Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/12/21

Dollyrots, “Auld Lang Syne” (Wicked Cool Records)

I absolutely hate New Year’s Eve. It’s the last celebratory moment before everything freezes here in New England for a good four or fifty months, and in honor of that, the lowest-tier 20something-age drinkers are out and about, having fun while we marrieds try to stay awake till midnight as if we’re somehow relevant. I’m basking in a little joy here, though: Finally a holiday record darkens my emailbox, after I’d given up hope (I probably missed like 20 of them, and I do apologize to any PR person who sent me news about one I absentmindedly deleted), and look at this, it’s a husband-wife punk team (the lady plays bass and sings, hubby does the guitars) who used to be on Joan Jett’s Blackheart Records label, doing everyone’s — OK, my, after “O Holy Night” and “Feliz Navidad” — least favorite holiday song. It starts out semi-seriously, as tedious as any other rock version you’ve heard, then it moves to a sort-of-fast tempo, nothing too wild, just something they’re probably hoping will make it onto a rom-com soundtrack, mostly to be annoying. I have no idea why I bothered with this at all. C

Various “Artists,” Yule Log Jamz: The World’s Hottest Wood Burning Sounds (Pretty Good Friends Records)

Fine, if I’m going to get trolled, I’m passing it along to my thousands of readers. This looked to me like a holiday record, but actually it’s a variation on the virtual “Yule log,” or “crackling fireplace” that can be found on Netflix and elsewhere. Pretty Good Friends is a comedy label, not that I can for the life of me remember reviewing one of their comedy albums, and I’m (all together now) too lazy to look, but yeah, it’s kind of funny in its way. This consists of videotapes of 11 different log fires from different countries, with no talking or anything, including “the party-pumping flames of Germany, the polite crackles of Canada, and the hygge-hysterical hotness of Sweden. Plus New Zealand lit up some Manuka wood like you’ve never heard it before!!” Anyway, you can find it at prettygoodfriends.com/fire, where you can pay $5 to own it forever, or just be normal and cheap and simply stream the YouTube version at their channel. They also offer a festive “Smells Like Something’s Burning” soy candle if you have $15 that you don’t figure you’d ever otherwise use under any circumstances whatsoever ever. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Oh by gosh by golly, it’s time for no new CDs to come out on Friday, Dec. 22, just like every year on the last Friday before ChristmaKwanzaKkah! I’ll tell you, hopelessness abounds, fam, hopelessness abounds, I’ll bet there are like zero new albums coming out for me to talk about here, and I’ll have to resort to riffing about how I couldn’t find candy canes at Walmart the other week to put on my HannuChristmaKwanazaa tree! There were literally none, which was insane, but if you want to read the whole story you’ll have to “friend” me on Facebook, but be patient; I usually only get around to checking my Facebook notifications once a month, as long as the month has a full moon in it somewhere. Oh, forget it, it’s no use, I’m going to do the dutiful and look for some albums to write about for all you good little boys and girls, you deserve a big huge ChrisHannuKwan cookie of snark, and by the gods, I will deliver, you’re just going to have to give me a minute to find something! (20 minutes later) Ack, ack, there’s nothing anywhere! Let me check Amazon, maybe Jeff Bezos isn’t too busy building his giant toy NASA to let us poor music journos know about some new albums! Wait, here’s one, from Conway the Machine and Wun Two, whoever in tarnation that is, it’s a new album, titled Palermo! This project unites Buffalo, N.Y., rapper Conway the Machine and German lo-fi producer Wun Two. The sample track I decided to, you know, sample, was “Brick By Brick,” a good example of awkward downtempo weirdness, over which Conway spits a bunch of venomous but unadventurous prattle while rapping like he’s eating a meatball sub. It’s cool, don’t get me wrong.

• I’ll tell ya, folks, for ultimate weirdness, you can’t do much better than Louisville, Kentucky’s Bo Daddy Harris, who as a kid wanted to grow up to become a superstar of something-anything. Hey, man, like I always say, if you can’t make the Who’s Who, you can always try for the What-The-Heck-Was-That, and guess what, he succeeded, folks! He continues his tradition of What-The-Heck-Was-That-ness on his new album, It’s a Southern Thing, and it’s always trippy to see him do his thing, singing his weird country tunes in that — voice of his. The closest experience I can think of to watching him sing one of his old-school country songs in his super-low weirdo voice — which you’d never expect to hear coming out of him, being that he looks like a typical Zoomer incel who’s employed at an Apple store talking to boomers about technology despite the fact that he wouldn’t know an embedded operating system from Jethro Clampett — was the first time I saw Gomer Pyle sing opera like Placido Domingo, but that’s OK! He tried doing comedy but that didn’t pan out, so obviously he was born for this, being a cross between Hank Williams Sr. and Tom Waits. Seriously, go check out one of his YouTubes, you’ll melt down completely.

• Ack, ack, there’s nothing but metal albums left, fam, except for some other CD that we’ll get to in a minute. Let’s see, we have the snobbily named Colombian thrash band Funeral Vomit, with their new album, Monumental Putrescence, which I guarantee would make a great gift for your grandma, and U.K. act Ulfarr, with their new one, Orlegscaeft! Ulfarr wears spooky eye makeup, so proceed with caution!

• We’ll vamoose for the week after one more, This Is New Tone, the new compilation LP from Bad Time Records! One of the sample tracks is “Better Home” by We Are The Union; it’s a frenzied ska-punk track that will appeal to millennials who thought Sublime were too wimpy and boring, which, of course, they were.

At the Sofaplex 23/12/14

A Disturbance in the Force

If the words “Star Wars Holiday Special” conjure up an image of Bea Arthur or Carrie Fisher soulfully singing and give you a little devilish jolt of glee, then give yourself the $5 treat of renting this documentary about the 1978 post-Star Wars, pre-The Empire Strikes Back television special that was a little bit Star Wars — I mean, there were Wookiees — and a lot bit 1970s variety show. I have listened to a whole multi-episode podcast about the special but never seen it for myself. But this movie’s clips from not only the special but other late 1970s Star Wars detritus, including a Donny & Marie episode that features dancing Stormtroopers and Paul Lynde, really put you in the moment. Aging geeks like Weird Al Yankovic, Kevin Smith, Seth Green (who worked on a Lucas property and watched the special with fellow writers in Lucas’ screening room) and Paul Scheer explain the fan perspective while the likes of Bruce Vilanch talk about what it was like to work on this cultural artifact that had a one-and-done airing. George Lucas so disliked the thing that it was never aired again or reissued — but it also earned such a place in the canon of nerd culture that it is now readily available on the internet. The documentary acknowledges the weirdness of what it is — a story about the Wookiee holiday of Life Day mixed with standard variety comedy and musical segments — and places it in the universe of weird 1970s specials and programming. It also explains the special’s role in the larger Star Wars marketing effort that included books, comic books and, belatedly, toys — all of which was in part an effort to first sell the original movie in 1977 and then keep up interest in the Star Wars franchise until the next movie came out.

Whenever you plugged into Star Wars fandom, the documentary holds nostalgic charm for what the thing was before prequels and Disney+ shows. A

Available for rent or purchase on VOD.

Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain (R)

The comedy team of Martin Herlihy, John Higgins and Ben Marshall, who have cultivated a persona of pale, fragile indoor boys in their Saturday Night Live videos, bring that same sensibility to this 92-minute movie. They play roommates who work at Ben’s dad’s (Conan O’Brien) outdoor equipment store. They’ve been friends since childhood but John fears they’re coming apart, with Ben focused on trying to take over the store and Martin focused on buying a house with his girlfriend Amy (Nichole Sakura). When John realizes a compass they found years ago may hold a clue to the long-rumored $100 million gold bust hidden on Foggy Mountain, he thinks a quest might be just the thing to bring them back together. Along the way the boys meet Taylor (X Mayo) and Lisa (Megan Stalter), two park rangers who decide to try to get the treasure for themselves. Well, actually, Taylor decides that, and Lisa is just wondering if maybe she and John will need to make out for the caper to be successful — like, maybe they should anyway?

The Treasure of Foggy Mountain is extremely stupid and I mean that as the highest of compliments. The boys are intimidated by a hawk, they run in to a cult featuring Bowen Yang, and John Goodman serves as a not-impartial narrator. This is not great comedy but it is dumb comedy and sometimes that’s exactly what you need. B Streaming on Peacock.

A Christmas Vanishing, by Anne Perry

A Christmas Vanishing, by Anne Perry (Ballantine, 190 pages)

Since childhood, Christmas reading has been a large part of my enjoyment of the holidays; I could quote from A Christmas Carol in grade school, and one of my favorite books is a collection of Christmas stories from celebrated authors. I start scouring new releases in the summer looking for upcoming holiday books and was hopeful when I came across A Christmas Vanishing by the late Anne Perry.

Perry, born in London and raised in New Zealand, is one of a few authors (Debbie Macomber and Richard Paul Evans among them) who churn out yearly Christmas-themed. There is an assembly-line precision about Perry’s 21 holiday offerings, which in recent years included A Christmas Deliverance, A Christmas Legacy, A Christmas Resolution, A Christmas Gathering and A Christmas Revelation — think of a noun, and Perry put “A Christmas” in front of it and turned it into a bestseller, and she would have continued to do so if she had not had a heart attack last December and died in April at age 84.

Perry is best-known as a crime writer, and the Christmas novels, set in Victorian England, follow that theme.

A Christmas Vanishing follows Mariah Ellison, a widow in her 80s (and the grandmother of a recurring character in Perry’s novels, Charlotte Pitt), on a journey from her home in London to a small rural town where she has been invited to spend Christmas with a friend and her husband. Mariah has known Sadie for a half-century but hasn’t seen her in 20 years; she remembers a falling out of some kind the last time they were together, but she can’t recall the specifics and is pleased to renew their friendship and see the town where she once also lived.

Also, “if she was being honest, she had to accept that she had nowhere else to go, which was entirely her own doing. Her daughter-in-law and grandchildren all had their own seasonal arrangements and she had not been included.”

When Mariah arrives at Sadie’s house via horse-drawn buggy (one of the occasional reminders that this novel is set during Queen Victoria’s time), Sadie’s husband, Barton, unpleasantly tells her his wife isn’t there, he doesn’t know where she is or when she’ll be back, and he’s sorry-not sorry but she can’t stay there. She goes to the house of another old friend but is told she can’t stay there either, and is sent to the house of that friend’s sister, Gwendolyn, where she finally finds a warm welcome.

Because this is a time in which there is no Nancy Grace or internet sleuths, and even Sadie’s husband doesn’t seem particularly interested in finding Sadie, Mariah struggles to assemble a search party, but soon she and Gwendolyn are joined by kindly bookstore owner Oliver, and they puzzle over the possibilities.

Did Barton kill or injure his wife? Did she take off on a lark? Was she in an accident? Has she run off with another man? Been kidnapped? The latter scenarios seem far-fetched given that Sadie is in her 70s and has no family money. The mystery deepens (as deep as this largely shallow story gets) when Oliver and Mariah learn that Barton spotted his wife, looking happy, in the window of a local vacant cottage not long after she disappeared.

There are hints that Sadie’s life was not quite what it seemed, and neither was Mariah’s. And Mariah is realizing she is trying to figure out the mystery of Sadie’s disappearance based on the Sadie that she knew long ago, not Sadie as she would be now. As the story unfolds, so do the secrets of the principal characters, and an element of danger is introduced that threatens Mariah.

“We all have things we would never want publicly known,” Oliver tells her at one point, and that was true for the author as well. In 1994 she was outed by the Peter Jackson film Heavenly Creatures as having participated in a murder when she was 15. Kate Winslet played Perry’s character in the movie, which was based on the true story of the killing of Perry’s friend’s mother. Perry is a pen name for the writer, whose given name was Juliet Hulme.

As was detailed in her obituaries, Perry, who had a chaotic childhood and struggled with mental illness, spent five years in prison in New Zealand before reinventing herself and becoming an extraordinarily successful writer, penning not just mysteries but also a series of novels about World War I. Hers is about as good a redemption story as you can get. We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead or their books, and Perry’s Christmas novels are beloved by millions. But I found A Christmas Vanishing more workmanlike than inspired, and it is a Christmas story only in that it is cold, homes are decorated and there are people roasting chestnuts on the street. C

Album Reviews 23/12/14

Asha Jefferies, Ego Ride (Nettwerk Records)

Debut album from this Australian pop-princess, steeped in queer sensibilities, aimed at the straight-ahead alt-pop demographic that gravitates to Liz Phair and such, and look, it’s on the Nettwerk Records label, which always promises goodness. I’m way ahead of the curve on this one, which isn’t out until April, but Katy Perry did pretty much the same thing with her first LP, like I was already sick of hearing about her months before her LP came out. I’ll leave it to you to grok the parallels there, but in the meantime, this one’s a winner from the word go. “Stranger” starts off in a casual Portishead-ish direction, triple-layered with lazy synths, slow-bonked piano and orchestral statements, and even before Jefferies adds her Sarah McLachlan semi-yodel to it you’re already envisioning its future as a roll-credits fadeout to a major movie, something of that sort. The artiste’s people want me to talk about the single, “Keep My S—t Together,” a master-class mid-tempo chick-rocker a la Sheryl Crow, and so here goes: It’s pretty dreamy too. A+

Tutu Puoane, Wrapped in Rhythm (SoulFactory Records)

Another far-in-advance notice that’s well worth the wait. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, and a resident of Belgium since the early Aughts, this theatrical singer has collaborated with the Brussels Jazz Orchestra, Bert Joris, the Flemish Philharmonic, Tineke Postma, John Clayton, Metropole Orkest and Black Lives – from Generation to Generation. Her lilting soprano, which you’ll find here nestled among typical smoky room-jazz components like belled trumpets and such, is of the Toni Braxton variety, at least when she’s in a more or less post-bop groove, but as well — and this should come as no shock — she’s got a world-music side to her, half-singing about esoteric concepts like the promises the Earth made to her forebears and how she feels them in her feet. This is a lot more advanced than what Braxton fans have become accustomed to over the years, but Braxton is without a doubt the touchstone here. The passages glide and swoop and become more irresistible by the minute. A+

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Ack, ack, I’m supposed to be writing about albums coming out this Friday, Dec. 15, but I’ll bet you there aren’t any on my go-to critics’ cheat sheet! Yup, nope, just one, an LP titled One Wayne G, the sixth one from Canadian jangle-pop annoyance Mac DeMarco, but since I’d rather go get a root canal than — wait, never mind, he’s a cat person, he made a video about his cat, Pickles, who died recently, so in honor of Pickles I’ll go check out whatever YouTube has on this album. Huh, looks like he named all this album’s songs after the dates he wrote them. Here’s one of the dumb things, titled “20180512.” It’s really mellow and upbeat and he thankfully doesn’t sing; it’s like what you’d hear if Spyro Gyra wrote an elevator music song for a yoga retreat, so forget all this nonsense, I’ll look for something kind of normal at a little-known CD-release-information website called Amazon.com. Well well, the first thing I see is a soundtrack thing, titled Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street 2023 Broadway Cast Recording. Now I know what you’re thinking, you want to watch me predict what I think this album will sound like, as if I’m just here for your entertainment. Well, to heck with it, I’ll tell you, I predict it sounds like bad but important-sounding music from a Broadway play that people stopped going to see back in 2011. Et voila, that’s exactly it, the same music they played on the super-boring 2007 Stephen Sondheim/Johnny Depp film that was based on Christopher Boyd’s 1970 play. Josh Groban sings the Sweeney Todd parts in this one, not that it helps any.

• There are so few new CD releases coming out as the “countdown to Christmas” winds down that I think we may as well just talk about new country & western albums for the remainder of the column, because that’s all I’m really seeing. But before that, if you’re wondering why you don’t have as much fun during Christmas as you did when you were 11, it’s probably because the mass media wants you to think there really is a “countdown,” like you’re not actually having fun or experiencing the joy of camraderie yet, because the countdown is still going on. Or at least that’s what “they” want us to think. The truth is that the journey is the fun part. In fact, when HannuKwanzmas day actually arrives, that’s when the fun ends, you know? That’s when things really get stressful as you run around trying to get your relatives out of your house, returning gifts and whatever. So enjoy the season, fam, and in the meantime you might consider buying country singer Riley Green’s new LP, Ain’t My Last Rodeo. Green is of course a Jon Pardi wannabe, sounding sort of like Thomas Rhett or a tin-plated Merle Haggard, but at least it’s not Rascal Flatts, so count your blessings, cowpokes!

• Sticking with this week’s country music tangent, Earned It is the new album by Larry Fleet, who sounds like every modern male picker-grinner, and plus, he has a ZZ Top beard, at least at this writing. The title track is really bluegrass-y, which I respect, like, if Larry the Cable Guy could hold a tune it’d probably sound like this.

• We’ll wrap up this week’s horse-ropin’, chicken-pluckin’, pig-scramblin’ column with the new full-length from Nashville’s most famous “nepo baby,” Rosanne Cash! The album is called The Wheel, and the title track is actually pretty good, some busy finger-picking guitar-tronica. Imagine Wilson Phillips trying to be seriously country and you’d be in the ballpark.

The Little Liar, by Mitch Albom

The Little Liar, by Mitch Albom (Harper, 333 pages)

There’s a downside to being the author of a runaway bestseller like Tuesdays With Morrie. It’s that every book you write from that point on will be compared to the most successful one.

In Mitch Albom’s case, the success of his 1997 memoir about conversations he had with his former professor, who was dying of ALS, made him turn to fiction. While his subsequent books haven’t enjoyed the popularity of Tuesdays, which is among the best-selling memoirs of all time, Albom has a loyal following and continues to write columns and books. His latest, The Little Liar, is an imaginative and often troubling story that is part historical fiction and part morality play.

The titular character is an 11-year-old boy named Nico who, at the start of the novel, lives with his family in 1943 in Salonika, a city that at the time had the largest Jewish population in Greece. The Nazis have invaded and are driving Jewish families from their homes and into ghettos with the intent of sending them to concentration camps.

A Nazi officer recruits Nico to assure the families that they are merely being “resettled” and will have jobs and new homes in Poland. Nico is the ideal child for this job, as he is “a boy to be believed,” having no experience with lying; he is so honest naturally that he doesn’t fib even a little bit when asked, for example, if he has done the required reading in school, or if he was tagged in a game of chase. Nico’s believability is enhanced by his good looks: He is an extraordinarily beautiful child, so much so that strangers on the street stop to comment on his appearance.

And because he is so honest, Nico does not doubt the lies fed to him by a young Nazi officer named Udo, who promises Nico that his own family will be safe. Because he does not lie, he can’t envision that others do. So he willingly goes up and down the train platforms telling the anxious waiting families that he has heard that all will be well.

Things fall apart when Nico sees his own family loaded onto a train, and he finds out they are going not to new homes but to Auschwitz. Among them is Nico’s oldest brother, Sebastian, and a family friend, the same age as Nico, named Fannie.

The rest of the novel follows each of those characters — Nico, Sebastian, Fannie and Udo — throughout their lives, showing how Nico’s unintentional deceit affected all of them, even as adults.

These characters were invented by Albom, who said he got the idea for the novel after visiting a museum and learning that Jews were used to convince others to board the trains bound for death camps. “That perversion of truth, with life and death on the line, stayed with me for months and even years later,” Albom wrote in an author’s note.

Some of the characters in The Little Liar, however, were real people, including Katalin Karady, a Hungarian actress who used her fame and money to rescue 20 Jewish children who were about to be murdered by the Nazis.

The main conceit of the novel is that the story is told in first person by a mythological being: the Angel of Truth. This character comes from an ancient parable about how, when God was creating the Earth, he consulted angels with names like Mercy, Righteousness and Truth, and Truth was the only one who advised God not to create humans, because, as Truth said, they would tell lies.

“So what did the Lord do? He considered all that was said. Then He cast Truth out of heaven and threw him to the depths of the earth,” Albom writes.

This parable is not Albom’s creation but part of the Jewish tradition. But Albom makes Truth the storyteller, which allows for occasional soliloquies into the nature of truth and lies, e.g., “Truth is universal. You often hear that expression. Nonsense. Were I truly universal, there would be no disagreement over right and wrong, who deserves what, or what happiness means.” And, “Of all the lies you tell yourself, perhaps the most common is that, if you only do this or that, you will be accepted.”

As the novel went on, this narration started to feel a little contrived, but it all comes together with a clever ending that is surprising and satisfying. This is no small feat, given the dark subject matter that comprises most of the book, during the events of World War II and in the anger, bitterness and resentment that festers in later years.

As the characters travel different paths — Nico turning into another person altogether in an attempt to atone for his past — Albom explores moral questions such as whether there are sins that can’t be forgiven no matter what we do later in life, and whether any amount of atonement can release us from the torment of our own conscience. These are complex questions for the simple language used in this book, but Albom, like his teacher before him, has proven himself to be an exemplary storyteller. B+

Album Reviews 23/12/07

KO Mini, Chef’s Kiss (self-released)

We’re seriously just about at the point where there’s almost no need to list a music release’s record label when writing about its merits or lack thereof, given that so many artists are completely independent (if the vampires at Ticketmaster and such could be prevented from buying up concert tickets and scalping them we’d be even better off). Anyway, what drew me to this little X-rated bubblegum EP was its tease that the single, “stoptryingtohavesexwithme,” “pushes the boundary of how much blunt humor and simultaneous sex appeal you should put into a song.” In a word, I was anticipating something funny, which it isn’t; it’s more about cruel rejection, not that most leering, overstepping incels don’t deserve anything better, but the beat is cool enough, a lot of earthquakey Ed Banger booms going on underneath. It’s a club-banging, Lolita-voiced break from the usual trap oatmeal, which, I’m sure you know by now, I absolutely cannot stand. The playful, fluttering/soaring “Sorry In Advance” is definitely worth checking into if you have some spare Spotify space. A

Escuela Grind, DDEEAATHHMMEETTAALL (MNRK Heavy Records)

I didn’t mean to riff on yet another metal release this quarter, but seriously, folks, this time of year I get sent like 50 of them every five minutes, and as well in my defense, at least this one’s from a New England-based band, well, half of it’s from Pittsfield, Mass., anyhow, go Patriots, amirite fam? The roster is three boys and two girls, one of the latter being singer Katerina Economou, who sounds like the dude from Cannibal Corpse, sort of, but more like Quorthon, like one of those raspy mini-sized cave-monster guys from the Hobbit movie, and the music is, as promised, very grindcore, like the sort of music you picture your pet tarantula humming to itself while it walks across the table to surprise your mom. It’s pretty epic for what it is, I suppose, not that I’d ever want these people to get mad at me, and thus I may be lying. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Hello, everyone, how was your late/second Thanksgiving, mine was fine except for when I completely ruined the turkey gravy by following a recipe I found online, at the Betty Crocker website, believe it or not, and it basically said I should combine equal parts flour and butter/turkey/whatever slime, but I took the recipe seriously and basically ended up with a cake that tasted like turkey; I’ve decided to cut this horrible disaster into a bunch of small compact cakes and sell them as “Gobbler Twinkies,” watch this space for my initial public stock offering and get a prime seat on the victory train! In the meantime, Friday, Dec. 8, is the next date for new CD releases, and look at that, there are actual albums listed on my private, secret metacritic.com web page, a source that only professional music journalists like me are allowed to access unless you have a web browser! I’ll stick to tradition and get the album I don’t really want to even talk about out of the way first, that being Before And After, the ninety-bazillionth album from horrible-voiced Woodstock charlatan Neil Young! No, I’m kidding, you guys, his song “Ohio” was OK, I thought, and it’s still OK even though it came out before SnapChat or the macarena or even electricity for that matter, and “Rockin’ In The Free World” is pretty epic, despite the fact that his guitar solo, as always, sounded like a duck trying to imitate the Storage Wars auctioneer dude (hey, let me have a little fun while I still can, I’ll be spending the next two or three columns complaining about the fact that there are no new albums coming out aside from box sets and hamster-wheel-metal albums from Finland)! OK, let’s see if my stomach can even deal with this new album, which is composed of acoustic versions of his old songs, like “Burned” from when he was in Buffalo Springfield during the days of the Thomas Jefferson administration, and “Mother Earth” from his 1990 album, Ragged Glory. Here, let me check out his re-rub of his famous song “Birds” and give you my expert analysis: Ah, I’ve got it, it’s an acoustic version of it and is absolutely no better than the original. Aaand moving on.

• Oh, great, time again for me to pretend I know anything about modern bubble-pop or divas or gigantic twerking butts or whatever the 11-year-olds listen to when they troll each other on SnapChat, because look folks, Nicki Minaj is back with a new album, called Pink Friday 2! There’s an advance single here, called “For All The Barbz,” and it features Drake and Chief Keef! The rhymes Nicki contributes are mindlessly pornographic, which adds to the je ne sais quoi, you feel me, and one of the dudes is using Auto-Tune, because it’s still 2002, right? So glad I’m living in a timeline that favors quality over redundant quantity, I have to say.

• Just a second now, this might be OK, the new LP from Alison Goldfrapp, The Love Reinvention! You might know that she got her start by being featured on the 1994 Orbital album Snivilisation, meaning she was one of the first electronic guest-princesses; I have to hand it to her. The new single, “Every Little Drop,” is understated warehouse-rave fodder, which I’m always glad to hear, just prettiness and sexytime romping, but there are no gigantic twerking butts and porn lyrics, what’s a critic supposed to do with this.

• And finally it’s California metalcore band Atreyu, with their new full-length, The Beautiful Dark Of Life! Wow, I have no idea what they’re even doing on the new tune, “[i],” it’s like some sort of Echosmith chillwave thing, I don’t mind it.

John Abernathy You are Kind by Molly McGhee

Jonathan Abernathy is an unemployed college dropout, age 25, with no prospects for anything getting better — his “loans, IOUs, and bills so diverse ecologists would be within their jurisdiction to classify the collection as an ‘ecosystem.’”

He has a quarter of a million dollars in student loan debt (“with an APR so lethal it can kill within a week”) and inherited credit card debt from his parents “in the low six figures.”

Living in a basement apartment not much wider than the length of his body, Abernathy is so profoundly miserable that he is envious of his landlord going to work — “going somewhere where someone will tell her what to do. Then in exchange for this, they will give her money. Jonathan Abernathy would like to be told what to do in exchange for money.”

This is the set-up of Molly McGhee’s glorious debut novel, which paints a dystopian picture of what is commonly called late-stage capitalism and its effect on America’s underachieving young adults. Other than the misery of young people saddled with soul-crushing debt, there is little realism here, however. Abernathy lives in a world in which “dream auditors” infiltrate the dreams of sleeping citizens, this being possible because it has been discovered that “humanity shares a consciousness while it sleeps.”

People who are chosen to be dream auditors don special clothes and wander about the dreams of troubled sleepers, cleaning out the nightmarish stuff so that the person can sleep better and therefore be more productive at work — all the better for the economy. The service is much in demand by companies whose workforces “seem depleted.”

In this strange world, Jonathan Abernathy is recruited for an auditing job — appropriately enough, during his sleep. He’s desperate for the job because the alternative is selling hot dogs off a food truck, and this new job promises $20 a night (though, sadly, no health care) plus incremental student loan forgiveness and a temporary freeze on collections while he is employed.

So he’s grateful to have work, even if it’s strange and his co-worker/mentor, Kai, is even stranger. She is one of three women who populate Abernathy’s life, the others being his landlord, Kelly, and his neighbor, Rhoda, a single mother who always smells of pine and is in desperate circumstances of her own and, astonishingly, seems interested in him. Their relationship deepens as Jonathan becomes more entrenched in his job and continues with it despite troubling signs that everything might not turn out OK in the end, for anyone involved.

That is not a spoiler — the book begins even more ominously, with the line “Though it will take three years, from this moment, for death to act, Jonathan Abernathy will never live a life unmarked again. Death will be tethered to him as a shadow.” There are also some Jacob Marley-esque apparitions on the book’s cover.

Why read something that’s such a downer, especially during the holiday season? It’s a fair question, but in a world saturated with formulaic books, this is not one. Poor doomed Jonathan Abernathy, who earnestly recites affirmations to keep his spirits up (Jonathan Abernathy, you are strong! Jonathan Abernathy, you are brave! Jonathan Abernathy, there is nothing in life not meant for you!) gets our sympathy in part because McGhee convincingly paints him as a helpless pawn in the cold capitalist machine, and also because he is an orphan, both parents having died by suicide. These are odds not just stacked against him, but malevolently working to ruin him, as his new employer also seems to be.

At the same time, Abernathy has a sweet optimism that exists because of his willful oblivion. He wants to be a good person; he wants to be a good worker; he wants to be needed at work. (“He anticipates the feeling of being needed with the same fervor that he looks forward to arriving at a destination with air-conditioning after a long heat-soaked walk.”) But as it turns out, you can’t affirm yourself out of terrible things that have happened in the past, both your own, and that of people you know. And we keep reading, because we care about Jonathan Abernathy, and honestly, just want to know what happens to him. Closure matters.

This is McGhee’s first novel; she was working in a publishing house as she wrote it, and as such, the novel is polished in a way that some debut efforts aren’t. You can tell when someone spends their days immersed in words. You can also tell when someone is disillusioned with capitalism, as McGhee, like many of her generation, appears to be. She equates work with dreams, writing, “To work and to dream is to forget.” In this world, work is the merciless maw that consumes our hours, leaving precious little of the meaningful stuff. Is it preachy at times, and a bit too single-minded in insisting that Abernathy is a victim, devoid of any agency in his life? Of course. Is it also a book you will think about long after you’ve lent it to friends? That, too. B+

Album Reviews 23/11/30

CrowJane, Bound To Me (Kitten Robot Records)
I’d thought it’d happened a lot more recently, but it turns out I haven’t heard from this Los Angeles kook lady since the release of her Mater Dolorosa EP in October 2020, which I described using RIYL comparisons like Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten. In this new five-songer she’s aiming for Siouxsie Sioux’s brand of weirdness, or so it says on the thing in front of me, and that sort of ’80s-goth-pop epicness is prominent in the works here, helped out by some pretty sweeping orchestral layers and Blue Man Group-ish drum-thumping (I should probably also mention that it’s a really captivating, super-nice tune). Elsewhere we have “Ides Of March,” which is like Siousxsie in metal mode, just an outstanding wreck-stuff rockout that’s got a bit of KMGDM to it. I hadn’t detected such a high level of accessibility in her earlier EP, but this one is remarkably good, well worth checking out. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Maddi Ryan, Growing Pains (self-released)
In this EP I’m hearing a cross between Amy Grant and [place random anti-diva like Lorde here] undergirding the voice of this Boston-area singer, who racked up Country Act of the Year nominations at count-’em-three New England Music Awards events. Enough Kellie Pickler/Taylor Swift wannabes have dropped CDs on this desk that I’ve forgotten what real disappointment feels like, but stop the presses, this five-song EP is proof that this particular cowboy-booted Insta princess knows her way around a studio, or at least whom to seat at the mixing booth’s least rickety chair, whichever the case. “Wilderness” opens things with some Swift-in-Jewel-mode crooning atop an acoustic guitar line, her soprano aiming for the angsty, hormone-bending vibe that usually leads to a boring chorus, but instead she stays on top of it, adding a truly pleasing vocal harmony, then some floaty dobro and similar layerings as it eventually morphs into Norah Jones-ish Americana. She’s a serious contender, I kid you not. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, Dec. 1, is the next CD release day, ermagersh, where did the summer go, what are we even doing here, and now let’s riff on ancient legendary arena-rock band Genesis for a minute, because one of the new rock ’n’ roll CD releases you can buy this week is I/O, from original Genesis singing person Peter Gabriel, his first since, holy catfish, 2011! Like his Genesis-singing successor, Phil Collins, Gabriel is famous for writing dishwasher-safe AOR-pop for dentists’ offices and Dollar Tree stores, and he’s most famous for being the singing person in the song trenchcoat-wearing kickboxing-slacker John Cusack was playing on his boombox during the famous “why aren’t the cops grabbing that guy” scene in the 1989 movie Say Anything. That alone elevated his cred far higher than that of Popeye-The-Sailor-lookalike Phil Collins, whose 1980s hits were horrible enough, but in order to ensure his ”Worst Song Of All Time” achievement award — and most Xers and Boomers have subconsciously erased all this from memory — Collins participated in a duet with really bad singer Philip Bailey on the song “Easy Lover” from Bailey’s 1984 LP Chinese Wall. The only ’80s rock music fail that came anywhere close to unseating that tune as the, you know, Worst Song Of All Time, was Eddie Murphy’s hilariously hubristic fish-out-of-artistic-water laughingstock, “Party All The Time,” which saw the first time a record company ever called an emergency Auto-Tune guy to come in and clean up Murphy’s transparently off-key vocal, and let’s not forget the video for Billy Squier’s “Rock Me Tonight,” in which he pranced around a bedroom like a preteen girl overdosing on Flintstones vitamins, a cringe-gasm so explosive that Squier’s career instantly tanked faster than the Lusitania. But yes, Gabriel has always been borderline listenable in my book, like, “Games Without Frontiers” was OK, mostly because I, like everybody else, thought it was either Psychedelic Furs or Echo And The Bunnymen, who even knew, you know? But anyway, whatever, “Turn It On Again” was a cool Genesis song, even though Peter Gabriel wasn’t there at the time, so here we go, let’s have a look at what’s on this new Peter Gabriel album, and wait a second, two remixed versions of the kickoff single song, “Panopticom,” have been released thus far: the “Bright Side Mix” (done by Mark “Spike” Stent), and the “Dark Side Mix” (mixed by Tchad Blake), both of which were released in January of this year. The Bright Side Mix is OK; the song is important-sounding in a first-world-problems sort of way, studious Gabriel nonsense that’s kind of a chore to listen to, same as always.

• Love Minus Zero is a new collaborative project between electro-revival producer Tiga and Scottish producer Hudson Mohawke, who was part of the “wonky” techno scene (think slo-mo dubstep with a lot of distorted, wobbly dance beats) until the end of the Aughts. L’Ecstasy is their forthcoming debut full-length, which spotlights “Love Minus Zero,” a track that’s a few years old, a really cool, hypnotic dance joint combining dubstep, trance and tribal, you’d probably like it.

• We Owe is the solo project of Swans’ Christopher Pravdica, whose new LP Major Inconvenience uses such things as autoharp and djembe to make off-kilter tunes like the new “Time Suck,” a woozy, discordant, Throbbing Lobster-ish experiment.

• Lastly we have yet another Bandcamp mess to decipher: When No Birds Sang, a joint-effort album between grindcore outfit Full Of Hell and heavy shoegaze dudes Nothing. “Spend The Grace” is a skronky, apocalyptic, blissed-out noise exercise, but other than that it’s probably fine for bouncy-house parties.

The Wake-up Call by Beth O’Leary

If I were a trendy person, I would call this book “mid”: just fine, mediocre, middle of the road. The Wake-up Call is fine for what it is — a predictable entry in the women’s fiction category.

Maybe I shouldn’t have read this right after finishing Remarkably Bright Creatures, which is thoughtful, intelligent and unique; this is a very different kind of book, meant to be light and fun. And it was fun, but it’s also forgettable, sharing the same tired plot as so many other rom coms before it. I personally am tired of plots that only exist because the two main characters keep misunderstanding each other and have an unbelievable inability to communicate.

The book alternates chapters between main characters Lucas and Izzy. They hate each other! But do they? The premise is that they work together, and the previous Christmas Izzy had written a card to Lucas telling him she was interested in him. But, big shocker here, he never got the card! And thus ensues a year of miscommunication that so easily could have been rectified if Izzy had just talked about why she was so damn upset.

The hotel that they work at is a great setting, and the supporting characters are far more interesting than Izzy and Lucas. There are mysterious guests, quirky guests and lonely guests. The rest of the staff is more compelling than the main characters too.

And then there is the ring subplot; the hotel is going under, so they’re trying to sell off unclaimed items that guests have left behind. There are, somehow, several diamond rings. So the staff sets out to find the people who belong to the rings, and Izzy and Lucas turn it into a competition of sorts, and it ultimately leads to some surprises that had the potential to make the book different from others in this category but were handled in what seemed like a slapdash way.

Ultimately, I wish O’Leary had put more effort into the stories and people behind the rings and less into Izzy and Lucas’s many, many frustrating experiences together — frustrating to them and frustrating to the reader who just wants to shake them and say “Just speak out loud what is in your head and everyone will feel better!” C+

The Good Part by Sophie Cousens

Meanwhile, I devoured The Good Part. Also in the women’s fiction genre but with a much fresher take on relationships and a more thoughtful reflection on life, it was a captivating read. Were there predictable parts and unbelievable moments? Of course. Is the general trope similar to Big and 13 Going on 30? Sure. (Cousens noted as much in her author’s note.) But The Good Part offers a new twist, and Cousens’ writing is engrossing, moving the story along at a quick and entirely enjoyable pace.

Lucy Young is in her mid 20s, unhappy with her job, her dating life and her living situation. An encounter with a wishing machine prompts Lucy to wish that she could skip to the good part of her life. When she wakes up, it is 16 years in the future. Her body has changed, she has a good-looking husband, a nice house and an important job, and she’s the mother of two.

The rub here is that her memories between the time she made the wish and the present are gone. She has no idea how she got to where she is in life, and she doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t know how to do her job, manage new technology or parent her toddler daughter and 7-year-old son.

The dialogue between Lucy and her son Felix is hilarious. Felix knows right away that this isn’t his mom — this is an alien imposter. When she tells him what she thinks might have happened, he sets out to find the wishing machine that could transport her back to the time of life she left behind. The way their relationship develops over the span of the book is heartwarming and, more importantly, believable.

And of course Lucy also gets to know Sam, this stranger she apparently married and had children with. Sam handles her memory loss with the right combination of compassion and sadness. He reminds her of some of the things she’s been through in the past 16 years, and it’s not all good — which is seemingly why she skipped those parts. But it also means she missed out on some of the good stuff: meeting Sam, her wedding day, the births of her children. She’s left to wonder whether it was worth it.

The Good Part is the perfect combination of thought-provoking and funny, and the characters are loveable and real. It’s a stellar example of what women’s fiction has the potential to be. A

Album Reviews 23/11/23

Gale Forces, Highlights Of Existence (self-released)

Well, I don’t mind this at all. As often as I’ve been disappointed by the last few months’ worth of Los Angeles bands darkening my door, there’s a lot of cred here, starting with the roster, which includes ex-members of Engine Kid and This White Light, along with a guy who’s still in AWOLNATION. The raucous music that’s on this LP isn’t hard to describe; there’s a lot of Aughts-era stoner rock to it, buoyed by a “brown” sort of guitar sound that typifies Trail Of Dead, and frontman Jade Devitt’s voice (he collaborated with someone from (((Sunn O))), by the way) evokes U2’s Bono on Nick Cave juice; that is to say it’s energetic but not hopelessly commercially shrinkwrapped. The end result is a bunch of tunes that are too cool for sports-bar rock but still quite accessible; SST Records would have loved this stuff as a companion product to Redd Kross and bands like that. A

dreamTX, Living In Memory Of Something Sweet (self-released)

Dallas, Texas,-based multi-instrumentalist and producer Nick Das is looking into techno reinvention after spending a few years chasing Drag City Records cred the way his fellow Texans do. He hatted out for Woodstock, New York, to inhale the spiritual air, promptly finding himself roasting in July without air conditioning, so this collection obviously has some trippy life stories behind it. “Get Around” has a tribal bend to it, evoking sunburnt neo-hippies jumping and dancing crook-legged; it’s celebratory, yes, but it’s also pretty gothic in its way, and I definitely like the muzzled no-wave guitar sound. “Elated” aims for the same sort of emotional bliss; like a sort of shoegaze 2.0, it’s sexless but rave-y, with multi-tracked faraway chant-like vocals begging the listener just to let go and be elated over something, whatever it might be. I’m sure a lot of writers will file this under dream-pop for the convenience of it, but it’s more than that, a very listenable mystery-meat I found particularly blissful really. A+

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nov. 24 is the day after Thanksgiving, aka Black Friday, and wouldn’t you know it, as always, even though Black Friday is the holiest of shopping days, very few albums will be released, assumedly because all the bands and artists and record company Men In Black know that people won’t be buying albums, they’ll be trapped at the mall, in the Apple and T-Mobile stores, trying to buy just the right glorified Tamagotchi for their ungrateful little Jacobs and Marissas, waiting around for some store clerk (who knows even less stuff about smartphones than they do, if that’s even possible) to take pity on them and answer their technical questions, like “Where’s the ‘on’ button?” (By now I’ve probably given away the fact that I hate smartphones; being an OG software engineer I see them as nothing more than walkie-talkies that tell you the weather). But anyway, Friday is a day that ends in ‘y’ and that means incorrigible songwriting addict Robert Pollard has written enough sort-of-songs to release a new Guided by Voices album whether I want him to or not! When last we left Pollard, federal agents were unable to confiscate his recording equipment owing to an obscure constitutional clause called “artistic freedom,” and so, for what, the 10th time this year, I’m again tasked with peering through an electron microscope at his latest songwriting outburst, an LP titled Nowhere To Go But Up, in an effort to find something to like about it. When last we left this nonsense, it was July and our intrepid hero had just released Welshpool Frillies, which had a song that I said was OK, not that I can remember anything about it, so I’ll have to take my word for it. OK, aaaand I’m riffing, let’s listen to the new single, “For The Home,” there it is, on YouTube. It starts out with some unplugged Led Zeppelin III weirdness, which would have been fine if Pollard had simply left it at that and maybe yodeled over it, but no, here we go, he rips off Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in The Sky,” hoping that there are three people left on the planet who’ve never heard that song and they’re Guided By Voices fans. It’s cool enough but pointless.

• British indie band Spector enjoy making borderline pub-rock for sports bars, you know, that goop that sounds important and edgy even though it’s not, and suddenly you’re saying to the waitress, “Sure, I’ll try the extra-hot wings,” and then you regret it. Their bandleader, Fred Macpherson, is influenced by ’80s/90s swill like OMD, Spandau Ballet and Ultravox, but I’m going to listen to the new single “Driving Home for Halloween,” from their fast-approaching new album Here Come The Early Nights, nevertheless. Oh lol, this is so gross, the tune’s faux-punk AOR hook is something you want to get out of your head as soon as it catches hold, it’s like a gothy version of the worst Kaiser Chiefs song you’ve ever heard, and there’s no escaping it. Absolutely terrible.

• Take That is a British dance-pop band that’s won zillions of British music awards, meaning that no American has ever heard of them except for me, just now. This Life is their ninth studio album, and the title track is — aw, I can’t snark at this, it’s nice and dancey, a dumb piano-pop thing, sort of like Andy Grammer or Billy Joel, and at least the video doesn’t have a runway model in it pretending to be a normal person.

• We’ll end with all y’all putting on cowboy hats, because country dude Chris Stapleton releases his new one, Higher, this week! He’ll be at the Bank of NH Pavilion for three days next August, tickets are going fast, and in the torchy new single “I Think I’m In Love With You” he sounds like a cross between Bon Scott and Peabo Bryson! Yee-haw, you have to love it!

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