Category: Pop

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

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

Maria Schneider, American Crow (ArtistShare Records)

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

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A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Stripp, Life Imitates Art (self-released)

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

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

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

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

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

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

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

KMFDM, Enemy (Metropolis Records)

This Hamburg, Germany-based industrial band has always been mandatory listening for safety-pin goths with aircraft-carrier-sized chips on their shoulders. I consider them Kiss for anarchists: crazy hair, piercingly loud fashions, and an unrelenting desire to smash the western world’s end-stage capitalist system. They’ve nailed the aesthetic with rage anthems before (“Free Your Hate” is still my favorite), but can they still compete in these sociopolitical times, which are obviously so [nervous hysterical laughter]? Well, things don’t get started until a few songs in: The rather childish title track sounds like something they thought would sound anthemic but doesn’t, and then comes “Oubliette,” which futzes around with Judas Priest-style riff-metal, which was never their strong suit. But then comes the echo-y, apocalyptic-sounding “L’Etat,” in which they remember that their biggest competitor is Rammstein; it’s one of the best things they’ve ever done. Resident hot chick Lucia Cifarelli steps in to sing the industrial-pop number “Vampyr,” sounding sweet during the verses and demon-rabid on the breaks of course, and — whoa, just hold it right there, they did get a new guitarist, and he can definitely shred. It’s OK! A-

Ben Rosenblum’s Nebula Project, The Longest Way Round (One Trick Dog Records)

Lot of fun, this one (if a bit scattershot with regard to focus), the latest release from award-winning (an ASCAP Young Jazz Composers award and two Downbeat awards, all in 2010) New York City-based pianist, accordionist and composer Rosenblum. Now, with regard to the parenthetical caveat above, there’s nothing inherently wrong with shifting genres and such in order to cover a crazy-wide spectrum of world music, and I’d chalk Rosenblum’s predilection for it to his eye-popping range of experience: He’s played with Rickie Lee Jones, yes, but also Canadian-Indian singer Kiran Ahluwalia and Brazilian hand percussionist/Late Show Band member Nêgah Santos; his influences are deep and varied, from Brazilian forró to Irish reels and jigs to Bulgarian folkloric songs and Dominican merengue. Yes, there’s accordion on here when it fits the mood, but no mood — or flavor of joyful expressionism, let’s say — is off limits, it seems. One minute you’re madly bouncing around in a hydraulically fitted 1964 Impala, the next you’re being treated to some of the most lively post-bop you’ve ever heard. So the verdict? Open minds will absolutely love this. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Alrighty, my fellow cubicle-imprisoned office colleagues, January’s already almost out of the way, won’t be long before we’re all offline at the beach again, so let’s keep the agile AI synergy circling back and pivot to the new albums “hitting the streets” (prolly with nauseating wet flopping sounds) on Jan. 30, reach out if you want to ping my brains out or just network, my DMs are open! Now, folks, we’ve lost a lot of famous rock stars over the last few months, so let’s chat about it. The worst one for me was Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley, a boyhood hero of mine. I’d really been looking forward to the next time his band played at Tupelo Music Hall so I could mooch some passes and have a serious chat with him about maybe letting me try out to be his lead singer, or at least let me get up and sing some Zeppelin songs with him or something; he knew he was a godawful singer and I figured we would have gotten along since he was as much of a jackass as me and took very few things seriously. O Fortuna, guys, but the most recent one was of course Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, a loss that was the talk of social media for days. Funny story about Bob: Back in the mid-Aughts, I was writing a column for a corporate newspaper on the New Hampshire seacoast that’s nowadays mostly digitally distributed and no longer found in your 7-Elevens and such. Anyhow, I’d written a piece about how electronic music was going to take over sooner rather than later (again, this was a long time ago), and the next day, lo and behold, there was an email in my inbox from Weir, whose band Ratdog was in town. He must have been bored in town, because he mansplained around 900 words at me about how “guitar-based rock wasn’t going to go away,” which wasn’t what I’d said at all, so immediately I got defensive, thinking “who is this guy anyway,” because I knew and still know basically nothing about the Dead, and I assumed he was a second-banana guitarist hack they’d hired in the ’80s or ’90s, in other words I didn’t know that he had been an original founder of the Dead when they were still just a silly Mungo Jerry-style jug band. We had words, folks, angry words, like, I told him I thought the Dead were awful and I’d be embarrassed to be in a band like that, so he got mad and wrote back, “Oh definitely, I want YOUR life, sitting in your mom’s basement telling people to [censored] off.” From there it got really ugly — my editor at the time is the only one who saw the whole thing — and he somehow never invited me to Thanksgiving dinner, but all that aside, I feel bad for his fans, RIP Bob, which brings us to the new album from The Soft Pink Truth, titled Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever! It’s an experimental house music side-project from Drew Daniel, who’s half of the San Francisco duo Matmos, but there’s really nothing danceable at all about the first single “Time Inside the Violet”; it’s a bunch of violins and eerie weirdness, but you might love it, I don’t know.

• James Adrian Brown was the guitarist for the now-defunct U.K. alt-rock band Pulled Apart By Horses, and his debut solo LP is Forever Neon Lights. The single “Generator” is pretty neat, built over a noisy, catchy beat a la Wonky-era Orbital.

• French synthpop bro Sébastien Tellier releases his first album in six years, Kiss The Beast, led by the single “Thrill Of The Night (feat. Slayyyter & Nile Rodgers).” It sounds like early Madonna if that makes you happy.

• We’ll end the week with California-based emo-pop band Joyce Manor, and their new full-length I Used To Go To This Bar. The featured tune, “I Know Where Mark Chen Lives,” sounds exactly like Lit or Hoobastank or Dashboard Confessional etc.

Featured Photo: album covers for KMFDM, Enemy and Ben Rosenblum’s Nebula Project, The Longest Way Round