Category: Pop

Lee & Dr. G, Girl For Me (self-released)

Although they both cut their teeth in different parts of the country, these two blues-guitar brothers-from-other-mothers, Lee Durham and Brandon Gauthier, have built a sizable following in New Hampshire, where they met and joined forces in 2023. They’ve logged hundreds of shows in the area, culminating in this debut album’s release show at Concord’s Bank of New Hampshire stage in December, a bullet point that should tell you they’re serious about putting the state on the record industry map, at least so they don’t have to go back to slugging it out in L.A. or Nashville, where they did have some success individually. Their net vibe is, as Hippo’s own Michael Witthaus observed, a sort of “psycho-delic” approach to blues, one part Chuck Berry to one part jam-band-meets-Pink Floyd immersion, with looong rootsy passages being driven into your brain until you can’t help but — admire the sound, whether as a musician or a fan. No, there’s something here for sure, at the very least a combination of selflessness between two wonderfully talented guitar soloists and a desire to rebirth their 70-year-old genre, no easy trick. They absolutely deserve your support, so get out there, would you? A+

Neurosis, An Undying Love For A Burning World (Neurot Recordings)

I’m not a fan of this vanguard sludge-metal band, and, um, uh, never really was, but nevertheless I figured it was as good a time as any to see how my tummy would react to this new album, given that some of you are under the mistaken impression that just because I’ll review other self-indulgent doom-soundscapers like Sunn(((O))) it means I approve of this kind of thing. I don’t, but they’re your ears, and if you really like the idea of hearing a blitzed caveman roaring over endless wall-of-sound extreme-metal ringouts, that’s on you. The ever-ridiculous YouTuber Needle Drop reviewed this and took issue with some chord changes here and there but praised it for something or other (does anyone really watch that guy’s videos for the purpose of musical edification?); I was more struck by the guitar solos, some of which are pretty musical but which convey the same comically depressing, angsty vibe as the rest of the tuneage, like every record that the Earache label put out in the Aughts. But knock yourself out, you have my blessing. B-

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Moving right along, the warmer weather is coming quick, in fits and starts and total fake-outs, so naturally new albums are beginning to pile up, all of them hoping to soundtrack your summer. Let’s pretend you have expendable income and can buy one or all of the albums releasing this Friday, April 10, which one(s) to choose? Maybe it’s the new one for all you Generation X grandparents, Hope And Fury by Joe Jackson, who was famous in the 1980s for the incel national anthem, “Is She Really Going Out With Him,” which everybody thought was Elvis Costello because it sounded exactly like him (and, well, half the songs that came out from pub-pop bands in the ’80s). He also had a hit with the almost as awful “Look Sharp,” but what I remember most from that dude was a totally ignored song from the Look Sharp album, called “Fools In Love,” because back in those days I was a young rock singer on a mission, the wildly idiotic sort of mission that only 20-year-olds who hate college take on: For a year straight, I tried out for every single band in the Boston area that put out an ad for one, and I mean literally every single one, and got an offer from all of them because apparently there were no other singers in the city. Now, because they were all Boston bands, they were mostly unworkable, in fact there was only one band I actually thought was kind of neat. Unfortunately I can’t say their name in this family-oriented newspaper, but they really did have some cool songs, but no way was I going to drive from my apartment in Nashua, New Hampshire, to Stoughton, Mass., three nights a week for a band with no record contract and no hope of ever getting one because stupid band name, but I almost did, but anyway, right, Joe Jackson, so there was a band composed of really good musicians in (I think) Medford, Mass., sort of a joke band, but they were good, and they made me learn “Fools in Love,” a really stupid ska/reggae tune that totally ripped off Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives,” but somehow I didn’t mind it and still remember most of the words to this day, and that is my Joe Jackson story. Anyhow, I’m going to check out what this Elvis Costello clone person is doing these days right now by listening to the advance single “Welcome to Burning-By-Sea,” which sure looks like something British oi-rock, I’m sure it’s dumb. Yup, he’s doing this cockney comedy act during the intro, nope, it’s through the whole song, he’s singing about stuff like fish and chips and getting into bar fights, it’s kind of fun, with a tribal beat and cockney yelling, but I won’t ever listen to it again.

• Ah, another Chappell Roan wannabe heard from, this time it’s British singer Holly Humberstone, with her new album Cruel World, whose title tune is flirty and awkward and sounds exactly like, you know, Chappell Roan, big deal, next.

• Wow, English electronic-music dude and showoff-y bassist Squarepusher is still around? His new album Kammerkonzert includes a new tune called “K2 Central” that’s sort of acid-jazz-y and I suppose pretty neat if you like to hear a lot of really busy bassplaying and mindless prog experimentation.

• We’ll close with Jessie Ware, who’s also British, like everyone mentioned in today’s column, bob’s your uncle! Superbloom is her new full-length; its single, “I Could Get Used To This” sounds like Mariah Carey trying to be Lana Del Rey, which is pretty — marketable I suppose.

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: Lee & Dr. G, Girl For Me and Neurosis, An Undying Love For A Burning World

I See Orange, “Wine Boy” (self-released)

Eh, this is fine, if not exactly groundbreaking. This three-piece buzz-band is from the U.K., where they’re slowly rolling out what’s expected to be a major debut album. They’ve done showcases at New York City’s New Colossus Festival and Austin’s SxSW, catapulting their brand of “post-grunge” (in other words grunge) rock into the hype stratosphere, but for now we’re relegated to just a few tunes, including this one, whose lyrics focus on Mexican-born singer/bassist Giselle Medina’s fascination with the popular consumption of red wine in the U.K., where it’s considered a casual social drink, as opposed to Mexico, where it’s enjoyed in a more refined, serious manner. As for the sound, it’s choppy, paint-by-numbers Dave Grohl stuff; guitarist Cameron Hill adjusted all the knobs on his Marshall stack to bring maximum earache potential, while Medina’s wispy, moonbatty soprano tries to make things interesting but only succeeds in conjuring a metal version of the average Gilmore Girls soundtrack tune. This band will go far, I’m sure, but it doesn’t deserve it really. C+

Jon Anderson, Survival And Other Stories (Frontiers Music)

This one’s for Yes completists only, a vinyl-and-CD re-release of the singer’s 2011 LP, which was widely rejected by fans for its lack of progressive rock; Anderson’s focus at the time of this release was on New Age feel-good vibes, given that he had just had a health scare. But it’s not hopeless at all; the fact is that Yes did a lot of stuff like this back in their early days, stuff that the strummy, upbeat “New New World” resurrects, and yes, I’m talking about the mellower moments of Close To The Edge, not to put too fine of a point on it. But OK, “Understanding Truth” jumps the hippy-dippy shark for me, with its unplugged guitar and Anderson’s helium-filled, totally-not-falsetto-it’s-true vocals settling all the good yogis down around the campfire. Speaking of yoga class, “Unbroken Spirit” reads like Christopher Franke’s 1996 pseudo-soundtrack to The Celestine Prophecy, a record that had plenty of similarly nice, pleasant, loping stuff on it. In the end, as I implied, it’s for superfans, reiki practitioners, etc. B+

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Our next album-dump Friday is April 3, two days after April Fool’s Day, a national holiday whose origins are uncertain but likely stem from a mix of European traditions. One popular theory blames France’s 1564 adoption of the Gregorian calendar, which moved New Year’s Day from April 1 to Jan. 1 (which is kind of dumb if you ask me, since one is more likely to die of frostbite after passing out drunk from multiple New Year’s toasts in January than in April), and people who were slow to adapt were mocked as “April fools,” isn’t that kind of transgressive? Well, whatever, nowadays in America pranking people is a national pastime of which I fully approve, especially when it involves someone dumping unwelcome news on me and then going “April fools, no, dummy, Creed isn’t releasing an album with Justin Bieber, so you don’t have to listen to and review any such thing, had you going though, didn’t I?” In that vein, I hope I’m not getting trolled by telling you people that Grammy-winning American bassist Thundercat releases his fifth album, Disappointed, this week! This one includes feats from A$AP Rocky, WILLOW, Channel Tres, Lil Yachty and Tame Impala, the latter of which appears on the tune “No More Lies,” which I only listened to because focus single “I Wish I Didn’t Waste Your Time” rubbed me the right way in a breezy yacht-techno sense. That hinted that the Tame Impala appearance would be even cooler than usual, given that I’ve liked Tame Impala’s mellow-but-edgy approach since the first time I heard them. However, “No More Lies” is slightly louder and more soul-infused than “I Wish…,” deep-fried in reverb, like what MGMT would have sounded like if they’d been around in 1974. If you’re trying to parse all this information, I’m saying that it’s good and you should go check it out.

• Seattle-based drone band Sunn O))) is at it again, with a new, self-titled album, because it’s so cool to self-title one of your albums after you’ve already been around for 28 years! If you are totally unaware of these guys you’re excused, because their stuff is largely unfollowable on purpose; they specialize in overly long metal-guitar ringouts that go on forever. They’re basically a metal version of Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans, an infamous exercise in self-indulgence, but some people have convinced themselves that they get something out of listening to Sunn O))), so I will not argue about it but will instead toddle off to YouTube to listen to the rollout track, “Glory Back,” and report back about how self-indulgent it is. Yup, I’m back, a full 10 minutes later, to report that it’s tedious, consisting of like five chords played very slowly, but with the guitar tuned so low that it feels like being digested by a tyrannosaurus rex. No, imagine if your little brother bought a vintage Marshall amp and was warming up to play something from Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality, but that’s all he ever did, strum a few chords as if trying to summon Cthulhu, that’s all this is.

• Cripes what’s next. Charley Crockett is a cowboy-hat singer from Texas who sounds like a cross between Jim Croce and Buck Owens on the twangy, lazy single “Kentucky Too Long” from his new LP, Age Of The Ram. Why do country music artists always have to have at least one song on every album that name-checks a southern state in the title? No, seriously, text me, because I really want to know.

• We’ll call it a week with U.K.-based R&B-popper Arlo Parks’s new one, Ambiguous Desire! “Impurities” is a very listenable trip-hoppish chillout featuring a full palette of ’80s-pop sound; her high-pitched singing fits in pleasantly in the yadda yadda. She’ll be in Boston at the Royale on Sept. 1.

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: I See Orange, “Wine Boy” and Jon Anderson, Survival And Other Stories

Flesh Field, On Enmity (self-released)

Some of you may remember the goth phase I was processing in these pages back in the Aughts. In those days I was always thrilled to get a new pile of CDs from Metropolis Records, until I wasn’t, when the same-sameness of the label’s artists began to wear me out. Unfortunately for this guy — an American industrial DJ who (and I didn’t know this until just now) earned a master’s degree in international policy studies with a focus on counter-terrorism (!) — his 2004 album Strain came in for review when I was kinda sick of goth. Not that the album was bad, it simply didn’t have quite enough sonic variety for it to stand out. This one, however, is different. The ideas are similar, borrowed from the usual suspects, such as Gravity Kills, Rammstein and of course Depeche Mode, but there’s some pretty cool experimentation afoot. Opener “Omnicide” gallops and rolls in the vein of Marilyn Manson but actually harder, whereas tracks like “Indestructible” lean on sounds made famous by Trent Reznor while nevertheless sounding fresh. I’d expect the folks at Manchvegas’ Resurrection “goth night” show at Jewel nightclub would be into this (yes, I’ll be checking that place out hopefully soon, so stay tuned). A+

Big Harp, Runs to Blue (Saddle Creek Records)

Prior to bringing their act (and marriage) to Los Angeles, this alt-country duo had been active in bands on the Omaha, Nebraska, indie scene: Chris Senseney was in the group Art in Manila, while Stefanie Drootin played with names that were more household-y, including none other than Bright Eyes, Azure Ray, and She & Him. Their approach is low-key and intimate, focused on poignant songwriting that centers on Senseney’s unstressed, bottom-dwelling baritone, whilst Drootin supplies the helium with bluegrass-tinted harmonies. I could tell you that it’s lazy campfire-oriented stuff, but remember that they’ve been in the big leagues for a while, so their past cover of The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” wasn’t out of the question for their repertoire, nor was it too Los Angelized. No, the net effect here is basically like having Josh and Jennifer Turner serenade you in their living room while something pleasantly slow-cooks in the oven. Definitely manna for the Bonnaroo crowd. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Onward, my trolls, to Friday, March 27, and its slate of new rock ’n’ roll albums, for all you “coolios” out there, or however you identify yourselves these days! At this writing we just survived the 70-degree days of “fake summer” and are presently watching the snow melt Up To A Point as winter resurfaces like Jason from Friday The 13th, bringing abject despair back to our hinterlands, so some decent music jump-scaring everyone from the blackness of our great cultural Crystal Lake would be great for taking the edge off, wouldn’t it? And look at that, a new album from José González, titled Against The Dying Of The Light, is on the docket, so I am mildly excited, or at least not completely disappointed. Maybe you know this soft-voiced Swedish singing man from his solo hits, like “Heartbeats,” or perhaps when he was in the band Junip, but to me, he’ll always be associated with Zero 7, when he sang a few tracks on their 2006 album The Garden; its music was like a cross between Massive Attack and whatever that meatless yacht rock stuff was that used to play over K-Mart’s loudspeakers during the 1970s and ’80s. Do you remember the weird smell in those K-Mart stores? It smelled like a mixture of melted Barbie dolls and human desperation, but nevertheless I miss having other stores besides Walmart or Target to visit when I needed to buy something I knew nobody would have, back when there were other retail choices before Amazon.com took over all of U.S. retail except for those two stores. Those were the days, weren’t they, boomers and X’ers, with Bradlees and Ames and whatnot, but no more, now everybody just buys everything online from Jeff Bezos, the actual real-life Grinch, who refuses to let his Amazon delivery drivers eat any hobo beans until they’ve made sure everyone on their route has had all their floo-floovers, Who-hoopers, and trum-tookas delivered straight to their door instead of having to go outside and touch grass and maybe even accidentally see their neighbors for the first time in months, which would of course pose the mortal danger of citizens actually talking to each other, whereupon the question of whether or not we actually like never having to leave the house for any reason whatsoever might come up. But I digress, because there are column inches to befoul with nonsense, so, circling back to José González, I assume most of you young twerking coolios have never even heard of Zero 7 and instead know him from some other project, but I’ll bet you the title track from this album sounds either like Zero 7 or “Heartbeats” and — yup, it’s a warm, mellow song with a psychedelic Spacemen 3 chorus. There’s nothing wrong with it; you may take that as a breathless rave from this correspondent.

• Flea is the bass player from Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band that, I was delighted to find recently, has a lot of fellow haters with whom I developed fast friendships. But rather than dwell on that, let’s see if I can stomach “Traffic Lights,” from his upcoming new album, Honora! Ack, The bass work is fine, and there are random Vegas-jazz horns, but Thom Yorke from Radiohead is singing, which would ruin any decent vibe.

• The New Pornographers are an indie band from Vancouver, which is promising. Their new LP, The Former Site Of, features “Votive,” an interesting little tune that combines Guided By Voices with literally any electro band that’s more interesting than Guided By Voices (that’s all of ’em Katie). They’ll be at The Wilbur in Boston on April 22.

• Lastly it’s Swedish electro-popper Robyn with her new Sexistential album! The title track is bratty and sexy and threatens to drop-explode like Orbital’s “Wonky” but basically gives up and just sits around being, you know, bratty and sexy, big whoop.

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: Flesh Field, On Enmity and Big Harp, Runs to Blue.

Cactus, Temple Of Blues II (Cleopatra Records)

With his Pedro Pascal looks, Carmine Appice (the actual pronunciation of which is “app-uh-cee,” a riddle that’s confused rock journos for decades now, probably because his equally famous brother Vinnie says it differently) has been one of rock’s premier drummers since the Flower Power days, when he was with Vanilla Fudge. This LP and its predecessor, 2024’s Temple Of The Blues, boast some of arena-rock’s biggest GOATs, shredding away at (you guessed it) blues tunes that would feel as antiquated as a Richard Nixon speech if they were performed by (almost) anyone else. On the whole, the sound is monstrously heavy after an old-school fashion, but it comes from a rotating stage of players who’ve all been around. The proceedings start with Eric “Raw Dog” Gales aiming his world-renowned guitar at anything that moves in a cover of Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man” (yes, the same tune covered by The Doors on their 1967 debut album), and things just get crazier from there: Older dudes who read Guitar Player magazine “for the articles, nudge-wink” have plenty to lose their minds over, including feats from Pat Travers, Ty Tabor and Bumblefoot, but the bass roster is also stacked: Billy Sheehan, Rudy Sarzo and Jimmy Haslip. Old-timers will love every second of this. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Gary Lucas, The Edge Of Heaven, Vol 2 (self-released)

Follow-up collection of midcentury (mostly 1930s and ’40s) Chinese pop music from the trio of guitarist Lucas, singer/Chinese-stringed-instrument virtuoso Feifei Yang, and multi-instrumentalist Jason Candler. This one caught my eye because my wife has been completely immersed of late in antique Chinese fiction; it’s not what my pathetically Americanized ears were expecting at all, at least not until the third track, “New Pair Of Flowers,” a classic Chinese pop number that was most famously performed in the ’30s by Chow Hsuan, aka “The Golden Voice of China.” Yang’s two-stringed erhu colors the whole thing, evincing the playful joy with which its high-pitched, oft-typecasted sound is most often associated by Westerners. You’ll also find plenty of modern jazz-inflected melodies, but everything here is intended to mark the record’s release date, Feb. 7, the start of the Year of the Fire Horse in Chinese culture. Other artists celebrated here are Bai Kwong (a sensual, husky-voiced singer known as the “Mae West of China”) and Yao Lee (ironically, an instrumental version of her “Rose Rose I Love You”; Lee’s dubbed vocals were lip-synched by various Chinese actresses in the movies from the 1940s on). A+ —Eric W. Saeger

_PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The next Friday-load of new albums will arrive on March 20, and now for your periodic reminder that you shouldn’t ever feel compelled to force-feed your ears a particular band’s music just because your friends seem to like them. Case in point: A dear Facebook “friend-quaintance” admitted to me recently that he “felt pressured to like” Postal Service, one of the worst bands I’ve ever heard. He was having trouble with it, so I tried talking him out of it. Now, I know that a lot of you people can relate to losing precious days or hours “trying to like” this or that band, maybe because the music you actually like is considered dated and you think your brain needs an upgrade. I would tell you this: If you listen to a good-enough number of songs by a band and all you get out of it is alienation and a desire never to hear them again, you should simply give up and go back to trying new bands or just stick with your favorites. Enjoying music isn’t a competition. It’s OK to be like the character Juno MacGuff in the movie Juno, when she tells her boyfriend she thinks Sonic Youth sucks, because honestly, a lot of people loved that moment, when she finally made it safe for people to point out the fact that they have sucked since Day 1. Same goes for almost every single “indie” band that’s emerged from Boston since the Lemonheads (Mission Of Burma, anyone?). Am I qualified to discuss this nonsense? Yes, but you are too, which is the point of this segue. Twenty-two years ago I started doing actual music review columns for actual newspapers and I have been forced to “try to like” entire genres ever since. Now, in our example, Postal Service is an easy one to dissect. Quite simply, they put out nothing but total suckage. The fact that Gibbard took Jimmy Figurine seriously enough to collaborate with him in Postal Service is irrefutable proof that Death Cab has a fatal flaw in its DNA, not that it hasn’t always been totally obvious.

Years ago, a Hippo writer lumped Postal Service and Clinic together, partly in order to dismiss certain indie bands as horrible, which many are. I disagreed with him in that particular instance, because to me, despite the fact that they screw up their song structures on purpose, Clinic’s very noisy core sound is awesome, with the doctor masks and the horribly distorted guitars. So if you want to post about why you hate indie music, it’s best to leave Clinic out of it. Just do a little research: A billion bands have tried to sound like The Strokes and failed, so pick one of those losers or be brave and just go with Arctic Monkeys. It’s not hard to find a lousy indie band, just do the research. OK, at any rate, speaking of force-feeding myself music I don’t care about, Kanye West, now known as Ye, releases his new album Bully this week, or maybe the next, according to some Redditors who hate him and don’t think it’ll ever drop, no one really knows. An advance song had some stupid AI stuff on it, which, surprise, made his haters hate him even more. Anyway, that.

• I’ve liked most of the music I’ve heard from British electronic band Ladytron in the past, and their new album Paradises didn’t disappoint — much, anyway. The disposable but very listenable single “Kingdom Undersea” is ’80s all the way, part Depeche Mode, part Pet Shop Boys.

• Superstar K-pop boyband BTS releases Arirang this week, and every snippet I’ve heard from it has been so overly epic it makes M83 look like a kazoo band.

• We’ll call it a week with cowboy-hat singer Luke Combs, who is from Huntersville, North Carolina. His new LP, The Way I Am, is a sexytime dobro-powered makeout song for cowboys and the heavily twanging gals who put up with them. —Eric W. Saeger

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter/Bluesky (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Featured Photo: Cactus, Temple Of Blues II and Gary Lucas, The Edge Of Heaven, Vol 2