Category: Pop

Album Reviews 25/09/25

Shiner, BELIEVEYOUME (Spartan Records)

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

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

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

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

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

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

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

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

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

Gwyneth, by Amy Odell

(Gallery, 364 pages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Photo: Gwyneth, by Amy Odell

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)

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