Category: Pop

Strings and Superman

Five for Fighting orchestral comes to town

By Michael Witthaus

mwitthaus@hippopress.com

Fittingly given their moniker, when Five For Fighting’s 2000 single “Easy Tonight” stalled in the charts, its leader decided to be bold in choosing a radio follow-up from their album America Town. The result was the biggest hit of their career, a milestone that’s still reverberating today.

“I figured if I was going to go down, might as well go down swinging with a song I truly believe in,” John Ondrasik said in a recent Zoom call from his home in Southern California. The tune was “Superman (It’s Not Easy),” and it turned a then-obscure singer-songwriter with a hockey penalty for a band name into a star.

Piano ballads weren’t much of a thing at the time, but he was undeterred after their first try did just well enough to earn a second shot.

“The record company said, ‘Well, what song would you want to put out?’ and I said, Superman,” he recalled. “Because I had a sense that it could hit the heart.”

He was right, and when 9/11 happened the next year, the song became part of the national vocabulary.

On Friday, Sept. 25, Ondrasik, backed by four top-shelf string players pulled largely from Broadway pits, performs at BNH Stage in Concord. He plans a stripped-down evening of music drawing from a catalog that includes “100 Years,” “The Riddle,” “World” and of course the song that launched him.

It’s his second New England fall run in as many years, following a 2025 stretch the native Californian still marvels about.

“I haven’t had a lot of experience with the fall turn,” he said of New England’s foliage. “It was just stunning. So we said, let’s do another run, and instead of doing three weeks we’re doing five or six.”

How Ondrasik went from solo singer-songwriter to a name that gets him lots of free hockey tickets is a fun story.

When he signed a major label deal in the mid-’90s, a suit there told him Elton John and Billy Joel types didn’t fly in the era of boy bands, grunge and Lilith Fair. He needed something else on the marquee. Ondrasik had just watched Wayne Gretzky’s enforcer, Marty McSorley, rack up two five-minute fighting majors at an L.A. Kings game.

A bit miffed at the exec’s suggestion, he tossed off the phrase half-sarcastically, expecting it to be rejected, only to hear an enthusiastic reply. “I’m like, ‘you’re crazy,’” Ondrasik recalled. Those early years bore out his belief, as he was sometimes mistakenly booked as a metal act, and looked like a piano man lost in the mosh pit.

He’s come to like it over time. “There’s some silver linings to the name … it also keeps the focus on the music.”

The string-quartet format grew out of full-orchestra symphony dates Ondrasik couldn’t take to smaller markets, so 15 years ago he scaled the arrangements down to four players, and he still alternates between that in the fall and winter months, taking a full rock band on the road in summer.
It lets him dig into catalog deep cuts like “Devil in the Wishing Well” and “Two Lights,” and reframe hits like “100 Years” and “Chances” in a more intimate, storytelling setting. His favorite part of the night happens when he hands it over to the band. “I kind of just walk off stage and let them jam,” he said. “They always get a standing ovation.”

The current lineup includes Tony-winning violinist Katie Kresek, Melissa Tong, Chris Cardona and Peter Sachon. The band is drawn from a rotating pool of about eight or nine Broadway and session veterans Ondrasik met through longtime producer Greg Wattenberg and Dave Eggar, who’s both a master cellist and piano player.

“They love rock ’n’ roll, and, frankly, not playing the same piece of music eight days a week in a pit,” he said.

Opening the Concord show is Lace & Lee, a folk duo Ondrasik is happy to gush about, as it includes his daughter, Olivia. She joins him onstage most nights for a song of her own.

“Touring with [her] is pretty wonderful,” he said. “The whole quartet, everybody just enjoys them, and I think the audiences too are in for a treat.”

Five For Fighting with String Quartet
When: Friday, Sept. 25, at 7:30 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $67 and up at ccanh.com

Featured Photo: Courtesy photo.

Album Reviews 26/09/24

The Church, Lacuna (Cooking Vinyl Records)

U.S. rock fans will — or more likely won’t — know this Australian gloom-pop band from their million-selling tune “Under The Milky Way” from their 1988 album Starfish, their only full-length to go gold here. Bassist Steve Kilbey’s unremarkable but goth-sounding baritone matched up nicely with their then-competitors U2 and The Cure and it’s still in fine fettle as proved in this record’s opening song “Lumbini Grove,” at least once it gets going anyway; the band has tried to avoid being pigeonholed as a Cure/Echo & The Bunneymen wannabe for pretty much their entire history, and to accomplish that, they’ve largely eschewed common song structures, insisting on padding their stuff with melodic, atmospheric dada as found in the first couple of minutes of this new track (which only accomplishes delaying the inevitable bummer-pop vibe, which isn’t to say it’s a bad song at all; indeed, it’s strummy and catchy and important-sounding; I’m saying it would have benefitted from having no intro at all). All told, there’s not a lot to dislike here; some reviewers consider this record one of their best, and at the very least they’ve been consistently active, taking no more than eight years between albums over their 46-year oeuvre, which definitely counts for something. A —Eric W. Saeger

Ibibio Sound Machine, Chopping Mountain (Merge Records)

If you always wanted more than a little Afrobeat authenticity with your Moby/Massive Attack-related techno, this London, U.K.-based outfit is your ticket. Interspersing such sounds as West African highlife, post-punk, Afrobeat, soul and electronic music, this stuff is as frenetic and crazy-busy as it is unpredictable and interesting; the eight-piece collective is led by Nigerian singer Eno Williams, whose life’s mission is obviously to direct the world to a more positive place through infectious dance grooves. This is their sixth LP, produced this time at their own Vanguard Studios; it’s an all-in, team-collaborative record that follows the darker disco/club-focused Pull The Rope and, before that, Electricity, which was produced by renowned synthpop heroes Hot Chip. Despite the jam-out origins of the songs, there’s real precision to them, indicating that parts didn’t end up making the cut by slim vote margins; whether they’re on a dancehall tip, trying to evoke glitter-ball energy or ramming a loop into your head, it all works exquisitely. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• And here it is, the last CD release Friday of September, this one, Sept. 25! Of course, in current music news, the thing that’s been virally abuzz on social media lately (unless it’s not by the time you’re reading this) has been Ed Sheeran’s dropping Macklemore from his 2026 tour — including the Boston-area show at Gillette Stadium this very Friday — at the behest of promoters, owing to a political statement Macklemore made onstage, that is unless Sheeran has the good sense to cancel the tour, which would cost him between $60 million and $100 million (he’s worth around $400 million now, so I suppose his decision ultimately hinges on how many 100-foot yachts he’d ideally like to own). Naturally I’ll not weigh in on the sociopolitical nitroglycerine in this space, but that’s mostly because since the story broke I’ve continued to be more flummoxed about Sheeran’s mass appeal than anything else. It’s always puzzled me; as I expressed on “my socials” the other week, I consider him to be “the most overrated musician since Gogg the Neanderthal found himself worshipped tribe-wide for his ability to smack a mastodon skull with a log four times in a row,” which isn’t to say that he doesn’t write catchy-ish songs that are relevant to members of today’s young, criminally underserved generation; it simply echoes the complaint lodged by many others in my business, that, for starters, he can’t sing for beans. Now, would I cut him any slack if he could sing for beans? Possibly yes, a little, but if he were indeed some sort of momentously talented mega-diva I expect he would have told the promoters to go bake themselves in a pie and demanded that things be done according to the original plan way before he sensed he was about to get into any hot water from the Twitter masses, and besides, didn’t Sheeran ask for it in the first place, what with all the controversy Macklemore’s drummed up previously? But let’s leave that to stew in its own rancid juices and move on to other, far less radioactive things, starting with the new album from French techno-shoegaze band M83, titled I Wrote You A Letter! Let me mention first to all you smarty-pants whippersnappers that I was into these guys before most of you were, having added their 2008 sort-of-hit “Graveyard Girl” to a few of my personal mixtapes, but I certainly didn’t think “Kim & Jessie” was the greatest thing since sliced bread like Pitchfork did; quite the contrary. In fact their new single “Blister Sunrise” was my first exposure to them in many uninterested moons for good reason. The tune isn’t much of a game-changer, making like an overproduced Raveonettes-style shoegaze dirge, but sure, it’s fine.

• Speaking of politics and stuff but oh let’s not, Rage Against The Machine frontman Tom Morello checks in this week with a solo album, Everyone Gets Everything They Want! “Date Night,” the single, starts off with some bullhorned spoken word, then moving on to a Pennywise-punk verse, all without the banshee-screechy vocal gimmick he’s most known for. I’d recommend buying literally any Ministry album instead, but it’s your money.

• Neo-soul singer Leon Bridges keeps his steamy tradition going with Happiness Anytime, his fifth full-length. The title track is low-key sexy and sublime, irresistible stuff.

• We’ll end the week with Australian indie-folk singer Julia Jacklin and her fourth album, The Gem. The leadoff single, “Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon),” is Sheryl Crow-ish but much more worthwhile than that. She’ll be in Boston at the Royale on Nov. 20. —Eric W. Saeger

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

Featured Photo: The Church, Lacuna & Ibibio Sound Machine, Chopping.

More of that

Alan Ritchson is always good for an Alan Ritchson type

Playing into that one character you always play might not be the way to blaze a path to an Oscar, but it does seem to be a good strategy for earning a regular paycheck.

Take, for example, Alan Ritchson, traveling butt-kicker Reacher in the Prime Video series Reacher. In addition to playing a large man who has a code and beats up bad guys in that series (which ends its fourth season this week; a fifth season is expected, according to Wikipedia), Ritchson plays a large man who has a code and beats up bad guys in Runner, released in theaters last week, less than two months after the release of Motor City, another movie where he plays a large man who has a code and beats up bad guys.

Hank (Ritchson), who has a “big guy” name, as Owen Wilson’s Ben says, is a courier, running things both legal and legal-status-unknown around Brisbane, Australia, where he lives and works on his sobriety. He is charged with picking up a medical package at the airport, which is where he meets Ben, who explains that he, Ben, is part of the medical package. The item is a secured cooler keeping a liver viable for a sad little girl who needs a new liver and Ben is the guy who knows how to keep it at the right temperature and knows the code to open it.

Things immediately start to go wrong with this assignment as Hank realizes that he and the aggressively chatty Ben are being followed by two SUVs full of bad guys. Soon the shooting and car chasing and occasionally some punching and kicking get underway as Hank and Ben try to race the organ to an out-of-town hospital before it loses viability while a cartel boss’s desperate, sweaty son (Rodrigo Santoro) attempts to hijack it for his mother’s own use.

Just to really hammer home that all of the violence Hank and Ben participate in is For A Good Cause, we see the sick kid and her mother regularly and we spend a little too much screentime on Hank’s sad backstory with his own sad sick daughter. And if that doesn’t do it for you, the movie really underlines the Extreme Danger and Extreme Heroism by scoring a lot of the action with music that feels like it was maybe left over from some Angel Studios’ biblical epic’s battlefield scenes. (Angel, which I know largely for its Christian and Christian-adjacent films, is this movie’s distributor and apparently has also started to release some less overtly faith-based movies. TBD on what all that means.)

Not unlike other movies I talk about here, Runner piles on a lot of unnecessary story elements for its characters — Santoro’s character has a difficult relationship with his mother! Hank is still sad about his failed marriage! These little extras aren’t needed because this movie’s core — overly talkative regular-guy Ben and strong silent type Hank — is very charming. They have good “guys who become buddies doing a task” chemistry, their respective skills help give energy and the right amount of humor to the action scenes. When the movie just gets out of their way, turns down the score and lets them do their things — Ritchson’s Reacher variant, Wilson’s Owen Wilson variant — we in the audience get the fun popcorn time the trailer promises.

In July theatrical release Motor City (available for rent or purchase), Ritchson, playing Vietnam vet and lunch-box-toting factory worker John Miller, is less crackling but still fun to watch. This action-revenge movie of few words lets 1970s production design, costuming and songs do most of the talking. Moments after Miller proposes to girlfriend Sophia (Shailene Woodley), cops are blasting smoke bombs into their home. Sophia and Miller end up under arrest, with police pulling bricks of cocaine out of his car, the car that hours earlier was briefly stolen from him. As we see in flashbacks, before she was with Miller, Sophia was the girlfriend of drug muckety muck Reynolds (Ben Foster) and now Reynolds, with the help of dirty cop Savick (Pablo Schreiber), is getting Miller out of the way. Miller goes to jail and Reynolds goes to Sophia, re-endearing himself to the woman who felt so betrayed by Miller. When she discovers Reynolds’ treachery and he gets violent, Miller’s friends (played by Lionel Boyce and Amar Chadha-Patel) break Miller out of prison to rescue Sophia.

Motor City is aggressive about its stylishness, from its slo-mo-enhanced action choreographed to Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” to every choice made with Woodley’s hair. It is very self-consciously Doing A Thing, which I found entertaining mostly and kind of endearing even when it felt like it tipped into A Little Much territory (which for me was when “Nights in White Satin” appeared on the soundtrack). For me, this movie boiled down to the appeal of Alan Ritchson and how he dances through his fight scenes with balletic precision, taking just enough punches so we don’t think he’s a robot.

Ritchson, of course, isn’t the only actor playing his standard character and serving up action in recent releases.

Ryan Reynolds plays that one Ryan Reynolds character who is here a fighter pilot during the Top Gun-era Cold War in Mayday, an Apple TV movie. Troy (Reynolds) is tasked with operating the camera on a spy mission over Soviet territory. When his plane is shot down, he winds up behind enemy lines and is found by Nikolai (Kenneth Branagh), an American-culture-loving former KGB agent who insists on Troy calling him “Nik” and is delighted to have real-life Maverick in his house. When Troy nixes Nik’s suggestion that they just wait out the end of the Cold War safely in Nik’s cabin, the two have to work together to get Troy to safety without Nik being arrested for being a traitor. Chasing them down is Volkov (Marcin Dorocinski), a glasnost-hating KGB agent hoping to use this situation to return the U.S.S.R. to its former hardline glory.

That all of these characters seem more naive than they should be for who they are is probably my biggest beef with this otherwise good-natured, goofy caper-like movie. There is some silliness to the “Russians are people, just like us!” elements of Troy’s journey. But Branagh’s heft helps to cut Reynolds’ patter-based glibness and the result is a highly watchable light bit of comedy.

Also playing his one character is Jason Statham in Mutiny, an August release that showed up last week on VOD for rent or purchase. Statham is Cole Reed, a former British military guy and also former British cop who is now the bodyguard for a shipping magnate Tibu (Ramon Tikaram), who treats Cole like family and buys him a fancy watch and is the stand-in for Cole’s cop father, who died during a police raid or something and Cole feels responsible and this is way too much backstory for a movie that was trying to sell itself by boasting it had the same director as Plane. Plane got right to the Plane of it all. Mutiny takes too long to get us in an actual ship on the actual water. The action kicks off on dry land when Tibu, who is about to sell his company, is ambushed. Cole nearly gets him to safety but Tibu is shot and has just enough time to say “take care of my crappy adult son” (not an exact quote) before dying. Cole then seeks the men who killed his beloved employer, which leads him to sneaking onto a cargo ship. Also on the ship is Angie (Annabelle Wallis), the third mate, who has her own irrelevant backstory. These are the good guys on the ship; everybody else (captain played by Roland Møller plus a bunch of henchmen I couldn’t keep straight) is a bad guy. What Cole and Angie, separately at first and then together, discover is that the ship is part of a human trafficking operation and some of the refugees aboard this particular ship are in dire need of medical attention. To get the help they need, Cole and Angie will need to kick, punch, shoot and stab their way through the bad guys.

There is one particularly fun scene of balletic hand-to-hand combat featuring Statham near the movie’s end. It stood out to me for how much more interesting it was than most of the action that preceded it. Statham does a lot of his Statham thing but the movie doesn’t have the fun this kind of action-focused affair should have. We are watching Mutiny for Mutiny, and all that implies in terms of sassy one-liners and creative violence, not a rumination on father-son relationships and not a study of the different ways human traffickers can be bad. A movie like this can put its characters in scary settings with bad people, and those characters should take it seriously, but the movie where a guy fights another guy with a giant hook shouldn’t take itself so seriously or weigh itself down.

I feel like recent Amazon Prime Video release The Runner also had action-entertainment potential, but it just doesn’t work, I think this is in part because the movie has no faith in itself or in lead Gal Gadot. In a movie that feels like smooshed together bits of other movies, Gadot plays Maia, a London prosecutor and single mom to diabetic kid Noah (Rory Wilmot). She drops her son off at school and then goes on a run before a big day in court where she’s meant to question the one witness who can put away the criminal on trial. Early in her run, she gets a call on Noah’s phone from a man (Damian Lewis) saying he has Noah and needs her to do exactly what he says if she wants to see her son alive again. Naturally, the task is killing the witness and she has about an hour to run a needlessly far distance to his hotel (no Uber in London?) and get the job done before Noah dies of the diabetic coma Damian Lewis (called simply “The Caller” on IMDb) has put him in.

Most of the action is Maia running through the city while talking to Damian. Along the way she tries to figure out how to tell someone what’s happening. This story feels like a copy of a copy of some similar movie that would have starred, for example, Jason Statham, but the movie never figures out a clear lane to stick to — is Damian Lewis a creepy sadist who gets his kicks from this or a professional just doing a task? Is Maia just a regular-lady mom trying to save her son or does she have some weird violent past? Or is Gal Gadot just so unsuited for this part, however well she might physically sell the action elements, that the movie doesn’t know how to compose her character? I vote for that option. One of the many signs of the movie’s total lack of faith in Gadot is the strange close-ups, shaky cams, slo-mos and other camera effects applied to Gadot, particularly in scenes where you might need an actor to convey an emotion. You get the sense that either Gadot couldn’t portray, like, panic or rage, or the moviemakers decided to add the character’s emotions in post. Either way, it highlights the overall limpness of her performance and adds to the “cheap story told cheaply” feel of the whole endeavor.

Featured photo: Motor City.

The Jellyfish Problem, by Tessa Yang

(Berkley, 373 pages)

You’d never know it from the title, but Tessa Yang’s The Jellyfish Problem is a good, old-fashioned ghost story, the kind to lose yourself in on chilly weekends in October when you’re not out pumpkin spicing or leaf peeping. It’s a bit fantastical, as ghost stories usually are, and asks us to care a bit too much about an invertebrate that lacks a brain and heart. But this is a mystery/thriller informed by marine science, and we will learn about jellyfish whether we want to or not. The author, Tessa Yang, clearly intends for us to appreciate jellyfish more after reading her debut novel, but that may not be the effect.

Dr. Jo Ness is a marine biologist who has been obsessed with jellyfish since childhood, when she came across one at the beach and admired “a raw gray thing slouched on the sand like an angel’s lung dropped from heaven.” All grown up now, she worked her way into a job at a struggling aquarium where she tends jellyfish in the first, tiny stages of life while working on a book about jellyfish with her best friend — a brash South American scientist named Aldo who has a remarkable resistance to animal venom.

Jo, who always said she liked jellyfish more than people, made an exception for Aldo, but he died in a scuba accident seven months ago, and Jo is still mourning. They were diving together but became separated in poor visibility, and Jo is wracked by the sense that she was responsible for Aldo’s death.

His loss was the second blow since she finished college: The first was becoming estranged from her college best friend, Nadia, a woman with whom she thought she had the makings of a romantic relationship. But Nadia went AWOL after commencement and they haven’t spoken in 11 years. She knows nothing about Jo’s current life other than that she had been obsessed with jellyfish. Then she unexpectedly calls and tells Jo she is living on an island off the coast of Maine and that they have a “jellyfish problem.”

Nadia doesn’t offer much more information and admits she hasn’t seen the creature herself. But Jo, listless and miserable since Aldo’s death, has plenty of accrued leave and books a cross-country flight, interested not only in the mysterious jellyfish but also in the possibility of rekindling her relationship with Nadia, or at least learning why it abruptly ended.

What she finds there, however, is nothing she expected. Nadia is happily married and nowhere to be found. The jellyfish is singular, not plural. It is said to be a massive, brightly colored, luminescent creature that appears for three days at the time of the full moon and has a strange effect on the locals who see it. They regard the jellyfish as not a fascinating object of study but a literal sea monster, the kind that Jo’s Japanese mother used to tell her stories about when she was a child.

Complicating matters is the geographic isolation of Shattering Point, “800 acres of spruce forest and granite shorelines and bracing, choppy waters that deter all but the gutsiest swimmers.” Twenty-two miles off the Maine coast, the island is reachable by ferry twice a week, but only during the summer season. Other times, to get on or off the island, you have to take an air taxi or catch a ride with the mail boat, which only goes out once a week.

Even though the island relies on tourists during the summer, Jo is not universally welcomed. Some of the islanders are hostile to her, and as she tries to find Nadia and unravel the mystery of the jellyfish, which the people of Shattering Point call Clementine, there is a bitter divide about what should be done about the jellyfish. The danger is not exaggerated or imagined: People are physically affected by even seeing Clementine, and one man has to be hospitalized.

That said, Clementine is not the ghost of this story, but an apparition that Jo begins seeing, which she understands to be a yōkai, a supernatural being that her mother used to tell her about.

The relationship Jo has with her mother is one of the many layers in the story: Her father, who used serve as an intermediary of sorts between mother and daughter, is dead, and their relationship is both distant and fraught, in part because the mother is resistant to her daughter’s sexual orientation and had been hoping that Jo would marry Aldo.

Each chapter of The Jellyfish Problem begins with an excerpt of the book that Jo and Aldo were writing, which serves not only to only impart jellyfish information but also to give us a glimpse of the closeness between the two. The conversation in the document’s editing notes grows poignant over time, and Jo begins to speak to her dead friend in editing mode, as if hoping he could see it. It’s a small but smart thing that Yang does to break up a novel that can feel overly long at times, especially when the suspension of disbelief is called for repeatedly.

When the explanation of everything arrives, it is — well, let’s just go with unusual: perhaps not wholly satisfying, but consistent with the novel’s intelligent foundation and supernatural overlay. The quirkiness of the story, however, is eclipsed by the gorgeous writing. Yang has the voice of a poet and hardly a page goes by without some elegant sentence construction that makes you take note of its grace. Give her bonus points, also, for assigning a cameo role to the University of New Hampshire. Wildcats beat jellyfish every time. A

Featured Photo: The Jellyfish Problem, by Tessa Yang

Album Reviews 26/09/17

Josiah Queen, Mt. Zion (Capitol Records)

Some weeks I take ’em as they come, and even though I reviewed the new Stryper album just a couple of weeks ago, another Christian rock album gets an ups today, the newest (it’s from last year but his people want me to talk about it, and I’m an easy mark today) from a 23-year-old Christian rocker from Florida who’s had two albums go platinum. I’m not religious at all but do have a weakness for Christian rock (I told you before about that live version of Brandon Lake’s “Resurrection Power” that’s so awesome I can barely stand it, even if I suspect it’s a ripoff of something decent from Creed, not that I’ve heard more than two Creed songs, the second of which only insulted my ears because I was accidentally watching wrestling). Before we proceed, I think this kid’s name is hilarious, like I’ll bet that in the 1970s half the garage bands in America thought about naming themselves “Josiah Queen” and may have even mocked up a logo, but musically this particular Josiah is big into Zach Bryan on the cool-breeze heartland-banjo-rock side and Mumfords and Kings of Leon on the arena-bombast side. It’s all awesome, and, I’m sure, like all Christian rock, blatantly stolen from different places, but hey man, the good kids do deserve their heroes, I suppose. Oh, and yup, my aforementioned home-dog Lake sings on here too (“Can’t Steal My Joy”). A

Kevin Sun, Kevin Sun I/Kevin Sun II (Endectomorph Music)

A lot of self-exploratory artistry for a bro to process here, in the form of two simultaneously released albums and you can just belay the snark about the economic sense of releasing two separate discs as opposed to a single two-disc digipak because I don’t want to hear it. In fact, this jazz saxophonist knows you were going to open your yap about it, and his excuse is that, and I quote, “it’s more like a pair of video games set in the same universe, each with its own style and cast of characters.” Regardless, we can cut him some slack, firstly because each disc has a different threesome backing the man (led by pianist Christian Li on the more reflective II and guitarist Max Light on far more animated I), and secondly because the guy’s a genius, pulling stunts like hammering a waltz into a busy 4/4 (Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Chanson”) and wedding ever-increasing tension to ever widening thickness in the aptly titled “Hold Music.” One not to miss. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Onward we trudge into the yawning black hole that is popular music in America this year (which I believe the Chinese have dubbed The Year Of The Xenomorph), as we look at the new CD releases of Friday, Sept. 18, from as sensible a distance as possible. Long list of new ones this week, which, to my delight, is indeed so big that I don’t have to bother sampling anything from Neil Young’s new album, Second Song, with his new band The Chrome Hearts, I’ll take the good news wherever I can get it these days; I assume it’s the usual bunch of messy, off-key-sung tunes featuring our gimmick-voiced hero grousing about Trump or AI or whatever he’s been mumbling about lately while not actually doing anything about all the nonsense, what would we do without rock stars making half-cocked sociopolitical statements, folks, I ask you. But more relevant to Generation X, the generation currently running the country from the C suite, we have a new album titled Apples For Isaac coming out from Liverpool, U.K.’s Echo & the Bunnymen, whom I’m still mad at because several years ago I had mooched passes to a show they were playing in Boston (I think it was at The Paradise club), and I drove there because my wife would rather get dental work than drive in Boston, and we got there a little late and hence they wouldn’t let us in, I assume because we missed one of the two songs they play that more than three people reading this could identify by name (before you start racking your brain, you’re thinking of “Killing Moon,” which you misidentified as being a Cure song the first 20 times you were exposed to it). Nevertheless I have never been mean to the band in these pages, unless you count the last paragraph, at least not that I can recall, and the singer and guitarist are still on the team, so I will give the new single “The Light That Surrounds You” a fair chance to impress me, let me move the barf bag closer to my Golden Sculpted Throne of Judgment, OK all set. Oh, what even is this, it sounds like Franz Ferdinand in trudgy-boring mode, why on Earth are they trying to be relevant in this century? If you were at their show at Boston’s Roadrunner club in June and they were playing this song, trust me, it was one of the times you were like “OK” and got in line at the bar for drinks, waiting for a song you actually know.

• Fans of hilariously overrated arena-rock superstars Queen have something to celebrate this week, as their drummer, Roger Taylor, drops new album Violence Insane In A Beautiful World. I assume he’s only putting it out because Queen is more or less done, given that the band’s guitarist, Brian May, is an astrophysicist (remember when he wrote a book about the planets or something-something, did I review that one here when his people sent it to me? If not, it was really boring and not at all Carl Sagan-like) who doesn’t care about rock ’n’ roll anymore, leaving Taylor to sink or swim on his own if he spent all the money he made during their almost-listenable era, meaning the coda of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Taylor’s new LP’s opening track, “I See You Now,” is David Bowie-ish but super wimpy and maudlin; it might interest your great aunt if she hasn’t been kissed since 1985.

• Carly Rae Jepsen sang “Call Me Maybe,” remember those days? Her new album, Day And Night, has a single called “We Get By (Day and Night)” that’s pretty decent, sort of Goldfrapp-ish and urban, I do like it.

• And finally, “unplugged metal” flamenco-guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela grace us with their newest full-length, OurHome. I’ve never been a fan of show-offy novelty acts and tend to lump these guys in with Buckets The Drummer, like I’d be more entertained if they wore rubber horsie heads as they played, but as usual the title track delivers its hard-driving whatever-it-is as succinctly as ever, you know, that “inimitable” Metallica meets Gene Autry vibe.

Featured Photo: Josiah Queen, Mt. Zion and Kevin Sun, Kevin Sun I/Kevin Sun II

Raygun and Whisper Man

A look at new Netflix flicks

Two new Netflix releases don’t demand your close attention but are acceptable relax-the-brain watches.

The Whisper Man feels like a study in contrasts. With its cast featuring Robert De Niro, Adam Scott, Michelle Monaghan and Michael Keaton, this movie about a retired detective (De Niro) joining the search for a possible copycat to the serial killer he put away years earlier is not nearly as fresh and compelling as it should be. But I also think all those people and their ability to bring top-shelf acting abilities to well-liquor material makes this grim and moody endeavor feel meatier than it would be with lesser talents.

To recommend the movie as a lazy-day crime drama is Scott as Tom Kennedy, author and overwhelmed recent widower and sole-parent dad to Jake (Acston Luca Porto), a kid whose mother’s death has left him with an imaginary friend and a fear of stairs. Why not relocate to a creepy multi-floor Victorian that had previously been (and is maybe still?) occupied by squatters? I feel like better real estate decision-making on Tom’s part could have saved him, and us, a lot of grief. Tom is retired detective Peter Willis’s (De Niro) estranged son, and so when Jake suddenly goes missing Tom immediately remembers his father’s super-disturbing case catching The Whisper Man, a serial killer who preyed on lonely young boys. Tom and Peter’s very strained relationship is one of the better parts of the story, as is Peter’s brothers-in-detective-ing partnership with Amanda (Monaghan), the detective working a new set of similar murders who asks Peter for help even before his grandson is was taken.

While the movie’s slow beginning suggests one of those grim eight-hour prestige crime series, there is a “get down to business” energy in the middle part of this movie as Peter and Amanda, and, on his own, a frantic Tom, try to figure out the connection between the old killings and the new killings and race to save Jake. But this movie spends too much time setting up a lot of, like, Chekov’s leaky-roof situations whose payoff is not nearly clever enough or expeditious enough to make up for the slog of showing us all the elements of the magic trick before the movie slowly performs it.

For a much peppier Netflix watch there’s Raygun: Breaking Badly,part of the Untold series of sports docs. This particular entry sympathetically tells the story of Dr. Rachael Gunn, aka Raygun, an Australian Olympic competitor in break dancing in the 2024 Paris games. By the looks of the Google search results, I am not the only person who searched “Baz Luhrmann Raygun movie” — because how is this story not a spiritual sequel to Lurhmann’s Strictly Ballroom just waiting to be made? Among the talking heads are Rachael’s sweetly supportive if befuddled parents and two fellow Australian B-girls talking delicious amounts of smack — all who read as straight out of Central Casting: Luhrmann division.

Rachael and her husband and coach Sammy Free are a cute, if somewhat in their own world, couple, both enamored of each other and of breaking, a style of dance they seem to maybe 45 percent understand. Rachael competed and frequently won in Australia, so it wasn’t really until she took her moves outside Oceania that she started to suspect how “not strictly breaking” her dancing was compared to the other dancer-athletes she’d be competing with. Who among us would be able to give up being an Olympian in Paris even if we realized, kinda too late, that actually we had no idea what we were doing? In the doc, Raygun walks us through her breaking career from her initial interest in this style of dance to the Olympics and into the horrors of going internet viral. Throughout she comes off as a friendly, enthusiastic, dorky lady who seems to have chosen — chosen correctly, for the sake of her personal sanity — to try to stay focused on the positive parts of her experience.

There is a “Raygun is bad for the break dancing community” element to her story that I’ve seen other reviews mention and that this documentary doesn’t really address in any meaningful way. I do think this doc does sell the idea that athleticism and skill are a big part of breaking — Raygun didn’t have skills at that level but her competitors clearly did. I feel like we’re watching Raygun show up ready to play her best game of T-ball not understanding that she’s playing baseball with MLB all-stars, which can make her seem sorta clueless but not necessarily, to my viewing, disrespectful to the game. And the documentary does work that Olympic magic of making me suddenly very interested in a competitive realm I’d never considered before. Time to rent 2007’s Planet B-Boy?

Featured photo: The Whisper Man.

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