Category: Pop

Parcels, Loved (ANTI- Records)

This Australian band describes itself as “sort of a blend between electropop and disco-soul” with a lot of ’70s and ’80s influences, which immediately had me thinking, “How adorable, they’ve invented either Daft Punk or Scissor Sisters.” Oddly enough, Daft Punk produced this group’s 2017 hit “Overnight,” which was basically the former’s Kool & The Gang-inspired “Get Lucky” in a fake beard and Sherlock Holmes hat (it was also the last song Daft Punk ever produced, take note) (yes, “Overnight” is all new to me, but give me a break, there hasn’t been a legitimate dance club in Manchvegas since when, the 1960s?). Anyway, let’s take care of this: “Summerinlove” is like a cross between Sade and Jamie Lidell with a sleep-inducing José González vocal that makes it mildly listenable; “Yougotmefeeling” (yes, every song uses that no-spaces gimmick) is Klaxons with an iron deficiency; “Safeandsound” is antiquated AM radio makeout tuneage for smoke-filled taxi cabs. It’s decent-enough chillout stuff I suppose; again, the singer’s González-like tenor makes it more or less worthwhile. B- —Eric W. Saeger

Chameleons, Arctic Moon (Metropolis Records)

Speaking of stuff I missed out on in the past, I dearly hope I’m the only one who slept through this British dark-post-punk band (if my buddy Gary is reading this, investigate these guys immediately). They made a good (and well-deserved) dent in the U.S. charts with their 1986 Geffen-issued LP Strange Times, which was full of agitated, haunting melody; think the Cure mixed with Bauhaus/Lords Of The New Church and fronted by David Byrne — what a rare treat their wall-of-sound was to find. Cut to now, since we must, where we find two-fifths of the band carrying on, led as always by bassist/singer Mark “Vox” Burgess and guitarist Reg Smithies. Although it’s transparently more commercial-minded than what they were doing in the ’80s (and one critically acclaimed album in 2001), it’s all seriously hummable, adventurous stuff. What a crime it is that these guys haven’t done anything in 24 years; they’d surely be as much of a household name as The Damned. Hop on this one, I beg all you Gen Xers. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

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• Hold thine hands, my hardy and valiant trolls, and let us sing a song of Sept. 12, the second new-CD-release Friday as our 14 crazily frozen post-summer months commence, I hope you can get to your snowshoes quickly as the descent into frostbite season begins! Let’s try not to think about it and proceed right to the albums, where we find a new one from famous folk-pop ginger Ed Sheeran, who is part British and part Ewok (the Ancestry.com sequencer eventually gave up trying to sequence his DNA, but not before wild-guessing that he also might be part Teen Wolf). Whatever he is, he has a new album out this week, which he titled Play just to make Moby realize that he hasn’t been relevant since Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office. This non-Moby Play album leads off with a tune called “Sapphire,” an arena-indie jam with a reggaeton beat that is of course very catchy and everyone will like it. I’m sure it rips off Bruno Mars and/or Imagine Dragons, but Sheeran’s already getting a lot of hate on the internet for, among other things, and I quote, “Doing nothing more than making up words and putting music to them.” I must confess that I was under the naïve impression that that’s how one is supposed to write songs, so really, if there are other newfangled rules of rock ’n’ roll that I’ve been missing, I do hope one of you SnapChat kids will contact me soon so I’ll understand how all this music stuff works.

• In positive news, Canadian techno lady Kara-Lis Coverdale isn’t a nepo baby, since she’s not related to David Coverdale, which was what I’d expected to find. What’s even cooler is that she’s been releasing albums for 12 years now, but all of them have gone unnoticed by the public! But her new LP, Series Of Actions in A Sphere Of Forever, has changed that even before its release, because at least Wikipedia has made the album’s title a separate hyperlink on her biography page. Now that’s all well and good, but something’s gnawing at me about the album’s push track, “Turning Multitudes,” oh, I know what it is, it’s because Coverdale bills herself as an alternative/dance musician, but this tune is a sparse, melancholy, downtempo number that’s more like a modern classical-piano piece than anything else. OK, since we can’t do anything about that, let’s move on.

• Sacramento, California,-based math/post-hardcore band Dance Gavin Dance releases their 11th album, Pantheon, this week. The single, “Midnight at McGuffy’s,” is a pretty fierce little jam, an amalgam of Black Veil Brides, Panic [sorry, I won’t add the silly punctuation mark] At The Disco and early emo, all mixed into a Dillinger Escape Plan slow cooker. What this means is that it’s fast, aggressive and complicated in spots, with enough Thursday-ish melody in there to maybe entice one or two actual girls into attending one of their shows, but they’ll promptly leave after one song when they realize there’s nothing even remotely My Chemical Romance-ish about the band.

• We’ll call it a week with an indie-pop nepo baby, Mikaela Mullaney Straus, who goes by the stage name King Princess! Her obligatory nepotism connection is having Isidor Straus as her great-grand-pop, the guy who owned Macy’s and died on the Titanic, if you’ve ever heard of that incident, so if you don’t buy this new album (no one bought her last one, but her first one did OK) she might sic the IRS on you, just sayin’. Her new album, Girl Violence, features the tune “RIP KP,” a song that starts out like a Chappell Roan ripoff and then turns into Nine Inch Nails (no, I don’t know why).

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

The Beths, Straight Line Was A Lie (ANTI- Records)

This Auckland, New Zealand-based band has made a name for itself in the twee/rock space over the years, serving up gentle-awkward but mildly aggressive tunes that made them a good fit as an opening band for Pixies, the Breeders and Death Cab For Cutie. After the critical success of the band’s 2022 LP Expert In A Dying Field, leader Elizabeth Stokes found herself out of song ideas, so she hung out in Los Angeles, immersing herself in Akira Kurosawa movies and listening to Drive-By Truckers, The Go-Go’s, and Olivia Rodrigo. The first two bands are vibe-checked here, toward a Pavement/versus fashion anyway, in the title track (she even rips off the “Round and round and round” bit from “We’ve Got The Beat”), but it works better when those influences aren’t crazily obvious but definitely close (“Mosquitoes” sounds like something that was left off an Aimee Mann or Michelle Branch album, so yeah, her approach to this one was pretty lazy. Better luck next time). C —Eric W. Saeger

Prayer Group, Strawberry (Reptilian Records)

We turn our gaze to Richmond, Virginia, the home of this noise band, who’re responsible for this (quite rushed, if I’m reading between the lines correctly here, not that that’s a big deal when the band is, you know, a noise band) seven-song 10” mini-LP. The “related-if-you-like” list includes Big Black and Jesus Lizard, which is accurate in its way (a heavy dose of drone, lots of yelling, and bashing stuff), but a look under the hood finds some Jello Biafra worship and plenty of things that make it more comparable to Swans, various Throbbing Gristle projects and so forth. To the uninitiated, this might sound like three or four twentysomethings trying their hardest to get their band evicted from their parents’ basement, but in that alone there’s some real authenticity, take it or leave it. If you have the slightest, foggiest idea what Adebisi Shank sounds like, there’s a similar amount of technical ability on board here, but the guiding influence is 1980s Steve Albini for sure. A —Eric W. Saeger

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• Gross, it’s September again, and new albums will be released on Friday, Sept. 5, summer’s officially over already, life isn’t fair. I’m not looking forward to all the pumpkin spice stuff being shoved in my face on my “socials,” but we all know it’s the worst on Facebook; people are so happy that it’s getting cold, so they get to wear sweaters and make their houses smell like cinnamon witch brooms and toadstools, all of which brings out my inner curmudgeon because really folks, I don’t like it (OK, except for those sunny, early October days when all the leaves have color and haven’t yet covered the streets in their colorfulness, where they begin to decay into a slippery, moldy mass of worm-slime, I should really just move to Hawaii). In any event, albums: Some of you were adult-ish in the 1980s and remember the salad days of New Wave, a musical fashion statement that saw bands like The Motels and Television and Romeo Void sing about the exact same lovey-dovey nonsense as Stephen Foster did in the 1800s, except with lots of hairspray. Know who else was big back then was Devo, and if any of you rotten Zoomer children want to know how cool that band was, there’s a new documentary on Netflix that’s awesome and hilarious (fun fact: Devo was a mixed-art project that didn’t firmly decide to become an actual band until they realized it was the most effective way to annoy as many people as possible), you should watch that show, but another rebellious fixture of the New Wave scene was David Byrne, whose new album, Who Is The Sky, comes out this week! The album’s songs all began their lives as rudimentary concepts and were fleshed out by the Ghost Train Orchestra ensemble; the first single, “Everybody Laughs,” is an upbeat dance tune remindful of Blondie’s “The Tide Is High”; it examines how people aren’t as unique as they think they are, which reveals more about Byrne than anything else, really.

• Here’s one for your nerdy friend who’s the only person you know who reads Guitar Player magazine (I know, I know, guitar nerds really just buy it for the hott sexxy pics of Flying Vs and Stratocasters, you know how creepy those guys get), the type of guy who insists that Jeff Beck is the greatest rock guitar player ever because, you know, just because, even though two of his fellow guitar gods, Jimmy Page and Tony Iommi, have sold, to date, a grand total of 252,963,481 more albums than him. Yes, I’m going somewhere with this, because we’re talking about Chosen, the new album from similarly geek-worshipped singer/bassist Glenn Hughes, formerly of Trapeze (no, I’ve never heard a Trapeze song either, so don’t feel inferior), who is much more famous for being the temporary frontman for Deep Purple and Black Sabbath in their darkest hours than singing for Trapeze. No, I kid Glenn Hughes, two of the songs on Sabbath’s Seventh Star album are good, let’s just leave it at that. Chosen’s title track is half ’90s-grunge-metal and half hair metal, for those who, ahem, can’t decide whether they feel like listening to Foo Fighters or Thin Lizzy.

• English rock band Suede is similar to Savage Republic, specializing in noisy/surfy post-psychedelica; they had only one hit in the U.S., the forgettable “Metal Mickey” in 1992. The band’s new LP, Antidepressants, includes the tune “Disintegrate,” which isn’t too bad if you like early Wire (translation: it’s rough, noisy and bored-sounding).

• We’ll wrap it up this week with Moments, the new album from Australian goth-adjacent synth-poppers Cut Copy. The new single, “When This Is Over,” nicks its yacht-’80s essence from Duran Duran and has a kids’ chorus for no reason whatsoever.

Featured Photo: The Beths, Straight Line Was A Lie (ANTI- Records) & Prayer Group, Strawberry (Reptilian Records)

Ashes And Diamonds, Are Forever (Cleopatra Records)

I’ve probably missed out on the last 40 records from the Cleopatra Records indie label, but only because my emailbox looks like the Brooklyn city dump the week after Christmas. I did, however, catch this goth-rock gem, due out on Halloween day; it features Bauhaus co-founder Daniel Ash, Bruce Smith of Public Image Limited and — excuse me, the bassist for Sade, as in literally the “Smooth Operator” lady. Ash uses an “e-bow” (an electronic device that emulates a bow, you know, like a violin bow) on his guitar (Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien uses one on songs like “My Iron Lung”); the gizmo brings a sort of “wub-wub” effect to these proceedings on songs like “Teenage Robots,” which reads like Trent Reznor with a fetish for throwback electro, if that makes any sense to you (it won’t be on the exam; think of it as a woofer-trashing Nine Inch Nails with a low-but-not-too-low budget). Elsewhere we have “Boy Or Girl,” which is fiercely goth, in the vein of Rammstein (or more accurately Combichrist). In short: It’s wrecky, buzzy, no-wavey, and well worth your time. A —Eric W. Saeger

Crayon, “Kill Your Idols” (Erased Tapes)

Crayon is a terminally hip Parisian music fixture who’s dominant both in jazz and electronic, and there’s a lot of futurism at work here, which some might choose to eschew, given that it’s almost too relevant to the times. OK, I’m being unintelligible, sorry, how about this: You remember when Moby’s Play first appeared and took over the planet by blending electronica with roots, downtempo and whatnot? Well, what this guy does is a next-level version of that. I’d love to tell you more, but his debut LP, Home Safe, isn’t out until Oct. 24; all I can reveal past this teaser track is that it proves that music technology has evolved far beyond Portishead. The tune in question here (it’s message isn’t violent, more a plea to the listener to be themself) features a casual but highly immersive, backward-masked beat over which painter-turned-singer Lossapardo lays some down-pitched vocal lines that reminded me of Tricky on grape drank. If this one does make the rounds it’ll be huge, I assure you, and I do hope it does. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

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• Another week of albums is upon us, specifically the typhoon of new albums that will be released verily unto thy Pirate Bay and AOL Music and such-and-so apps on Aug. 29! Into the breach we go; the blank Microsoft Word page stares back at me, begging me to fill it full of stuff about albums, for your edification and amusement, so let’s just do it by first taking a gander at something I assume I won’t hate, the new album from The Hives, The Hives Forever Forever The Hives! The Hives are from Sweden and therefore eat herring at every meal, except when they’re eating “fermented dairy products,” which sounds like “cheese” to me, but I don’t know a lot about what the day-to-day life of a Swede is like, so for all I know, their version of a “fermented dairy product” is a half-gallon of milk after it’s been sitting in the sun for a day or so, and the only reason they consume such horrific junk is so that they’ll automatically have to take a day off from work in order to go to the emergency room, where they revel in taking selfies and posting them on their Facebooks just to taunt Americans about how great it is for Swedes, having excellent soup-to-nuts health care that barely costs them anything, neener. Now, if you’re one of those pesky millennial kids who needs to get off my lawn, you know The Hives as the greatest garage band on Earth, not only because their music is a loud sloppy mess but also because their singer, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist, will do anything for publicity, like the time in 2023 when he stood around on Hollywood Boulevard holding protest signs written in fluent broken-English that said “The Hives Must Album Now!” and “Honk If You Want a New The Hives Album.” I’ll tell you, folks, that’s a showman after my own heart; that kind of thing is something I’d love to see a local New Hampshire band do, like, set up their gear some Saturday night outside one of the restaurants that serves all-you-can-eat pulled pork and sing songs about how much they hate Dave Matthews and Judas Priest, whatever, I think it’d be funny anyway, so let’s see what these lunatics are singing about these days. Ah, here’s the video for the title track: The five band members are walking around in some dumb castle, dressed up like King Henry VIII, and then they sit down to eat giant mushrooms, but all the while the song is playing, and it sounds like Gang Of Four covering a Billy Idol song from his “Dancin’ With Myself” era. They are smiling playfully in the video because they have wonderful health care.

• Once upon a time in the 1980s, when punk rock was starting its inevitable decline, there was an all-girl band called The Go-Gos, which was led by the bass player, and she wanted to have a hot-looking singer, so they hired Belinda Carlisle, whose talent for singing off-key eventually became the stuff of legend. Belinda’s new album, Once Upon A Time In California, is composed of cover tunes, including a rub of the Youngbloods’ hippy anthem “Get Together,” in which Belinda tries to sound like either Marianne Faithfull or Sam Kinison, I can’t really tell.

• Sabrina Carpenter is still relevant until the next harvest moon or whatever, so she’s releasing a new album, Man’s Best Friend! The single, “Manchild,” sounds like Chappel Roan singing a cover of Hall & Oates’s “Kiss On My List,” and its video is getting a lot of hate on YouTube, which is just mean, you know?

• And finally it’s ’70s-arena-rock throwbacks Wolf Alice, with their fourth LP, The Clearing! “The Sofa” rips off Roberta Flack’s 1974 hit “Feel Like Makin’ Love” in basically every way, take from that what you will. They’ll be at Citizens House of Blues in Boston on Sept. 20, good luck getting tickets. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Ashes And Diamonds, Are Forever (Cleopatra Records) & Crayon, “Kill Your Idols” (Erased Tapes)

Visions of Atlantis, Pirates II – Armada (Napalm Records)

I’ve had lots of jolly fun on this page making sport of friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny’s fondness for symphonic metal, and oddly enough, when I was literally getting to the actual “record reviews” part of this pirate-joke-filled record-review column, he ba-dinged his way into my Facebook with an immediate demand for me to listen to this pirate-oriented album, the newest (but year-old) one from this Austrian band. Little did Dan know that one of the first records I ever reviewed for any newspaper was these guys’ second full-length, 2004’s Cast Away, which sounded like a LootCrate version of Nightwish, but I thought it was cute and adorable. A lot has changed for this band over the past 21 years, of course, but they’re still a bit kitschy, opening with a maudlin Celtic Woman-tinged ghost-ballad in “To Those Who Choose to Fight,” but then it’s right to business with “The Land of the Free,” which wants to be all Hans Zimmer-soundtrack-y (but with Yngwie Malmsteen guitar sounds) and more or less succeeds as a segue into its usual meat and potatoes shtick: super-gorgeous opera chick with a Helloween-soundalike backing band. It’s fine of course. Oh, while we’re here, the coolest pirate tune ever is Tiesto’s “He’s A Pirate,” which chops up samples of Zimmer’s theme to Pirates Of The Caribbean and turns it into a trance drop for the ages. You simply must hear it, folks. A

Babymetal, Metal Forth (Capitol Records)

Oh fine, as long as this week’s award-winning column has already crashed and burned in a conflagration of pirate jokes and Dan Szczesny’s weakness for girl bands being epic and metal, let’s make it official, since Dan loves this band and I have hott-sexxy-hilarious Stormigee TikToks to watch. Back in June, you may recall, I dubbed the three ridiculously over-choreographed female twentysomething Koreans who front this band “Waifuta, Waifutite and Waifutatta,” which is actually close to what they have for stage names, but if you missed that, both Dan and I hope at least three people in our beloved state have heard of them. If you haven’t, it’s all good; their trip is hyper-speed thrash metal with alternating Munchkin-rapping and catchy pop choruses, a genre known as “Kawaii metal,” or “cute metal,” a Cuisinart of thrash and J-pop. From there we can do the perfunctory: “Ratatata” is a sped-up version of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”; “Song 3” is Cannibal Corpse for techies; “Kon! Kon!” sounds like a cross between Marilyn Manson and the Bakugan theme song (most of them do, really), and now you’ve heard of them, you’re welcome, New Hampshire! A

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• New albums are being released on Aug. 22, because that’s what always happens on Fridays. Now, I know it’s way past time to address your question, since we’ve known each other so long; you want to know why all the bands and rich nepo baby Autotuned singers release their albums on Fridays, given that people don’t go to the mall to buy albums until Sunday (no one goes to the mall on Saturdays, because that’s the day you spend doing all the un-fun stuff that’s piled up during the week, like cleaning up your office mess and buying and installing that new battery in your car; in ancient Greek, the word “Saturday” means “I should just quit my job and live on a Hawaiian beach, living off pineapples and tourists’ pizza crusts”). Then again, does anyone actually go to the mall at all anymore, except to visit Best Buy, which is always a wasted effort, because you know in your bones that that all-important wire you need so you can run your Sega Genesis for the first time in 30 years isn’t going to be at Best Buy, you silly goose, don’t even bother, even though you definitely will use that hopelessly impossible mission as an excuse to drive to the mall just to see actual people, ha ha, remember those things? But anyway, my invisible AI friend who lives in Google.com says albums are released on Friday “to coincide with the start of the weekend, maximizing potential exposure and engagement. This practice, known as ‘New Music Fridays,’ is a global initiative aimed at standardizing release dates, combating piracy, and aligning with streaming platform updates.” Sure, sounds fine, but you may be wondering how on Earth releasing albums on Fridays “combats piracy.” I wondered that too, so I looked it up and finally found an obscure pirate tradition that was first cited in the year 1589, when the captain of a Welsh pirate ship named the Petunia told his crew of, you know, pirates that it was bad luck to engage in normal pirate activities (aside from singing sea shanties and guzzling rum from jugs) on Fridays. Are you with me so far, so, since record company executives are 100 times worse people than Captain Jack Sparrow, they believe people won’t pirate albums on Fridays, and now you know why I always kick off this multiple-award-winning column with something about Friday. So let’s begin this Friday-centric exercise with the new album from tech-metal dudes Pendulum, a band that’s a lot better than Linkin Park, but since I’m the only one onEarth who seems to know about them, we all live a lie. Inertia is the title of this non-pirate-able-because-it-comes-out-on-a-Friday-don’t-even-try-it album, and the tune “Driver” is insane and frenetic; if The Prodigy went metal, this is what it’d sound like. You’ll definitely like it.

• Ghostface Killah conjures some epic Wu-Tang Clan magic with Supreme Clientele 2 this Friday. Some internet nerds are complaining that sequel albums are stupid (except, they admit, for Ghostface’s first sequel album of course), but leadoff tune “Nutmeg” — guested by NZA, believe it or not — is so badass it’ll shut them up. The techy beat is completely relentless.

• Speaking of believe-it-or-not, my new favorite emo band (only because its name is so long and column-filling) is from Connecticut: The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die! Their fifth album, Dreams Of Being Dust, features “Dissolving,” a really neat track that combines post-punk and art-rock. Me likey.

• Lastly we have the new LP from North Carolina’s Superchunk, Songs In The Key Of Yikes, and its single, “Is It Making You Feel Something,” which is OK! Sounds sort of like Gwen Stefani fronting an early ’80s-indie band, which is cooler than it looks.