Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/11/23

Gale Forces, Highlights Of Existence (self-released)

Well, I don’t mind this at all. As often as I’ve been disappointed by the last few months’ worth of Los Angeles bands darkening my door, there’s a lot of cred here, starting with the roster, which includes ex-members of Engine Kid and This White Light, along with a guy who’s still in AWOLNATION. The raucous music that’s on this LP isn’t hard to describe; there’s a lot of Aughts-era stoner rock to it, buoyed by a “brown” sort of guitar sound that typifies Trail Of Dead, and frontman Jade Devitt’s voice (he collaborated with someone from (((Sunn O))), by the way) evokes U2’s Bono on Nick Cave juice; that is to say it’s energetic but not hopelessly commercially shrinkwrapped. The end result is a bunch of tunes that are too cool for sports-bar rock but still quite accessible; SST Records would have loved this stuff as a companion product to Redd Kross and bands like that. A

dreamTX, Living In Memory Of Something Sweet (self-released)

Dallas, Texas,-based multi-instrumentalist and producer Nick Das is looking into techno reinvention after spending a few years chasing Drag City Records cred the way his fellow Texans do. He hatted out for Woodstock, New York, to inhale the spiritual air, promptly finding himself roasting in July without air conditioning, so this collection obviously has some trippy life stories behind it. “Get Around” has a tribal bend to it, evoking sunburnt neo-hippies jumping and dancing crook-legged; it’s celebratory, yes, but it’s also pretty gothic in its way, and I definitely like the muzzled no-wave guitar sound. “Elated” aims for the same sort of emotional bliss; like a sort of shoegaze 2.0, it’s sexless but rave-y, with multi-tracked faraway chant-like vocals begging the listener just to let go and be elated over something, whatever it might be. I’m sure a lot of writers will file this under dream-pop for the convenience of it, but it’s more than that, a very listenable mystery-meat I found particularly blissful really. A+

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nov. 24 is the day after Thanksgiving, aka Black Friday, and wouldn’t you know it, as always, even though Black Friday is the holiest of shopping days, very few albums will be released, assumedly because all the bands and artists and record company Men In Black know that people won’t be buying albums, they’ll be trapped at the mall, in the Apple and T-Mobile stores, trying to buy just the right glorified Tamagotchi for their ungrateful little Jacobs and Marissas, waiting around for some store clerk (who knows even less stuff about smartphones than they do, if that’s even possible) to take pity on them and answer their technical questions, like “Where’s the ‘on’ button?” (By now I’ve probably given away the fact that I hate smartphones; being an OG software engineer I see them as nothing more than walkie-talkies that tell you the weather). But anyway, Friday is a day that ends in ‘y’ and that means incorrigible songwriting addict Robert Pollard has written enough sort-of-songs to release a new Guided by Voices album whether I want him to or not! When last we left Pollard, federal agents were unable to confiscate his recording equipment owing to an obscure constitutional clause called “artistic freedom,” and so, for what, the 10th time this year, I’m again tasked with peering through an electron microscope at his latest songwriting outburst, an LP titled Nowhere To Go But Up, in an effort to find something to like about it. When last we left this nonsense, it was July and our intrepid hero had just released Welshpool Frillies, which had a song that I said was OK, not that I can remember anything about it, so I’ll have to take my word for it. OK, aaaand I’m riffing, let’s listen to the new single, “For The Home,” there it is, on YouTube. It starts out with some unplugged Led Zeppelin III weirdness, which would have been fine if Pollard had simply left it at that and maybe yodeled over it, but no, here we go, he rips off Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in The Sky,” hoping that there are three people left on the planet who’ve never heard that song and they’re Guided By Voices fans. It’s cool enough but pointless.

• British indie band Spector enjoy making borderline pub-rock for sports bars, you know, that goop that sounds important and edgy even though it’s not, and suddenly you’re saying to the waitress, “Sure, I’ll try the extra-hot wings,” and then you regret it. Their bandleader, Fred Macpherson, is influenced by ’80s/90s swill like OMD, Spandau Ballet and Ultravox, but I’m going to listen to the new single “Driving Home for Halloween,” from their fast-approaching new album Here Come The Early Nights, nevertheless. Oh lol, this is so gross, the tune’s faux-punk AOR hook is something you want to get out of your head as soon as it catches hold, it’s like a gothy version of the worst Kaiser Chiefs song you’ve ever heard, and there’s no escaping it. Absolutely terrible.

• Take That is a British dance-pop band that’s won zillions of British music awards, meaning that no American has ever heard of them except for me, just now. This Life is their ninth studio album, and the title track is — aw, I can’t snark at this, it’s nice and dancey, a dumb piano-pop thing, sort of like Andy Grammer or Billy Joel, and at least the video doesn’t have a runway model in it pretending to be a normal person.

• We’ll end with all y’all putting on cowboy hats, because country dude Chris Stapleton releases his new one, Higher, this week! He’ll be at the Bank of NH Pavilion for three days next August, tickets are going fast, and in the torchy new single “I Think I’m In Love With You” he sounds like a cross between Bon Scott and Peabo Bryson! Yee-haw, you have to love it!

Build the Life You Want, by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey

Build the Life You Want, by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey (Portfolio/Penguin, 208 pages)

Trying to make sense of the career path of Arthur C. Brooks can make your head hurt. Brooks started out as a classical French hornist and for a while played for a Baltimore brass quintet before joining an orchestra in Barcelona. From there, he was a music teacher in Florida before deciding to study economics. A master’s degree and Ph.D. later, he became head of a conservative think-tank, then a Harvard professor, and he’s now written a book with Oprah Winfrey.

The only connective tissue in all of this is that Brooks, in his own life and professionally, is a master of the pursuit of happiness, which qualifies him to teach the subject at Harvard and to write about it for The Atlantic. It is through his column there that Oprah Winfrey attached herself to his train. Their collaboration, Build the Life You Want, is a compendium of Brooks’ research on happiness, presented O magazine style.

They begin with by recounting the last days of Brooks’ mother-in-law, who had a challenging life and was confined to a bed at age 93 yet insisted she was happier than she’d ever been. Brooks questioned her and learned that her happiness came in part from her sense of agency, and her cultivation of relationships, work and religious faith.

Happiness, Brooks and Winfrey contend, in the many sections of the book that teeter dangerously toward platitude, is not a destination but a direction.

“You can’t be happy — but you can be happier,” they write. This requires nurturing the three components of happier-ness: enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose, all of which require some degree of struggle. It is throwing off the idea of happiness being an achievable, sustainable state that allows us to be happier, to their way of thinking.

They delve into arguments that feel a little tired, such as the importance of not being led by emotions. They frame this within the concept of metacognition — “thinking about thinking” — viewing emotions as something to control, rather than letting them control you. To do this requires practice, Brooks and Winfrey write, offering four ways to develop the ability: becoming more observant of your feelings, writing about them in a journal, tapping into happy memories and looking for “meaning and learning in the hard parts of life.”

Their next recommendation, choosing better emotions, is a bit trickier, but they maintain this can be done. How? Practicing gratitude (more journaling required), finding ways to laugh, and choosing hope over optimism. The latter are not synonyms, they argue, saying “Hope involves personal agency, meaning it gives you a sense of power and motivation.” Like an earlier section, in which they insist that enjoyment and pleasure are different things, this assertion can send you down a rabbit hole of disagreement unrelated to their general point. Best not go there.

You can also get bogged down in their descriptions of how sympathy differs from empathy, which is different from compassion. But their point is that compassion combines empathy with a stoic tolerance of uncomfortable feelings associated with another person’s pain. “To be a more compassionate (and thus happier) person, start by working on your toughness. To be tougher in the face of another’s pain doesn’t mean feeling it less. Rather, you should learn to feel the pain without being impaired to act.”

Brooks and Winfrey challenge the common assumption that difficult times call for more “self-care.” Research has, in fact, shown that focusing on ourselves excessively does less to improve our sense of well-being than focusing on others. They offer suggestions for breaking this cycle, such as “avoid your own reflection” (this includes things like taking selfies and Googling yourself) and refraining from making constant judgments about the world.

Perhaps most helpful, particularly as we head into the holiday season, is their advice on family conflict. Families can be morass of unmet expectations and simmering resentments even when there aren’t larger problems like a “values breach,” which is the rejection of other family members’ deeply held beliefs. People often try to ignore conflicts like these, assuming they will age out of them, but in most cases these points of contention become more fixed over time. The authors recommend regular conversations to try to work out small conflicts before they become large, accepting others’ values, and they say, “don’t treat your family like emotional ATMs.” They also warn against “chronic negativity,” which requires a degree of emotional separation to overcome.

Finally, Brooks and Winfrey offer tips on categorizing friends as “real” or “deal” and cultivating friendships that contribute to happier-ness because they are “deeply real.” Meaningful work — “work that is love made visible” — and spirituality round out what is needed for happier-ness.

It is unclear how much of Build the Life You Want is Brooks and how much is Winfrey, although the scattered “A Note from Oprah” pages throughout the book suggest Winfrey mostly lent her name to the project. Some passages, the authors acknowledge, have already been published in The Atlantic. There’s nothing groundbreaking here for anyone familiar with the authors, but also nothing that isn’t worth a reminder. Then again, with such star power, it’s a bit disappointing that it doesn’t dazzle more than it does. B-

Album Reviews 23/11/16

Sick Boss, Businessless (Drip Audio Records)

Brandishing not just post-rock but indeed post-apocalyptic sound adventures a la That F-king Tank, the meanderings of this Vancouver, B.C., six-piece outfit are mostly loud and sinister, nicking from Jimi Hendrix, 1970s-spaghetti-crime flicks, Primus and really anything they can wrap their instruments around. Slotted into the fusion jazz category for reasons of convenience, this bunch is led by guitarist Cole Schmidt and includes trumpeter JP Carter (who’s collaborated with Destroyer), as well as a violin guy and a cellist; all six of them are terrific improvisers when they’re called upon to put in two cents toward realizing the noise-stomp-meets-Ennio Morricone ideas put forth. Par for the course for any outstanding group of this sort, static-noise jams give way to passages of beauty and vice versa; there are hard riffs, proto-emo chill-outs (“CJ Blues”) and other related-or-not things that complete a picture of a very interesting instrumental group that’ll be around a while with any modicum of luck. A+

Art Feynman, Be Good The Crazy Boys (Western Vinyl Records)

Art Feynman is an alter ego of producer Luke Temple, and it’s a lucky thing I even found that out when I skimmed the press release for this LP; anyone who reads this column knows that I’ve had a soft spot for the Salem, Mass., native since I first heard him years ago and likened him to another artist you’ve never heard of, one Winston Giles (I’m waiting for just one reader to finally get into Giles and express their eternal gratitude in sonnet form in my Facebook messages). This one was recorded live in the studio with a full band, a first for Temple; the record’s nervous but basically carefree feel recalls Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, which was a touchstone in the writing process. The tunes are meant to touch on “the part of the modern collective consciousness that’s struggling to maintain balance in a toxic, chaotic world,” but it’s a lot lighter-hearted than that; “In CD” feels like a Vampire Weekend demo intended for approval by B-52s. Infectious, massively accessible, genius-level stuff. A+

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nov. 17 will be a day of new CD releases, try to stay calm, with regard to all the new music! It’s almost Thanksgiving, fam, and in order to honor that pumpkin-spiced holiday in the most appropriate way possible, Hollywood released a movie named after it, and the soundtrack was done by one Brandon Roberts, who handled the soundtracking for a bunch of other nonsense-horror movies, including A Quiet Place and The Woman in Black. At present the soundtrack isn’t available, probably because no one would buy a CD of a soundtrack about serial-killer turkeys or whatever it is, but, just saying, I did look into it for you. In fact, I’m a little surprised that there was an actual professional soundtrack for that movie, but you just never know what’ll happen when those Hollywood guys start drinking at Spago’s, you know?

• If you spend a lot of time on Twitter or basically any other social media site that isn’t Facebook and is thus possessed of a little bit of street credibility, you know that Dolly Parton is now Taken Seriously by Serious Internet Posters because she’s rattled off a few virtue-signaling posts about something or other, which resulted in a noticeable uptick in her cred! Yes, her coolness factor is now at Tom Jones level, and all sorts of younger musical artists are hopping on the gravy train, like when Lady Gaga recorded the duet with Tony Bennett for no rational reason whatsoever, but good for her! Yikes, just look at the roster of rockers who contributed to her fast-approaching new album, Rockstar: her version of “Let It Be” features the last two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Magoo or whatever his name is; it basically just sounds like Dolly Parton doing a Vegas version of that tune, in case you ever wanted to hear such a thing. But wait, folks, there’s more, Rob Halford from Judas Priest and Nikki Sixx from Motley Crue appear on the third single, “Bygones,” and it’s pretty funny but serious, like you end up thinking “why did they let Dolly Parton start randomly singing on a disposable heavy metal song,” not that she doesn’t do as good a job as you could ever hope for with it; she sounds wildly out of place, but yes, she does keep pace, singing fast over the metallic riffing, boy did I land on the wrong planet.

• Ah yes, Smoke Fairies, we’ve dealt with them before, to a most pleasant outcome in spite of the fact that the indie-folk ladies rose to fame mostly owing to the fact that famous hamburger-gobbling person Jack White decided they were cute and he simply had to have them on his record label! Who cares, either way, yes, they’re cute, toward an Emily Perkins I-am-the-world’s-weirdest-dorm-mate fashion, so I welcome the chance to hear them sing new songs about ghosts or whatever it is. Carried In Sound, their new album, is on the trucks headed to the stores as we speak, and it will feature a new single, called “Vanishing Line,” a haunting tune that combines Loreena McKennitt’s ren-fair shtick with Enya’s multi-tracked technique. You know, if you’re a pale-skinned goth who’s never listened to these gals, do yourself a favor and check ‘em out; they’re completely crazy but don’t let that stop you.

• We’ll end the week with Salvage Enterprise, the new album from The Polyphonic Spree, a huge-ass “choral rock band” from Dallas, Texas! On Nov. 17, they released the single, “Shadows On The Hillside,” a really pleasant tune that’s pure ’70s acid-AOR, recalling Nilsson and, quite frankly, The Who’s Tommy album. It’s pretty deep and wide, well worth checking out.

A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (Penguin Press, 448 pages)

Besides buying Twitter and normalizing electric cars, Elon Musk is known for his belief that human beings need to get off this planet and in particular colonize Mars. “It’s a little cold, but we can warm it up,” his SpaceX website says, adding that because gravity on Mars is 38 percent that of Earth’s, “you would be able to lift heavy things and bounce around.”

That sounds like an argument you would make to a 5-year-old. Also, a little cold? The average temperature is -80 Fahrenheit.

The optimism about populating an inhospitable planet has been long overdue for a reality check, and Kelly Weinersmith, a biologist, and her husband, Zach, a cartoonist, have stepped up to the plate.

The Weinersmiths are self-described “space geeks” who have studied the subject for four years, longer if you count the research they did for their 2017 book Soonish.

“We love visionary plans for a glorious future. We also are very skeptical people,” they write.

The Weinersmiths say the current conversation about Mars colonization centers around the specifics of getting there and settling in, while larger, stickier questions — such as ethical air rationing — are swept aside. They accept the noble intentions of the “space billionaires” — namely Musk and Jeff Bezos — but think that done right, colonizing space should be something that takes us centuries, not decades.

A City on Mars — subtitled “Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?” — comprises six parts, liberally punctuated with cartoons. The first section addresses the biological costs to spacefarers and the psychology of space settlement (i.e., how to go to Mars without losing your mind), as well as the logistical nightmare that is “space sex.” The people we’ve sent to space thus far are the best humankind has to offer; they go through gauntlets of testing to ensure they’re in peak condition. Even then, encapsulated in all their high-tech gear, they suffer the physical insults of living outside Earth’s gravity, including muscle and bone loss and eye damage. They’re exposed to higher levels of radiation in a place where medical facilities are in short supply. We don’t know what will be the physical effects of a longer period in space, much farther away than we’ve gone.

And there are the “morally dicey” issues that come with conceiving a child (should one be conceived) as basically an experiment. For example, “What we know about human bones in space today comes entirely from fully developed adults,” the authors write. “We have no knowledge about how altered gravity regimes will affect, say, a twelve-year-old girl having a growth spurt.”

The second and third sections of the book focus on living arrangements, including housing, food and waste disposal. You’d think anyone who signed up for a trip to Mars wouldn’t care about food beyond sustenance, but the Weinersmiths write, “People who study space psychology report good food as one of the most important factors in day-to-day well-being — an idea also found in books from the era of polar exploration.” (Fun fact: NASA prohibits adult beverages on the International Space Station, but on other trips, astronauts have taken cognac, whiskey and wine.)

Sections 4, 5 and 6 explore big-picture challenges: space laws, space states, space politics and of course the potential for space wars (which strikes down the argument for getting off this planet to escape the tumult here). The basis of space law was the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which in English was only about 2,500 words and basically said no weapons of mass destruction or military exercises in space. It also said all space activity should be carried out “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries.” That treaty and the Moon Agreement of 1979, however, do little to mitigate the kind of conflicts a greater human presence in space will raise, both in international politics and in the minutiae of spacecraft law such as whether starving astronauts can legally eat one of their crew. (There’s a scientific paper on space cannibalism titled “Survival and Sacrifice in Mars Exploration.”)

Mars, which has 24-hour days similar to ours, could possibly be “terraformed,” its climate made more hospitable by detonating nuclear weapons at its poles, eventually making it warmer and wetter, and it’s easy enough to get to compared to other sites, but it’s far enough away that if something goes wrong you’re on your own. And the Weinersmiths envision everything, concrete and fanciful, that can go wrong, right up to war breaking out between the factions of Bezostralia and Muskow. They leave no moon rock uncovered.

Even a dystopian Earth is still better than Mars, the Weinersmiths argue: “That Earth still has a breathable atmosphere, a magnetosphere to protect against radiation, and quite possibly still has McDonald’s breakfast. It is not a world we would like to inhabit, but it is the one world in the solar system where you can run around naked for ten minutes and still be alive at the end.”

They’re not saying we should never go to Mars, just that we should do so slowly, after having worked some things out, like how to establish a short-term research station and how to make babies in space. B+

Album Reviews 23/11/09

Newmoon, “Fading Phase” (self-released)

Funnily enough I was just watching a long documentary about shoegaze bands for no real reason, luckily for me. Newmoon, based in Antwerp, Belgium, has already released a couple of albums to “critical acclaim” (which, let’s be honest, in some cases may pretty much mean that one of the band’s friends said “it’s awesome” on Instagram), and this single will lead off their third when it drops in March 2024; it’s mastered by Simon Scott of shoegaze legends Slowdive. That last bit is important, because if there ain’t no plasma-blob immersiveness to the guitars it simply ain’t shoegaze. Toward that, the guitars are pretty bright and, well, tropical as the tune rolls out, until of course the inevitable noise-chaos appears two-thirds of the way through. I’m definitely more of a My Bloody Valentine guy than a Glasvegas fan, but all the ingredients fit, from the sexless faraway Q Lazzarus-like vocals to the ludicrous reverb level. It’s fine. A-

Dokken, Heaven Comes Down (Silver Lining Music)

Once you little Zoomer rascals get off my lawn, I’ll tell you the story of way back in the 1980s, when I completely ignored this Los Angeles-based glam/hair-metal band, mostly because my guitarist at the time thought they were awesome; he and I shared a strained, awkward mutual respect. I preferred bands that had a pulse and obvious brain damage, like Slade, Wasp and Alcatrazz, where Dokken had a weird rep as some sort of borderline prog-rock thingamajig but was really just about getting dates, which is of course the only reason anyone starts a metal band in the first place (raises hand). OK whatever, the LP kicks off with “Fugitive,” a decent speedster that’s decorated with either a 12-string or sitar that makes it sound important, and then the main riff kicks in and yep, it’s good, making the listener want to punch someone in the face out of adrenaline overload. Singer Don Dokken is as boring as ever, which really drags things down during obligato lonesome-male filler tune “Is It Me Or You.” The band’s the same as ever, folks, pseudo-epic slow-burn tunes (“I’ll Never Give Up”) yadda yadda. A-

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nov. 10 will be a day marked by the release of many new albums, because Friday is the traditional day of the week when all the bands and artistes release their new records in the hope that people will buy them! Hello to all the new readers out there, I’m your host for this journalistic exercise, in which, every week, I try my darnedest to find something nice to say about albums that should never have seen the light of day. Just so’s you know, I actually do try to wax positive about all the bands and sonically creative types that send things to my physical and virtual mailboxes in the usually misplaced hope that I’ll be in good enough of a mood to say something positive, which, my longtime readers know, is like expecting the famous groundhog Punxsutawney Phil to neither confirm nor deny that he saw his shadow but instead to start singing “Vesti la giubba” from the classic opera Pagliacci in such a perfect tenor that people begin weeping uncontrollably on the spot. No, kidding, I’m usually really nice to bands, especially local ones, not that that ever gets me anywhere.

Yow, here we go, look at that, I had all but forgotten the the early Aughts had ever even happened (I’d need 50 pages of space in this paper to list all the reasons), so it was quite a trip when I noticed that the Cold War Kids have a new album coming out. The LP is self-titled, which is such a late-Aughts thing to do, but I liked those guys; they had Spoon-level songwriting, even if they were too catchy and commercial-sounding for the snobs at Pitchfork Media (which is actually a selling point in the opinion of most people, let’s be honest). Anyhow, the Kids have a new single, of course, and it’s called “Run Away With Me,” let’s listen to its YouTube version. Wow, it’s energetic and bouncy and poppy, Pitchfork would hate it, and at the moment I’m trying to find a reason not to do the same. It’s disco-y and works a Weeknd/LMFAO angle, but — OK, here’s the chorus. Right, it’s cool, try to picture the Strokes having a Some Girls period, that’s what this is. I physically can’t hate these guys.

• Pinkpantheress is a British 22-year-old who had viral success on TikTok; when our civilization is gone, TikTok success will be something that will puzzle archaeologists. She’s into bedroom pop and two-step garage, and thus her new single, “Capable of Love,” is a lot more listenable than Ariana Grande, there, I said it.

• We’ll end with Beirut’s new one, Hadsel, because why not. The band is led by trumpet/ukulele dude Zach Condon, and the new single “So Many Plans” is a plodding weird-beard tune that crosses Sigur Ros with Carolina Chocolate Drops; it’s liveable.

Mr. Texas, by Lawrence Wright

Mr. Texas, by Lawrence Wright (Knopf, 336 pages)

Sonny Lamb is a rancher who lives with his wife, Lola, in the middle of nowhere, Texas. It takes them 45 minutes to get to the nearest Dollar General. He is a kind-hearted man, the sort who, when he takes a prized bull to the livestock auction, can’t stomach it when the animal is about to go to a slaughterhouse, so he buys his bull back, even though the animal was only at auction because he was so broke.

This could explain why Lamb is just getting by in life, and suffering a bit of an early midlife crisis, sensing that “his life was ebbing, inevitably, pointlessly.” His wife loves him, but her large, fertile extended family exacerbates her husband’s feeling of everlasting mediocrity: The family “all carried themselves with an air of importance that Sonny could never hope to achieve.”
Then one day Lamb gets himself on the map when he saves a young girl and her horse from a barn fire. This happens around the time that a Texas state legislator dies mid-term, and a political mover-and-shaker is seeking a replacement in line with his interests. He’s looking for “Someone who stands for good, conservative values. Someone who commands the respect of all who know him. Someone with ideas. A patriot. A hero. A Republican.”
Sonny Lamb is none of these things, really. He’s adrift in a red state with “blue measles.” But someone had taken a photo of him riding a terrified horse out of a burning barn, and he’s hero enough.

Such is the beginning of Mr. Texas, a rollicking novel by New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Lawrence Wright. A Dallas native who lives in Austin, Wright has said he came up with the character of Sonny Lamb more than two decades ago, and what is now Mr. Texas had earlier lives as a failed screenplay, a failed HBO pilot and even a failed musical. Which is fine, because it’s now a first-rate novel.

The person who plucks Sonny Lamb from obscurity is a lobbyist named L.D. Sparks, who at one point observes, “Funny how a person can live his whole life being good or bad, but there’s nothing on the record, nothing that you can hold in your hand and say, here, take a look, this is who I really am.”

But after Sonny’s heroics at the barn fire, he has a photograph that says exactly that, and even though Sonny also has a history of womanizing and drug abuse after a war injury in Iraq, Sparks realizes he could construct a winning candidacy around the man — with the help of a PR firm, of course. Sparks needs a legislator he can control since he is one vote short in the General Assembly to pass all the things he needs, and Sonny seems perfect, possessed of “youth, looks, good teeth, and naivete.”

Sonny and Lola are initially taken aback when Sparks appears on their doorstep, but Sonny decides this is the chance he needs, since he’s been struggling with the fact that he’s never set an important goal and achieved it. Despite the angst, hilarity ensues. When Sonny appears on a local talk show, his mother calls in to ask why he didn’t consult her before deciding to run. “Don’t just assume you’ve got my vote,” she says.

His Democratic opponent, Valerie Nightingale, is ahead by 25 percentage points. Things are going so poorly that Sonny is starting to think that Sparks was working for Nightingale and scammed him into running. After a debate in which Nightingale mops the floor with him, however, Sparks and the other consultants decide it’s time to exchange the moral high ground for street-fighting, albeit through a political action committee, keeping Sonny’s hands clean.

Meanwhile, Lola has announced that she desperately wants children and they need to try harder. So the couple embark on a “breeding schedule” — sex twice a day, between campaign events, as they throw themselves into a new life that will upend their current one in ways neither can foresee.

While Sonny and his handlers are Republicans, Mr. Texas is partisan, but not problematically so. Wright says he is politically independent and the book skewers all of us, not just the political establishment, mocking people who loathe government while living on Social Security and food stamps, and those who see elected officials as Santa Claus, existing to grant their every wish.
Sonny’s world is our contemporary one; his state is populated by real people and places, like Ted Cruz and the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas, although it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. A scene where legislators go pig-hunting seems made up but is based on reality, similar to an event held simply for Sonny to collect lobbyist checks.

While Mr. Texas gets a tad preachy toward the end and concludes a bit abruptly, this does not diminish the overall pleasure of the novel. This is no Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the classic 1939 film starring Jimmy Stewart, but it’s a version for our time, at least in book form. A —Jennifer Graham

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