Category: Pop

Ashnikko, Demidevil (Parlophone/Warner)

Eh, this is OK for what it is, a nauseating wad of enthusiastically moronic, hip-hop-infused bubblegum roughly in the vein of Billie Eilish and whatnot, in other words blocky, straightforward YouTube-pop that gets to the (more or less) melodic point. The 24-year-old from North Carolina struck a vein of TikTok gold with the viral “Stupid” (featuring Yung Baby Tate, the daughter of former Arrested Development singer Dionne Faris), and is now poised, she hopes, to break a bit bigger in the States than she has in the U.K. Place your bets; she’s obviously got a lot of competition, meaning every Tumblr girl with good teeth and a webcam, but like I said, it’s OK, fronting boomy post-Avril Lavigne righteousness on the Kelis-guested “Deal With It” and a decently bloopy hearing-test beat on “Slumber Party” (alongside Princess Nokia). (OK, I know I’ve been remiss in covering the flood of hilariously disposable TikTok divas, and I’ll readily admit that her social media-professed fascination with intersectional feminism is probably already so, like, totally 2019, but I gotta start somewhere, right?) C

Cult of Luna, The Raging River (Red River Records)

Awesome, a new Nile album, it’s been a while! Wait, what, this isn’t Nile? Well, I never! Who — exactly who — is this then, sounding like Nile, with a side of Silkworm, I demand an answer this instant! Wait, Cult of Luna, you say? I thought they were just a permanent slow-math-metal fixture, destined to be trapped on the Epitaph Records label forever, or whatever indie it was. Nope, it’s them. Figures. I’d kept forgetting to write a little bot that would delete any promos like this from landing safely in my email lest I end up listening to it by mistake, but here it is. They sound a little different for the first eight minutes or so (roaring-drunk-pirate-bellowing vocals, slow doom-metal guitars, stormy proto-emo angst) but then come the pinched math chords, fortified with more yo-ho-ho Blackbeard roaring, and of course no guitar solos. It doesn’t seem like this’ll ever end, you know? C

Retro Playlist

It was February 2013 eight years ago. Let’s commemorate that week, shall we, by briefly looking at the dilemmas on whose horns I was … you know, dealing with or whatnot, on these pages.

Emmylou Harris’ Old Yellow Moon album was on the way, which found her teaming up with Vince Gill and her old guitarist Rodney Crowell in a cohort-palooza of proper bluegrass.

That was nice and everything, but this column’s main focus that week was, as usual, two albums, one of which was High Beams, from a duo calling themselves Javelin. Released through David Byrne’s Luaka Bop record label, it was a pretty amazing achievement in Battles-like tech-indie, at least insofar as the vocals weren’t the same old tedious Beach Boys-nicking that the band’s contemporaries (Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, etc. etc.) were getting away with. I actually liked that record, and said so: “Javelin is a pair of guys who squeeze every resistor for every bit of worth on the technical end, but my God, someone took some advanced voice lessons — the vocals at startup tune ‘Light Out’ could be mistaken for Yes’ Jon Anderson’s sweet unobtrusive falsetto.”

Still a highly recommended album, as is the other album I talked up that week, Fear Inside Our Bones from Florida roots-emo/radio-rock dudes The Almost. I suppose you could have tagged them as kind of a metal band, but my first impression was a “toned-down Iggy, next-gen emo, or Collective Soul redux, depending on how you look at it.” In other words, the band was slightly difficult to pin down style-wise, but after charting in the Top 200 in 2009, they were more accessible than before. I particularly liked the tune “Ghost,” saying that it’s made of “a few no-wave sounds soldered onto ’70s Foghat-style blues — there’s no doubt in my mind I’ll hear that one in a movie theater lobby or something and won’t be able to remember who the band is for the life of me.”

I still haven’t heard it played at a movie theater or a sports bar, so there went that theory. It’s still pretty awesome, though.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Feb. 12 is a Friday, which means that there will be a new set of random albums available for sale in the stores and whatever, and now let’s talk about hipster rocker Ariel Pink, the one-time Lilys member who has been trolling his fans and the music media for over a decade now. His hobbies include posing as a really crazy political extremist, which had gone largely unnoticed until the other week, when I wrote a piece on Medium.com about him. To my knowledge, no journalist has ever come out and accused him of being an Andy Kaufman-style super-troll (one YouTube commenter said that’s exactly what Pink is), and there’s the outside possibility that I’m wrong (I’m not), but he pulled a too-obvious publicity stunt in the wake of the January 2021 invasion of the U.S. Capitol that instantly put him in the same league as Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat). He actually got interviewed on the Tucker Carlson Show by claiming that he was dropped by his record company “simply for attending the event,” which did cause a bit of a stir. No one actually did have any video or photographic evidence of Pink hanging out at the rally that led to the insurrection; there was just a mysterious Instagram post that “outed” him, which later resulted in a tweet from his record company claiming they’d dropped him. Long story short, fans and casual observers who’ve been well aware of Pink’s over-the-top pranking over the years did notice a particular clue that gave up the jig. I’m pretty proud of this journalistic moment, but I won’t take up this whole space by elaborating further. If you want to read about it for some ungodly reason, just google “Eric Saeger Medium” and click on the first link you see. The story will be in the list.

• Speaking of intolerable college-pop bands, look guys, it’s Philadelphia/Brooklyn-based one-hit-wonders Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s new album, New Fragility, fresh out of the oven! The band hasn’t charted since 2011, back when half the emails in my inbox were from public relations hacks trying to get me to write about the band’s Hysterical album (even after I’d already done so), but here we are again, I can hardly contain my enthusiasm! The latest single, “Where They Perform Miracles,” basically rips off Bright Eyes, which actually might be a selling point to some of you people. It’s an OK-sounding indie-folk strum-fest, naturally without a discernible hook, but plenty of strummy, alt-folkie vibe.

• Man, I don’t know how people can stand what passes for “music journalism” these days, really. It’s always the same annoying overuse of litotes (double-negatives — for example, writing “not bad” instead of “good”) just to fill space. There’s a new album from dream-pop duo Sports, called Get a Good Look Pt. 1, and this is what UnderTheRadar said about it: “’Never Know,’ the latest track from the band, wastes no time in delivering the band’s established blend of indie pop and funk, infused with touches of psychedelia.” Why would some band waste any time in the first place, right? And why didn’t the writer just say, ‘It sounds like the Bee Gees singing underwater, like everything else they do’?

• Finally, L.A. indie band Bodies of Water releases Is This What It’s Like this week. Test-drive single “Every Little Bird” starts off like a Rocky Horror bit, then becomes the boring Brooklyn-hipster gymnasium-pop nonsense I expected, yay.

Practice, Not A Game (self-released)

Practice is the stage name of one Michael Tapper, a New Yorker who’s played drums for We Are Scientists, Bishop Allen and a couple of other bands. The nom is an in-joke that I suppose is funny to some; the backstory is that NBA great Allen Iverson kept repeating the word during an interview to troll the gathered press corps who were on his case for not showing up for team practices. And that’s about as deep as things get these days with one-man one-offs, not that I’m trying to put a hex on Tapper if he’s going to go further with this project, a sometimes-deep-but-mostly-not stab at Hot Chip-ish house. It doesn’t hurt that Tapper’s voice sounds similar to that of TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe in mellow mode a lot of the time; with all the from-the-mountaintop reverb the beats get, a voice like that makes everything more downright approachable. Weird, when he harmonizes with himself it sounds like Duran Duran. A

Asiahn, The Interlude (Since The 80s Records)

Imagine Toni Braxton evoking Lorde on a Smoky Robinson tip. Then imagine that sort of #BlackLives-steeped vibe finding a home on a soul-centric record label that’s trying to be the polar opposite of Motown in the area of artist-exploitation. That’s a logical direction in which to turn for any singer, let alone one who’s written tunes for Pitbull, Drake, Lil Wayne and so on, someone who wants a solid platform for the out-and-proud songs she’s held in reserve for however long now. Rather than beating the silly love song horse to death, the theme of this EP is self-care expressionism, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t romantic or whatnot. In fact it is, which is of course quite fitting in these times of endless isolation and second-guessing everything we do. “My World” kicks off the festivities with a 1970s-bedroom-radio miasma; “Gucci Frames” mixes understated trap beats with megaphone-whispered nothings muttered into the void; “Messed Up” tables waterlogged post-bling afterparty ambiance. A

Retro Playlist

This week we revisit a couple of albums I covered exactly six years ago, in 2015. Back then, the albums I was actually kind of psyched about included Colin Hay’s Next Year People. Hay used to be in Men At Work, so I was mildly excited to see if he could recreate the “magic” of their ’80s hit “Down Under,” but of course he couldn’t, because if he had I would have found joy for a few moments. No, instead it was a lame Van Morrison type song which, obviously, warrants no further examination.

Anyway, the main focus that week was the usual two-album tandem, first focused on Hyperview, an album from Pennsylvania band Title Fight. The short-version takeaway was “sometimes a band’s sound changes so much they should really just change their name,” being that the band had suddenly sworn off the Drive Like Jehu roots-emo approach of their first album and gone almost totally Joy Division. Today, I have no idea why I said that the switch was a display of good judgment, seeing as how plenty of people actually like Drive Like Jehu. Maybe I was trying to tick those people off, which is a pretty safe bet, but then again, maybe my stomach was, at that time, fully capable of tolerating yet another band that ripped off Joy Division. I really have no idea.

The other defendant that week was a buzz band from Los Angeles called Street Joy, with their self-titled EP. Not that I don’t have more important things to do than Google the band to see if they’re still together, but there was promise, at least with the opening song, “Wandering in Your Mind.” The idea there was “BRMC-meets-Strokes lo-fi garage-raunch, decorated nicely enough with some old-school Iggy hollering.” Another song, “Moon,” sounded “like Strokes doing a slow, bullhorn-powered version of something Alice Cooper left off the Billion Dollar Babies album.” In other words it was mostly Strokes pickpocketing, which was, I stated, “worthy of placement on a Ford Focus commercial, if that sells you.”

Given that I haven’t heard a peep from the band since 2015, they probably didn’t even soundtrack a My Pillow commercial, which is just sad.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• On Friday, Feb. 5, all the latest CDs come out! Remember when that used to mean something, when all the new records would come out on Tuesdays, and your edgy, hip record store would write all the new albums in erasable Sharpie on a whiteboard, and when the clerk wasn’t looking you’d draw little skulls and other edgy transgressive things on the whiteboard, and it was all so fun and exciting, and then everything went online and rock ’n’ roll died its last death? Oh, well, Tower Records and Strawberries and all those things are all gone, converted into Dave & Buster’s and emergency soup kitchens or whatever, but I’ll have you know that there are still several record stores in New Hampshire, like Bull Moose in Portsmouth, Metro City and Music Connection in Manchester, Pitchfork in Concord, and four different Newbury Comics. To be honest, I haven’t been in a record store for a year, because of the plague, but anyway, some or all of our local record stores will be blessed with brand new stuff on the 5th, starting with Medicine At Midnight, the newest “slab” from corporate grunge charlatans Foo Fighters! Supposedly the band recorded this album in a haunted house, like weird things kept happening during the recording sessions. The weirdest thing I can imagine is my actually being impressed by the album’s second single, “No Son of Mine,” but here we go, it’s queued up on the YouTube. Eh, it’s OK, a punkish, grindy tune that’s part WWE entrance theme and latter day Jello Biafra. Pointless but OK.

• British rapper Slowthai has finally gotten around to releasing his second album, Tyron, which is on the way and scheduled for a Feb. 5 release date. The lead single, “Mazza,” features A$AP Rocky as the main guest, adding his usual spit-takes to Slowthai’s agile Eminem imitation. The beat is made of creepy, Postal Service-like minimalist weirdness, if that floats your boat.

• Haha, I thought the whole “John Carpenter making albums” thing was just a passing meme, but here’s another one, titled Lost Themes III: Alive After Death. The idea behind this is that Carpenter didn’t use all the two-note songs he wrote for his movies, like the two-piano-note theme to Halloween, the murky mess he wrote to soundtrack The Thing, you know, all those things that sounded like Keyboard Cat but in real life, not a meme. The sort-of-title track, “Alive After Death,” is just spooky and whatnot, the backdrop to an animated film. It’s like the intro to that movie Creepshow but not with Scooby Doo-level animation.

• Finally this week, it’s The Weather Station’s new album, Ignorance, hot off the presses and whatnot! If you’re the type who likes decent-enough folktronica and whatever, you might enjoy this album, because frontwoman Tamara Lindeman is like a cross between Sia and Aimee Mann. “Tried To Tell You,” the single, isn’t bad at all, like a low-budget Lana Del Rey with a pulse.

Cyrrca, Cyrrca (self-released)

By now, you’re probably in the habit of heading for the hills whenever I start talking up an ambient album, but in this case I’d encourage you to stick around, as this isn’t just composed of a bunch of accidental “hey, that sounds kind of neat” finds. I mean, yeah, it’s that too, but what electronic record isn’t these days, and besides, this is actually based on the mononymed artist’s world travels over the last several years, to Turkey, Ireland and other places, toward the goal of “spiritual enlightenment.” Wait, don’t laugh at that bit, we could all use it, for sure, after a year like the last one, and it doesn’t hurt that he threw together a few one-off collaborations while journeying, guest feats that included rappers, weird instrumentalists and all that stuff. No, it’s not some soundtrack to a movie that’ll never be made (all of the songs have videos, while we’re here), more of a high-end sonic affair in the vein of Aphex Twin, Moby, Massive Attack, that sort, but at a more un-funked, chill level. There’s an art book that goes with it, by the way. A+

Everdawn, Cleopatra (Sensory Records)

Every time a new girl-fronted symphonic-metal album comes barreling in here, I get to wondering if the tunes might actually possess the power to inspire their listeners to buy actual opera CDs, like “Cavalleria Rusticana” and “Pagliacci,” the two most-often-paired-up operas when you go to, you know, the opera. I know that might sound a little crazy, but if you’d buy this album more for Alina Gavrilenko’s soaring soprano than the polite Wayne’s World-style power-metal on board, face it, bub, you might want to go all the way and drop a few hundred to take your date to see good ole “Cav and Pag” at the Boston Opera House, if the current horror ever ends, of course. Aside from that, there’s really very little to add here in the way of music reviewin’ per se. If you’ve heard Trans Siberian Orchestra or Visions Of Atlantis, you’ve already been here, and, fact is, Alina’s capable but not remarkable. But don’t let that stop you; all I’m trying to accomplish is to get you to think for just five seconds about how cool it would be to brag to your gamer friends about going to an actual opera. Try it, man! (Ha ha, their Facebook has one of the guys getting his picture taken with the actually-named Nicko McBrain from Iron Maiden. Hee HEE, he’s giving a thumbs up, an expression of approval commonly exhibited by humans!) B

Retro Playlist

Two up from the Way-Back Machine, this time from 2015, which seems like a million years ago, doesn’t it? That was the same year as Bob Dylan’s Shadows In The Night and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly. Now do you remember? Ha ha, I don’t.

This week in 2015, I covered two albums, the first of which was Black Coffee Sigh, the second album from Boston-based bar band Sunshine Riot. It’s hard-ish rock, not all that well-produced, but, as I alluded to back then, they are/were something of an area band, and “I only write about albums like this when they’re from decent local artists, not because I expect big-production guitar-rock to overthrow trap-snap diva-bling anytime soon, even if the fantasy is comforting to some.”

Anyhow, the band’s was taking on “the doomed mission of bringing back rootsy bar-band rock, specifically southern-rock, more or less,” and I was pretty nice to them overall. There was opening tune “Black Coffee Sigh Side A,” “a doomy/crunchy thing that makes like a Ministry warmup,” but from there the record becomes an amalgam of Hank Williams Jr. quasi-cowboy-punk (“This Is a Raid”), sweetly rendered Allmans nicking (“Better Days”), Doobie Brothers head-drug-pop (“Liz Stone”) and blissy but faceless ’70s filler (“Dead Baby Cocaine Blues”). A band you might like to see live, I suppose.

The other one that week was The Mindsweep, the then-new LP from U.K.-hard-rawk outfit Enter Shikari, a record I did actually like, more or less. That album was their fourth and found the crew “comfortably at ease with their ingredients, a unique mishmash of grime-rap, bass-driven Meshuggah-style death-metal and, well, screamo, if you must know.”

But don’t let the screamo bit scare you away, I tried to say. The album is “a vision of early-aughts Linkin Park reborn as a po-faced limeys, with a tightness that would give Pendulum night sweats if they ever had to face them at a metal-palooza.”

The fact that Enter Shikari is awesome is probably old news to you, if you’re into neo-metal-ish rock, but, anyway, that

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The next catchall date for CD releases is Friday, Jan. 29, a day that will live in infamy, because oh noes, I have to deal with Revolutionary Love, the newest LP from rabies-frothing grunge-folk howler-gibbon Ani DiFranco! You all know this Buffalo, N.Y.-born busker’s story, like, she became emancipated at age 15, leaving her mom’s to strike out into the great Unknown, which is super-hard when you’re the child of MIT grads who were actually happy to just be able to watch The Price Is Right in peace without having to deal with Ani’s constant barking at postmen and meter-readers and whatnot. I haven’t had the pleasure of dealing with her last few albums, all of which, like the ones before them, were released on Ani’s own record label, with crayon album-cover art or whatever, but don’t knock it, because it’s not everyone who can just simply produce and release and market their own albums, especially with only the support of MIT-grad parents to count on, so you shut up right this minute while I go and damage my brain to the strains of the album’s title track. It is a slow song, like a warped outtake from a 1980s Dionne Warwick album, and the lyrics are about dealing with anger and empowering oneself. Good heavens, this dumb song is over seven minutes long, and I must shut it off right now.

• Speaking of the ’90s, Goat Girl is a new-ish all-girl post-punk band from England that sounds like Hole, but with less throwing stuff, not that their 2018 semi-hit “The Man” wasn’t somewhat edgy. On All Fours, their newest, streets on the 29th, led by the single “Sad Cowboy,” an eclectic little ’90s-chill song that has elements of Natalie Merchant, Calexico and, for no reason whatsoever, an occasional break interpolating 1970s disco drums. It’s not as annoying as I just made it sound, so go listen for yourself if you’re even slightly curious.

• Dum de dum, boom boom kapoosh. Huh, what’s this, it’s Americana singing person Langhorne Slim, who literally named himself after the town he was born in. Now there’s an idea, I’m changing my name to Westford Saeger. Slim was in the band Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. Any of you guys remember when I was twisting myself into funny Rold Gold pretzel shapes trying to review one of that band’s albums, and you could just tell I was bored out of my skull? Doesn’t matter, because Slim’s new full-length, Strawberry Mansion, is here, with a decent-enough song, called “Mighty Soul.” His yodel-y voice is perfect for this kind of chill but grungy folkie-pop. He’s like a cross between Conor Oberst and Cat Stevens. Some readers will salivate uncontrollably over that description, and others will simply continue coughing up pesky hairballs.

• Finally we have Chicago-born gloom-indie songstress Lia Ices, who’s been compared to Feist, Bat for Lashes, etc. Her fourth LP, Family Album, is out imminently and features the tune “Young on the Mountain.” Her voice sucks but the ’60s-radio-pop vibe is OK.

M Ward, Think of Spring (Anti Records)

Sorry I missed the PR email when this CD came out officially on Dec. 11, but better late than never, I always say. I assume you’re aware of Ward’s collaborations with Monsters of Folk, Norah Jones, Bright Eyes and all that, but maybe you’ve passed on his solo stuff, which does have a tendency to be a bit sparse. Good news is that sparse is the perfect way to be if one wants to cover Billie Holiday’s entire Lady In Satin album and be somewhat edgy at the same time. That record was her final one, released in 1958, and it, like other examples of her output, was a big inspiration to Ward, who pays a sort of alternate-universe tribute to it. Ward’s mumbly voice is nothing compared to Holiday’s, of course, and the production is not much beyond boombox level, but poignance and sincere reverence do drip from his stabs at “It’s Easy To Remember” and “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” among all the others. There’s an odd sort of verisimilitude at work either way; Holiday’s version came out when her voice was largely trashed, whereas Ward’s voice has always been, you know, a non-starter or whatever. B+

The Avalanches, We Will Always Love You (Astralwerks Records)

Another bit of catch-up here, the most recent LP from the criminally underreported (at least in the U.S.) Australian electronic duo, who’ve counted none other than Baltimore-based rapper Spank Rock as one of their touring members. These guys originally came up in the late ’90s, hoping to make it big (if you count bands like Drive Like Jehu as “big”) in the OG-emo scene, and those roots are part of why they’re so rich and delicious: They’re mildly noisy, in fact no-fi at times, but still a good choice for afterparty vibe. This time, guests include Orono, MGMT, Neneh Cherry and — wait, what — former Clash band member Mick Jones. As you can tell, it’s one of those Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World-style cameo-fests, and the vibes are, by and large, up to the task. The title track is old-school Moby-ish pseudo-soul stuff; “We Go On” is throwback disco as put through a deep house filter; “Until Daylight Comes” gives us a broke-down trip-hop effort from a perfectly placed Tricky. A+

Retro Playlist

Exactly 10 years ago to the week, I covered a couple of albums that were actually in my sweet spots, even if they were a bit disparate in their target audiences. Of the Jan. 18, 2011, release from Decemberists, The King Is Dead, I blathered, “With the one-off ‘concept album’ experiment from Decemberists that was 2009’s Hazards of Love now in the books, the band turns again to the hayloft-indie space while claiming that three-minute pop songs are more difficult to put together than conceptual magnum opuses.” What I was implying with that little mouthful was that they were trying to edge toward more commercial things, but — wait, calm down, I didn’t hate the band for selling out a little. I was pretty nice to this album, actually. Aside from not outright complaining about Peter Buck’s completely unnecessary guest shot, I also gave them props for the album’s curve balls: “a grog-and-whaling accordion/fiddle break in the wry mining storyteller ‘Rox in the Box’; a nod to Jimmy Buffett in the sedate, Christmasy ‘January Hymn’; and some not-unlikeable NASCAR bluegrass (‘All Arise’). It’s an OK album, see, even if half your friends will assume it’s an Arcade Fire joint and judge it accordingly.

The other bit that week was Tao of the Dead, from And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead. Now there’s a band I can only like so much, which isn’t to say I dislike them, just that nowadays I find them about as compelling as a PBS workout video. Sure there were moments of heaviness, which, come on, is their real selling point (“The sounds spring from ideas Blue Oyster Cult, Offspring, Foo Fighters and Minus the Bear could have had, meaning you stubborn old-schoolers will have to allow for Hello Kitty-fied half-punk whimsy between the walls of noise, which are, I assure you, psycho-heavy at times [‘Weight of the Sun’].” But in the end, the band itself is their biggest problem; their indie-ness is an obvious handicap, as I alluded to later: “…imagine Foo Fighters trying to write a sequel to Tommy while being very mindful of their limits in both technical aptitude and imagination, but a little more interesting than that.”

Both albums, then, belonged in the “better luck next time” bin.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The Jan. 22 general-CD-release-date is just about here, which can only mean one thing: some indie band from Canada is about to break it big, if by “big” we mean city bus fare totally covered and enough money to take the whole fam to Burger King. No, I’m kidding, this band called Kiwi Jr., which is from Toronto, was probably in Nylon magazine, and if so, the reviewer put down their vape pen just long enough to go straight into glitch-mode and make up some nonsense words to describe the band’s first album, whatever it was called. But now this weirdo band is on Sub Pop Records, so all of us actual critics have to put down our vape pens in an elegant, refined manner and pretend we’re paying attention to the band’s upcoming new album, Cooler Returns, because otherwise we’ll be considered hacks who don’t know what we’re talking about, as if we ever do. They have a weird stream-of-consciousness trip going on, although to be honest the weirdness mostly appears to stem from stupid nonsensical lyrics (“Throwing dead birds into the air, singing howdy neighbours how’d you like my new ride?”). I mean, the title track is nice and jangly and stupid, like, if you like hopeless college-rock nonsense like Parquet Courts or Franz Ferdinand you might dig it, and at least there’s a dated-sounding stun-guitar solo at the end that might impress you, if you’re impressed that the guitarist for a hipster band would even learn how to play a guitar solo.

• Speaking of sophomore albums I’m not particularly excited to have to deal with, Austin, Texas, soundsystem Thee Conductor is releasing Spirit Of A Ghost this week. I call this twosome a soundsystem because it’s basically two guys, a producer and an engineer, and that’s it, but this time they have help on the vocal end from Bonnie “Prince” Billy (a.k.a. Will Oldham), on the single “Tsk Tsk,” a track steeped in slow finger-picked acoustic guitar and made more than palatable by Oldham’s voice. The fadeout is decent, as the guitar is suddenly drowned in UFO noise, but not before the thing has sort of taken hold of your brain as a chill earworm. I don’t hate it in any way, which automatically makes this column a rare collectible that you should pass on to your grandchildren.

• Delving further into the paltry amount of new albums to talk about his week, the mostly obscure electronic dance guy known as TRZTN is New Yorker Tristan Bechet, whose new album, Royal Dagger Ballet, is on the Walmart trucks for delivery as we speak. The album cover is deconstructionist and kind of gross, but that only means that it’s Important, but remember, if you ever hope to be cool, learn to love art that grosses you out. Jonathan Bree guests on the single “Mirage,” a sexytime deep-techno joint made out of faraway-sounding vocals and pseudo-’80s Stranger Things vibe.

• Finally, we have James Yorkston And The Second Hand Orchestra’s new LP, The Wide Wide River, a pretty cool record if you like emo for grown-ups, a la Elbow and such. Album opener “Ella Mary Leather” has a bonky but tasteful piano line, a bit like Ben Folds, of course, but more refined.

Frank Sonic & L-Ex, “Talamanca Beach, Ming (Ger) Remix” (Amber Blue Recordings)

As if I don’t mention it every other month, I’m always up for some velvet-rope techno, especially Above & Beyond-style trance, in other words “trance that’s actually too slow to be properly considered ‘trance’ but whatever.” That’s Frank Sonic’s trip, at least on this track, which isn’t a chest-thumping floor-stomper, more one of those countless odes to the crazily decadent island of Ibiza, in this case a specific beach that struck his fancy when he visited on tour. No, Sonic isn’t in the same class as Tiesto or any of those DJs with “Van” in their name, at least here in the States. But he’s been a fixture in Germany for 20 years, and stuff like this would do just fine for me if the right club ever opened up in these parts. The tune builds and swirls and dive bombs like an overly confident seagull, hitting on the right vibe to remind us that travel sure was a fun thing back before the plague hit, you know? A

Trillionaire, Romulus (Nefarious Industries Records)

I hesitate to dub this band a supergroup, but it does have all the markings of some sort of mutant hard-rock Toto, being that it brings together a bunch of guys who’ve been through the ringer for a collective period of many decades. If you’re hip to bands like Inter Arma, Fuligin, A F—ing Elephant and such, you may have been exposed to parts of this whole, which reads like a tech-savvy (in a Linkin Park sense) version of Metallica (in a the-singer-sounds-like-Hetfield sense). No, it’s not a lot like Tool, so get that out of your head before you decide prematurely to bail on this, and besides, I can’t stand Tool. No, it’s like if Mastodon had gone in a near-emo direction, but no, it’s not emo either. The riffing is sharper than a paper cut, befitting a band that’s been together a really long time, but they haven’t. The tracks were passed around from and recorded in Boston, Seattle, Richmond and Nashville, thus it’s a Covid baby, and quite the great one, in fact. A

Retro Playlist

Weird coincidence, but if you noticed my talking about the Cheatahs in the weekly rundown, here they are again, coming up in a search for old stuff I haven’t talked about in a dog’s age. Their 2013 album Extended Plays was actually a rollup of the band’s earliest EPs, showcasing the initial volleys in the British indie-shoegaze-pop foursome’s attempts to take over the world. That hasn’t happened, to date, and they’re way overdue for a new album these days; their second LP, Mythologies, came out in 2015. With regard to my first exposure to them, I described them as “Foo Fighters on Drive Like Jehu’s budget, but it’s beyond that; these guys are fantastic riff-writers, as heard in album opener “The Swan”, which rides one hellaciously awesome guitar line for most of the tune and then stops to riff something even more cool, after a Sabbath-y Foo Fighters-ish fashion.” As for the last album, it rated a 73 on Metacritic’s aggregate score, meaning they were considered pretty freaking good. To be honest, it wasn’t until I was today years old that I finally caught up with Mythologies, or at least some quick samples thereof; it’s a bit more formulaic than their older stuff but still worth a stream if you’d be down with clean, blissy, over-reverb-ed shoegaze sung by a dude who’s trying to nick Simple Minds (who wouldn’t?).

Not so awesome was Buckcherry’s Confessions album, which I reviewed that same week in 2013. They were doomed in my eyes from the start anyway; I don’t trust throwback hard-rock bands that can’t come up with riffs to save their lives, and these L.A.-based imbeciles were lucky I didn’t throw the book at ’em and give them an F grade for being “very much like 3 Doors Down if that band had been exposed to too much Papa Roach.” Did it help that the singer, Whatsisname, ripped off Staind’s stupid sourball inflection? No, it did not.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Jan. 15 arrives this week, on a Friday, which can only mean one thing: New albums will be arriving in the Pandoras and whatever, to soothe your aesthetic sensibilities and of course make you wish good music were coming out instead! Take for example Suckapunch, the seventh album from English pop-punk/post-hardcore (could we possibly dispense with all the superficial, superfluous genre-labeling this year and just call all this stuff “emo” whether the band likes it or not?) band You Me At Six! They are certainly likeable enough for what they do; they sound sort of like Fall Out Boy, but with nothing new to add, so you might like them, I have no idea whatsoever. I could have sworn I’d written these guys up before, but maybe I didn’t, who cares, like, I thought they were a tiresome hipster-indie band until I went back and listened to their biggest songs, which were like Fall Out Boy. Whatever, and then I checked to see if some WWE wrestling dude had used one of their songs as an “entrance theme,” you know, the sophisticated part where the wrestler runs out of the arena tunnel and starts barking at the moon and throwing chairs at the referee. Anyway, the title track is actually OK, like a cross between Coldplay and Linkin Park (please don’t pretend you couldn’t possibly imagine what that would sound like, seriously, I beg you), even if the video is just a trope-dump of sci-fi nonsense, like first there’s a random Darth Maul dude, and then they get unplugged from their Matrix brain implants, blah blah blah. You might like it, like I said. I do not know.

• Hmm, let’s see what else is here. Wait, guys, this looks interesting, some British indie band called Shame, with their second album, Drunk Tank Pink, this might actually be cool, because NME takes them seriously. Yep, on their first album, Songs Of Praise, they were sort of like a drunk version of Elbow that was trying to sound a bit like the Hives, like a mutant strain of oi-indie. The new single, “Water in the Well,” is like old Madchester yell-pop, a lot cooler than Gang Of Four (is that OK to infer, or am I risking my critic’s license?). I like these guys and would be most keen on joining them if they ever assemble a flash mob with the intent of invading a big electronics store and throwing golf balls at everything that looks expensive.

• Midnight Sister, you say? Never heard of them? Hmm, neither has Wikipedia. Eh, maybe it’s cool, given that their record label is Jagjaguwar Records, which has sent me good records in the past, or am I thinking of the Cheatahs? I swear, my brain is like an episode of Hoarders, except everything in my packed-to-the-ceiling guest room is nothing but boxes of bad, redundant albums without any redeeming artistic qualities. Meanwhile, this new album, Painting The Roses, has a new single, called “Foxes,” a cabaret-rock tune that’s sort of like 1970s Electric Light Orchestra. I don’t hate it, does that help any?

• Wrapping up, let’s look at “Mork & Mindy,” the new single from Spare Ribs, the latest LP from Sleaford Mods! OK, it’s awesome, like imagine a brain-damaged Cockney “punter” rapping gently over a wicked cool EDM chill beat. No, I’m serious, this is cool, in its way!

Laraaji, Moon Piano (self-released)

In news from the weird, we present this New York pianist, an 80-year-old cult artist whose forte is sparse ambiance for New Agers who’d like their brains to kindly stop for a second. Apparently the big sell is that these slow, deserted improv pieces were recorded in a Brooklyn church, but quite honestly, that’s an effect that could have come by way of a few decent knob twists on the part of an engineer, not to harsh anyone’s mellow about it, particularly if you love whatever he’s done before. I mean, a well-played acoustic piano is a sound to behold; my parents were both M.A. graduate pianists of New England Conservatory, so I was spoiled absolutely rotten in that regard, and therein lies my rub: This is, in the end, a one-man jam session focused on careful, reflective non-songs, largely minor key experimentations comprising various series of notes that will appeal to not overly cultured art-freaks. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but for me, regardless of this guy’s training/pedigree/whatever, it’s non-eventful. B

Hunter, 1960 (self-released)

Hunter Stamas is a Portsmouth-by-way-of-Nashua singer who’s led her band through a few albums now, this one being the latest. It’s stunningly polite, this stuff, heavy on the guitar jangle, squeaky clean vocal tracks that could certainly amaze young YouTube addicts and the fedora-hatted denizens of your favorite bars and eateries (opening soon, I hope, dear God). To dispense with the vulgarities, the production values are decent (a lot more pro-sounding than most of the local material that gets flopped onto this desk) and the songs generally stick to a specific formula (ditto), making it something of a contender you might place in your SoundCloud queue between the first Miley Cyrus album and basically anything by Bonnie Raitt. I know that might sound a bit weird, but from my seat it’s not unusual at all; Stamas is a commercial-oriented songwriter who’s come close here; there’s a ’60s Yardbirds/girl-group vibe at work that’s actually pretty unique. B+

Retro Playlist

Jazz comes in all sorts of flavors, not that you’re required to know even that much about the genre if you’re a budding newbie aficionado of it. Sometimes jazz guys will throw different genres into their recipe, as I discussed six years ago, in January 2015, when I wrote about Three Rivers, an LP from Richie Goods and Nuclear Fusion. A Pittsburgh Jazz Hall of Fame bass player, Goods has toured with Whitney Houston and Christina Aguilera, which speaks to a pedigree he earned after studying under legendary Blue Note Records legend Ron Carter in New York. With regard to his own (original) stuff, I’d anticipated mellow-ish fusion a la Spyro Gyra, but it was really more a modernized Return to Forever, although in some cases not so modernized when considering the outright hard rock workouts found in such tunes as the title track. There’s definitely a heavy influence afoot here; album opener “Soul Glow” has, as I put it back then, “a suspended-animation riff that proves he can restrain himself from going all-out Pelican-metal, but the desire is there,” as indicated by every plonk of his Rickenbacker, not to mention the grungy sounds of guitarist Ben Butler, “a real treasure who punches up every guitar sound from Al di Meola to Blue Oyster Cult on that one track alone.”

Speaking of Ron Carter, he released a full-length on Blue Note Records in 2007, Dear Miles, which was discussed in this space. With a resume packed with guest spots on – get this – over 3,500 albums, Carter had more than earned the right to rely on his past association with Miles Davis, who kept Carter on for most of his 1960s output. It was harmonically uncomplicated, I noted: “With Roger Squitero on board strictly to fortify percussion, the only harmonic instrument within this outing’s four-piece framework is the piano of Stephen Scott, who is kept crazy-busy with the job of re-creating various Miles Davis grooves for this sort-of-tribute LP (ex: in order to shrink the big band sound of ‘Gone’ from the Evans/Miles Porgy & Bess collaboration into these confines, Scott takes on the horn parts).”

Obviously a great one for wonks of both Miles and bass in general.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Way kool, everything’s back to normal, with plenty of new albums coming out on Jan. 8! Or so I thought, it doesn’t really look like a ton of stuff, but at least there’s something, starting with the new album from Barry Gibb, called Greenfields! Gibb is, of course, one of the founders of that old disco band The Bee Gees. He was the pretty-handsome one who looked like God’s idea of a male Farrah Fawcett, but now, guess what, he looks like a trucker who’d beat you up for driving a sissy electric car. But that’s what happens to all of us, like one time years ago, my boy-ees and I were walking around near the Worcester Centrum, and these three girls came up to me and insisted I was Michael Hutchence from INXS, and it took forever to convince ‘em otherwise, up to and including my refusal to speak in an Australian accent, but nowadays … well, never you mind about nowadays, and that’s what happens, so don’t get old, I’m serious. Oh whatever, we’re supposed to be talking about this old disco has-been, who became a “knight” in England, like, can you imagine if 10-foot-tall alien monsters landed here and demanded to fight our planet’s “knights,” so we had to trot out Paul McCartney, Elton John and this dude? We’d be doomed, just like this album’s lead single, “Words Of A Fool,” is doomed to be mistaken for a Matthew McConaughey cover of a Willie Nelson song. It sucks, let’s move on.

• Swedish post-punk ruffians Viagra Boys release their second LP, Welfare Jazz, any minute now. The single “Ain’t Nice” is terrific, a grungy, messy soundsystem thing that krazy-glues Chainsmokers to Big Black. It’s awesome.

• British folk-rock dude and former busker Michael Rosenberg goes by the stage name Passenger because he knows that no hipster kids would buy an album by someone with a ridiculous name like Michael Rosenberg, you know? I wonder how long the person-who-goes-by-a-band-name trend will continue, don’t you? If it does continue for much longer, I hope these “bands” will start thinking of cool “band names,” like if I were going to use a band name as my own name, I’d probably call myself, er, I mean my band, something like Tell Grandma It’s Polka And Watch Her Epic Reaction When The Crazy Kicks In. Cool, huh? Oh, I don’t care if you think that, and besides, that Van Halen tribute band I talked about forming a few weeks ago never materialized, so no bands for me, just writing in this latest column about this one-dude-band here and his new album, Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted. I’m watching the video for the tune “A Song For The Drunk And Broken Hearted,” and it’s pretty dumb, like he’s sort of cosplaying as the Joaquin Phoenix version of The Joker, and the six or eight people in the crowd are razzing him, and then he launches into the song, a strummy, harmonica-powered ditty that sounds like Conor Oberst trying to sound like Bob Dylan. It is very “meh,” if that’s your thing.

• Lastly we have Dangerous: The Double Album from cowboy-hat singing dude Morgan Wallen, who got arrested for public drunkenness outside Kid Rock’s gross bar in Nashville. On the title track he sings-raps like a total redneck, like the guy from Primus but not joking around. It’s kind of cool I suppose.