Category: Pop

Afterz, The Midnight Cafe (self-released)

Mixed pot of trip-hop artistry here from a London, UK-based duo, professing to be influenced by Massive Attack et al but deeper and more world-music-rooted than that. These guys are inspired by the Alté movement in Nigeria (a fusion of genres that include Afrobeat, hip-hop, R&B, and alternative sounds), as well as the dance music culture of South Africa. They aim to bridge the gap between traditional Afrobeats and amapiano (a South African deep house/jazz-based hybrid) and more experimental-alternative and electronic sounds. This EP is like a collection of dream sequences, borrowing heavily from Tricky’s sounds but with the reverb set to 11; passages come and go, processed through the aural equivalent of a Vaseline-smeared lens. The title track may have the gentlest reggaeton undergirding I’ve ever heard, put it that way, while “Voltaire” comes off like a shape-shifting wave pattern that emulates a giant’s resting lungs. This is some exquisite stuff but could stand a little more layering. A

Black Sabbath, Never Say Die (Warner Bros Records)

Continuing with my inconsistent, totally off-the-cuff series on Classic Rock Albums Zoomers Need To Know, you know how you’ll go on social media and see someone talking about something you sort of like and then find out that the person really hates it? That happens to me every time someone mentions this 1978 album, the last record that featured the original lineup of Sabbath (yes kids, with Ozzy): everyone hates it. Now that the band has just (reportedly, and I don’t believe it for a second) scrapped itself forever, it’s safe to come out of the closet and admit that this one featured a few pretty good songs (the title track, “A Hard Road,” “Swinging The Chain”) and was actually quite a bit better than its 1976 predecessor, the absolutely dreadful Technical Ecstasy. Mind you, defending this LP is no hill I’d ever want to die on; the bad tunes are truly bad (“Johnny Blade,” “Junior’s Eyes,” the soggy “Over To You”), but it’s notable in that it was guitarist/bandleader Tony Iommi’s final desperate effort to keep the band interested in staying together. That was impossible: They’d been ripped off by their manager for years (fun fact: to this day they still get no money from their first five albums, yes kids, including Paranoid) and Ozzy was about done with it, yet Iommi persisted heroically. Obviously he knew the band was over, and it shows; there’s a deathly pall over the record that’s quite sad, but again, some of it is well worth knowing. B-

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Ugh, this new-CD-release Friday is July 11, meaning the summer’s already half over. I hope you already visited the Atlantic Ocean (you know, the really waterlogged place that makes up everything to the right of New England), because I haven’t yet, except for a quick fish ’n’ chip basket at Bob’s Clam Hut in York, Maine, where I sat gawking at the muddy estuary next to it, where all the seagulls go to poop and make little seagulls. But be that as it may, it’s time to look at this week’s list of new albums, which I assume is rather long, given that almost no new albums were released last week, and, with the slightest modicum of luck, doesn’t have any holiday albums in it, because come on man, it’s way too early for those, please not yet, I beg of you. OK, no Christmas albums this week, that’s good, now let me see if I’ve even heard of any of these people who’re releasing albums this week (things don’t look promising). I’ll start with English singer Mark Stewart, a pioneer of post-punk and industrial music and a founding member of The Pop Group, whose most renowned song, “We Are All Prostitutes,” wasn’t the slightest bit industrial; more of a ska-punk joint that had a Trent Reznor tint to it. Stewart died in 2023, but as is wont to happen, some old recordings of his have been found and summarily compiled into a new album, The Fateful Symmetry. “Memory Of You” is one of those tunes; in a nutshell it sounds like David Bowie singing with a goth-techno band, which of course means that it’s worthwhile in its way.

• Blub blub blub, nothing else is really jumping out at me, so let’s keep moving and I’ll babble something I hope is informative about No Sign Of Weakness, the new LP from Nigerian dancehall/Afrobeat singer/producer Burna Boy! In 2019, his fourth studio full-length, African Giant, was nominated for a Best World Music Album at the Grammy awards, but what you obviously want to know is whether or not his dancehall stuff is as fun as Mad Cobra or whatnot. It isn’t, but one of the singles, “TaTaTa (feat. Travis Scott)” is pretty authentic. Would I dance to it at a tiki bar? No, I do not do such things.

• Actress/singer Noah Cyrus is the sister of famous bothersome person Miley Cyrus, and toward that I have no comment at this time. Interesting how Wikipedia doesn’t even bother assigning a musical style category to Noah like they do with literally every other singer on Earth, given that anyone could take a wild guess, but let’s look and listen, shall we, actually wait, let’s not, I want to see what I’m about to deal with — OK, Wikipedia categorizes Noah’s 2016 debut single “Make Me (Cry)” as “electro,” which sure narrows it down, doesn’t it folks, do I really have to do this? Ack, I suppose I do, so here’s the skinny: Noah’s new album, I Want My Loved Ones To Go With Me, includes a single, titled “New Country,” and guess what, you’ll never guess, it’s not electro, it’s a country ballad duet with some obscure country singing dude named — let’s see — “Blake Shelton” it looks like, unless there’s a typo. The tune is unplugged Bonnaroo bait, pleasant enough I suppose, but come on, can Blake Shelton ever just get out of our face for five seconds for once, that’d be great.

• We’ll wrap up the week with seven-piece jazz/Afrobeat band Kokoroko and their new one, Tuff Times Never Last! The single, “Sweetie,” is “a salute to West African disco music from the ’80s/’90s,” so yes, it sounds like something Sade would listen to while she’s getting a foot rub. No brains required here, but it’s nice, sure.

Madison McFerrin, Scorpio (Madmcferrin Music)

As everyone who’s ever paid the slightest bit of attention to pop music mythology knows, the best albums come after romantic breakups. That, I’m informed, is the case with this one, but you wouldn’t know it by its smoky, torchy, breezy and ultimately upbeat vibe. As you’d guess, Madison is the daughter of Bobby McFerrin of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” fame, a sentiment that applies here as far as I’m concerned, but in a much more nuanced, sensual, tech-soulful manner, a la Erykah Badu, if you know who that is (if you don’t, think Anita Baker in fully unlocked mellow mode with a focus on loop-driven acid jazz). Regret and pain and such are part of the lyrical template, yes, but again, it’s meant more as gentle escape for recent divorcees and dumpees, not maudlin Adele epicness for those who feel a need to dwell in what-might-have-beens; it’s quite soothing. If you’re planning ahead, she’ll be at De La Luz in Holyoke, Mass., on Oct. 19, and Space in Portland, Maine, on Oct. 20. A+

Butthole Surfers, Live At The Leather Fly (Sunset Blvd Records)

To the guy who was giving me crap all last year for “covering too much mainstream stuff” (he’s literally been the only one ever [eye-roll emoji]): this oughta make you happy. I’ve always hated this San Antonio, Texas-based psych-punk band’s name more than any of you people do, trust me, but its way-over-the-top weirdness has absolutely earned these guys a star on some Rock ‘n’ Roll Walk Of Fame somewhere; at this point, leaving them out of any non-commercial-rock conversation would be like pretending the Sex Pistols never happened, so let’s just not. Bandleader Gibby Haynes and his boys offered a unique brand of bizarrely skewed but somehow addictive tuneage that often conjured Jello Biafra babbling over your uncle’s garage band as recorded by an answering machine, but it was somehow irresistible. This live set (recorded someplace that’s still unidentified; the “Leather Fly” was a Gibby in-joke) kicks off with a wacky version of “Graveyard” from their 1987 LP, which was when I boarded their victory train to nowhere; it’s an album I’d still tell anyone on Earth to listen to until they like it. What a mess here, but a glorious one. A

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• This Friday is the Fourth of July, are you drunk yet? I should be, because what am I supposed to be talking about this week, like, what kind of lunatic releases an album on the Fourth of July, when they know full well that anyone who actually buys albums rather than pirate all their music through all those totally suss but workable YouTube-To-MP3 sites will be drunk that day? OK, I expected a bunch of new albums to be released this week on odd days that weren’t Friday the Fourth, but no, I’ve had to go hunting around to find enough albums to fill up this space, because according to Metacritic there’s literally only one more-or-less-notable LP streeting this week, so I suppose I’ll have to do some actual work this week, to find stuff, but for the moment we’ll jump into this horror with Period, the latest from Kesha! Now, not that Kesha’s stuff is distinguishable from half the bling-divas who emerged during the Aughts, but in her defense, she’s something of a survivor, having spent her childhood living in actual poverty, as opposed to the non-actual poverty Billie Eilish was originally purported to have suffered. Then of course was the kerfuffle with her producer Dr. Luke, who allegedly was an abusive lunatic. What does all this mean? Not much, it just means that I’m willing to give Kesha five seconds to impress me with the album’s newest single, “Boy Crazy!” So, it’s got a sort of trance-meets-hip-hop vibe with a side of Mr. Roboto, and the hook is nothing more than a Millennial Whoop bit, which I thought had gone out of style five or 10 years ago, but whatever, all the power to her, I suppose. The video features her lusting after basically every type of guy, including older guys, a growing trend among younger women that I endorse wholeheartedly. She’ll be at the Xfinity Center in Mansfield, Mass., on July 24.

• Like I said earlier, very few albums are being released this Friday, but we can play a little catch-up by talking about Atlanta rapper-singer Lazer Dim 700’s new album, Sins Aloud, which came out on Tuesday, July 1. Lazer, whose real name is Devokeyous Keyshawn Hamilton, is renowned for his breathless ad-lib rhyming, a fetish for primordial 808 beats and bringing a lot of fun to his art (for example, last year’s single “Injoyable” is propelled by a sample of Spongebob Squarepants’ laugh). New single “Undalay” is pretty weird itself, with its drum-less, woozy, Lewis Carroll-redolent beat; in the video, Hamilton spits at top speed (he’s been rapping since second grade, by the way) while fondling stacks of hundred-dollar bills. No tour coming for the moment; last year he was at Boston’s Middle East, in case you were wondering whether he’s “legit underground.”

• Let’s see, what else. On July 3, London, U.K.-based indie-rockers Double Virgo release Shakedown, which is their first full-length, I believe (the two principals, Sam Fenton and Jezmi Tarik Fehmi, also play in the band Bar Italia). I was really impressed by the single “Bemused,” which combines drunken pub-indie/oi with art rock.

• And finally, Pitchfork Media tells me we have a new record from another Londoner, Nilüfer Yanya, namely the Dancing Shoes EP, which came out on Wednesday, July 2! The single, “Where To Look,” is more upbeat and tribal-sounding (she grew up on Turkish music) than your average Chappell Roan tune. She’ll play three shows in Massachusetts (one at the Drake in Amherst and two at the Roadrunner in Boston) from Sept. 9 through Sept. 11.

Frankie Cosmos, Different Talking (Sub Pop Records)

In nepo baby news, this New York-bred singer (real name Greta Kline, daughter of actors Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates) specializes in sleepy bedroom pop, more specifically early-Aughts “anti-folk,” the twee-ish sort of stuff that made up half the Juno soundtrack (I still love the line in that movie when Elliot Page said Sonic Youth sucks, so I was ready to hand this record a hall pass despite its being nothing I’d ever voluntarily listen to). This new LP brings nothing too much new to that formula, which will certainly please its 30-to-40-something target demographic. Lots of waifish moonbat warbling that’s lighter than air and equally substantive, but sure, a lot of it is pretty, for example “Vanity,” which was born for Cape Cod fashion-boutique loudspeakers and shows signs that she’s grown somewhat. Things like “Pressed Flower” are more along Belle & Sebastian lines. She’ll be at Brighton Music Hall in Boston on Sept. 19. A

Durand Jones & The Indications, Flowers (Colemine Records)

If you want to capture the essence of 1970s soul-disco this summer (and there’s no better time for it, of course), look no further than this record, put forth by a band whose songwriting core consists of former students at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, who obviously put tuneage from period contemporary radio-R&B bands like Four Tops and The Spinners under an electron microscope in a fevered push to synthesize it. Melodically it’s top drawer, with “Lover’s Holiday”’s instantly accessible cool-breeze vibe evoking convertible cars cruising through beach-town streets as the crowd starts ambling back to its hotels. “Flower Moon” is even more accurate, nicking the lazy horn-driven steez of Chicago’s “Only The Beginning” exquisitely; any ’70s kid would swear they’d heard it somewhere before. If you were looking for something to inspire you to drive to the beach, this is exactly it. They’ll be at Citizens House of Blues in Boston on Sept. 26. A

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• We continue not to be safe from new albums, and a bunch more of them are coming on Friday, June 27, which is World Diabetes Day, so if you eat any American food at all that day you’re being as tradition-conscious as a Dropkick Murphys T-shirt on St. Patrick’s Day and I salute you. It is the last Friday of June, and with the Fourth of July drinking-contest date in the works and car-backseat mating season in full swing, many famous rock stars want to be part of your summer memories/nightmares, so let’s go, open the gates and let all those new albums loose, into the stores and Napsters, look at ’em go, running around like it’s the Deerfield Fair’s pig scramble, let me just grab one of those little rascals with my snark-lasso! Jeepers, there are so many it’s like shooting whales in a barrel, I’ve got one already, and it’s squealing its head off, right in my face! Yikes, it’s an ornery one, this album, the new one from Japanese kawaii-metal influencers Babymetal! Maybe you somehow don’t know what this band is, so let me explain to all three of you: Imagine three 20-year-old girls dressed like anime princesses but their miniskirts are leather, and they’re singing and dancing like Destiny’s Child to really fast thrash-metal music, sort of like early Poppy when she was relevant (and in fact they’ve done a feat-or-vice versa with her). If they were Pokemon they’d be named Waifuta, Waifutite and Waifutatta, identical triplets who are all easily captured using sleep attacks, but if you had to catch them to win Pokemon Go, you’d have to get past friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny, who thinks they’re so awesome that he guards them like a hairy Charizard, so that his daughter will always have them available for consultation when she eventually inherits this column from me, after WMUR-TV finally taps me to become the on-air replacement for Fritz Wetherbee and once she’s mastered the art of long sentences! This is an exciting time for our totally corporate-manufactured trio, with their new album Metal Forth heading to your earbuds, led by a tune called “From Me To U,” which sounds like a cross between Black Veil Brides and the Beyblade cartoon’s theme song, you have to hear it to believe it, folks!

• But then again, maybe you don’t like anime metal and prefer instead to trash your eardrums the old-fashioned way, not with digitally neutered nu-metal guitars but with 60-year-old Fender Stratocasters played though analog guitar amps cranked to 11, in which case you’ll be glad to know that Motörhead is also releasing a new album on Friday, titled The Manticore Tapes! This recently unearthed set features the band’s original “three amigos” lineup playing all sorts of loud Motörhead-y proto-punk songs, including an early demo version of the band’s flagship track, “Motörhead!”This is exactly the type of album you want to crank in your bedroom if your sister keeps ignoring the sign on your door that says “Positively No Admittance, Please Take Note!”

• You remember when New Zealand’s Lorde was important, after her big single “Royals” and her dreary cover of “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” for the Hunger Games: Catching Fire soundtrack, right? Well guess what, her new album is here, headed up by the single “What Was That,” a Chappell Roan-inspired hormone-booster about having a lousy boyfriend, unless it’s about something else (it never is).

• Finally it’s New York City-based alternative-rockers Blonde Redhead with their latest full-length Shadow Of The Guest! Includes the tune “Before,” a nice-enough twee tune with a children’s chorus singing along for some reason.

The New Eves, The New Eve is Rising

Couple of advance singles from this U.K.-based all-female art-whatever band; I wanted to get to this before I forgot, not because the band’s upcoming (Aug. 1) full-length LP The New Eve Is Rising is a “who’s who”-level release, more of a “what the hell is that” that I think your super-awkward roommate should know about so she takes a break from talking to you. Weird, edgy recipe here: Visuals from the Flower Power era but with one foot firmly planted in The Blair Witch Project (seriously, go look); ritualistic, sometimes polyrhythmic chant-along tuneage that’s borderline tuneless unless you’re into Rasputina when she’s in certifiably crazy mode — I’m sure this stuff is inspired by some sort of goth-faire band or some such, but either way these girls are alright. The video for the flute- and Peavey-plugged guitar-driven “Rivers Run Red” looks like found footage of the Manson girls before they did their thing and it does fit, even their gobbling bowls of strawberries and dancing their pagan crook-leg summoning of Cthulhu or whatnot. “Highway Man” isn’t as nutty, more or less combining No Nos with Romeo Void. The Go-Go’s on acid is the bullet version. B

The Wildmans, “Highway Man”/”Rivers Run Red” (Transgressive Records)

I have a Twitter friend I absolutely adore, an Appalachian-bred woman who was adopted into a hilariously hardscrabble life and is nowadays chugging right along with a career in political knowledge work. She inspired me to take Appalachian folk music seriously, and it’s a genre I’ve come to like quite a bit, which brings us directly to this brother-sister act from the lush hills of a burg called Floyd, Virginia, population 449. They’re on the way up, having already shared stages with Bela Fleck, Billy Strings and Steep Canyon Rangers, not a bad resumé given that they’re in their early 20s. Guitarist/mandolinist Elisha has a Linda Ronstadt quality to her voice, a good match for these stubbornly country songs as well as the harmonizing of her fiddle-playing brother Aila, who won the 2018 Best All Around Performer award at the Galax Old Fiddlers Convention in their home state. Lots of depth and prettiness to be found here, primarily focused on balladry, I didn’t hear any cutting-loose here but there’s plenty of time. A

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, June 20, will bring us, guess what, new albums, because that’s what Fridays do for us, whether we need new albums or not. The number of albums released by humans is now in the trillions of gorillions, but our appetite for new albums cannot ever be sated, because we instinctively know that a trillion monkeys putting out a trillion albums in the 2020s will, by anyone’s logic, eventually result in an album that’s just great and awesome without being derivative, and no, I’m not referring to Chappell Roan, because all she really did was gussy up top-drawer Madonna/TayTay-style tuneage with Ed Banger beats, which I told you people in February, but did you listen for yourselves to find out I’m right? Mind you, if you’re in a band and trying to write new songs, it’s almost impossible not to be the teensiest bit derivative; when I was putting out records with my own punk-metal band years ago, I tried to force-feed myself music that I wouldn’t have normally listened to in the hope that it’d somehow influence my punk-metal music, which is really how you should really approach songwriting if you have a serious band with record label interest (in case you didn’t know, that’s all Led Zeppelin did when they started, rip off Willie Dixon et al. songs from the early ’60s). At the time, a really old DJ dude had given me a big box of 45-rpm singles from the 1970s, including Kool & The Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” — this was before the tune became famous for its inclusion in the Pulp Fiction soundtrack — and I listened to that nonsense constantly, hoping that all that weird antique disco stuff would worm into my brain and influence my punk-metal songs and — oh, you guys don’t care about this, except for the serious musicians out there, you just want to hear about the latest news from totally derivative artists like Cardi B or Vanilla Ice or whatever you’re doing here, let me go look at the list and see if there’s anything that isn’t horribly derivative and/or generally stupid, fat chance, let me look. OK, here we go, let’s start with the three sisters who comprise the soft-rock band Haim, and I’ll try not to ruin everything by mentioning that they’re basically the Zoomer version of Fleetwood Mac, because they don’t like when people do that, so stop thinking about Fleetwood Mac you guys, come on. Their new LP is called I Quit and features the fun little single “Down To Be Wrong,” which totally doesn’t sound like Fleetwood Mac at all except for the Lindsay Buckingham guitar parts, the carefully sculpted ’70s harmonies, and the subtle country-pop aroma to it that you only detect on Fleetwood Mac songs, look, just forget it, I need you guys to knock it off right this minute.

• English alt-rock singer Yungblud claims to have been “diagnosed with ADHD at a young age,” but in my opinion ADHD is a sign of normality in our TikTok world. His new album Idols is here and starts with “Lovesick Lullaby,” a cross between Eminem and Blur. It’s very cool and totally completely a derivative mashup, let’s move on.

• Straight-laced pop-rocker Benson Boone wisely left the 2021 American Idol competition before the show’s vapid judge-monsters voted him out for sounding like a lame version of Billy Squier. American Heart, his new album, spotlights “Young American Heart,” a tune that evinces his talent for totally not ripping off Bryan Adams, OK, it does, but that’s fine by me, next.

• Lastly, like any band that’s on Third Man Records, New York City’s Hotline TNT has a story about the time hamburger-addict Jack White decided to sign them. Their forthcoming full-length Raspberry Moon includes “Julia’s War,” which takes their usual shoegaze-ish formula and retrofits it with Foo Fighters-ness. Real dumb video, but hey.