Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/08/17

Bluphoria, Bluphoria (Edgeout Records/UMe)

I’m late to the ball by a couple of months on this one, the debut LP from this northern California-based alt-rock band, whose guitarist/frontman Reign LaFreniere is a Black dude who grew up on stuff like Hendrix, Dylan, James Brown, Pink Floyd and whatnot; he’s all about retaking the hard-ish-rock genre back to its roots, and for that he should be thanked, sort of, I suppose. Produced by Mark Needham (Imagine Dragons, Mt. Joy, The 1975, others), it’s a mixed bag of throwback-bar-band-microwaving. Opener “Set Me Up” is blatantly ’80s, a kissin’ cousin to Greg Kihn’s “The Break Up Song” with a Lenny Kravitz buzz to it (not reaching for the handiest reference there, either, it just is); “Believe in Love” is a cross between dance-floor Prince and the main theme from Footloose. Harmless, idiotic fun throughout. The closest they’ll come to New Hampshire during their current tour is the Middle East Upstairs in Cambridge, Mass., on Nov. 9. B

James Rivera’s Metal Wave, New Wave Gone Metal (Massacre Records)

In “am I the only one who thinks the ’80s rebirth has overstayed its welcome” news, this is a project from former Helstar singer Rivera, 10 New Wave tunes re-rubbed as hair-metal versions, and the only really interesting thing about this, to me anyway, is the fact that no one’s done it before, unless they have, not that I want to find out. OK, strike that, be nice Saeger, the concept does work in some of the tries, for instance the rub of Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”; I always thought the original version was kind of lumpy and dumb, and some Ozzy-style guitar definitely breathes new life into it, even if Rivera’s campy vocals border on Weird Al level. Wasn’t a big fan of the version of The Ramones’ “Pet Sematary,” being that the original track was fine; same goes for the Cure’s “Love Song.” The band’s take on Tears For Fears’ “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” is so well-deservedly awful toward a Mercyful Fate manner that it’s the best on board. A hearty “meh” to this. B-

Playlist

• I haven’t trawled through this week’s list of new CD releases that can only be found on the top-secret list we professional music journos consult when we put on our nappy fez hats and begin writing our edgy newspaper columns (psst, Amazon.com is the most reliable place, really, but we always tell readers we use Metacritic, just so you’ll think we’re actual wizards), so I don’t yet know what rock ’n’ roll albums are coming out this Friday, Aug. 18. There’s a reason for my telling you all this; it’s because I predict that a holiday album will be in the list, being that Christmas is so close (anyone have some liquid nitrogen I could spray on myself to get a little relief from all the insane heat?), so let’s have at it, let’s look at the list and see who’s going to be the first dumb band/artiste to take the plunge this year and try to impress us rock journos with their polite renditions of “O Holy Night” and whatever, even though, ironically enough, said band/artiste is most famous for “having beefs” and/or getting arrested and publicly canceled for some totally Christmas-y act of sexual depravity or etc., let me go take a gander here, dum de dum — Ack! Ack! I win, and I’m not kidding, I hadn’t looked at the list yet: It’s actress/singer Renee Rapp, who plays Leighton Murray in the HBO Max series The Sex Lives of College Girls, with an album called Snow Angel! The title track has a happy-gloom-chill feel to it, like Lana Del Rey, except Rapp’s singing is more gimmicky/interesting than that, sort of yodel-y. OK, it’s not a hardcore Christmas tune, but it is definitely Christmas-minded, toward a calculated, corporate fashion, because the lyrics don’t include words like “Christmas tree” or “Kringle,” but there are references to frozen noses and boyfriends, so tough noogies, guys, I’m calling it, I win, so let’s hop on Yukon Cornelius’ North Pole sleigh and go be Christmas-y and independent together! Wahoooo!

• Oh, look, the guys in the garage-punk band originally named Orinoka Crash Suite have changed the band’s name again, this time to Osees! Actually, I’m a day late and a dollar short or something, because their new album, Intercepted Message, is their fourth one released under the new moniker, isn’t it the best when bands change their names and you have to spend a good 10 percent of your column explaining that to your readers instead of describing their music? I sure do, and I probably went over this whole sordid story the last time I talked about them in this space, but we’re almost out of room for talking about this new LP, so what say we take a listen to the new single, “Stunner!” OK, it’s a cross between Flaming Lips and Primus, more or less, “boasting” a bunch of whirring space-guitar-noise and vocals that are in the Captain Beefheart realm, which means — oh, whatever, I’m not going to try to get pedagogic about this nonsense, it’s a joke song, whatever, let’s move this along.

• The three dudes from The Xcerts are originally from Scotland, but now they want to be called a British band because they moved to England. Kind of sad, isn’t it? They were around 13 years old when they first formed the band, and their upcoming fourth LP is Learning How To Live And Let Go. One of the tunes, “Blame,” has some art-rock guitar to it, but the vocals are pretty Weezer-ish, if your stomach could tolerate something of that ilk.

• We’ll call it a wrap with New York City-based rocker Margaret Glaspy, whose new album, Echo The Diamond, is on the way, spearheaded by the single “Act Natural,” which features Glaspy doing a Kate Havnevik warble over a rudimentary guitar riff. Not much to say about this one really.

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).

Save What’s Left, by Elizabeth Castellano

Save What’s Left, by Elizabeth Castellano (Anchor, 304 pages)

When Kathleen Deane’s cardiologist husband of 30 years decides to move out because of a “paradigm shift,” she experiences her own.

She decides to move from the suburbs of Kansas City to a New York beach town where a childhood friend is happily ensconced on a 50-acre potato farm, “unironically wearing overalls and aprons” and painting everything that doesn’t move white. Ten years near the sea have made this formerly free spirit of a friend “downright wholesome.” And Kathleen is convinced that by moving there, she, too, will find the sort of bliss her husband thinks he will find on a ’round-the-world cruise and then living in an RV.

What she finds, however, is a McMansion under construction next to the ocean-view shack that she purchased on the recommendation of a real-estate agent. And a life that is not quite what she envisioned.

This is not a tragedy, however, but pure comedy, a book-length stand-up routine with a punchline every few minutes. It’s Elizabeth Castellano’s comic distillation of her life growing up in a beach town on a peninsula in New York’s Suffolk County, where, as in the novel, development threatens to swallow much of the town’s character and charm.

In Save What’s Left, the fictional town is called Whitbey, and Kathleen is unwittingly absorbed into its drama when she buys a “Save What’s Left” bumper sticker at a local shop without knowing what it really means, and donates to a “community fund” that is funding something quite the opposite of what she imagined.

Whitbey is beautiful, as promised, but upon close inspection, there is much drama seething among the locals, making the hostilities of a typical suburban HOA seem docile by comparison.

The instigators seem to be a group of women known as the “Bay Mission,” who walk by Kathleen’s house every morning at exactly 7:16, so strict is their routine. When Kathleen gets on their mailing list, she deems the group something of a cult, despite its benign activities such as cleaning up the beach and creating a community zen garden. Every time Kathleen gets an email from the group, she says, “I half expect it to include a recipe for turning all the children of Whitbey into mice.”

But Kathleen herself is turning into a different person than she was when she arrived in Whitbey. Having tired of collecting orange jingle shells on the beach, she has turned her energies to questioning the legality of the ever-growing house under construction next to hers, which is constantly raining debris in her yard. She throws herself into anti-McMansion advocacy, writing a column for the local paper (that is hilariously rewritten by the editor) and showing up at every town council meeting, aided by a local man who had no interest in her cause but apparently wanted to be on television and likes the attention.

Meanwhile, Kathleen’s husband, who had been sending her postcards and gifts during his paradigm-changing trip around the world, turns up unexpectedly in an Airstream, with nowhere else to go.

Kathleen, who had said of her husband, “I don’t want to sound unkind, but, if a man leaves you in search of adventure, you want that man to choke to death on a deep-fried cricket in Beijing. You just do,” isn’t happy about this but allows him to camp in the driveway and use her electricity, not unlike the Griswold family’s Cousin Eddie. (It is, Kathleen reflects, the secret to a good marriage or a good divorce: “Someone needs to live in the driveway.”) Soon after, the monstrosity next door is finally finished and shows up on AirBnB as “Seaside Retreat. Modern Wonder.” (It has, after all, “four outdoor showers, five bathrooms, two washing machines, two full kitchens, and a waterfall.”)

At times the hijinks threaten to devolve into National Lampoon-style slapstick, but Castellano set out to write an anti-beach read, meaning one that slyly makes fun of typical beach reads while exaggerating the foibles of beach town life. She does this spectacularly. She also is a master of hilarious apropos-of-nothing asides, such as a running storyline about a Christmas card and letter that Kathleen and her family gets every year from someone they don’t know. (After her husband left, Kathleen was quick to send the letter-writer a card with her new address so that she gets the future Christmas cards in the divorce.)

Save What’s Left is a romp in the sun and sand, albeit without the physical irritants of sun and sand. It’s all fun, especially if you’ve ever loved a beach town, or thought about moving to one. And in that case, it’s also a warning.

As Kathleen says in the opening of the book: “I’m now the kind of horrible person who genuinely cares about what so-and-so had to say about the traffic from the chowder festival. I’m the kind of person who has an opinion about whether the beach sticker should be placed on the front or rear bumper of the car. I know more than one person named Bunny. … I’m that kind of person. The worst kind of person. I’m a beach person.” A

Album Reviews 23/08/10

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

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

Girlschool, WTFortyfive? (Silver Lining Music)

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

Playlist

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

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

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

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

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

The Heat Will Kill You First, by Jeff Goodell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Album Reviews 23/08/03

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

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

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

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

Playlist

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

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

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

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

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

The Last Ranger, by Peter Heller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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