Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/04/27

T3nors, Naked Soul (Frontiers Records)

Had a weird little exchange the other day, on either Facebook or Twitter, I forget, where this one guy was saying that every album put out by Frontiers Records sounds the same as all the others. I can’t say I concur with that, only because basically all indie labels tend to sign bands that fall into that same trap, like, you won’t hear a Metal Blade-released LP that has much character past Slayer, for example. This one’s somewhat unique in that it features three successful AOR-style singers, Kent Hilli of Perfect Plan along, with Robbie LaBlanc and Toby Hitchock, both of whom have been in bands that specialized in Whitesnake/Jefferson Starship rawk. Spoiler, the result is a bunch of Toto-style radio nuggets with a few Scorpions-ish moments here and there, which is code for “this band has no sense of humor at all and is completely unaware that it’s not 1985 anymore.” That doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means that wiseasses like me have no patience for it. B

Dust Prophet, One Last Look Upon The Sky (self-released)

Local-to-Manchester, N.H., guy Otto Kinzel continues to prove himself to be a fiercely independent warrior in the worst industry in the world, the music business. Right on time, a new album from guitarist/singer/label-runner/floor-mopper Kinzel, bass player/keyboardist Sarah Wappler and drummer Tyler MacPherson has landed, aimed at expanding on the apocalyptic verism they tabled in a teaser single a little while back, accomplishing that by pouring on classical lit-goth imagery from John Milton, Flannery O’Connor and such. Wappler kicks things off in style with a ghostly contrapuntal piano line serving as an intro, which leads us into “When The Axe Falls,” easily the best thing I’ve ever heard from Kinzel, a doom-speed Metallica joint made more delightfully indie by some guitar rawness. Riff-wise, “Dear Mrs. Budd” evokes next-level Obsessed, featuring a waltz-time bit that’s instantly memorable. New Hampshire, you really need to help these people get to their rightful place in the underground metal hierarchy, I’m serious. A+

Playlist

• Here we go, my precious trolls, just like every Friday, April 28 will be a day on which new rock ’n’ roll albums will appear magically, in your Spotify, because that’s how things are done, in these United States! The first thing that jumped out at me in this week’s list was an album titled Signs of Life, from Neil Gaiman, the human who wrote Sandman and all those other Lovecraft-meets-X-Men books and comics or whatever his trip is, I’ve never really gotten into any of that stuff. But wait, why would an esteemed author make an album when he doesn’t have to? In this case I’ll bet it’s because he’s sick of watching his wife, Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, make all the albums in the family. I would definitely do that too, like, if Petunia were an author of romance novels, I’d definitely drop the nonfiction book about social media that I’m working on right now and write a book about smooches and sexytimes just to keep her on her toes and get a nice sweet $2,000 advance from Harlequin Romance And Sexytime Book Co. and spend it on a used copy of Spider-Man No. 3 or whatever, as opposed to a signed copy of Sandman No. 1 or whatnot, you feel me? Anyway, folks, Gaiman is not a one-man band, so his music album needed actual musicians, and so he hired a group of instrument-playing slackers he knows, who call themselves the FourPlay String Quartet (see what they did there?), and those people play on this (probably completely pointless) album. I’ll now meander over to the YouTube box and listen to one of the tunes, “Bloody Sunrise,” which I selected because it looks like there’s a hot vampire girl in the video. Yup, it’s a cute vampire girl, and she’s singing a quirky comedy number about crawling out of her coffin and hanging around with bats and owls and trying to get a boyfriend, and oops, there’s the string quartet, and the vampire girl sings decently enough, like a third-place finisher on The Voice, something like that. There’s a random TV in the graveyard, and every once in a while Neil Gaiman (I think) appears on the TV and starts harmonizing with the vampire girl. This would be something for the Neil Gaiman completist on your holiday shopping list, because why wouldn’t they want to see proof that Neil Gaiman once did something incredibly dumb?

• If you’re like me at all, you’d given up on Canadian art-rock bands after the first one you ever heard, but you actually held a little hope for Braids, whose new LP, Euphoric Recall, has a very worthwhile little single, “Evolution.” Overall, it evokes an understated-electro version of Lisa Loeb’s “Stay,” something that Sia would definitely do. It’s a good one.

• Believe it or not, there are bands in Cincinnati, Ohio, friends, and one of them, The National, recorded a single that former President Barack Obama named as one of his favorite songs of 2017, namely “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness,” which was indeed jagged, slightly aggressive and cool overall. The band’s new album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, leads off with the song “Eucalyptus,” an art-rock thingamajig that combines the sounds of late-’80s Wire and Guster to create a slightly cowboy-ish atmosphere. It’s perfectly fine.

• Lastly it’s Canadian folk-rockers Great Lake Swimmers, with their new album, Uncertain Country! They’ve released albums on the Nettwerk Records label, which is code for “they’re consistently good.” The new single “Moonlight, Stay Above” is way too Bon Iver-y for my tastes, but other than that is shimmery and peaceful and blah blah blah.

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).

Reading the Glass, by Elliott Rappaport

Reading the Glass, by Elliott Rappaport (Dutton, 322 pages)

Have you ever felt the urge to throw everything away for the love of a good boat and a life at sea? Me neither. But there are people who not only feel the urge, but obey it, who consider “life ashore” boring and “hard to reconcile.”

Part-time Maine resident Elliott Rappaport is one of those people and with his new book he promises “a captain’s view of weather, water, and life on ships.” For those whose knowledge of seafaring comes from Carnival cruises and watching The Perfect Storm, Reading the Glass might be a rough slog. Who knew that boat captains, always portrayed as blue-collar and salty, could be so erudite? Who knew that their memoirs would read like high school science books? Reading the Glass is eye-opening in this respect, as modern mariners apparently talk more like learned meteorologists than pirates of the Caribbean.

But Rappaport brings a dry sense of humor to the task and works to break up long professorial descriptions of weather with elegant descriptions of life at sea. “Below the surface,” he writes, “are things seeable only when the sea is calm — the dolphins, grazing whales, sharks, and mola, ocean sunfish as big as car hoods. Once a giant leatherback turtle, four feet across with long triangular flippers and drooping dinosaur eyelids. I’ve seen their babies on a beach in Mexico racing toward the surf, identical but small as silver dollars.”

Rappaport has been a ship’s captain for 30 years and teaches at the Maine Maritime Academy, a small public college in Castine, Maine, that trains ships’ officers and engineers. (If you have a driftless kid, send them there — the school says 90 percent of its graduates have jobs within three months of graduation.)

Whatever the seafaring equivalent of a public intellectual is, that’s what Rappaport is. He can wax eloquently about where New England’s summer air originates (“the subtropics, carried along by the southerly winds at the the edge of the Bermuda-Azores High and moistened by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream”) and about atolls, the “recipe for shipwreck” created by submerged islands that present “an opportunity to run aground without ever seeing land.”

He can smartly and simply explain weather phenomena we so often hear about in forecasts, such as jet streams, El Nino and the ever popular polar vortex. And you will learn so much about clouds that you didn’t retain from middle school. “There’s a lot going on inside a cloud, most of it poorly understood by the average person,” Rappoport writes. “Or, fairer to say, it’s not a priority for most people to understand.” For example, one misconception is that most people think clouds are composed only of water vapor, which can’t be true since water vapor is invisible. “Clouds are in fact clusters of of water droplets and ice crystals spawned by condensation or deposition the process whereby water vapor converts directly to ice.”

That’s clear enough, but many of his explanations aren’t quite as simple; it would have taken me two years to finish the book if I’d looked up every word I didn’t know (“Taxonomically the bora and mistral are katabatic (downhill) winds….”) and it is not by coincidence that the first glowing Amazon review I saw for this book was written by someone who included at the end of his name “Ph.D.”

For those of us with B.A.s, it’s more of a struggle to enjoy this book, but it’s possible if you focus on Rappaport’s stories, which are wide-ranging like his travels, and vividly memorable. He’s sailed all over the world, and for every place he hasn’t been, he’s seemingly talked to someone who has. He can tell you about the port in Tahiti where the tattoo artists are so good that the crew requires time off for appointments, and explain the origins of a microburst from a personal encounter with one at sea.

For those interested in maritime disasters, he is an encyclopedia of knowledge, not only of long-ago tragedies with no survivors, but also of contemporary battles of human vs. sea. Describing the type of offshore cyclone that can suddenly roil the ocean without warning, he writes of a discussion he had with a friend about a storm in 1990: “‘A giant hole opened up in the ocean,’ he told me, ‘and the ship fell in.’”

It was, Rappaport writes, “an image I have not forgotten,” and neither will we.

Nor will we forget his funny description of the Beaufort scale of wind force (which includes “Force 6: Umbrellas ruined” and “Force 10: Don’t go out”) or the image he paints of himself making his way through suburban Washington, as off-kilter as most of us would be at sea.

“It is May, the trees already a deep summer green and the sky boiling with clouds that would alarm me if I were at sea.” He vaguely knows the direction of the Metro station, but the battery has died on his phone, and “I have no chartroom to visit, no swarm of seabirds flying helpfully in the right direction.” He is wearing the orange rain slicker he wears at sea, its pockets filled with “old bits of twine and candy wrappers.” Finally he finds something by which he can navigate: a Starbucks in the distance, where the well-dressed professionals are “mysteriously dry.” Perhaps they’ve read the forecast, he quips.

It’s that kind of writing and imagery that makes Reading the Glass pleasurable for those without Ph.D.s.

But truthfully, a Ph.D. would help. B+

Album Reviews 23/04/20

Messa, Live At Roadburn (Svart Records)

Meanwhile, back in the doom-metal sphere, we have this new four-song LP from an Italian crew whose unlikeliest press quote came by way of Spin magazine: “If you’ve ever longed for an album that could reconcile Stevie Nicks at her witchiest with the sublime gloom of How the Gods Kill-era Danzig, this is the LP of your dreams.” Anyhow, these guys have a girl singer, which works when the (always slow) music is new-age-y or folky, but when it goes more in the direction of raw, blissed-out, Candlemass/Kyuss-tinted doom metal, it’s a bit of a reach, at least with her vocals, which, although strong overall (she sounds more like Florence Welch than Stevie Nicks, point of order), sound a little overwhelmed in the context. I’m sure she’d rather be in a Nightwish-type epic-metal band, but she’ll figure that out at some point. It’s a different kind of trip, I can assure you of that. A

Ric Wilson, Chromeo, & A-Trak, Clusterfunk (Free Disco Records)

Collaborative, highly accessible nine-song EP from a bunch of guys I remember covering (or ignoring) during my days covering velvet-rope club techno back in the mid-aughts. And that was probably to my detriment; I keep hearing about this or that going on with A-Trak and Wilson, but I don’t like Chromeo, as you may have noticed in these pages, and probably never will. Suffice to say, though, that this record is a pretty big deal, there are lots of semi-famous names on board this often catchy funk/hip-hop/spoken-word fricassee, such as King Louie (who tables some cool weirdo-rap on the ’90s-prostrating “Whisky In My Coffee”), Felicia Douglass of Dirty Projectors (in the Kool & The Gang-sounding “Everyone Moves To LA”), STIC.MAN of Dead Prez (on the record’s most fascinating dance-funk track, “Git Up Off My Neck”), Kiéla Adira and Mariame Kaba, whose spoken-word rant on the criminal justice system is pretty priceless. A

Playlist

• This Friday is April 21, which means we’re pretty much done with this stupid delayed-action winter, unless Mother Nature has plans to dump 20 feet of snow on us just to see if we’re paying attention. Ha ha, remember in January, there was no snow, and it was kind of warm, and everyone was like, “yeah, wow, talk about a lame winter” but suddenly in March (my least favorite month to begin with) good old “MoNat” (that’s the celebrity hip-hop name for Mother Nature) realized she’d lost all track of time playing Candy Crush, and she suddenly turned into Oprah Winfrey, yelling “Yikes, here you go, you get a driveway covered in a foot of frozen vanilla Slushy, and you do too” and whatnot, and all that massively heavy, dense-packed hatefulness sent 8,000 people to the hospital with chest pains and dislocated elbows? Well, folks, it’s almost over, it almost is, but first we must talk about a few albums that will be streeting this week. I’ve decided that we’ll start the week with Atum, a new album from comically overrated ’90s band The Smashing Pumpkins, because that’s what’s crackalackin’, home skillets, look at the ’90s rebirth that’s happening all around us, it’s all that and a bag of chips, I tell you! Can you even believe it, a new Pumpkins platter, and the band is still fronted by that Uncle Fester dude. I keep seeing all kinds of tweets and stuff saying, “Man, I loved the Pumpkins back in the shizniz, they were so fly, booyah,” and no one gets into an argument with them because they feel so sad for them. Anyway, I’ll bet this music will be absolutely awful if it’s anything like old Pumpkins, so I suppose I should trudge off to the YouTube box and see what the new single, “Beguiled,” is about. OK, here’s the video, and the tune is pretty much like Megadeth-metal at first, and ha ha, look at Billy Uncle Fester, all dressed up like the crazy dream-villain from that Jennifer Lopez movie The Cell, but it’s 100 times worse than ever before, like he’s really trying to channel that Cell dude. You shouldn’t let your kids watch this video. Huh, now there are ballerinas doing Swan Lake stuff, in Uncle Billy’s creepy Cell world. The song is OK if you like mid-tempo ’90s metal. Hm, now a bunch of people are doing fancy modern dances and stuff. One of the guys looks like Jim Carrey’s alter ego from The Mask. The ’90s are coming back, folks, there is no escape. Pray for us all.

• No way, a new album from The Mars Volta, with their most transgressive title yet, Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon, which translates to “May God curse you my heart.” Lol whatever, I’ve made fun of — um, I mean, reviewed some of their previous albums, like, their music has always struck me as freeze-dried low-grade prog-rock that’s missing its flavor packet, but let’s not go there, I’ll go have a listen to the title track and be normal. Wow, it sounds like Latin-radio stuff, which is a lot better than anything these guys have ever done. Maybe there’s hope, fam.

• Frenetic and spazzy flamenco guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela are releasing their new album, In Between Thoughts A New World, this week. Hopefully it won’t be a bunch of metal covers again, please oh please oh please. OK, the single, “Descending To Nowhere” is normal, but then a bunch of spiffy Spyro Gyra layers appear and it starts to sound like polite Weather Channel jazz. Kinda dumb but it’s OK.

• Lastly, it’s ’90s-radio-poppers Everything But The Girl, with their newest full-length, Fuse. The rope-in track is “Nothing Left To Lose,” a trippy, percussive, trance-pop dealie that sounds like Roxy Music reborn as afterparty patter. It’s perfectly fine.

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).

At the Sofaplex 23/04/13

Boston Strangler (R)

Keira Knightley, Carrie Coon.

Two female newspaper reporters investigate the strangling deaths of several women in 1960s Boston in this movie that feels as much about being a working mom as it does about true crime investigation. To that second element, the movie leaves open a lot of questions about whether the man eventually arrested for what Wikipedia says are 13 murders actually committed them — or committed all of them. I think the Wikipedia rabbit hole you may choose to follow after watching the movie is probably more informative about the crimes. The movie itself is more about how crime was reported in the early 1960s and the struggle of women in newspapers to break out of the lifestyle beats. Jean Cole (Coon) and Loretta McLaughlin (Knightley), both real-life journalists, have to deal with sexism in the newsroom and from the police as well as the demands of husbands and children at home. Watching them balance these demands and watching them dig into this story that has put them on the front page makes for an enjoyable bit of drama. B Available on Hulu.

Tetris (R)

Taron Egerton, Toby Jones.

The story of how a software developer and Nintendo got the licensing agreement for the game Tetris is the surprisingly tension-filled focus of this fun little tale. Henk Rogers (Egerton) stumbles on Tetris when he’s at the Consumer Electronics Convention and buys the licensing rights for the game in video game consoles and arcades in Japan. Or so he thinks. He plans to make a deal with Nintendo to produce the game, which he instantly realizes is an addictive hit, for them. But then he learns that Robert Stein (Jones), the man who had bought the rights to license the game from the Soviet tech agency where its creator worked, maybe hadn’t actually purchased the rights he thought he had. Or maybe the Soviet director who agreed to let creator Alexey Pajtinov (Nikita Efremov) sign the licensing agreement didn’t entirely understand what they were signing. Either way, here at the end of the 1980s, the motivations of the various Soviet officials involved might not be as clear. This little slice of 1980s nostalgia is a surprisingly fun, well-paced business story that pulls in the video games wars, the British Maxwell family and the fall of the USSR. B Available on Apple TV+.

Murder Mystery 2 (PG-13)

Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler.

Sandler and Anisiton return as married couple Nick and Audrey, who, after their European adventure, have quit their jobs to become professional private investigators. It’s not going great, exactly, but they’re chipping away at it, with Audrey pushing Nick to get a certification that she thinks will help their business. They’re in need of a getaway, though, and jump at the offer by a friend from the first movie, the Maharajah (Adeel Akhtar), to come to his wedding to Claudette (Mélanie Laurent), all expenses paid, on the fancy island he recently purchased. At first, all is grand, with iPhone wedding favors and closets pre-filled with the right attire and a welcoming cheese platter. But then, as so often happens around Nick and Audrey, someone is murdered and the Maharajah is kidnapped. Even after serious investigator Miller (Mark Strong), who happens to be the author of the book Nick and Audrey have been studying from, shows up, Nick and Audrey are still entangled in the investigation that leads them on another mayhem-filled tour of Europe.

I watched this movie exactly as I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to — namely, with half my attention while doing something else. This movie is built for this. A shot where we see the cheese knife in Nick and Audrey’s room lingers a considerable amount of time, like “here’s a thing you need to pay attention to — no, go ahead, finishing writing that check, we’ll keep the camera here until you can look up.” Everything about Murder Mystery 2 is relaxed and affable. Sandler and Aniston have good chemistry with each other. Most of the comedy is enjoyably silly — the lack of sharp edges anywhere here would probably be taxing in a theater, but at your house, where you can be half-heartedly scanning the emails you’ve ignored or folding laundry or intermittently snoozing, it’s fine. B Available on Netflix.

The Promise of a Normal Life, by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

The Promise of a Normal Life, by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson (Arcade, 266 pages)

The pantheon of bad mothers is crowded, from Medea to Mommy Dearest. The latest inductee is Polina, a Jewish physician and mother of two who dabbles in motherhood the way some people dabble in a hobby that they are only vaguely interested in.

Polina curdles the childhood and adolescence of the unnamed narrator of The Promise of a Normal Life, a debut novel from Marlborough resident Rebecca Kaiser Gibson. She is a perfectly coiffed, upwardly mobile chain-smoking pseudo-villain who, in her perpetual self-absorption, is unaware of how she is failing at her most important job. Her oldest daughter, sensitive and unusually perceptive, sees all.

The novel, told in first person, opens in 1967 with the narrator at age 18 en route to Israel on a ship. It is an impromptu trip during a break from the University of Sussex and marks the first time she feels the promise of the freedom of adulthood, of the glamor and adventure that might await away from the stifling control of Polina and Leonard, the narrator’s father. This is where I belong, she thinks. As it so often does in real life, reality soon rudely barges in. She is sexually assaulted by a hairdresser on the ship in an encounter that she can only fuzzily remember, having been asleep at the time.

Her meekly passive response turns out to be a pattern of her life, seemingly the result of growing up with a larger-than-life mother who had provided for her children in material things but did not bestow any emotional gifts. The reason was evident, not only in her behavior but in her words.

“Polina told me once that she’d decided, when she was in Scotland talking to some women about how they would treat the children they would have, that the most important thing was to keep your own life first. The children should stay in their place,” the narrator remembers.

That hands-off philosophy was enhanced by Polina’s employment of a housekeeper, who prepared most of the meals, did the housework and did much of the work of tending the children. When Polina did mother, she did it brusquely, as when she would bring consomme to a sick child in bed, command them to drink lots of liquids, and then depart.

Even once her daughters are young adults, they are people to command, not to enjoy. When the narrator meets the parents of the man she will marry, she is surprised by their relationship. “When I actually met her, I was struck by how much Tom’s mother seemed to admire her son. I didn’t know how to understand a mother who made room for her child’s maturity.”

And it wasn’t just Polina. When her daughter and Tom decide to get married, Leonard and Polina could not let go of their roles. “My father could barely look at me, his own child, could hardly stand to see my green eyes doting on those blue ones. Leonard could not prevent me, but he could take over,” pushing the couple to marry on the parents’ timetable.

While the narrator is a thoughtful, intelligent and self-aware young woman who finishes college and starts a career, she struggles to see how she is taken advantage of by men. The reader, as well, is not easily able to see the next trainwreck coming as the narrator navigates adulthood.

In my own family lore, there is a story we tell about my then-5-year-old son who, during an apparently uneventful movie, leaned over to his great-grandmother and said “If they don’t start blowing up stuff soon, I’m outta here.”

There will be that temptation at times for readers who grew up on Dan Brown or James Patterson, those who expect something explosive to happen in the last paragraph of every chapter, which will then yank them into the next.

The Promise of a Normal Life moves slowly; there’s not much in the way of TNT. It is a quietly revealing character study that wields its power in lyricism and detail. Gibson, a widely published poet who taught creative writing at Tufts University for 23 years, endows her narrator with her own gifts of observation and wisdom. At one point, when the narrator and her husband move to Los Angeles, she joins a synagogue having suddenly felt attached to Jewish heritage. (“Suddenly it seemed interesting, instead of ordinary and assumed. The desert dry air had given me room to imagine.”) A rabbi later tells her, “You are a mystic, a true Jewish mystic,” which in the context felt like something of a come-on, but still resembled truth.

Without spoilers it’s difficult to discuss the last quarter of the novel, but it extends to the end of Polina’s life, when her daughter, for the first time, addresses her mother by something other than her first name.

For much of the novel it is unclear just how damaging Polina was — there are hints that there might be something more than just garden-variety bad parenting involved. At the same time, the narrator is at times so fragile that it also seems possible that the hard-driving Polina will eventually be vindicated — that she wasn’t the problem, but something else was. It’s a thin mystery within the complex tapestry of this family, but it works. The Promise of a Normal Life offers anyone with a — how to put it? — challenging mother a compelling sense of solidarity. A

Album Reviews 23/04/13

Dan Montgomery, Cast-Iron Songs and Torch Ballads (Fantastic Yes Records)

The overall takeaway from “Start Again,” the opening tune from the New Jersey-bred singer-songwriter’s seventh full-length record, is, if you ask me, redolent of Iggy Pop singing for Bread. So it’s vintage-sounding, taxicab-radio stuff, which is apparently the way he started his career, fresh from his teenage years, which were spent, from the age of 14, playing Grand Funk and Bad Company covers in bars, followed by a stint busking at coffee houses and such. The story here is that he “came into possession of a Danelectro [vintage type of guitar], plugged it into an amp and new songs immediately came pouring out,” which is sometimes all it takes to come up with a very inspired-sounding album. To pinpoint the music a little better, it’s floating-on-a-cloud Americana-rock, with some diversions into ’80s-pop-rock (the Dire Straits-ish “In For A Penny”), cowboy-hat jam-band grooving (“Lonesome Train”), early Bad Company (“Beaumont”) and things of that nature. It’s too sturdy (and sometimes too muddy) to be labeled a fedora-rock joint, so I’m down for it for what it is. A

Various Artists, Remmah Rundown (Remmah Records)

Just when I thought I was out of the techno club scene, they drag me back in, I tell you. This compilation comes to us from Northern Irish DJ, producer and label head Hammer, a.k.a. Rory Hamilton, who wants to clue us in to the electronic music scenes in Glasgow and Ireland, or at least the parts he’s familiar with. Like with basically any decent club mix, there’s plenty here to make your chillout experience better, which brings us to the part where I try to differentiate this stuff from early Diplo and all that kind of thing. I could fib for effect and say it’s jaw-droppingly innovative, these average-tempo dance beats, but let’s not bother; I’ve heard wub-wub like Hammer’s “Sickwave” before, and Rohypnol-glitch-tech like Remmy’s “I Know,” for that matter, and so have you, but Hamilton obviously isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, just remind people it exists. Solid all around. A

Playlist

• April 14 is a Friday, which means that you will have an extra day or so before you have to send Uncle Sam the money you owe him for taxes, or at least I think that’s how it works, I mean, you do you, I don’t think the IRS really cares anyway, but let’s kick off this week right away, because there’s a lot to get to, starting with 80-year-old bikini lady Ann-Margret, who was mostly famous for hanging around in Las Vegas with none other than Elvis, as well as being lasciviously ogled by Johnny Carson every time she appeared on the Tonight show during the ’60s and ’70s. No, I’m not kidding, Ann-Margret has a new album coming out this Friday, Born To Be Wild, which may or may not be a reference to the Steppenwolf song that came out when Thomas Jefferson was president, or maybe earlier, I honestly forget. You know, I’m just checking the Metacritic.com aggregate score for all of Ann-Margret’s films, and it’s dead even at this writing. Critics thought some of her movies were really dumb, like The Villain and The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, whereas they liked some of her other movies, for instance 1975’s Tommy, which featured Jack Nicholson and Keith Moon. But I digress, which usually happens when I’m reviewing albums from 1960s pinup girls, so let’s get to the gettin’ on and have a listen to the title track, come on, don’t be shy. Ack, her backing band on this tune is the Fuzztones, and it’s not completely horrible. OK, it is, but she’s on key for a few bars, unless I’m hearing things. Other notes: The Who’s guitarist Pete Townshend can be heard on this album’s cover version of the Everly Brothers’ classic “Bye Bye Love”; other guests include Joe Perry, Steve Cropper, Rick Wakeman and Chip Z’Nuff.

• No way, bro, a new Metallica album, called 72 Seasons, I’m totally down with that! Say, has anyone ever noticed that the band’s drummer and leader, Lars Ulrich, is like the Elon Musk of heavy metal, like, remember when they did the 5.98 EP just to remind folks that they were still edgy and punk, even though they were just about to get rid of guitar solos for a few albums in order to be like Papa Roach, because people don’t want complicated music, man, they just want to be stupid, and now we have two million bands that sound exactly like Bury Your Dead? No? Well it’s all Metallica’s fault that metal sucks now, but let’s try to get past that and go listen to a new song from this Metallica album, “If Darkness Had a Son,” before the album premieres in cinemas on the 13th (no, I’m not kidding)! Hm, it’s got a cool syncopated riff, it’s not completely horrible, well, at least before the vocals come in, all dishwasher-safe. Iron Maiden fans would like this, I guess.

• Ack, just when you thought you’d never have to hear aughts-era Canadian indie-pop ever again, look, it’s Feist, with her new album, Multitudes! Lol, remember when she lent her song “1234” to that iPod Nano TV ad and said something like “Well hey man, at least it wasn’t a preconceived marketing ploy” or whatever? Classic stuff, but the new single, “Hiding Out In The Open,” finds Feist in unplugged Joni Mitchell mode. The song isn’t completely horrible, which isn’t to say it’s terribly catchy or whatnot.

• We’ll end with Fruit Bats, remember those guys from a few years ago? That’s cool, I don’t remember a thing about them other than the fact that their PR people were demanding that I write about them. Their new LP, A River Running To Your Heart, includes a song called “Rushin’ River Valley,” sort of a cross between Decemberists and Guster, it’s breezy and nice, it’s fine by me.

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).

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