John Carpenter, “Skeleton”/”Unclean Spirit” (Sacred Bones Records)

It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it? I would have loved to hear the put-downs of Carpenter during the 1980s, mumbled during power-lunches with Hollywood executives, when they’d mercilessly tool on the musically untrained Carpenter’s insistence on soundtracking his movies (Halloween, The Thing, They Live, etc.). Of course, they probably ate all those words when he won a Saturn award for soundtracking his 1998 film Vampires, or maybe, more likely, they didn’t, but in any case, his musical style — bouncy, redundant Nintendo-techno — is pretty huge these days. This advance two-song single offers his signature vibe, which of course has seen a rebirth of late (think the theme music to the Netflix show Stranger Things), and voila, music critics have to pretend to be paying attention. “Skeleton” is a rather upbeat offing, entry-level ’80s krautrock with a good amount of heart, whereas the much darker “Unclean Spirit” conjures a cross between “Dies Irae” (the Gregorian chant that opens the movie The Shining) and, oh, something with the usual looping and piano-bonking, let’s say the theme to Halloween. Hey, if he’s happy, it’s fine with me. B+

Peel Dream Magazine, Moral Panics EP (Slumberland Records)

I wrote off this New York crew as the latest tuneless pile of emperor’s new clothes way back, upon hearing a few tunes from their 2018 debut LP Modern Metaphysics. Singer Joe Stevens is so bad that he single-handedly set back the entire hipster-pop movement a gorillion years (the only vocal comparison I can make is Lantern Waste, whose deliriously awful song “200 Miles to York” is often played as a joke by Toucher and Rich on their local 98.5 Sports Hub radio show in Boston). But whatever, here we go again, thankfully just an EP this time. It starts out survivably enough with “New Culture,” a droning stab at borderline no-wave remindful of Superdrag’s “Destination Ursa Major,” in other words amateurishly rendered Foo Fighters. Stevens doesn’t suck as bad as he usually does there, which had me — well, “salivating for more” wouldn’t be it; more like “not retching.” Of course, that attempt at normal music is immediately ruined by the pointless crayon-drawn doofus exercise “Verfremdungseffekt.” These folks have a gift for bad music, I’ll give ’em that. D

Retro Playlist
Eric W. Saeger recommends a couple of albums worth a second look.

As you (hopefully) just read, one signature feature of the pandemic is album release dates being canceled, changed or otherwise messed with. I’ve about given up the delusion that a release announcement consists of reliable information, but the show must go on here.

Another bizarre thing we’ve witnessed is the freezing of trends. In the area of music, after several years of the 1990s being laughed off as the worst decade for music ever (which always happens just before something blows big from the same arena), sure enough, bands were starting to fess up to listening to ’90s bands as a guilty pleasure. It was becoming cool for bands to cite grunge, riot grrl, commercial ska-pop, etc. influences when BS-ing rookie rock writers from Nylon and such. It looked unstoppable.

And then came Covid 19. Like I said somewhere above, at this point people are more occupied with virtue-signaling and fighting on social media and fretting about the apocalypse than reading some hipster dummy’s thoughts on Gwen Stefani’s “edgy” years. It’s as if every artistic rebirth and micro-renaissance that was in queue is in stasis, frozen like Ripley on Alien, waiting for the coast to be clear.

There were good things about the ’90s, at least in my view. Nirvana of course, Rage Against The Machine, Cypress Hill, Moby, Limp Bizkit, Korn, a bunch of other stuff, including many you’ve probably never heard of, bands that helped usher in the ’90s-rock era by releasing albums that were clear warnings of things to come. Transvision Vamp may have been doomed to obscurity from birth, but they were different in a lot of good ways, a sort of commercialized riot grrl thing that presaged sexy android-pop bands of the Aughts like Asteroids Galaxy Tour. In fact, Transvision Vamp peaked and declined at the decade’s turn, unfairly so, because their 1991 full-length Little Magnets Versus the Bubble of Babble was no less sexy and vampy and kickass than their 1988 Pop Art debut. Another one you may have missed was Gaye Bykers on Acid, which, along with a few other bands, almost squashed the grunge movement in favor of the “grebo” scene, which mashed influences from punk rock, EDM, hip-hop and psychedelia. We’d all be so much better off if their 1992 self-titled album hadn’t been lost in a sea of grunge (their 1987 freak-fringe niche-hit “WW7 Blues” is still monstrously cool).

Yeah, a ’90s revival wouldn’t be the worst thing.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Email [email protected] for fastest response.

PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, July 24, is ahead, and with it will come albums, some good, some bad, some why-would-anyone-bother-recording-this. To be honest, the list is pretty thin at this writing, which may be due to the fact that all the bands have figured out that people aren’t interested in music anymore, because it’s much more fun and self-fulfilling to argue with people on the internet, just to take the edge off the stir-craziness the coronavirus has wrought. Matter of fact, my usual source of hot new music nonsense, Metacritic, only has two upcoming new records listed, so I’m going by the list on Pause And Play. This means I am out of my comfort zone once again, having to deal with some stupid new website that wants me to fork over my email address and then drop a cookie into my Cookies folder, just so that Pause and Play can send me spam and slow down my “browsing experience” while the cookie tracks every moronic thing I look for on the internet. Does anyone not just click the little “X-close” button when presented with that kind of junk, or should I really just spend an entire afternoon searching Google for “best free spamblocker”? (I won’t do that. I spend a lot of time on the internet, yes, but going to such trouble seems a little obsessive.) Where was I? Right, albums. Most of these look kind of dumb and boring, like the only one I’m actually drawn to is Goons Be Gone, the new album from Los Angeles-based duo No Age! They make noise-rock, which you all know makes me smile, and… oh, come on, the release date changed to last week, according to Amazon! See why I hate using new systems? See why I didn’t want to use Pause and Play? Whatever, I’m listening to the single “Sandalwood” anyway, because the whole rollout here is a hot mess, and maybe it’s coming out on the 24th. Whatever, the tune is cool, noisy and messy, like Mick Jagger jamming with Half Japanese, and that brings us to some actual usable news, the first new album in 27 years from ancient punk band X, called Alphabetland! Ha ha, look how old they are now, like Exene looks like some random Birkenstock Karen who haggles with gift shop owners for price breaks on stinky incense. The title track is like early Ramones except with Exene singing half-heartedly. It’s eh.

• Neck Deep is a power-pop band from Wales, in the U.K. Their fourth album, All Distortions Are Intentional, is on the way as we speak, led by the single “Lowlife,” which is OK but sounds like the last nine billion songs you’ve heard that involve ripping off Weezer in Nirvana mode. So, unless anyone has questions — yes, you, in the back. No, I will never willingly listen to this song again. That it? Good, let’s proceed to the next thingie.

• Country-Americana-folkie Lori McKenna is from Stoughton, Mass., where there are no cowboys. She once received a country Grammy nomination. Her new album, The Balladeer, includes the single “Good Fight,” a strummy folk-pop song that you might like if you dig ’70s radio-pop.

• Time for one more, and I choose Irish singer Ronan Keating’s new album, Twenty Twenty! Did I choose wisely? No, unless you like shuffle-y chill-out Ed Sheeran-ish boy-band pop that would be a perfect fit on the Ellen show. I do not.