Corbie Hill

Emma Swift paints with subdued blue tones in slow, deliberate strokes. Indeed, listening to her new album The Resurrection Game is less like processing a collection of songs and more like getting to know the shapes and shades of a melancholy painting. “Meet me at the station / where the roses

“Use a Friend,” off Josh Halper’s new Schlemiel, sounds huge, but it’s the size of the space between two people. Sonically, it’s a driving space-rock anthem in the War on Drugs vein. Drum machines and a drum set propel keyboards, guitars and a pedal steel forward at

“The Music Man,” the lead single from the new David Ramirez, opens with an ode to the Walkman. Ramirez describes his younger self—innocent, free of existential dread—blindsided by mind-altering wonder when his dad gave him one. “The wheels began to turn / the magnets both took control,” Ramirez sings

The new Jason Boland and the Stragglers album closes with an image right out of Steinbeck: “Lonesome travelers and rambling types / shuffling down some unknown trail tonight,” Boland sings in “Buffalo Return,” penned by late Oklahoma songwriter Jimmy LaFave. “In your hobo jungles and your boxcar dreams / living only by