Nick Cave returns with a reason to keep on living: 5 new releases we love

Read our featured review of Little Oblivions here.

Lydia Luce, Dark River

[Self-released]

Lydia Luce explores and expands the boundaries of the Nashville sound on her latest, Dark River. Using celebrated game-changers like Dusty Springfield, Emmylou Harris, and Neko Case as jumping-off points, Luce’s self-released second album makes exhilarating use of layered instrumentation for a genre-bending sound that flits between chamber pop, country-rock, and singer-songwriter balladry. Pillowy postwar strings are especially prominent, which should come as no surprise: Along with leading her own band, Luce is also a well-known violin session player. But although the album is stuffed full of sound, there’s still a lonesome quality to Luce’s melodies that roots Dark River in the world of country and western. No matter the genre, however, two things remain constant: the soft edges of Luce’s voice, and the swelling dynamics that give the title track its wings. [Katie Rife]

McKinley Dixon, “Make A Poet Black”

[Spacebomb Records]

Wordsmith McKinley Dixon established himself as a lyricist to watch with his set of 2018 LPs The Importance Of Self Belief and Who Taught You to Hate Yourself?, infusing performance with wit and stark vulnerability. In preparation for his upcoming album For My Mama And Anyone Who Look Like Her, Dixon returns this month with “Make A Poet Black,” a theatrical culmination of grief and existential pondering. You won’t find snares or any of the percussion that often goes hand-in-hand with hip-hop; instead, tightly knitted verses ride on swelling strings and the forceful, looping pluck of the koto. Dixon takes his time exploring not only his own relationship with mourning—the song tracks his experience with the loss of a friend—but how Black people tend to process their own trauma, which often involves a sense of labor. In his own words, Dixon questions, “What about trauma forces a Black person to feel the need to create?” It’s a query worth both thoughtful reflection and this seriously artful rhapsody. [Shannon Miller]

Blanck Mass, In Ferneaux

[Sacred Bones]

There are exactly two tracks on In Ferneaux, the searching and complex new album from Blanck Mass, a.k.a. electronic music provocateur Benjamin John Power. “Phase I” and “Phase II” are vague, simple names that hide multitudes—a fitting assemblage for an album that literally moves from our innermost thoughts to the distant stars. Thematically meant to evoke the nigh-inexplicable connections we make with others—other people, other places, other times—these twin movements are littered with the incidental sounds of voices and nature compiled from years’ worth of Power’s field recordings archives. Synths pull back to reveal boats creaking against a dock; the pummeling noise that opens “Phase II” drops out to spend minutes listening in on various men opening up about deeply intimate thoughts. Sonically, it’s a less assaultive journey than 2019’s Animated Violence Mild, though the shift in tone actually makes the harder-hitting moments that much fiercer, as in the aggressive drums that erupt almost five minutes into “Phase I,” or the white-noise sheen that irradiates the first half of “Phase II.” But through it all, Power’s restless, experimental muse finds beauty in the connection of the organic and inorganic, the painstakingly composed and the accidentally captured. If there’s such a thing as the opposite of easy listening, this is it. [Alex McLevy]