1) Guided by Voices, “Styles We Paid For” / The latest from Bob Pollard and Co.—unless they released something while I was typing this, which is absolutely possible—only adds to the GBV canon of sugary, grunge-y, curmudgeonly power pop. Aka perfection.
2) Jyoti, “Mama, You Can Bet!” / If you get your cosmic kicks from Alice Coltrane, your righteous indignation from Ms. Lauryn Hill and your goddam—Mississippi or otherwise—from Nina Simone, you’ll revel in this record. Creating under the Jyoti name, Georgia Anne Muldrow lays out a soulful spread, stretching to every corner of a long, wide sonic table and threatening to spill over the edges.
3) Kacy and Clayton with Marlon Williams, “Plastic Bouquet” / The Canadian duo teams up with the perpetually underrated Williams, a singer-songwriter from New Zealand, to create a lovely late-year treat. 1960s and ‘70s folk rock—tasting and touching every type, including British and Laurel Canyon iterations—is mingled with psychedelia and country, then stirred and not shaken to make something beautiful.
4) Natalie Diaz, “Postcolonial Love Poem” / Rapture and reality twine in this collection from the Arizona-based poet. In one moment, Diaz is writing odes to the glory of basketball played on a reservation; in the next, she bemoans the efficiency of a white American system that pushed Native people to small plots of their own land. It feels cliche to survey the emotional range of Diaz’s work (“You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll rage against machines!”), but her ability to hold delight and tragedy together—never swinging back and forth on a pendulum—is truly remarkable.
5) Jane Zwart, “Every Comb in the House” for Barely South Review / Man, I love this one from Jane Zwart. Layers of family and memory, what we do and don’t know of a person we love, come together as she considers a photo of her father-in-law. Read this in full, but I especially love these lines:
The man whose son I wed
and the kid in the candid:
I was able only to tell them apart.
But this morning
I saw the back of Abel’s head
and (he just risen from sleep)
my husband’s father’s hair
was the hair of a child
roused from humid dreams.