1) Portugal. The Man, “Chris Black Changed My Life” / The second half of the band’s latest is impeccable, and the whole record forms a soundtrack for summer—or any season—carried by unforced cool and charming weirdness.
2) M. Ward, “Supernatural Thing” / Matt Ward’s latest represents everything I love about his music—noir-ish sonics, folksinger ethos, fine yet enveloping details—while somehow still surprising me 25 years into his career. This is a record to sit with, steep in and drift alongside.
3) Home is Where, “The Whaler” / Florida’s Home is Where creates a pitch-perfect emo record for the Year of Our Lord 2023, while reaching into the past to process trauma and nostalgia—and the places they feel one and the same—through view-askew lyrics, visceral vocals and deceptively nuanced songcraft.
4) Jake Skeets, “The Butchering” for Emergence / Skeets’ 2019 poetry collection “Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers” still vibrates for me four years after reading. The same elements which made that book special—Skeets’ lyrical yet sober touch, a remarkable braiding of the personal and communal—shape this essay about food security and sovereignty and community rites.
Their house had no electricity, so the light grew dimmer as we sat around the fire and ate the fruits of their labor, their offering. Soon, it was night, and we were still sitting outside in the pitch darkness with only a partial moon for light. No sound for miles. Just us and the cosmos. Each star a story. Each rock formation, another. Each memory folding into a story. And each ingredient of the food we enjoyed folding into even more stories, each food carrying a story of its own.
5) Elissa Field, “A North American Field Guide to How It Falls Apart” for Monkeybicycle / Gorgeous tension and a familiar yet somehow ever-surprising flush mark this brief, fervent piece from Elissa Field: a record of mating rituals, sensual scientific behavior and, as the title implies, gradual dissolution.
“You will sketch the plumage, carefully, beside your notes. What she wore. What he noticed. What they overlooked. What they loved anyway,” Field writes in this painfully truthful account of the human animal.