Angel Olsen - Big Time

There's a comfort and expansiveness here that envelopes the entire record, continuing Angel Olsen's great run - Burn Your Fire For No Witness, My Woman, All Mirrors and now this one. The warmth of Big Time's first section, leading off with "All The Good Times" and "Big Time", sets a tone and reminds me of Margo Price in its contemporary folk-tinged country, in that way of idiosyncratic personal reference points. And threads of that continue as things get moodier, reaching a mid-album high point with "All The Flowers" which is like an escapee from Roberta Flack's 60s/70s catalogue and "Right Now". All through, in a slow burning way, it's excellent.

Minari

A quiet, beautiful film. Korean migrants in Arkansas, family, farming, faith. Perfectly weighted.

Beach House - Once Twice Melody

Is there such a thing as too lush when it comes to a Beach House album? Once Twice Melody suggests the answer is 'yes'. There's a lot of music here and despite repeated listens it all tends to blur.

Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This

It's no easy thing to write fiction in the mode of our very online existences today, but No One Is Talking About This does it as well as anything else I've read - the fragmentary style in which the banal comes to seem aphoristic, the sense of life lived through endless filters and memes, with the personal and the political both in play (including frequent references to the dictator, ie Trump) yet always struggling for purchase against the tidal waves of content and knowingness that make up Lockwood's 'Portal'. Part one is immersive, funny, convincing and human.

How part two - in which real life makes itself unavoidably felt, with the diagnosis and then unexpected survival and birth of the narrator's sister's baby with Proteus syndrome - rubs up against that is the core of the novel, and an unexpected one by the time it arrives halfway in. I found the sections just after the diagnosis very moving, and so too those when the baby arrives and is treasured despite (because) everyone know her life expectancy can be measured in weeks or months rather than years. Each part works on its own; whether - or how - they work together is more of an open question but I think the effect is cumulative. This is a novel about being human today, and the nature of connection as well as grief, with a form that reflects the segment of life that it's about. 

Maria Gainza - Portrait of an Unknown Lady

The unknown lady is, of course, the narrator - with shades of Cusk to her - who we meet checking into a hotel under a false name, just as much as the mysterious and totemic art forger Renee in search of whose story she goes in her dissolute way. Doesn't have the same remarkable quality as Optic Nerve, but does have some of the same pleasures - the sentences, the slipperiness, the combination of clarity with opacity.