Category: Pop

The Testament of Ann Lee (R)

I’d have given Amanda Seyfried an Oscar nomination for playing Shakers church founder Ann Lee in this sorta-musical biopic, which is now streaming on Hulu.

Seyfried presents a compelling performance as Lee, a woman who believes she is having visions guiding her religious convictions and pushing her beyond the mainstream Church of England of 18th-century Manchester, England. The musical aspect of the movie — singing and dancing often presented as a heightened form of worship — fits in nicely with the slightly-out-of-the-world nature of Ann Lee. She grows up in Manchester, working in a cotton mill and later as a cook in an asylum, but is also constantly active in her pursuit of a religious home. When she finds Jane and James Wardley, leaders of a Shaking Quakers church in the town, she seems to enjoy the ecstatic movements of their style of prayer, as well as the relatively egalitarian approach to gender. When visions lead her to become a preacher in her own right as Mother Ann Lee, she and the Wadleys decide she should set sail for America with a party that includes her brother William (Lewis Pullman), her longtime friend Mary (Thomasin McKenzie, who is also the movie’s narrator) and her somewhat reluctant husband Abraham (Christopher Abbott). Abraham is not thrilled that one of Ann’s revelations is that celibacy, even in marriage, is the only way to get closer to God — a fact that the movie puts in context of Ann’s four pregnancies that resulted in children who died before they were one year old. In the U.S., Ann and her followers slowly build a church community — one full of some truly lovely furniture — but also deal with the persecution of being a relatively fringe religion with a woman in charge.

In addition to the good work by Seyfried, the movie is lovely to look at — lit and framed like a live tableau of 18th-century paintings. The look of the movie conveys the emotion and helps put you in this world where religion plays this very un-21st-century role not only in society but also in the internal lives of the characters. B+ On Hulu and available for purchase.

Featured photo: The Testament of Ann Lee

Frog and Other Essays by Anne Fadiman

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 171 pages)

Anyone with a passing knowledge of poetry knows of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English poet who composed “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” (the latter said to have been written under the influence of opium).

Far fewer know of his firstborn son, David Hartley Coleridge, frequently referred to by friends and family as “Poor Hartley.” Essayist Anne Fadiman plucks the lesser Coleridge out of popular obscurity in Frog (And Other Essays), a collection that offers an eclectic assortment of subjects, from the titular frog, a family pet that wound up in the freezer, to the men on a doomed polar expedition who produced a newspaper/literary magazine to help them endure the long and depressing Antarctic winters.

All are, in a word, a delight.

“Frog” is the first of seven. It chronicles the life and death of Bunky, who entered the Fadiman household as a tadpole shipped in a Styrofoam container. The brand was called “Grow-a-Frog” and it wasn’t until later that Fadiman learned of Bucky’s heritage: He was an African clawed frog who looked “as if a regular frog had been bleached and then put in a panini press.” Bunky lived, more or less happily, with the family for about 17 years, although Fadiman notes that she would sometimes “hear him softly calling for a mate he would never meet” when she got up for a middle-of-the-night snack.

Bunky’s story meanders. Fadiman leads us through short discussions of various family pets and varied anecdotes of Bunky’s limited life, some of which, she admits, now cause her regret. When he died, “I mourned for all frogs in too small-aquariums. All the fish brought home from fairs in plastic bags. All the turtles bought on impulse, vegetating in plastic lagoons. All the baby alligators flushed down toilets.” Her attempt to honor him in death, however, doesn’t go as intended, and he winds up spending an extended time in the refrigerator, because “It’s easy to forget you have a frog in your freezer when he’s behind the frozen tamales.”

“The Oakling and the Oak” is the surprisingly riveting tale of “Poor Hartley,” which shows that the travails of a child growing up in the shadow of a larger-than-life parent is a story that has existed since Adam and Cain.

Hartley didn’t kill anyone, but he was a disappointment to his father, even though he was not without talent himself, and his father was enamoured of him when he was a child. (“By the time he was seven, it is no exaggeration to say he had inspired some of the greatest poems ever written in English,” Fadiman writes.

In fact, it was that early outpouring of love that could have been a problem: “A penumbra of impossible expectation began to settle around Hartley’s head” and the poems his father wrote about him described the boy “as more spirit than mortal, a child who did not walk so much as levitate.” But STC turned out to be an absentee father, and Hartley turned out to be something of an irresponsible young adult; despite a strong intellect, he lost a coveted fellowship, in part because, as the college dean wrote, “he was often guilty of intemperance and came home in a state in which it was not safe to trust him with a candle.” It wasn’t long before father and son were not on speaking terms. He never married, and Fadiman describes a poignant deathbed scene where Poor Hartley, who loved babies but never had children, asked to hold a neighbor’s infant as he was dying. As is her wont, Fadiman leaves us wanting to learn even more about the various subjects she writes about.

In “South Polar Times” she offers evidence that “the value of a periodical cannot be judged by the size of its circulation.” Case in point: the newspaper/literary magazine produced by Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his team. “There was only one copy of each of its twelve issues, to be shared (depending on the year) by between thirteen and forty-seven readers.” Because the sun in Antarctica set in April and rose in August, depression was as much a problem as the cold. A publication featuring the work of the crew, all submitted anonymously, was one of Scott’s antidotes to misery (along with brandy and theatrical shows); contributors deposited their poems, essays and other articles into a mahogany box for consideration.

The originals still exist; Fadiman, having long held interest in arctic expeditions, once reviewed a compilation of them, marveling at the illustrations done by Dr. Edward Wilson, the Discovery’s assistant surgeon, who also happened to be a zoologist and artist. (Wilson was among the men who perished alongside Scott after discovering that Roald Amundsen had beaten them to the South Pole.)

Again, more books will have to be read, for having read Frog.

Not all of Fadiman’s topics are so poignant. In “My Old Printer,” she rues her unwillingness to part with old printers. (“Why couldn’t I treat my printer the same way I’d treat an elderly relative who, if spared the indignity of intubation, would succumb to a painless bout of pneumonia? Why couldn’t I just let nature take its course? It’s because I and most other people my age are cumbersome ourselves. We are hard to upgrade. We are not adaptable. Our memories are short on disk space. … We are all HP LaserJet II printers.”)

In “All My Pronouns,” she takes us through a brief history of pronoun controversies, from her Yale students adapting they/them to the Quakers who insisted on addressing everyone as “thou” even though the usage demoted in social standing some of the people who were addressed.

(In 16th-century Europe, she writes, “there were few more efficient ways to dishonor a man than to ‘thou’ him.”)

In “Screen Share,” she tells her pandemic story, which while interesting is no more or less interesting than yours — pretty much everyone over the age of 15 has an interesting pandemic story to tell these days.

She finishes with “Yes to Everything,” a tribute to one of her students (“Thin. Beautiful. Long reddish-brown hair. Long legs. Flagrantly short skirt. Nimbus of angry energy.”) who had been told by a visiting novelist “that making it as a writer today was virtually impossible.” It will punch you in the gut, is all I’ll say. Read with tissues. And don’t buy your kids frogs. A

Featured Photo: Frog and Other Essays by Anne Fadiman

Album Reviews 26/04/09

Lee & Dr. G, Girl For Me (self-released)

Although they both cut their teeth in different parts of the country, these two blues-guitar brothers-from-other-mothers, Lee Durham and Brandon Gauthier, have built a sizable following in New Hampshire, where they met and joined forces in 2023. They’ve logged hundreds of shows in the area, culminating in this debut album’s release show at Concord’s Bank of New Hampshire stage in December, a bullet point that should tell you they’re serious about putting the state on the record industry map, at least so they don’t have to go back to slugging it out in L.A. or Nashville, where they did have some success individually. Their net vibe is, as Hippo’s own Michael Witthaus observed, a sort of “psycho-delic” approach to blues, one part Chuck Berry to one part jam-band-meets-Pink Floyd immersion, with looong rootsy passages being driven into your brain until you can’t help but — admire the sound, whether as a musician or a fan. No, there’s something here for sure, at the very least a combination of selflessness between two wonderfully talented guitar soloists and a desire to rebirth their 70-year-old genre, no easy trick. They absolutely deserve your support, so get out there, would you? A+

Neurosis, An Undying Love For A Burning World (Neurot Recordings)

I’m not a fan of this vanguard sludge-metal band, and, um, uh, never really was, but nevertheless I figured it was as good a time as any to see how my tummy would react to this new album, given that some of you are under the mistaken impression that just because I’ll review other self-indulgent doom-soundscapers like Sunn(((O))) it means I approve of this kind of thing. I don’t, but they’re your ears, and if you really like the idea of hearing a blitzed caveman roaring over endless wall-of-sound extreme-metal ringouts, that’s on you. The ever-ridiculous YouTuber Needle Drop reviewed this and took issue with some chord changes here and there but praised it for something or other (does anyone really watch that guy’s videos for the purpose of musical edification?); I was more struck by the guitar solos, some of which are pretty musical but which convey the same comically depressing, angsty vibe as the rest of the tuneage, like every record that the Earache label put out in the Aughts. But knock yourself out, you have my blessing. B-

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Moving right along, the warmer weather is coming quick, in fits and starts and total fake-outs, so naturally new albums are beginning to pile up, all of them hoping to soundtrack your summer. Let’s pretend you have expendable income and can buy one or all of the albums releasing this Friday, April 10, which one(s) to choose? Maybe it’s the new one for all you Generation X grandparents, Hope And Fury by Joe Jackson, who was famous in the 1980s for the incel national anthem, “Is She Really Going Out With Him,” which everybody thought was Elvis Costello because it sounded exactly like him (and, well, half the songs that came out from pub-pop bands in the ’80s). He also had a hit with the almost as awful “Look Sharp,” but what I remember most from that dude was a totally ignored song from the Look Sharp album, called “Fools In Love,” because back in those days I was a young rock singer on a mission, the wildly idiotic sort of mission that only 20-year-olds who hate college take on: For a year straight, I tried out for every single band in the Boston area that put out an ad for one, and I mean literally every single one, and got an offer from all of them because apparently there were no other singers in the city. Now, because they were all Boston bands, they were mostly unworkable, in fact there was only one band I actually thought was kind of neat. Unfortunately I can’t say their name in this family-oriented newspaper, but they really did have some cool songs, but no way was I going to drive from my apartment in Nashua, New Hampshire, to Stoughton, Mass., three nights a week for a band with no record contract and no hope of ever getting one because stupid band name, but I almost did, but anyway, right, Joe Jackson, so there was a band composed of really good musicians in (I think) Medford, Mass., sort of a joke band, but they were good, and they made me learn “Fools in Love,” a really stupid ska/reggae tune that totally ripped off Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives,” but somehow I didn’t mind it and still remember most of the words to this day, and that is my Joe Jackson story. Anyhow, I’m going to check out what this Elvis Costello clone person is doing these days right now by listening to the advance single “Welcome to Burning-By-Sea,” which sure looks like something British oi-rock, I’m sure it’s dumb. Yup, he’s doing this cockney comedy act during the intro, nope, it’s through the whole song, he’s singing about stuff like fish and chips and getting into bar fights, it’s kind of fun, with a tribal beat and cockney yelling, but I won’t ever listen to it again.

• Ah, another Chappell Roan wannabe heard from, this time it’s British singer Holly Humberstone, with her new album Cruel World, whose title tune is flirty and awkward and sounds exactly like, you know, Chappell Roan, big deal, next.

• Wow, English electronic-music dude and showoff-y bassist Squarepusher is still around? His new album Kammerkonzert includes a new tune called “K2 Central” that’s sort of acid-jazz-y and I suppose pretty neat if you like to hear a lot of really busy bassplaying and mindless prog experimentation.

• We’ll close with Jessie Ware, who’s also British, like everyone mentioned in today’s column, bob’s your uncle! Superbloom is her new full-length; its single, “I Could Get Used To This” sounds like Mariah Carey trying to be Lana Del Rey, which is pretty — marketable I suppose.

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

Featured Photo: Lee & Dr. G, Girl For Me and Neurosis, An Undying Love For A Burning World

Send Help (R)

Rachel McAdams is a kooky delight as an overlooked office worker who blossoms into her best, insane self when she is stranded on a tropical island in this fun, queasy-making thriller. (Eye stuff, puking, big oozy gashes — this movie has it all!)

Linda Liddle (McAdams) is passed over for promotion by her new nepo-hire boss, Bradley (Dylan O’Brien). Though smart and capable, Linda is also awkward and messy and covered in tuna fish sandwich flecks when Bradley is first reintroduced to her. He nevertheless brings her along for a business conference in Thailand — for work purposes because she can solve the problems his dumb college buddy (who got the job she wanted) can’t but maybe also to have someone to bully. One of the dudes in the bro-pack accompanying Bradley has found Linda’s Survivor audition video, which reinforces both how deeply uncool she is and also her wildlife knowledge bonafides. Chekhov’s fire-making skills do not have long to foreshadow as the plane goes down (gruesomely!) and Linda is soon set adrift in a stormy sea. When she washes up on the island, she finds that an injured Bradley has also survived and sets about making shelter and a fire and finding food for them both. After he makes a few stabs at telling her how to island, Linda reminds him that, as she says in the trailer, they’re not in the office anymore and the power balance is not as it was.

Bradley of course deserves every gross thing that happens to him. The movie nicely never lets him learn and grow; he is an unlikeable wienie throughout. But the movie doesn’t just paint Linda as a poor wronged nerd who never learned to dress for success. She has weird, potentially violent, layers and her time on the island awakens not just confidence but a gleeful enjoyment of her power over a former tormentor.

And sure, this could all come off as nasty in a way that would be less enjoyable to watch. But McAdams is having so much fun here — reveling in the darkness of Linda as much as the earnestness. For me, the fun is what makes Send Help such a solid good time, with its winky needle drops and its dark comedy sensibilities. B+ Available for rent or purchase.

Featured photo: Send Help

The Official We Do Not Care Club Handbook, by Melani Sanders

(Harvest, 203 pages)

If you are a woman of a certain age who spends any time on social media, you’ve likely encountered Melani Sanders, glasses on her head, glasses on her face, glasses on a lanyard around her neck, speaking deadpan to the camera about the things she doesn’t care about.

Sometimes she’s wearing a shower cap, too, or has a travel pillow around her neck. The more ridiculous the get-up, the better. It’s comedy gold, born in a Whole Foods parking lot.

“Hello, and welcome to all new and existing members of the We Do Not Care Club,” she says. “This is a club for all women going through perimenopause, menopause and beyond. We are putting the world on notice that we simply just do not care much anymore.”

With dramatic effect, she opens a notebook and takes out a pen, which she uncaps with her mouth. “Let’s go ahead and get started with today’s announcements.”

The announcements are the punchlines — the things Sanders doesn’t care about anymore:

We Do Not Care if we are wearing leggings and a graphic tee. We are dressed for the day. We’re ready for bed and possibly dressed for tomorrow.

We Do Not Care if we excel at work. We will be meeting expectations.

We Do Not Care if you have no interest in true-crime stories. Celebrity gossip does not interest us; we need to know why Ann in Toledo offed her husband in 1983.

After the announcements, she invites her audience to send her things they don’t care about anymore. Couldn’t be simpler. Also couldn’t be more viral.

Not even a year after her first “Do Not Care” video hit the internet, Sanders is out with a book, the idea of which will surely thrill her followers. Just the idea — not the book.

What makes Sanders so funny on Instagram — her deadpan delivery — is absent on the printed page, and even the same jokes aren’t as funny when you’re reading them yourself. Moreover, trying to make her short-form persona become long-form in a book, Sanders has produced a book that is part menopause primer, part autobiography, part social media posts and part fourth-grade diary. These things do not go together. The wise crone has no use, truly, for any book whose resources include an Official We Do Not Care Club Membership Card, with dotted lines so you can cut it out.

The clippable Letter to Coworkers is probably a joke? Not so the templates for the letters she suggests we send elected representatives supporting menopause care and research. Peak ridiculousness comes with the lyrics to a song — two full pages of lyrics — that begin:

We’re the We Do Not Care Club / She’s Melani, the fierce leader / Where peri and menopause / Will not ever defeat us.

There were Barney the Purple Dinosaur songs that were more thoughtful and intelligent than this.

A married mom of three, Sanders had a modest social media following with whom she shared household tips and snippets of family life before she went viral pretty much by accident. It is that story, summarized in a few opening pages, that holds narrative promise, promise snuffed out with the “handbook” format, with its club songs and club patches (like Scouting patches).

The only tolerable parts of this book are the occasional “Real Talk with Melani” pages, where she gives tidbits of her life with her husband and their three sons, before ripping us away for a list of things club members have forgotten (“vaccuum cleaner attachments / books we were just reading / sanity”) and all manner of trite self-love exercises. Brief bios of honorary members of the Club add no heft, nor do “Challenges of the Day” such as silencing your inner critic.

Sanders’s appeal is more than comedy. But the deeper issues she speaks to are not plumbed here.

The Official We Do Not Care Club Handbook is evidence that there are many things worse than social media, and one of them is books born of social media. By all means, if you enjoy cutting dotted lines with safety scissors, there is fun to be had with this book. If not, just find Sanders on social media. She’s a queen there, deservedly. Not in this book. D

Featured Photo: The Official We Do Not Care Club Handbook, by Melani Sanders

Album Reviews 26/04/02

I See Orange, “Wine Boy” (self-released)

Eh, this is fine, if not exactly groundbreaking. This three-piece buzz-band is from the U.K., where they’re slowly rolling out what’s expected to be a major debut album. They’ve done showcases at New York City’s New Colossus Festival and Austin’s SxSW, catapulting their brand of “post-grunge” (in other words grunge) rock into the hype stratosphere, but for now we’re relegated to just a few tunes, including this one, whose lyrics focus on Mexican-born singer/bassist Giselle Medina’s fascination with the popular consumption of red wine in the U.K., where it’s considered a casual social drink, as opposed to Mexico, where it’s enjoyed in a more refined, serious manner. As for the sound, it’s choppy, paint-by-numbers Dave Grohl stuff; guitarist Cameron Hill adjusted all the knobs on his Marshall stack to bring maximum earache potential, while Medina’s wispy, moonbatty soprano tries to make things interesting but only succeeds in conjuring a metal version of the average Gilmore Girls soundtrack tune. This band will go far, I’m sure, but it doesn’t deserve it really. C+

Jon Anderson, Survival And Other Stories (Frontiers Music)

This one’s for Yes completists only, a vinyl-and-CD re-release of the singer’s 2011 LP, which was widely rejected by fans for its lack of progressive rock; Anderson’s focus at the time of this release was on New Age feel-good vibes, given that he had just had a health scare. But it’s not hopeless at all; the fact is that Yes did a lot of stuff like this back in their early days, stuff that the strummy, upbeat “New New World” resurrects, and yes, I’m talking about the mellower moments of Close To The Edge, not to put too fine of a point on it. But OK, “Understanding Truth” jumps the hippy-dippy shark for me, with its unplugged guitar and Anderson’s helium-filled, totally-not-falsetto-it’s-true vocals settling all the good yogis down around the campfire. Speaking of yoga class, “Unbroken Spirit” reads like Christopher Franke’s 1996 pseudo-soundtrack to The Celestine Prophecy, a record that had plenty of similarly nice, pleasant, loping stuff on it. In the end, as I implied, it’s for superfans, reiki practitioners, etc. B+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Our next album-dump Friday is April 3, two days after April Fool’s Day, a national holiday whose origins are uncertain but likely stem from a mix of European traditions. One popular theory blames France’s 1564 adoption of the Gregorian calendar, which moved New Year’s Day from April 1 to Jan. 1 (which is kind of dumb if you ask me, since one is more likely to die of frostbite after passing out drunk from multiple New Year’s toasts in January than in April), and people who were slow to adapt were mocked as “April fools,” isn’t that kind of transgressive? Well, whatever, nowadays in America pranking people is a national pastime of which I fully approve, especially when it involves someone dumping unwelcome news on me and then going “April fools, no, dummy, Creed isn’t releasing an album with Justin Bieber, so you don’t have to listen to and review any such thing, had you going though, didn’t I?” In that vein, I hope I’m not getting trolled by telling you people that Grammy-winning American bassist Thundercat releases his fifth album, Disappointed, this week! This one includes feats from A$AP Rocky, WILLOW, Channel Tres, Lil Yachty and Tame Impala, the latter of which appears on the tune “No More Lies,” which I only listened to because focus single “I Wish I Didn’t Waste Your Time” rubbed me the right way in a breezy yacht-techno sense. That hinted that the Tame Impala appearance would be even cooler than usual, given that I’ve liked Tame Impala’s mellow-but-edgy approach since the first time I heard them. However, “No More Lies” is slightly louder and more soul-infused than “I Wish…,” deep-fried in reverb, like what MGMT would have sounded like if they’d been around in 1974. If you’re trying to parse all this information, I’m saying that it’s good and you should go check it out.

• Seattle-based drone band Sunn O))) is at it again, with a new, self-titled album, because it’s so cool to self-title one of your albums after you’ve already been around for 28 years! If you are totally unaware of these guys you’re excused, because their stuff is largely unfollowable on purpose; they specialize in overly long metal-guitar ringouts that go on forever. They’re basically a metal version of Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans, an infamous exercise in self-indulgence, but some people have convinced themselves that they get something out of listening to Sunn O))), so I will not argue about it but will instead toddle off to YouTube to listen to the rollout track, “Glory Back,” and report back about how self-indulgent it is. Yup, I’m back, a full 10 minutes later, to report that it’s tedious, consisting of like five chords played very slowly, but with the guitar tuned so low that it feels like being digested by a tyrannosaurus rex. No, imagine if your little brother bought a vintage Marshall amp and was warming up to play something from Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality, but that’s all he ever did, strum a few chords as if trying to summon Cthulhu, that’s all this is.

• Cripes what’s next. Charley Crockett is a cowboy-hat singer from Texas who sounds like a cross between Jim Croce and Buck Owens on the twangy, lazy single “Kentucky Too Long” from his new LP, Age Of The Ram. Why do country music artists always have to have at least one song on every album that name-checks a southern state in the title? No, seriously, text me, because I really want to know.

• We’ll call it a week with U.K.-based R&B-popper Arlo Parks’s new one, Ambiguous Desire! “Impurities” is a very listenable trip-hoppish chillout featuring a full palette of ’80s-pop sound; her high-pitched singing fits in pleasantly in the yadda yadda. She’ll be in Boston at the Royale on Sept. 1.

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

Featured Photo: I See Orange, “Wine Boy” and Jon Anderson, Survival And Other Stories

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