Summer citizen

With new music, MB Padfield returns to New England

It’s a quiet Monday for musician MB Padfield — she has only two shows. The New Hampshire-born singer, songwriter and guitarist is back for her summer sojourn, something she’s done since moving to Los Angeles a while back. This season, she’s booked 130 dates, including a run of 11 gigs over six days at the end of June — a personal record for her.

“I’m not far off from being an endurance athlete,” Padfield said by phone. “I’ve been doing a lot of physical training outside of music to be able to make these shows happen. Doing a lot of nutrition, learning so much about just the body and health and science and how it relates to live performance.”

Though Padfield plays mostly covers at places like The Goat, Wally’s and Margaritaville in Boston, such rigor extends to her original music. Take the video she made for “Waverider,” released earlier this year and part of an upcoming EP. In it, Padfield sang in an ice bath, and she had to repeat the process three times to get the right take.

At the end of the clip, she’s visibly quaking from what looks like hypothermia.

“Yeah, that was an experience … it was great and horrible at the same time,” she recalled. “I filmed over the winter in New Hampshire, in Bedford with my friend Ben Proulx, who is a really incredible videographer. He’s worked on some massive projects. He’s Grammy nominated.”

Impossibly, she managed to lip-sync all the song’s words. “That was a really tricky part … but I drilled it so many times,” she said. “I started with cold showers, and I did cold baths. Then I found a cold plunge in Los Angeles, and I’d sit there the whole song. I just tried to keep my head on straight.”

The song itself is a gem, an electronica-infused slow burn with bracing confrontational lyrics reminiscent of Taylor Swift’s recent work. It addresses the challenges of being an independent musician and facing a world where big acts have massive organizations behind them.

“It can be quite intimidating as an artist just getting started … that’s a bit of what ‘Waverider’ is about,” Padfield said. “It’s funny, everyone is asking me if it’s about a jet ski. It’s not, but I guess a jet ski wouldn’t be a bad analogy. I think everyone has their own Waverider. We all have our own ups and downs and do our best to try to navigate. It’s not necessarily about trying to keep calm waters, but just drive right in the waves where you’re at.”

Padfield’s latest release is “Into the Grey,” a song about letting go that became more poignant when her 96-year-old Meme passed away in May.

“We hospiced her at home, and I was there to the end; it was a wild experience,” she said. “There are people I’ve known who’ve had a hard time functioning through grief…. With the small experience I had, I learned that you have to pick the right memories to hold on to. That’s a big part of what ‘Into the Grey’ was about.”

Two more songs, “Lost at Sea” and “I’ll Be,” will be released in the coming months to complete a four-song EP. Padfield has a full-length album in the works as well and plans to make videos for the forthcoming songs.

“I’ve really come to see the value in communicating not only the music but also the visuals,” she said. “To explore not just what sound sounds like but also what it looks like … which has been a really fun creative adventure.”

In performance, Padfield is a one-woman powerhouse, using looping pedals and samples to produce a full band sound. It makes the most sense for her at the moment, keeping overhead low and her mobility flexible.

“That being said, I do love live looping, there’s such freedom in it,” she said. “I have my recipes for songs and how I make them. The cool part is, at least with the current setup I have, almost no two performances are identical. They’re similar for sure, but not identical, and that is a lot of creative freedom.”

MB Padfield
When: Sunday, July 28, 7 p.m.
Where: The Goat, 50 Old Granite St., Manchester
More: Full schedule at mbpadfield.com/tour

Featured photo: NB Padfield. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 24/07/25

Local music news & events

Funny dad: Quintessential New England comic Juston McKinney holds forth for an evening of standup in Derry. His secret sauce is an ever-changing set of material, a keen observer’s eye for regional foibles, and relatable self-deprecation, along with a skill for illuminating life’s absurdities with smiling kindness. His latest comedy special, On the Bright Side, was filmed in Manchester. Thursday, July 25, 8 p.m., Labelle Winery, 14 Route 111, Derry, $40 at labellewinery.com.

Maine man: The Cocheco Arts Festival continues with Toby McAllister & the Sierra Sounds. Maine-based McAllister is a singer and guitarist who came to prominence as the founding member of Sparks The Rescue. That band’s rhythm section backed him on last year’s solo effort Autumn Skies. Friday, July 26, 6:30 p.m., Henry Law Park, 1 Washington St., Dover; tobymcallister.com.

Smoke show: A barbecue benefiting a veteran support group has music from four bands. 61 Ghosts is singer/guitarist Joe Mazzari and drummer Dixie Deadwood, a roots rock effort inspired by John Hiatt, Link Wray and others. Rounding out the bill are Burn Permit, Sumwhat Lucky and Corduroy. The Operation Up In Smoke event includes a pig roast, brisket and ribs. Saturday, July 27, noon, American Legion, 232 Calef Highway, Epping, $30/plate, fishingforthemission.org.

Summer night: Performing an extended set, Train appears in the Lakes Region, as the pop rock band takes a brief break from its co-headlining tour with REO Speedwagon. They will have support from Yacht Rock Revue, who have covered songs such as “Ride Like the Wind” and “So Into You” since 2007. Train is carrying on after losing a founding member in May. Sunday, July 28, 8 p.m., BankNH Pavilion, 72 Meadowbrook Lane, Gilford, $38.50 and up at livenation.com.

Song pull: Continuing its support of original music, a Meredith winery hosts Songwriter RoundUp. The monthly show is hosted by Katie Dobbins, who also plays a few of her own songs. The evening’s lineup has country performer Lexi James, and Charlie Chronopoulos, whose LP Chesty Rollins’ Dead End was a stark look at life in his home state of New Hampshire. Wednesday, July 31, 5:30 pm., Hermit Woods Winery, 72 Main St., Meredith, $10 to $15 at hermitwoods.com.

At the Sofaplex 24/07/25

Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1

Kevin Costner co-writes, directs and stars in the expansive Western Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1, what feels like a three-hour TV pilot.

And who knows how this will shake out — with Chapter 1 not a box office hit and now available in premium VOD and Chapter 2 pulled from the August release schedule, maybe you will be watching this alleged four-part movie only on the small screen.

We meet what feels like a million characters, many of whom are dudes with beards or blond ladies, most in dust-covered brown get-ups, so it can be hard at times to follow which beard-dude’s story we’re watching. Generally, we are following the beginnings of the American settlement of Horizon, a town (which Wikipedia tells us is in Arizona) that we see a surveyor laying out plots for as the movie opens. The next look we get at the surveyor and his family is when another dude shows up to find their fly-covered remains and bury them. Sometime later, we meet a group of people who have created a mostly tent-filled town of Horizon across the river from the graves of the surveyor family. The characters who will matter most from this group are Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her young-teen-ish-aged daughter Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail). The town is attacked and burned to the ground by Apache warriors, who don’t love all these settlers “discovering” and moving onto the land they have been and are currently living on. Survivors of the attack include the Kittredge ladies as well as Russell (Etienne Kellici), a kid who escapes to get the army at a near-ish-by fort. Thus do we meet First Lt. Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington) and Sgt. Major Thomas Riordan (Michael Rooker), who take a particular shine to the grief-stricken Kittredge family.

Meanwhile, Lucy (Jena Malone) has apparently been terrorized by some man whose child she bore. She shoots him and takes the baby and runs and then his extremely awful adult sons are sent to find them. During her life on the run, Lucy shares a house and child care duties with Marigold (Abbey Lee), a, uhm, professional freelance fancy lady who tries to woo potential customer Hayes Ellison (Kevin Costner). Stuff happens involving the terrible sons after Lucy, and Hayes, Marigold and Lucy’s baby end up on the run together.

The movie gives the Apache a storyline, with Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe), the head of the raid on Horizon who wants to fight to get the settlers off their land, facing off against Tuayeseh (Gregory Cruz), the tribal elder who would prefer to just stay off the white settlers’ raiders all together.

And there’s a whole plot involving Russell, who joins up with a posse looking for the Apache that destroyed Horizon or, if they can’t find them, basically any Native Americans they can take their anger out on (and also collect bounty for killing).

And and we meet a wagon train which I guess, based on the cast list on Wikipedia, includes more Kittredges but the movie is more focused on snooty British wagoneers Juliette (Ella Chesney) and Hugh (Tom Payne), who are a real headache for the, like, mayor of the wagon train, Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson playing a Luke Wilson character).

There are oodles of other side characters and small performances by actors you know, including Danny Huston as an army muckety muck who delivers the speech about people making it in the West — if they’re clever enough, tough enough, mean enough, etc. That speech is the movie’s mission statement and it works fine in the trailer but feels particularly “stop and watch me orate” in the movie. One other “yeesh” acting moment of note is when the movie makes Russell, a child, do some “oh the humanity” stuff near the movie’s end. It’s just asking an unfair amount from a kid actor who has been basically fine up until then.

Look, there are few things more cinematic than the expanse of the American West. Throw some people on horseback riding through it and you almost don’t need an actual story. I understand the basic appeal of a movie that looks at the whole messy history of American westward expansion and all that that entails set against the backdrop of beautiful desert, mountain and plains scenery. But this movie is just a big bucket of plot water spilled all over everywhere that does not even come together in the end. What we get in the movie’s final moments is a chunk of scenes that feel like a “this season on Horizon” clip package giving us a sense that all of these people are headed to (or back to) Horizon. But even that is vague and vibesy with a lot of Costner about to draw on some fellow gunslinger or ladies in updos looking wistful.

In 2022 Tara Ariano wrote a piece for Vanity Fair headlined “5 Signs Your TV Show Should Be a Movie.” Horizon has the exact opposite problem, smooshing half a season of a clearly-should-be-a-TV-show into something that barely reads as a movie. C+ (the + being largely for cinematography) Available for rent or purchase.

Babes (R)

Pamela Adlon directed and Ilana Glazer co-wrote (with Josh Rabinowitz) this tale of longtime buddies facing life and children in Babes, which stars Glazer and the always awesome Michelle Buteau.

We meet Dawn (Buteau) and Eden (Glazer) as they get together for a 9 a.m. movie screening on Thanksgiving, a longstanding tradition. Dawn is heavily pregnant with her second child and seems to be in the earliest stages of labor but figures she has hours to go before any serious birthing begins. She does not, which is how Eden ends up attending the birth of Dawn’s second child. Afterward, Eden attempts to get Dawn and her husband Marty (Hasan Minhaj) something to eat but is then barred from reentering the maternity ward because it is after hours and she’s not technically family. All of which explains how Eden finds herself on a long subway ride on Thanksgiving day with over $400 worth of sushi. She ultimately shares the sushi with fellow passenger Claude (Stephan James), an actor also returning home to Eden’s Astoria neighborhood after a day of shooting a Martin Scorsese film. Over sushi, their meet-cute becomes a friendship which becomes an invitation to Eden’s apartment which becomes a special evening-into-morning for both of them. How special Eden learns later when she finds out she is pregnant.

Meanwhile, Dawn is struggling with breastfeeding and the family readjustments that come with having a new baby — her preschool-age son has decided he wants to be a baby again, and her beloved nanny has been hired away, making Dawn’s return to work difficult. As Eden leans on Dawn throughout her pregnancy, Dawn seems increasingly incapable of handling Eden’s neediness and is maybe slipping into some kind of postpartum depression.

Gestating and caring for babies and young children is messy and exhausting and leaves little room for things like friendships or personal sanity, seems to be the movie’s operating principle, which is extremely accurate. And this is portrayed here with both truthfulness and fondness for motherhood, the blend of which I feel like I still don’t see enough. Motherhood fundamentally changes everything and Babes does a good job of showing what that means for a friendship — not so much that it ends or fades but has to go through its own kind of messy growth process to continue. It also does a good job of just showing the grind of it all, especially through Dawn’s story, which includes her attempts to balance work with child care and her relationship with Marty and their financial stability. It’s an honest snapshot of all the emotional highs and lows delivered with enough laughs that I found the whole thing very charming with a friendship tale that is genuinely sweet. B+ Available for rent or purchase.

Unfrosted (PG-13)

Jerry Seinfeld directed and co-wrote Unfrosted, a Netflix movie about the making of Pop-Tarts that was recently nominated for a best TV movie Emmy.

This comedian make-work project full of dozens of Seinfeld-friend cameos features very few true facts — one is that cereal heiress Marjorie Post built Mar-a-Lago (American history is weird!). It is a gleeful riff on the 1960s as told through the lens of a Kellogg/Post war for breakfast dominance — all milk men and Cold War and space race and Mad Men. It is deeply stupid and, if you like this sort of thing, laugh-out-loud enjoyable.

Seinfeld, who continues to really just play himself, is a Kellogg corporate man tasked with beating Post to their latest invention, some kind of shelf-stable pastry item. On team Kellogg are also Jim Gaffigan, Melissa McCarthy and Hugh Grant as an increasingly unhinged classical Shakespearean actor who earns a living as Tony the Tiger. Amy Schumer and Max Greenfield are on Team Post. Christian Slater shows up as part of the milk man racket, which is run by Peter Dinklage. When Grant’s character eventually leads food mascots on a riot they are joined by Snap, Crackle and Pop — Kyle Mooney, Mikey Day and Drew Tarver, respectively.

I could have lived without the Jan. 6 callbacks of that scene but otherwise this movie is entirely cartoony nonsense frosted with Seinfeldian love of irrelevant minutiae. I realize people have all kinds of feelings about present day Seinfeld — if that is you, no worries. You’re not missing a great cultural artifact with this one.

But if you are basically fine with Seinfeld and enjoy whimsical dumbness, Unfrosted is a corn syrup-y treat. B Available on Netflix.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (R)

Eddie Murphy rides again as Detroit police detective Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.

This Netflix release clears the low bar of feeling like a real movie and offers the added bonus of genuinely enjoyable-to-watch (for the most part) movie star Eddie Murphy along with some 1980s nostalgia and some tolerably fun action. Axel is called out to Beverly Hills by old pal Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold), a retired detective now working as a private investigator. Billy has been working on one of his old cases and asked Axel’s daughter Jane (Taylour Paige), a defense attorney, to take the case of a man he believes was wrongfully accused of murdering a police officer. Billy had been investigating the officer and believed he might be part of a bigger conspiracy. Now Jane is facing threats from muscle-y bad dudes if she doesn’t drop the case. Axel heads west but when he arrives Billy is nowhere to be found. Though Axel and Jane have a difficult relationship, they eventually team up.

Along the way, there are jokes and cameos (John Ashton, Bronson Pinchot, Paul Reiser) and a light romance plot involving Jane and her ex, police detective Bobby (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who is of course working the same case. It’s all perfectly fine — better than it would be if just some regular old Netflix players were doing the same plot, not as good as if we were approaching new material. (I’m pretty sure I saw Beverly Hills Cop back in the day but I don’t really remember it or have strong feelings about the franchise.) But if you liked the original, I don’t think this outing is an embarrassment. Murphy brings more spark, more “I am willing and reasonably happy to be here” to this than Will Smith and Martin Lawrence did to their recent Bad Boys entry. Kevin Bacon shows up to turn in a villain performance that probably didn’t strain anything to give but that he also seemed to be having a loose good time with. It is a surprisingly not-bad meal at a middling restaurant and you leave a little more satisfied than you expected to be. B-Available on Netflix.

The Exorcism (R)

Russell Crowe plays a troubled actor playing a troubled priest in this meta demon horror movie that needs to be more fun.

Anthony Miller (Crowe) is a one-time action star trying to recover from addiction to alcohol and drugs, repair his relationship with his teenage daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins) and perhaps even forgive himself for abandoning his late wife as she was struggling with cancer. He is also trying to repair his career and to that end takes a role playing a priest in a movie that is sort of positioned as a The Exorcist remake. The role is available after the mysterious death of the actor who previously played the role. Director Peter (Adam Goldberg) makes it clear that hiring Tony is a risk for him but Tony just wants to work again. Which is perhaps why Tony doesn’t immediately realize that playing a priest, with the collar and prayers and all, might dredge up some undealt-with traumas from his childhood as an altar boy in a church notorious enough that Peter had heard about it on the news.

Lee accompanies Tony on set and so she sees him struggle both at work (with remembering lines and delivering whatever “broken man” pathos Peter is looking for) and at home, where she finds him creepily sleepwalking and reciting weird stuff in Latin. The movie’s consultant priest Father Conor (David Hyde Pierce) initially tells Lee her father’s difficulties are of an earthly nature and he, a psychiatrist, will talk to him. But then Father Conor pulls out ye olde booke of demon etchings and whatnot, suggesting that Tony’s troubles might not be entirely psychological.

I mean, we eventually move to the deep voice and the extraordinary physical abilities so the “is he having a breakdown from trauma or is he possessed” question is answered pretty definitively. Which is fine — in a movie called The Exorcism you’re expecting a demon. I was also intrigued with the elevator pitch of “an exorcism movie causes a possession in a cast member” — “intrigued” sounds more high-minded than the “ooo, this looks like goofy fun” reaction I had to the trailer. But this movie is too sad to be goofy fun and too uneven to really work on any other level. Goldberg’s smarmy director is built for the fun version of this movie, swinging from exasperated at Tony to sadistically poking at his traumas to try to get a better performance. Lee, Father Conor and Blake (Chloe Bailey), the actress playing the possessed girl in the movie, feel like they’re in some different more straightforward possession movie aimed at teens. Crowe is giving just the saddest man on Earth as Tony — even when the demon possession really kicks in. Russell Crowe seemed to have way more fun in last year’s The Pope’s Exorcist, which is where I recommend turning if what you’re looking for is a good time with Crowe in a priest collar yelling religious stuff at a demon.C Available for rent or purchase.

Twisters (PG-13)

Attractive people chase tornadoes in Oklahoma in Twisters, an, I guess, in-universe but otherwise sort of unrelated follow-up to the 1996 Twister.

When we meet college-age buddies Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Javi (Anthony Ramos) and friends, they are chasing a storm to try out an experiment: putting barrels of moisture-absorbing material in the path of a tornado in hopes that the material will draw water out of the tornado and the lack of water will cause the tornado to collapse. It’s the non-toxic particles used in diapers, one girl explains. (Except if you’ve ever accidentally put a diaper in a washing machine you’ll know that what you have is a bunch of slippery, impossible to clean up blobs and are people really going to want those in their wheat fields? Never addressed.) But on this day, the tornado they try it out on is a, whatever, category five tornado (it’s called something else but let’s just go with cat 5) that eats these diaper science particles for breakfast and then proceeds to come roaring after the buddies, eventually vortexing away everyone but Kate and Javi.

Five years later, Kate is working at NOAA in New York City and avoiding anything to do with tornadoes and Oklahoma. Javi searches her out and asks her to join his new company to chase tornadoes. His company makes three-dimensional maps of tornadoes which something something profit and helps people. As little sense as what he says he’s doing makes, what he’s actually doing is a viable, if slimy, business that doesn’t require close storm-monitoring at all but you can only pull so many threads of this plot before this whole movie unravels.

And anyway, what he’s doing makes more sense than what rival (sort of) storm chaser Tyler (Glen Powell) is doing. While Javi and his well-equipped, uniform- and tech-sporting team seek to gather storm data, Tyler and his crew, sporting kind of a post-apocalyptic cowboy pirate look, are YouTube stars. They drive into tornadoes and shoot off fireworks and somehow this — well, this plus merch sales — brings in the dollars. For what? I’m not sure.

Anyway, it allows for inter-group antagonism and Tyler calling Kate “City Girl” and the two groups chasing after the same storms. Though Kate is still working through her trauma from the whole “friends dying in a tornado” thing, her overall purpose in joining Javi’s work is still, somehow, to use the data to find a way to protect people from the increasingly frequent, increasingly powerful storms.

I realize how grumpy, how “old man yells at cloud” this will sound but I don’t find Glen Powell handsome and charismatic as much as I find him to be a product being sold to me as Handsome and Charismatic TM. The salesmanship is so aggressive, so “embrace this next-gen Tom Cruise, embrace him!” that it gets in the way of my actually relating to any character he is playing. His character here comes off as like 73 percent grin and cowboy hat. It’s as if I were watching an ad for, I don’t know, Arby’s or Chili’s on a loop, something where the food might look plausibly intriguing on first watch but looks more suspicious the longer I have the same pitch yelled at me.

Powell’s Tyler is thus a prickly irritant that kept me from just letting the dumb action and pretty cinematography of this movie wash over me. The wide-open spaces of the Midwest can be beautiful and director Lee Isaac Chung (who also directed the excellent Minari) truly shoots this movie for maximum wonder. Even crumbly farms and oil storage tanks have landscape loveliness. The twisters of Twisters are also fine — perhaps it is a function of the theater I saw the movie in (just a regular screen) that they didn’t have a greater wow factor. I feel like if you want to see this on the big screen probably go for the biggest, most total-attention-getting screen you can.

Beautiful images plus one half of the lead actor duo who needed to dial it down gets me to a movie I didn’t enjoy as much as I wanted to but I didn’t find actively loathsome. I feel like this movie never fully found its footing, never really decided what it wanted to be — straight-faced action? 1990s near-camp action? something else entirely? — and as a result always felt like it was running at half strength. C+

Rated PG-13 for intense action and peril, some language and injury images, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Lee Isaac Chung with a screenplay by Mark L. Smith, Twisters is two hours and two minutes long and distributed in theaters, where it made $80 million its opening weekend according to media reports, by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: Twisters.

The Summer Pact, by Emily Giffin

The Summer Pact, by Emily Giffin (Ballantine, 352 pages)

For the Love of Summer, by Susan Mallery (MIRA, 400 pages)

Neither The Summer Pact nor For the Love of Summer — despite their titles’ insinuations and their beach-vibe covers — is about summer, the season. The titles both refer to a character named Summer. So cute. Because both authors had this clever idea, and because I read them one after the other and felt equally annoyed by their bait-and-switch covers, I figured I would share their other downfalls.

Emily Giffin’s The Summer Pacthas a trigger warning before the novel begins announcing that difficult themes, including suicide, are present. If you read the jacket cover carefully, it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going to happen — and it does, in the first 10 pages of the book, so this is not a spoiler but rather the basis of the story. After their college friend Summer dies by suicide, Hannah, Lainey and Tyson make a pact to be there for each other if they are ever in crisis. A decade later, Hannah’s engagement ends abruptly, and she finds herself reaching out to Lainey and Tyson for support.

They each agree that they should embark on a trip together, a journey meant for healing and self-discovery. Instead, it seemed like a messy, depressing coming-together of three people who do not make sense as friends — and not in the quirky, we’re-so-different-it’s-funny kind of way, but in a forced, uncomfortable way.

It might have helped if Giffin had spent more than a few pages at the very beginning on the origins of their friendship, the solid foursome that existed before Summer died. But 10 years post-college, they seemingly have nothing in common other than this pact that they made.

It’s hard to even like or care about most of the characters, especially Lainey, who seems to be on a mission of self-destruction and generally comes across as selfish and immature.

The way Lainey reacts when she meets her half-sister for the first time is just childish. She was wronged by her dad, yes, but she confronts them as if she’s an angry 13-year-old with absolutely no filter or ability to communicate like an adult. When her other half-sister later tries to connect with her, Lainey refuses to have anything to do with her.

Hannah is the meek one of the group. The way she reacts to her fiance’s infidelity is pitiful. It’s infuriating to watch a main character not stand up for herself — and when she finally does, it’s at the prompting of her friends, in their presence, under false pretenses, because she couldn’t confront her cheating fiance on her own.

I didn’t have a problem with Tyson, other than he seemed to be Giffin’s attempt at racial inclusivity, with a lot of focus on the fact that he’s a Black man and not much other character development. That makes it hard to believe the romance subplot that Giffin throws in toward the tail end of the story.

I’ve been an Emily Giffin fan for years and have read all of her previous novels, so this was a disappointment for me.

I wish I had read For the Love of Summer first, because I probably would have appreciated Giffin’s writing a bit more – she, at the very least, does not repeat the same messages over and over again, the way Susan Mallery does in her “summer” novel.

The plot of Mallery’s book is cute: Allison’s husband gets sent to jail, and her stepdaughter — Summer — feels bad for her because she’s got a toddler and a baby on the way and no money, so Summer begs her mom, Erica, to let them move in. New wife living with ex-wife — could be fun, right?

Sadly, somehow, most of the book comes across as depressing and negative, with the exception of Summer, who is so positive and hopeful and empathetic that she’s actually unbelievable. This is another example of a cover that’s made for marketing and not representative of what the book is actually about.

The amount of repetition is maddening — the book easily could have been 100 pages shorter (yes, we know Allison is broke, pregnant and raising a toddler alone – we don’t need every character to think and say this over and over). There’s also at least one significant editing issue, where Mallery uses the wrong character’s name. Both of these issues may be the result of Mallery churning out multiple books a year, because it certainly felt hastily written.

With both of these books, I obviously cared enough to finish reading and find out what happened, which is something (honestly, though, I almost gave up on For the Love of Summer because I was so tired of so many words when so little was happening). If you want to give one of them a try, my vote is for The Summer Pact. But if you’re looking for light, fun, well-written beach reads, don’t let these covers fool you. The Summer Pact, B-; For the Love of Summer, C

Album Reviews 24/07/25

Sweet, Give Us A Wink (Capitol Records)

I’m still kicking myself for forgetting to mooch press passes to this seminal arena-rock band’s recent appearance at the Tupelo Music Hall (all the original members save Andy Scott are deceased), but this album still merits a few paragraphs for the edification of Zoomers and millennials, who need to understand that the ’70s weren’t just about Zeppelin and Skynyrd. It was 1976 and seemingly everything was under the influence of LSD, from the bands to the Lipton Noodle Zoopman; this album’s vaguely Zep-like sound was a new thing, heavy and progressive but the instruments were played so mechanically and succinctly that I’d describe it as a predecessor to today’s hard-electro, like that of Pendulum for example. The octave-level, Munchkinesque vocal harmonies took a little getting used to, although people were well-accustomed to them after their prior hit “Ballroom Blitz,” a more generic rawk tune that was nothing like the ones on this album, like the spazzing “White Mice” and “Healer,” their answer to Zep’s “Kashmir.” Anyway, this is one you’d want to be familiar with if you’re at a pool party and the old folks are waxing nostalgic about the days “when music didn’t suck.” A+

Brian Ray, My Town (Wicked Cool Records)

Decent rock ’n’ roll musicians are born swindlers, musical roustabouts whose importance exists only in their own minds; the trick is to get everyone else to believe in their trip. This 69-year-old guitarist’s papers check out; he parlayed his 1970s stint with Bobby Pickett (of “Monster Mash” fame) into a reputation that allowed him to troll his way into Etta James’ band and then Paul McCartney’s in 2002. As you’d guess, the credits on this record are decidedly too-long-didn’t read; Smokey Robinson, Michael des Barres and Gia Ciambotti turn in vocal contributions, just for starters, and I could go on, but as far as the demographic this might appeal to? I don’t know, maybe people who’ve never heard a Rolling Stones record before? I mean, that’s what it is, tempo- and vibe-wise; the guitar sound alternates between grunge and Kinks, which is fine, and at times the sound wants to be Weezer-ish (Scott Shriner is here, by the way), but ultimately it’s background patter for an ’80s action movie, and bloody disengaged at that. B-

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• At this writing the temperature is exactly one million degrees outside, here in sunny Manchvegas, New Hamster, and I have melted into a puddle of snark, so fair warning, all you new albums coming out on Friday, July 26, you’d better be good, or I’ll — why, I’ll — well, just you wait, ’enry ’iggins, I have plenty of outraged rage I’d love to direct at the wrong places, Given that my new book about social media and politics, My Year In The Online Left, just dropped a bit in the bestseller list, which means I can’t afford a trip to the North Pole! Yes yes, in my melted, snarky, basically liquefied state I am a loose cannon, and all I’ve been able to tolerate listening to lately is old — as in old — music, like, I made a mixtape for my car that has songs from Outlaws, Andrew Gold and Ace Frehley on it, and those are the most modern artists on the CD! The rest of it comprises stuff from the 1950s like Jerry Lee Lewis, The Dovells and Eddie Cochran, stuff that all the bros used to have playing in their souped-up ’32 Ford Coupes when they drove over to pick up Petunia and take her “parking” [nudge, nudge]. Yessir, 1950s greaser rock is all my delicate constitution has been able to tolerate lately, like, this week, Petunia wanted to catch up on the most recent season of Yellowjackets, and when I heard that stupid, sad, morose Radiohead song playing in the background during that one awful, disturbing, horrible scene, well, that was it, fam, something broke inside me and suddenly I had to hear “Sweet Little Sixteen” or I knew I would crack in half! But wait, don’t flip to Amy’s film reviews quite yet, I can still be as “groovy” as any other music journo; here, watch this, as I take a listen to the new Ice Spice single “Did It First,” from the TikTok/Nickelodeon princess’ fast-approaching new album, Y2K! Spoiler, it’s about romantic cheating and hawk tuah-ism, as always, but at least the beat is sci-fi and noise-garage-y, not that stupid wimpy trap stuff, like, this thing would totally shred the woofers in your totally keen souped-up Toyota Corolla to tatters if you cranked it while heading over to pick up Petunia and take her to the Twerk-O-Rama to watch her do her subtle, seductive mating dances! OK, may I go back to listening to The Silhouettes’ “Get A Job” now!

• OK, spread out, let’s stop making fun of twerking princesses and get down to the real meat of the era, namely bands that are kind of fun in a Mungo Jerry sort of manner, you know, amateurish bands led by broke, smelly millennial NEETS (which stands for “not in employment, education, or training,” have you heard this 15-year-old expression yet?), for instance Los Angeles outfit Alex Izenberg & The Exiles! Yes, they are in my “You should talk about this band” list, but they aren’t recommended, because they are broke and slovenly, so let’s be rebellious and talk about the band’s new single, “Drinking the Dusk Away,” from their new self-titled album! Wow, I have to report that although the song is appropriately moronic to fit the times, the vocal harmonizing is pretty concise, and they use an actual dobro. It’s on Domino Records, which is all you really need to know; i.e., it’s good.

• When he’s not having anxiety attacks on stage, North Carolina dance DJ Porter Robinson releases albums, like his new one, SMILE! 😀! The tune I listened to, “Knock Yourself Out XD,” combines a Nintendo beat with emo and Beatles. It is OK!

• We’ll call it a column with New York twee/dream-pop band Cults, whose new LP To the Ghosts features the tune “Left My Keys,” which sounds like Bon Iver with a (slight) pulse, or a really uninteresting M83, take your pick.

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