Category: Pop

Album Reviews 25/05/01


Hexenhaus, Awakening (Roar Records)

As a genre, “tech-metal” is one in which I lost interest after the second or third Pendulum album, I forget which, not because it was bad but because it’s so confoundedly perfect all the time. To me, Pendulum got it right the first time, unlike Tool and Linkin Park (the latter of whom has been the subject of endless Facebook-message debate between friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny and myself; he thinks Linkin’s new singer is the bee’s knees, whereas to me she sounds like a particularly feisty America’s Got Talent contestant) et al. (while we’re at it, I’ve always thought A Perfect Circle kind of sucked, but that’s a whole other tedious discussion). And yadda yadda, that brings us to this Swedish five-piece, which has gotten love in the usual metal-fanboy Euro-trash circles (Kerrang, Metal Forces and such) for their more thrashy flavor of robo-metal. So. Whichever Dokken-looking dude writes their songs knows some beginner music theory; intro track “Shadows Of Sleep” doofs around with a spooky augmented arpeggio before windmilling a power-metallish Raging Speedhorn riff, after which “Awakening” tinkers with the idea of Iron Maiden calling out early Slayer (and, later, Anthrax, which is basically the formula throughout). It’s fine, sure, no complaints. A —Eric W. Saeger


Erin LeCount, I Am Digital, I Am Divine (Good As Gold Records)

The husky vocal timbre of Lady Gaga and Florence Welch has obviously had a massive influence on several quasi-pop divas who’ve emerged recently, from Dua Lipa to Lorde to Zola Jesus, the latter of whom would be my pick to offer as a soundalike to this 22-year-old U.K. resident. Like Zola, LeCount drowns her progressive-minded post-goth-pop in ethereal, Christian-begging vibe, instantly branding her as a “reclusive genius” in the manner of Chappell Roan, that is if you believe all the hype, which I don’t, but really, if I weren’t a painfully obvious cynic I’d hope that no one would want to read anything I type (don’t say it). On the other hand I’m always willing to play along with the public relations hucksters who sell us fairy tales (remember when Billie Eilish was reportedly discovered singing near a Dumpster or whatever it was?), so let’s: This girl recorded this EP in her gardening shed, they say, all by herself, adding brilliant layers of sampled harp, mandolin and other things to brighten her already glimmering pop gems, all of which are really well-written. Whatever the case, this is essential if you’re a fan of Florence And The Machine and similar products. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

• Yikes, folks, tons of new albums are coming our way this Friday, May 2, and with any luck there’ll be a couple that don’t instantly upset my tummy-tum! We’ll start in Canada’s Manitoba province, specifically the little town of Portage la Prairie, with their idea of a punk band, Propagandhi! The foursome were originally a skate-punk band, then they dabbled with heavy metal, so knowing all that, I assume they sound like Good Charlotte nowadays, but more well-behaved, because Canadian! But let’s not just blindly assume, let me go live-review whatever they’re passing off as a single from their fast-approaching new album, At Peace, because it wouldn’t be fair to tell all you nice folks that Portage la Prairie, Manitoba (teeming with a population of 13,000, less than New Hampshire’s sleepy retirement community of Pelham) wouldn’t know the Ramones from a barbershop quartet, not unless I had hard evidence. So let’s go, fly to the YouTubes, my flying monkeys, and give a listen to the title track, I can hardly wait to get my hands on these little hockey-playing so-and-sos and their — wait a second, flying monkeys, forget it, bring it in, this isn’t bad, for a band from Canadian Pelham! It starts out with a messy, crummy solo guitar line that’s obviously a parody of the guitar doodle that opens Yes’s “Roundabout,” nothing wrong with that at all, good comedy is really hard to find in today’s punk scene. So then it kicks into a triple-speed punk-metal thing with plain vanilla emo vocals spitting lyrics about why it doesn’t pay to be a peacenik these days, which reminds me, aren’t we at war with Canada nowadays, I just haven’t had time to keep up with Buzzfeed?

• By far the most well-known Suzanne Vega song is “Luka,” a haunting tune about child abuse that cemented Vega’s reputation as a pop-rocker who specialized in folk-oriented lyrics, and yes, you could say that it’s all toward a Gordon Lightfoot fashion. Fun Fact 1: in the original 1980s video for “Luka,” the part of the titular character was played by the guy who grew up to portray Jackie Aprile Jr. in The Sopranos. Fun Fact 2: Vega’s hideously famous a capella “doo doo doo doo” vocal in the original version of her 1987 song “Tom’s Diner” earned her the title of “the mother of MP3s” when DNA’s techno remix of the song served as the test subject for formulating MP3 compression. But whatever, you guys don’t care about all that science-y stuff, so let’s see what she’s doing now, with her new album, Flying With Angels, that’d be great. The single, a mellow folk-rocker titled “Speakers’ Corner,” begins with some Aimee Mann-style formalities before settling on a very nice hook. She’s still got it, ladies and germs.

• In the beginning, Car Seat Headrest was a lo-fi solo project by Leesburg, Virginia, slacker Will Toledo, who played trombone in his high school’s marching band. Now it’s an indie quartet whose new album, The Scholars, streets on Friday. The push single, “Gethsemane,” is a mid-tempo dance-punker obviously inspired by Chk Chk Chk’s better moments. I like it, personally.

• And lastly it’s rootin’ tootin’ country-rock singing man Eric Church, with his eighth album, Evangeline vs. The Machine! The single, “Hands of Time,” isn’t annoying in any Rascal Flatts/Big & Rich manner, because it’s mellow and kind of pretty in its way, but the cowboy accent is forced, just like most country music. That’s annoying to people who know about singing, because accents don’t really manifest when someone sings in English, just to tell you Something You Should Know. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Image: Hexenhaus, Awakening & Erin LeCount, I Am Digital, I Am Divine

Tilt, by Emma Pattee

Tilt, by Emma Pattee (Marysue Rucci Books, 227 pages)

If you’ve ever imagined yourself in the middle of a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, where were you when it happened? That’s what Annie, the protagonist of Tilt, is thinking as she frantically makes her way out of a big-box store in Portland, Oregon, moments after the long-predicted “Big One” hits.

“What I’m saying is, my imaginary earthquake did not include IKEA,” Annie says.

Annie is 35 years old and 37 weeks pregnant when the earthquake hits on the very morning that she has finally pushed past her inertia and gone shopping for a crib. Up until this point, the “nursery” in the two-bedroom apartment that she shares with her husband, Dom, consisted of an empty room and a car seat still in its box. To say that she is ambivalent about this pregnancy is an understatement. Also, Annie and Dom are barely solvent, a circumstance that she blames on Dom’s unwillingness to let go of his dream of being a famous actor, even though he is 38 and his latest “big break” is being an understudy for the lead in a local production of “King Lear.”

Annie herself is something of a theater kid, but she has largely abandoned the dream of her younger self to be a playwright, having taken a 9-to-5 job that pays the bills while suffocating her soul. She is on her first day of maternity leave when the earthquake hits the Pacific Northwest. It is the long-feared Cascadia earthquake, one that collapses buildings and bridges and destroys all communications and life as we know it. Annie survives with minor injuries but in her struggle to escape the building she leaves her purse, keys and phone behind. Unsure of what to do, not knowing if her apartment still exists or if her husband is alive, she sets off on foot, in a pair of Birkenstock sandals, planning to walk to the coffee shop where her husband works, some miles away.

It is a precarious journey for anyone, let alone a woman just weeks away from giving birth. Almost everything around her is broken or ablaze, people are dazed and injured or dying, and, as the hours go by, survivors are becoming predatory.

As Annie makes her way through the streets she reflects on a fight she and her husband had the previous night — and tells the story to her unborn child, which she affectionately calls Bean. It was a run-of-the-mill fight, but also one that summarizes the couple’s journey: “Because all fights are about nothing in the grand scheme of things but then also in the grand scheme of things when taken all together, they tell a larger story. Like each fight is a star in the sky and now that I’ve been with your father for a decade or so I can look up at the constellation of all of our arguments and see a shape there, clear as day,” Annie tells her child.

That constellation becomes clear to the reader in a series of flashbacks that alternate with Annie’s real-time journey and also give us snapshots of Annie’s hardscrabble upbringing and her relationship with her late mother. We learn of the bright promise that lit up Annie’s twenties, as she writes and produces a play that led to her meeting and marrying Dom. But as she settles into the monotony of her job as an office manager for a tech company, those dreams “sparkle at us from a distant mountaintop” amid a life consisting of “an infinite amount of time spent unloading the dishwasher and waiting in line at the grocery store.”

She wavers between trying to appreciate her life as it is, and wondering whether she and Bean would be better off on their own. She can’t shake the idea that Dom is failing her. But it is unclear whether he is failing Annie, or whether she is failing him. She grapples with these questions on the journey, in which she forms an unlikely bond with a young mother who is trying to reach the school where her daughter was when the earthquake hit, and as she encounters a variety of memorable characters: a bicyclist whose wife has been seriously injured, a malevolent gang of teenagers, the passing drivers who offer her a ride, a young woman who works with Dom.

Parents, Annie notices, are everywhere. “What is it about parents that you always know they are parents?” she muses. “That look that says I am serious but I also spend lots of time picking up LEGOs. Their hands tense and anxious from constantly cutting apple slices. A kind of hanging flesh around their mouth. A hurried way of walking.”

Ultimately, while this is a novel about the end of the world as we know it, a species of the so-called “apocalypse genre,” it’s also about coming to grips with your life when your life has not turned out as you planned, when you are so dissatisfied with your lot that even an earthquake doesn’t mess up your plans. “Nobody wants to be where they are,” Annie thinks at one point. “So would it really matter so much if the earth swallowed us all?”

But Pattee answers her character with this book, which thrums with tension and is gorgeously written, with scenes and phrases that will long remain with the reader. She describes the blaring of car horns as “honks [that] rise around us like the mating calls of a long extinct species” and Annie’s monotonous existence as “looking for some way to spend a Saturday, all those Saturdays collecting in dusty piles around the house.”

A narrative built around an interior conversation with an unborn child takes a bit of getting used to, but after a while, it works, and gives Annie license to deliver asides like this one, spoken to the child after a remembrance of an exchange the parents had the night before the earthquake:

“Did you hear me say that? Were you listening to all that? Seeing the dusty baseboard, cracked linoleum, and light fixtures from the eighties. Did you look at us in our baggy pajamas, in our untoned bodies, and think, Them? Them?”

Tilt is a remarkable literary debut. Every end of the world as we know it should be this good. A —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 25/04/24

Stella Cole, Stella Cole (Iron Lung Records)

Don’t be fooled by the disposable-template look of the album cover. The world is waiting pretty breathlessly for the follow-up to this Knoxville, Tenn., native’s next album, whenever it comes; for now we’ll have to make do with this, her self-titled debut, an exercise in Great American Songbook standards, oh, and a cover of Billie Eilish’s “My Future.” Would that more of this kind of thing showed up on my desk — I mean, it does, but usually from singers who don’t seem to get that singing songs made famous by people like Judy Garland and such requires more than a little flair, or at least a desire to tell a story, which Cole states was the next-level step at which she’d approached this album after spending too many years sweating over what her voice sounded like (all the necessary trill-drenched panache is present when she covers the Garland-originated “Meet Me in St. Louis”). At 26, Cole’s knack for online self-promotion gained her worldwide recognition; her devotees include Michael Buble, James Taylor and Meghan Trainor, which should definitely tell you something. The Eilish tune, since you’re curious, isn’t steeped in the same torchiness as the original, more like a story, as we discussed. A world-class debut. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

The Crystal Teardrop, The Crystal Teardrop Is Forming (Popclaw/Rise Above Records)

What’s old is new again, again, with this U.K.-based Jefferson Airplane-configured five-piece. You may (or may not, I don’t care which) remember the Paisley Underground of the 1990s, which tried to resurrect the groovy sounds of the late 1960s while retaining some semblance of current relevance, but in case you’d never heard of it (a few of the bands on the soundtrack to The Silence of the Lambs came from that scene, for reference), these guys were at least cool enough to name one of their bangly-jangly flower-power songs after one of the bands that thrived during that short-lived cultural blip (“The Rain Parade”). That really wasn’t necessary, given that this group aims for the rafters as far as authenticity: The totally analog recordings feature a guy on sitar, one on Mellotron and the singer Alexandra Rose’s vocals were captured through an old Leslie speaker, which lends it a nostalgically claustrophobic Byrds/Mamas And Papas sound. Catchy though the music occasionally is, we have here an obvious flash-in-the-pan that I’m sure the Nylon reviewer will find to be a nice, dishwasher-safe distraction from the turmoil of current events; maybe your great-grandfather will dig it, or something. B —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

• Well here we are, gang, as I write this we are in the grip of a typical Third Winter, in New England, and guess what, spoiler, it’s freezing again! I had a heat-saving idea so we didn’t have to call the oil delivery guy again, what I did was take all our tax return stuff and put it in the ol’ pot-bellied stove and burn it, which was better than paying my taxes; after all, there’s no one at the IRS anymore to take my check and staple it neatly to their pile of Eric’s Tax Stuff and drop it in someone’s inbox and then go back to their desk and eat the ham sandwich they have every single day, while looking out the window, dreaming of freedom and birdies and super-polite sexytime with someone they work with who actually talked to them once a few years ago! I tore up the check and ordered Captain America #100 from eBay, for my comics collection, and stocked up on cans of beans, for the fast-approaching apocalypse! Anyway, while I shuffle the myriad pages of my giant doomsday prepper grocery list, we should probably talk about the Friday, April 11, batch of new music CDs, in this music CD column, everyone shut up and let me look at the list, oh! Oh! Look guys, it’s sludge-metal heroes Melvins with a new album, Thunderball, wait, why did the Melvins think they could name their new album after a copyrighted James Bond movie (actually I’m kidding, legally they can, they’d only maybe have lawyer problems if they renamed their band “Thunderball,” and besides, anyone who even remembers that there was once a James Bond movie called Thunderball is in a retirement home right now, where all they watch is reruns of Match Game ’77, so I think no one will complain either way), why did they do this? Oh who cares, it’s a Melvins album, let me do the rock journo thingie and listen to something from it. Here it is, a new tune called “Victory Of The Pyramids,” and wait, what are they even doing here, the video starts with crazily flashing images, aren’t the YouTube moderator-goblins supposed to warn people first? Like, suppose I’d just accidentally heard a Van Morrison tune and my stomach was already totally touch and go, I’d probably toss my cookies right now! And waitwhat, the song is awesome of course, but it’s punk-speed, someone tell me what’s going on here with all this crazy nonsense, between “fast Melvins” and “no IRS anymore” and ridiculously high prices for Captain America #100 in “Fine” grade condition, I’m lost, on this silly planet, with all you crazy people! But wait, breaking news, it slows down to normal Melvins speed after a few minutes; it’s doomy and Black Sabbath-y but not crazily insane like Korn. Right, OK, it’s mostly slow, please disperse, nothing to see here, let’s move on.

• But wait, there’s more doom metal, with Insatiable, the new album from Aussie band Divide and Dissolve! Composed of two women, the band doesn’t have a singer, but you’ll probably like them if you like Bell Witch or getting in car accidents.

• Pennsylvania “shoegaze/post-hardcore” band Superheaven releases its self-titled LP on Friday! “Cruel Times” is really cool, kind of like Stone Temple Pilots, a band that was never shoegaze, why are they saying they’re shoegaze? They’re not!

• Lastly this week I’d like to say that experimental indie/world music band Beirut’s new album is called Study Of Losses, and it includes the single “Guericke’s Unicorn,” a woozy and weird but very tolerable modern art-pop thing that sounds like Luke Temple trying to make circus music for cute dogs that like to swim. Just go listen to it, trust me. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Image: Iron Lung, Adapting // Crawling (Iron Lung Records) & Mac Sabbath “Pair-a-Buns” (self-released)

Source Code, by Bill Gates


Source Code, by Bill Gates (Knopf, 315 pages)

Of all the Big Tech moguls, Bill Gates is the one getting the least attention these days. Since his split with his wife of 27 years, Melinda French Gates, announced in 2021, he seems to have struggled to find public favor amid reports of infidelity and meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. He’s not disappeared from the spotlight altogether — he still contributes at Microsoft and heads the foundation that he and his former wife founded, and he still makes book recommendations on his personal website, GatesNotes.com. On the cusp of 70, he’s not making headlines like he once did, although maybe that’s a good thing.

But he’s back in the spotlight on the occasion of Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, coupled with the release of a memoir, Source Code, that is being billed as an origin story for Gates. The book covers only a portion of his life — childhood through the early days of Microsoft. That timeline delivers Gates from the minefield of writing about his marriage and divorce, although that may be yet to come; reportedly, this is the first of three volumes.

Does the world want to read three books about Bill Gates? Does it even want to read one? That’s yet unclear, but Source Code is surprisingly engaging, both as an autobiography and as a period piece — the period being the 1960s and 1970s when Gates was coming of age. It was a different time, to be sure.

Gates begins with a story about a treacherous hike he undertook with friends as a sophomore in high school. It was to take more than a week and cover 50 miles in the Olympic mountains. With no adult supervision. Again, it was 1971 — a different time. Today, child protective services might pluck the boys off a mountain mid-hike, especially under the conditions they were hiking in.

At one point the trip got quite difficult, and Gates explains how he coped, by going deep in his own mind and thinking about computer code. But the fact that he spent a day or so marching silently through the woods, while accompanied by friends, thinking about coding isn’t the most amazing part of the story. That would be the fact that he still remembered the code he had written in his head three and a half years later when he had need of it for a project that would lead to Microsoft. “I have always been able to hyperfocus,” he later writes, and that seems an understatement that explains a lot.

Gates’ brain has already been the subject of a Netflix documentary (2019’s Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates), so it’s no surprise when he writes “my parents knew that the rhythm of my mind was different from that of other kids.” He read early and often — by age 9, he had read every volume of the 1962 World Book Encyclopedia. He had a compulsion to rock, at first on a rocking horse on which he would sit for hours, but later, even in adulthood, swaying back and forth when he was thinking. He thought of things that interested him, or that had some sort of tangible reward. (He memorized Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, but only because a Sunday School teacher offered to buy dinner on the top of Seattle’s Space Needle for anyone who did so.)

He shares a note his mother saved from the director of his preschool who said “he seemed determined to impress us with his complete lack of concern for any phase of school life. He did not know or care to know how to cut, put on his own coat, and was completely happy thus.”

Gates rummages through childhood memories like a grandfather with no plans for the weekend and an audience at the ready — we learn about his father’s first car, a tornado that touched down in the family’s backyard, what he ate at the World’s Fair (Belgian waffles, their debut in the U.S.). It was a privileged and well-ordered life, almost Cleaver-esque. “We lived by the structure of routines, traditions, and rules my mother established. … You did not leave the house with an unmade bed, uncombed hair, or a wrinkled shirt.”

When his mom was off volunteering with the Junior League, her mother would fill in, always with “a string of pearls and perfectly coiffed hair.” Every summer, the family would spend two weeks on vacation near a waterfront with nine other families. Gates’ parents threw a roller-skating party for all their friends every Christmas. Norman Rockwell would have had a field day with many of these stories, wholesome as they are. And they are the best part of this memoir, told with the affection of age, simply because they are part of the Gates story that we don’t know. (Which is a good thing, since this is also the bulk of it — he’s not even out of high school 160 pages in.)

The scaffolding of his career is already well-known to anyone paying attention: how he became obsessed with nascent computer technology in high school and formed deep friendships with similarly inclined, nerdy friends; the ups and downs of his friendship with the late Paul Allen, with whom he co-founded the world’s largest software company. Source Code gives us engaging and often funny anecdotes along the way to their success, as well as the pain. He writes movingly of the accidental death of one of their closest friends, and of seeing his friend’s mother, after the memorial service, “curled up on the sofa, sobbing.”

Gates, of course, threw himself even more deeply into coding as he processed his own grief, and he grew closer to Allen in the subsequent years, leading up to the pivotal day when they saw the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, with its breathless article about “the world’s first minicomputer kit” which could be had for about the price of a color television.

Gates had filled out his application for Harvard on a typewriter — that’s how different his world was then from ours today. It’s easy to forget how radically the world has changed in the past half-century, but Source Code reminds us, page after page. I’m still not convinced that the world needs three books about the life of Bill Gates, but I’m at least open to the possibility after finishing the first. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Source Code, by Bill Gates

Album Reviews 25/04/17

Iron Lung, Adapting // Crawling (Iron Lung Records)

Holy catfish, fam, this is the craziest thing I’ve heard since — well, the last craziest thing I heard. Maybe if I’d read their bio I’d’ve been better prepared, but what’s done is done: This Nevada hardcore metal duo bonded over (please tell the kids to leave the room, that’d be great) a fascination with medical experiments from the 1800s and whatnot, so in that sense they’re perfectly qualified to push envelopes, which they do in the areas of both speed and unbridled ferocity. In a way, their lightning-fast Bad Brains/Larm approach could be said to be a Dillinger Escape Plan type of thing for the black metal crowd, that is to say it feels like they’re careening out of control for the most part, flailing away like Venom at three-times speed, but every once in a while they slam on the brakes to make a slow-doom point. The project is completely self-financed, too, which is all the more reason for you to give them a shot. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Mac Sabbath “Pair-a-Buns” (self-released)

In completely insane news, I received a note from this Los Angeles-based Black Sabbath parody band’s PR person that they’ll be “coming to my area soon,” specifically to The Vault in New Bedford, Mass., on May 3, which may as well be Neptune for all the likelihood that I’d ever drive that far for a joke band, even if the fog is beginning to clear regarding who and what the band actually is and revealing a novelty act that just might blow up big (people loved RackaRacka’s Ronald McDonald Jackass-style videos, after all). A video for this went crazily viral on Twitter, but even before that, news outlets like the U.K.’s Daily Star were spilling plenty of ink over it. This (now old) flexi disc single contains a parody of Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” which the b tune and plays at about the same speed as proto-punkers The Dickies did in 1979, but these guys are serious about their anti-fast-food, anti-music-industry theatrics: The guys dress up like metalized versions of the old McDonaldland characters — an Ozzy-fied Ronald McDonald who plays the spatulas, “Slayer MacCheeze” on guitar and such, you get the gist — and put on a frenzied live show at any small club that’ll put up with them. This is priceless, guys. You know what, if you’re driving to this show, message me and I’ll join you; we’ll get in the door for free. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

• Well here we are, gang, as I write this we are in the grip of a typical Third Winter, in New England, and guess what, spoiler, it’s freezing again! I had a heat-saving idea so we didn’t have to call the oil delivery guy again, what I did was take all our tax return stuff and put it in the ol’ pot-bellied stove and burn it, which was better than paying my taxes; after all, there’s no one at the IRS anymore to take my check and staple it neatly to their pile of Eric’s Tax Stuff and drop it in someone’s inbox and then go back to their desk and eat the ham sandwich they have every single day, while looking out the window, dreaming of freedom and birdies and super-polite sexytime with someone they work with who actually talked to them once a few years ago! I tore up the check and ordered Captain America #100 from eBay, for my comics collection, and stocked up on cans of beans, for the fast-approaching apocalypse! Anyway, while I shuffle the myriad pages of my giant doomsday prepper grocery list, we should probably talk about the Friday, April 11, batch of new music CDs, in this music CD column, everyone shut up and let me look at the list, oh! Oh! Look guys, it’s sludge-metal heroes Melvins with a new album, Thunderball, wait, why did the Melvins think they could name their new album after a copyrighted James Bond movie (actually I’m kidding, legally they can, they’d only maybe have lawyer problems if they renamed their band “Thunderball,” and besides, anyone who even remembers that there was once a James Bond movie called Thunderball is in a retirement home right now, where all they watch is reruns of Match Game ’77, so I think no one will complain either way), why did they do this? Oh who cares, it’s a Melvins album, let me do the rock journo thingie and listen to something from it. Here it is, a new tune called “Victory Of The Pyramids,” and wait, what are they even doing here, the video starts with crazily flashing images, aren’t the YouTube moderator-goblins supposed to warn people first? Like, suppose I’d just accidentally heard a Van Morrison tune and my stomach was already totally touch and go, I’d probably toss my cookies right now! And waitwhat, the song is awesome of course, but it’s punk-speed, someone tell me what’s going on here with all this crazy nonsense, between “fast Melvins” and “no IRS anymore” and ridiculously high prices for Captain America #100 in “Fine” grade condition, I’m lost, on this silly planet, with all you crazy people! But wait, breaking news, it slows down to normal Melvins speed after a few minutes; it’s doomy and Black Sabbath-y but not crazily insane like Korn. Right, OK, it’s mostly slow, please disperse, nothing to see here, let’s move on.

• But wait, there’s more doom metal, with Insatiable, the new album from Aussie band Divide and Dissolve! Composed of two women, the band doesn’t have a singer, but you’ll probably like them if you like Bell Witch or getting in car accidents.

• Pennsylvania “shoegaze/post-hardcore” band Superheaven releases its self-titled LP on Friday! “Cruel Times” is really cool, kind of like Stone Temple Pilots, a band that was never shoegaze, why are they saying they’re shoegaze? They’re not!

• Lastly this week I’d like to say that experimental indie/world music band Beirut’s new album is called Study Of Losses, and it includes the single “Guericke’s Unicorn,” a woozy and weird but very tolerable modern art-pop thing that sounds like Luke Temple trying to make circus music for cute dogs that like to swim. Just go listen to it, trust me. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Image: Iron Lung, Adapting // Crawling (Iron Lung Records) & Mac Sabbath “Pair-a-Buns” (self-released)

Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp


Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp (Little, Brown and Co., 341 pages)

When you toss a plastic water bottle in a recycling bin, you’re saving the Earth — or so we’ve been told for decades. But in recent years a more disturbing story has been emerging, with evidence that much of the stuff in our recycling bins is not being recycled but is being shipped, at significant financial and human cost, to developing nations.

In Waste Wars, journalist Alexander Clapp goes Dumpster diving for the truth, traveling the globe to witness what he calls “the wild afterlife of your trash.”

It’s a sobering story that’s being compared to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which in 1962 launched the environmental movement with its examination of the devastating effects of pesticides. But Waste Wars is not so much about how America’s garbage is destroying us, but about how it’s trashing other countries.

Clapp’s introduction includes an astonishing statement: “Since the early 1990s, when your discarded Coke bottle first emerged as a major object of global commerce, China had been the recipient of half the plastic placed into a recycling bin anywhere on Earth.” In another decade, he writes, “America’s biggest export to China was the stuff Americans tossed away.”

But China got fed up and stopped accepting the world’s plastic, creating chaos in the global trash trade. “Within months, Greek garbage started surfacing in Liberia. Italian trash wrecked the beaches of Tunisia. Dutch plastic overwhelmed Thailand.”

The richest nations soon realized that the poorest could be counted on to take their waste — not just plastic and the remains of incinerated garbage (all that ash has to go somewhere) but also things like sewage sludge. The garbage and waste shipped to other countries is sometimes processed and sometimes repurposed, but often buried or dumped anywhere a truck driver thinks he can get away with it. In some areas sewage sludge has been broadly distributed and then paved over with “roads to nowhere.” In one area of Kenya, there are acres of six-story-high trash mountains seeping a poisonous soup that mosquitoes won’t breed in.

These sorts of arrangements have sometimes been brokered by government officials with no say by the citizens affected. In Guatemala in the early 1990s, for example, 200 families were “relocated” from their villages to make way for the processing of sewage coming from Miami, Galveston and other U.S. cities. In Turkey, a Kurdish farmer watched a truck stop outside his citrus groves, dump a load of garbage and light a match, the resulting fire nearly destroying his livelihood in the coming years.

Then there’s the e-waste. Clapp travels to a place in Ghana known as Agbogbloshie, which is a slum in which much of our electronic waste winds up. Perhaps, he says, your first cell phone and Game Boy, your DVD player, your college laptop, perished here. He writes about “enterprising young men in Ghana who have spent their lives rummaging through the piles of keyboards, desktop monitors, and smartphones that waste brokers in rich countries have shipped to Agbogbloshie; they are seasoned at restoring these busted electronics back to life — and, on occasion, using them to conduct epic long-range fraud against residents of the countries that sent them.”

At the same time, he writes, Agbogbloshie has become “a byword for ecological ruin.” Chicken eggs there contain high levels of chemical compounds, making them “probably the most poisonous on Earth.”

And yet the enterprise provides jobs. Clapp describes what he calls a “de-manufacturing line” — young men who sit for eight or nine hours a day dismantling and smashing trash: “old ceiling fans, motorcycle mufflers, speaker systems.” It is ironic, he observes, that some of the discarded objects being destroyed contain the world’s most advanced technology and yet it is backbreaking human labor — “of an almost unimaginably archaic kind” — doing the destroying.

Unfortunately, the problems Clapp uncovers have no easy fix, driven as they are by consumer demand for products that don’t just become waste themselves but produce waste, are literally wrapped in waste, every step on the way to your house, from their production to their packaging to the cash-register receipt you receive.

The book sometimes feels a bit like a lecture in which Clapp is chastising each of us for the contents of our closets and refrigerators. And yet we needed that Game Boy, didn’t we? Yes, water bottles are bad, we get it, but for many of us, so is our tap water. It’s easy to see the problem, not so easy to see the solution. Unfortunately, Waste Wars offers no way out of the mess we are in.

At the beauty store where my youngest daughter works, they recently tried to reduce plastic bag consumption by discontinuing plastic bags and offering a paper bag for 10 cents. They had to return to plastic bags within a few months because customers were so angry, they would storm out of the store.

Other countries are being more hard-nosed. In Indonesia, which is said to be the third largest contributor to plastic in the ocean (behind China and India), stores in Jakarta banned single-use plastic bags five years ago, levying a fine that amounts to $1,800. Dubai is building an enormous incinerator that it says will burn what amounts to a thousand trucks full of trash every day. But Indonesia also has plastic being sent there from other countries, and incineration has environmental costs of its own.

Depressingly, Clapp admits at one point, “As long as plastic keeps getting physically diverted by those who consume it the most, the farther from public concern — and political action — it is likely to remain.” Waste Wars is an eloquent and deeply researched call to action, even as it’s frustratingly unclear about what that action should be. A —Jennifer Graham

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