Aflame, by Pico Iyer


Aflame, by Pico Iyer (Riverhead, 222 pages)

Pico Iyer is widely known as a travel writer, and he has traveled the globe for his books and essays, but some of his most meaningful experiences have been in a tiny room with a single bed, a chair and a desk and no distractions save an ocean view, nothing but “silence and emptiness and light.”

It is here, at a monastery in Big Sur, California, called the Hermitage, that Iyer has returned to repeatedly over the past three decades, once driving nearly four hours after his father died to sit in the stillness for two hours before driving back home again.

In Aflame, an unnerving title given the recent devastation in Los Angeles, Iyer writes lyrically and movingly about the gifts of solitude and quiet and why they matter, especially in a culture that seems determined to deprive us of them. And yes, he also writes about wildfires, inevitable because the setting is California, and death and suffering. But the title is a metaphor for burning in the heart, as well.

When Iyer tells one friend about his experiences at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, the friend replies, “You sound like you’re in love.” He answers, “Exalted, at the very least.”

The friend cautions him, “A love like that can’t last,” to which Iyer responds, “But it can leave you a different person, not always for the worst.”

This was an unlikely love story for Iyer, who is not a Christian or a member of any organized religious group and says he has an “aversion to all crosses and hymnals” because of having to attend chapel for 12 years in school.

But at the Hermitage he found transformative peace similar to what Admiral Richard Byrd found in the Antarctic, where the explorer made friends with stars and ice crystals, and the playwright Henry Miller, who happily lived alone in a rude cabin with no electricity or phone for three years.

But, as Iyer writes, “The silence of a monastery is not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop; it’s active and thrumming, almost palpable.”

Although the website of the Big Sur hermitage is contemplation.com, the monks have work to do — when they are driven out by wildfires that threaten their home, they find similar jobs to do at the places where they evacuate.

Iyer himself is too much acquainted with fire: “I can still feel myself inside that oven, my mother’s cat panting and struggling to breathe in my lap. One minute we had been sitting in our family home, the next we were surrounded by walls of flame five stories high.”

That home was in Santa Barbara, and his mother was in Florida at the time, so Iyer had to call her to tell her that everything she owned was now ash. There are many such heartbreaking stories coming out of Los Angeles right now, but Iyer, having lived through such a fire and recovered, brings to the subject a stoic’s view: As painful as it was, the fire “did clear the way for many things,” he tells a friend. He recounts a Japanese poem:

My house burned down

I can now see better

The rising moon

True hermits are rare, and even those famous for time spent alone, like Henry David Thoreau, weren’t alone as people think. Even while living at Walden Pond, Thoreau visited his mother every Sunday, and “The title of his first talk at the Concord Lyceum was not ‘Solitude’ but ‘Society’,” Iyer writes. Being alone is not an end unto itself, but “the means to becoming a more useful member of society.”

But a little aloneness doesn’t cut it. As one monk tells Iyer, “You have to learn how to enjoy leisure. … But you can’t be leisurely for just half an hour. It’s only in the sixth half hour that things start developing inside you — and then you know you have another three hours to go.”

While not every day is bliss in stays that sometimes last for a month — there is rain, and there are rattlesnakes and occasional bouts of boredom — Iyer comes to understand that it is the learnings of silence, not the busy work of his career or any money in his bank account, that would be useful as his father came to the end of his life.
Still, a friend says to him, “I can’t believe you’re spending all this time with these old guys in hoods.” But those old guys in hoods are quite the sages. Once, Iyer walks in on one working in the kitchen, who says to him, “This bloody peeling of onions, it never stops!” Iyer assumes he is talking literally, but no: “It’s the inner onion I’m talking about. The invisible stuff!”

There is, as there always is, another fire, threatening the Hermitage. And then another.

“The sacred is not a sanctuary, I’m moved to remember; it’s a force field. In many ways a forest fire. You can try controlled burns or back burnings, you can walk towards the heat, but its power comes from the fact that it can’t begin to be controlled or anticipated.”

Aflame, released the week after the Santa Ana winds blew embers across the Pacific Palisades, is beauty amid those ashes, and those yet to come. AJennifer Graham

Featured Image: Aflame, by Pico Iyer

Album Reviews 25/01/30

J. Michael Graham, Stuck (self-released)

Debut six-song record from this Manchester, N.H., native, who’s nowadays running his operation out of Rhode Island. He’s worked his way up in the world, having opened up for basically anyone who’ll have him, from James Montgomery to The Samples to, um, waitwhat, the Dresden Dolls. What’s going on here is a mostly unplugged Dylan-meets-Tom Petty entry. The record’s release party was set for Feb. 7 at Chantilly’s Restaurant in Hooksett. B

Eric W. Saeger

Niambi, Taboo (Easier Said Records)

Debut solo EP for this Washington, D.C.,-born artist, who, after establishing herself as one-half of the neo-soul/hip-hop duo OSHUN now operates out of Puerto Rico. I really have no complaints regarding this record aside from its length; hopefully there’ll be a lot more of her to hear soon. On first listen I’d attest that this stuff is state-of-the-art trip-hop, beginning with “Soccer Mom,” whose subliminally buzzy busy-signal-ish sample fits perfectly with this lady’s stoned-out-of-her-gourd-style flow; it’s underground to a fault but simultaneously non-threatening, given its sexually ambivalent attitude (Billie Eilish could learn some things from this girl, take that however you wish). “No Budget” is a page right out of Massive Attack’s Heligoland-era schematic, with a lazy, tick-tocking drum line reminiscent of “Teardrop” (the theme to the old House TV series if you’re unfamiliar). “Run It” is the record’s final entry, the closest thing to a trap joint in the set but undeniably soulful. Great things ahead for this lady, no doubt. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• Before we get into the new releases streeting this Friday, Jan. 24, I’d like everyone in the class to please pick up your copy of the Dec. 26, 2024, Hippo and take a look at the ribbing I gave former British boyband-numbskull Robbie Williams for the soundtrack for his album Better Man (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), based on his biopic of the same name. You see, Variety just announced the numbers for the independently made Paramount-released movie (please ask your kids to leave the room, folks, this is for mature audiences only). Ahem, it was a record-breaker in the States, all right: It appeared in 1,291 movie theaters and made $1 million, which would be great if it had cost $5 to make, but guess what: it cost $110 million to make! Even overseas, where people actually even know who that dude is, it’s only made $4.9 million! Now, it might have done better if Williams hadn’t been portrayed by a digitally animated chimpanzee in the film, but you know what, I’m glad he was, because now maybe we have a new Rocky Horror Picture Show to mock and deride and laugh at. I’ll tell you, I don’t mind being right all the time, but this was like winning the Lotto!• Cool beans, we’re almost done with stupid wasteful frozen January already, let’s go! Friday the 31st will see a bunch of new albums, which we must talk about now, so let’s do that, please let’s! Why don’t we kick off the week with The Purple Bird from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, real name Joseph Oldham, known for his “do-it-yourself punk aesthetic and blunt honesty.” Music critics who are just trying to get their columns finished for the week usually associate his music with Americana, folk, roots, country, punk and indie rock, but this new album’s leadoff single, “London May,” is Guster-like and formulaic in a sonic sense: The piano-bonking chorus is compelling enough to prevent it from being written off as unlistenable, much as it deserves it. “Downstream” is more interesting, possessed of a bluegrass patina that mixes dobro and Irish ren-faire folk; it’d be pretty great if not for the guest vocal from overrated country singer John Anderson. Oldham is trying too hard to be eclectic there, but Flight of the Conchords fans will probably like it for its faux-sincerity and world music feel.

L.S. Dunes is something of an Aughts supergroup, fronted by Circa Survive/Saosin vocalist Anthony Green, who’s backed by My Chemical Romance guitarist Frank Iero, Coheed and Cambria guitarist Travis Stever, bassist Tim Payne and drummer Tucker Rule from the band Thursday. Their new LP Violet is heading to your Soundclouds as we speak; it’s the follow-up to their 2022 debut Past Lives, which sputtered at No. 174 in the U.S. charts despite its spazzy screamo/extreme-metal-tinged single “Permanent Rebellion,” which is nevertheless a pretty cool tune if you give it a chance (since I know you won’t bother, I’d urge you instead to go listen to the new album’s title track, which is in the same vein but slightly more accessible, sort of like Fall Out Boy with a jet pack strapped to its butt). These guys are definitely on to something, but their survival depends on suburban American youth’s capacity for taking scream seriously in [current_year]. (One annoying side effect of my looking into this band on YouTube was that I’ve ever since been spammed by ads for the Coheed and Cambria/Taking Back Sunday tour, which, by the way, will be coming to Boston’s MGM Music Hall on August 30; I will not be attending that one, for the record.)

Manic Street Preachers is a Welsh alt-rock band that’s done some interesting stuff over the near 40 years of their existence, including their older hit “La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh),” which krazy-glued grunge-rock to Jet in a long-overdue experiment (I liked that one a lot more than their more popular hit “Motorcycle Emptiness,” but your mileage may vary). They’re officially old nowadays, so their forthcoming LP Critical Thinking includes a transparent attempt to dent the AOR charts, specifically with the single “Hiding in Plain Sight,” a sleepy mid-tempo rocker that might have been interesting in 1967 but won’t do much for anyone under 40 today, I assure you. That’s not to say that traditional rock ’n’ roll is dead, but bands like this should really Google the word “electronic sampling” for all our sakes.

• We’ll end this week’s nonsense with Maribou State, an English electronic music duo famous for remixing stuff from Alpines, Lana Del Rey and anyone else who’ll put up with them. Their new full-length Hallucinating Love features the single “Bloom,” a ’60s-soul-tinted that’s got a lot to offer in the electro-experimentation department. They’ll be at the Royale in Boston on May 8. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: J. Michael Graham, Stuck (self-released) and Niambi, Taboo (Easier Said Records)

Sweet Fury, by Sash Bischoff

Sweet Fury, by Sash Bischoff (Simon & Schuster, 288 pages)

Check any list of the greatest American novelists and F. Scott Fitzgerald is likely in the top 10. Few of us escape high school without reading The Great Gatsby, but not all of us go on to read Fitzgerald’s next novel, Tender is the Night, published in 1934.

That puts Tender-illiterates like me at a bit of a disadvantage going into Sweet Fury, a debut novel by Sash Bischoff that revolves around a modern, feminist interpretation of Tender.

The disadvantage is not prohibitive — you can still follow the storyline, and might even emerge with a desire to visit (or revisit) all things Fitzgerald. But a fear of missing out might hang over your reading, since Bischoff admits she embedded Easter eggs — inside jokes or references — nodding to Fitzgerald and his work throughout the book.

The story begins with the clinical notes of a psychiatrist, Jonah Gabriel, who has agreed to take on a new client, a Hollywood star named Lila Crane who is about to play the role of Nicole Diver in a modern adaptation of Tender is the Night, directed by her lover. The star and the therapist have an immediate rapport once they discover that they both went to Princeton and were both fans of Fitzgerald.

Crane had decided to see therapy because of trauma she suffered in childhood. Her father was abusive and had an alcohol addiction, and he was driving drunk, with Crane and her mother in the car, when they collided with another car, killing the father.

“I want your honest opinion,” she says to Gabriel in their first session. “If someone has done something terrible to you, can you ever truly heal? Or will you always have a scar? Is there a way to erase the scar itself — and more importantly, erase that person’s power to hurt you again?”

Since Tender also involves alcohol abuse and a car wreck, Crane believes she might benefit from working out her own issues, which also, it turns out, include a past sexual assault. She enters therapy just as she becomes engaged to the man she’s living with, an A-list director named Kurt Royall, who is a powerful, attention-seeking man 18 years her senior. Her mother, not surprisingly, has concerns, even if Lila does not.

The story swivels back and forth between the therapist’s notes, Crane’s journaling and what is happening in real time as production begins on this new, empowering version of Tender. Crane is excited about the production because, as she tells Gabriel, “Our version of Tender isn’t another tragedy of the tortured white man. It’s a feminist story of healing, of reparations.”

From the first page, we’re swimming in a story within a story within a story — Tender is about a psychiatrist who falls in love with a patient, and much of that book derived from Fitzgerald’s relationship with his wife, Zelda, who had mental health issues that required psychiatric care.

But if you haven’t read the Fitzgerald novel, don’t go down the CliffsNotes rabbit hole like I did, as it will just leave your head spinning. Better to just read Sweet Fury on its own merits. That is, if you can get past the title and cover art — a silhouette of a nude woman’s body — that makes the book look like some sort of cringe bodice-ripper. (Honestly, if I’d been reading on public transportation, I would have hidden the cover, and I’m not sure if that makes me a prude or a literary snob.)

The publicity for Sweet Fury promises Gone Girl-like pivots and twists, and after a slow start these come fast and furious, making it difficult to talk about the last half of the book without significant spoilers. Let’s just say that more than one character is not the person they are set up to be; in fact, hardly anybody is.

Bischoff knows how to turn a phrase — my mind keeps returning to her description of an opulent wrap-around porch stretching into a “single, satisfied grin.” And she does an excellent job concealing the twists until their reveal; the story is well plotted and foreshadowing is light. She unpacks everything with sufficient depth at the story’s end.

If there’s a fault in these stars, it’s that Bischoff does not adequately convince us to love any of them as the story unfolds.

I never felt an emotional attachment to Lila, her mother, the scriptwriter, the therapist, the gay best friend or any of the myriad other characters. I read Sweet Fury as one watches the second season of a TV show you’ve never seen before, with clinical detachment. This is, no doubt, partly because I knew little about the book that was incessantly being referenced (even a cat is named Zelda — everything is Fitzgeraldized) but it’s also partly because, as I found out at the story’s end, much of what I thought I knew about these people wasn’t true. And you can’t love characters if you don’t know them.

That said, will I re-read it now to connect the dots I missed the first time? Yes, of course — somewhat grudgingly. And if I’d loved Lila Crane like I want to love protagonists, I’d probably read Tender is the Night, too. But at this point, that’s more time and energy than I want to invest in this particular fictional actress. At least until the movie comes out. B-Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Sweet Fury, by Sash Bischoff

Album Reviews 25/01/23

Löanshark, No Sins To Confess (Reigning Phoenix Music)

I swear I haven’t developed some weird fetish for foreign heavy metal bands, cross my heart; you may have noticed that I pick a random metal band out of my overstuffed emailbox every few weeks, and it just so happened that this week it’s yet another entry from Barcelona, Spain. I can make this short and sweet: If you ever wanted to hear what it would sound like if Scorpions and Alcatrazz had a baby, it’s this. The old-school hamster-wheel gets spinning really fast from the jump, with opener (no, I’m not making this up) “Electric Shockin’ Waves,” a headbanger that doesn’t break any new ground at all but nevertheless is a fine attempt; the singer sounds like a cross between Klaus Meine and Dio, which is about as generic as things could get. In case you’re not sure what this is about, there’s a cover version of NWOBHM cult band Marseille’s“Open Fire” that sounds a lot like a forgotten hit from Europe, come to think of it. It’s OK! A —Eric W. Saeger

The Vapors, Wasp In A Jar (Vapors Own Records)

Holy crow, stop the presses, this isn’t stupid at all! I know it must be a shock to Gen-Xers (how’s the imminent approach of your 60s feeling, kiddies?) to find that this U.K. New Wave band is still at it; you oldbies remember their big (OK, only) hit “Turning Japanese” from wayyy back in the day, but fact is, this isn’t the only album they’ve released over the decades. Anyway, what was I saying — oh yes, it’s not stupid, or at least it doesn’t start out that way, with the hardcore thrasher “Hit The Ground Run.” That one’s followed by “The Human Race,” a spazz-fest that’s their newest “Son Of Turning Japanese” entry, replete with a geeky, mildly catchy chorus. Later comes the obligato joke song, “Miss You Girl,” with a challenging but stupid bass line and purposely sloppy feedback-washed guitar line (literally every New Wave band wrote one of these during the Reagan years). Whatever, it’s a fun record, God bless ’em. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• Before we get into the new releases streeting this Friday, Jan. 24, I’d like everyone in the class to please pick up your copy of the Dec. 26, 2024, Hippo and take a look at the ribbing I gave former British boyband-numbskull Robbie Williams for the soundtrack for his album Better Man (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), based on his biopic of the same name. You see, Variety just announced the numbers for the independently made Paramount-released movie (please ask your kids to leave the room, folks, this is for mature audiences only). Ahem, it was a record-breaker in the States, all right: It appeared in 1,291 movie theaters and made $1 million, which would be great if it had cost $5 to make, but guess what: it cost $110 million to make! Even overseas, where people actually even know who that dude is, it’s only made $4.9 million! Now, it might have done better if Williams hadn’t been portrayed by a digitally animated chimpanzee in the film, but you know what, I’m glad he was, because now maybe we have a new Rocky Horror Picture Show to mock and deride and laugh at. I’ll tell you, I don’t mind being right all the time, but this was like winning the Lotto!

• If you’re old, you had a small psychological meltdown in 2021 when you were just trying to mind your own business and eat your Fiery Doritos and watch the Super Bowl halftime show and suddenly, instead of Tom Petty or Aerosmith actually playing the hits you used to listen to at keggers in 1986, there was some dude running around in a funhouse mirror-hall, lip-synching some Raffi-esque nursery rhymes, and you were like “How did this all happen?” It’s hard to say, but that was The Weeknd, and he has a new album coming out this Friday, titled Hurry Up Tomorrow, which took forever to roll out even after being postponed, and is said to be “all over the place” genre-wise. “The Crowd” is one of the new songs, an Auto-Tune fest that’s slow and foggy. “Timeless,” with a feature from Playboi Carti, is a cleverly syncopated chillout that fares a lot better. Late breaking: Oh for cripe’s sake, this guy moved the release date again, back a week to Jan. 31, for anyone who takes this ridiculousness seriously.

• Southern-roots-rock band Larkin Poe is often said to be a female version of Allman Brothers, mostly by journalists who don’t know what they’re doing. The band’s new album, Bloom, is led up by the single “Little Bit,” an unexciting slow-rock ballad that’s like Melissa Etheridge trying to be relevant to both the Billboard chart guys and the Zoomer demographic, which is obviously not something anyone should ever try.

• Lol we certainly are on a roll this week, folks, what could possibly be next, I ask you seriously, what on earth will be the next thing I’ll have to — oh look, it’s Scottish post-rock whatevers Mogwai, a band that’s famous for the horribly horrible Pavement-meets-Spacemen 3 single “Take Me Somewhere Nice,” deliver me from nonsense somebody please. Their new album is titled The Bad Fire and features a song called “Lion Rumpus,” a shoegaze-ish thingamajig with lots of guitar distortion that is, as always, its only saving grace, although the fact that there’s no singing on it is an added bonus. The video features the “lads” walking their dogs around Glasgow and asking people if they’ve even heard of Mogwai; most of them say “no” of course.

• Finally we have London-based indie-Bandcamper Anna B Savage, attempting to salvage something positive from this absolutely dreadful week of new releases, with her new one, You and I Are Earth. The single, “Agnes ft. Anna Mieke,” is basically an overacted nick of Tori Amos for Zoomers who’d secretly rather be listening to something decent (they all are); too bad about that. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Löanshark, No Sins To Confess (Reigning Phoenix Music) and The Vapors, Wasp In A Jar (Vapors Own Records)

The Cure for Women, by Lydia Reeder

The Cure for Women, by Lydia Reeder (St. Martin’s Press, 286 pages)

Given some of the past practices of medicine, bloodletting and leeches and such, it’s a wonder any of us are alive today. What’s even more disturbing is how recent some of these strange medical practices are.

Take, for example, the “rest cure for women,” a protocol of the 19th century in which women suffering from a raft of maladies — but mainly being thin and “short of blood” — were told to take to their beds, sometimes for months, where they were fed milk and raw eggs, and forbidden social interaction and “brain work.”

While many women were actively harmed by such treatments, there were far worse things done to women under the guise of medicine in that era, even by physicians ostensibly devoted to women’s health. The doctor credited with inventing the speculum, for example, once wrote, “If there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis.” This physician was a showman in the vein of P.T. Barnum, performing operations in front of an enthralled audience, sometimes with the patients (often enslaved women) awake and screaming.

All this was occurring in a century in which smart and capable women were being denied entry to medical school because of the belief that they were not intellectually or psychologically equipped for the work, even though female midwives had been delivering babies for millennia.

The first woman to graduate from an American medical school, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, was admitted by mistake — her male classmates thought they were voting on her enrollment as a joke. Blackwell and her younger sister Emily, who also became a physician, are fairly well known today for their pioneering work improving the prospects of both patients and female doctors.

But Lydia Reeder argues that a lesser-known physician, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, also deserves history’s acclaim. In The Cure for Women, Reeder explains how Jacobi, a contemporary of the Blackwells, took on the established beliefs about women’s monthly cycles, which had been used as “evidence” of women’s inferiority, and refuted them with data.

The daughter of the New York publishing scion George Palmer Putnam, Mary showed her capacity for medicine at age 9 when, after discovering a dead rat in their barn, she asked her mother if she could dissect it. Her mother said no, and her father did not think medicine was a proper career for women, but he had published a book by Elizabeth Blackwell and so consented to let his precocious daughter work at Blackwell’s clinic.

Eventually Mary enrolled at one of the few educational opportunities available to her, the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, but she left “after she discovered she knew more about medicine than most of her instructors” and went on to graduate from a medical school in Paris. In one funny anecdote, her father sent her money there for a dress — she had to plead with him for permission to use the money to buy a microscope instead.

Upon returning to the States with a medical degree, Mary found work teaching at the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary and dedicated herself to evangelizing “a scientific spirit” among women. Unfortunately for modern sensibilities, that scientific spirit also included justification of vivisection, the dissection of live animals, which Jacobi would defend. It is, perhaps, the one area in which her thinking was not visionary, although it might have helped establish her as a serious medical mind at the time.

She went on to marry a widower, Dr. Abraham Jacobi, a leading pediatrician in New York, and shortly thereafter became pregnant and worked throughout her pregnancy — refuting in real time the prevailing thought that women were suited for domestic life and reproduction solely. She began conducting research to test and challenge views about women’s capabilities during menstruation, and also to counter prescriptions of “the rest cure” as well as other medical practices of the time. She was also an advocate of sports and physical activity — as opposed to rest — to improve women’s health.

Perhaps the best story about her is that she submitted a paper arguing that menstruation does not constitute “any temporary predisposition to either hysteria or insanity” to a prestigious Harvard University competition: the Boylston Medical Prize. Per the competition’s instructions, the entry was submitted anonymously. She won, beating out hundreds of men. The work was later published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons as “The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation” and was widely praised.

Even as Mary advanced professionally, she was lauded publicly for being an excellent housekeeper, and she had three children, and suffered the loss of two — a daughter who died at birth and a son who died at age 7 from diphtheria — a terrible loss for any parent, but especially for two doctors who could not help their child and who wound up blaming each other. The death, Reeder wrote, created a “fault line between Mary and Abraham that would, ultimately, never heal.”

Almost 20 years later, Mary Putnam Jacobi would diagnose a brain tumor in herself, and spent the last years of her life writing a case study on it titled “Description of the Early Symptoms of the Meningeal Tumor Compressing the Cerebellum, from Which the Author Died.”

Her life was clearly extraordinary and worthy of a biography, and Reeder’s treatment is more than comprehensive — to a fault, at times.

Going back and forth between history and inventive narrative, in which Reeder imagines what might have happened in a scene, was the wrong approach for a book about women devoted to science. Their imagined thoughts and actions — such as, “Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D., paced back and forth in her drab Lower West Side apartment, stopping occasionally to glance through her parlor window at the blizzard swirling outside” — are simply unnecessary. The occasional asides into this literary construction serve no purpose other than befuddling the reader.

It is also a little odd that the central character of the book is not introduced in any substantial way until chapter 3.

The author is the great-granddaughter of a midwife who cared for women and children in rural Missouri early in the 20th century, at one point plunging her fingers down a child’s throat to remove a safety pin. That midwife, Ellen Babb, no doubt had as many fascinating stories to tell as Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, despite the vast differences in their economic circumstances and training. The Cure for Women is a tribute to both of them — and a thumb in the eye to the 19th-century male doctor who wrote, “I said I did not believe it was best either for the sick or for society for women to be doctors.”

B-Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Cabin, by Patrick Hutchison

Album Reviews 25/01/16

Bumblefoot, Bumblefoot … Returns! (Bumblefoot Music)

Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal is a guitarist, producer, composer and educator whose career spans more than 30 years, highlighted by collaborations with Guns N’ Roses, Asia, Sons of Apollo, and Whom Gods Destroy. In other words, you’ve assuredly heard his work but had no idea who he is. It’s been 30 years since his debut solo album Adventures Of Bumblefoot, but — and I don’t think I’ve ever used this hackneyed phrase in all my years of music-journo-ing, correct me if I’m wrong but I’m not — this was worth the wait, but only if you’re a Guitar Player-reading nerd who wants to expand your horizons past basic shredding methods. Guests on this one include Queen’s Brian May (turning in a rather pedestrian blooz-rawk performance in “Once In Forever”), Steve Vai (the far more interesting stomp-thrasher “Monstruoso”), and Guthrie Govan (the epic-metal-washed “Anveshana”), but it’s Thal’s own otherworldly experimentation on numbers like “Simon In Space” that makes this a can’t-miss for you wonks out there (don’t try this at home). A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Wow, folks, it’s already Jan. 17, we’ll be past this frost-Viking weather before you know it and I’ll be in my glory again, eating overpriced clams and fish on York Beach while annoying tourists from Methuen and Allston intentionally park themselves in front of me, coagulating in beach umbrella encampments (they get sunburned anyway, every single time), just to ruin my view of Maine’s peaceful waves and yelling seagulls! If there’s a worse buzzkill than that it hasn’t been invented yet, but I’d take it over the alternative, all the silly windy Day After Tomorrow-level mega-blasts of insta-freeze North Pole nonsense that’s settled in lately, any day! Whatever, shut up, we’re supposed to be talking about the new albums coming out on the 17th, like Humanhood, the new LP from Canadian revolving-door folkie band The Weather Station, can you hardly wait! This lady-fronted outfit has won and been nominated for several Canadian music awards, which is the musical equivalent of winning the Wiffle Ball World Series, but you know what, I’ll listen to something from this new album anyway, in order to provide my frantic fans with the latest developments in obscure world music happenings! Hold it, the new single, “Neon Lights,” is very good, to be honest, sort of a cross between Loreena McKennitt and Arcade Fire, aren’t you tired of Canadian bands making very listenable music when we can’t, so annoying! There’s an urgent street-smart vibe to it, and bandleader/singer Tamara Lindeman puts her Canadian-music-award-nominated songwriting talents to the test, mopping the floor with the likes of Natalie Merchant. You’ll like this tune if you’re not in the habit of being intentionally obtuse.

• World-, um, I mean Europe-renowned singer-songwriter David Gray has won many awards that you didn’t even know existed, but in his defense, he was also nominated for a few Grammys, including Best New Artist in 2002, obviously because the heavily medicated Grammy Award people had to fill up the nom list with nine sacrificial lambs to lose to Alicia Keys that year (private to a constant reader: naturally they didn’t take Linkin Park seriously back then, and I still don’t)! Who cares and whatnot, Dear Life is this British bloke’s new album, eh wot, and it features the single “Plus and Minus,” a duet with Talia Rae. It is a gentle AOR tune for soccer parents, comprising a chill vibe and debatable amount of mild listenability. At least it’s not annoying, eh wot bob’s your uncle?

• Lastly on the listly, it’s the second posthumous album from Pittsburg jazz-rap/alt-hip-hopper Mac Miller, aka Delusional Thomas. Balloonerism is the new album; it’s as East Coast hip-hop as you could ever want, whatever that means to you. His family handled this release, which is very important to the handful of people who care about stuff like that. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Bumblefoot, Bumblefoot … Returns (Bumblefoot Music)

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