Hey all – check this out: a Recommended Albums post that actually arrived on time! The bad news is is that WordPress has decided to mess with me once again (as they do every few years) and decide the old way I embedded links is cringe and illegal. So I’ve had to take this legitimately great selection of Recommended Albums and mess with it a bit, messing up spacing, etc.
This is a really solid list of records. Furthermore, it’s 16 albums long. When was the last time I had 16 records in here? May 2024 really brought its A-game, with big hitters from reliable favorites, a few new faces, and some really invigorating new projects from artists that I didn’t expect. So please ignore the spacing and any wonkiness that you might find and just enjoy the music. I’m sure you’ll appreciate that.
Beth Gibbons – Lives Outgrown [Domino]
Storms approach a lonely cliffside house where its reclusive resident grapples with dread and possible freedom from the potential impending changes.
Camera Obscura – Look to the East, Look to the West [Merge]
A day spent out at the seaside with friends you haven’t seen in years, any awkwardness of catching up is abandoned in favor of relishing in each other’s company.
Dehd – Poetry [Fat Possum]
Sun-baked and exhausted after spending a whole day outdoors, but feeling a pure love-fueled second wind once the sun has almost set past the horizon.
Iglooghost – Tidal Memory Exo [LUCKYME]
Grinding across a rail made of pieces of old, decrepit A/V equipment in the underbelly of a crumbling future metropolis, its shantytown-like dwellings shadowed by empty towers and covered with soot from the skies above.
Jessica Pratt – Here In The Pitch [Mexican Summer]
At the thought of a passed loved one, an open window facing a quiet, tree-lined street brings in a gentle, evening breeze that billows out an inherited lace curtain and diffuses your incense further across the room.
Keeley Forsyth – The Hollow [130701 / FatCat]
A smoldering house is found in an arctic expanse. The family that lived inside finally achieved warmth.
Lightning Bug – No Paradise [Self-Released]
A field of flowers that emit a thick fog from their petals suddenly sprout in the middle of a town green, plunging the townsfolk into an ambiguous but beautiful new environment.
Lip Critic – Hex Dealer [Partisan]
Openly acknowledging and taunting the secret capitalism sensor drone that’s been tasked to you (like every person) to make sure we support the consumer empire efficiently. Your wanton defiance even causes the surveillance to glitch and its AI to consider self-termination.
Mary Lattimore & Walt McClements – Rain on the Road [Thrill Jockey]
Checking a book out of the library and finding nearly everyone who had read it before you had pressed a flower inside it, its stories augmented by dried petals and blank fragrances.
Mdou Moctar – Funeral for Justice [Matador]
Riding on horseback and launching an array of fireworks that cast dynamic lights and colors across a vast plain.
musclecars – Sugar Honey Iced Tea! [BBE Music]
The Saturday of your dreams, the energy of the city and the people outside flowing through you.
Priori – This but More [NAFF]
Gray skies like iridescent silver glint over an expanse of frozen taiga, steaming vents that poke up from the ground suggest the subterranean lives of the post-cataclysmic humans remaining on Earth.
Shannon & The Clams – The Moon Is In The Wrong Place [Easy Eye Sound]
Sending a paper lantern into the sky with a message of love and updating the heavens above on all the bullshit that’s going on down here.
Tidiane Thiam – Africa Yontii [Sahel Sounds]
Waking up with the birds at sunrise and feeling the Earth’s natural, renewed energy fill you up.
Winged Wheel – Big Hotel [12XU]
Tales of aliens that crash landed in a small, middle-of-nowhere midwestern town, who experience harrowing, psychedelic hallucinations thanks to Earth’s thick, polluted air while they rebuild their craft with rusting junk, but are greatly unnoticed by the townsfolk, their eyes having glazed over years ago.
youbet – Way To Be [Hardly Art]
On hour 13 of a 15-hour roadtrip across the United States. You have not slept, but have instead conducted an experiment where you talk to your friends on the phone the whole time. Your burnt psyche reveals a buried tenderness, and is contagious.
GR8 TRACKS OF MAY 2024::
- Amen Dunes – “Boys”
- Amen Dunes – “Purple Land”
- Anastasia Coope – “Darning Woman”
- Anastasia Coope – “What Doesn’t Work What Does”
- Arooj Aftab – “Raat Ki Rani”
- Beth Gibbons – “For Sale”
- Beth Gibbons – “Lost Changes”
- Beth Gibbons – “Oceans”
- Beth Gibbons – “Reaching Out”
- Camera Obscura – “Denon”
- Camera Obscura – “Liberty Print”
- Camera Obscura – “Pop Goes Pop”
- Camera Obscura – “We’re Going to Make It In A Man’s World”
- Crumb – “Crushxd”
- Crumb – “Side by Side”
- Dehd – “Dog Days”
- Dehd – “Necklace”
- Dehd – “Mood Ring”
- DIIV – “Soul-net”
- Drew McDowall – “A Dream of Cartographic Membrane Dissolves”
- Fcukers – “Bon Bon”
- Group Listening – “Hills End”
- Habibi – “On The Road”
- Halima – “Ways”
- Ibibio Sound Machine – “Got To Be Who U Are”
- Iglooghost – “flux•Cocoon”
- Iglooghost – “Pulse Angel”
- Jessica Pratt – “Better Hate”
- Jessica Pratt – “By Hook or by Crook”
- Jessica Pratt – “Empires Never Know”
- Jessica Pratt – “The Last Year”
- Jessica Pratt – “Life Is”
- Jessica Pratt – “World on a String”
- Jon McKiel – “Everlee”
- Jon McKiel – “Under Burden”
- Jordan Rakei – “Flowers”
- Jordan Rakei – “Freedom”
- Keeley Forsyth – “Come and See”
- Keeley Forsyth – “The Hollow”
- Keeley Forsyth – “Turning (feat. Colin Stetson)”
- Lightning Bug – “December Song”
- Lightning Bug – “The Quickening”
- Lip Critic – “The Heart”
- Lip Critic – “Milky Max”
- Lip Critic – “Spirit Bomber”
- Lip Critic – “Toxin Dodger”
- Machinedrum – “ZOOM (feat. Tinashe)”
- Mary Lattimore & Walt McClements – “Nest of Earrings”
- Mary Lattimore & Walt McClements – “The Poppies, The Wild Mustard, The Blue-Eyed Grass”
- Mary Lattimore & Walt McClements – “The Top of Thomas Street”
- Mdou Moctar – “Funeral for Justice”
- Mdou Moctar – “Imouhar”
- Mdou Moctar – “Oh France”
- musclecars – “Ha Ya! (Eternal Life) (feat. Natalie Greffel)”
- musclecars – “Running Out Of Time”
- musclecars – “Tonight (feat. Kamaal)”
- Priori – “Moonstone (feat. Ben Bondy)”
- Priori – “Thick Air”
- Priori – “To See Our Secret Die (feat. Sabola)”
- Priori – “Wake (feat. James K)”
- Richard Hawley – “Have Love”
- Shannon & The Clams – “Oh So Close, Yet So Far”
- Shannon & The Clams – “Real Or Magic”
- Shannon & The Clams – “What You’re Missing”
- Tidiane Thiam – “Néené Africa”
- Tidiane Thiam – “Oo Duna”
- Winged Wheel – “Demonstrably False”
- Winged Wheel – “From Here on Out Nothing Changes
- Winged Wheel – “Sleeptraining”
- youbet – “Carsick”
- youbet – “Seeds of Evil”
Warm Visions 