Category: Pop

Decouplr, Digital Bonfire (self-released)

Debut LP from this boy-girl electronic music duo, who, I’m advised, have been duking it out on the “DIY scene” in Philadelphia for a decade or so (I could be a real jerk with regard to translating that particular claim to fame, but let’s just proceed). Singer Bailey Walker’s soprano is chill and breathy, sort of a cross between Goldfrapp and Billie Eilish, not something you haven’t heard before, but mildly interesting in the settings in which it basks, a series of low-intensity, subterranean trip-hop beats that pulse, twinkle and cross rhythms here and there. There’s nothing here that has the sheer depth of Portishead, let’s say that, but by the same token the songs hold their own and do aim for the same sort of broke-down subway ambiance as Dummy, an album that’s — my stars, around 27 years old now. Much as I’d love to recommend it, then, the record seems a little, I dunno, underdone. B+

King Yosef and Youth Code, A Skeleton Key in the Doors of Depression (self-released)

Given that I’m all up into horror-techno in general and KMFDM in particular (with caveats), I was pleasantly surprised by this collaborative EP from a trio of underground industrial/hip-hop artists. Portland, Oregon-based Yosef (real name Tayves Yosef Pelletier) has produced songs for Billboard Hot 100-charting rap artists like the late XXXTentacion and Ski Mask the Slump God, while Youth Code is a boy-girl pair-up from Los Angeles. The latter act’s singer Sara Taylor is the broken-glass-gargling singer in front here, sounding every bit the Lucia Cifarelli worshipper, and maybe even better, and the grinding, crazily angered beats are up there with Terrorfakt, if you have any idea who that is. The Skinny Puppy/Front Line Assembly cabal is big into them too; having Pelletier along to provide a little underground-rap sensibility makes this a tough one to top, I don’t care who you are. When you absolutely, positively have to get everyone on Elm Street running for the safety of the shops. A+

Retro Playlist

Wow, exactly (almost) 10 years ago, we had a couple of real doozies to talk about on this page, and the Playlist stuff was full of big-album news too. There was F.A.M.E., the then-new LP from Rihanna’s ex, Chris Brown. Ha ha, remember that one, with the song “Yeah 3X,” where Brown tried super-hard to dance like Michael Jackson? Unfortunately for me, it wasn’t that bad, and there wasn’t even a lot of Auto-Tune on there, so I really didn’t have anything bad to say about it, except for, of course, “ha ha, look, it’s Chris Brown!”

Anyway, of the two albums I talked about in this space the week of March 14, 2011, Angles, the album from The Strokes, was the biggest disappointment. Granted, the band ran into a ton of problems during the making of Angles, not the least of which was singer Julian Casablancas’ total absence from the planning of it, but nevertheless some critics claimed to think the album was good, a “return to form” (what, they’d actually left the form at some point?). The press’s praise, I noticed, was of the sort parents gush in the direction of their kids on Christmas morning, when the little dears finally break down and put on the pink bunny pajamas Grandma sent them. But I was free. I wasn’t trying to sell my opinion to Rolling Stone or Nylon editors, so I was able to snark at will: “Five years it took these guys to barf out what amounts to Second Impressions of Earth? Five years?” And etc., viewer discretion advised.

Now, the other album that week, Pet Shop Boys’The Most Incredible Thing, was another matter entirely. “There’s likely no band other than PSB,” I blowharded back then, “more culturally credentialed and intellectually licensed to combine techno and classical toward the creation of a modern ballet, as this is — the stage production is a modernization of the Hans Christian Andersen story, which grew from his disgust with the pointless conflict of his own time, the Franco-Prussian War.” Yes, it was a technopop/classical “soundtrack” album of sorts, from, yes, the same guys whose first hit single, “West End Girls,” substantially lowered the bar for pop music in 1984. My, what a terrific band those guys grew up to be, really.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The next general CD release date is this Friday, March 12, and now for a message about the rumors of my selling out to the corporate matrix! For months I’ve been amusing myself with a mutual dragging contest over email, with a mysterious cabal of underground-music guys, all of whom have a nicely warped sense of humor but who don’t seem to understand that you can’t ask for publicity in this fine upstanding newspaper while also remaining completely anonymous and — here’s the key — not having an actual, official album/mixtape/EP/single available for sale (or whatever, free download, I don’t care, anything that loosely resembles a finished product). In other words, to tweak the old, stale Game Of Thrones meme, “One does not simply send Uncle Ewic an email demanding coverage for a music release that is not a release and then spazz about the fact that he doesn’t take you seriously.” We’ll start with Zach and Emily, an “artist-promoting” couple who, under the corporate name of Cupcake Kamikaze, promote bands that are, you know, different. When last I heard from them, they were pushing a “band of meatheads” from Maine, The Imbosills, which had just released The Imbosills Sing Your Favorite Marvel Theme Songs on YouTube only. This fine collection kicks off with some joke song about Marvel superhero Scarlet Witch, and I had to shut it off about 30 seconds in, because it sounded like two 4channers singing in joke voices over a boombox recording of a guitar riff and nothing else. They also sent along a demo of “all-disco versions” of King Crimson songs that weren’t horrible, which isn’t to say they were good. So there you have it, guys, whoever you are; you have officially gotten some press in the Hippo. If this is all a troll, I technically won, because you spent a lot more time making these nonsense-songs than I did writing about them. I. Win.

• There’s really not a lot else to chat about this week, but we can discuss Louisiana sludge-metal band Eyehategod’s first LP in seven years, A History Of Nomadic Behavior, just so I’ll have a reason to go listen to them, which I’ve avoided doing for years. Ah, yes, here we are, the first single, “High Risk Trigger.” The band is like Crowbar with Trent Reznor singing. OK, moving along.

• Wow, more fringe-metal, might as well: it’s Rob Zombie, with new LP The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy! I haven’t cared about this dude since his “Drag-U-La” days, but maybe this is good, I’ll go listen to his new song, “The Triumph of King Freak.” Whoa, this is cool, an Arabian-metal trip, sort of like Ministry’s “Khyber Pass” (the tune at the end of Hurt Locker). It is OK!

• We’ll wrap up this week with alt-blues/folk singer Valerie June’s The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers, in specific its single, “Call Me A Fool [feat. Carla Thomas].” It’s a nice little soccer mom song, sort of like “Blue Bayou,” a decent vehicle for June’s Kate Havnevik-ish sour-pickle voice. Norah Jones fans would like this I think.

Scolex, “Black Pyramid Ritual,” and Mortuous, “Dessicated”(Split Single) (Carbonized Records)

As every underground metalhead in New Hampshire knows, I’m pretty worthless as far as covering the DIY end of the genre with any real dedication. If I can remember to, I’ll be talking a bit more about that next week and defending myself, but for now, let’s kill two relevant birds with one stone by giving a cursory glance at this split single from two bands slugging it out in California’s Bay Area. This split single (released on cassette only) first spotlights “Black Pyramid Ritual,” a tune by Oakland boy-girl outfit Scolex, which aims at a cross between early Mastodon and Cannibal Corpse. I assume it’s the dude who’s singing, but hey, ya never know, but either way, the singer sings in a Cookie Monster glubber-growl, but not just any glubber-growl. This singing means business, folks, like, if you have any cookies, you best fork ’em over, toot sweet! San Jose band Mortuous is the band on the flip side, with the song “Dessicated.” That one’s mid-tempo doom-metal stuff, but metal dudes probably don’t call it that anymore (like I care), and the Cannibal Corpse-style vocalizing is totally jacked, man, like, I think he’s just literally gargling Listerine and trying to scare his mom, not singing. As always, your mileage may vary! B

Rest Easy, Sick Day EP (Mutant League Records)

This Vancouver-based four-piece is more punk than 99 percent of the stuff that comes my way for review. What’s that? No, I’m saying that’s a good thing, after all that’s come before, the Green Day phase, the “power pop” phase, and all that stuff. And no, I’m not saying dishwasher-safe corporate punk like that stuff is doomed, nor is this little four-songer something with which I can’t find fault. It does have a hint of mid-career Weezer and all that stuff, but the brain-damage is front and center, not just in the frenzied tuneage (imagine some band like Panic! At The Disco lowering the fakeness enough to convince fans they’ve actually listened to the Ramones’ Animal Boy at least once) but in their imagery as well: the video for the straight-edge dipped “Bad Idea” touches on puerile, vitally important things like Jackass, as they play N64 in the bathtub and make Evel Knievel jumps over each other while riding mopeds. More of this, please. A+

Retro Playlist

I’ll bet you forgot about the awesome jokes I made at the beginning of the column from six years ago this week, cracking wise about the then-upcoming new album from Kid Rock: “Yee ha, it’s a new Kid Rock album, titled First Kiss! I have to say, talk about soft targets, this imbecilic phony is even driving a big gas-guzzling pickup truck in the video for the title track! This is AWESOME, ladies and germs! Why did the chicken run across the road? Because there was a pickup truck next to the chicken playing Kid Rock songs!”

Maybe that was a little mean, but I was nice that week to the self-titled album from Nashville-by-way-of-New-York-by-way-of-Boston indie-rock girl Liz Longley, who at the time was scheduled to play at ye olde Tupelo Music Hall after the album came out. Geez, remember when we could just bop down to Tupelo and not have to worry about the ’rona? I sure miss those days. But whatever, Longley had spent a lot of time opening for acts like Paula Cole and Nancy Griffith, the latter of whom she nicked on the tune “You’ve Got That Way.” Another “RIYL” match for this record was Lisa Loeb, so it’s a good one to check out if that kind of stuff is your thing.

The other album strapped to the examination table that week was Revisionist, from Oakland composer William Ryan Fritch, who’s soundtracked a few snobby documentaries and such. The album was a bit contrived, in that it was relevant to the Beach Boys-inspired zeitgeist in indie rock back then: “[Fritch’s] wobbly, over-acted voice looms over these sweeping, ghostly tracks, much of it remindful of Bon Iver — OK, imagine Bon Iver trying to re-envision Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans, but with less self-indulgence and a bigger percussion palette.” The fact that Fritch doesn’t read music won him a few bonus points, so I gave him an A-.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The new CD releases for March 5 are here, gather ’round, my little cacodemons, come and get it! Looky there, it’s skinny-jeans fabulosos Kings of Leon, with some new album called When You See Yourself, betcha can’t wait, can ya? When last we left this indie band that puts out albums on big major labels (which is sort of like when baseball stars join the minor leagues, just to pad their stats), they were … whoa, that was way back in 2016, when they put out the Walls album, which the snobs at Pitchfork rated a 4.5 out of 10, because it didn’t fit into Pitchfork’s dream of a music world owned and operated by white hipster fellas who make sucky songs on purpose, which is still their idea of Xanadu (totally not referring to the Olivia Newton John song, just saying), to this day! Of course The Independent hated it too, which also makes sense, as people in the U.K. only like their “indie rock” albums to be decent, like Elbow and all those guys. What am I getting at? I don’t know, maybe I’m saying that I hated Walls even more than I let on back in 2016, but then again, to me, hearing a disappointingly bad album from some bunch of hilariously overrated dingbats is no more memorable an event than seeing a skunk hanging around in my backyard, like, I just kind of go “hm, a skunk” and go about my business. At any rate, the new single is “The Bandit,” and OMG, it’s boring and worthless, but still Kings of Leon-ish, like maybe the Martians from Mars Attacks took control of the Followill brothers’ bodies and tried to make a song that was mostly ’90s-rock but with that rich and delicious hayloft-rock angle they use. I SEE you, Martians!

• Since 2005 British indie-electro guy James Mathé has been more commonly known by his stage name, Barbarossa. That trip is minimalist techno, but going by what I’m hearing on “Iris2Iris,” a single from his new album, Love Here Listen, it’s not wildly minimalist; in fact I’d call it progressive house. But you don’t care about genre labels, or at least I hope you don’t, for both our sakes, so let’s just leave it that it’s a very pretty, nicely layered song, and if I actually cared about house music anymore, I’d probably be trying to mooch a promo CD out of this guy. It’s cool, is what I’m saying.

• So it says here that one of the two dudes who compose Scottish slowcore/indie band Arab Strap has some sort of connection to Mogwai, but I really just lost interest in tracking the association after like five minutes, so the heck with it, let’s just roll and talk about the band’s new album As Days Get Dark, spearheaded by the single “Compersion Pt. 1.” You’ll note that these guys originally got together in 1995, after bonding over lo-fi nonsense like Smog and Will Oldham, and this tune is indeed possessed of that sort of sonic patois, except it’s more metal, like if Silkworm suddenly decided they loved Lou Reed or something, in other words it’s like Pavement but less awful (which obviously isn’t a high mountain to climb).

• And finally, we have Fruit Bats, with their new LP, The Pet Parade! The single, “Holy Rose,” isn’t the insufferable indie-folk I was expecting, more like Harry Nilsson meets Tom Waits, but you could dance (awkwardly) to it. Bon appetit, please do get this out of my face.

Sana Nagano, Smashing Humans (577 Records)

Hey man, if I have to get introduced to an avant punk-jazz record by the most sterilized, LinkedIn-style jumble of words I’ve ever read, you do too: You see, on this album, the “compositions are naturally motivic with grid-like melody lines underpinned by relentless rhythmic intensity.” What does this mean? It means that the music of this NYC-based band (i.e. Smashing Humans), as led by Nagano, is probably the most interesting — even agreeable — cacophony to which I’ve ever been exposed, not that I ever honestly seek out avant jazz (it’s more like that stuff finds me). I d_)on’t believe this is actually improvisational; “Humans In Grey,” unhinged and spazzy as it is, goes on a long tear that bespeaks progressive head-drug jazz from the ’80s, and like the designated genre would indicate, the sax, guitar, drums, bass combine with Sana’s battered violin to render pure, raucous expressionism that you could actually groove to. Like the impulsive eight-bit cover art hints at, it’s perfect for clearing your head of any stupid but manageable frustration du jour. A+

Yoko Miwa Trio, Songs of Joy (Ubuntu Music)

At this writing, Jazz Times hasn’t weighed in on this (by my count) fifth LP from the long-time Berklee college instructor’s trio, a pianist who’s been touted by the legendary Ahmad Jamal and has been a regular fixture at festivals and Boston jazz clubs (if you’re a regular visitor to that scene, Les Zygomates Wine Bar & Bistro in Boston closed as a casualty of Covid last year). With regard to her last album, 2019’s Keep Talkin’, the Jazz Times guy noted that Miwa’s work possesses a certain prettiness that jazz snobs tend to snub (“even some of Oscar Peterson’s work was dismissed for being too beautiful”). She won’t get that sort of nonsense from me; not that I’d ever pretend to be a Mingus-head, but I find stuff like this album’s intricately woven rub of Richie Havens’ “Freedom” really just cool. Like Havens’ original Woodstock-hippie outcry, it rushes to say a lot, but in this case Miwa’s expansive wanderings are slowly counterpointed by Will Slater’s upright bass in a boss move. This ain’t lounge stuff, no, it’s way too bold, but it wouldn’t be out of place at one. A

Retro Playlist

Let us go back, friends, back to the year 2013. Do you even remember what it was like before Covid and the Q-Shaman guy who’s part yak and part human, back when everything wasn’t so messed up that you had to hold Zoom meetings with your friends in order to get some semblance of communal togetherness? Oh, wait, for young people, that was how most interpersonal relationships were maintained anyway, so what’s all the fuss about, again?

Anyway, warping back to late February 2013, one of the new releases that week was What About Now, by Bon Jovi. As I noted that week, the title track “starts out with an ’80s-new-wave shoegaze sort of guitar line” and then it devolves into the usual epic throwback radio-rawk fail to which his fans have long been accustomed. That’s nice and all, but one of that week’s column’s main focus points was Flowers, a solo record from Seabear leader Sindri Már Sigfússon, under the stage name Sin Fang. Naturally, since it’s by an Icelandic dude, someone from Sígur Rós had to be involved, in this case their producer, Alex Somers. The album, thankfully, wasn’t the expected Slushie mix of Animal Collective and Raveonettes; some OK Go-style rocking out was present, and so I didn’t just whip out my handy bag of insults when I talked about it.

That week there was also the album The Fire Plays from Ari Hest, whose approach is, in general, stripped-to-the-hooks radio-folk a la Paul Simon. I don’t think I’ve so much as mentioned the guy in the eight years that have passed since my review of TFP, so you probably know more than I do, but regardless, on this album Hest did a decent Seal impersonation on “Set In Stone,” but otherwise it comprised things like hayloft indie (“All Because”) and halcyon-cowboy haze (“Couldn’t Have Her”), which automatically got my approval because Hest mostly sounded like Warren Zevon. Man, does the world need another Zevon, seriously.

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The first thing I see in this list of new CD releases for Feb. 26 is Willie Nelson’s That’s Life, and of course I can’t resist putting in my two cents, because it’s always fun to make fun of 87-year-old dudes who drive Cheech and Chong vans powered by nothing but pot smoke! What’s interesting is that he is 5’6” tall, which, as his Wikipedia entry specifically notes, is the same height as Patsy Cline. I hope that if I ever get an actual Wiki entry instead of the stupid “Wikipeople” thing or whatever it is, they will make note that I am the same height as George W. Bush. I think it’s important to know that about me, so that you won’t ever mistake me for Danny DeVito. Anyway, with all the important stuff out of the way, we can proceed to the contents of this new album, one that consists solely of covers of Frank Sinatra songs. I sort of don’t blame Willie for doing a victory lap for having lived so long, like, he totally dunked on James Dean and the dude from Nirvana and all those guys, so really, he does have every right to imprison a few musicians in a studio while he warbles old Rat Pack songs in his hoarse grandfatherly tenor. This is actually the second time Willie’s done an album of Sinatra tunes, but unlike the last one, this new album features a cover of “Luck Be a Lady” as well as a duet with none other than famous jazz singing lady Diana Krall (“I Won’t Dance”). OK, I know this has been a lot to unpack and wrap your head around, so let’s move to the next thingie after you gulp down some Pepto Bismol in order to settle your stomach, which got violently upset over my use of the buzzspeak word “unpack.”

• Ha ha, speaking of albums from old and crazy rock stars, look there fam, it’s famous Halloween decoration Alice Cooper, with Detroit Stories, just when we needed it, or at least I did! OK, I know Alice grew up in Detroit, so these tunes are probably about the times he used to play pranks with Jack White? No, Jack White’s young enough to be Alice’s great-grandson, so maybe it’s about the old days with another Detroit guy, Iggy Pop? Nope, Iggy is way cooler than Alice, so they probably never hung around either. In that case, I’ll just ditch this exercise, bite the bullet and go listen to the new Alice single, “Rock & Roll!” Nope, it’s not the Led Zeppelin song, it’s the old Velvet Underground song, so apparently the album title refers to Alice’s favorite songs that have the word “Detroit” in the lyrics. Say, guess who plays guitar on this? That’s right, it’s Joe Bonamassa! This rocks so hard, like, if you had just arrived from another planet and this was the first rock ’n’ roll song you’d ever heard, you’d be like, “Ha ha, wow, dig this crazy music!”

• Blub blub blub, I’m drowning in awful music that never should have — wait, belay that order, leftenant, it’s a new Melvins album, called Working With God, we’re saved! One of the songs, “Brian the Horse-Faced Goon,” is part joke song and part early Ministry, I love it so much I’d marry it if I were single.

• To close the week out, it’s one-man U.K.-based electronic-drone-whatnot project Blanck Mass, with In Ferneaux, his fifth album! The single, “Starstuff,” is just fine I suppose, if you like krautrock and ’80s sci-fi soundtrack music mixed together. I don’t, but then again, I have become biased against music that sucks, so don’t mind me.

Disco Shrine, xxoo Disco (self-released)

Man, the world just needs to stop a second so I can catch my breath. This week I had to deal with a string of disasters, including two different hacks of critical life stuff, then it was the news about the “Robin Hood” subreddit Wallstreetbets helping desperate people make big money by trolling hedge funds, and today, this came into my emailbox with little explanation, the first EP from a day-glo Los Angeles-based girl who, I’m told, “bops,” in other words writes songs that have a lot more to offer than most of the corporate-run ridiculousness you usually hear on dance radio. The Iranian immigrant does have a great formula if you can get past the many trap beats (I still can’t, I’m sorry); the song structures and hooks are more like MIA and Gwen Stefani than anything else, marinated in hip-hop but with an eye toward ’90s-throwback radio. She’s getting big overseas and will probably take down a good number of slow-moving Taylor Swift fans as things progress. A-

Trance Wax, Trance Wax (Anjunabeats Records)

Here we have a Belfast-based DJ specializing in more-or-less throwback trance and meanwhile being touted as an innovator. That didn’t sit well with me for obvious reasons, but I was going to inspect this album anyway, being that it’s on my beloved Anjunabeats imprint, the home of the Above & Beyond dudes, whom I’ve talked about plenty of times here. It is a throwbacky record for sure, made of ’90s rave afterparty chill as opposed to more modern, immersive hypnotics. And that’s OK; if you’re big on slightly stripped-down electro, you came to the right place. Toward that, it can feel a bit cheesy here and there, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. Wish they had put the single Clannad’s Moya Brennan. I’m sure it’s gorgeous, which I’m off to verify now, but again, that tune’s not on here, so it doesn’t even apply. B+

Retro Playlist

Going back to Feb. 17, 2011, your not-so-humble Playlist guy here (moi) was babbling something about Boston oi-pop band Dropkick Murphys, who “have made a career out of making Jonathan Papelbon into a tutu-wearing dancing bear.” The new album at the time was Going Out in Style, a concept album about some Irish guy, because as we all know, there are no other types of people in Boston except for Irish mill-workers who work 78-hour shifts. Thus a departure, more or less, but I did note that there were a few songs Bruins fans could sing at the top of their lungs “while the Bs get pasted by horrible teams like the Panthers” (that sentiment has changed now, of course, being that the team has no good scorers these days except for a few 40-year-olds and maybe the mascot).

Not that my B- grade reflected it as much as it deserved, but truly the loser album up for discussion that week was Native Speaker, from Montreal-based indie band Braids. The buzz over this, their debut album, was deafening, which made me instantly suspicious. And they did get some blowback from the press, which surprised me. The haters (I was one of them) thought these guys were too much like Animal Collective, “indulging in the sort of repetitive robot arpeggios you hear during the happier moments of nature documentaries.” In other words it was nice, sappy and disposable. I mean, it’s not a horrible album; I guess what surprised me was that no one jumped on the band for the album’s title track. It sounded too much like a Fever Ray tune, which is, admittedly, not shocking, being that the band’s singer sounds so much like Karin Dreijer Andersson (i.e. part Sinead, part Bjork).

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Just like every Friday, Feb. 19 will see a few new albums, from bands and people and self-aware robots with Soundcloud accounts. One of the albums is from The Fall, and it is titled Live At St. Helens Technical College ‘81. If I’m still the professional music critic I’ve always been, the consummate tastemaker who can identify what an album is going to sound like just by looking at its title, I predict that the songs will all be live versions of old Fall songs, probably at a technical college of some sort, recorded circa 1981, or perhaps 1881, when this music was relevant to people other than those brothers who made the Stranger Things TV show. I don’t like The Fall and, um, uh, never really did, like it was always too messy, like Captain Beefheart on mood stabilizers. Feel me, guys? I know, I know, I’m supposed to be the noise-rock connoisseur around here, but The Fall isn’t noise rock, it’s just awful and gross. It’s OK if you like them, and if you do have that particular brain malfunction, I hate to tell you, but you’ll be sad to know that their landmark tune “Hip Priest” is not part of this package. Bummer, dude, but lots of other stupid Fall songs are on there, like “City Hobgoblins” and blah blah blah whatever, I don’t know.

• I think Brooklyn indie-rock band The Hold Steady sounds like They Might Be Giants with a Pennywise (lack of) personality, at least going by the only song of theirs you’ve probably ever heard, 2013’s “The Bear and the Maiden Fair,” the punkish spazz-out that was pretty popular back then. Fast forward to today, and their eighth album, Open Door Policy, which streets on the 19th and is propelled by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones-ish horns of leadoff single “Family Farm.” It’s more along the lines of Barenaked Ladies, that kind of thing, stompy and danceable. I can deal with it.

• Scottish post-punk crew Mogwai have always been pretty cool, don’t you think? Buzzy, loud and all that stuff. But it is a new year, and a new album, As The Love Continues, which has a single, called “Dry Fantasy.” This tune is something of a surprise, like ’90s radio-techno-chill, not a lot of meat to it, but that’s OK, it definitely works if you want to relive all those afterparties where you passed out on your roommate’s futon while talking about French philosophy, and then talk turned to how much the both of you love Ren & Stimpy, which is basically the same concept as Foucault but with better graphics.

• Lastly, it’s Australian indie-folkie Julia Stone, who often records albums with her brother Angus, but not this time. She had some modicum of fame last year when she re-did the Midnight Oil song “Beds Are Burning,” but it didn’t save her from the fate that befalls all decent Australian musicians, specifically the problem with American audiences taking Australians seriously unless they’re in the band AC/DC. Her third solo record, Sixty Summers, will include the song “Dance – Alone,” which I assume is a variation on the wispy, angelic tune “Dance” that was on her last EP, a romantic trifle about picking someone up at a bar. It’s music for moonbats, but it’s nice.

Ashnikko, Demidevil (Parlophone/Warner)

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

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

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

Retro Playlist

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

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

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

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

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

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

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

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

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

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

Practice, Not A Game (self-released)

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

Asiahn, The Interlude (Since The 80s Records)

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

Retro Playlist

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

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

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

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

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

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

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

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

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