Category: Pop

The Horsewoman, by James Patterson and Mike Lupica

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Events

Author events

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

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

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

Poetry

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

Book Clubs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Album Reviews 22/02/24

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

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

Sataray, Blood Trine Moon (Scry Recordings)

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

PLAYLIST

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

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

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

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

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

At the Sofaplex 22/02/17

Kimi (R)

Zoë Kravitz, Rita Wilson.

Angela (Kravitz) listens professionally — her job for Amygdala is listening to clips recorded from a Siri/Alexa-type device called Kimi and translating, say, a request to order “kitchen towels” into a Kimi-recognized request for paper towels. She is sent streams of audio recorded from Kimi devices and decodes them in her home, where she works, exercises, occasionally sees a neighbor who has become something not quite a boyfriend (Terry, played by Byron Bowers) and does everything else in life. Angela, still healing after an assault and further distressed since the pandemic, is agoraphobic and can’t bring herself to leave her apartment, even to meet Terry for a quick bite at the food truck parked outside their apartments.

In one of the streams Kimi generates, Angela hears something more than just confusing regional slang or a common-word song title. Under a layer of loud music, she hears something that at first she thinks could be a sexual assault but then, as she digs deeper, she believes could be a murder. The more information she gathers, the more Angela realizes that she will have to leave her apartment to find help.

This Steven Soderbergh-directed movie is impressively economical — using everything in exactly the right amounts and pulling in only the characters (and only the amount of the characters and their lives) and story elements it’s going to need. At an hour and 29 minutes, it gives you just the right amount of story as well, turned up to the right speed to give you maximum tension as Angela tries to uncover what has happened and then get that information to the right people before she becomes another victim. Kimi is the sleek, well-crafted answer to the question of how to make a thriller on a budget. B+ Available on HBO Max.

No Land to Light On, by Yara Zgheib

No Land to Light On, by Yara Zgheib (Atria, 285 pages)

Americans tended to think about the horrific damage of terrorist acts as things that affect only us — the lives lost on 9/11 or in the Boston Marathon bombing, the injuries of those who live, the property destroyed and so on, right down to the perpetual annoyances that stem from these attacks, such as removing our shoes to get through airport security.

But terrorists inflict damage on their native countries and cultures, too, most notably in lasting discrimination borne of fear and suspicion. It would be hard to find a better illustration of this than in No Land to Light On, Yara Zgheib’s poignant novel about the devastation brought on two innocent lives in the wake of an executive order that temporarily suspended the entry of Syrians into the United States.

There was such an order in recent years, yes, and it is easily Googled, but for the most part, Zgheib stays clear of the politics involved and doesn’t mention the president by name. Instead she stays focused on the love story at the heart of the novel: Sama and Hadi, who meet at a social event in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and fall in love despite their vastly different circumstances.

Hadi has been admitted to the U.S. as a refugee after enduring horrific conditions in a Syrian prison — confined to a cell about the size of a coffin — during that nation’s Civil War. Sama, meanwhile, had come here as an anthropology student at Harvard, where she was studying similarities between the migratory journeys of birds and humans. She had left just before the war began and knew little of the country’s current conditions. Sama’s research informs the novel’s title and also the parallel stories the author tells about the migration of the 1,800 species of birds (out of 5,000). For example, sandpipers, also known as “red knots,” are birds “so tiny one could fit in the palm of your hand,” yet they travel each year from the Arctic to Argentina, for reasons that scientists don’t fully understand.

It’s not a spoiler to tell you that Hadi and Sama get married not long after they meet, and soon after that, conceive a child. In a wonderful scene, after learning that Sama is pregnant, they decide not to share the news with other people yet, but spend an afternoon telling inanimate objects in Boston, such as the “Make Way for Ducklings” statues in the Boston Public Garden. In this way and others, this is an extraordinarily New England book, despite its main characters being from Syria. (There’s even a somewhat comical Dunkin’ Donuts scene, when Sama goes to one for the first time and eats her first doughnut: “Her heart flapped madly in her chest. Columbus must have felt this.”)

But the couple’s brief happiness is coldly upended when Hadi is detained and then deported — because of the just-issued executive order — on his return from a trip home to bury his father. His deportation occurs as Sama, six months pregnant, gets trampled in a protest at Logan Airport, causing her to prematurely go into labor.

Again, the couple’s travails are based on real events. There were protests at airports around the country in 2017; you can see snippets of them on YouTube and Twitter. Politics aside, inasmuch as this is possible in 2022, even people who support this and similar orders understand that they impact innocent families, even as they seek to turn away those who would do Americans harm. And the harm that the order caused this fictional couple (and their newborn son) is heartwrenching, as is the auxiliary heartache of a new mother having to leave a premature baby in the care of a hospital while she herself is discharged.

Told in alternating first-person language from the perspective of Hadi and Sama, the story does not unspool in chronological order, but jumps around, eventually revealing the circumstances of Hadi’s imprisonment and arrival in America. But it never feels disjointed or complex; Zgheib is a masterful storyteller, and the novel’s only real problem is the unrelenting heartache it inflicts upon readers. That, of course, was the author’s intent: to assign faces to the effects of immigration orders, faces that are deeply sympathetic and not vaguely suspicious. No Land to Light On lands as an uncomplicated but deeply affecting novel. A

Book Notes

A decade ago, one of the bestselling parody books was Go the [expletive] to Sleep (Akashic Books, 32 pages), a riotous little book by Adam Mansbach that mimicked peaceful and comforting verse in children’s books in every regard, except for its profane mantra.

The book actually contained the full expletive on its title page, but of course, it presented a dilemma for reviewers who wrote for publications that would never print the word. But that hasn’t stopped publishers from turning out new titles in the genre, seemingly every few months. It’s as if adding an expletive to a title guarantees an extra measure of sales. The latest to capitalize on the trend is Carolina Dooner, author of 2019’s The [expletive]-It Diet, who is out this month with a follow-up, Tired As [expletive] (Harper Wave, 320 pages).

Presumably we’re tired as, you know, because children who won’t go the (you know) to sleep.

This follows 2020’s Buy Yourself the [expletive] Lilies by Tara Schuster (The Dial Press, 320 pages), 2016’s Un[expletive] Your Brain by Faith Harper (Microcosm, 192 pages) and the ever popular The Subtle Art of Not Giving a [expletive] by Mark Manson (Harper, 224 pages), which came out in 2016 but remains a fixture on Amazon’s bestseller lists.

But as difficult as it is for reviewers to write about these and other books that use expletives in the title, the motherlode of difficulty is in Penguin’s reissue this month of a book by Randall Kennedy that is titled with a racial slur. The subtitle is more respectable: “the strange career of a troublesome word.”

Kennedy is a Harvard law professor and the 20th anniversary edition of his book (Pantheon, 253 pages) is certainly timely, given the recent news coverage of Joe Rogan’s use of the word. But since I can’t even bring myself to type the word into my browser, it will be interesting to see how other media outlets deal with it. (So far, NPR discussed it with an editor’s note that said “The title of the book discussed in this segment contains a racial slur.”) It may be an excellent and important book, but it’s a marketing nightmare. I certainly will not be requesting it at my local library, which actually may bode well for sales.

Book Events

Author events

• GARY SAMPSON AND INEZ MCDERMOTT Photographer Sampson and art historian McDermott discuss their book, New Hampshire Now: A Photographic Diary of Life in the Granite State. Sat., Feb. 19, from 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• ROBERT G. GOODBY Author and professor of anthropology presents his book, A Deep Presence: 13,000 Years of Native American History. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., Feb. 23, at 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

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

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

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

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents her poetry collection, 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 22/02/17

Neuro No Neuro, Faces & Fragments (Audiobulb Records)

Meanwhile on Neptune — or in Tucson, Arizona, same thing — electronic music tinkerer Kirk Markarian is still at it, making albums of gently demented noise for people who probably need a few drinks before they crack in half. I have too many big-time connections nowadays to ever have to go back to the days when I was the eclectic-music-blogging world’s central repository for albums made by kooks, but I’ve heard this guy’s name enough times to have grown curious to see what the fuss is about. And, well. These experiments are intended to “blurr the connections between vocabulary, memory, and day-to-day processes,” with tracks that illuminate “fragments of memory and speech, as they wander out of focus in the growing aperture of time.” It’s a littered beach of sound, this thing, gentle waves of synth coming in and out of focus while found sounds, snippets of human speech and random clanks drop out of nowhere. Not a party record, but, you know. B-

Hollan Holmes, Emerald Waters (Spotted Peccary Music)

Well, I’ll be darned, it looks like fate’s decided that both of this week’s album-review slots need to be occupied with similar products; let me explain. Right after I wrote the Neuro No Neuro review for this week, I emphatically deleted a thrash metal album download offer from my email, and literally the next thing that popped up was this record, which is indeed related: Where Neuro No Neuro does have an ocean-like ambiance to its weirdness — whether or not that was Markarian’s intent — this LP from Texas music-scaper Holmes is something far more geared to normies. Holmes, a Berlin School-influenced composer, is big into Tangerine Dream, and that’s what you get here, in a broad sense, but sans any goofy krautrock edge. The ocean-like feel (and if you don’t miss that this time of year there’s something wrong with you) is baked into this stuff, its main ingredient lazily sweeping synths that sometimes form into things that recall the progressive trance of Above & Beyond. Deeply agreeable, soul-soothing stuff here. A+

PLAYLIST

• Like it or not, new rock ’n’ roll albums will magically appear in your stores and streaming services on Feb. 18, right in the middle of the worst month of the worst part of the year, not that you should dislike any of those albums for that reason alone (the music will probably be nauseating enough, just sayin’). Our solar system’s sun is a big tease right now, chuckling and yelling “Neener” as it stays too far away from us to give us New Englanders any relief from our North Pole weather, but like I said, there are albums coming out, like Are You Haunted, the fourth full-length from Australian art-indie band Methyl Ethel! I nearly wrote them off as a weak imitation of Tame Impala the first time I heard their 2017 single “Ubu,” but the tune is possessed of an instrumental break that proves they weren’t put on earth just to annoy me, so I’ll proceed with caution in the hope that new single “Proof” is a slight improvement (I don’t know diddly about their third album, Triage, so they’ve had ample time to improve in my eyes). So, the song features vocals from successful-enough singer Stella Donnelly rambling prettily over a polite staccato laptop beat, and then — yup, there it is, a really cool little melodic tangent. Works for me. You know, I have to confess that I always feel a bit funny giving love to Australian bands even today; a lot of them are really good, but it seems to be really difficult for them to break big in America. I mean, they might as well be on Mars, all things considered, but those bands rarely disappoint.

• Hurray for the Riff Raff is the Americana-indie project owned and operated by New Orleans singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra. Her seventh album, Life On Earth, is here, daring to step forward to face my judgment and wrath, coming on the heels of her sleepy 2017 album The Navigator, which I’m pretty sure I tossed into the yard sale pile for its mostly unplugged Natalie Merchant verisimilitude — yes, that’s the one. Whatever, “Rhododendron” is the single, and it does have more of a pulse than I’ve felt from her earlier stuff, not that that’s a rock-solid recommendation, mind you. It’s Bonnaroo-hipster stuff but does have something of a punk edge (every time she sings the word “boys” she sounds like she’s describing rotten eggs, which is oh so novel and edgy). The video is pretty awful — where did they get all that bubblegum? — but I don’t know, maybe someone will get something out of it. I sure didn’t.

• OK, I know I’ve heard of Metronomy, let me go look. Ah, yes, they’re an “English electronic music group formed in 1999.” That didn’t help at all, but I know I’ve heard of them, and I’m too lazy to search my archive, so let’s pretend I liked them before, at the very least to have some more positive news in this week’s thingie. Their new album, Small World, is on the way, featuring the single “It’s So Good To Be Back,” comprising a blip-bloopy elevator-music beat and some happy-but-not-aggravating vocals. Jeez, so happy, but I’m not getting angry. What on Earth is happening to me?

• We’ll pull stakes on this week’s column with the new album from boy-girl indie duo Beach House, whose new album Once Twice Melody is probably a bunch of dream-pop songs, because that’s what Wikipedia says, they do dream-pop. My stomach will be able to tolerate that, I’m sure. Yes yes, it’s like My Bloody Valentine but not messy, like your grandmother probably wouldn’t mind this at all. It’s so polite and listenable that I’m starting to get a little mad, so before I start comparing this to 1960s Spanky And Our Gang records and getting jerkish, let’s end it here.

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 22/02/10

Flee (PG-13)

This animated documentary (nominated in for Oscars in the animated feature, documentary and international film categories) tells the tale of Amin Nawabi — not, according to a story in Variety, the man’s real name, even though I believe it is the real “Amin’s” voice that we hear in the movie and he has a co-writing credit along with the director, Jonas Poher Rasmussen (whose voice is also featured). Amin is the identity created to protect the man who is now happily married — to Kaspar, who I think we also hear (I’m not sure if that’s his real name, though I suspect it is his real voice) — and living in Denmark. Amin was born in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the story of how he and his family tried (occasionally failing) to escape the country when the Soviet occupation ended and the civil war began is the story Amin is telling Jonas, a little at a time, with increasing veracity the more Amin comes to trust Jonas.

Rendered mostly in a spare but beautiful color sketch-style of animation, Amin’s story follows his family as they flee — first to Russia and then attempting to go further west, perhaps to Sweden, where his adult oldest brother already lives. Along the way, the family’s legal situation grows ever more precarious — they only ever have tourist visas in Russia — and the weight of hiding and being at the mercy of unscrupulous traffickers and even more unscrupulous Russian police drags at all of the family members, particularly Amin’s close-in-age older brother Saif.

As Amin ages, he is also coming to a better understanding of himself and his sexuality. His struggles with his fears about how his family might receive this information and struggles with the balance between living the life that might do his family the most good (one largely dedicated to work) and one that makes him feel safe and happy.

Similar to Persepolis, the animation allows you to experience Amin’s story as though you are inside his mind, with images that focus on the emotions of a moment — fear, sorrow, loneliness, excitement. It’s an engrossing way to absorb this story, while occasional archival newsclips help to ground it in a past that feels particularly relevant to this moment in world history. A Available for rent or purchase.

Ice Age: The Adventures of Buck Wild (PG)

Simon Pegg, Justina Machado.

In the grand tradition of TV series adaptations of movies starring none of the original characters and direct-to-video sequels featuring sound-alike (maybe) voices, Ice Age, the previously five-movie animated franchise, gets a sixth movie sidequel thing that is direct to streaming.

Gone are your Ray Romano and Queen Latifah and parade of big name vocal talent (except for Pegg, who voices Buck, the crazy weasel, as he apparently did in previous movies, so Wikipedia explains, which I consulted because this Ice Age saga is basically an All My Children-like web of characters, relationships and story points). Instead, Manny (voice of Sean Kenin) the mammoth, Sid (voice of Jake Green) the sloth and Diego (voice of Skyler Stone) the saber-tooth tiger are voiced by people doing a facsimile of Romano, John Leguizamo and Denis Leary, respectively. Latifah’s Ellie (now voiced by Dominique Jennings), a female mammoth who showed up in the second movie and is now Manny’s wife, and her adopted possum brothers Eddie (Aaron Harris) and Crash (Vincent Tong) are also voiced by new actors. And several characters — Sid’s grandma voiced by Wanda Sykes, Manny and Ellie’s daughter Peaches, and a Jennifer Lopez-voiced love interest for Diego — have been lopped off entirely. Which, whatever; in my review of the last movie “way too many characters” was one of my criticisms.

The main characters are sort of shunted to the side here, with the story focusing on Eddie and Crash, who are chafing under the constant sisterly bossing by Ellie and want to strike out on their own. They end up wandering back to the Lost World, the dinosaur-filled valley beneath the Earth’s surface where the characters spent some time in a previous movie, and meet up once again with Buck Wild (Pegg), the off-kilter one-eyed adventurer who enforces a “land for all animals” peace. The boys decide to hang with Buck and help him on his current adventure: stopping a big-brained dino named Orson (voice of Utkarsh Ambudkar) from upsetting the dino-mammal coexistence in the Lost World.

I don’t fault this movie for not getting back its big money players or for moving the action — set in some vague part of the franchise timeline — to some side characters. I do fault it for not being weird enough about the whole thing. Let Buck, who has a pumpkin he calls his daughter, be weirder; let Crash and Eddie be zanier. At its best, Ice Age was never great, but it had some nice Looney Tunes elements in Scrat, the saber-tooth squirrel always thisclose to getting his acorn, and in the dopey wise-guy nature of Sid. Here, everything feels muffled, like the volume has been turned down on all the wacky and goofy — even Buck feels flatter. This movie, which doesn’t even hit the 90-minute mark and is clearly being delivered as Disney+ filler, doesn’t need a super strong emotional arc but it does need to be constantly appealing to its young audience. It didn’t feel like it consistently had that big energy. One of my younger elementary schoolers proclaimed it “boring” by about 10 minutes in, though later he did decide it was “kinda cool.”

Similar to what I said in my recent review of the fourth Hotel Transylvania installment, I think this movie’s principal selling point is that it is available in your home right now for no extra cost. This movie is probably even more younger-kid-audience-friendly than that one as it has fewer adult-type problems. It is, for a day when your kids just need new content and you just need them to settle down for a bit, fine but doesn’t offer anything more. C Available on Disney+.

Oscar movie season!

Welcome to the new class of Oscar nominees! The nominations for the 94th annual Academy Awards were announced on Feb. 8 and this year there are 10 contenders for best picture (the Oscar winners will be announced on March 27). If you’re still looking to catch up on the films of 2021, the list of nominees is an excellent place to start. Here are the best picture nominees and where to find them:

• Belfast (PG-13) Kenneth Branagh wrote and directed this semi-autobiographical tale of a boyhood amid the unrest of Northern Ireland in the 1960s. It is available for rent at home and it is still in theaters, including Red River Theatres in Concord, where it returns starting Friday, Feb. 11.

• CODA (PG-13) This excellent story about a teen who discovers her singing talent and her changing relationship with her parents might be my favorite of this group. It is available on Apple TV+.

• Don’t Look Up (R) Adam McKay directed and wrote the screenplay for this satire, which you can find on Netflix, that stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence.

• Drive My Car (NR) This Japanese film also nabbed a Best International Film nomination as well as nominations in other categories and is the one movie of this group I haven’t seen yet. It is currently in theaters in the Boston area.

• Dune (PG-13) Not surprisingly, this beautiful-to-look-at adaptation also nabbed several nominations for the look and sound of the film. It is currently available for rent or purchase and will return to HBO Max on March 10.

• King Richard (PG-13) Will Smith also got a Best Actor in a Lead Role nod for this movie about Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena Williams. The movie is available for purchase.

• Licorice Pizza (R) For me, the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s was this real star of this Paul Thomas Anderson story about a precocious 15-year-old and the twentysomething girl he falls for. The movie is currently in theaters.

• Nightmare Alley (R) This movie from director Guillermo del Toro was another one that wowed me more for its aesthetics. It is currently playing in theaters in the Boston area and available via HBO Max.

• The Power of the Dog (R) This Jane Campion-directed movie nabbed a slew of nominations, including nods in three acting categories and for Campion in the director category (making her the only woman nominated in that category this year). Find it on Netflix.

• West Side Story (PG-13) Steven Spielberg’s very good adaptation of the musical got Ariana DeBose a much deserved nomination in the Best Actress in a Supporting Role category for Anita, among its many nominations. It is currently in theaters.

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!