The Lacking Permanence

Nice indie guitar sounds, with whispery vocals and a meandering melodic spirit.

A set of guitar-centered mid-tempo numbers that live somewhere in the region staked out by jazz, funk, and soul.

The catamarine knifed silently upstream, its passage discernible only as a faint twin wake on the surface of the river. Up ahead, the sonar array was already picking up the turbulence from the Mbocaruzú falls, the staccato warning pings slicing neatly between the Mozambique big-band swing being piped into the earpieces. In their individual pods, the cartographer and the miner reviewed their maps, surveys, and orders. Up ahead, behind the rushing down-flow of the water and completely out of sight, a set of steel doors silently opened and awaited the pair’s arrival.

Songs that the Purple One wrote for others, as performed by the person who wrote them. A good set of well-produced demos, but nothing that should have been released a long time ago and mostly of historical interest.

Hot-as-fire punk disco party with a raging saxophone and urgent female vocals.

Once above the canopy, it was impossible to see the green-winged hang-gliders that the archeologist and the mercenary had used to enter the Antananarivo bird sanctuary. Going through Customs had been dicey, the parts for the flying machines had been dispersed with various kinds of unassembled patio furniture, but the quality of the materials still stood out. Fortunately, the mercenary had brought up the Madagascar goth metal scene and distracted the functionaries into stamping passports and waving them through. They hadn’t even asked about the Geiger counter.

The name promises so much, and the band overdelivers. The continent of Australia is awash in lysergic excursions lately, and this is one of the finest.

Delicious pop conconctions, loaded with clever production flourishes and infectious melodies wrapped around a soulful core.

There wasn’t enough room on the narrow boat for the botanist to take out a handkerchief and wipe their brow. The square head vessel, slicing through the water on its way to the Phong Dien Floating Market, looked to be laden with mangos, but that was a ruse. The pyramids that piled the boat only a had a skin a single mango deep. Underneath were piles of something with about the same density as mangos, but much much more valuable. The captain twisted the knob on the cabin radio on hearing some narcopolka, the device’s limited capacity making the sound increase not in volume, only in distortion. The sun sparkled off the water, a thousand heat lasers evading the shade thrown by the wide straw hats they wore.

It’s not ska, and it’s not rocksteady, but it’s definitely Jamaican and powerfully dancy — you can call it “69 Reggae” after the year of its initial popularity.