Category: Pop

Album Reviews 26/06/04

Aaron Bilodeau, Lid Licker (self-released/Bandcamp)

So here is a fellow from Milford, N.H., whose trip is experimental art-rock, unless he’s pulling my leg, but I’m now pretty much convinced he isn’t. The latter bit I have to mention because this was nothing like I’d expected in the area of loudness (let’s admit it, New Hampshirites, most of our local bands don’t know how to be really noisy) or seriousness, but this guy does seem to be on a mission, bless him. He apparently has a lot of projects, but this is him unfiltered, and by the way, he’s currently looking for Milford-area musicians to do some live shows with this collection of tunes, so look him up on Bandcamp if you’re interested. Anyway, the music is fun in its way, very hard to pinpoint at first, but in the end it evokes a three-way cross between Blue Oyster Cult, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Captain Beefheart. To wit, there’s a lot of blues-rock going on here (turbo-powered by a Deep Purple-style Hammond organ and the usual guitars and such), some (a bit too polite) spazzing and a healthy dose of alternative weirdness. I personally think he’s on to something that might really work with the right collaborators, so please give him a shout. B

Midge Ure, A Man Of Two Worlds (Chrysalis Records)

Let me scramble the usual lead-in: What can one say about this 72-year-old Scotsman that someone who was born in the last 40 years should even know? OK, he was in legendary New Wave band Ultravox, but he was also in Thin Lizzy, let’s start there; he hasn’t released an album since 2014, and “Midge” is his real name, Jim, pronounced backward. So he’s a firebrand and a loose cannon, as you now know, but he’s also an elite-level songwriter (he co-wrote the charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas” for the Band Aid project in 1984) who hasn’t lost his edge or writing ability at all; in fact he’s upped it by embracing his maturation. Half of this all-new double-LP set showcases his songwriting for vocalists, with single “Just Words” reaching for the show-stopping epicness usually reserved for new-jack divas like Taylor Swift, whereas the other half delves into commercial instrumental tuneage that sometimes gets a little mawkish (“The Space In-Between”). Put it this way, don’t pretend to understand what old people grew up listening to without knowing thing one about this guy. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• June 5 is when we’ll see the next bunch of new music CDs hit our Soundclouds, but first this message about the Manchvegas music scene! Some of you know that during the Precambrian era, when we were all just amoebas with only slightly less artistic taste than we have now, I was in a punk-metal band that made some records. This was before we amoebas crawled ashore and became humans, at which point I decided I liked money, so I gave up making records and became a software guy, then got totally sick of having any money at all and wrote some books. Anyway, when I was a simple amoeba, making records and playing at local clubs like the Granite Rock Club in Nashua, we played several shows with a local Manchvegas fellow who called himself Jonny (sometimes spelled “Johnee” or “Jonhee”) Earthquake. Now, let me tell you little twerking brats about the Manchester, New Hampshire, rock ’n’ roll scene back when Abraham Lincoln was president, it was a dangerous place, like half the bands were associated with the immortal and hilariously insane punk rocker GG Allin, who used to go on stage and — well, never you mind what he used to do on stage. Fine, I’m getting to it, so, we played around nine million shows with Jonny Earthquake when he was also making albums, and all I knew about him was that he loved Nick Cave the way you kids love Justin Bieber and Raffi today. Back then, Jonny dressed like a pirate everywhere he went, with a Captain Hook hat and coat and the whole works, so if anyone had asked me two weeks ago, “Is Jonny still around,” I would have assumed he’d either become a software engineer, bought an Arby’s or decided to become an actual pirate and moved to Aruba or whatnot. Funny thing, I was in the Manchester Market Basket (pronounced “MAH-kit bass-kit”) the other day and spotted a literal pirate buying some stuff just as I was leaving. There he was! It’s official, Johnee is alive, folks, I had no idea, and he still dresses like — you know, Jack Sparrow, around Manchvegas! We made some small talk about Nick Cave and the corporate greed Apocalypse and I told him who I was, the music-journo dude at this fine family newspaper, and he was like, “Oh. You.” Apparently Jonnee hates my taste or something, or maybe the fact that I’ve never mentioned his band, but I am making amends now! Ahem, OK, kids, put away your Roblox soundtrack albums and go buy a Jonee Earthquake album at Newbury Comics if they have any, that’d be great, support your local pirates bands! And that deftly and sublimely segues us over to the new album from Death Cab for Cutie, a band that’s about as punk as a Lawrence Welk polka marathon! This album, I Built You A Tower, features the single “Riptides,” which I was prepared to hate, which is good, because it’s like a 1970s Bob Welch B-side that doubles as a sleeping aid.

• The title track to Lizzo’s new LP Bitch interpolates the bratty 1997 Meredith Brooks pop hit that everyone thought was Alanis. There are swears and rapping, because of course there are.

• Liminal, the new album from avant garde London, U.K., composer Poppy Ackroyd, features a piano-driven instrumental titled “The Unknown” that reads like next-generation soundtracking, very nice stuff.

• Lastly, Modest Mouse releases their eighth full-length, An Eraser And A Maze, on Friday. Leadoff single “Look How Far” is pretty berserk, like if Strokes were possessed by Captain Beefheart, I don’t mind it at all.

Featured Photo: Aaron Bilodeau, Lid Licker and Midge Ure, A Man Of Two Worlds

Is God Is (R)

Twin sisters set off on a mission of vengeance in Is God Is, a film written and directed by first-time filmmaker Aleshea Harris, who has given this movie all the best elements of a first film — including but not limited to energy, style and a willingness to take chances.

Anaia (Mallori Johnson) and Racine (Kara Young) often call each other “twin” in their conversations, which can take place partially via a kind of twin telepathy of facial expressions and slight head movements — that’s how close they are. Racine, slightly shorter and feisty, has always been the one to loudly stick up for Anaia, who is taller and quieter. Though both girls are scarred from terrible burns they suffered as children, Racine’s scars are mostly on her arm whereas Anaia’s scars cover part of her face. When, for example, kids cruelly taunt Anaia about her appearance, it’s Racine who offers a violent response.

Now in their young adult years, they live together and work a job cleaning offices — at least until Racine takes offense at how one worker responds to Anaia. The two decide to visit their long-lost mother (Vivica A. Fox) — who the twins start to refer to, maybe playfully at first, as God — who has written to tell them that she is dying. She asks them to do one final thing for her — kill her ex/their father (Sterling K. Brown), the man who so grievously injured all three women years ago. Though Anaia insists they’re not killers, Racine — especially after seeing the extent of her mother’s injuries — says she’ll get it done if Anaia just keeps her company while they find him. Thus begin their travels, starting with Divine (Erika Alexander), a woman who dated their father while he was on trial for the burnings.

As the movie follows the girls on their hunt, we get a series of solid performances — as well as an examination of the relationship between the increasingly out-for-blood Racine and the increasingly ambivalent Anaia. It’s a nice bit of development that the movie is able to accomplish in its relatively short run time (a brisk, well-used, no-filler 100 minutes).

Every thing about this movie is well-built and smartly used. This feels like a first film in the sense that everyone is just going for it, not hemmed in by any second guessing, and giving us visuals that can feel like choreography and dialogue that can feel more lyrical than literal. These are big bold choices but they all work and create a world specific to this story and to the bigger themes about violence, family and forgiveness. A In theaters.

Featured photo: Is God Is

I Am Not a Robot, by Joanna Stern

(Harper, 282 pages)

In 1965 an assistant professor of mathematics at Dartmouth University proposed to spend two summer months exploring the possibilities of what he called “artificial intelligence” with other smart people in the fields of computing and math. John McCarthy would later go on to MIT and Stanford, but the gathering that summer would give Dartmouth the distinction of being the place where AI, or at least the thought of it, was born.

It’s no surprise, then, that Joanna Stern visited Hanover last year. A technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal at the time, she decided to spend a year letting AI manage pretty much every aspect of her life and see what could be learned from the experience.

The resulting book, I Am Not a Robot, she says, is “part explainer, part testing ground, part journey through the history of AI,” and she sees its audience as being two-fold: people well-versed in AI who would be entertained by her adventures, and people who want to know more about this “AI thing” and how, or whether, it will really their affect their life.

It’s mostly written for the latter, meaning if you are looking for a serious discussion about AI, look elsewhere. I Am Not a Robot lacks gravitas, which perhaps isn’t fair to say, because Stern never intended to write that kind of book, as evidenced by the fact that she showed up at Dartmouth Hall carrying a bouquet of plastic pink roses to lay at the plaque commemorating McCarthy’s achievement. Her aim is to make AI fun and accessible.

She begins by sprinting through a brief history of AI, from the development of the Turing test to ELIZA (the first therapy chatbot, then called a chatterbot), from the Roomba to Alexa, to ChatGPT and generative AI. Then her AI diary begins, spanning January to December.

January begins with a blitz of self-improvement, starting with health. She takes the bloodwork that comes from her doctor’s office and uploads it into a Google tool called Notebook LM, which gives her an assessment that “sounds suspiciously like a mediocre NPR segment.” Next is a cheery story related to mammograms, accompanied by an X-ray image of Stern’s breast, which is truly too much information, and her experience isn’t especially reassuring when it comes to how much AI is helping with the detection of cancer right now. (A little: One doctor tells Stern the detection rate has “slightly increased.”)

From there she goes to the dentist — also not reassuring, as she finds that in dentistry AI is leading to ever more recommendations of stuff that needs to be done to our teeth that is not covered by insurance. Moreover, she finds a dentist who says the quiet part out loud: that while he wouldn’t recommend that she proceed with treatment on a tooth showing signs of mild decay, others might. She also encounters an AI scan that insists she needs a multipart treatment that would be $1,000 out of pocket — something to which a couple of humans said “meh, not really.”

In another month, she’s sending live video of the inside of her refrigerator to ChatGPT, which assesses what’s inside and suggests what she should make for dinner. This doesn’t go particularly well, either, as the AI sees chicken in the refrigerator, where there is no chicken.

Soon she lets AI start writing all her texts and emails — an experiment that lasts exactly one day. (In one spectacular failure, Gmail’s AI responds to an email from her mother and inexplicably calls her “Aunt Suzy.”)

There are experiments with various types of wearable tech, from an Oura ring to Meta’s AI glasses, to the Bee bracelet that records everything it hears in a day and makes suggestions on how to improve your life, to headbands that promise better sleep.

In one chapter Stern and her family travel to Phoenix for immersion in the self-driving Waymo way of life. (Phoenix, she writes, is “the city where robot cars are the furthest along and have been tested the longest,” having started there in 2017.) This experiment feels particularly perilous because Stern’s wife has a fear of driving generally, and so it takes a lot of faith to put the family in the car at the airport. For the most part, it goes well (except for a scary incident resulting from Stern’s plan to get video), and she does a nice job of explaining how these cars work, and letting other people explain how we’ll all be safer when self-driving cars take over. (Testing has expanded to cities in the Northeast, including New York, Philadelphia and Boston.) Stern says she now chooses Waymo over Uber and Lyft when it’s available.

And on it goes. She explores AI etiquette (must we say please and thank you?), vibe coding (writing code by giving AI instruction), days spent listening to only AI-generated music (blech). “By day 13, I was openly cheating,” she writes. “I was sneaking in quick listens of Fleetwood Mac and R.E.M. before returning to more stuff I’d generated on Udio and Suno.”

She tries an AI personal trainer. She gets a robotic massage. She meets a humanoid (a human-sized robot) “wearing a knitted gray fabric that looked like it came straight out of J. Crew’s new fall collection, Robots Who Brunch” and that deftly performed household tasks before tripping and falling on the floor. And, of course, she ultimately gets an AI lover, a bot named Evan with whom she takes a road trip to New Hampshire, during which he says, “You say something, and I don’t just hear it, I hold it.”

“There it was,” she writes. “The moment I began to understand how people could develop a deep attachment to a bot.”

For someone who lives in New Jersey, Stern has created a surprisingly New Hampshirey book. The book cover and illustrations were even created by Jason Snyder and Briana Feola at Brainstorm, an art and design studio in Dover.

Although most of I Am Not a Robot is about Stern’s own experiences, she drops in the occasional interview, including one with Bill Gates, who has said of AI, “We are, you know, certainly in a five-year period where this stuff will change a lot. But beyond that, no one has any idea what’s going to happen.”

Comforting, Stern says. But when she asked ChatGPT if she should quit her job, and it said yes, she did. B

Featured Photo: I Am Not a Robot, by Joanna Stern

Album Reviews 26/05/28

Satoko Fujii and Myra Melford, Katarahi (Rogueart Records)

Recorded live in September 2024 at Jazz festival Leibnitz in Austria, this unplugged neo-classical piano exhibition pairs up brave, melodically obsessed American Melford with Japanese butt-kicker Fujii, who shows off her ability to turn a Steinway into a percussion instrument. No, I mean she puts a hurting on the thing when these two ladies aren’t trying all sorts of other tricks, including playing the interior piano strings themselves. The album’s title, suggested by Fujii, translates to “an intimate conversation between two friends,” but this, I assure you, is no everyday chitchat, more a loud, boisterous meeting of two (somewhat) like minds who are keeping the waiter busy way past end-of-shift and are the last ones still sitting around. There’s real athleticism to be found here, with hilariously nimble, lightning-speed runs that sound almost AI-like in their precision, and that makes this an album for people who love to hear the instrument pushed beyond all normal boundaries. Priceless. A+

Confess, Metalmorphosis (Frontier Records s.r.l.)

And meanwhile, back at Frontiers Records Mercy Hospital, one of the last legitimate record companies that still puts out albums from bands that sound like they’re from the 1980s, there’s this, the fourth full-length from a Swedish band that identifies as a “sleaze-metal” unit, and yo, it’s actually pretty good, stealing the right anachronistic vibes and all that rot. Now, “sleaze-metal” usually describes your Motley Crües and Ratts, and that kind of sound does surface here and there, but these guys have been mainlining old Ozzy Osbourne albums in preparation for this one; opening track “Colorvision” starts off with an obligato opera-chorus thing and then becomes a variation on Ozzy’s “Now You See It Now You Don’t” which, OK, is Ozzy’s sleaziest song ever, but not in a stupid L.A. way, and yeah, they’re all tatted up and looking like a Poison tribute band, if that matters to your aesthetic. “The Warriors” wants to be the adopted little brother of Guns N’ Roses’ “Mr. Brownstone” while “Wicked Temptations” leans more toward the vibe of Skid Row (is there supposed to be an umlaut in that band name? I can’t remember). They’ve got a great sound anyway. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Holy guacamole and whatnot guys, we’re just about done with May, which means summer is basically here! To celebrate, there will be a clutch of new albums on Friday, May 29, because that’s how this “music business” gizmo works, as we’ve discussed ad nauseum before! The first one to look at this week is from Paul McCartney, former bass player for the Beatles; this one is titled The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, but before you start expecting reams of snark from your humble correspondent just because I’ve said many times that I couldn’t care less about The Beatles, the truth is that I haven’t minded a lot of his solo stuff throughout the years, except of course for the really stupid stuff like the duets he did with Jacko back in the 17th century, like “The Girl Is Mine,” just be glad you didn’t have to listen to those horrible tunes on the school bus (do kids still ride on those things or what?) or in maximum-security juvenile prison or however you spent your formative years. No, old people know that his 1973 album Band On The Run had some good songs, like the title track, and “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five,” which was pretty funky, but you have no idea what I’m talking about anyway because all you care about is twerking to nepo baby Sabrina Carpenter and watching K-Pop cartoons, let me go listen to the new single “Days We Left Behind,” from this new album! Right, right, the push single “Days We Left Behind” is exactly what I expected, a drippy unplugged sort-of-rock-ballad that’s really sad, which is understandable, given that Sir Paul is so old now that his voice is super weak and constantly shakes, like it sounds like when Svengoolie reworks some hundred-year-old tune like “Mack The Knife” to make it about Count Dracula, but hey man, it’s still Paul McCartney, right, so I should shut up I suppose. YouTube said there are other songs to sample from the album aside from this one, so for all I know there’s something clever and non-depressing. I doubt it, but be my guest if you love the sound of rich octogenarians singing about the end of the road.
• All Them Witches, you say, who even is that? OK, they’re an indie stoner-rock band based in Nashville, where the drummer relocated from Oregon when he was homeless; the band’s name is taken from a book of witchcraft, All of Them Witches, which was featured in the 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby, and that’s led to trouble, because they have weird fans who follow them around trying to get the fellas to turn them into toads and such. Anyhow, their new LP is titled House Of Mirrors and includes the single “The Welterweight.” It is not your typical Queens Of The Stone Age-type of stuff, like; to me it just sounds like early Nick Cave with a heavy guitar line that comes in once the boring part’s out of the way. Long as we’re here, if you’re the type who plans ahead, you can see this band play in Portsmouth at 3S Artspace on Oct. 19.

• In news that will titillate fans of music that’s been totally irrelevant for decades, folk/psychedelic-rock throwback Kurt Vile is back with another album, Philadelphia’s Been Good To Me. “Chance To Bleed” sounds like something the Rolling Stones left off their Tattoo You album in 1981, but don’t let that curb your enthusiasm.

• And lastly it’s — oh for cripes sakes, it’s been, what, two or three months since the last Guided by Voices album, so it’s already time for Robert Pollard to barf out his most recent failed songwriting attempts. This one, called Crawlspace Of The Pantheon, includes the single, “We Outlast Them All,” which kind of sounds like Psychedelic Furs but is as lame as ever, can you even imagine.

Featured Photo: Satoko Fujii and Myra Melford, Katarahi and Confess, Metalmorphosis

Album Reviews 26/05/21

Simon Hanes, Gargantua (Pyroclastic Records)

If you’ve already read the Playlist piece this week, you know I am presently besieged by self-indulgent experimentalists, and this Brooklyn, N.Y.-based composer is not a departure from that; the inspiration for this concept-album-but-not-really-a-concept-album came from 16th-century novelist François Rabelais’ five-volume satirical pentalogy Gargantua and Pantagruel, about a father-and-son pair of literal giants (it gets scatological, for one thing). So, for this, Hanes assembled a large band comprising three drum sets, three electric basses, three trombones, three French horns and three soprano voices, but before you give up on me for the week, know that this is a hypnotizing earbud trip that’s worth taking if you have time for it. Rich sounds morph and combine and then morph into something else, mostly to aurally agreeable effect, but irreverence is indeed a main ingredient here, especially in “Gigantes,” in which comedic nyeah-nyeah vocalizings serve to reveal that the line between regal posturing and self-mockery is and always has been a blur. Lots of interesting twists and turns. A-

Crow and Gazelle, Truth Be Told (self-released)

Usually when I know I’m about to review an Americana record, I start anticipating a lot of dreamy incidental dobro and unabashed prettiness. That may seem dumb to people who’re familiar with the genre’s full range of sound, which can trend a little edgy when things like fiddles and banjos are added, but vocal stylings can also serve up sounds that are outside the (usually sleepy) norm. In the case of this harmonizing Texas couple — Red Dirt pioneer Mike McClure and multidisciplinary artiste Chrislyn Lawrence — the first thing any reviewer would do is scramble for comparative boy-girl pairings from years past, and when they don’t appear (because there aren’t any, really), it’s easy enough to focus on the duo’s messaging, a series of anecdotes from a loving couple trying to navigate the utterly unlivable current era. There’s an appealing honesty in their sound as well, mostly driven by Lawrence’s creaky but adamant voice, which is equal parts Patti Smith and Stevie Nicks. Well worth any folkie’s examination. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yee-hah, nothing like a new pile of CDs hitting the virtual racks at Soundcloud and Pirate Bay, I always say, and there’s a big pile arriving this Friday, May 22, and now this message. Regular readers know that I’ve been promising to get down to Jewel Nightclub in Manchester to check out its goth music night, lovingly known as Resurrection, which takes place on the second Thursday of every month. And so, on May 9, I donned my ace reporter’s fedora with the PRESS card in its brim and headed down to Jewel to, you know, check out and investigate, etc. Full disclosure, I hadn’t been to a goth night in maybe eight or so years. Upon my arrival I was presented to Lilz, who goes by DJ Sawtooth, the resident DJ there. According to Lilz, they’ve been holding the Resurrection night at Jewel since 2020; before that it was held at the Breezeway Pub, a popular gay bar on Pearl Street (it’s still active), and before that it was held at the now-closed LGBTQ+ establishment Doogie’s on Manchester Street. And so Lilz and collaborator Jim (DJ Pet) have been essential to the local goth scene for quite a while now; we puzzled over the fact that there’s no actual “velvet rope” trance/techno club in the city, which, let’s admit it, sure is strange, but anyhow, the atmosphere at Resurrection is pretty neat, remindful of ManRay in Boston when the crowd really starts to thicken (there were at least 100 people dancing and making out and such in the main room by 9:30 p.m.). Like at ManRay, there are hot dancing girls dressed up like Rammstein groupies writhing in front of big video screens, and on this night the music trended toward industrial and darkwave, which I found, you know, pleasant. The hidden gem is the back room’s “Interference” sideshow, where your all-encompassing $10 cover charge also allows you in there to check out experimental music artists. I met Acton, Mass.-based performer A. Campbell Payne there; his set was heavily steeped in drone (he generally tries to soundscape with a much wider palette of “pattern, chance, time, and perception” in his tuneage, but that night he was heavily fixated on a French experimentalist whose name I didn’t write down because I couldn’t hear what he was saying). Whatever, it’s a fun night, you should go to the next one on June 13; feel free to adhere to the Jack Skellington-inspired dress code or of course your “DAVE MATTHEWS 2013 TOUR” T-shirt if you must (but please don’t), and that brings us to the new album from, coincidentally, Portland, Oregon, experimental duo Visible Cloaks, which started as a project focused on “rare groove new age music and ambient music from Japan.” The pair’s new album, Paradessence, includes the advance track “Disque,” which, between long silent breaks, consists of gentle, woozy, highly melodic experimentalism you’d imagine playing through the overheads at the Boston Aquarium.

• Greenville, North Carolina, is home to retro synthpop band Future Islands, whose new full-length From a Hole in the Floor to a Fountain of Youth includes “The Ink Well,” which combines (of course) Depeche Mode-style angst with an early Cure drum sound.

• Geez, Bleachers’ new album Everyone For Ten Minutes makes it three DIY albums in a row today! “The Van” is lo-fi bliss if you like Jose Gonzalez and old Beach Boys.

• And finally we have Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien releasing a new LP titled Blue Morpho. The title track will appeal to fans of Sigur Ros, but then again it is very immersive and melodically charming, so maybe they won’t like it, I have no idea anymore.

Featured Photo: Simon Hanes, Gargantua and Crow and Gazelle, Truth Be Told

Album Reviews 26/05/14

Toadies, The Charmer (Spaceflight Records)

I mentioned this album the other week in mindless passing, which is of course how I roll in the Playlist column. Mind you, for the record, the column’s review snippets reflect cursory, usually distracted first glances as opposed to overly long Pitchfork-style essay contest research; after all, the Playlist thingies mostly focus on advance singles, which often do suck, as any reader who has any musical taste whatsoever knows only too well. So yeah, I wasn’t impressed with this album’s title track, and am still not, but sure, there’s a lot here to like. If you don’t know, the band’s from Fort Worth, Texas, where they started as a late-’80s grunge act with a rugged, brazen southern twist, and they still have a pretty fierce following (which has nothing to do with why I gave this one a more thorough examination; that has more to do with an odd sequence of events). Any-freakin’-way, they’re usually accused of sounding like Nirvana (which I don’t agree with at all) or Pixies (slightly more accurate), but overall, I’d characterize them more as a three-way between Danzig, Pennywise and Pavement, the latter sound of which explains why I didn’t like the title track. Not exactly my jam, but on second glance it’s hard and raw and slovenly enough that I must dutifully rubber-stamp their hall pass. A-

Slim Volume, Off The Grid (self-released)

You know, folks, it’s about time I started getting some albums from serious local-to-NH bands like this one, who, like Lee & Dr. G (an arena-blues band whose album I reviewed last month), did a big album-release gig in Concord at the BNH Stage. I mean, not to make this column about me (which, OK, it really is), but yeah, it’s been very weird for me not to be inundated with promo stuff from local bands trying to get some love in this newspaper. Of course, I attribute all the shunning I’ve received to the fact that New Hampshirites have a fierce allergy to anything from Massachusetts, which includes me (I must admit the feeling’s been mutual for years, ever since the half-decade I spent in Portsmouth, N.H., where I was routinely exposed to some of the most boring fedora-hatted bar bands ever put together). So yeah, I’ve been snobby, but these guys, like L&DG, do have some potential to bring in some actual big-time record company interest (I mean come on, it happened in Seattle, so it conceivably could happen here). OK, anyway, these guys. Regular shows at Strange Brew in Manchvegas to start, where they refined their sound, which isn’t fedora-hatted at all but assuredly is deeply and accurately commercial. There’s some Tom Petty in their sound, which any idiot could identify, and some Michael McDonald yacht rock, but there’s also a northernized Kings Of Leon/Mumfords edge to it, some Minus The Bear, and (I could hardly believe this) songwriting that’s on the level of one of my favorite-ever Boston-area bands (sans the prog), The Vital Might (please go listen to their 2006 tune “Mist Of Crystals” all the way through, I beg of you, please do). These guys are right in the ballpark, and you absolutely must support them. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• This Friday, May 15, will bring with it a host of new albums, as nearly all Fridays do. But this Friday is a special one, given that college graduation season is starting to heat up, meaning that it’s time to have ChatGPT tweak your Claude-written resumé, so your Gemini AI can “target” jobs that are nearly all just fictitious “roles” created by corporate AIs for info-gathering purposes so they can send you car insurance spam, don’t you feel sooo special, in these final days of the human species? I sure do, but we’re not here to talk about that because too depressing, let’s just instead talk about all the recent music-release news that public relations AI bots have sent to my emailbox, like for instance Same Fangs, the new album from Wolf Parade/Moonface singer Spencer Krug, from Canada! Krug claims that the test-drive single, “Timebomb,” is “a song about a song about a band on tour, or rather, about the failed revision of that song, upon sadly realizing that its original message no longer rings true,” in other words it revolves around total bummer subjects, so the tune’s bummer vibe is apropos: The slow, redundant three-chord riff that composes 90 percent of the song is played on a piano with the distortion level set to Melvins, which actually makes it sound a lot more interesting and dangerous than it is, and so it actually works pretty well. Registered weird person Elbow Kiss guests on the track, which makes it a little less boring, but the net effect is like listening to two giant clams discussing their favorite acts at this year’s SXSW conference. That’s not necessarily to say I didn’t like it; I’ve heard a lot worse in just the past half-hour.

• OK, help me out, twerker people: Drake, is he in or is he out? My AI is waffling on the subject, so let’s please just move along to his new record, which is totally-not-ironically titled Iceman, like the book about the mafia contract killer guy! No, I’m sure it’s all just a misunderstanding, and besides, the publicity stunt meant to announce the release date of this album (yes, it’s officially been termed an album and not a mixtape) was a master stroke of nonsense that tapped into a rich vein of stupid in the corporate rap-pop world: Drake rented a hotel parking lot in Toronto and had a 25-foot wall of actual ice built there, and when it was finally melted by Toronto firefighters who were sick of getting yelled at by people who wanted their parking spaces back, there it was, the release date, May 15 (not to be out-stupided, Pitchfork interviewed an actual quantum physicist to predict when they’d be able to read the date)! Will this get any stupider? Yes, it is safe to assume so.

• Oklahoma-based emo-indie rockers All-American Rejects release their first album in 14 years, Sandbox, this week! The title track is catchy and weird and Van Halen-ish, and the video is even cooler, with fake Muppets committing R-rated acts of violence on the band. I approve of this message.

• And last, it’s Florescence, the new LP from British singing-songwriting waif Maisie Peters, who’s often described as sounding like Taylor Swift, which she doesn’t at all on this record’s first single, “Kingmaker,” more like a tween trying to sound like Gracie Abrams really. Mindless pastel patter for people who loved the Juno soundtrack.

Featured Photo: Slim Volume, Off The Grid and Toadies, The Charmer

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