1) Algiers, “Shook” / The Atlanta band agitates the rock and roll waters in the very best ways. Forever proving that the political is personal and the cathartic is consoling, Algiers unsettles for the sake of rebuilding. The band’s latest opens with an all-time great: “Everybody Shatter” features danceable beats, disembodied voices, Franklin James Fisher’s iconic soul singing and a wonderful confluence of the high and low end, reaching a vitally cinematic effect. As the record progresses, the band folds comrades and collaborators into its work: Zack de la Rocha, Billy Woods, Future Islands’ Samuel Herring, Lee Bains, Patrick Shiroishi and others who rub against and off Algiers in pitch-perfect ways.
2) Christian McBride’s New Jawn, “Prime” / Bassist McBride is perhaps my favorite contemporary bandleader and his latest, keeping company with trumpeter Josh Evans, multi-instrumentalist Marcus Strickland and drummer Nasheet Waits, only adds to the feeling. Adventure-seeking yet rooted in soul; showcasing each member’s talent in spaces both quiet and virtuosic—and yet a sum-is-greater-than-its-parts record. “Prime” lives up to its name.
3) The Necks, “Travel” / The cohesion and collective motion of this Australian jazz trio—who’ve been at this more than 35 years—is something for the ears to behold on their latest. The Necks just sweep you up into their world and you love the feeling of being carried along.
4) Michael Robbins, “Apocalypse Now-ish” for Harper’s / Poet and essayist Michael Robbins handles a remarkably thorough history of apocalyptic thinking, deftly and angrily navigating the nuanced (and sometimes nuance-less) spaces between end-of-the-world pictures. Robbins spoke to me through his treatment of apocalypse as a gradual cursedness, rather than the Big Bang my evangelical forebears often described. He writes, and we must pay attention:
We live in a dark house full of war. Not that I anticipate the Christian eschaton—who needs divine revelation when you can google “more plastic than fish by 2050”? Nor have I been “black-pilled.” I didn’t ask to get “Eve of Destruction” stuck in my head. I desperately want us to get our shit together. We could build a free society that doesn’t view the planet as a profit engine. I just really doubt that we will. … Late-capitalist society is a coyote suspended above an abyss, believing he still stands on solid ground. We are in the interval before he notices he’s supported by thin air and plummets to the canyon floor.
5) Kwame Opoku-Duku, “Divine Hours” for The Yale Review / This absolutely exquisite poem awakes to thunder but otherwise stays hushed, full of quiet wonder that is saved and shared with the speaker’s beloved. Their romance is rich, as evidenced by the nature of the speaker’s address, and the details they hold, then set free, knowing they are better when absorbed by the power of two.
I met a prophet on the corner of 125th and Lenox. Beloved,
when he spoke to me, there were chills all over my body.
I wanted you to know that it was never about belief for me—
only, always about the feeling—the knowing—of what is holy.