Overrated/Underrated: Remarkable new music from John Coltrane, and Amazon’s smart bet on Simon Stalenhag

UNDERRATED

Simon Stålenhag: Get to know the name of this Swedish painter, whose surreal and often haunting images of a future, semi-rural dystopia populated by strange, possibly alien invaders and collapsing technology were just picked up to become an Amazon series called “Tales From the Loop.” All expected jokes about the Peak TV arms race of content reaching the art world aside, Stålenhag’s images are evocative enough to feel like stills from an imagined movie in their own right, and with Nathaniel Halpern from FX’s “Legion” on board to help bring it to the screen there’s a good chance they will be handled with care.

John Coltrane’s “Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album”: When is a never-before-released collection of music from a master of American music “underrated”? When it exists in the chronically under-heard jazz canon, which expanded by one with this set recorded in 1963 and released last month. While the decades-long rummaging through archives to unearth middling posthumous releases is a tradition that spans genres, this album, despite boasting less-than-evocatively named compositions like “Untitled Original 11383” and a purring “Nature Boy,” is a welcome chance to hear new expressions from an unmistakable voice near the height of its powers.

OVERRATED

Greta Van Fleet: Rock bands aren’t talked about very often along the ever-blossoming, shape-shifting pop panorama, but one that has been gaining a lot of notice is this Michigan four-piece, which sounds so terrifyingly informed by Led Zeppelin it’s a wonder that band (and the artists they nicked) won’t be collecting royalties once their new album is released. There’s nothing wrong with recalling past idols — most recorded music wouldn’t be right if it were — but it’s distressing that a semi-annual march of groups that can be bannered as a “return to rock” keeps drawing from the same well. Is the barbed disaffection of the ’90s harder to reproduce than ’70s blues swagger?

Season 2 of “Westworld”: An ambitious series with enough timeline jumps that it practically dares you to try and understand it, this HBO series was among the most lauded at the recent Emmy nominations alongside its fellow drama category favorites “Game of Thrones” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.” While “Thrones” feels as if it last aired another lifetime ago in 2017 and the aggressively grim “Handmaid’s” feels too uncomfortably close to the present day, anyone looking to place odds on the winners among the big three would do well to look past the showy puzzles of this series, which seems determined to keep audiences working as much as guessing.

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chris.barton@latimes.com

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