Category: Pop

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

Mood Machine, by Liz Pelly


Mood Machine, by Liz Pelly (Atria, 241 pages)

Spotify is in the news this month, having recently reported that 2024 was its first profitable year, with 675 million monthly active users and climbing. That made investors happy, but what are the costs? That’s the subject of music journalist Liz Pelly’s timely examination into the rise of the music streaming company, founded nearly 20 years ago in Sweden.

Spotify, of course, is the Godzilla of streaming services, eating the lunch of most of its competitors, although Apple and Amazon also have strong shares of the market. The business model sprang vaguely formed from the forehead of Napster, the digital music-sharing platform — notably illegal — that freed consumers from actually paying for music.

While today’s streaming services, of course, are not free, they remain a mind-boggling value. As Hua Hsu wrote for The New Yorker, “Adjusted for inflation, a monthly subscription to an audio streaming service, allowing convenient access to a sizable chunk of the history of recorded music, costs much less than a single album once did.”

Musical artists and their associated companies, however, have contended that the change has come at their expense, and it’s been a slog to get to the point where most everyone is satisfied. Count Pelly among those who are still pushing back against the changes that streaming has wrought.

Spotify’s goals, apart from making money, are ostensibly to make what Pelly calls “self-driving music” — the ability for a subscriber to “simply open the app, press ‘play,’ and instantaneously get the perfect soundtrack for any given moment or context, without having to search, click, or think.”

But in achieving this on-demand nirvana, Pelly argues that Spotify and other streaming services have helped give rise to a “dynamic of passivity” among consumers, who are spoon-fed what algorithms have determined they will like. Spotify playlists “worked as a flattening, making a scene that was previously sprawling and complicated into something commodified and palatable, cutting out many original voices along the way.”

At the same time, music has become background noise in modern life, and “it follows that a population paying so little conscious attention to music would also believe it deserving of so little financial remuneration,” Pelly writes.

These are all interesting cultural changes worthy of reflection, but Pelly comes to this book as a nuts-and-bolts journalist, not as a philosopher. She tracks the minutiae of Spotify’s ascent, which she was covering in real time, and reports with detail on the inner workings of the company, aided by both named and anonymous employees, some of whom have since left.

That sourcing adds, of course, to pervasive cynicism about Spotify throughout the book. Pelly and her sources are not dispassionate observers, but people with a take, and that take is that streaming, while great for consumers, is not great for artists, who are paid fractions of a cent per stream. And how big the fraction is is virtually impossible to figure out, given the many variants possible, which include the type of streaming plan (free, standard or family?) and even what country the consumer lives in.

“This is all to say: the digit on an artist’s royalty statement is much more complicated than a per-stream rate. And artists are almost always systematically shut out of any sort of transparency around the calculations creating their livelihoods,” Pelly writes, explaining how the digital age has led to a music labor movement.

To be fair, she notes, with every change in technology, the industry has had to adapt. In the 1920s the rise of the phonograph was seen with the same sort of concern that musicians have had about digital music. Musicians went on strike in the 1940s over LP records; they feared unemployment, believing that people were less likely to go see a live performance if they could hear the music in their living rooms. Of course, that’s proved not to be the case; witness Taylor Swift’s proceeds from her Eras tour.

Still, Pelly sees the problem of artist compensation as something all of us should worry about, even arguing that music, like libraries, should be seen as a “public good,” with public funding and protections. Some people in Europe are even arguing for what amounts to a universal basic income for musicians. In fact, that’s even been tried in Ireland, which experimented with a “Basic Income for the Arts” that gave 325 euro each week to 2,000 artists for three years. France has also experimented with a system that gave artists their own unemployment system, in order to make up for the irregularity of their work.

In her conclusion, Pelly asks, “What’s the ethical alternative to Spotify?,” which is not a question the average American consumer will want to entertain, and Pelly admits there are no easy answers. For those who are not inclined to worry about artist pay — or to consider that “our shared music cultures would be so much more compelling and diverse if so many [musicians] did not need to abandon the arts for jobs with health insurance” — Mood Machine may seem like so much hand-wringing, interspersed with sometimes mind-numbing detail on things like hyperpop and Discovery Mode.

Ultimately, while well-reported, Mood Machine is more a book for insiders than the general public. But insiders and struggling musicians will love it.

B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Mood Machine, by Liz Pelly

Album Reviews 25/02/20

Sanhedrin, Heat Lightning (Metal Blade Records)

I haven’t checked in with the Metal Blade Records stable in quite a while. This record seemed mildly interesting, given that the New York-based three-piece band’s musicianship is advertised as being top-drawer, which made me think of Rush, a band that was rather interesting for two or three albums before they decided to kind of suck. Ah yes, look at that typical Metal Blade-approved cover art, evoking an AI-created Halloween card created for sale at dollar stores; but wait. Opening song “Blind Wolf” rips off the intro to Metallica’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” then combines Savatage and Mercyful Fate and tables some really nice melodic touches. “Above The Law” nicks Buckcherry but in a good way; “Franklin County Line” Slayer-izes the Fates Warning formula. It’s fine for what it is. A —Eric W. Saeger

Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke, “Back In The Game,” Warp Records

The only reason I came within a country mile of paying any attention whatsoever to this new collaborative single is its painfully strident “edgelord” factor: “Look everyone, it’s Thom Yorke! And it’s on Warp Records!” Usually I avoid both those things like leper-hospital Dumpsters (my favorite all-time line about Yorke was Dr. David Thorpe’s iconic “Thom Yorke, the man with completely superfluous letters in both his names,” while Warp’s output has never failed to disappoint me; they have a strange fetish for electronic music that’s so boring it makes Postal Service sound innovative), but it was either this or dig through my emails for something great but which most of you wouldn’t care about anyway, so here we are. Pritchard, of Reload and Link fame, previously featured Yorke on the Sigur Ros-ish “Beautiful People” from his (Pritchard’s) 2016 LP Under The Sun; the only thing that made that tune interesting was its New Age vibe and some mildly innovative vocal effects. This track employs the latter trick again but with less boldness; all in all the song comprises dated, government-issue krautrock that sounds like a bonus track from the Saw soundtrack. There, I pretended to care about this, I demand my gold sticker this instant. C —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 (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

• Before I descend into the usual madness about albums good and bad coming out this Friday, Feb. 21, here’s something important. You guys know I’m a big supporter of New England-based singer-songwriter Kris Pedersen, whose award-winning Tom Petty-meets-Florida Georgia Line/Kings Of Leon-style music is amazingly well-written and well worth your support. You may also know that he’s had a very tough slog of it, but on Feb. 9 the absolute worst possible thing happened. A fire consumed his family farmhouse in South Wallingford, Vermont, in no time flat; his home and all his possessions were totally gone before the fire department guys could even get set up. He and his wife April have literally nothing left but the clothes they were wearing that day, and that’s where you rascals come in: Kris’s fan base stepped up immediately to start a donation page, which is already up to around $3,500 at this writing with a $5,000 goal (and no limit), but he’s obviously going to need a lot more than that to get back to business, so if you’re feeling it, please do give. “Mutual aid” is a big thing nowadays, as you probably know, and this is as deserving a cause as you could ever imagine, so if you have a few bucks to spare, please donate to Kris’s GoFundMe pool at this page: www.gofundme.com/f/support-kris-and-family-after-devastating-fire. It’s the best way for you to help out this struggling world-class artist.

• British techno-funk-blues singer Neo Jessica Joshua is better known as Nao, and her new album, Jupiter, will be out this Friday! Her resumé is top-level, including singing backup for such peeps as Kwabs and Jarvis Cocker, and six years singing in an all-girl a cappella group called The Boxettes. And so I must take her very seriously, and thus I shall remove my (true fact) custom-designed T-shirt that reads “Your Band Completely Sucks =(” and approach this section with all the professionalism I can muster, excuse me while I open this box of Jolly Joes grape jellybean thingies to ensure that my brain has enough reserve sugar for the task! So I am watching the visualizer video for her new song, “Happy People,” and let me just say that she is blessed with a bubbly voice that sounds kind of like a Munchkin; the music underneath is sparse and lo-fi, a combination of acoustic guitar and authentic-sounding Afrobeat, in sum a very island-vacation feel to this. It is very nice, yes.

• Singing human Patterson Hood, a co-founder of the band Drive-By Truckers, releases his fourth solo album this Friday, Exploding Trees & Airplane Scream! The spearhead track is “The Pool House,” whose video features the stupidest-looking puppet I’ve ever seen, doofing around in a quaint doll house or whatnot. The music is an eclectic but listenable mixture of Bon Iver and corporate country & western, sort of like what you’d hear if Garth Brooks toned things down in order to do a Robert Palmer trip from 1990, you know, when he did that dumb Marvin Gaye cover tune.

• British wimp-indie bros The Wombats are up to six LPs as of this Friday, with their latest, Oh! The Ocean. “Can’t Say No” is a twee-ized ripoff of Echosmith’s two big hits, you know the ones. Nice but completely disposable.

• Lastly we have Boise, Idaho-based producer-DJ-whatever Trevor Powers, who goes by the nym Youth Lagoon, and his new album, Rarely Do I Dream! “Speed Freak” is wicked cool in my opinion, a ratty, crunchy no-wave/electro joint with an ’80s-pop center. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Sanhedrin, Heat Lightning (Metal Blade Records) & Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke, “Back In The Game,” Warp Records

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