Category: Pop

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.

Touché Amoré, Lament (Epitaph Records)

I usually swipe left on promos from the Epitaph label anyway, so this Los Angeles emo quintet owes me one. I’m not just being a jerk here; it’s no longer necessary for me to pretend that I can deal with more of the shimmery, downer guitar lines I’ve heard on so many OG emo albums. Much as I respect their workaday dedication, bands like Silkworm and Drive Like Jehu make me feel claustrophobic, like I’m stuck sitting in a musty room with way too much sun pouring in. But whatever, not knowing anything about this band I gave this record a shot, figuring it couldn’t be more morose than its predecessor, 2016’s Stage Four, which revolved around singer Jeremy Molm’s mom’s bout with cancer. This is fine with me, to be honest; the triple-speed punk-popping “Reminders” is melodic and hellish at the same time, coming off like a Partridge Family hit played at 78 RPM. “Deflector,” on the other hand, sucks, but in a good way, scoring enough post-hardcore points to keep me tuned in until the fade. I’d rather listen to this garbage than Pennywise, put it that way. A-

Dave Douglas, Marching Music (Greenleaf Music)

By the time you’re reading this, the 2020 election will be over, and its inevitable counter-reactions will have already begun to surface. I endorse the Nov. 6 timing of this record, because whichever way the political winds blow, regular people do need to make their voices heard. Jazz trumpeter Douglas, who owns and operates the Greenleaf Music imprint, put together a great quartet for this album, which musically documents the unprecedented protests of our scarily delicate time. It’s not like anything I’ve ever heard from Douglas, and in fact I almost hesitate to lump it as jazz: Son Lux guitarist Rafiq Bhatia figures heavily in the sound, tabling doom-metal-inspired heaviness and trippy Nels Cline-ish incidentals to this rich, solemn outing. It’s not difficult to grok where the band’s sentiments lie, of course; “Whose Streets” is the standout track, hinting at aftermath as it brilliantly evokes a windswept, litter-strewn cityscape thoroughly doused with hope. A+

Retro Playlist

I’ve talked here previously about how the coronavirus has presented record buyers with the chance to broaden their horizons, to try testing out things they might not normally listen to. You should know by now that I have no real agenda, aside from a wish to have all music legally banned from public places except for 1920s-1940s swing, as it might put everyone in a good, or at least presentable, mood.

You should consider yourself lucky in that regard. Can you even imagine how gross this quarter-page would be if I were some sort of irrepressible superfan of the Rolling Stones, or some other way-too-popular band about which literally billions of words have already been written by wonks and nerds? Just picture it. I mean, if that were the case, and I totally loved the Stones (I don’t), by now I would have filled this “casual stream-of-consciousness” space with random babblings about “super-rare” bootleg versions of “Mother’s Little Helper,” covering such obscure trivia as the time Stones’ amazingly boring drummer Charlie Watts left this or that drum roll out of the version the band played in 1986 at the Philadelphia Spectrum. People actually do write stuff like that.

You won’t get that kind of thing on my watch, no sir. I prefer sticking to the meta, and today’s theme is all-girl bands that were reviewed in past columns. You already know about ’80s band the Go-Go’s, of course; they were featured in a Showtime documentary this past July and need no further examination. I’d much rather re-raise a little awareness about Japanese band Shonen Knife, the original female answer to the Ramones for decades now. Last year they released their jillion-zillionth album, Sweet Candy Power, and it was, thank heaven, nothing new. “Opening track ‘Party,’” I said last June, “is simply the Ramones’ ‘Go Mental’ wearing wax lips.” Now, that wasn’t an actual diss, for the record; I just can’t express affection properly, you see.

Nor unfounded disdain. In 2013 I really wanted to toss Au Revoir Simone’s album Move in Spectrums out the car window because the girls were from Brooklyn (and plus the fact that they proved once and for all that all-guy hipster bands hadn’t cornered the market on purposely terrible indie-pop), but it wasn’t to be. There were a couple of hooks in there, so I just left it at that in my mini-review, leaving out the part about their being an absolutely dreadful band.

And that’s how I missed out on a Pulitzer, fam.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Onward we go to the next general-CD-release Friday, Nov. 6! You should be paying attention, because there are tons of new CDs coming out before ChristmaRamaHanuKwanzaa, after which will be nothingness and epic fail, when, like every year, all the good albums have been released and I have nothing to write about in this space except for goat-demon thrash-metal bands and reissues of 1960s Lawrence Welk albums. So what’s first this week? Why, it’s Neil Young & Crazy Horse, because they haven’t released a new album in like a whole two weeks or whatever, so here it is, the new album, Return To Greendale! Will Neil Young solve all our problems by singing about politics, like in the 1960s? Let’s hope so, because the corona-whatever is really harshing my mellow, so if he could do that it’d be great (Oh, whatever, I don’t know, you shouldn’t listen to me, because I’ve always hated Neil Young. I think of him as the Billy Jack of room-temperature rock, a fragile but indefatigable put-upon soul who gets girls because he can swear in Chippewa. If it hadn’t been for Richard Nixon, Neil Young would be working at a Denny’s, and that’s literally the thing I hate most about Nixon). Anyway, what does this whiny-voiced fraud want from me today, a review of his new single, “Falling from Above?” Sure, I’ll bite, I’m at the video right now. Ha ha, he looks like Rex Trailer. Oh boy, it’s a (spoiler alert) mid-tempo (spoiler alert) bar-rock tune that’s (spoiler alert) totally boring. Dang it all, he used the word “freedom” in the song to make fun of Americans or whatever, which means I have to drink a shot. Oops, there’s a sloppy, stupid harmonica part. Drink! OK, I’m drunk, because wimpy constitution, let’s move along.

• Wow, even at 52 Australian-British singing lady Kylie Minogue is hot, but enough about substance, let’s talk about style, namely whatever style people will hear on her new album, Disco. I predict the style will be what I like to call “awesome house-pop,” but you never know in what sort of craziness an artiste will indulge. Right, there ya go, as I predicted, the new single “Say Something” is awesome; totally ’80s-throwback stuff, like early Madonna. On the video, she’s riding a badass-looking horse and throwing sparkle-bombs at some Blue Man Group people or whatever. I love her, really.

• Well, how do you like that, my Kylie-inspired good mood continues into another blurb, as U.K. folktronica band Tunng will release its seventh full-length, Dead Club, within 24 hours of this issue’s street date. The single, “A Million Colours,” is sort of like an art-rock version of Gorillaz, with lots to like about it. What’s that you ask? What happened to the folktronica part? Right, what, you expect genre bands to stick to their given genres? Please don’t be difficult.

• Time to close up shop at the Snark Garage for the week, but not before I mention Meteors Could Come Down, the fourth album from LAL! LAL is an electro-world band, consisting of musicians from Uganda, Bangladesh, Barbados and India. The title track is super dreary but awesome, a Tricky-like trip-hop tune with an organic feel. OK, the more I hear of this the more I like it. This is awesome, go buy it.

Laura Jane Grace, Stay Alive (Polyvinyl Records)

Laura Jane Grace has a lot her plate dealing with being the most wellknown punk-rocker in the LGBTQIA community. Thankfully, this time out, she didn’t even bother trying to bring in her band, Against Me!, through some sort of awkward Zoom collaboration in order to express her feelings about and reactions to the ongoing social crises that have overflowed from the pandemic. But these songs aren’t psychically exclusive to people who are trans and whatnot; I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t be able to relate to the final line of opener “The Swimming Pool Song,” where Grace, wailing on her acoustic guitar, hollers, “It feels like the death of everything” in her sturdy Weezer baritone. Yes, Grace and her unplugged guitar’s only accompaniment throughout the record is provided by a drum track, but it’s no surprise to hear such powerful (and sometimes very pretty) stuff exuding from a study of prison-like isolation as experienced by one who’s already well used to it. A

Ryan and Pony, Moshi Moshi (Pravda Records)

This coed duo (Ryan Smith the guy; Pony, a.k.a. Kathie Hixon-Smith, the girl) were in separate Minnesota-scene indie bands forever until this joining-of-forces debut album, which has made quite the splash with the Twin Cities press corps. They were both raised on hard stuff — Marilyn Manson, Husker Du, Metallica and such — which naturally resulted in their team-up sounding like a well-above-average Arts & Crafts Records release, in other words Canadian hipster-pop with a much lower-than-usual level of worthless ’90s-college-rock gunk. Like Broken Social Scene, the duo usually sings the same lines, note for note, in a dueling-octave style that usually makes me barf, but they do have something of a hard edge within those confines, i.e., where BSS might place some stupid piano-vs.-xylophone part, these two jack the guitar energy, a la Len or [place name of one-hit Canadian ’90s-radio band here]. They’re OK; they should just move to Montreal and get it over with, if you ask me. B-

Retro Playlist

If there’s anything we’ve learned from this semi-lockdown, it’s that man, do we need some fun around here, you know?

In that spirit (if quite a bit late), I’ve decided to end our collective suffering and simultaneously pay tribute to the recently departed Eddie Van Halen by starting a Van Halen tribute band, called “Old Morons Playing Van Halen.” The band will play nothing but David Lee Roth-era songs, no “Van Hagar” stuff, the garbage they put out when Sammy Hagar sang for them.

I can sing exactly like Dave, and I don’t care what people think of it, which, taken together, is my only artistic talent, really. I was hired to be the Dave in the local Van Halen tribute band Diver Down back during the George W. Bush era, but the guitarist didn’t think I was bad enough. Literally. See, Dave absolutely sucks when he plays live, and this guitarist wanted authenticity. He was all set in that regard; he had every pre-amp and guitar pedal that Eddie used in his actual stage setup, like, he studied Eddie, and for some stupid reason he wanted his singer to be able to sing like the “live version” of Dave, not the “just like the album” version. I wasn’t going to fight the guy right then and there, so I wished them luck and left.

So why not? What could it hurt? What, would all the bands I’ve insulted or ignored over the years finally get back at me by telling their friends, “Don’t bother going to Saeger’s Van Halen show, he just sounds like Dave.” Um, ouch? I mean, no one’s going to go to shows for a while longer unless a really awesome band is playing, so let’s do this, local musicians! My favorite Van Halen album is Women And Children First, so we could just perform that record in its entirety, and whatever, “Runnin’ With The Devil” and “Atomic Punk,” you know, the good stuff from their first album.

Come on, guys, whattaya say? For the time being, for social distancing protocol’s sake, maybe the Mall Of New Hampshire would let us play in front of Macy’s (are they still in business?) and the crowd could adore us from in front of Mobile Envy. The little kids could dance, the people could spazz and fire Nerf guns at us, and it would just rule.

I’m serious, folks. PM me!

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• OMG, it’s totally the dump of new albums streeting on Oct. 30, coming straight for us, led by It’s Christmas All Over, the new holiday album from ’90s indie-pop gods the Goo Goo Dolls! I usually hate people who are upbeat during plagues, but during a Quibi interview the band’s irrepressibly happy (and why shouldn’t he be) frontman John Rzeznik convinced me that he is legitimately pumped about releasing an album of dumb old Christmas songs, because “2020 has been horrible for everybody, so let’s just drop the pretense of being hip, and make a classic Christmas album the way Bing Crosby used to do it, and stuff,” something to that effect. He’s so bloody enthusiastic that I’m almost believing in Covid Santa myself, and I hope everyone buys this awesome album. I mean, I assume it’s awesome, but Warner Bros. is too cheap to release any advance tracks, but I do know that the songs will include “Let It Snow,” “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” What does that all mean? Who cares! Everyone’s laid off, it’s never gonna end, and it’s the most wonderful time of the year! Merry Whatnot, guys!

• As I’ve gone over before, one of my Constant Readers has a crush on Faith No More’s Mike Patton, so it is my duty to mention the forthcoming new Mr. Bungle album, The Raging Wrath Of The Easter Bunny Demo! It will be full of “avant-garde-metal,” because that is the totally fake genre that certain critics made up for them, and it will be rad and awesome, because it is made of re-recordings of the songs that were on their first-ever demo from literally one million years ago, in 1986! Musical guests include former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo (yay!) and Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian (boo! Or vice versa!). To be honest, I am not a Mr. Bungle expert, but I know that Patton’s other band, Tomahawk, is awesome, so I expected that the new single “Eracist” would be at least semi-awesome, and it is, if you like throwback thrash-metal. Kind of Venom-ish really. It doesn’t sound like a boombox recording, the way the 1986 demo did, so it’s hard for me to tell on which 1986 song “Eracist” is supposed to be based. Do you like old Slayer demos? Then you might like this. Probably. Or not.

• Oh great, there’s literally nothing I like more than having to drop everything I’m doing in order to try and figure out what Mark Oliver Everett, the dude from The Eels, is babbling about. Yes, it’s a new Eels album, called Earth To Dora. As with all new albums released these days, the plan was to promote the album through touring, but come on already, but it will be here regardless, spearheaded by the single “Are We Alright Again,” an infectious but ultimately empty roller-rink-hipster-pop confection that gets its strength from Everett’s world-weary baritone. As always, this is what Flaming Lips will sound like when they’re in their 80s, basically.

• Our parting shot this week is a quick listen to 1980s geek-punker Elvis Costello’s new LP, Hey Clockface, specifically its single, “Hey Clockface / How Can You Face Me?” It is a 1920s-flapper-flavored tap-jazz track, which is fine by me. Elvis sounds like Randy Newman now. Who would have ever guessed he’d turn into Randy Newman when he got super old? Besides me, I mean?

CrowJane, Mater Dolorosa (Kitten Robot Records)

For your Halloweening pleasure, we have this Los Angeles lady, last seen as the guitarist of Egrets On Ergot, a noise-rock band with the sound of early Nick Cave and the aesthetics of Dresden Dolls. The story goes that L.A. punk legend Paul Roessler (Nina Hagen, 45 Grave, etc.) was recording the Egrets and, noticing that this girl was deeply depressed, took her under his wing, basically locked her in a room full of instruments and such, and waited to hear the results. It’s a Throbbing Lobster-level noise opus, a cross between Swans, Zola Jesus and everything in between, especially Einstürzende Neubauten, given that the list of her noise weapons included tin foil, bed frames and kitty litter. She’s deliciously off her rocker, this one; her Exorcist-beholden promo photos fit perfectly with tracks like “Estrella” (clanging noise-rhythms under stream-of-consciousness existentialist hooey), “Delusion” (crazed-witch wilding plus tribal skronk) and her “cover” of James Brown’s “Man’s World” (primal-scream therapy accompanied by a shoegaze-metal guitarist blissing out). Picture what you’d get if Jarboe had a daughter and you’re pretty much there. Deliciously freaky. A+

Zero 7, “Shadows” (BMG Records)

It feels like a million years since a proper full-length from this British techno duo hit the streets. I lost track of them after 2006’s The Garden, an album that I listened to constantly in the car, more toward an attempt to like it than anything else. I mean, don’t get me wrong; José González, the Art Garfunkel of trip-hop, was on there, and so was (as always) Sia, and the album’s whole scorched-asphalt effect was wildly appropriate for its summertime release date. But Tina Dico wasn’t there that time, and whatever, nothing actually happened on it. Take the giant jump forward to now (we can skip past 2009’s Yeah Ghost, which was even more meatless), and we have this track, from a promised forthcoming Shadows EP, and once again I’m all set with these glorified Massive Attack wannabes. The tune features newcoming singer Lou Stone, who sounds like — ready for a shocker? — a white accountant’s idea of Tricky, and between that and the painfully obvious Portishead worship of the song’s airless, deep-chill beat, there’s nothing wrong, but also nothing to celebrate. Um, bravo, I guess? C

Retro Playlist

I still love me some Halloween, even in 2020.

Halloween doesn’t have a lot of songs associated with it. The only one I can think of is Bobby Pickett’s 1962 sock-hop hit “Monster Mash,” which went on to become the “Jingle Bells” of Halloween (Jack Marshall’s theme to the 1960s TV show The Munsters didn’t have lyrics, unfortunately; it coulda been a contender).

Corny as they are, I’m always up for campy monster-themed bands. In fact, the only surefire way to get a guaranteed review in this multiple award-winning column is to send me something where the band is singing about Frankensteins or Draculas or wolfmen or whatnot. It’s a tradition dating from way back, even before my Hippo days, when I reviewed an advance copy of British band Zombina and the Skeletones’ 2006 album, Death Valley High, for some such zine or newspaper. The sheer audacity exhibited by the band for naming themselves such a thing earned it an instant A+, never even mind the garage-pop nonsense-songs that are on the album: “The Kids Are All Dead”; “Janie’s Got A Dissolvo Ray.” A definitive, masterful work whose genius should be broadcasted at 100,000 watts from every mountain top on an hourly basis.

And then there are the fails, or at least the failed bands that didn’t start out as fails. The 2007 debut album from U.K. band The Horrors, Strange House, was utterly crazed, like a Screaming Lord Sutch-fronted Bauhaus being stung by a million bees. On that record, the singer shrieks his spazzy lines (“Jack the Ripper! Jack the Ripper!”) over goth-core that’s to die for. They were so awesome it physically hurt, like, I was like, “Why didn’t I do this?” (I’d actually thought of starting a day-glo-metal band called Goody Howl in the early Aughts, but my laziness won out.)

Anyway, then, inexplicably, The Horrors made a group decision to suck. For their second album, 2009’s Primary Colors, they got rid of the fright wigs and the monster stuff and went in the direction of, I don’t know, shoegaze-tinted indie.

That was a tough one. I’ll tell you, if I weren’t an actual vampire, I would have cried. You know, maybe I should do it, put together an awesome band. Watch for an announcement in the coming weeks.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Oct. 23 is on the way, and with it will come new albums, some of which people will like, and some of which will be brutally mocked and derided by mean-spirited critics who have been in quarantine for the last million years and are always on the lookout for albums to mock and deride, in order to take some of the edge off the boredom and horror. And speak of the devil, look, everyone, it’s gravel-throated Vegas-pop charlatan Bruce Springsteen, with his guitarist The Guy From The Sopranos and whatever horn player hacks could fit into the studio, with a new album, called Letter To You. Everyone thought I was pretty mean to The Boss’ last album, whatever its name, but in my defense, it was only due to the fact that it sucked, so it’d be cool if y’all would stop making up #FakeNews and reporting me to Twitter just to get me bounced off of there, not that I’d miss it in the first place. Whatever, Bruce is super-old now and should probably just form a super-band with Willie Nelson and William Shatner and call it “The Jammin Old Dudes” instead of releasing new albums with the whatsitsface band, don’t you think? No? OK, then I’ll just go watch the video for the title track. Look, it’s the Sopranos guy, all smiling, and the other guys too. This song kind of sounds like Bon Jovi, but more old and boring. Disposable junk it is, as Yoda would say.

• I don’t know about you, but the last Wilco album was so good that I’m ready to cut frontman Jeff Tweedy some slack for his upcoming fourth album Love Is The King. But not if it’s super bad, though, because I never recommend music that I don’t like unless free concert tickets or dinners are involved — I have standards and principles to uphold, fam! So, the title track finds our hero in full John Lennon fanboy mode: His voice sounds like John Lennon, and there’s all sort of John Lennon-level reverb on his voice. As a song it’s fine, so if you like fine John Lennon songs, you’ll probably like this.

• Last time we checked on Claremont, California, indie band The Mountain Goats was February of last year, when I gave their 17th album, In League With Dragons, a once-over. My lava-hot take back then was that it was awesome (in a Vampire Weekend meets Decemberists way) but a little under-adventurous. Whatevs, the new LP, Getting Into Knives, is out imminently, led by the single “As Many Candles As Possible,” a delightfully unprofessional no-wave-chill mess. Know who it sounds like, is the nerdy prank singer “Mike Behind The Mike” Callahan from the Sports Hub morning show, but since you have no idea who that is, I won’t mention it.

• To wrap up we have Big Thief singer Adrianne Lenker, with two albums coming out the same day: Songs and Instrumentals. See what she’s doing there, hipsters? Guess what, one of the albums just has instrumental-only tunes on it, and the other one has full songs on it. So cute, on the song “Anything,” she sounds like a weird Baby Yoda wombat-girl, singing in a sweet little voice over 12-string wondrousness, about her boyfriend, whom she likes to smooch. So adorable and fresh!

Yellow Days, A Day in a Yellow Beat (RCA Records)

If you believe the hype bubbling up around this second album from Yellow Days, a.k.a. George van den Broek, he’s successfully bending ’70s radio-funk into a form of “upbeat existential millennial crisis music.” What that translates to in the real world of real things is a patchwork of listenable-enough blue/jazz/funk sampling that draws from the Moby playbook. The 2.5-minute “Intro” is a bit tired: an old TV interview with Ray Charles (in which he bemoans the lack of artistic freedom granted to those poor downtrodden souls who’ve scored record contracts) pattering over a decent-enough imitation of 1980s jazz-pop chill, complete with dated synths, faux-xylophone and assorted other piffle. “Be Free” is more of a traditional tune (or extended ringtone, take your pick), one dripping with Carter-era authenticity, and from there you’re off to the escapist races with the rest of the songs, lounging in a silky hammock of occasionally skit-decorated Soul Train vibe. All of it’s pretty catchy, if that counts. B+

Spice Girls, Forever (Virgin Records)

Unless the holidays are canceled — and who would blame us — we’ve arrived at that time of the year when nearly all the new releases are reissues, box sets, bootlegs, laughably expensive multimedia DVD/CD packages (“Only 10,000 in existence!”), and, of course, first-ever vinyl releases, like this one. No, this isn’t the album with their monster hit “Wannabe” on it (that was from their 1996 debut album, Spice); Forever was their final studio album, and “only” reached No. 39 in the U.S. Not surprising, given that they were down to four singers by then (Ginger Spice, a.k.a. Geri Halliwell, left for a solo career and to write children’s books). OK, no, that wasn’t the unsurprising thing about this album’s failure to do much in the U.S.; it was the phoned-in quality of the songs. Like most of this stuff, “Let Love Lead the Way” (granted, a filler track if ever there was one) was at best a bad example of massage-spa background patter; “Get Down With Me” couldn’t decide whether it wanted to nick TLC or Missy Elliott, and so on. Frankly, the only thing that didn’t outright suck was the girl-power ballad “Goodbye,” which actually did fit as a final righteous statement. C-

Retro Playlist

If you haven’t yet cracked in half over this endless quarantine, one might guess that you may have discovered meditation and/or yoga. Those things do help soothe the soul, believe it or not, despite the fact that so many people suggest them.

I should know, if you’ll pardon. I became a certified Kripalu yoga instructor 15 years ago, after spending a month at the practice’s ashram, which resembles a suburban grade school more than it does any sort of ancient spiritual retreat. Regardless, this led to my becoming co-owner of the now-defunct Manchester Yoga Center, which was located over what was then the India Palace (now Royal India) restaurant on South Willow Street in Manchvegas. Strategic partnering, you see.

Music, of course, is a big part of the yoga experience. When you’re trying to rid your body and brain of toxins, it helps to play music that’s cleansing. Just to get this part out of the way, everyone automatically thinks of Irish multi-tracking weirdo Enya when they think of “yoga music,” and yeah, it is awesome stuff. I usually have her “Best Of” LP playing in the car around the holidays.

But honestly, Deva Premal is as good as Enya, if in a different way. I used to play her 1998 Essence album a lot in my yoga classes. Her voice is truly a marvel. Her last couple of albums kind of sucked, but that’s only proof that perfection simply isn’t attainable on this plane.

As for my personal go-to “yoga records” — which, it should be said, means “New Age Music,” of a sort — one constant has always been Anugama’s Shamanic Dream, which works as yoga-class ambiance and meditative trance-inducement. It’s a crazy-long tune made of one simple, gentle, super-cool tabla/synth pattern over which a faraway voice chants “So be it.” Really immersive stuff.

My most guilty New Age pleasure, though, is the 1996 Christopher Franke album The Celestine Prophecy. The story goes that Franke, of the early ambient band Tangerine Dream, was inspired to pay homage to James Redfield’s 1993 novel of the same name. Though a bit mixed, the results do include a tune titled “The Mission of Father Sanchez,” a song that is, to this day, the prettiest, most spiritually empowering thing I’ve ever heard. The ultimate wedding march. I can’t make it to the final fade without being overwhelmed with joy and blubbering like a baby. It gets me every single time. If The Lion King soundtrack makes your lower lip twitch, this tune might just knock you flat.

(Please don’t ever use it on me at a party. I do have a certain amount of Grinch cred to maintain.)

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Hey, everyone, guess what happens on Oct. 16? Yep, that’s right, all the new albums get released, because it is a Friday! Let’s start the festivities with this hipster dude over here, Kevin Morby, a Texas native who moved to Brooklyn because he thought it would be awesome, and he’d live this totally neat-o Singin’ in the Rain life, or something like that, I honestly don’t know what this stupid Wikipedia article is even trying to say. But whatever, he was in a band called The Babies with Cassie Ramone of the Vivian Girls, and — look at that, I’ve lost ya, haven’t I. Come back, man, I agree with you, seriously, like, who cares about bands who sacrificed nice suburban lives just to rack up 85 YouTube listens or whatnot, and so I will end the boring history lesson and go have a listen to whatever single is on tap from Morby’s upcoming new album Sundowner! I don’t know anything about this guy, but I swear on a stack of Silver Surfer No. 4 comic books that if this is melodically good but there’s really horrible singing, like every other “indie” band that doesn’t have a full band roster I’ve heard this year, I’ll — why, I’ll, well, let’s just say that you don’t want to know! OK, here’s the stupid single, “Campfire.” It’s a cross between The Cardinals and Bob Dylan, and it’s been done literally one trillion times before.

• Right, here we go, with British glam-rockers The Struts, who are releasing their third album, Strange Days! Will it be as terrible as The Darkness, or will it be technically awesome, like the old British glam rock band Sweet used to be? By the way, only ninnies call Sweet “The Sweet.” Their name is just plain “Sweet.” Why did people call them “The Sweet,” like, was there a misprint in the August 1979 issue of Hit Parader or something? I don’t care, at least this band definitely does have “The” in its name, and for that I thank them. Oh, let’s just go, the first single is the title track, and the “feat” person is none other than the guy from Take That, Robbie Williams! Wait, this isn’t glam, it’s soccer-mom music for the Ellen DeGeneres show. Come on, guys, at least do some cowbell, hah? Nope, no cowbell, no glam, just music for daydreaming about receiving a tender back massage from Bradley Cooper while dropping the kids off for a “play date,” or whatever soccer moms do, I have no idea. Barf, no glam, just over-processed piano-pop, let’s just move along here.

• Ha ha, look at the funny skinny soy-boy, who calls himself “The Wonky Angle,” on the YouTube, ranking Autechre’s albums from best to worst and gettin’ him some Likes! Is there really a difference from one album to another, when a band plays awesome glitchy IDM? Nope. The new album is called Sign, and there’s no advance, but — wait a second, why is the album cover a complete ripoff of Orbital’s Wonky, or at least the promo version? Whatever, I’ll take it, this will be awesome, don’t mind me.

• We’ll end the week with Don’t Know How But They Found Me, a band led by two of the sad emo clowns from Panic! At The Disco. The title track from their new album, Razzmataz, is — wait, is this Smirnov commercial real? Like, you can drill a hole on top of a watermelon and stick a vodka bottle upside down in the hole, attach a spigot, and you get drinkies? Uh-oh, yikes, I’m out of room, no time to talk about whatever this emo song is about.