1) Justin Townes Earle, “All In” / How can a record make you feel so buoyant and so sad all at once? When it’s a posthumous J.T. Earle release, spanning rarities, demos, live cuts, covers and more. We lost a giant when Earle died in 2020; still he gives us the gift of consolation, even in this.
2) The music of Holy Wave / To immerse yourself in the music of this Austin, Texas, band is to baptize yourself with delight. So many small moments, and the greater curve of Holy Wave’s music, register; this music is sometimes psychedelic, sometimes sun-kissed, always soulful.
3) Chuck Johnson, “Sun Glories” / The Oakland-based musician recreates the cosmos in miniature here, entrancing listeners with pedal steel, guitar, synthesizer and more; Johnson’s compositions both encompass with their grandeur and focus in on details that otherwise might go unattended.
4) Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “Long Island Compromise” / Somehow Brodesser-Akner manages to supersede the particular genius of her breakthrough “Fleishman Is In Trouble” with this sharp, satiric, sad-eyed portrait of a wealthy Jewish family on Long Island. The novelist intermingles some of the wittiest prose and most barbed punchlines of recent literary memory with rhapsodic passages about the felt influence of drugs, about forgiveness, about entry into the afterlife. This book is a manifold marvel.
5) Stephen Graham Jones, “I Was a Teenage Slasher” / I’m not much for horror or crime fiction, but I’m always willing to suspend expectation or assumption, and enter into the worlds created by Stephen Graham Jones. His latest, a first-person plunge into the bloody fate of a small Texas town, is a feat of fusion: combining action and lyricism in a seamless manner. “I Was a Teenage Slasher” is voice-y in all the best ways, and binds you to these characters, even as you fear for them and for your own sake.