Category: Pop

Wayne Wilkinson, Holly Tunes (self-released/Bandcamp)

It’s that time of year when I complain that no one’s been sending me holiday-time CDs, so I requested some from my jazz contacts, and yikes, in no time one appeared in my mailbox, this one. One cool thing about jazz bands is that they try to give credit to super-old songs that weren’t ever copyrighted or the copyright expired in the 1950s, so today I learned that “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” was first popularized by an English lawyer, William Sandys, in his 1833 publication Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern. Anyway, that one’s here, in subtle, quiet, barely-there form, rendered by guitarist Wilkinson and his two-man rhythm section. While we’re at it, I’ll have you know that “Deck The Halls” is a 16th-century Welsh melody whose English lyrics were written by a Scot, Thomas Oliphant, around 1862. That’s here too, but — OK, fine, fine, you want to know what it sounds like, OK, it sounds like what you’d get if Pat Metheny threw together a trio so he could (very lightly and expertly) decorate a bunch of famous Christmas songs. It’s lovely I tell you; I’m keeping this one in the car till the dread of January. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Premik Russell Tubbs & Margee Minier-Tubbs, “The Bells” (Margetoile Records)

I think the last modern original holiday original song my stomach could tolerate was Aimee Mann’s “Calling on Mary”; you know how it goes, modern Christmas tunes are so awful that they’ve become memes, like I’m sure you know at least one person (if not you) who’s praying to avoid the usual awful suspects, George Michael’s “Last Christmas” and Mariah Carey’s sanity-destroying “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (I’m always more concerned with avoiding “O Holy Night,” but you do you). Now, what we have here is a husband-wife team with a holiday song whose lyrics are inspired by Edgar Allan Poe (yeah, I know, how goth, but this is the time of year I read M.R. James’s ghost stories, so it is proper in my opinion). They’re from Connecticut, but once I got past that I was interested enough to see if this was any fun, and it is. After a few lines of banter between the principals, multiple Grammy-winning violinist Zach Brock goes full-on merry fiddler while Margie and some friend of hers named Patrick trade spoken-word verses filled with Connecticut-y words like “mellifluous” and “raconteur” (in the same sentence!), and then they start talking about why the season is so wonderful, which isn’t very Poe-esque, but whatever, it’s fun, we’re all obviously doomed at this point, I got a kick out of it. A —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Our next new-release-Friday is Nov. 21, which happens to be the anniversary of two major events. For one, the first ARPANET connection was made on that date in 1969, marking a crucial step in the advancement of the internet, which gave us such technological miracles as Twitter and Skynet (I know, I know) and led to your breaking all ties with your uncle forever because of a Facebook argument over his totally medically plausible theory that if you’d just stop being a bratty know-it-all and guzzle Clorox out of the jug you’d never contract monkey pox or whatnot. More to our point, though (assuming there’s been any point to rock ‘n’ roll at all lately, at least since the Rolling Stones licensed their song “Start Me Up” to Bill Gates to serve as Windows 95’s theme song, thereby erasing any remaining doubt that computer use isn’t cool), in 1877, Thomas Edison announced the invention of the phonograph (basically an early version of Pandora) on that date. Since then, quite a few albums have been released, so if you want to blame someone for Corey Hart’s records and Dishwalla’s “Counting Blue Cars” and all the other absolutely terrible music you’ve been subjected to over the decades, it’s too late to post an anti-Thomas Edison rant on Facebook, his account is closed! Now, meanwhile, I’m sure I’ll have good stuff to talk about this week, because look who has a new album coming out on Friday, none other than Danko Jones, with one titled Leo Rising! Now, who exactly is Danko Jones? I have no idea at all, so let’s discover this person together! Ah, I see, he has a hard rock band based in Toronto, Canada, which is already frozen over until late July, let’s proceed to the part where I listen to their stupid new song, “Everyday Is Saturday Night.” OK, it sounds like a cross between Hellacopters and late-career Thin Lizzy, which isn’t actually stupid; it’s safe to say that they are a lame, modern-day Thin Lizzy similarly to how Buckcherry is a lame, modern-day Spinal Tap. Who even ordered this, send it back, oh look, lol, the first YouTube comment sums up this thing perfectly: “When I was getting my vasectomy, this song was playing in the background at the hospital,” let’s please just move on to the next horror.

• Neo-folkies Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover release their second collaborative album this week, What Of Our Nature. They love Woody Guthrie, whose Facebook account is also closed, so I assume the new single “Fluorescent Light” sounds like your grandpa singing a Stephen Foster song. Nope, it’s more like an unplugged Norah Jones/Amos Lee collaboration, it’s neat if you’re a folkie.

• As we discussed when she released her last album two months ago, Kara-Lis Coverdale is not a nepo baby, but — waitwhat, TWO MONTHS AGO? Whatever, I give up, Changes In Air is the new one, not that you’ll be able to tell the difference, because “Curve Traces of Held Space” is, like her last single, a sparse, aimless exploration of harp samples and cheap synths, but at least it’s melodic.

• And finally, it’s a new album from classical-folkie Keaton Henson, titled Parader. Now, I know what you’re thinking, but this fellow is not an obvious nepo baby; he isn’t related to Jim Henson of the Muppets, he’s more of a “stealth nepo baby,” given that he’s the son of actor Nicky Henson, who, among other roles, played a Shakespeare-looking trooper dude in the idiotic 1968 Vincent Price tomato-soup-soaked horror film Witchfinder General! OK, now that you know, grab your box of Raisinets and let’s go listen to the new single “Insomnia.” OK, it’s a cross between Sigur Ros and Smashing Pumpkins, let’s just escape from this week with our lives. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Wayne Wilkinson, Holly Tunes (self-released/Bandcamp) & Premik Russell Tubbs & Margee Minier-Tubbs, “The Bells” (Margetoile Records)

Mark Sherman, Bop Contest (Mile High Records)

If the class will please turn to the CD review page of the Oct. 16 Hippo, you’ll note that the first jazz-vibraphone bandleader ever featured in this section was Patricia Brennan, who earned the spot by tabling some wildly innovative tuneage, so much so that it didn’t feel much like a jazz-vibraphone record at all, at least not in the way this one does. At 68, Sherman is a confirmed old-school vibes legend, joined here by, among other renowned fixtures, pianist Donald Vega and already immortalized bassist Ron Carter, who always pops up when you most expect it. The basics go like this: mostly renditions of Great American Songbook-adjacent bop-drenched standards, like Johnny Mercer’s “Skylark,” Oliver Nelson’s bustling “111-44” and Cedar Walton’s jog-time ”Bremond’s Blues,” along with a pair of originals (“Love Always Always Love” and the speed-limit-stretching title track). It’s most listenable when one of Joe Magnarelli’s horns takes the spotlight, which shows you how enamored with vibes I am. A

Smoke Fairies, Carried In Sound (Year Seven Records)

My excuse for bringing up this nearly two-year-old album now is that I’d really truly meant to mention it here but it wasn’t the right time (promo people hate it when I review advance albums a few weeks — or sometimes months — early, but tough noogies for them from now on, is what I say), so I filed it in the hopelessly overstuffed George Costanza wallet I call a brain and then, of course, forgot about it. This British female duo are epic in their way, which I discovered after hearing their second album, Blood Speaks, in 2012. That one revealed the pair as Loreena McKennitt stans who also think Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti era was their best; naturally Jack White signed them to a record deal faster than you can say bacon double cheeseburger. This one found them completely independent, not even reliant on White, and it’s a sentient evolutionary step. “2002” reads like a rawboned Enya, the harmonies soaring far above what we’d heard previously, setting the tone for the balance forward. “Vanishing Line” is a witchy exercise in counterpoint; the title track makes terrific use of stun guitar as understated drone; “Perseus” would have fit great on the Lord Of The Rings soundtrack. These two are the bee’s knees, truly. A

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Like every Friday, Nov. 14 will be a day of albums that you can buy, with whatever’s left after you paid $50 for a Spider-Man costume for your third-grader for Halloween trick-or-treating, did you even know this was going on? I know, of course not, anyone who’s young enough to have kids can’t afford them, and besides, we need to start talking about holiday albums, if there are any, let’s go see! Ack, there aren’t any at this writing, and in fact there aren’t many new albums coming out at all in the next few weeks, what’s going on here? This isn’t supposed to be the time of year when I have almost nothing to write about, but this week is an abyss of almost no albums, and it’s your fault! You people had your chance to buy new albums, but you didn’t, except the one from Taylor Whatserface, which you only bought because of all the peer pressure, so now the record companies are mad at you. Why didn’t you people buy any albums this year, aside from the fact that your 8-year-old’s Elphaba dress and witch hat ensemble forced you to finance it in four easy-pay installments of $12.50 at 23 percent interest, how are you people even buying food and whatnot these days? But it’s OK, the two albums I’ll definitely have in my car until all the festive happiness dies on Jan. 2 are old ones, Enya’s Best Of Enya album and Boston Ballet Orchestra’s recording of The Nutcracker, since they always make me feel holiday-y, but until it’s time for me to venture into our bat-filled attic to try and find those albums, I’ll make do with the new album from ’80s New Wave goofballs Cheap Trick! It’s titled All Washed Up, which they definitely aren’t, since they practically invented the formula for writing hard-rock-flavored pop songs, but just to be sure they haven’t suddenly forgotten how to write pop songs I’ll go check out the first tune on this album, “Twelve Gates.” Yup, same as always, it’s genius, evoking a drive at the beach in the 1980s. It’s put together perfectly, because the weird-looking guitarist with the baseball cap could write Billboard-ready hits in his sleep. Seriously, I’ll bet the whole album is awesome, someone tell me if something on there isn’t (and I won’t believe you).

• Blondshell is the stage name of talented Los Angeles singer-songwriter Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum, who first broke out on Soundcloud and was on Jimmy Fallon’s late night show once. She is a nepo baby of course, given that her dad is chairman of the vape company NJOY, but I’ll ease up on that noise since she sounds like she wants to be a cross between Sheryl Crow and Avril Lavigne, going by the tune “T&A” from her forthcoming new album Another Picture. Her lower register sucks, but she does a decent Michelle Branch imitation when her grungy guitars go for the mountaintops.

• Moving on, it’s some sweet sounds from California-based electronic alt-pop band The Neighbourhood, whose new album (((((ultraSOUND))))) is their first in five years. Their new tune “OMG” blends the best parts of Pet Shop Boys and New Order, so if you’re allergic to good music consult your physician before listening.

• And lastly it’s British avant-pop/trip-hop lady FKA Twigs, who’s been in relationships with Robert Pattinson and Shia LaBeouf (both relationships ended for the exact reasons you’re suspecting). Her new full-length EUSEXUA Afterglow features the single “Eusexua,” a shape-shifting EDM/electro-noise stomper with some Kylie Minogue stuff in there; it’s interesting enough.

Featured Photo: Mark Sherman, Bop Contest and Smoke Fairies, Carried In Sound.

Carrier, Rhythm Immortal (Modern Love Records)

Once in a while I do check in on the bleeding edge, at least as Brooklyn, N.Y.,’s influenceratti define it, and as of this afternoon anyway, this is the bee’s knees, according to one of the loquacious scribes at Pitchfork Media. Carrier is the nom-de-DJ of Brussels, Belgium-based producer Guy Brewer, who was previously half of the drum ’n’ bass duo Commix, whose glitchy, trippy Burial-adjacent beats grabbed the attention of, well, Burial himself, who remixed one of their songs (see how all this works?). Anyway, at some point Brewer looked around the room he was DJing at and suddenly decided that drum ’n’ bass is crap and that he needed to try something else, namely this collection of thoughtful, monochrome, often sparse compositions you’d picture serving as background at a spotlessly scrubbed art museum full of postmodern sculptures and junk like that. Clicks and thumps and splashes and such appear and reverberate at random, threatening to break into IDM coherence, but that never happens, which isn’t to say that it’s completely scattershot or at all unlistenable, more that the beats tend to settle into grooves that bespeak Aphex Twin nicking Portishead or somesuch. It’s worth knowing about, sure. B —Eric W. Saeger

Lip Cream, Kill Ugly Pop [Reissue] (Relapse Records)

From their inception in 1984 to their breakup in 1990, this crew was one of Japan’s most important punk bands, or so I’m told by my buddy at Relapse Records. As with most U.S.-based underground acts of that era, their elite pedigree is, or at least was until just now, mostly based on anecdotal evidence, tales told by curiosity-seeking mosh-pit scamps who risked their lives smashing into anyone, anytime, anyplace. In those days, of course, there was no handy digital proof that bands like this even existed outside of American cities, so, sure, I was game to investigate this. It’s hardcore all right, of a Black Flag bent, but these guys wore their influences on their sleeves: This 1986 record, considered to be their seminal one, gets right down to cheeky business with opening song “Shangri-La,” ripping off Black Sabbath’s “The Mob Rules” as if they had written permission to do so. “Fight In The Street” comes after that, sounding more like mid-career Metallica than Metallica did at the time. The quality of sound here is pretty remarkable, it’s honestly as much an ’80s thrash-metal album as a punk one. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• It’s November, and look there, a bunch of new albums, all waiting to be released on Friday, Nov. 7, but what a lot of people have asked me about, of course, is the upcoming tour by Canadian prog-rock band Rush! They have a new drummer now, Anika Nilles, replacing the completely irreplaceable Neil Peart, who, after spending years redefining the art of hard rock drumming, passed away in 2020. What he did was monumental really; unlike more prog-oriented drummers like ELP’s Carl Palmer and Yes’s Bill Bruford, Peart had to make a lot of noise on the drum kit, which he did, but his noises were next-level, full of odd little tricks that were too clever to be written off as mere gimmicks. Anyway, like many Rush fans (not that I’m a card-carrying Rush fanatic; I really only like their album A Farewell To Kings and the more self-indulgent half of Hemispheres), I wanted to see what Nilles has done before. She arrived on the scene in the early 2010s through a series of videos posted to YouTube, which is where I found her playing along to her first album, Pikalar, the camera fixed solely on her while her backing band played along unseen, revealing that she was intent on parlaying her drumming work (and cachet as an educator specializing in pop music) into some sort of big gig. Joining Rush is certainly that, and I’m genuinely happy for her, and even more so for Rush’s fans (although ticket prices for this “reunion tour” — which is far from that, given that surviving members Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee are best friends who hang out constantly — are monstrous, as I talked about last week), especially the ones who never got to see them stand around play in their heyday. On the other hand, it does feel to me like something of a money grab by the original members. Why? Not just because of the ticket prices, which they could have had some say in capping, but — and I’m well aware that this will sound snobbish — because Nilles is an above-average rock drummer who seems to have a side fetish for Return To Forever-style fusion, i.e, she isn’t a lifelong prog/jazz drummer. Yeah, it bothers me that Lifeson and Lee didn’t grab someone like Weather Report’s Peter Erskine (who, at 71, is actually younger than the Rush guys) or Will Kennedy of the Yellowjackets. But hey man, that’s just me; if you have that much spare cash, you do you, so let’s put aside all that awfulness and talk about the new Mountain Goats album, Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan! The Goats are still led by singer-songwriter John Darnielle, of course; the new single, “Only One Way,” sounds like Pavement re-doing Elton John’s 1976 hit “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart,” but it’s all good, no one under the age of 40 knows Elton John ever existed anyway.

• I’ve never liked Portugal. The Man, but maybe “Angoon,” the single from their new album, SHISH, will convert me, you never know. Hmm, Of Montreal-style singing, some noise-pop edge to it, weren’t the Aughts a great time to be alive, guys?

• Welsh-Australian indie-waif Stella Donnelly has a good one here, the single “Feel It Change,” from her new album, Love And Fortune! Nice, gentle, mildly angry despite its 1960s pop vibe, it’s, you know, nice.

• And finally it’s former Kurt Vile cohort Steve Gunn, with a bunch of new mope-folk tunes on his latest album, Daylight Daylight! “Nearly There” is of course strummy and depressing, perfect for staring at your bad date’s fish tank while you think of an excuse to leave. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Carrier, Rhythm Immortal and Lip Cream, Kill Ugly Pop

Mitski, The Land: The Live Album (Dead Oceans Records)

I’ve meant to delve into the work of this Japanese-American singer for a long time and always dreaded it. She’s been prime Pitchfork-bait for years now, targeting bougie audiences with random two-minute outbursts of overly artsy, poorly sung existentialism, often coming off like a cross between Ani DiFranco and Yoko Ono but more depressing. She does have her moments; in 2014 she provided evidence that she’s not a Martian with “Townie,” which, given its ultra-distorted Big Black guitar sound and noise-pop hook, is probably the only Mitski song I’d ever add to a Spotify list. That said, she’s happier in a live setting, which immediately lends these versions more attractiveness than their studio counterparts, but, as many people have commented — including on the r/Mitski subreddit — the most irritating thing about this lady is her fans. They’re “woke” of course, which isn’t cause for any grown-up to downright hate them, but these people way overdo it and behave in the meantime like they’ve never heard a verse of poetry in their lives. The rapturous weirdness starts right at the beginning of this set: “Everyone” is a decent-enough Patsy Cline-nicking tune, but suddenly, five seconds in, the crowd is going absolutely bonkers, making like pre-teens flipping out over Hannah Montana materializing in a latex tutu. I’m giving it an “A” grade only because I must be missing what her cult sees so vividly, but by the time you’re reading this I’ve assuredly dropped it to a B-, tops. A

Machine Gun Kelly, “home bittersweet home” / “no cell phones in rehab” (Interscope Records)

This isn’t meant to serve as a wildly instructive explainer for Gen Z kids, who’ve already made up their minds as to whether or not this dangerously gifted performer is worth a minute of their time, more of a gentle urging to older/less plugged-in folks who long ago abandoned figuring out which “new” rock stars they should be investigating in current_era. Normies know him as “Mrs. Megan Fox,” the kids know him as “mgk”; either way he’s a giant of today’s mashup-obsessed pop zeitgeist, especially after his last album, the August-released lost americana, which repackaged old melodies, from The Who’s “Baba O’Reilly” to Alice Deejay’s 1999 Eurodance hit “Better Off Alone,” all done seemingly in an effort to tell Zillennials that they have a lot of catching up to do while simultaneously celebrating the generation’s trademark “vulnerable sincerity.” Anyway, these two just-released songs, along with one or three others, were left off mgk’s 2000 LP Tickets to My Downfall, a landmark record that bridged the gap between commercial hip-hop and power pop (which I still refer to as “emo,” because it’s my column). Like a fusion of Bruno Mars and Dashboard Confessional, these tunes would have been just as successful as the album’s hits, proving that this guy’s instincts in developing the formula were dead right. He, or, more likely, some team he’s got in place, could write this stuff in their sleep. A+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Halloween is this Friday, Oct. 31, and since it’s a Friday there will be new CDs for you people to buy and cherish and keep under your car seat when you get sick of them. But first, I know I promised to leave the house and investigate the city’s music scene in more depth than I did a few weeks ago, but I honestly haven’t had the time. I plan to, though, because it’s fun to put a “press” identification card in the band of my fedora and watch local musicians squirm as I ask them why they didn’t respond to my last five emails, but there’s been Other Stuff to do. Today I spent a few hours investigating what’s happening in the Billboard magazine space, which is where you go if you want to find out what pop songs the top echelon of the music industry really really wants your grade-school children listening to on their TikToks and MySpaces, so that the rich dudes at the top can all dive into swimming pools full of cash, like Scrooge McDuck, all for rubber-stamping the release of albums that basically sound exactly like Britney Spears did during the Aughts but with more deep house and random world music sounds. A recent darling of the corporate-dance-pop crowd is Kali Uchis, a Latin techno singer who made Billboard’s cover recently; she’s been fighting in the trenches for a few years now and finally hit on the right formula with her fifth album, Sincerely, which features a mix of ’70s radio pop, reggaeton and (mostly) Lana Del Rey-style yacht-techno. What I heard of the LP was quite nice, but the tunes sounded too similar to each other, which is all too common nowadays. Of course, it’s understandable that the Scrooge McDucks of the music business don’t want to take chances on artists; as Shirley Manson of Garbage said in a viral onstage rant last month, the music business is becoming completely unsustainable, with everyone but musicians making any money. “The average musician makes $12 a month on Spotify,” she said, warning that a musicians union is long overdue. “This is an alarm call for all the young generations of musicians who are in our wake, and who we feel duty-bound to speak up for because there’s nobody speaking up for them.” Good on her, but gone equally viral recently is the backlash to Canadian band Rush’s handlers charging ridiculously high prices for tickets to their 2026 reunion tour’s shows (tickets for their Sept. 12 show at TD Garden currently range from $500 to $4,000). What does it all mean? It means that fans have to start supporting smaller bands, like for instance U.K.-based grunge-punkers Witch Fever, whose fast-approaching new album Fever Eaten is a fascinating study in messy loud-quiet-loud-ness! Leadoff single “Safe” is a good one, combining a New Order-ish rubber-band bass line, early Cure desolation and no-wave singing, it’s seriously great.

• In other non-stupid news, Florence + the Machine, aka this generation’s Siouxsie, is back, with an album titled Everybody Scream! The title track is actually kind of cringey, meant as a crowd-yell-along thing; hopefully the rest of the album is a lot better.

• It’s been a while, as in a month or whatever, so it is time for a new Guided by Voices album, because bandleader Robert Pollard is addicted to making albums! Thick Rich And Delicious is their second one this year and features “(You Can’t Go Back To) Oxford Talawanda,” a rugged but forgettable attempt at mid-tempo Brit-punk.

• To close out the week let’s discuss Iconoclasts, the new full-length from Swedish goth singer Anna von Hausswolff, who enjoys playing the pipe organ! “Stardust” is really neat, a cross between Massive Attack and Bjork in tribal mode.

Featured Photo: Mitski, The Land: The Live Album and Machine Gun Kelly, “home bittersweet home” / “no cell phones in rehab”