Slinky Vagabond, King Boy Vandals (self-released)
The core of this punk-pop (in the real, actual sense) crew comprises Keanan Duffty (a fixture in the NYC punk underground who helped to style David Bowie, Sex Pistols and others) and Italian producer/rock musician Fabio Fabbri. Something like 100 years of punk/’80s/whatnot experience went into this, and it gets pretty nasty (in a good way), alternately evoking early David Bowie space-ballads (“The Beauty In You”), barely tamed New York Dolls-ish raunch-blues welded to Killers post-arena-rawk (“Prima Donna”), ’70s roots-punk experimentation (“Old Boy”) and so on. If you’re young, one RIYL touchstone would be Guided By Voices, being that there’s that Beatles edge to the singing, but it’s all delightfully messy really. All told, there’s really nothing an OG-punk purist could possibly dislike about this thing. It would probably translate a million times better on vinyl, true, but its analog purity emerges even through digital media, with fuzzy guitars bleeding right into the sloppily miked hi-hat and such. Like the LOLCats say, moar plaese. A+
Cheap Trick, In Another World (BMG Records)
As everyone knows, 99.9 percent of the albums released by old-school 1960s-1980s arena-rock bands have been embarrassingly bad. But then there’s this American four-piece, fronting like an actual living coelacanth in an ocean carpeted with extinct dinosaur fossils, not because they can still “rock out” (in other words, add way too much blues-rock to a recipe that became invalid the minute the earliest tech/rap groups crawled out of the primordial ooze) but because their songwriting formula, strictly aimed at the Billboard charts as ever, is eternal. There’s a trick to it, you see, writing perfect, simple pop music for general taste, and Cheap Trick’s leader, Rick Nielsen, is a Picasso at it. This isn’t Live At Budokan, but we’re not living in 1977, so it’ll just have to do, a thick patchwork quilt of melodic perfection that I’d envision reading like complicated prog-rock to Zoomers, an endless parade of summer-hormonal joy. Singer Robin Zander is still goofily brash, stressing the long “R” sounds on his lines like an idiot (“Here Comes The Summer”), but that’s part of the magic. A+
PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases
• Friday, May 7, is the next day when we would traditionally see a bunch of new CD releases from awesome bands and whatever twerking Roombas you troublemaking Zoomers have convinced yourselves should count as music. But who knows, maybe there will be no new albums at all, and we can compare Rice Krispies Treats recipes while we wait for the next five Covid variants to pass through town and keep us all stuck at home forever, trying to find something that doesn’t suck on Netflix (ha ha, there is no such thing). Nope, there are albums, the first of which is Van Weezer, from geek-rock superstars Weezer! The band’s leader, Rivers Cuomo, has said that Weezer’s audience is “probably ready for some shredding again,” a fact he gleaned by finally noticing that the crowd would freak whenever he played a totally shreddy guitar solo during live performances of “Beverly Hills,” and that’s how the whole idea of totally rocking out with new nerd-metal music came to be. I can’t wait to hear it, although I think I already talked about this stuff when the first variant of Covid was still leaving people confused about whether or not it was airborne and all that stuff. Ho ho ho, remember those days, when we didn’t know anything, and we were all watching the movie Contagion on endless loop just to freak ourselves out, so much family fun! Whatever, the newest single. “Hero,” is your basic mid-tempo AC/DC b-side, and actually, you know what’s weird, a lot of the time on this song, Cuomo sings like the dude from Goo Goo Dolls. It’s OK I suppose, not the They Might Be Giants-style hard-emo I was expecting.
• And speaking of hard-rock whatevers, in a weird scene, Nancy Wilson, the guitarist from million-year-old arena-rawk-band Heart, sort of broke up the band when she had some sort of problem with her sister (and original Heart singer) Ann’s son and made a scene. There was angry-emoji drama, and now Nancy has a solo album, called You And Me, coming out this week. Will it be old-school Heart, like when they were into Freudian symbolism and hobbits, or latter-day Heart, like when they tried to be female Michael Boltons? I don’t know, which is why I’m going to go to YouTube and listen to the album’s title track. Hm, the song is a Zeppelin III-ish folk-rock ballad. It is OK, but she needs to end her beef with her sister, because Nancy can’t sing very well. That’s not to say she’s a bad person.
• For people who still remember actual dancing in smelly clubs, look, there’s a new album called When God Was Great from The Mighty Mighty Bosstones! I love their spazzy music, it’s so perfect for watching family-friendly high-jinks like Gritty the Philadelphia Flyers mascot throwing pies at little kids and weighing in on political subjects he cares nothing about, just like everyone else on this uninhabitable planet! I’m sure their new song “The Final Parade” is spazzy and spittle-flecked — yes, it is, not like their big idiotic ska-punk-whatever hit “The Impression That I Get,” but nevertheless it is perfect for drinking and throwing pies, absolutely.
• In closing I’d like to say that there is a new Van Morrison album coming out, called Latest Record Project: Volume 1. If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s this guy’s fedora-hat accountant-pop, so I will recuse myself from talking about whatever stupid nonsense is on this stupid album and tell you to enjoy!
Retro Playlist
Retro-ing back to this week in 2013, Atlanta-based indie band Deerhunter was about to release their sixth LP, Monomania, and the first sighting, the title track, boded well. The title-track teaser was like the previous album’s single “Coronado” on angel dust, “totally wigged-out Iggy-garage craziness that’s almost like Warlocks but without the skronk — no, it’s almost like the first Horrors album but without the speed.” I posited that most indie dweebs would “probably run and hide behind [their] stacks of twee records, but this song will eventually find you and get you drunk.”
Anyway, one of the two featured CDs that week was one that — and you won’t believe this — is still kept in my car in case the missus and I are in the mood for a little goth. That one is Ministry of Love, the debut (and unfortunately only) full-length from Los Angeles boy-girl industrial-shoegaze duo Io Echo, which opened for Nine Inch Nails, toured with Bloc Party and Garbage, and did other fun things. Sort of like Asteroids Galaxy Tour but a lot more heavy on the shoegaze, the album opens with “Shanghai Girls,” a slow, methodical, epic shot of shock and awe, evoking nothing less than the queen of outer space come to take hold of our planet. But that’s not all. “’When the Lilies Die’,” I blathered, “is an even better song than that, just … alien, for lack of a better word, and thus one can’t help but notice that the duo’s band name isn’t just for show, it’s about aural integrity.” RIP, awesome band. I just can’t ever win.
New York hipsters Postelles were also under the microscope that week, with their third-or-whatever LP, And It Shook Me. This dreary slog of a band actually formed at a New York City prep school. You can probably guess how it went. “The hooks aren’t subtle, they’re boring,” spat I, “though not hopelessly bubblegummy, a debatable saving grace when everything here sounds like it came from a bunch of politely tiresome potential boyfriends from your basic episode of Girls working out their manias du jour.” Ayuh, pretty hurtin’.