1) The music of Modest Mouse / A listening assignment led me back to the first two Modest Mouse records—1996’s “This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About” and “The Lonesome Crowded West” from the following year. While it (in a fashion I’m sure the oft-misanthropic band would appreciate) took me some time to warm up to Modest Mouse, I really see the genius in these early records. A sort of shambolic virtuosity that travels many moods in one sitting. RIP Jeremiah Green.
2) Fireworks, “Higher Lonely Power” / On its fourth full-length, this Detroit band weaves emo, punk, hardcore and alt-rock influences together to create a searching epic that digs around American pop religion and beautifully blurs the lines between human love and divine images of ecstasy, God’s absence and that of a lover’s.
“Shapes shift in the night / I love my sad life / I want to start a religion,” the band sings. “I did what I was told / American wife and American home / I want to start a religion / I’m alone without you / but I was alone with you too / I want to start a religion with you.”
3) Tumi Mogorosi, “Group Theory: Black Music” / The South African drummer and composer guides a truly cinematic jazz record, one which unites an almost-operatic choir with gorgeous hard-bop and modern influences to evoke the spirit of history’s witness past and present.
4) Mieko Kawakami, “Heaven” / The Japanese novelist entranced me with her exquisite handling of light and dark, loneliness and blurry connection in “All the Lovers in the Night.” In my second go-round with her work, I responded to a melding of philosophical musings and painfully authentic scenes in this tale of two schoolchildren who bond over the bullying they endure. Kawkami’s prose always sings; here, it often resembles a discordant, ultimately satisfying 20th-century composition.
5) Maya Popa, “Wound is the Origin of Wonder” / What a gift Maya Popa has given us with her latest collection, an astonishing poetic record of the way we hurt, heal, move together and drift apart—all under the watchful eye of the cosmos, of art, of someone or something like God.
So many lines stick to my soul, perhaps none more so than these passages from “Prayer”:
“What runs through me could hardly be called piety. It's not patience either, at least not by that name. The pasture's dissolution into darkness, the cow gnawing obediently without notion of infinity and stars—God, you know all about them. Those evenings I was sure I'd die, you were teaching me to live; I see that now.”
Then, later, these words:
“I'll tell you something I've never told a God: I've been ready for a fight, been ready for suffering.”