Category: Pop

International Oscar

A look at more Oscar nominees before the big night

Happy Oscar day to all who celebrate!

The 98th Academy Awards will air Sunday, March 15, at 7 p.m. on ABC. There are some true gems on the list of nominees — I’ll be rooting for Sinners in the 15 categories where it’s nominated and for all of the nominees in the best lead actress category — let’s go, five-way tie! But to wrap up the Oscar season, I took a look at the nominees for International Feature Film, which this year include two movies — The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value — that have a strong presence in other categories as well.

Sirāt, the entry from Spain, is the one movie of the five not yet available (as of March 8) for home viewing. The four I did watch, while varying in tone and style, all had a thread running through them about a country in crisis — what it’s like for the people living in it and how the trauma can echo through the decades.

The Voice of Hind Rajab (rent or purchase), the entry from Tunisia, is based on a true story of operators at the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s 911-like center and their attempts to save 5-year-old Hind Rajab in early 2024. Operators take a call about a car trapped on a street in Gaza, being hit by shells and gunfire. Eventually, Hind is the only survivor in the car and ends up on the phone with the operators, crying for someone to come get her. The movie takes place within the phone center, while the operators attempt to comfort Hind and work on finding a way to get an ambulance to her. Getting an ambulance into the war zone requires a slow-moving this-official-calls-that-official process to find a route where the Israeli military is not. The office head (Amer Hlehel) is desperate not to lose any more ambulance drivers and medics while the two operators (Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees) talking to Hind are desperate to get the scared young girl help now. It’s a harrowing story that mixes the actors and their voices with the voices of the real operators and uses Hind’s real voice throughout, according to media reports. In the way that it is very tightly focused on one child a group of professionals are trying to save, the movie reminded me a bit of the TV show The Pitt, with dedicated people offering competence and compassion in the face of tragedy.

It Was Only An Accident (Hulu, rent or purchase), a French entry that is, according to Wikipedia, a “co-production between Iran, France and Luxembourg,” has a dark comedy veneer with a bleak psychological-drama interior. Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) is absolutely, completely positive that the man (Ebrahim Azizi) who happens to visit the auto repair shop where he works is the man who once tortured him when Vahid was held prisoner by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Absolutely, completely, probably positive, after he kidnaps the man, ties him up and puts him in the back of his van. He considers burying the man alive, but maybe he’s only like 90 percent certain he has the right guy? Looking for confirmation, Vahid contacts another prisoner who was tortured by the man, another person who is also only mostly certain the blindfolded man in Vahid’s van is her former tormentor. Eventually, photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari); Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), the wedding-dress-wearing bride-to-be Shiva was photographing, and Hamid (Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr), the most certain that Vahid’s hostage is the torturer, are driving around in Vahid’s van, attempting to stay undetected by officialdom and trying to figure out what to do with this blindfolded, sometimes unconscious, possibly very dangerous man. There are a few darkly funny moments but the movie’s core is the trauma these people carry around from what they experienced, a trauma that is never far from the surface.

There are similarities in tone between It Was Only An Accident and The Secret Agent (Hulu, rent or purchase), a movie that also deals with people trying to live a normal life in a country that is broken. In this case, that country is Brazil in the late 1970s, when, as the movie tells us, lots of “mischief” happened, from the dead body left for days in a parking lot because no police can be bothered to come get it to the government persecution that requires people to go into hiding. Armando (Wagner Moura) is hiding in plain sight as Marcelo, living in an apartment full of people using different names in an attempt to stay alive, as he tries to figure out what happened to his long-gone mother and find a way to get himself and his young son out of the country. Armando’s problems seem to stem from the politically-connected head of the country’s power company defunding Armando’s university work and Armando’s objections to that action. When rich dudes and their idiot sons hold government-backed, extra-legal power, their personal prejudices and power-seeking whims can destroy lives — is how Armando’s problems can be boiled down. The movie does an excellent job with the world building with lots of engrossing moments and details about the people trying to maneuver through this fraught society.

Sentimental Value (rent or purchase) from Norway received nine Oscar nominations, including International Feature Film and, along with The Secret Agent, a spot on the Best Picture list. This movie has an episodic feel, like you’re binging a family dramady TV series. After the death of their mother, sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) must deal with the reappearance of their father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a famous filmmaker who has been largely absent from the family since the parents’ divorce decades earlier. The family house still belongs to Gustav, the latest in a long line of his family to inhabit it, who is now considering using it to film his new movie, a semi-biographical story about his mother. He’d like stage actress Nora to star in his movie but their relationship is so spikey she won’t even read the script. Agnes, married mother of a young son, is sort of the family peacemaker, but you can tell she’s dragging around baggage too — some of it, as she learns when she investigates Gustav’s mother’s imprisonment for anti-Nazi resistance during World War II, possibly inherited. The sudden appearance of American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) as a possible Nora replacement in the movie does not help with family dynamics. All four of these core performers are nominated and they all turn in nuanced performances that let us see character arcs and growth.

New Hampshire Jewish Film Festival
The 18th annual New Hampshire Jewish Film Festival kicks off Sunday, March 15, with an opening reception at the Singer Center for the Arts (77 Amherst St. in Manchester) at 5 p.m. followed by the festival’s the first in-person screening, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire at the Rex Theatre in Manchester, at 7 p.m., according to a press release. In-person and virtual screenings continue through Sunday, March 29, and the festival will feature 13 feature films and four short films, the release said. Screenings will take place in Manchester, Concord, Portsmouth, Hanover and Keene, according to the nhjewishfilmfestival.com, where individual tickets and ticket packages are available for purchase. Local in-person screenings include The Road Between Us on Thursday, March 19, at 7 p.m. at Chunky’s in Manchester; Ethan Bloom on Tuesday, March 24, at 7 p.m. at O’Neil Cinemas in Londonderry; The Stronghold on Thursday, March 26, at 7 p.m. at Red River Theatres in Concord; Hidden: The Kati Preston Story with special guest Kati Preston for a post-film discussion on Sunday, March 29, at 1 p.m. at Red River Theatres; 13: The Musical on Sunday, March 29, at 1:30 p.m. at Red River Theatres, and The Ring on Sunday, March 29, at 3:30 p.m. followed by a festival wrap party at 5:30 p.m. at Red River Theatres. See the festival website for the full schedule and for tickets and trailers.

Featured photo: It Was Only an Accident

The Hitch by Sara Levine

(Roxane Gay Books, 291 pages)

“You don’t realize how small your life has become until something wreaks havoc, until the pin is removed on which the threads of reality hang.”

That’s Rose Cutler musing on the havoc in her spare bedroom, where her 6-year-old nephew is barking and playing with chew toys, having been inhabited by the soul of a dead corgi.

This is the improbable premise of The Hitch, Sara Levine’s comic novel about a young woman whose world is thrown into chaos by an otherworldly event. Single and childless by choice, Rose lives alone — very comfortably, thanks to the success of her artisanal yogurt business. She’s a vegan, sharing recipes throughout. She’s also a moral scold who can’t get through a meal or a conversation without a lecture about the environmental problems caused by this, that or the other, and yet seems bewildered at the effect this has on other people. (“Chat rooms, social media platforms, electronic bulletin boards — people routinely misunderstand my tone,” she says.)

Rose has a younger brother, Victor, to whom she became a de facto mom after their parents died. Now that Victor is married and has a child, Rose is overly invested in the life of her nephew; spending two hours with Nathan every Saturday is the highlight of her week.

When Rose’s brother and sister-in-law announce they are visiting Mexico for a week to reconnect as a couple, she is thrilled to have Nathan stay with her. But she does not have a contingency plan for the dark turn the week takes when her dog, a massive Newfoundland, accidentally kills a corgi in a park and her nephew insists the soul of the corgi entered him.

This is a ludicrous premise, but Levine is known for absurdity. One of her previous books has three exclamation points in the title (Treasure Island!!!); I’ve not read it but am informed by the internet that it’s a cult classic. The internet also informs that she writes in the style of Kevin Wilson, who has an enormously appealing dry wit. And even though Levine’s muse appears to be slightly unhinged and The Hitch dangles on the precipice of lunacy, it works.

It works because (a) Levine is funny and (b) Rose, despite her circumstances, is achingly familiar; we all know someone like her, or perhaps we are her, if we’re willing to admit it. Rose describes herself as a “scientifically literate person with ethical standards,” and she is struggling to live in a world that violates these standards at every turn. Her own company, the Cultured Cow, violates them, adding to her inner turmoil.

Her comic foil is her sister-in-law, Astrid — Nathan’s mother — who “isn’t a dog person. Or a cat person. Or a people person.”

As much as Victor and Astrid love Nathan, they draw the line on their animal-loving son getting a dog, and so when the soul of the corgi enters him, Nathan is enthusiastic — he sees it as getting an “inner dog.” Rose, however, sees it as her nephew becoming possessed by a corgi, a turn of events made worse by the fact that she doesn’t like corgis: “The bat ears and the stubby legs, the huge head and the black-rimmed prostitute eyes; the length of the body, the absence of a tail! The breed is engineered to make people smile, specifically those people who need to patronize an animal in order to love it.” She is desperate to exorcise the corgi from her nephew before her brother and sister-in-law return from vacation. Hilarity ensues. And some sadness, too, as we begin to understand what motivates Rose, and how lonely she is.

The Hitch is by no means the great American novel, nor does it aspire to be. It’s more like a single episode of a sitcom contained in a book. Humorless vegans and corgi lovers best stay away, but for everyone else Levine offers a light-hearted diversion from the more reality-based cares of the world. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: The Hitch, by Sara Levine

Album Reviews 26/03/12

Quinsin Nachoff, Patterns From Nature (Whirlwind Recordings)

This New York-based saxophonist and composer has earned a rep for “moving fluidly between jazz and classical worlds through stirring yet intricately cerebral compositions,” to borrow some promotional verbiage I’d never use myself to describe anyone’s music but which isn’t too shabby overall. Nachoff does use a wide spectrum of sounds to render these soundscapes, which are meant to describe precisely what you’d expect from the title, i.e., a fractal, ever-expanding aural depiction of nature at work (there’s a companion video that was designed with the help of a physicist). There’s even a musical saw at work in the opening track, “Branches,” a sighing, often mopey exercise that borrows the creepy nervous tension from Jonny Greenwood’s avant garde soundtrack to There Will Be Blood, in which warring strings dance around their own dissonance without ever providing real closure, while elsewhere we have bouncy nature-documentary cuteness (“Cracks”) and so on. A highly intellectual engagement that took 10 years to complete, well worth your time. A+

Rivers of Nihil, Rivers of Nihil (Metal Blade Records)

I’m really not trying to be the Chuck Eddy of New Hampshire rock journalism, sticking to heavy bands and ignoring others; really the only reason I’m reviewing a metal record for the second week in a row is that Metal Blade Records was kind enough to send me a 12-inch vinyl copy of this one (yes, I can be bought cheap, please take note; I miss the days when I’d get stacks of vinyl from SST and all the other indie labels, so chalk up this hiccup to a desire on my part to relive my 20s). This one just came out in “bleach and ammonia” colored vinyl (gray/black marble), which is cool, and their music is cool too in its way. The band markets itself as a progressive/extreme metal thingamajig, and yeah, there’s a lot of both genres going on: Instead of a bunch of gear-changes from Cookie Monster thrash to epic metal, these guys simply layer those things together like a peanut butter cup, using the Cannibal Corpse stuff as a drone device, which is pretty freaking clever, and, of course, brutal. I’m not surprised that the thrashers have been loving these guys. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Like every other Friday, March 13 will be a day of new albums, yadda yadda. It is another Friday the 13th, because we had one last month, which is how March always rolls 75 percent of the time because the Gregorian calendar was a silly idea to begin with, but either way we can start with the new album from Daniel Romano & The Outfit, a project that usually features Canadian indie-slacking musician/poet Romano, but this time it doesn’t, which I’ll blame on Gregorian calendars because there’s no one else I can think of to yell at. The album is titled Preservers Of The Pearl, and once again it will focus on “underground rock” because that’s what Romano wants the five people who show up at his shows to think it is, but there are several songwriting collaborators on board for this exercise in mediocrity, namely Outfit band members Ian Romano, Carson McHone, and new guy Tommy Major, all of whom were probably ready to quit if Daniel didn’t let them write some songs, you know how it goes. Supposedly they are trying to follow in the footsteps of (their words, mind you) “underground rock trailblazers like Mystery Lights, Sheer Mag, Shadow Show, and Uni Boys,” but my first encounter with this album was the tune “Cardinal Star,” which is the most boring, decidedly non-underground song I’ve heard all year, like it’d be too boring for Sheryl Crow to include on one of her albums, but believe it or not there’s a little hope here, thanks to the lead single “Autopoiet,” which, if it had a little more punk in its vibe, would be almost as interesting as your basic Parquet Courts tune, if you remember those guys, but anyway, what I’m getting at is that The Outfit is no more “underground” than eating a tuna fish sandwich in the park, but if Romano wants to insist that this is something rebellious, I can nod, walk away slowly, and simply allow this band to fade into oblivion, no harm done.

• Speaking of overhyped bands and musicians who’ve gotten away with spectacular mediocrity, look, gang, it’s Sonic Youth’s bass player Kim Gordon, with a new album, Play Me, another Friday The 13th arrival she probably timed just to be random and hip. Now look, I have my reasons for never having liked anything by Gordon or Sonic Youth or Thurston Moore, the main one being that I’ve never felt the urge to burn any of their songs to a mixtape because eww, but note that this doesn’t mean that I never liked any indie bands from the ’80s and ’90s, just the really popular hipster ones; I mean, back then the record industry was taking the Boston indie scene seriously out of sheer desperation. But who knows, maybe I’ll hear Gordon’s new single “Not Today” and think it’s so cool that I can forgive her for once literally claiming that her dream three-band concert would feature John Cage, Neil Young and Yoko Ono (that wasn’t easy to get over, and don’t think I didn’t try). Oh let’s just roll it and let me barf in peace. Eh, it’s not awful, lots of distortion, some Romeo Void-style singing, it’s OK as a post-No Wave song, may I be excused now?

• Oh great, it’s The Black Crowes, whom I’m still mad at after all these years for not sending me an advance of that one album, whatever its name was. Their new LP A Pound Of Feathers includes the song “It’s Like That,” which sounds like Whitesnake trying to be relevant. They’ll be at the Xfinity Center in Mansfield, Mass., on June 19, but I shall not mooch passes to be in attendance, so don’t look for me.

• Lastly it’s U.K. band The Orielles, with Only You Left, featuring the single “Three Halves,” an interesting enough combination of shoegaze vocals and extreme-metal guitars, all overdone.

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

Featured Photo:

Family movie night

A look at the Oscar-nominated animated features

This year’s Oscar-nominated animated features are all fairly kid-friendly — though the fact that your family can watch these movies together won’t necessarily mean the whole family will want to.

“This is a great movie,” deadpanned my most sarcastic child about 20-ish minutes into Arco (rent or purchase), a French animated movie that in its English dub features the voices of Mark Ruffalo, Natalie Portman, Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, Flea, America Ferrera and more. Arco is a boy living about 1,000 years in the future and eager to go back in time, as his parents and older sister frequently do, to see dinosaurs. He steals a time-traveling flying suit and zooms off, only to land in the 2070s in a world of robot nannies and suburban homes existing in bubbles meant to protect them from rainstorms and wildfires. Arco is found by Iris, a girl around his age, and the two work on trying to get him back to his time, while dodging a trio of goofballs who have stumbled on the diamond Arco needs to power his suit. While I don’t exactly agree with my kids — the bored one who stayed to complain about the movie, the even more bored one who lasted about five minutes during the most action-packed sequence before deeming it too boring — Arco does have a chilliness and a calm that counteracts the adventure of its premise. It is, however, lovely to look at and there is real emotion behind the relationships, including between Iris and Mikki, her robot nanny.

Their relationship is very similar to one between the main character and her caregiver in Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (rent or purchase). As a baby, Amélie is decreed a “vegetable” by her doctor, but when she’s about 2 years old, an earthquake and a few squares of white chocolate wake her up to the world — specifically, her world in mid-20th-century Japan where her Belgian diplomat father and concert pianist mother are living with Amélie’s two older siblings. When the kind and thoughtful Nishio-san comes to work for the family, Amélie bonds with her, learning how to be in the world and to process experiences of grief and joy. Their relationship is very sweet and the movie is rendered in a kind of picture-book brightness that I enjoyed but could be too gentle for kids looking for, say, demons and sword fights.

KPop Demon Hunters (Netflix) on the other hand delivers when it comes to action and was a movie that I think my kids watched on repeat for about a month after its June release. The trio Huntrix is a hugely popular KPop girl band who are also secret demon fighters, the latest in a long line of fighters throughout history whose voices create a protective shield between our world and the demon world and who have the ability to spot and battle any demons that sneak through. With its pop music soundtrack (including original song nominee “Golden”) that to me sounds like the music you hear at a workout class and its stretches of tinny earnestness, this one is very much not for me, though I do appreciate the elements of the movie reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“into every generation,” etc.) and Jem and the Holograms (secret identities and a “totally outrageous” stage presence). And the movie has its moments of goofy fun, particularly as Huntrix is faced with battling demons taking the form of a floppy-haired boy band.

My kids enjoyed KPop Demon Hunters and they liked, well enough, Zootopia 2(rent or purchase), a movie whose most “adults friendly” quality is that I, the parent, could let myself snooze through the movie knowing my kids would be reasonably entertained and kept in a Disney safe space. As with its previous outing, Zootopia 2 features a fox (Nick Wilde, voiced by Jason Bateman) and bunny (Judy Hopps, voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) working together to fight injustice. This time both Judy, the cop trying to prove herself, and Nick, a former guy on the make, are police officers. They attempt to overcome big-animal privilege and prove their own abilities in the investigation of some sneaky goings on that may have links to the founding of Zootopia and the longtime mammal/reptile divide. As with the first movie, it is jarring when the movie attempts to map people-world racism and classism onto animals. There are several instances of “wait, what?” with the whole Movie Saying Something vibe here. But it also features lots of quick moments of animal goofiness, usually involving one of the mile-long list of big-name voice actors — Idris Elba again, Andy Samberg, Ke Huy Quan, Patrick Warburton, Quinta Brunson, to barely name a few.

But the winner of this year’s nominees in terms of “won’t hurt the parents, won’t bore the kids” is, in my opinion, Elio (Disney+, rent or purchase). (Winner for me but probably not for Oscar. Gold Derby and my kids agree that, as one kid said “oh, KPop Demon Hunter is going to win, 100 percent.”) Released to absolute “meh” reactions in June, Eliois a Pixar movie, and while not one of Pixar’s best it is a solid tale of a kid trying to find his place in the world. Or really, in the universe, as Elio (voice of Yonas Kibreab), a boy who longs to be abducted by aliens, feels he doesn’t fit in to this world, especially after the death of his parents. He fears his aunt Olga (voice of Zoe Saldaña), an Air Force officer, resents having to care for him as it means she’s had to give up on entering the astronaut program. However, her position at an Air Force base does mean he’s nearby when they receive what seems to be a message from deep space. Elio manages to send a message back to the aliens, lending them to think he is the leader of Earth. He is whisked to space and finds himself involved in interplanetary politics — and, for the first time in a long time, making a friend. Where the movie really gets me is in its use of sound clips of Carl Sagan, which bring a hopefulness to this sweet tale that still manages to pack in lots of alien capers and physical comedy laughs.

Featured photo: Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits

(Summit Books, 229 pages)

A dozen years ago Tom Layward learned his wife had an affair. He decided he’d stay with her until his youngest child left home.

Now that milestone has arrived. Tom’s son, Michael, is living in Los Angeles, coming home as rarely as he can get away with; he has become “one of those young people who decides that contact with their family is not a source of happiness, so you have to limit it to unavoidable occasions.” His daughter, Miri, is headed to Carnegie Mellon University and trying to extract herself from a romantic relationship before she goes.

For Tom and his wife, Amy, the past 12 years have been an exercise in marital managed care. Most people who stay married for the long haul, Tom observes, do so because “you’ve accepted that this is what they’re like, and what your life with them is like, and you stop expecting them to do or give you things you know perfectly well they’re unlikely to do or give you. It’s like being a Knicks fan.”

With that, author Ben Markovits signals what the ride of Tom Layward’s life will be like in his 12th novel, The Rest of Our Lives: an excavation of a marriage and its attendant family life, served with droll wit that is a welcome interruption to Tom’s matter-of-fact recitation of events.

It’s a quite manly book, unusual in a fiction market oversaturated with women’s points of view.

Tom, the first-person narrator, is a 55-year-old law professor who departed from literature when he realized he actually would have to write a book. He met his future wife (who “looks like the kind of woman who can ride a horse, which she actually can”) when they were both graduate students in Boston. Amy’s family has a vacation home on the Cape, which is where we first observe the Layward family’s dynamics: the simmering conflict between husband and wife, and between wife and daughter, of which Tom notes, “from the beginning their relationship was one long argument.”

Tom’s relationship with his kids is less fraught; he feels comfortable talking with his son, and he is looking forward to driving his daughter from their home in Scarsdale, New York, to Pittsburgh, as a family. When Amy decides not to go, he doesn’t object and is still planning to drive home after moving his daughter in.

But after spending the night in the spare bedroom of a friend in Pittsburgh, he takes off on an impromptu road trip that will begin with a visit to his brother and end with a visit to his son, first visiting a Walmart to buy clothes, snacks and a basketball for the road. (“If you ever want to feel your place in the scales of the universe, go into a Walmart Supercenter,” Tom says.)

He has the bandwidth for a road trip because, unbeknownst to Amy, he’s on leave from his job, having inadvertently become entangled with a scandal through a client. When she reaches him, bewildered, he’s in Akron and vaguely explains that he needs a few days to himself. It’s clear he’s not even really sure what he is doing or what he will do next. Meanwhile, the physical problems he’s been having for months — waking up with a puffy face and draining eyes — are worsening. Everyone has been telling him to get medical help, but Tom is too involved in his existential crises and keeps writing the symptoms off as long Covid.

Throughout the trip Tom ruminates on his marriage, which he concludes “was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than B overall on the rest of your life.” Along the way we learn more about Tom’s childhood and other aspects of his life.

He doesn’t have an especially compelling voice, which can make it difficult to want to stick with him when he’s talking about minutiae, such as what he and others are eating. There are no made-for-Hollywood plot twists here, just the quiet unspooling of a life, with two questions that beckon the reader to the end: What’s wrong with Tom physically, and will he leave his wife?

The Rest of Our Lives, first published in the U.K.,was on the short list for 2025’s Booker Prize, which may baffle some readers who find the novel’s plodding pace tough sledding. But it doesn’t so much intend to dazzle as to evoke, and its heart and intelligence won me over, as did its understated ending. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Dragon Cursed by Elise Kova.

Album Reviews 26/03/05

IT’sALIE, Wild Games (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

I know it’s lazy of me to write about arena-metal bands, given that I was in one for about 14 years and know the genre and all its predictable, hare-brained tropes like the back of my hand, but I think it’s been a long enough while since I last wrote up an LP from the Frontiers record label, which I always affectionately refer to as “Frontiers Mercy Hospital,” given that they remain committed to releasing records from bands whose musical growth stopped at either Judas Priest or Iron Maiden. The band’s name isn’t a misprint, they’re not “It’s A Lie,” but they’re Italian, so what do they care (it makes me think of all the Americans out there who’ve gotten tattoos with “genuine Chinese characters” that actually read something like “If tent parakeet for” or whatnot). These guys say they like Lynch Mob, Dio–era Sabbath, and Southern Rock,” how adorable, let’s go. OK, it’s a girl singer whom they tout as having Janis Joplin chops, which she doesn’t, more like if your aunt sang for a Skid Row cover band, which is what the first song (“Waiting For The Rain”) sounds like. The next soggy tune sounds like Buckcherry, zzz I am getting shleeeepy, nothing to see here but yay for these guys, sure. B- —Eric W. Saeger

Onelight, Autobody (self-released)

Finally something I can sink all four of my canines into, from a French R&B-experimental hybrid-electronic DJ/producer who’s gotten love from DJ Mag, Complex, and Rinse FM, I’m all over this. Dude looks like a cross between Borat and the U.S. Olympics goalie, and I simply can’t be arsed to try Googling up his real name, but he’s got more soul in him than a dozen Jamie Liddells or (lord help us all) Steve Aokis. He kicks things off with a glitchy dubstep-adjacent curveball (“Starter”) that had me expecting a showoff-y, unreadable noise filibuster, but it settles into a wickedly relatable groove that’ll be the envy of a lot of EDM guys. A lot of stuff goes on here, folks, from Mariah Carey diva-twee (“Let It Be,” featuring the helium-inflated vocals of Nikki Ariel) to bong-bubbling reggaeton (the title track) to Martian bloop-tech (the Tristan Price-guested “Keep Your Heart Alive”). I have absolutely nothing bad to say about this record, it’s truly a beauty. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Oh great, here comes another Friday, specifically the one on March 6, which spells new albums for your ears! We’ll start this week with very old U.K. New Wave band Squeeze, who tortured human ears in the 1980s with jangle-pop nugget “Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)” and the even more awful
proctologist-waiting-room standard “Tempted,” which had xylophone in it, before xylophones became cool again in the Aughts for whatever reason! The band’s revolving door membership once included singer Paul Carrack, who was in Mike And The Mechanics for a while, but either way, during their early ’70s breakout era, Allmusic hailed the band’s songwriting core of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook as “the heirs to Lennon and McCartney’s throne,” that is to say, they were the next Beatles, a compliment critics have doled out over the years to, let’s see, The Bee Gees, The Monkees, Oasis, and the Bay City Rollers just to name a few (in the Reagan era, Tears For Fears skipped the middleman and just came right out and said they were the new Beatles, that’s telling ’em!). Whatever, Squeeze has a whole new incarnation these days, built around Difford and Tillbrook, including Dirty Vegas singer Steve Smith. This all brings us to the band’s new album Trixies, their 15th. The project features songs written by the duo in 1974 when they were teenagers (19 and 16, respectively), long before their first official record, which is as things should be, given that the chill-pop single, “You Get The Feeling” sounds like it was written by two teenagers who had just discovered the guitar arpeggio, how useless!

• New Jersey-born R&B/pop singing man Charlie Puth shoots for his fourth straight Top 10 album this week with Whatever’s Clever! He is really going for it this time: Instead of settling on feats from nobodies like Meghan Trainor, Boyz II Men, Blackbear or Jungkook again, he’s corralled a Who’s Who of super-famous 1980s names to turn in guest appearances, for instance Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins and Jeff Goldblum, wait what, why is Jeff Goldblum on an album, what is even going on here, pop culture! There have already been two singles from this album; the latest one, “Cry,” features pop saxophonist Kenny G, who once tried to make jazz safe for normies with no taste, but we won’t get into that. The tune has a yacht rock vibe stolen from Toto’s “Africa”; it is very nice and pretty, perfect for the overhead speakers at Bed Bath & Whatever, I don’t really mind it.

• Before I landed at your illustrious Hippo Press, I was on a team of snarkmeisters at a seacoast-area newspaper that has basically been banished to online-only publication these days. Now, my editor there was a big fan of Morrissey, who used to be in The Smiths, whom she also liked very much, and she’d get all over my case if I made fun of either band in my column, because I couldn’t stand them. Much good-natured ribbing ensued, which usually ended with my messaging something cleverly mean, but either way, I’m sure she’ll be buying Morrissey’s new album, Make-up Is A Lie, just to upset me. But an open mind is important, so I will listen to the title track single, just to upset myself. Yes, it is a tuneless mishmash of French café vibe, 1960s fashion statements and hotdog water, get this nonsense away from me this instant.

• And lastly it’s Kentucky freak-folk fixture Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, with his latest album-load of Bonnaroo bait, We Are Together Again. The single “They Keep Trying To Find You” is like James Taylor if James Taylor couldn’t sing all that well. — 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

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