Category: Pop

Album Reviews 26/02/19

The Grownup Noise, No Straight Line in the Universe (self-released)

The focus of this Boston-based act, which has had a rapidly revolving door-load of short-term members, is bridging the gap between Americana and indie-rock, which, it seems to me, has been handled quite well by Wilco to name just one band. These tunes are full of great sounds and some very deft musicianship, but there’s more twee here than indie, and not enough bluegrass to qualify as high-grade Americana. That pretty much sums up the failure — or resistance — on the part of critics to “classify” them properly, not that that’s as important as being recognized as a band that has great songs, but knowing that these guys are happily well-entrenched in the Boston scene, (still) with all its Evan Dandos and Morphines, should answer some people’s questions. Their fatal flaw is singer Paul Hansen, whose unflustered, bland tenor doesn’t do the songs much justice, but that’s a matter of taste of course. In the end it’s a Boston alt-rock band that’s a cross between Guster and, jeez, I don’t know, Yo La Tengo; I can’t feign enthusiasm for it. B- —Eric W. Saeger

Jennie Arnau, A Rising Tide (self-released)

The middle of the Americana/alt-country road — and I mean right in the middle, where it doesn’t pay to remain very still because a zillion other artists might run you over — is where this New Yorker finds her comfort zone. She’s been out of it for 15 years until this album, which is said to exhibit “southern charm meets New York grit, with a healthy dose of heart,” which might describe Sheryl Crow, to whom Arnau’s been compared, but nah, I’d say the tunes feel like a more organic Waxahatchee. The instrumentation is another matter, an all-hands-on-deck affair that runs the gamut from Sade-tinted yacht-pop (“Sail Away”) to Lucinda Williams cowboy-waltzing (“Mabel”) to Smoke Fairies banjo-folk (“The King”). “Young and Alone,” the pensive but wispy focus track, is an honest labor of love calling into question the broken system that’s resulted in countless school shootings across the country; she’ll be donating proceeds from the song to Everytown for Gun Safety. B+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yay, new albums coming out on Friday, Feb. 20! The new-album race is heating up as we speak, now that the holidays are over and Valentine’s Day is over and the most pathetic Super Bowl performance by the New England Patriots since their 46-10 loss to the Chicago Bears in 1986 is over, like, there’s really no days off for you slackers to look forward to until Memorial Day, unless you choose to finally surrender a few of the 300 comp days you’ve hoarded or, in the case of most workers, just quit your job and move back in with your ex! It’s all good, do whatever feels right is what I say, and maybe a few of these new albums will cheer you up, who knows, but of course the biggest “music news” of February was the Super Bowl halftime show led by Puerto Rican reggaeton-rapper Bad Bunny, because no one could shut up about it on their social media whatevers! For no reason whatsoever, it turned into a controversy, because Bunny sang and rapped in Spanish, which one would normally expect, given that that’s, you know, what he does; to me it was a cool thing for the NFL to do again, recognizing Latin culture as a major component in the country’s DNA, and that’s really about it. I didn’t find the music to be all that groundbreaking, like, there’s all sorts of great reggaeton, merengue, salsa and mambo to be found if you spend a few seconds looking, for instance there’s the five-hour ¡Con Salsa! show on WBUR radio (90.9 FM in Boston) every Saturday starting at 10 p.m. if you could use some perfect afterparty ambience (you can also stream the whole show on the station’s website), but either way the vibe is almost universally positive, so what’s the harm? Sure, some people took the halftime show as an affront somehow, but they probably didn’t mind that Chubby Checker and The Ronettes played at 1988’s halftime show or that Gloria Estefan and Stevie Wonder played 1999’s “Celebration of Soul, Salsa and Swing” halftime show, and so on and so forth. Now, one conservative buddy of mine on Facebook said he simply didn’t like Latin music and could leave it at that, which I commended him for. I mean, in the end, it’s younger people who buy albums, so trotting out the Rolling Stones again like they did in 2006 in order to trigger nostalgic feels in people who can barely remember the last time they had a legitimate Billboard No. 1 hit song (they didn’t come close that year) would be a bit of a disservice to the record-buying public, don’t you think? Whatever, I’m sure people will flip out over whoever plays next year’s Super Bowl halftime show, but for the record I’d be fine if they went country-indie-rock, like, say, with Mumford & Sons as the headliner, since they’re so much more relevant than Kings of Leon now. In fact, the Mumfords release their new LP, Prizefighter, this week, featuring the pretty-epic-pretty title track and “The Banjo Song,” which is similarly sweeping and epic. I like them, the end.

• Florida power-pop band New Found Glory release their 11th album Listen Up this week. They haven’t charted for at least six years, because boring, but the new single “Beer and Blood Stains” has a pretty filthy guitar sound and actually has a pulse.

• Also this week, electroclash icon Peaches releases No Lube So Rude, and of course the title track is awesome. It is made of dubstep, goth-industrial and diva-pop smothered in pure lunacy.

• We’ll close with Hilary Duff, aka Lizzie McGuire to people who are around 35. The new record, Luck Or Something, includes the single “Roommates,” which is pretty and pleasant, sort of like a kinder gentler Alanis Morissette. — 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 Grownup Noise, No Straight Line in the Universe and Jennie Arnau, A Rising Tide

The Emergency, by George Packer

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 401 pages)

During the Covid-19 pandemic, George Packer often traveled between rural New York and New York City. They seemed like two different worlds, he told the Pittsburgh Review of Books. The dichotomy underpins Packer’s dystopian novel The Emergency.

It centers on 48-year-old surgeon Dr. Hugo Rustin, struggling to adapt to his new life after the collapse of the government, defined only as “the empire.” There was a standoff in the capital that lasted for weeks and devolved into fighting between mobs, and before long the leadership and police fled and looting began. A new form of governance emerged, more egalitarian than the old system, marked by the motto “Together.”

Rustin was happy to do what he could to keep the hospital running. But as Together took hold, he began to resent some of the changes — how people under his command called him by his first name, how titles like “nurse” or “housekeeper” were replaced with “healing associate” and patients were called “healing recipients.”

He finally snaps when a junior associate points out a mistake at the end of a grueling day. That results in Rustin being called into a meeting — a “Restoration Ring” — where his colleagues recite principles of Together like “I am no better and neither are you” and “Listen to the young.” Rustin tries to apologize without compromising his values, and it doesn’t go well. He is advised to spend a month wandering around the city and then come back and share the lessons he has learned.

Meanwhile, Rustin’s wife, Annabelle, is caught up in the spirit of Together and starts a ministry of sorts helping to care for the homeless “Strangers” constructing tent encampments near their home. His son Pan and his daughter Selva, too, have taken up the cause.

It is the father-daughter relationship that is at the heart of this book, as Dr. Rustin and Selva attempt a dangerous journey in a dystopian world even while bickering about the ordinary things families bicker about. Rustin understands that Selva’s beliefs, as much as he thinks they are wrong, come from a good place — at one point, she tells him, she has been angry with him “because you never believed the world could be better or worse than the one you gave me. And that breaks my heart.”

And Packer makes it clear that there were things wrong in the pre-Emergency world; for one thing, the disdainful way Rustin and those of his standing referred to the bottom 10 percent, the ones barely getting by and often succumbing to addiction, as “Excess Burghers.”

But there are uncomfortable things in the new world, too, such as the “Suicide Spot” — a gallows where young people go and put a noose around their neck, and are then talked out of the act by young people serving as “Guardians.” It is a ghastly sort of therapy, but the Guardians take pride that they have not lost a child. And there are ghastly things that father and daughter encounter as they venture beyond the city’s borders in hope of reuniting a “Stranger” father in the city with his missing son.

From the opening pages of the novel it is clear we are being asked to consider what happens when a society of disparate means and morality throws out the old ways of being for a new order. But it is not clear whether Dr. Rustin is the hero or the antihero in this world. That is one of the mysteries that propels the reader through the story; it is as compelling as whether Hugo, Annabelle and their children can stay together in a Together world. Give Packer credit for not revealing his hand; this is a deeply nuanced book. Most astonishingly, it’s also occasionally funny. B+

Featured Photo: The Emergency, by George Packer

Oscar documentaries

Many of this year’s Oscar-nominated feature-length (four of the five nominees) and short-film documentaries (three of the five) are available for home viewing and make for compelling, though not particularly lighthearted, watches.

My pick in the Documentary Feature category would be The Perfect Neighbor (Netflix), a chilling look at a sour neighbor relationship that turns tragic and is told largely through police body cams. The movie gets the drumbeat of dread going from the beginning.

It’s often the inmates telling their own story in The Alabama Solution (HBO Max), which looks at the abuse and neglect of prisoners in the state’s prison system and their attempts to get somebody to listen to their plight. Come See Me in the Good Light (Apple TV+) is a sad, beautiful and frequently funny look at Colorado Poet Laureate Andrea Gibson as they battle an incurable cancer, fighting for a chance to do one last live show and get more time with their wife, poet and author Megan Falley. In Mr. Nobody Against Putin (VOD and streaming on Kino Film Collection), a videographer at a school in Russia is horrified by the increasing amount of government propaganda pushed on the students and unsure how to help them and himself.

Of the short documentaries: I watched the 33-minute All the Empty Rooms (Netflix) in small chunks over several days — it offers heartwrenching interviews with four families whose kids were killed in school shootings and gives us a look at the bedrooms they left behind, with all their photos and stuffies and bits of hopeful kid-ness. In Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud (HBO Max), Craig Renaud talks about the work and death of his journalist brother, including a look at Brent’s focus on the people caught in war zones. Also on HBO Max, The Devil Is Busyoffers a well-constructed day-in-the-life of a woman who works at a women’s health care clinic and the stress and threat of violence she and her colleagues face.

Album Reviews 26/02/12

Amanda McCarthy, Looking For The Light (self-released)

Surely you recognize this country-pop singer-songwriter’s name if you’ve followed New Hampshire music news for any amount of time. After racking up a good number of big-time opening gigs and awards for her winning writing and big-time sound, she left the area for the glitz of Nashville. It sounds to me like she’s on the right track with this album, which is only her second and really just needs to be heard by the right Music City VIP at the right time. This one opens with the instant ear-grabber “Vodka,” whose rich and delicious chorus evokes peak KT Tunstall right from the gate, after which she flexes her bluegrass/Americana muscles with “Normal,” a deep, lush and well-constructed joint that has a slight Wilco flavor to it. “Fine” tells me that she’s been listening to Chappell Roan with an eye toward improving the formula; “LOL WTF” shoots for the Tay-Tay demographic and hits nothing but net while vibe-checking 1990s Wilson Phillips. I have no complaints whatsoever. A+

Maria Schneider, American Crow (ArtistShare Records)

It’s a little unsightly that this EP isn’t listed in the Minnesota composer/jazz orchestra leader’s Wikipedia page, but between crowdfunding her work (ArtistShare was the first crowdfunding site), composing music and wrangling an orchestra, it’s unsurprising that things get lost in the shuffle. Clocking in around 30 minutes, this record is an astonishing achievement, a brilliantly elaborate post-bop big-band effort with touches of rock; it’s one that needs to be heard to experience its symphonic ebbs and flows. Schneider, a multiple Grammy winner who was a 2021 finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in music in 2021, has a deeply organic, breathe-in-breathe-out touch, dedicated to “the art of listening,” as she puts it; Wayne Shorter described her ensemble as rendering “the very stuff of life into music.” This tuneage is brilliantly but unobtrusively listenable, fit for practically any set of ears; the constant sparring between guitarist Jeff Miles and trumpeter Mike Rodriguez is claimed to mimic our post-cooperative world, characterizing “a society at verbal war, screaming from their echo chambers.” Don’t we know it. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Ack, look out, the next Friday-load of new albums will be dumped into your streaming service on Feb. 13, yes, a Friday the 13th, as if my expectations weren’t, as they are every week, already lower than the Earth’s magma layer! Actually there are three Friday the 13ths this year, which is better than five or 12 of them at least, so there’s that; we simply must stay positive in these Lovecraftian end times, or Cthulhu will have beef! Speaking of beef, Charli XCX is said to have a problem with Taylor Swift, according to people who take that nonsense seriously, but never mind that, because this week Charli is releasing the soundtrack to the new Wuthering Heights movie, the (literally) 30th film adaptation of the 1847 Emily Brontë novel to be burped into theaters since 1920, but this one is special because big budget or whatever. Far as that goes, the other day the 2026 film’s star, Margot Robbie, tweeted this after she invited a bunch of her girlfriends to a private screening: “Twenty women were like frothing at the mouth. They were like rabid dogs. There was screaming and sobbing. If Jacob walked in right now, they’d eat him.” See that, folks, this is why it’s difficult to be a man in this timeline, you gals only care about one thing, but anyway, a lady friend replied to that tweet with “This is the kind of press you do when you know your movie is terrible and you are desperate to drum up business,” which I suppose is kind of cynical, but I’ll never know for sure, because if I ever do watch a film version, it won’t be this Barbie one or whatever, it’ll be the most iconic version, the classic 1939 one featuring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, but that sort of depends on whether I ever run out of new episodes of Cheaters, because I know I’ve seen one or two PBS versions, so I already know that it’s just a story about dealing with a boyfriend who kind of sucks, don’t we all? Of course, Charli XCX was a great choice for soundtracking this new remake, because she’s sort of like Chappell Roan except for being like Madonna, just check out the teaser single, “Chains Of Love,” from this album! Naturally it is epic, like if Enya and Lorde recorded a duet, echo-y Celtic drums and gigantic eerie choruses stolen from Highlander or whatever. We bad boyfriends are the source of all art!

• Gogol Bordello, the New York-based Romani/Ukrainian-flavored punk band, isn’t done causing political trouble or whatever their problem is, no sir, because their new album, We Mean It Man, is heading to your Pirate Bay outlets as we speak! The title track is a masterwork of 1980s synths, antique robot vocal effects, and, of course, manic spazzing. I have no idea what they’re even trying to say, but the video’s worth it for the fake eight-bit graphics alone!

• Australian indie band Howling Bells drops their new album Strange Life this week! The single, “Heavy Lifting,” is a sleazy little thing with a shoegaze beat and Karen O-style vocals; it isn’t very special at all in my opinion, but it might be the coolest thing you’ve ever heard, I just don’t know!

• Lastly we have Converge, a metalcore band from Salem, Mass., which means I must be nice to them up to a point. They have been around since 1990 and are said to be very ferocious, with interesting lyrical concepts, but I’ve never listened to anything by them, so I assume they sound like Tool but with more heaviness, not that that’d be difficult, but we’ll find out right now as I preview the title track from their new LP, Love Is Not Enough! Yup, nope, it sounds pretty much like Cannibal Corpse, not Tool, so there it is, folks, the first time I’ve been wrong since 1998.

Featured Photo: Amanda McCarthy, Looking For The Light and Maria Schneider, American Crow (ArtistShare Records)

Off the Scales, by Aimee Donnellan

(St. Martin’s Press, 287 pages)

From Hollywood stars who microdose the drug to people who were once hundreds of pounds overweight, many people have found Ozempic and its imitators to be game-changers. Ozempic has also been a game-changer for Novo Nordisk, the Denmark-based company that brought the drug to market at a time when its fortunes were failing.

In the 1990s the company had what was internally described as “an innovation problem,” Aimee Donnellan explains in this deep dive into the history of Ozempic and similar drugs. But Novo Nordisk had a promising project, a drug to help people with diabetes. It was a synthetic version of a gut hormone called GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide 1), discovered through research on anglerfish caught in Boston Harbor, and it proved a powerful means of lowering blood sugar in people with diabetes — and, fortuitously, of helping these same people lose weight.

The weight loss industry has long been profitable in America, and it was clear there was money to be made. Ozempic was used for weight loss off-label; word spread and so did its use.

Several researchers did the work that would lead to this breakthrough, among them Danish chemist Svetlana Mojsov, whose work preceded the approval of Ozempic by more than a decade. But science is as competitive as politics, especially when its result is lucrative, and Donnellan takes up the banner of Mojsov here, presenting her as a woman done wrong by men who attempted to take credit for her work (and might have succeeded had she not kept detailed notes).

The story of the behind-the-scenes infighting seems incongruent with other parts of Off the Scales, which can’t seem to decide what sort of book it wants to be.

Donnellan, a Reuters columnist who covers the pharmaceutical industry, begins with the story of a marketing specialist in Michigan who lost more than 100 pounds on Ozempic and saw her world change. At work Sarah started getting promotions, even though her performance was the same. “At her parents’ house, her father, previously loving but somewhat absent, seemed to take a newfound interest in her. She could visibly see how proud he was of her. Now 34, she had never before seen this look on his face.”

Through Sarah’s story and others, Donnellan offers a picture of lives changed. Formerly invisible people gain social status as their bodies shrink and gain peace as the “food noise” that had dominated their lives quiets.

She also shares disturbing stories, like that of a Los Angeles hairstylist who lost weight on Mounjaro, albeit while also taking an anti-nausea medication because she constantly felt sick. After four months a friend told her she looked gaunt; she started getting facial injections to restore volume to her face. (Donnellan notes that not everyone can afford dermal fillers.) Moreover, Donnellan writes, “for a small minority of GLP-1 users, the side effects are so severe that they may wish they never even heard of the medication.”

Donnellan presents these and other stories without judgment. Toward the end she touches on what may be the most underreported part of the story: how these drugs will affect the culture as people who use them change their eating habits (several writers have tried to tackle this, as Kari Jenson Gold did in a First Things essay titled “The Night Ozempic Came to Dinner”). Donnellan suggests that changed eating patterns may spell doom for fast food restaurants and the makers of ultra-processed food, and says weight-loss drugs may also affect alcohol consumption.

But we are new to the GLP-1 world and we don’t know the drugs’ effect decades out. Donnellan’s examination, while sometimes disjointed and uneven in its readability, raises interesting questions. B-

Featured Photo: Off the Scales, by Aimee Donnellan

Album Reviews 26/02/05

Transatlantic Radio, “City Of Angels” Midnight Transmission (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

Any time a press release bumbles into my inbox touting a “supergroup,” I take the bait, thinking “We’ll just see about that, won’t we?” In the case of the song in question here, an advance single from this hard-rock/AOR band’s upcoming debut LP Midnight Transmission, “supergroup” feels a bit hyperbolic: For starters, guitarist RJ Ronquillo has a YouTube channel with, I’d assume, eleventy-blah-blah-gorillion subscribers, not that he doesn’t have a great guitar sound; his comes off like a precision chainsaw that kind of wants to be a six-string bass, if you know what I mean. The other dudes are mostly highly paid journeymen, including Chris Reeve, who was drummer number four or five for Filter for a few years. You get the idea; basically they’re a hard-rock version of Toto that wishes they’d thought of Trans Siberian Orchestra’s Christmas-metal trip first (see the connection here, anyone? Trans Siberian/Transatlantic?). OK, fine, if I quibbled over every bit of unoriginality I encountered every week I’d never have room to talk about anything else, but hoo boy, this tune steals the riff from Trans Siberian’s biggest crowd-pleasing rockout, “First Snow.” I mean it’s fine other than that, I guess; Swedish vocalist Mattias Osbäck pulls off a decent Glenn Hughes, but that’s faint praise if I ever — OK, let’s just stop there. C —Eric W. Saeger

The Stripp, Life Imitates Art (self-released)

OK, this one reaches your overworked, overtired eyeballs courtesy of Friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny, who Facebooked me as I was wrapping up this week’s critically acclaimed column. First he tried to get me to talk about Brass Against’s cover version of the Pink Floyd song where the opera lady sings all opera-y, and I was like “Oh, you think that’s an awesome girl singer?!” and sent him a link to Delerium’s “Heaven’s Earth,” and then he melted into butter after the chorus ate his entire head, so I went back in our now mile-long message thread to this album so I could finish this column and go watch my shows and sip my hot Café Vienna toddy. Dan loves this Australian band, who profess to sound like Motorhead, which they don’t at all, firstly because they have a girl singer who’s not possessed of much in the way of je nais sais qua, but secondly because Motorhead’s guitars sound like a bear crashing its way into a museum, not like these guys, whose core sound is more like 1980s-era Black Flag mixed with early Kiss. But! There’s something to be said for early punk and Kiss, so if they get a new singer I’ll give them an A. That is my price, take it or leave it, and now Petunia and I will continue bingeing reruns of The Nanny. B- —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Keep on truckin’, fam, like they used to say when Woodrow Wilson was president, we’re already into February, the last full month of pure frozen misery, I can practically smell the deep-fried botulism wafting from the hilariously undercooked fish at the cheapest beach-food shack I can find when it’s unbearably hot out again and a few of you people actually start posting “I can’t wait for pumpkin-spice everything to get here again” on your Instagrams and Roblox gaming Discords, can we please get to the part where global warming turns New England’s weather into Georgia’s weather like they keep promising! Unfortunately, though, we’re trapped here together, but I’m keeping snug and super-warm buried under all the spam coming into my emailbox from bands and various people pretending to be “important cogs in the music industry,” asking me if I can get down to Austin, Texas, in mid-March for the 40th annual South By Southwest (SXSW) conference, I’m so warm and comfy right now! They all want me to show up and get free tickets, all these bands, and I’ll admit that it makes me feel special, but would I attend this “conference” if my airfare and hotel accommodations and car rental were paid? No, because Wire isn’t playing, and they’re the only band left on Earth that I’d actually sacrifice some American dollars to see, and neither is Mac Sabbath, the joke band that plays Black Sabbath songs while disguised as McDonaldland characters like Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar and whatnot, I told you guys about them, remember? No? Well, I’d go see them too, but no, I have no wish to see any of this year’s SXSW headliners, a list that includes All-American Rejects, Don Toliver, Junior H, and Mau P, but hey man, if you’re going to SXSW and want to co-write this column for an issue, I’ll tell you what, message me on Facebook or Bluesky (I’m barely on Twitter anymore, just like everyone else) and you can send me your thoughts on those four bands, and I’ll listen to them and add my two cents about why I think you’re wrong about them, sound fair? But look at how much we’ve digressed from business, specifically the business of the albums coming out on Feb. 6, for example The Fall-Off, the new one from North Carolina rapper J. Cole! Purported to be his final record, it features a tune designated/titled “Disc 2 Track 2” that features a sunny cheerful beat and (thankfully non-flashy) flows that are pretty masterful.

• Ha ha look, a new album from Nick Jonas, who used to be married to one-note sadgirl actress Sophie Tucker before she had her “what on Earth am I doing marrying a Jonas brother” moment! Oops, wait, this just in, the former Mr. Sophie Tucker was Joe, not Nick; Nick’s married to Priyanka Chopra, management couldn’t care less about the error! Sunday Best is the album, and “Gut Punch” is the single, featuring lightly AutoTuned boyband vocals; it rips off Katy Perry’s “Roar,” not that there’ll be a lot of royalties to grab from a lawsuit.

• L.A.-based emo/dream-pop whatchamallits Silversun Pickups release Tenterhooks this week. “New Wave” is a loud, depressing outburst with math-rock guitars, something you’d hear from Bono if his dog died and he was kind of metal.

• We’ll end this unbelievably disastrous week with Puma Blue, “the alias of artist, producer and romantic, Jacob Allen.” Wikipedia tells me he sings in falsetto, which he does in the title track from his new LP, Croak Dream. It’s pretty cool, jazzy yet street-wise, I don’t hate it at all. He’ll be at the small but great-sounding Crystal Ballroom in Somerville, Mass., on March 6. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Transatlantic Radio, “City Of Angels” Midnight Transmission and The Stripp, Life Imitates Art

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