Category: Pop

Source Code, by Bill Gates


Source Code, by Bill Gates (Knopf, 315 pages)

Of all the Big Tech moguls, Bill Gates is the one getting the least attention these days. Since his split with his wife of 27 years, Melinda French Gates, announced in 2021, he seems to have struggled to find public favor amid reports of infidelity and meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. He’s not disappeared from the spotlight altogether — he still contributes at Microsoft and heads the foundation that he and his former wife founded, and he still makes book recommendations on his personal website, GatesNotes.com. On the cusp of 70, he’s not making headlines like he once did, although maybe that’s a good thing.

But he’s back in the spotlight on the occasion of Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, coupled with the release of a memoir, Source Code, that is being billed as an origin story for Gates. The book covers only a portion of his life — childhood through the early days of Microsoft. That timeline delivers Gates from the minefield of writing about his marriage and divorce, although that may be yet to come; reportedly, this is the first of three volumes.

Does the world want to read three books about Bill Gates? Does it even want to read one? That’s yet unclear, but Source Code is surprisingly engaging, both as an autobiography and as a period piece — the period being the 1960s and 1970s when Gates was coming of age. It was a different time, to be sure.

Gates begins with a story about a treacherous hike he undertook with friends as a sophomore in high school. It was to take more than a week and cover 50 miles in the Olympic mountains. With no adult supervision. Again, it was 1971 — a different time. Today, child protective services might pluck the boys off a mountain mid-hike, especially under the conditions they were hiking in.

At one point the trip got quite difficult, and Gates explains how he coped, by going deep in his own mind and thinking about computer code. But the fact that he spent a day or so marching silently through the woods, while accompanied by friends, thinking about coding isn’t the most amazing part of the story. That would be the fact that he still remembered the code he had written in his head three and a half years later when he had need of it for a project that would lead to Microsoft. “I have always been able to hyperfocus,” he later writes, and that seems an understatement that explains a lot.

Gates’ brain has already been the subject of a Netflix documentary (2019’s Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates), so it’s no surprise when he writes “my parents knew that the rhythm of my mind was different from that of other kids.” He read early and often — by age 9, he had read every volume of the 1962 World Book Encyclopedia. He had a compulsion to rock, at first on a rocking horse on which he would sit for hours, but later, even in adulthood, swaying back and forth when he was thinking. He thought of things that interested him, or that had some sort of tangible reward. (He memorized Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, but only because a Sunday School teacher offered to buy dinner on the top of Seattle’s Space Needle for anyone who did so.)

He shares a note his mother saved from the director of his preschool who said “he seemed determined to impress us with his complete lack of concern for any phase of school life. He did not know or care to know how to cut, put on his own coat, and was completely happy thus.”

Gates rummages through childhood memories like a grandfather with no plans for the weekend and an audience at the ready — we learn about his father’s first car, a tornado that touched down in the family’s backyard, what he ate at the World’s Fair (Belgian waffles, their debut in the U.S.). It was a privileged and well-ordered life, almost Cleaver-esque. “We lived by the structure of routines, traditions, and rules my mother established. … You did not leave the house with an unmade bed, uncombed hair, or a wrinkled shirt.”

When his mom was off volunteering with the Junior League, her mother would fill in, always with “a string of pearls and perfectly coiffed hair.” Every summer, the family would spend two weeks on vacation near a waterfront with nine other families. Gates’ parents threw a roller-skating party for all their friends every Christmas. Norman Rockwell would have had a field day with many of these stories, wholesome as they are. And they are the best part of this memoir, told with the affection of age, simply because they are part of the Gates story that we don’t know. (Which is a good thing, since this is also the bulk of it — he’s not even out of high school 160 pages in.)

The scaffolding of his career is already well-known to anyone paying attention: how he became obsessed with nascent computer technology in high school and formed deep friendships with similarly inclined, nerdy friends; the ups and downs of his friendship with the late Paul Allen, with whom he co-founded the world’s largest software company. Source Code gives us engaging and often funny anecdotes along the way to their success, as well as the pain. He writes movingly of the accidental death of one of their closest friends, and of seeing his friend’s mother, after the memorial service, “curled up on the sofa, sobbing.”

Gates, of course, threw himself even more deeply into coding as he processed his own grief, and he grew closer to Allen in the subsequent years, leading up to the pivotal day when they saw the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, with its breathless article about “the world’s first minicomputer kit” which could be had for about the price of a color television.

Gates had filled out his application for Harvard on a typewriter — that’s how different his world was then from ours today. It’s easy to forget how radically the world has changed in the past half-century, but Source Code reminds us, page after page. I’m still not convinced that the world needs three books about the life of Bill Gates, but I’m at least open to the possibility after finishing the first. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Source Code, by Bill Gates

Album Reviews 25/04/17

Iron Lung, Adapting // Crawling (Iron Lung Records)

Holy catfish, fam, this is the craziest thing I’ve heard since — well, the last craziest thing I heard. Maybe if I’d read their bio I’d’ve been better prepared, but what’s done is done: This Nevada hardcore metal duo bonded over (please tell the kids to leave the room, that’d be great) a fascination with medical experiments from the 1800s and whatnot, so in that sense they’re perfectly qualified to push envelopes, which they do in the areas of both speed and unbridled ferocity. In a way, their lightning-fast Bad Brains/Larm approach could be said to be a Dillinger Escape Plan type of thing for the black metal crowd, that is to say it feels like they’re careening out of control for the most part, flailing away like Venom at three-times speed, but every once in a while they slam on the brakes to make a slow-doom point. The project is completely self-financed, too, which is all the more reason for you to give them a shot. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Mac Sabbath “Pair-a-Buns” (self-released)

In completely insane news, I received a note from this Los Angeles-based Black Sabbath parody band’s PR person that they’ll be “coming to my area soon,” specifically to The Vault in New Bedford, Mass., on May 3, which may as well be Neptune for all the likelihood that I’d ever drive that far for a joke band, even if the fog is beginning to clear regarding who and what the band actually is and revealing a novelty act that just might blow up big (people loved RackaRacka’s Ronald McDonald Jackass-style videos, after all). A video for this went crazily viral on Twitter, but even before that, news outlets like the U.K.’s Daily Star were spilling plenty of ink over it. This (now old) flexi disc single contains a parody of Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” which the b tune and plays at about the same speed as proto-punkers The Dickies did in 1979, but these guys are serious about their anti-fast-food, anti-music-industry theatrics: The guys dress up like metalized versions of the old McDonaldland characters — an Ozzy-fied Ronald McDonald who plays the spatulas, “Slayer MacCheeze” on guitar and such, you get the gist — and put on a frenzied live show at any small club that’ll put up with them. This is priceless, guys. You know what, if you’re driving to this show, message me and I’ll join you; we’ll get in the door for free. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

• Well here we are, gang, as I write this we are in the grip of a typical Third Winter, in New England, and guess what, spoiler, it’s freezing again! I had a heat-saving idea so we didn’t have to call the oil delivery guy again, what I did was take all our tax return stuff and put it in the ol’ pot-bellied stove and burn it, which was better than paying my taxes; after all, there’s no one at the IRS anymore to take my check and staple it neatly to their pile of Eric’s Tax Stuff and drop it in someone’s inbox and then go back to their desk and eat the ham sandwich they have every single day, while looking out the window, dreaming of freedom and birdies and super-polite sexytime with someone they work with who actually talked to them once a few years ago! I tore up the check and ordered Captain America #100 from eBay, for my comics collection, and stocked up on cans of beans, for the fast-approaching apocalypse! Anyway, while I shuffle the myriad pages of my giant doomsday prepper grocery list, we should probably talk about the Friday, April 11, batch of new music CDs, in this music CD column, everyone shut up and let me look at the list, oh! Oh! Look guys, it’s sludge-metal heroes Melvins with a new album, Thunderball, wait, why did the Melvins think they could name their new album after a copyrighted James Bond movie (actually I’m kidding, legally they can, they’d only maybe have lawyer problems if they renamed their band “Thunderball,” and besides, anyone who even remembers that there was once a James Bond movie called Thunderball is in a retirement home right now, where all they watch is reruns of Match Game ’77, so I think no one will complain either way), why did they do this? Oh who cares, it’s a Melvins album, let me do the rock journo thingie and listen to something from it. Here it is, a new tune called “Victory Of The Pyramids,” and wait, what are they even doing here, the video starts with crazily flashing images, aren’t the YouTube moderator-goblins supposed to warn people first? Like, suppose I’d just accidentally heard a Van Morrison tune and my stomach was already totally touch and go, I’d probably toss my cookies right now! And waitwhat, the song is awesome of course, but it’s punk-speed, someone tell me what’s going on here with all this crazy nonsense, between “fast Melvins” and “no IRS anymore” and ridiculously high prices for Captain America #100 in “Fine” grade condition, I’m lost, on this silly planet, with all you crazy people! But wait, breaking news, it slows down to normal Melvins speed after a few minutes; it’s doomy and Black Sabbath-y but not crazily insane like Korn. Right, OK, it’s mostly slow, please disperse, nothing to see here, let’s move on.

• But wait, there’s more doom metal, with Insatiable, the new album from Aussie band Divide and Dissolve! Composed of two women, the band doesn’t have a singer, but you’ll probably like them if you like Bell Witch or getting in car accidents.

• Pennsylvania “shoegaze/post-hardcore” band Superheaven releases its self-titled LP on Friday! “Cruel Times” is really cool, kind of like Stone Temple Pilots, a band that was never shoegaze, why are they saying they’re shoegaze? They’re not!

• Lastly this week I’d like to say that experimental indie/world music band Beirut’s new album is called Study Of Losses, and it includes the single “Guericke’s Unicorn,” a woozy and weird but very tolerable modern art-pop thing that sounds like Luke Temple trying to make circus music for cute dogs that like to swim. Just go listen to it, trust me. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Image: Iron Lung, Adapting // Crawling (Iron Lung Records) & Mac Sabbath “Pair-a-Buns” (self-released)

Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp


Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp (Little, Brown and Co., 341 pages)

When you toss a plastic water bottle in a recycling bin, you’re saving the Earth — or so we’ve been told for decades. But in recent years a more disturbing story has been emerging, with evidence that much of the stuff in our recycling bins is not being recycled but is being shipped, at significant financial and human cost, to developing nations.

In Waste Wars, journalist Alexander Clapp goes Dumpster diving for the truth, traveling the globe to witness what he calls “the wild afterlife of your trash.”

It’s a sobering story that’s being compared to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which in 1962 launched the environmental movement with its examination of the devastating effects of pesticides. But Waste Wars is not so much about how America’s garbage is destroying us, but about how it’s trashing other countries.

Clapp’s introduction includes an astonishing statement: “Since the early 1990s, when your discarded Coke bottle first emerged as a major object of global commerce, China had been the recipient of half the plastic placed into a recycling bin anywhere on Earth.” In another decade, he writes, “America’s biggest export to China was the stuff Americans tossed away.”

But China got fed up and stopped accepting the world’s plastic, creating chaos in the global trash trade. “Within months, Greek garbage started surfacing in Liberia. Italian trash wrecked the beaches of Tunisia. Dutch plastic overwhelmed Thailand.”

The richest nations soon realized that the poorest could be counted on to take their waste — not just plastic and the remains of incinerated garbage (all that ash has to go somewhere) but also things like sewage sludge. The garbage and waste shipped to other countries is sometimes processed and sometimes repurposed, but often buried or dumped anywhere a truck driver thinks he can get away with it. In some areas sewage sludge has been broadly distributed and then paved over with “roads to nowhere.” In one area of Kenya, there are acres of six-story-high trash mountains seeping a poisonous soup that mosquitoes won’t breed in.

These sorts of arrangements have sometimes been brokered by government officials with no say by the citizens affected. In Guatemala in the early 1990s, for example, 200 families were “relocated” from their villages to make way for the processing of sewage coming from Miami, Galveston and other U.S. cities. In Turkey, a Kurdish farmer watched a truck stop outside his citrus groves, dump a load of garbage and light a match, the resulting fire nearly destroying his livelihood in the coming years.

Then there’s the e-waste. Clapp travels to a place in Ghana known as Agbogbloshie, which is a slum in which much of our electronic waste winds up. Perhaps, he says, your first cell phone and Game Boy, your DVD player, your college laptop, perished here. He writes about “enterprising young men in Ghana who have spent their lives rummaging through the piles of keyboards, desktop monitors, and smartphones that waste brokers in rich countries have shipped to Agbogbloshie; they are seasoned at restoring these busted electronics back to life — and, on occasion, using them to conduct epic long-range fraud against residents of the countries that sent them.”

At the same time, he writes, Agbogbloshie has become “a byword for ecological ruin.” Chicken eggs there contain high levels of chemical compounds, making them “probably the most poisonous on Earth.”

And yet the enterprise provides jobs. Clapp describes what he calls a “de-manufacturing line” — young men who sit for eight or nine hours a day dismantling and smashing trash: “old ceiling fans, motorcycle mufflers, speaker systems.” It is ironic, he observes, that some of the discarded objects being destroyed contain the world’s most advanced technology and yet it is backbreaking human labor — “of an almost unimaginably archaic kind” — doing the destroying.

Unfortunately, the problems Clapp uncovers have no easy fix, driven as they are by consumer demand for products that don’t just become waste themselves but produce waste, are literally wrapped in waste, every step on the way to your house, from their production to their packaging to the cash-register receipt you receive.

The book sometimes feels a bit like a lecture in which Clapp is chastising each of us for the contents of our closets and refrigerators. And yet we needed that Game Boy, didn’t we? Yes, water bottles are bad, we get it, but for many of us, so is our tap water. It’s easy to see the problem, not so easy to see the solution. Unfortunately, Waste Wars offers no way out of the mess we are in.

At the beauty store where my youngest daughter works, they recently tried to reduce plastic bag consumption by discontinuing plastic bags and offering a paper bag for 10 cents. They had to return to plastic bags within a few months because customers were so angry, they would storm out of the store.

Other countries are being more hard-nosed. In Indonesia, which is said to be the third largest contributor to plastic in the ocean (behind China and India), stores in Jakarta banned single-use plastic bags five years ago, levying a fine that amounts to $1,800. Dubai is building an enormous incinerator that it says will burn what amounts to a thousand trucks full of trash every day. But Indonesia also has plastic being sent there from other countries, and incineration has environmental costs of its own.

Depressingly, Clapp admits at one point, “As long as plastic keeps getting physically diverted by those who consume it the most, the farther from public concern — and political action — it is likely to remain.” Waste Wars is an eloquent and deeply researched call to action, even as it’s frustratingly unclear about what that action should be. A —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 25/04/10

Ingrid Laubrock, Purposing the Air (Pyroclastic Records)

Her fully caffeinated handlers describe Laubrock as an “experimental saxophonist and composer interested in exploring the borders between musical realms and creating multi-layered, dense and often evocative sound worlds.” In this album the composer pairs single instrumentalists with lone vocalists to futz with the poetry of African-American poet/essayist Erica Hunt, whom I’d imagine might be a little taken aback (or totally not) by this LP, which, at 60-odd short compositions, is a Whitman’s sampler of modern alienation, its half-written/half-improvised passages offering seemingly random bite-sized chunks of psychic turmoil. There are sing-song thingies about kites, general observations on everyday items and such (I lost track), fleshed out musically by an acidic, often noisily played cello for the first 16 pieces (undergirding Fay Victor in noise-scat mode) and a much tamer but equally animated piano, played by Matt Mitchell for the next set, over which our old buddy Sara Serpa unleashes her inner songbird (as in actual bird, seemingly). If you want unapologetically urban ambiance, this is one-stop shopping. B+ —Eric W. Saeger

Art Nation, The Ascendance (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

Seems to me — mostly because I haven’t heard a lot of this kind of stuff — that melodic metal may be starting to move in an emo direction, that is unless this Swedish trio is startlingly original. Here we have the speed of Good Charlotte and the hormone-tugging angst of Trivium without the low end; I suppose the short version is Iron Maiden as its most highly evolved Pokemon character, if that makes any sense. The thing these guys do really well is bring the hooky, operatic melody without making it as indecipherable as those things can get; there’s almost no punk element to this tuneage but it’s quite powerfully done. And boy, the sound is pretty huge, which one wouldn’t expect from a trio, not that that can’t be explained by multi-tracking of course, but yeah, they shoot for the rafters. Past the obligato ballad (“Julia”) you’ll find songs like “Lightbringer,” which is like a cross between King Diamond and Pendulum, i.e. next-gen tech metal. High marks for sure. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Happy weekend, rock fans, it’s your weekly ray of musical sunshine and blind hope for humanity, back with another fresh Dumpster-load of albums from rock stars, nepo babies, comedy bands whose silly monkeyshines amuse unfunny people, and whatever else is in this list of new records coming out on April 11, don’t mind the stench, I hope you guys all brought clothespins for your noses! Jeezum crow, look at all these darned albums, durn burn it, this is gonna make a freakin’ mess! Since I probably should, I’ll launch the festivities by drinking five much-needed fingers of scotch and heading to the YouTube matrix to listen to something from Wisconsin-based soft-rocker Bon Iver’s (pronounced “BONE ee-VAIR” for you readers who couldn’t care less about mispronouncing his name and will continue to do so regardless, sticking to the New England-centric pronunciation “Bawn EYE-vah”) new album, SABLE fABLE, see what he did there, with those modern Latin alphabet letters [shocked face emoji]? No, I kid Bon Iver, his first record was done in total DIY fashion; he played a borrowed old Sears brand Silvertone guitar, which has become sort of a cult instrument among musicians, hilarious as that may seem. I don’t hate those things myself; my first guitar was a 12-string Silvertone, and its sound was pretty neat, so I won’t argue about it, but that doesn’t mean I approve of any Bon Iver music I’ve ever heard, because I don’t, but maybe this new record will change my mind about this crazily overrated dude, let’s go. So the album opens with “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” (in which Mister Ivah continues his capitalization gimmick, which, to the average reader, is pretty rude, like getting yelled at on Facebook by someone who really, really wants you to LEAVE ELON MUSK ALONE). With all that capitalization stuff I assumed I’d be hearing a new Ivah-meister, maybe even packing a little aggro-metal attitude, but nope, it’s yet more sleepytime music for awkward millennials, just like during the Aughts, when Ivah-bro was relevant, when millennials hated music and music hated them back. I suppose the tune is nice if you ever wanted to hear Coldplay doing some unplugged twee-Americana hybridization, so if that interests you, by all means, go buy this album and stay away from me on my socials, that’d be great.

• Speaking of the Aughts, look who it is, guys, it’s OK Go, with a new album, And The Adjacent Possible! You rock fans all remember when this Chicago band filmed the most epic music video of all time for their yelly indie-pop song “This Too Shall Pass,” the one where they built a gigantic Rube Goldberg machine (you know, like the kids’ game Mousetrap, but a million times more elaborate) in a warehouse and it was awesome, right? Well, times change, so the video for the new single “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill” is a wickedly elaborate shoot that involved 64 smartphones; the tune is kind of like something you’d hear if Maroon 5 were kinda funky. They’ll be at the Royale in Boston on May 30.

• Ecstasy-gobbling Norwegian soundsystem Röyksopp releases True Electric on Friday; it looks like a bunch of re-rubs of their more explosive techno tunes. Fever Ray guests on a version of “What Else Is There” that’s basically a repeat of the Trentemöller remix you may have heard on the HBO show Entourage back when our planet was still managed by dinosaurs and giant dragonflies.

• Lastly it’s the posthumous album from Flaming Lips fixture Nell Smith, Anxious. The title track is a pretty little twee-ish mid-tempo thing; the only thing wrong with it is the occasional tremolo effect on her voice (probably Wayne Coyne’s dumb idea). —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Image: Ingrid Laubrock, Purposing the Air (Pyroclastic Records) & Art Nation, The Ascendance (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

Heartwood, by Amity Gaige


Heartwood, by Amity Gaige (Simon & Schuster, 320 pages)

“Any woodsman who says he’s never been lost in the woods is a liar. It’s inevitable,” says Maine game warden Beverly Miller in the opening pages of Heartwood, a new novel about a woman who goes missing while hiking the length of the Appalachian Trail.

“Up here, we tend to think of being lost as something you can be good at,” Beverly, who goes by Lt. Bev, explains. But for some people who get lost in the woods, panic sets in, and “loss of mental control is more dangerous than the lack of food or water.”

And with that, we are propelled headlong into the search for Valerie Gillis, the 42-year-old nurse who vanished about 200 miles from the terminus at Mt. Katahdin, where she was supposed to end her three-month trek. Valerie’s voice is present throughout the novel, however, in letters she is writing to her mother as she tries to stay alive in what’s known as the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, growing weaker by the day.

“The first thing I should say is that you were right. You didn’t want me to hike the Appalachian Trail,” she writes, acknowledging that a “thru-hike” — the insider’s term for walking the trail straight through — “isn’t a reasonable thing to do.”

“Anyone who wants to walk two thousand miles in a row does it because they find beauty in the unreasonable. All that misery, that’s the point. The high probability of failure, that’s motivation,” she writes.

Meanwhile, her parents and husband are part of a search effort that grows larger as each day passes, even as the odds of finding her alive drop as the days tick on. “Ninety-seven percent of the time, we find lost people within twenty-four hours. The other 3 percent, we know those stories like scripture,” Lt. Bev says.

The story unfolds, not only through the narration of the game warden leading the search effort, and Valerie’s letter, but also through the eyes of Lena Kucharski, a 76-year-old disabled resident of a retirement community who becomes something of an an internet sleuther, eager to help in the only way she can.

Interspersed throughout, we are introduced to people who met Valerie on the trail — members of her “tramily,” as AT hikers call each other — as well as various tips that are phoned in by psychics, do-gooders and other concerned people. While it’s assumed there has been some sort of accident that has befallen Valerie — maybe a bad fall or medical episode — there is also the concern that someone she came across in the woods harmed her, and or that even someone she knows was involved in her disappearance.

Meanwhile, we learn of a secretive facility near where Valerie disappeared, a real-life military operation identified by the acronym SERE — Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape — which is training for members of the Armed Forces and civilian contractors who might one day be trapped behind enemy lines. It sounds like the stuff of video games, but a SERE facility exists in Rangeley, Maine, among other locations.

The story has good bones, for sure, but its heart is in the development of four characters:

– Valerie, who became a nurse to “fix things” but was exhausted by the challenges of caring for patients during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic; who had come to question her love for her husband while on the trail, where she assumed the name “Sparrow” while making new friends and writing quirky trail poetry like “Ode to My Spork.”

– Bev, one of only two female wardens in the state, an imposing 6 feet tall, but with a mother, now dying, who didn’t understand her daughter’s line of work: “It’s just so unusual. For a woman to want to drive around chasing criminals,” she’d said.

– Ruben, the 260-pound Black man who decided to hike the trail on a whim and became Valerie’s companion for a while and kept her laughing with his stories of trying to find hiking clothes and boots that fit, while also trying to fit in, so to speak, on the trail: “Man, do you have to be friendly when you are a Black man hiking. You have to start waving, like, a mile away. ‘Hey, ya’ll! Beautiful morning, innit?”

– And Lena, the lifelong voracious reader who lives alone in a retirement community, where she rebuffs the attention of other residents in favor of foraging for edible plants and chatting with an internet friend who goes by the name TerribleSilence.

Gaige gives all of these characters such warmth and depth that they could each hold up a novella on their own, but she weaves their stories together and manages to keep the tension thrumming until the last few pages.

As someone who has technically been on the Appalachian Trail but never felt the compulsion to actually hike it, I found this story compelling not only as a novel but in its ample nonfiction detail. Gaige, the author of four other novels, hung out with real-life game wardens in Maine and heard their stories while researching this book, and it is full of the language, customs and experiences of thru-hikers.

Gaige has said she has been long haunted by the story of a 66-year-old hiker who died of starvation and exposure after getting lost in Maine in 2013. There are similarities between that hiker’s story and the fictional Valerie Gillis’ — both started their trek in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia (Valerie plans to complete the upper stretch, then the lower), and like the real hiker, Valerie is afraid of the dark and takes anxiety medication, making a terrible situation even worse.

In simple and sparse narration that blooms with lyrical descriptions of New England landscapes, Heartwood manages to be part mystery, part thriller, part how-to-hike-the-Appalachian-Trail guidebook — or it might convince you to never set foot in the woods again. Either way, start Heartwood and you’ll likely be a thru-reader, all the way to the end. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Heartwood, by Amity Gaige (Simon & Schuster, 320 pages)

Album Reviews 25/04/03

Michael Rudd, Going to the Mountain (Invisible Road Records)

Although one would naturally assume that Bob Dylan viewed Townes Van Zandt as a competitor, the two were quite respectful of each other; like the Stones and The Beatles, one couldn’t exist without the other. Thus we could wax hyperbolic and say that there are only two types of roots-folk fans in the world, and this K-8 school principal, an Albuquerque resident who left New Jersey to concentrate on writing, lumps into the “darker please” category, preferring muddy examinations of slovenly desperation to Dylan’s more laissez-faire, metaphor-stuffed acquiescence. Rudd’s second album begins with “Before The Demon Came,” and immediately comparisons to Eels and Tom Waits spring to mind, along with the usual suspects, T. Bone Burnett and such. In that, the tuneage is more appropriate for an American civilization that’s creaking awkwardly around on its last legs; sung in a baritone that’s both weary and indestructible, Rudd weaves a tapestry comprising dream fugues (“Going To The Mountain”), quiet soul-searching (“End Of Days”) and spidery unplugged honky-tonk (“Walk My Way”). Boy, would I like to hear local folkies lean into this approach. A+ — Eric W. Saeger

Carriers, Every Time I Feel Afraid (self-released)

This band’s leader/frontperson is Curt Kiser, formerly of indie rockers Pomegranates; in this project his focus is fixed in the direction of War On Drugs (for reference, old people should think David Essex fronting Pink Floyd). There’s a similar airy quality to these songs, and in fact Kiser’s infatuation with WOD is a little off-putting: The title track is a little too close to WOD’s “Suffering” for my comfort, not that that should necessarily dissuade you from checking this out, and besides, a little melodic helium does fit our zeitgeist a lot better than that of Bon Iver and such, especially given that the Aughts-indie period has finally been consigned to the recycle-bin of history where it belonged on Day 1. What am I even saying, you ask? I mean that it’s melodically pure if derivative in spots; where WOD’s “Under The Pressure” is more Joy Division-ish, Kiser selects A-ha’s “Take On Me” as his spirit animal for the push track, “Motion.” Hey, either way, at least I don’t have to stomach more Sigur Ros verisimilitude, put it that way, which is always a good thing. B — Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Hooray, the most pointless month of the calendar is over, good old March, goodbye forever, hasta la vista, arrivadertch, but oh goodie, here comes March’s annoying little brother, April, the month when we all hit Target at 7 a.m. the morning after Easter just to stock up on Reese’s peanut butter eggs at 50 percent off, what else are you supposed to do in April other than start a really inadvisable romantic relationship now that the alcoholic bars are serving their gourmet cheeseburgers outside, when there isn’t a “freak” (in other words normal for April) snowstorm? Well, OK, there’s always that other thing you can do, go to Strawberries or Rockit Records or Bradlees or K-Mart or Amazon to buy bad albums, but you can do that every week, when Friday strikes, with its Easter basket-load of new albums! Just look at this one, streeting this Friday, April 4, a collaborative album between Elton John and Brandi Carlile, titled Who Believes in Angels! Now hopefully, Elton, who recently celebrated his 3,000th birthday at his vampire pyramid-castle, had some vague idea of who Brandi Carlile is when he was doing these recordings and didn’t think she was actually Lorde or Madonna or Brenda Lee, who can even keep up with all this nonsense, you know? In case you’re also a mega-old vampire who doesn’t know who she is: Carlile’s a famous folk-rocker who wrote a bunch of tunes for Tanya Tucker, so maybe Elton’s handlers told him she was actually Alison Krauss (of frequent Robert Plant-collaboration fame) to get him on board, but either way, I’m sure the circumstances of their collaboration are bizarre indeed, but belay all that, folks, let’s go listen to the title track of this collaborative collaboration between the 3,000-year-old mummy-vampire and Carlile, whom some of us professional rock journalists refer to as “No, Not Bonnie Raitt, The Newer One.” Yikes, you should see the video for this song, they’re trying to revive Elton’s most famous antics, the stage set in the video revolves around his Captain Fantastic-era optics, you know, when he was into high nonsense-art a la Hieronymus Bosch (but nice!), and then we move to the song, which is in the same vein as “Candle in the Wind,” Elton’s famous ode to Princess Diana. What am I saying? Well, basically I’m saying that there was no need for this mutually collaborative collaboration-a-thon to ever happen, but I’m sure there are some 80-year-old National Enquirer readers who’ll love it, and Elton looks really good for someone who’s been preserved in a Dracula coffin with ancient tanna leaves since Carter was president.

• DOGGOD also comes out on Friday; it’s the third album from L.A. Witch, an all-girl garage band that launched when the singer’s boyfriend forbade her from playing with male musicians, and instead of dumping him on the spot she decided to go with it, because boyfriends don’t just grow on trees, you know. “The Lines” is a cool ’80s-goth-dance thingie, evincing the band’s love for The Gun Club (and by extension X-Ray Spex, but don’t tell them that). It’s fine, sure.

• And yadda yadda, here’s another one, The Ophelias, with their new LP, Spring Grove! Oh, it’s not the California psychedelic band, it’s the Ohio indie band, what are we even doing right now? The single, “Salome,” is a grungy filthy indie-grinding mess with a really catchy groove, I approve of these people, whoever they are.
• We’ll put this week to bed with New York noise-poppers Sleigh Bells, who are selling a new album, Bunky Becky Birthday Boy! The single, “Bunky Pop,” is like a Nintendo-ized ripoff of Outkast’s “Hey Ya,” and yes, it’s as artistically important as it looks. — Eric W. Saeger

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