1) Dry Cleaning, “Secret Love” / For whatever reason, I’ve dodged this British band till now. Actually, I know the reason—Dry Cleaning’s album covers have made my eyes burn. But with little to listen to in the way of new music in the first month of the year, I delved into “Secret Love” and found a set of razor-sharp, impossibly smart post-punk songs that keep moving the needle with each listen.
2) SAULT, “Chapter 1” / The secretive British collective continues to churn out some of the best R&B of the 21st century on a record that honors soul icons while always shimmying forward.
3) Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek, “a-sides and b-sides” / Somehow I slept on the 2014 album from Big Thief’s principal players. Lenker and Meek’s creative connection comes through with a tender lyricism and subtle musical turns.
4) Mark Doty, “What is the Grass?” / Subtitled “Walt Whitman in My Life,” the accomplished poet’s 2020 book is a radiant treatment of Whitman’s ecstatic writing as well as a thoughtful venture into memoir, examining Doty’s creative, romantic and sexual life through ties back to the literary lion.
5) Emma Bolden, “When I Say My Heart Is Full, I Mean It's Full of Ghosts” for Baltimore Review / Bolden’s fresh poem beautifully handles the body, inside and out, to consider the odd and tragic miracle of living from within a cardiologist’s care:
Outside, the elms branch into branches that bud with leaves; the trees collect their secrets in rings inside, truths they’ll tell only after the axe kills them. I think sometimes this is also true of the soul and the body and then I’m miserable, imagining that at the moment of death I’ll reveal every humiliation ringing its truth through my trunk.