Category: Pop

Album Reviews 25/12/25

Kris Davis and Lutosławski Quartet, The Solastalgia Suite (Pyroclastic Records)

Canadian pianist/composer Davis won the Best Jazz Instrumental Album Grammy in 2023; she’s known for “intricate, rhythmically complex yet connected compositions” that touch on many genres, including improv, modern jazz, rock and techno. She’s joined here by Poland’s Lutoslawski (string) Quartet, which has no problem keeping up with and elaborating on Davis’ busy-pensive-busy pieces, so much so that busier, more intricate, time-change-riddled pieces like opener “Interlude” would sound mechanical if they weren’t so obviously heartfelt. “Towards No Earthly Pole” is wonderfully unearthly, desolate in spots (recall we’ve got Eastern Europeans on board here) and eerily alien in others; “The Known End” sounds like something that was considered for the edgier scenes of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But wait, folks, it gets more unsettling, with the appropriately titled “Ghost Reefs,” and then the tumultuous “Degrees of Separation,” which demands that the listener acknowledge its presence. Here there be serious, mathematically ambitious stuff, appropriate for absorptive vegging or summoning a creative brainstorm. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Gavial, Thanks, I Hate It. (Exile On Mainstream Records)

Instantly compelling band here from Germany; oddly enough it was sent to me by a public relations crew that usually specializes in thrash metal, and after reading the one-sheet — which promised “minimalism” and things like that — I was expecting something like Boris or even retro like Zodiac Mindwarp, but nothing could be further from the fact. It’s a massive curveball, starting with leadoff track “Control,” comprosed of grunge/noise sounds futzing with a roots-bluesy Moby idea, and yes, I mean like “Honey,” but quite a bit dirtier, in the vein of All Them Witches meets Fantastic Negrito’s Last Days Of Oakland (those references won’t be on the test, no worries, you’ll have to give me a second to compose myself; this is a thousand times more cool than I was expecting). “Koru Mindset” comes next, and it’s even more impressive, combining Trail Of Dead and Nick Cave. As if it wasn’t already pegged enough, the reverb goes to Jerry Lee Lewis level on “Pretender,” the longest tune here, which exposes these guys as Pink Floyd/Spacemen 3 fans. Lot of filthy fun, this one. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• Ho ho ho, it’s the least wonderful time of the year for us music journalists with columns to fill, because I’m sure there are no new albums coming out this Friday, Dec. 26, the day after Christmas, that would be like trying to sell gaily colored eggs on the day after Easter, you know? No, I know I whined about all that last week, but this week’s the worst one of all, let me go on my fool’s mission, armed only with my new best friend, Google’s AI bot, to find new albums! Well look at that, the new album from Busta Rhymes, Dragon Season, will be out on the 26th, I can’t even believe someone who’s that renowned would ever — oh wait, I see, it’s the follow-up to two Dragon Season EPs from back in January, which received some pretty stinky reviews, because boring, so he’s releasing this full-length on the day that everyone’s returning stuff and not buying anything. But you know what, in the spirit of Saint Nick, I will go listen to a track from this probably uneventful album and tell all you nice people about it, eeny meeny miny whatnot, let’s try listening to — OK, it’s all top secret, so there are no advance tracks, and I don’t blame him, because the critics all fell asleep during the two advance EPs, both of which sounded OK to me, except for there being too much Auto-Tune here and there. Have fun discovering the wonders of this boring album, and if you go to one of his shows, don’t say anything about how he looks exactly like Tracy Morgan, because he really doesn’t like that, so don’t.

• Not a lot else going on, but I suppose we could look at the vinyl re-release of John Williams Conducts The Star Wars Trilogy, because these new vinyl versions come in colors, for your favorite Star Wars geek, who will of course never listen to them, because colored vinyl is more valuable than — OK, most everything, but you know how Star Wars geeks roll. The original album was released in 1990, and all the tunes are from the first three movies, which had interesting music but not as cool as the music in 1998’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, there, I said it. Wait, don’t leave, hear me out, nerds: Remember the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when the giant “asteroid beast” (the “Exogorth”) tries to chomp on the Millennium Falcon but misses, and the music is kind of epic but not really? Well, in The Phantom Menace, Williams had 20 years to make that same piece definitely epic, so that’s what he did during the “There’s always a bigger fish” scene. Shut up, it’s the same tuneage, just a million times better, so give me the soundtrack to The Phantom Menace, not the first trilogy, I will delete any hate mail on sight, just saying.

• Next it’s Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso, a hip-hop-EDM singing duo from Argentina, whose new album Top of the Hills actually came out on Saturday, Dec. 20, but I’m including it because I’m desperate it’s interesting maybe, oh whatever just let me watch my shows and eat chocolate Santas. So, at least they’re serious musicians who studied music, and moreover their October 2024 Tiny Desk Concert for NPR went viral, and most importantly, they opened a show for Kendrick Lamar this year. The new album’s teaser track “Gimme More” is a lot of fun, a Latin-infused pop thingamajig with some calliope emulation and plenty of mindless boasts about their decadence.

• We’ll wrap it up with literally the only thing left, the split EP featuring the bands Tsunami Bomb and Hammerbombs, titled Bombs Away! “Things Aren’t Going Well” is a no-wave/oi-infused tune that would’ve slapped harder if Tsunami Bomb’s singer weren’t so vanilla, she sounds like my fifth-grade music teacher. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Kris Davis and Lutosławski Quartet, The Solastalgia Suite and Gavial, Thanks, I Hate It.

We Did OK, Kid, by Anthony Hopkins

(Summit Books, 352 pages)

Is there anyone over the age of 20 who hasn’t seen an Anthony Hopkins film, or 20? It’s hard to imagine. As he approaches his 88th birthday on New Year’s Eve, the Welsh actor best known for his Academy Award-winning performance in The Silence of the Lambs has amassed a formidable body of work, and became the oldest actor to win the Oscar for best actor for The Father in 2021.

Talent on the silver screen, however, doesn’t always translate to talent on the printed page, as any number of Hollywood memoirs attests.

But Hopkins’ new memoir, We Did OK, Kid, is surprisingly compelling and will be of interest to even people who aren’t especially enthralled with cinema. Like all good celebrity memoirs, it is strongest in reflecting the experiences of a human being, not a star. Hopkins’ luminous career is almost incidental to the lessons learned over the course of a lifetime as someone who was underestimated in his youth and had to overcome parenting that was, let’s just say, not always ideal.

The title comes from Hopkins’s own message to the child that he was, at age 3, in a photo that appears on the jacket of the book. He had a slightly enlarged head that worried his parents and elicited teasing from cruel peers who called him “elephant head.” Making things worse, he was not much of a student. A pivotal moment came when he was sent to boarding school by his parents, against his will.

He writes: “I vowed, I’ll take my chances and never get close to my mother and father again — or anyone else for that matter. I no longer cared. I decided to live life on my terms, to open my eyes to the future. Forget the past. Childhood over. Copy that. Over and out. The ghost had entered the machine.”

He was 11 at the time.

Despite this steely girding of adolescent loins, Hopkins continued to perform poorly in school. He recounts the dreaded opening of the envelope containing his grades that would arrive at his home. On one such occasion, his father exploded, saying, “Honestly, you’re bloody hopeless. You’ll never get anywhere, amount to anything in life, the way you’re going on. … Can’t you do anything useful?”

Young Hopkins, who had been cultivating a demeanor of “dumb insolence,” listened to the rant coolly and then told his parents, “One day, I’ll show you. I’ll show both of you.”

It wasn’t a relationship-ending exchange — father, mother and son then went out to see a movie — but something changed again that day, in Hopkins and in the way that his father viewed him. It is one in a series of memorable scenes that the actor recounts throughout the book, like his first encounter with a young Richard Burton (another legendary Welsh actor, who died in 1984), and having drinks with Laurence Olivier, to name a few.

The first indication that young Hopkins had the seeds of an extraordinary orator within him came when he was asked to read a poem before his class at the boarding school. (His teacher’s response was “Thank you. Rather good.”) The poem was “The West Wind” by John Masefield, and it’s among the meaningful verses and monologues he shares in an appendix of the book — a nice touch.

Bumbling his way through his first stage-related jobs, Hopkins was told more than once that he wasn’t careful or attentive enough; he was fired from one job. But everyone he encountered seemed to recognize a raw talent in him despite the rough edges. He earned a scholarship to an acting school on the strength of an interview. One woman recommended him for a job after briefly interacting with him in a restaurant. His capacity for memorization is legendary, and it was a skill he developed as a child when he repeated words and phrases over and over. His current wife, Stella, believes he has some form of Asperger’s syndrome, “given my proclivity for memorization and repetition … and my lack of emotionality.”

“But,” he writes, “like any stoic man from the British Isles, I’m allergic to therapeutic jargon. Even if the world might prefer I accept the Asperger’s label, I’ve chosen to stick with what I see as a more meaningful designation: cold fish.”

The “lack of emotionality” comes across on the page in stark, clipped prose. No one will ever accuse Hopkins of overwriting. He tells what needs to be told, nothing more, and yet the book sometimes feels like a confessional. He writes, for example, of his failures as a father to his only child, Abigail, after leaving her mother when she was a toddler “after the worst two years of my life.” Although he went on to marry again twice, he vowed not to have more children. “I knew I was too selfish. I couldn’t do to another child what I’d done to her,” he says. Performing in a production of Lear, “the line that hit me harder than perhaps any I’ve ever spoken was ‘I did her wrong.’”

He wonders if his failure to connect with his daughter was in some way connected to his experiences in his own parents’ house, even though his father turned out to be a complicated person. Despite his harshness to his son, he also cried when young Hopkins delivered his first line in a play at a local YMCA (it was a beatitude: “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the world.”) And he asks his son to recite lines from Hamlet when he is on his death bed.

Like father, like son, Hopkins grew up to drink heavily, which contributed to the abrupt end of his first marriage. After a doctor warned him that he was drinking his way into the grave, he started attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

At the first one, “I was moved by the speaker’s story. He’s just like me, I thought. He was a truck driver, not an actor, but we were the same.”

Sitting in that room, Hopkins thought, “They’re all misfits like me. Like all of us. We feel we never belong. We feel self-hatred. All of us are the same. I’m not alone.”

It is that sort of revelation that makes this more a human story than a celebrity memoir. Yes, there are big names in this book, but coming as they do from Sir Anthony Hopkins (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1993), they never feel like name-dropping; how could they? In most cases, he is the bigger star. He did far more than OK. And yet in the deeply human memoir, Hopkins plays an ordinary man, perhaps his most extraordinary role of all. B+

Featured Photo: We Did Ok, Kid by Anthony Hopkins

Album Reviews 25/12/18

Pentatonix, Christmas in the City (Pentatonix Records

Fine with me, there’s plenty of room for more from the flood of holiday albums that washed over this desk this year. This one was brought to my attention by friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny, who was trying to get me to pay attention to a violin-metal band named Silenzium, which had done a Kiss cover for the purposes of getting mindless clicks or something. At any rate, in 2011 this Austin a cappella group won the third season of NBC’s The Sing-Off, a show I’d never heard of, and it turns out that this instrument-less group (which I’d similarly never heard of) had done a bunch of Christmas albums, including this latest one. The scatty title track is annoyingly listenable if you like Miami Sound Machine, but thankfully they cover a few traditional carols, starting with an Andrews Sisters-sounding “Holly Jolly Christmas,” along with a few Irving Berlin staples. There’s an overly busy Great American Songbook medley (“Moody Rudy”) which is obligato with these guys; the originals are mostly awful (I went straight to screensaver 15 seconds into “Elf”). If you’re interested, Wayne Wilkinson’s Holly Tunes, a collection of deeply mellow jazz covers of carols and such, has been the only holiday album I’ve listened to for the past month, please go get it. B- —Eric W. Saeger

Tracy Bonham, “Un-F*k This F*kt Up Christmas” (A Woody Hollow Records)

This Eugene, Oregon, native became a legend of Gen X/late-millennial lore when her first album, 1996’s The Burdens of Being Upright, yielded the slacker anthem “Mother Mother,” which stapled Alanis Morissette existentialist oatmeal to the coda riff from Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” This one-off novelty tune is an unburdening of sorts, addressing 2025’s epic horribleness by peering at it all through a Reality Bites lens, accepting the grim, inescapable facts of the matter, and knowing that even worse is surely coming, so why not deal with it in the blithe, disaffected manner that generational cohort has been perfecting since birth? In less capable hands this could have been pretty — you know, lame, but Bonham bandies the NSFW word around as if it were as common as dirt, which it is nowadays, let’s face it, but the beauty touch is that she apes Billie Burke’s lilting voice from 1939’s The Wizard Of Oz, as if to say “Fiddlesticks! There’s no such thing as a forbidden word!” I got a kick out of it anyway, and you should know by now I never go in for such stuff. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• Public apology for my blurb about the new Peter Criss album last week; Metacritic said quite clearly that it’s coming out Dec. 19, which is our next general CD release Friday, but I messed up, because somehow when you start getting old enough to start taking serious interest in buying a camera-equipped bird feeder, these things happen. I totally regret the error and have already mumbled five Hail Marys as penance, no worries, but what’s worse is that this is the last CD release Friday before Christmas Day, so according to Metacritic no serious band or musician or even William Shatner is putting out an album for me to comment on this week, or until Jan. 9 for that matter. Or are they? As we discovered this year, if there’s anyone who can tell us about new CD releases during freakin’ Christmas week, it’s a robot, so being the consummate professional journalist that I am, I shall now endeavor to blah blah blah with Google’s AI while they still have one, before computer scientists realize how stupid the idea of non-renewable-energy-powered AI was to begin with, let me microwave this mug of English Breakfast tea back into semi-usefulness and see what’s even going on here. Yes, tally ho, here’s one that’s due on Friday, the Her Name Is Love EP by Jamaican singer/DJ Masicka, real name Javaun Fearon, a fixture in the dancehall and reggae genres! His 2012 single “Guh Haad and Done” was a reggaetronica hit in that country owing to its rapid-fire lyrics, which centered on surviving the harsh streets of Kingston. This EP’s lead single, “Deep Love,” has the same sort of ingredients: trap riddims, Auto-Tuned vocals and whatnot, but it’s more soulful at least, if unoriginal.

• According to Genius.com, Megzsoul’s new album The Teenage Tragedy Show actually was set for release on Thursday, Dec. 18, for some idiotic reason, so technically it does belong in this issue, just give me a break already, I don’t even have Peter Criss to laugh at this week, would you prefer I talk about Al Jolson records again, I didn’t think so. OK, actually I probably should devote this space to Al Jolson, because this Megzsoul is obviously a teenager who successfully trolled the ironically named Genius.com into believing she has a legitimate album coming out; the only available information is some lyrical content where she imagines having a boyfriend who pays more attention to her than his TV and then she makes fun of him for becoming obsessed with her, kids these days, am I right folks?

• OK, don’t give up on me yet, here’s a legitimate album from a legitimate music person, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s Thoughts on the Future! She is a Pacific Northwest-based composer/performer who has put out a bunch of albums, including this newest one for Nettwerk Records; she mostly works with old Buchla synthesizers, which were analog modular synths that did all kinds of weird stuff owing to their sensitivity, like if you turned a light on in some other room the synth would respond by making sounds, so it was kind of like a prehistoric Furby in a way, I suppose. There is no music available to hear yet, but she put out another album called Gush a few months ago, which included the track “Everything Combining,” which sounded like Oompa Loompas singing around a Martian campfire, there’s no other way to describe it.

• We’ll end with a remix album from Trensum Tribe, regarded as “Scandinavia’s finest reggae-and-beyond soundsystem,” who futzed around with Axel Boman’s LUZ / Quest For Fire double album. The originals were glitch-techno with Jose Gonzalez vocals; Trensum Tribe’s obsession with dub simply makes the songs, you know, dubbier. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Pentatonix, Christmas in the City and Tracy Bonham, “Un-Fk This Fkt Up Christmas”

Queen Esther, by John Irving

(Simon & Schuster, 408 pages)

Esther was 3 years old, almost 4, when she was left outside a Maine orphanage, where the staff found her angrily kicking the door. “Esther doesn’t cry — she just gets angry,” it is later said of the child.

The toddler had a well-developed vocabulary and had memorized passages from the Book of Esther of the Bible. She knew she was Jewish. But it would be years before anyone would learn that she was born in Vienna and came to the U.S. with her parents, both now dead.

The orphanage where tough little Esther is left, St. Cloud’s, is well-known to those familiar with The Cider House Rules, the John Irving novel that later became a film for which Irving won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay 25 years ago. Queen Esther is not a sequel, although its themes will be familiar to Irving fans — perhaps wearily so.

Esther will live at St. Cloud’s for a decade until she is offered a job — and a home — with Thomas and Constance Winslow, residents of Pennacook, New Hampshire, and the parents of four daughters named after the virtues: Faith, Hope, Prudence and Honor.

Like Dr. William Larch, the physician who runs the orphanage (played by Michael Caine in the Cider House movie), the Winslows are not fans of religion or the concept of God. They are ideologically at odds with the pearl-clutching “townspeople of Pennacook,” despite Thomas Winslow’s best efforts to open their minds at “Town Talks” where he endeavors to instruct them about the great books and convince them that morality is not the equivalent of conventionality.

Thomas Winslow is comically opposed to anything related to Maine; at one point, his wife thinks “Oh, Tommy, please give up the grudge you have against Maine!” But the couple need a new au pair to care for their youngest child, Honor, and they have run out of options elsewhere. So they travel to St. Cloud’s and adopt Esther despite the objections of people shocked that they would want “the Jewish one.”

It’s a good match, for the child and the couple. Like Esther, the Winslows are prodigious readers (which gives Irving a chance to proselytize his most favored 19th-century authors through his characters, as is his habit), and they are taking in a young woman who intends to get a tattoo that is a quote from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

The quote permeates the novel, even as Irving wrests the focus from Thomas and Constance Winslow, to Esther Nacht, to Jimmy Winslow, the child that Esther ultimately gives birth to and gives to Honor to raise, in accordance with a pact they have made.

The journey is winding, complex and transcontinental. Esther goes off to Israel to fulfill what she sees as her life’s purpose, and the child she conceived, Jimmy Winslow, grows up and becomes a father and a writer and tries to sort out his complicated roots, insisting all his life that he is “just a New Hampshire boy,” although in reality he is not a Pennacook townie and never will be.

This is ironic, since the Winslow line was genealogical royalty in America; the ancestors of both Thomas and Constance sailed on the Mayflower, and, as Irving writes, “If you grew up in Pennacook, in southeastern New Hampshire, in the 1940s and 1950s, where you came from mattered.” But so did adherence to a certain set of standards that didn’t include unconventional families and overlooked far more grievous sins. And Jimmy’s conundrum is that he isn’t really a Winslow by blood and doesn’t identify as Jewish; despite being ardently loved by people on multiple continents, he is not really sure who he is.

Irving is a master at character development, and 100 pages in, I was so invested in the lives of Thomas and Constance Winslow that I was reluctant to leave their world to delve into Esther’s, and Jimmy’s. Nor was I prepared for the degree of preaching to which I would be subjected about social and international issues.

Indeed, it is Irving’s preaching that is an obstacle to be overcome in enjoying this novel. As evidenced here and throughout his body of work, he has strong opinions on reproductive choice, on non-traditional families and on religion, opinions which he intends to inculcate into his readers with all the subtlety of a hammer. Even as Irving riffs on the pious townspeople of Pennacook for their moralizing, he moralizes with the same unyielding zeal, denying the microphone to any timid nuance that might want to offer an opposing view. This belligerent approach at times comes off as a grudge.

In one scene, Jimmy visits what is believed to be the tomb of Jesus Christ at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and observes a weeping man who leaves the cave, “his face streaked with tears, his smile radiant.”

“Jesus touched me — I felt him touch me!” the lunatic Christian cried,” Irving writes, and in the insertion of the word “lunatic,” we feel the full force of those who harbor animosity toward religion and believe its ills outweigh its good, even though it later becomes apparent that the man had been touched by a cat, and not a deity.

Irving once told an interviewer that he believes “it’s vain and presumptuous to presume that what you believe, everyone else should also believe. …. In other words, people who are so convinced of their religions that they proselytize it to others, I find very tiresome.”

It’s unclear if Irving is aware of how much he proselytizes to others of his own values and beliefs. Nonetheless, he is, like Jimmy Winslow, “a New Hampshire boy” and one of New England’s most important contemporary writers. If some parts of Queen Esther feel like reconstituted sermons from The Cider House Rules or The World According to Garp, this does not preclude the reader taking pleasure in the world of the Winslows.

But offer thoughts and prayers for the poor. maligned, monocultural “townspeople of Pennacook” — not to be mistaken with the good people of the village of Penacook in Concord — as you read. B

Featured Photo: Queen Esther

The local shelf

Books from local authors

Want to add to a friend’s book collection? Here are some recent releases from local authors. Look for them at your favorite bookstore.

• The True and Lucky Life of a Turtle,written by Sy Montgomery and illustrated by Matt Patterson, is the story of a real-life 42-pound snapping turtle named Fire Chief. Montgomery has written many other books about animals, including some for adults and other picture books illustrated by Patterson. Kirkus Reviews named this 40-page hardcover one of the Best Picture Books of 2025 for Animal Lovers.

• Frankie the Ghost Train, written by LaBelle Winery co-owner Cesar Arboleda, “is a heartwarming tale of a quiet boy, a mysterious train, and the power of imagination,” according to the book’s description on LaBelle’s website. “Set in the forgotten corners of Milltown, this story reminds readers young and old that sometimes the places we stumble upon are the ones that shape us the most.” About the author, the website says this: “Cesar Arboleda immigrated as a young boy from Colombia, South America, to Lowell, Massachusetts. He is a proud American citizen, a storyteller, dreamer, husband, father, and lifelong believer in the quiet magic found in unexpected places.” This 40-page hardcover children’s book is available for $20 at labellewinery.com/shop.frankie-the-ghost-train-book-by-cesar-arboleda.

• The Shopkeeper of Alsace is the debut novel from former NHPR host Laura Knoy. It’s based on a true story and “brings to life a little-known corner of wartime history — and an inspiring real-life heroine you’ll cheer for,” says the book description at lauraknoy.com. Visit the website to read about the background behind the book and to order a copy. (Michael Witthaus talked to Knoy about the book; see the story in the Nov. 6 Hippo on page 14. Find the issue in the digital library at hippopress.com.)

• A Better Loser is a collection of short stories set in southern New Hampshire, written by Manchester resident and high school teacher Nate Graziano. “Whether facing romantic troubles, addiction, or struggling to rein in their passions, these characters will not allow their failures to define them — instead, they become ‘better losers,’” according to the author’s website, nathangraziano.com, which has links for purchasing the book.

• Grenier Air Base: A Beacon on the Home Front, by Leah Dearborn, is “a non-fiction military history of a vanished air base,” says the author’s website, leahmdearborn.com. Dearborn is associate director of the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire; the book is available at the Museum’s website, aviationmuseumofnh.org/shop, where it goes for $35. The author’s website says a portion of all proceeds goes to AMNH programming.

• The Weight of Snow and Regret, by Elizabeth Gauffreau, is a novel that “tells the story of the closure of the last poor farm in Vermont in 1968,” according to a press release from Paul Stream Press. “The Weight of Snow and Regret tells the poignant story of what it means to care for others in a rapidly changing world.” Gauffreau grew up in Vermont and lives in Nottingham, New Hampshire.

• The Gospel According to Jack: Tracking Kerouac In My Life is written by Rev. Steve Edington, a retired Unitarian Universalist minister and Minister Emeritus of the UU Church of Nashua. “Through meditations on Kerouac’s life, art and restless searching, Edington weaves together literary reflection and personal journey. The Gospel According to Jack offers an uplifting and wise exploration of faith, creativity, and what it means to seek meaning in a vast, mysterious universe,” said the website for Balin Books in Nashua (balinebooks.com), where Edington will discuss the book on Saturday, Jan. 10.

• Courtship in Purgatory, by Robert Perreault, is described as “an intimate look at the difficulties faced by two middle-aged lovers” and “a sincere look back at family and Franco-American traditional attitudes and constraints following World War II.” Perreault is a bilingual writer of books and articles about the New England Franco-American experience and the history of his hometown, Manchester. This is his first novel in English. He holds a B.A. in Sociology from Saint Anselm College (1972), including a year of study in Paris; an M.A. in French/New England Franco-American Studies from Rhode Island College, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction/Nonfiction) from Southern New Hampshire University, according to a press release, and Manchester’s Franco-American Centre proclaimed him Franco-American of the Year in 2012.

• Perfidy: The Silver River Series 2, by Emily Siems, is the second book in a planned romantasy trilogy. Visit the author’s website, emilysiems.com, to read Siems’ blog and an excerpt from Springhaven, the first book in the series.

Featured Photo: The Shopkeeper of Alsace by Laura Knoy

Album Reviews 25/12/11

Ski Team, Burnout Boys (self-released)

New York native Lucie Lozinski looks (and often sings) like an awkward twee-waif Zoomer, but she’s been around the block quite a bit. Her father owned a backyard studio, and that somehow led to her singing backup for the likes of Tony Bennett and Queen Latifah before she turned 10. She’s pretty excited about releasing this debut album under her stage name Ski Team in January, but as promised in the Playlist column, there’s holiday music afoot this week, and she was able to eke out a rough-ish draft of “Santa” just before my deadline. There’s a light, frosty elegance to the beginning of it, in which she toys with covering “The First Noel” and then switches gears into epic/country-fied Chappell Roan mode, while introducing some world-class sampling into the mix. The push track is “Thirst Trap For Diego,” which combines wood-paneled ’80s disco with spaceship incidentals and some pretty odd found sounds. “Gilroy” has elements of Taylor Swift and Sheryl Crow within its pretty-crunchy-pretty pattern. Lots of decent melody here. A —Eric W. Saeger

Brian Sumner, Christmas (self-released)

This jazz guitarist has racked up a pretty impressive 400,000 Spotify listens this year on the way to making a name for himself as an improv specialist; his previous record For What explored a variety of emotions and themes, but this one is, as you’d venture to offer if pressed by the Spanish Inquisition, more focused on the holidays: “Within the context of his own mind, Sumner puts himself in the family room, at the dinner table, near the front door waiting for guests to arrive, in fights, away from home and in a myriad of other situations, and then freely improvises to the thoughts and feelings that are invoked,” and — waitwhat, “in fights?” Well, those come with the holidays too of course, in case you tend to avoid the news (which is always a good idea), but in all honesty, tension and emotional discomfort of any sort are rare commodities here. It’s mostly upbeat; if the idea of having a highly trained expert noodling around on a barely plugged electric guitar as you stare into a fire appeals to you, you’ll want this. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• Look out, fam, I’ll be talking about holiday records again this week. Of course, I should have been talking about that in Hippo’s holiday issue, but like I told you people last week or whenever it was, I wasn’t deluged with holiday albums until after I’d written the column for the holiday issue, so I have an excuse. Just making you aware that I actually do pay attention to what I’m doing once in a while, and speaking of that, I also haven’t forgotten that I promised to pop into some local-to-Manchvegas clubs and talk about some of our struggling artists, and I do plan to do that once I’m not crazy-busy with a million-billion stupid things in my “semi-retirement” from work hell, but toward all this nonsense, I’ll have you know that I took my nephew to this year’s Trans Siberian Orchestra concert at SNHU Arena, on Black Friday, a family ChristmaHannuKwanzaa tradition! We were seated dead center in the 10th row, and it literally doesn’t get better than that; Petunia couldn’t go because she was sick, so I took my nephew. He’d never been to a big concert, let alone sat so close to the stage that one of the guitarists tried to throw a pick to him, so I expected him to be all full of young Millennial enthusiasm afterward, you know how they get. But the first thing he said? “Boy, pretty old crowd, huh?” so I was all like “What?!” and he goes like “All the old people!” so I was like “You’re walking home, Bucko!” and he was like “No way!” No, I’m kidding, he had to be in Maine the next day, so I did unlock the passenger door and let him in, but it got me thinking about older people who go to shows at giant hockey arenas. They really don’t want to stand up, even when there are lasers and flying flame-balls and they’re playing super-old songs, and yes, it bugged me too during one song, when we and two teenagers were the only ones standing up. Look, man, if you’re at a concert, push yourself up somehow and start getting your jam on, you know? Right, so that is today’s rock ’n’ roll lesson, and now we can look at the albums coming out this Friday, Dec. 12! We’ll start with English EDM-pop singer-producer Fred Again, whose new album USB002 is the follow-up to USB001, I don’t know what it all even means! There is a rehearsal video that shows him smoking butts, nodding his head a lot and playing his ProTools Tamagotchi thing, maybe you’ll find it interesting. OK fine, whatever, there’s some decent trance and tribal house that sounds fine if terribly 2010s to me, let’s continue.

• Many of you hip-hop scamps love the collaborations you’ve heard over the years between Nas and DJ Premier, and guess what, they’re releasing an album together! Titled Light Years, it starts with “Solar Scriptures,” which features a piano-driven old-school hip-hop beat. It’s uneventful, but what else would you expect?

• Nate Amos, more famously known as This Is Lorelei, is from Vermont, and his second album, Holo Boy, spotlights the title track, a slow grungy tune that has a lot of melody and weird guitar sounds. If Pavement didn’t suck they’d sound like this.

• We’ll close with former Kiss drummer Peter Criss, whose eponymous album is on its way! Lol, he put it out through Bandcamp, but don’t judge, maybe it’s better than his absolutely awful 2007 LP One For All, which included an actual cover of “Send In The Clowns,” let’s go see! Yup “Creepy Crawlers” is a cool hard-rock song, you’ll like it! —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Ski Team, Burnout Boys and Brian Sumner, Christmas

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