1) Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Wild God” / Cave long has tapped into a strange and sacred vein; “Wild God” furthers the feeling of an arthouse revival meeting, with hymns and prayers and mystical cloudbursts of ecstasy.
2) The music of The Gaslight Anthem / A trip back through The Gaslight Anthem catalog awakens all the ways Brian Fallon and Co. coax soul and resilience through the fog of everyday struggle.
3) Cold Gawd, “I’ll Drown on This Earth” / This California band’s record label describes its influences as “early aughts nu-gaze and R&B melodies” and those fronts collide here to make a glorious storm and a dreamy state of being.
4) Why Bonnie, “Wish on the Bone” / The new one from songwriter Blair Howerton and Co. is purposefully restless, always pulling, pulling, pulling toward illusory resolutions between sounds, between situations and people.
5) Carl Phillips, “Scattered Snows, To the North” / The latest collection from the Pulitzer-winning poet is a quiet stunner. Phillips divines the shapes of desire (“I need you / the way astonishment, / which is really just / the disruption of routine, / requires routine”); casts about for a place and a purpose in a world always swelling and receding; sifts the weather for reality; and inches its way toward contentment. Another masterpiece from a master.