· At 26 years old, Dare You to Move remains as potent a motivator as ever, gilded by Switchfoot’s particular brand of sunny-but-not-naïve sound.
· Rilo Kiley’s album, The Execution of All Things, is somehow reassuring in its bluntness.
· Five Years seems a bit more relevant in our present moment of AI-apocalypse anxiety; but then, that itself is an encouraging reminder that such fears of imminent doom are hardly new, and would have been hard to shake off in decades past as well.
· FIG TREE is a properly haunting introduction to the impeccably-named sleepazoid.
· I am not really sure how Annie Lennox’s ballad for Bram Stoker’s Dracula relates to that fascinating and bizarre movie; but then, the ‘90s sort of had a running theme of movie ballads that seemed only tenuously connected to their films. It sure is a good song though.
· Between Softcult and chokecherry and cryogeyser and Yumi Zouma and she’s green and The Pains of Being Pure At Heart and Asobi Seksu, I unintentionally put a lot of fuzzy-wuzzy-buzzy alternative in here, which is fun.
· Ratboys’ album Singin’ to an Empty Chair may suggest a musical version of Clint Eastwood’s 2012 Republican convention speech, but it’s actually quite a good alt-country album.
· Middle Kids’ 2024 album Faith Crisis Pt 1 just rips.
· For all the personal drama attendant on it, the musical tie between Baez and Dylan remains difficult to ever top.
· Bruce Springsteen is a good companion for trying to find light in the darkness.
