1) The music of Nicole Atkins / Immersing myself again in Atkins’ catalog for a work project, I was reminded how gorgeous and mysterious and sensual these songs are; music from the margins of a Raymond Chandler or Patricia Highsmith novel, the soundtrack to some as-yet-unwritten but already ill-fated on-screen romance. Atkins sings the hell out of every song she writes, and forever finds poetic means to express the endless allure of love.
2) Florry, “The Holey Bible” / Any record which starts with the harmony-soaked lyric “Pull the car over, I gotta puke, you're no good at driving high” has my attention. And Florry keeps—and rewards—that attention over 11 tracks, the Pittsburgh band stamping listeners with their own brand of dirtbag country rock.
Highlights include “Hot Weather,” a sort of apocalyptic summer answer to Rod Stewart’s “Hot Legs,” and the Old 97s-crashing-the-truck feel of “Cowgirl in a Ditch.” “The Holey Bible” is a delight from nauseated start to finish.
3) Josaleigh Pollett, “In the Garden, By the Weeds” / My God, this record. Pollett dodges anything like expectation while managing to deliver the exact emotional language listeners need. When people (people like me, no doubt) throw around phrases like “21st-century pop music” or “future sounds,” this is what they mean. The future is here, found in Pollett’s artistic (and literal) voice, depth and experimentation serving each other in a gorgeous feedback loop.
4) The music of Drayton Farley / I don’t just toss around Jason Isbell comparisons but Farley, his fellow Alabama songwriter, pursues and often catches up to a similar union of plain speech and uncommon insight, earthy soul and rock adornment.
5) Sandra Marchetti, “Aisle 228” / I am predisposed to wax rhapsodic about baseball and all its everlasting charms, and thus predisposed to lose myself in the lyric reflections of poet Sandra Marchetti.
These poems something to love in a losing team (“… yet players lope over this green hill / and our minds agree to rise / and clap for them”); chase the heavenly transmission of a crackling baseball broadcast coming in from somewhere, anywhere; rightly make a cathedral of the ballpark; and even find the romance in blowing the game (“From the mound you shook off Soto’s sign, / the announcer said, and instead / of finishing them, the walks fell / like stars from your hand”).