More Real Life Rock: The Wilderness Years, 2014–2021

Critic Marcus (Mystery Train) picks up where he left off in Real Life Rock with this spirited if uneven collection of 73 columns written for Barnes & Noble Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Pitchfork, rollingstone.com, and the Village Voice. Marcus pulls no punches: in a one-sentence takedown of the album Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, he sharply asks, “Where does talent go when it goes away?” Meanwhile, Barney Hoskyns’s Small Town Talk is “the most depressing music book I’ve ever read,” and jazz saxophonist Charles Lloyd plays “riffs that wouldn’t disturb a car commercial.” In a vibrant appraisal of Erik Jensen’s one-man play about music critic Lester Bangs, however, Marcus writes that “the play is about Bangs’s struggle to believe that music can not so much save his soul as allow him, through signal moments of music, to construct a soul in which he might want to live... Jensen gets it all.” Marcus’s most thoughtful review discusses the origins and best years of Fleetwood Mac and the “long shadow” cast by founder Peter Green. The pieces suffer a bit from repetition when read straight through, but even so there’s always fun to be found in Marcus’s curmudgeonly musings and razor-sharp wit. Play this one on random and enjoy the ride. (May)