Really, you wouldn't know it to read Last Plane to Jakarta these days, but I've been listening to & loving a fair amount of new music. Too busy with other things to really properly describe what I've been listening to, not ready yet - never! never ready for that! - to just link to the artists or songs in question without saying something, anything, about why I think they're worth your attention. Because: your attention is more valuable than the present age would have you believe. It's the one thing you brought to this world that it didn't have before, and it's the only thing of consequence that you'll permanently remove from this world when you leave. You know? So when somebody sort of cavalierly directs your attention someplace without so much as a tossed-off phrase indicating why you should bother, then you ought, in my opinion, to regard such people/sources/tweets as emissaries of the dark Lord. To say that something "has to earn your attention" is false; one of the miracles of attention is that it sometimes yields the biggest dividends when it's given weightlessly, unmerited, on a one-way street. But that's not to say that attention is so light a thing that one can afford to shed it like dandruff. Our supply of attention is finite. That's worth remembering.

This is all by way of saying that Tiny Vipers sound possessed of an almost limitless darkness, one which she/they construct out of the barest tools available: finger-picked guitar & voice. There is no speaker from which Tiny Vipers' new one will leap out at you, no grocery aisle in which its audible solitude will sound at home. The whole world is too crowded for this record. The only place in which it can live is the confined space of an individual skull. I think it is incredible; I think lyrically it achieves something that lots of people aim for but few hit, i.e., the cusp of desolation. She mumbles sometimes with more weight than most people can scare up for their most carved-out enunciations: "It's not wrong/it's just a feeling," she seems to say at one point, swallowing the "g" in "feeling" and refusing to commit to the "t" in not. It's a heavy moment, because it shores up the insecurity inherent in even voicing such a sentiment in the first place. Which makes for something of a terrifying moment, one among many on the album.

Can't recommend this record highly enough, really. If this is the 2nd time I've mentioned it, sorry to repeat myself, but there are some of you - not all of you - who will respond as strongly to it as I have, and you won't regret having heard about it twice if that's what it takes for you to have heard it once.