1) Bully, “Lucky for You” / Alicia Bognanno plugs in her guitar and billows a rock and roll flame on the latest Bully record. Urgent and sensitive, impassioned and soaked through with nuance, “Lucky for You” should revive the vision for what rock can be anywhere and everywhere the light has grown dim.
2) Protomartyr, “Formal Growth in the Desert” / “Welcome to the haunted earth / The living afterlife / Where we chose to forget / The years of the hungry knife,” Protomartyr’s Joe Casey’s sings on the opening lines of his band’s latest. And what do we have here, but a perfect distilling of what Protomartyr sounds and feels like: a deep, dark welcome into the more of life that never makes a move without acknowledging the lingering pain of our living.
This is, as I’ve said and will say again, one of the most vital bands working and they only grow by degrees here, in this desert they’ve made into a home.
3) McKinley Dixon, “Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?” / Ever a force of artistic generosity, I knew I’d love the new McKinley Dixon before I heard it. When the album kicked off with Hanif Abdurraqib (maybe our best modern writer) reading Toni Morrison, it was clear an opus was unfolding. And “Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?” lives up to all those promises; easily the hip-hop album of the year to date, this set twines cousin musical forms to create its own world in which Dixon is the benevolent poet-prophet, guiding listeners into better colors, better images, better ideas than we’d find alone.
4) “Shift” by Shannon Deep for Whale Road Review / A gorgeous craving marks this Shannon Deep poem, which begins in conversation with a city, then winds into a moment of revelation, a locating of desire and momentum within the self.
there rises in me an instinct
to pour out my undernourished gratitude
as I pass the institutions,
as I pass the prescription green spaces,
as I pass the vaulted buildings that stand
as monuments
to the flimsy premisethat any human work could ever fill them.
This is the time I most feel the undertow
of my magnetic soul …
5) Rob Harvilla, “All Hail Beck, King of the Losers” for “60 Songs that Explain the ‘90s” / Harvilla’s podcast is irresistible to someone like me, whose very musical foundations were poured in the ‘90s. I was especially delighted by his exploration of “Loser” and, more broadly, Beck’s career; the episode is as funny and strange, whipsmart and soulful as the artist it covers.