Category: Pop

The Cliffs, by J. Courtney Sullivan

The Cliffs, by J. Courtney Sullivan (Knopf, 369 pages)

When her ne’er-do-well mother dies, Jane Flanagan’s only inheritance is a dog named Walter, “an orange powder puff of a thing” that Jane was convinced her mother loved more than her daughters. She knew her mother had nothing of value to pass on, but “Walter was so much worse than nothing.”

Even in death, her mother caused Jane trouble.

In life, her mother’s drinking and other poor choices led the teenage Jane to hide out at an abandoned house, pale purple and creepy, that sat on a cliff overlooking the ocean in Maine. The home had been built in 1846 and it had the vibe of houses abandoned in zombie movies — dusty furniture, random toys, a collapsed railing, food expired decades ago that animals had gotten into. Still, Jane felt drawn to the house and didn’t feel she was breaking any laws by going into it to sit quietly or read: “It felt like honoring whatever came before.”

That’s how we meet Jane in The Cliffs, the sixth novel of acclaimed Massachusetts author J. Courtney Sullivan. A smart and conscientious young woman, Jane soon leaves the dumpster fire that is her family home, earns multiple degrees, travels and gets a great job and boyfriend. The purple house recedes in her mind.

Meanwhile, the house beckons another woman, Genevieve, who is the polar opposite of Jane. Married, moneyed and entitled, Genevieve convinces her husband to buy the house and to entrust her with its renovation as a vacation house for the family of three. Unlike Jane, she is not respectful of the home’s history; when a contractor she hired to install an infinity pool overlooking the ocean discovers a small cemetery, she has no qualms about disturbing the dead.

Not long afterward, Genevieve is shaken when she walks into her young son’s room and finds him conversing with a girl that he claims to see, but she can’t. And we’re off and running with what at first appears to be a classic New England ghost story. Only it’s not.

While there are ghosts in The Cliffs, and a psychic named Clementine who claims to connect Jane with her mother and grandmother, the sprawling story is primarily about human beings who are alive, or once were, and their legacies. Rich in history, it also delves into the lives of indigenous people who named the (fictional) town Awadapquit, and the ethical issues of living on their land. (“What does it mean to acknowledge that this land had been stolen, when no one had any intention of giving it back?” Sullivan writes.)

These are side stories that are so expertly woven into the narrative that they never feel preachy or pretentious.

As the story progresses, Jane returns to her hometown to help clean out her mother’s house, and also to escape fallout from an alcohol-induced humiliation that is also threatening her job and her marriage. Meanwhile, Jane’s friend Allison’s mother, who was a mother surrogate for Jane when she was in high school, is slipping into dementia, and Allison connects Jane with Genevieve, who wants someone to research previous owners of the house.

There’s more than one mystery here: In addition to the spirit that Genevieve’s son thinks he sees, Jane had been told by a psychic that she needed to get a message from a girl identified only by the initial “D” to her mother, assuring her that she is at peace.

Jane, who has a Ph.D. in American history, hadn’t wanted to meet with this medium at all — the visit was a gift, and she is highly skeptical of psychics in general, and bewildered as to why some random child would be connected in any way to her family.

“And by the way, why is it that dead people always come back to tell their loved ones, ‘I’m at peace.’? Why is it never, ‘This absolutely sucks, get me out of here,?’ Jane tells Allison when recounting the visit.

As in every human life, there is so much pain that the characters don’t see, much of it caused by each other.

“Human beings did so much damage to one another just by being alive. To the people they loved most, and to the ones they knew so little about that they could convince themselves they weren’t even people,” Sullivan writes.

We also all have ghosts, real or not, in the sticky shadows of people who have passed and left their mark on us. The Cliffs is a study of family that is deeply affecting, even if you don’t care much for the learning about spirits, like why children are receptive to ghosts (it’s said that they see parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that older people can’t) and what happens at a real-life “spiritualist camp meeting” in Maine (renamed Camp Mira in The Cliffs, but which is actually called Camp Etna).

(Unrelated to spirits, but New Hampshire also has a couple of cameos in here — Jane sneaks across state lines to buy alcohol, and a pivotal event happens while one character is on a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough.)

Lots of dubious writers come to be “New York Times best-selling authors” through marketing campaigns and purchasing gimmicks. The Cliffs is fresh evidence that Sullivan is one by virtue of talent. It is an engrossing and deeply New England novel, with characters that will burrow into your heart. A

Album Reviews 24/09/05

George Strait, Cowboys And Dreamers (MCA Nashville Records)

At 72, Strait has been around a billion years, having been instrumental in pioneering “neotraditional country” music in the ’80s, a style that emphasizes what the instruments are doing, an approach that was a reaction to the blandness that had overcome country music after the urban cowboy fad. In that, you could call it an OG resurgence I suppose, being that artists like Strait, Toby Keith and Reba McEntire tend to dress in midcentury fashions and sing in a more traditional country style. Strait’s new LP doesn’t deviate from the neotraditional formula, but you’ll hear things you probably weren’t expecting, such as on opener “Three Drinks Behind,” in which his radio-announcer-style baritone warbles its obvious sentiments over mildly edgy guitar strumming and mandolin lines that fit like a glove. “The Little Things” is a mawkish love ballad, buoyed by (spoiler alert) dobro as Strait’s voice explores croaky mode. “MIA Down In MIA” is a curveball that’s obviously an amalgam of Jimmy Buffett’s lifetime catalog. Friendly, authentic stuff here. A+

Yes, Drama (MCA Nashville Records)

Continuing my quixotic efforts to educate Zoomer normies about classic arena-rock bands: The first thing to understand about Yes is that most people never really understood their trippy approach in the first place. I was at their Deep Purple-headlined show in Gilford a couple weeks ago and was psyched to see Yes opening their set with “Machine Messiah,” the opening tune from this album, which I’ve always liked even though original singer Jon Anderson was gone, replaced by Trevor Rabin, whose faux-soprano sounds exactly like Anderson’s. Like any prog-rock album, this one is musically complicated, but the math and the riffing are a lot more user-friendly than that of their earlier ones, serving as a very listenable (often hard-rock influenced) precursor to the commercial stuff they tabled in 90125 (whose big hit was “Owner Of A Lonely Heart”). Prior to this LP, Going For The One was a great one too, but Drama found the fellas in a less fluffy mood, perhaps even looking over their shoulders at Rush, who were doing the same kind of thing at the time. “Roundabout” isn’t the only thing this band ever accomplished, is what I’m getting at here, and this one is criminally overlooked. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Sept. 6 will see the next Friday-load of CD releases from burnt-out rock stars, twerking bubblegum divas and assorted swindlers, so, all you pumpkin spice people, let’s just do this “oh no, it’s gonna be freezing in New England any minute now” thing, because I can hardly wait! Yay, I guess we can start with a few off-the-cuff riffs on Pink Floyd, a band that never really appealed to me aside from a select few random songs (“Sheep” and maybe “Run Like Hell,” as I’ve said before), because look at this, guys, it’s their guitar dude, David Gilmour, with a new album, Luck And Strange! I figured it’d be best if I spun the track “Between Two Points,” since Gilmour’s daughter Romany handles the singing on it, but wait a minute, I’ll not indulge you nepo-baby haters in this case, because I don’t mind her breathy soprano at all. She sounds a lot like famous British trance singer Justine Suissa; in fact she’s a dead ringer. As for the tune’s music, it’s a slow Pink Floyd-ish snoozer, with Gilmour in lazy-strummy mode, in line with most of the stuff he did with Floyd back in the olden days. It’s fine really.

• OK, very funny, I really don’t have any time for a good punking, what with trying to sell my new book, talk to my Twitter followers and respond to Friend-Of-The-Hippo Dan Szczesny’s enthusiastic Facebook personal messages about Korean all-girl speed-metal bands. But sure, for the sake of somesuch, let’s say you’re serious, that none other than observably untalented nepo-baby Paris Hilton is actually “releasing a new album called Infinite Icon” tomorrow and I have to talk about it. Now fess up, are you just telling me this to upset me, because it won’t work; I’m permanently upset enough over many things in this world these days, so my listening to this hyper-privileged dunce sing some (off-key) nonsense about her latest bad-choice boyfriend over some microwaved Kylie Minogue beat from 1993 or whatever she’s doing these days isn’t going to strain the camel’s back, who on Earth cares? I have to admit, I’d actually much prefer talking about Babymetal so that at least someone would be happy, but I’ve put it off long enough, let me go have a listen to “I’m Free,” because I have to. Oh how cute, it’s pure Ariana Grande ripoff-ism, beach-chill with not much going on other than ringtone-ready romance, but you want to know the worst part, of course you do, she sings through Auto-Tune through the whole stupid thing, and no, I’m not kidding. Rina Sawayama is the feat. guest, delivering a phoned-in vocal that’s nowhere near her best work, but at least everyone is happy, here in nepo land, can we move on from this please.

• Here we go again, another ’80s new wave band resurfacing from out of nowhere to have a go at the last few drops of glory that can be shlurped from the Gen X resurgence. I speak of course of British post-punkers The The, which is still singer/songwriter/sole-constant Matt Johnson’s baby; Ensoulment is this band’s first proper studio album in, holy cats, 24 years! “Cognitive Dissident” is the feature single, and it’s a pretty good one, combining INXS swagger with Ennio Morricone spaghetti sauce, it’s actually very cool. The closest the band’s new tour will come to you reader folks will be the Orpheum Theatre in Boston on Oct. 19.

• We’ll wrap up the week with Madrid, Spain-based indie band Hinds, whose new full-length, Viva Hinds, will feature three or four songs sung in Spanish! Several tunes have already made the rounds, including “Boom Boom Back,” which features a contribution from Beck; it’s a riot grrrl-flavored thing that’s like The Waitresses recycling a beat from Red Hot Chili Peppers, it is fine.

Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, by Priyanka Mattoo

Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, by Priyanka Mattoo (Knopf, 304 pages)

American women who chafe at the Sisyphean nature of household chores will adore Priyanka Mattoo’s grandfather.

A physics professor who once calmly shot a python in his house, he raised free-range kids at his family’s compound in India. If the children weren’t at school, “they were up to something, somewhere in the house, unsupervised,” and his household rules were simple, Mattoo writes: “study, don’t lie, and don’t embarrass the family.”

More importantly, Nanaji (“nana” is the word for the maternal grandfather in Hindi, “ji” the suffix of respect) insisted that the girls and women around him do no menial household work, believing “The only useful pursuits for a young woman were those of the mind.”

In her engrossing new memoir, Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, Mattoo recalls another family story: Her mother decided to take up knitting as a teen and was working on a sweater when her father sternly asked why she was doing that. “Did all the stores burn down?” he demanded.

Nananji was not against work, just domestic labor, and as such, Mattoo’s mother, and indeed the whole extended family, became remarkably competent adults and “pathologically assertive women.”

“The Kaul girls — doctors, engineers, professors, and some now grandmothers — have no patience for wallflowers, or fools. They enter every unfamiliar room as though they own it. Greet each stranger as though they’ve been reading up.” She adds, “I’m not sure anyone on that side of my family knows how to whisper, and I’m happier for it.”

But despite this remarkably strong and loving family unit, Mattoo and her immediate family suffered the loss of their treasured family home in Kashmir, the region at the center of a bitter territorial dispute between Pakistan and India. The property was ransacked and destroyed by militants, and the family lost not just their physical center but also the decorative contents gathered from all over the world. It is these precious belongings that give the book its title. “Bird milk and mosquito bones” is a phrase Kashmiris use to describe things “so rare and precious that the listener should question their very existence.”

Mattoo’s writing is exquisite in exactly that way, and she builds this series of discrete and elegant essays on the scaffolding of her transcontinental search for home in the aftermath of loss. Her experiences are often exotic by American standards; she writes somewhat disparagingly of the homogeneity of the American experience:

“What a crazy place America is, where you can drive for three straight days and everyone’s still speaking English, and all were seemingly raised on the same episodes of eighties television. But they’ll tell me, in a lather, that the barbecue is dry here, whereas in another place it’s more … wet.”

She adds, “I stare blankly, feeling like an alien that’s landed on a well-meaning planet, one that believes that it is the beating heart of the universe.” She’s got a point.

But there are universal themes here, of longing and loss and the desire for connection. And this is ultimately a book about family, one that is frankly captivating. Here, for example, is Mattoo’s description of a family vacation: “ … we vacation hard, my family. Ideally three weeks, and always a home rental, never a hotel. We settle in like we own the place and have always owned the place. … In the places we stay, there is no turndown service, often no air-conditioning, and the elevator always breaks on day two.”

A “thinky” child, Mattoo is now married with children and lives in the United States, and “presents as American” but is always searching for connection with her home continent. When a music app recommends a song that she becomes obsessed with (“Pasoori” by Ali Sethi), she tracks down the artist, who is from Pakistan, and asks him to speak on WhatsApp (“official communication tool of the global diaspora”). She says, “I need to connect with the person who has made me feel this way.” She later connects with another Pakistani singer, who turns out to also be a medical doctor. “Our countries still bristle with tension — they might always — but I’m encouraged by evidence of this generation’s desire to create,” she writes.

Mattoo veers off delightfully into asides about her children and her childhood. Consider this opening to an essay titled “You Are My Life,” which may be the best start to a chapter I read this year:

“The only grudge I ever held was in nursery school, thanks to a tiny witch named Christina.”

Or this, from a chapter simply titled “A Toothache”:

“I had a terrible toothache the summer my great-aunt Indra was murdered, but that wasn’t the worst part.”

One of the most interesting essays involves Mattoo’s search for a husband, aided in part by her parents, who respectfully asked if she’d be open to them setting her up — a challenge since they were by then living in the United States, where there are about 400 Kashmiri Pandit families, in which there were about 20 “single, age-appropriate men.” Mattoo said OK, but she wanted someone who would make her laugh, to which her mother said, “Funny’s not important!” But funny was. She wound up marrying a Jewish comedy writer.

The book appears to have taken shape in Peterborough at the MacDowell Artists Colony, where the author was in residence in 2022, working on a book that was then titled “16 Kitchens.” That’s now the title of a chapter in Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, in which Mattoo talks more about her mother and the family’s experience of living in Saudi Arabia, where the weather felt like “being warmed up in a low oven.” The MacDowell team can be proud of this one. As can Mattoo’s Nanaji. It’s been a while since I enjoyed a collection of essays so much. A

Album Reviews 24/08/29

Bill Leeb, Model Kollapse (Metropolis Records)

If you’re an OG techno-goth who gave up on this column owing to the lack of love I’ve showered on your favorite genre for many months now, it’s me, not you (or goth); my email box is nowadays a hopeless trash heap of messages in bottles from bands and labels looking for a little attention, and as far as goth goes I have no idea how many emails from Metropolis I’ve unintentionally missed. This is a great one for playing catch-up, though. Leeb is of course the prime mover behind Front Line Assembly and all the other stompy Skinny Puppy-ish bands you know and love (including Skinny Puppy itself), so what I was looking for here was a little risk-taking on Leeb’s part after so many years of lording over the space. Fat chance, of course, turns out. There’s Rammstein jackboot-stomping on the Shannon Hemmet-assisted “Terror Forms,” and tribal, Last Rites-era Skinny Puppy stuff on “Demons,” etc.; it’s all very nice but formulaic (I hate to burst any bubbles, but that’s of course not a shocking development). I mean, if you’re looking for kickass background ambiance for playing Wolfenstein: The New Order, you can’t go wrong here, and I’d prefer to just leave it at that if you don’t mind. B

Marquis Hill, Composers Collective: Beyond The Jukebox (Black Unlimited Music Group)

This Chicago-based jazz trumpeter is big on mixing genres; he views jazz, hip-hop, R&B, Chicago house and neo-soul as essential cogs in the African-American creative context. “It all comes from the same tree,” quoth Hill, “they simply blossomed from different branches.” Of course, promises are one thing, delivering on them is another, but he certainly does right out of the gate with “A Star Is Born,” a refreshingly courageous genre-salad that deftly moves from a timbales-driven (or sample thereof) shuffle to a sparklingly clean post-bop horn exercise with a dubstep drumbeat underneath it. Next is “Joseph Beat,” featuring guest sax guy Josh Johnson helping decorate a stubbornly rhythmic pattern that’s too sophisticated for Weather Channel backgrounding but wouldn’t be terribly out of place as some sort of 1970s game-show incidental riff. “Pretty For The People” is a dazzling, prog-referencing slow-burn; “Enter The Stargate” is an ambitiously nimble bit showcasing the understated abilities of drummer Corey Fonville. A relaxing, fun, terrific record. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• I give up, the summer’s over, the next Friday haul of new CDs will arrive on Aug. 30, which is tomorrow, according to this newspaper’s publishing schedule!

The first one we should probably talk about, not that we have to, is the 18th studio album from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, titled Wild God. Cave has always been something of an acquired taste that I never, you know, acquired, but even if you don’t like his proto-goth baritone voice or any music he’s ever done, one thing’s for sure: It’s usually expressive and revealing in some way. Far as that goes, I reviewed his Ghosteen album in this space in 2016; the album was dedicated to the memory of his son Arthur, who slipped and fell off a cliff while under the influence of LSD. It was a very impressive album that, you may dimly recall, was strong enough to tie Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly album on Metacritic’s scorecard that year. Before that, a short-lived relationship with PJ Harvey — actually its breakup — inspired the 1997 album The Boatman’s Call. As for Wild God, Cave is enthusiastic about it, saying that the band was “happy” when they put it together. That’s usually a bad sign in my experience, like it’s always better when the main songwriters are going through a breakup or some other trauma, not that I’d ever wish such things on anyone, but it is what it is. Now, despite the fact that the band was feeling happy, the title track is haunting, moody and occasionally sweeping; it starts out with a vanilla mid-tempo beat, Cave’s Sisters Of Mercy-prototype vocalizing leading into a noisy bliss-out that’s interesting enough I suppose.

• OK, and with Nick Cave out of the way, it’s out of the frying pan and into the art-rock fire, let’s look at American avant-garde lady Laurie Anderson’s new album, Amelia! If you’re old and tried a lot of different drugs in the early ’80s you’re probably familiar with Anderson’s 1982 sort-of-hit “O Superman,” an eight-minute-long exercise consisting of two notes, some vocoder-tweaked singing and some normal, minimalist warbling from Anderson. You probably have no idea what that song even is, but like I said, it was a surprise hit that year, and people still remember it; in fact it was used in one of the alternative endings to the 2018 interactive Netflix film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. OK, so now we know where this is going, let’s go have a listen to one of the tunes, “India And On Down to Australia feat. Anohni.” So OK, this is a soft, tastefully decorated, electronically enhanced joint that’s got a tinge of Enya to it. It’s quite soothing and pretty; I don’t hate it.

• London, England-based pan-continental underground band Los Bitchos specialize in instrumental music in the style of 1970s/1980s “cumbia,” a folklore-based dance genre from Colombia. It is danced in pairs with the couple not touching one another as they “display the amorous conquest of a woman by a man,” in other words it’s basically twerking except Americans can’t understand what’s actually going on. Talkie Talkie is the band’s new album, which leads off with “Don’t Change,” a dance-y beachy folk instrumental that may remind you of Tangerine Dream with a little bit of prog in there.

• And finally it’s John Legend, Chrissy Teigen’s husband, with a new album of children’s music, called My Favorite Dream! Apparently Chrissy uploaded a video of Legend playing and singing “Maybe” on a Fisher Price piano to one of their kids and then somehow Sufjan Stevens got involved, whatever. “L-O-V-E” is annoyingly happy, not Nick Cave-level happy or anything, more like Raffi/Barney-dinosaur-level happy, which makes me really unhappy.

The Midnight Feast, by Lucy Foley

The Midnight Feast, by Lucy Foley (William Morrow, 350 pages)

The jacket of Lucy Foley’s The Midnight Feast promises a “deliciously twisty murder mystery,” which is more a nod to the title than a description of the book itself.

Foley, a British author who has been compared to Agatha Christie, has enjoyed success in the genre (her 2020 book The Guest List was a Reese’s Book Club pick) despite a parade of cookie-cutter covers that may be all the rage but to me suggests that the content within lacks originality.

That can’t be said of The Midnight Feast, which is complexly plotted and tries at times to deliver cultural commentary within the core mystery. But the novel suffers from an unsatisfying pileup of perspectives that prevents readers from developing any real connection with the characters.

The Midnight Feast begins at the gala opening of an opulent resort called “The Manor,” which overlooks a cliff on the Dorset Coast in southern England. The owner, Francesca Meadows, is a wealthy wellness influencer of sorts reminiscent of Gwyneth Paltrow, and is determined to give her guests a goopy good time despite the objection of locals who believe her dream estate has desecrated sacred ground.

Francesca, “very good at living in the now,” wears a black opal ring because the stone signifies “purification for the body and soul” and “provides you with a shield against energy.” She’s very much into crystals. Every room at The Manor has a selection of stones in it for the guests’ well-being and sticks of sage to burn “for cleansing.” The place has signature scents and a signature cocktail whose ingredients include ginger, vodka and a dash of CBD oil. The guests themselves are “carefully curated” to keep out the wrong kind of people.

Francesca, newly married to the architect who designed The Manor’s infinity pool, is introduced as something of a dopey villain. Disdainful of the locals and their spooky folk tales, she is scheming to acquire an old farm down the road where “the animals look sad, like they’re begging for a better life. They honestly do!”

She inherited the property from her grandmother, and she had treated her grandfather poorly in his last years of life, thinking that he was simply daft when he warned her repeatedly, “You must keep the birds happy; don’t upset the birds.”

The birds, of course, aren’t literal birds in this context, although there are plenty of them in the story, which is heavy-handed with the bird imagery. According to local legend, The Birds are human-size creatures with beaked faces that occupy the woods and demand sacrifices and on occasion take a life for themselves, leaving behind a feather or two.

Snippets of this are revealed as the story unfolds in staccato, told by five narrators interspersed with excerpts from the diary of one of the characters, and yes, this is just confusing as it sounds. In fact it’s more confusing than it sounds because the story also jumps around in time, from June 2025 to July 2010, and back and forth between the day before the solstice (i.e. the titular “midnight feast”) and the day after it. There’s so much whiplash here that the book could be a ride at the Big E.

The narrators include Bella, a single mother who has come alone to opening weekend for reasons that we learn right away are Very Mysterious, since she has brought with her a folder of articles about Francesca.

There’s also Eddie, a young employee at The Manor, whose family owns the dilapidated farm down the road and who is hiding from his family the fact that he works here. There’s Owen, Francesca’s new husband, who doesn’t seem to be a very happy newlywed; and a DI (detective inspector) named Walker who is tasked with investigating a fire and mysterious deaths at the property. Along with Francesca, they all take turns narrating what’s happening in real time and revealing snippets of the past that connect them to each other and to the land.

Although the language is simple (too much so, one might say) and the chapters short, the constant change of perspective is wearisome and diminishes character development. Also, for a book that is heralded for its plot twists, alert readers can see many of them coming, and there is nothing revealed at the end that will leave us mulling the story in disbelief for days afterward. More likely, the ending is likely to result in a feeling of relief — we’re glad things are resolved so we can move on to a more compelling book.

On the plus side, for a murder mystery, there is very little gore involved, and only a couple of scenes that might be problematic for PETA.

Credit the author for managing to neatly tie up all the loose ends at the close of the novel; she had a destination in mind and gets us there eventually. No doubt some people will consider her a mastermind for navigating such a complicated plot, but it comes at the expense of the reader. C

Album Reviews 24/08/22

Bek, Derby Girl [EP] (Amber Blue Recordings)

This mononymed DJ is a well-established player in the (reportedly vibrant) Hamburg, Germany, velvet-rope scene. He’s steadily made a name for himself as a producer as well, releasing tracks on such imprints as Traum, What Happens, Ohral and Natura Viva, and back in 2015 he won the Mixmag + ANTS Ibiza DJ competition over 300 other participating DJs. With all the resume nonsense out of the way, we can proceed to what’s on this four-songer (actually three, but the label owners added a remix to the second track, “Cannibal Licornes,” a Calvin Harris-style joint that doesn’t do much other than make you wish you were sipping mai tais in the Maldives, not that we don’t need more of that sort of vice in this loveless world). The title track is a lightly syncopated bounce-along whose (actually pretty raucous) drop comes halfway though its six minutes; overall it’s a lot more experimental than what I expected. Sure, this is fine. A–

Alison Moyet, Key (Cooking Vinyl Records)

As a celebration of 40 years of releasing records, this is one for the books, a mix of reworked songs with only a pair of new ones, but the rerubs are reflective of the changes she’s undergone personally over the years. In fact, she’s outgrown some of the tunes since her days releasing her first solo record, Alf, as a 22-ish-year-old. Like Siouxsie Sioux, Moyet’s distinctive contralto has probably been mistaken for a male tenor on many an occasion; Andy Bell mainlined her music while preparing to audition for Erasure, a RIYL name-check relative to her sound. Here, she reshapes her most famous track, “Is This Love” (from the 1986 album Raindancing and featured in the film All of Us Strangers), as an epic chillout ballad as opposed to the (very) ’80s slow-dance track it’d originally been. Major hits “All Cried Out” and “Love Resurrection” are here, updated for the times; newcomer songs “Such Small Ale” and “Filigree” are nice-enough slowbie bringdowns. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• A Friday is ahead, specifically the one that falls on Aug. 23, and you know what that means: People will be crowding the malls to buy all the new albums! Yes yes, your friends will be dressing up just like the cool but awkward kids in Pretty In Pink and making fun of all the mall cops (aren’t adults so stupid, lol) and buying plenty of albums, for your Sony Walkman audio devices, aren’t you glad Stranger Things made the ’80s come back? Right, I have no idea where I’m going with this, I’m just waiting for the ’90s-rock echo boom to take over from this tedious ’80s wave once and for all, until we’re all sick of hearing bands that sound exactly like Nirvana and Indigo Girls (I’m way ahead on both scores), and in the meantime, let’s try to ease our suffering by finding something that might be relevant to our current era of music, that’d be great. We’ll start with Philadelphia electro-psych/slowcore band Spirit Of The Beehive, which releases You’ll Have To Lose Something on Friday! They’re on a post-indie trip and insist on being weird, so the video for the first single, “Something’s Ending / I’ve Been Evil,” is moderately annoying. As for the song itself, it’s a slapdash slowcore mess that’s somehow listenable, and like many bands are doing nowadays, there’s a dubstep layer in there that serves pretty well as a sort of binding force. The vocals are faraway and over-reverbed, in other words there’s government-issue oldschool-shoegaze afoot in this business but despite the performative, androgynous gloom there’s a hint of 1960s Spanky And Our Gang sunshine-pop at work as well. If all this sounds good to you, you can catch them live at Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Mass., on Sept. 24.

• Wow, it’s the first album in 24 years from Pacific Northwest-based minimalist indie-pop/cuddlecore duo The Softies, isn’t that special? I hadn’t realized I sort of missed hearing about them, and come to think of it, I never did, but I will listen to something from their new album, The Bed I Made, because I am an equal opportunity hater, just let me pop a few Dramamine to settle my stomach first. Ack, I used to confuse these guys with The Swirlies for obvious reasons; an AllMusic reviewer nailed it on the head when he said The Softies’ stripped-down, two-voices/two-guitars aesthetic was too boring to build entire albums around. But hey, maybe they’ve added some layering, who knows, let’s go listen to the single, “I Said What I Said.” Yep, it’s twee-pop, happy and upbeat and catchy in its way, and jangly and minimalist and decidedly dated, and one of the girls is wearing nerd glasses, and both girls are wearing the spring line equivalent of Christmas sweater fashion. But like I was saying, you’d better get used to this vanilla-frappe-blooded nonsense, because it’s gonna be everywhere before you can say “Oh no, please don’t, I beg of you.”

• New York City-based industrial metal/noise-rock fivesome Uniform release their fifth album, American Standard, this Friday! They’re my kind of dark-futurist-type guys, having used samples of gunshots and explosions to produce rhythm tracks, why haven’t more bands done stuff like that? The single, “This Is Not A Prayer,” is psychotic, deranged and awesome, like “Stumbo” from Jim Thirlwell’s Wiseblood project. That’s another thing, why haven’t more bands ripped off Wiseblood?

• Lastly let’s check out Sabrina Carpenter, a nepo singing person who used to be on the Disney Channel series Girl Meets World; her aunt is Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson on The Simpsons. “Espresso,” the single from her new LP, Short n’ Sweet, is disposable Britney bubble-pop. I’m sure 6-year-old girls would like it, aren’t they growing up so fast these days (world’s loudest eyeroll)?

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