Category: Pop

Counting Miracles, by Nicholas Sparks

Counting Miracles, by Nicholas Sparks (Random House, 368 pages)

I love a good Nicholas Sparks book, so much so that I’m on my library’s automatic waitlist for his new releases. I’ve read them all, and usually I know what I’m going to get: romance, a healthy dose of drama, and possibly a few tears. There is always love, and there is sometimes loss.

Sparks’ latest, Counting Miracles, explores love and loss to the extreme. There are two storylines, very loosely woven together at first and uniting in the end, as such stories do. They’re told in chapters that alternate from the points of view of Tanner, Kaitlyn and Jasper. Tanner and Kaitlyn’s storyline is one — that’s the romance — and Jasper’s is a story all his own.

The book starts with Tanner, a middle-aged veteran, stepping up to help a teenage girl, Casey, who appears to be in trouble with a boy. Moments later Tanner helps her again after she crashes into his car. He kindly drives her home, and his good deeds are rewarded as he meets Casey’s single mom, Kaitlyn, and instantly falls in strong like.

Tanner’s purpose for being in town is to potentially find his birth father after getting a cryptic clue from his grandmother when she was on her deathbed. He still works on that goal, though it’s somewhat put on the back burner for a while as he obsesses over Kaitlyn.

Then there’s Jasper, an older man with a host of health problems and a long history of tragedy. He’s connected to Kaitlyn because he is teaching woodcarving to her son Mitch. When he’s not doing that, he’s living alone in a cabin with his dog Arlo and no family or friends to speak of. When the town is abuzz with news that a rare white deer has been seen in the forest, Jasper makes it his new mission to save that deer from poachers.

The premise of Counting Miracles is finding hope in times of despair, of moving forward when there doesn’t seem to be anything to move toward. It’s uplifting in theory, but Counting Miracles is so heavy on despair that it was hard to push through to get to the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Yes, Sparks can obviously tell a good story if he’s making me feel all the feels, but I found myself skimming the darker chapters because they were uncomfortably depressing.

Plus, the darker chapters were the Jasper chapters, and I wasn’t all that interested in reading about his deer-saving adventures, especially since sitting in the woods for long periods of time led to a lot of reflection on the aforementioned tragic past.

Perhaps most off-putting for me in Jasper’s story is the heavy Bible influence. At one point Jasper recalls a tornado that took out his pear tree farm — his source of livelihood. In the present, he recalls staring at the toppled trees and thinking of the ninth verse in the fourth chapter of Job: “By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of His anger they come to an end.” But then he reminds himself that “the Lord works in mysterious ways and thought about 1 Corinthians 10:13, which promised that ‘God is faithful, and He will not let you be tested beyond your strength.’” He was losing sleep at that time due to financial worries and considered declaring bankruptcy but instead thought about Psalm 37:21, which says “the wicked borrows and does not pay back.”

All three of the above-quoted Bible passages occur in the space of one page. That’s a lot, and it continues throughout his story as he recalls experiencing, and seemingly continues to experience, the worst life has to offer.

Kaitlyn and Tanner, meanwhile, are going through the typical highs and lows of a potential new relationship. Tanner has never settled down and has plans to leave the country again soon; Kaitlyn knows that and tries not to get attached, and he does the same, but of course they just can’t ignore their infatuation.

You kind of have to suspend reality to fall for a Sparks love story, because his romances often happen quickly. Kaitlyn and Tanner can’t wait to spend time together; their first date is a day at the zoo that Kaitlyn had planned with Mitch, and she asks him to join them. As a single mom myself, I was a little surprised by this, and then annoyed because they didn’t pay much attention to Mitch and instead had deep conversations while following him around. But all Tanner has to do is throw the kid a frisbee later in the date and Mitch is as smitten as his mom.

Casey, on the other hand, is a great foil to their relationship. She’s very 16 and has the attitude to prove it, but ultimately she’s a good kid who wants her mom to be happy — even if she doesn’t always show it.

I was rooting for Kaitlyn and Tanner throughout their ups and downs because they’re likable characters. I wish we heard a little more of Kaitlyn’s backstory and a little less of Tanner’s, because he did a lot of the talking in their conversations, and I felt like I never fully got to know her.

And maybe that’s one of the reasons why I was always disappointed to leave Kaitlyn and Tanner behind at the end of a chapter to re-join Jasper. I wanted more of their story and less of his. But I know that’s a personal thing; I prefer light and romantic over sad and tragic. And I think a lot of people will enjoy the duality of this novel and how it comes together in the end. It wasn’t my favorite Sparks novel, but definitely worth the read. B —Meghan Siegler , and wilder than I had a right to ask for.” A

—Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 24/11/7

CULT, DW-05 (Drum Workouts Records)

OK, this is actually great, an EP from an Irish DJ who’s part of a purported new wave of classically influenced producers. If you keep track of such things, he’s received love from X-Coast, DJ Stingray and IMOGEN, among others, which is as workaday as getting a review blurb from Stephen King for your new horror novel, but in this case I’m hopping on board, absolutely. In truth there’s really only a perfunctory modicum of “classical” in this stuff, so don’t be put off; mostly it’s a hybrid of drum ’n’ bass and deep house if that makes any sense (it certainly should, I’d imagine). Put more succinctly, the beats lope and (gently) stampede, chasing their layers around aural racetracks, while ’80s and ’90s hip-hop-centric vocal lines and assorted toasts keep pace. If it isn’t the current state of the velvet rope club in places like Ibiza I’d be surprised and a bit disappointed. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Caleb Wheeler Curtis, The True Story of Bears and the Invention of the Battery (Imani Records)

Hope you’re into Thelonious Monk if you’re thinking of indulging in this one, because this Brooklyn multi-instrumentalist sure loves him some of that; matter of fact the songs are, it’s suggested by this thing I’m reading here, explorations of Monk’s ideas, particularly on the second disc of this double LP, appropriately subtitled Raise Four: Monk the Minimalist. It sounds that way, too, lots of honking and wildly adventurous post-bop explorations, what I usually think of as high-test, dark-roast jazz if you will. Curtis switches back and forth between trumpet and three saxophone types, “stritch” (alto), sopranino and tenor, and he’s supported most ably on this double album by two rhythm sections, bassist Sean Conly and drummer Michael Sarin on the first disc and bassist Eric Revis and drummer Justin Faulkner on the second. Obviously, Monk is an acquired taste, not one I’ve ever developed with any seriousness, but this is surely a great workout for your noggin if you have the time and space to indulge in it. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Our next Friday-load of new albums is Nov. 8, or so this thing’s telling me, but this week we’re going to start with something decidedly not rock ’n’ roll at all, specifically super-old music played by 24-year-old Dutch recorder wunderkind Lucie Horsch! If you’re the type of listener who only knows about comedy albums and crunk singles, you’re probably wondering what a “recorder” is, so let’s dig into that before you lose interest completely! A recorder is a vaguely flute-like wind instrument, basically a glorified “flutophone” (an easy-to-play thingamajig we old people had to play in grade-school music class or we’d get yelled at). Lucie’s new album is The Frans Brüggen Project: Orchestra Of The Eighteenth Century, and it features her own wunderkind-centric renderings of music written by composers in the 1700s. The selections on this album were originally created by Haydn, Bach and all those guys in wigs, and the angle here is that she plays these wicked old tunes on antique recorders that were previously owned by this Frans Brüggen feller, who was sort of wunderkind-ish himself. Case in point: If you want awesomeness, on her recording of Marcello’s “Oboe Concerto in D Minor, S. Z799: II. Adagio (Performed on Recorder),” Lucie plays a recorder that was made in the year 1720, way before the first Hives album came out. Ha ha, look at this, Lucie caught flak on Facebook (where else) for calling her advance recording of the aforementioned concerto a “single,” like, some guy yelled at her for calling it a “single” instead of a “movement”; it was as if she’d asked the guy “would you please pass the jelly” when she’d actually wanted him to pass the Polaner All-Fruit, and it made him lose it completely! Anyhow, the Marcello single or Polaner Blueberry Snob Spread or whatever is very pretty and bucolic and whatnot; she’s supported by a string section, so it’s music that’s perfect for relaxing in a forest glade, nibbling on psychedelic skunk cabbage leaves or whatever people used to do for entertainment before there was My Cat From Hell and such.

• And now back to our regularly scheduled rundown of music from this abysmal century, starting with Scottish indie-rock band Primal Scream’s new album, Come Ahead! They have been around since 1982, spotlighting the bland vocals of former Jesus and Mary Chain drummer Bobby Gillespie, and he’s still here, bringin’ the LootCrate-level singing to these neo-psychedelic/garage tunes, like the new single from this album, “Deep Dark Waters,” a mid-tempo snoozer that sounds kind of off-key to me, but what would I know, I’ve only been a rock critic since Walter Mondale was president!

• Albany, New York,-based emo band State Champs is back, dumping another of their Dashboard Confessional-soundalike albums on my hopelessly messy desk, and surprise, this one’s self-titled, for no reason whatsoever! “Too Late To Say” is catchy, after a watered-down emo fashion. Do people still listen to this kind of stuff?

• Last but not least (unless I find that it actually is), it’s experimental metal duo The Body, with their new LP, The Crying Out Of Things! They are from Portland, Oregon, but they are nevertheless awesome, going by their new single, “End Of Line,” a deconstructionist’s dream that would have fit in fine with all the other fine products from Throbbing Gristle and all that stuff, back when planet Earth was still a smoldering ball of lava and the nepo babies hadn’t taken over. It is highly recommended! —Eric W. Saeger

Playground, by Richard Powers

Playground, by Richard Powers (381 pages, W. W. Norton & Co.)

Richard Powers is one of America’s most distinguished novelists, and also one of the most daunting. His 2018 novel The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, despite a complicated narrative entwining nine characters. By comparison, his latest, Playground, gives us just four. It still gives the reader a mental workout.

While The Overstory was about trees, Playground is about the ocean and, surprisingly, AI. Its multiple narratives are linked through four lives intricately knit together.

Evie Beaulieu has been obsessed with water since, when she was 12, her father tossed her in a pool of water to test a device that allows people to breathe underwater. She emerged “another kind of creature,” becoming an expert diver with experience far beyond her years, a woman who would rather be on water than on land. She goes on to write a book called “Clearly It Is Ocean” — the title taken from the real-life quote of the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who said, “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly ocean.”

That book was read in childhood by a boy named Todd Keane, who was born the first child of the new year and carried with him for the rest of his life the pressure to always be first at everything. The marriage of Todd’s parents was a train wreck — “My father: the strength of mania. My mother: the cunning of the downtrodden.”

The manic father, who always needed to be doing something resembling work, drilled his son in games, from Chutes and Ladders to backgammon to chess, even though, like Evie, Todd had a deep connection to water, because Lake Michigan was the place he escaped to in his mind when the household got too chaotic: “When my mind raced and the future rushed at me with knives, the only thing that helped was looking out from the castle and seeing myself walking across the bottom of the lake.”

It is an obsession with games that later connects Todd to the brilliant Rafi Young, a bibliomaniac who has been reading light-years beyond his peers since preschool because of an abusive father who was determined that his children have a better education than he did. Todd and Rafi meet in school and bond by playing chess and Go throughout high school and college, becoming so close that it seems that “our brains are synchronized.” But later they suffer a rift that takes them on vastly different paths.

Todd invents a world-changing online platform called Playground and becomes a billionaire diagnosed with Lewy body dementia at age 57. Meanwhile, Rafi goes on to work for an NGO and to marry Ina Aroita, a native of Hawaii whose life comprises the fourth narrative in this story.

Rafi and Ina make their home on Makatea, an island in French Polynesia. For decades the island had been plundered for its copious phosphate, which helped supply the world with fertilizer and thus food. Once the phosphate mines closed, Makatea’s role in the world shrunk and it was just occasionally visited by wealthy tourists looking for a couple of days of climbing adventure.

But it was now faced with a seemingly existential decision: whether to allow an American company to use it as a port for “seasteading” — the launch of modular floating cities. Aided by artificial intelligence called Profunda, the residents of Makatea are preparing to take a vote on whether to allow this venture to begin.

All of this is just the set-up to the deeper complexity of the novel, which wants us to to think deeply about the unintended consequences of the development of AI and human dominance of the planet as we wade through the events of each character’s life, laid out in constantly changing points of view.

It also wants us to love the ocean like Evie does. It succeeds, with sparkling prose and the insistence that the reader become attached to the characters, who make the case for the ocean through their observations, experiences and passion.

In the opening pages of the book, for example, Ina and her daughter, while beachcombing, come across the carcass of a young albatross whose chest cavity was stuffed with small pieces of plastic: “bottle caps, a squirt top, the bottom of a black film canister at least fifteen years old, a disposable cigarette lighter, a few meters of tangled-up monofilament line and a button in the shape of a daisy.”

Toward the end of the book Powers gets in a dig at everyone who has ever dismissed his writing as too cerebral or complex, writing of Evie’s editor, “The editor knew that no one had ever lost a sale by underestimating the desire of the reading public to read at a simpler level.”

Despite that, Powers effectively applies a technique that is coming dangerously close to overuse in more populist fare: the plot twist, the sort that makes you want to read the book again, despite its heft.

Powers may limit his audience, and thus his influence, by refusing to write for the masses, but for those willing to rise to the challenge Playground is a wholly immersive experience. It offers a refuge from reality much like the ocean offers.

As Todd reflects, when one’s attention is fixed on a hidden world throbbing with primordial life, “Chicago was nothing. Illinois and even the U.S. were a joke. There were insanely different ways of being alive, behaviors from another galaxy dreamed up by an alien God. The world was bigger, stranger, richer, and wilder than I had a right to ask for.” A

Album Reviews 24/10/31

Janet Devlin, Emotional Rodeo (Ok!Good Records)

Regardless of genre, it’s not often that I encounter an artist who actually seems to be having fun with what they’re doing. I realize that modern country-pop stars, particularly female ones, are basically required to exhibit positivity and all that stuff (see Pickler, Kellie), but this girl does have her some fun, tabling neo-honky-tonk stompers like the newest single “Red Flag” (whose lyrics argue that people shouldn’t be hypervigilant for warning signs in new relationships, at least up to a point, which I’m on board with, given that I personally never dated anyone for whom I didn’t have a few dozen pointed questions within 10 minutes of meeting them; it’s really basic stuff) and Walmart-radio face-punchers like the title track. OK, at least the vibe here isn’t pseudo-heavy metal, and the bluegrass-dobro parts do seem genuine enough. This will be a big one if you’re into ladies in cowboy hats, folks, don’t miss out. Lots of non-annoying fun. Oh, before I forget, she’s Irish by the way. A+

Haujobb, The Machine In The Ghost (Dependent Records)

Bit of a surprising one, this. Last time I checked in with this German electro-goth duo — jeez, 2011’s New World March — they’d abandoned their hope of becoming the next Skinny Puppy or Front Line Assembly in favor of chasing a more danceable sound. That more or less sent them to the back of the bus as far as the black leather vampire crowd was concerned; obviously joy isn’t part of the equation. However, this marks a return to their darkwave-loving roots, with somewhat mixed results, not that it’s all that bad really: Here they’ve embraced the goth-club trend of throwing movie samples, stompy industrial lines and borderline cheesy synths into a Cuisinart and barely checking the results, or so it seems at first listen. The riffing does get infectious, but first you have to get past the overuse of post-apocalyptic atmospherics that seem to introduce every song. That stuff’s been done to death, but sure, it’s nice to hear it done by these guys, who obviously do have an interest in keeping bodies on the dance floor. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• This can’t be, homies, it’s November already, the next new-album-Friday is Nov. 1, please stop and let me get to the beach just one more time before hopelessness descends upon the land! You know, people love to get on my Facebook and grill me about stuff like “Is there anything that you actually like?” but it’s really hard for me to say on social media, given that it’s so impersonal. Why bother? If I express an opinion, like, say, “I never need to hear another song from Bowie or Queen ever again,” these people act like I kicked their dog, so usually I try to — no, actually I won’t lie to you guys, yes, I do say things just to cause trouble, especially on Facebook. See, to me, the only reason to use social media in the first place is to see what you can get away with. For instance, I don’t actively hate The Beatles, I’m just sick of them after listening to them for half a century (I loved Abbey Road when I was the only kid on my block who was actually listening to the whole thing) (I do hate Queen, though; aside from the opera stuff, their song structures are hilariously awful). In short, my real strategy is to get my invisible friends on social media to go listen to music that wasn’t released back when every car had a cigarette lighter. Like everyone else I’m selectively hypocritical about it, of course, take for example my positive regard for edgy-ish ’80s bands like The Cure, whose new album, Songs Of A Lost World, is on the way to the “record stores” or the 7-Elevens or wherever people buy physical albums these days. Cure singer Robert Smith is of course a sad insane clown these days (did you see his performance at the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame a couple of years ago, how does stuff like that even happen), and yes, there was his “All I Want” period, when he’d obviously decided to write nothing but bad songs for whatever reason. But no, it’s still The Cure, and I am now listening to the new single, “Alone!” And so much for that, it’s pretty disappointing, sort of a Las Vegas-ready ballad that drags on. Maybe the album’s other songs are fine, I don’t know!

• Peter Perrett is the singer for British new wave band the Only Ones, who’ve been around since 1976! His new solo album, The Cleansing, features a single titled “Disinfectant,” a mid-tempo old-school-punk tune that recalls Sex Pistols and all that sort of stuff. It’s decently annoying, go check it out if you have nothing else to do!

• Autre Ne Veut is the stage name of one Arthur Ashin, from New York City, U.S.A.! Perhaps you are one of the 9,000 people who hit Like on his most popular YouTube tune, the borderline boyband single “Age of Transparency,” an epic, listenable-enough joint when he puts away the trap drum sample and the bad singer and shoots for the rooftops. His new LP, Love Guess Who, will feature contributions from Micah Jasper (ELIO, Rebecca Black), Kris Yute and Spencer Zahn; it is his first album in seven years! The test-run single is “About To Lose,” a chill-pop number that combines Bruno Mars with Tangerine Dream in an effort that actually reads a lot better than I just made it sound; it’s fine.

• And finally, it’s English singer Beth Jeans Houghton, who makes psychedelic/garage albums under the pseudonym Du Blonde, including their forthcoming new one, Sniff More Gritty! “TV Star” showcases this person’s talents for making their hair into 1970s punk-spikes, singing like Sixpence None The Richer half the time and writing passable no-wave noise-guitar lines. It’s usable enough.

Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell

Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell (Little, Brown and Co., 368 pages)

Malcolm Gladwell had never written a book when he began, with a mix of “self-doubt and euphoria,” the manuscript that would become The Tipping Point, published in 2000. That book explored the ways in which an idea or a product will languish, until suddenly it doesn’t — ultimately becoming a “social contagion” that spreads rapidly, like contagions of disease.

The Tipping Point itself was something like that. At Gladwell’s first book event, two people showed up, a stranger and the mother of a friend. But after a while, the book “tipped” and went on to spend years on the New York Times bestseller list. At one point Bill Clinton called it “that book everyone has been talking about.”

Six other books and a podcast later, Gladwell is back to revisit the tipping point from a darker place. While The Tipping Point talks about how we can leverage the principles of social contagions to achieve a social good, Revenge of the Tipping Point posits that in this pursuit, there can be unintended negative consequences. We can tip over into something worse. Gladwell’s latest book is a cautionary tale that will appeal mainly to fans of The Tipping Point. As an author,he is something of an acquired taste. People seem to either love him or to doze off before the end of the last chapter. Let’s just say his books require an attention span.

Gladwell began his career as a journalist: first for The Washington Post, then The New Yorker. He still writes as a journalist, weaving together his own interviews and news accounts to tell stories in his own conversational voice and then to link seemingly unrelated events in the service of his own ideas. Along the way, he offers “rules” he invents to describe his views of how the world works.

Revenge of the Tipping Point follows that formula, from the quirky Gladwellian rules to the whiplash-inducing pivots between seemingly unrelated stories.

Take, for example, Gladwell’s treatment of “Poplar Grove,” a pseudonym for an affluent, homogeneous community that experienced a cluster of teen suicides (a focus of the 2024 book Life Under Pressure by Anna Mueller and Seth Abrutyn). Gladwell took his own tour of the town, finding a real estate agent who took him around and explained the dynamics of the family-oriented community. Then he linked the town’s tragedies to … a fertility crisis among cheetahs.

In this bewildering journey, readers are suddenly thrust from the leafy suburbs of domesticity to a veterinary clinic where scientists are grafting skin samples from domestic cats onto captive cheetahs, trying to figure out why breeding programs fail so spectacularly.

And then, before we even have time to get attached to our new cheetah friends, boom — we’re back in Poplar Grove.

And so it goes, while Gladwell gradually reveals the point he is trying to make, which is that in a monoculture — “a world of uniformity” — there are “no internal defenses against an outside threat.” In the case of both a “perfect” homogeneous community and cheetahs with little genetic diversity, “The best solution to a monoculture epidemic is to break up the monoculture,” Gladwell writes.

Gladwell then takes us to a community in Palo Alto, where a planned development on what was called the Lawrence Tract was supposed to solve the problem of “white flight” from American cities.

That community was developed with the stipulation that one-third of the homes be owned by whites, one-third by Blacks and one-third by Asians, in order to prevent “tipping” in the neighborhood — one ethnic group taking over the neighborhood. The word “tipping” had begun to be used in this way as neighborhoods changed by ethnicity.

“For a time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, if you used the phrase, people knew exactly what you meant,” Gladwell writes. Real estate agents would talk about “tipping a building” or “tipping a neighborhood.” They were demonstrating, as Gladwell maintains, that “tipping points can be deliberately engineered” — especially once you venture beyond “the magic third.” (Which is another Gladwellian rule.)

“People, it is clear, behave very differently in a group above some mysterious point of critical mass than they do in a group just a little below that point,” he writes. And people who know this sometimes act to manipulate the tipping in ways that aren’t in a community’s — or a country’s — best interests.

For the New England reader, there is plenty of regional interest in this book. For instance, in Gladwell’s discussion of what is known as “small-area variation” — bewildering differences in outcomes among otherwise similar areas — he examines research that took place in Middlebury, Vermont, and Randoph, New Hampshire.

Despite both towns having almost identical sociological profiles when it came to insurance, income and levels of chronic illness, there were notable differences in hospitalizations, surgery and Medicare spending, with much higher numbers in Randolph. Similarly, when looking at two Vermont towns — Waterbury and Stowe — the same pattern emerged. “The people were the same — except, that is, that the children of Waterbury tended to keep their tonsils and the children of Stowe did not.”

Gladwell also ventures into Massachusetts with his examination of why Harvard University has a rugby team — when hardly anyone goes to see the games, and the players have to be recruited outside of the U.S. — and, later, the infamous Biogen conference in Boston in February 2020 that turned into a superspreading Covid-19 event.

It is the opioid crisis, however, that Gladwell begins and ends with. He uses the saga of OxyContin and the Sackler family to argue that epidemics, both medical and social, have rules and boundaries but it is human beings who create the stories around them and it is human beings who are ultimately responsible for where epidemics go. “It’s time for a hard conversation about epidemics…. We need to be honest about all the subtle and sometimes hidden ways we try to manipulate them,” he writes.

Gladwell has said that for the 25th anniversary of The Tipping Point, he’d intended to simply update or “refresh” the original book, but decided to do the harder work of taking it into another place. That paid off for the established Gladwell fan, but it’s unclear whether he will win new ones with this complex and meandering collection of stories. B

Album Reviews 24/10/24

Sara Serpa, Encounters & Collisions (Biophilia Records)

I’m sorry, I can deal with a lot of things — improv jazz, noise-jazz, lots of things — but this just isn’t my cup of tea. That may be because I gravitate to a rather conventional Earl Grey, and sure, I appreciate that a lot of critics would tell me that this Portuguese singer is an acquired taste that’s beyond my ken, but I’m not a fan of self-indulgent sounds of any sort. This LP starts out with a spoken-word soliloquy about how her name is pronounced “SAH-rah,” not “SAIR-ah,” and some other gobbledygook I didn’t bother with, and then it’s on to an exercise in off-Broadway performance art, riding bumpily along on a purposely rickety float comprising cello, sax and piano. I’ll admit that a lot of (never-released) tension does emanate from Serpa’s constant edging toward dissonance, stuff that most normies would diagnose as being off-key. But I don’t need it, really. Your mileage may vary, of course, and if you want intimacy in your acoustic, academic-sounding chamber-jazz, this’d be it. C

Various Artists, Pulp Fiction: 30th Anniversary Soundtrack (Interscope Records)

I don’t know how anyone reading this could say they’ve never seen this 1994 movie, but then again, I’ve never watched The Shawshank Redemption or Deliverance all the way through, so there’ll be no charge for your hall pass. The soundtrack gave (more or less) rise to a surf-rock resurgence in pop culture; the film’s opening tune, Dick Dale’s “Miserlou,” starts things off here, leading into some dialog between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson (yes, the bit about how the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder is called a “Royale with cheese” in France). Next is Kool & The Gang’s stomp-funky “Jungle Boogie,” which was a pleasant surprise for me to hear on the original soundtrack; I’d listened to it quite a bit in the 1980s while writing an album and doggedly attempting to expand my spectrum of musical influence (back then, I honestly believed no one else had ever even heard the dumb thing before). Director Quentin Tarantino (nowadays #MeToo-canceled, last I checked) had a pretty bizarre range of influences himself; I never understood the appeal of Urge Overkill’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” but it’s here too. The draw here is that it’s being released on day-glo vinyl, which is as Tarantino-schlocky as things could possibly get I suppose. A

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Right on time, Oct. 25 will see a Friday-load of new albums, from bands, overrated synth-pop artists, and nepo babies who sing off-key! Twerking like demented circus clowns, they’ll bang their Who-boombas and clang their ba-zingas and annoy me with all the noise, noise, noise, noise! What am I to do, fam, demand hazard pay? Ask all those bad bands to take music lessons? No, there is nothing I can do but report on these new albums, so that you’ll know what to do with whatever money you have left after rent, your Roku subscription and your weekly supply of ramen noodle packets and cans of beans! But wait a second, before I whip out my Gatling gun of snark and really go to town, here’s some good news, a new album from Amyl and the Sniffers, titled Cartoon Darkness! You know, I’d thought I was the only kid on my block to admire this Australian pub-punk band, but the other week someone posted about them on my Twitter and my hope for humanity was instantly lifted juuust a little bit. Don’t know about you, but I fell in love with these criminals when I saw the video of “Some Mutts (Can’t Be Muzzled),” like, the singer makes Courtney Love look like Martha Stewart, and all I wanted out of life was to go on a Dave & Buster’s date with that girl and see how long it would take to get arrested. You people really need to go check them out, but in the meantime I’m going to see if they’re still completely feral, by checking out the video for “Chewing Gum,“ from this slappin’ new album! OK forget it, it’s awesome, she’s trying to be the next Lydia Lunch and succeeding, she’s got lipstick all over her insane rictus grin, and she’s holding a cigarette whose ash is like 2 inches long, go see this video, kids, I beg of you, you need to.

• Awesome and groovy, I’m already ahead of the holiday album curve, because your generation’s Elton John, Ben Folds, is releasing an album of Christmas songs, cleverly titled Sleigher, see what he did there! I am pleasantly amazed that the Christmas albums are already coming out, because it seemed like there weren’t any at all for me to write about here the last few years, let’s go see what this wacky piano person is doing to “Jingle Bells” or whatever. Yup, it’s good, this version of “The Christmas Song,” but let’s be real, even Gilbert Gottfried could have made that song appealing. He’ll be appearing at the Cabot Theatre in Beverly, Mass., on Nov. 10, but I’m sure the last 18 remaining tickets will have been sold by the time you read this, sorry for your loss.

• A lot of you old people remember the 1980s, when Tears for Fears was doing so many drugs that they were going around saying they were bigger than The Beatles, ha ha, remember those days? Well, they have a new live album coming out on Friday, titled Songs for a Nervous Planet! Now, don’t worry, fellow old people, Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal are still leading the band, and they still (mostly) sound like Tears For Fears as of their last album, The Tipping Point, so let’s cut to now, when they sound like a sleepy wedding band on the live version of “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” that’s on board this one. But who cares, guys, it’s Tears For Fears, amirite? I miss big poofy hair, don’t you?

• Last but not least on our plate is the new album from 1980s Boston-indie-rock legends Pixies, The Night The Zombies Came! “Motoroller” is a decent mid-tempo goth-rocker, with Frank Black doing a passable Marilyn Manson impersonation, sort of, if that’s even what he was even intending to do, who knows.

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