1) Sam Beam and Jesca Hoop, “Love Letter for Fire” / Somehow I missed (or misplaced proper affection for) this 2016 collaboration, but I’m on the straight and narrow now. Beam and Hoop bring out the best in each other, crafting a record that’s exquisite and soulful in the truest ways.
2) Rural Alberta Advantage, “The Rise and the Fall” / This Canadian band has exerted its pull on me for a dozen years with songs both epic and intimate, sounding something like blurred northern landscapes passing and painting the view from a car’s windows.
3) A. Savage, “Several Songs About Fire” / The Parquet Courts singer will never not remind me of Elvis Costello, had he been born Declan MacManus in late 20th-century New York, and not 1950s London. Savage takes a kinder, gentler way into these songs than he and his band might, but still applies his unvarnished vocals to melodies that chip away at artificial cool, replacing it with the real thing.
4) Butcher Brown, “Solar Music” / Cool-as-the-other-side-of-the-pillow soul music just radiates from these self-proclaimed Virginia “groove merchants” who soar and sing on their own, and enfold friends such as Charlie Hunter, Keyon Harrold and Nappy Nina into their minty-fresh mix.
5) Cass Donish, “Queer Time” for Bear Review / This Cass Donish poem is devastating and gorgeous; that is to say, the size and shape of grief. The elongation of time, and its elision, that comes whenever death shakes its shadow is captured here in warm images and knowing, backward glances. With a perfect economy of language, Donish pays the dearest departed proper tribute:
she was already
wind in fig tree
shocked light
cypress tilt hawk light
We’re living in dead time