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Photo by Anna Webber |
David Crosby's new album
Here If You Listen is billed as "a collaborative album with Becca Stevens, Michael League and Michelle Willis," who also backed up his 2016 album,
Lighthouse.
The Guardian writes that the music "retains [Crosby's] trademark unusual tunings and dreamy harmonies but is a thoroughly band effort," and that working with young musicians "seems to have turbo-charged Crosby’s muse." Our pick for the New Music bin is "Vagrants of Venice." It paints a post-apocalyptic picture of a once-great city submerged by rising seas and sparsely populated by "wild people / nearly feral / living on what they can find." There's a strong thematic echo of the classic "Wooden Ships," which Crosby co-wrote with Stephen Stills and Paul Kantner in 1968. Fifty years later, global warming has taken its place alongside nuclear war as a nightmare of civilization's suicide.
With so much new good music emerging every week, we're bound to miss some gems, and we're always glad when someone calls our attention to one that we overlooked. And so, six months or so after its release, we're catching up with
Joy Ike's luminous album,
Bigger Than Your Box. The Nigerian-American singer, songwriter and pianist describes it as a collection of songs "about dreaming beyond what you can actually see." Our featured track is "Ever Stay," an uplifting song driven by shifting rhythms. Ike says the song "is for the person who needs to be reminded that they are not alone."
We're only about six weeks behind in catching up with
Lydia Luce's debut full-length album. Luce grew up in Florida in a musical family, played in her mother's orchestra as a teenager, studied at Berklee College of Music and earned a master's degree in viola performance at UCLA. She then moved to Nashville, where she recorded
Azalea, combining her classical training with Americana and folk influences. We're featuring the moody, intriguing title track.
We've previously featured tracks by
The Wind + The Wave, the Austin-based duo of Patricia Lynn and Dwight Baker. They've now released their third full-length album,
Human Beings Let You Down -- recorded in hotels and backstage dressing rooms as they toured the USA behind their previous album,
Happiness Is Not A Place. Baker does double-duty as producer, Lynn is the primary singer-songwriter, and they're joined on the record by their touring band. Now they're back on the road again. Our featured track, "Lay Me Down," evokes the excitement - and weariness - of the touring life: "I'm all fired up / and when I'm all dried up / I'm gonna lay me down."
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Photo by Zackery Michael |
From Austin we slide over to New Orleans and pick up a track from the latest album by
The Revivalists, Take Good Care. It includes the single, "All My Friends," which has been out for a few months, and the just-released LP is packed with another 13 songs. The Associated Press suggests that's several songs too many, saying it starts off featuring "the band’s exciting mix of jazz-funk grooves, blues rock and warm melodies," but gets generic and boring toward the end. We'd put "You And I" in the first category, and that's our pick for the New Music bin.
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