1) Big Red Machine, “How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?” / As autumn tunes its first notes, I just want to burrow into the latest from Big Red Machine. Most supergroups/side projects allow their members to showcase their weirdest sides. This band, from Bon Iver leader Justin Vernon and The National’s Aaron Dessner, actually displays their most intimate, accessible traits. This gorgeous, thoughtful album will gain attention for its guest stars—Taylor Swift, Fleet Foxes, Anais Mitchell—but the winsome vision and the open-hearted feel is all Vernon and Dessner.
2) Turnstile, “Glow On” / I’ll admit my ignorance of this Baltimore band till now; I don’t partake of much within or adjacent to hardcore. But chasing the praise that kept coming across my social-media feed, I spent time with “Glow On” and was impressed with the band’s rare ability to synthesize sound and style. The markers of heavier music remain, but the band deftly mingles synth-pop, world and soul elements to keep listeners curious.
3) Marisa Anderson and William Tyler, “Lost Futures” / Anderson and Tyler are two of our truest guitar heroes. The pair don’t indulge in histrionics, but as composers and players craft quietly dynamic portraits of America. Teaming here, they offer one of the most beautiful, painterly records of the year—a sensitive collaboration that emphasizes each of our senses in turn, helping us to fully take in our surroundings.
4) Charlotte McConaghy, “Once There Were Wolves” / Just two novels into her career, McConaghy might already be one of her generation’s best. Her latest, a tale of re-introducing wolves to the Scottish highlands and the complications which ensue, is a masterwork of character development and pacing. Suspenseful but, more important, soulful, McConaghy’s work calls us to examine the wild within and without us—and how we both rely on and may be hindered by our animal instincts.
5) Kelli Russell Agodon, “How to Live to Among the Buzzing” at The Missouri Review / This one, from the ever-luminous Agodon, keeps slipping between the material and physical world, drawing us into the full use of our senses while suggesting the influence of something beyond them. The language is sumptuous; the feel of the poem, unsettling but exhilarating.
… And when I find
the honey spilled in the pantry closet, I wonder
how many bees died this year and when you joke
you want to name your punk band Colony Collapse,
I think how we use humor to rub out being terrified,
like when a neighbor’s pesticides made every fat leaf
fall from our fig tree, we said, Thank God!
We’ve outgrown those shadows! …