Ends of the Earth, by Neil Shubin


(Dutton, 235 pages)

Unless visiting all seven continents is on your bucket list, you probably don’t think a lot about the northern and southernmost parts of the planet. The Arctic and Antarctica make for a good documentary every couple of years (Antarctica: A Year on Ice and March of the Penguins come to mind) but then the subject retreats for most of us, ice usually confined to a rink or a drink. Not so for scientists like Neil Shubin who have spent years journeying to places with temperatures most rational people would rather avoid.

In Ends of the Earth, Shubin recounts his polar experiences, which began when he pitched a tent as a student with three other researchers in Greenland in 1988. Just staying alive in such an unforgiving landscape is a challenge, and when gear or equipment breaks there is no Amazon delivery.

And yet, “There is something almost magical about living in an environment where the sun never sets for a month or more while being disconnected from the rest of humanity,” Shubin writes. “Running streams exiting melting glaciers hold water so pure we drink it unfiltered from the source. Every babbling glacial brook could be a water fountain or, for extraordinarily hearty souls, a bath.” Isolated with a few others sharing the experience, “The world becomes small and intense.” Shubin isn’t a travel writer, but he might as well be, with the sheen he puts on the arctic experience.

The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 established that the continent, most of which is layer upon layer of ice, be used for scientific study; since then 29 countries have established 70 research bases, the most prominent of which is the U.S.-run McMurdo Station, where more than 1,000 people work during the summer, 300 in winter. (Fun fact: You can take a break from watching live panda or eagle cams and watch McMurdo cam on a government website, at least until Elon Musk finds out about it.)

There, one of the exercises new researchers experience early on is a “mock crevasse rescue” — highlighting that one of the dangers of living in this environment is falling into a practically invisible 200-foot crack in the ice. There are methods to pull people out, but still not everyone survives, and honestly, the photograph of a massive crevasse in this book is the stuff of nightmares for people who don’t enjoy being cold. Astonishingly, a member of Shubin’s team volunteered to be lowered into a crevasse so the group could practice a rescue, and he was so moved by the beauty of what he saw that “his shouts from 20 feet down were as if he was undergoing religious ecstasy.”

In fact, there seems to be a scientific ecstasy that permeates polar research with its out-of-this-world experiences and extraordinary sights, such as blue ice, ancient ice that looks like a “shiny version of an aquamarine” and which, when melted to drink, “means consuming water from snow that fell when Neanderthals roamed the Earth,” Shubin writes.

While the Arctic region is inhospitable to humans and most forms of flora and fauna we know, it has its own hardy life, including a tree called the Arctic willow, which instead of growing upward grows sideways and either atop the ground or below it. (Arctic leaf peepers will want to know that the leaves of this tree turn orange in August.)

And life in Antarctica includes cousins to New England’s woolly bear caterpillars, the fuzzy ones with the weather-predicting stripes. In the Arctic they spend most of their life frozen and awaken only for a few summer months to feed on willow leaves before freezing solid again. This cycle occurs for seven to 15 years, Shubin writes, until the caterpillar becomes a moth and lives out the rest of its short life: “Nearly a decade of freezing and thawing, feeding, and basking, all the while avoiding predators, is all in the service of two weeks of flying and mating.”

Shubin walks us through the science of how animals survive polar temperatures — and humans, too, including the story of a skier who had an accident that left her mostly submerged in ice for more than an hour. After she was cut from the ice, doctors were able to restart her heart at a hospital. She eventually made a full recovery. Shubin quotes a doctor who says, “You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead” — miserable as it may be, cold often works in the service of life.

Scientists working in polar regions deal with the cold with a combination of high-tech clothing and purposeful exercise. “I’ll routinely do abdominal crunches when I get into my cold sleeping bag before going to sleep each night. The burst of activity makes for a cozy furnace inside,” Shubin writes.

It is asides like these that make Ends of the Earth mostly compelling even though Shubin, ever the scientist, at times teeters into AP science class mode. Now a professor at the University of Chicago, he comes by that naturally, yet his ability to make science engaging resulted in a PBS series based on his 2008 book Your Inner Fish. Credit Shubin, also, with the ability to write seriously about climate change in an apolitical manner. He is an observer, not a flamethrower, and yet wants all of us to consider what will happen as ocean levels rise up to 120 feet in the next few centuries. (There will be more wooly bear caterpillars for one thing.)

Shubin recalls the famous commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace in which the late author describes a fish asking another, “What is water?” In Ends of the Earth he invites us to consider what is ice other than an annoyance glazing our driveways. The answers are more complex than we might think. BJennifer Graham

Featured Image: Ends of the Earth, by Neil Shubin

Album Reviews 25/03/13

Free Range, Lost & Found (self-released)

’Tis the season for music journalists getting inundated with spam from agents and record companies whose artists are scheduled to perform on various stages at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. This year’s conference ends on Saturday, March 15, so if you’re down in Austin reading this remotely, there might still be time to plan a visit to this person’s 8:15 p.m. show on the 15th at the Dear Life Showcase, which’ll be held at All The Sudden. The nym belongs to one Sofia Jensen of Chicago, who previously dazzled listeners with her 2023 album Practice; the overall vibe is easy listening Americana with lots of quirky but eminently listenable indie-weirdness on board. Lots of Norah Jones energy going on here, of course, but with a few vocally acrobatic twists; in the dobro-washed bluegrass tune “Storm” she browses the scale like a savvy farmers market shopper, finding hidden jewels of melody that are pretty unique. Well worth your time. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Good Looks, Lived Here For A While (Keeled Scales Records)

Also performing on SXSW’s final day is this hometown Austin four-piece, who gravitate to feel-good rock that combines jam band, alt-country and ’90s radio-indie in fun ways. That’s not to say they aren’t serious-minded; the lyrics on this one take jabs at such things as “job creators” (“they’re just stealing our labor”) and that sort of thing, and besides, they’ve got plenty to be existentially discombobulated about; while leaving the venue where they’d just played the record release show for their critically acclaimed 2022 debut LP Bummer Year, lead guitarist Jake Ames was hit by a car crossing the street, fracturing his skull and tailbone. This album almost never happened, in other words, but after a lot of rehab and despair they’ve cobbled a seriously listenable set of songs reminiscent of Barenaked Ladies duking it out with Tom Petty (“If It’s Gone”) and Hank Williams Jr. (“Can You See Me Tonight”) in a dark alley. I couldn’t hate these guys if I tried. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Today we’ll talk about the albums coming out on March 14, because that makes perfect sense, like it wouldn’t be timely or hip to talk about some military coronet album that came out in 1918, now would it? Unfortunately, the first thing we’ll need to talk about here is the fast-approaching 12th album from Nyack, New York’s favorite (because there aren’t any others) progressive-rock band, Coheed and Cambria! That band, as everyone knows, is cut from the same cloth as Mars Volta, Thank You Scientist and Muse, specializing in the sort of arena-rock style invented by Queen, whose albums were mostly comprised of half-written obnoxious filler tunes with one or two overwritten orchestral pieces added into the mix to get musically untrained critics to write nice things about them. Ahem, in the hierarchy of musical genres, Coheed and all those guys occupy the rung that sits just under Tool, Pendulum and Linkin Park; Coheed’s stuff is music for people whose post-grad sensibilities demand that they not get caught listening to actual techie-prog-metal because they don’t want to scare off future employers, so what Coheed does instead is throw a bunch of random musical notes in a blender and hope to attract the sort of listener who takes LinkedIn seriously (have you guys ever watched any of LinkedIn’s user-submitted short videos? They’re all basically “career-promotional videos,” starring and written by people who double-majored in marketing and business, and any time they come within a country mile of criticizing anything about corporate culture that obviously bugs them, a chimpanzee in a power suit zaps ‘em with a taser and they get back to the script). Anyway, if that describes you, and you want to stick with listening to anodyne milquetoast tripe instead of something interesting like Pendulum or Mozart, then Coheed’s new album, The Father Of Make Believe, is for you! Yup, like Billy The Exterminator used to say, I can’t wait to get my hands on this horrible new critter and tell you good folks all about it! So the single, “Searching for Tomorrow,” is like Linkin Park doing power pop, like, if Beavis and Butthead had jobs as human resources directors, they’d totally head-bang to it. If Dashboard Confessional had rabies it’d probably sound something like this (lightbulb moment: I’m going to start calling this band “LinkedIn Park!”).

Circuit des Yeux is the stage name of Chicago-based singer/songwriter Haley Fohr, whose four-octave vocal range is a big deal to people who don’t like normal singing but instead prefer people who can both squeak like a Munchkin and mumble like Lurch from The Addams Family! While we’re on the subject, I always thought the super-high notes on allegedly four-octave-range-possessing chanteuse Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” were generated by a computer, but this multi-talented blah blah blah person’s new album is called Halo On The Inside, and it spotlights a Trent Reznor-sounding single called “Megaloner” where she sings like the dude from Roxy Music, which is impressive.
• Electronic rock band Courting is from Liverpool, England, which goes to show you that not every band from Liverpool is as famous as The Beatles. Their new album Lust for Life has a single, “Pause At You,” that sounds like Aha meets Gang Of Four meets Hives; it’s OK.

• And finally we have Whatever the Weather, which is what British electronic producer/musician Loraine James likes calling herself in order to confuse old people or something. Whatever The Weather II is her new album, with the single “12°C,” a sluggish noise-electro ambient thingamajig that goes nowhere, but they’re your ears. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Free Range, Lost & Found (self-released) & Good Looks, Lived Here For A While (Keeled Scales Records)

Penitence, by Kristin Koval


Penitence, by Kristin Koval (Celadon, 320 pages)

If former lawyer Kristin Koval’s debut novel, Penitence, were a court case, it would be called Potential vs. Execution. The main storyline has great potential, the writing itself is solid, and I wanted to keep reading to see the resolutions to the plot and various subplots. But getting there was often a slow, meandering journey that weaved back and forth between timelines and third-person points of view — and the resolutions that I kept hoping to find as I made my way to the end of the book never came to fruition.
There are two families at the heart of this novel, the Sheehans and the Dumonts, whose lives have intertwined in various ways for decades. The matriarchs of each family used to be best friends, and their kids were high school sweethearts, until an accident mired in questionable decisions broke them all apart. Another tragedy, decades later, brings them back together.
The story begins in rural Colorado with the murder of a 14-year-old boy, Nico, dead at the hands of his 13-year-old sister, Nora. Their parents, Angie and David Sheehan, request legal help from local lawyer Martine Dumont, the mother of Angie’s first love, Julian — who works as a criminal defense attorney in New York City and agrees to help with the case as well. So he flies back to his hometown, where Angie has remained all this time. Lots of memories dedicated to each of their points of view of what happened “back then” ensue.
Does it feel like I glossed over the fratricide? That’s what reading Penitence felt like — this major crime was overshadowed by chapters devoted to Julian and Angie’s past and the years-ago incident that changed their lives forever. Those chapters, to me, felt repetitive and boring; I kept finding myself trying to rush through them to get back to that small matter of fratricide.
In that storyline, Nora is pretty much mute, which seems like a convenient way for Koval to avoid answering The Big Question: Why did Nora kill her brother? Instead, we get a little bit of speculation about that and a lot of extraneous characters and side stories.
Angie’s mom, Livia, for example — she’s not a likeable character in the “back then” storyline, and in the “now” storyline she’s suffering from Alzheimer’s and barely knows who anyone is. I understand that this mother-daughter relationship is a piece of the family-drama puzzle that Koval has put together, but like many of the subplots, it was given too much space.
Koval wants us to “consider whether the worst thing we’ve ever done is all that defines us,” according to the jacket blurb and the numerous references to that idea that are littered throughout the book. And I appreciate that she wove together several storylines that allow for contemplation of that question.
But oh my god, give me some closure. I wasn’t looking for a happily ever after here, but I did want an ending that made the read feel worthwhile; instead, I felt frustrated. This would actually be a great book club choice, as I imagine opinions and debates would be intense.
There is one twist in Penitence that I didn’t see coming, and that was the highlight for me. But a “suspenseful, addictive page-turner,” as it bills itself to be? I think that’s a bit misleading — perhaps I would have enjoyed the book more if I had been expecting the slow burn that it is. Or perhaps it would have been more of a suspenseful page-turner if more attention were given to Nora’s crime: her motive (I wanted so badly to get inside her head!), how her case played out in the court system and how it affected her parents.
Koval writes in the Acknowledgements that she thought fratricide might “provide the right framework for a novel about forgiveness,” and she’s right. David and Angie react very differently toward Nora after the murder — she is their daughter, but she killed their son. David turns toward her, while Angie turns away. It’s fascinating, thinking about how people might feel in that tragic situation.
I wish Koval had stuck more closely to this framework, that the book had been more singularly focused on that crime and the aftermath. Penitence had the potential to be great, but ultimately there’s just too much going on. C+ —Meghan Siegler

Featured Image: Penitence, by Kristin Koval

Album Reviews 25/03/06

Anika, Abyss (Sacred Bones Records)

Since the assimilation of punk, New Wave, et al. by the corporate Matrix (it happens every time), rock and rebellion have been business partners more than any sort of combined force for socioeconomic or culturally equalitarian progress. You can quote me on that, but chances are that you’re already well aware of it; most of the tuneage that lands on this desk (from white-kid bands especially, let’s note) has no idea that “the system” is their real problem, not their awkwardness or generational malaise. Yet they persist, for the most part, but once in a while a record does bumble in here that evokes memories of artists who seriously wanted to break stuff rather than resign themselves to forlorn inevitability. This British-born, Berlin-based singer channels Patti Smith more succinctly than anyone I’ve heard recently; she actually wants people to direct their energies toward creating “safe spaces” where people can vent and collaborate on ideas for better living in an unlivable world. The tunes are rough and jangly and decidedly punky; she comes off like a ’90s-grunge Grace Slick with no-wave sensibilities. I hope she keeps sticking to this formula, put it that way. A+

The South Hill Experiment, Earthbreaks

Brothers Baird and Gabe Acheson left Baltimore for Los Angeles several years ago and the move is finally paying off: “Open Ocean,” the single from this, their band’s third full-length, hit No. 1 at KCRW, the seminal Santa Monica NPR affiliate. This is decidedly DIY stuff, probably recorded in their bedrooms, which afforded them the opportunity to experiment, as heard in album opener “Rifting,” built around backward-masked percussion and gentle vocals that have the reverb set to 11 (it’s not shoegaze, just to clarify, it’s a lot more experimental than that: Think early Luke Temple or a more technologically adventurous Gorillaz). But things change quickly here, with “Maybe It Takes Time” borrowing its bubbly ’70s-radio-pop undergirding from Michael McDonald, and then we have the focus track, “Open Ocean,” a deep-house-adjacent dance-along combining Atlas Sound with Jamie Lidell. This is all to say that it’s definitely worth investigating, I assure you. A

Playlist

• Feb. 28 is a Friday, which means new albums will be released en masse! Now, one thing we Professional Music Journalists always have to remember is that not every band with “Bear” in its name sounds the same, even if OK, they basically do. It’s sort of like bands that have “Deer” in their names: Deerhoof and Deer Tick are both supremely boring indie bands, but my mnemonics go like this: “Deerhoof helps me fall asleep faster than Deer Tick when I’m stressed,” or “Don’t even bother trying to name a Deer Tick song, because even their fans don’t remember any of them.” You see? But I digress, which I can do because it’s my multiple-award-winning column, so let’s get back to the “bear” thing. I liked Grizzly Bear, but only because I didn’t really hate them; they can indeed be borderline interesting with their skronky noise approach, and Minus The Bear was a great prog band but for some reason no one cared about them or their potluck formula of Rush-meets-Jackson Browne, so they broke up, and it made me sad. But the really sad news is that for the purposes of this week’s column I have to pretend I know who Panda Bear even is if I ever hope to win another award, let’s go have a look, because their new album, Sinister Grift, is coming out this Friday! Oh, OK, Panda Bear is what Noah Benjamin Lennox calls himself, in order to get dates with awkward college girls just like all the other indie rock bros. Lennox is co-founder of Animal Collective, a band that was relevant during the Aughts when college radio stations nationwide became hypnotized by their use of “fractal” music patterns, back before Nels Cline of Wilco invented the fractal riff to “Love Is Everywhere,” which was so cool that it instantly made people forget who Animal Collective even is (what took you people so long?). Anyway, at first, the “Defense” single sounds like a Hank Williams Jr. song about sitting in a Dumpster drinking Jagermeister, which would be cool, but then it turns into a really boring mess, something you could tell your little brother was considered too stupid to be added to the Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack and he’d totally believe you.

• Brooklyn R&B singer Jonathan Josiah Wise is more famously known as Serpentwithfeet, and since we were just talking about Grizzly Bear, his Wikipedia page says that he opened for them for a while. Boy, this Wiki page may be the most boring one I’ve ever seen — blah blah blah, his mom forced him to join a boys choir, he worked with a producer who worked with Bjork, yadda yadda. Whatevs, his new album is Grip Sequel, featuring the single “Writhing In The Wind.” The beat is kind of cool, like Blue Man Group doofing around with Aphex Twin, and Wise is singing like Keith Sweat. Is that what all the children are listening to now, I simply must know.

Andy Bell used to play bass for famous indie-pop band Oasis, but now he is on his own because everyone in Oasis hates each other. Pinball Wanderer is his latest “opus,” and the single “I’m In Love…” is very neat because it sounds exactly like Wire circa Change Becomes Us, except there are girls singing. I endorse it.

• Lastly it’s British metalcore band Architects, whose new album The Sky The Earth & All Between is on its way to your eardrums if that’s the sort of thing you enjoy doing to yourself. This is pretty loony stuff, reminiscent of Dillinger Escape Plan and such, but with occasional Cannibal Corpse vocalizing. What does that mean? It means that their listening experience is lightning-fast and scary, but one of the things chasing you is the Cookie Monster, and he really wants your tasty, tasty cookies!

Featured Photo: Yes, Relayer (Atlantic Records), Rush, Permanent Waves (Anthem Records), & Eric Comstock & Barbara Fasano, Painting The Town (Human Child Records)

Three Days in June, by Anne Tyler


Three Days in June, by Anne Tyler (Knopf, 166 pages)

Anne Tyler is one of America’s most beloved writers, especially in Baltimore, where many of her novels are set. Six of her books, including The Accidental Tourist, were adapted for film, and she won a Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons in 1989. As such, it’s a bit surprising that her latest, Three Days in June, landed in February like an out-of-season beach read.

Not that it’s not a good beach read. But coming from the keyboard of Tyler, one expects a bit more.

Set (of course) in Baltimore, Three Days in June is about a divorced mom getting ready for the wedding of her 33-year-old daughter. Gail Baines is an assistant headmistress at a private school who has just been informed that her boss is retiring and that she, at 61, is not in line to succeed her because she lacks “people skills.”

As her boss tells her, “All I’m saying is, to head a private girls’ school you need tact. You need diplomacy. You need to avoid saying things like ‘Good God, Mrs. Morris, surely you realize your daughter doesn’t have the slightest chance of getting into Princeton.”

When the boss suggests that Gail might want to leave the field and follow her dreams, Gail wonders what that would be: “I am not the kind of woman who dreams of doing things.” Nor is she the kind of woman who gets her hair done, or who moves on from an answering machine. When she goes to a hair salon the day before the wedding, she will only allow the hairdresser to “pouf it out” a little bit — “just something to show I tried.”

Gail had been married to Max, an affable underachiever eking out a living teaching at-risk teenagers, and living in a “one-room apartment above somebody’s garage.” He is “fond of recounting his dreams and they were always interminable.” It’s initially unclear why they are no longer married — they are friendly enough when Max shows up at Gail’s house unexpectedly, carrying a elderly foster cat and needing a place to stay, as their future son-in-law turns out to be deathly allergic to cats.

There’s soon one more complication when their daughter, Debbie, shows up, fresh off a pre-wedding “Day of Beauty” where she had inadvertently learned something terrible about the fiance that puts the wedding in question.

This is the point at which, were this plot in the hands of a less accomplished writer, we could sigh and say, “hijinks ensue” and be done with it. Tyler is too smooth a storyteller to let us go, however, and we are too pleasantly invested in Gail (and the foster cat) to leave them alone with a wedding on the brink.

For much of the book, Tyler gives us an entertaining and humorous look at the rituals surrounding an American wedding. When meeting, for example, the groom’s mother, we learn that everything she says is “three degrees too vivacious” — “It seemed that she lived on some other level than ours, someplace louder and more brightly lit.” And Gail and Max reflect upon the ridiculousness of the rehearsal ritual itself (the same thing happening the next day, with “fewer et ceteras” and fancier clothes). It’s a pleasure to read her witty observations on these slices of life.

As Tyler finally gets around to revealing why and how Gail and Max broke up — a story not unconnected to the present tension — she is a master storyteller at work. There is no one better at crafting dialogue that breathes life into characters and puts them in the room with the reader. There are no wasted words here, either coming from the characters or in the narrative. It may be a beach read in plot, but it’s a finely tuned one, with enough heart to justify its release in February. The conclusion, while not a shocker, doesn’t feel contrived.

It’s worth noting that Tyler is 83, and she could be sitting by the shore, enjoying her fame and the royalty checks from her 25 books. Three years ago, she told People magazine that “For several years I thought, ‘The world does not need another of my books.’ What if people are saying, the woman doesn’t know when to quit?’” She continues to write, she said, in part because “I’m not wildly social and I have no hobbies.” Her fans, and they are legion, hope that she doesn’t pick one up. B+

Album Reviews 25/02/27

Anika, Abyss (Sacred Bones Records)

Since the assimilation of punk, New Wave, et al. by the corporate Matrix (it happens every time), rock and rebellion have been business partners more than any sort of combined force for socioeconomic or culturally equalitarian progress. You can quote me on that, but chances are that you’re already well aware of it; most of the tuneage that lands on this desk (from white-kid bands especially, let’s note) has no idea that “the system” is their real problem, not their awkwardness or generational malaise. Yet they persist, for the most part, but once in a while a record does bumble in here that evokes memories of artists who seriously wanted to break stuff rather than resign themselves to forlorn inevitability. This British-born, Berlin-based singer channels Patti Smith more succinctly than anyone I’ve heard recently; she actually wants people to direct their energies toward creating “safe spaces” where people can vent and collaborate on ideas for better living in an unlivable world. The tunes are rough and jangly and decidedly punky; she comes off like a ’90s-grunge Grace Slick with no-wave sensibilities. I hope she keeps sticking to this formula, put it that way. A+

The South Hill Experiment, Earthbreaks

Brothers Baird and Gabe Acheson left Baltimore for Los Angeles several years ago and the move is finally paying off: “Open Ocean,” the single from this, their band’s third full-length, hit No. 1 at KCRW, the seminal Santa Monica NPR affiliate. This is decidedly DIY stuff, probably recorded in their bedrooms, which afforded them the opportunity to experiment, as heard in album opener “Rifting,” built around backward-masked percussion and gentle vocals that have the reverb set to 11 (it’s not shoegaze, just to clarify, it’s a lot more experimental than that: Think early Luke Temple or a more technologically adventurous Gorillaz). But things change quickly here, with “Maybe It Takes Time” borrowing its bubbly ’70s-radio-pop undergirding from Michael McDonald, and then we have the focus track, “Open Ocean,” a deep-house-adjacent dance-along combining Atlas Sound with Jamie Lidell. This is all to say that it’s definitely worth investigating, I assure you. A

Playlist

• Feb. 28 is a Friday, which means new albums will be released en masse! Now, one thing we Professional Music Journalists always have to remember is that not every band with “Bear” in its name sounds the same, even if OK, they basically do. It’s sort of like bands that have “Deer” in their names: Deerhoof and Deer Tick are both supremely boring indie bands, but my mnemonics go like this: “Deerhoof helps me fall asleep faster than Deer Tick when I’m stressed,” or “Don’t even bother trying to name a Deer Tick song, because even their fans don’t remember any of them.” You see? But I digress, which I can do because it’s my multiple-award-winning column, so let’s get back to the “bear” thing. I liked Grizzly Bear, but only because I didn’t really hate them; they can indeed be borderline interesting with their skronky noise approach, and Minus The Bear was a great prog band but for some reason no one cared about them or their potluck formula of Rush-meets-Jackson Browne, so they broke up, and it made me sad. But the really sad news is that for the purposes of this week’s column I have to pretend I know who Panda Bear even is if I ever hope to win another award, let’s go have a look, because their new album, Sinister Grift, is coming out this Friday! Oh, OK, Panda Bear is what Noah Benjamin Lennox calls himself, in order to get dates with awkward college girls just like all the other indie rock bros. Lennox is co-founder of Animal Collective, a band that was relevant during the Aughts when college radio stations nationwide became hypnotized by their use of “fractal” music patterns, back before Nels Cline of Wilco invented the fractal riff to “Love Is Everywhere,” which was so cool that it instantly made people forget who Animal Collective even is (what took you people so long?). Anyway, at first, the “Defense” single sounds like a Hank Williams Jr. song about sitting in a Dumpster drinking Jagermeister, which would be cool, but then it turns into a really boring mess, something you could tell your little brother was considered too stupid to be added to the Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack and he’d totally believe you.

• Brooklyn R&B singer Jonathan Josiah Wise is more famously known as Serpentwithfeet, and since we were just talking about Grizzly Bear, his Wikipedia page says that he opened for them for a while. Boy, this Wiki page may be the most boring one I’ve ever seen — blah blah blah, his mom forced him to join a boys choir, he worked with a producer who worked with Bjork, yadda yadda. Whatevs, his new album is Grip Sequel, featuring the single “Writhing In The Wind.” The beat is kind of cool, like Blue Man Group doofing around with Aphex Twin, and Wise is singing like Keith Sweat. Is that what all the children are listening to now, I simply must know.

Andy Bell used to play bass for famous indie-pop band Oasis, but now he is on his own because everyone in Oasis hates each other. Pinball Wanderer is his latest “opus,” and the single “I’m In Love…” is very neat because it sounds exactly like Wire circa Change Becomes Us, except there are girls singing. I endorse it.

• Lastly it’s British metalcore band Architects, whose new album The Sky The Earth & All Between is on its way to your eardrums if that’s the sort of thing you enjoy doing to yourself. This is pretty loony stuff, reminiscent of Dillinger Escape Plan and such, but with occasional Cannibal Corpse vocalizing. What does that mean? It means that their listening experience is lightning-fast and scary, but one of the things chasing you is the Cookie Monster, and he really wants your tasty, tasty cookies!

Featured Photo: Anika, Abyss (Sacred Bones Records) & The South Hill Experiment, Earthbreaks

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