Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/06/01

Satoko Fujii, Torrent (Libra Records)

In this, her ninth solo album, jazz pianist Fujii explores “new musical territory in a completely improvised concert performance.” Usually the thought of jazz improv has me running for the exits at full bore (years ago I somehow became the central repository for that stuff and it came by the wooden pallet-load every month, all kinds of off-the-cuff noise that eventually led to my forsaking it for a few years). but the New York Times touted her as “an improviser of rumbling intensity and generous restraint,” which is, as always, college-boy-speak for “she’s good,” so here we are, indulging in a record consisting of noodlings Fujii rattled off during a recent concert setup. It’s assuredly an “artist album” in that she sees the piano not merely as a keyboard set but as something to be tinkered with: In “Cut the Painter” she blends weird noises made on the inside of the piano with lyrical melodies played on the keyboard. Elsewhere she plucks piano strings and whatnot in between delivering fantastic runs, morose sentiments and the usual ingredients. It’s a masterful thing if you’re willing to go off the beaten track. A+

Alcatrazz, Take No Prisoners (Silver Lining Music)

Waitwhat, you’re doing a fly-by, what’s even going on here, which Alcatrazz is this? I mean, there are two versions of Alcatrazz making records nowadays, one with Graham Bonnet, the dude who sang “God Blessed Video” in the mid-80s, a tune that almost single-handedly makes the case for hair-metal’s not being a complete waste of time. But yeah, it’s a mess here, folks, this is the Alcatrazz without Bonnet, and ha ha, look at that album title, it would have been cooler if they’d named it “Place Album Title Here,” which I’m sure has been done. Other than those two strikes, this album comes to the plate with my full attention and — um. Hideously generic stuff here, Udo Dirkschneider meets Bruce Dickinson vocals, power metal riffs out of a cereal box, etc. The gals from ’80s-girl-metal band Girlschool visit for a feat on “Don’t Get Mad Get Even,” I know not why. C

Playlist

• Spoiler alert, new albums will “hit the streets” on June 2, another lovely Friday filled with music and whatever! There will be good albums, bad albums, rock albums, Scandinavian folk-thrash albums, super-derivative albums and everything in between. Like the recently canceled Dr. Seuss once said, “My hat is old, my teeth are gold, I have an album I like to hold,” but what sort of albums will I be holding this week? That’s the ongoing mystery, one album, two albums, red album, blue album, will any of them be good, or will I tear off my white plastic earbuds in frustration like I always do and throw back three fingers of cheap 12-year-old multi-malt scotch just to forget that my ears once made contact with those — those horrible notes? I do not know, Sam I Am, so let’s try one of these albums on for size, how about — oh no, you’ve got to be kidding me, it’s a new album from talentless post-Iron Maiden frauds Avenged Sevenfold, called Life Is But A Dream, can’t I just review some TikToks from funny pot-smoking longboarders instead? Ack, here they are, with some dumb new song called “Nobody,” and the video features a cartoon skeleton and his family chilling in some dumb graveyard whatsis, and the tune is slow and doomy, but of course it gets really stupid and unusable when the singing starts, because, well, you know, it’s A7F or however you say it. Ack, ack, the singing, it’s like that horrible monster Dr. Seuss once said, “I do not like this one so well, all he does is yell, yell, yell; I will not have this one about, when he comes in I put him out,” in other words it’s time to depart these premises, for some better music, hopefully, but then again, how could it not be?

• Huh, this shouldn’t be too bad, it’s the millennials’ answer to Elton John, Ben Folds, with a new album called What Matters Most! From what I’ve heard of Ben Folds, it’s mostly been very musical but not really, you know, catchy, or whatever the kids call it these days — you know, “good” or whatnot. The whole album is up for sampling on YouTube, but the first single is “Winslow Gardens,” hold my hand and let’s listen together. OK, let go of my hand so I can shut this off, it’s just a twee song with a little bit of orchestration and Ben’s big dumb piano. It’s like Ben Kweller, or, as people used to say, “The Brady Bunch Band.” People need to stop listening to spineless, pointless nonsense like this, seriously, how can they even stand it.

• Yo, it’s none other than Cowboy Junkies, a band that has played at our beloved Tupelo Music Hall. They have a new album, called Such Ferocious Beauty, which will surely be decent, given that it’s not Avenged Sevenwhatever, but at this writing I am not seeing anything about their visiting Tupelo; in fact, the closest they’ll come to us is The Danforth Music Hall in Toronto, Canada, which is somewhere near the North Pole if I recall correctly. This album is their first one in five years, and the single, “What I Lost,” has kind of a 1960s-meets-Fiona Apple vibe or something like that, mildly depressing and strummy, it’s acceptable.

• And lastly we have Foo Fighters, a band that I have a newfound respect for after seeing a video of their bandleader Dave Whoever serving giant pots of food to a bunch of homeless people. More people should do that, you know? But Here We Are is the new album, and the whole thing is on YouTube for the moment, but we’ll focus on the kickoff track, “Rescued.” It’s got a jagged Pretenders vibe when it starts, but then it turns into their five-zillionth variation on “There Goes My Hero.” Everyone drink!

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).

All the Beauty in the World, by Patrick Bringley

All the Beauty in the World, by Patrick Bringley (Simon & Schuster, 226 pages)

When Patrick Bringley’s older brother died after a lingering illness, his life was upended at age 25 and so he did the only thing that made sense at the time: He applied to be a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, that hallowed institution most people simply call “The Met.”

Like a lot of us, Bringley had visited the museum as a child and had memories of being gobsmacked by a couple of exhibitions even at age 11. Looking at a Pieter Bruegel painting from 1565, he writes, “I experienced the great beauty of the picture even as I had no idea what to do with that beauty. … As such, my response to the picture was trapped inside me, a bird fluttering in my chest.”
The opportunity to be a guard was both employment and healing, though he didn’t realize it at the time. Bringley’s brother, Tom, was two years older and a math genius who was, at the time he was stricken with cancer, studying for a Ph.D. in biomathematics (which I’d never heard of, but which is exactly what it sounds like: the use of mathematical models to understand biology). Newly wed, he’d been philosophical about his fate and rapid deterioration. (“Everybody suffers, my time. Everybody dies, my time.”) But the loss of such an extraordinary person, and the time caring for Tom for before he died, hit the family especially hard. Art of all kinds was one way they coped — reading Dickens, tacking a Raphael print above Tom’s hospital bed.

After Tom’s death, Bringley and his mother took their grief to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where his mother lost herself in a painting of Mary supporting the dead body of Jesus, a cathartic experience. “She cupped her face and her shoulders shook, and when I met her eyes, I saw she wept because her heart was full as well as breaking, because the picture inspired love in her, bringing both solace and pain. When we adore, we apprehend beauty. When we lament, we see the wisdom of the ancient adage ‘Life is suffering.’”

It was on his way back home to New York that he conceived of quitting a dream entry-level job he held at The New Yorker, where he hobnobbed with people like Stephen King and Michael Chabon, in order to stand as a sentry at the Met, which in many ways was not a dream job. (It’s so hard on the feet that the guards are given extra compensation to buy socks, and you have to work there more than a year to get a week’s vacation, the timing of which is assigned by seniority.) But working at the museum expanded his horizons in ways working penny-ante tasks for the magazine for four years had not. It connected him with the ages, and with beauty, and gave him an education as fine as — or finer than — any Ivy League school.

Bringley becomes an authority on the various pieces of art in the corridors he patrols, as well as the minutiae of what the museum contains. (He takes to counting, for example, the number of inhabitants in the paintings in any particular hall — “I will count 210 Jesuses in Section B” — and says, “If you’re wondering how I could possibly count all that, you underestimate the kind of time I have.”

In conversations with visitors to the museum, and with his coworkers, he brings us fully into the job with him, letting us see through the eyes of first-time and regular visitors the effect that the ancient art has on them. All the while, he himself is healing, not only from his brother’s death but from the stifling job and career trajectory that he had escaped. A remark from a co-worker one day is telling: “You know, it really isn’t such a bad job,” Brimley’s colleague says. “Your feet hurt, but nothing else does.”

One of the gifts of All the Beauty in the World is that you don’t need to know anything about the Met, or even about art, to enjoy the book. The best memoirs don’t just chronicle the author’s experiences; they also bring value to ours. Bringley provides an easily digestible education of some of the Met’s greatest pieces, and the museum itself, and rough illustrations show the outlines of the art. As such, this is a great book for anyone planning a visit to the museum.

But it also opens a window into why art matters, and Bringley’s account can kindle, or rekindle, an interest gone dormant. His reflections on grief will be especially poignant to anyone who has recently experienced a loss, as will his slow path to recovery.

The book spans roughly a decade, during which time Bringley marries and becomes a father, an experience he compares to the “Virgin and Child” paintings of the masters. (“How composed the Child always looks! How serene the holy parent! By contrast, the animal squirming in my arms is lusty, rude, ridiculous.”) His experience of fatherhood is a hopeful one, analogous to life: “goodness subsuming the struggles.”

He ends with some advice for the Met goer: “Come in the morning, if you can, when the museum is quietest, and at first say nothing to anyone, not even a guard. … Find out what you love in the Met, what you learn from, and what you can use as fuel, and venture back into the world carrying something with you, something that doesn’t quite easily fit in your mind, that weighs on you as you go forward and changes you a little bit.” Wise counsel from a short but memorable book. A

Album Reviews 23/05/25

The Waymores, Greener Pastures (Chicken Ranch Records)

This one comes with a backstory that’s kind of encouraging for artists slogging away in more remote, less arts-centric areas of the country. We’re talking about throwback-country/bluegrass stuff here, the real deal, and this duo’s success came about when they released a two-song demo featuring Marty Robbins’ “Don’t Worry” and Buck Owens’ “Under Your Spell.” Their hayseed sound is so close to Tammy and George’s that it caught the ear of actor Howard Zinn, who passed it along to a music producer buddy, Shel Talmy, a 1960s fixture who’d done The Who, Bowie and The Kinks among others. All of a sudden there were heavyweight session players all over the pair’s orbit, and this record, their third full-length, comes as a result of all that. Dave Pearlman (who’s worked with Merle Haggard, Hoyt Axton and all those guys) is on steel guitar, creating a large proportion of the magic; the songs weave a tapestry of old-school country and pop that’s at times reminiscent of Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, that kind of thing. Good for them. A+

Michael Dease, The Other Shoe: The Music of Gregg Hill (Origin Records)

There are jazz-heads who read this space, watching like lonely lost puppies, ever hoping I’ll finally get back to giving the genre some love, and the guilt does weigh mildly heavy, so let’s do this one, from Georgia trombonist Dease, whose previous 15-odd records as a bandleader were mostly on Posi-Tone Records, with guest shots scattered in his oeuvre with the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band and others. Here he pays tribute to equally fruitful Michigan-raised jazz composer Gregg Hill, who grew up on swing and big band stuff as a kid and went on to cobble 150 pieces starting at age 39 (see? It’s never too late, folks). All About Jazz called this one of the year’s best LPs to date, to which I can only rejoin with a meek “sure, why not,” given that I’ve been such a bad apple this year (again, my apologies). Dease has rearranged some of this stuff, which may have led to its being more mathematically interesting; “Wake Up Call” evokes Monk and leads to what sounds like a post-bop outing for the most part. Flashes of keyboard brilliance stand out, but Dease does hold down the melodic focal points. Nice blend of echo-bop, for lack of a better term. A+

Playlist

• Onward, my scamps, on we go, to May 26 and the albums that will sally forward thence; the moon will enter its first quarter phase the next day, May 27, bringing with it laments of regret from the record-buying world, as they give a listen to the things they purchased this Friday! O Fortuna, no store returns on CDs that have been opened, abandon all hope ye who blah blah blah, so let’s do some reconnoitering, so your money won’t be used on musical nothingburgers, I am here to help you! Ha ha, look what’s first on the docket, a new album from the Spinal Tap of techno, Sparks, titled The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte, I can hardly wait! No, you know what, Sparks isn’t like Spinal Tap, they’re more like ManOWar, that band that used to dress up like Conan the Barbarian, like they have this stubborn fan base that insists their limp tunes are the best ever, because good taste can’t be taught to people, but it doesn’t matter because they’re already a parody of themselves, which leaves them impervious to snark attacks from mayhemic jerks like me, whose sense of duty calls on us to remind people that Sparks and ManOWar are really stupid bands and that it’s OK to give up on that one friend who believes otherwise; not everyone can be saved, is what I mean, like some people who voted for Vermin Supreme for president weren’t being ironic, they literally believed he was going to give everyone a pony or whatever it was. OK, now that I’m almost out of room for this nonsense, it’s time to go listen to the title track from this new Sparks album, and — wait, Cate Blanchett is in the dumb video? Hellooooo nurse, heart-eyes emoji, I’ve had a crush on that lady forever, let’s see if she can change my mind about Sparks! Oh, for Pete’s sake, no, she can’t, the tune is their usual Devo-krautrock with Cate Blanchett standing still throughout the video and breaking into a boomer dance every 30 seconds, this is so stupid that I wouldn’t be surprised if the Stupid Stuff Society sends Sparks a cease-and-desist order. Why on earth would someone even do this?

• Moving on, it looks like all of today’s “artists” have names that rhyme with “snarks,” because here we are with a new LP from Nigerian R&B/indie-folk lady Arlo Parks, titled My Soft Machine! It’s her second album; 2021’s Collapsed In Sunbeams suffered from a lack of touring owing to Covid, but it did chart pretty well everywhere. So let’s check out the new single, “Pegasus,” which includes a guest appearance from Los Angeles-based indie-folkie Phoebe Bridgers. Well, well, the song is really nice, sort of a trip-hop-pop hybrid recalling Kate Bush in mellow mode but with some drum glitch and stuff like that. Nothing wrong there, let’s push our luck and move on.

• Next, it’s More Photographs (A Continuum), the latest album from Kevin Morby, a Texan who was formerly with the bands Woods and The Babies and is eight albums into his solo trip as of this one, which I assume is a bunch of remixes lifted from his 2022 LP, Photographs. The single, “This Is A Photograph II,” is like a cross between Wilco and ’70s disco, and there’s lots of edge to it, believe it or not. Cool stuff, I can deal with it.

• And finally, we have Canadian hard-indie band The Dirty Nil with a new full-length, called Free Rein To Passions! Teaser single “Nicer Guy” is an amalgam of Weezer and Foo Fighters, which shouldn’t be too hard to imagine, and it’s pretty decent overall, because the singer sounds angry but awkward. Wow, I wasn’t mean to any bands this week, was I? Wait, no, I was, to Sparks, never mind.

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).

At the Sofaplex 23/05/18

The Lost King (PG-13)

Sally Hawkins, Steve Coogan.

Based on the true story: Philippa Langley (Hawkins), who suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, takes issue with the standard Shakespeare version of the English King Richard III wherein his hunchback has made him “a villain.” Her research into Richard leads her to join the Richard III Society and eventually to start looking for the then-unknown resting site of his remains. Along the way, she negotiates her relationship with her ex-husband, John (Coogan), who she needs to move back into the family home so she can leave her job and pursue the Richard search full-time. And, she talks to Richard (Harry Lloyd) himself.

Even Richard, an apparition Philippa knows is just her own head working stuff out, suggests her search for him is something of an obsession, which points to one of this movie’s (maybe intentional, maybe not) running themes about how we view the passion projects of those who don’t have the cover of officialdom. As a woman who deals with a health difficulty, Philippa is shown being regularly thwarted by a bunch of smug dudes “there, there”-ing her, both in her Richard search and in her regular life. There’s a scoffing “she’s an amateur” tone that everyone takes with her — until her theories are shown to have merit and then she’s sort of shoved out of the way. The movie’s handling of this doesn’t always completely fit with Hawkins’ teary and fragile-seeming portrayal — it’s like the story is trying to say something about women, academia and who gets to claim history, and Hawkins’ performance more suggests a shaky woman having a midlife crisis. The result is a movie that tells an interesting story but can at times feel slight and somewhat “this film could have been a magazine article.” C+ Available to rent or own.

Ghosted (PG-13)

Ana de Armas, Chris Evans.

Farmer Cole Turner (Evans) has a meet-cute with tentative plant-buyer Sadie Rhodes (de Armas) at a farmers market. They end up going on a date, which turns into a night-long hang and sleepover. Cole returns home to the family farm all besotted and convinced Sadie is someone special — even though she’s not returning any of his way-too-many texts. When he realizes he left his inhaler with her, he AirTags it and finds out Sadie is in London. I’ll go surprise her, he says, it will be romantic! It will be creepy stalking, everyone tells him, but Cole heads out anyway, only to be knocked unconscious just as he’s getting close to Sadie’s location. He wakes up and finds himself tied to a chair and about to be tortured for a secret passcode by a group of bad guys who are convinced that he is the super spy known as The Tax Man. When a gun-toting Sadie shows up to rescue him, Cole realizes that his one-night stand might be ignoring his texts for more reasons than just his suffocating neediness.

Cute, right? No. Sure, Ghosted has some occasionally cute elements — I think Evans and de Armas get maybe one good line delivery each; Amy Sedaris plays Cole’s mother and is fun. But otherwise the movie has the smooth oily feel of processed cheesefood but without the satisfying tang. It’s the kind of bland nothing that comes to mind when streaming network executives talk about “content.” It makes me sad for movies and worried about Ana de Armas, who has suffered through Blonde and Deep Water and The Gray Man and now this and really deserves better work. C Available on Apple TV.

We Have a Ghost (PG-13)

Jahi Di’Allo Winston, Anthony Mackie.

And David Harbor as the titular ghost, called Ernest, in this odd mash of comedy, whodunit, serious family drama and supernatural caper. I feel like any two of those might have worked in this tale of a family — teenage Kevin (Winston), his parents Frank (Mackie) and Melanie (Erica Ash) and older brother Fulton (Niles Fitch), who move into an obviously haunted house. Kevin is the first to see Ernest, who appears to him as a moaning ghoul. Perhaps it’s the combover or the bowling shirt, but Kevin just shoots a video of Ernest and laughs. Eventually, the two become buddies, even though Ernest can’t talk or remember anything about his life. When Frank finds out, he is also not particularly scared but he does see a viral video and possible money-making opportunity.

There’s Frank’s whole scheme using Ernest as his shot at the big time, there’s Frank and Kevin’s shaky relationship and the mystery of how Ernest came to be. But the movie also goes into Kevin’s burgeoning whatever with neighbor teen Joy (Isabella Russo), the search of discredited scientist Dr. Leslie Monroe (Tig Notaro) for proof of ghosts and the hucksterism of “medium” Judy Romano (Jennifer Coolidge). Parts of this are promising with bits of decent performances but none of the pieces ever really fit together. C+ Available on Netflix.

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Claire Dederer

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Claire Dederer (Knopf, 273 pages)

In 2017, the year that the world learned about the sexual predation of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, Claire Dederer published an essay in The Paris Review in which she tried to work out her feelings about bad men and good art.

Dederer came to the topic not through Weinstein, but through another filmmaker, Roman Polanski, who repulsed her because he had been accused of raping a 13-year-old girl. Polanski’s monstrousness, Dederer wrote then, was “monumental, like the Grand Canyon. And yet. When I watched his movies, their beauty was another kind of monument, impervious to my knowledge of his iniquities.”

Dederer is not the first to squirm uncomfortably in this particular space. The question of what we should do with the art of problematic people has come up regularly in recent years, and nobody seems to have a good answer. Dederer didn’t in her Paris Review essay, but she attempts to craft one in Monsters, A Fan’s Dilemma, an elaboration of the ideas put forth in that essay.

You could read just the essay and have a good grasp of the book, but then you’d miss out on the delightful interior wrestling match in which Dederer engages as she tries to reconcile her desire to be “a virtuous consumer” and “a demonstrably good feminist” while consuming the work of troublesome artists. These are mostly men — Polanski, and Woody Allen, and Bill Cosby, and Michael Jackson, and numerous others, dead and alive, who either have been exposed for beastly behavior in recent years, or who have had old behavior newly scrutinized in the light of new standards of conduct. (Polarization alert: She also paints former President Donald Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with the broad brush of monsters.)

After Weinstein, the floodgates opened, Dederer writes: “A rock had been turned over and revealed a bunch of sex pests, scuttling around in the newly bright light.” The men “did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to the great work without remembering the awful thing.”

Dederer turns over a few rocks of her own; unless you’ve paid close attention to the personal lives of some of these men, you may know their names and their contributions to art but nothing of their personal behavior. Be prepared for the pedestals of Pablo Picasso, the Italian painter Caravaggio, composer Richard Wagner, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and many others to crash down, as Dederer, who lives on a houseboat in Seattle, muses about her existential dilemma.

In the hands of a less capable writer this could get sort of tiresome after a few chapters. But Dederer is like a dinner guest you don’t want to stop talking because she’s so well-read and interesting (you will likely, like me, come away with a list of other books you want to read) and her writing is delightful and fresh. (She describes one person as looking like “a character from a children’s book about plucky pioneers caught in a blizzard.”)

Dederer’s challenge in Monsters was not in the prose or the thinking, but in stretching an essay to book length, and she does this in part by means of a dubious analogy — whether we are all monsters in our own way. This was how she ended the Paris Review piece: “What is to be done about monsters? Can and should we love their work? Are all ambitious artists monsters? Tiny voice: [Am I a monster?]”

Her principal analogy to the everyday monster is that of the female artist who abandons her children to pursue her calling … not necessarily literally, although that has certainly been done.

“The idea of what constitutes abandonment exists on a continuum,” she writes. That continuum includes shutting the studio door to a child, letting another parent do all the child care, putting a child in day care, going out of town for work for days, weeks or months at a time, and so forth. “Please note that none of these behaviors count as abandonment if practiced by men,” she says. “This is extra-true if the men in question are artists.”

Society excused men-monsters for a long time if they were artists and even more so if they were geniuses, Dederer says. In particular, we’ve given a pass to abusive geniuses like Hemingway or Picasso by giving them the ultimate creative license: license to have demons.

Big monsters have equally big demons; the consumers of art have their own, smaller devils that emerge when we sit in judgment on others. For instance, “When you’re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it. … The transmission of our virtue feels extremely important and strangely exciting.”

The difference between Roman Polanski’s sins and Dederer’s (she confesses to worrying whether she’d made the right decisions about child care even now that her children are grown) is vast, and to tenuously connect them Dederer follows a chaotic path. Her conclusions are likewise unkempt, but still ultimately satisfying.

“The heart wants what it wants,” Woody Allen famously said in excusing his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn. Put another way, the heart loves what it loves, and this also applies to art, Dederer says.

“Critical thought must bow its knee to love of the work — if something moves us, whoever we are, we must give that something at least a small degree of fealty.” That is, after all, what we do with our families, which are the “unchosen monsters” that we love. A

Album Reviews 23/05/18

Gridfailure and Interstitia, Sunyata Ontology (Pax Aeternum Records)

Imaginative collaborative album from North Carolina-based Interstitia (the noise-rock nym adopted by Graham Scala) and New York-based Gridfailure (a solo project from David Brenner, also of Diminishing). This is underground aggro ambient, if I’m going to try to put a finger on it; the aim is to evoke visions of “a disparate not-too-distant dystopian America, with military/espionage tactics, civil unrest, off-the-grid cults and militant factions, covert government police, the takeover of artificial intelligence, and the looming threat of nuclear catastrophe more realistic than ever.” As always, some of that isn’t reflected in the offerings here, but it does deliver a lot of grimy, spooky noise. Opener “Call Of The Black Hand” sounds like an electric shaver fitted with phase-shifter effects, which is in the ballpark; “Omega Agency” is more along the lines of Rhys Fulber’s Noise Unit project, meaning it’ll appeal to goths and people like that. Worth your while if you like apocalyptic underground-DJ tuneage. A-

Esther Rose, Safe To Run (New West records)

I can hardly believe the hype that’s washing over the landscape with regard to the fourth rather pedestrian country-indie album from this New Orleans-based chanteuse; pound for pound, all the praise from Pitchfork Media and whatnot has reached the same level of ridiculousness — OK, in an indie sense — that Katy Perry’s first record rode in on. I mean it’s all fine and everything, a little bit ’90s-moonbat pop, a Natalie Merchant aftertaste and whatnot, wrapped in four-chord Joni Mitchell-ness and such. This isn’t to say it’s bad or anything — I wouldn’t dare at this point — but it’s not everything you may have heard it is. Lyrically it’s about running and staying in a literal-but-really-not sense, and in order to enhance that vibe she brings in Alynda Segarra (from Hurray for the Riff Raff) for a tune, in a move that the pressed-for-way-too-many-descriptors Pitchfork wonk saw as genius, being that both ladies make albums that “juggle the personal and the public so well.” Wheel reinvented? Um, no. But it’s nice, and all that stuff. B+

Playlist

• May 19 is a magical day, not just because it’s a Friday but also because many new rock ’n’ roll albums will be “unleashed” upon the unsuspecting masses, who will buy them in bulk just so the “artists” who made those albums won’t yell at them or whatever! Since it’s getting near barbecue season, when everyone needs good wholesome, dishwasher-safe, almost-sort-of-rockin’ tunes to listen to while the kids run around with Super Soakers until the dads flip out and yell, we should probably first talk about the new album from Dave Matthews Band, Walk Around The Moon! I’m sure the title track will be a terrific example of modern AOR radio rock, so let’s go listen, ah, here we are, it’s a live version! Well I’ll be horn-swaggled, it’s more like Blue Oyster Cult than the “serious version of Barenaked Ladies” twaddle he usually puts out. His voice is trashed, so maybe the vocal line is OK, but I can’t guarantee it

• Good lord, I’d almost forgotten the fact that quirk-folk superstar Sufjan Stevens even existed! Note to self, I really must either begin to care more about quirk-indie-electronica-folkies or stop pretending that I do! Whatever, as always, the fascinating thing about his new album (Reflections, which will be released in a few hours) is trying to guess which weird outfit Stevens will wear during his concerts. Will he be “owl boy,” “Good & Plenty-striped licorice boy,” or will he suit up in some sort of variation on the stupidness 1980s-era Elton John used to wear when he really wanted people to stay away from him? I don’t care, but maybe a quick distracted listen to the new single, “Ekstasis” will do the trick! Well, that’s interesting, the tune is a neoclassical piano piece with a few edgy, dissonant moves and whatnot, so if neoclassical piano music played by someone who dresses up like an owl is your jam, it’s your lucky day!

• Endlessly annoying 1960s songwriter Paul Simon is a million years old, and he was once the singing partner of Art Garfunkel before trying to become Jimmy Buffett or whatever that whole deal was. He was married to Carrie Fisher for a year, right after she played Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi, and once she calmed down from that whole experience, she realized that she’d married Paul Simon and pleaded insanity or whatever she did to get out of it. Simon’s new full-length is titled Seven Psalms, not to be confused with the Nick Cave album, which literally came out last year and hence Simon should have known to name his album something else, and he has not released a single as of this writing, just an album trailer on YouTube, obviously just to irritate me, and yes, it worked. Yes, there he is, hanging in the studio, singing some stuff. Yuck, whatever this teaser song is, it’s all serious and maudlin, with some lyrics about getting someone to forgive him. There is a string section and a choir and it pretty much sucks, let’s finish off this column before I lose my marbles.

• And finally, ack, some people have literally no shame, because here we go, folks, look, David Crosby from Crosby Stills Nash & Young just recently died, but without missing a beat, here comes Graham Nash, the most useless one out of the bunch, with a new album, called Now! If you still drive a 1962 Dodge Dart with peace signs on it, you know that Nash is the skinny English dude who wrote like only one song that the other guys could tolerate playing at Woodstock and whatever else, the ground-breaking ceremony for the Great Pyramid of Giza or whatever other hippie festivals those guys played during the Swingin’ Sixties. The single, “A Better Life,” is flower-power ukulele-folk, and I swear I’ve heard it before, but all the weakest songs on CSNY’s 4 Way Street were written by this guy, so it’s all a wash, whatevs.

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).

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