Category: Pop

Sounds Like Love, by Ashley Poston

(Berkley Romance, 362 pages)

Sounds Like Love is a PG13-rated story that, as of this writing, ranks No. 1 in Amazon’s “feel-good fiction.” It has a romance at the heart of it, but is also a story about family and friendship, mostly set during summer at a beach town at North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Thus it qualifies as not just rom-com, but a beach read.

Joni Lark — who goes by Jo — comes from a musical family. Her grandparents owned a music hall, which was passed down to Jo’s parents. Her mother was a performer, and Jo grew up to be a songwriter of note. When we meet her, she’s at a concert of a pop star who shot to fame because of one of Jo’s songs. Although thirty-something Jo has enjoyed professional success, she herself is not famous, and so when she is escorted to a private balcony where a famous singer sits, he assumes she’s seeking a photo or an autograph, and is coldly condescending despite his dreamy blue eyes. He smirks three times in four pages, that’s all you need to know.

But Jo will have none of that, and flirty banter ensues, and also an unexpectedly intimate moment with the man, who used to be part of a boy band and is the son of an even more famous musician.

When Jo leaves the concert in an Uber, we know we will see Sebastian Fell again, even though the logistics are unclear, as she is leaving Los Angeles to visit her family in North Carolina.

Jo isn’t going home for a typical beach visit, however. Her mother has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, and her father has asked her to come for an extended stay so the family can have “one last good summer” before God-only-knows-what sets in. She knows it will be a bittersweet time but soon realizes that it will also be complicated — her best friend, who happens to be dating her brother, has an edge to her that Jo can’t quite figure out, and her parents soon announce that they have decided to retire from the family business, the music hall called the Revelry that was a fixture in the community and had “weathered more hurricanes than years I’d been alive.”

Amid all this, Jo has writer’s block — she hasn’t been able to write a song in weeks and has clients waiting on her. And she has developed the strangest of earworms, strains of a tune that won’t leave her head — along with a man’s voice. Not only does she hear this stranger’s voice clearly, but he can hear her thoughts as well. They can converse silently, like imaginary friends.

OK, Supernatural it isn’t, and yet it sort of is — one of Poston’s other books, 2022’s The Dead Romantics, has been described as “paranormal romance” and her The Seven Year Slip (2023) involves a time-travel relationship. So suspension of disbelief is required with this author, who has built a large and devoted following.

So it’s important to not spend any time thinking about how this could actually be happening, but just go with the flow, as Jo and her new inner friend, Sasha, do. Neither rushes off to a shrink, but they continue about their lives, chatting up each other, and becoming closer as they do, even though they are also trying to figure out how to break this connection.

It is totally weird, this back-and-forth dialogue, until suddenly it isn’t.

Because who among us hasn’t experienced the proverbial voice — or voices — in the head? It’s only when they begin to suggest that we commit a crime that people become concerned. Of course, hearing the thoughts of another person while falling in love with them is a whole other matter, and that is no spoiler, given the title of this book.

Sounds Like Love unfolds in somewhat predictable ways; there are no momentous plot twists that leave the reader gasping. But it’s smart in its own way, and becomes more engaging as the story evolves. It’s not just a romance but an exploration of our unlived lives — what would have happened “If You Stayed” — which is, not uncoincidentally, the name of Jo’s most popular song. It is also the story of the long and poignant goodbye that takes place when a person you love is succumbing to dementia. (Poston says in an author’s note that the book came about, in part, because of her own experience losing someone to dementia, and the pain that comes from having a loved one say, “Who are you?”)

Fans of the romance genre will embrace Sounds Like Love, even more so if they’re into pop music. (Every chapter title is a line from a well-known song.) We don’t just experience songs as the soundtrack of our lives, Poston is saying here, but music is a building block of the people we become. “We were all made up of memories, anyway. Of ourselves, of other people,” Jo reflects at one point. “We were built on the songs sung to us and the songs we sang to ourselves, the songs we listened to with broken hearts and the ones we danced to at weddings.” Sounds like a bestseller, if not a movie.

Featured Photo: Sounds Like Love, by Ashley Poston

Album Reviews 25/08/21

Visions of Atlantis, Pirates II – Armada (Napalm Records)

I’ve had lots of jolly fun on this page making sport of friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny’s fondness for symphonic metal, and oddly enough, when I was literally getting to the actual “record reviews” part of this pirate-joke-filled record-review column, he ba-dinged his way into my Facebook with an immediate demand for me to listen to this pirate-oriented album, the newest (but year-old) one from this Austrian band. Little did Dan know that one of the first records I ever reviewed for any newspaper was these guys’ second full-length, 2004’s Cast Away, which sounded like a LootCrate version of Nightwish, but I thought it was cute and adorable. A lot has changed for this band over the past 21 years, of course, but they’re still a bit kitschy, opening with a maudlin Celtic Woman-tinged ghost-ballad in “To Those Who Choose to Fight,” but then it’s right to business with “The Land of the Free,” which wants to be all Hans Zimmer-soundtrack-y (but with Yngwie Malmsteen guitar sounds) and more or less succeeds as a segue into its usual meat and potatoes shtick: super-gorgeous opera chick with a Helloween-soundalike backing band. It’s fine of course. Oh, while we’re here, the coolest pirate tune ever is Tiesto’s “He’s A Pirate,” which chops up samples of Zimmer’s theme to Pirates Of The Caribbean and turns it into a trance drop for the ages. You simply must hear it, folks. A

Babymetal, Metal Forth (Capitol Records)

Oh fine, as long as this week’s award-winning column has already crashed and burned in a conflagration of pirate jokes and Dan Szczesny’s weakness for girl bands being epic and metal, let’s make it official, since Dan loves this band and I have hott-sexxy-hilarious Stormigee TikToks to watch. Back in June, you may recall, I dubbed the three ridiculously over-choreographed female twentysomething Koreans who front this band “Waifuta, Waifutite and Waifutatta,” which is actually close to what they have for stage names, but if you missed that, both Dan and I hope at least three people in our beloved state have heard of them. If you haven’t, it’s all good; their trip is hyper-speed thrash metal with alternating Munchkin-rapping and catchy pop choruses, a genre known as “Kawaii metal,” or “cute metal,” a Cuisinart of thrash and J-pop. From there we can do the perfunctory: “Ratatata” is a sped-up version of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”; “Song 3” is Cannibal Corpse for techies; “Kon! Kon!” sounds like a cross between Marilyn Manson and the Bakugan theme song (most of them do, really), and now you’ve heard of them, you’re welcome, New Hampshire! A

PLAYLIST

• New albums are being released on Aug. 22, because that’s what always happens on Fridays. Now, I know it’s way past time to address your question, since we’ve known each other so long; you want to know why all the bands and rich nepo baby Autotuned singers release their albums on Fridays, given that people don’t go to the mall to buy albums until Sunday (no one goes to the mall on Saturdays, because that’s the day you spend doing all the un-fun stuff that’s piled up during the week, like cleaning up your office mess and buying and installing that new battery in your car; in ancient Greek, the word “Saturday” means “I should just quit my job and live on a Hawaiian beach, living off pineapples and tourists’ pizza crusts”). Then again, does anyone actually go to the mall at all anymore, except to visit Best Buy, which is always a wasted effort, because you know in your bones that that all-important wire you need so you can run your Sega Genesis for the first time in 30 years isn’t going to be at Best Buy, you silly goose, don’t even bother, even though you definitely will use that hopelessly impossible mission as an excuse to drive to the mall just to see actual people, ha ha, remember those things? But anyway, my invisible AI friend who lives in Google.com says albums are released on Friday “to coincide with the start of the weekend, maximizing potential exposure and engagement. This practice, known as ‘New Music Fridays,’ is a global initiative aimed at standardizing release dates, combating piracy, and aligning with streaming platform updates.” Sure, sounds fine, but you may be wondering how on Earth releasing albums on Fridays “combats piracy.” I wondered that too, so I looked it up and finally found an obscure pirate tradition that was first cited in the year 1589, when the captain of a Welsh pirate ship named the Petunia told his crew of, you know, pirates that it was bad luck to engage in normal pirate activities (aside from singing sea shanties and guzzling rum from jugs) on Fridays. Are you with me so far, so, since record company executives are 100 times worse people than Captain Jack Sparrow, they believe people won’t pirate albums on Fridays, and now you know why I always kick off this multiple-award-winning column with something about Friday. So let’s begin this Friday-centric exercise with the new album from tech-metal dudes Pendulum, a band that’s a lot better than Linkin Park, but since I’m the only one onEarth who seems to know about them, we all live a lie. Inertia is the title of this non-pirate-able-because-it-comes-out-on-a-Friday-don’t-even-try-it album, and the tune “Driver” is insane and frenetic; if The Prodigy went metal, this is what it’d sound like. You’ll definitely like it.

• Ghostface Killah conjures some epic Wu-Tang Clan magic with Supreme Clientele 2 this Friday. Some internet nerds are complaining that sequel albums are stupid (except, they admit, for Ghostface’s first sequel album of course), but leadoff tune “Nutmeg” — guested by NZA, believe it or not — is so badass it’ll shut them up. The techy beat is completely relentless.

• Speaking of believe-it-or-not, my new favorite emo band (only because its name is so long and column-filling) is from Connecticut: The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die! Their fifth album, Dreams Of Being Dust, features “Dissolving,” a really neat track that combines post-punk and art-rock. Me likey.

• Lastly we have the new LP from North Carolina’s Superchunk, Songs In The Key Of Yikes, and its single, “Is It Making You Feel Something,” which is OK! Sounds sort of like Gwen Stefani fronting an early ’80s-indie band, which is cooler than it looks.

Album Reviews 25/08/14

Friendly Rich, The Birds of Marsville (We Are Busy Bodies Records)

It’s not often that I mumble “Oh shut up” at a record, but the spoken introduction to the first of these two 18-minute experimental-cabaret tracks had me doing that. Once the babbling (mostly chatter about how he’s — Rich Marsella — chasing a Ph.D. in musicology and how bizarre his music is, etc.) finally stops, the tuneage reveals itself to be something the steampunk crowd will go wild over. I’ll make it even easier: This guy is the Captain Beefheart of steampunk, and I won’t be surprised in the least if I happen upon him someday at some nerd convention and get mad at myself for not remembering how on Earth I first heard of him. Contents: Calliope (you know, the mechanical organ stuff you hear on a merry-go-round), tempos changing with no rhyme or reason, Hammer horror frightwig soundtracking, spastic Bride Of Chucky ballistics, bell-and-whistle stuff out of Monty Python, you get the idea. He’s gathering a following, fair warning. B

Still in Love, Recovery Language (Church Road Records)

Always cracks me up to be presented with an informational one-sheet from a hardcore punk or extreme-metal band, and when it gets to the stuff about the musical messaging, the verbiage suddenly starts looking like an ad for a yoga retreat. In this case, I’m informed their new album “delves into themes of personal struggle, resilience, and emotional catharsis, offering a sonic journey through the complexities of the human experience,” all of which is, I suppose, more elegant than just writing “GRAHHH” in 52-point font, which would be more succinct. Either way, yes, more of this please. The band is something of a supergroup, composed of members of the biggest (for want of a better word) hardcore bands stomping stages and breaking stuff in the U.K., and boy are they out to break stuff. Two-minute songs that aren’t speed races, no gimmicky screamo yowling, no nonsense, and the guitar sound is absolutely filthy. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Wuh-oh, frantic fam, the new albums of Aug. 15 are afoot (and I assume that’s what most of them are going to smell like when I go check them out in a minute), but in the meantime I’m sure that parenthetical segue will only serve further to convince my small platoon of haters (they’re out there, folks, and I mean that in more ways than one) that the only music I actually like is made by noise bands from Boise, Idaho. As someone once said to me, “Just what the world needs, a music column written by someone who hates music,” after I’d mentioned that I thought AC/DC has been hilariously overrated since Day 1 (obviously your mileage may vary, but I don’t really want to know about it), but either way, that’s not part of my actual mission statement. I don’t view this column as a platform for me to change people’s minds but instead to find and promote the occasional artist/band I find worthy or interesting. This isn’t a Nylon column written by a 23-year-old intern who lives for getting free CDs from the big record companies; if I think something’s dumb, I can say so, and in the meantime, sending me a Facebook message in ALL CAPS that’s basically the music-related equivalent of “Maybe if you weren’t such a poopyhead you’d appreciate the exotic, tantalizing flavor of a freshly made peanut butter and guacamole sandwich” isn’t going to change my mind any more than my strapping you into a chair and forcing you to listen to Kiss albums is going to make the lights come on in your attic. OK, with that completely unaccomplished, let’s turn our attention to this week’s slate of decent things and peanut butter and guacamole sandwiches, and there’s tons of ’em, so let’s start with the big one, Maroon 5’s Love Is Like! Ha ha, I totally changed my mind about Maroon 5 and love them now ever since the other week, when they put that AI CEO guy in an old pickle by shining the Kiss Cam on him and his “Chief People Officer” lady friend while their spouses waited for them to finish “working late,” wasn’t that the stupidest — oops, wait, someone in my earphone just informed me that that wasn’t Maroon 5, it was Coldplay, my bad, doesn’t Andy Grammer sing for both those bands anyway, nothing to see here! Whatever, the new single, “Priceless” is a bootylicious yacht-hip-hop tune featuring Lisa Manoban from the South Korean girl group Blackpink, who does a fantastic job sounding exactly like Kesha, but wait, there’s more, OK actually there isn’t.

• Recently divorced nepo baby Chance the Rapper shows he can still rhyme in half-speed-reggae-triplet-rhythm just like everyone else on the planet on the title track from his second full-length album, Star Line! His fans are hoping this LP is a lot better than The Big Day; the tune is pretty edgy but there are so many people who can’t wait to diss the album he probably should have just had Lil Wayne guest-rap on the whole thing or at least just stuck to mixtapes.

• I’ve gushed over bluegrass/Americana artist Molly Tuttle before; she’s won awards for her “clawhammer” guitar-picking style and for being awesome in general. However, the single “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark” from her new album So Long Little Miss Sunshine is pretty basic, sounding like a cross between Amy Grant and Reba McEntire, but if that sounds great to you, well, peanut butter and guacamole it is, you do you.

• Ending this week’s exercise on a positive note, synthpop/trip-hop singer Alison Goldfrapp releases her second LP as a solo artist, Flux! “Reverberotic” is an electropop single in the tradition of Britney Spears and ’90s-era Madonna, nothing too innovative but it’s, you know, nice.

UnWorld, by Jayson Greene

UnWorld, by Jayson Greene (Knopf, 224 pages)

If you could upload your memories and experiences into the cloud, would you? There’s an obvious benefit — having a backup copy of your brain when the original starts to fail. But what if the alternate “you” was just different enough to develop its own will, different from your own, and wants to strike out on its own?

These questions are explored in Jayson Greene’s UnWorld, set in a not-so-unimaginable future where human beings are still the dominant life form on Earth but increasingly surrounded by sentient technology. This world is full of “uploads” — beings composed of the uploaded memories of the person they came from, the person to whom they are “tethered.” This has created an ethical quagmire for society — what happens when an upload wants to be emancipated from its tether? Should uploads qualify for personhood and be granted rights?

In the midst of all this, the everyday experiences of human life go on, with adjustments: self-driving cars are the norm, household chores are obsolete, the elderly in medical settings are cared for by robots. And despite all the technological advances, human beings are still dying.

Anna and Rick are grieving, having lost their only child, a teenage son, in what was either an accident or suicide — no one can say for sure. Neither is coping well; Anna, in particular, is bewildered by how quickly people expect life to resume its normal shape. “My pain was meant to crack the earth,” she thinks, while trying to get through an evening of socialization. “And here I was, not even half a year later, one of grief’s private citizens again. Were people’s memories really so short? Or was it just that you could never stop performing — falling to your knees, rending your garments — if you wanted to keep their attention?”

Compounding her anguish, Anna’s upload, who has been with her for eight years, has suddenly requested emancipation. The upload was a gift from Anna’s husband, and although she was unsure about it at first, she came to realize that the relationship was “the first and only time I’ve ever enjoyed my own company.”

“When we synced, my memories suddenly stood up straight, marched in line. Somehow, in that moment when I transferred the millions of little impressions I had gathered through the chip in my ear, up to her, and that tunnel feeling was established, the one that provided the link between her and me, I felt like my memories were being polished, pored over. Each one became clear, clean, interesting.”

Anna is distraught about the loss of her alternative self, whom she relied on for companionship; uploads, in addition to being storage, also serve as de facto friends. But she consents, and the upload disappears into the world, taking on the name Aviva.

The story unfolds through four points of view. After Anna, we meet a professor named Cathy who specializes in the “transhumanities” and upload personhood, and who has ingested a biomechanical chip in hopes of communicating with an emancipated upload. “It didn’t look too much like freedom to me, this new state of being: conventional uploads could vote on behalf of their human counterparts, but they couldn’t vote once they left their tethers…. We didn’t so much set them free as snip their tethers and let them float free like balloons loosed into tree branches.” Some scholars were talking about “fleshism” — what they considered the false idea that beings only had worth if they were encased in human flesh.

After Cathy, the first-person narrative flows seamlessly to Samantha, who had been the best friend of Anna’s son. Samantha and Alex were children when they’d met, two years apart in age and so close emotionally that “they rhymed.” The two were making a horror movie together when Alex died. Now Samantha keeps going back to the cliff where Alex either fell or jumped to his death, trying to figure out what happened, while she processes her own loneliness and grief.

Finally, we get to the perspective of Anna’s upload, Aviva, who, despite not having a physical body, feels pain when she disconnects from her human, not having neurochemicals that can rush in to numb it. Pain, she says, is “blinding, indescribable. It runs in all directions. I am made of this pain, I realize, and so is everything. … God made borders; he made solitude and alienation and loneliness and all the small cherished lockets we stuff our feelings inside just so we can hear something rattle when we shake them.”

It is in Aviva’s musings that Greene’s writing and imagination really take off. Thinking she might be dying, Aviva says, “I don’t even get to watch my life flash before me. What I get is a spilled bag of someone else’s memories, which float around me now, glinting in the cold way of all stolen things.”

All these beings are intertwined in ways we will not fully understand until the story’s end, when their connection, and the truth of Alex’s death, becomes fully realized. Along the way, Greene invites the reader to consider the future that might lie ahead of us, perhaps not the exact world that he has imagined here, but something similar. It hints at where we could go wrong, like when one of the personhood scholars writes a paper suggesting uploads would need to “create their own language, possibly out of range of human understanding, to communicate the privacy of their subjective experience.”

That’s exactly what we need, right? A world full of invisible sentient beings communicating with each other in a language that humans can’t understand?

Greene, whose first book, Once More We Saw Stars, was a memoir about the loss of a child, knows first-hand the terrible landscape of grief he navigates here, and his writing is compelling, even though at times, the voice that comes through these four female characters feels a bit masculine.

And some of the technology that is presented here as commonplace takes a suspension of disbelief for sure — but then again, so does most of the Mission: Impossible series. UnWorld is a cautionary tale in an age of artificial intelligence, while also a reminder of what it means to be human in that world. B+

Featured Photo: UnWorld by Jayson Greene.

Album Reviews 25/08/07

Tulip Tiger, Da Meanz of Production (self-released)

This collection of (purportedly) throwback Aughts-era electronica comes to us from Los Angeles sound-artisan Augustus Watkins, who attempts here to combine big-beat (Chemical Brothers/Prodigy etc.) explosiveness with “genre-shaping soundtracks from films like The Matrix and Blade.“ Or so he’s said, but once you get past that mission statement, what this experiment proves is that the latter vibe tends to cancel out the former, which some might find appealing. I could be wrong of course (that did happen once in 1993 or 1995, I forget), especially given that these beats aren’t block-rockin’ (insert snobby production-nerd comment here); I’m saying that it’s probably better suited to movie soundtracking than dance floors. And that’s OK if you really liked the soundtrack to 1987’s The Running Man (there’s plenty of cheese afoot here, so if I were to concur with Watkins’ info-sheet and tell you people it’s 1998-reminiscent that’d be a disservice). No, my impression is that it’s variations on the first Terminator’s soundtrack with some Meat Beat Manifesto stuff in there. The producers of Stranger Things would probably love it. B

Maia Sharp, Tomboy (self-released)

This singer-songwriter, the daughter of Grammy-winning country songwriter Randy Sharp, is, like her dad, one of those largely unsung folks who’ve racked up a pretty near endless list of behind-the-scenes credits over the decades, having collaborated with such artists as Cher, Carole King and, interestingly enough under the circumstances, fellow note-Tetris-ing wonk Bonnie Raitt, who’s one of her influences. The title track of this one is quite ’70s-radio in its way, with some smooth intricate vocal work you’d rather listen to while relaxing than try singing along with, which is to say that it comes off as slightly academic but in a very colorful, deeply unworried manner, a la late-career Otis Redding and that sort of thing. “Counterintuation” is a clever one that’ll appeal to Norah Jones fans, and in fact there are hints of a Jones tune in there that I can’t think of at the moment, not that that detracts from the richness of the songwriting. The record ends on a hauntingly pretty note, a Joni Mitchell-ized version of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Oh, look, it’s the pile of new albums coming out on Aug. 8, isn’t that awesome, rock fans? We’ll get right into this week’s morass with a look at the new album from white-rapper-turned-Dashboard-Confessional-wannabe Machine Gun Kelly, he of someone-with-way-too-many-tattoos and unironically-being-from-Cleveland fame. No seriously, this fellow — whose real name is Colson Baker, how gangsta can you get — was all up in the hip-and-hop for his first few mixtapes; why, he even got into a war of diss tracks with his fellow white rapper, Eminem, a fact of which you’re well aware if you’re a fan of mindless displays-of-media-manipulating opportunism corporate hip-hop. That tedious little fake beef put our boy Colson on the map, but then one day someone in his totally gangsta hip-hop crew fell asleep while he was supposed to be keeping people out of the studio, and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker snuck in and started randomly producing Colson’s Tickets To My Downfall album, and then Halsey let herself in to “help out” and so did emo-rapper Trippie Redd, and suddenly Colson was no longer just a bargain-bin Eminem but some guy with an idiotic amount of tattoos who couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be Weezer or the Killers. At that point, Transformers actress and terminally insecure person Megan Fox entered the picture: Hypnotized by Colson’s impressive number of tattoos and the fact that Colson’s career was launched by none other than insane sex felon Puff Daddy, Megan unwisely stretched their first date into a four-year relationship. Are you with me so far I don’t care either, so here we are with the new MGK album, Lost Americana, a record that I can’t hate because it has an awesome single: “Vampire Diaries” (no, I’m serious, I really like it, what is even happening in this world)! The tune is like what would happen if Amos Lee got married to Good Charlotte and didn’t do anything stupid. The video is chef’s-kiss too, guys.

• Ack, speaking of famous Maryland-born emo-cretins Good Charlotte, they’ve also got a new one coming out this Friday, Motel Du Cap! Now, it must be said that unlike Machine Gun Kelly, these guys are content to stick to their original genre, and their devotion to their craft has resulted in yet another classic emo song, “Rejects.” I’d say it’s their best ever, except for the little problem with its being nothing more than a cleverly disguised ripoff of Weezer’s “Beverly Hills,” but that being said, it might nevertheless impress the last few toucan-god-worshipping Amazonian tribespeople who somehow still haven’t ever heard that song before, so by all means, a heartfelt “godspeed” to Good Charlotte from everyone at this newspaper!

• Oh, gross, I’ve never heard a song by The Black Keys that didn’t make me not want to be listening to it, but such is my lot, checking out their new one, No Rain, No Flowers! The synth lines are really thick in the aimless title track, which will, I hope, lead to many music journos following my lead and finally writing those guys off as a cheap imitation of MGMT once and for all, I mean can we talk for Pete’s sake?

• We’ll wrap things up with New York City-based chiptune-rock band Anamanaguchi, whose new one, Anyway, doesn’t sound very chiptune-ish if by “chiptune-ish” you mean music that sounds like it was made using 8-bit electronic devices, as opposed to basic unlistenable indie rock. Unfortunately, the new single “Rage” sounds like Pavement with a huge budget and one of those big-name producer dudes. Aaaand we’re barfing.

Cloud Warriors, by Thomas E. Weber

In 2011, one of the most destructive tornadoes to hit the U.S. touched down at 5:34 p.m. in Joplin, Missouri. Although the area had been under a tornado watch for more than four hours and tornado warnings were issued shortly after 5 o’clock, 161 people died and more than a thousand were injured.

In the aftermath, researchers wanted to learn not only all they could about the tornado’s formation, but also why, with ample warning time, there were so many casualties. Among others, they interviewed a man who “was aware that storms were likely, but wanted to get something to eat,” writes Thomas E. Weber in Cloud Warriors, his examination of the past and future of weather forecasting. The man — who was turned away by one restaurant but found another that let him in and served him with the storm bearing down — was lucky to survive despite his “optimism bias,” the idea that when bad things happen, they likely won’t happen to you.

Optimism bias is but one of the challenges of the people who try to keep us safe from tornados, hurricanes, flooding and other catastrophic weather. Weber calls them “cloud warriors,” people whose job is ostensibly to forecast the weather but who have a larger purpose: keeping us safe from Mother Nature.

“Weather predictions are impressively good, so much so that their accuracy may surprise you.” Weber writes, noting that today’s five-day forecasts are as good as a 24-hour forecast was in 1980. While everything from artificial intelligence to the weather balloons that the National Weather Service launches every day (in every state) will continue to improve forecasting, forecasts have limited value if people don’t heed them, which is why Weber, a journalist, wants everyone to improve their weather literacy, especially about four types of weather-related threats: tornadoes, wildfires, extreme heat and hurricanes.

For the tornado chapter, he travels to Norman, Oklahoma, home to the National Weather Center, which, in addition to being populated by very intense and learned meteorologists, pays homage to the Twister movies with its Flying Cow Cafe. Like the stars of those films, Weber goes storm chasing in a tricked-out truck but doesn’t encounter anything more exciting than an ominous wall cloud (a sign of potential tornado formation) and some aggressive hail. (We do learn, however, that the Twister movies didn’t exaggerate the storm chasers on the plains of Oklahoma — a dozen or so companies will take tourists’ money in exchange for putting them in harm’s way.)

Fire isn’t weather, but is driven by wind, which is why Weber travels to an emergency operations center in San Diego to look into how meteorologists and firefighters try to keep people safe from fires that burn at up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and spread at six miles an hour. In this chapter, he examines the Camp Fire, which destroyed much of Paradise, California, in 2018, explains the infamous Santa Ana winds, and delves into why so much of the country is indifferent to the danger of wildlife. He quotes one meteorologist who says: “They don’t comprehend what happens when you have low humidity and wind on a fire. Or when you have a drought or a normal dry summer, what that does to vegetation. They know what it’s like to be thirsty, but they don’t understand what it’s like for vegetation to be thirsty.”

Those of us who pay even fleeting attention to meteorologists like Dave Epstein on social media are familiar with the “European models” that compete with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Strangely enough, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is best-known for its hurricane models, even though hurricanes are rare in the 23 nations and 12 “cooperating states” that it serves.

To learn more, Weber takes us to the town of Reading, England, where the ECMWF’s supercomputers sit; they can, he tells us, conduct more than four quadrillion calculations per second. And yet, “They’re just rows of big metal cabinets; they look like a bunch of refrigerators placed side by side.”

While many of the questions that Webster poses are really interesting — for example, how do you get emergency weather notifications to the Amish, who shun technology — the book often lacks electricity, it moves sluggishly, bogged down by an unfortunate impulse embedded in every journalist’s DNA: to include every last piece of information you gathered in telling a story.

Therefore, when we learn about why accurate weather forecasting is so important to the people launching delivery drones at Walmart, we are tempted to put the book down and go to the Walmart website and try to order by drone, which is much more exciting. In other words, Weber tells us interesting stories, but not always in the most interesting way. This is not necessarily his fault. He is, after all, interviewing the geekiest of weather geeks and is one himself, being one of your fellow Americans who have their own personal weather station installed in their backyard so they can, among other things, get a phone notification if it starts to rain.

Me, I’m still astounded that the weather app on my phone can announce that it will start to rain in 14 minutes and will rain for 24 minutes, and pretty much be right. Weber tries to explain how that happens, and frankly I still don’t fully get it after 200-plus pages. I’m not fully convinced that I need to be as weather literate as Weber and his sources, so long as my iPhone is. Cloud Warriors, though well-reported, may be a deeper dive into the subject than most readers want or need. B

Featured Photo: Cloud Warriors, by Thomas E. Weber

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