Category: Pop

The Heart of Winter, by Jonathan Evison


The Heart of Winter, by Jonathan Evison (Dutton, 368 pages)

A 70-year marriage is unfathomable to most. After all, approximately half of all marriages end in divorce (not a myth, according to a recent Forbes article), and, logistically, you’d have to marry young and you’d both have to live beyond the average life expectancy to hit that 70-year mark. But if a marriage were to endure for 70 years — how?

The Heart of Winter by Jonathan Evison sheds some light on this as it follows Abe and Ruth Winter’s journey from college-age courting (very reluctantly on Ruth’s part) to 90th birthdays and end-of-life planning.

The book gets off to a slow start as Abe unenthusiastically allows his family to celebrate his 90th birthday. Evison does the reader no favors by naming dozens of characters up front: the Winters’ living children — Anne, Kyle and Maddie — plus their significant others and their kids and their kids and their pets, plus family friends.

It seems trivial to point this out now that I’ve finished the book and mostly enjoyed it, but the fact is that it almost made me put it down and not pick it up again — too many people to try to remember, plus dialogue that makes their grown children sound like teenagers, which adds to the confusion around who’s who. Meanwhile, Abe is lamenting that he’s still alive, making for a depressing start.

But get past the beginning and you’ll find the answers to that “how” question, laid out by Evison in shifting perspectives between Ruth and Abe, and shifting timelines between present day and various impactful years in their marriage.

The answers, it seems, are resilience, patience, perseverance and tolerance, a recipe of big words mixed with steadfast love.

From the moment they meet in college, it’s clear that Abe and Ruth are very different people, and Ruth does her best to avoid him at all costs. But Abe is enamored by her spirit and free will and eventually wears her down. They date, and before she can graduate Ruth gets pregnant. They get married, and Ruth is suddenly a stay-at-home mom with little use for her books of poetry and lofty ideals.

Ruth is not unhappy, but she isn’t exactly happy either. And so Abe, without Ruth’s knowledge, accepts a job and buys a farmhouse on Bainbridge Island, a ferry ride away from the hustle and bustle of Seattle and not exactly the kind of life Ruth thought she’d be living when she was deep into her studies of the liberal arts. But Abe is convinced she will love life on the farm, where she can garden and raise chickens and take care of the kids. She’s mad, really mad, at his presumptuousness but ultimately acquiesces, and another chapter of their life together begins.

Ruth does like living on the farm, as it turns out, at least for a while. But as Abe focuses on his growing business and ensuring his family is financially set, Ruth has moments of restlessness. Keep in mind that we’re exploring 70 years of life together, so of course life doesn’t always go smoothly. They experience a number of situations that could have ended another couple: Abe’s unilateral decision to move the family, the tragic loss of a child, a brief infidelity (Ruth), an even briefer exploration of sexuality (also Ruth), absentee parenting (Abe) and differing political views (Ruth’s views being “pseudocommunist malarkey” and “unreasonable optimism,” as far as Abe is concerned).

And through it all, Evison keeps bringing us back to present day, where they squabble like the old married couple they are.

“‘Minor inconvenience?’” Abe says to Ruth about the CPAP machine she insists he use. “‘You try strapping that contraption on! Every time I open my mouth, I’m like a human leaf blower.’

‘One of these mornings, you’re just not gonna wake up, you know?’

“Good,’ he said. ‘Then I won’t have to hear about it anymore.’”

They can joke at times, but they also have to face some harsh truths about old age. Ruth thinks, at one point while worrying about Abe falling in the driveway, “Everything was a high-risk proposition after eighty. To rage against the dying of the light sometimes meant shoveling the walkway or driving after dark.” (I love how Evison deftly references Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” here, subtly showing that Ruth’s love of poetry never fully dies.)

And, as Ruth undergoes an invasive procedure to save her life, she questions whether it’s worth it to keep fighting. “While she wasn’t without use, the world was hardly dependent on her participation.”

But Abe is not ready to try life without her, and his 90th-birthday thoughts of preparing for death turn into a steadfast need to be Ruth’s caretaker, despite their children’s misgivings. He drives through snow on city roads that terrify him to be with her at the hospital, and, with the deepest sense of love and commitment, brings her back to their farmhouse and tries his best to take care of her.

Like Abe and Ruth, I’m glad I made it past the beginning of their story. The Heart of Winter reminded me that love can last even through the darkest of times if your heart is in it. B+ —Meghan Siegler

Featured Image: The Heart of Winter, by Jonathan Evison

Album Reviews 25/02/13

EST Gee, I Ain’t Feeling You (Bonus Edition) (Interscope Records)

This 30-year-old Louisville, Kentucky-born rapper lost a good number of fans after trying actual singing on for size for a couple of albums or so, but his return to straight spitting in this one does go pretty hard, aiming for the same intensity as 2021’s Bigger Than Life or Death. Of course, “intensity” isn’t an attribute that’s usually applied to him, what with his mumbly, disjointed style; he’s been dubbed a “less coherent Rich Homie Quan” among other things, but I was captivated enough by opener “Free Rico” and its woofer-rattling, from-the-mountaintop kettle-drum beat to get past the pedestrian trap undergirding that serves as its base. “The Streets” winds and roils in hypnotic, serpentine fashion, evincing casual excitement and an endless supply of oxygen, instantly lending the record grower potential rather than evoking some texted-in flavor-of-the-week exercise. “Do My Own Stunts” is the underground stoner-a-thon, for those who live for that kind of thing. A —Eric W. Saeger

Friko, Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here (ATO Records)

In In-Case-You-Missed-It news, this album didn’t hit my radar until just now, so you have my sincere apologies if you’re already deeply familiar with it. I’m literally a year late on it, but in my defense the angle here is that on Saturday, March 8, they’ll be at The Sinclair in Cambridge, Mass., and besides, at the rate indie bands come and go in the endless flux of our no-attention-span zeitgeist, it’s worth mentioning. This Chicago duo, claiming to be inspired by such acts as Minski and such, are, as some have noted, remindful of Radiohead and Arcade Fire, but there’s a wild-horses feel to these frightwiggy tunes; they incorporate some of the decent things (few though they were) about Aughts-indie bands like New Young Pony Club and Los Campesinos, for one thing the amateurish group-singalong sound that was a staple at Bowery Ballroom shows and later refined by Arcade Fire. The overall effect is like being subjected to a cult initiation; you want to learn the lyrics because the melodies sound so bloody important, a rare thing these days. A —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

• Happy Valentine’s Day to those who celebrate, and even to those who haven’t dated or even talked to another human being since the 1990s (good choice)! It is another two months before the South Korea-originated “Black Valentine’s Day,” when people who celebrate being “happily single” take themselves out to dinner and a movie and then go home to descend into madness in front of reruns of Classic Concentration on the Buzzr channel, as opposed to us totally happily married people who spend most of our time living like Fred Flintstone, half-watching Match Game ’78 while trying to figure out how to hide ridiculously impulsive Amazon purchases from our spouses, do you guys even know how much money buying a 20-pack of button-cell batteries for kitty laser pointers can save you in the long run? But I digress, someone stop me, the record companies are gearing up for a long year of releasing albums and trying to figure out a way to out-sell Chappell Roan, who won the Best New Artist Grammy award the other week for such things as dressing up like Carol Kane in Scrooged, giving attitude to random people with cameras, and of course her masterstroke, adding gravelly Ed Banger beats to microwaved Madonna oatmeal and summarily dispatching a battalion of record company mafiosi to pressure low-information writers from Nylon and such to proclaim her marginally listenable album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess to be the greatest thing since Reese’s Cups. This too shall pass, as you know (by the way, are Zola Jesus and Poppy still relevant, someone please tweet at me), but in the meantime we have albums to discuss, new ones that are coming out on Valentine’s Day, let’s get it over with. First things first, speaking of Buzzr, guess who’s got an album coming out on Friday? None other than Richard Dawson! But wait, it’s not that Richard Dawson, the creepy touchy-grabby British dude from Family Feud, it’s a different one, some British folkie whose voice sounds like a drunk Basset hound! Nothing normal is going on here, this man has been using a literally broken guitar as his go-to instrument for years, he just likes the sound of it. His trip has been described as “the folkie version of Captain Beefheart’s approach to blues music.” In other words it’s completely horrible, but our pals at Domino Records are releasing this monstrosity nevertheless, so I’m compelled to listen to it, so I am. OK I’m not anymore, it sounds like the Unabomber singing a love song to his first-grade teacher on a wooden Fisher Price guitar from 1959. If you honestly love this I hate you.

• Usually when I hear the term “space rock” I start barfing uncontrollably, figuring I’m about to hear something that sounds like Spacemen 3 or a Loot Crate version of Pink Floyd, but British band Doves are pretty awesome: They actually sound kind of like Elbow! Constellations For The Lonely, their new one, features the tune “Renegade”; it’s psychedelic, yes, but singer Jimi Goodwin’s voice is seriously neat.

• Oh, great, notoriously awful singer Neil Young has once again found some old tapes in his goat barn and made an album out of them. Oceanside Countryside was recorded in 1977 but never released until now; it features “Field of Opportunity,” a fiddle-driven bluegrass jam that’s OK if you like bad singing with your bluegrass.

• Finally we have Sleepless Empire, the latest LP from Italian goth-metal spazzers Lacuna Coil. The song “Gravity” is doomy and epic, of course, less so when the Cookie Monster-voiced dude is doing the singing, more so when the hot chick singer is trying to sound like an America’s Got Talent contestant. It’s fine for what it is. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: EST Gee, I Ain’t Feeling You (Bonus Edition) (Interscope Records) & Friko, Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here (ATO Records)

All the Water in the World, by Eiren Caffall


All the Water in the World, by Eiren Caffall (St. Martin’s Press, 294 pages)

“Storms always came. They took things,” the young narrator of All the Water in the World says matter-of-factly, explaining what life was like before melting polar ice caps drowned New York City.

But in the early days of the climate apocalypse, the girl named Nonie explains, there was always a sense that things could be fixed, that the world could adjust to a new reality without cars, reliable electricity, airplanes, bananas — whatever disappeared next.

“Every year, the storms were bigger — moving the ocean up into the streets” and eventually moving Nonie and her family onto the roof of the American Museum of Natural History, where her parents had worked before the world shut down.

That living arrangement was safe until it wasn’t, when a “hypercane” — a monstrous hurricane with winds up to 200 mph — made even a rooftop in Manhattan unsafe, and Nonie and her people had to relocate even though it seemed that the whole world was under water. It wasn’t just their few belongings that they had to worry about, but the whole of history that had been contained within the museum and has now been painstakingly described in a handwritten logbook for future generations, if they exist.

Eiren Caffail’s debut novel was inspired by actual events: the struggle to save museum collections from the devastation of war.

During the siege of Leningrad in the second World War, Caffail writes, curators stayed in the Hermitage museum, eating paste to stay alive and caring for the art. “They belonged to the art and the art belonged to them and it was a sacred duty. But so was the vision of what it would be one day when the siege was over and the windows repaired and the museum alive again for everyone, for the world that mattered, the one they wanted.”

In All the Water in the World, Nonie’s parents work to save what they can of the museum’s collections, wrapping and hiding artifacts, hoping that they will one day again be treasured and displayed. Nonie herself contributes, making a “water logbook” and writing descriptions of the storms as they get bigger and bolder.

Unlike her sister, Bix, who is terrified of water, Nonie has “water love,” a gift from her mother, now dead. And so it’s Nonie who has to comfort Box as they climb into a birchbark canoe, once part of an exhibit of an indigenous civilization and now their only means of transportation as the water rises in the museum.

Four people — the sisters, their father and an entomologist from the museum — launch the canoe in terrifying conditions hoping to follow the Hudson River to a family farm they know used to exist to the north. Their journey at times is Walking Dead-esque — “Sometimes what looks like shelter is only menace,” Caffall writes — except the horror comes from the water, not zombies. Through it all, Caffall’s prose is gorgeous:

“The new sea coursed with lost things. Debris swirled and rose in the water — headphones, water bottles, flotillas of paper, broken birds, photographs. In the mud of the Park after a storm, photographs surfaced, bleached and peeling, evidence of lives in The World As It Was, lives that included trips in planes, cake with candles, people in fresh clothing with white teeth and no idea what was coming, a child on a three-wheeled bicycle, a newborn screaming with a red face faded pink, a man holding it, on the edge of laughter, eyes slapped wide, joy pouring out of his smiling mouth.”

As they progress through New England, the group meets sickness and death and new people, with more about the past revealed in flashbacks. In this landscape of sorrow and misery, it is an accomplishment for Caffall to close the story in a way that doesn’t end with utter destruction, like the movie Don’t Look Up. But she does so, like the parents kept Nonie and Bix going: “with hope thrown hard at the darkness.”

Caffall has published one other book, a memoir called The Mourner’s Bestiary, which weaves together her family’s struggle with a genetic kidney disease and the plight of animals affected by ecological change in the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound. Dystopian climate fiction is all the rage right now, but Caffall brings a thoughtful voice to the genre and is writing books that have value as books and not just as storylines for disaster movies.

The only part that didn’t work for me were the occasional excerpts from Nonie’s logbook, which, frankly, just aren’t that interesting, compared to the rest of the narrative, because the writer is 13. (Example: “Keller told me that ‘nor’easter isn’t a real weather word, and that at some point, there were so many storms that you could hardly call anything nor’easters anymore.”)

Caffall said it took her 11 years to write this book, and it shows. While some readers might wish for more of a disaster-movie plot, it was clearly not her intent to write that kind of a book. It’s not so much a climate novel as it is a climate meditation that just happens to have a submerged Empire State Building in it. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: All the Water in the World, by Eiren Caffall

Album Reviews 25/02/06

Frank Meyer, Living Between The Lines (Kitten Robot Records)

Back in June of last year I’d talked in this space about former New York Dolls guitarist Steve Conte, whose Concrete Jangle LP was a really pleasant surprise, a decidedly ’80s post-punk exercise that was full of really filthy guitar work and awash in hooks. Age and elite-level experience will bring that sort of pedigree to an artist, as it did to this guy, whose resume includes stints with Wayne Kramer from MC5, former New York Dolls utility player Sylvain Sylvain, and Iggy & the Stooges guitarist James Williamson. Like Conte, Meyer has spent so much time as a second banana that he hasn’t gotten around to releasing his own stuff; in fact this is his first solo album, and what a great one it is. It’s a gamma ray blast of shredding, glam, Iggy, Kiss, and, well, early Bon Jovi, a ferocious uncorking of ’70s-’90s testosterone that’s (all together now) the sort of thing the current dystopian zeitgeist needs. Absolutely nothing bad here. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

G. Himsel, Songs of Doubt & Despair (Sedan Is Real Records)

You probably won’t remember this, but exactly three years ago I wrote up Manchester, N.H., folk revivalists Bird Friend, which featured this fellow and his girlfriend Carson Kennedy trying out some rather adventurous Woody Guthrie-steeped stuff. What made it seriously notable was the liberal use of random sound samples that evoked 1930s train stations, rainstorms, things like that. He’s up in Portsmouth, N.H., now, more pessimistic than he was before, still obsessed with the sound of the Dust Bowl era and such; these tunes range from the “gospel and old-country balladry of the 1800s to the coffee shop folk of 1950s New York,” meant as harbingers of what climate change is bringing us all in the far future (and the present day, as in the case of areas of Pakistan where wet bulb temperatures can already suffocate a person to death within a couple of hours, just sayin’). The songs were recorded at his kitchen table, not that it shows; this time he’s more focused on antiquities than jazzing them up with natural sound effects, his own missives to a species in deep peril. Other than that it’s an upbeat record of course, don’t get me wrong. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

• A brand new pile of CDs will be dumped on humanity this Friday, Feb. 7, the date that marks the 61st anniversary of The Beatles’ British Invasion, when the Fab Four landed in New York City for their first U.S. concerts! Two nights later, Beatlemania stormed America, when their performance on the Ed Sullivan show was “watched by 73 million viewers” (mostly it was bots run by the record company of course). Now, if you were age, say, 60 back then, you were confused and not sure what to make of all the hubbub, because the music of your youth was made in the 1920s and 1930s, by people like Al Jolson, the Billy Hays Orchestra and all the other bands that recorded their music using “a single microphone, a towering 6-foot amplifier rack, and a live record-cutting lathe, powered by a weight-driven pulley system of clockwork gears.” In other words, it was like a glorified grandfather clock that only worked for a short time: The musicians had roughly three minutes in which to record a song directly to disc, hopefully without any foul-ups, before the weight hit the floor. Of course, The Beatles had modern analog technology and saved us from all that cringe by recording three-minute lovey-dovey songs that featured Chuck Berry guitars being played aggressively, sort of like Metallica would have if they hadn’t all been playpen-dwelling infants at the time, and voila, rock ’n’ roll had arrived to change the world! That brings us to the here and now, after however many years of advancement in recording techniques, with U.K.-based post-punk band Squid, whose new concept-ish album, Cowards, cleverly eschews lovey-dovey Al Jolson piffle and focuses instead on an obscure dystopian Splatterpunk sci-fi novel, about institutionalized wide-scale cannibalism, how rock ’n’ roll can you get! The novel in question, Tender Is The Flesh, was panned by one Redditor as being “the worst horror book I’ve ever read by far,” but did that stop the bandleader guy from Squid? Nope, the single is titled “Crispy Skin,” and it sounds like Devo doing a joke version of a speed-rockin’ Hall & Oates song, like “Maneater,” but really stupid and pointless, doesn’t that sound gooood? Pitchfork Media thinks so, of course!

• Krept & Konan is a British hip-hop group whose haters are starting to pile up at the gates. Most of those are incensed over the fact their new album, Young Kingz 2, caters to American tastes, which is definitely true of the new single, “Low Vibrations,” what with its uneventful trappy beat and boring flow. Naturally, the haters aren’t as angry about the yawn-inducing music as they are triggered by the fact that the crew bought into a supermarket chain and are presenting it as a Black-owned business when it’s actually owned by another minority, which we won’t get into here because who even cares about silly beefs anymore.

• You remember Boston-based progressive-metal band Dream Theater, right? Well, don’t look at me, because I can’t erase those memories, but their new one, Parasomnia, is here! “Midnight Messiah” is basic Slayer-tinted epic-metal oatmeal, and ha ha, the video for the tune has a guy in the audience who looks like the skinny blond guy from the X-Files’ Lone Gunmen! This column is writing itself these days, fam!

• Lastly and definitely leastly, it’s Guided by Voices, the band led by Dayton, Ohio’s pride and joy, Robert Pollard, who just can’t stop making albums! Universe Room, his 41st album, features “Fly Religion,” whose first part is decent, but then he adds some other silly parts and it sort of flops like a failed Teardrop Explodes experiment. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Frank Meyer, Living Between The Lines (Kitten Robot Records) and G. Himsel, Songs of Doubt & Despair (Sedan Is Real Records)

Aflame, by Pico Iyer


Aflame, by Pico Iyer (Riverhead, 222 pages)

Pico Iyer is widely known as a travel writer, and he has traveled the globe for his books and essays, but some of his most meaningful experiences have been in a tiny room with a single bed, a chair and a desk and no distractions save an ocean view, nothing but “silence and emptiness and light.”

It is here, at a monastery in Big Sur, California, called the Hermitage, that Iyer has returned to repeatedly over the past three decades, once driving nearly four hours after his father died to sit in the stillness for two hours before driving back home again.

In Aflame, an unnerving title given the recent devastation in Los Angeles, Iyer writes lyrically and movingly about the gifts of solitude and quiet and why they matter, especially in a culture that seems determined to deprive us of them. And yes, he also writes about wildfires, inevitable because the setting is California, and death and suffering. But the title is a metaphor for burning in the heart, as well.

When Iyer tells one friend about his experiences at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, the friend replies, “You sound like you’re in love.” He answers, “Exalted, at the very least.”

The friend cautions him, “A love like that can’t last,” to which Iyer responds, “But it can leave you a different person, not always for the worst.”

This was an unlikely love story for Iyer, who is not a Christian or a member of any organized religious group and says he has an “aversion to all crosses and hymnals” because of having to attend chapel for 12 years in school.

But at the Hermitage he found transformative peace similar to what Admiral Richard Byrd found in the Antarctic, where the explorer made friends with stars and ice crystals, and the playwright Henry Miller, who happily lived alone in a rude cabin with no electricity or phone for three years.

But, as Iyer writes, “The silence of a monastery is not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop; it’s active and thrumming, almost palpable.”

Although the website of the Big Sur hermitage is contemplation.com, the monks have work to do — when they are driven out by wildfires that threaten their home, they find similar jobs to do at the places where they evacuate.

Iyer himself is too much acquainted with fire: “I can still feel myself inside that oven, my mother’s cat panting and struggling to breathe in my lap. One minute we had been sitting in our family home, the next we were surrounded by walls of flame five stories high.”

That home was in Santa Barbara, and his mother was in Florida at the time, so Iyer had to call her to tell her that everything she owned was now ash. There are many such heartbreaking stories coming out of Los Angeles right now, but Iyer, having lived through such a fire and recovered, brings to the subject a stoic’s view: As painful as it was, the fire “did clear the way for many things,” he tells a friend. He recounts a Japanese poem:

My house burned down

I can now see better

The rising moon

True hermits are rare, and even those famous for time spent alone, like Henry David Thoreau, weren’t alone as people think. Even while living at Walden Pond, Thoreau visited his mother every Sunday, and “The title of his first talk at the Concord Lyceum was not ‘Solitude’ but ‘Society’,” Iyer writes. Being alone is not an end unto itself, but “the means to becoming a more useful member of society.”

But a little aloneness doesn’t cut it. As one monk tells Iyer, “You have to learn how to enjoy leisure. … But you can’t be leisurely for just half an hour. It’s only in the sixth half hour that things start developing inside you — and then you know you have another three hours to go.”

While not every day is bliss in stays that sometimes last for a month — there is rain, and there are rattlesnakes and occasional bouts of boredom — Iyer comes to understand that it is the learnings of silence, not the busy work of his career or any money in his bank account, that would be useful as his father came to the end of his life.
Still, a friend says to him, “I can’t believe you’re spending all this time with these old guys in hoods.” But those old guys in hoods are quite the sages. Once, Iyer walks in on one working in the kitchen, who says to him, “This bloody peeling of onions, it never stops!” Iyer assumes he is talking literally, but no: “It’s the inner onion I’m talking about. The invisible stuff!”

There is, as there always is, another fire, threatening the Hermitage. And then another.

“The sacred is not a sanctuary, I’m moved to remember; it’s a force field. In many ways a forest fire. You can try controlled burns or back burnings, you can walk towards the heat, but its power comes from the fact that it can’t begin to be controlled or anticipated.”

Aflame, released the week after the Santa Ana winds blew embers across the Pacific Palisades, is beauty amid those ashes, and those yet to come. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Aflame, by Pico Iyer

Album Reviews 25/01/30

J. Michael Graham, Stuck (self-released)

Debut six-song record from this Manchester, N.H., native, who’s nowadays running his operation out of Rhode Island. He’s worked his way up in the world, having opened up for basically anyone who’ll have him, from James Montgomery to The Samples to, um, waitwhat, the Dresden Dolls. What’s going on here is a mostly unplugged Dylan-meets-Tom Petty entry. The record’s release party was set for Feb. 7 at Chantilly’s Restaurant in Hooksett. B

—Eric W. Saeger

Niambi, Taboo (Easier Said Records)

Debut solo EP for this Washington, D.C.,-born artist, who, after establishing herself as one-half of the neo-soul/hip-hop duo OSHUN now operates out of Puerto Rico. I really have no complaints regarding this record aside from its length; hopefully there’ll be a lot more of her to hear soon. On first listen I’d attest that this stuff is state-of-the-art trip-hop, beginning with “Soccer Mom,” whose subliminally buzzy busy-signal-ish sample fits perfectly with this lady’s stoned-out-of-her-gourd-style flow; it’s underground to a fault but simultaneously non-threatening, given its sexually ambivalent attitude (Billie Eilish could learn some things from this girl, take that however you wish). “No Budget” is a page right out of Massive Attack’s Heligoland-era schematic, with a lazy, tick-tocking drum line reminiscent of “Teardrop” (the theme to the old House TV series if you’re unfamiliar). “Run It” is the record’s final entry, the closest thing to a trap joint in the set but undeniably soulful. Great things ahead for this lady, no doubt. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• Before we get into the new releases streeting this Friday, Jan. 24, I’d like everyone in the class to please pick up your copy of the Dec. 26, 2024, Hippo and take a look at the ribbing I gave former British boyband-numbskull Robbie Williams for the soundtrack for his album Better Man (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), based on his biopic of the same name. You see, Variety just announced the numbers for the independently made Paramount-released movie (please ask your kids to leave the room, folks, this is for mature audiences only). Ahem, it was a record-breaker in the States, all right: It appeared in 1,291 movie theaters and made $1 million, which would be great if it had cost $5 to make, but guess what: it cost $110 million to make! Even overseas, where people actually even know who that dude is, it’s only made $4.9 million! Now, it might have done better if Williams hadn’t been portrayed by a digitally animated chimpanzee in the film, but you know what, I’m glad he was, because now maybe we have a new Rocky Horror Picture Show to mock and deride and laugh at. I’ll tell you, I don’t mind being right all the time, but this was like winning the Lotto!• Cool beans, we’re almost done with stupid wasteful frozen January already, let’s go! Friday the 31st will see a bunch of new albums, which we must talk about now, so let’s do that, please let’s! Why don’t we kick off the week with The Purple Bird from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, real name Joseph Oldham, known for his “do-it-yourself punk aesthetic and blunt honesty.” Music critics who are just trying to get their columns finished for the week usually associate his music with Americana, folk, roots, country, punk and indie rock, but this new album’s leadoff single, “London May,” is Guster-like and formulaic in a sonic sense: The piano-bonking chorus is compelling enough to prevent it from being written off as unlistenable, much as it deserves it. “Downstream” is more interesting, possessed of a bluegrass patina that mixes dobro and Irish ren-faire folk; it’d be pretty great if not for the guest vocal from overrated country singer John Anderson. Oldham is trying too hard to be eclectic there, but Flight of the Conchords fans will probably like it for its faux-sincerity and world music feel.

• L.S. Dunes is something of an Aughts supergroup, fronted by Circa Survive/Saosin vocalist Anthony Green, who’s backed by My Chemical Romance guitarist Frank Iero, Coheed and Cambria guitarist Travis Stever, bassist Tim Payne and drummer Tucker Rule from the band Thursday. Their new LP Violet is heading to your Soundclouds as we speak; it’s the follow-up to their 2022 debut Past Lives, which sputtered at No. 174 in the U.S. charts despite its spazzy screamo/extreme-metal-tinged single “Permanent Rebellion,” which is nevertheless a pretty cool tune if you give it a chance (since I know you won’t bother, I’d urge you instead to go listen to the new album’s title track, which is in the same vein but slightly more accessible, sort of like Fall Out Boy with a jet pack strapped to its butt). These guys are definitely on to something, but their survival depends on suburban American youth’s capacity for taking scream seriously in [current_year]. (One annoying side effect of my looking into this band on YouTube was that I’ve ever since been spammed by ads for the Coheed and Cambria/Taking Back Sunday tour, which, by the way, will be coming to Boston’s MGM Music Hall on August 30; I will not be attending that one, for the record.)

• Manic Street Preachers is a Welsh alt-rock band that’s done some interesting stuff over the near 40 years of their existence, including their older hit “La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh),” which krazy-glued grunge-rock to Jet in a long-overdue experiment (I liked that one a lot more than their more popular hit “Motorcycle Emptiness,” but your mileage may vary). They’re officially old nowadays, so their forthcoming LP Critical Thinking includes a transparent attempt to dent the AOR charts, specifically with the single “Hiding in Plain Sight,” a sleepy mid-tempo rocker that might have been interesting in 1967 but won’t do much for anyone under 40 today, I assure you. That’s not to say that traditional rock ’n’ roll is dead, but bands like this should really Google the word “electronic sampling” for all our sakes.

• We’ll end this week’s nonsense with Maribou State, an English electronic music duo famous for remixing stuff from Alpines, Lana Del Rey and anyone else who’ll put up with them. Their new full-length Hallucinating Love features the single “Bloom,” a ’60s-soul-tinted that’s got a lot to offer in the electro-experimentation department. They’ll be at the Royale in Boston on May 8. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: J. Michael Graham, Stuck (self-released) and Niambi, Taboo (Easier Said Records)

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