1) The music of Kurt Vile / Traveling back through a couple Vile records this week reminded me just how loose and natural and lovely and lived-in his work is. Sometimes it’s a good thing to just hang out in the middle of a rock song and Vile offers ample chances.
2) Sierra Ferrell, “Trail of Flowers” / From its opening track, Sierra Ferrell’s new record remakes a faulty American dream in the artist’s image. Like her, these songs resemble forces of nature—whether in storminess or stillness. Something refreshing and artful waits around every turn, yielding so many rewards.
3) Hovvdy, self-titled / The new one from Charlie Martin and Will Taylor proves stirring as it projects warm, gliding pop melodies over a rock and roll sense of drama and momentum. Hovvdy, the band, and its namesake album abide so many moments of aligned glory.
4) The books of Lydia Millet / My god, Lydia Millet knows how to end a book. Her beginnings and middle passages are wondrous too, of course.
But recently coming to the ends of both “We Loved It All”—her new self-portrait of the artist living in concentric circles of community and climate change—and the novel “Ghost Lights” brought me in touch with spiritually virtuosic codas, these reveries sad and beautiful as they unite the reader with the figures on the page and all of them together within the interconnectedness of every past and present living thing.
5) Shome Dasgupta, “Plastic Rivers” for Centaur / I responded both to the physicality and soulfulness of Dasgupta’s ode to a mixtape generation. Read (and hear Dasgupta read) to fall in love with the romance of this exercise, but also the way it feels like such a natural phenomenon in the author’s telling.
… and we entered the radio like ghosts to their forgotten homes and twirled around the reels with our mouths opened, becoming magnetic—dizzied and mesmerized—into the echoes we lost ourselves until the lullabies were mute and all that was left were the memories of Sunday nights—that one song—and captured it like we were tracking history through electricity and wires.