Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/06/29

Aja Monet, When The Poems Do What They Do (Drink Sum Wtr Records)

Right, so today I learned not only that famous-ish actress Amber Tamblyn is a poet, but that she was actually here in Manchvegas (unless it was her talking through a Zoom feed or some dumb thing) in May, at a Slam Free Or Die event at the Stark Brewing Co. This presents yet another opportunity for me to implore whoever runs the Slam Free thing to get in touch with me for press love opportunities, especially if any local poet has done a recording. And so on, but yes, all that stuff is relevant to this item, because Monet’s trip is beat poetry (or whatever she’s calling it, but it’s beat poetry, OK) and it comes from the heart of a community organizer and an enraged Black woman with the capacity to censor herself well enough. The New York Times and all those guys are into her very clever, very urban stuff; her backing musicians are quite creative as well. A

Austin Stambaugh, ‘Til I Reach Downtown (Anti-Corporate Music)

Recorded in just three days (probably owing to the fact that there are some pretty good session musicians who were on the clock), this is the latest album from the Nashville-by-way-of-Ohio guitarist/poet/songwriter, the preparation for which — so he claims — involved his listening to a lot of Roger Miller, but it’s all good either way. This is the most drawl-y sort of bluegrass, remindful of Hank Williams Sr. in his earliest heydey. The pedal steel is handled with tobaccy-spittin’ aplomb by Stephen Karney; there’s fiddle of course, including Jared Manzo’s (of Brazilbilly) “bass fiddle,” in other words upright acoustic bass. Any old-school — and I mean seriously old-school — country music fan would love these tunes about being lonesome, being lonesome around people, and being lonesome at a hotel. The whole record sounds like these folks were having a great time making it, oh, and by the way, the drummer, John Mctigue III, played with Emmylou Harris. Not a hair out of place on this one. A+

Playlist

• Friday is the last day of June, the 30th, and that means the summer is already a third of the way over, can you even stand it? In addition, Friday is a day when new albums will emerge to bring us joy and happiness and barfiness in appropriate measure, and that’s what we’ll talk about today, in this multiple award-winning column, the good albums and the bad ones! The first thing we should cover is the “new” LP from Frank Zappa, Funky Nothingness, because a lot of people really like Zappa for some reason and I don’t want everyone to think I’m a jerk. OK, I really don’t care about that all that much, and in fact this is the first time I’ve ever mentioned The Zap in this column, because I’ve always thought of him as a cross between Captain Beefheart and Weird Al Yankovic, basically a joke-band leader I don’t have time for, but whatever, I think the most eyebrow-raising thing is that since 1994 the Zappa family trust has released count-’em 63 posthumous albums (nine of which have actually charted) prior to this three-record set. No, I’ve always viewed Zappa adherents as casual music fans who listen to his music because they’re afraid that if they listened to listenable music they’d actually like it; they’re sort of like Marxists who’d much rather discuss peripheral nonsense like “dialectical materialism” than do anything constructive. I mean, your mileage may vary of course; if you love Zappa because you had some sort of religious or drug-induced or whatnot epiphany that led you directly to the realization that he was a genius, then bless your heart, I accept you without reservation and hope this record makes your day. All I’d ask in the meantime is that you consider listening to Charles Mingus if you really want to hear noise-music-genius, and please don’t send me emails trying to convince me that I just don’t get it. I tried once in the past, I assure you: I bought the Joe’s Garage album with real American money long before I became a music journo whose only tangible reward has been receiving over 21,585 free albums from PR people since 2004, all of which I’ve liked more than Joe’s Garage. I don’t get Zappa and never want to. I’d rather listen to the 1970 nature album Songs Of The Humpback Whale than try to like Joe’s Garage, much less this new collection of balderdash, which is said to include a song I can’t name in this fine family newspaper, although a live version of it recorded at Olympic Auditorium in 1970 is blow-doors if you like hard jam-band music, which I don’t.

• Next up is another posthumous release, from former Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, widely known in musician circles as The Little Engine That Wasn’t Allowed To Make Interesting Drum Rolls. The LP is called Anthology and features the artiste’s impressions of old jazz tunes from Charlie Parker and such. Let’s move on.

• Folk-rock veteran Lucinda Williams, a.k.a. “not Bonnie Raitt,” returns with a new “platter” of music things, titled “Stories From A Rock N Roll Heart!” One of the songs is “Where The Song Will Find Me,” a slow moonshine-crooner with some nice pedal steel guitar, not that pedal steel guitar isn’t nice.

• We’ll close with Angelo De Augustine, an awkward California-indie dude who’s collaborated with and opened for Sufjan Stevens. His new LP is Toil And Trouble and features the tune “Another Universe,” which has lots of falsetto vocals and whatnot, making him the 2 billionth awkward indie-pop dude to rip off Pet Sounds this decade! Congratulations, Whatsyourface!

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).

Drowning, by T.J. Newman

Drowning, by T.J. Newman (Avid Reader Press, 293 pages)

If you haven’t read T.J. Newman yet, best get started. She is one of the hottest names in publishing right now, having seemingly emerged out of nowhere to sign multi-million deals that will put her two novels on the big screen. The first was 2021’s Falling; her new book is Drowning. Both are fast-paced thrillers set on a plane, drawing from Newman’s experience as a flight attendant, a job she took after failing to capitalize on her musical theater degree on Broadway. Both are best read on terra firma, not in the air.

In Falling, Newman gave us a Coastal Airlines pilot who learns midflight that his family has been kidnapped by terrorists who will kill his family if he doesn’t intentionally crash the plane. Coastal Airlines — the most cursed fictional airline since the TV show Lost gave us Oceanic — is back in Drowning, in which a plane with 99 souls on board has a catastrophic engine failure less than two minutes into a flight out of Honolulu and has to “ditch” — airline lingo for the dreaded “water landing.”

It’s unclear why Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger could land an Airbus A320 on the Hudson River without fatalities in 2009, while Coastal Flight 1421 — an Airbus A321 — could not, but ours is not to wonder why. Ours is to sit nervously in the grips of a book that author Don Winslow described in his jacket blurb as “Apollo 13 underwater.” The squeamish and claustrophobic will never make it through the movie when it comes out, but can probably suffer through the book just fine.

Probably.

The story revolves around a family of three which used to be a family of four — an engineer named Will, his estranged wife Chris, and their 11-year-old daughter Shannon. The couple had another daughter who died in an accident, and the relationship had broken from the weight of the tragedy.

Shannon is spending two weeks away from home, and Will is accompanying her on the flight because he is so anxious about something happening to his only surviving child. That setup seems unnecessarily campy given that the stakes are already so high, but Newman employs every trick to keep her readers engaged.

The entire family is brainy — Will had designed their Honolulu home so that even the position of the sun works to make it comfortable, and Chris is an industrial diver who — conveniently, as it turns out — owns an underwater salvage company. One criticism of Newman’s first book is that the circumstances so much require the suspension of disbelief, and that is certainly true here. (What are the odds that the mother of one of the children trapped on an underwater plane is an industrial diver? One hundred percent in a T.J. Newman book.)

There is no lengthy build-up to the disaster: Will notices the engine on fire on the first page, and we are rocketed into assorted passengers’ lives as they frantically try to come to grips with what is happening. We meet the flight attendants Molly and Kaholo, the co-captain Kit, the elderly couple who had traveled to Hawaii to celebrate their anniversary, the newlyweds, the newly divorced woman taking her first solo vacation, the unaccompanied minor, the requisite jerk whose death we won’t mind. When the plane goes into the water, some passengers die right away; others make the ill-fated decision to exit and take their chances in the water.

Only 12 stay behind — some following the advice of Will, who realized the risks of exiting the plane as a fire raged and fuel spilled into the sea — others because they just can’t get out in time. Not long afterward, the plane starts to sink and eventually comes to a precarious stop on the point of a cliff. Water is seeping into the cabin, but there is enough air that Will, Shannon and the other passengers can function normally, at least for the time being. Each new section of the book ominously gives an update on how much oxygen they have left: “2:48 p.m. 2 hours and 47 minutes after impact. Approximately 2.5 hours of oxygen inside plane.”

Meanwhile, on land, the military-led rescue operation somewhat improbably grows to involve a certain industrial diver whose estranged spouse and child happen to be on the plane. There is conflict over which of the severely limited rescue options has the least chance of killing the people inside the plane and those who are trying to rescue them.

The language is sparse to the point of comical when viewed with a critical eye: “A baby started to wait. The mother held her tight and sang a soft song into her ear. No one had a clue what was going to happen. Uncertainty brought fear. Fear created anxiety. They prayed. They cried. They texted goodbye to their loved ones.”

So you already know where this is going. And you probably have a decent idea how this will end. But that’s OK, because Newman, who looks to be her generation’s James Patterson, is a master at the carrot-and-stick formula that builds tension into every bite-sized chapter. A lot can go wrong even after a commercial jet lands in the ocean, let’s put it that way. And things are going wrong long past the point at which you’d think things should be starting to resolve.

There was a full-scale bidding war over the film rights, even before the book was released May 30. The excessively campy video trailer for Drowning says “the best film of the summer is a book.” It’s not wrong. The book reads like a screenplay, and therefore must be judged like one. No one will swoon over Newman’s prose, but in the summer thriller genre, in which literary standards relax quite a bit (like office dress codes on Casual Friday), she’s at the head of her class. B

Album Reviews 23/06/22

Dan Rosenboom, Polarity (Orenda Records)

L.A.-based trumpeter/composer Rosenboom leads a modern jazz quintet assisted by the production expertise of Justin Staley, who has worked on albums by Prince and Beck in the past. I really like this one. Opening song “The Age Of Snakes” has a slow, city-at-midnight beat that’s pure addictive chill, featuring some truly wonderful (and, appropriately, serpentine) interplay between Rosenboom and progressive-steeped sax guy Gavin Templeton. Those guys are heavyweights in the L.A. jazz scene, which has been trying to find its center-point over the last few years, but they imported both pianist John Escreet and drummer Damion Reed from New York City to liven things up, which they certainly do on “A Paper Tiger,” a hyper-speed post-bop-tinged foray into harmonic dissonance powered by jaw-dropping solo turns from those two. Templeton summons Wayne Shorter in the lonely but happy “On Summoning The Will”; group-syncopation and world-melodic patterning infuses “Ikigai” with a level of gentle forcefulness you rarely find. A great record. A+

Alex Lore & Weirdear, Evening Will Find Itself (Whirlwind Recordings)

Weird, this: Just when I thought the Dan Rosenboom album (reviewed elsewhere on this page) was going to be the most accessible/sturdy/appealing jazz record I’d hear for months, this one came in on the same banana boat sent by one of my favorite PR providers. Lore, whose trip is more Mingus-ish and less prog than Rosenboom’s crew, plays sax in this quartet but it’s similar in its sonically forceful gentleness, which we could all use right now, am I right? In fact, the apocalyptic state of the world (watch any YouTube interview with economist Clara Mattei if you really want to know how America got into this mess) figures heavily into this set of songs, in which Lore, a rising star, attempts to make sense of it all through careful experimentation. One quibble, it would have been nice to have anything — especially a trumpeter or Pro Tools person — aboard to canoodle with him further, but Glenn Zaleski’s piano helps deliver the latte-bar ambiance well enough. A

Playlist

• June 23 is a wonderful day in the neighborhood, because it is a Friday, which means new albums, new albums everywhere! What’s really great is that this week I get to pick on one of those American Idol people, Kelly Clarkson to be specific, because she has a new LP coming out on the 23rd, Chemistry! I mean, I think she’s a nice lady and a true warrior for whatnot cause and yadda yadda, but those talent shows have bothered me from the beginning, like, they all have a sort of Hunger Games patina to them, don’t they? And most of the big winners end up getting polite-sized record contracts and eventually wind up doing nothing really. Remember Taylor Hicks? I don’t either, like I had to toss “American Idol Taylor” in the internet search-box because I couldn’t remember his full name for the life of me. Lol, what a weird time that was, those early American Idol days, wasn’t it? It seemed as though the world was just careening off a cliff, that corporate garbage-pop had finally won and taken the last bit of fun away from music itself. Hicks looked like George Clooney’s really stupid brother, which appealed to people at some level, and then he put out two “blue-eyed-soul” albums that were too white to be considered cultural appropriation, the last one in 2009, and nobody bought them, and then the Billboard world suddenly woke from their stupor and mumbled something about Kelly Clarkson, and here we are. I’ll bet the new single, “Mine,” is Vegas-ized country-pop, wouldn’t that be extraordinarily bizarre, especially since she’s doing a 10-show stint in Vegas that’ll probably turn into a lifetime residency? Yes it would, and guess what, “Mine” is a diva ballad in which Clarkson tries to sound like every other currently relevant diva within each of the lines alternately; it’s like some sort of TikTok challenge: the first two lines sound like Billie Eilish, then Beyonce, then there’s some loud Adele myna-birding, and so on. The song itself is pretty good for a way-too-serious attempt at bumming out well-off yuppie girls who don’t have boyfriends, but you might like it, I do not know.

• Yikes, here we go, let’s start some arguments, whattaya say? I used to have a CD from Portugal. The Man in my car, and gang, I tried sooo hard to like them, mostly because I sort of felt sorry for their being a six-piece indie band from Alaska, like, what parent would want that for their children, you know? Whatever, I listened and listened and eventually gave up, because I couldn’t stand them at all. But now I have friends my age (never you mind) who’ve been hypnotized into liking them, and I know I’ll be hearing all about the band’s fast-approaching new album, Chris Black Changed My Life, but this time I’m actually going to listen to it and see if I can keep my lunch down, just so that I can stay relevant in the always evolving world of rock ’n’ roll music, so let’s do this thing, let’s listen to their probably dumb new song, “Champ,” which is the most appealing to me at the moment, because Edgar Winter is playing in it for some ridiculous reason, which means that there will be some minor guitar-god stuff in it. Yup, there is, toward the end, but other than that it’s awkward ironic trash, with Beach Boys vocals and Flaming Lips junk all over the place. I hate it.

• Ack, look fam, it’s Baltimore’s favorite boy-girl indie-folk/dream-pop/noise act, Wye Oak, with their new full-length, Every Day Like The Last! The pair’s newest single, “I Learned it From You,” is in front of my face right now, let’s just get it over with. Yup, sounds kind of Pretenders-ish, mopey, the drum sound is huge, it’s OK.

• And finally, let’s look at Melodies On Hiatus, the new full-length from the second-banana guitarist from The Strokes, Albert Hammond Jr.! “100-99” is an indie-hip-hop crossover tune featuring Goldlink on raps. Hammond’s voice sucks, so it’s relevant.

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 Collected Regrets of Clover, by Mikki Brammer

The Collected Regrets of Clover, by Mikki Brammer (St. Martin’s Press, 314 pages)

Clover Brooks is 36, single and surrounded by death — not the thing you’d want to put on a Tinder profile. The lifetime New Yorker lives alone in a rent-controlled apartment she shared with her grandfather growing up and she works as a death doula — the opposite of a birth doula. She sits with dying people, ensuring that they don’t die alone and helping them to process their pain and other complicated emotions they are experiencing. She keeps three notebooks in which she records notes; they are labeled “Regrets,” “Advice” and “Confessions.”

That’s what you need to know to understand the title of The Collected Regrets of Clover, a debut novel from Mikki Brammer, an Australian transplant who has a remarkable level of knowledge of New York City, where she lives now. It is a surprisingly upbeat novel, given the subject matter. The protagonist is a lonely young woman who has been hobbled by grief, having lost both parents as a child and, later, more traumatically, the grandfather who raised her. You might call her death-haunted; the first line of the novel is, “The first time I watched someone die, I was five.” (It was her kindergarten teacher.)

Clover does not have much of a life outside her work, caring for her two cats and a low-maintenance dog and keeping up with her neighbors. The only thing she does with any regularity is attend an occasional death cafe — a group where people gather to talk about death and enjoy refreshments (yes, this is a thing) — and every weekend have breakfast out and visit the bookstore she used to frequent with her grandfather before he passed more than a decade ago.

The few friends she has are old, and they include the 70-something bookstore owner and an elderly man who lives in her building and has known her since childhood. An only child who never learned to be social, she sees no reason to make friends and finds all the companionship and solace she needs in her structured life and in her books. Or so she thinks.

You probably see where this is going. Which is the only problem with this generally engaging book.

From the moment Brammer introduces a character named Sebastian, an overly enthusiastic visitor to a death cafe who tries to befriend Clover, there is a likely trajectory of this story. Our heroine will resist Sebastion’s overtures for only so long, and eventually he will bring her the companionship and love that she has long resisted. (She has never, she reveals, uttered the words “I love you” nor had them said to her — although her grandfather, a biology professor at Columbia University, clearly loved Clover deeply, he wasn’t one to say it, and her parents, whom she only vaguely remembers, had been more interested in each other than their child before they died in an accident while visiting China.)

To her credit, Brammer doesn’t follow that well-trampled plot, at least not completely. Instead, the story takes a sharp detour when Clover takes on a new client who, at 91, is dying of pancreatic cancer and has two months to live. Although she had a good marriage and a fulfilling life, she has long wondered if her life would have been better if she had married another man, someone she fell in love with when she was young and living in France. Clover does some research and finds the man seems to be living in Maine, so she sets off on a New England road trip to find him to fulfill the dying woman’s last wish.

In many ways The Collected Regrets of Clover is a literary death cafe — it is populated with millennials who grew up in families uncomfortable with talking about life’s end and who therefore are eager to explore the subject — everything from the legality of burial at sea to burial suits made out of compostable mushrooms. From Clover’s work to her memories to the visits to death cafes, the novel is one long conversation about grief and death. It’s a subject that the author seems to know something about.

One character says, “Someone told me once that [grief is like] a bag that you always carry — it starts out as a large suitcase, and as the years go by, it might reduce to the size of a purse, but you carry it forever.”

Clover has been carrying her own grief for reasons that unfold throughout the novel, and while it’s not an especially complicated story, it’s competently told and has enough light twists to keep readers engaged. The squeamish need not worry; death is largely a concept here; there are no unsettling depictions of the stages of decomposition or other things that happen to the body after we die. Nor does Brammer take up any discussion about the existence (or not) of an afterlife.

In a writing group she joined while she was working on the book, Brammer told others that she was trying to write a book about death “that’s fun and uplifting.” Strange as that sounds, she succeeded. B

Album Reviews 23/06/15

Troller, Drain (Relapse Records)

So this one is basically a cross between the ambient doom-drone of Sunn(((O))), Swans-style apocalypse-noise-punk and Raveonettes, in other words music to chant devil incantations by, in sum. It was purported to me to be possessed of such elements as “witch-house, goth-pop and industrial shoegaze,” which I suppose equals my above assessment; it’s proffered by a trio from Austin, Texas, composed of singer/bassist Amber Star-Goers (possibly not her real name), Justin Star-Goers (ditto) on guitar and SURVIVE synthesist/programmer Adam Jones. The tune “Lust In Us” is assuredly a shoegaze excursion, bathed in decidedly anti-sexual warbling and existential noise that isn’t on a My Bloody Valentine tip, more a sort of radio-static-dipped albeit melodic base. It’s a formula that could have served well enough to produce a full album, but as I pointed to earlier, the trio has other plans, mainly of the volcanic slow-motion-math variety. “Out Back” has an ’80s-synthpop edge to its woozy, muddy weirdness. B+

The Alarm, Forwards (Twenty First Century Recording Company)

During their early ’80s heyday, pushing hits like “The Stand” (which you’ve likely heard if you’re a devout follower of the 13 Reasons Why TV series; it played in the background of one episode, which led to 3 million Spotify plays) and “68 Guns” (their signature tune), this Leeds, U.K., band was a kinder, gentler Clash, I’d say; there was enough tough-guy edge to make their melodically agreeable tuneage appeal to the safety-pin-pierced patrol while maintaining a rather polite U2 flavor. This album, their first since 2021’s WAR, finds singer Mike Peters taking a decidedly Bono direction (particularly in the mid-tempo ”Another Way), which helps to justify his aping Tom Petty a bit in the blues-tinted “Love and Forgiveness.” “Transition” is the best on board here, fiddling with a sort of Ennio Morricone spaghetti-Western vibe before exploding into its Cult-inspired second half. I wouldn’t say the band’s evolved per se, but they’re still a bunch of (mildly) bad boys with a desire to make a dent. B+

Playlist

• I was privileged to attend the Sisters Of Mercy show at the Big Night Live club in Boston on May 31, so it’s a great time to remind all the young ’80s-goth-rock-loving kids out there that their last album, 1990’s Vision Thing, is still available to buy and act tragic to, if you really want to be an edgelord and impress your little friends with your comprehensive black-fishnet-clad acumen! Oldsters know that the big songs on that one were the title track and “Doctor Jeep,” and that the album was produced by Bat Out Of Hell fixture Jim Steinman, but wait, a few things first. The album you really want is 1987’s Floodland, which includes the band’s most enduring hits, namely “This Corrosion,” “Dominion” and “Lucretia My Reflection,” all groove-centric tunes that inspired the Boston crowd to break into snake-charmer dance moves when they were nicely rendered at the Boston show. The classic songs were the shorter studio versions but effective nonetheless, bringing the loudest applause after a series of less well-known numbers, a couple of which were pretty cool. It was the first time I’d been to Big Night Live (or any club in the last three years, owing to Covid), and I was treated super-nicely: the staff found me a table at which to sit so that my injured foot could take a nice break here and there. Anyway, what was I — oh yes, so even though Sisters frontman Andrew Eldritch is widely regarded as the godfather of goth, he hates that appellation, so don’t do it, even though he is totally, totally goth. He’s no longer the long-haired troublemaker of olde; nowadays he looks more like James Carville than Sid Vicious, but he still sings angrily and spookily, and hearing them play “This Corrosion” was worth getting stuck in an inexplicable midnight traffic jam for 1.5 hours. And voila, there you go, vampire kids, go support your uncle Andrew!

• Getting back to our usual business, June 16 will find you covered head to toe in albums, because it is a Friday, which means zillions of albums — most of them joke albums from troll bands, or just plain bad albums from people who still think the planet needs more albums — will enter Earth’s atmosphere at the speed of light, and they will all change course as they hurtle and make a beeline for people like yours truly, renegade music “journos” who still tell the truth about how most albums are pretty awful. But maybe that will change during today’s album-storm, as we look at the new Deer Tick album, Emotional Contracts, with a clinically detached eye, looking for something praiseworthy in this album. Yes, it’s one of those bands with “Deer” in the name, so I’m lost; I don’t remember the last few album reviews I wrote trying to excuse Deerhunter or Deerhoof or Deerpark or Deer Tick, so (as always) let’s just take the easy way by starting from scratch and having a look at this indie-rock album, which will probably be subtly boring or earth-shakingly awful like all the other “Deer” albums I’ve reviewed over my career. But look at that, it’s not so bad: “Forgiving Ties” is the closest thing to a Tom Petty single since “Learning to Fly,” except it goes nowhere melodically. It is meh but I don’t hate it.

• Jackpot, gang! Look at the title of this new album from psychedelic druggie dorks King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, it’s going to take over half the space for this column, and for that I thank it! Ready to spend eight minutes reading the title? OK, it’s: Petrodragonic Apocalypse; Or, Dawn Of Eternal Night: An Annihilation Of Planet Earth And The Beginning Of Merciless Damnation! That leaves us about 10 words left to talk about how the bald Needle Drop music reviewer dude on YouTube thought the title track “dragged a little bit” at the end, which is wrong, as always. If you like old Black Sabbath, that’s what it sounds like, not their usual early Pink Floyd/Flaming Lips nonsense. Never pay attention to Needle Drop, is the moral to this story.

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).

Soul Boom, by Rainn Wilson

Soul Boom, by Rainn Wilson (Hachette Go, 275 pages)

The shelf life of The Office and its cast seems eternal, even though it’s been 18 years since the sitcom’s debut. The actors keep turning up in other roles, in podcasts and in a surprising number of books, the latest from Rainn Wilson, who played the quirky paper salesman Dwight Schrute on the long-running NBC series.

It was the kind of iconic role that is hard to escape later in one’s career. Like Bob Odenkirk will always be Saul Goodman to fans of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, Rainn Wilson will always be Dwight Schrute, which is a bit of a problem for someone who is now selling spirituality. As great as that character was, he would not be my first choice for discussing the mysteries of the universe, human consciousness, God and death.

But following his passion, Wilson founded a media company that he, perplexingly, called “Soul Pancake” and currently stars in a streaming travel show called The Geography of Bliss. It’s hard to see his third book, Soul Boom, as anything but other than a marketing vehicle for the show, given its timing and its promotion of The Geography of Bliss. But maybe it would at least be funny, I thought.

Sadly, not, at least not in the smart, sly way that The Office is funny. It’s lighthearted and at times amusing, but Wilson’s folksy style of writing often deteriorates into words that really should not be on the printed page, as in this cringy sentence from the preface: “So … OK to move forward on the old booky-wook?”

Really, it was not — he lost me at booky-wook — but I soldiered on, hoping for improvement.

Wilson grew up in a family of Baha’is, members of a monotheistic faith that teaches progressive revelation — the idea that God is so far beyond our comprehension that existential truths must be revealed to humans gradually through holy teachers like Jesus, Mohammed and the Buddha. Its founder and prophet, Baha’u’llah, was, to the mind of young Wilson, “loving and reasonable” with “absolutely no fire-and-brimstone qualities.” Although he left the faith for a time in his 20s (“For a couple of years, I even tried on atheism like some jaunty, rebellious cap!”), he eventually returned to it.

But Soul Boom is not a come-to-Baha’u’llah book. Wilson does not seem particularly interested in recruiting people to his faith, but just in expanding our spiritual consciousness generally. He believes that nothing less than a spiritual revolution can solve the problems the world faces. And although he’s not hard-line preachy about it, he does want us to believe in God and the continuation of consciousness after death. You can’t have a “soul boom” without belief in a “soul,” after all.

Wilson’s own belief in an afterlife solidified at the time of his father’s death of heart disease when, after life support was removed, he recognized that “This body, this vessel was not my father. … The still, vacant body on that hospital bed in the ICU was simply a suit he once wore.”

That leads into a discussion of consciousness that is informed by Wilson’s deep reading in philosophy and disparate religious traditions. He notes that for all our scientific advances, human consciousness is largely a mystery. He then invites us to think about death, a topic that he tried to address in a reality-type TV show called My Last Days. (The studios passed.)

Again, he was failed by an editor, who left intact sentences like this one: “But what, exactly, does death put into perspective? Why, the preciousness of life, you big silly willy.”

This is the problem with celebrities writing books. Editors are so star-struck that they obsequiously leave in sentences — indeed, sometimes whole paragraphs and chapters — that should never have survived the first draft. It is this sort of silly-willyness sprinkled throughout that drags Soul Boom to a literary nether level. It’s unfortunate, because there are some moving passages in the book and Wilson, despite admitting that he hasn’t read some of the books from which he quotes, has clearly thought deeply about the material.

In one chapter, he writes about the importance of pilgrimages and describes his family’s trip to visit the Shrine of Bahji in Israel, where the founder of the Baha’i faith is buried. After sitting on the floor and praying there for over an hour, Wilson writes, he found that his world had shifted. “It’s like when you hit your windshield wipers and spritz the glass in front of you and all of a sudden you realize just how dirty it had been. Just like that, you can see everything outside your car with a renewed clarity. It was like that. Only in my heart,” he writes.

Without proselytizing, Wilson rues the way in which our culture has turned away from words like “sacred,” “holy” and “reverence” and is losing touch with religious traditions of all kinds, to include those practiced by Native Americans. “In fact, my life in 2023 Los Angeles is pretty much lacking in anything remotely sacred or spiritually connected. It’s all iPhones, quickly devoured sandwiches and leaf blowers. It’s texts and podcasts and emails. It’s pressured phone calls, calendars, and a nonstop newsfeed.” But he points out that the problem is not capitalism, per se. While our society is losing touch with the sacred, even businesses created for profit can be meaningful places — he gives as an example the Seattle restaurant where he and his wife had their first date, before taking up the question “What makes something sacred?”

Ultimately Wilson proposes seven pillars of a spiritual revolution, which, while not terrible, are disappointingly platitudinal and sound more political than spiritual. (They include “Celebrate joy and fight cynicism,” “Build something new; don’t just protest” and “systematize grassroots movements.” It’s all fine, in the way that fast-casual restaurants are fine, and I’ll admit to being impressed that he’s friends with noted theologian David Bentley Hart and quotes from a wide range of poetry and scholarly books. (He also includes a list of recommended reading, which is also admirably diverse.)

As celebrity books go, it’s a pleasure to find one that takes on life’s biggest questions, but there’s nothing here that seems especially revolutionary. C

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