The War on Drugs – I Don’t Live Here Anymore
“A rich, absorbing work that rewards immersive listening” – The Guardian Despite its three-year, seven-studio gestation, the War On Drugs’ fifth album feels warmer, more organic, and more personal than their last album – the Grammy-winning ‘A Deeper Understanding’. An album tha
Mark Lanegan – Whiskey for the Holy Ghost
Mark Lanegan’s second solo album was released in between his band The Screaming Trees final two albums, 1992s breakthrough ‘Sweet Oblivion’ and 1996’s ‘Dust’. The album showcased Lanegan’s growing maturity as a songwriter and vocalist and is regarded as an early career high
The Church – Priest=Aura
“Evocative, poetic, and gripping music with a distinctly unsettling edge…an astonishing album” – All Music In the 30 years since its release, the Church’s Priest=Aura has gone from a post-“Under the Milky Way” footnote to an acknowledged career pinnacle. It was a commercial failure upon it
Recollections of My Non-Existence by Rebecca Solnit
“This book is a knockout.” You weren’t expecting it, any of it. An unassuming knockout. A slim “memoir” that reads with such ease that each time it is striking to uncover the profound content that is packed in page after page, line after line. Reflections of her life as a writer and activist based i
Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki
“Syzygy? Androgyny? I’m no man and I’m no woman. Who needs gender anyway?” The phrase “ahead of her time” gets thrown around a lot but in 1970’s Tokyo, Izumi Suzuki was writing Sci-Fi stories featuring screen addicted people, robot vacuums, live-streams and celebrities as politicians. One characte
Best Poetry You’ve Never Read: Mercies Selected Poems by Anne Sexton
“Insanity, religion, adultery, feminism, poetry.” By fusing these worlds Anne Sexton helped redefine what could be written in poetry. Mercies: Selected Poems, gathers a rich new selection of work of each of her collections, including the Pulitzer winning Live or Die as well as pieces published after her d
The daddy of true crime: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote 
“If I realized then what the future held I would have driven straight on. Like a bat out of hell.” Truman Capote drove south to Kansas to write about a small town murder. He mixed and blended all the right elements of a murder novel with the investigative analysis of a journalist… it was the […]
Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill
“Gaitskill gives flawed and unexpected characters the time of day.” These uncensored, transgressive short stories document the ‘bad behavior’ (sex, secrets, lies, cruelties…it’s a long list…) of several men and women in NY in the 80’s. IT reads as if she simply slipped into the minds of passing
STOP EVERYTHING AND LISTEN TO MERRY CLAYTON ON CD – Gimme Shelter and Merry Clayton by Merry Clayton
“Well first listen to ‘Gimme Shelter’ by the Rolling Stones.” That searing backing voice belongs to Merry Clayton, who recorded the song with the Stones while heavily pregnant, in her pajamas and perfectly set hair curlers after being called to the studio in the middle of the night. She knocked it out i
Best Book You’ve Never Read: Berline Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin
“As long as he had money, he remained decent. But then he ran out of money.” Franz is fresh out of prison and determined to get his life together…but he lives in the underworld of Berlin in the 1920’s, so how the hell do you do that? Published in 1929, Berlin Alexanderplatz is often regarded […]
