Velvet Insane, Rock ‘n’ Roll Glitter Suit (Sound Pollution Records)

Wait, can it be something cool for a change? I mean, it’s not like a few dozen old-school blues-based records don’t waltz into my email every month, and sure, I usually just send them straight to Trash, knowing in my bones that none of them will be the next New York Dolls or Kiss (come on, millennials and Zoomers, get in touch with your generational disgruntlements already), or, on occasion, I’ll listen to one out of misguided benevolence and pay the price by experiencing black-hole-level suckage I never would have imagined being physically possible. This one had promise, a Swedish band that was somehow able to “entice” former Kiss fixture Bruce Kulick into hopping a flight and shredding some lead guitar in the studio (yes, I did keep in mind the fact that everyone in the arts has their price — remember when German hack filmmaker Uwe Boll fooled Ben freaking Kingsley into joining the cast of BloodRayne?). The results? Well, it’s basically Poison for dummies. Opener “Driving Down The Mountain” had me going for a second, like I thought it was going to be a punkabilly thing, but then it turned into Trixter or whatever. Great ambiance for your backyard barbecue for when you want the kiddies to spazz all over the place and annoy your spouse. B- — Eric W. Saeger

Blood Honey, Blood Honey EP (self-released)

Debut release for a Los Angeles boy-girl ’80s-technopop duo which, as is so common these days, comes with a couple of interesting backstories (his: he was studying cognitive neuroscience but ultimately dropped out of a Ph.D. program to make records; hers: tragic story about surviving ovarian cancer). Not saying they get a free pass or anything, but at the very least, their collective level of personal bravery does help explain their rather soothing, eminently mature take on ’80s-mania: this stuff isn’t just another Simple Minds/Flock Of Seagulls slam-dunk. It’s quite apparent that they’ve listened to Human League, probably even Roxette, and not just out of basic necessity but for deeper study. The song structures are almost experimental compared to all the other Stranger Things prostration that’s being released every five minutes while the gravy train is still on its tracks (“Favorite Fever” starts with eerie darkwave and slowly settles into a Mummy Calls-ish chillout). Oddly comforting; above average songwriting for sure. B —

PLAYLIST

• July 9 is bearing down on us, bringing with it its usual “Ha ha, neener, summer’s half over, and before you know it you’ll be shoveling whatever crazy amount of snow is set to fall this year!” I usually like to take a bunch of four-day weekends during the summer, and that’s my deal again this year; it’s a million times better than torching a couple of separate weeks of vacation all at once and then having to sit there, going quietly insane on the final Sunday, beating myself up for not having single-handedly inspired world peace and cured cancer like I’d planned all year. No, gimme four-day weekends every other week for the entire summer and I won’t even take all of them, because I start feeling sorry for my co-workers, having all those glorious Fridays and Mondays off every other week. I mean, three-day weekends are stupid, aren’t they? All I end up doing is running around on Friday doing all my Saturday catch-up nonsense, and then spending Saturday dreading that I only have two days to chase the cats around the house and do “me stuff,” such as listening to new albums from such “essential artistes” as The Wallflowers, whose new album Exit Wounds is on my to-do list. A prime example of the joys of nepotism in the music business, Wallflowers is the solo project of Jakob Dylan, the son of a fashion model lady and some struggling hack named Bob. One of the new singles, “Roots And Wings,” shows us just what Jakob is made of, basically doing a Rich Little impersonation of his dad over a folk-rock beat that’s sort of like Train but with less going on (I know, mind-blowing concept, but try, really try, to picture it). (Please bear in mind that my distaste for nepotism in any endeavor only comes from my appreciation for Aristotle, that guy who used to be in Monty Python or whatever it was.)

• Yay, so pumped, I wonder what other rich and delicious goodies are in store this week — oh looky, it’s Mythopoetics, from Half Waif, whoever they are! I only added the “whoever they are” part because most music critics won’t admit when they have no idea what some band is about, and my mission is to fix the entire music critic industry if it’s the last thing I do, and plus, I literally haven’t heard of Half Waif, ever, like, I didn’t know “the band” is just some girl named Nandi Rose Plunkett, she was in the band Pinegrove, and she’s from Mass. The single, “Sodium & Cigarettes,” is like Lana Del Rey but fortified with some P!nk-level dramatics. The tune isn’t bad at all; it actually has a pretty cool crescendo, meaning it’s well-written, meaning it will be ignored, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing or whatever, in these times.

• Next we have Australian indie-twee-pop trio The Goon Sax, with Mirror II, their new album! Actually, their rubric isn’t ’80s-indie-twee-pop, it’s a genre called “dolewave,” which just means “’80s-indie-twee-pop’, but spoken in an Australian accent by a random music critic blowhard.” “Psychic” is the teaser tune, and it’s actually kind of awesome, despite sounding like Depeche Mode trying to be Simple Minds. You’d probably like it, honestly.

• We’ll wrap up this week’s nonsense with Museum of Love’s Life Of Mammals, a project headed by LCD Soundsystem’s drummer, Pat Mahoney! The new song is “Cluttered World,” yet another stab at ’80s-pop by random pikers who can’t write songs (think Thomas Dolby collaborating with Tears For Fears, and no, I would never encourage such a thing).

Retro Playlist

So four score and however-many blah blah blah whatever, it was somewhere around this same week 10 years ago that I was blatantly using this space to brag about the fact that I’d been offered Katy Perry tickets to her TD Garden show. This was before she suddenly became about as cool as tapioca served at a Ladies auxiliary club meeting. Anyone remember when Katy Perry was edgy? No? Well, whatever, at one time, she was cool, and so was I, which led some public relations guy to think it made sense to offer me tickets, which I refused, because I would have maxed out my hypocrisy allowance for like the whole year. I’m easy, not sleazy, guys.

One of the albums getting the treatment that week was Happeners, an album from White Wives, a Pennsylvania pub-punk band that, I wrote, sounded like — and try to contain yourself — “Kaiser Chiefs upfitted with good songs and a case of Four Loko,” a bunch of not-entirely-bad musicians whose aim was ”conjuring a vision of what a young Springsteen would be if he had to make a name for himself today.” There was some early Clash going on in “Paper Chaser,” but overall the key to the entire album was “Sky Started Crying,” a Bruce-ized ripoff of Airborne Toxic Event’s “The Kids Are Ready to Die,” an angsty melody that pops up constantly throughout the record. I guessed that it would make the band famous, and permeate “every corner of date-night backgrounding, from Cineplex lobbies to Red Lobsters.” I was wrong, for the first time ever, in my entire life. I’m still getting over my error in judgment, so if we can just drop it at this point, that’d be great.

The only other thing of any note that week was Rocket Science, from Bela Fleck and The Flecktones. My review was obviously texted-in, with bons mots like “at the very least we can say that Fleck is to banjo what Chick Corea is to piano” and “a roots return of sorts for Fleck, providing listeners with a simultaneous dose of pure bluegrass and pure jazz fusion, unique stuff that’d serve as perfect backgrounding to long summer drives into the wilderness.” Guys, I really feel bad about not caring about hipster-banjo albums, I really do.

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. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).