Vika & Linda - The Wait

One word that comes to mind to describe The Wait is 'convincing'. The songs are written by a cast of well known Australian songwriters - Kasey Chambers, Bernard Fanning, Glenn Richards, Mick Thomas, Paul Kelly and more - and span genres, but in the execution they're all Vika & Linda's and it's pretty glorious, from stirring opener "Raise Your Hand" all the way onwards.

S.G. Goodman - Old Time Feeling

Not bad but there's a lot of this type of thing going around. Title track is quite a blast.

Katie Pruitt - Expectations

This is a good one - brightly anthemic songwriter stuff with a familiar combination of rock, electrified folk, grown up pop and countryish sounds, but done with a verve and sense of feeling that sets it apart. The high points - "Wishful Thinking", "My Mind's A Ship (That's Going Down)", the Haim-ish title track, "Loving Her") are much higher than the rest but it never drags, more fades a bit into the background at times at worst.

29/10: With continued listening this one has kept getting better. Two things in parallel and reinforcing each other - the more subtle melodies and pleasures of the less obvious songs emerging, and paying attention to the simple but moving lyrics, which dwell heavily on feelings of being on the outside while growing up and later coming into one's own (and coming out) and finding love (of self and with others), adding greater weight to the culmination of penultimate track "Loving Her".

Lilly Hiatt - Walking Proof

A nice clean electric guitar sound and a few good hooks but in the end nothing remarkable.

Lord Huron - Long Lost

A fair bit of Fleet Foxes, smaller amounts of Roy Orbison and Calexico (and, on "Twenty Long Years", a sizeable dash of the National), let's go with that. It's an agreeable, croony confection.

Charles Yu - Interior Chinatown

It's funny, it's political and it's got heart. 

What looks like a gimmick - being written in the form of a tv/film script - turns out not to be a gimmick at all, but instead a case of form serving content, as Interior Chinatown smoothly blurs the tv series in which Willis Wu performs and the 'real world' he lives in, which is in turn in service to the novel's wider points about the performativity and constructedness of racial identity and roles in America. And all of those formal and structural gambits somehow contrive to at least not obscure, and often illuminate, the human-ness of the stories that Yu is telling. 

It's a breeze to read, and clearly deliberately so, and unabashed in being obvious about what it's saying about the (American) world and the experience of being an Asian male within it, as well as its prescriptions, and at the same time sophisticated and rich in insight. Quite an achievement. (Little wonder about this; its universality of appeal is striking.)

Siri Hustvedt - Memories of the Future

Hustvedt's great themes are consciousness and identity, along with art, and over this latter part of her novel-writing career (The Summer Without Men, The Blazing World, this one), the female experience and patriarchy have been equally to the fore; the blurb copy on my edition declaring her the 21st century's Virginia Woolf feels only mildly hyperbolic, if at all.

In its staging as a book being written by a woman with many similarities to the 'actual' Hustvedt, looking back on her younger days in 1970s NYC and littered with multiple intertexts including the diary and novel-in-progress of that younger self, Memories of the Future actively invites reading through the lens of both what one might imagine one knows of Siri Hustvedt, the author, and one's own experiences - and, subsidiarily, the intersection between those two, ie one's own experiences of Hustvedt's previous writing. For me, that goes back at least 15 or so years (but maybe, unwittingly, longer) and takes in a couple of gigantic milestones in What I Loved and The Sorrows of an American (*) as part of an ongoing engagement. 

And in some ways Memories of the Future feels like a culmination of her novels to date - not because it's her best, but in the way that it draws together so many threads that have run through her writing/life specifically from the vantage at which she's now arrived ... making it all the more impressive that it's so compelling in its own right, and that it finds a way to end in a way that conveys a leaping forward into the future. 

The prose is as good as ever, with the sections containing the big set pieces suffused with a sense of build-up and portent (especially the assault in her apartment and the dinner party scene that culminates in her outburst) and the threads of mystery and female-ness across the multiple layers of texts meaty and satisfying; especially good is the representation of multiple types of meaningful female relationships (mother-child, sister-sister, friends-in-twenties, induction into the mysteries of collective older feminine experience via Lucy and the witches). Whatever it is that Hustvedt has been tapping into and deepening for so long, it's still there.

Wussy - Attica

What a rush! Noisy electric guitar-based rock with multiple vocalists - Lisa Walker (she) and Chuck Cleaver (he), alternating between and within songs - and a heavily strummed countryish streak that's to the fore on songs like "Halloween" and "Gene, I Dream" and sits comfortably alongside the rockier surgers like "Rainbows & Butterflies" and "To The Lightning" which call to mind bands like ... Trail of Dead. The odd airier songs work well too, landing with emphasis along with their lilt - I'm thinking of "North Sea Girls" and closer "Beautiful" ("I'm not the monster that I once was..."). And then of course there's "Teenage Wasteland" at the top. I'd never heard of Wussy before Julian's playlist a few weeks back; they're very impressive.

Sarah Jarosz - World On The Ground

Warmly mingled roots; a bit of folk, a bit of country, a bit of bluegrass, a tiny jazz sway. I like it.

Lucy Dacus - Home Video

Seems like Lucy Dacus might be in it for the long haul; this is a low-key excellent singer-songwriter record that feels in conversation with the listener. I like Historian more but Home Video is different and, if anything, more easeful-feeling while equally grounded in observational detail and personal story-telling.

Neil Gaiman - American Gods

Great high concept and the commitment to story-telling pulls it through. Baggy and manifestly imperfect but engaging even in its digressions and cul de sacs.

Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda - Monstress - Vol 4: The Chosen & Vol 5: Warchild

It's the usual problem, reading serial graphic novels at long intervals and in short bursts, and Monstress is at least as complex and difficult to keep track of as any. Good though.

Natalie Imbruglia - Firebird

I don't hold it against her that, on this album, Imbruglia sometimes sounds like Taylor Swift - never more than on opening track "Build It Better" - because almost who doesn't these days? But Firebird reaches no great heights.

Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers - Ramble in Music City

Newly released 1990 concert; music city = Nashville. Harris is so pristine both live and on record that there's often little difference except in the textures and nuances. Much good stuff.