1) The Hold Steady, “The Price of Progress” / The world is always a better place for having new Hold Steady songs in it. On the band’s best effort in at least 10 years, they chase frontman Craig Finn’s well-crafted characters around with distorted guitar, dynamic drumming and piano that manages to be full of narrative detail. All this is an expression of affection; few writers, in any discipline, love their characters more than Finn, even when he’s glancing at them askew.
2) Larry June and The Alchemist, “The Great Escape” / The collaboration between Bay Area rapper June and fellow Californian The Alchemist (aka producer Alan Maman) yields a set that fuses glow and grit, an unfussy old-school sensibility with an in-the-moment sense of innovation. Easily one of the best hip-hop records of the young year.
3) A Certain Ratio, “1982” / This British outfit has more than 35 years of history and, on its latest, unites past, present and future tenses—excavating roots of New Wave and funk, delivering deliciously relevant melodies and shimmying toward whatever comes next.
4) Jeff Sharlet, “The Undertow” / Subtitled “Scenes From a Slow Civil War,” the veteran journalist’s latest book is a travelogue of the Trump era—not so much an effort to understand his acolytes, but to exhibit the seemingly intractable depths of what we’re up against. Unlike similar efforts, Sharlet aids the reader by unveiling a longer history, beginning his book with an essay on the politics faced and embraced by Harry Belafonte. And this book is remarkably beautiful, elegiac for what we’re losing and penned with a deep affection for the contours of America’s landscape and common life.
The title essay, which comprises the book’s second half, explores the meaning- and myth-making around the death of Ashli Babbitt; it’s a stark, often soulful examination of how disconnected from reality Americans can be—yet shows how all of us, no matter what we believe, are connected to each other in this defining period.
5) Patricia Smith, “Unshuttered” / A masterwork of poetry, and an extended conversation with the generations, Smith’s newest book writes in response to collected photographs of African-Americans from the 19th century. Smith’s writing to and for these images is tender and imaginative, drawing on deep, dynamic wells of personhood.
Smith pens the joy and fatigue of yearning (“This in-and-out love / with the gap in horizons woo us, but only when / we’re very weary”); creates the story of a fated infant (“I was named / Rose, after the thorn”); captures the strange, ambiguous nature of desire (“Let your imagination reckon on my name”); and voices resilience just beyond the grip of despair (“White / cannot be the color of what / saves us”).
These poems would be staggering alone. Written before and beside the faces in these images, they are a glorious reckoning and an act of love for those who came before.