas-based grunge-punk band Toadies with their first album in nine years, The Charmer. You young whippersnappers probably know as much about Toadies as you do Everclear, and no one could blame you. The new album’s title track is rugged, noisy, punkish and basically as unlistenable as ever.

Featured Photo: Khun Narin Electric Phin Band, “Sut Sanaen”/“Poet Wong Pt. 1” and April + Vista, Traditional Noise

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