Bon Iver featuring Dijon and Flock of Dimes, ‘Day One’
A couple struggles against self-doubt and depression and tries to reconcile in “Day One” from “Sable, Fable,” Bon Iver’s cathartic new album. “It got bad enough I thought that I would leave,” Justin Vernon moans. Jenn Wasner (Flock of Dimes) advises, “You may have to toughen up while unlearning that lie.” Together, they sing, “I don’t know who I am without you.” While the chords and tempo come from gospel, the production is fractured and glitchy, questioning its own comforts.
Constant bad news on TV? Pervasive isolation and hopelessness? In “Endless Tree,” from her new album “Owls, Omens and Oracles,” Valerie June recognizes dire times — she’s not naïve — and preaches hope, community spirit and “getting the courage to do something small” anyway. “If you’re on the couch and you’re feeling alone / May you feel moved after hearing this song,” she urges. An increasingly frantic orchestra and chorus join her, revealing some tension behind the positive thinking.
Galactic and Irma Thomas, ‘People’
“Keep on holding on,” Irma Thomas insists in “People,” a hardheaded, horn-pumped song from the album she made with the stalwart New Orleans band Galactic, “Audience With the Queen.” Thomas, 84, has been recording since she was a teenager, and her voice is undiminished — and more than convincing — when she sings, “I might have stumbled and fell a few times / But I’m strong as a woman could be.”
Daughter of Swords, ‘Talk to You’
“Talk to You” is the outlier on “Alex,” the new album by Daughter of Swords, a.k.a. the songwriter Alex Sauser-Monnig. Most of the album is hand-played indie-rock, but “Talk to You” is a mostly electronic lark, driven by handclaps and whimsical samples. She’s skeptical about “falling for a person like a person’s gonna solve anything.” And for her chorus, she sings, “I really wanna talk to you / I really wanna know what you — “ and lets a funny noise finish the line.
A traditional Afro-Puerto Rican rhythm, the bomba, is the foundation of Rauw Alejandro’s “Carita Linda” (“Pretty Face”), a love song that muses, “Why don’t we go live in a little house on the sand?” The track surrounds the drumming with surreal layers of electronics, strings, vocals and an occasional sea gull cry, but the song stays close to its roots.
