Kristian Montgomery and the Winterkill Band, Prince of Poverty (self-released)
Catching up with a couple of local-ish releases, things that have sat in my Facebook messages for a while, mostly because there’s always a hassle dealing with local guys. Take note, bands, just send direct links, OK, because I hate Dropbox, and now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at this (very good) album from Montgomery, a Danish alt-country-hippie who’s now based in Boston, working as a fisherman in Brewster, Mass. Although the biographical materials claim the album’s a genre-goulash, I didn’t find that to be true, more like something between ’70s country-pop and Hank Williams III, i.e. there’s a discernible punk influence afoot. Lots of throwback southern rock going on here, too: The LP starts out with “American Fire,” which will immediately have you thinking of The Outlaws, a sound, when done well, that’s always welcome at this desk. And so on and so forth, some things that evoke Amos Lee, Rascal Flatts in afterparty mode, stuff like that, all of it memorable and never annoying. A+
Amber Dust, Nothing Is Lost (self-released)
Another local release, this time a sort-of-compilation album (actually an audiophile’s take on the movie Boyhood, in many ways) from Sandown-based Jesse Nickerson, whom we’ve talked about before. Nickerson’s obviously a gentle soul, and his nicely lived life is documented here in the form of a sequence of alt-Americana tunes that were written for friends and family and such. For the most part, the record Krazy-Glues your basic Sufjan Stevens patter to Steve Winwood-level notions of songwriting, which means you’ll hear billowy melodies spiced with Wilco-ish experiments that are guaranteed not to get on your nerves. The music itself was salvaged from a personal collection of cassettes, spanning from 1985 to 2000; it all had to be digitally rescued, and thus it’s hilariously casual overall, with songs often introduced by background chatter from various bystanders and cohorts. I particularly liked “Tethered,” wherein a ’70s stun-guitar line matches up nicely with a trashcan-bashing drum line during one segue. A
Retro Playlist
In this space 10 years ago today, I wrote about America’s favorite Honey Boo Boo singing lady Britney Spears and her then-new album, Femme Fatale. Back then, it was de rigueur for pop divas to use trance techno in their beats. Remember those days? It was like the three hacks who write all the lousy, interchangeable pop songs for America’s smarmy, Nerds-gobbling tweens were listening to nothing but Tiesto, and life wasn’t all that bad. I’m sure you’ve forgotten by now, but “Till the World Ends” was the single, and it was pretty decent, except for this one stupid “hiccuping” Auto-Tune effect that was added to her voice, an unsurprising move by the corporate Borgs who’ve ruined everything else in music to date.
Ho ho ho, know what else was released that week? The soundtrack to the famous TV show NCIS, delivered in the form of a CD titled NCIS: The Official TV Score. My Stupid-O-Meter had to be put in the shop for a week after that one, but before the poor device fritzed out I was able to get off a quick “it’s such cheesy horrible music that I automatically went to the kitchen to make a horrible cheese sandwich when I heard it just now.”
It was a tough week, that week. I had to pretend to give a fair examination to The King Of Limbs, the album Radiohead had just put out. I have no problem admitting that I absolutely detest Radiohead, probably just as much as does fellow music snarkician Dr. David Thorpe, former editor of the “Your Band Sucks” page on the Something Awful site. Thorpe once commented that, oh-so-fittingly, Radiohead’s singer, Thom Yorke, has two superfluous letters in his name. And so on, hate hate hate. My take on the album was that along with a couple of Aphex Twin-style moves, most of the sounds “came from the same old pit of eye-rollingly mournful slowbie-slug nonsense in which they traditionally wallow.”
The other album on the slab that week was Grails’ Deep Politics, a band that’s essentially a work in progress, given that they have no singer. Nonetheless, I submitted, “If you’re into penny stocks, there’s actual potential here.” (I may have been lying, though, just to keep the PR person from getting too bummed out.)
PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases
• Blessed be, y’all, blessed be, because guess what, new albums are coming out this Friday, March 19! I love seeing what’s in the weekly list, guys. It’s a surprise every week, like going into a haunted house at the circus, except the ghosts and goblins and mummies who used to play bass for REO Speedwagon and assorted talentless hipster phonies are real, and they’ll totally get me if I don’t have my trusty snark-hammer at the ready, and I am fully prepared to smite them! Now take my hand, random person who’s reading my genius at the diner, yes, take my hand, strap yourself in for safety, and let’s see what’s goin’ on, in the crazy haunted house world of rock ’n’ roll and whatever! Yikes, looky there, folks, the first creature to pop out from behind the spooky gnarled trees is ancient cowboy-hat sorceress Loretta Lynn, whose new album, Still Woman Enough, is on the way! This is her 50th album, and no, I’m not kidding, she’s made 50 albums, not even including her duet albums with Conway Twitty. How does she do it? I don’t know! But I’ll bet she’s got to be playing thrash metal by now, so let’s see what the dilly is with the new single — wait, stop the ride, there’s no single! There’s just a “trailer” that’s 20 seconds long. If there’s anything on earth I detest to the core, it’s album trailers! But there’s banjo being plucked slowly, and she rap-sings about being a coal miner’s daughter, so it’s safe to say she still sounds like Reba McEntire. OK, that’s it, the first stop is always a fail in these cheap haunted houses, so keep your arms and legs safely inside as we press onward!
• Hope you took your heart medication, guys, because look, the next stop in our ride through the poorly maintained ghost house is a Canadian act, some indie-rock imbecile named Chad VanGaalen! Look out, it’s a moose with a knife, ha ha, so scary! The new album is World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener, and maybe you’ve already heard the single, “Samurai Sword.” If so, I’ll bet you wish you hadn’t; I mean, I sure didn’t need to hear this numbskull sing really bad harmony with some edge-lady girl he probably met on TikTok through some “Really Bad Music” search. They literally sound like they’re drunk, or just really stupid, and the beat is a rickety messy joke, like something the Rolling Stones recorded just to troll their manager into thinking they’d lost their minds. OK, next stop, gang, choo choo!
• Here we are at the spooky graveyard part of the ride, guys, with an album from Bell Orchestre, called House Music! The horror angle here is that this is a six-piece “avant-garde” band from Montreal, and there are fiddles and other trappings used by hayloft bands that have never been inside an actual hayloft. These guys opened for Arcade Fire early on, and the first single here is called “V: Movement.” It is, of course, awful, sort of Eno-style ambient, with some disparate layers, like belled trumpet, cheap synth, and bad singing. Moving on.
• Last stop, kids, with the big showstopping gorilla monster, Sting, and his new album, Duets, which, I’ll bet you anything, doesn’t include a duet with anyone who doesn’t own a few Ferraris. Italian singer dude Zucchero adds his voice to a clunker song called “September.” It’s almost OK, but then it turns into a song you swear you’ve heard before on every lousy Sting album. OK, out, everybody out, single file, let’s go.
