Category: Pop

Album Reviews 25/10/30

Mitski, The Land: The Live Album (Dead Oceans Records)

I’ve meant to delve into the work of this Japanese-American singer for a long time and always dreaded it. She’s been prime Pitchfork-bait for years now, targeting bougie audiences with random two-minute outbursts of overly artsy, poorly sung existentialism, often coming off like a cross between Ani DiFranco and Yoko Ono but more depressing. She does have her moments; in 2014 she provided evidence that she’s not a Martian with “Townie,” which, given its ultra-distorted Big Black guitar sound and noise-pop hook, is probably the only Mitski song I’d ever add to a Spotify list. That said, she’s happier in a live setting, which immediately lends these versions more attractiveness than their studio counterparts, but, as many people have commented — including on the r/Mitski subreddit — the most irritating thing about this lady is her fans. They’re “woke” of course, which isn’t cause for any grown-up to downright hate them, but these people way overdo it and behave in the meantime like they’ve never heard a verse of poetry in their lives. The rapturous weirdness starts right at the beginning of this set: “Everyone” is a decent-enough Patsy Cline-nicking tune, but suddenly, five seconds in, the crowd is going absolutely bonkers, making like pre-teens flipping out over Hannah Montana materializing in a latex tutu. I’m giving it an “A” grade only because I must be missing what her cult sees so vividly, but by the time you’re reading this I’ve assuredly dropped it to a B-, tops. A

Machine Gun Kelly, “home bittersweet home” / “no cell phones in rehab” (Interscope Records)

This isn’t meant to serve as a wildly instructive explainer for Gen Z kids, who’ve already made up their minds as to whether or not this dangerously gifted performer is worth a minute of their time, more of a gentle urging to older/less plugged-in folks who long ago abandoned figuring out which “new” rock stars they should be investigating in current_era. Normies know him as “Mrs. Megan Fox,” the kids know him as “mgk”; either way he’s a giant of today’s mashup-obsessed pop zeitgeist, especially after his last album, the August-released lost americana, which repackaged old melodies, from The Who’s “Baba O’Reilly” to Alice Deejay’s 1999 Eurodance hit “Better Off Alone,” all done seemingly in an effort to tell Zillennials that they have a lot of catching up to do while simultaneously celebrating the generation’s trademark “vulnerable sincerity.” Anyway, these two just-released songs, along with one or three others, were left off mgk’s 2000 LP Tickets to My Downfall, a landmark record that bridged the gap between commercial hip-hop and power pop (which I still refer to as “emo,” because it’s my column). Like a fusion of Bruno Mars and Dashboard Confessional, these tunes would have been just as successful as the album’s hits, proving that this guy’s instincts in developing the formula were dead right. He, or, more likely, some team he’s got in place, could write this stuff in their sleep. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Halloween is this Friday, Oct. 31, and since it’s a Friday there will be new CDs for you people to buy and cherish and keep under your car seat when you get sick of them. But first, I know I promised to leave the house and investigate the city’s music scene in more depth than I did a few weeks ago, but I honestly haven’t had the time. I plan to, though, because it’s fun to put a “press” identification card in the band of my fedora and watch local musicians squirm as I ask them why they didn’t respond to my last five emails, but there’s been Other Stuff to do. Today I spent a few hours investigating what’s happening in the Billboard magazine space, which is where you go if you want to find out what pop songs the top echelon of the music industry really really wants your grade-school children listening to on their TikToks and MySpaces, so that the rich dudes at the top can all dive into swimming pools full of cash, like Scrooge McDuck, all for rubber-stamping the release of albums that basically sound exactly like Britney Spears did during the Aughts but with more deep house and random world music sounds. A recent darling of the corporate-dance-pop crowd is Kali Uchis, a Latin techno singer who made Billboard’s cover recently; she’s been fighting in the trenches for a few years now and finally hit on the right formula with her fifth album, Sincerely, which features a mix of ’70s radio pop, reggaeton and (mostly) Lana Del Rey-style yacht-techno. What I heard of the LP was quite nice, but the tunes sounded too similar to each other, which is all too common nowadays. Of course, it’s understandable that the Scrooge McDucks of the music business don’t want to take chances on artists; as Shirley Manson of Garbage said in a viral onstage rant last month, the music business is becoming completely unsustainable, with everyone but musicians making any money. “The average musician makes $12 a month on Spotify,” she said, warning that a musicians union is long overdue. “This is an alarm call for all the young generations of musicians who are in our wake, and who we feel duty-bound to speak up for because there’s nobody speaking up for them.” Good on her, but gone equally viral recently is the backlash to Canadian band Rush’s handlers charging ridiculously high prices for tickets to their 2026 reunion tour’s shows (tickets for their Sept. 12 show at TD Garden currently range from $500 to $4,000). What does it all mean? It means that fans have to start supporting smaller bands, like for instance U.K.-based grunge-punkers Witch Fever, whose fast-approaching new album Fever Eaten is a fascinating study in messy loud-quiet-loud-ness! Leadoff single “Safe” is a good one, combining a New Order-ish rubber-band bass line, early Cure desolation and no-wave singing, it’s seriously great.

• In other non-stupid news, Florence + the Machine, aka this generation’s Siouxsie, is back, with an album titled Everybody Scream! The title track is actually kind of cringey, meant as a crowd-yell-along thing; hopefully the rest of the album is a lot better.

• It’s been a while, as in a month or whatever, so it is time for a new Guided by Voices album, because bandleader Robert Pollard is addicted to making albums! Thick Rich And Delicious is their second one this year and features “(You Can’t Go Back To) Oxford Talawanda,” a rugged but forgettable attempt at mid-tempo Brit-punk.

• To close out the week let’s discuss Iconoclasts, the new full-length from Swedish goth singer Anna von Hausswolff, who enjoys playing the pipe organ! “Stardust” is really neat, a cross between Massive Attack and Bjork in tribal mode.

Featured Photo: Mitski, The Land: The Live Album and Machine Gun Kelly, “home bittersweet home” / “no cell phones in rehab”

Future Boy, by Michael J. Fox

(Flatiron, 159 pages)

It’s impossible to imagine the Back to the Future franchise without Michael J. Fox, whose portrayal of Marty McFly seems effortless, even preordained. Surely Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale wrote the script with Fox in mind.

But the blockbuster film, released in 1985, started production with another actor in that role — Eric Stoltz. In fact, filming had gone on for more than a month before the team came to a conclusion that seems obvious now — Michael J. Fox is Marty McFly. But for that to happen, not only would Stolz have to be let go, but Fox would have to work two full-time jobs, as he was under contract to play Alex P. Keaton in the popular sitcom Family Ties. In fact, there had been conversations early on about Fox taking the role, but his handlers wouldn’t even approach him about it, because they knew he couldn’t get out of Family Ties and thought it would be too much.

Once offered the part, though, Fox gladly took on the role, thrilled to be working for a team of luminaries capped by Steven Spielberg. He showed up for work two days later, wearing outfits that had been quickly assembled and his own Nike sneakers, which would turn out to be an iconic part of the film. That story, and how the film came to be, is told in Future Boy, Fox’s latest memoir, written with Nelle Fortenberry and released 40 years after the film.

Even if you haven’t seen the film in decades, it’s an engrossing story that reveals the ins and outs of Hollywood and shows how cinematic sausage gets made. (If you’re one of the 11 or 12 people who haven’t seen the film, here’s the short version: a California teen gets accidentally sent back in time in a modified DeLorean and winds up interacting with young versions of his parents, threatening his own future existence.)

What it also reveals is how jaw-droppingly talented Fox was, even at age 23. When he first filmed a scene with Lea Thompson, who played Marty’s teenage mother, he had met her only 10 minutes earlier, and he had to negotiate a working relationship with an actress who was unhappy about Stoltz being let go. Even so, within a few takes, Fox was already comfortable enough to make suggestions, even adding a joke for Thompson and a pratfall for himself in the scene where they meet in a bedroom. (A pratfall is a fall on your bottom, if you haven’t heard the term.) He writes, “I was used to these comedic rhythms, my body was not my temple — it was a resource to be ransacked and pillaged.” She warmed up to him in short order.

As naturally as the acting came to him, the schedule was grueling: He’d work eight or nine hours during the day being Alex Keaton at Paramount Studios and then be driven 45 minutes to his next job, being Marty McFly at Universal, where he would sometimes film until 1 or 2 in the morning. Food would be set out around midnight. He was living in his own time portal.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Future Boy also goes back and forth in time. Fox takes us back to 1972, when his family traveled from their home in Vancouver to Los Angeles and took a tour at Universal Studios. Seven years later, after some promising work in the theater and on TV in Canada, he returned there again, this time with his father, to sign with an agent at age 18. He had a few “starving artist” years before he landed the role on Family Ties and recalled collecting day-old cookies that had been thrown out in dumpsters behind bakeries while going on auditions that resulted in no work. “I got the s … kicked out of me as a fledgling Los Angeleno and nearly threw in the towel,” he writes. But once those days were gone, they were gone for good. Family Ties was a hit.

Despite Fox’s natural ability and his belief in the self-help mantra “Act as if,” he knew the stakes were high and he could fail at Back to the Future. He also knew how the rest of the cast and crew were being inconvenienced to accommodate his schedule. “I was either going to be the best thing or the worst thing that had happened to these people. There could be no middle road,” he writes. And a lot was being spent on this film. “A single night [filming] in the mall parking lot probably cost as much as a full episode of Family Ties.”

Talking to the team about their remembrances, he learns that they don’t believe anyone would do something like that today. One says, “It was a ballsy thing we did, and I was afraid there was going to be a mutiny because we had to reshoot five weeks, but they all stayed. I think it’s because they loved the project; they were fans of the material.”

Fox, who is now 64 and has been living with Parkinson’s disease since age 29, dishes respectfully on some of his co-stars throughout the year and shares anecdotes from the Family Ties days, like how he randomly added the initial “P.” to his character’s name. He also reveals that some people had not wanted him for that show; the network president said he was too short for the role and also said, “You’ll never see that kid’s face on a lunchbox.” Fox later gifted him one.

There would be much more to his career that is not detailed here, but Fox was smart to make this book a moment in time. It also has a perfect coda: what happens when Fox, after 40 years, reaches out to Eric Stoltz, the actor whose place he took in the movie. Incredibly, they’d never talked about it. Read this, then watch the movie again. Or vice versa. Either way, you’ll enjoy the experience. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Future Boy, by Michael J. Fox (Flatiron, 159 pages)

Album Reviews 25/10/23

Tortoise, “Layered Presence” (Nonesuch Records)

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

Kashena Sampson, Ghost of Me (self released)

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

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

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

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

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

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

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

All the Way to the River, Elizabeth Gilbert

(Riverhead, 400 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Album Reviews 25/10/16

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

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

Holy Wars, “Metamorphosis” (Rise Records)

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

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

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

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

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

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

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

At Last, by Marisa Silver

(Simon & Schuster, 288 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Photo: All Consuming, by Ruby Tandoh

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