Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/03/30

Glitter Wizard, Kiss The Boot (Kitten Robot Records)

Sure, these guys are good for what they do, which, for over a decade, has been sort of a cross between T-Rex and the first two Kiss albums (stop cringing). This is a crew of five dudes from San Francisco who are into combining psychedelica, old glam rock, punk, and (sort of) prog in order to table a That 70s Show party vibe. The lead guitarist is decent, reaching for the acid-rock stratosphere with squealy, pinched notes around every corner, but what I actually like best is that the backing vocals are a complete mess, probably having been recorded on the cheap with the remaining 20 minutes of recording studio time. I’d venture to say that fans of Black Lips would be jiggy with this, but in the end, if this bunch sticks with this off-the-rack lo-fi engineering, they could probably end up putting out a single that ends up replacing Gary Glitter’s “Rock ’n’ Roll” at football games. Do I expect that to happen? Well, no, but who knows. A

The Church, The Hypnogogue (Communicating Vessels Records)

I’d say everyone who was club-hopping in the ’80s has heard of this Australian New Wave quintet, but being able to name one of their songs is a whole ’nother trick. If you rack your brain hard enough you might come up with the title of the one song that charted in the U.S., “Under The Milky Way,” which was sort of like what it might have sounded like if Lou Reed had stolen “Eleanor Rigby.” Anyway, they’re back, still led by bass player and singer Steve Kilbey, and they do seem to have evolved a little. They’re still purveyors of a lay-back-and-drink vibe; for instance, “No Other You” has the same sort of laid-back rawk energy as Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” but with a more, you know, throwback New Wave sound. The title track tables the same sort of sleepiness but takes something of a Savage Republic approach. Not sure why I’d ever listen to this record again, but you do you. A

Playlist

• A lot has come in lately, so let’s play a little catch-up with some releases from earlier this month, that’d be great. May as well start with So Much (For) Stardust, the new album from emo-rock heroes Fall Out Boy. I saw those dudes open up for someone years ago, I think it was Motley Crue, and they were only provided around a quarter of the stage on which to move around and sing their little emo songs. You’ve heard them before for sure, probably at a Chuck E Cheese or someplace else that has a lot of little kids running around and spazzing to barely punk-ish music that’s sort of like the Velveeta cheese version of Iron Maiden, i.e. the prototype for Imagine Dragons, like that one song of theirs that always plays over loudspeakers when you least expect it, “My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark,” with its spazzy millennial-whoop “oh-oh-oh” verse and matching chorus; it’s actually OK now that it’s too old for anyone to really care about anymore, like if you told a 9-year-old it was heavy metal they’d have no choice but to believe you. So this Illinois-based band, which originally tried to be taken seriously in the Chicago punk scene before choosing to rip off Taking Back Sunday and all those guys, wants you to know about this new album and its single, “Heartbreak Feels So Good,” a totally worthless, biodegradably recyclable hunk of music-trash that sounds like Dashboard Confessional trying to rewrite the main theme to Footloose, but first, at the top of the tune’s video, they insist that you watch them “pull a prank” by pretending to kidnap Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo from in front of an ice cream stand or something, but it all hilariously backfires and a bunch of girls start chasing them around like they’re The Monkees, and the total effect is like watching early MTV, when the world got its first insights into how rock stars shouldn’t try to make comedy videos. Talk about awful stuff, let’s move on.

• Borderline-goth-pop pioneers and closet Ultravox wannabes Depeche Mode are back, with their 15th album, Memento Mori. There are approximately 3,291 goth bands I like more than Depeche Mode, but owing to their rabid fan base, I think I can feign interest in them for a short little writeup here, so let’s go. David Gahan and Martin Gore are still in the band, but that’s about it, not that the fact that the band is barely Depeche Mode anymore could possibly detract from their sound, and remember, I don’t care in the first place, but never fear, people who love this band, literally nothing has changed: The single, “Ghosts Again,” may as well have come out in 1987, yes, it’s that dated. You know, Pet Shop Boys are literally a hundred times more listenable than this stuff, even though they’re also really old people, but if you insist, go ahead and pretend it’s relevant, I cannot prevent it.

• You’d probably have heard of British synthpop lady Ellie Goulding, but for the most part she’s really only popular in other countries. This is typical, of course, because the only singers Americans care about are Taylor Swift and Willie Nelson. Her new album, Higher Than Heaven, is coming out this Friday and it includes “Let It Die,” a Michael Jackson-ish tune that showcases her Dolly Parton-esque soprano. It’s OK.

• Lastly, look, it’s those three little Japanese teenage girls, Babymetal, with another album, The Other One! Did you even know they existed? I didn’t, but now I know that there is a band that combines Slayer with happy, super-high-pitched singing that would be more at home on a joke album. These little rascals have played shows in which Rob Halford from Judas Priest got up and sang with them. I give up.

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).

I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking, 435 pages)

When the protagonist of Rebecca Makkai’s gripping new novel is a teen, she arrives at a boarding school in New Hampshire knowing little about the school or the region.

“I remembered wondering if New Hampshire kids had accents, not understanding how few of my classmates would be from New Hampshire,” she says. Bodie Kane was not headed to Phillips Exeter, but to the fictional Granby School, somewhere deep in the woods in the general vicinity of Manchester, Concord and Peterborough.

It’s now two decades later and Kane, a successful podcaster in Los Angeles, is headed back to her alma mater to teach a two-week “mini-mester” on podcasting and film. The trip is stirring up troubling memories about the death of her beautiful Granby roommate named Thalia Keith, whose body had been found in the school pool.

A Black athletic trainer had been arrested, tried and found guilty of the murder, but enough questions remained that the case had attracted national attention, even being featured on “Dateline.” And with the rising interest in true crime and an attendant rise in internet sleuthing, people were still talking about the case online and pointing out problems with the state’s case against the trainer, even picking through a grainy video of the musical that Thalia had performed in shortly before her death.

Despite their being roommates, Bodie had not been especially close to Thalia, who was one of the “in” crowd. Thalia had the sort of effortless beauty that attracted everyone to her: “She played tennis, and suddenly tennis practice had spectators.” And Thalia had arrived at Granby with an exquisite wardrobe that contained 30 sweaters, while Bodie, whose tuition was paid by kindly members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, wasn’t remotely prepared for cold weather.

But Bodie, whose “Starlet Fever” podcast probed into little-known stories of often troubled Hollywood stars, has a knack for investigation. And so when one of the students in her podcasting mini-course proposes doing her initial podcast on Thalia’s murder — with the premise that Omar Evans had falsely confessed and was innocent — Bodie agrees.

Meanwhile, she seems to have trouble brewing back at home, where the father of her children (to whom she is legally married, but only on paper) is asking nervously if she has read the news and is asking her to stay off Twitter.

It would be reductive to call I Have Some Questions For You a thriller or a whodunit, although it has many components of both. Bodie, the narrator, has her own dark past; both her father and her brother are dead (the father having died because of something her brother did). When her mother fell apart, she was taken in by the Latter-day Saint family who paid for her to escape Indiana by going to Granby. And she brings parts of her own troubled history to her obsession with cases of abused and murdered women across geography and time, even while acknowledging the moral questions about probing into their cases in true-crime shows and podcasts.

“I have opinions about their deaths, ones I’m not entitled to,” Bodie says. “I’m queasy, at the same time, about the way they’ve become public property, subject to the collective imagination. I’m queasy about the fact that the women whose deaths I dwell on are mostly beautiful and well-off. That most were young, as we prefer our sacrificial lambs. That I’m not alone in my fixations.”

Thalia Keith’s murder is, in a sense, a fictional scaffolding on which Makkai builds a serious discussion about abused and murdered women, and how we exploit and fail them. While it’s a page-turner in a practical sense — the reader is carried in the current of wanting to know what really happened to Thalia, and what the role was of the teacher that Bodie keeps addressing in the narrative -— there are frequent mentions of real women who had violent, premature deaths, and the men responsible.

If this sounds like a lot to put on the reader, well, it is; the novel feels mildly oppressive at times, with all it is trying to take on. Plus, we know there is not going to be a happy ending: Thalia is dead when the novel opens; she will be dead when it ends. Meanwhile, we are going to hear about a lot of other dead women, abused women and sexually harassed women. Amazingly, in all of this, New Hampshire comes off just fine except for the repeated insinuations that its winters are cold. Makkai is careful not to suggest that any real-life police departments would force a false confession or that any real-life attorney would have so horribly failed the wrongly convicted man.

“New Hampshire’s public defenders are apparently excellent, and know everyone in the legal system of what is, after all, a very small state. They know the culture, and they don’t overdress for court,” she writes in what seems a bit of overkill. (In her acknowledgements, Makkai also credits Portsmouth public defender Stephanie Hausman, “who course-corrected and fine-tuned the legal parts of the book.”)

As such, while it’s not a novel that New Hampshire’s chambers of commerce will want to use for marketing, it’s not a bad one for the Granite State. And every good book is made better when it’s set in familiar environs. Look for this one when the lists of the best books of 2023 emerge later this year. A

Album Reviews 23/03/23

Personal Blend, Inhale and Release (self-released)

Rochester, N.Y.-based seven-piece reggae-rock band for parties, bar mitzvahs and rock clubs, if those things even still exist. Surf, reggae, rock, dub and Rasta are the game that’s afoot here; I’d agree with the press blurb that pronounces these songs “complex arrangements” featuring digital drum rhythms, punchy horn lines and ambient vocal melodies, but really, how complex would you want your drinking music to be? OK, maybe something along the lines of Disco Biscuits, Minus The Bear or geez, I dunno, there are times when these guys go off on a prog tangent (“Skin Deep” is quite priceless). It’s pretty tight for sure, probably owing to the machine-made drums. Overall there’s a psychedelic vibe to this stuff, I suppose, but this band is dedicated to standard-issue riddims even when they throw in arena-rock curveballs like spaghetti Western guitars for mariachi-esque effect (“Watch Your Step”). Nothing wrong here. A

Walking Bombs, Spiritual Dreams Above Empty Promises (self-released)

I’m told that DIY punk dude Morgan Y. Evans — not to be confused with country music’s Morgan Evans, who recently went through a painful divorce — will be releasing several albums this year, including this one, a set of lo-fi creepy tunes “about trying not to lose hope and to remain centered despite the world’s sorrows and perils.” Written just after the death of Evans’ mother, it deals with topics like mortality, spirituality, individuality, gun violence, love and being startled awake by technology. It definitely has an early Nick Cave-in-gloom-mode feel as it labels out sentiments intended to fix someone (probably the artist himself, it would seem), for instance how we need to remember that cynicism is not as powerful as our deeper hopes, dreams and empathy. If you have any love for the Throbbing Lobster era, there’s a lot here to like; I’d offer Swans as a comparison but it’s a little too speedy (as in midtempo) for that. Same ballpark, though. A

Playlist

• New albums will magically appear this Friday, March 31, so that you can buy them, like a good doobie, for your music collection! Let’s see here, we’ve got Packs, an Ottawa, Canada-based indie quartet that’s fronted by some art school slacker named Madeline Link, who decided that her chosen career of making papier mache animals or whatever she makes out of papier mache wasn’t as spiritually fulfilling (i.e. profitable) as making awful music to go with it. Anyway, Packs’ new album, Crispy Crunchy Nothing, is just about here, and man, the new single is so awful I can’t even comprehend it, like, if they’d at least add a weird Clinic-style organ player it’d be less bad than Broadcast, but no, they’re truly out to annoy me as much as they can. It’s like Pavement, but even more Pavement-y than the average human constitution is built to withstand. My, what wonderfully off-key guitars you have, Packs! Did they hold open auditions for the very worst musicians in Canada, or — you know, I mean, how could a band even be this bad? This junk is out of style anyway, if you ask me, like I really doubt Generation Z wants nothing more out of the party lives than listening to junk that sounds like it was rejected from the Juno soundtrack, you know? I was watching some “Why New Music Sucks” influencer video where some millennial girl was trying to explain that “sorry, older people, tastes change” (Really?! Someone call the New York Times!), and that now, in her wizened wisdom, she’s figured out that Zoomers want a mixture of styles, can you imagine such a thing? This means that when Zeppelin mixed early 1900s-era American folk with heavy metal, that didn’t count as a “mixture of styles,” nor did it count when her own generation (when it wasn’t listening to truly horrible bands like Slint and Franz Ferdinand) was guzzling purple drank and watching YouTubes of Megadeth vs. Pointer Sisters mashups. I mean, I’m confused, guys. I’m confused about a lot of things, actually, but I’m not confused about how awful Pavement was, nor am I convinced that garbagey trash like this Packs album has any redeeming musical qualities at all. But really, bon appetit if listenability doesn’t matter when you’re compiling your daily Soundcloud. (Note to self: How did this ever happen?)

• Great, time once again to try to remember the difference between Deerhoof, Deer Tick and Deerhunter, oh that’s right, I don’t care. No, I’m kidding, Deerhoof is the indie band who did — let’s see, blah blah blah — never mind, no one reading this has ever heard any of their songs, unless they were at a frat party in 2005 maybe? So anyway, their fast-approaching new disk, titled Miracle-Level, features the single “Sit Down, Let Me Tell You a Story,” and boy is it awful. Absolutely terrible.

• Right, right, so James Holden is a British weird-beard electro DJ, and his new LP, This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities, has a new single making the rounds, called “Common Land,” which is pretty cool, some bizarre but accessible noise loops and a neat breakbeat. I have heard much worse songs before in my life.

• Lastly, let’s get the new Hold Steady album, The Price of Progress, out of the way so I don’t have to think about oi-rock again this week. Hm, wait, this new single, “Sideways Skull” is OK if you like noise-rock. It’s like Frank Black playing for early Big Black, a comparison you’d appreciate if you had any shred of hope that rock ’n’ roll might rise again (it won’t, but that hasn’t stopped it from trying once in a while).

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).

Maame, by Jessica George

Maame, by Jessica George (St. Martin’s Press, 320 pages)

There’s a lot to like about 25-year-old Maddie Wright, the main character in Jessica George’s debut novel. Born in Ghana and living in London, Maddie is navigating her unique brand of young adulthood struggles, from low-key workplace racism to familial responsibilities and expectations. She is sweet and kind and very innocent, at times frustratingly so. But watching Maddie grow up and figure out who she is and who she wants to be is what Maame is all about, and it’s a charming journey.

In some ways, Maddie is forced to be more of an adult than many 25-year-olds; she’s taking care of her dad, who has Parkinson’s disease, and her mom, though still married to her dad, spends most of her time in Ghana running a hostel while Maddie and her dad live in London. Her mom is critical of Maddie and the fact that she isn’t as engaged in her Ghanaian heritage and customs as her mother would like her to be — yet Maddie is the one paying all the bills at home and sending money to her mom in Ghana, while her brother does little to help.

In other ways, though, Maddie seems younger than most women her age, and she knows it. That’s why she sets a goal to transform herself into “The New Maddie.” She makes a list of who she wants to be, which includes “drinks alcohol when offered, always says yes to social events, tries weed or cigarettes at least once (but don’t get addicted!), goes on dates, is not a virgin,” and so on.

Maddie gets the chance to work on these goals when her mom returns to London for a year to take over the care of her husband. Maddie moves out and into a flatshare with two women her age, both very different and seemingly more worldly than she is, which gives her a whole new opportunity to live her own life. At the same time, she starts a new job at a publishing house, and, of course, there’s suddenly a new guy hanging around. (Happily, though, romance is not a central plotline but rather a nonintrusive piece of Maddie’s coming-of-age puzzle.)

George expertly depicts both Maddie’s Gen Z traits and her innocence through her frequent Google searches. She Googles random things like “back pain in your mid-twenties” and gets mostly-useless answers from random people: “CC: ‘It’s all linked to the Government. … From a young age we’re told office jobs are the goal. Then you sit at a desk hunched over 9-5, 5 days a week for most of your younger years.’ LG: ‘Why would the government want a nation suffering from back pain?’ CC: ‘So we don’t take over.’”

Many of her questions show her uncertainty and lack of confidence, particularly in the social domain. Waiting to hear back from a potential love interest, she Googles “How long do guys wait before asking a girl out on a date?” (Some very realistic Google answers range from: “I spent four months getting to know my now-girlfriend before I asked her out on a date” to “One hour.”) George incorporates these searches sparingly enough that they’re not annoying and they add some relatability to Maddie’s character no matter how different she is from the reader. We can all relate to the frustration of such drastically diverse search results with no definitive answer from a source — the almighty internet — that is supposed to have all the answers. (Honestly, who hasn’t Googled “weird rash” and been led to believe it’s either totally normal or a sign of impending death?)

Maame covers all the bases of growing up with cultural barriers, without being heavy-handed or preachy. Despite Maddie’s sometimes cringy naivete, I was rooting for her all along. Her story is often funny, and always heartfelt and engaging. A

Album Reviews 23/03/16

Creye, III: Weightless (Frontiers Music)

Some epic melodic metal from Sweden here, in the vein of bands like Heat and whatnot. Their sound is even cleaner than Trans Siberian Orchestra, if you can even conceive of such a thing, and that makes this stuff come off as a bit one-dimensional, but not, I assure you, in the area of wonky musicianship, which is what should really matter, and I’m well aware of that. But still, in between all the (very complicated and clever) riffing and all that, I was really hoping to hear some bad-assery, something messy or slightly dangerous, but it didn’t really happen for me. Now, all that means is that I wouldn’t play this in the car, but I can still heartily recommend it if you ever wanted to hear a smarter, more prog-rock version of Iron Maiden, or at least an Iron Maiden that sounds freshly scrubbed for dinner, like White Lion or some such hair-metal thingie. But again, the selling point is that these guys can really play. A

Public Serpents, The Bully Puppet (SBAM Records)

And here we have a ska-punk band from New Jersey. I didn’t even know that was still a thing, you know? What’s that? No, I was referring to New Jersey, not ska-punk. But anyway, folks, all seriousness aside, this band’s leader, who goes by the name of Skwert, has had a rough time of it over the last few years, enduring incarceration, homelessness and the end of his marriage, so if you like ska-punk, and who actually does, this would be a wise investment, as maybe Skwert could take some time off to rest his voice, because right now these tunes sound like a really drunk Ozzy Osbourne singing for the Suicide Machines except the horn section is better. There’s really nothing stunningly innovative here, not that you’d want innovative music if the only reason you’d ever even sit through a ska band would be to get to the three 19-year-olds playing hamster-wheel straight-edge stuff after them. Side question: Do people still listen to Sublime anymore, or was that just a giant troll? A

Playlist

• March 17 is a Friday, which means a day of new CD releases, because that’s just how it works, folks. It used to be Tuesdays when all the albums would be released, if I recall correctly, but the record industry changed the traditional release weekday to Friday in their infinite wisdom, after figuring out that Fridays are a lot better, because that’s the day rock ’n’ roll fans figure is the most safe for partaking in day-drinking and puffing wacky tobaccy during work hours, and when quittin’ time comes around they leave work completely shnockered, burn rubber out of the parking lot and just randomly go buy albums at Strawberries and Bradlees and Woolworths. OK maybe not anymore, which only brings up the question, “Is music still cool if all you have to do to obtain it is download it from a pirate site or whatnot?” I don’t think so, but little shining points of light pop out of nowhere now and then, for instance this week’s spotlight new LP, Fantasy, from excellent French weird-beard soundsystem M83, whom you may know if you’re either young or were a fan of the Ovation network’s TV show Versailles (M83 did the impossibly epic theme song) until its untimely demise in 2018. I’m sure this’ll mark a high point for these guys, unless they’ve run out of ideas like everybody else, and toward answering that pressing question I’ll venture into the YouTube, to see what I can hear. I’ll bet you anything that by now they’re ready to make some real money out of their success, so there’s some edgy diva like Zola Jesus guesting on a single that you’ll hear playing at — well, I don’t know, where do people even hear music being played nowadays? Roller skating rinks? Red Lobster? Seriously, now that rock is completely dead, and there’s nothing left of the club scene except for bored-looking (and honestly bored) 20-somethings standing around listening to chopped-and-screwed versions of “My Humps” or whatever, who’s going to buy this awesome new M83 album? I’ll leave that here, with a scratching-my-head emoji added as emphasis, for you to puzzle over, but meanwhile, the group’s new single, “Oceans Niagara” is completely epic and cool, a really buzzy electro dance-beat infused with an urgent, energetic, loud-ass multi-voiced chorus. M83 are still the best, don’t even argue with me.

• Unknown Mortal Orchestra, a band from Auckland, New Zealand, is all about the psychedelic rock ’n’ roll, just like our good buddies, whose name takes up nearly a full line of column space, King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard. There’s something fishy about all the awesome stoner-rock coming from “Down Under,” like this new album from UMO, titled V, but either way, these fellas are based in Portland, Oregon, now, so we’ll see if being far away from King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard had any negative effect on these new songs. I’m test-driving the new single, “Hunnybee,” and it’s not stoner-rock at all, it’s chill soul-pop, like Bon Iver trying to be Jamie Lidell. It’s OK I guess.

• Speaking of weird people with Warp record contracts, it’s Yves Tumor, with his new one, Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume. The rollout track, “God Is a Circle,” is driven by loud, muddy bass, mumbled vocals and industrial samples, I like it just fine really.

• Lastly, it’s Black Honey, a U.K. indie band that’s gone through a few name changes, so no, I already don’t take them seriously at all. A Fistful Of Peaches is their new album, and the video for the song “OK” has a seizure warning (I’m not taking that seriously either). The tune is like Foo Fighters but with a vampy girl singer. It’s cool overall.

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).

Hidden Mountains, by Michael Wejchert

Hidden Mountains, by Michael Wejchert (Ecco, 256 pages)

Granite State residents are used to hearing about rescues — from the 180 or so people who have to be rescued from outside adventures gone wrong each year, to the seven loons trapped in lake ice in February. As such, there is an underlying debate about assumed risk and the escalating costs of rescue — not so much the financial cost, but the potential of injury and loss of life of those doing the rescue.

Into this conversation comes a compelling book by North Conway resident Michael Wejchert. Hidden Mountains — subtitled “Survival and Reckoning After a Climb Gone Wrong” — is a deep dive into a 2018 climbing accident in a remote part of Alaska, and its aftermath.

The people involved — two couples from Boston, ranging in age from 29 to 40 — were experienced climbers; the accident that befell Emmett Lyman was apparently just freakish bad luck. (In one analysis, “loose rock” was deemed the cause.) Out of the sight of his partner, Lauren, he fell about 30 to 40 feet, hitting his head so hard that his helmet came off.

Wejchert describes how Lauren intuited what happened: “She felt the rope [that connected them] come tight and knew that on the other side Emmett was falling, though she couldn’t see him. Rock and debris flushed down the snow gully to her left so forcefully that it caused a small avalanche. … Somewhere in this, ‘I heard a human sound,’ she recalled. ‘It wasn’t words. It was just a sound of … maybe surprise and dismay.’”

Although the couples had been trained in what to do in emergencies and were well-prepared and well-equipped, the situation was precarious, not just for Lyman but for all of them. Lauren, Lyman’s girlfriend, was still attached to him with a rope; they were on steep rock in a national park 90 miles from civilization, in territory not accessible by road. That was one reason they were there. The Hidden Mountains of Lake Clark National Park and Preserve are one of the most inaccessible places for climbers in the world; they expected to be the first humans to have climbed this particular mountain, which they dubbed Mount Sauron after the tower in The Lord of the Rings.

Lauren was able to text the other couple for help, and they immediately set out to find their friends, but they had to endanger themselves by descending laterally in emotional turmoil. The story of how they got to this point is harrowing enough; then comes the rescue by helicopter nine hours later — all the while, without knowing whether Lyman was alive or dead.

While there was news coverage of the accident at the time it happened, for those who are unfamiliar with the story Wejchert smartly structured Hidden Mountains as a thriller, and I won’t betray his efforts by saying what happened during and after the rescue. Suffice it to say the story raises challenging questions and endeavors to answer what for me is the biggest one: Why anyone would take up a sport that required (literally, for Lauren) a 10-page contingency plan that listed potential dangers (e.g. river crossing, sliding snow, falling rock, bears) for each day of the trip, based on the forecast and where they would be, and specialized insurance from a company that swoops in and rescues the likes of journalists caught in war zones. (That company, Global Rescue, is based in Lebanon, N.H.)

Wejchert, a climber himself, tries to make clear the allure of the sport, which draws so many adventurers to the White Mountains and elsewhere. He writes of “dreamy summits” and moving along “perfect alpine granite, thousands of feet of snow and ice and quiet looming beneath us,” of “plumbing the depths” of our personal limits. But just as honestly he writes of a friend who was nearly killed by an avalanche, of being asked if the risk of climbing is worth it and answering “no.”

Rock and ice climbing — “vertical movement” — doesn’t seem to be something people casually fall into, but more of an urgent calling. After going to a New York climbing area called “the Gunks” as a newbie, Emmett had said, “Oh my God. This is where I want to live. This is what I want to do with my life. And we just started climbing all the time.”

And one of his climbing partners, Alissa Doherty, had vowed to become a mountaineer — while she was in a convent — after reading Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air. That book was about a 1996 climbing disaster on Mount Everest, so for people without the mountaineering gene, it’s hard to see how reading that would attract anyone to the sport.

And of course, Krakauer’s other masterpiece, Into the Wild, was about Chris McCandless dying alone in the Alaskan wilderness. It’s a certain kind of person who says “sign me up!” for both Alaska wilderness and remote climbing, and it doesn’t appear to be me. But the people who do sign up are fascinating people whose stories make for fascinating reading. And Wejchert, who is chair of the all-volunteer Mountain Rescue Service in North Conway and knew Emmett before the accident, was exactly the person to tell it. He does so with expertise and with heart. B+

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