Category: Pop

Album Reviews 25/10/23

Tortoise, “Layered Presence” (Nonesuch Records)

This is the lead single from this all-instrumental Chicago band’s new album, Touch; there was more of it available for me to review, but it’d be dishonest of me to pretend I wanted to hear it, given that these guys have never made me feel anything other than slightly intimidated that I’ve never gotten the point of their trip, which is invariably described by (strictly hipster) tastemakers as “post-rock with jazz influences.” This meandering but oft-dissonant tune rates the same as anything else I’ve ever heard from them: It got on my nerves, not because the musicians aren’t any good; they are, but not to the point that I think of Tortoise as anything more relevant than a fashion statement that’s way past its expiration date. They pay a lot of lip service to free jazz, so much so that some of their fans literally name-check Ornette Coleman when describing them, but — and this may owe more to production limitations than their creativity — there are always annoying sounds in their tunes, to put it simply. I mean, experimentation and improvisation are fine, but — and this is just my impression, of course — this is more like a Flaming Lips-flavored Pelican: every move was planned, and they should just grow up and hire a singer. But you do you, as always. C —Eric W. Saeger

Kashena Sampson, Ghost of Me (self released)

It was refreshing to see this Nashville folk-rocker opening the one-sheet press announcement for this, her third album, by admitting that the record is about her frustration at not being where she wants to be in her music career, to wit: “Besides being a musician, I have also been a bartender at a music venue for the past 10 years to pay my bills. It’s a great job, but there are some nights that feel like my heart is breaking, watching others live out the exact dream I’m still chasing, night after night.” That’s some rare honesty there, a sentiment many can relate to in our golden age of show biz nepotism, when impossibly high paywalls prevent worthy artists from achieving mainstream success. Now, she did recruit Jon Estes to produce the record (he’s worked with Bela Fleck, Abigail Washburn and many other well-knowns), and he dragged some pretty dramatic performances out of her, so much so that she probably needs her resumé overhauled: In the past, wags (including a Rolling Stone writer) described her as a ’70s radio-folkie, but her vocal sound here evokes Grace Slick, Florence Welch — dare I say an older version of Chappell Roan — mostly in from-the-mountaintop mode. She’s shooting for something of a goth image, but I’d advise her to think about some image redefinition; she’s pretty close to the right formula, I’d say. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Oct. 24 is the first new-album Friday after my birthday, so if you forgot to do something special for my birthday on the 21st, like leave a microwaved joke on my Facebook about my being older than your grandmother or whatever (do people even bother sending birthday cards anymore, when they can just post something completely vacuous on social media, we really need to change that), you could order one of my books from any bookstore or just send me money, either thing is fine, I thank you in advance for your kind indulgence. Now, as important as it is, we aren’t here to talk about my birthday, we are gathered here today to talk about albums, and I’ll tell you folks, this week’s slate’s getting filled up with new ones, all competing for your holiday dollars, if you have any! Why, just look at this, we were just making fun of talking about this fellow last week, in the context of Chrissie Hynde saying she hates his music, one Mr. Bon Jovi, who of course rose to fame in the 1980s for looking like Farrah Fawcett or whatever his appeal was (mostly the press just talked about his hair), since his music was pretty awful, but then legendary hair-metal songwriter Desmond Child entered the picture and wrote songs for him, like “Livin’ On A Prayer” and such, and then he left the picture, and the Jovis tried to re-capture the magic, but instead went back to their tradition of writing bad music, starting with the awful ballad “Bed Of Roses” and the hilariously contrived single “It’s My Life,” which all of us music critics secretly refer to as “Just Pretend Desmond Child Wrote This Song And Give Us your Money, That’d Be Great” when we’re holding our secret meetings about controlling what music all you people have to listen to on the radio and Spotify. Whatever, who cares, the new album is titled Forever, same as their last album, but this is the “Legendary Edition,” spotlighting the push single “Legendary,” which stole the hook from Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” and had a mediocre run on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart, mostly by accident, given that people who are old enough to be able to name one Bon Jovi song assumed it would be awesome, but it wasn’t, because Desmond Child had nothing to do with the album, and now you’re armed with all the information you need to make a buying decision about this completely unnecessary record (there’ll be a lot of such albums coming out as holiday gift-buying season draws closer), you’re welcome.

• As you all surely know, alt-country folkie Brandi Carlile bestowed upon humanity the ballad-ish single “The Story,” a romantic dirge that was about as fun as getting your four-wheeler stuck in a swamp, and that’s actually what the song sounds like as far as I’m concerned, but many people like it because they think it’s as epic as “What’s Up” by Four Non Blondes for some reason. Returning To Myself is her new album; the title track is a yodely unplugged strum-a-thon that’s pretty unremarkable until the 12-string guitar kicks in, after which it’s pretty decent-ish.

• Demi Lovato rose to stardom after appearing on Barney & Friends and then some Disney Channel things and now she’s just massively famous for totally sounding like Kesha. The title track from her newest LP, It’s Not That Deep, is fine by me, an Aughts-era house track that Tiesto wouldn’t hate at all.

• Finally it’s Boston alt-rock legends The Lemonheads, led by Evan Dando, who has been name-checked in a whole bunch of popular songs, including “Jane” by Barenaked Ladies. “In The Margin,” the lead single from the band’s new album, Love Chart, is a return to their nerdy, low-key, mumbley Ramones-twee roots, it’s pretty cool. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Tortoise, “Layered Presence” (Nonesuch Records) & Kashena Sampson, Ghost of Me (self released)

All the Way to the River, Elizabeth Gilbert

(Riverhead, 400 pages)

Elizabeth Gilbert is not known as a humor writer, but a few pages into her latest book I laughed out loud when she apologetically wrote that she hadn’t yet said much about herself. “How very typical of me, to have immediately put my focus upon the other,” she wrote.

What? Say again? This is the woman who made the confessional memoir a genre when Eat, Pray, Love detonated on the world nearly 20 years ago. That bombshell of a book, and its subsequent movie, and its subsequent sequel (2010’s Committed) made Gilbert so much money that, had she lived modestly and managed it prudently, she wouldn’t have to work again, ever. She could have just flitted around the world eating and praying.

But as Gilbert reveals in her latest memoir, All the Way to the River, she gave money away as fast as it came in. She paid off credit card bills, medical bills and student loans, paid for friends’ homes and vacations, invested in businesses and covered college tuition. She sent checks to women she heard were getting divorced. At one point during the financial crisis of 2008, she says, she literally walked down the street of a small town in New Jersey asking business owners if they needed any money.

Some people might call that extraordinary kindness. Gilbert calls it co-dependancy. It was a symptom, she says, of a larger problem that has ruled her life: “love and sex addiction.” And with that, we kind of know what we’re in for here.

All the Way to the River is a book-length confession, told through the unfolding relationship with the woman she calls the love of her life: a hairdresser/musician named Rayya who at first was an acquaintance, then a best friend and eventually a lover.

Rayya was also addicted to drugs. She had gotten clean, but then, a week after her 56th birthday, learned that she was dying of cancer. And in the course of her illness, she again spirals into addiction.

Rayya died in 2018, and Gilbert has said that she is just now telling this story because it took “years of therapy, grief, confusion, recovery and sobriety for me to even be able to understand all that happened between us and why.”

She sees her own compulsive behavior reflected in Rayya’s addiction and entwines their stories in a narrative that is alternately harrowing, mystical, strange, unhinged and deeply touching. Could a less gifted writer publish a book in which she describes herself as being a conduit for a dead woman to hold and kiss her dying daughter and find a world receptive to this story? Unclear.

But Gilbert sees herself as both a radiant soul and a painfully flawed human being, and this sort of mysticism infuses her life. (At one point, Rayya told her that the first time they met, when Gilbert came to her apartment for a haircut, she saw “a big circle of golden light around my head” and later wondered “Who has that much freaking sunshine? What’s that all about?”)

Anxiety and fear has always infused her life as well. Without specifically assigning blame, Gilbert says that her parents “made it clear to me growing up that I was expected to leave the house right after high school and never live there again.” She did so, but with a “lifelong quest to make other people into my home,” a strategy that didn’t work especially well. She bounced from relationship to relationship and estimates that between the ages of 20 and 48, she lived in about 20 different homes. She left men she describes as good and says she broke up marriages. She could bear neither intimacy nor living alone.

Then she fell into the rabbit hole of Rayya, the woman that Gilbert let move into a church that she had bought sight unseen off Craigslist, planning at first to make it her forever home and then to turn into a working sanctuary for artists. Gilbert was still married at the time, but over time, she was falling in love with Rayya as they spent more time together and their relationship deepened.

After Rayya’s cancer diagnosis in 2016, Gilbert writes, “I cried so hard, I fell out of time and space.” She ended her marriage and became Rayya’s lover when they thought Rayya had six months to live. It turned out she had more time than that, and it wasn’t a Taylor Swiftian love story, but a dark, chaotic tunnel in which Rayya’s treatment depleted both women. At one point, Gilbert confesses, she considered killing Rayya with an overdose, and while she didn’t do that, she did finally ask her to move out of church.

When Rayya leaves and gets sober through the help of another friend, Gilbert is distraught and angry that someone else was able to help Rayya when she couldn’t. Theirs is a messy and complicated relationship, right to the end, except there really isn’t an end, because Gilbert believes that Rayya continued to communicate with her after her death.

As in Eat Pray Love, which proceeds from a middle-of-the-night instruction delivered from God, Gilbert has a running conversation with the divine, which is likely not the same kind of divinity perceived by her readers, especially those, say, in the deep South. The God that speaks to Gilbert throughout is one who addresses her as “my love” and “my child,” a love language that disbelieving cynics might call “wackadoodle.” And to be sure, there are scenes throughout that might also be described as cringe. But Gilbert answers her critics with her talent — she is, first and foremost, a creative force of nature expressed through a keyboard — and with her unwavering belief in the spiritual realm.

All the Way to the River is a memoir about addiction and love, but it is also a memoir about death — what it costs the living to watch someone close to us die, how it changes us. It’s a strange and often unsettling book that upends the myth of Elizabeth Gilbert given to us by Eat, Pray, Love.

It is a reminder that even in the genre of memoir, not everything is revealed, although it’s hard to see what Gilbert could have possibly left out here. Yes, we are entertained, touched, riveted. But there is an underlying ickiness to it, the sense we’ve been enlisted as voyeurs to another’s pain without their consent. But Gilbert has an answer for that: Rayya, she says, told her to write this book, told her after her death. “Tell them every single thing that happened! Don’t worry about protecting my dignity or yours — just go full punk rock with it. Lay it all out there.” Rayya assures Gilbert that she doesn’t mind being dead. “But I do miss grilling.” A

Featured Photo: All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert

Album Reviews 25/10/16

Patricia Brennan, Of The Near And Far (Pyroclastic Records)

The only reason you don’t see a lot of vibraphone-jazz reviews in this space is that I don’t receive many of them from the coffee-pounding public relations people who promote jazz albums. This one’s important: Mexican-born Brennan is one of the best around; she’s played with Yo Yo Ma, The Philadelphia Orchestra and Vijay Iyer for starters, not to mention all the awards she’s won, including Jazz Album of the Year and Vibraphonist of the Year in Downbeat’s 2024 Critics Poll. But wait, what are we even talking about, you ask, isn’t a vibraphone the same thing as a xylophone? No, xylophones have wooden bars, whereas vibraphones have metal bars that produce a warmer, more sustained sound, but either instrument would seem an odd choice for an astronomy nerd who grew up listening to Zeppelin and Radiohead until you knew that Afro-Cuban musical traditions and the sounds of Mexican marimba bands were vying for her attention all the while. This record, as everyone from NPR to Stereogum expected, is a masterstroke, a worthy successor to 2024’s Breaking Stretch; like the album cover, it’s an exercise in beautifully bizarre fractals (opener “Antlia”), frightwig Latin-jazz (Andromeda”) and experimental ambient (“Lyra”). Transcendental stuff for sound explorers. A+

Holy Wars, “Metamorphosis” (Rise Records)

This industrial-indie single came to my attention courtesy of (you should be able to guess by now) friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny, whose love for badass chick-rock is inexplicable but fierce; this Los Angeles boy-girl duo was his weekly Favorite Band Of All Time a week or so ago, and the singer is now pen pals with Dan’s kid. The tune follows their more recent single, “Crucify,” which for me immediately evoked a bolder, more over-the-top version of another L.A. boy-girl duo, Collide, who entranced me — good lord — 20 years ago, with their Tool-meets-synthpop vibe. The punchline here is that the link Dan sent for “Metamorphosis” was on a delay, and I was literally one of the first people to hear it, along with their most diehard fans and however many PR bots were in attendance (I know how weird that sounds, but it’s the honest truth; I literally clicked the link three minutes before the video premiered). The recipe’s been done, but the song’s quite good; think A Perfect Circle but more sharply focused and with more Nine Inch Nails menace (in other words Poppy, i.e. Evanescence jamming with Rammstein), or, more accurately, Collide after downing a flask of 28 Days Later serum. It goes hard, sure. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Oct. 17 is the next Friday-load of albums from established rock stars and such, but there are local bands and artists that could always use more attention, so let’s turn to that first! I had planned to visit another local club in order to spout more run-on sentences in support of the local scene, but it didn’t happen this week, because I’ve been so busy with other stuff I’ve barely even checked my rapidly dying Twitter in a month. OK, I’m being serious, I do want to talk more about local bands in this space, like my plan was to see what’s happening at The Wild Rover Pub, which, I hear from Ross The Mandolin Player from local Irish-folk-rock band Rebel Collective, people are pretty excited about. But I didn’t; instead I waited for the universe to send me local stuff to talk about so I wouldn’t have to stop re-binge-watching Alien: Earth and leave the house, and sure enough it did. Here it is: You people know how supportive I’ve been of hilariously underrated Americana-rocker Kristian Montgomery for years now, right? Well, believe it or not, he just racked up a bunch of first-round nominations for actual national Grammy awards, including the Best Rock Album Grammy for his newest full-length, Prophets Of The Apocalypse. Naturally, we all wish Kris the best of luck competing against Taylor Swift and whatever’s left of the Beatles and whatever other nobodies put out records this year, and if he does win, Petunia and I will be attending the afterparty at Snoop Dogg’s apartment, and I will demand a huge bowl of all-purple Skittle-flavored gummies from Snoop’s victory garden. Mind you, competition for that Best Rock Album Grammy will be fierce, because guess who’s got one coming out this week, none other than Chrissie Hynde, of The Pretenders! Titled Duets Special, the record features (spoiler) a bunch of duets with famous rockers, for instance a version of Billy Paul’s 1972 radio hit “Me & Mrs. Jones,” which Chrissie sings with k.d. lang. Spoiler, k.d. sings the really high parts, because she is a more awesome singer, although Chrissie is more awesome at making fun of bands she hates, like Bon Jovi and Duran Duran, no one can top her, don’t even bother trying.

• Speaking of awesome, Icelandic indie band Of Monsters and Men release their new album, All Is Love And Pain In The Mouse Parade, this week! If you’re like most people, you became aware of their awesomeness by way of hearing one of their better songs on TV soundtracks, like the time on Sweet Tooth when their totally killer track “Dirty Paws” was playing while the kid was turning into a goat or whatever the point of that show was. OK, you can already listen to the whole LP on YouTube; I just picked the tune “Dream Team” at random, and it is of course crazy-cool, a cross between M83 and God Lives Underwater, full of surprising electro and post-indie twists and turns. Those guys still haven’t messed up yet.

• Boz Scaggs is responsible for some of the worst cab-driver-radio songs of the ’70s, like “Lowdown” and “Lido Shuffle,” but maybe his new album, Detour, has something good on it, who even knows anymore. Yes, “I’ll Be Long Gone” is a strummy mellow jazz-pop ballad, perfect for watching potato-baking contests on ESPN.

• We’ll call it a column with Deadbeat, the new album from Australian indie dude Kevin Parker, aka Tame Impala. New single “Loser” is a Jamie Liddell/Gorillaz-infused joint that really brings the mellow electro-funk, if that’s your jam (it isn’t mine).

Featured Photo: Patricia Brennan, Of The Near And Far album cover and Holy Wars, “Metamorphosis” album cover

At Last, by Marisa Silver

(Simon & Schuster, 288 pages)

There are few relationships in life as complex as that of the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom. This is true not only as the two women prepare for the union of their children, but throughout the course of their lives. It becomes more true if there are ever grandchildren involved.

Marisa Silver dives into the dynamic in At Last, a sharp and perceptive novel that is heavy on characters if light on plot. The story follows the lives of Evelyn Turner and Helene Simonauer, who are thrown together, unwillingly, when their children decide to get married.

Helene was not at all happy about the union of Ruth — “this tall and rashly opinionated girl” — to Tom, her “otherwise responsible son.” Evelyn, for her part, sees the upcoming wedding as a tragic accident of timing. “Two years ago, [Ruth] met a young man on the street, and now they were getting married. If either she or Tom had been at that same spot five minutes earlier or five minutes later, Evelyn would not be driving around with a woman who clutched her purse on her lap as if she thought Evelyn might steal it.”

“The woman was a disturbance. Evelyn needed to be undisturbed,” Silver writes, letting us know that however disagreeable the women are, her own prose is going to be delightful.

Both Evelyn and Helene are widows, and the sort of women that are often described by others as a “piece of work,” but of course they don’t see it in themselves. They think if they can just get through the wedding and its preparations, they can retreat to their lives and not have to pretend to be nice to each other again.

That’s not how life works. But as the women’s relationship develops over decades, we learn stories from the past that turned them into who they become. Their own mothers are very much architects of their daughters, at least to a point. We witness Evelyn’s attempts to get out from the shadow of an insecure and sometimes cruel mother, and Helene’s efforts to keep her family functioning after her two siblings die in unrelated incidents.

The past is interspersed with the relationships of the present, always with Silver’s shrewd humor and her deep understanding of human nature. In one scene Helene takes Ruth to a hair salon, where she says, with all good intentions, “it looks to me like you haven’t had a good cut in quite a while.” As Ruth sits in the chair, the hairdresser looks at Helene.

“What a feral cat you’ve brought me, her raised eyebrows seemed to say. Oh, don’t I know it, Helene’s eyebrows responded. Satisfied, Helene picked up a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal and pretended to read about tapioca.”

The story’s complexity owes not just to current events but to past ones. At one point Helene comes across a packet of letters in her late husband’s things that indicate a secret relationship overseas. The letters were written in German between 1939 and 1943 by someone named Irina. (“It was the string, wrapped several times around the letters horizontally and vertically and then knotted, that made her know she was in the presence of something dangerous.”)

As Helene tries to figure out their meaning, she sets into motion the events that will culminate in Tom and Ruth meeting, and ultimately getting married, and having a daughter named Francine. The grandmothers, as grandmothers are wont to do, compete for the child’s affection as she grows up into a person old enough to have her own narrative in this story — it’s Francine who tells us, in her own words, what it’s like to be told by her parents that they’re getting a divorce, what it’s like to see her grandmothers ravaged by age and memory loss.

Silva has said that At Last has its roots in a childhood memory. One of her grandmothers, driving her to the other’s grandmother’s house, said “I know you love me more than her.” She was 4 at the time, but those words were burned into her memory and provided the scaffolding on which she built Helene and Evelyn’s story.

We hear her own experience when she writes, “When Francie was a newborn and Helene would go over to visit, Evelyn would be there more times than not holding Francie while Ruth rested. And so it was Evelyn who would ask Helene if she’d like to hold the baby, or if she’d like to give Francie a bottle, and it was Evelyn who would take the baby from her when Francie started to fuss, as if Helene didn’t know how to calm a child.”

This is Silver’s eighth novel, and it is expertly crafted. Despite the fine writing, it’s hard to imagine what audience it might find among men. It’s a novel of and about women and the intermingled tensions that hum through their lives. Mother-in-law and baby experience is not required to enjoy the story, but it helps. B+

Featured Photo: All Consuming, by Ruby Tandoh

Album Reviews 25/10/09

Air, The Virgin Suicides Redux (TH Productions)

I was never a fan of this French space-rock duo or space-rock in general, but this remix of their 1999 album The Virgin Suicides is more like it, mostly because it’s an all-analog affair that reveals the band as the outlet-mall-ambient organism that it is much more so than the original did. They knew the 1999 record wasn’t representative (or useful, let’s just say it) because it was made on a very low budget. “It was during the first era of digital home studio equipment,” the band recently said, now that it’s safe to admit it, “and the sound is very metallic and cold. We’ve always regretted that about the way it sounds.” Well, hear hear, I completely understand it now after hearing this reupholstered version: They wanted it to sound like Dark Side Of The Moon-era Pink Floyd, except, you know, edgier. Or something. No, seriously, the non-cheese-drenched parts are quite indica-stoner-listenable, whereas the over-modulated Flaming Lips parts are still intact, all of which means it’s actually more relevant now than when it first came out. The spaceship sounds and This Island Earth robo-bursts are still idiotic, but Wayne Coyne wouldn’t be around today if it weren’t for that nonsense, put it that way. B-

Magic Wands, Cascades (Metropolis Records)

Ah, a nice easy Halloween-apropos dream-pop/goth record from Metropolis Records. This one features a Los Angeles-based boy-girl duo, Chris and Dexy Valentine, who first surfaced in 2012 with Aloha Moon, the title track of which sounded like a shoegaze band trying Sadé-yacht-pop on for size, while the rest sounded like a Chex Mix of Asteroids Galaxy Tour, Lana Del Rey and Lola Falana. This one stays in that zone but goes harder, starting with “Across The Water,” which borrows the buzzy guitar drone from Wire’s “It’s A Boy” to good brain-zapping effect, after which “Armor” does the obligato Joy Division-meets-Bauhaus thing (translation: there’s a lot of reverb, angst and intentionally cheesy production values; “Hide” uses a similar sewing pattern). “Albatross” is pure shoegaze, sounding like Raveonettes trying to sound really forlorn; “Moonshadow” is the best on board if you like sexy vampires riding motorcycles (and who doesn’t). This is definitely worth any goth’s while. A-

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Sure and begorrah or whatever, this Friday is another Friday, Oct. 10, meaning there will be new albums coming out that day, and we will talk about them in this space, but as long as we’re talking about albums while speaking with Irish accents, I would like to discuss very quickly an album that is not coming out on Friday, because it isn’t done yet! This segues magnificently into my new sub-series for this column, tentatively titled “Eric Actually Leaves The House To Find Nightlife In Manchester NH,” which I did once again on Saturday, Sept. 28, to chill with the homies at the Shaskeen Pub on Elm Street! Yes, if you can even understand my words through this thick Irish brogue, that date was the Pub’s 20th Anniversary celebration, so I showed up at midnight to meet Ross The Mandolin Player from the Irish folk/rock band Rebel Collective, whose members live up north a bit, but not as ungodly far as Berlin or Montreal, I forget where exactly. Anyway, they have recorded all the tracks for their upcoming new album, but haven’t mixed it yet. I’m sure it will be awesome; they are influenced by Flogging Molly, The Pogues and of course world music of a leprechaun bent, and it all went off quite well during this performance. FYI, they haven’t played any large conventions where people guzzle green absinthe lager or whatnot, but they have played their tin whistles and guitars and fiddles at the Highland Games, so that’s something to look forward to! Now, recall that I did ask you people where I should go after the Slam Free Or Die poetry event I attended the other week, and you naturally ignored my totally desperate pleas, but funnily enough, I, a confirmed unwelcome person from Mass., heard about the Shaskeen from a friend on Twitter who used to live in Manchester during the days when Pockets The Mastermind was the local king of hip-hop, so neener, I know your secrets now. In the meantime, while you wait for Rebel Collective’s awesome new album, you could always put away your kilt and taxi-driver cap and don your skinny jeans and chullo hat to go listen to Paw, the new album from indie-rock dude Avery Tucker, formerly half of Girlpool, whose awkward moonbat-twee tune “Chinatown” is still talked about among the 10 or 15 people worldwide who still remember it! Paw’s leadoff single, “Like I’m Young” is similarly moonbatty and minimalist, except for when Tucker starts singing increasingly loudly and then the whole mess descends into a slow-motion ’90s-grunge Silkworm-ish skronk-a-thon. It’s OK!

• In April, Mass Appeal Records announced a set of seven albums coming this year from such rap artists as Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, and Nas, the latter of whom helped out on the forthcoming new one from Mobb Deep, Infinite. Includes some rhymes from Prodigy, who died in 2017; “Easy Bruh” is eerie, trippy and of course badass, just like all hardcore hip-hop that appeals to fans who prefer groups whose logos are rendered in Spinal Tap font.

• The Wytches is a raw, rattley post-punk band from England that kind of reminds me of The Horrors when they were good. Talking Machine, their new album, features a tune called “Black Ice” that’s loud and messy in a Hives kind of way but less spazzy and more mid-tempo; you’ll probably like it if you like Brian Jonestown Massacre and that kind of thing.

• And lastly we have to pay attention to veteran emo band Yellowcard, whose new album Better Days sounds exactly like Blink-182 and Lit and Good Charlotte and all the rest of them, isn’t art amazing?

Featured Photo: Shiner, BELIEVEYOUME (Spartan Records) & Patrick Wolf, Better Or Worse [EP] (Appaport/Virgin Music)

All Consuming, by Ruby Tandoh

(Knopf, 304 pages)

Did we really need another book about food? Yes, foodies, we most certainly did. Ruby Tandoh’s All Consuming is a fresh take on an old subject, a disjointed romp through the world of bubble tea, Magnum ice cream and TikTok recipes that is both an indictment of and a tribute to food culture.

Tandoh was a runner-up on The Great British Bake Off, one of the most popular TV series to cross the pond. Just 20 years old when she applied to the show after being encouraged by her mother to watch it, she parlayed the experience into a food- and cookbook-writing career. As she demonstrates in a New Yorker piece about the show, not only can Tandoh cook, but she can write, in a breezy tone and with a sardonic wit that invites you to follow along whether you’re interested in this stuff or not. You may not have realized you wanted to know the history of the All Recipes website or the vagaries of the New York automat, but Tandoh somehow makes even the most useless information fascinating.

She begins with a reflection of why we eat what we eat, and how that has changed. Until the past century, our food choices were shaped by availability and family tradition: “Conversations, meals together, some person you want to be more like, some person you hate, a myth about this or that, a recipe taught to you, a story about witches.”

“Not always, not for all people, but as a rule: almost everything you knew about food, you probably learned either in the kitchen or at the table,” she writes.

But in the middle of the 20th century, she explains, tastes and diets began to be determined by corporations and advertising. This trend was exacerbated by the internet, which shapes our appetites with photographs and recipes that seduce us into embracing whatever is the hot new trend (think sriracha and kombucha) while we order groceries and meals from our couches while salivating over TikTok recipes and restaurant reviews on our phones. The most influential restaurant critic in America right now, Tandoh says, is a TikToker named Keith Lee who has 15 million followers and admits he knows very little about food.

“I love it. I love humankind’s inexhaustible capacity for nonsense,” Tandoh writes. She herself has fallen under the spell of TikTok food, saying as soon as she saw the videos of a certain kind of chocolate-covered strawberries, “I knew two things: I was going to buy them, and it was going to be a mistake. … The algorithm brought these videos to me tenderly but insistently, the way a cat drops a dead mouse on the carpet.” The staggering number of people looking at these strawberries — 150 million at her last count — added to the appeal, just like lines outside a Shake Shack make the meals inside seem more desirable than they are. Fear of missing out, she says, is responsible for 80 percent of her biggest food mistakes.

She devotes a chapter to explain the rise of bubble tea — usually a concoction of tea, milk, assorted add-ins and tapioca pearls — that originated in Taiwan, soon overran China and started showing up in California in the 1990s. “There is no practical reason to drink bubble tea, no culture to which it is truly traditional…. In fact, in most places, the point is exactly that it’s fun and unserious.” It’s also hard to define, having become “an umbrella term for a miscellany of Instagrammable drinks, many of which don’t have tea, milk or even tapioca pearls.” (Her recommendation to friends who want to try it but are bewildered by the choices: get the brown sugar boba milk tea, the archetype.)

There’s another chapter on food influencers like Nara Smith, who absurdly show us how to, for example, prepare grilled-cheese sandwiches for toddlers by first making the bread from scratch, and then the cheese, and the fresh pesto, and eventually, yes, even the butter, seasoning it delicately with parsley, garlic and sea salt. These sorts of influencers make Martha Stewart look like a slacker, and they have arisen even as the gold standards of food magazines, like Gourmet, have gone out of business, which she clearly rues.

Martha Stewart does not go unskewered; in fact one of the chapter titles, “Cook remaining 100 lobsters,” is apparently one of the more precious lines from her debut book Entertaining. Real cooking, Tandoh informs us, is “making the same five dishes on rotation for 363 days of the year, and then getting wildly above your station for the remaining two.” And about entertaining? It is, she says, “an invented and avoidable problem. Nobody is making you do this.”

This is a very British book — it begins by examining how food content in British newspapers led to the foodies of today and ends with Tandoh’s visit to Wimpy, a U.K. fast-food chain. But it’s impossible to talk about food without America being a large part of the story — for example, how a handful of tech nerds at the University of Washington, in the early days of the internet, were casting about for websites that would be enormously profitable and landed on the idea of cookierecipe.com. Launched with just a couple dozen recipes in 1998, the venture expanded to other categories — there would be a pierecipe.com and a thanksgivingrecipe.com, for example, before all this gloriously combined into allrecipes, which is usually one of the first websites to turn up when you look for a recipe on the internet.

Tandoh talks to the Iowa woman who uploaded “Banana Cake VI” to the website in 1999 — distinguishing it from many other banana cake recipes is that you put it in the freezer for 45 minutes after taking it out of the oven — and explains how “Carrot Cake XII” — a disastrous cooking experience because of its use of canned carrots — made it onto the website. She also explains the origin of “crockpot squirrel” which is another one of those things that I didn’t know about, but very much needed to know.

After a spin through cookbooks, ice cream and tonic water, Tandoh grants us all absolution. She wonders whether she’s ever had an original craving for anything. “For anyone who has ever been anxious about food, getting pulled over the event horizon of your feelings, I have to tell you — it feels amazing when you realize that your appetites don’t just belong to you.”

There’s little in the way of deep thinking here and nary a recipe, but Tandoh is the dinner guest who will keep everyone entertained, and All Consuming is a delightful read, much better than its staid title suggests. B+

Featured Photo: All Consuming, by Ruby Tandoh

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