Category: Pop

Album Reviews 22/03/17

Crowbar, Zero And Below (Mnrk Records)

’Twas only by accident that I ever discovered this New Orleans mud-metal band for myself in the first place, and for that, you’ll have to indulge a little inside baseball, apologies in advance. In 2005, around the second year I’d decided to moonlight as a music reviewer, Candlelight Records was sending me every CD they released. Those albums were never any good, and I was just about to swear off them, but I was trying to fill a column and ended up with Crowbar’s Lifesblood for the Downtrodden in my car. I couldn’t believe how awesome it was, Kirk Windstein’s ragged, uniquely badass voice and sludge riffage blasting into my face like a Frankenstein’s monster that had a personal gripe with me. You have to hear these guys to believe it, and the tradition continues here, in their 12th album, starting with “The Fear That Binds You,” a brand-flaunting exercise that sounds like early Mastodon covering Paranoid-era Black Sabbath. Windstein’s voice isn’t as insane-sounding as his “Slave No More” days, but that really shouldn’t stop you; if you’re a rivet-head who’s never heard these guys, your life is incomplete, trust me. A+

Birthday Massacre, Fascination (Metropolis Records)

This Canadian goth-techno band is still, at least to me, the gold standard for spooky 1980s ghost-pop. Some critic wrote that their 2007 full-length Walking With Strangers is the “Sgt. Pepper’s of Dark Wave,” and I’d have to agree; it’s still an unsurpassed mix of Missing Persons and Depeche Mode, the perfect dance tuneage for an ’80s-themed Halloween party. But notice I said it’s still “unsurpassed,” which is a bit of a run, there, because this crew should have surpassed it a long ago, and, well, they haven’t. The band tried some KMFDM stylings that fell flat; singer Chibi is no raging Lucia Cifarelli and should never have tried it on for size, but anyway, that brings us up to date, and to this album, which does start out on a cool-enough note with a sparkling rawk ballad in the title track. Definitely more of a pop edge than on the last few records, which is where they should be; it’s definitely their best since WWS, but all that means is WWS is still, you know, unsurpassed. A

PLAYLIST

• March 18 is our next all-purpose album release date, when you can wait outside the record store for the guy in the truck to dump out all the albums, where they will find homes in people’s cars, where the delicate CDs will eventually wind up getting Wendy’s mayonnaise spilled on them and thrown away, which is what you should do with most of those albums in the first place, use them as little single-serving plates for fast food. So that brings us to Georgia Gothic, the new album from Mattiel, a band from Atlanta that’s fronted by its namesake, Mattiel Brown, who sounds like a cross between Nico and Siouxsie Sioux, not that that means they’re forgiven for making such boring music. Take for example teaser single “Jeff Goldbum,” a tune that sounds like Garbage but without any hook whatsoever, just a medium-tempo Rolling Stones-ish groove that wanders around aimlessly looking for spare change on the street and then, finding none, ends as uneventfully as it began. Punchline to this bit is that the band played this dumb tune on Stephen Colbert’s late night TV show, which proves once and for all that Colbert needs to find some act-bookers who don’t take the first bribe some indie label (ATO Records in this case) extracts from their trenchcoat and slides over to them at the greasy coffee shop. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this would be awesome stuff if it were the first time I’d ever heard music played on an electric guitar, it’s all good, man.

• Midlake is a funny little indie-folkie-ish band from Denton, Texas, and they seem to be something of a big-hitter, an up-and-coming band on the AOR/yacht-rock scene! The band’s new LP, For The Sake Of Bethel Woods, is coming out in just a few hours and features the single “Bethel Woods,” a tune that’s sort of like if Guster had a baby with some sleepy-time 1980s AOR band like Bruce Hornsby, like there’s a sort-of-driving piano line and a hook meant for driving around in the rain looking for a 7-Eleven. It’s boring, in other words, but like I hinted, there’s money behind these guys, so the video for the tune features none other than Hollywood second banana Michael Pena, who’s just walking around the city looking kind of intense, and — wait a second, is that Trinity from The Matrix? Nope, it’s a younger Trinity, and now they’re in a church and there’s a wedding. No, wait, it’s a baptism. Nope, hold it, it’s a funeral, and now Michael Pena’s running around on the streets having memories of being a young boy or whatever. I’d rather peel potatoes for a month than ever have anything to do with this band again, honestly.

• Babeheaven is a pair of British girls who started their career as youngsters, and now no one seems to know what they are exactly. Run a search for the band’s name and you get “they’re R&B,” “they’re dream pop,” and of course Pitchfork’s “bedroom indie,” which does make sense I suppose. Whatever, blah blah blah, they’re “more mature” now, which means they have their own smartphone bills to deal with or something, I guess. The new LP Sink Into Me is kicked off by “Make Me Wanna,” which would have been a cool Portishead-ish chillout, but the tandem appearance of a crummy cheese-synth and none-too-smooth rapper Navy Blue had me bailing after about two minutes. Hard pass.

• We’ll close this out with Sonic Youth’s In/Out/In, which features unreleased tuneage from 2000 to 2010. Keeping in mind that the band peaked in 1983, I was naturally none too thrilled with “In And Out,” which comes off like a Tangerine Dream throwaway, but all the power to you if you’re a Sonic Youth completist; enjoy.

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).

Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti

Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 216 pages)

In her new novel Pure Colour, Canadian Sheila Heti imagines a new Genesis, one in which God is not yet finished with the work of creation but is just taking a break, stepping back, critically looking at what he has so far produced. “This is the moment we are living in — the moment of God standing back,” Heti writes on the first page.

And that, my friends, is the last time that this novel makes sense.

From there, Heti hurtles into a book-length word salad that is at times poignant and insightful; other times, a baffling stream of consciousness. At its best, it’s an imaginative fable about love and loss, wrapped in a blistering social critique. At its worst, which happens too often, you wonder what (and how much) Heti was drinking when she wrote it. Such is speculative fiction.

We begin in a world that is “heating up in advance of its destruction” since God has decided the first draft wasn’t good enough and a new one is needed. Like any good manager, God needs feedback, so “God appears, splits, and manifests as three critics in the sky: a large bird who critiques from above, a large fish who critiques from the middle, and a large bear who critiques while cradling creation in its arms.”

People are born from the eggs of these creatures (yes, even the bear produces eggs in this world), and take on the characteristics of their breeders. People born from fish eggs care most about the collective; people born of bird eggs care about things like beauty, meaning and order; people born from bear eggs care about a few other people: “They are deeply consumed with their own.”

Our protagonist, Mira, wished she was of bear lineage, but she, born of a bird, had the hollow bones and heart of an artist. We follow Mira around in her strange world, where she works at a store that sells expensive lamps. (This all occurs during an unspecified age before the internet, when people found jobs and housing from “little paper signs.” Mira goes to school at the prestigious American Academy of American Critics (which, in a wry twist, has international branches) where self-important students learn to “hone their insights” and to “develop a style of writing and thinking that could survive down through the ages, and at the same time penetrate their own generation so incisively.”

The school, it seems, could have been worth an entire cynical book, or at least a couple of chapters, but it is quickly dropped to explore a brief love relationship Mira has with an American orphan named — wait for it — Annie. Coincidence or something more? Hard to say. Then her father dies, and this strange little novel gets even stranger.

When Mira’s father dies, his essence seems to take over her body. For a while, the book turns into a meditation on grief, as Mira processes her loss. “She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.” She stopped caring about the business of living (though, frankly, it wasn’t like she was doing that much living before her father’s death). “It was the dead who needed our love, the dead who she wanted to be loyal to, the dead who needed us most. The living could take care of themselves, going to the grocery store in all that sunshine. It was the dead who need to be held on to, so they would not slip away. Who would save the dead from oblivion, if not the living?”

Then, Mira has an experience in which she takes the form of a leaf — a leaf in which her father’s spirit also dwelled — and they have the sort of beautiful and cleansing Kafkaesque conversations you might have if you suddenly found yourself inside a leaf. Was she dead? It seems so for a while, then she comes out of the leaf and is back with orphan Annie for a while while musing about gods, plural, specifically gods who tired people out when they wanted to stop them from doing things. “The weariest people are being the most prevented. They are the most dangerous ones, who would change the world if they could.”

Eventually, Mira’s mind-boggling dialogue comes to a close, though we are not sure what, if anything, has been accomplished, either for Mira or for the long-suffering reader.

Still, Heti proves herself a shrewd critic of modern life, as in her observation about social media:

“There were so many ways of being hated, and one could be hated by so many people. … Hate seemed to spring from the deepest core of our beings. Years later, all you had to do was peep through a peephole and there it was for anyone to see — a whole world of vitriol, entirely without end. It seemed that rage was what we were made of.”

That said, it seems that the world would be better served if she just wrote columns of cultural criticism. Maybe we are bears, and she’s a bird, building thought nests that others can’t fully see. In Mira’s world, artists who created stories, books and movies were producing their own second drafts, better versions of God’s world, as if hoping to get his (or her) attention. For the sake of the next world, let’s hope God doesn’t option this book. C

Book Notes

One of the silver linings of the pandemic was the virtual author event.

When physical bookstores were shuttered, many took to having author readings and Q&As online, which enabled people in remote locations to participate. You couldn’t get a book signed this way or shake the author’s hand, but it was still a better way to “connect” with an author than reading an interview.

Author events have now returned live in many places, but there are some bookstores that are still enabling people to watch online. Others have posted past events on YouTube, such as Washington, D.C.,’s famous bookstore, Politics and Prose. A quick Google search may find a few videos of your favorite author that will make for a more enjoyable evening than watching NFL reruns.

Here are a couple coming up of note:

Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., will have a virtual event March 14 for How She Did It(Rodale, 336 pages), by Molly Huddle and Sara Slattery, who offer “stories, advice and secrets to success from 50 legendary distance runners.”

Mystery writer Simone St. James has a new novel, The Book of Cold Cases (Berkley, 352 pages), for which she’s doing a virtual event March 17 through the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Phoenix, Arizona.

Novelist Lisa Scottoline doesn’t release What Happened to the Bennetts (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 400 pages) until March 29 but is already doing events. One virtual one will be through Friend and Fiction on Facebook Live on March 23.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk has a new book, Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama (Random House, 304 pages), for which he’s doing both live and virtual events. He’s got a virtual event March 13 through Live Talks Los Angeles. It’ll cost you $40 to get admitted, but you also get actor Jack Black, for what that’s worth.

Book Events

Author events

• AZAR NAFISI Author presents 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 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 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 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.

• ANNE HILLERMAN Author presents 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 22/03/10

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).

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