Category: Pop

Album Reviews 25/11/06

Carrier, Rhythm Immortal (Modern Love Records)

Once in a while I do check in on the bleeding edge, at least as Brooklyn, N.Y.,’s influenceratti define it, and as of this afternoon anyway, this is the bee’s knees, according to one of the loquacious scribes at Pitchfork Media. Carrier is the nom-de-DJ of Brussels, Belgium-based producer Guy Brewer, who was previously half of the drum ’n’ bass duo Commix, whose glitchy, trippy Burial-adjacent beats grabbed the attention of, well, Burial himself, who remixed one of their songs (see how all this works?). Anyway, at some point Brewer looked around the room he was DJing at and suddenly decided that drum ’n’ bass is crap and that he needed to try something else, namely this collection of thoughtful, monochrome, often sparse compositions you’d picture serving as background at a spotlessly scrubbed art museum full of postmodern sculptures and junk like that. Clicks and thumps and splashes and such appear and reverberate at random, threatening to break into IDM coherence, but that never happens, which isn’t to say that it’s completely scattershot or at all unlistenable, more that the beats tend to settle into grooves that bespeak Aphex Twin nicking Portishead or somesuch. It’s worth knowing about, sure. B —Eric W. Saeger

Lip Cream, Kill Ugly Pop [Reissue] (Relapse Records)

From their inception in 1984 to their breakup in 1990, this crew was one of Japan’s most important punk bands, or so I’m told by my buddy at Relapse Records. As with most U.S.-based underground acts of that era, their elite pedigree is, or at least was until just now, mostly based on anecdotal evidence, tales told by curiosity-seeking mosh-pit scamps who risked their lives smashing into anyone, anytime, anyplace. In those days, of course, there was no handy digital proof that bands like this even existed outside of American cities, so, sure, I was game to investigate this. It’s hardcore all right, of a Black Flag bent, but these guys wore their influences on their sleeves: This 1986 record, considered to be their seminal one, gets right down to cheeky business with opening song “Shangri-La,” ripping off Black Sabbath’s “The Mob Rules” as if they had written permission to do so. “Fight In The Street” comes after that, sounding more like mid-career Metallica than Metallica did at the time. The quality of sound here is pretty remarkable, it’s honestly as much an ’80s thrash-metal album as a punk one. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• It’s November, and look there, a bunch of new albums, all waiting to be released on Friday, Nov. 7, but what a lot of people have asked me about, of course, is the upcoming tour by Canadian prog-rock band Rush! They have a new drummer now, Anika Nilles, replacing the completely irreplaceable Neil Peart, who, after spending years redefining the art of hard rock drumming, passed away in 2020. What he did was monumental really; unlike more prog-oriented drummers like ELP’s Carl Palmer and Yes’s Bill Bruford, Peart had to make a lot of noise on the drum kit, which he did, but his noises were next-level, full of odd little tricks that were too clever to be written off as mere gimmicks. Anyway, like many Rush fans (not that I’m a card-carrying Rush fanatic; I really only like their album A Farewell To Kings and the more self-indulgent half of Hemispheres), I wanted to see what Nilles has done before. She arrived on the scene in the early 2010s through a series of videos posted to YouTube, which is where I found her playing along to her first album, Pikalar, the camera fixed solely on her while her backing band played along unseen, revealing that she was intent on parlaying her drumming work (and cachet as an educator specializing in pop music) into some sort of big gig. Joining Rush is certainly that, and I’m genuinely happy for her, and even more so for Rush’s fans (although ticket prices for this “reunion tour” — which is far from that, given that surviving members Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee are best friends who hang out constantly — are monstrous, as I talked about last week), especially the ones who never got to see them stand around play in their heyday. On the other hand, it does feel to me like something of a money grab by the original members. Why? Not just because of the ticket prices, which they could have had some say in capping, but — and I’m well aware that this will sound snobbish — because Nilles is an above-average rock drummer who seems to have a side fetish for Return To Forever-style fusion, i.e, she isn’t a lifelong prog/jazz drummer. Yeah, it bothers me that Lifeson and Lee didn’t grab someone like Weather Report’s Peter Erskine (who, at 71, is actually younger than the Rush guys) or Will Kennedy of the Yellowjackets. But hey man, that’s just me; if you have that much spare cash, you do you, so let’s put aside all that awfulness and talk about the new Mountain Goats album, Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan! The Goats are still led by singer-songwriter John Darnielle, of course; the new single, “Only One Way,” sounds like Pavement re-doing Elton John’s 1976 hit “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart,” but it’s all good, no one under the age of 40 knows Elton John ever existed anyway.

• I’ve never liked Portugal. The Man, but maybe “Angoon,” the single from their new album, SHISH, will convert me, you never know. Hmm, Of Montreal-style singing, some noise-pop edge to it, weren’t the Aughts a great time to be alive, guys?

• Welsh-Australian indie-waif Stella Donnelly has a good one here, the single “Feel It Change,” from her new album, Love And Fortune! Nice, gentle, mildly angry despite its 1960s pop vibe, it’s, you know, nice.

• And finally it’s former Kurt Vile cohort Steve Gunn, with a bunch of new mope-folk tunes on his latest album, Daylight Daylight! “Nearly There” is of course strummy and depressing, perfect for staring at your bad date’s fish tank while you think of an excuse to leave. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Carrier, Rhythm Immortal and Lip Cream, Kill Ugly Pop

1929, by Andrew Ross Sorkin

(Viking, 449 pages)

Wall Street wasn’t always glamorous. Until the early 1900s, “The practice of buying and selling stock was disdained by polite society as a grubby endeavor, the handiwork of gamblers and social benefits,” writes Andrew Ross Sorkin in his new nonfiction book 1929.

But in a couple of decades that had changed, to the point where brokerages dotted New York City streets like Starbucks cafes do today, thanks in part to Americans’ new, lenient attitudes toward credit.

It was an ominous setup to the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed. Most contemporary Americans know little about these events, says Sorkin, who has set out to change that and to convince us that there are alarming parallels today.

Sorkin is the business journalist and CNBC personality whose 2009 book Too Big to Fail chronicled the 2008 financial crisis and was made into an HBO movie. That book was the kind you call both exhaustive and exhausting, coming in at more than 600 pages. In comparison, 1929 is a mere 456, not including footnotes. It is, let’s be honest, a lot, and I didn’t have “refresh my knowledge of the Glass-Steagall Act” on my to-do list for 2025.

But Sorkin does his research and wants us (or the future writer of the film script) to know every detail of this story, largely written in narrative style, with the players’ dialogue, surroundings and daily life recreated from diaries, memos, oral histories and private letters — as well as court records, depositions and lawsuits.

The cast of characters is large: presidents and partners of major banks, assorted business leaders and politicians. Some of the major players are largely obscure today (apologies if you are a fan of Russell Cornell Leffingwell) but many are names we know well, if only by their business legacy: Walter Percy Chrysler, Charles M. Schwab and Louis-Joseph Chevrolet among them. There are also cameos by people such as Groucho Marx and Winston Churchill.

Sorkin opens his story with a prologue set just after the market closed 13 points down on Oct. 28, 1929. A 13-point drop is nothing today, but it was worrisome then, particularly after a turbulent week. We follow Charles Edwin Mitchell — a banker known to the press as “Sunshine Charlie” — back to his office after emergency meetings at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At his office, he learns that in his absence, his colleagues at National City Bank had been purchasing shares trying to inflate the bank’s value despite the volatility. They’d purchased 71,000 shares, at a cost of about $32 million — a risky scheme that could take the bank out if the market continued to fall. Mitchell envisions people lining up at National Bank’s 58 branches: “A run on the country’s largest bank. There was nothing bankers feared more.”

To make matters worse, the market downturn was occurring on the heels of one of the most optimistic times in America. Ten years earlier, Sorkin explains, General Motors started letting Americans buy its cars on credit. Sears, Roebuck & Co. joined in, offering credit plans for appliances. And before long, Wall Street let people buy stock “on margin” — putting up a percentage of the stock’s value and paying the rest over time. “Borrowing became a habit, born along with optimism,” Sorkin writes. “… And individuals became spectacularly rich. The wealthiest in the nation amassed fortunes in excess of $100 million, which, in today’s dollars, would be nearly $2 billion.” For the first time, businessmen were becoming celebrities, like performers and athletes.

Sorkin then takes us back to February 1929 and leads us month-by-month through that fateful year, exploring the mindsets that kept most of the business leaders from seeing what now seems inevitable in hindsight. “Across the country, speculating in the stock market had become so widespread and profitable that it seemed almost as if everyone were leveraged, committed, and in on the action.”

One Philadelphia banker suggested that women should be prohibited from the market “as a way of keeping in check the public enthusiasm for speculation.”

“So many women had started investing that brokerages had installed specially designed lounges and galleries where they could watch the fluctuations of the market safe from the rowdiness of men buying and selling,” Sorkin writes.

When President Herbert Hoover was inaugurated, he told Americans, “In no nation are the fruits of accomplishment more secure … I have no fears for the future of our country.”

There were a few Cassandras, among them Roger Babson, an economist who started a college by his own name in Massachusetts. He had been predicting a market crash for two years. But the majority of New York bankers in their stately Upper East Side homes would not and could not see it, as they had too much riding on the market. Besides, the economy had been up and down over the past few decades — the country had, after all, recovered from the Panic of 1907 and other more recent volatility.

Sorkin recounts the clashes between Washington and Wall Street as the point of crisis neared. Hoover, becoming worried, was starting to listen to Babson, but the powerful bankers countered Babson’s warnings with relentless optimism. One banker, 10 days before the crash, sent the president an 18-page letter saying that the American future “appears brilliant” and that it would be folly for the president to interfere with the market with “corrective action.”

All too soon we arrive at the last week of October 1929 and see why Charles Mitchell was having such a meltdown in the prologue 200 pages ago. In the days to come, there will be those crowds lined up outside banks and brokerages (16 pages of photos and images of New York Times front pages are a nice addition), suicides (though not as many as have been reported) and eventually criminal charges against Mitchell. There would be “Hoovertowns” (homeless encampments named after the president), breadlines and periods when nearly a quarter of Americans were unemployed. This is a story, after all, that did not end in 1930, but affected many people throughout the next decade and resulted in changes that still govern banking today.

Could the crash have been avoided? Sorkin says yes, with caveats. He also believes Hoover deserves a better grade as president than history has given him. The lessons he offers to us are simple: “we need to remember how easily we forget,” he writes.

And also: “No matter how many warnings are issued or how many laws are written, people will find new ways to believe that the good times can last forever. They will dress up hope as certainty. And in that collective fever, humanity will again and again lose its head.” B

Featured Photo: 1929, by Andrew Ross Sorkin

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

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