Category: Pop

Sculptor, Untold Secrets (Frontiers Music)

Is “melodic death metal” an oxymoron, a shameless way to sell out, or a sure sign that a band doesn’t belong together owing to artistic differences? This quintet is from Brazil, here tabling their debut album, which is released through one of the few record labels that actively seeks out this kind of stuff, specifically Evanescence-level power-metal sung by guys whose preferred vocal style is totally Cookie Monster. Well, maybe not strictly Cookie Monster; there’s black-metal devil-monster caterwauling too, and rainy gloom-death riffing if you tend to keep score when listening to this kind of album, not that I ever do. I mean, good luck to these dudes, is what I say, not that a Brazilian death metal band that sounds kind of like In Flames would need extra help in the form of best wishes from a critic as detached from the genre as I am — São Paulo is where I’d want to be personally if I were playing in a band like this. B- — Eric W. Saeger

Deafkids, Ritos do Colapso (self-released)

I honestly had no intention of turning this week’s column into a central repository of Brazilian doom-music, but that’s how the dice rolled, first with Sculptor’s debut album and then with this one, which basically caught my fancy after discovering that this slightly experimental ambient-noise-techno band landed a spot on the soundtrack for Cyberpunk 2077, a dystopian role-playing video game starring none other than Keanu Reeves (it seems Australia has some sort of problem with the game’s messaging, which means it’s probably fun in some way). Whatever, this digital-only EP reads like a Whitman Sampler of experimental spazz-beats, starting with two dubstep-ish rinseouts that were apparently played on real drums. That’s a pretty cool trick, but “Tentáculos” is a lot more interesting, a creepy blend of tribal rhythm and random snake-taming bizarreness that would have fit in well on the Hurt Locker soundtrack. Like I said, strictly experimental, but cool; nicely organic, undoubtedly with an eye toward more soundtracking gigs. A

Retro Playlist

I have to admit, sometimes I’ve gotten it right the first time. For those who’ve subjected themselves to this column for the last 15 years plus, you may remember the bit in 2009 when I talked about New Orleans band Stanton Moore/Garage A Trois’s then-new All Kooked Out album, and how there was “nothing wrong with you” if you’d never heard of him. On this one-man effort, I posited, Moore was trying to be “Spyro Gyra and That F–ing Tank in the same album,” a recipe for commercial failure if ever there was one, or, just as possibly, a spazzy version of Charles Mingus’ least listenable records. As you’d guess, the random fricassee of honking, clattering and Wayne Shorter-style sax suddenly stopped about a third of the way in, for a decent-enough tune called “Purgatory,” and then a rather mellow version of Roberta Flack’s “The Closer I Get To You.” As well, there was “Fragile,” which sounded like the E Street Band trying to weird each other out, and “Electric Door Bell Machine,” a look at what Weather Report might have sounded like if they’d been really idiotic hipsters. Nevertheless, believe it or not, in my review of the album, I didn’t cover Moore in snark gravy and bake him at 350 for an hour. I was pretty nice to the dude.

At times I’ve experienced the joy of dissing multiple artists at a time, when unwary compilation albums come in. But it’s not always mean-spirited claptrap I spew; in fact I was quite genial to the various artists featured on 2014’s Le Sigh, Vol II. Le Sigh is/was an online zine based in Brooklyn, supporting women in the arts. In order to prove they were serious, the editors threw together a couple of female-punk comp albums, which gathered together such bands as Slutever, Fleabite and Alice. Soundalike touchstones ranged from X-Ray Spex to The Waitresses, but it was all good fun, really, with more attitude than a 13-year-old girl threatened with losing her iPhone if she doesn’t wear the cute bunny pajamas Grandma sent for Christmas.

Moral: I can be nice at times. It really depends on the quality of our current dinner leftovers, to be honest.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• OMG, it’s totally the last-minute holiday rush, when those 14 million newly unemployed Americans, all snug in their warm cardboard refrigerator-box condominium complexes comfortably located somewhere under the overpass, need direction as to where to spend that stray $20 bill they found skittering across the parking lot at Whole Foods! Well, I’m here to help, homies, with the latest albums you can buy, all of which are coming to your stores and whatnot, on Dec. 18! As you’d guess, there is basically nothing new coming out except for metal albums and reissues from rich bands and whatever, and trust me, I already looked. First thing that jumped out at me was a 50th anniversary of The Kinks’ eighth album, Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, a fine album that was released in 1970, in case you’re deficient in math skills like I am! I have to confess that I was never the biggest Kinks fan, like they were basically the prototype for every joke-band ever put together, but this album did have one awesome song on it, I’d be the first to admit it. No, I don’t mean the titular “Lola,” a song I could literally live forever without ever hearing again; it’s in fact “Apeman” to which I refer, a joke song about alienation or whatnot, and it was kind of ahead of its time. Check out these lyrics: “I think I’m so educated and I’m so civilized / ‘Cause I’m a strict vegetarian / But with the over-population and inflation and starvation / And the crazy politicians / I don’t feel safe in this world no more.” Cool, huh? Anyway, there you go, fam, the Kinks, with a new-old album, you are now free to go pay good money for whatever you’re going to get out of it, maybe extra cowbell or whatever.

• If you can stand the suspense and wait until Saturday the 19th, there is a new EP from hip-hop guy Letoa coming out that day, called Glocstarr V1! There is already a user review (not a review from an actual music critic, in other words) on the Album Of The Year website, from someone identified as mIlk, and that person says it’s awful. Actually they didn’t say anything, they just left a one-star rating and wrote “0” as a comment. All that goes to prove is that no one really uses the Album Of The Year website except for rock critics who are desperately trying to find albums coming out at the last minute, because nearly a half-million people have streamed at least one of the tunes, called “Ice Cold.” The beat sounds like some incidental theme music from Lord of the Rings, except for the beginner-level haunted house bass and the stupid trap drums. Can I shut this off now?

• OK, I give up, there’s nothing else coming out this week, and I refuse to talk about whichever black-metal bands are only putting out records because they either hate Christmas or don’t even know when it is, so we’re going to wrap up with chillwave/ambient techno guy Tycho! It’s not that he even has a real album coming out, just a remix album, called, appropriately enough, Weather Remixes, based on his 2019 Grammy nominated LP Weather. That one was great, a little bit guitar-tronic and a little indie-rock, so I’m sure all the remixes are good as well, if they’re even half as decent as the gorgeous remix of “Japan” by Satin Jackets. Awesome stuff.

The Myrrhderers, The Myrrhderers Sleigh Christmas (self-released)

It was with great sadness that I read last week there’d be no live Trans Siberian Orchestra shows coming to the area, just a streaming thingamajig instead. I looked to the universe, hoping to be cheered up, and lo, hark, behold, a wonderful holiday EP from a bunch of trolling punks declaring themselves to be a “North Pole punk-rock supergroup,” made up of members of “Dead Kringles, Prancid and Sleigher.” I immediately decided that the record would receive an A+ grade, then listened to all five songs, which literally only required 12 minutes out of my life. It’s all actually quite good if you like Good Charlotte demos and junk like that; their rub of “Deck The Halls” could actually be Green Day in Santa beards for all I know. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” is straightedge-leaning punk-pop lunacy, and so on. These guys aren’t just pikers with an eight-track recorder from 1991, but I didn’t deduct points for their decent production quality. Very tolerable. A+

Deep Sea Diver, Impossible Weight (ATO Records)

This album being so good, I think I’ll pass on listening to their last couple of records, as the consensus seems to be that they’re not as ambitious. The quartet is led by Seattleite Jessica Dobson, who in the past has played with a who’s-who of indie royalty (Shins, Spoon, Beck, others), experiences that have helped to shape her into the closest thing to a millennials’ Chrissie Hynde that I’ve heard to date. There’s a palpable grunge edge to this stuff; “Lights Out” sounds like a cross between Yeah Yeah Yeahs (with regard to the vocal approach) and Superdrag (relative to the mashed-potato guitar sound), but she’s obviously got a jones for trip-hop, by the afterparty steez emanating from “Shattering The Hourglass.” So that’s all well and good, and the tunes, regardless of their disparate influences, sound like they belong together, but the killer bit is that Dobson’s songwriting is outstanding. Well worth your stream time. A+

Retro Playlist

Merry corona-mas everyone, as the science nerds like to say down at CDC headquarters! There’s still plenty of time to order holiday music CDs, so today I’ll look at albums this page has covered in the past, but first it’s your reminder of the festive songs I can’t stand in the least, like “Feliz Navidad,” “O Holy Night” and of course Billy Squier’s “Christmas Is A Time To Say I Love You,” which, yes, I already harped on a couple of weeks ago, but wait, go listen to it again, if your stomach can handle it. Isn’t his voice super-annoying, like, doesn’t he sound like some sort of post-punk WC Fields, as though he wants to say “Go away kid, ya bother me” after every line? I mean, sure, I’d rather be subjected to Billy Squier’s dumb song than “O Holy Night” while I’m in line at Walgreens buying some stupid last-minute thing, like my hatred for that song isn’t bone-marrow level the way it is with John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Christmas,” but — oh, you get the point.

For more tolerable holiday sounds, let’s go all the way back to 2006 for til Tuesday front-lady Aimee Mann’s Another Drifter In The Snow. It’s a mellow, very listenable collection, and her choices were all good: Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song”; a bearable “Winter Wonderland” and for (polite) laughs, a rip of “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”

In 2008 there was the charity-driven A Princeton Christmas: For The Children Of Africa album, by Princeton Choirs. Beautiful, reflective stuff for those quiet holiday nights, featuring donated tracks sung by The American Boychoir, The Westminster Concert Bell Choir and several others. Fun fact for cynics: Despite all the holiness baked into the tracks, there nevertheless exists a one-star review on Amazon submitted by someone who freaked out over the fact that the Princeton Theological Seminary Choir wasn’t brought into the mix. I really don’t need to expound on that, I’m sure.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yee hah. It’s a landslide of new releases, vying for your Hanukkwaanzmas dollar! I feel totally blessed this time of year, what with all the new albums coming out on Dec. 11, but honestly, this year I may not have enough snark left to deal with it all! I mean, just look, it’s a double-live album from Belle and Sebastian, called What To Look For In Summer, can you even stand it? Fifty million hipsters totally love dancing their happy irony dance to BS’s gentle, inoffensive twee-pop, and they only dance harder when the song is so boring and unlistenable that all their friends give up on them forever, like all that stuff from Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant (they played the whole album during their headlining stint at the Boaty Weekender festival, the famous gathering place for rich people with boats and stock options, and some of those live versions are on this album). The album starts off with a version of the Scottish beer-guzzling singalong “The Song of the Clyde,” isn’t that so awesome? I’m totally going to listen to this album on my schooner as I chase that devil Moby Dick all over the seven seas, with my ironic hipster bos’n mates who all have mad harpoon skills and bunny tattoos!

• Wait, fam, look, we don’t just have young millennial hipster deck-swabs to talk about, because thar she blows, a new album from Paul McCartney, titled McCartney III! I totally can’t remember the name of his old band, something like Herman’s Hermits, or Len, or whatever, but either way, this guy, whose eyelift surgery makes him look like Carol Channing at closing time at an after-hours bash, is at it again, just cold bringin’ the guitar-pop music, to teach you crazy Death Grips listeners how it’s done! Boy, I can hardly wait to dig my ears into the new version of “Coming Up,” any of you boomers remember that awful song? Ah, here it is. It sounds like it’s sung by drunken Ewoks who don’t know how to use their cheap downloadable music-making software. Gack, it’s even more horrible than the original, so let’s put this aside for now and press on.

• Continuing our excursion to find musical coolness whilst sailing on board the Pequod, Canadian folkie duo Kacy & Clayton have been around since 2011, doing their part to bring good folkie-fied feels to the hipster whaling community and all young people who watch shows like Archer just to annoy their roommates. Their new album is Plastic Bouquet, a collaboration of sorts with New Zealand musician Marlon Williams! No, I have no idea who that is either, but whatever, yay Marlon Whastisname! The lead single, “I Wonder Why” mostly sounds like Roy Orbison, but it’s mostly an acoustic guitar thing, so there’s a rootsy Hank Williams feel to it as well. It’s OK.

• Lastly, we should probably take a quick listen to whatever’s going on in the new M. Ward album, Think Of Spring, specifically the single “For Heaven’s Sake.” Spoiler: It’s a wispy, dreamy unplugged-strummy-guitar tune with way too much reverb on his voice. I suppose I’d love it if I were a salty hipster whaleboat swab born in 1987 instead of never-you-mind-all-that, and had never listened to Simon & Garfunkel, because that’s kind of what it’s like, except it’s bare-bones. But I wasn’t, so I hereby rudely dismiss this song, with extreme prejudice.

• Finally we have Tucson-based Tex-Mex-indie stalwarts Calexico, with their new LP, Seasonal Shift! Huh, how do you like that, it’s a holiday album! The first single is called “Hear The Bells,” in which the boy-eez sing about drinking mescal and selling something or other by the side of the road, I don’t know. Sounds like a cross between Everly Brothers and your least-favorite pop band from the 1980s, if that helps any.

Life in a Blender, Satsuma (Telegraph Harp Records)

So here’s this New York long-time quirk-rock guy, David Rauf, leading his band on their million-billionth release, a six-song EP that’s only slightly unpredictable (he’s not doing yelly punk or anything like that nowadays). The Rosetta stone here is anything David Byrne’s ever done (meaning everything), but I found this record to be slightly — I don’t know, comforting. Imagine Electric Six with NRBQ horns and you’re pretty much there, not that Rauf’s voice is Jello-Biafra-level crazy or anything like that, and the lyrics wouldn’t be conducive to that sort of thing anyway. On “Soul Deliverer,” for example, our hero yammers in a disaffected but volatile Byrne-like baritone about how he’s regretting drinking coffee at lunch (or whatever) and swearing to switch to water. But where was I — oh yes, comforting. I mean, I could picture these guys as a musical opening act for a comedian in Vegas, and not one of the unfunny ones like Jimmy Fallon or whatnot. No, I think Doug Stanhope would be a fit. A

Ilsa, Preyer (Relapse Records)

Sludge-doom metal isn’t my cup of tea unless it’s done really well and with some variation in speed, like, with Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality as its sentai. Kyuss is OK, for example, but Candlemass and St. Vitus aren’t, and Sleep is a bit too off-Broadway, if you get my drift. As with any genre, there are tons of others we could cover here, but this Washington, D.C., outfit reads like a tyrannosaur cage-match, relying on crazed, wounded bellowing on the vocal end, and not a lot of imagination with regard to the guitar riffing, which isn’t actually riffing but mostly four-chord mud ringouts (imagine Sunn(((O))) with a purpose in life). The subject matter is pretty dark even for my beloved homies at the Relapse imprint, and I’ll mercifully leave out the particulars in that regard. There are some straight-up black-metal passages that feel more like obligato checklist sign-offs, which isn’t to say there’s nothing at all innovative here, but, well, you know. B

Retro Playlist

As we await our Very Special Covid Christmas, let’s step into the Way-Back Machine and go over a few albums that may have been written about a little unintelligibly the first time around, and no, I don’t mean unintelligibly in the way that most of my stuff is written, I mean reviews that even confused me.

In February 2015 I unwisely took it upon myself to check out stoner band Jeremy Irons & The Ratgang Malibus and their Spirit Knife LP. This resulted in such run-on messes as “Alright, they’ve mostly been doing singles and comps, but what intrigues me is that they’re adamantly indie, using distributors like Carrot Top (local bands, you should really be taking notes if you’re releasing your own stuff) and AEC, all to push bands who are friends with owner Scott Hamilton, who is not the figure skater, in the same manner as no one in this band is the duckling-lipped actor you’re thinking about. Everybody lost? Cool.”

All I was saying there is that this capable-enough Boris-like outfit was using independent distributors. I’d have expounded further on the music, but it was pretty disposable, so I didn’t. Suffice to say that if you love metal, by all means, seek this one out, so that you can listen to it once and promptly forget you ever did so.

I’ve got a million of ’em, I tell ya. That same week, there was O Shudder, by the British quirk-prog crew Dutch Uncles. I actually liked that album, come to think of it, despite its indecisiveness over whether they wanted to rip off Vampire Weekend or Muse. It’s a weird but very good record, not that I probably enticed any of you nice folks by spitting takes like what I said about opening tune “Babymaking”: “…its winding, skeletal beat evoking Spandau Ballet after a marathon Orb listening bender.”

Pitchfork sort of liked them too, but I got over it. Meantime, I promise I’ll try to be less confusing in future. No guarantees, of course.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

The new CD releases are coming hard and fast, looking for your holiday dollar — you should see all this stuff coming up! Now that we’ve dispensed with the worst Thanksgiving ever, which you mostly spent on the phone, trying to get Grandma to install the right video driver on her 2006 Windows XP computer so it could seize up while you tried to Zoom video her eating cranberry sauce, it’s down to the serious stuff, with the batch of new junk coming out on Dec. 4! For holiday gift-giving, I’d recommend the new White Stripes compilation, The White Stripes Greatest Hits, because it’s not horrible. OK, maybe it is, like, their fanboys will be all like “Why isn’t such-and-so song on here?” But who cares, because “Seven Nation Army” will probably be on there (the final tracklist hasn’t been released yet), and what else do ya need?

• Gahh, aside from the aforementioned greatest hits thing, the new release list is freaking full of live albums, comps, and rich musicians just asking for fans to send them beer money. Just looky there, it’s Arctic Monkeys, with their new album Live At The Royal Albert Hall, a title that also speaks for itself! Remember years ago when I was an Arctic Monkeys hater? You do, right? Well, whatever, if you like them, I can’t do anything about it, so like them all you want, with my Christmas blessings.

• OMG, even hipster-black-metal fraudsters Deafheaven are getting in on the live/comp gravy train, with their live collection, 10 Years Gone! Yes, there’s nothing I’d rather hear than a live version of this band’s typical songs, which always goes like this: blissy Sunn(((O))) part → metallically doomy Boris-or-Cannibal Corpse part → Bathory part. And now you know everything about Deafheaven and can brag about it to your little brother, who will be amazed by your cultural acumen.

• It turns out that not everything is old news and boring box sets or whatever, unfortunately for me! Depressing Icelandic hipster-dingbats Sigur Rós release their new studio album Odin’s Raven Magic this Friday! Now there’s an album title I can love; it sounds like the title of an episode of The Witcher, so it’s got to be cool! I couldn’t wait to hear what dreary hipster slop these crazy kids had cooked up for 2020, so off I went, first to discover that Odin’s Whatever is simply a recording of the band’s 2002 orchestra-accompanied tune, which is set to the Icelandic poem “Hrafnagaldr Óðins.” You guys know that one, right? It’s an anagram that spells “The Hamburglar Did It” sideways. As for the song, it’s just a slow, morose indie-rock joint comprising boring samples and a completely unnecessary orchestra, and it sounds like Vikings mourning an iPhone that got hacked by a bored troll from 4chan. Enjoy!

• Finally we have Tucson-based Tex-Mex-indie stalwarts Calexico, with their new LP, Seasonal Shift! Huh, how do you like that, it’s a holiday album! The first single is called “Hear The Bells,” in which the boy-eez sing about drinking mescal and selling something or other by the side of the road, I don’t know. Sounds like a cross between Everly Brothers and your least-favorite pop band from the 1980s, if that helps any.

Patrick Higgins, Tocsin (Telegraph Harp Records)

Just before the election, there was a pretty good meme making the rounds, in which God scolds Gabriel for filling the year 2020 with all the events that were supposed to happen during the entire decade instead of spacing them out. This New York based noise/classical composer is perfect for this apocalyptic period, focusing his efforts on creating “crisis music” with his combo of overeducated, over-Manhattan-ed music nerds. After serving in bands both rock and classical, Higgins’ goal these days is creeping you out, or at least bringing the listener awareness of how creepy everything is these days, this by making his music act as an organic, brain-bending x-factor. In the beginning (“SQ3 (I) Aletheia”), it’s a cross between maximum-crazy Jim Thrilwell and the hope-destroying soundtrack to There Will Be Blood. But there are other things too, of course, such as angry piano-bonking, slasher-movie string assaults (“SQ3 (III) Passagio”), chime concertos (“Tocsin 01”), etc., all of it washed off most elegantly in the end with a stab at Bach’s Contrapunctus XIV. World-renowned contributors include Wet Ink Ensemble, pianist Vicky Chow and the Mivos Quartet. A+

Suuns, Fiction EP (Joyful Noise Recordings)

This Canadian band has been around since 2007, making an artsy mix of neo-psychedelic art-punk. They’re arguably most famous for their 2013 tune “2020,” a wub-wubbing freak-electro joint that sounds pretty much exactly like what you’d expect to hear from a band of Martians trying to sound like Clinic, which I, at least, am fine with. This shorty EP is the product of Covid-enforced isolation and sounds it; the basic tracks for these songs come from older recordings that have been micro-analyzed and reworked with their trademark futuristic mindset as tempered by the sense of doom that pervades human life these days. Opener “Look” is a bizarre noise essay combining the smooth EDM of The Orb with the reverent nonsense-sampling of The Books, but that’s just the warm-up. “Breathe” features guest Jerusalem In My Heart adding a buzzy Albanian chordophone line to a couple of pretty neat loops; “Pray” bounces along nicely with some bloopy goth soundtracking. A

Retro Playlist

At this point there’s really not much else to do other than commiserate with others on the internet. The other day I got into it on Facebook with a couple of my old alpha-troll friends, a couple of European chaps who, like me, used to chase bad people off the internet for fun. It all started when the British guy posted a SoundCloud clip of himself playing a guitar line to some song titled “So What.” I told him that to me it sounded like Allman Brothers (my default response when light jam-rock isn’t hopelessly wimpy), and our Belgian friend said it sounded like Steve Vai, one of those old guitar hero-type guys, you know, the “rock stars” who nobody really knows except for nerds and other guitar players.
The Belgian and I were surprised to find out that the Englishman was actually playing his “axe” over a rip of a Miles Davis jazz tune. Miles is the most famous trumpet player in history, which you should know if it ever comes up on a test, so the other guy and I felt kind of stupid, which meant that we all had to start throwing mindless insults at each other. Being I’m not a “Miles-ophile,” I led with the defense that I believe “anyone who pretends to like everything Miles has ever done should be dipped in murder hornets.” Things devolved from there, as always, but I think I successfully made the point that I’m a casual jazz fan, not a Miles wonk, mostly familiar with his work with Sonny Rollins.
I’ve gotten a lot of pleasure and serenity out of all these years of reviewing jazz albums, the bonus being that unlike my British friend I didn’t spend many thousands of dollars building my collection, since public relations people send me new ones nearly every day. And the jazz world isn’t just composed of a bunch of bands huddling in unheated recording studios trying to get a good take of “My Echo My Shadow And Me”; there’s always a new angle. I don’t know if any of you remember this — OK, you don’t, but who would — but in 2011 I tried to get you to listen to Mocean Worker’s Candygram For Mowo! You should still check it out; it’s a jazz album but with a ton of hip-hop and house-techno influences.
In 2014 I mentioned Zara McFarlane’s If You Knew Her, which included a cover of Kitty White’s “Plain Gold Ring,” but other than that it was expressionism colored in her African roots, accentuated with such things as bird noises and steel drum bits.
Great stuff, but as always, all jazz is eclectic stuff, so it’s best to sample jazz albums before buying the vinyl versions. Unless it’s the Yellowjackets. If you see a Yellowjackets album, just buy it.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Here we go, the holidays are here, as evidenced by all the new CDs slated for release on Friday, Nov. 27! For our first inspection of the week, let’s look at the new Miley Cyrus album, Plastic Hearts, because it’ll probably be interesting if nothing else. Miley has stated that her influences for this record were Britney Spears and Metallica, meaning she’s still officially insane, but let’s not rush to judgment, shall we? I mean, if she can do this, maybe Bruno Mars will do a cover of a Death Grips tune, you know? Wouldn’t that be awesome, guys? But no, I’m kidding, Miley legitimized herself as a metal queen when she did the cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole” at the Glastonbury festival last year, but even before that, her appearance on the Worst Episode Ever of Black Mirror Krazy-glued her spurious new image into the public consciousness: She’s basically a hilariously overprivileged, 27-year-old version of Keith Richards, but with Auto-Tune. So this album (by the way, she’s also threatening to make an album of Metallica cover songs) is basically a Kinder Egg for critics, like, I know that when I check out “Midnight Sky,” the single I’ve successfully avoided for two months now, it’s going to turn out to be cheap and dumb, but will its Kinder Surprise be a toy car or a xenophobic Smurf? Whatever, the video is OK, if your brain doesn’t glitch out from being exposed to her usual overacting; it’s like ’80s post-disco, think mellow-mode Taylor Dayne as sung by Britney Spears. It’s survivable, is what I say.

• Ho ho ho, anyone notice that Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins is looking more and more like a clown version of Uncle Fester these days? I mean, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, per se, I was just making an … oh just drop it, the ’Kins are back, with a new double-album, called Cyr, this week! The only thing that’s ever stuck out to me about the ‘Pumps is that they have a real knack for making headlines, in rock ’n’ roll magazines, while only ever delivering room-temperature grunge-pop made even more inedible by Corgan’s Steve Urkel singing voice. But that’s just me, and you may disagree, which is fine, and I will simply agree to listen to the title track. Hmm, it’s like Kraftwerk, but with a catchy chorus. Does it seem weird to anyone else that the good old ‘Smashies are a ’90s band, and the ’90s were supposed to be an improvement over ’80s music, but here they are doing phoned-in krautrock? No? Never mind then.

• Billie Joe Armstrong is that little fake punk guy from whatever-their-name, Green Day. Since Green Day’s music hasn’t made enough money to buy all the Twizzlers he could ever eat, he’s solo now, with a new album, No Fun Mondays! The album consists of all cover songs, including Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America,” which was a finalist in the 1981 “Worst Songs Ever Made” competition as selected by the legions of Beelzebub.

• We’ll end the week with holiday cheer, as spread by Nova Scotia-born folk-popper Jenn Grant on her new album, Forever On Christmas Eve! It includes “White Christmas,” blah blah blah, and an original, called “Downtown Christmas Eve,” a sexytime chill-out with binking piano and an aimless but pleasant melody.

The Old Rochelle, Pony Steps (Crumple Crumple Crumple Records)

This band is too messy and cool for me to dismiss as an average fedora combo, even if most of the varying ingredients are there. Thing is, this Lowell, Mass., band, led by Bucky Fereke, has hit on something that’s like a zydeco-washed cross between Eels, Springsteen and ’80s-era Randy Newman. The up-front stuff on this record, starting with “It’s All A Mystery,” is party-time Cajun-pop, made legitimately listenable through the efforts of the band’s accordion player, Tony Cavalieri. It goes on like this for a few tunes, and then, as expected, comes a nice knuckleball, in the form of “West Coast,” an examination of personal rebirth sizzling with a squeaky clean Byrds-style guitar line, in other words stylized in the manner of every other indie-rock song made in the Aughts. That’d usually make me reach for the Tums, but Fereke’s battered yet unrelenting voice can be, as alluded, redolent of Mark Oliver Everett, even borderline Elvis Costello, come to think of it. I’m sure this is a blast to hear live, if this Covid nonsense ever ends. A+

Orianthi, O (Frontiers Records)

You may remember this millennial answer to Lita Ford from her 2009 bubblegum hit “According To You,” a Michelle Branch-style rockout in which the mononymed Australian did her own guitar shredding, something she’s done for a long time now, not only as a solo artist but also as a sidekick for Michael Jackson, Alice Cooper and others. The aforementioned 2009 album, Believe, earned platinum sales status, mostly on the strength of the similarly Avril Lavigne-esque stuff that was on it, but on this, her fourth LP, she ventures into other blends of familiar female-rock, applying a grungy Alanis Morrisette vocal to the Evanescence-drenched opener “Contagious.” “Sinners Hymn” ropes in the noise-heads with a brilliantly beaten-down mud-blues riff, and I suppose I’d love the tune even more if it didn’t rip off Alice in Chains, but what are ya gonna do. “Sorry” finds her trying Trent Reznor goth-electro on for giggles, at which point anyone into heavier music has to tip their hat. A

Retro Playlist

People who are old enough to have their mailboxes stuffed with AARP spam remember when ’80s hair-metal hack Billy Squier, a Boston native, once sang “Christmas is a time to say I love you.” In my mind, now that it’s looking like a Covid Christmas, I’ve changed the lyrics to “Covid is a time to stop being a sucky band.”

Like, why not, bands? There’s really nothing else to do other than reassess your whole approach. It’s either that or just keep trying to press on with the current plan, which, for most bands, involves streaming live shows from someone’s basement. That hasn’t worked out so well, at least from a critic’s eye view. I’m not the only one who’s noticed it; in a recent Facebook post, local veteran rock writer Billy Copeland noted, “The sound quality sucks. The singer keeps pausing to acknowledge all of the fans watching, and that reminds me of … Romper Room, when the lady used to look into her crystal ball and say ‘I see Tommy, and I can see Sally, and I can see Robin[…].’”

The more palatable option for bands looking to make a socially distanced splash, according to one of my favorite PR guys, is to spend no more than $500 on two professionally shot videos. I like that, but I’d always rather see bands getting better at, or changing entirely, their approach to music-making.

We’ve already discussed the possibilities that can come from bands changing their sounds, both the good (Fantastic Negrito’s dumping his Prince trip and becoming the best Led Zeppelin wannabe in the world) and the bad (The Horrors, enough said). But there’ve been others, like Staten Island indie rockers Cymbals Eat Guitars, who in August 2011 gave up posing as a lousy Pavement-type band and released the LP Lenses Alien, which, I noted back then, evinced “a talent for funk-chill, an ear for angsty hooks, a singer who can accurately karaoke Trail of Dead, and a gimmick (mad, mad bliss) — the whole Pavement thing was doomed from the start.”

On the flip side, we have trip-hop legend Tricky, a once-vital character in the Massive Attack canon. His 2013 album False Idols was too minimalist and wasn’t my cup of tea. He went “completely torch,” I whined then.

So, if you’re an artist or band, don’t just change for the sake of changing. I know, it’s totally Captain Obvious, but true.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• It’s here, fam, Nov. 20, the next dump-day for general CD releases! What’s in the can and headed our way, don’t you wonder? Maybe an album of T-Pain burping complete Bach concertos through an Auto-Tuned mic? A Blu-ray of Cardi B giving twerking lessons while wearing a scowling “I Heart Beethoven” half-top? Miley Cyrus covering the entire Mastodon Leviathan album? (You know she wants to, seriously, have you even seen what she’s been up to lately?) Jeezum crow, I can’t imagine what sort of horrific monstrosities are on their way, for the final shopping weeks of this, Week 47 of The Worst Year Of Our Lord 2020, when marriage counselors and family therapists made more money than the airline, cruise ship and hotel industries combined, all while working from home in their Scooby Doo pajamas! Harumph, I say, old chaps and chapettes, look yonder, it’s mummified English EBM/industrial-punk veterans Cabaret Voltaire, with their 15th album, Shadow Of Fear! Hmm, it says here that Richard Kirk is the only remaining member of the band. What fun could that have been, with no drama over artistic differences? Boring! The single, “Vasto,” is a krautrock-electro thing, with no singing. It is OK, because at least it isn’t like some stupid Kraftwerk fanboy thing. Nice tribal-house loops, I shall allow it to live.

• Canadian pub-emo band Partner is commanded by two lesbian guitarists, Josée Caron and Lucy Niles! They won a Canadian songwriting contest or another, whatever, and then got semi-famous when their video for “The ‘Ellen’ Page” went viral, when actual Ellen Page shared it on her Twitter and such. Anyway, Never Give Up, the band’s new LP, features the tune “Honey,” a pretty decent hipster-ized nicking of Joan Jett’s “Do You Wanna Touch Me.” Totally salvageable tune; you might possibly like it, but also might not!

• Speaking of ambivalence, maybe you liked “My Heroine” by Canadian screamo geeks Silverstein, back in 2005, when you were a nerdy tadpole playing Counter Strike for 26 hours a day, but now you’re hopelessly adult and don’t have time for dweeb-rock anymore, yet you’re still interested to know that the band has a new album, Redux II, coming to your Spotify! The first single, “My Disaster (2.0)” is mostly oi-tinged ape-screamo, but then the Dashboard Confessional part comes in, and you realize you must drop everything and go pwn noobs on CS just like back in the old days, what are you waiting for!

• Finally we have my favorite stoner band in the world (because their name fills up almost one million characters of column space), King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, with not one but two new albums! We’ll first talk about the new studio album, K.G., which includes a song titled “Automation,” a shuffle-y, super-cool, mid-tempo post-grunge tune in which our demented heroes try to make Indian sitar-like sounds with their guitars; you’ll totally love it, it’s like a s’mores of Queens of the Stone Age and Ravi Shankar. Now, of course, because it’s holiday shopping season and this band loves putting out albums every two weeks or whatnot, they are also releasing a concert album, Live In S.F. ‘16, which will include such songs as — oh, whatever, it’s all awesome, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard everyone!

Raf Vertessen Quartet, LOI (El Negocito Records)

The term “avant-garde” originally came to us from the military, a catchall describing a small troop of highly skilled soldiers who went ahead of the rest of the army to explore the terrain and warn of potential danger. That military association has mostly faded from the public hivemind, which nowadays regards it as an adjective describing various forms of improvised, off-the-cuff art. After years of trying to “clue in” to avant-jazz, even the red-hottest of it, like this Brooklyn-by-way-of-Belgium drummer has accomplished on this, his bandleader debut, I’ve experienced several stages of self-confidence, but always come back to my musician’s sense that improv is three-dimensional, that the listener is observing personal, not solely musical, interactions. Here, the sax/trumpet/bass contributors do seem to want to expand on Vertessen’s whiteboard sketches, but the constant outbursts of (spoiler) unmitigated skronk really did nothing for me until the heavily syncopated “Fake,” at which point the band did sound like they had a common goal. Note that the whole record was recorded during two one-shot attempts, so, as one critic noted, it gets better after they’re warmed up. B

Fred Hersch, Songs From Home (Palmetto Records)

Album titles rarely ring this true. On this LP, the Ohio-raised jazz pianist, now 64, has made coping with Covid easy on himself by leaving his two usual-suspect rhythm-section cohorts out of it and simply solo-doodling with (mostly) some standards at relaxed leisure, at home. This guy’s a survivor; one of the first jazz musicians to come out as gay and HIV-positive, he was on the ropes in 2008, first suffering from AIDS-related dementia and then, promptly afterward, pneumonia. Unbelievably, after nine nominations, he still hasn’t won a Grammy, not that those are handed out like candy, and regardless, a Grammy won’t keep a person from contracting Covid depression. No, better to keep at it, to be the best you can be, and within this wide-open environment, Hersch reminds us that he is indeed one of the best, period. Playful versions of “Wichita Lineman,” “After You’ve Gone”; some deft rhythmic change-ups on “All I Want,” solemn modal ruminations on Hersch’s own “West Virginia Rose” — sweet escapism abounds. A+

Retro Playlist

By now it’s an established supposition that I may indeed have an undiagnosed allergy to bands in fedora hats, a fashion accessory usually reserved for bands that specialize in music I detest, like jam bands. If I see fedora hats on bandmembers, I usually expect them to play their guitars through wimpily affected Peavy amps, with the distortion knob set to “Don’t Upset Anyone.” I mean, it’s cool if you’re into that; maybe that’s on me, on my black-and-white worldview. My thinking is that a band either plugs guitars into amplifiers to produce loud-ass noise, or leaves them unplugged in order to temporarily to soothe the savage lager-drinking beasts who attend shows, concerts and after-hours fire-pits. I’m not much with gray areas, apparently.
That’s not to say I hate all fedora music. You know for a fact that I’m always nice to Norah Jones, whose Blue Note Records release, The Fall, had me gushing over its prettiness (if not its faux-world-weariness) way back in 2009 (“’Chasing Pirates’ — the lyrics of which betray a weariness with the stupid side of boys — is a shy chick’s ‘Like a Virgin’ in rhythm, tone and attitude”). As well, back in June of this year, I was quite impressed with her new LP, Pick Me Up Off The Floor (“she is officially a folk-jazz goddess … and at least she’s not trying to become a media conglomerate like everybody else who lucks into a hit record”).
And don’t forget Amos Lee. I always have time for that guy. 2011’s Mission Bell is still one of my favorite fedora albums, on the strength of the galloping “Windows Are Rolled Down” alone, but there’s plenty of folk-and-soul-tinged fedora-pop on board to love. Thus I am not hopelessly irredeemable.
(Note that someone may jump onto a [hopefully rickety] stack of milk crates and object that Lee is simply too soulful to be classified as a fedora artist, but that’s the whole point: My “Critic’s Tip To Bands” for this week is to avoid being boring if you’re writing fedora-rock tunes, a thing far easier said than done.)

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Uh oh, gang, the new releases of Nov. 13 are on the way, and things are heating up, probably! I mean, the holidays are basically here, so all your favorite bands and twerking frauds plus William Shatner In A Pear Tree want you to spend the last of your emergency Spaghettios unemployment money not on food, but on albums, like you should, don’t be such a cheapskate! I haven’t looked at the list of new releases yet, but I’ll bet you there’s some OG rapper dude releasing a Christmas album, or maybe a team-up between Kellie Pickler and Dolly Parton, which could be titled Before And After. Wouldn’t that be funny? No? OK, whatever, let me put on my Santa hat and check the list! Whoa, wait a second, look, guys, it’s a new AC/DC album, called POWER UP! The title is capitalized, because seriously man, now that they’re all older than Betty White or whatever, Angus and his boys are seriously powered up! Ho ho ho, this should be awesome in every way, I can’t wait to hear the new single, “Shot In The Dark,” but first, look at Angus! He looks like a beardless Gandalf now, like a cemetery caretaker extra dude from some 1980s PBS show about Sherlock Holmes, so funny and awesome. OK shut up, wait, here’s the video, after this commercial word. Hey, why is the YouTube spam-bot trying to sell Cadillacs on an AC/DC video? Don’t they know AC/DC hates new cars, because the establishment is bad? I’m gonna email Angus on his MySpace or AOL, right after this song (man is he gonna be mad)! Ack, guess what, it’s the same song as “Shoot To Thrill,” like, I’ll bet if you heard this song and “Shoot To Thrill” played at the same time, you’d just say “Hmm, interesting multi-tracking!” Ho ho ho, all right, enough of that.

• I say, old chaps, it would appear that there is a new album from Yukon Blonde, called Vindicator! If you tend to avoid bad music, you probably don’t know about this Canadian indie-rock band, but for the record, they did have a No. 11 hit (in Canada) with the (Canadian) single “Saturday Night,” which was basically a meatless Canadian ripoff of A-ha’s “Take On Me.” Unfortunately they weren’t sued into oblivion for that, so now I have to go listen to the band’s new single, “You Were Mine,” because no justice no peace. I’m watching the YouTube video for the song now, and shocker, it has no hook, just vibe, like a way-too-long Gorillaz/Jamie Liddell mashup. I am now shutting it off and will try to forget the dumbness I have just experienced.

• The Cribs are an indie band from Britain (or, more specifically, because you know how people in the U.K. like to be specific: Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England, U.K., Europe, Earth, solar system, Orion Arm, Milky Way, universe). They have been around since the early Aughts, and everyone from England loves them, because they once made a song called “Mirror Kissers” that sounded kind of like The Hives. The band’s new LP, Night Network, is on the way, and it features the tune “Never Thought I’d Feel Again,” which sounds like a Herman’s Hermits B-side from 1965. You might like it, but probably won’t.

• To end the week, let’s talk about Fear & Loneliness, The Darcys’ new album! “Too Late,” the single, sounds like background music for a disco scene from The Love Boat, and is, thus, worthless, but I thank the band for playing.