Category: Pop

Album Reviews 24/10/03


Randy Ingram, Aries Dance (Sounderscore Record

Often, this Los Angeles-based jazz pianist astutely refers to his playing as “dancing,” a descriptor one could toss out to denote any similar keyboard-meister. Other critics have dubbed his playing “strong,” “personal,” “passionate” and “self-possessed,” adjectives that are also generically accurate when one is trying to paint a picture of a pianist whose mastery evokes ritzy ballrooms as opposed to smoke-filled bars. The thing about this swing-influenced fellow is that he’s devoutly determined to match up well with his drummers, in this case legendary Herbie Hancock/Stan Getz/etc. beat-keeper Billy Hart, who at age 83 doesn’t hold back, and in fact, if I’m forced to quibble with any of the soundscaping on this record, it’d be that Hart’s toms are a tad loud in the mix (usual caveat applies: others would argue that it makes it sound more organic). But anyway, yes, it’s livelier than most of the piano-led trios that wander into my mailbox, and the song selections are first-class, from the almost Beethoven-like interpretation of Wayne Shorter’s “Penelope” to the night-cruising original “Para Milton e Pedro,” it’s an exquisitely elegant trip. A

The Disappearing Act, An Illusion (Happiness [A Record Label])

This on-again-off-again indie band hasn’t released an album since Born to Say Goodbye nine years ago. While researching this outfit I had to check out a few D-tier bands that are cited as RIYL soundalikes, one of them being Motorcade, which do sound like this but with a lot spiffier production values (Apples In Stereo are also mentioned, which couldn’t be farther off). But you don’t want to spend the next three minutes getting caught up with bands that have less than 2,500 YouTube listens and I respect that; the long and short of it is that this sounds like a more animated Pavement that’s on Velvet Underground’s plethora of drugs. As such, if you’re like me — an adrenaline junkie with debilitating ADD — you’ll find that it plods along for the most part, you know, strummy-strum-strum, edgy platitudes piled one on top of the other like it’s a competition, etc. The Beck-begging “Why Is Everybody So Damn Happy” is a sentiment that shows the band isn’t paying attention to all the anxiety and self-hatred on social media nowadays; it’s kind of quaint in that regard. Yucky poo. B-

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Onward we slog, me hardies, onward we slog to this Friday, Oct. 4, when new music albums will wash over our decks and near-drown our persons in twerking butt music, poorly written (on purpose, as we’ve seen) indie rock, nepo baby nonsense and probably tons of metal albums, because those guys never shut up, even for a minute. Oh, well, at least it’s Halloween month, and who better to usher in the festivities than British arena-indie legends Coldplay, with their suuuper-scaaary frontman Chris Martin, who was married to the even scaaarier Gwyneth Paltrow for a week or however long it was. As you may or may not know, Coldplay is widely considered indie-rock’s answer to Creed in too-online circles, in other words not too many people take them seriously. However, the band does have a fan here at the Hippo’s front offices (it’s either Coldplay or Five For Fighting, I’m not really sure, but let’s just proceed), so I will be nice and listen to their forthcoming new album, Moon Music, with an open mind and a full bottle of Southern Comfort, because it’s only fair! In case you’re intelligent and ignore celebrity gossip like most people avoid open elevator shafts, things have changed for Chris Martin! After Gwyneth yelled “Seize him!” and her scimitar-wielding guards threw him out of her weird-smelling mega-mansion, he hooked up with alpha nepo-baby Dakota Johnson of really-bad-movies fame, and that’s where we stand at the moment, waiting for him to announce another thing that’s really strange about him! But in the meantime, this new album is already available on YouTube, let me go check it out and start typing things about it before I bag the whole idea and just find a decent kazoo-and-jaw harp band that’s releasing an album of Metallica covers to review instead of Moon Music. Right, the first song on here is called “feelslikeimfallinginlove,” see what they did there. Ha ha, the video has people hand-dancing like Napoleon Dynamite, and the tune is mellow soccer-parent somnambulism, very polite, appropriately melodic, it’ll be a huge hit on Good Morning America and such. Is Coldplay the Aughts version of The Beatles/Pearl Jam? Discuss.

• Hold the phone, guys, something interesting is here, namely a band called Memorials, with their new album, Memorial Waterslides! Why are they interesting? I’m glad you asked: The band features Electrane’s Verity Susman and Wire’s Matthew Simms, and as you know, I’m one of those inappropriate misfits who loves Wire, so I’ll listen to anything any of those guys puts out, including this, even though Simms only joined the 48-year-old band as their guitarist in 2010. Yikes, there’s like no promotion for these guys, I had to dig around YouTube for an entire eight minutes before I found the single, “Cut It Like A Diamond,” how am I the only person on Earth who cares about Wire? In short, it’s awesome, a psychedelic-art-rock tune that makes like Flaming Lips trying to be David Essex, won’t you people please love this?

• Alicia Keys is a fan of San Diego band Thee Sacred Souls, so they might be good, I don’t know! Their new LP Got A Story To Tell includes a torchy reggae-soul tune called “Lucid Girl,” you’ll probably like it if you dig both Bob Marley and Smokey Robinson. They’ll be at Roadrunner in Boston on Nov. 10.

• Finally it’s Canadian indietronica act Caribou, aka Dan Snaith, with a new album, called Honey! The title track has been around a few months and it’s really quite good, a wub-wubby, jungle-infused IDM track that’ll fit your brain like a pair of thick comfy socks. Very kyewl.

Meet the Neighbors, by Brandon Keim

Meet the Neighbors, by Brandon Keim (W.W. Norton, 368 pages)

With all the studies and books published on animal intelligence in the past decade, did we really need another one? Well, yes, it turns out we did. Brandon Keim, a science and nature writer who lives in Bangor, Maine, has found a new twist on the subject in Meet the Neighbors.

Culling from copious research, Keim takes a Mr. Rogers approach to animal science, reporting his findings while strolling through “the everyday landscape of a suburban neighborhood” and pointing out the various animals residing there. While this may seem a sophomoric endeavor to some, he argues otherwise, saying that the central question of our time is “How might an awareness of animal minds shape the ways we understand them and, ultimately, how we live with them on this shared, precious planet?” In other words, until we approach animals as compadres in the struggle, we are getting them, and our own moral development, wrong.

Challenge him at your own risk: No less than Charles Darwin was a fan of the lowly earthworm, about which he wrote a surprise bestseller. (The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Actions of Worms is not quite as catchy a title as On the Origin of Species.) In this, Darwin’s final book, he wrote of earthworms, “they deserve to be called intelligent.”

Keim’s interest in the topic came from his realization that the birds he watched bathing daily in a local reservoir “were like locals at a coffee shop or the gym. They were my neighbors.” Since most Americans actually know little about their human neighbors, this might not be the best argument for learning more about squirrels and chipmunks.

A better argument comes from the quote by the writer and Whole Earth Catalog co-founder Stewart Brand, who said, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” When Keim first came across this quote, he said, it “grated” at him, but he came to accept the hard truth in it: that we all make decisions every day that affect the lives of other creatures, whether it’s something as simple as turning over a stone and disrupting a small colony of insects, or clearing a wooded lot for a house.

“But we could turn the phrase a bit differently than Brand,” Keim writes. “We might as well be good neighbors.” This involves questions with ethical considerations, such as “what do we owe so-called pets, or animals who are sick or injured? How do we live with predators whose presence is not always welcomed?” In attempting to answer these questions, Keim walks us through a brief history of animal rights, from Aristotle to Peter Singer, at times including nauseating detail about animal cruelty, and the challenges that remain. (For example: “the federal Animal Welfare Act exempts farm animals and most lab animals; the Humane Slaughter Act doesn’t apply to chickens or fish, who account for the vast majority of farmed animals.” And protections for wild animals mostly apply to endangered species.) This section feels a bit thin, coming so soon after the masterful treatment of the subject in Our Kindred Creatures by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, and Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals, earlier this year.

But when Keim resumes his neighborhood walks (which aren’t limited to where he lives now, but include other places he’s lived and traveled), he uses his own experience to explore animals that don’t get as much sympathetic treatment, as, say, dogs or elephants. He takes up the neighborly cause for rats and cormorants, waterbirds that are among the most hated birds in the world, with contempt for them going back to the biblical book of Leviticus. While he once hated the bird, Keim sees a flock and envisions them as “returning home after a day’s work” with family, friends and acquaintances and thinks about what stories they would communicate to each other. He talks to an ecologist studying the effects of pollution who adopted a deformed baby cormorant that he named Cosmos and who later became something of a minor celebrity because of their media appearances.

He also takes up a subject that gets too little attention: the cultural cognitive dissonance when it comes to animals that allows us to be entranced when a raccoon climbs an office building in Minnesota, becoming a social media star, and yet also considers that species a pest to be eradicated. The story Keim tells of a Canada man who raised and released a baby raccoon only to have the raccoon return two years later for a visit will cause you to reconsider hiring a pest control company — or at least any that don’t consider the animals’ welfare as well as the humans’.

Even the most ardent of animal lovers claim the right to kill animals in self-defense, but do we also have the right to kill them when they damage our property, invade our homes or generally fit the definition of “nuisance”? The law usually says so. But even when people try to deal with nuisance animals in a humane way — by trapping and relocating them, for example — that may turn out to be just a slower form of death.

The Canadian man who had raised the raccoon later went on to run his own “pest control” company with humane methods, and told Keim an amazing story about a client who had a raccoon living in a garage with a nest of babies. They couldn’t figure out how the raccoon was getting in or out until he one night watched the raccoon push the button that opened the garage door.

“As best as he could figure, she would go outside at night while the homeowner slept, then close the door when she returned in the morning’s wee hours, leaving her humans none the wiser.” It’s an astonishing story and bolsters Keim’s contention that understanding “the neighbors” makes us less likely to want to kill them, and more likely to want to find ways to live in harmony. B

Album Reviews 24/09/26

Hayley and the Crushers, Unsubscribe From The Underground (Kitten Robot Records)

You may have noticed that rock bands, particularly older ones, aren’t very good at evincing any sense of internet-savviness when they make a record whose lyrical slant is focused on “what all the kids are doing on social media and whatever.” Hayley Cain, this melodic punk band’s frontlady, defines herself as a “vintage Millennial, the last generation to remember an analog childhood before and after the internet.” Well well. OK, given that my job is playing a hypercritical jerk who’d find fault with Mother Teresa, I take that — as well as a couple of her other quotes — as an admission that she’s actually a GenXer who was never big into online culture (if you don’t know, I’ve written two books about that, so I could get really nasty about this but won’t). Bands, don’t be like this, singing about stuff you don’t know about, and don’t be like the Stones and pay Sydney Sweeney to sprawl around in your video in a cynical attempt to extract a little Zoomer cred just because “Whoa, it’s Sydney Sweeney.” Hopefully two or three of you get what I’m talking about, and mind, I have no deep problem with the music; it’s jumpy, (politely/gently) crazed and rather catchy, even if the bass is almost absent from the mix. Anyway, all the other stuff has needed to be said for decades now. B

Peter Somuah, Highlife (ACT Records)

This album would normally be lumped in the jazz category, but that’d be oversimplifying things. This Ghana-born trumpeter isn’t the Miles/Hubbard disciple some will paint him to be; in fact, he grew up playing Ghanaian “highlife” music (think Afrobeat/ska-tinged reggae or vice versa to grok the basics), and, among other sounds, this record is something of a homecoming to those musical roots, when he’d play all night until no dancer could still stand erect. The album opens with some heavily accented words from highlife legend Koo Nimo on the origins of the genre (“highlife” refers to the style that evolved from the waltz, samba and Western popular music that wealthy British colonizers forced Ghanaian locals to play). “We Give Thanks” fuses ’60s Beatles-booted organ to samba in a tune that evokes both Lawrence Welk and the early James Bond movies; in “Bruce Road,” Somuah’s horn drapes itself over a “Superstition”-like bass beat that touches on bossa nova. “Feel-good stuff” would be one (woefully inadequate) way of describing this. B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• You have to be kidding me, the next major album-release Friday is this week, Sept. 27, slow your roll, there, calendar, think about the children! OK, children, if you’re reading this award-winning column in your favorite sub shop on Saturday the 28th, grab your uncomfortable molded-plastic desks and gather ’round, so we can learn about experimental punk band Xiu Xiu, whose new album, 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn Grips, just came out yesterday! The band is based in San Jose, California, and over the past 22 years of their existence they’ve undergone some personnel changes. The band is still led by Jamie Stewart, the nepo-baby son of one Michael Stewart, who, back during the days of the American Revolution, won two Grammys for producing such albums as Billy Joel’s breakthrough LP Piano Man. Nowadays the group prominently features longtime member Angela Seo, a singer/multi-instrumentalist, and also they have Tried Unusual Music Things, such as releasing a tribute project to singer/civil rights activist Nina Simone in 2013. As well, their albums usually end up at Pitchfork’s unlistenable music desk, where they always garner rave reviews except when the reviewer didn’t get whole oat milk in his flavorless latte. What does all this mean? It means that this new album will be strange and unusual and will have a lot of girl vocals, duh, so let’s go listen to it for as long as my stomach can stand it. The test-drive track is on their Bandcamp space; it is called “Common Loon,” a loud punky thing that begins as a discombobulated emo tune a la Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy.” Whoa, then it gets really muddy and heavy, and the nepo baby is singing like Buffalo Bill on Silence Of The Lambs, this is getting pretty edgy, folks! Huh, then some epic goth-pop synth comes in, and the whole mess becomes quite listenable, I’m surprised Pitchfork likes these guys at all, but then again, people do eventually grow up a little.

• One of the new albums coming out this week is titled EELS, but funnily enough it wasn’t recorded by the Eels; it’s from an Austin, Texas, band called Being Dead, don’t you hate it when these things happen! Odd, I probably have this album somewhere in my stack of new releases; they are represented by my favorite public relations firm, which only rarely sends me crappy albums, so I am anticipating a pleasant-enough listening experience. Mind you, their songs are said to be always adventurous and genre-bending, so this will be like my taking some random piece out of a generic box of chocolates, and you know how that goes, you always end up with the cherry one and immediately throw the whole box in the trash. Wait though, the sample track, “Van Goes” is post-punk in a very classic sense, combining the rawness of Exene with B-52s-ish poppiness. It is OK!

• Great, jog my memory why don’t you, new release list, the last time I remember even thinking about Maxïmo Park was when they were mentioned every time someone was talking about metrosexuality, do any of you people even remember that nonsense? Good, count your blessings, let’s just skip that and talk about the band’s new album, Stream Of Life! The single, “Your Own Worst Enemy,” is the worst song I’ve heard this year, a hooty, Morrissey-nicking waste of notes. Absolutely awful.

• Lastly, let’s have a look at White Roses My God, the debut solo album from Low co-founder Alan Sparhawk! “Get Still” is Nintendo-driven slowcore, like Figurine on head drugs he’d ingested just to be even more annoying than usual.

Burn, by Peter Heller

Burn,by Peter Heller (Knopf, 291 pages)

Jess and Storey have been friends since they were kids growing up in a small town in southern Vermont. As adults, they maintained their friendship, in part by spending several weeks each year hunting off the grid. In fact, it was those trips that killed Jess’s marriage. His wife wasn’t happy with his lengthy absences to hunt and fish when he couldn’t make time to vacation with her.

Jess is still mourning the loss of his wife and dog, and clutching the prayer stone that Jan had once given him, when he joins Storey to hunt in north-central Maine one September. But his personal tragedy soon shrinks in the middle of a bigger one.

When the men try to return to civilization after more than a week off the grid, they find that civilization, as they know it, has vanished — the bridge they’d previously crossed blown up, no cell service, towns incinerated, the residents missing except for a few corpses.The second Civil War, it seems, has come to New England.

Burn is novelist Peter Heller’s take on a popular theme: the idea that America’s polarization could lead to secession and war, trivialized by some with the euphemism “national divorce.” There have been numerous fiction and nonfiction books exploring this theme, and a movie earlier this year.

But Burn is no made-for-Hollywood thriller that exploits the country’s tensions. It aims higher with a story that explores family, betrayal, secrets and friendship. The savage conflict is just an accelerant that elevates the stakes.

The story begins with Jess and Storey emerging from the woods to find a gory mystery: Where are the people who lived in the incinerated towns? Why were their cars torched, while boats at the marina were left untouched? And most pressing of all, who was responsible? The federal government, or militias, or a foreign invader? “Jess began to carry a stone in his gut he recognized as dread,” Heller writes.

The men, both in their late thirties, surmised that the violence was related to “secession mania” that had pitted Mainers against each other. “But no one had expected it to come to full-bore civil strife. They had discussed the risk while planning the trip and decided that what was happening in Maine was no worse than the stirrings of revolt in Idaho and the failed secession vote in Texas the year before. These were fringe minorities, vocal and passionate, but not a real threat.”

Storey — who lives in Burlington, Vermont, with his wife and two daughters — and Jess, who lives in Colorado — have no dog in this fight. But they also have no way to get out, once they realize that all the combatants seem to be shooting everyone they see on sight. Their primary problem is sheer survival as they try to figure out how to escape what seems to have become a war zone.

They scavenge food and coffee from boats, and camp deep in the woods, as they plot a way out. Storey grows increasingly worried about his family, while Jess ruminates on what he has already lost, and his teenage years, providing flashbacks into his pre-apocalypse life, in which he spent most of his time with Storey’s idyllic, warm family, feeling unloved by his own parents, who mostly seemed to care about books.

There is little time for contemplation, however, as the men have to keep moving. The danger they are in is underscored when helicopters appear without warning, firing on someone in a boat, and at one point the two friends have to fire on other men who are shooting at them; while both are experienced hunters, neither has ever shot at another human being, let alone killed one. And by means of a ham radio they come across, they are able to learn snippets of what is transpiring around them, from a Canadian broadcast in French.

All of this provides tension enough to sustain a whole book, but Heller surprises his readers with two turns of events — one in the present day, one in the past — that raise the stakes even beyond the hellscape they are navigating. The introduction of these subplots adds complexity to the men’s journey, and at one point threatens their friendship.

Full disclosure: I was already a Heller fan, having read 2012’s The Dog Stars, 2014’s The Painter and 2023’s The Last Rangers (and given each of them an A). But not every author gets better with age, and with the subject matter, I was prepared for Burn to disappoint. It did not.

An accomplished outdoorsman who grew up in New York, went to high school in Vermont and attended Dartmouth College, Heller’s writing is suffused with knowledge of nature and sport, and New England. In Burn, he uses the names of real towns, not fictional ones, which might be disconcerting to lovers of Maine, as the conflict widens. But it’s also interesting to see this sort of story, which a more predictable writer might have set in a southern state, play out where it does.

The problem with a book like Burn is that the reader is anxious to get to the end to find out what happens to the characters, but at the same time doesn’t want their story to end. Heller has not written sequels before, but Burn is deserving of one. While he delivers as satisfying an ending as possible in a story this bleak, we still want to know what happens next.

“Always leave them wanting more” is a phrase attributed to P.T. Barnum. Heller employs the tactic well. Still, I’d pay $50 cash right now for Burn 2. A

—Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 24/09/19

The Black Pacific, Here Comes Our Wave (Dine Alone Records)

The long-awaited second album from this side project led by Jim Lindberg (lead singer and songwriter for seminal California skate-punk band Pennywise) is a lot of fun at the beginning, leading off with “I Think I’m Paranoid,” which Lindberg accurately describes as a “panic attack with distorted guitars at 120 beats per minute.” If you’re a visiting Martian, that means it’s legitimately hardcore-fast, but this isn’t just a sk8er record; after a few barn-burners like “No Fun” (about “sociopath dictators around the world inflicting chaos and death on innocent civilians”), and take-no-prisoners rawker “Here We Come” (about the encroaching threat of AI taking everyone’s jobs and all that happy stuff), along comes “Float Away,” which opens as an exquisitely filthy no-wave thing and becomes a Hoobastank-derived emo joint in which he yearns to build a raft and sail away with his wife. This one puts Lindberg’s versatility with different power-rock styles on brilliant display. A+— Eric W. Saeger

Blitz Vega, Northern Gentlemen (FutureSonic Records)

This debut LP is also a posthumous one; as the duo’s remaining member Kav Sandhu has remarked, Smiths bassist Andy Rourke (who died last year of pancreatic cancer) was this band. Where it’ll go from here is anyone’s guess, but it’d be nice to see Sandhu continue in this vein, especially if you’re into ’80s music; there’s some really captivating material here. The album opens with “Disconnected,” which flirts with a Depeche Mode feel while also drawing from Lords Of The New Church. That’s followed by government-issue mid-tempo rocker “Strong Forever,” a junkie-rock dance-along made for post-industrial smoke-filled rooms. “Big Nose” hails to New York Dolls deconstructionism; the jangly “High Gravity” recalls mid-career Wire; “Love City” will make you think of ’70s/’80s-era Jim Steinman (remember, he didn’t just produce Meatloaf but Sisters of Mercy as well). With any luck this project will continue, but the loss of Rourke may well negate any hope of that, which really is a shame. A — Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yuppitty-yup, it’s all downhill from here, the new albums of Sept. 20 are on the trucks and heading to the stores for another freaky Friday of new music, as the snows gather in Canada and our tundra prepares to permafrost! Yes, what I actually mean is that you’ve already heard all about those albums from bootleggers and people who found the one YouTubeToMP3 website that wasn’t crawling with viruses and gleefully downloaded the albums, and you’ve already heard the advice that I’m about to impart, but can you at least pretend that this is news to you, that’d be great. But first, let’s look at the new solo album from Sonic Youth bandleader Thurston Moore, titled Flow Critical Lucidity, that is if he can give us a rest from promoting that Shelly Duvall lookalike girl on his Instagram, what’s even going on there, no don’t tell me I don’t care. Huh, today I learned that Moore and his bandmate/ex-wife Kim Gordon released a collaborative album with Yoko Ono in 2012, which came out at about the same time as my favorite New Yawk City public relations dude started sending me all sorts of spam about a new Yoko Ono album; maybe that collaboration had something to do with people trying to legitimize Yoko and make me write about her, which I did at the time in these very pages unless it was somewhere else (I hated it). No, everything Moore does is considered rad and cool by people who enjoy not-very-good music, but if that is your wont, yes, I shall now sashay over to the YouTube whatsis and have a listen to “Sans Limites,” Moore’s new single, which features guest vocalist/weird French person Laeitia Sadier, of Stereolab! OK, I’m reporting live from the YouTubes, and this song has been shockingly boring for a full minute, a guitar-strummy thing that sounds like your little brother trying to impress his crush, like, sort of a fractal but nothing fascinating going on. Finally Moore starts singing in his serious-mode Nick Cave voice, and the only thing Sadler is doing is breathing sort of melodically. What. Ever.

• Since 2000, Canadian singing lady Nelly Furtado has straddled the lines between pop diva, Latinx pop star and trip-hop princess, aside from her short stint singing that borderline heavy metal song with Bryan Adams at the Olympics, when they gave everyone in the crowd drum-shaped noisemakers, do you even remember that? Well heaven only knows what she’s doing on her seventh album, titled, of course, 7, because she claims that her ADHD drove her to write 500 songs since her last album, 2017’s The Ride, let me go listen to one of them now. Yes, “Corazón” is the opening tune, a tribal-washed reggaeton affair with a deep-diva tonality, it’s pretty interesting.

• Reality talent-show fixture Katy Perry is back with us again, with a new album called 143! She told cardboard-cutout jokeman Jimmy Kimmel that the album is “super high energy, it’s super summer, it’s very high BPM,” which would make sense if it were still summer, but as we know, it is not. Regardless, the lead single from this record, “Woman’s World,” is actually low-BMP, not that I’m trying to be pedantic, and it’s easily the most uninspired thing I’ve ever heard from her, like she hired a hack songwriter who needed immediate money to pay his gardener. Very low-quality stuff, folks.

• Lastly it’s Conor Oberst and his band Bright Eyes, with a new LP titled Five Dice All Threes! The album’s jump-off track, “Rainbow Overpass,” combines snoozy Bonnaroo-ready indie-folk with loud Big Black-style no-wave. Nice idea, but, you know — why? — Eric W. Saeger

The Singularity is Nearer, by Ray Kurzweil

The Singularity is Nearer, by Ray Kurzweil (Viking, 312 pages)

If there is anyone who can envision how artificial intelligence will change our lives in the next few decades, it’s Ray Kurzweil, whose title at Google includes the words “AI visionary.”

Kurzwell has been working in the industry for more than six decades. So when he tells us that “the singularity” — the merger of humans with AI — is likely to occur by 2045 and will be “utterly transformative,” we’d best pay attention.

Building on his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil examines the developments in AI since then, as well as its impact on jobs, health, longevity, and the risks that technology poses. It’s widely believed that AI will soon pass the “Turing test” — the point at which AI’s response to questions is indistinguishable from humans’ — which Kurzweil expects to occur by 2029. That milestone, he believes, will launch us into the fifth epoch of development, connecting our brains with computers that “will allow us to add many more layers to our neocortices — unlocking vastly more complex and abstract cognition than we can currently imagine.”

Augmented in this way, the enhanced human brain will eventually “become more than 99.9 percent nonbiological” in two ways, Kurzweil says: “One is the gradual introduction of nanobots to the brain tissue itself. These may be used to repair damage or replace neurons that have stopped working. The other is connecting the brain to computers, which will both provide the ability to control machines directly with our thoughts and allow us to integrate digital layers of neocortex in the cloud.”

As AI is advancing even quicker than many futurists initially believed, it seems the digitization of the human mind will likely happen within the lifetimes of many people who are alive today. Kurzweil, who lives near Boston, is 76 and he believes he will live to see it.

“As nanotechnology takes off, we will be able to produce an optimized human body at will: we’ll be able to run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish, and even give ourselves working wings if we want them,” Kurzweil writes. “We will think millions of times faster, but most importantly we will not be dependent on the survival of any of our bodies for our selves to survive.”

There’s another, controversial word for all this, which Kurzweil doesn’t use: transhumanism. And much of what Kurzweil envisions is dependent on nanotechnology, the development and implantation of nanobots, almost unimaginably tiny robots that could roam our bodies, repairing or removing malfunctioning cells. (To give you an idea of scale, there are more than 25 million nanometers in an inch; Kurzweil describes a nanobot as about the size of a human cell.)

While some forms of medical nanotechnology are already in testing on animals, the life-changing nanobots that Kurzweil is talking about don’t actually exist yet. He’s largely talking about what could happen, and the future may not be as rosy as he thinks.

He acknowledges as much in a chapter titled “Peril” in which he examines scenarios where AI doesn’t help us but leads to the mass extinction of anything carbon-based. He nods at Bill Joy’s famous essay “The Future Doesn’t Need Us,” published in 2000 in Wired magazine, and the “gray goo” theory, which posits that self-replicating nanobots that consume or otherwise destroy living things could wipe out the Earth’s biomass within a matter of weeks. Nanobots could also be used as military weapons, delivering virtually undetectable poisons to whole populations. But the technology can also be used for defense systems, and technology companies are taking these sorts of doomsday scenarios seriously and devising safeguards.

While Kurzweil is trying to write for a general audience, and largely succeeds, the book at times descends into college-textbook dryness when he explains various technologies. But he turns out to be a surprisingly engaging philosopher as he navigates the ethical issues surrounding AI.

A chapter titled “Who Am I?” examines subjective consciousness, or qualia, and the trouble with assuming AI can never acquire it, as well as the issues that arise as we get closer to “resurrecting” the dead with avatars or replicants created using photos and video, texts, interviews and other data about loved ones. (Kurzweil has done something like this with his own father, collecting everything his father had ever written, including love letters to his mother, and then using AI to have a “conversation” with his deceased father, or as he put it, his “dad bot.”)

Another question he delves into is how much of our essential selves we might lose as our body parts — even the brain — are rebuilt as Lee Majors was in the old TV series The Six Million Dollar Man.

Kurzweil recalls the thought experiment of ancient Greeks who pondered what happens when an old ship is gradually rebuilt using new planks. If the old planks are stored and then reassembled into a ship again, which is the original? The stakes are higher when it comes to human beings. “For most of us, it matters a great deal whether the person standing next to us is really our loved one or is just a Chalmersian zombie putting on a convincing show.”

For those of us who can live long enough to take advantage, Kurzweil assures us that “radical life extension is close at hand.” That may make you want to start exercising and eating right, or to take up drinking and smoking posthaste. Either seems a rational decision, given what is headed our way. B

—Jennifer Graham

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