Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/10/19

Charlene Darling, La Porte (Disciples Records)

It’s been a while since the last time I was presented with an album from a quirk-pop Kate Bush wannabe, and here it is, and thankfully not drowning in desperado-romantic angst. But at least this Parisian-born, Brussels-based underground fixture sings off-key a lot, I’ll give it that! No, seriously, folks, if you like Air, Figurine and all that stuff, you’ll probably find a lot to like here, even if I can barely stand it. The key to making music like this is to spend a lot of time in your apartment playing at being existentially lost, as the video for “Tour s’efface” demonstrates; I saw something in the press release about a guy running tape loops for this lady’s group but didn’t hear anything notable in that regard, which is par for the course here. Despite all my disdain for this thing, Iggy Pop, of all people, liked it enough to play it on his BBC radio show. Urban sluggery and first world problems ahoy! C- —Eric W. Saeger

Iogi, We Can Be Friends (Raw Tapes Records)

It’s been a while since the last time I was presented with an album from a quirk-pop Kate Bush wannabe, and here it is, and thankfully not drowning in desperado-romantic angst. But at least this Parisian-born, Brussels-based underground fixture sings off-key a lot, I’ll give it that! No, seriously, folks, if you like Air, Figurine and all that stuff, you’ll probably find a lot to like here, even if I can barely stand it. The key to making music like this is to spend a lot of time in your apartment playing at being existentially lost, as the video for “Tour s’efface” demonstrates; I saw something in the press release about a guy running tape loops for this lady’s group but didn’t hear anything notable in that regard, which is par for the course here. Despite all my disdain for this thing, Iggy Pop, of all people, liked it enough to play it on his BBC radio show. Urban sluggery and first world problems ahoy! C- —Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

  • Oct. 20 is our next new-CD-release Friday, and, much as I don’t want to, yes, I will be normal today and speak first about the only album that matters to Billboard magazine and the mainstream audience it hypnotizes, The Rolling Stones’ new one, Hackney Diamonds! OK, I mentioned it, may I be excused now? Right, I guess not. Let’s just say that I never cared about the Stones and never will; the only songs I used to like were “The Last Time” and one other, I forget, but it doesn’t matter, if I want to hear Stones songs all I have to do is go to Dollar Tree and wait around a few minutes, basking in the despair of that end-stage-capitalist vibe you can only get at a dollar store. Personally I’d much rather hang around at Discount Madness in Pelham because they play 1950s songs all day, and it’s fun to hear the retirees walking around casually whistling along to tunes about jalopies and sock hops, songs that really marked the end of rock ’n’ roll’s usefulness. I mean, after that, pop rock was just about hair and “trousers” and really nothing else; the Stones were basically Black Sabbath to Led Zeppelin’s more pliable Beatles, and both ’60s bands had super-boring drummers. That’s all I have on all this tediousness for the moment, so, as far as the new album, the single, “Angry,” has a video that features this generation’s Marilyn Monroe, Sydney Sweeney belly dancing to the song, which has some good AC/DC energy but is still mindlessly Stones-ish. I don’t hate it, no, now may I please go?
  • The Streets is one of the stage names under which British alternative hip-hop/garage dude Mike Skinner releases records. His forthcoming new LP, The Darker The Shadow The Brighter The Light, features the single “We All Need An Enemy,” a Cockney-accent-drawled chill-trap number that’s actually quite listenable; in it, Skinner waxes apathetic about people finding love in hate groups and other necessary evils. I was impressed.
  • Bombay Bicycle Club is an English indie-rock trio named after a now-defunct chain of Indian restaurants in North London! In 2009 they released their first album, I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose, a fairly thrashy affair that was all about post-punk, and the hilariously loquacious wonk at Pitchfork Media found stuff in it to complain about, and then they went low-key folk in 2010 with their Flaws LP, which was silly of them to do, then they tried stadium-indie on for size in 2014 with the album So Long See You Tomorrow, which was electronic pop, and that takes us to now, with their newest, My Big Day. I hate to take just one song to talk about when discussing the latest album from a band that’s never really even known what kind of band it’s supposed to be, especially given that it’s my understanding that this album is a genre-mishmash according to my fellow music-journalist hacks, but I’ll go out on a limb and give a listen to the title track, because I am a daredevil, don’t try this at home, folks!
    Right, so it’s a quirky whisper-electro joint powered by a fake electric piano sample that really accomplishes nothing, but that’s the charm of that kind of thing, isn’t it?
  • We’ll wrap things up for the week with Blink-182, which is one of those emo-rock/power-pop bands whose success baffles most people over 45; at the moment their main selling point is that their drummer is Mrs. Kourtney Kardashian, which is sure to change after her next mimosa vacation in the Maldives, but that’s OK! One More Time is the band’s new full-length, the title track from which is a strummy nerd-pop ballad. It sounds like Lit trying to be Simon & Garfunkel, all set with this. —Eric W. Saeger

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

The Vaster Wilds, by Lauren Groff

The Vaster Wilds, by Lauren Groff (Riverhead, 253 pages)

In a world populated with doomsday preppers, people embracing life off the grid, and extreme athletes racing for days through the wilderness, there is surely a market for a book about a girl who escapes servitude and lives alone in the wilds of 17th-century America.

Whether there’s a market for such a book written in the language of, say, Chaucer, is harder to predict.

But many people are gushing about Lauren Groff’s latest book, The Vaster Wilds, which is a brutal and bloody survival story wrapped in lyrical Middle Ages prose.

The unnamed girl, in her late teens, had been born in England and “discovered a new born babe, all alone one bad dawn, still in the juices of birth, and naked in the filth of shiteburne lane, and nearly dead of cold.” She was taken in by a church and adopted at age 4 by a minister and his wife, and charged with taking care of their child.

The girl grew attached to her charge, whom she calls repeatedly “the child Bess,” and traveled with the family by boat to the Jamestown colony, not knowing that people were starving in the “new world.” (The novel is set around 1610, a time in which an estimated 80 percent of Jamestown colonists died of starvation and disease.)

For reasons that are slowly revealed, the girl decides that the wilderness of this strange land is better than the colony, so she steals leather gloves and a cloak from her mistress, and boots from a boy who’d died of smallpox that week, and she flees.

“Into the night the girl ran and ran, and the cold and the dark and the wilderness and her fear and the depth of her losses, all things together, dwindled the self she had once known down to nothing. A nothing is no thing, a nothing is a thing with no past. It was also true that with no past, the girl thought, a nothing could be free.”

The dangers awaiting the girl include not just the elements and men sent to pursue her, but continued starvation, wild animals and the fact that she has no compass or roads and no real place to run to. She just goes, intent only on survival.

As her trajectory itself is not much more interesting than a typical NASCAR race — only she is running in a direction, north, and not in circles — part of the story is her recollections of the past, to include a lost love, and her hopes for the future, which involve making it to Canada, getting married and having children in a house that is safe and has food. She recalls various atrocities she witnessed, in England and in the new land. And there are enough heads on sticks and flayed men here to comprise a new episode of Game of Thrones.

There is also the matter of her sustenance, which requires many unsettling scenes, such as a half fileted frozen fish that suddenly, upon thawing, is shocked back to life, and a nest of baby squirrels that she harvests for meat with the angry mother looking on.

But there is transcendence in the wild, too, as when she awakens one night to see a huge bear sitting at the base of a waterfall, looking at it in something that seems to resemble awe. That leads her to contemplate how “if a bear could know god in his own bear way, then a bear had a soul. …. Then she thought that perhaps in the language of bears there was a kind of gospel, also. And perhaps this gospel said to the bears the same thing about god giving bears dominion over the world. And perhaps bears believed that this gave them license to slaughter the living world, including the men in it.”

For an uneducated girl of 17 or 18, she is deeply spiritual, in part because of the religion pressed upon her in servitude, in part because of the voices that she converses with while she runs. At one point, the voice scornfully interrogates her about why she thinks she can survive in such harsh conditions, alone. “And she wanted to weep but she did not and instead she said, But I am not alone for I carry my god in my heart always. And she did, she felt god, a pinprick of light deep within her.”

The Vaster Wilds is not an easy read, despite the beauty of its language. It wasn’t until I was more than a third through the book that I grew comfortable enough with the style and language that I wasn’t actively observing it. But once you get to that point — and maybe it will be sooner for you than me — it’s like getting a second wind on a run, or getting into “flow” in an activity. Still, it’s a book that, like poetry, requires you to take it in slowly for effect. Unfortunately, it’s also a book that requires readers to suffer with the protagonist, from beginning to merciful end. You’ll love it or hate it, but will not forget it. Which also might be good or bad. B

Album Reviews 23/10/12

Diamond Dogs, About the Hardest Nut to Crack (Wild Kingdom Records)

I don’t get too many rootsy honky-tonk-punk records in here, but point of order, they’re always welcome. Formed way back in 1991, this Swedish rock group attempts to revive the soul of borderline Stiv Bators/New York Dolls-style pre-punk, not the least melodic thing you’ve ever heard, but certainly awash in attitude. “Blight The Life” is all that and more in the form of purebred bluegrass punkabilly, and by that I mean of the purest original Hank Williams Sr. sort, the type of mayhemic cowpunch-rock that evokes an odd combination of barns and chickens and imminent danger from carelessly flung slam-dancers; similarly, “Wring It Out” is a hilariously anachronistic cross between the Stones and Black Crowes, which isn’t to imply that there’s anything wrong with it. If you need a legitimacy check, the band’s OG posturing earned them a brief moment of fame on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball in 1993 when one of their tunes somehow snuck into the show. A

The Nervous Eaters, “Kelly’s Sixteen” (Wicked Cool Records)

I didn’t hate this band all that much back when I was even younger than you are today, when idiotic soul-sucking working-class assembly-line jobs were depressingly plentiful (you unemployed kids living in your moms’ basements really need to count your blessings) and WBCN was the Boston radio station to listen to if you wanted people to think you were cool. This local-to-Boston band was a one-hit local-radio wonder (unless I’m missing something) whose big single, “Loretta,” was produced by Ric Ocasek of The Cars in the early ’80s; the tune was, like most Boston rock was in that halcyon era, ’50s-tinged, mildly punkish and sublimely tuneless, but there were a lot worse bands to “experience” at the Rathskellar and whatnot, and so the Eaters made their mark, not that anything ever came of it. And so, yadda yadda, here’s a new single by them, a corporate-punk-speed snoozer that sounds somewhat Gang Of Four-ish and Buzzcocks-ish at first, and then, right when you think a giant-ass hook-fadeout is coming, it just flops and expires. Nothing changes, folks, remember that. C

Playlist

  • Yay, Oct. 13 is a Friday the Thirteenth, I’m sure all the new albums coming out that day will jibe with the occasion in a manner most apropos! But first things first, fam, wait till I tell you about my visit to Manchvegas’ new rock club, Angel City Music Hall, the other week! It takes a lot to get me out of my trash-pile, um, I mean my ultra-modern, totally organized office, but when my PR friends the Brenners in New York City told me that Crowbar was coming to play their crazy sludge-metal tuneage right here in da city, I was like “I’m your huckleberry!” So I contacted a couple of bros to go see them, like our local rock ’n’ roll mastermind Otto Kinzel of Dust Prophet and friend of the Hippo Dan Szczesny, but they made up excuses, so I went by myself. The band was deafeningly loud, which was nice, and the lady who runs the place calls people “Hon,” which is also nice.
  • OK, I don’t know if you people remember that techno soundsystem called Justice, and how they named one of their albums “†” (you know, like, “cross”) just to be a pain to everyone who had to write an article about them and hunt down that particular ASCII character. If you do, you also remember that they tried to make the super-noisy Ed Banger sound happen, which it did for little while, but — oh for pete’s sake, I’m going totally off-track, whatever, there’s a band that started up around the same time as “†”, called †††, a darkwave/dream-pop/witch-house project often referred to as Crosses by journos who hate hunting for ASCII characters, and guess who’s in it, that’s right, it’s Deftones singer Chino Moreno and his buddy Shaun Lopez, from the band Far! I’m sure you’ve heard about them if you’re a ‘Tones-head, amirite, but this is news to me, so in order to catch up to all you hippies I’m going to go listen to a single from their new album, Goodnight, God Bless, I Love U, Delete, called “Invisible Hand.” So it starts off with some sort of glitchy-ish techno beat, and then the Deftones guy suddenly starts jumping up and down all hip-hop style, yelling and ranting about something, and then there’s a barrage of angry Death Grips-inspired haunted-house-metal. I don’t really hear anything compelling going on here, but feel free to pretend to find something redeemable about it.
  • Oh no, come on, not another Canadian indie band, I’m really not in the mood! OK, it’s Metric, so there’s an outside chance that this might be salvageable, even though the singer is involved with Broken Social Scene, I don’t really know right now. The band’s new album, Formentera II, features the single “Who Would You Be For Me,” a sort of ’90s cowboy-goth-tinged chill-pop jam that’s not unlistenable, it’s OK.
  • We’ll wrap up the week with Australian/South African singing man Troye Sivan, who portrayed young Wolverine in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. OK, so Something To Give Each Other, his new full-length, includes the single “Rush,” a house-chilldown whose video features Sivan smoking weed out of a banana and singing gently through his Auto-Tune. Yay, Auto-Tune, what would we do with it!

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson

Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 615 pages)

In April of this year, social media had a field day when, soon after launch, a SpaceX rocket exploded 24 miles in the air and Elon Musk’s team called it a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

What most people didn’t know is that this phrase wasn’t a euphemism devised by a beleaguered PR team, but a term that SpaceX had long used to describe a strategy: Move fast, take risks, blow stuff up, learn from it. It explains why, right after the explosion, Musk said to his team: “Nicely done, guys. Success.”

That strategy is not just a business slogan but a way of life for Musk, who is not only the world’s richest man but possibly its most interesting. The tech world used to have a galaxy of superstars, to include Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Jack Dorsey. After his purchase of Twitter, Musk started taking up all the oxygen in the room, making all these movers-and-shakers in the tech world sideshows or opening acts for him.

Whether you admire or loathe him, Musk is one of the most consequential people on the planet, and Walter Isaacson, formerly head of Time and CNN, does a masterful job at explaining why in his exhaustive new biography. Spanning 615 pages before the footnotes, bibliography and acknowledgments, it’s a compilation of interviews with Musk and his family and business associates, and two years of following Musk around. Essentially, the only way you could know more about Elon Musk is to have witnessed the 52 years of his life yourself.

And while most of what we know about Musk started when he became an internet multimillionaire at age 27, it’s the formative stuff — the things that happened in childhood and adolescence — that best explains him. Unlike, say, Zuckerberg, who seems to have had a relatively stable childhood in suburban New York, Musk grew up in challenging circumstances in South Africa, the child of unconventional parents who were themselves the children of unconventional parents.

Take his maternal grandfather, who worked as a rodeo performer, construction hand and chiropractor. One day he drove past a single-engine airplane sitting in a field. He had no cash and didn’t know how to fly, but convinced the owner to trade the airplane for his car. “The family came to be known as the Flying Haldemans, and [Musk’s grandfather] was described by a chiropractic trade journal as ‘perhaps the most remarkable figure in the history of flying chiropractors,’ a rather narrow, albeit accurate, accolade.”

Musk’s mother, Maye, was part of the “Flying Haldemans” and was for a time a model, but it was perhaps his father, Errol Musk, described as “an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist,” who had the biggest impact, because of his abusive behavior. Elon’s brother, Kimbal, who, like Elon, has no contact with his father today, said Errol had “zero compassion,” and Elon Musk still chokes up when talking about how his father treated him as a child, at times making him stand for an hour while his father yelled him calling him an idiot and worthless, Isaacson writes. School was no better — young Elon was constantly getting beaten up, and he was sent to wilderness-type camp during the summer where the boys were literally told to fight each other to survive, and some campers had actually died. Musk described the camp as “a paramilitary Lord of the Flies.”

Isaacson said these early experiences help explain why, even today, Musk’s moods “cycle through light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what those around him dreaded as ‘demon mode.’” Elon’s first wife, Justine, told Isaacson that in South Africa, Elon “learned to shut down fear,” adding, “If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”

The sins of the father haunted the son even as he left South Africa for Canada just before he turned 17. He went by himself and later was joined by his mother and siblings. Soon after he got to Canada, he lost all his money when he failed to return to a bus before it took off; that experience was what got him thinking about ways the financial industry needed disrupting, which eventually led him to a troubled partnership with PayPal founder Peter Thiel.

But Musk’s first millions came from a venture called Zip2, an internet startup that created city guides for newspapers. Then in 1999 he founded a venture he called X.com, which he saw as a “one-stop everything-store for all financial needs: banking, digital purchases, checking, credit cards, investments and loans. He described the venture to Isaacson as “the place where all the money is at,” which makes X, as in the company formerly known as Twitter, seem like child’s play.

From there Isaacson goes on with astonishing detail into the creation of Tesla and SpaceX and sundry other ventures, as well as the relationships that came after Justine. Musk has 11 children with three women, the youngest (with singer Grimes) named X, Y, and Techno Mechanicus, who is called Tau.

The X obsession is more than a little strange, and the richer Musk gets, the more the world gives him a pass for his strangeness and the cruelty that he seems to have inherited from his dad.

“Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness?” Isaacson writes. “The answer is no, of course not. One can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones. But it’s also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly. It can be hard to remove the dark ones without unraveling the whole cloth.” Isaacson, who has also written biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs, among others, was granted astounding access to Musk and his associates; he says Musk even encouraged his adversaries to speak with him. There will yet be other biographies written; Musk is still in the early stages of his goal to transfer human consciousness to Mars, and he seems to think time is running out to save the species. Then again, a risk-taker like Musk may run out of time himself. His grandfather, the leader of “The Flying Haldemans,” had a motto: “Live dangerously — carefully.” He wasn’t careful enough. He died when Elon was 3, in a plane crash.

Isaacson’s prose is sparse; he lets his subject and interviewees do the talking, and they all had plenty to say. This is the rare book that I recommend reading on a tablet or phone. The heft of the book makes it difficult to hold comfortably. It’s hard to pick up, but it’s also hard to put down. A —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 23/10/05

Wolves in the Throne Room, Crypt of Ancestral Knowledge (Relapse Records)

I remember this Olympia, WA trio from way back; the name impressed me but the music — a mixture of various disparate Bathory/Boris/Neurosis thingamajigs microwaved to extreme-metal-ish perfection for the benefit of beginner indie-metal stans — didn’t. 20 years on, this is more of the same, music that’d be perfect for gore-horror-movie man-to-ghoul transformation sequences, you know, waves of raucous, tortured monster-yelling buoyed by (place name of earl-Aughts-era Epitaph Records band here) guitar spazzing and such and so, nothing you haven’t heard before but (more or less) epic toward a bargain-bin fashion, intended to impress the easily impressed. I’ve never liked this kind of stuff, but if demon-caterwauling, pre-Sunn(((O))) noise-thrash and etc is your bag, don’t let me stop you, not that I ever have, to my eternal chagrin. By the way, “Initiates of the White Hart” starts off with a mandolin, not that that explains anything, and “Crown of Stone” is like Enya on downers. A —Eric W. Saeger

Elm Street, The Great Tribulation (Massacre Records)

Well, what a nice surprise this is. Seems like 90 percent of the jazz albums I’ve been getting for review lately have been breezy dark-coffee-house exercises (luckily there’s been a lull in singer-oriented Big Book projects; not that I don’t like hearing the 4,749th interpretation of “Nature Boy,” there’s just no need for it in current_year), but this one, the debut EP from the Manhattan School Of Music pianist, is deeply ritzy ambiance, stuff you’d expect to hear at a snobby wedding reception for which all the stops have been pulled. The difference comes by way of the fact that Fujiwara is supported by a four-piece string section, along with a vibes person and a pretty chill drummer; as well, our heroine tables a pretty dazzling, dextrous version of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” and, in a really courageous effort, offers a retrofitted version of a Japanese children’s song from her earlier life (“Hotaru Koi”). This is well worth the trip, folks. A+

Playlist

  • Like every Friday, Oct. 6 will be a day on which new albums are released in a giant gust, there’s no place left to hide, let’s go look at the — wait, folks, wait, I can’t believe it, guess who’s got an album coming out, you’ll simply die: It’s none other than 1980s boy-man-toddler Rick Astley, I’m not kidding you! Astley is from the U.K., because no one else would have him, and his claim to fame is being the subject of the “RickRoll” internet meme that was first discovered in a newly unearthed Babylonian tomb from 12,000 BC, but it never gets old, am I right, folks? It’s the prank where you post something to everyone on your social media space and tell them to click a link in order to find out more information, but what happens instead is you’re sent to a YouTube of Astley, looking like a preteen, singing his one hit, in a super-serious man-voice, the famous awful song “Never Gonna Give You Up!” Ha ha, OK, Billboard announcement page, fun time’s over, if you think I’m actually going to search YouTube for a link to a “new” Rick Astley song, nudge-wink, from a totally fake album called Are We There Yet and then suddenly find myself watching Doogie Howser singing “Never Gonna Give You Up,” um, no, I’ll have you know I’m not that dumb! OK fine, I’m going, let’s see what this is, this quote-unquote, air-quotes, “new Rick Astley song,” which is called (I’m serious, folks) “Never Gonna Stop.” Huh, hold the phone, guys, it’s not anywhere near as stupid as you’re imagining, it’s bonk-bonk piano-soul, and Astley is singing sort of like Bill Withers, I would actually listen to this song if I didn’t have exactly 2,593 other CDs in my car.
  • The Rural Alberta Advantage is a Canadian indie trio, but other than that, they’re OK! Their new album, The Rise & The Fall, includes a single titled “Conductors” that is really quite muscular, a loping strummer that evokes Kings Of Leon and even a little bit of old-school emo.
  • My wife is from Texas, so it’s always hilarious when I troll her yankee-style. For example, she worked super-hard for years to lose her southern drawl, so every couple of weeks I start talking in an Alabama trucker accent, like the “Git ’Er Done” guy, Larry The Cable Guy, and after an hour or so, she starts to slip and talk about eating grits and whatnot in a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader accent, it’s so funny, you’d have to be there, but another prank I like pulling is when we’re watching TV and I go off to write my book or this column or check in on my social media friends, I change the channel to CMT, because Reba McEntire’s sitcom is always on it, I don’t think they have any other shows, and before you know it there she is, drawling like Reba. Endless laughs that never get old, fam, but in this case it’s relevant, because a new Reba album is coming at us fast, titled Not That Fancy! Now just let me go and — wait, the entire world has been rickrolled by Reba, because from what I’m seeing this isn’t an album, it’s some dumb audiobook, written by a bored ghostwriter, I’m sure, so forget it, false alarm, at least I didn’t have to go listen to some new Reba song.
  • • We’ll put this week in the books with Dogstar, because their new album, Somewhere Between The Power Lines And Palm Trees, has such a long, space-filling name that I’ll finally have time to catch up on Amy Diaz’s film reviews and see if one single movie that has come out in the last three years is worth watching, I seriously doubt it! Anyway, Dogstar’s new single, “Breach,” is a grindy ’90s-rock shepherd’s pie of Marilyn Manson, Weezer and — wait, the bass player is actual Keanu Reeves, you people need to tell me these things before I start riffing! This is actually cool! —Eric W. Saeger

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Happiness Falls, by Angie Kim

Happiness Falls, by Angie Kim (Hogarth, 387 pages)

What if a father went missing, and the only person with information about what happened was a disabled teenager who was unable to talk?

That’s the disturbing premise at the heart of Happiness Falls, the second novel by the author of 2019’s Miracle Creek, Angie Kim.

The novel is narrated by Mia, a 20-year-old college student, home for the pandemic and prone to rattling on at length about anything that comes to mind.

She has two brothers, the younger of whom is autistic and has also been diagnosed with something called mosaic Angelman syndrome, a genetic disorder “which means he can’t talk, has motor difficulties, and — this is what fascinates many people who’ve never heard of AS — has an unusually happy demeanor with frequent smiles and laughter.”

Eugene is 14 and is primarily cared for by his father, a stay-at-home dad who daily takes him for long walks in a park near their home in the suburbs of Virginia. One day in June 2020, however, Eugene arrives home alone — running, dirty, disheveled and agitated, with traces of what appear to be blood under his fingertips.

Mia, who like the rest of her family is extremely protective of Eugene, later washes Eugene’s clothes and directs him to shower, one of many reactions that she later comes to question. But the Korean-American family is slow to realize that something bad might have happened to the father — they assume that there’s some rational explanation for why the father is slow to return and don’t even call the police for hours.

Once they do, a series of events unfolds that causes Mia, her other brother and her mother to question everything they believed about their life to that point, in particular what both Eugene and their father might be capable of, what secrets they might be concealing.

When, during an interview with police detectives, Eugene becomes upset and lunges at his mother, the teen comes under suspicion. Could he have violent tendencies the family has covered up, and could he have accidentally or even intentionally harmed his father?

And the discovery of texts the father sent to an unfamiliar woman — who is also now missing — calls into question his fidelity to his wife and family.

Meanwhile, other snippets of evidence keep turning up — perplexing snippets of video shot by passers-by the day of the disappearance, security footage showing the father’s credit card being used, and a backpack found in a river that contained a water-logged notebook in which the father had been recording notes on what he called the “Happiness Quotient.”

A less skilled writer could have taken the bare bones of this story and turned out a Hollywood thriller. But Kim makes it next-level by incorporating research on happiness and how changes in its baseline (literally, happiness levels falling and rebounding) affect our sense of well-being. And the novel is deeply researched on the subject of people who are unable to speak, because of severe autism or other disorders.

Kim explains in her author’s note that she experienced the frustration of being unable to communicate when her family moved to the U.S. when she was 11 and only knew a few “essential English phrases” she’d memorized. “Our society — not just the U.S., but human society in general — equates verbal skills, especially oral fluency, with intelligence. Even though there was a good reason I couldn’t speak English, I felt stupid, judged and ashamed,” she wrote.

Eugene, trapped in a seemingly impenetrable bubble, appears to have this sort of frustration, apparently processing some sort of trauma in the only way he knows how, by incessantly jumping on a trampoline and making anguished animal-like sounds, or zoning out by watching anime on his tablet. What he has going for him is love — a family that is unwilling to give up on him, no matter what has happened. But the novel also questions whether our expressions can go too far, to the point where they become damaging.

Happiness Falls is both an engrossing mystery and a family drama with multiple layers of complexity. A minor irritant is the series of footnotes that populate the book — not substantiation of facts, as footnotes are in a research paper, but asides derived from Mia’s hyper-analytical stream of consciousness. Addressing the reader, Mia says at the beginning of the narrative that readers can skip over the footnotes to get to the end, and eventually I did just that, as their presence was such an annoyance in the novel. It’s not that I objected to what Mia was saying in the footnotes, but their presentation interrupted the flow.

Also, I questioned whether this needed to be yet another pandemic book. But those are minor quibbles, and Happiness Falls delivers, maybe not happiness, but a novel you can get lost in this fall. A

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