Category: Pop

Album Reviews 22/03/10

Bye Bye Tsunami, Bye Bye Tsunami (Nefarious Industries Records)

You know, giving this Copenhagen-based noise-rock album any amount of love in this space makes me feel guilty that I haven’t done the same for the couple of weirdo bands who’ve been blowing up my email with demands that I stop “being all corporate and covering national bands,” mostly sent from (I think Boston-based) dada weirdos who’ve been emailing me gigabytes of nonsense that honestly isn’t any more unlistenable than this. And plus, a lot of those “national bands” have no support from their record labels. This one is a messy cacophony, some noise-punk grooves, some sax skronk, a few samples, some absolutely piercing feedback bursts, and so on. Recently been hit in the head with a 90 mph fastball? You might actually love this. C

Away, self:antiself (Boom Records)

Four-track EP from the Los Angeles-based beatmaker, whose biggest inspirations are professed to be Nine Inch Nails, Deftones, and Burial, a compelling trifecta of kickassage if I ever saw one. And kickoff song “Ritual” does possess all those aspects: some heavy electro riffage, a volley of glitch-dubstep and goth-sexytime vocals courtesy of Echos, whose soprano is a cross between Kesha and Evanescence’s Amy Lee. So the formula is inarguably good, but the result? Eh, not so much; it’s vibe more than anything else, something to have blaring in your ear when you’re 99 percent sure your sketchy significant other is cheating on you, that sort of thing. “Help Me” fares a lot worse, outright ripping off NIN’s “Closer” to such an extent that for the first 20 seconds you’ll think it’s a cover of that tune. “Ghostbox” is the winner here, possessed of a mellow-mode Imagine Dragons idea that translates even when the glitch gets a little thick. It’s OK overall. B

PLAYLIST

• March 11 is our next all-purpose album release date, and to help us celebrate the last few weeks of our yearly collective cracking in half Shining-style here in Antarctica, looky there, it’s three-chord pop-metal dunderhead Bryan Adams, with his new album So Happy It Hurts! No, I’m just joshing, he’s not a dunderhead, I really don’t mind Bryan Adams and his tidy, perfect little rock ’n’ roll songs; he’s actually a very good songwriter in my opinion. Remember when he did that three-chord hard rock ballad with Tina Turner? My favorite was when he did that tune “Bang The Drum” with Nelly Furtado at the 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, man was she gorgeous, and he was so funny, dressed like a Blues Brother with that stupid skinny tie and off-the-rack suit, ha ha. Whatever, he had a bunch of catchy songs, and I didn’t hate him, which brings us to the here and now, when I’ll probably hate everything I’m about to listen to from this new album. Right, the title track is a sleepy, strummy bridal-shower-pop ballad that’s probably some old John Cougar song played backward, it’s lame and dumb, but “On The Road” is a lot better, because the guitars are heavier, I don’t really have anything bad to say about — wait, ha ha, you should hear it when he starts singing about “Gettin’ back on the road / is all I’ve ever known.” What a hapless fail, I’m telling you, your uncle who used to play in an AC/DC cover band could think of something cooler than this, honestly. Remember when I made fun of the last David Duchovny album because it was such dad rock? This record would get the same review if I had to review it, the exact same verbiage.

• Now that Marilyn Manson did so much stupid stuff that he got himself kicked off the Loma Vista Records roster, the company sincerely hopes that you’re in the mood to buy the new Ghost album, Impera, which will be out tomorrow! These guys are a veteran hard rock-ish/metal-ish band from Sweden, and they’re kind of weird. In the new single, “Call Me Little Sunshine,” they sound like a cross between ABBA and Whitesnake. Read that again: a cross between ABBA and Whitesnake. The tune wants to be a catchy, epic ballad but it just sort of flops around and looks at you dumbly, hoping that you’ll be interested in it, but then you go off to find a snack and forget you ever heard it; I know I already have.

• The Districts are a stripped-down, minimalist-ish indie band from Pennsylvania, composed of three guys who’ve known each other since high school. They’re up to five albums as of tomorrow, when their latest, Great American Painting, hits the Spotifys and whatever, so I checked out the new single “I Want to Feel It All” to see if there was anything to salvage out of it, and there was, if you like mall-pop with a lot of bloops and whatever. The tune doesn’t really go anywhere but it’s pleasant, as aimless music goes.

• We’ll wrap up this week’s business with an album from Rex Orange County, a disposable English hipster-pop dude whose real name is Alexander James O’Connor; his claim to fame is a “token skinny jeans dude” guest spot on Tyler, the Creator’s Grammy-nominated album Flower Boy. Anyone still paying attention, anyone at all? No? Well that’s fitting, because this fellow’s new album is called Who Cares, featuring the single “Keep It Up,” a tune about unironically puttering around on a little boat or something while pastel ponies dance around, I don’t even know. This dude wants to be Jose Gonzalez really badly but will just end up being forever known as “Whoever, you know, that one dude on that Tyler mixtape.”

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

At the Sofaplex 22/03/03

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (R)

Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher.

And by “rated R” I mean hard R, with people cut in half and Bellagio-in-Oceans 11-style fountains of blood. Very R.

I know I have seen some previous Chainsaws — could not even begin to tell you which ones or what happened in them — but the movie doesn’t seem to be some mid-arc entry into the franchise and feels more like it is going the route of the recent Halloween entries, with some connection to the 1970s original but easy enough to follow for new joiners.

Melody (Yarkin) and Dante (Jacob Latimore) are chefs and partners in a plan to colonize with hipsters a small, nearly desolate Texas town where every interaction with the locals seems vaguely hostile but at least the real estate is super cheap. Their plan is to open a restaurant, an art gallery owned by Dante’s fiancée, Ruth (Nell Hudson), and maybe even a comic book store owned by Lila (Fisher), Melody’s sister — you know, zhuzh up this deserted-during-the-Dust-Bowl looking town. Hey, cool, says Lila, but I’m still getting over my trauma from surviving a school shooting and this place is seven hours from my friends so, like, maybe not? But Melody and Dante have a busload of “investors” coming and so they are charging ahead with their plans, even when Melody gets into a spat with Richter (Moe Dunford), a contractor and mechanic who doesn’t enjoy being patronized by hipsters, and Dante is fed up with the woman (Alice Krige) who seems to be squatting in one of the buildings despite having been evicted by the bank weeks earlier. Also, she’s flying a Confederate flag outside her building, which he feels like will not be so great for business with the from-this-century young people he’s got coming to check the town out.

That woman claims she squared everything with the bank and has run that home, the town orphanage, for decades. There is one last person in her care — she calls him baby (Mark Burnham), I think — and he doesn’t do so well out in the world so they need to stay. We never get a good straight-on look at Baby; we mostly see his hulking person in shadow. But we, and Melody, get enough of a look at him to know that something bad will come of their removal, especially when it leads the woman to have some kind of medical emergency.

This movie is mostly a straightforward “run, stab, run, stab” affair (well, actually, it’s more like “run, bludgeon, run, hack, run, chainsaw”). And if you like that sort of thing, with the gore and the screaming, this would seem to deliver the basics. But it doesn’t really do more and, similar to those recent Halloween installments, for me it quickly gets kind of, well, boring seems like the wrong word but — tedious? Repetitive? Fast-forwardable?

The movie does have some funny moments, not laugh out loud but more like a “ha.” And maybe it has some messaging — anti-gentrification? pro-gun? — but I feel like it more has “ideas about ideas” than it has actual ideas. Maybe there is some sense that having more than just slashing and screaming brings in a bigger crowd but it doesn’t really put forth a lot of baked-in-the-story effort in that direction. Genre die-hards might have a different opinion, but for me, for the horror agnostic, it’s a C Available on Netflix.

The Royal Treatment (TV-PG)

Mena Massoud, Laura Marano.

You know Massoud from playing Aladdin in the Guy Ritchie live-action remake and Marano from, like, around (she’s a singer, she was on a Disney Channel show, she was in The War with Grandpa). Here, they are the couple from opposite worlds: he’s Prince Thomas from Lavania, a country with a vague “International Location” aesthetic, and she’s Izzy, a hairstylist and wannabe world traveler from New York. When a Siri mistake has his butler-type guy Walter (Cameron Rhodes) call her (instead of some similarly named chi-chi salon), Izzy is at first delighted to cut hair for about 10 times her normal rate. But when she witnesses Thomas’ handler, Madame Fabre (Sonia Gray), being rude to a hotel staffer, she takes Thomas to task for not intervening on the staffer’s behalf. He apparently likes this check on his privilege because he eventually hires Izzy and two of her fellow stylists to come to Lavania to do hair and makeup for his forthcoming wedding to Lauren (Phoenix Connolly), a woman he barely knows but whom his parents are really keen for him to marry because her parents “own half of Texas.”

Though it’s been decades since I’ve seen it, this light and friendly rom-com called to mind The Beautician and the Beast (and also the TV show The Nanny, both Fran Drescher vehicles) with notes of The Princess Diaries (there is a fun mention of Genovia) and your standard Cinderella story. Nobody is all that evil, no comeuppance is all that harsh, nobody is all that compelling, but they are all perfectly pleasant to spend time with if you just need a little cotton candy fairy tale. B- Available on Netflix.

How to Be Perfect, by Michael Schur

How to Be Perfect, by Michael Schur (Simon & Schuster, 265 pages)

As television sitcoms go, The Good Place was rather remarkable. The NBC show, which premiered in 2016 and aired for four years, had all the typical goofiness of low-brow comedy but was based on high-brow ideas: What does it mean to be a good person? Why should we care? And, of all the prevailing philosophical schools of thought on the matter, which ones are true and most relevant today?

These are tough themes to take on in 30 minutes minus commercials, but Michael Schur succeeded in creating a star-making show that worked on both levels and managed to elevate relatively obscure philosophy books into the mainstream (most notably, retired Harvard professor T.M. Scanlon’s What We Owe To Each Other). Now Schur has written a book of his own, a summary of the ethical frameworks he studied when developing The Good Place. It is, in many ways, a sitcom of a book, as Schur applies a vaudevillian touch to topics rarely taken that lightly: among them, existentialism.

Parts have a slapstick quality that would quickly grow tiresome but for Schur’s true comic gifts and his willingness to question his own moral judgments, among them his struggle to reconcile his admiration of Woody Allen’s work with revelations of the filmmaker’s personal life.

The punchlines begin on the book’s cover, in which the title is hysterically imperfect; it leaves off the “t” in “perfect.” (The subtitle, “the correct answer to every moral question,” also reveals itself to be a joke, because Schur’s ultimate aim isn’t to answer all the big questions, but rather to give readers the framework for thinking about them, and in fact, to insist that we think about them.) They continue through the acknowledgments, in which Schur peppers his thanks to friends and colleagues with random facts. (Einstein used a $1,500 check as a bookmark, then lost the book; moose in the Western Yukon appear to have parties for each other.)

Along the way, Schur unpacks the thinking of the likes of Immanuel Kant, Bertrand Russell, Maimonides, Aristotle, William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, all names with which any graduate of a U.S. high school should have at least a passing familiarity. He applies their ethical concepts to modern first-world dilemmas — Should I cheer for sports teams that have problematic names? Should I eat at Chick-Fil-A? Should I eat meat at all? — injecting personal anecdotes along the way, such as the angst he felt after spending $800 for a baseball bat autographed by Red Sox players as a Christmas gift for his son.

In another story, he reveals that his interest in ethics pre-dates The Good Place by at least a decade. In 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina, Schur’s then fiance (now wife) had a fender bender that resulted in an $836 claim, despite the fact that the claimant’s bumper was barely scratched and the responding police officer said there was no damage. Schur was furious and offered to donate $836 to Katrina relief if the man would drop the claim and continue to live with the indignity of having a scratch on his bumper.

While the man was thinking it over, Schur took his outrage to the internet and raised $20,000 in pledges for Katrina relief if the bumper went unreplaced. “I had dreams of rescuing New Orleans all by myself, armed with nothing but a keyboard and a brilliant masterstroke of moral reasoning,” he wrote. “And then I started to feel sick.”

The “chirpings” of conscience began to nag at Schur and his fiance, and he started consulting ethics books and philosophy professors about why his actions felt wrong and what he should do. While he still believed that the other driver was wrong to insist on replacing a barely scratched bumper, he came to believe that he was also wrong to subject the man to public shaming even if an auxiliary outcome (Katrina relief) was good. This experience led Schur into the rabbit hole of ethics that resulted in The Good Place and ultimately this book.

In 2019, Schur was asked to write the introduction to the re-release of controversial ethicist Peter Singer’s book The Life You Can Save, and he wrote of it, “More important than what you feel when you read this book is what you will not feel: complacency. You will not feel like other people don’t matter.”

The same can be said of Schur’s book, which may seem superficial (2,500 years of complex moral philosophy condensed into 265 pages — with jokes!) but in fact achieves the author’s aim: to get us to think consciously about the mass of decisions that comprise our days, and to consider the ideas that could help us choose more wisely. Not because we think this might get us to a “good place” — this is a secular book, as was the show — but because, as Harvard’s Scanlon said, this is something that we owe each other.

B+

Book Notes

Some people choose books to read because they like the author; others, because they like the premise of the book. But have you ever chosen a book based on something the author said?

That happened to me this week when I read an interview with Brendan Slocumb, the author of the new novel The Violin Conspiracy (Anchor, 352 pages). I’d seen the book mentioned before, but it didn’t catch my attention until I read in Publishers Weekly that Slocumb said, “I wanted to pull back the curtain and let everybody know this is how the sausage is made. Classical music is a very cutthroat profession, though it’s especially tough for people of color.”

Classical music a “very cutthroat profession”? Who knew? Suddenly I was interested. Slocumb, who lives in D.C., is a music educator and professional violinist who also founded a nonprofit and plays in a rock band. Yet he found the time to write a novel. Definitely worth checking out.

Other new releases of interest:

Fans of Charles Dickens will be interested in The Turning Point (Deckle Edge, 368 pages), nonfiction by Robert Douglas Fairhurst that examines how the events of one year — 1851 — changed and shaped the beloved novelist’s career.

Funny Farm (St. Martin’s Press, 256 pages) is Laura Zeleski’s memoir of “my unexpected life with 600 rescue animals” and the story of how she, a graphic designer with government contracts, fulfilled her dying mother’s dream of running a rescue.

Daniel Pink sorted through more than 15,000 self-reported regrets of people around the world and found something resembling redemption, chronicled in The Power of Regret (Riverhead, 256 pages). If nothing else, reading the regrets of others might make you feel better about your own.

And finally, this is not a new release, but worth checking out given recent world events: Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine (Anchor, 466 pages), which examines another heartbreaking part of Ukraine’s history, when Josef Stalin intentionally starved more than 3 million people in the region through sinister agricultural policies.

Book Events

Author events

• AZAR NAFISI Author presents new book Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times, in conversation with Jacki Lyden. Ticketed virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., March 19, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $27 to $31 and include a copy of the book. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents new book Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• EMMA LOEWE Author presents new book Return to Nature: The New Science of How Natural Landscapes Restore Us, in conversation with author Hannah Fries. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 7 p.m. Registration is required. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents new book The Possibility of Red. Henry Walters presents new book Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• ANNE HILLERMAN Author presents new book The Sacred Bridge. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., April 19, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] or visit nashualibrary.org.

Album Reviews 22/03/03

The Waymores, Stone Sessions (Chicken Ranch Records)

I’m not big into latter-day “country music” (or so they call it) because it’s usually so awful, evoking noisy tuneage for NASCAR commercials or WWE wrestler entrances, but if you’ve read this space for any amount of time, you know for a fact that I have the utmost reverence for things like genuine bluegrass and such. I’m not a monster; there are hallowed genres that are completely unassailable, and I count traditional C&W in that number, including the vanishing breed of coed duos whose achievements are historic, like Johnny Cash/June Carter and Loretta Lynn/Conway Twitty. This LP aims for a similar down-home honky tonk/country-pop vibe, and though it’s professed to have blues and folk elements, it’s more like a sonic homage, songs about whisky, cheating, road life and all that stuff, and it does nail it with some great songs. “Asleep At The Wheel” fiddler Katie Shore helps out on “Caught.” A

Howless, To Repel Ghosts (Static Blooms Records)

Wow, my favorite new record of this young year, right here. This female-fronted Mexico City quartet offers a noise-pop/dream-pop style that’s part Jesus And Mary Chain, early Cure and New Order, dipped in 24-karat gold production values and — this is the best part — born of a certain innocent, anti-punk Go-Go’s-ish je ne sais quoi. The guitars sparkle like an autumn river over heavily saturated synth layers, all driven by the faraway, shoegaze-ish singing of Dominique Sanchez and Mauricio Tinejro, altogether just the system you’d want if you were trying to resurrect ’80s alt-pop but keep it fresh, gorgeous and no-nonsense. Lyrically it’s about such things as “questioning our place on earth,” “the bitterness of saying goodbye to someone who hasn’t yet left your psyche,” and “human self sabotage” — no dummies, these people, and that’s a rare thing in an indie scene overrun with bored hipsters who just bought their first guitars a week ago. Fantastic stuff all around. A+

PLAYLIST

• March 4 is dead ahead, y’all, and the warm weather isn’t too far away, all you have to do is get through a few weeks more! So let’s get to the albums that will be released on that fateful day, oh great, look, there’s not a lot, but I shall make do with what little nonsense has been handed to me, starting with Oochya, the new LP from Welsh indie-rawk band Stereophonics! You may be familiar with this band from their 2003 single “Maybe Tomorrow,” which rose to No. 5 on Billboard’s U.S. Adult Alternative Songs chart. If you’re not sure what that is, picture Rod Stewart singing the most boring Black Crowes/Train mashup you could imagine, and then picture it being even more tuneless. Yes, that tune, please try to stay awake so we can talk about this new album, which has a single, called “Hanging On Your Hinges.” The video has a bunch of cheap art that’s sort of playing-card oriented, like there are art deco devils and waitresses and whatever this other stuff is, and the music is sort of throwback boogie, like if Jet spent too much time listening to Bo Diddley but was trying to be as cool as The Hives, something like that. As always, there is little in the way of melody here, just empty-calorie music for Uber drivers to fall asleep to while waiting for their fares to get their acts together. The only comparable song that comes to mind is like a rockabilly version of Ramones’ “Freak Of Nature,” but you readers have probably never heard that song — my god, why am I even bothering trying to describe this stupid song, let’s forget this ever happened and move on to something else, anything that isn’t the Stereophonics.

• Oh, no. No. If you could see me right now, you’d see that I am clutching my chest like Fred Sanford from Sanford & Son, because “Elizabeth, I’m comin’ to ya,” things just got even worse: Just when I was recovering from the new Stereophonics album, will you look at this, now I have to pretend to care about Vancouver-based surf-indie Bonnaroo-bums Peach Pit, whose third album, From 2 To 3, is here. OK, let’s calm down, the single “Vickie” isn’t all that bad, it’s jangly and has a stupid tremolo-or-something effect going on in one of the guitar layers, and it’s a happy song about walking around on a sidewalk or something. The singer kind of sounds like Kermit the Frog. You know, if you ever went back in time to the 1980s or before that and played this idiotic waste of musical notes to someone and told them people would be buying this record, you would have been locked up in a padded cell. I can’t believe how much lower the bar goes every single week, people, I mean it’s — haunting. Next.

• Yay, guys, it’s Nilüfer Yanya’s new album, Painless, I’m not kidding! And who is Nilüfer Yanya? I don’t know, let’s find out together! Here it is, she’s a singer from London, and she turned down a gig in a girl-group that was going to be produced by Louis Tomlinson of One Direction. Hm, we may have something here, supposedly she sounds like Siouxsie from Siouxsie and the Banshees, so let’s give a spin to the tune “Stabilize,” maybe it’s like “Hall Of Mirrors” or something else cool. Nope, she doesn’t sound like Siouxsie, she sounds like Lorde but mumbly and sleepy. The beat is spazzy but aimless, like a British grime fan’s idea of Siouxsie if Siouxsie had been into skateboarding and whatever.

• We’ll close with Crystal Nuns Cathedral, the 228th album in the past five months from Guided by Voices, in other words the last bunch of crummy demos from songwriting-addicted Robert Pollard. Yup, as I expected, the single “Excited Ones” is boring and stupid, sounding like an old demo The Cars made and then recorded over because they hated it. If Pollard ever writes a good song I’ll weep with joy.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

The Horsewoman, by James Patterson and Mike Lupica

The Horsewoman, by James Patterson and Mike Lupica (Little, Brown & Co., 433 pages)

I probably shouldn’t confess this in public, but until this week, I was a James Patterson virgin.

Called by his publisher “the best-selling author in the world,” a claim questioned by Google, Patterson certainly is among the richest and most prolific. How many books has he written or co-written? There’s a printable checklist on his website that goes on for longer than I cared to count; in 2017, the Wall Street Journal put the number at 150. And lately, of course, Patterson has taken to collaborating with celebrities — for example, The President is Missing, written with former President Bill Clinton, and the upcoming Run, Rose, Run with Dolly Parton.

With a catalog like that, Patterson seems to offer something for everyone, and I thought he’d finally delivered for me with The Horsewoman; its jacket blurb promises “breakneck speed and hair-raising thrills and spills.” That should have been a warning, as should have been the partnership with sportswriter Mike Lupica, who comes by his knowledge of the horse world as the father of a competitive rider. In other words, Patterson knows the formula, and Lupica filled in the details.

The result: a formulaic yawner that’s twice as long as it needed to be, and it’s debatable whether it needed to be at all. (Does Patterson really need more money or adulation at this point?) But because Patterson is a pro at turning out bestselling novels, The Horsewoman has a serviceable elevator pitch:

A mother, Maggie Atwood, was on track to make the U.S. equestrian team in the Olympics but months before the qualifying trials, she was injured in a fall from her horse, putting not only her dreams at risk but also the solvency of the family farm. Her daughter, Becky, a hithertofore lackluster rider, reluctantly steps up to take her mother’s place. Then, because, as Becky repeatedly says, “[excrement] happens,” it turns out that the mother recovers and is able to compete after all and wants her horse back, setting up the pair to have many first-world resentments and to compete against each other in the Paris Olympics.

There’s more to the story, of course. There is a villain in the form of an investor in Maggie’s horse, who wants to take full control of the horse, instead of the 60 percent share he owns. Steve Gorton is a caricature of a villain, complete with the hedge fund and the Ferrari and the Harvard Business School ballcap.

Then there’s Daniel, the trainer from Mexico who is a love interest for Becky and also justifies some political theater involving the treatment of “Dreamers” — undocumented workers whose parents brought them to the U.S. as children. There’s also the reliable tension of assorted family drama — the cold and critical matriarch who snaps at her granddaughter a lot, and the absent father who only shows up halfway through the book.

It keeps you turning the pages because formulas work even when they are obvious: The short chapters, some only a couple of pages in length, that always end with some small cliffhanger, even it’s resolved on the very next page; the occasional good line thrown in to make you think “this isn’t so bad” even though it kind of is, at least compared to, say, Dickens.

Although the focus changes throughout the book — from Becky to Daniel to Maggie — it never deviates from the intellectual level of the 21-year-old Becky (who says things like “This guy doesn’t know a bridle from a bridesmaid”), even when it’s expounding on the minutiae of equine infections.

The Horsewoman kept reminding me of another, more interesting story about a horse family struggling against the odds, the story told in the 2010 Disney film Secretariat. Though the film was embellished, it was a largely true story about a woman fighting to save her family farm with a risky but promising horse. Secretariat had the same problem that Patterson and Lupica faced: how to make sympathetic characters out of poor little rich girls whose chief worries in life are losing multimillion-dollar farms and horses. But Disney gave its cinematic story a heart; Patterson and Lupica never do.

While they talk about the Atwood family’s struggles to keep their farm and to hold onto a horse worth more than a million dollars, Becky casually mentions her CWD saddle (the brand starts at around $5,000), and of course there’s the travel to all the horse shows, and the veterinary bills, and all the other things that make competitive riding a rich person’s sport. As such, this is a novel that will also have appeal on a certain socioeconomic level. It also helps if you’re a horse-obsessed 15-year-old girl.

The most offensive thing this novel does, however, is not the dumbing down of an intriguing premise, but that it, like a grasping New York socialite, drops names.

During a competition, the names of two real equestrians show up — Jennifer Gates, the daughter of Bill Gates, and Georgina Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg’s daughter. I’m sure they’re lovely people and have every right to appear in a novel with hair-raising thrills and spills, but their inclusion among otherwise fictional characters seemed a shameless bid for attention from people who can afford to buy lots of books.

If this is what it takes to be the best-selling author in the world, count me out as a fan. C-

Book Notes

Ten years ago, Amy Diaz offered me the opportunity to review books for the Hippo. This was a leap of faith on her part.

Even though I had been a journalist longer than most of you have been alive, at the time, I had exactly one book review to my credit: a blistering takedown of Caitlin Flanagan’s first book, To Hell With All That, that hasn’t aged well. Flanagan has since become one of The Atlantic’s best known and most beloved writers. I stand by the review, nonetheless.

Here, we give books a letter grade, but there’s another grading system that has evolved at my house: Terrible or mediocre books are given away, good books are “lent” to friends (never to be seen again), and the very best books never leave the house. This system is a pure and cold calculus of a book’s worth, given that I have limited space and seem to downsize every few years. So, on the occasion of my decade with the Hippo, here, in no particular order, are some of the books I once reviewed and now refuse to part with:

The Dog Stars (Knopf, 336 pages) — 2012 novel by Peter Heller about a man and his dog in a post-apocalyptic world.

The End of Night (Little, Brown & Co., 336 pages) — 2013 nonfiction by Paul Bogard about what artificial light is doing to the planet and our brains.

The Regrets (Little, Brown & Co., 304 pages) — 2020 novel by Amy Bonnaffons about a man caught between Earth and the afterlife.

Dwelling in Possibility (Bauhan Publishing, 240 pages) — 2013 nonfiction by New Hampshire author Howard Mansfield, who muses on “searching for the soul of shelter.”

The Mindful Carnivore (Pegasus, 304 pages) — 2013 nonfiction by conflicted carnivore Tovar Cerulli, who went from vegan to hunter.

This is How (St. Martin’s, 240 pages) — thought-provoking essays by Augusten Burroughs, the Running With Scissors guy, on how to overcome a lifetime of problems and catastrophes.

Florida Man (Random House, 416 pages) — 2020 novel by Tom Cooper, wickedly funny and fresh.

Bowlaway (Deckle Edge, 384 pages) — 2019 novel by Elizabeth McCracken that had me at the first sentence: “They found a body in Salford Cemetery, but above ground and alive.”

How to Have a Good Day (Currency, 368 pages) — 2016 nonfiction by Caroline Webb that is a well-written encyclopedia of social-science research on improving pretty much everything in your life.

A Particular Kind of Black Man (Simon & Schuster, 272 pages) — fiction by Nigerian-American writer Tope Folarin, whose real-life experiences inform this account of an outsider trying to find his path in America.

There are more, but the others might yet be given away. All of the above are keepers.

Book Events

Author events

• MARGARET ATWOOD Author presents Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, in conversation with Judy Blume. Ticketed virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., March 1, 8 p.m. Tickets cost $30. Via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents The Possibility of Red. Henry Walters presents Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email [email protected] or visit nashualibrary.org.

Album Reviews 22/02/24

Mark Stewart VS, Challenge Institutionalized Power (eMERGENCY hearts Records)

Whoa, now we’re getting somewhere. Stewart has been a fixture in the noise-punk scene since he visited New York City in 1980 and got vacuumed into the no-wave vortex, and here he “faces off against” some of his favorite like-minded music-cultural transgressors, but now for some normie-speak. This is literally the most badass thing I’ve heard in months, evoking images of my walking into basically any half-edgy record store and feeling like I’d landed on a hostile planet that was yet somehow home, with the terrifying, epic sounds of Jim Thirlwell or Big Black blasting over the speakers as if the whole place just wanted everyone to leave. Who’s here? Well, Front 242 for one, leading off with a techno assault that’s trying to chase Stewart’s wobbly David Byrne-ish tenor out of town. There’s a face-off with electronic post-punk pioneer Eric Random (“Ghost Of Love”) that’s got dubstep in its DNA and pure anarchy in its heart. If you’ve ever liked any sort of aggressive music, especially one that’s got a lot of techno to it, you have to get this, you simply must. A+

Sataray, Blood Trine Moon (Scry Recordings)

This one-woman dark-ambient project (based in Olympia, Washington) has released a four-song EP here that’s aimed at the goth-est of the goth, meaning people who really think they’re witches or whatnot. It’s something you’d definitely want to have on hand at Halloween to scare the kids away: no cute howling dogs or whimsical mad scientist laughter; this lady wants to instill really ghoulish visions in the listener (think Lovecraft, M.R. James, etc.), and she’s started to make inroads into the convention world, bringing her super-creepy Japanese butoh dance moves to such nerd-fests as the Esoteric Book Conference, Passiontide and ShadowDance. Trippiness abounds here, folks, trust me, with slow, relentless, samples of (probably) gongs, singing bowls and Addams Family organ samples building in intensity until she starts going deep with some Linnea Quigley-circa-Night Of The Demons-worthy half-whispered chants and invocations. Don’t get me wrong, though, this isn’t cheesy in any way; this lady really wants to scare the pants off you, and for what it is, it’s totally rad, sure. A

PLAYLIST

• Next stop Feb. 25, get on board y’all, choo choo, isn’t it great! Yep, that’s when the new albums will come out, for your listening pleasure, and boy, is it great that February’s almost gone or what, am I right? We’ve got a full deck this week, so let’s start with ancient witch lady Judy Collins, whose latest album, Spellbound, is on the trucks, ready for delivery to anyone who can still buy an album and afford $190 for a gallon of milk, or however much it is these days, with all the cows being on strike or whatever the problem is! Collins rose to fame in the 1960s (she’s 82 now) with the song “Both Sides Now,” which her arch-enemy Joni Mitchell wrote while on a plane, reading some boring book about a guy who was in a plane flying over Africa and he saw some clouds. That’s all it was, but whatever, maybe Joni and Judy and their co-arch enemy Carole King will star in a reboot of The Golden Girls where they make hemp necklaces and maybe they’ll have Dolly Parton show up to play the Betty White lady, wouldn’t that be hilarious? Whatever, I think it would, but to the business at hand, Judy — she was the cute one out of the whole bunch, by the way — has a new single that will be on this album, namely “When I Was A Girl In Colorado,” a pretty little country-folkie tune that finds her singing as well as Amy Grant if you ask me, so take that, young people, these super old pop stars are going to be topping the Billboard charts until they’re 150 years old, so don’t bother learning instruments is my advice. And guess what, even though Judy’s super old, she will be on tour in 2022! The closest she’ll get to New Hampshire is Bar Harbor, Maine, on April 23, at the 1932 Criterion Theater! It’s true!

• Ha, if you’re kind of old, you may remember when, in the 1980s, British pop nincompoops Tears For Fears were going around saying they were going to be bigger than The Beatles. I remember it vividly, and I was probably the only one who didn’t think that was stupid, in fact I thought it was kind of awesome. Like, what else would you want to hear from some band that you kind of liked on MTV, “We anticipate having a fairly successful career?” No, if you have to deal with some idiot from MTV, of course you’re going to say something crazy, and for that I thank them. Anyway, their upcoming new album The Tipping Point is their first in 18 years and second in 27 years, meaning half the people reading this are like “Tears for who?,” to which I say they were a decent enough band that had a fairly successful career. The album’s seen a few singles already, but I’ll just check out the tune “No Small Thing.” Hm, it’s kind of like a cowboy-spaghetti song, a little Ennio Morricone and a little Conor Oberst, in other words it doesn’t have any relation to the yuppie-pandering synthpop nonsense they used to do. The hook is weak and depressing and old-sounding, let’s bag this and move on.

• Speaking of 1980s shlock, look guys, it’s bloopy synthpop retirees Soft Cell, with their newest, Happiness Not Included! These guys were one band I always kind of hated, which means that after 35 years they’ve probably written a good song, right? Well, the single “Heart Like Chernobyl” is bloopy and dumb, even worse and more meatless than “Tainted Love.” Repeat: It’s. Even. Worse. Than. “Tainted Love.”

• Time to bounce, fam, but first let’s have a listen to “Love It When You Hate Me” from Avril Lavigne’s new album Love Sux! Holy crow, is it still 2003? This is the exact same song she’s always written, the exact same hook, everything. Hard pass on this.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

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