1) Bjork, “Fossora” / The Icelandic pop royal returns with an album that is as knotty, lush and immersive as ever. Several tracks sound like secular hymns, with clarifying vocals that swirl and resound as if reaching for cathedral rafters.
2) Delays, “Faded Seaside Glamour” / A playlist rabbit hole brought me to the 2004 debut from this British band—for the very first time!—and God, am I glad. Belonging to the Brit-rock family, yet possessing a more floating and cinematic glory than most of its forebears, Delays creates an enveloping experience on these 12 songs. Thanks goodness I found them.
3) Daniel Villarreal, “Panama ‘77” / Maybe my jazz record of the year comes via this Chicago drummer and DJ, who coaxes glorious rhythms and vivid colors from the music of his Panamanian heritage. Villarreal works magic, never wasting an instinct, always chasing the most vibrant and satisfying sonic moment.
4) Ruth Awad, “Two Poems” for Asian American Writers’ Workshop / These poems are filled with such urgency and gloriously askew wonder, “aware at once of the difficulty of having a body that rides through space on a warm rock” and the selfsame beauty. Dread and dying surround these lines, but Awad concerns herself (and us) with the dots and dashes, the signs of real, messy life, we create between birth and fading away.
5) Dina Relles, “On Going” for Split Lip / “Where the roads meet at the top of the hill and you can see farmland stretch as far as the city lights, I become intimate with everything I’ll never know” this Dina Relles poem begins and, thus, wins my heart.
Intimately acquainted with the fleeting moments of satisfaction and desire that make up a life, “On Going” entrances even as it introduces moments of great bittersweetness: “like in that retro motel room years later when I threaded my fingers through the black strands above your temples and wanted you to kiss me and you swore you touched your lips to my neck—at least this—but I can’t recall it, and so here I am left longing even for the memory of the thing.”