MUSIC

Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what’s truly hers, what can’t be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. “The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,” Mitski says. “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I’ve created onto other people.” She hopes her newest album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she’s gone. Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land. Love is always radical, which means that it always disrupts, which means that it always takes work to receive it. This land, which already feels inhospitable to so many of its inhabitants, is about to feel hopelessly torn and tossed again – at times, devoid of love. This album offers the anodyne. “This is my most American album,” Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. But “maybe it’s beyond witnessing,” she says. At times, it feels like the album is an exercise in negative capability – a fearless embodiment and absorption of the pain of other bodies. When I ask her what the album would look like, if it were a person, she says it would be someone middle-aged and exhausted, perhaps someone having a midlife crisis. But through the daily indignity and exhaustion, something enormous and ecstatic is calling out. In this album, which is sonically Mitski’s most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. Mitski wrote these songs in little bursts over the past few years, and they feel informed by moments of noticing – noticing a sound that’s out of place, a building that groans in decay, an opinion that splits a room, a feeling that can’t be contained in a body. It was recorded at both the Bomb Shelter in East Nashville and the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles. The album incorporates an orchestra arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, as well as a full choir of 17 people - 12 in LA and 5 in Nashville - arranged by Mitski. And for the first time, it felt important to Mitski to have a band recording live together in the studio, to create this new sublime sound. Working with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, the album has a wide-range of references, from Ennio Morricone’s bombastic Spaghetti Western scores to Carter Burwell’s tundra-filling Fargo soundtrack, from the breathy intimacy of Arthur Russell to the strident aliveness of Scott Walker or Igor Stravinsky, from the jubilation of Caetano Veloso to the twangy longing of Faron Young. From the first track, the album introduces and then heals a wound. “Bug Like an Angel” finds the divine in the ordinary, in the boozy drowning of sorrow. The narrator sings from the strange comfort of rock bottom: “sometimes a drink feels like family.” And suddenly, that choir of angels sings: “FAMILY!” This first track introduces a cosmic paradox: “The wrath of the devil was also given him by God.” This is an album in which dark and light exist in the same gesture, the same broken prayer. Like the Buddha inviting the demon Mara in for tea, The Land embraces brutal, daily pain — the necessary toll of transcendent love. In “Buffalo Replaced,” the wail of a freight train replaces the vibrations of the long-gone stampeding buffalo. Here, hope itself is personified, anthropomorphized into a sleeping creature, and our narrator wonders if life would be easier without her. But then, as though in response, “Heaven” offers a beautiful moment of passion, preserved like a fossil in time even though the “dark awaits us all around the corner.” This oasis is aggressively interrupted by “I Don’t Like My Mind,” a song from the perspective of someone in extraordinary pain. They are begging to keep their job, while actively keeping terrible traumatic memories at bay. Without their employment, these memories might take over, consuming them as relentlessly as the cake that they ate one “inconvenient Christmas.” The toggling between hope and despair in these four songs is masterful — the good, the bad, and the ugly in America’s backyard. This mythology continues to deepen with the stunning “The Deal,” in which someone is so burdened by their soul that they beg for it to be taken from them. Soon, the singer’s soul is revealed to be a bird perched on a streetlight. In a coup of songwriting, the narration does not switch into the newly-souled bird’s voice. No, we stay with the soulless “I.” The bird calls down: “You’re a cage without me. / Your pain is eased but you’ll never be free.” This song reinforces the album’s tug-of-war between the intoxication of love and the pain of isolation. Close on its heels is “My Love Mine All Mine,” an instant classic and the beating heart of the album, wherein the singer imagines their love shining down on the earth from the moon, long after the speaker is gone. “It’s just witness-less me,” she sings on “The Frost,” which suddenly takes us from the anticipation of loss right into the aching loneliness of it. On the subject of witnessing, Mitski says: “I’ve always been the person on the outside watching. And I’ve also done that with myself... outside of myself, witnessing myself, watching myself.” She thinks that she might have adopted this habit as a condition of being a woman of color, and that it’s led to the occasional post-apocalyptic fantasy of being the only person left in the world. We talked about Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in which a man is profoundly alone, with only an archive of old tapes to keep him company. He remembers the seismic event of an old sexual encounter, but now it’s: “Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.” The Land repeatedly offers that same hypothesis. Without love, is there anyone here? After the alien lift of “Star” comes the album’s showdown. “I’m Your Man” feels as inevitable, bloody, and haunting as a Sergio Leone duel scene. The “Man” in the title isn’t some fella proclaiming devotion, Mitski says, but rather the man inside her head, the haunting patriarch who treats her like a dog and can destroy her at whim. Despite his confidence and swagger, he is tracked down by a pack of hounds — who have unionized in the name of catharsis. After this violent reckoning, a Fowler’s Toad calls out in what sounds like a human scream. The night settles into silence. The earth might be uninhabited. We glide into the liberating closer, “I Love Me After You,” in which someone is truly alone but truly free. King of all the land. “I don’t have a self,” Mitski observes. “I have a million selves, and they’re all me, and I inhabit them, and they all live inside me.” Loving all of these selves does not yield the easy burst of a pop song. It’s the “long, complex, deep love, that you can never get to the end of, that’s always evolving, like a person. And there’s just no end to it. It feels like space travel.” The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Maybe this is what our best artists do: take a spaceship into the furthest reaches of pain, in order to bring back the elixir that we already had inside us. The unknowable known of love. “You have to go to both worlds all the time,” Mitski says, by which she means the mysterious world of making and the brutal world of living. This album is an act of hyperlocal space travel. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.

Limited Blue Seaglass Wave Translucent Vinyl edition. singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart, who is known for his work at Meditations best-selling compilation 'Fragments du Monde Flottant', and who is a great admirer of esoteric studies, oriental music and Haruomi Hosono. Devendra Banhart, a singer-songwriter, and Noah Georgeson, a producer and friend who has produced many great works together, recorded and completed their ambient albums separately during the pandemic. The work began while recording Devendra Banhart's album "Ma" in 2019, and was put together with friends in 2020. An idea that had been brewing since they first met, and now, after over 20 years, has finally taken shape and been released as a necessary part of the current era. It's quintessential that they express their own sensibilities to the fullest while showing strong influences from their predecessors in new age music such as Henry Cowell, Lou Hudson, and Pauline Oliveros! This compassionate, meditative piece of work, with its like Zen quality, will be a beautiful "refuge" as the title suggests.

Like the days of Steely Dan or Harry Nilsson releasing a classic album every year (or less) comes Mac DeMarco's Another One, a Mini-LP announced one year after the release of the meteorically successful Salad Days. Written and recorded during the downtime between a relentless touring schedule, Another One is an eight-track release that expands the arsenal of Mac's already impressive catalog, showing the maturity of Mac's progression as songwriter: it's a bit more refined, a bit more sophisticated, but nonetheless retains the guts and soul of classic Mac. Despite working at the same pace as artists like Creedence and The Rolling Stones, coupled with an equally unending schedule of touring and press, it's odd that Mac is labeled as a slacker. With two full-lengths and two EPs released and hundreds of sold out shows performed in the last several years, a recent late night television debut on Conan following a special performance on The Eric Andre Show, it seems, as Mac nears his 25th birthday, there's not a slack bone in the man's body. Great songwriters don't need to reinvent themselves; they just need to keep going and let the songs out in the world. Thus, here's Another One.

Salad Days is the follow-up to Mac DeMarco’s lauded 2012 album 2, which saw the Edmonton local propelled into the limelight. Written and recorded around a relentless tour schedule, Salad Days gives the listener a very personal insight into what it’s all about to be Mac amidst the craziness of a rising career in a very public format.In celebration of the 10 year anniversary of DeMarco’s career-defining album, this limited edition 2xLP compiles both the original Salad Days and Salad Days Demos into a unique ‘Chamber Of Reflection’ package complete with full color poster, 12-page booklet with DeMarco’s Salad Days Tour dates, original rider, previously unpublished photos, and new liners written by Mac. “DeMarco channels Harry Nilsson, The Beach Boys, Steely Dan, and The Beatles, but the offbeat stoner vibes are all him.” - Rolling Stone“An outstanding crystallization of [DeMarco’s] gifts” - Pitchfork“The real-talk advice of Jonathan Richman with a far more accessible poetic dreaminess.” - Pitchfork

Downtempo, Folk, Pop … Just a little over two years since the release of his debut album Opening the Door, Jack re-emgerges with a new full length album. On Blue Desert, the Australian-born Vancouver-based multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter and producer wades deeper into the stylistically prismatic pool of his own creation.

〈Captured Tracks〉The biggest seller! Along with masterpieces such as "Salad Days", this is definitely an introductory board for this person! Mac Demarco is a current indie pop cult icon from Canada, known for his activities in Makeout Videotape, sampling Sekito Oshigeo's "The Word II", and the popular split single "Honey Moon" with Mr. Hosono. The 10th anniversary edition of the masterpiece "Rock And Roll Night Club" released in 2012 has been released as an analogue. A masterpiece of psychedelic and addictive indie pop that makes you feel like you're listening to Deerhunter's "Microcastle" cassette demo!

"The Clean broke up (for the first time) in 1982. After a break, the Kilgour brothers pursued a new aesthetic and started recording on a four-track at home. Poking fun at their past, they called themselves The Great Unwashed. Clean Out Of Our Minds was made in two months at the beginning of 1983 and released on Flying Nun Records. The Kilgour's glorious pop hooks are still at the heart of everything but supplanted with a laid-back charm and maybe some of the spirit and mystery of '60s psychedelic folk. However, rather than hippie cosplay, the vibe is more akin to fellow New Zealanders The Tall Dwarfs and/or Syd Barrett. Beautifully remastered by Tex Houston. Vibrant 3D sound allows you to hear everything better than ever before. Housed in a Stoughton tip-on sleeve and available on vinyl for the first time in years. Don't miss out this time!"

Research Records indicate their inclination for cosmic instrumentation and kraut pervaded polyrhythms once again with an introduction to newcomer Glass Beams. Recorded at the beginning of 2020, Mirage is the first release from the artist, issuing four compositions that lend from a profusion of sounds and influences. "I was looking for new energy & inspiration to write a bunch of new music. I recalled a childhood memory of my parents and I watching a DVD they had bought: ‘Concert For George’ (a tribute concert for George Harrison from the Beatles). George’s long time collaborator and friend Ravi Shanka put an Indian Orchestra together for that concert, and even though I hadn’t even started playing music at the time that I watched this, the sounds really stuck with me. My father was born in India and moved here when he was 17, and after recalling this memory I decided to look up musicians from my father’s hometown and surrounding areas. I found a wealth of Indian classical, disco and pop music that formed the building blocks for this record. As soon as I had that vision of what I wanted to write and why I wanted to write it, the songs just flowed out really." – Glass Beams The album's opener and title Mirage arrives with a coiling vocal mantra that conspires with a sliding bassline and transcendent synthwork, reminiscent of early 70’s prog jams yet inverted and futuristic. Taurus is a brisk arrangement, steeped with spaghetti-western elements and space-jazz to pave the way for the agile Kong. Rife with psych-fusion guitar phrases and instrumentation, Kong unfolds like a forecast lysergic voyage. The finale Rattlesnake nudges the serpent with intergalactic scales and spellbinding riffs. We may not know much about the enigmatic Glass Beams but Mirage is one epic inauguration, leaving the listener with more questions than answers.