Kacey Musgraves - star-crossed

At this point, Musgraves has found a real sweet spot of contemporary, pop-swirled cosmic-ish country-ish. Her previous one, 2018's Golden Hour, turned out to be a massive one for me - probably the last album to've entered my personal pantheon - and while star-crossed isn't at that level, its best moments, heavily front loaded, especially "good wife" and "justified", are striking.

Big Red Machine - How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last?

Given who's involved - Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon, and a fair smattering of their talented friends including Sharon Van Etten, Fleet Foxes, Taylor Swift and more - you'd think this would be good, but instead it's boring, ultra mainstream-indie easy listening where they neglected to bring any good songs.

"To Howard, From Julian 2021" (playlist)

These days they are most definitely playlists and no longer mix cds - not even virtual ones.

This one's particularly good. First to land was "Teenage Wasteland" by Wussy, from 2014 but gesturing at the 90s with its mix of fuzz and melody, and urgency and resignation, plus a title and anthemic compactness that puts it in a lineage of teenage experience-referencing classics eg "Teenage Kicks", "Teen Age Riot" (the latter compact even at 7 minutes).

Other favourites: "Some Small Hope" by Virginia Astley, "Small Talk" by Scritti Politti, "London" by Benjamin Clementine (which at first I thought was too fey but changed my mind about after more listens).

Was it deliberate that the lyrics of the last three songs all prominently feature foreign cities? London, Vegas ("Meet Me In My Dream" by Marc Almond), Winnipeg ("One Great City" by the Weakerthans). Sign of the times, maybe.

Michelle Branch - The Spirit Room

20th anniversary of this debut album. I'd never heard more than "Everywhere" and the acoustic version of "Sweet Misery" that DP put on a mix cd once so it's nice to encounter such a jam-packed record of high quality pop-rock soarers even if such a long time after the fact.

Ballboy - A Guide for the Daylight Hours

Long known to me via the version of their song "I Lost You, But I Found Country Music" recorded by lead singer Gordon McIntyre with Laura Cantrell, but without any other context. This 2002 album turns out to be a bit of a charmer, albeit very much of a certain slice of its time - an indie pop record from Scotland at the turn of the millennium, and only just (but nonetheless) on the right side of overly precious, with some good tunes dialled up by melodically noisy fm-radio style instrumentation into low-key epics.

Lake Street Dive - Obviously

Not easily categorisable but partaking of plenty of familiar sounds, Obviously only really hits its strides on a few songs near the middle, but it's easy listening.

Liz Phair - Soberish

It sounds like Liz Phair, plenty of years on, but Soberish is undistinguished. 

Vika & Linda - 'Akilotoa: Anthology - 1994-2006

Warm, characterful and frequently singalong. Many quickly lovable discoveries.

Loki season 1

A colourful and pretty fun MCU product - the charm of Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson goes a long way.

"Becoming You: An incomplete guide" (Immigration Museum)

71 snippets of coming of age stories told by diverse Australians. Enjoyable.

(w/ Siobhan)

"French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston" (NGV)

It wasn't one of my first loves, but I came to love impressionism some time back. It's the artists' interest in rendering their experience of the world (phenomenologically) and their resultant interest in light, form and perception, and it's the way this has frequently beautiful results. To the extent that I'm drawn to their subjects - landscapes, famously - it's because they lend themselves to such treatments and because my own experiences of them arrive similarly in an immediate perceptual sense, making for that always-to-be-cherished sensation of recognition writ large when the same appears in art.

This exhibition is a roll call of big names, centred on the most canonical of the impressionists - Pissarro, who I used to find overly decorative but no longer, Renoir, about whom I'm always a bit ambivalent because of how verging on saccharine he can be but whose paintings' out and out beauty are self-evident, and Monet (especially Monet, in every sense) - and with a proportionately lesser representation of those less in that core stream but still somehow part of it (Cezanne, Degas, even and maybe a bit incongruously a Van Gogh), plus some important early influences and predecessors.

Some of these I saw when visiting the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston what was only three years ago but feels much longer. Then as now, the gathering of Monets was stunning.

Eugene Louis Boudin - 'Fashionable Figures on the Beach' (1865)

Paul Cezanne - 'Fruit and a jug on a table' (c 1890-94)

Camille Pissarro - 'Two Peasant Women in a Meadow (Le Pre)' (1893)

Monet - 'Meadow with Poplars' (1875)

Monet - 'Seacoast at Trouville' (1881) - I like the Japanese feel of this one

Monet - 'Road at La Cavee, Pourville' (1882)

Monet - 'Grainstack (snow effect)' (1891)

Monet - 'Water lillies' (1905)

Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee

Bright, indie-ish tunes that spin through shoegazey, twee and electro pop elements if these kinds of genre descriptions mean anything these days. Highlights are "Be Sweet" (R accurately observed this is a highly motivational song) and the sugar-charming "Kokomo, IN".

Natalie Zina Walschots - Hench

Zippy and fun and also pretty hard-nosed. It's not as razor-focused as say The Other Black Girl but nor is it difficult to see what Hench has on its mind when it comes to capitalism, celebrity, patriarchy, state violence, and the ills of the contemporary world - funnelled through the lens of an alternate universe populated by villains and superheroes plus of course their henches and kicks.

C Pam Zhang - How Much of These Hills Is Gold

Here's the section that made me really certain that I was reading something 100% worth my time - good in isolation, and far better in the context of the associations that, by page 42, the novel has already set up to resonate when activated here.

They've nearly reached the foot of the mountains, one week later, when the rib in the sky thickens. Wolf moon, rarest kind. Bright enough that after sunset and star rise comes moonrise. Silver pries their eyes awake. The blades of grass, the bristles of Nellie's mane, the creases of their clothes - illuminated.

Across the grass, an even brighter glow.

Like two still sleeping they rise from their blankets and walk. Their hands brush. Did Sam reach across? Or is it a coincidence of strides grown similar thanks to Sam's new height?

The light comes from a tiger skull.

It's pristine. The snarl untouched. Chance didn't place this skull; the beast didn't die here. No other bones surround it. The empty sockets face East and North. Follow its gaze, and Lucy sees the very end of the mountains, where the wagon trail curves to the plains.

"It's -" Lucy says, heart quickening.

"A sign," Sam says.

Most times Lucy can't read Sam's dark eyes. Tonight the moonlight has pierced Sam through, made Sam's thoughts clear as the blades of grass. Together they stand as if at a threshold, remembering the tiger Ma drew in the doorway of each new house. Ma's tiger like no other tiger Lucy has seen, a set of eight lines suggesting the beast only if you squinted. A cipher. Ma drew her tiger as protection against what might come. Singing, Lao hu, lao hu.

Ma drew her tiger in each new home.

Song shivers through Lucy's head as she touches the skull's intact teeth. A threat, or else a grin. What was the last word of the song? A call to the tiger: Lai.

"What makes a home a home?" Lucy says. 

Sam faces the mountains and roars.

In some ways, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is deceptive. There's a surface flashiness to it, in the present-tense, image-rich argot through which it's narrated (to start with, by Lucy, age 12) and the self-reflexive myth-making it wears on its sleeve, mega-buffalo and tigers roaming late Gold Rush California and refracted through the prism of its Chinese-American experience. And then there's the apparent simplicity of its high concept - the two lost sisters with their Chinese parentage, seeking opportunity in an America whose frontiers are still seemingly untamed, but already haunted by the ghosts of western 'progress'. But in truth those elements are strengths, and wrapped together by the control that Zhang exerts over her material so that the symbols and motifs operate as plot as well as theme. It's very satisfying, and very good.

Natalia Lafourcade - Un Canto por Mexico, Vol 2

A lot of music comes heavily pre-contextualised, by the superstructure, personal expectations, and everything in between - especially after a lifetime spent listening to a great deal of music of certain types. By contrast, while for me the music on this record summons plenty of associations, I have next to nil exposure to its underlying sources - the traditional Mexican songs that Lafourcade contemporises to wonderful effect - so it arrives as something of a revelation, and absent ready reference points, which makes it only the more enjoyable, which it is, very.

Robert Finley - Sharecropper's Son

This record has a roar to it. I can't really assess the the authenticity of its blues and soul lines but it has the ring of truth to me.

Allison Russell - Outside Child

Quite the mixture, roaming across a range of roots and folk streams. It ties together well - there's depth to it.

Zakiya Dalila Harris - The Other Black Girl

This is ferocious and good. It's focused in its rendition of race and racism, in the broad and with specificity, and page-turning in its plot, structure and sentence-level writing. Doubtless it reads differently, and deeper, to Black readers but it scans strongly for me regardless. I could quibble with some aspects - especially the way some of the secondary characters and background plotting feels underdeveloped - but the overall energy of the novel carries it easily over those things.

Art

Some discoveries via last year's and this year's (to date) Metropolitan Museum of Art desk calendars which have been part of my home work space - along with others, including many existing favourites - over the last while.

Janet Fish - "Raspberries and Goldfish", 1981

El Greco - "Christ Healing the Blind", 1570

Utagawa Hiroshige - "In the Kameido Tenjin Shrine Complex", 1856

Leon Bibel - "Brooklyn Bridge", 1938

Camille Pissarro - "Rue de l'Epicerie, Rouen (Effect of Sunlight)", 1898

Amedeo Modigliani - "Jeanne Hebuterne", 1919

Winslow Homer - "The Bather", 1899

Walker Evans - "Subway Passengers, New York City: Two Women in Conversation", 1941

Kerry James Marshall - "Untitled (Studio)", 2014

Leonora Carrington - "Self-Portrait" , 1937-38

Ruth Chaney - "The Writer", 1935-43

Martha Marlow - Medicine Man

Ornate, faintly Disney-ish singer-songwriter pop in the vein of Natalie Prass's debut. Has some nice hooks, but not the songs to lift it above the throng.