1) The Mountain Goats, “Jenny From Thebes” / John Darnielle and Co. shake hands again with a character from their 20-year-old record “All Hail West Texas.” Unsurprisingly, given Darnielle’s empathetic literary style, we encounter Jenny in embodied lyrics and arrangements that sparkle, crackle, soar and erupt.
2) Angie McMahon, “Light, Dark, Light Again” / The words closing this record—the title phrase woven throughout the song “Making it Through”—sound like a chant, a prayer, the expression of a soul who wants to see the world as it is and could be. Then again, the entire set by Australian songwriter Angie McMahon feels like a cracking open of the soul to see light and color, to hear music and find yourself somewhere in the harmony.
3) Terrace Martin and Alex Isley, “I Left My Heart in Ladea” / Cool might be an overused word, but it floods my mind every time I hear Terrace Martin’s music. The songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist just spills silk and soul with every composition. Here, teaming with singer-songwriter Alex Isley, the result is a different shade of cool, one both immediate and abundant.
4) Franz Kafka, “Amerika” / Look, I blew so much time, so many opportunities to absorb great literature in my teens and twenties; I am trying to teach myself what I almost lost.
Only in the last year, have I come around to the greatness of Kafka and I’m particularly pulled in by this one. The novelist traces absurdities encountered by a European teen who immigrates to America after a social scandal. Unlikeable characters and ludicrous situations somehow underline very real feelings of alienation and distance, driving home something oft-unsaid about the immigrant experience.
5) Ben Lerner, “The Lights” / Lerner, whose novel “The Topeka School” captivated me, unites my attention again in this set of poems. His opening “Index of Themes” sealed my affection from the jump:
Poems about night
and related poems. Paintings
about night,
sleep, death, and
the stars.
These, after all, feel like my themes.
Many of these poems, resembling prose dispatches, rely on the cumulative effect of their motion and concern. But Lerner also knows how to write a line that unravels your whole day, the likes of “The nearly audible click of snow / on snow … ”