Category: Pop

Album Reviews 25/10/09

Air, The Virgin Suicides Redux (TH Productions)

I was never a fan of this French space-rock duo or space-rock in general, but this remix of their 1999 album The Virgin Suicides is more like it, mostly because it’s an all-analog affair that reveals the band as the outlet-mall-ambient organism that it is much more so than the original did. They knew the 1999 record wasn’t representative (or useful, let’s just say it) because it was made on a very low budget. “It was during the first era of digital home studio equipment,” the band recently said, now that it’s safe to admit it, “and the sound is very metallic and cold. We’ve always regretted that about the way it sounds.” Well, hear hear, I completely understand it now after hearing this reupholstered version: They wanted it to sound like Dark Side Of The Moon-era Pink Floyd, except, you know, edgier. Or something. No, seriously, the non-cheese-drenched parts are quite indica-stoner-listenable, whereas the over-modulated Flaming Lips parts are still intact, all of which means it’s actually more relevant now than when it first came out. The spaceship sounds and This Island Earth robo-bursts are still idiotic, but Wayne Coyne wouldn’t be around today if it weren’t for that nonsense, put it that way. B-

Magic Wands, Cascades (Metropolis Records)

Ah, a nice easy Halloween-apropos dream-pop/goth record from Metropolis Records. This one features a Los Angeles-based boy-girl duo, Chris and Dexy Valentine, who first surfaced in 2012 with Aloha Moon, the title track of which sounded like a shoegaze band trying Sadé-yacht-pop on for size, while the rest sounded like a Chex Mix of Asteroids Galaxy Tour, Lana Del Rey and Lola Falana. This one stays in that zone but goes harder, starting with “Across The Water,” which borrows the buzzy guitar drone from Wire’s “It’s A Boy” to good brain-zapping effect, after which “Armor” does the obligato Joy Division-meets-Bauhaus thing (translation: there’s a lot of reverb, angst and intentionally cheesy production values; “Hide” uses a similar sewing pattern). “Albatross” is pure shoegaze, sounding like Raveonettes trying to sound really forlorn; “Moonshadow” is the best on board if you like sexy vampires riding motorcycles (and who doesn’t). This is definitely worth any goth’s while. A-

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Sure and begorrah or whatever, this Friday is another Friday, Oct. 10, meaning there will be new albums coming out that day, and we will talk about them in this space, but as long as we’re talking about albums while speaking with Irish accents, I would like to discuss very quickly an album that is not coming out on Friday, because it isn’t done yet! This segues magnificently into my new sub-series for this column, tentatively titled “Eric Actually Leaves The House To Find Nightlife In Manchester NH,” which I did once again on Saturday, Sept. 28, to chill with the homies at the Shaskeen Pub on Elm Street! Yes, if you can even understand my words through this thick Irish brogue, that date was the Pub’s 20th Anniversary celebration, so I showed up at midnight to meet Ross The Mandolin Player from the Irish folk/rock band Rebel Collective, whose members live up north a bit, but not as ungodly far as Berlin or Montreal, I forget where exactly. Anyway, they have recorded all the tracks for their upcoming new album, but haven’t mixed it yet. I’m sure it will be awesome; they are influenced by Flogging Molly, The Pogues and of course world music of a leprechaun bent, and it all went off quite well during this performance. FYI, they haven’t played any large conventions where people guzzle green absinthe lager or whatnot, but they have played their tin whistles and guitars and fiddles at the Highland Games, so that’s something to look forward to! Now, recall that I did ask you people where I should go after the Slam Free Or Die poetry event I attended the other week, and you naturally ignored my totally desperate pleas, but funnily enough, I, a confirmed unwelcome person from Mass., heard about the Shaskeen from a friend on Twitter who used to live in Manchester during the days when Pockets The Mastermind was the local king of hip-hop, so neener, I know your secrets now. In the meantime, while you wait for Rebel Collective’s awesome new album, you could always put away your kilt and taxi-driver cap and don your skinny jeans and chullo hat to go listen to Paw, the new album from indie-rock dude Avery Tucker, formerly half of Girlpool, whose awkward moonbat-twee tune “Chinatown” is still talked about among the 10 or 15 people worldwide who still remember it! Paw’s leadoff single, “Like I’m Young” is similarly moonbatty and minimalist, except for when Tucker starts singing increasingly loudly and then the whole mess descends into a slow-motion ’90s-grunge Silkworm-ish skronk-a-thon. It’s OK!

• In April, Mass Appeal Records announced a set of seven albums coming this year from such rap artists as Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, and Nas, the latter of whom helped out on the forthcoming new one from Mobb Deep, Infinite. Includes some rhymes from Prodigy, who died in 2017; “Easy Bruh” is eerie, trippy and of course badass, just like all hardcore hip-hop that appeals to fans who prefer groups whose logos are rendered in Spinal Tap font.

• The Wytches is a raw, rattley post-punk band from England that kind of reminds me of The Horrors when they were good. Talking Machine, their new album, features a tune called “Black Ice” that’s loud and messy in a Hives kind of way but less spazzy and more mid-tempo; you’ll probably like it if you like Brian Jonestown Massacre and that kind of thing.

• And lastly we have to pay attention to veteran emo band Yellowcard, whose new album Better Days sounds exactly like Blink-182 and Lit and Good Charlotte and all the rest of them, isn’t art amazing?

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

All Consuming, by Ruby Tandoh

(Knopf, 304 pages)

Did we really need another book about food? Yes, foodies, we most certainly did. Ruby Tandoh’s All Consuming is a fresh take on an old subject, a disjointed romp through the world of bubble tea, Magnum ice cream and TikTok recipes that is both an indictment of and a tribute to food culture.

Tandoh was a runner-up on The Great British Bake Off, one of the most popular TV series to cross the pond. Just 20 years old when she applied to the show after being encouraged by her mother to watch it, she parlayed the experience into a food- and cookbook-writing career. As she demonstrates in a New Yorker piece about the show, not only can Tandoh cook, but she can write, in a breezy tone and with a sardonic wit that invites you to follow along whether you’re interested in this stuff or not. You may not have realized you wanted to know the history of the All Recipes website or the vagaries of the New York automat, but Tandoh somehow makes even the most useless information fascinating.

She begins with a reflection of why we eat what we eat, and how that has changed. Until the past century, our food choices were shaped by availability and family tradition: “Conversations, meals together, some person you want to be more like, some person you hate, a myth about this or that, a recipe taught to you, a story about witches.”

“Not always, not for all people, but as a rule: almost everything you knew about food, you probably learned either in the kitchen or at the table,” she writes.

But in the middle of the 20th century, she explains, tastes and diets began to be determined by corporations and advertising. This trend was exacerbated by the internet, which shapes our appetites with photographs and recipes that seduce us into embracing whatever is the hot new trend (think sriracha and kombucha) while we order groceries and meals from our couches while salivating over TikTok recipes and restaurant reviews on our phones. The most influential restaurant critic in America right now, Tandoh says, is a TikToker named Keith Lee who has 15 million followers and admits he knows very little about food.

“I love it. I love humankind’s inexhaustible capacity for nonsense,” Tandoh writes. She herself has fallen under the spell of TikTok food, saying as soon as she saw the videos of a certain kind of chocolate-covered strawberries, “I knew two things: I was going to buy them, and it was going to be a mistake. … The algorithm brought these videos to me tenderly but insistently, the way a cat drops a dead mouse on the carpet.” The staggering number of people looking at these strawberries — 150 million at her last count — added to the appeal, just like lines outside a Shake Shack make the meals inside seem more desirable than they are. Fear of missing out, she says, is responsible for 80 percent of her biggest food mistakes.

She devotes a chapter to explain the rise of bubble tea — usually a concoction of tea, milk, assorted add-ins and tapioca pearls — that originated in Taiwan, soon overran China and started showing up in California in the 1990s. “There is no practical reason to drink bubble tea, no culture to which it is truly traditional…. In fact, in most places, the point is exactly that it’s fun and unserious.” It’s also hard to define, having become “an umbrella term for a miscellany of Instagrammable drinks, many of which don’t have tea, milk or even tapioca pearls.” (Her recommendation to friends who want to try it but are bewildered by the choices: get the brown sugar boba milk tea, the archetype.)

There’s another chapter on food influencers like Nara Smith, who absurdly show us how to, for example, prepare grilled-cheese sandwiches for toddlers by first making the bread from scratch, and then the cheese, and the fresh pesto, and eventually, yes, even the butter, seasoning it delicately with parsley, garlic and sea salt. These sorts of influencers make Martha Stewart look like a slacker, and they have arisen even as the gold standards of food magazines, like Gourmet, have gone out of business, which she clearly rues.

Martha Stewart does not go unskewered; in fact one of the chapter titles, “Cook remaining 100 lobsters,” is apparently one of the more precious lines from her debut book Entertaining. Real cooking, Tandoh informs us, is “making the same five dishes on rotation for 363 days of the year, and then getting wildly above your station for the remaining two.” And about entertaining? It is, she says, “an invented and avoidable problem. Nobody is making you do this.”

This is a very British book — it begins by examining how food content in British newspapers led to the foodies of today and ends with Tandoh’s visit to Wimpy, a U.K. fast-food chain. But it’s impossible to talk about food without America being a large part of the story — for example, how a handful of tech nerds at the University of Washington, in the early days of the internet, were casting about for websites that would be enormously profitable and landed on the idea of cookierecipe.com. Launched with just a couple dozen recipes in 1998, the venture expanded to other categories — there would be a pierecipe.com and a thanksgivingrecipe.com, for example, before all this gloriously combined into allrecipes, which is usually one of the first websites to turn up when you look for a recipe on the internet.

Tandoh talks to the Iowa woman who uploaded “Banana Cake VI” to the website in 1999 — distinguishing it from many other banana cake recipes is that you put it in the freezer for 45 minutes after taking it out of the oven — and explains how “Carrot Cake XII” — a disastrous cooking experience because of its use of canned carrots — made it onto the website. She also explains the origin of “crockpot squirrel” which is another one of those things that I didn’t know about, but very much needed to know.

After a spin through cookbooks, ice cream and tonic water, Tandoh grants us all absolution. She wonders whether she’s ever had an original craving for anything. “For anyone who has ever been anxious about food, getting pulled over the event horizon of your feelings, I have to tell you — it feels amazing when you realize that your appetites don’t just belong to you.”

There’s little in the way of deep thinking here and nary a recipe, but Tandoh is the dinner guest who will keep everyone entertained, and All Consuming is a delightful read, much better than its staid title suggests. B+

Featured Photo: All Consuming, by Ruby Tandoh

Album Reviews 25/10/02

Todd Herbert, Captain Hubs (TH Productions)

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

The Belair Lip Bombs, Again (Third Man Records)

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

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

B —Jennifer Graham

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

Album Reviews 25/09/25

Shiner, BELIEVEYOUME (Spartan Records)

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

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

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

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

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

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

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

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

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

Gwyneth, by Amy Odell

(Gallery, 364 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Photo: Gwyneth, by Amy Odell

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