1) The Districts, “Great American Painting” / I’ve been rooting for The Districts for nearly a decade now, and it’s been a delight to witness the band come into its own, slowly and steadily, over that span. The Pennsylvania trio’s latest possesses a timeless college rock feel—“Great American Painting” could have been a hit in 1982, 1992 or 2002. But it’s here now, and we get to reap the rewards of that timeline.
2) Drug Church, “Hygiene” / The pride of Albany, New York (!?) delivers a seriously visceral listening experience on its fourth LP. On the surface, “Hygiene” is all buzz and bash; but these songs cooperate to craft an agitated sensibility that is more substance than style, an inside-out representation of our moment and mood. Fair or not, the ‘90s are often invoked in conversations around the band, and anyone who discovered hard-edged rock through that decade’s MTV Buzz Bin clips will be thoroughly satisfied.
3) The Boo Radleys, “Keep On With Falling” / It’s been 24 years since this British band—perhaps best known to casual fans for their cover of “There She Goes,” which shared the So I Married An Axe Murderer soundtrack with The LA’s original—released a new record. While it’s not quite accurate to deem the album worth that wait, it’s a wonderful, jangly gem that evokes the band’s previous highs while serving as a worthy addition to its canon. These songs glide and crackle in a way only Boo Radleys songs can.
4) Phil Christman, “Reading the Comments” for Plough / Perhaps, in this still-distanced and ever-distant time, we take for granted music’s inherent power of assembly, its capacity for gathering people around a sing-song melody or the feeling of bass rattling a breastbone. One of our day’s finest essayists, Phil Christman finds another place people are gathering—in the comments on YouTube videos of bands like Joy Division and Bananarama. Here, he comes across so many shades of humanity:
To read the comments on anything on the internet – an article, a video, a photo of an unimpeachably cute dog – is usually a bullet train to despair. But that evening, I discovered that people who comment on Joy Division videos are delightful, responding to the impersonal intimacy of the music with an equally disarming, if less artful, vulnerability.
5) Abbie Barker, “No One Falls In Love In Dorm Rooms” for Had / I love pieces that exhibit a particular sort of knowing, a knowing that is both familiar to the reader yet helps us see ourselves in ways we never could without it. This piece on college love, and the migration between states of adulthood, is shot through with that knowing. It begins:
Because every dorm room is a cramped box furnished with heavy oak bunks, fluorescent tube lighting, and a sliding window that sticks. You flew to the opposite coast to find yourself, knowing no two oceans are the same. You unpack photos of foliage and snow drifts and a boy who only calls when he’s sad.