Category: Pop

Album Reviews 26/07/02

Ow! Live at The Penthouse, Johnny Griffin and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis (Reel To Real Records)

It’s summer in New England, when we hardscrabble Yankees regroup and take a look at things we may have missed over the past year. My problem is that so many albums get dumped into my virtual and non-virtual mailboxes that I tend to run years behind, which means a lot of releases never get the attention they deserve, case in point this one, which originally streeted on Record Store Day in 2019 as an exclusive, and then in standard form a couple of weeks later. Put simply, it’s a master class in hard bop jazz, spotlighting two amazingly gifted tenor saxophone players; it really show-stopped my music-listening life the first time I heard it and it’s become a staple in my car over the past couple of months. Recorded live over two nights at the Penthouse jazz club in Seattle in 1962, it features both guys (who were dubbed the “Tough Tenors” for their fast-motion interplay) in peak form, blazing (in an uncharacteristically gentlemanly way, as opposed to the one-upmanship observable in their other Prestige Records outings) through such improv-begging tunes as Count Basie’s “Tickle Toe,” at mind-boggling speeds. Advanced post-bop is everywhere here; if you buy one vintage jazz record this year, this should be it. A+

Gandalf Murphy and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams, A Very Unusual Head (Storm Kings Records)

Like I always say sometimes, if you can’t make the Who’s Who, try for the What The Hell Was That, where these guys are situated comfortably with a bullet. At first glance I was expecting steampunk: stovepipe hats, facial hair courtesy of 1971, suits louder than Godzilla after stubbing his toe on a school bus, etc., but this 30-plus-year veteran crew of upstate New Yorkers is usually found at folkie festivals, which makes sense, given their sound, but only a little. More accurately, their trip is usually described as “hillbilly Pink Floyd,” and when I found that out I was filled with dread (you all know what a jerk I am about Floyd, and obviously everything about these guys screams joke band). But whattaya know, opening tune “Beez (I Know Where The Beez Have Gone)” is very listenable and really very epic; if there was anything you liked about Dark Side Of The Moon, it’s distilled here. No, I’m being serious, the sound is very big, even when it gets a little weird thanks to the presence of hayloft/jackass instruments like ukuleles, melodicas, flutes and theremins. This is simply a great band of songwriters who happen to dress like Randy “Macho Man” Savage. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• OK, the summer’s already moving along too fast; the next new-CD Friday is this one, July 3, the day before this country’s 250th birthday, which means that everyone you know will be spending their time gathering together dangerous quantities of liquor and fireworks, not thinking about buying albums, but new albums will come nonetheless, and you can listen to them, while you shoot off fireworks, safely drunk, unless you hate George Washington! According to Metacritic, which has been proving itself increasingly worthless of late with regard to telling me about new albums, there are only two, but Google’s AI (the one everybody’s already using for free, which means it’s totally destined to win the AI wars, which will bankrupt companies like Microsoft and Oracle and bring on the Apocalypse, but not to worry, because something-something) found several more! The most “important” album comes from 58-year-old British hard-rock band Deep Purple, and it is titled SPLAT! Now, I don’t know how these fellas are even still alive, but I’m certain I’ll be impressed by their ability to keep up with the times and street a record that sounds fresh and innovative, let’s go find out! Yes, yes, the new single “Guilt Trippin’” is basically the same thing as their 54-year-old song “Space Truckin,’” except that 80-year-old singer Ian Gillan is trying to sound funny, like Butthead from Beavis and Butthead, so if you enjoy hearing five 80-year-old men pretending to be a joke band, I highly recommend that you consider purchasing this album!

• Two weeks ago, Happy Mag reported that Madonna wanted an “extortionist’s sum” to fund her biopic Who’s That Girl, and not even Netflix would pay for it. Says here that the script, which she wrote herself, would demand a blockbuster budget, so it’s on hold until further notice, meaning it will probably never happen, which is a bit unfair I suppose; as Happy observed, “[A Bob Dylan movie] gets [a gigantic budget]. Bruce gets one. Michael gets one. But Madonna? Apparently the industry forgot who invented half of pop culture.” Well, as far as I’m concerned — and not to minimize the fact that women are treated horribly by the music industry — I’d remind the Happy writer that we already had a Madonna documentary in 1991, titled Truth Or Dare, whose most non-boring moment was when she pretended to barf when Kevin Costner appeared backstage, but either way, Madge has a new album out this week, called Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II, which harkens back to her space-disco days, with hypnotic progressive-house elements, random sexy whispering, etc. It’s fine.

• Next is Anton Pearson, guitarist for U.K. band Squid, which is, according to the band’s subreddit, “focused on post-punk, jazz-rock, ambient and krautrock,” meaning they’re, you know, totally unfocused, not that that’s always a bad thing. Pearson’s debut solo LP, Driving Through Belgium, is ambient stuff; I listened to two tracks, one that was cheesy Daedalus-type stuff, and another that sounded like an electric shaver getting pressed against a stainless steel pot; I’d cite the song titles but I already forgot them, mercifully.

• And finally we have Atlanta rapper/producer Ken Carson with his newest album, Xperiment, a 22-track affair that lays melodically competent AutoTuned rhymes over rage-y, distorted, experimental beats. I would give you the deets on one tune in particular, but given that all he’s made available for preview is a collection of snippets, I assume he couldn’t care less about my desire for exhibiting any journalistic professionalism whatsoever, bravo.

Featured Photo: Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes and Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me

Jessie’s version

Toy Story 5 returns to fun

Summer is kids-in-the-movie-theater-air-conditioning time and Toy Story 5 offers a fun, very solidly built family moviegoing option.

I was a little apprehensive about Toy Story 5 (in theaters) largely because Toy Story 4 (streaming on Disney+ if you’re a completist)felt to me like someone at Pixar having an empty-nester, career-change crisis and trying to work it out with the toys. Toy Story 5 feels much more like an episode of Toy Story with our familiar characters having an adventure — with of course, the occasional Pixar gut punch.

Here, Jessie (voice of Joan Cusack) takes the lead of the story. She is the sheriff of the now elementary-school-aged Bonnie’s (voice of Scarlett Spears) toy room and one of Bonnie’s favorite toys to feature in her wild adventures. But these adventures just feature Bonnie and her toys — she is shy around other kids, most of whom seem to spend their“play” time on devices rather than with toys. Seeking to help their daughter break out of her shell, Bonnie’s parents buy her a Lilypad (voice of Greta Lee), a kids’-iPad-like toy with a vaguely M3gan-esque aggressively positive voice. The girls in Bonnie’s dance class all hang out on their Lilypads, playing games together in the morning. Lily is determined to help Bonnie make friends with them, learn the emoji-based inside jokes and give up on lame old toys. But Jessie knows that Bonnie needs a friend with similar interests to really connect and isn’t willing to let Lily take over.

Eventually, Jessie and her horse Bullseye wind up out in the world, running into new toys including earlier generations of tech toys that have been just as discarded as their analog brethren, including Smarty Pants (voice of Conan O’Brien), a toilet training toy. Meanwhile, Woody (voice of Tom Hanks), thinking Jessie needs his help, shows up at Bonnie’s room about the time Buzz (voice of Tim Allen) realizes that Jessie is missing.

Even though this is basically Jessie’s story, Buzz gets some nice bits of running story: with the recent marriage of Forky (voice of Tony Hale) to his plastic knife wife Karen Beverly (voice of Melissa Villaseñor), Buzz wants to propose to Jessie. And, in the movie’s opening scenes, we see a shipping container of next-generation Buzz Lightyears wash up on an island where they activate and try to figure out their mission. These scenes, which are intercut with the central action of the movie, bring a nice cartoon-antics quality to this movie. For all that the movie deals with some big issues — toys battling screens for the attention (and affection and imagination) of kids, kid-on-kid bullying facilitated by those screens, the idea that the screens are pushing kids to act grownup too fast — most of the movie is able to do this while still being lively and kid-fun, not just adult clever. The result is a movie with beloved characters that is truly enjoyable for everyone in the family.

Looking for more kid-friendly fare this summer? Here are some of the PG-rated movies slated for summer release:

• Minions & Monsters The next entry in the Minions universe opens July 1.

• MoanaDisney is going to keep making these unnecessary live-action adaptations, I guess. The Rock returns as live-action Maui on July 10.

• Paw Patrol: The Dino MovieNo job too big, no pup too small — Aug. 14.

• The Magic Faraway Tree A live-action adventure based on the books by Enid Blyton opens on Aug. 21.

• Coyote vs. Acme Trailers suggest a Who Framed Roger Rabbit?-like blend of live action and the Looney Tunes characters. See it Aug. 28.

Featured photo: Toy Story 5.

Take Me To Your Leader, by Neil deGrasse Tyson

(Simon Six, 226 pages)

Aliens are having a moment.

Of course, it could be argued that they’ve been having a moment since 1961, when Betty and Barney Hill, a Portsmouth couple on their way home after visiting Canada, said they encountered a mysterious disc-shaped aircraft near Franconia. Their story is among the most famous of so-called alien abductions.

The Hills, however, appear only briefly in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Take Me To Your Leader, a semi-serious handbook of alien adventures. Capitalizing on the current interest in all things extraterrestrial, driven in part by the new Steven Spielberg film Disclosure Day and the slow drip of formerly classified UAP [formerly known as UFO] videos coming from the government, the book proposes to tell us how to interact with our new alien friends (or overlords) when they come.

Tyson, according to his publisher, is America’s favorite astrophysicist, so you might think he would bring a serious, scholarly bent to the subject. You would be wrong. The book, at times, is more like a BuzzFeed reporter ran a couple of questions about aliens through Claude, and out came this manuscript.

Tyson begins by talking about aliens in popular culture. There have been a lot of aliens in movies and TV shows, probably more than you recall. And as he recounts them, Tyson wonders why they are always so human-looking and predictable, with a few exceptions, like Project Hail Mary.

“Once, just once, I want to see a gray Alien portrayed with a full head of coiffed hair,” he writes.

Humans pride ourselves on our intelligence and imagination, but we probably shouldn’t. Voltaire conceived of aliens 23 miles tall, and astronomer Frank Drake of aliens the size of a pinhead, and Tyson offers 12 archetypes of aliens, but few of us go beyond little green men.

That may be because, as Tyson points out, there is just 2 percent of DNA that separates us from the chimpanzee. He invites us to consider the differences in capabilities between humans and chimps, and then to consider aliens that are 2 percent more advanced than us — or 20 percent. “For all we know, they created Earth as a literal aquarium-terrarium for their own amusement,” as we do with fish, turtles and ants. “Do they know we built their domicile? Do they know we are looking in on them through transparent walls? Do they care?”

And of course, building a world like ours, or the one in The Matrix, is “nothing that a smart Alien couldn’t accomplish in an afternoon.”

Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, brings a wrecking ball to every commonly held notion about extraterrestrials. In a chapter on what alien technology would look like, he concludes that “smooth, rotating flying saucers are not a thing,” because the staid, steady laws of physics are literally universal. He goes on to explore what’s known as Fermi’s Paradox (named for the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi), the conundrum presented by the probability that life exists outside our planet and the lack of actual evidence for it. That lack of evidence should relieve us, given our vast vulnerabilities. As Tyson notes, “The world’s fastest human, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, would be easily caught and eaten by a half dozen different species of mammal predators.” That said, it could also be the case that the evidence for aliens is just not apparent to mere mortals: “We are three-dimensional creatures. Nothing to stop an Alien from living in four or five or more dimensions. If they never deigned to pass through our measly three dimensions, we would never know they were there,” Tyson writes.

So where does America’s favorite astrophysicist stand on all of this? Do aliens exist or not? In his conclusion, Tyson offers his response to an invitation he received to inspect purportedly alien mummies recovered in Peru. In declining, he encouraged the team to publish their research in a peer-reviewed journal and offer samples of the specimens to scientists for analysis. “We do this for findings much less extraordinary than what you have presented. … So it will never be about what I think, it’s about the quality of the data and its verification.” (Reviewer’s note: Scientists later said the “mummies” were dolls made with human bones.)

So until there is a peer-reviewed study of alien remains, he says, “Alien visitations will remain a belief system like any other.”

It’s notable that throughout Take Me To Your Leader Tyson says things like, “Nobody knows how or why that happened.” I’m not sure if it’s reassuring or disturbing that astrophysicists still know so little about the universe, but rest assured, Tyson knows much more than most of us.

Regardless, when it comes to aliens and alien culture, this is a thin and often frothy take on the subject. You can do better with Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s The Ghost Lab, published last year. C —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Take Me To Your Leader, by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Album Reviews 26/06/25

Pussy Riot, CYKA (self-released)

It was quite a surprise for me to find that this was the Russian protest-punk group’s debut album, given that they’ve been playing well-publicized shows, pulling all sorts of anarchic stunts and getting arrested for 14 years now, but yes, that’s what it is, the first proper full-length from Moscow’s answer to the Dead Kennedys, after a fashion (most of the band members are in exile nowadays at the behest of Vladimir Putin for all the rabble they’ve roused). In a way, it qualifies as world music, of a certain bent: While many Americans are accustomed to protesting our own government’s actions in the Middle East and such (at least online) this is a, well, almost refreshing view from another world entirely, where citizens — especially mindful, news-junkie types like these girls — are in a permanent, rabid state of outrage over events in Ukraine. It’s a striking juxtaposition if you’re an American who’s spent a lot of time on Twitter/Bluesky et al. over the last few years. Lots of angry Poppy-like caterwauling goes on here, of course, but the band had a lot of help from different corners of the industry, which led to some unexpected results, such as the sexy TLC-like cooing in the “Putin-guested” title track. In the no-surprise department, Avenged Sevenfold volunteers their nu-metal weaponry to “Candy Dopamine.” A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Tesla, Homage (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

In the moment I’m writing this, I couldn’t name one song from this Sacramento, California, ’80s-hair-metal band if I had to save a million kittens, so luckily I don’t. I threw it on this week’s list because it seemed timely, given that Tesla Inc. owner Elon Musk just became America’s first trillionaire-on-very-flimsy-paper, and wisely enough the band leads off their home page with an announcement that they are indeed the band, not the automaker. Anyhow, they’ve actually been more of a bland-tasting mainstream rock band than anything else, which is the chart where they’ve historically made some dents, but for everything they do that sounds like Black Crowes there’s some room-temperature hard rock that’s in the vein of Europe and that sort of thing. They’re big into the Stones and Beatles, not that you can tell much from the cover songs they recite on this record; Supertramp’s absolutely awful “Give A Little Bit” gets a reading that replaces the original’s falsetto with the nasal bleating of an annoying nitwit like the dude from Buckcherry. Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” gets a particularly revolting turn, which was where I tapped out on this nonsense. They’ll be in Gilford at the BankNH Pavilion on July 24. C —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Moving right along with this totally forgettable year — or at least we’d like to forget it for five minutes, but the amount of alcohol required for that level of psychic anesthesia would bankrupt most countries – the next jumble of albums will come out on June 26, so we must talk about them, I’ll take an adequately barrel-aged tequila straight up please, with a nice lime wedge! Oh, but first, it’s time once again to remind musicians who are in local bands and want to get reviewed by me in this multiple award-winning newspaper section that the only sure-fire way to contact me is by messaging me at my Facebook and/or Twitter/Bluesky thingamajigs, at the addresses mentioned elsewhere on this page. The only thing I ask is that you include a graphic of your album/EP/mixtape cover and a brief “biography,” that is to say a description of your act, any interesting factoids, the official release date of your record, and, most importantly, who you are and where your band/act is based, meaning what specific town. I know I’m repeating myself, but in the old days, that used to be a no-brainer, like, bands automatically sent “press kits” with their albums, but nowadays, with the rise of things like Banksy and Burial and all sorts of other popular figures pretending not to want any recognition (any way we can stop that yet, pretty please with sugar on top?), it’s like pulling teeth for us art-scene journos to get straight answers to our basic questions, and it’s massively, massively annoying. For example, if you’re from Nashua, New Hampshire, don’t jump in my messages saying “my band is from the Boston area,” because it gives me a skin rash. Be concise, tell me why your act is awesome, and for extra points tell me whom you think your band/act sounds like. The easier you make my job, the more nice I will be to your album-or-whatever on this page, that’s how this works. I mean, not to brag, but I get about 300 emails a week from bands and publicists seeking press for new records, and given that I like to sit around eating Fig Newtons and watching Netflix documentaries as much as you do, you should keep in mind that there are always 300 other bands — some of them famous! — that want the publicity if you don’t. I am here to help you, same as how I am here to let people know that British folktronica lady Beth Orton has a new album coming out this Friday, titled The Ground Above. You may know Orton from the Aughts era, when she was something of a techno “It Girl,” collaborating with Chemical Brothers and such. The album’s title track features Orton singing rather badly over a sublime trip-hop beat in the vein of Portishead. She’ll be at the Crystal Ballroom in Somerville, Mass., on Sept. 19.

• For some reason, whenever I hear the name Chanel Beads I always think of taking a bubble bath, do you think that’s dumb, my sense of self-worth hinges on your answer. It’s the stage name of New York indie dude Shane Lavers, whose new album Your Day Will Come includes the cool, sparse, percussive dance(ish) track “Police Scanner.” He’ll perform at The Sinclair in Cambridge, Mass., on Sept. 13.

• I’ll just assume you know Aughts-indie favorites The Strokes; they release their newest LP Reality Awaits this Friday. What I heard of it was all fine, of course, starting with album opener “Psycho Sh-t,” made of their usual edgy, angular Romantics-meets-Interpol ingredients.

• Lastly we have The Pretty Reckless with an album called Dear God, whose title track sounds like Ani DiFranco trying to be Nine Inch Nails-ish, please make it stop. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes and Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me

Space!

The summer movie frontier?

Who doesn’t love summer movie space aliens?

(Spoilers ahead — I don’t really know how to proceed without a little bit of secret-spilling.)

It is perhaps a mild spoiler to say that Disclosure Day (PG-13, in theaters now), directed by Steven Spielberg, is about extraterrestrial beings. It is maybe a bigger spoiler to say the movie is specifically about what happens as the existence of those aliens goes from being a secret held by the government for some 80 years to being something that a wider group of people, perhaps even the whole world, knows.

As we see in trailers, TV weatherperson Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is suddenly capable of speaking an unEarthly clicky language, which she breaks into during one of her live broadcasts. Margaret’s moment of on-air strangeness leads her to fear she’s had a medical issue. But we see the reaction that footage of the episode gets from a secretive quasi-government agency run by Noah (Colin Firth), who is already scrambling the troops after one of his tech guys, Daniel (Josh O’Connor), made off with some highly classified video footage. And we see the reaction of a group led by Hugo (Colman Domingo), who seems to be directing Daniel in his heist. As Noah’s people chase Margaret, who doesn’t understand why she’s suddenly a wanted woman any more than she understands why she can suddenly read everyone’s thoughts, and Daniel, the two seem drawn to each other. Fairly early, we learn about the big secret Daniel is so desperate to get out to the public when he shows his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) some of the stolen footage starting with, bestill Fox Mulder’s heart, the Roswell crash in 1947.

I think we’re supposed to be watching basically regular people being pulled into this big secret — how would they handle this information, how would they react to learning the part they are playing, do they think the world can handle knowledge of aliens? There are moments that exemplify this: Jane talks to a nun played by Elizabeth Marvel and they weigh the meaning of aliens, the reaction they’d expect the world to have.

My problem is that these conversations frequently can’t break off the page to feel like a real conversation, these people never quite feel like real people to me. Emily Blunt feels off-key here. It’s as though she was given too many notes about exactly what tone to strike and ends up feeling like two or three character ideas smooshed into one person. Josh O’Connor, meanwhile, feels like he’s just hitting the one character note, just a lump of doe-eyed Big Emotion. Colman Domingo is maybe doing something interesting — isn’t he always? — but it feels like it’s from a different movie. And Colin Firth is just serving up angry British authority, take it or leave it, no side of fries.

For every “that’s an interesting idea” the movie has many story elements that are unnecessary, don’t fully make sense or don’t feel like they were developed beyond the idea stage. A running subplot throughout this movie is that international tensions have the whole world on the brink of war. We see people hoarding gas and buying out supermarkets. This element is maybe meant to heighten tension or underline the destructive tendencies of humans or some other thing I just didn’t get. For me, though, it was one of the extra accessories that Coco Chanel wants you to take off before leaving the house.

There are elements of the chase that are fun and well-constructed, though the movie is never as energetic as its most John Williams-y of John Williams scores seems to want us to think it is. I feel like there are ideas here, things that could have gone in either a more popcorn fun direction or something that felt more like a stripped down gritty sci-fi adventure reminiscent of 1970s Spielberg. For me, though, the movie never pulled together into something that was either a thrilling ride or a compelling thought experiment.

A few days later I rewatched that 1977 grittier Spielberg sci-fi: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (available for rent or purchase and streaming on Peacock). In many ways, this is the spikier, low fi version of Disclosure Day. We get many of the same elements — strange occurrences, the “what’s happening to me,” a chase with officialdom — though there is more chase and a shorter timeline in Disclosure Day. Characters played by Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon see clearly not-from-here crafts flying in the sky and come away from the experience with thoughts of Devil’s Tower National Monument stuck in their heads. Desperate to figure out what they’ve seen and what they’re experiencing, the two unwind — first Dreyfuss’s character as he scares his family (including his wife played by Teri Garr) and then Dillon’s character when her young son, seeing brightly lit “toys,” runs after a UFO and is abducted. I highly recommend this double feature — I think I had more fun thinking about Disclosure Day after watching Close Encounters. The movies are, as your serious film academics might say, in conversation with each other and are both interesting reflections of their times.

I also used the outer space theme of Disclosure Day as an excuse to catch up with March release Project Hail Mary (PG-13, available for purchase). Based on the Andy Weir book, Project Hail Mary is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the team who wrote and directed The Lego Movie and wrote the animated Spider-Verse films, with a screenplay by Drew Goddard, who also wrote Weir’s other book-to-film, The Martian. This movie is exactly as good as all those names promise.

Ryan Gosling here is, similar to Matt Damon in The Martian, the one person working alone for a good chunk of the movie. He plays Ryland Grace, a middle school teacher who is also a molecular biologist and has been kicked out of standard scientific work for some kooky ideas about the conditions required for life to develop. Luckily, Eva Stratt (an excellent performance from Sandra Hüller) is in the kooky ideas business. The head of an international scientific project, Eva is trying to figure out astrophage, a substance that is traveling from Venus to the sun and appears to be dimming the sun’s light. Scientists all over the world are working on the project and she calls Grace in to study a sample of the astrophage gathered on a recent space mission. We watch as Grace joins the project to try to figure out what astrophage is and how they could possibly reverse the potentially world-ending effects it’s having on the sun.

All of this is viewed in flashback as Grace, in the movie’s present, wakes up to find himself alone on a space craft with no memory of much of anything — who he is, where he is, why he’s there, why a robot is trying to shave off his extremely long beard.

Similar to The Martian, Project Hail Mary is a movie of questions and whiteboards and smart people tackling small problems with duct tape and plywood in order to get the information needed to tackle bigger problems. It is optimistic in its view of science and people doing science — this isn’t callous tech-dinguses trying to figure out how to monetize some crappy thing that nobody really needs anyway. It’s people, all curious and fallible, working together, across borders and language barriers, to figure things out with the ultimate aim of saving the world. This might be my favorite brand of save-the-world adventure movie? No magical stuff or superpowers, just middle-aged nerds who can mock things up with Home Depot supplies. This movie does everything right — Gosling’s performance, space visuals, showing people thinking through things and showing Gosling working out a puzzle by himself that includes a really solid vocal performance (by James Ortiz).

Featured photo: Disclosure Day.

Ruins, by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Grand Central Publishing, 389 pages

By her admission, Ember Agni was a weird kid. For fun, she liked to bury things in her backyard and then dig them up over time to analyze the stages of decomposition. Like other children, she had a “penchant for dirt,” but her play had a purpose: observing history in the process of being made.

So of course she became an archeologist, but a frustrated one. When we meet Ember in Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Ruins, she is sleepwalking through her life: stuck teaching faceless students at a university where she’d intended to work for only a few years before returning to the field; stuck in a marriage to a man whose interests and goals seem to grow more distant from hers every day.

But as Ember begins a new semester, a letter arrives from a former student. It informs Ember that the writer, named Ish, has found an artifact, and “It’s as we hoped. Intact. Good condition. A few thousand years? It’s hard to pinpoint. Two? Three?”

And with that, Ember’s world is upended, as the missive tantalizingly dangles a different life, one in which she might finally be able to get funding for an archaeological dig that frees her from the drudgework of the university and from her increasingly tense marriage.

The dig, she believes, has the potential to explode existing narratives about the origins of humanity, which is not a small thing. And yet, also not a small thing, I struggled mightily to care.

That’s because Ember is the worst kind of protagonist: the unlikeable one. We’re told early on that she is “not well liked at the university. By anyone: students or faculty or administrators.” She is hard on her assistant, hard on her husband, hard generally; in part because she’s miserable because of decisions she has made, in part because of her difficult single mother, now dead, “embittered, vain, endlessly critical Ola, who had never hesitated to remind her daughter how costly being a parent was.”

That parenting helped turn Ember into someone who was ambivalent about being a parent herself, which is a problem because her husband, Jerome, finds his joy on the homefront. The difference between the two of them is illustrated by the care he puts into a garden in their backyard; she hasn’t so much looked at it in months. Jerome wants children; Ember wants professional success. She’d made that clear when they met, but he’d thought she would change. To Ember, it is Jerome who is changing. He had, she observes, “become increasingly rigid over the years. Unimaginative. Boring, in fact. By association, she was becoming boring also, as if his desire for the banality of procreation and home improvements and a back garden was leaking into their union, and further, into her.”

The arrival of the artifact that Ish found, however, sends Ember charging down a new path of discovery, one that will reunite her with an important woman from her past and raise questions about her culture’s beliefs about what the societies that came before them. To her this dig is everything, andwe realize early on that the title of the books, Ruins, represents not just Ember’s professional focus but also other aspects of her life.There is nothing subtle about this.

More subtle is the gradual unpacking of mysteries — minor ones, such as the nature of Ember’s relationship with Ish, and major ones, such as the genesis of the “Pre-Crisis” civilization and a “Thermal Epoch” that has occurred. The novel is intentionally vague about where and when it is set; Ember lives in a “Commonwealth” that is most certainly not Massachusetts. And indeed, what we know about Ember’s society we are invited to doubt: An excerpt from her unpublished manuscript says, “The endurance of any given historical narrative is never a function of its factual accuracy but rather, of its utility to those who perpetuate it.”

As is noted in every podcast and article about Ruins, this is a novel that suffers from spoilers, making it difficult to talk about the plotting in detail. Suffice it to say that Brooks-Dalton, whose previous novels include The Light Pirate and Good Morning, Midnight (the basis for the film The Midnight Sky), has described Ember as a “polarizing” woman and the novel as “a rumination on how we uncover, interpret, and teach about ancient civilizations.” Those naturally interested in such things may find it fascinating. For those of us who aren’t, Ruins presents a challenge to remain engaged, even with a consciousness-altering plot twist. B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Ruins, by Lily Brooks-Dalton

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