Category: Pop

Python’s Kiss, by Louise Erdrich

(Harper, 222 pages)

The titular short story in Python’s Kiss is ostensibly about a dog named Nero whose job is to guard the 8-year-old narrator’s grandparents’ grocery store. The grandfather sleeps beyond locked doors “with my grandmother on one side and a loaded gun on the other. This is not a place where a child got up at night to ask for a glass of water.” The 8-year-old is staying there because her mother is about to have a baby, and she forms a bond with the dog. Nero, however, is infatuated with a cocker spaniel who belongs to a woman the narrator’s uncle is infatuated with. As events unfold, they intersect with the narrator’s memory of a traveling show of exotic, dangerous animals that went amok at her school.

This story, like the others in this imaginative collection, offers a smorgasbord of memorable characters. They are ordinary people in strange circumstances, often with an animal involved.

In “The Feral Troubadour” we meet a man enamored of poetry and stray cats. He lives alone in an apartment where he is decorating the bathroom with black and white tiles on which he writes excerpts from poems with a permanent marker. One day, like the narrator of “Python’s Kiss,” he receives what he perceives to be a sign from the universe, this one telling him “You must change your life.” The events that transpire are a confluence of absurdities that, against all odds, ends on a positive note. Not every story does, so enjoy it while you can.

In “Wedding Dresses,” four dresses stored in a basement closet are ruined by mold after a water pipe bursts, and their owner is confronted by her visiting niece: Why were there four wedding dresses? Who had she married and why did they divorce?

“This was suddenly like being a real parent. Having to explain her own past to a child, and do it in a way that would have little impact, either negative or perhaps overly positive.” The four-time bride goes through the story of each dress. Along the way we learn what she tells her niece and what she doesn’t. It’s a brilliant bit of storytelling.

In “Domain,” there is an afterlife controlled by corporations, which charge people for the privilege of uploading their consciousness into the one of their choice, or rather, the one they can afford. The narrator has been injured in a free-climbing accident and applied for early admission to an afterlife called Asphodel (also the name and subject of another story in the collection). When she arrives there, she sees what’s left of her carcass, but it’s not upsetting because “I have a new body now and it’s made of thought.” And she now has one overwhelming thought: how to find and eliminate — for good — her father, who she holds responsible for the death of her son.

The final story, “The Stone,” is as strange and riveting as the rest. It involves a woman who found a large, smooth stone as a child and adopted it as a kind of talisman, taking it with her to college, carrying it with her to concerts when she became a famous pianist. Stroking the stone gives her a sense of calm — until the day she has something that resembles a quarrel with the stone, and it breaks in two. As she slips from its emotional grip, we see the highlights of the stone’s existence over a billion years, the other lives it’s been part of.

There are 13 stories here, of which seven were previously published, in The New Yorker and elsewhere, but for anyone unfamiliar with Erdrich’s work this collection is a gateway drug to more. They are a great distraction from the everyday world, if there’s anything going on that you’d like to tune out for a while. A

Featured Photo: Python’s Kiss, by Louise Erdrich

Album Reviews 26/05/07

Ted Lucas, Images of Life [Disc 1: Strange Mysterious Sounds (1965-1970)] (Third Man Records)

Forgive me for being overly complicated in this bit: What we have here is disc 1 of a three-LP (vinyl) set covering the life’s work of one Ted Lucas, a fixture in the Detroit music/counterculture scenes of the 1960s and ’70s; disc 2 was released the other week, and the third won’t be released until the whole thing comes available on May 22. Everyone with me? OK, so for some reason — probably something to do with cultural preservation of early Motor City psychedelic-cum-proto-punk music, or possibly owing to the fact he felt Lucas was “unfairly” obscure — Jack White (who owns Third Man Records) wanted to release this compilation, which includes music from three of Lucas’ bands, Spike Drivers, The Misty Wizards and The Horny Toads. As well, White unearthed some rare live appearances and whatnot to complete the package. Like I hinted at earlier, it’s a historical artifact, its target taste most certainly acquired during that particular decade. To be honest — and I don’t say this just to help meet my self-imposed yearly quota of making fun of Jack White — the stuff on this set sounds as dated as first-album-era Jefferson Airplane, like, it’s trying so hard to be trippy it comes off as self-mockery — think the “Bat Dance” from the 1966 episode of Batman when Adam West couldn’t stop dancing with the hippie girl. For all I know this would be manna to 75-year-olds who miss the good old days (and sitars), but past that I have no idea what to tell you. D

Holy Wars, Shadow Work / Light Work (Pale Chord Records)

Time once again for another lady-fronted epic-metal album recommended by friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny, one that’s been in the queue since he first flipped over this Los Angeles band’s first one, after which his Substack-column co-writing daughter “Little Bean” made email-friends with Kat Leon, the band’s singer. Usually when a bandwagon-jumping L.A. outfit clambers onto my desk I can expect two things: great musicianship (bad musicians find out just how bad they are after, like, two days in that city and give up quickly) and a lack of originality (anyone remember when L.A. band Gliss tried to be relevant in the shoegaze space? Anyone at all?). The first part gets a checkmark (if anything it sounds overly tight, typical for the genre); however, I wouldn’t write off these guys as Cassyette/Evanescence clones; Leon does have a distinctive flourish to her vocal lines that matches her ’tude, which is less untouchable Amy Lee dom-princess vibe and more bemused Natasha Lyonne “where even am I” puzzlement. Stronger songs than I’d anticipated, too. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Come sail away with me, my legion of drunken scamps who still believe in rock ’n’ roll for some inexplicable, intricately convoluted reason, come have a gander at the new albums of Friday, May 8, through our mud-colored Jagermeister goggles! First up in our list of abject disappointments new records is Look For Your Mind, the latest from Long Island, N.Y., jangle-poppers The Lemon Twigs, a band semi-famous for collaborating with Bread-worshipping mope-popper Weyes Blood and perpetually unexciting veteran dude Todd Rundgren! Knowing those facts, I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from these guys’s new single “My Golden Years,” but I’ll admit that they did make a valiant effort to resurrect the ’70s-radio-bubblegum sound of The Raspberries, down to the Beatles guitars and creamy, sugar-frosted vocal lines. Much of the song is spent trying to re-create Eric Carmen’s way with a hook, which of course doesn’t happen, but like I said, they did try, which counts for — well, nothing really, but I’ll pretend it does if someone out there feels it’s necessary. Now, if you happen to be in a neo-jangle-pop band and want to sound like The Raspberries, the fastest way to create those tunes is by (A) being a decent songwriter, and (B) not even bothering to try doing it at all, since our current timeline in rock ’n’ roll has an unquenchable thirst for mediocrity, which these guys possess in big bucket-loads. I predict that they will do more songwriting with Todd Rundgren, which will deplete even more from their oeuvre, and they will eventually give up and become part of the problem, working in the music business as “talent scouts” and signing random bands to contracts they don’t deserve, but that’s enough inside baseball for today.

• Now, like I just kind-of said, being in a band that would like to try to sound like Raspberries is evidence of having good intentions at least, which I’ve never accused Canadian milquetoast-hipster clowns Broken Social Scene of harboring, but here they are, with a new album, Remember the Humans. Aside from giving us a couple of debatably decent songs from charter member Leslie Feist, Broken Social Scene has mastered the art of bland, un-catchy music, and we music critics have had to pretend to like them forever now, mostly because catchy music is bad for people’s ears because — well, it just is, never even mind why (it’s like the Aughts have never ended as far as overrated indie bands like Broken Social Scene are concerned). But fine, cut to now, and the new single “Not Around Anymore,” which sounds like a Strokes (of course) filler track that’s been put through a Jamie Lidell modulator and just aspires to be, you know, a really bad song. Let’s continue.

• Lykke Li is a Swedish dream-pop/dance-pop singer, songwriter, model and actress, because hot-looking people should never have to settle on just one attention-seeking specialty, amirite folks? Her forthcoming sixth LP, The Afterparty, is claimed to be her final one; there’s no explanation for that as far as I could find on my ’puter, but she recently had her second child and wanted to explore darker “themes of the lower self, including revenge, shame and despair,” and that’s fine with me. “Knife In The Heart” sounds like ABBA trying to be Sigur Ros, which isn’t as bad as it might look.

• And finally we have British emo/noise-rock/soft-grunge band Basement with Wired, their fifth album and first since 2018’s Beside Myself. I expect this to be good, let’s go see. Yup, nope, “Be Here Now” is just Foo Fighters’ “My Hero” in a fake beard and sunglasses, I hope this has edified you.

Featured Photo: Ted Lucas, Images of Life [Disc 1: Strange Mysterious Sounds (1965-1970)] and Holy Wars, Shadow Work / Light Work

Album Reviews 26/04/30

Khun Narin Electric Phin Band, “Sut Sanaen”/“Poet Wong Pt. 1” (Innovative Leisure Records)

This multi-generational psychedelic ensemble from rural Thailand is known for ecstatic performances that have accumulated the group a global cult following of sorts. Their forté is electrified phin music, that is to say its lead instrument is a sort of electric phin, which is similar to a lute but with a distinctive-looking head (the upper part where the tuning keys are). A full album, titled III, is due out May 15, but the two YouTube-accessible singles covered here will give the curious a fine idea of what their sound is about. The most recent, “Sut Sanean,” is the band’s take on one of the foundational melodic patterns in the musical tradition of the Isan people from Northeastern Thailand, which will probably ring no bells to readers, but suffice to explain that it sounds like it’d be right at home soundtracking an opium-den scene in a 1970s episode of Hawaii Five-O; there’s a perpetuity to the meandering soloing that’s comforting in its way. “Poet Wong Pt. 1” is slower, more tribal and melodically enchanting, characterized by soloing that would turn Jimmy Page green with envy. Fascinating stuff. A+

April + Vista, Traditional Noise (Third & Hayden Records)

Formed in Washington, D.C., in 2014, this electronic duo has refined a sound “rooted in curiosity, experimentation, and emotional candor,” this promo sheet tells me, whilst refusing to assign them a genre. Such elite-level publications as Newsweek and The Fader have also punted on classifying these guys, with the former going with “[they meld] electronic, classical, hip hop and ambient influences into something distinctly their own.” Now, I’d like to try my hand, since I don’t see any difficulty: It’s new-jack bleeding-edge trip-hop. There’s some classical in there, sure, and some Sadé and a whole host of different influences, but altogether it honestly doesn’t spell a new sound, just a (truly amazing and gorgeous) fricassee of sound that recalls such usual suspects as Zero 7, Portishead, Tricky and Massive Attack. To be sure, these two are master chefs at it, using only the best ingredients they can find, from soft bubble-dynamic incidentals to exquisite, subtle loops, all of which are pure heaven when April’s vocals weave into them. It’s electronic music for humans, a stuff that everyone needs to know about (and hopefully will). A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Awesome, we’ve already escaped the month of April with our lives, so it’s time to look at the first Friday-load of albums to be released in May, on May 1 to be precise! But first: I was a bit remiss in not mentioning the 25th Coachella music festival that went on during mid-April, which I mostly ignored, not because I wasn’t seeing any news about it (quite the contrary, since late March, half the stuff in my emailbox’s recycle bin has been from promoters, bands and public relations hacks telling me about Coachella appearances — like the one from disposable techno singer Lisa that I got trolled into talking about in the April 16 issue) but because I had almost no interest in the artists whatsoever. This year’s Coachella was — um, eventful, in case you missed it; Justin Bieber dragged an uncomfortable-looking Billie Eilish onstage to lip-synch “One Less Lonely Girl” at her; there was an appearance from Nine Inch Noize (i.e., Trent Reznor & Co. with Boys Noise, the latter of whom added nothing more interesting to goth anthem “Closer” than an over-extended electro-drop), and Karol G become the first Latina to headline one of the main stage’s nights. Other than that it was a Nylon-directed clickbait affair, with two headlining nights from Hollywood’s 2026 Nepo Baby Of The Year Sabrina Carpenter, whose 15 minutes should hopefully be up soon (she had awkward guest appearances from a bizarre array of A-List actors that included Will Ferrell, Susan Sarandon, Samuel L. Jackson, Geena Davis and, um, Sam Elliot; the whole thing came off like it was cooked up by the entire editorial staff of Billboard sitting around plotting in a smoke-filled hall, eating nothing but leftover cafeteria meatloaf until they came up with the right names). Sets from Röyksopp, Armin van Buuren and Yamagucci would have interested me, though not enough to give up my snacks for two weeks, so I didn’t attend, not that the trust fund crowd would have left me any VIP passes anyway (those sold out in minutes, which tells you about the bougie crowd that shows up at that thing and buys $12 Cokes), and P.S., I’m not expecting to be there next year either. And that brings us to North Carolina mixed-genre-pop-folkies Hiss Golden Messenger, whose new album I’m People spotlights the single “Shaky Eyes,” an AOR-geared tune that sounds like Guster possessed by ’70s-era Fleetwood Mac, or vice-versa; it’s the sort of tune someone would fall asleep to while waiting for their kid to try on new jeans at K-Mart, if there were still K-Marts around.

• Speaking of music to nod off to, Akron, Ohio, fedora-hatted bar-pop duo The Black Keys are at it again with a new album, titled Peaches, which opens with “Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire,” a tune that will make you think of Calexico if they had no pulse at all.

• Next it’s certifiably crazy ’90s alt-pop queen Tori Amos, whom we last encountered in 2025 when she surprise-released the Music of Tori and the Muses album as a companion work to her illustrated children’s book Tori And The Muses. Her new LP In Times Of Dragons includes the single “Shush,” which is of course composed of loud, overly bombastic piano cranked to 11 and a funereal vocal line that sounds like something Wednesday Addams would sing if her tarantula died. Allll set with this.

• Lastly it’s Fort Worth, Texas-based grunge-punk band Toadies with their first album in nine years, The Charmer. You young whippersnappers probably know as much about Toadies as you do Everclear, and no one could blame you. The new album’s title track is rugged, noisy, punkish and basically as unlistenable as ever.

Featured Photo: Khun Narin Electric Phin Band, “Sut Sanaen”/“Poet Wong Pt. 1” and April + Vista, Traditional Noise

In Trees, by Robert Moor

(Simon & Schuster, 372 pages)

“A tree is not just a thing made up of bark and leaves and sap and wood. At its core, a tree is not even really a noun. It is more like a verb.”

With that musing, journalist Robert Moor puts readers on notice that In Trees aspires to be a combination of qualities he ascribes to trees: “something inventive, exacting and long-lasting. Something wise.” He largely succeeds. In Trees entwines a decade of hands-on research — to include climbing trees, sleeping in them and protesting in them — with lyrical philosophy. The result is an exploration of everything even remotely related to trees.

If, Moor writes, “we could watch the full life cycle of an oak play out in a few seconds, it would look as violent as a fireworks display.” He delves into the three simultaneous processes that result in a mature tree — branching, pruning and gnarling — and proposes that all of life follows much the same pattern. “In one sense, they are nothing more than very big plants,” he writes, but they take hold of the human imagination in a way that other plants don’t, almost god-like in the way that they outlive human beings and provide for us.”

Moor has been interested in trees and their significance ever since he spent time at a monastery in India and visited the site of the Bodhi tree, where the Buddha is believed to have achieved enlightenment. (Moor describes the tree as “a huge ficus with low crooked pale arms propped up by metal crutches, like some kind of decrepit extraterrestrial.”)

But mild interest turned to fascination when he, like Thoreau, went to the woods to live, moving from a New York City apartment to a cabin in British Columbia. For a while it was enough to sit under trees and think about them, but one day Moor felt the urge to climb one, something he hadn’t done since he was a kid.

The urge, however, was thwarted by fear, and so he sought out an instructor, a British man who sees tree climbing as a lost human skill. Under the guidance of this man (who never wears shoes, except when rock climbing, and sees the destruction of a tree as similar to the harpooning of a whale), he comes to see tree climbing as a form of “rewilding” — rewiring the brain in healthy ways.

Later he travels to the World Bonsai Convention near Tokyo, where he considers the question “What is a tree?” in the company of people who snip and trim them into myriad shapes, and later he attempts to nurture a bonsai himself with fairly disastrous results. (After he failed to water it for a while, he writes, “it had taken on a raw-spined, mangey look, like a former show poodle gone feral.”) There was, it seems, no limit to his travel budget. He goes to Papua, in Indonesia, where a tribe called the Korowai lives in treehouses deep in a jungle and mysteriously open themselves up to anthropologists and writers gaping at their way of life; getting there requires more than four hours of walking. With his husband, he goes to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, searching for the “very stem of the human family tree,” in the form of Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old fossilized remains, weirdly named after a Beatles song. Then on to Tanzania, searching for wild apes, another component in the human family tree. This is a serious amount of branching out from the core topic.

Nowhere, however, does he stray so far from the Joyce Kilmer vision of trees, however, as when, mid-book, he departs on a story we don’t see coming: how, on a genealogical project with his father, they are confronted with the knowledge that they are descended from a southern physician who owned enslaved people and had children with at least one of them. This leads Moor to track down a cousin he had never known about, a woman who has Black heritage and is a family physician in California. They get to know each other and ultimately take a road trip to Alabama together to visit various civil rights monuments and even try to track down the grave of the enslaved woman who was the genesis of their shared history.

The story fits within the theme of the book in two ways: Moor’s exploration of family trees, and, in a more sinister way, the horrific lynchings of the Jim Crow era in which “Southerners deliberately refashioned trees into murder weapons — murder weapons that lived on for hundreds of years, often in places like the town square — to remind the town’s Black residents to remain subservient.”

It is a dark and poignant chapter that is a startling departure from the rest of the book, although Moor does do a fair bit of preaching about what’s been called the “Great Uprooting” — the abandonment of close-to-the-land lifestyles caused by industrialization and other forces. It was, he says, a change in both the soil and the soul.

Moor, who for the most part nicely blends humor and serious reflection, previously won praise for a similar book, On Trails, which won the National Outdoor Book Award in 2017. In Trees seems a sequel of sorts, fortuitously timed for your celebration of Arbor Day, April 24. You are celebrating Arbor Day, aren’t you? It would surely please Moor, who confesses that he hopes to “arborize humanity” with this book. This is his core advice: “Learn to branch out like a tree, to let go like a tree, to weather hardship like a tree, to rise above like a tree, to set down roots like a tree.” And maybe go climb a tree, as well, spider monkey. B+

Featured Photo: In Trees by Robert Moor

Strangers, by Belle Burden

(The Dial Press, 241 pages)

After Belle Burden and her husband bought a house on Martha’s Vineyard, they became interested in ospreys. Raptors that mate for life, the birds live near water, and a pair nested on Burden’s property, to the family’s delight.

The ospreys are a motif threaded through Burden’s new memoir, Strangers, born of a viral New York Times essay titled “Was I Married to a Stranger?” about how Burden’s husband abruptly moved out when she learned he was having an affair, leaving her to question whether she ever knew the man she’d been married to for two decades.

After the essay was published, Burden received shaming emails, some calling her a bad mother for casting the father of her children as a weapons-grade jerk. But she also got notes from people who said her story helped them get through their divorce. And she had always wanted to be a writer, a dream cast aside by early harsh feedback and a law degree.

Throw in Burden’s lofty pedigree — John Jay and the Vanderbilts are in her family lineage — and of course, publishers wanted her to tell more. The memoir has gotten widespread publicity, from People magazine to Town & Country.

But this isn’t so much a book about a celebrity divorce as it is a book about ordinary heartbreak. Burden begins by recounting the details of the evening when she listened to a voicemail from a man who said her husband was having an affair with his wife. She confronts James — the useless pseudonym she gives her husband (his real name is a click away on Google) — and he assures her the relationship is meaningless and will end. But the next morning he tells her he wants a divorce. “You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it,” he says. Burden was leveled. As she tried to get answers from James, he grew colder.

As she wades into legal machinations of divorce, she reflects on their courtship and the life she had enjoyed until that point.

To the reader there are many red flags. James has a bad-boy history and a controlling nature: Three weeks after they started a romantic relationship, he said, “Tell me you love me” to her. When, after having three children and staying home to care for them, she gets a job offer, he decides the answer is no. He becomes increasingly obsessed with his work; she, increasingly obsessed with family life.

After James left, everything about Burden’s life was cast in a different light, even her custom of sending Christmas cards every year. When holiday cards began to arrive from married friends, she tore them up; they seemed boastful, she writes, and a painful reminder of what she no longer had. She vowed to never send Christmas cards again.

There is little in the way of mystery here, but for how the court case turns out — whether Burden gets to keep the two homes she bought with the entirety of her trust funds, or whether her husband, a hedge-fund manager, gets half of them. It’s important to note that James has told The New York Times that his recollections of some events are different from hers, as is his assessment of what kind of father he is to their children.

The real-time action in Strangers spans just the timeline of the divorce, from her husband telling her he was done to the finalization of the courts, the ospreys accompanying us all the way. This is a bit predictable, as is the self-actualization Burden reaches. No memoir of misery is complete without the realization that all the pain was somehow worth it. Strangers is well-written but also well-trod. B+

Featured Photo: Strangers by Belle Burden

Album Reviews 26/04/23

Hollan Holmes, Inside the Sound of Decay (self-released)

Nice surprise here. Usually when an album waddles in here claiming to be “ambient,” I expect to hear something chintzy and low-rent like Daedalus or whatnot (if you don’t know who Daedalus is, count your blessings), but wow, this Texas-based producer is doing a lot here, so much so that such zines as Sonic Immersion and Ambient Visions have sat up and taken notice. Yes, there’s a lot of barely filled space in the tuneage, but this is no Tales From Topographic Oceans; in fact I got the sense that Holmes was constantly ready to start rocking out, which he does almost in clockwork fashion every couple of minutes or so, tabling some next-level video game-soundtracking-ish gravitas, retro Tangerine Dream techno, or even more retro-sounding Return To Forever ’80s prog. Matter of fact, toward the latter, I’d say that’s what this record evinces more than anything else, a nod to ’80s snob-rock, not that there’s anything wrong with that at all, particularly given the state of the art. A+

Reba McEntire, “One Night In Tulsa” (Nine North Records)

OK, stay calm, hipsters, there’s a gag in here somewhere. Reba is something of a running joke in my household, given that my wife’s from Texas (I can get her to start twanging like a complete hillbilly if I walk around the house doing my Foghorn Leghorn-meets-Deliverance-guy imitation for a few minutes); like, whenever there’s nothing even mildly interesting on cable (when is there?) I ask her if she wants me to put it on Reba on CMT. Anyway, this (of course) overblown, over-produced, Celine Dion-style yell-ballad single is pretty freaking good if you enjoy having your lacrimal glands squeezed like lemons (I don’t, but the last Wicked movie did have me sniffling through most of it, which was somehow soul-enriching). But the funny bit here is that along with this tune, she’s releasing a bunch of new singles and mini-EPs and such over the next couple of weeks, which is evidence that the music industry is taking its product-release-schedule ideas from the rap world. Now, if that’s not hilarious, I don’t know what is. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The new music albums scheduled to be released this Friday, April 24, are on the docket, and, as always, I am full of hope that at least one will be decent when I preview them for you in this multiple award-winning music-preview column. Speaking of that, a lot of people message me with questions like, “Hey, man, what is your writing process, like, how does your tummy withstand all the horrible music you expose yourself to on a weekly basis, and plus also, P.S., I hate you forever because of what you said about the new ___ album, why are you so stupid?” Well, that’s a two-part question, so after endeavoring to triangulate the hypotenuse of the biscuit, I’ll reveal my writing process, which is a simple one: You see, ever since I was old enough to construct a run-on sentence — I think I was in second grade — every time I see a blank page, be it physical sheet of ink-ready whatever, like a priceless ancient Egyptian scroll, or a virtual void like a Word document window that’s empty except for a popup bubble of Progressive Insurance spam, I feel compelled to fill it with stuff. That’s the secret, folks. Born writers — and I consider myself to be one, given that I’ve published two obscure books and “penned” (now there’s a word that needs to die) a music column for 23 years now — don’t know what “writer’s block” is even like. Now as to the second segment of the question, the answer can be found within the verbiage of the first segment: I’d be a lot less stupid if 98 percent of the music I listen to every week in order to fill this space with stuff weren’t so bloody awful, boring and/or derivative. While I’m at it, I may as well go full meta with a confession: Like most weeks, today I tried to write most of the opening riff of this multiple award-yadda yadda before even looking at the list of new albums I’ll cover here. So let’s do that now, look at the list. Ah, here’s one that’ll make a nice curveball, put on your cowboy hats, fam, it’s Georgia blockhead Jason Aldean with his 12th LP, Songs About Us! Will there be a politically annoying video for the new single, “Dust On The Bottle,” like when he did the blockheaded video for his 2023 tune “Try That in a Small Town,” or is the new one just a normal drinking song? Yup, it’s the latter, they’re sitting on stools, just pickin’ and grinnin’, you know how it goes, the tune rips off the riff from Electric Light Orchestra’s “Do Ya,” and it’s about drinking, what more do you people even need?

• Meghan Trainor, now there’s a familiar name, the gal who did the novelty twerking song “All About That Bass,” were you aware of that silly thing or were you gainfully employed and happily existing without twerking songs? She grew up in Nantucket, Mass., which automatically qualifies her as a nepo baby; her parents are jewelers, on Nantucket, do you have any idea what a string of plastic Mardi Gras beads costs in a Nantucket gift shop, probably $8,000 plus Massachusetts tax! But wait, she’s not just a nepo baby, she’s also a one-hit wonder who hasn’t broken the Top Ten since “…Bass,” but maybe “Still Don’t Care” from her new album Toy With Me will break the spell — nope, it’s just “All About The Bass” if The Corrs had done it. Avoid.

• Is it OK to talk about Foo Fighters again (not that I want to) or is Dave Grohl still canceled for being creepy? Whatever, their new one, Your Favorite Toy, includes its title track, which is pretty neat if you ever liked No Wave music, and I hope you did.

• We’ll call it a multiple award-winning column with Canadian indie band Metric, whose new LP, Romanticize The Dive, features the single “Time Is A Bomb,” a listenable-enough song that’s part Garbage and part Echosmith, I don’t hate it.

Featured Photo: Hollan Holmes, Inside the Sound of Decay and Reba McEntire, “One Night In Tulsa”

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!