Wind-Up People - "The First Train Out of Town". A smoky holler, a fumbling parting, a gas lantern bumping in the rattling trunk of a car. Wind-Up People have listened to albums by Constantines and Cloud Nothings, or maybe their predecessors', and they have made the kind of record, like those, that you need to put on when certain rotten things are sparking in your chest, snicking and buzzing, like the dancing end of a powerline. You turn the volume knob and you put your palms flat on the wall, above your head, and you click your molars, and then you can no longer hear the click of your molars, because the music is too loud, that smoky holler, and you will yourself to forget the fact that every part of your house is utterly unchanged. (Deep breath.) Thank god for this fucking rock and roll. [free at bandcamp]

Julie Doiron - "Our Love". Half a song. Less than that - an eighth of a song, a tenth, a twentieth, not a song but a sentiment, a single rosy sentiment. Julie takes this tiny vast sentiment and doubles it, redoubles it, makes three minutes and thirty-two seconds out of just that little thing, repeated, like the tolling of a golden clock, the blinking of those familiar eyes, the drowsy nightly ritual. Every evening you get into bed and it is different and the same, another one counted in, a duplicate, and the lamplight is unabating. (A song for lovers, certainly; a nonsense for the ones who are without.) [buy]

[Photograph is of the USS Akron, by Margaret Bourke-White]