apricotbenjamin

Under all the new production gloss and the admittedly strange anime film rollout, people seem to be missing that this a great collection of songs from one of the best writers in American music today. Sturgill has a vision of his own that is equal parts psychedelic, iconoclastic, and soulful.

Best tracks: "Sing Along," "Make Art Not Friends," "Best Clockmaker on Mars," "Remember to Breathe," "Mercury in Retrograde"

This album is quite literally the music of my dreams. Wide Open Spaces is a meditation on lost Americana, the west, and country music in a 21st Century culture of technology, cynicism, and distortion. An album with moments of confounding grace if not a difficult listen overall. I walked five miles in the snow and listened to it in its entirety.

"I feel so much at once that I could scream."
Angel Olsen is one of the best writers in contemporary music and this album will put you under the spell of her burning, beautiful soul. Burn Your Fire seems to have arrived from some kind of timeless place of melody and mood. Her best work.

The Dream of the Blue Turtles is as much a work of world literature as it is a pop album. A brilliant pairing of stories and feelings with performances of nuance and virtuosity. The album occupies a unique sonic space as well- you are unlikely to hear music that sounds like this anywhere outside of Sting's canon. The jazz-inflected playing of Branford Marsalis, Omar Hakim, Kenny Kirkland, and others is transplanted to a landscape of lush 80s adult contemporary synthesizers and ambiance. ... read more