1) Toad the Wet Sprocket, “Starting Now” / Some of my favorite art happens when something changes within a context that largely stays the same. Allow me an example: On “Starting Now,” the first Toad the Wet Sprocket album in eight years (and second since 1997), Glen Phillips and Co. largely offer the same sort of music. Phillips’ perceptive, Everyman vocals cut through a jangly texture of electric and acoustic guitars. Not much change there (though a collaboration with Michael McDonald on “The Best of Me” cuts against my very premise).
But the band thoughtfully keeps up with its own times. The best song on the record, “Transient Whales,” is a document of the little twists and turns that make up middle age. Phillips sings:
I miss calling some place home
I miss thinking I could know
Where I would spend my final days
Or plant a seed and watch it grow
I don't like waking up alone
Don't like cooking meals for one
I miss the chaos and the noise
The family work that's never done
Now in dreams I swim with the transient whales
All we have is each other and the songs we share
Those sentiments allow us to change alongside the band, and make the album feel as lived in as anything Toad has ever committed to record.
2) The music of Larkin Poe / I recently interviewed sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell, aka Larkin Poe, for a festival feature (look for it very soon). In researching the band, I went deep down a rabbit hole of YouTube cover songs they made throughout this pandemic season. The duo’s original work sizzles, but these covers apply their remarkable talents to terrific songs by Chris Isaak, Peter Gabriel, Seal, Sam Cooke and more. Look them up on YouTube and you might spend an entire afternoon, the same way I did.
3) Syna So Pro, “Chill/Hype” / Syrhea Conaway is one of modern music’s well-kept secrets. The St. Louis-based artist creates remarkably intricate (yet accessible) soundscapes with all the sadness and soul of Moby’s best work but follows diverging paths and interests into artful funk, modern dancefloor aesthetics and even neo-classical music. Conaway’s latest, described as “a warm hour of remixes and reimaginings,” possesses a real richness and approximates a musical treasure hunt.
4) Motorists, “Surrounded” / Man, I dig the new one from this Toronto band—this is barbed, new New Wave guitar rock at its very finest.
5) Rachel Cusk, “Outline” / I’m finally digging into a recent triptych of novels by the British author starting at the beginning (of course) with this 2014 offering. Reading Cusk, at least so far, is a hyper-realistic experience in which characters reveal their foibles and virtues by degrees. The author’s dialogue-heavy style lulls you into a certain sensibility with realistic speech patterns, then upends your world every two or three pages with a revelation about human nature worth preserving in a modern book of Proverbs. This rhythm—normalcy, epiphany, normalcy, normalcy, epiphany—is as real as life itself.