Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/08/10

Huey Lewis & The News, Sports [vinyl reissue] (Capitol Records)

I know right, 40 years late, but hey man, this is an actual reissue on vinyl, and another notable aspect of this occasion is the fact that I’ve never reviewed a Huey Lewis record, unless I have, but I doubt it. Anyway, Lewis’ pull quote from the press release for this one goes, “In the early ’80s, there was no internet, no alternative scene, and really only one avenue to success; a hit single on CHR (Contemporary Hit Radio)” and blah blah blah, out of touch much, and plus some nonsense about the band producing this album themselves and such, which I don’t believe for a millisecond, but at any rate, for the benefit of all the millennials I see grumbling on social media about how much better the ’80s were, this album is solid proof that they weren’t, because you had to hear this album’s singles everywhere you went on this planet, from the beep-beep dingbat-pop megahit “Heart Of Rock n Roll” and its evil twin, “I Want a New Drug” to the mindless heavy rock-riffed “Heart and Soul” and the doo-wop pandering of “If This Is It.” So, young folks, if you want to know what 1985 sounded like, it was this: If you weren’t being subjected to the eleventy-zillionth listen of one of the singles from Michael Jackson’s Thriller (the only album to beat this one, sales-wise, that year), it was one of these monstrosities, so really, count your blessings. B

Girlschool, WTFortyfive? (Silver Lining Music)

No, the titular “forty-five” here doesn’t reference Donald Trump, it’s a reminder that this British all-female heavy metal band has been at it for 45 years, exhibiting a knack for technical-enough riffing of a Judas Priest-ish bent all the while, meaning that they’re better musicians than the guys in, say, Saxon, for example, which isn’t supposed to matter anyway in this era of so-called “another politics,” in which activists and such are expected to stop disrespecting others based on anachronistic power levels and whatnot, in other words it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a guy or a girl shredding on guitar, it just is. A noble thing, that, but opening tune “It Is What It Is” is the most generic ’80s-metal track I’ve heard since the entire B-side of the original Fright Night soundtrack. “Cold Dark Heart” is cool, though, a grinder about vampires I think, but, in a move to negate any credibility they could have attained otherwise, the band brought in Saxon frontman Biff Byford to holler a few syllables in the tosser “Born To Raise Hell.” Ah well. B

Playlist

• Aug. 11 is a Friday, which is as good an excuse as any for bands and artistes to put out albums, like the ones we will discuss today in this multiple-award-winning column! I haven’t won an award for my in-depth music journalism since 2007 or thereabouts, so if any reader out there is up for handing out an award, I’d be glad to hear from you, but what would be even better would be someone from New Hampshire Chronicle getting in touch with me for a long-overdue interview; I’d be glad to talk to them and discuss my decades as a rock journalist, especially if it meant that I’d get the chance to maybe run into Fritz Wetherbee at the WMUR snack machine and “totally accidentally” touch his awesome bow tie, and maybe chat with him about my adventures hunting antiques in Warren, N.H., and all the chickens that run around loose in the town, anecdotes I’d gladly allow him to use on his show! With regard to what new rock ‘n’ roll albums I’d suggest Fritz listen to, it’s hard to say, because if he insists on listening to proven great music like Jerry Lee Lewis and Bo Diddley, there’s not much I could offer the esteemed Nashuan this week aside from the latest record from The Hives, The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons! The Hives are, of course, one of the few bands born during the aughts that’s worth even listening to, mostly because, hey, imagine five Swedish dudes who think they’re Jerry Lee Lewis, or the guy from The Cramps, or whichever. Honestly if Fritz and I were at the beach enjoying some cheap beach-stand chop suey right now, I would play the new single from this album, “Bogus Operandi,” in the car, and just crank it until he started bobbing his head over its post-Black Flag punkness. It’d be rad, and then we’d talk about all the ghosts and chickens he’s encountered in our beloved Granite State.

• Ha ha, speaking of Johnny Rotten and whatever, someone tell Fritz Wetherbee that Public Image Ltd. has a new album coming out this Friday, titled End Of World! Boy, I’ll bet my homeboy Fritz would suddenly find his bow tie spinning around like a cartoon Elmer Fudd pinwheel if he heard this new single, “Car Chase,” because it’s a combination of ’80s krautrock and Ozzy Osbourne, sort of, and Johnny’s voice is cracking worse and worse every minute, which actually makes it cool.

• Ack, it’s a day that ends in ‘y,’ so there’s another Neil Young album for me to deal with. Chrome Dreams was supposed to be released in 1977, but it wasn’t. Or not, it seems like YouTube has plenty of video versions of the gentle, breezy, strummy snore-along “Will to Love,” a song that’s decent enough but doesn’t go much of anyplace, not that that’s ever been part of the plan with that dude. Aside from “Ohio” and “Southern Man” I guess. Oh, forget it. Next.

• We’ll end with indie-whatever stalwart Bonnie Prince Billy, who has a new album, Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, coming out in like 10 or 15 minutes! One of the songs is “She Is My Everything,” and in it he sounds like an off-key Peabo Bryson, and he’s singing over a folk guitar, and then he adds some oboe to make it completely unpalatable. I love all the hot new music jams, folks!

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 Heat Will Kill You First, by Jeff Goodell

The Heat Will Kill You First, by Jeff Goodell (Little, Brown and Co., 385 pages )

The effects of a warming planet seem less obvious in New England than in, say, Phoenix, Arizona, where it is 115 degrees Fahrenheit as I write. Except, of course, for the recently flooded towns in Vermont. And the hazy smoke that keeps drifting down here from Canada.

We can argue until the cows come home about whether we sit on the precipice of weather-driven, man-made calamity, but Jeff Goodell’s mind is made up. Heat, he says, is “an extinction force that takes the universe back to its messy beginnings. Before there was light, there was heat. It is the origin of all things and the end of all things.” And he is 100 percent certain about what is driving recent extreme weather: “250 years of hell-bent fuel consumption, which has filled the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide.”

Goodell is a journalist who has been writing about climate for more than a decade. The cover of his 2017 book The Water Will Come looks like a still from a dystopian movie, with a trio of skyscrapers nearly submerged in seawater. Now Goodell is back with the equally alarming title The Heat Will Kill You First. His timing is impeccable.

Smart people on either side of the debate can disagree about whether recent record-setting heat waves are blips in time or a uniquely dangerous threat to humankind. But there’s no disputing that Goodell is an engaging writer at the top of his game. He’s like the love child of Ed Yong and James Patterson, with a little bit of Rachel Carson thrown in, which is to say he writes science-based, dystopian thrillers.

He acknowledges that small changes in global temperatures in recent centuries (overall, we’re up 2.2 degrees) don’t seem particularly scary. “Who can tell the difference between a 77-degree day and an 81-degree day?” he asks. … “Even the phrase ‘global warming’ sounds gentle and soothing, as if the most notable impact of burning fossil fuels will be better beach weather.”

But heat is deadlier than most of us think, he says. The human body is generally a well-regulated heat-generating machine, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of excess heat to kill us. Internally, there’s less than 10 degrees difference between our normal, everything’s-fine temperature of 98 degrees and the catastrophic cell death and organ failure that can occur at 107 degrees. And tragically, we get new examples of this almost every year when another fit athlete dies from heat stroke that occurs during a run or a football practice.

To drive this point home, Goodell recounts the story of the California couple who died with their baby and dog on an otherwise unremarkable day hike close to their home. The deaths, which made national news because they were originally so puzzling, were eventually determined to be from hyperthermia and dehydration. It had been in the 70s when they started the hike going downhill, but temperatures exceeded 100 on their way back up, and all appeared to have died of heat stroke.

“Just being alive generates heat. But if your body gets too hot too fast — it doesn’t matter if that heat comes from the outside on a hot day or the inside from a raging fever — you are in big trouble,” he writes. As our internal temperature rises past 103 degrees, blood pressure falls and people pass out. Interestingly, “This is in fact an involuntary survival mechanism, a way for your brain to get your body horizontal and get some blood to your head. At this point, if you get help and can cool down quickly, you can recover with little permanent damage.” But if you fall in a hot place and there is no one to help, you may never wake up.

Of course, people freeze to death when they fall unintended in cold places; falling and extreme temperatures are bad generally. But heat, Goodell says, is an “extinction force” and “the engine of planetary chaos, the invisible force that melts the ice sheets that will flood coastal cities around the world. It dries out the soil and sucks the moisture out of trees until they are ready to ignite. It revs up the bugs that eat the crops and thaws the permafrost that contains bacteria from the last ice age.” The next pandemic, he predicts, may come from some recently thawed ancient bacteria.

It’s not just humans at risk in extremely hot temperatures; others struggle in ways we normally wouldn’t think about. In the heat wave that hit Portland in 2021, for example, people were finding an unusually high number of injured baby birds on the ground. They weren’t dehydrated. They were leaving their hot, crowded nests before they were old enough to fly. And yes, dogs pant in heat since they can’t sweat like humans or plants, but some dogs fare better in heat than others, and not just because of differences in their fur. “Dogs with flat faces and wide skulls, such as English bulldogs, are twice as likely to succumb to heat as beagles, border collies and other breeds with more pronounced snouts.”

There is hardly a page without an odd, memorable fact like that, and a beautifully crafted paragraph that, as an added bonus, kindles a vapor of fear. Goodell, a longtime writer for Rolling Stone, is a pro at the dialogue-rich narrative style that keeps readers turning pages. Also, he’s really, really worried about us. From the sea creatures dying in warming oceans to deliverymen and farm workers passing out from heat stroke, he sounds the alarm on every page: you don’t know what is coming, you don’t know what is here.

In air-conditioned offices and homes, it can seem a bit overwrought, but, as he points out, there is a big divide between “the cool and the damned.” The affluent have central air conditioning while the poor swelter in homes without AC, or with old, inefficient units they can hardly afford to turn on. The disparity is worse in poorer countries. “Two hundred and twenty million people live in Pakistan, but there are fewer than a million air conditioners in the country,” Goodell writes. Economic inequality will be manifest in a “thermal gap,” he said, in which some people will fare better than others.

Goodell seems doubtful that things will improve; he notes that, were carbon emissions to cease today, carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, but also acknowledges that human beings are adaptable and are already coming up with new ways to live; some cities, for example, are painting streets white to deflect heat. In other words, most of us can probably survive this — if the heat doesn’t kill us first. A

Album Reviews 23/08/03

Babychaos, “Guilty Hands (I Bleed)” (self-released)

Initial single heralding a fast-forthcoming EP from this eye-rollingly edgy goth chick, who, like Poppy (and you’ve already forgotten how awesome Poppy is, or at least was, I’ll bet), is Boston-based (this girl won the Metal Artist of the Year award at the 2022 Boston Music Awards), has a lot of gross slasher-movie stuff in her videos (Poppy wanted to be a one-woman Meshuggah before she foolishly abandoned that ship in a rush), has a lot of tattoos (I think Poppy’s are fake) and is a big social media influencer. Does that automatically make her interesting or important? No, it does not, but it might inspire some to become entranced by her siren song (she’s from Salem, Mass., by the way!), because — at least going by this single — her trip is part Marilyn Manson and part Evanescence — my stars, look at how edgy she is on this video! OK, may I go now? B

The Mystical Hot Chocolate Endeavors, A Clock Without A Craftsman (Massacre Records)

So I’d just finished up the Babychaos review (somewhere else on this page), and funnily enough Poppy has an album coming out as well, but the only advance I had in hand was a single, but even funnier-ly enough, this prog-rock band is from Boston as well, so let’s give this a whirl. This count-’em 98-minute double album from the four-piece group professed to enjoy dabbling in “everything from ’70s progressive rock, ’90s alternative rock/shoegaze, ’80s New Wave” to blah blah blah, this was a pleasant surprise. It’s tough to nail them down, not because they’re unfocused but because they really are good. A lot of this stuff really soars, toward a middle-of-the-road, aughts-indie-radio fashion: try to picture Nile with a Minus The Bear fetish, or just Minus The Bear, period, but 10 times more technically busy, and that’d be this. Seriously, if you’d be down with a more tech-metal Foo Fighters, this’d fit the bill for you. It’s already on my short list for Underrated Record Of The Year. A+

Playlist

• Oh, no, it’s August already, I am not ready for the summer to end, are you? Of course not, especially because you can be sure that Mother Nature will make up for the limp winter she sent us last year, remember? Yup, I only used the snowblower once, and since all the “snow” was actually just lemon slushie goop that was already half-melted, my indestructible 30-year-old snowblower was all like, “right, you know all I’m going to do is clog and stall, let’s just bag it and take a nap, there, buckaroo, it’ll be melted by morning, relax.” And it was, and what that means is that this winter will be a vengeance-wreaking hellscape of horizontally blowing ice-doom and Abominable Bumble monsters chasing Yukon Cornelius around and eating cars — oh, just tell me when it’s over and I can go have fish on the beach again, won’t you? Where was I, oh, yes, the new albums that are hitting the streets on Aug. 4, that was it. Art School Girlfriend is the pseudonym of Polly Mackey, a producer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist from Wrexham, North Wales, and her new LP, Soft Landing, is headed this way right now. I just checked out the latest single, “Real Life,” from this music album, and it’s pretty cool if you like a little Portishead vibe with your Goldfrapp-style bedroom techno. It’s pretty somber and depressing overall, but her samples and grooves are quite nice indeed.

• Girl Ray is an all-female indie-rock trio from London, U.K., and look over there, their new album, Prestige, is on the way for delivery to stores this Friday, if there are indeed any record stores still in existence other than the Newbury Comics in Manchvegas, unless even that place stopped selling records and got into the vitamin supplements market. Anyway, this album is quite fascinating, or at least the tire-kicker single “Love Is Enough” certainly is; it leans heavily to a funky, almost progressive vibe a la Red Hot Chili Peppers, but with Lana Del Ray-ish vocals. Hard to picture, I know, right, but trust me on this, it’s impressive.

• Hey, Zoomers, did you know that once upon a time there was a TV show called General Hospital, and it starred this guy Rick Springfield as one of the doctor/model dudes or whatever they are? No, I can see you don’t, and I don’t blame you at all, just suffice to say he was basically the prototype for the Kardashians, except he didn’t know how to apply press-on fingernails, which is, admittedly, an essential survival skill. But whatnot, anyway, Springfield’s new “platter” is Automatic, I’ll bet it sucks beyond belief, let’s go listen to the title track, shaaaall we? Ack, it has a sample composed of unplugged guitar, and it moves really fast; the song sort of rips off Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible.” You’d have to hear it for yourself, let’s move on.

• And finally we have Mammoth WVH, with their new album, Mammoth II. Guess what “WVH” stands for, I’ll bet you’ll never get it, it’s Wolfgang Van Halen, gawd, I miss his dad Eddie so bad, don’t you? Wolfgang plays almost all the instruments on this album, and the first single, “Take A Bow,” sounds like Creed trying to be the Foo Fighters, but take heart, maybe there are other songs on this album that will save the day and preserve Eddie’s legacy, I am not sure at this writing.

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 Last Ranger, by Peter Heller

The Last Ranger, by Peter Heller (Knopf, 304 pages)

Yellowstone National Park is having a moment. An hour, really.

The first national park in the U.S., it was established in 1872 and straddles Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. It is one of the nation’s most popular tourist destinations and a plot device in the popular Paramount TV series. Its popularity derives not just from its natural beauty, but also from its wildlife, which includes bison, bears and wolves — the latter of which were reintroduced into the park nearly 20 years after they’d disappeared from the region a century earlier.

Human interference in the lives of wolves was the topic of Erica Berry’s memoir Wolfish (Flatiron), published earlier this year. Now Peter Heller addresses the topic in The Last Ranger, the latest in his growing compendium of novels that involve the outdoors, an interest he developed while growing up in Vermont and matriculating at Dartmouth.

Ren Hopper is a National Park Service ranger stationed at Yellowstone. It is a career best suited for solitary sorts, as much of the human interaction is observation, save encounters with the dumb or malevolent tourists, of which Ren seems to encounter more than his share. The dumb ones endanger themselves; the malevolent ones endanger the animals, by poaching. (Grizzly bears most often make the news when they kill someone, but more often it seems that humans try to kill them; their parts, especially the gallbladder, are components in traditional Chinese medicine.)

The story of how Ren, a fan of Russian fiction and specialty coffee drinks, came to live in a rangers’ cabin deep in the woods unfolds slowly. He learned to fish and love the outdoors under the tutelage of his mother, who drank to excess and left the family suddenly for murky reasons. He was married once, to a woman he deeply loved, but she died; why and how is initially unclear.

Ren’s best friend, besides trout, is a biologist named Hilly who studies wolves. She also lives in Yellowstone, where she is so entrenched with the packs that they know her scent and pay her little attention, as they live out their lives.

One of the more fascinating revelations of The Last Ranger is how keenly aware animals are of a human presence — some can smell us from nearly 2 miles away, and the more intelligent seem to sometimes leave their young within sight of wildlife-seeking tourists, knowing that they will be safe from predators for a short time. It’s like they’re getting some “me-time” with human babysitters, Heller writes. The novel is deeply researched, and some passages stumble into the realm of nonfiction when it comes to describing Yellowstone and its denizens.

But every good story needs a villain, and wolves are not it. The first antagonist is a surly local named Les Ingraham, whom Ren meets while fishing on his day off. To Ren, Ingraham is clearly breaking the law by pursuing a young bear with a dog. But he can’t do anything about it; he is out of uniform, and Ingraham, who is smart, has a story: his dog had been on leash but got away from him, and he was simply trying to reclaim his wayward dog.

Ren doesn’t believe him; Ingraham, like many locals, appears resentful that Yellowstone even exists and that the federal government enforces protection to animals and to the land. In particular, he seems to nurse a grudge for Hilly. And so when Hilly later gets caught in a leg trap near one of her observation points and nearly dies, Ingraham is a natural suspect, especially since he was arrested for assault 17 years earlier.

But as Ren researches Ingraham’s past, he learns that this seemingly malevolent poacher was a high school and college football star celebrated for an act of selfless heroism before he broke his back during a game. Rather than being a black-and-white suspect, Ingraham is now a puzzle to be figured out. At the same time, he learns about the existence of a group of wealthy ranchers called the Pathfinders, who had sued the federal government for stripping them of what they claim were historical rights to hunting and allowing their animals to graze on what was now park land.

Are the Pathfinders also more complicated than they seem, like Ingraham, or were they responsible for not only the trap that nearly killed Hilly and other seemingly taunting traps set around the park?

From the start, Heller’s sympathies clearly favor animals over people; like Hilly, who once made a vow to defend creatures who have no voice in the human world, he sees the worst things humans do as more reprehensible than the worst things animals do.

As Hilly says at one point, “If the earth were a meritocracy and we were graded on how much each species contributed to the well-being of the whole, we’d be [expletive]. God will blow the whistle at all the people and yell, Everybody out of the pool! It’s why Paul Watson, the Sea Shepherd captain, once said that the life of a worm is worth more than the life of a man. Sounds nuts, but it’s something to think about.”

As a writer, Heller has copious gifts of description. At one point, he describes the sounds of a wolf like this: “Two barks testing the night. Almost like a tuning, the confirming plucks of a string. And then a rising resonant howl that froze the stars in place, and dropped and hollowed like a woodwind, and then crescendoed again.”

He gives a character the habit of pinching the brim of his baseball cap as if to ward off bad luck. “It was like a rosary he wore on his head,” he writes.

But Heller’s novels are reliably gripping because they thrum quietly with tension, while slowly revealing the essence of characters who will stay with you for years. The Last Ranger, while not as good as Heller’s 2012 debut novel The Dog Stars — it’s a bit more predictable in places — is an excellent companion for the dog days of summer, especially for anyone who is more comfortable outside than in. A

Album Reviews 23/07/27

EbE404, Dark Ice Days (Give/Take Records)

It’s not that I’ve been avoiding the goth/industrial promo albums that have been coming in for many months from the Give/Take label; to be honest, the name of the PR company that services the imprint’s stuff is very similar to one of the nyms that a local troll uses when he emails literal gigabytes of punk cartoons to author Matt Taibbi and me, so most of it gets deleted out of hand. As far as the music on this album goes, it’s pretty much a stompy, wordless industrial DJ trip, the first two songs (“Open Water” and “Alchymicus”) sounding almost identical, which I truly hope wasn’t done on purpose; they’re of a Combichrist/darkwave sort, lots of sustained laser bursts, random samples and whatnot, not my cup of tea really but nothing that would keep the latex crowd off the dance floor, I suppose. Things get more interesting with “Bouncing,” in which the artiste(s) dabble in Greater Wrong Of The Right-era Skinny Puppy glitch and bleep-bloop. It’s fine for what it is. B

Styx, Crash Of The Crown (Alpha Dog 2T/UMe Records)

Owing to age and such, midcentury-era arena bands are dropping like flies, or at best, touring around with only one original band member, as is the case with Foghat, which is down to the drummer. Styx, though, comes off as being as spry as Greta Van Fleet, pound for pound; now that they’re pretty much a self-contained unit, with their own record label (and, assuredly, studio and all that), they’re free to be as prog-rock as they like, and this album does go into some pretty busy riffs and things, as evidenced in the opening track, “The Fight Of Our Lives,” which continues their tradition of writing sociopolitically topical lyrics focused on conflicts between the First and Third Estates, but always ending on a positive note (which gets more difficult each year, of course). But as I alluded to, this is more proggy; drummer Todd Sucherman has Neil Peart-level chops, which has to be making the other guys feel really pleased. Probably the band’s best ever, pound for pound. A+

Playlist

• Jane, stop this crazy thing, it’s July 28 already, a Friday, and you know what that means, that’s right, it means there will be a bunch of new albums for you to listen to if you haven’t completely given up on music yet! Look there, the first album off the assembly line is a live album from Sissy Spacek look-alike Joni Mitchell, called Joni Mitchell At Newport! That’s right, Facebook grandmoms, totally live versions of all your favorites from back when everyone lived in log cabins and believed in forest giants and wood nymphs, and — wait, is this the one where — yes, it is, it’s the one where Joni was wheeled out to the Newport Folk Festival as a surprise guest during Brandi Carlisle’s set, and it was so cool, Brandi twerking like a dancehall princess or whatever she usually does, and then they rolled Joni onstage in her ancient scarab-inlaid sarcophagus and Brandi probably ruined a few songs by singing/twerking along to tunes like “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Shine,” “Help Me” and “Come In From the Cold” and whatever, “Both Sides Now” and all those other super-old melodies that, when the grandmothers put their Joni cassettes in the boombox at the backyard barbecue, it’s the cue for us males immediately to gather together, pretending not to hear them or our wives or dates, while we form a big awkward man-circle, sizing each other up just like our Neanderthal ancestors, cheap smelly American lagers in hand, talking about installing random shelves in our garages or the skyrocketing price of Viagra and all the usual man stuff. And so all those tunes will be on this disc, remember to buy this album so that Joni can get even more ridiculously rich, you owe it to ’Murica as a citizen.

• If you’ve spent any time within earshot of the overhead speakers in a Target electronics department you know of Post Malone, the Syracuse, N.Y., singer/sort-of-rapper who’s essentially a more Disney-fied version of The Weeknd, doesn’t that sound goooood? Whatever, he’s got no beef with any corporate hip-hop fraudster that I’m aware of, so I’m already fighting to stay awake writing anything about him at all, but suffice to say that his new album is called Austin, and the title track is OK if you like his usual brand of post-Drake bedroom-trap-chill and have a tolerance for Auto-Tune and grillz and all the other cutting-edge cultural touchstones Malone figures he should zzzzzzzzzzzz

• Ack, I fell asleep, sorry, guys, and look who’s here, it’s Florida nu-metal wannabes Sevendust, with a sizzlin’ new album titled Truth Killer! You know, I interviewed these guys once, way back, for the Village Voice family of newspapers, and they were probably the nicest, least egotistical fellas I encountered back in those days, so hopefully they’re still a decent-enough band and still making tolerable if not terribly inventive hard rock so that I don’t have to bring down the thunder and bum them out in today’s column, you know how it goes! OK, wait, I am now broadcasting live from YouTube, where I’m watching the video for the band’s new song “Everything,” and it’s pretty decent, like Living Colour but heavier. They always did sound like Living Colour, of course, but now they sound like an even angrier derivative act!

• And finally we have London-based indie pop band The Clientele, with a new LP titled I Am Not There Anymore! They’ve released albums on Merge Records (including this one if I’m not mistaken) and that always means one thing: the reverb level is cranked to 11, which automatically makes this band awesome. The single, “Blue Over Blue” is like a cross between Beck and Belle & Sebastian, not anything I’d ever listen to in the car, but it’s fine, you have my permission to listen to it wherever you like.

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).

After the Funeral and Other Stories, by Tessa Hadley

After the Funeral and Other Stories, by Tessa Hadley (Knopf, 240 pages)

The essayist Lorrie Moore once said that a short story is a love affair, compared to a novel, which is more like a marriage. That’s one way to put it. I’ve always thought of short stories as an amputation, with some vital part of the tale rudely cut off just as it’s getting good. If I’m invested in a character enough to read 5,000 words, I’d appreciate another 70,000 or so.

That said, contemporary short stories are perfect for summer reading, when the attention span is as short as the days are long. And if you can forgive her the depressing title, the new collection by acclaimed British novelist Tessa Hadley provides a summer smorgasbord of family drama that might be comically or tragically familiar.

Many of these pieces have been published in The New Yorker, including one of the best, “The Bunty Club,” which revolves around three middle-aged sisters who have returned to their childhood home as their mother lies near death in the hospital.

Hadley’s imagery is lush. She writes of one sister, getting into bed mid-afternoon to read a George Elliot novel: “She couldn’t remember the last time she had laid down to read during the day — it was like being a teenager, time stretching out voluptuously in all directions.”

On a man and a woman interacting in a cafe: “[She] felt the old tide of flirtation rising between them, promising to lift her from where she was stranded.”

Here’s how she describes one sister: “She had an aura that was just as significant as if she were a celebrity, improbably washed up at the seaside, having shaken off her entourage of admirers or detractors, thirsting to be left alone with her luxuriant inner life.”

“The Bunty Club” was the secret society the sisters had in their childhood when they met in a shed and swore to each other “not to do good and never to help people.” It was in danger of being forgotten forever until one sister came across an old box with their meeting minutes (they were exceptionally organized as girls), badges and “lists of enemies and bad deeds.” Again, I would gladly read 60,000 on that.

The other stories in the collection follow the pattern of familial angst and intimacy, often in the context of ineffectual men and mothers.

In “My Mother’s Wedding,” the narrator reflects on her relationship with her mother, who is about to marry a much younger man she met “when both reached for a paper sack of muesli base at the same time” at a natural food store. An intellectual who had “never properly come up against life in its full form before,” the groom-to-be seems as uncertain about the wedding as the bride’s daughters, who have their own ways of coping (or not) with their mother’s unconventional lifestyle.

In the titular story, a family that is basically run by two precocious girls deals with the death of the father, an airline pilot who hadn’t been all that involved in their lives. In “Funny Little Snake,” a stepmother unhappily tasked with returning a child to her mother is forced to rethink the reality of her own marriage and choices.

Hadley has a gift for parsing the difficulties of family life, particularly that of adult children and aging parents. In “Coda,” set in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the narrator explains that when temporarily living with her elderly mother, she shuns the handicapped-accessible bathroom downstairs in part because of the irrational sense that “if I used it, I’d be contaminated with suffering, with old age.” She goes on, “The truth was that every so often I just needed to be alone for a few minutes, not making any effort, or being filled up with anyone else’s idea of what I was.”

In this story, as in several others, the narrator has grown up relatively plain in the shadow of a beautiful mother. Also as in others, the narrator is a sophisticated reader: “For the moment, Madame Bovary was my inner life, stirred like rich jam into the blandness of my days.”

The 12 stories in this collection are achingly beautiful at times, and painful in places. Like much contemporary short fiction, a few may leave readers scratching their heads over the conclusion, or wishing for CliffsNotes, and readers unfamiliar with the U.K. may not recognize the places Hadley writes about. But women, in particular, will recognize the family dynamics for sure. A

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!