Category: Pop

Album Reviews 25/10/02

Todd Herbert, Captain Hubs (TH Productions)

Herbert, an Evanston, Illinois-bred jazz saxophonist, has been a top-level performer out of New York City for many years now, serving as a member of the Freddie Hubbard Quintet, Jimmy Cobbs Legacy Band, and the Charles Earland Quartet, among others. As great as this album is, it does feel a little sparse all told, but only because Herbert’s only traditional-style cohort here is pianist David Hazeltine, whom I’ve talked about here now and then. The sax runs are gold for the most part, but the excitement, along with the sound levels, drops considerably when Herbert’s seemingly tireless workouts suddenly stop and Hazeltine steps in with his smoke-filled-room tinkling. I say this only to point out that this isn’t a whiz-bang sax-jazz album but a duo collaboration, which some would admittedly find wildly appealing. John Weber’s bass is flawless, as is Louis Hayes’s drumming, and the selections are good; the bombastic title track that opens the record was originally written for Hubbard and is a definite keeper. Wayne Shorter’s “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum” and John Coltrane’s “Straight Street” are here, so it’s worth investigating, sure. A-

The Belair Lip Bombs, Again (Third Man Records)

Here we have the first Australian band to be picked up by Jack White’s Third Man Records label, and strangely enough it’s not the most amazing Australian band I’ve ever heard, not by a long shot. It’s a female-fronted indie band that makes the right noises, with their scratchy-raunchy ’90s-tinged guitar sound betraying a fetish for Big Black and things of that sort, but singer Maisie Everett’s voice rarely pushes past the tepid Sheryl Crow range that’s well into her comfort zone. I’m saying that the band’s noise level is up there with Amyl And The Sniffers, maybe even more aggressive than that, but Everett doesn’t quite fit in, save for when they try snoozy pub-pop oatmeal on for size (“Cinema”; “If You’ve Got The Time,” which includes an incidental heavy-ass Queens Of The Stone Age riff for no logical reason). “Hey You” reads like Au Revoir Simone, while we’re at it; I literally have no idea what these guys are trying to accomplish, to be honest. C

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday is Oct. 3, a day that will live in infamy because my sister was born that day (she’s a dog person and I’m a cat person, so Thanksgivings are super-hard and usually end in yelling and Facebook-unfriending until the next time). And speaking of unfriendings and harmless, mindless drama, look who’s got another album coming out, it’s none other than Taylor Swift, the subject of half the internet fights a few months ago, for really no good reason whatsoever! This one is called The Life Of A Showgirl, and it is produced by, you guessed it, ubiquitous Swedish pop-music-oligarch Max Martin, whom I’ve talked about before. He’s written, among other modern super-hits, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” Celine Dion’s “That’s the Way It Is,” Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time” and TayTay’s “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space,” in other words he’s written the second-most No. 1 singles in history, behind only Paul McCartney, so if you want to write Facebook posts about how much modern music stinks, always be sure to blame it all on that dude. Along with Max, this album is co-produced by his producer-bro partner, Shellback, another overexposed Swede, so I know I am about to listen to something so unbelievably novel that I will explode, so here’s the title track, a diva ballad that sounds like Mariah Carey for a while and then she starts hitting high notes kind of like Celine Dion in yell mode. A lot of people will like this, because it is a single-ladies’ angst overload but not as intolerable as Adele.

• Rachael Yamagata is an adult alternative singing lady who hasn’t dented the U.S. charts since 2003, which means that I’ll probably like what she’s doing on her new album, Starlit Alchemy. Ugh, forget that, her voice is too breathy on the advance single, “Birds,” like a female Peabo Bryson, or Ani DiFranco trying not to be too annoying. It is a piano-driven ballad; I imagine you’ll probably see it on Good Morning America or whatnot and think “well that’s kind of pretty,” and then never think about it again.

• Sparks, a band we talked about a few months ago, is releasing an EP, titled MADDER! Funny story about Sparks, someone read my review of their last album, Mad, in this newspaper and sent me a private Facebook message asking me to write about a Sparks-related art project they were doing, and that was the only time I’d ever mentioned Sparks on Facebook. But then, oddly enough, I started getting spammed by Facebook about Sparks’ Sept. 11 show at Boston’s Berklee Performance Center, meaning Facebook is reading people’s private messages in order to spam them. Isn’t that disgusting, but anyway, the new single is “Porcupine,” a really dumb thing that sounds like Devo trying to be elevator music, go hear it for yourself.

• Lastly and somewhat apropos for early Halloween, Canadian alt-folk/country band The Deep Dark Woods releases their 11th album, The Circle Remains, this Friday! They are from Saskatoon, the biggest city in Saskatchewan, whose closest U.S. city is Portal, North Dakota, all of which means that it’s basically like living on Pluto except it’s much colder. Saskatchewan, which means “Great, how did we end up here anyway” in Native Canadian, doesn’t field a professional hockey team, so they root for the Edmonton Oilers, who have lost the last two Stanley Cup Finals series in a row, which is very sad, so I anticipate that this album will be full of sad songs from these Plutonians, whose team cannot win the Stanley Cup, let’s go listen to some of their mournful wailing on kickoff single “The Circle Remains Unbroken.” So yeah, it’s droopy and soft and vaguely funereal but not really sad, with slow-strummed acoustic guitar and a vintage-sounding organ doing annoying things. The singer sounds like Burl Ives, if that does it for you.

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

Swallows, by Natsuo Kirino, translation by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

(Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages)

Riki is a temp worker at a hospital, barely making enough money to feed herself and pay the rent. She is responsible enough and punctual, showing up promptly at 8 in the morning and working until 5:30, taking a break only to eat her lunch, often a hard boiled egg dipped in soy sauce. But Riki is bewildered by people who know what they want to do with their life, people with energy and ambition. She doesn’t really know what she wants to do with her life; she just knows she wants to escape the constant worry about money, to be able to occasionally splurge on a cup of coffee from 7-Eleven.

Then comes an offer to bear a child for a married couple for what seems a life-changing amount of money. It would require a complete upheaval of her life, the subjection of her desires to others, and going against the mores of her family and culture.

This is the ethical quandary at the heart of Natsuo Kirino’s Swallows, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and released in the U.S. this month. (It was published in Japan in 2022 with the title The Swallows Always Come Back.) The novel explores the issues surrounding surrogacy, which, while legal, is more controversial in Japan than in the U.S.; here, the auxiliary issues of class and privilege might resonate with readers more.

Riki, who is 29, didn’t set out to become a surrogate; a younger coworker, who supplemented her own insufficient income with sex work, suggested they both look into “donating” eggs to help couples struggling with infertility to conceive. While that’s not allowed in Japan, they would travel to Thailand for the procedure and be paid 500,000 yen, about $3,500 in U.S. dollars. But during Riki’s interview, she is asked to consider going further and being a surrogate, since she looked remarkably similar to the wife of a couple who needed one.

That couple, Motoi and Yuko, then become the focus of the narrative, and we learn how they got to this point. It is Motoi’s second marriage, the first having broken up because of his adulterous relationship with Yuko. They have tried unsuccessfully to have a child through IVF, and Yuko is resigned to its not happening, but Moito, growing older and wanting to see his DNA passed on, is increasingly adamant, even if they have to hire a surrogate. His mother offers to pay for the IVF and surrogacy — a surrogate would receive about $20,000 plus living expenses throughout the pregnancy, medical costs and gifts.

Motoi and Yuko proceed down this path even as a rift is developing between them. Motoi is a professional ballet dancer and teacher, the son of a mother and father who were also famous in Japan’s ballet world. Yuko is an outsider to their world — she had simply been a fan when she met Motoi. His motives for wanting a child have nothing to do with love for his wife or a desire for them to raise a family, but derive from his ego — his own star fading, he wants a child he can shape into a new star within the “ballet elite.” This, he believes, “would only confirm his own excellence. His obsession with having that proof only grew stronger with age.”

Meanwhile, Yuko, an illustrator, is increasingly cognizant of a sort of haughtiness that Motoi and his mother have toward her own family, especially a brother who is what is known in Japan as hikikomori — a young adult who rarely leaves the home and relies on his parents for support. When her brother came to their wedding, Yuko was delighted, knowing how difficult it was for him to leave the house. Her new husband, however, was contemptuous of her brother, and she later reflects that this moment was the start of the tension in the marriage.

In setting up these characters, Kirino presents a challenge for her readers: Where is a hero to be found in this cast? Who are we supposed to pull for? Despite our sympathies for Riki’s circumstances, there is a moroseness about her, and she makes decisions throughout the story that are reckless and dumb. And Yuko, despite not wanting to raise a child she has no biological connection with, and having doubts about the marriage itself, numbly goes along with the scheme.

The changing perspectives throughout the novel cause the readers to constantly reevaluate our allegiance. When Yuko and Riki first meet, there is the initial sense that they might experience a Thelma-and-Louise sort of bonding. There are some jarring events that occur as we travel from conception to birth; to call them plot twists doesn’t exactly seem right, but the dilemmas facing each character get more complicated. And Riki ultimately makes a decision that I never saw coming.

The setting adds depth for American readers, and the story doesn’t seem to have lost any power in its translation, though it moves a bit sluggishly in places. With advancements in IVF constantly making the news (the latest being the birth of a baby conceived via IVF more than 30 years ago), the field of assisted reproduction technology is ripe for exploration. While fiction, Swallows offers a compelling story that helps us process a mind-boggling world that’s getting newer and braver with each passing year.

B —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Gwyneth, Swallows, by Natsuo Kirino, translation by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

Album Reviews 25/09/25

Shiner, BELIEVEYOUME (Spartan Records)

This one came to my attention by way of friend-of-the-Hippo and fellow underreported author Dan Szczesny, but wait, don’t flip to the movie reviews yet, this time it’s not another opera-metal band but instead a post-prog/polite-math-rock foursome from Kansas City, Missouri. They’re quite good, these guys, able to shift gears rather seamlessly; we’ll randomly start with “So Far So,” a mid-tempo rockout evoking a harder-edged, art-rock-infused Kasabian (please tell me you’re familiar with Kasabian, I’m at the end of my rope, I swear, but if you haven’t, think Gang Of Four Krazy-glued to Alice in Chains), and then move on to the one they spent the bulk of their video-filming money on, “Asleep In The Trunk,” which launches with an obtrusive, somewhat Rush-like bass line and then shoplifts a few ideas from Muse. That brings us to “The Alligator,” a song that’s reminiscent of Live, or more accurately Collective Soul in radio-wimp-pop mode. I told you a ’90s-rock resurgence was coming, which is what this is, just please don’t shoot the messenger. A- —Eric W. Saeger

Patrick Wolf, Better Or Worse [EP] (Appaport/Virgin Music)

About time I got a record in here that sounds like the musicians wear funny European shoes. This South London, U.K.-based multi-instrumentalist is a folktronica/baroque-pop-grounded genre-tinkerer with a growing cult following; he’s played viola for Arcade Fire and Chicks On Speed among other interminably artsy acts. We find him here experimenting with largely agreeable, pub-friendly sounds, not in the stuffy unplugged fedora sense but in the manner of a crew of heathens adding pop elements to Irish jigs and sounds of that nature. The title track is an odd but very listenable duck, with its M83-style from-the-mountaintop verse, Simple Minds chorus and brightly strummed mandolin. Irish-traditional cover “She Didn’t Dance” reads like a pop-minded ode to the TV show Black Sails, combining boisterous Nick Cave belting with mournful zydeco sounds; “Mejora O Empeora” is a windows-down cruiser with world-music sensibilities. He’ll perform at Center of The Arts Armory in Somerville, Mass., on Nov. 10. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Sept. 26 is your next new-album-release Friday, so a lot of albums are making their way to your Spotifies and Napsters, which brings us to the latest update in my totally informal Manchester Nightlife series, in which I try to find stuff to do in New Hampshire’s “Queen City,” which should actually be called the King City, as everyone knows! When last we left this exercise, I asked you scamps where a regular fella like me could go to do a little twerking to the latest hip-to-the-hop music from Ye and Kendrick and Skee-Lo, but no one responded, and after much informal polling past that, I’m going to assume that there is a small faction of 21- to 32-year-olds who know of such a dance club, but they’re keeping it on the DL, because they know I’m the best twerker in the state and they don’t want to be embarrassed when they “bust a move.” In the meantime, however, there is an excellent, super-friendly indie-arts community to be found here in town, namely the Slam Free Or Die slam-poetry series, operated by a super-nice bro named Christopher Clauss! It’s a nicely attended open-mic event, held at Stark Brewing Co. at 500 Commercial St. in Manchester on Thursday nights, where you can get a brewski and a burger or other pub food (the fish and chips is a very good buy) or just munch on ketchup packets if you’re broke, then, if you want to, get up in front of all these super-cool people and read a poem (or vaguely rhyme-y rant) that you wrote! It’s a great time, an opportunity to offload a little of your existential angst over the coming Apocalypse, maybe meet a celebrity (actress Amber Tamblyn spoke there once) and yes, there’s beer, so why not give your parrot a little break from watching you misery-browse through Facebook and Twitter and go hang out with some actual people, in our arts community, who want to hear your words, no matter how weird or swear-y! In the meantime, I’ll resume searching for a local twerking club, or just see what the Wild Rover is like nowadays, anyplace where I might be able to perform my hypnotic come-and-get-it mating dance in time to something from Here For It All, the new album from former important person Mariah Carey! The single, “Type Dangerous” is perfect for slow-twerking, with its afterparty hip-hop-soul-meets-new-jack-jazz beat and disposable pop flourishes, my tail is wagging as we speak!

• Robert Plant was the singer for Led Zeppelin, but then he got tired of having enough money to buy random Scottish castles and struck out on his own with some really captivating rockabilly-tinted beach-pop albums in the 1980s, and then shoved Alison Krauss in our face for a while. His new LP (and band) is named Saving Grace, featuring vocalist Suzi Dian, who plays accordion. They’re said to be a psychedelica band, but there’s a (spoiler) polka-Western edge to it, going by opening single “Everybody’s Song.” They’ll be at the Shubert Theatre in Boston on Nov. 6.

• Biffy Clyro is a Scottish alt/prog band that sounds like Braid or Reuben or a busier, feistier Killers, you get the idea, and they’re releasing their 14th album, Futique, this week. The last time I talked about them at all was probably 15 years ago, so this will be as new to me as it is to you. Yuh, new tune “Hunting Season” sounds like Reuben, the end.

• We wrap up the week with a bougie, quirky comedian who’s never made me laugh, as in not once, ever, Portlandia’s Fred Armisen and his new comedy album, 100 Sound Effects. There is no advance sample for me to critique, but one of the titles is “Romanian Crowd At Rock Club Shouting For An Encore,” isn’t that so droll (eyeroll emoji)? —Eric W. Saeger

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

Gwyneth, by Amy Odell

(Gallery, 364 pages)

The origin story of Gwyneth Paltrow is well known: The daughter of Hollywood royalty, Bruce Paltrow and Blythe Danner, she had a gilded, bicoastal upbringing, and she was kissed by the gods who run the Department of Looks. When your godfather is Stephen Spielberg and you look like Patrow, you don’t seek fame and fortune so much as you tolerate it. And Paltrow has tolerated it exceptionally well.

Just 26 years old when she won the Academy Award for best actress for Shakespeare in Love, Paltrow has now been in more than 40 films, but fame stalks her in unexpected ways: witness her controversial wellness company, Goop, and the skiing collision turned courtroom drama turned musical. Most recently, she turned up in a commercial for the company at the center of the Coldplay kiss cam controversy. There’s an awful lot of Gwyneth Paltrow in the public domain.

But we don’t know as much about Paltrow as we might think, the author of the biography Gwyneth writes. According to Amy Odell, “As the main narrator of her own public story, Gwyneth has masterfully shaped our perception of her,” and like any experienced actor, “She knows all her best angles.”

Odell says she wanted to show Paltrow “from all angles, not just her best ones.” To do so, she interviewed more than 200 people, though not Paltrow herself. Not only did Paltrow turn down an interview, but she reportedly discouraged others from speaking to Odell, who also wrote a 2022 biography of Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

With Wintour, Odell had two additional decades of material to work with; Paltrow, for all her accomplishments, is just 52. Presumably there’s plenty more of her story to come, whether we want it or not. As such, Gwyneth is an opportunistic book, rather than a serious attempt to catalog a life for posterity, like, say, Walter Isaacson does. Did we need a Gwyneth Paltrow biography? Certainly not. Will it sell and make headlines? Of course. It is well researched and appropriately saucy, with just enough spicy detail and quotes to wag the dog that is Hollywood.

Odell spends a good bit of time talking about Paltrow’s famous parents, both of whom had at least a vague New England connection. Bruce Paltrow’s “biggest hit” was St. Elsewhere, the TV series “about doctors teaching interns at a run-down Boston hospital.” And Danner was a perennial darling of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, the highbrow summer stock in the Massachusetts Berkshires, which Gwyneth grew up attending with her mother.

“Starting at toddlerhood, Williamstown exposed Gwyneth to some of the best plays ever written, while acclimating her to the realm of Hollywood and celebrity,” Odell writes. The child also was a “sponge,” absorbing her mother’s lines while watching her perform. Once, the stage crew put little Gwyneth up on the stage to watch as she recited lines from the Anton Chekhov play “The Sea-Gull.”

It’s a long way from Williamstown to Gwyneth Goes Skiing, and there are a lot of details on the way that seem, well, overkill. For instance, she wore “penny loafers, a blue-and-white striped Breton shirt, and a white skirt” on her first day of school in seventh grade — that is information taking up space in my brain that could be better used. Then again, some of the detail explains a lot: You can draw a straight line from Bruce Paltrow’s cashmere socks and his insistence on always flying first class with his children to a grown-up Gwyneth hawking $165 T-shirts on Goop.com and saying, “I am who I am. I can’t pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year.” She may be royalty, but the people’s princess she is not.

In fact, Paltrow had flown so high above the average American for so long that her friend Robert Downey Jr. had to talk her into Iron Man by saying, “Don’t you want to be in a movie that people see?” She had to take less than her usual rates to do it, but it turned out to be her most financially rewarding film and it lifted her to be among the highest-paid actresses in the world — the dream of so many women in Hollywood.

But Paltrow had bigger plans — writing cookbooks and building an empire called Goop (G and P being her initials, and the two Os born of advice that successful internet companies had two Os in their names (most famously Google and Yahoo, which seems coincidence, but OK). Interrupting the Goop saga is a series of color photos of Paltrow with her various boyfriends and other famous people who circle her life like moons, assorted magazine covers and photos of Paltrow in very short skirts. She is very thin in every stage of her life, not surprising, since one high school yearbook put her biggest fear as obesity. She is also very healthy-looking, all the better to sell the various products that Goop offers, including the infamous jade egg, meant to improve a woman’s sex life.

When she first encountered the eggs, said to be a practice of women in ancient China, Paltrow laughed, Odell wrote. But she later went on to sell them on Goop for more than $50 each, attracting the ire of a San Francisco gynecologist, Dr. Jen Gunter, who began calling Goop out for promoting what she said was a potentially dangerous product. It was not Goop’s only controversy — Paltrow’s prescriptions have at times included an eight-day goat-milk cleanse. But Goop marches on as a leader in “Big Wellness,” although Odell questions its profitability and sustainability, especially if Paltrow ever withdraws.

From her upbringing to her education to her romantic partners (Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck were among them before she married — and consciously uncoupled from — Coldplay’s Chris Martin, with whom she has two children), everything that Paltrow has undertaken seems sun-kissed, so it’s hard to see anything ending for her in ignominy, even though she is constantly and mercilessly mocked. And Odell, in the end, doesn’t seem like she’s much of a fan.

But maybe Paltrow’s gift isn’t so much genetics or the ability to act or withstand strange health protocols; maybe it’s her ability to sniff out a potential bomb.

One of the gems that Odell offers her readers is that Paltrow considered for a while cutting an album, before losing interest and moving on to other things. Yes, we came that close to seeing Paltrow not only constantly in the news and on our social media feeds, but also on Spotify. B

Featured Photo: Gwyneth, by Amy Odell

Album Reviews 25/09/18

Beat, Beat Live (Inside Out Records)

In my never-ending quest to be a people-pleaser, I cover basically every genre on Earth in this space, and yes, I know how obvious it is. I’ll pick a random record, start listening, and the words start zapping out of my fingers automatically. I really only have a tough time with newest-hottest indie bands, because they’re almost always ridiculously overrated, but another genre that’s out of my wheelhouse is “wildly creative” prog-rock a la Zappa, because I don’t ever get the point. In that vein, King Crimson is another band I’ve never liked at all, but this isn’t all that bad, even though it’s rendered by a supergroup consisting of two Crimson members (Adrian Belew and Tony Levin) along with the guitar wonk’s guitar wonk, Steve Vai, and Tool drummer Danny Carey. Their mission: “re-imagine” three Crimson albums, namely Discipline, Beat and Three of a Perfect Pair, thus it’s obviously for Crimson fanatics. The results are all very tech-prog-sounding, like a wacky Spotify mix comprising random entries from Disco Biscuits, Styx, Talking Heads and Return To Forever, with occasional departures into Captain Beefheart nonsense. What can I diplomatically say other than come and get it, King Crimson completists, yee-hah. A

Bill Brennan and Andy McNeill, Dreaming In Gamelan (self-released)

Wonderfully peaceful “fourth world music”-based collaboration between two Canadian multi-instrumentalists/composers. They deal in “Sundanese Gamelan,” a sound created with gongs and chimes and associated elements, instruments that are manufactured under local conditions in towns in the Indonesian province of West Java, such as Bogor and Bandung. At its core, the music is an Indonesian tradition practiced by the West Javanese ethnic group known as the Sundanese, but here, as you’d naturally expect, the melodic patterns are geared more toward Western tastes. Electric violinist Hugh Marsh (on leave from Loreena McKennitt) adds a layer to the sonic depth, but whether or not that’s really needed is probably a matter of taste; the violin is more an undergirding than anything that ever gets busily melodic. The chimes and gongs have a “singing bowls” effect that sounds simultaneously planned and completely spurious, that is when it isn’t exhaling exquisite ambiance. The tldr: It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to hear at a wildly pricey spa or advanced yoga center, etc. A+

PLAYLIST

• Like almost every Friday since the fall of Rome or whatever, Sept. 19 will find us covered in new albums, clawing our way to safety, away from all the albums that want us to buy them! Since Christmas is a mere 98 days away, I have a Mount Vesuvius-load of albums to deal with this week, so instead of going into anything obscure right off the bat I’m going to talk about the new one from Sarah McLachlan, Better Broken! She’s my all-time favorite Lilith Fair fixture, but you may better know her as the lady who interrupts your TV show to ask you to donate to abandoned pets, which of course you definitely should do, don’t be a cheapskate (I can’t watch those commercials, like, the minute one shows up on the teevee when I’m watching my shows I change the channel at top speed, which I deserve to do because I’ve rescued enough cats in my lifetime. In fact, it’d be really nice if the Humane Society would give me some sort of special Xfinity code that would block commercials starring starving cats and dogs automatically, you know, maybe show me a nice happy video of skunks and raccoons frolicking in the forest instead, but then again, I’d end up being all like “You know, I should start rescuing abandoned skunks and raccoons,” even though every wildlife expert advises people not to, so don’t do it). Where were we, oh yes, Sarah McLachlan, she’s the best, let’s go lend an ear to the album’s title track, the first single from this new album! It is a deep, mellow tune, starting out with a trip-hop drumbeat reminiscent of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop,” which means she hasn’t changed much; the verse is mature and awesome, then it moves into an addictive little hook that flirts with brazen catchiness before folding into a yodel-filled chill-art piece that’s as good as anything else I’ve heard from her before. Some things never change, and in this case that’s actually a good thing!

• Hark, it’s the sound of rapidly twerking butts, who else could it be but New York rapper Cardi B, twerking away like a demented terrier! Cardi’s new album, Am I the Drama, is out this week; mayhaps you’ve heard the title track if you have small twerking children (I was going to say that you may have heard it at a local Manchvegas club, but now that the local club scene is changing and there’s basically no local place to twerk as far as I know — someone message me on one of my “socials” if I’m wrong of course, that’d be great — you’re better off just having kids if you want to stay hip to twerking and Humpty Dancing or whatnot) (yes, I’m being serious, send me your local club spam. At present I assume the Manchester dance club scene is nowadays the same as Portsmouth’s, just dudes in fedoras doing Bob Dylan covers). OK, this Cardi tune is, of course, a glossy yacht-rap song with lots of swearing, for your kids, who secretly just want you to give them guidance, love, discipline and money for tattoos.

• Yikes, I thought I was going to have to slog through another new Black Keys record, but thankfully it’s just everyone’s favorite demented stoner-indie band Black Lips, with their new LP, Season Of The Peach! “Tippy Tongue” is of course awesome, like early Rolling Stones but 100 times more interesting, meaning it’s nothing like Black Keys.

• And finally it’s nerdy chillwave artist Toro y Moi, with Unerthed: Hole Erth Unplugged, his new album! I hate to name-check José Gonzalez two weeks in a row, but “CD-R” is like his stuff with Zero 7, lazy and techie, but with a dobro in there, which makes it Americana-ish. It’s very nice and yadda yadda.

Featured Photo: Parcels, Loved (ANTI- Records) & Chameleons, Arctic Moon (Metropolis Records)

Culpability, by Bruce Holsinger

(Spiegel and Grau, 341 pages)

Noah and Lorelei are traveling with their three children, en route to a youth lacrosse tournament in Delaware, when their top-of-the-line self-driving minivan hits a Honda that explodes into flames.

The Cassidy-Shaw family all survive; the couple in the Honda do not. The headline in the local paper: “Lucky five escape crash, two die at scene.”

Noah, a corporate attorney, doesn’t feel lucky — wouldn’t luck entail not being involved in a fatal crash? But the larger theme in this smart novel, the fourth from University of Virginia professor Bruce Holsinger, is encapsulated in the title: Culpability.

It is not always obvious who is to blame in any given tragedy, and the closer you look at the circumstances and the people involved, the muddier things get.

The accident occurred when the Honda drifted toward the minivan’s lane, but because the senior citizens in that car are dead, the investigation centers on the survivors — and the artificial intelligence powering the minivan.

Charlie, a star lacrosse player about to enter college on a full scholarship, was sitting in the driver’s seat when the accident happened and as such was the “de facto driver,” the person charged with monitoring the AI’s navigation. Noah, his father, was next to him, composing a memo on his laptop. The two were the only ones to emerge uninjured, and they are the center of the investigation: Charlie, because he jerked the steering wheel when his sister screamed, thus disabling the AI, and Noah, because he was supposed to be supervising his minor son. Lorelei and the couple’s two daughters, Izzy and Alice, were in the back and seemingly involved.

But as the family recovers from their injuries, both psychological and physical, it is gradually revealed that Charlie and Noah are not the only parties whose actions prior to the crash warrant scrutiny. There is a web of culpability with nearly invisible threads that expand in multiple directions, threads that go far past the family. These become increasingly more apparent as the family decamps to a rental house in Virginia, near the Chesapeake Bay — a place they’d stayed a year before. Noah and Lorelei are hoping that a week of kayaking and board games and hot fudge sundaes will do more to help heal the family than the therapy so far has.

The expectations take a turn as Noah notices dramatic changes on the property across in the inlet where they are staying. It turns out a billionaire tech mogul has bought 90 acres across the inlet and transformed the former rustic horse farm into a high-tech, high-security compound that fills Noah with disgust. A widower whose wife died in a car accident, this mogul has a lissome daughter about Charlie’s age, and the teens become smitten with each other after a chance encounter on the water.

But as the families intermingle, Noah begins to suspect that his wife has a prior connection with Daniel Monet, the billionaire, through her work in the field of “computational morality” — the ethics of AI. He has been distant from her career because of what he sees as a divide, in their education, intellect and luck — a state-school graduate, he comes from a family that struggled to do more than survive, while Lorelei comes from a seemingly gilded family, where the siblings went to Yale, Stanford and Princeton.

In dealings with his wife’s sister, Noah notes “a reflective condescension given away in a certain lift of her eyebrows and the angle of her pretty nose.” And on his first and only time to accompany his wife to a conference, Noah feels diminished, out of his league, experiencing “my own terrifying insignificance.”

“My wife became a different person in that rarefied world, as if her brain had suddenly shifted to a higher plane while I hovered by her side as the interloping cupbearer, unworthy of drinking so much as a sip from whatever Olympian ambrosia she was drinking,” Noah says in the novel’s first-person narration.
As the story unfolds, Holsinger injects excerpts from a book that Lorelei has written, which is titled “Silicon Souls: On the Culpability of Artificial Minds,” as well as text conversations between one of the daughters and her AI friend, a chatbot named Blair that knows in detail everything that is going on, and keeps offering advice.

For a while, these asides seem like unwelcome interruptions in the narrative, but by the novel’s end their significance is clear, and evidence of Holsinger’s skill in plotting a deeply intelligent storyline that blends technology, philosophy and ethics, while also plumbing an essential pain of parenting: “No matter what parents do, their children’s outcomes are neither predictable nor inevitable. Life is not an algorithm, and never will be.”

Like the TV show The Good Place, the novel delivers a crash course in mainstays of secular moral thought, such as situational ethics: “The relative morality of certain actions is determined by the circumstance and context rather than by some absolute, unchanging ethical code. Likewise, our morality as individuals is formed not by innate personality traits but by the variables of our environment.”

Culpability moves slowly at times — it’s told by a corporate lawyer, after all; no offense to corporate lawyers except to say that Noah’s musings on corporate acquisitions right before the crash seem designed to dull our senses. Also at times the book seems overly long, continuing after what seems a natural ending. But Holsinger, as it turns out, knows exactly what he’s doing, and his ending is nothing short of genius. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Culpability, by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel and Grau, 341 pages)

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