The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Circa Waves don’t waste time setting the stakes and providing a raison d’être for the band’s sixth album, Death & Love, Pt. 1.1
Lead vocalist Kieran Shudall sings it plainly in the chorus for album-opener, “American Dream,” a short song about a big trip, larger aspirations and intrusive disillusionment: “Walking in Central Park
Trying to find my feet but the street got dark. I’ve seen things you won’t believe. Oh, I’m an English boy with an American dream.”
While a British Invasion aftershock seems incredibly unlikely in 2025, Death & Love, Pt. 1, released Jan. 31 via Lower Third Records/PIAS, makes a strong case that guitar-driven pop should still cause a transatlantic buzz. On the strength of big hooks and some sounds nicked from multiple waves of cool bands from both sides of the pond, Circa Waves crafted a tight, bright LP that often successfully channels the emotional grandeur hinted at in its title.2
This is especially true on tracks like “Like You Did Before,” “We Made It” and “Everything Changed,” which draw heavily from the well of mid-aughts indie rock. These songs are propulsive, catchy, feature nifty guitar work and build to enormous group-vocal choruses. “Like You Did Before” and “We Made It,” are well positioned as the second and third song on the album. They provide an adrenaline shot of energy early and clearly demonstrate Death & Love Pt. 1‘s virtues.
“Like You Did Before,” charges forward like a lost Room on Fire or Bows + Arrows track. It expertly deploys a pre-chorus lull that makes it that much more effective when the song blasts off into the nostalgia-laced fatalism of it’s “ki-ki-kill me now” chorus, and it boasts the best guitar solo on the album. “We Made It,” whirs, swirls and sells its hook with the breathy sincerity of a Hot Fuss single. “Everything Changed,” the album’s penultimate song, owes less to any one source, but with twinkling soft-strummed verses that swell into its Godzilla-sized stomp-along chorus, it would sound right at home on a burned CD in 2005.3 Its inflated pomp is also immediately punctured by the album’s playful, mostly manic closing track, “Bad Guys Win,” and that’s for the best. Going any bigger would guarantee implosion. Chalk up a triumph for album sequencing.
Death & Love, Pt. 1, isn’t all thrilling one-two punches, however. There’s a gulf between the two combos that highlight the album, and when the songs that fill it stand out, it’s not for quality. Momentum and pleasure suffer when the LP slows down for “Hold It Steady,” which aims for atmospheric new wave and falls flat. That’s partially because of some subpar crooning. While Shudall’s voice is versatile and effective throughout Death & Love, it can sound thin without backing bombast and bandmates. That’s not to say every up-tempo song is automatically strong. “Let’s Leave Together,” which references “Here Comes the Sun” in its lyrics and synth line, is grating. It also includes some of my least favorite lyrics on the album.4
Despite the occasional lyrical clunker and some mid-album scuffles, the sugar highs far outweigh the dull-not-bad lows. The net balance is an album stocked with sweet treats that lack the substance and nutrition of a meal. It’s possible the sequel implied by Death & Love, Pt. 1′s title will level up the project to something richer and even more fulfilling.
About the writer
Ben Hohenstatt
Ben Hohenstatt is an Alaska-based dog owner who moonlights as a music writer and photographer.
For more information, consult your local library or with parental permission visit his website.
Tags for this article
More articles by Ben Hohenstatt
Year of the Month
A new Iceage album is now treated like a Capital-E Event. That wouldn't be the case without Plowing into the Field of Love.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Kojak, “Loser Takes All” – A lot of the plotting here is really murky. What matters is that Leslie Nielsen, still a dramatic actor, is pretty okay as a criminal who’s never been caught and who pulls off an audacious diamond heist at JFK, and that in the process he shoots Kojak! Obviously our lead isn’t hurt badly – no serialization of a six week recovery back then – but it’s still pretty unexpected. Guests also include Ja’Net Dubois (Good Times) and Antonio Fargas (Starsky and Hutch).
Frasier, “Give Him the Chair” – Frasier, thinking that he’s doing his dad a favor by replacing that decaying old easy recliner, realizes that he’s really screwed up, and tracks the chair down to a middle school production of what is now usually called “And Then There Were None.” Most memorable for Martin’s heartfelt explanation of just why that chair means so much to him, for everyone’s reactions to the vibrator on the new chair, and for Frasier taking his bows as part of the cast for that play. Hidden among the kids on stage is a young Brittany Murphy. The guest caller, a Germanic psychologist whose book on male menopause is apparently rather personal, is Malcom McDowell having a lot of fun with the accent.
High Potential, episodes 1 and 2 – wanted some new TV for February, since I’m trying to prioritise creativity and don’t need to cram in a movie every night (much as I’ve trained my brain to think otherwise at this point). I was gonna give Shogun a shot but fired up the app and this was the first thing I saw, and it seemed like a better laid-back watch. And it is! Although it does reward full attention just because of the amount of detail. It’s a fun take on the procedural and Kaitlin Olson is great in the lead. Some of the supporting cast feel a bit TOO generic (especially the male detective she’s paired up with) but I guess there’s plenty of time for those characters to get fleshed out. Only three episodes available in the UK so far but I enjoyed these two enough that I’m very tempted to watch the third later, even though that gets me back into a “need more TV” state immediately.
Karadec (her partner) definitely grows over the course of the season. Less of a skeptical grump and more and more someone who appreciates what Morgan does and even opens up from time to time. Actually kind of refreshing to see that kind of steady character evolution. (Of course, there do still often manage to be people who are skeptical of Morgan on just about every case.)
The Naked Gun – Apparently it’s Leslie Nielsen Day around here!
With some dated exceptions, a hilarious collection jokes, some of which only get discovered on repeat viewings. This time around the boiled beef bit absolutely killed me, the most unappetizing basis for sexy banter. Nielsen’s talent for parody would become something of a parody of itself in time, but he’s on his A-game here, glorious deadpan and physical humor.
Throw out a few clunkers and this would be among the best. The opening with Drebin taking on a roomful of America’s enemies has always annoyed me, even beyond being carbon dated to a precise time, it’s too indicative of the cranky right wing turn Zucker would take later. Similar the almost obligatory “safe sex” joke (when I was a kid I assumed the condom was a recent invention the way it was talked about in the media). But the hits go for longer stretches, like the student driver car chase and especially the extended finale at the ballpark. The kids insisted I replay the bit where Drebin inadvertently takes a hot mic into the bathroom, I only did so under the condition we rewatch the dancing umpire. Something for everybody.
Most underrated line delivery: “I bought her a harp for Christmas. She asked me what it was…”
See the safe sex joke still gets me, I think that it really is Presley and Nielsen in these giant tubes. So silly!
*rubs birthmark off Chris’ head* I knew it! Treating America’s enemies as a bloc bad guy club, like they’re COBRA or something, is still funny to me and it also works as a very Reagan-esque way of viewing the world, apropos for our bumbling cop lead. But anyway, my pick for rewind GOAT in this movie full of greatness is the very end, OJ’s ejection just gets funnier and funnier.
I can see it that way, but it can just as easily work as is in a film by Ray Stevens or Jeff Dunham, if you’re going to do jingoism gotta be funnier than that. I was going to say you have to go more absurd than that, but of course it’s an incredibly absurd scene, maybe the problem is there’s already a lot of absurd thinking among the defenders of the free world.
I remembered that OJ got the shit beat out of him in this movie but I’d forgotten that his only role is to get the shit beat out of him. That’s only gotten better with age!
My favorite is Frank Drebin casually mentioning how he’ll probably die in front of his wife.
Beavis and Butthead Do America + To Die For – A double feature about television as the great motivator in the 90s! Both very good still though the latter bugs me knowing more about Pamela Smart and how her guilt is…actually pretty debatable. Suzanne is a hybrid, but the book this is based on and the movie both use real details from the crime, making it harder to separate fact from fiction here. Kidman nevertheless is undeniable – this is a person as much raised by TV as Beavis and Butthead, but concerned entirely with being ON the screen, dominating it (“You’re not anyone unless you’re on TV”), her massive eyes always exactly at camera level, rather than B+B’s concern with, uhhhh, getting a TV back and sitting there as long as possible. Both are indictments of the country’s obsession with dumbassery on the screen either way.
Flores – A Portugese queer science-fiction short about an island invaded by violet flowers, forcing the residents to leave save for a few soldiers and some holdouts. Some interesting stuff here about exploitation and the landscape reshaping identity, akin to Annihilation, but it doesn’t entirely come together as a film. The intoxicating purple all over the photography nevertheless is really arresting and contributes to the feeling of disassociation throughout.
Shoresy, “Blueberry Buddies”
“Where did it happen?”
“The dressing room.”
“Were there girls there?”
“Why would there be girls in the dressing room?”
“Fair.”
“It’s not Ted Lasso.”
Hahaha. The team members who hung out in Sudvegas for the summer (obviously, the half-dozen or so cast regulars) are charged with training up the next generation… which, well, they don’t really get to do much of; we get an intro video of the kids who are on their way to big-city teams after the summer, which is pretty funny in its own right. And then… the actual adult players have to set them straight, but first they go through a session of how mores have changed, even in the locker room, where apparently you can’t just “helicopter” anymore, among other things (Michaels was more a “brain” guy)… and they’re trying to wrap their head around some of those things (some of which are more reasonable than others).
And then, of course, some of the players hang back when the others go out with their slam pieces, because… it’s Wednesday, and Wednesday means Shoresy’s gonna be serenading Laura Mohr. So we also get a Shoresy karaoke performance of “You Learn.” Which apparently was the second single off Jagged Little Pill, but I remember it as the fourth or even fifth that got radio play here in the States (or where I was in the States).
So, all in all, fun episode. And I even learned something about the second-best selling Canadian album of all time.
American Dad!, “Get Him to the Greek Life Style”
“Stan attempts to live forever in order to do everything on his bucket list.”
Well, it starts normally enough, with a news report on parts of the world with abnormally long lifespans and their lifestyles. From there it goes to the Smiths adopting the Greek lifestyle– and of course taking it way too far; the food and the walking aren’t enough, they’ve also gotta fly a Greek flag and have a big al fresco dinner (which apparently means turning their entire backyard into an outdoor Greek patio) and of course Stan imports “some local Mediterraneans.”
But then one of Stan’s imported old Greek men dies at 96, and Stan realizes that extra-long life is still not forever. And Stan is a lunatic, so… of course this goes into crazy-tech-billionaire territory. And of course Roger is the biohacking longevity quack. Of course there’s a Bryan Johnson-style ‘replacing your blood with your son’s blood” bit, and a “collapsed submersible” bit (although it collapsed because Roger builds a glory hole into everything he builds).
But obvious or not, it is still all pretty funny.
Also, unexpected side effect of the Greek life: Hayley turns out to be a natural bocce player.
And guest starring Ringo Starr. Or, wait, he wasn’t in the credits. So guest starring someone voicing Ringo Starr, I guess.
I saw his album review in this space, surely Ringo Starr isn’t that busy.
Well, they got Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick three weeks ago, and Charles Barkley last week, so it wasn’t at all out of the realm of possibility it was really him. They’ve gotten weirder and more unexpected guest stars, certainly.
The Shield, “Blowback”
As will be my pattern for these, more scattered SOMEWHAT SPOILERY notes:
– We have three of the show’s top comedy moments in this one. #1: “The Armenians … speak Armenian.” Pitch-perfect deadpan delivery, and these kinds of minor complications always lead to some fun on the procedural end of things–in this case, to the Strike Team having to go pluck some college kid away from his friends for a bit and give him $100 for a quickie translation. (Top translation wrench in the works of all time: the multi-stage wrenching in Inside Man.)
– We Go Live to Ronnie Cam: he’s allergic to cats! And many other things, according to Vic.
– Adorable detail: Lem doing air guitar on a shotgun while the team is listening to their psych up music.
– Shane leaving the stolen coke in the car while he goes to get laid, and the car then getting jacked–this is just one of the first truly great Strike Team plots, believable and frantic and escalating very nicely as it goes along. A lot of shows wouldn’t even think to change the stakes midway through this, since they’re high enough already–it’s a big fuck-up, the team’s already worried about the loss of their payout and the potentially spoiled relationship with Rondell–but here we get Julien spotting the lift and Aceveda putting out an APB on the car in response, which means there’s now real prison time on the line as well. I’m also always a sucker for “you can’t execute a perfect plan with other people involved,” and here we get a nice example of that when Vic’s enlisted Danny to quietly tip him off about the car, and she’s willing to do it but Julien’s not willing to go along with it.
– My wife’s reaction to Shane’s panicky hailing-down of the not-so-stolen Navigator: “Shane. Baby. Why. What are you doing?”
– Love the intercutting between Dutch and Claudette’s interrogations. They don’t get much to do in this one, but it’s lovely to see how much they can get on each other’s wavelength: they share the same joke (“Means one of them could get hit by a bus…”) in their separate interrogation rooms, and when they’re telling Aceveda about how weird Margos’s apartment is, they both get delightfully hung up on the microwave popcorn but no microwave. Great double-act there.
– Top comedy moment #2: “I mean, Christ, dude, Amy’s not even that hot!”
– Actually a fair amount of cute Shane and Lem stuff in this episode. I love them sitting in the car talking about the pink coke. Shane may think Vic’s his best friend–and Vic is certainly able to hand-wave away Shane’s worst traits in a way that Lem, who feels them more deeply, can’t–but I think all in all, he gets more endearing hangout moments over the course of the series with Lem. That’s not painful at all!
– Tomas, Julien’s boyfriend, has been sent to try my patience. Do you want to get Julien killed? Stop showing up at the Barn to flirt with him! (Obviously this will reap dramatic dividends later.) It doesn’t help that the two of them have negligible chemistry. But I can technically see what Julien is getting out of this, as much as I want to tell him that he can do so much better: he’s still so closeted that it would be next-to-impossible for him to seek out a different boyfriend, all he can do is tell himself that he’s giving in to the one who has attached himself to him. Anyway, nice Julien characterization note unrelated to all this: him going to Claudette for advice feels like a direct consequence of her laying into him about knocking over the churro cart a few episodes ago. If he were a different person, that might have made him feel more defensive around her; instead, it’s made him correctly see her as someone who values justice over brotherhood of cops power-play bullshit.
– Speaking of that, I love how Claudette phrases her advice. It’s a corrupt world, and she knows that even if Julien’s still struggling to accept it. This won’t be the last bad thing he sees, and reporting it will have consequences for him, not just for the Strike Team. What he has to decide is whether or not the moral weight here has to be dealt with: “Is it something you can’t live with holding?” Fantastic question, and one that tells us a lot about her.
– Love Catherine Dent’s smile, and the pure sunniness of it, when she addresses Vic’s claim that Shane lost the car while running in somewhere for a Slurpee: “Is that what Shane’s calling it these days, a Slurpee?”
– Deena! Love to see her. Probably the smartest non-Vic criminal we’ve seen so far: the one who knows to drop an angle the second it stops working, knows to ask for a lawyer, knows to get a deal in writing.
– I can’t help finding it kind of sweet how easily the Strike Team falls into a genuinely good rhythm in the cover-up scene at the end. They’ve been on edge all episode, obviously, but the second there’s the relief of rediscovering the coke, they snap into gear and get the place cleaned up, and it’s a genuine joy to see them all in-sync and companionable again. (I have a similar soft spot for the end of S4, obviously.) Shane carefully moving the tray with the lines of coke on it while constantly announcing his position is a particularly great detail–it’s like a “behind you, chef” for crooked cops trying to cover up their misdeeds.
– Nice touch that the answer Danny gets wrong on her sergeant’s exam practice test is about covering up for her partner (she’s supposed to alert her commanding officer); Danny’s loyalty is always to her sense of the community, so of course she’d get that wrong. And I love that when she nudges Dutch about what he would do in that situation, he comes back with the measured: “I know what I’d answer on the test.”
– Shane leaves the stolen coke in the car to go make up his missed date with Amy; Vic leaves an overwhelmed Corrine at home with her books on their son’s newly diagnosed autism to go sleep with Danny. Two men, both thinking about getting laid, but in very different directions and sacrificing very different things.
– Top comedy moment #3: “Oh, you’ve gotta be shitting me.” Sorry, Dutch!
Helps that Kenny Johnson and Goggins were real buddies.
At some point I’m going to have to watch Major League: Back to the Minors just to imagine them hanging out behind-the-scenes. I know they shared a house during filming!
Kids In The Hall, Season Two, Episode Ten
– “Got no strong opinions.”
– “I think colourisation is horrible! I hate it!”
– “Bradley, I got a better idea! Why don’t we skip the sex and get straight to the guilt!”
– “Is the Pope with us today? Is the Pope with us today?”
– LORNE MICHAELS DOESN’T PRESENT
– “Uh-oh. I dropped my contact.”
– “Great! We’ll pitch a tent when we reach the nipple!”
– “We’re bonded!”
– “I remember that day the way some people remember Kennedy’s death.”
– The credits have Kevin MacDonald eating in the shower for some reason.
“Guess Your Weight” is so great.
“Oh, puh-leeeeeease!”
“I wonder what he would be like…”
And yes, the last sketch is just called “Kevin Eats While Showering.”
What Did We Listen To?
Selected the “This Is David Bowie” collection on Spotify and belatedly listened to at least some of Blackstar. It’s not at the level of Bowie’s greatest works, but it is quite good as late career albums go.
Did the same with Paul McCartney, and boy he did a lot of work with other people, and in other people’s styles. I once saw him described as something of a musical chameleon, who can adapt to any trend and make it his own at least to some degree. Indeed! Not quite at the level of Peter Sellers saying he had himself surgically removed, but Paul really works to get lost in someone else’s melodies.
Falling way behind on Blank Check, what with the NBA trade deadline coming and a lot of basketball pods to ingest.
Still wild to me that Peter Sellers’ wittiest and frankest self-assessment came from The Muppet fucking Show
Yeah, that’s something you tell your therapist and not, uh, puppets!
1001 Albums etc. – this project will be taking a back seat this month but I did get to a few this week. Aladdin Sane is a Bowie album I’d never spent any time with it and sadly not one that really grabbed me at all – felt a bit sluggish and bloated to me, lacked the lighter touch I enjoy in some of his best stuff. King Crimson’s “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic” was not for me at all, I quite enjoyed “Court of the Crimson King” but this one had all of the prog excess without the kick-ass riffs. I was more positive on Bob Marley & The Wailers’ “Catch a Fire” – for the most part I’ve been skipping the bonus tracks on these albums, most of which have had deluxe reissues at some point, but this one caught me off guard by putting the bonus tracks on the first disc! So I ended up listening to the stripped back “Jamaica version” first, then the version with additional rock instrumentation. I preferred the version with the extra stuff, sorry Bob! The stripped back version is nice but got a little samey for me, the bulked up version gives it a bit more variation and I thought the additions sounded really sweet.
Blank Check, Sugarland Express – fun enough discussion, didn’t make me particularly keen to revisit the movie.
Screen Drafts, 1999 – 25th anniversary draft of a classic Movie Year. They already did a draft on this year early in the show’s run so this extended version saw some attempts to fix historical omissions and ended up being quite entertainingly odd. It’d be easy to make a pretty generic top 10 from this year so I was happy that they got a bit weird with it. Ghost Dog at #2! Hell yeah.
London Town, Paul McCartney
My favourite solo McCartney so far – in terms of song structures and lyrics, this feels like a throwback all the way to his earliest Beatles work, but with the sophistication of a man much older than that. The lyrics are simpler and more elegant, the instrumentation is gorgeous, and the songwriting is peaceful and happy.
Nothing particular, except a couple of favorites (both recent and 80s-based) on Saturday.
Been listening to the radio to try to pick up on anything new worth hearing. There’s a new Lucy Dacus single out (“Ankles”). Craig Finn’s got a new album out soon with The War on Drugs backing him, and that sounded pretty good on the first single, “People of Substance.” Even Franz Ferdinand has a new album! Just learned that today; first single is “Night or Day.” My Morning Jacket has a new one on the way, too, with Is, which is still not their shortest album title. The first single is “Time Waited.” Japanese Breakfast also has a new album on the way, first single is “Orlando in Love.”
Also started flipping stations a little bit periodically (turns out there is not just one local station), and another station played Jack White’s “Archbishop Harold Holmes,” which I guess is the latest single from No Name. There are a couple other songs I gotta figure if they’re actually new or not.
In the local realm, I listened to my station’s top-15 local artist countdown last week, and I’d only heard two of them before, which is odd because I listen to the station quite a bit. (Those two were Slow Caves, whose “Tension” ended up at #21 on my countdown as I’m sure you already know, and The Mssng, whose “Rock Island” got an honorable mention, although that was not the song they played.) Disappointed more of my picks weren’t selected; baffled at how few of these local artists I’d heard before despite the amount I listen to the radio station that was counting them down.
Also in local music, one thing I can definitely confirm is that the new song “JAWZ” by the Boulder-based band Diva Cup is pretty good.
Year of the Month update!
This February, you can sign up to write about anything from 2016, including these movies, albums, and books.
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Rogue One
TBD: Cori Domschot: Ghostbusters, Hidden Figures, and/or Sing
Feb 7th: Gillian Nelson: Queen of Katwe
Feb. 11th: Lauren James: Inside
Feb. 14th: Gillian Nelson: Milo Murphy’s Law
Feb. 18th: John Roberts: Silence
Feb. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Pete’s Dragon
Feb. 27th: John Bruni: Jet Plane and Oxbow
Feb. 28th: Sam Scott: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
And March is going to be Silent Era Month, where you can join these writers in examining your favorite silent movies and anything else from the 1910s and ’20s!
Mar. 26th: Sam Scott: Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie
Mar. 31st: John Anderson: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
Holy moly that Cobra Kai lyric sucks ass.