Category: Pop

How to Win at Travel, by Brian Kelly


How to Win at Travel, by Brian Kelly (Avid Reader Press, 304 pages)

It’s hard to say whether Brian Kelly really founded the travel website known as The Points Guy, or whether his father actually did, because it’s Kelly’s father who set him on this path. When Kelly was 12, his dad let him arrange the family’s vacation using points he’d accumulated from airlines and hotels, and a traveler influencer was born. Before he even had a driver’s license Kelly was hooked on the game: how to travel the world, in style and at minimal cost.

As an adult, he went on to start a website in order to share his strategies, and “The Points Guy” took off after he was featured in a New York Times article in 2011. Now Kelly is a dad himself, he’s sold the website, and he has compiled a couple of decades of travel wisdom into a book that arrives just in time to help navigate your summer vacation.

Kelly calls this the “platinum age of travel,” arguing that it’s never been cheaper and easier to go so many different places if you know what you’re doing. Problem is, he says, most people don’t — unless they travel a lot for business, or grew up in a family that had the resources to travel, most people have never learned to travel well — it’s not something that’s taught.

“You may think travel is horrible across the board, but it’s amazing when the system works for you. When I travel, I rarely wait in lines. I don’t pay for food and drinks in airports. You can do the same, and I’ll show you how,” he promises.

Kelly begins by inviting readers to decide on “travel goals” and to set a travel budget, which right away may lose him some readers whose travel budget allows a day trip to Worcester, Mass. There is a smattering of generic advice in this section, some of which seems obvious (“Stay at hotels if safety is a concern or if you’re traveling alone”), but some of which is surprising (he advises travelers to wear backpacks on your front in crowded areas lest a thief slice the bottom of your bag without you knowing it). There’s high season and low season for travel, but there’s also “shoulder” season, the bridge between the two that is often the best time to go. And so forth.

From there, Kelly organizes the book into how to win at different aspects of travel: booking, earning and redeeming rewards, accessing perks, navigating lines, traveling with family, staying healthy, dealing with problems that arise, and managing fear of flying.

Again, some of the information he shares is intuitive: Your odds of having a flight delayed or canceled are the lowest earliest in the morning, for example. The more prestigious airlines (read: Delta) are usually more reliable. Where he gets into the granular stuff is where it gets interesting, as in one of his tips for booking cheaper flights. If you are, for example, in Oklahoma City and want to go to Tokyo, he advises that you buy a ticket from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, and then book a separate flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo, thus (by his calculations) making the trip half of what it would have cost booking from Oklahoma City to Tokyo. This is a practice that travel junkies call repositioning flights.

The points and miles redemption chapters are where Kelly gets deep into the weeds, and readers will need to already have some knowledge of this game, or a burning desire to learn, or a couple of over-the-counter headache relief pills to keep up. He describes the machinations involved in getting the best values by accumulating points and moving them around and looking for “sweet spots” and planning “open-jaw” itineraries. (To be fair, Kelly does acknowledge, “If you’re a beginner, this chapter may get confusing.”)

Nor did I particularly enjoy reading about all the luxuries that all you people with access to airport lounges are enjoying while I’m waiting outside my gate. (You have showers? And buffets and VIP customer service?) I’m getting a bit grumpy at this point, I will acknowledge, since Kelly had promised me that I, too, could enjoy all the perks he’s enjoying, but he didn’t mention that I might need a Platinum Amex and elite status on Delta (which requires spending $28K a year).

As for easing the pain of lines, his advice is not novel (TSA PreCheck, CLEAR and Global Entry), and there have been reports lately of PreCheck lines being longer than regular since so many people have it, so that’s not even guaranteed to help.

Things get interesting again in the “flying with families” section because, despite having flown with four kids over two decades, I did not know that there is a debate over whether children should fly in first class (Kelly has done so) and that some people fly with “sorry gifts” to offer people who are upset by their crying or misbehaving children — like George and Amal Clooney, who once gave noise-canceling headphones to others seated near them on a flight. (Kelly’s against it — “Babies have a right to fly just like anyone else, and these types of gifts set an unnecessary precedent that we need gift packages to tolerate small humans.”)

Finally, Kelly offers some valuable nuggets on dealing with the inevitable problems, such as politely asking to be upgraded to first class on a flight to make up for the inconvenience if you are bumped from a flight or miss a connection because your flight was delayed. He also suggests contacting the airline via a DM on X if your flight is running late, asking them to “protect” you (hold a seat) on another flight in case you miss your connection. “Not all airlines will do this, but it never hurts to ask. Plus, asking to be protected makes you sound like a pro traveler and someone they want to keep happy as a customer.”

Kelly is a likeable guy who is enthusiastic about what he does, and he can make you think a little harder about how to improve the travel experience for you and your family. It’s unlikely that this book will overhaul the travel experience as promised for the casual traveler, and it feels a bit long for the amount of useful information gleaned. But at least those of us still without lounge access can save money by dispensing with the “sorry” gifts. B-

Featured Image: How to Win at Travel, by Brian Kelly

Album Reviews 25/03/27

Idle Heirs, Life Is Violence (Relapse Records)

Relapse continues to be one of the two or three (tops) metal-focused record labels I actually appreciate getting new stuff from, and the debut LP from this Kansas City crew is yet another spine-crunching assault, if you’ll pardon the metal-centric hyperbole. The “RIYL” (“Recommended If You Like”) list, so they told me, includes Deftones, Mogwai and Cult of Luna (in all honesty I was pleased that anyone knew Cult Of Luna even existed) and that’s right on target. I’d also add Isis as a more-or-less-soundalike, not that this record is as, I don’t know, polite as those guys; what I refer to is the raw intensity. We start with “Loose Tooth,” which lifts off with one of those balladic-acoustic patterns, with Coalesce singer Sean Ingram floating in mellow mode for a bit, and then the thing just explodes as Ingram lets out a Crowbar-worthy yowl that seems to go on forever (it sort of made me chuckle insanely, thinking about the last time a tooth was bothering the heck out of me). Anyway, it’s all overhead-speaker ambiance for Hell, as promised, not for the squeamish. A+

Roi Turbo, Bazooka [EP] (Maison Arts)

Fun act here, comprising two brothers named McCarthy, who grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, with music-loving parents and abandoned their drum lessons for autodidactic strategies (Conor played along to Bloc Party records; Ben learned via YouTube). I liked ’em already just based on that, but what’s even more hilarious and exhilarating is the underlying gay-disco-but-not-quite-gay-disco vibe of “Super Hands” on this five-songer. It’s pretty relentless, really, semi-seriously dabbling with Afrobeat and subsonic Aughts-era house cavitation; it made me think of YouTube’s Hulett Brothers, you know, the guys who do the trick shots with ping-pong balls and whatnot. These are party jams for sure, mildly gritty, slightly Ed Banger-ish instrumentals guaranteed to get heads a-bobbin’, for example “Dystopia,” with its faux-yacht-techno steez, which is punctuated with monkey sounds and ’70s-pop sweetness. They’ll be (very appropriately) supporting Empire Of The Sun at The Music Hall in Boston on May 24. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• And lo, unto the masses the lord (or someone pretending to be Him) commanded from his brunch table, “Let there be new albums dumped unto those peeps on March 28,” and thus it will be, this Friday, because I have no say in the matter! Yes, it’s another new release Friday, as we await “second winter” after a bunch of 60-degree days, but I’m ready for it! Why, you ask? Because I stored a turkey in our freezer in January, back when Market Basket was charging negative ten cents a pound for them or whatnot, so when this year’s Second Winter’s cruel frost sets in, I am going to be eating Second Thanksgiving Dinner, in my house, and then an entire blueberry pie, and then Petunia and I are going to go Christmas caroling in our neighborhood, dressed like Grinches, for the amusement of all the little children! Important note, I saved last year’s Detroit Lions’ Thanksgiving Day game on DVR, so I could watch it on Second Thanksgiving, so please don’t message me to tell me what the final score was, that’d be great, I just want to enjoy Second Winter in style, snoring on the couch! But where were we, oh yes, albums, and look at this, guys, the first thing to hit my radar is none other than Based On A True Story, the first album in 20 years from insane slapping person Will Smith! Wow, so that explains why he keeps coming up in “my socials” and by extension why my Twitter is full of slapping jokes! I was like, “Why is everyone suddenly making fun of the stupidest moment in the history of awards ceremonies, isn’t that old news,” but this explains it: The guy actually thinks we forgot about that incident with Chris Rock, my third favorite comedian after Doug Stanhope and Elon Musk! Well I’ll tell you, I haven’t forgotten, but I suppose there’s always the possibility that his new duet with Big Sean, “Beautiful Scars feat. OBanga,” will be so awesome and underground-hip-hoppy that I’ll be like, “Maybe Chris Rock actually deserved it for all his rotten ‘literally being a funny person’ antics, can’t we just pretend it’s 1990 again?” Nah, it’s awful; as you know, Big Sean peaked with Detroit 2, this is just corporate-hip-hop nonsense, with Auto-Tune, because of course there’s Auto-Tune. Some online person just said something about “Will should do a diss track of Jada Pinkett Smith and have Chris Rock spit some lines.” Ha ha, wouldn’t that be funny, OK, let’s move on from this horror, I’d love that.

• Mumford & Sons, they’re still relevant, aren’t they, or are we already past believing any good music came out in the 2010s? Well, doesn’t matter, the Mumfords’ new album, Rushmere, is getting uploaded to your Spotifys as we speak, and it will include the title track, which is another one of those urgent-sounding galloping-horsie indie-meets-bluegrass tunes those guys specialize in, so yes, it’s cool, if hilariously redundant. You know, they really need to make up their minds about what to do next while they figure out which Vegas theater will give them a residency after their inevitable Grand Ole Opry phase (ack, did that sound cynical, I can never tell).

• Speaking of horsies, there’s pop-metal band The Darkness again, with a new album, called Dreams On Toast, featuring their horsie-voice singer, Whatsisname! The new tune, “I Hate Myself,” sounds like 1970s-era Sweet but super-boring, has anyone ever actually cared about this band, like really seriously, pinkie swear?
• In closing this column, I’d like to say that Deafheaven is still around, as they have a new album coming out momentarily, Lonely People With Power! “Heathen” starts off sounding like Sigur Ros, and then they do their usual black-metal nonsense. I don’t actually hate it, make of that what you will.

We Do Not Part, by Han Kang


We Do Not Part, by Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth, 256 pages)

It was inevitable that after K-pop, or Korean pop music, conquered America, K-lit would soon follow, with a suitable time for translation. But one of these things is not like the other. Unlike the frothy music genre, the latest Korean novel to be published in the U.S. is a serious work that challenges readers to confront evil and pain, while not closing our eyes to love and beauty.

At the center of Han Kang’s We Do Not Part are two friends who had fallen out of touch, an urgent request and a small white bird.

The events of a short but precarious journey are woven into a larger tapestry of a horrifying period in the history of South Korea, in which an estimated 10 percent of the population of Jeju Island were murdered in a violent campaign in 1948 that, like 9/11, came to be known by its date: Jeju 4.3.

The story begins with the nightmare of the narrator, Kyjunga, who repeatedly dreams that she is seeing a graveyard about to be overtaken by water. In her dream she is desperate to save the remains. She is unsure whether the nightmare — a “black-blue sea billowing in to dredge the bones away beneath the mounds” — is her mind processing a book she had written in the past, or an omen of horrors to come.

Kyjunga once had a family — people to cook for and dine with — but now lives alone in Seoul in poor health and suffering from insomnia and migraines. She is spending her days writing, and perpetually rewriting, a will and letters to be sent after her death. It is all she can do to summon the energy to leave her home and get a meal every now and then. It is all she can do to go on living.

One day, however, she gets a text from a friend she has not communicated with in a while, asking her to come to a hospital and bring an ID. Kyjunga leaves immediately and goes to her friend, who is being treated after a horrific accident. The friend, named Inseon, asks Kyjunga to travel to her home in Jeju to feed her bird, a white budgie (or parakeet) that has now been alone for several days and is likely near death without food or water.

It is an enormous ask. A fierce snowstorm is moving in, Inseon’s home is not easily accessible, and she wants Kyjunga to not just check on the bird but to stay with her for several months, until her treatment is complete. But Kyjunga cannot say no, not only out of pity for her friend and the bird, but also because she is, in a convoluted way, partly responsible for the accident her friend suffered.

And so she sets out in a snowstorm that is rapidly shutting down public transportation, leaving her friend to endure an agonizing treatment alone, and hoping she can find the house, which she has not visited in some time, and that the bird will still be alive.

Along the way, we learn more about the two women’s lives — how they met on a work assignment (Kyjunga is a writer, Inseon a photographer and filmmaker) and supported each other over the years. Kyjunga knows a little about Inseon’s complicated relationship with her mother, whose immediate family members perished in the JeJu Massacre. She had met her mother, at a time when the mother was descending into dementia. But neither woman had a complete understanding of what Inseon’s mother had suffered as a child, a story that is revealed in slow-motion over the course of the novel.

Snow is a secondary character in this novel — coating the faces of the dead, clinging “desolately” to Insenon’s hair as the friends walk together, and providing an eerie and tangible link from the present to the past. At one point Kyjunga reflects on how the snow falling around her is the recycled water from decades past and might well have fallen on the mounds of bodies bloodying the ground in 1948: “Who’s to say the snow dusting my hands now isn’t the same snow that had gathered on their faces?”

Kang, the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was honored in 2024 for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” Kang has said that she herself had the dream that haunts Kyjunga, and that We Do Not Part came from it. She wrote the novel over two years while living in a rented room on Jeju Island. The questions the novel is probing, she said in her Nobel speech, are “To what extent can we love? Where is our limit? To what degree must we love in order to remain human to the end?”

We Do Not Part arrives in the U.S. four years after it was first published in Korea — late, perhaps, but exceedingly welcome. Kang and her translators have crafted an achingly beautiful story that will send readers to her previous novels, which include 2017’s Human Acts and The Vegetarian, published in the U.S. in 2016. Bring on the K-lit. A

Featured Image: We Do Not Part, by Han Kang

Album Reviews 25/03/20

Diane Coll, I Am Fire (Happy Fish Records)

Musically, Coll, a professional couples therapist from Atlanta, Georgia, is a true DIY warrior, having released three full-length albums since 2022 along with several EPs and singles, the latter of which this is, a three-songer released in honor of International Women’s Day (March 8). Coll’s muse for these songs is the goddess Kali, “destroyer of ignorance and liberator of the ego; a benevolent and unapologetic warrior who takes on the torment caused by those who operate from their own ignorance and the need to dominate others.” Sounds like my gender for sure, yes, and if you want to know (or don’t, it’s all good), I’m considering wrapping up my trilogy of internet-culture-focused nonfiction books with one about how women are subliminally oppressed on social media. Anyhow, to the music, tally-ho: In short, I’m very impressed. “Starting a Fire” is a brilliant deep-house-rooted exercise, its beat consisting of AM radio patter and a synth that becomes more menacing by the moment while Coll incants various warnings and calls for “accelerated action,” which was the theme of this year’s IWD observance. “Timeline Shift” is yoga-class soundtracking, reminiscent of Anugama, if you have any idea who that is; “Je Suis Feu” ends the set with a polyrhythmic tribal dance-along that’s both hypnotic and, well, catchy. Very nicely done, great-sounding stuff. A+

Luke Marzec, Something Out of Nothing, Side A (Swift Half Records)

Technically, this odd bird submits this as the “first half of his debut album,” which might play in Poughkeepsie but not with me; nevertheless I’ll play along and not tell you it’s an EP; let’s just proceed. Marzec’s a multi-instrumentalist Londoner who led a bunch of classical and jazz bands during his high school days, nowadays he’s a reformed music-academic who put out several other EPs prior to this release. He’s a terminally hip white kid whose gravelly singing voice evokes Satchmo and Little Richard, which screams “cultural appropriation” if you’re nasty, but you’d better be dissing Jamie Lidell too if you’re going to do that, not that this is the proper place to get into that. So what we have here is a jambalaya consisting of funk (“I Can’t Get You Out Of My Mind” is pure James Brown-ness), deep soul and random jazz phrasings that sound antiquated in all the right ways. Given that he’s racked up well over a million Spotify listens (and really knows what he’s doing) he’s certainly one to watch. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Our country’s next “New CD Release Friday” is March 21, isn’t that the wackiest thing you’ve heard all week? We’ll get into it, but before I forget, everyone’s favorite local historian Fritz Wetherbee officially retired from his New Hampshire Chronicle post at WMUR TV, and so I am once again asking you, my loyal readers, to demand that the station hire me as his replacement and keep the tradition going! Hassle them on Facebook and MySpace or whatever, that’d be great!

But rather than delve into that any longer than my editors would want me to, it’s probably best to chat about the fact that Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco are releasing an album this Friday called I Said I Love You First! Those two are married, in case you didn’t know, and between Selena’s $1.3 billion fortune and Benny’s measly $50 million emergency fund, it’s safe to say that they’re able to afford to eat eggs every Sunday, in case you were worried about them. Where does this all lead us, fam? Well, where else: directly into the bizarre alternate universe of Bieberland. You see, Justin Bieber used to go steady with Selena, and they broke up (probably because he is insane) and last month the Biebs unfollowed former collaborator Blanco on Instagram, but not because he was envious of Blanco’s dating his ex, or so Bieber nation claims. That leaves only other two possibilities: Either he was hacked (in January he claimed he got hacked and the hacker unfollowed Biebs’s wife, Hailey) or Biebs is insane. You see, he (or the hacker) also unfollowed a bunch of other vacuous pop-culture celebrities, including Drake (who hasn’t?) and The Weeknd. Whatever, the title track from those two lovey-doveys’ new album is a chilled-down reggaeton thingamajig, featuring Selena singing like Lady Gaga like always. It’s cool, if anyone actually cares about this!

• You guys all know that English band The Horrors tabled the most disappointing sophomore album in rock history, but they’re back! Night Life, the band’s new LP, features the single “More Than Life,” a decidedly Depeche Mode-sounding thing. It’s very kyewl. They’re back!

• Louisville, Kentucky’s My Morning Jacket is also back, with Is, their new album! The single, “Time Waited,” sounds like Spandau Ballet trying to be Lynyrd Skynyrd, and if you have no idea what that might sound like, count your blessings.

• Aaand lastly it’s dream-poppers Japanese Breakfast with their new LP, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)! The single, “Mega Circuit,” is really mellow for a dreampop tune, kind of like Lana Del Rey meets Wilson Phillips. They’ll be at The Music Hall in Boston on May 7.

Featured Photo: Diane Coll album I Am Fire and Luke Marzec album Something Out of Nothing, Side A.

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. B —Jennifer 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)

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