1) Trampled by Turtles, “Alpenglow” / One of our great underrated bands (and, for my money, among the true inheritors of a legacy handed down from the likes of Woody Guthrie and Jack Kerouac) teams with producer Jeff Tweedy to create another standout record, shot through with the warmth of strings and the sadness of this American life.
2) Abraxas, “Monte Carlo” / The duo of Uruguayan artist Carolina Faruolo and Night Beats bandleader Danny Lee Blackwell create in soulful shadows, uniting rock, folk and all manner of Latin dance rhythms to stay in perpetual motion, shimmying and sashaying through the desert just before dawn.
3) This Lonesome Paradise, “Nightshades” / Bandcamp’s Ben Salmon perfectly describes the latest from California songwriter E. Ray Bechard: “like a 45 RPM Calexico record playing at 33 RPM in an abandoned building well after midnight.” For those who love bands like Giant Sand, or wish Bill Callahan would wander into a Cormac McCarthy story, this record is for you.
4) Lydia Millet, “How the Dead Dream” / Time with this decade-old Millet novel has been well spent. The author traces, in ways that are satirical and sentimental, how a man who learned to calculate his way through life becomes a feeling, messy creature. The writing never grows stale or meets expectations, always changing and subverting them.
5) Three poems by Ryan Eckes in Prolit / A Twitter rabbit hole led me to these three poems by Ryan Eckes, which appear in the new chapbook “Old Light” (now on my to-read list). There is a remarkable unity of timeless beauty and gut reactions in these poems, images that stop you cold and ask you to take stock:
the to-do list “from a year ago that’s still good,” “how knots in wood bleed thru paint,” snow falling off an awning—“a flicker of heart in the heavy weather,” “the wind worn out, whiff of that one year long ago.” Eckes’ poems disrupt in the most necessary, gratitude-inducing fashion.