Category: Pop

Album Reviews 25/09/18

Beat, Beat Live (Inside Out Records)

In my never-ending quest to be a people-pleaser, I cover basically every genre on Earth in this space, and yes, I know how obvious it is. I’ll pick a random record, start listening, and the words start zapping out of my fingers automatically. I really only have a tough time with newest-hottest indie bands, because they’re almost always ridiculously overrated, but another genre that’s out of my wheelhouse is “wildly creative” prog-rock a la Zappa, because I don’t ever get the point. In that vein, King Crimson is another band I’ve never liked at all, but this isn’t all that bad, even though it’s rendered by a supergroup consisting of two Crimson members (Adrian Belew and Tony Levin) along with the guitar wonk’s guitar wonk, Steve Vai, and Tool drummer Danny Carey. Their mission: “re-imagine” three Crimson albums, namely Discipline, Beat and Three of a Perfect Pair, thus it’s obviously for Crimson fanatics. The results are all very tech-prog-sounding, like a wacky Spotify mix comprising random entries from Disco Biscuits, Styx, Talking Heads and Return To Forever, with occasional departures into Captain Beefheart nonsense. What can I diplomatically say other than come and get it, King Crimson completists, yee-hah. A

Bill Brennan and Andy McNeill, Dreaming In Gamelan (self-released)

Wonderfully peaceful “fourth world music”-based collaboration between two Canadian multi-instrumentalists/composers. They deal in “Sundanese Gamelan,” a sound created with gongs and chimes and associated elements, instruments that are manufactured under local conditions in towns in the Indonesian province of West Java, such as Bogor and Bandung. At its core, the music is an Indonesian tradition practiced by the West Javanese ethnic group known as the Sundanese, but here, as you’d naturally expect, the melodic patterns are geared more toward Western tastes. Electric violinist Hugh Marsh (on leave from Loreena McKennitt) adds a layer to the sonic depth, but whether or not that’s really needed is probably a matter of taste; the violin is more an undergirding than anything that ever gets busily melodic. The chimes and gongs have a “singing bowls” effect that sounds simultaneously planned and completely spurious, that is when it isn’t exhaling exquisite ambiance. The tldr: It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to hear at a wildly pricey spa or advanced yoga center, etc. A+

PLAYLIST

• Like almost every Friday since the fall of Rome or whatever, Sept. 19 will find us covered in new albums, clawing our way to safety, away from all the albums that want us to buy them! Since Christmas is a mere 98 days away, I have a Mount Vesuvius-load of albums to deal with this week, so instead of going into anything obscure right off the bat I’m going to talk about the new one from Sarah McLachlan, Better Broken! She’s my all-time favorite Lilith Fair fixture, but you may better know her as the lady who interrupts your TV show to ask you to donate to abandoned pets, which of course you definitely should do, don’t be a cheapskate (I can’t watch those commercials, like, the minute one shows up on the teevee when I’m watching my shows I change the channel at top speed, which I deserve to do because I’ve rescued enough cats in my lifetime. In fact, it’d be really nice if the Humane Society would give me some sort of special Xfinity code that would block commercials starring starving cats and dogs automatically, you know, maybe show me a nice happy video of skunks and raccoons frolicking in the forest instead, but then again, I’d end up being all like “You know, I should start rescuing abandoned skunks and raccoons,” even though every wildlife expert advises people not to, so don’t do it). Where were we, oh yes, Sarah McLachlan, she’s the best, let’s go lend an ear to the album’s title track, the first single from this new album! It is a deep, mellow tune, starting out with a trip-hop drumbeat reminiscent of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop,” which means she hasn’t changed much; the verse is mature and awesome, then it moves into an addictive little hook that flirts with brazen catchiness before folding into a yodel-filled chill-art piece that’s as good as anything else I’ve heard from her before. Some things never change, and in this case that’s actually a good thing!

• Hark, it’s the sound of rapidly twerking butts, who else could it be but New York rapper Cardi B, twerking away like a demented terrier! Cardi’s new album, Am I the Drama, is out this week; mayhaps you’ve heard the title track if you have small twerking children (I was going to say that you may have heard it at a local Manchvegas club, but now that the local club scene is changing and there’s basically no local place to twerk as far as I know — someone message me on one of my “socials” if I’m wrong of course, that’d be great — you’re better off just having kids if you want to stay hip to twerking and Humpty Dancing or whatnot) (yes, I’m being serious, send me your local club spam. At present I assume the Manchester dance club scene is nowadays the same as Portsmouth’s, just dudes in fedoras doing Bob Dylan covers). OK, this Cardi tune is, of course, a glossy yacht-rap song with lots of swearing, for your kids, who secretly just want you to give them guidance, love, discipline and money for tattoos.

• Yikes, I thought I was going to have to slog through another new Black Keys record, but thankfully it’s just everyone’s favorite demented stoner-indie band Black Lips, with their new LP, Season Of The Peach! “Tippy Tongue” is of course awesome, like early Rolling Stones but 100 times more interesting, meaning it’s nothing like Black Keys.

• And finally it’s nerdy chillwave artist Toro y Moi, with Unerthed: Hole Erth Unplugged, his new album! I hate to name-check José Gonzalez two weeks in a row, but “CD-R” is like his stuff with Zero 7, lazy and techie, but with a dobro in there, which makes it Americana-ish. It’s very nice and yadda yadda.

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

Culpability, by Bruce Holsinger

(Spiegel and Grau, 341 pages)

Noah and Lorelei are traveling with their three children, en route to a youth lacrosse tournament in Delaware, when their top-of-the-line self-driving minivan hits a Honda that explodes into flames.

The Cassidy-Shaw family all survive; the couple in the Honda do not. The headline in the local paper: “Lucky five escape crash, two die at scene.”

Noah, a corporate attorney, doesn’t feel lucky — wouldn’t luck entail not being involved in a fatal crash? But the larger theme in this smart novel, the fourth from University of Virginia professor Bruce Holsinger, is encapsulated in the title: Culpability.

It is not always obvious who is to blame in any given tragedy, and the closer you look at the circumstances and the people involved, the muddier things get.

The accident occurred when the Honda drifted toward the minivan’s lane, but because the senior citizens in that car are dead, the investigation centers on the survivors — and the artificial intelligence powering the minivan.

Charlie, a star lacrosse player about to enter college on a full scholarship, was sitting in the driver’s seat when the accident happened and as such was the “de facto driver,” the person charged with monitoring the AI’s navigation. Noah, his father, was next to him, composing a memo on his laptop. The two were the only ones to emerge uninjured, and they are the center of the investigation: Charlie, because he jerked the steering wheel when his sister screamed, thus disabling the AI, and Noah, because he was supposed to be supervising his minor son. Lorelei and the couple’s two daughters, Izzy and Alice, were in the back and seemingly involved.

But as the family recovers from their injuries, both psychological and physical, it is gradually revealed that Charlie and Noah are not the only parties whose actions prior to the crash warrant scrutiny. There is a web of culpability with nearly invisible threads that expand in multiple directions, threads that go far past the family. These become increasingly more apparent as the family decamps to a rental house in Virginia, near the Chesapeake Bay — a place they’d stayed a year before. Noah and Lorelei are hoping that a week of kayaking and board games and hot fudge sundaes will do more to help heal the family than the therapy so far has.

The expectations take a turn as Noah notices dramatic changes on the property across in the inlet where they are staying. It turns out a billionaire tech mogul has bought 90 acres across the inlet and transformed the former rustic horse farm into a high-tech, high-security compound that fills Noah with disgust. A widower whose wife died in a car accident, this mogul has a lissome daughter about Charlie’s age, and the teens become smitten with each other after a chance encounter on the water.

But as the families intermingle, Noah begins to suspect that his wife has a prior connection with Daniel Monet, the billionaire, through her work in the field of “computational morality” — the ethics of AI. He has been distant from her career because of what he sees as a divide, in their education, intellect and luck — a state-school graduate, he comes from a family that struggled to do more than survive, while Lorelei comes from a seemingly gilded family, where the siblings went to Yale, Stanford and Princeton.

In dealings with his wife’s sister, Noah notes “a reflective condescension given away in a certain lift of her eyebrows and the angle of her pretty nose.” And on his first and only time to accompany his wife to a conference, Noah feels diminished, out of his league, experiencing “my own terrifying insignificance.”

“My wife became a different person in that rarefied world, as if her brain had suddenly shifted to a higher plane while I hovered by her side as the interloping cupbearer, unworthy of drinking so much as a sip from whatever Olympian ambrosia she was drinking,” Noah says in the novel’s first-person narration.
As the story unfolds, Holsinger injects excerpts from a book that Lorelei has written, which is titled “Silicon Souls: On the Culpability of Artificial Minds,” as well as text conversations between one of the daughters and her AI friend, a chatbot named Blair that knows in detail everything that is going on, and keeps offering advice.

For a while, these asides seem like unwelcome interruptions in the narrative, but by the novel’s end their significance is clear, and evidence of Holsinger’s skill in plotting a deeply intelligent storyline that blends technology, philosophy and ethics, while also plumbing an essential pain of parenting: “No matter what parents do, their children’s outcomes are neither predictable nor inevitable. Life is not an algorithm, and never will be.”

Like the TV show The Good Place, the novel delivers a crash course in mainstays of secular moral thought, such as situational ethics: “The relative morality of certain actions is determined by the circumstance and context rather than by some absolute, unchanging ethical code. Likewise, our morality as individuals is formed not by innate personality traits but by the variables of our environment.”

Culpability moves slowly at times — it’s told by a corporate lawyer, after all; no offense to corporate lawyers except to say that Noah’s musings on corporate acquisitions right before the crash seem designed to dull our senses. Also at times the book seems overly long, continuing after what seems a natural ending. But Holsinger, as it turns out, knows exactly what he’s doing, and his ending is nothing short of genius. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Culpability, by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel and Grau, 341 pages)

Album Reviews 25/09/11


Parcels, Loved (ANTI- Records)

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

Chameleons, Arctic Moon (Metropolis Records)

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

PLAYLIST

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

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

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

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

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

Album Reviews 25/09/04


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

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

Prayer Group, Strawberry (Reptilian Records)

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

PLAYLIST

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

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

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

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

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

On Her Game, Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports, by Christine Brennan

(Scribner, 250 pages)

The story of how Caitlin Clark entered the national consciousness begins not with basketball but with soccer. As Christine Brennan explains in On Her Game, it was specifically the Women’s World Cup championship in 1999, the one in which Brandi Chastain led her team to victory over China and ripped off her shirt.

There had been female athletes before, but they wore “tennis dresses, figure skating sequins, gymnastics leotards and swimming suits,” Brennan writes. What came after Title IX was different: “It was raw athleticism that Americans fell for that summer of ’99. It was the girl next door we’d all seen in our neighborhoods, coming back from a game with a grass-stained jersey and scuffed-up knees, now all grown up.”

It was what Caitlin Clark would become.

Clark, the Indiana Fever point guard who has ignited interest in women’s basketball nationwide, is the latest product of Title IX, the 1972 law that ensured equal opportunities in sports for women and girls. And Brennan’s book is a primer for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention and wants to understand why the Iowa native is all over the news.

Brennan writes for USA Today and is also a sought-after television commentator. She caught the fever when Clark was still a junior in college and made a ridiculous three-point shot in a game against Indiana. “There was no way on earth something like that could go in — until it did,” Brennan writes.

At the time, Clark was beginning to build a devoted fan base that would follow her from college to the WNBA. Brennan describes a young woman who benefited from both natural talent and a fierce spirit of competition honed in a family consumed with sports. (Her dad was a college athlete, her mother’s father was a football coach, and her two brothers were also athletes in school.) In the third grade, Clark’s No. 1 goal was to be in the WNBA. She was competitive even when it came to Halloween: “I was the first to the door. I had the best costume. I just dominated trick or treat,” she has said.

Combining interviews she conducted, and the interviews of others, Brennan offers as good a biography as one can compile of someone who is just 23 years old; it’s fleshed out with observations about how Title IX changed women’s sports, and play-by-plays of essential Clark games.

Like the Clark phenomenon, this book came about quickly — Brennan struck a deal with a Scribner editor within a day of their conversation about the project; she then went to Paris to cover the 2024 summer Olympics, before immersing herself in all things Clark for six weeks. Along the way, Brennan became part of the story herself when some WNBA players took offense at questions she posed to a Connecticut Sun player who bruised Clark’s eye during a game and later appeared to laugh about it. The players’ association wanted Brennan banned from covering the league — this did not happen, and Brennan says her questioning was in line with “questions I would ask any athlete — male or female” on a controversial topic.

While that may well be true, Brennan clearly is a fan: She writes about Clark’s “talent, her intelligence, her competitiveness, her sense of humor, and her sense of responsibility, especially toward young girls who love sports.” She believes the WNBA was unprepared for Clark and the attention she brought to the league and shows how some of the athletes were overtly hostile toward Clark because so much attention was being focused on her.

But she also offers a portrait of Clark as a hard-nosed and volatile athlete who often lets her own emotions get the best of her. Near the end of last season her teammates famously formed a “Caitlin Clark De-Escalation Committee,” intervening on the court when it looked like Clark was in danger of getting yet another technical foul. Much of the news coverage of Clark in the past year has focused on opponents’ heavy coverage of her, and fouls that may or may not have been intentional, but Clark has had her own bad-girl behavior, and those around her are constantly saying they need to let “Caitlin be Caitlin,” whatever that means in the moment.

Brennan says she first saw Clark in person at the Iowa-Maryland game in February 2024. Within a minute of watching Clark play, she understood why so many people were talking about her.

“This wasn’t just sports. It was entertainment. Clark was the high-wire act at the circus. She was the diva at the opera. She was a show. She was the show.”

Despite a slow start in the WNBA, Clark continued to draw crowds, filling arenas that were never sold out before Clark arrived (at least before an injury in Boston July 15 sidelined her indefinitely).

Her detractors say she has enjoyed “white privilege” and “pretty privilege” and is stealing attention from veterans in the WNBA; her defenders point out that the surge in popularity in women’s basketball has occurred because of her, and say that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” In fact, it was Brennan’s questioning last May about why WNBA teams had to fly commercial that led to the league’s implementing charter flights — but it came after video of Clark walking through baggage claim went viral, not after Brittney Griner was harassed at an airport by a YouTuber.

Brennan does a solid job laying out the Clark story, although at times it’s a bit of a slog to get through the play-by-play of each consequential game on which she reports. Those who follow Clark closely might find much of this book repetitive, as so much of it has been reported elsewhere. But anyone wanting to understand why Clark became a cultural flashpoint will appreciate the crash course offered in On Her Game. B —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: On Her Game, Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports, by Christine Brennan (Scribner, 250 pages)

Album Reviews 25/08/28


Ashes And Diamonds, Are Forever (Cleopatra Records)

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

Crayon, “Kill Your Idols” (Erased Tapes)

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

PLAYLIST

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

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

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

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

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

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