1) Ezra Furman, “Goodbye Small Head” / Furman’s latest is the sort of mid-career revelation we rarely get. The accomplished songwriter somehow goes bigger and more personal on a set that beautifully occupies the territory between head and heart.
2) Alien Boy, “You Wanna Fade?” / Led by Sonia Weber, this Portland (PNW) band weds huge washes of guitar and alluring hooks, pulling listeners into the middle of their indie rock.
3) Mourning [A] BLKstar, “Flowers for the Living” / The ever-vital Cleveland collective offers yet another record with wondrous touches of old-school soul and an up-to-the-minute consciousness.
4) M(h)aol, “Something Soft” / The Irish band creates something that’s visceral both in its intensity and subsequent subtlety; this is artful punk rock that enjoys a range of frequencies, musical and otherwise.
5) Caylin Capra-Thomas, “On (the) Sublime” for Longreads / My friend, the terrific poet Caylin Capra-Thomas digs around the sublime—both the So Cal band and the quality transcending space and time—in this remarkable essay.
The piece would be worth reading for Capra-Thomas’ luminous music writing alone, but the work also touches on family history, a “vanishing” California, crying at concerts, ADHD and addiction and … and … while joining each thread in a seamless fashion.
What you touch is the limit. You never touch what’s beyond. But the limit establishes the existence of the beyond and drives our hunger to know it.
Band lore has it that Sublime got the name from the dictionary and nobody knew what it meant. That feels right. You’d have to be either completely oblivious or extremely self-aware to get away with that name. You may as well call your band “Transcendently Good” except your band is a trio of fuckups from Long Beach who make, as one meme puts it, music for people who have thrown up in the ocean.