New Music Guide for Solidarity Activists – AFGJ SATURDAY!

by James Patrick Jordan, for AFGJ Saturday

AFGJ SATURDAY! Is a new, occasional effort from the Alliance for Global Justice to give a little something back to our supporters, something fun, useful, and, yes, related to political struggle and the overall vision and mission of AFGJ. For the launch of the series we are providing a list of new albums of interest to activists who may not have time to follow the latest developments in music, but genuinely wish they could.

New Music Guide for Solidarity Activists

By James Patrick Jordan for AFGJ SATURDAY!

Keeping up with what’s going on culturally is a time-consuming endeavor. For those of us who don’t just keep up, who are out there trying to make a change, it can seem impossible. But the reality is that those who only engage with the world’s troubles will wind up forgetting just what we’re fighting for. We fight for a better, more beautiful world. When we forget that, we lose the very soul of what we protect and what we aim for. Good music helps us remember.

As a service to you, dear comrade, I have put together these reviews of some new albums from 2022 (so far). My criteria is simple enough—the albums have to have been released this year, must relate in some way to people’s struggle and culture, with special emphasis to albums with Latin America solidarity themes (because that is what AFGJ specializes in), and, well, of course, I have to like it! So, here you have it, and I hope you will find something here that you will like and make part of your soundtrack as you take to the streets for peace, justice, liberation – and beauty.

If you appreciate this little gift from AFGJ to you, and if you are also a fan of the day-in, day-out work we do against imperialism and for liberation across the Americas and around the world, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution. We simply can’t do what we need to do without your support!

Okay, here goes, your activist listening guide for 2022…so far….

Tom Zé, Lingua Brasileira The great Tom Zé has produced an infinitely listenable album called Lingua Brasileira (Brazilian Language), a biting, critical, and defiant celebration of Brazilian culture that has flourished despite a legacy of colonialism and oppression. Even if you know nothing of Portuguese, you’ll find a way, somehow, to sing along.

While Zé celebrates the voice of Brazil, we must take a moment to celebrate his voice and the fact that it was not lost. Born in 1936, Zé was one of the originators of the Tropicália sound of the 1960s. His work drifted into obscurity during the 1970s and 80s until David Byrne (Talking Heads) signed him to his Luaka Bop label, and his career took off again.

The album’s title song takes on Eurocentric lusophones who decry Brazilian Portuguese as a degraded form of the language. He denounces the colonialism that brought Portuguese to Brazilian shores, and celebrates how the New World reformation of the language, drawing on a variety of sources, has enriched the world with its poetry and rhythmic musicality. The song lashes out at the “House of Aviz” dynasty that was in power at the time Portugal began the colonization of Brazil.

When you smile at me…

cultured and beautiful lady language of Aviz…

there where you sew a multitude of woes, bitter honey,

slices of fear, and very sour wine all in abundance….

You serve me with pain,

With laughter you ask for my life and heart….

Babel of languages,

You seduce Africa, yield to the Gentiles

Nouns, verbs….

Your eyes conquer the Moors.

The sea-craft pilot steals

From unknown souls and abysses…

Every sailor continent hunting….

Astonished you see our destiny

our Samba songs….”

Tom Zé will remind US fans of Woody Guthrie’s guitar when he talks about “my war guitar”, very similar to what Guthrie had scrawled on his guitar: “This machine kills fascists.” For Zé, like Guthrie, music and culture is struggle. As he sings in Unimultiplicidade (Unimultiplicity),

 “In this Brazil

Corruption kicks ass,

Damned bag of stink….

In this country of bosses…

There’s always someone doing well….

I take my war guitar

To respond to this dirt…”

Tom Zé displays a culture that has transcended colonialism to create new language, new music. He may be singing about Brazil, but his message is truly universal.

Hurray for the Riff Raff, Life on Earth Hurray for the Riff Raff’s latest album takes their underground folk  music into new territory. The directness of the songs almost hides the layered nature of the arrangements. The at times minimalist approach shows in its restraint a high degree of forethought. The constant balance that interweaves the threads into a whole fabric, requires the listener to pay attention to what’s going on beneath the surface, which is really where most the action is. Nothing is placed above any other part—except the voice, except the song itself. The strong vocals of Alynda Segarra almost obscure the many harmonies, including the intriguing interplay of the background vocals to the opening song, Wolves. Segarra’s voice is like molasses, or maybe it’s like fly paper. Either way, it sticks to you, and you stick to it. Segarra is Puerto Rican born in New York, who left the city as a teenager, riding freight trains for a while before settling down in New Orleans.

The album Life on Earth tackles a number of themes, all of them in a very personal way. The titular song is a kind of meditation on both the continuity and fragility of life on this beloved planet. It is an affirmation that is both tender and hopeful yet sad because of the unspoken but underlying sense of threat our world faces. It recognizes both the strength and the fragility of Earth and its creatures. As the lyrics say:

“Sky and the trees

And birds and the bees

Life on earth is long

Rivers and lakes

And floods and earthquakes

Life on earth is long….

Monarchs and flight

Dawn’s early light

Life on earth is long

And the sun in the west and the one you love best

Life on earth is long

And oh, I might not meet you there

Spirit blinded by despair

Oh, but the lighting strikes

To illuminate the night

And oh, I might not meet you there

Through galaxies, of song and prayer

I’ll be lost in time….”

The song Precious Cargo will have special relevance for immigrant rights activists. The song is delivered with a subtle but steady and inescapable syncopation, and tells about someone who is picked up by the Border Patrol, separated from family, and subjected to harsh and prolonged detention.

Meridian Brothers y El Grupo Renacimiento, Meridian Brothers y El Grupo RenacimientoThis is a band from Colombia that sings about the world we live in from a very societal point of view, tackling some truly timely subjects, and with an underlying sensibility of peace, justice, human  autonomy, and, yes, the absurd. Their song La Policía, predictably, talks about the police and, you know, trying to avoid them. The song Bomba Atómica, as you might imagine, talks about bombs and wars and how bad they are for us all. I guess the song that really speaks to me is Metamorphosis, which worries not so much about the Kafkaesque notion of turning into a cockroach, but about a much more relevant problem: humans turning into robots. In this song, the author prays to an African deity to be saved from a future where humans are becoming computerized cyborgs who have lost all sense of living in a real flesh and blood natural world.

Above and beyond the lyrics, this album is just simply fun and fascinating with its Caribbean roots, tropical rhythms, mixed with some general vocal strangeness (in a good, no, make that wonderful way) that makes even the most reluctant to dance want to get up and move. This is an album for weirdos with a sense of rhythm. If that describes you, it will carry you happily away, even when they’re singing about worrisome things! What better and more enjoyable way for the modern human to rediscover their connections with their inner cave dweller!

Golden Boots, LIquid Ranch Be forewarned: Listen to this album just once, and you’ll find you can’t get some of these songs out of your head! The album is as infectious as music can be. They’ll throw more hooks at you than a heavyweight boxer. But also be forewarned: the catchiness and pop sensibilities are intermixed with rather dark social commentary, and some undeniable sonic weirdness. A perfect example is Party USA 666, with its super hooky music mixed in with a wonderfully askew sax solo. Tucson’s Golden Boots are  a true marriage of both pop and underground.

I should reveal that the two leaders of the band, Ryen Eggleston and Dimitri Manos, are two of my best friends ever and have even recorded a couple of my songs (Purify and She Just Wanted to Watch the Sky). For what it’s worth, I met them as musicians before we became friends. So, even when I didn’t really know them, i was a fan..

Another thing I’ll say about Golden Boots: these guys are working class. I know, they used to work for me some when I had my own landscaping business. Dimitri is an excellent tree pruner! These days, they support themselves doing odd jobs, mainly house painting, as well as scraping around for whatever money they can get playing gigs. Truly, all music made by workers is political. It’s a struggle against the full weight of oppressive capitalism any and every time someone, after a full day’s hard work for The Man, picks up a guitar and sings a song.

But be assured, this album is very political. Right off the bat, with the opening song, “Lookout!”, they sing to us:

“Look out look out

They’re all around

They’re buying up your little town

They’re building up & we’re all going down….

Look out look out….

The cost of living keeps us drugged….

Look out look out

They’re in the sky

Watching with that lidless eye

Watching everything you buy….

Look out look out

They’re everywhere, burning through

Your thoughts and prayers

The bloody bullets burn the air”

A similarly dark but super catchy song is the already mentioned Party USA 666, which fantasizes about the aftermath of the final party in a world that has died:

“This burninjg world

Lights up the night

The last weekend

The final Friday night

The big blow-out

American style….

‘gee it must have been great’

Said the rich folk watching from space

The rain will wash the confetti away

Feed the rust & keep the fires at bay

Radiation, cities of sand

and no one left to pay the bands”

Ah, those working class bands… still worried about getting paid, even after the final gig….

Their final song, Suicide Electric leaves us with this caution:

“The petty powers that play

Deliver Death in their wake

The Meek shall inherit

Whatever We can Take 

Your dazzling dreams are just greedy

Schemes on flashing screens of vanity

The Wolf is at the door & all that

We can say is ‘Give us MORE’”

You can listen to this album for free, but it’s really nice if you go to their site on bandcamp and pay these working stiffs for their work! And, best of all, if you actually send in an order for the album’s vinyl version, you get a really cool little lyric book/fanzine.

Linqua Franqa, BellringerMore than any other reviewed here, this album comes from the heart of struggle, presented by someone who is out there every day fighting for a better world. Linqua Franqa, aka Mariah Parker is an African heritage artist born in Louisville, Kentucky, and now living in Athens, Georgia. Athens is famous for being a college town, and for producing bands like R.E.M., the B-52s, and Pylon. But beyond the college parties there is another Athens, situated in a county with a 30% poverty rate, marked by entrenched racism and class oppression. That’s the Athens and the world that Linqua Franqa tells us about, and she means to change it.

Ms. Parker has a truly beautiful voice, and mixed in with rap, she sometimes breaks into singing. Another thing to know about Linqua Franqa is that she holds a Ph.D in linguistics, is openly queer, and has served as a county commissioner sworn in with a copy of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, held by her mother. I mean, can we just elect this woman as our next president?

Linqua Franqa is certainly a voice of Black people, of the queer, of all women. And she’s a voice for every single working person of whatever background. Being an old communist and union supporter, and someone who has more than a few times sung that song of songs “Which Side Are You On?” and chanted that chant, “El pueblo unido jamas será vencido”, I was especially blown away when I got to the song Wurk. I’m just going to print the entire lyrics here and if you know what’s good for you—you’re going to, right this minute, get a copy of this gem of an album.

“Communication Workers of America

United Campus Workers of Georgia 3265 bish!

Which side are you on

Workers ship the boxes

They swiffer and the mop and

Look chipper whenever talking

and whipping the shopping carts

They pack the beer in the walk-ins

and stack the weird little boxes

Keep our kitchen fridges stocked and

our financial markets solvent

They clock in for a pithy fitty bucks

And bear the coughing of like sixty thrifty chad’s

And get spit on like sitting ducks

And they are sick of getting fucked

So you ever wanted to honor them?

Here’s my ask for all my hominids: collective bargainin

Amazon and Target and Fedex and Walmart and Instacart and Whole Foods til we all get what we oughta get

Workers run the company, there isn’t any argument

So are you with them are you in?

El pueblo unido jamás será vencido

Which side are you on

Imagine a minute, millions of average women and men in the tragic position

Of trading in passion for wages in cash cause they shackled by capitalism

Imagine a minute, millions of average citizens

Planting the spinach and waxing the kitchens and stacking the linens, contractors and renters and tenants, their labor extracted for pittance

What if they coordinated to address the sordid state of it in an organization?

Guess fucking what! That’s what organized labor does

And not even sort of it’s more of the crux

Taking the power from hoarders of bucks,

Big bankers offshoring their cuts,

Returning the value of labor to those who create it the billionaires owe it to us

So if you jaded and surly bout waking up early to earn a bag, if you sad about Bernie, if you’ve got a curious yearning and had it with passively lurking,

We got your back and we happy to have ya,

out on the picket line actively working going

Which side are you on?”

Adia Victoria, A Southern Gothic plus In the Pines, and Ain’t Killed Me Yet – Adia Victoria, like Linqua Franqa, is also a Black woman from the South, currently based in Nashville, originally from South Carolina. I admit that I have broken my own rules here because the album A Southern Gothic was released in 2021, not 2022. I  justify this because she has released two new singles this year, so, on the basis of that, I’ve included them with the album in this listing. And, honestly, I could write about each and every song from the album, but I was so utterly blown away by the song In the Pines that I just went on a free throught stream of consciousness ramble when I first heard it..

But before I include my own reactions, let me share Adia’s own words about this song:

“In 2019, I spent an afternoon poring over the journal I kept during my junior year of high school in Mauldin, SC. Revisiting the frustrations and observations of my 16-year-old self would lead to the creation of ‘In The Pines’—a song that tells the story of a teenage girl from a small conservative town whose slow slide towards self-destruction is recounted by her best friend. It is the all-too-familiar story of how young women desperate search in vain for escape from totalizing ideologies that define their lives and the lives around them. It is a young girl’s quest for autonomy via rebellion over her life. Failing that, she will ultimately have autonomy over her own death. The song centers the stories of those who fall victim to the ideologies of emotionally stunted men. I dedicate ‘In the Pines’ to every teenage girl who is desperately scratching at the walls of ideological imprisonment. It is a song that I hope reminds them that they are not alone in their hunt for freedom.”

Here’s my initial ramble on hearing the song for the first time:

Adia Victoria is haunting in so many ways. She is a young woman, producing new music, yet all of it seems so old. She’s like a young tree in an ancient forest. The thing about Adia Victoria is that from the minute she starts singing, it’s not just her you’re listening to, but generations and generations of voices, of lost voices, come back demanding to be heard. She brings new life to a world of the dead and buried in the many unquiet graves of the South and of this entire country.

In the Pines, just wow. I had to start this over only a few seconds into hearing it for the first time. The starkness and the directness came on almost too soon, so fast, you might miss the beauty, just had to pick it up and start over, the opening notes just stripped down to her powerful voice and those elemental first sounds. Adia Victoria’s voice, its beauteous frankness, and the harmonies, the harmonies, the harmonies, like wind whistling through the cracks of an old barn somewhere up high in the mountains, where the tobacco is hung and curing, and the wind is whistling all around and in from the pines, the pines that fill and surround and engulf and smother these barren hollows. This song makes you ache in the deepest corners of your heart with a loneliness that, if it can’t be transformed, will certainly kill you.

Los Shapis, En El Mundo de los Pobres Los Shapis was formed in 1981, and are progenitors of Peru’s chicha music style, a mix of influences including traditional huaynos and more modern rock and roll and psychedelic guitar sounds. This is Los Shapis first new offering since 2008, but they haven’t lost anything in the last 14 years. This is another example of really catchy music that packs a punch.

The title song, in English, is “In the World of the Poor”, explains that

“We…. lovingly sing to my proletarian brothers

Of Peru….

I want to say to you, brother,

Or ocean fisher,

To the farm worker in the country,

To the factory worker,

That the world of the poor

Is yours and my world….

Farmers, professors, miners,

University students, wanderers,

And all the comedians,

Let’s go, already, like this, like this,

For a spin.”

Bob Marley with the Chineke! Orchestra, Bob Marley with the Chineke! Orchestra Look, you already know the songs and you’re already familiar with the words. From your Get Up, Stand Up to your Redemption Song, this album can really, you know, Stir It Up! And stir it up it does, mixing the sounds of the late Bob Marley, who obviously, couldn’t be releasing a new album of new material, given that he’s been gone from us for several decades now. What’s new are the additions of the work of the Chineke! Orchestra, the first orchestra in Europe that is majority Black. And, no, they don’t sound like they put on some Bob Marley records and just played over the top. What the Chineke! Orchestra has done is to very artfully reframe and recontextualize the songs, with orchestral augmentations and underlying foundations that really and truly work. Reggae and orchestral arrangements—find out for yourself!

Xênia França, Renascer – Brazilian singer Xênia França is a former model turned musician whose music showcases the African roots to the country’s music, and whose songs have been important sources of inspiration for Afro- and all Brazilian women. While the album is not overtly political, it is an album that affirms and encourages the listener.  The song Ancestral Infinito (Infinite Ancestor) is an example:

“The arrow comes from afar

And always hits the horizon

I leave the door open

for you to enter

spark in the dark

Dream big, play hard

It’s you who creates your world…

ancestral, maternal, infinite.

The song Animus x Anima advises her many listening brothers:

“Hey brother

You are losing your mind

You’ve been drinking illusion

Wandering around just clueless

Take off that armor brother….

Don’t you see my brother

In the midst of this war, brother,

who are you fighting for?”

OKI, Tankori in the MoonlightOKI, born on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, is Ainu, from the indigenous people of Japan. He notes that, “I might travel on a Japanese passport but I am Ainu”. He is also one of only a few masters of the Tankori, a five-stringed Ainu harp.

OKI collaborates with several different partners from different traditions, and at the same time this album revitalizes traditional Ainu music, it also creates a new fusion of world music, bringing in and adapting a variety of styles and approaches.

Is this a political album? Many of the songs are re-framings of Ainu folk songs, and the words are in a language I don’t understand at all. But I would argue that any time musicians contribute such stunning arrangements breathing new life into old songs, that the very effort to both preserve a culture in danger of extinction, and to make it relevant to a new day and time, is itself a political struggle.

The songs are also celebrations and explorations of the natural world, from an Ainu vantage point. The music is spacious and meditative and, even more, integrative. With titles like Bear Trap Rhythm, Tonkori in the Moonlight, Wake Up Sun, you can hear the voices and the ecosystems described. With the song Grasshopper Dance, you can see, hear, and feel the grasshoppers jumping about.

Ratas de Porão, Necra PolíticaOkay, head bangers, thrashers, and monsters of the mosh pit, this offering is for YOU! The band’s political anger and disgust is on full display. Singer João Gordo explained in an interview about why he will vote for Workers Party presidential candidate Lula da Silva, that he would vote for his dog if that would keep current extreme-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro from being elected. The initial song, Alerta Antifascista (Antifascist Alert) speaks directly to Bolsonaro:

“Depraved genocide,

Dictator who eats people…

Immoral liar

Decadent human being

Specialist in killing

Privatizing the present

Without a future to dream

Alert! Antifascist alert!…”

No less subtle are the lyrics to Necropolítica, lashing out at the politics of death:

“Being able to decide who should live

Being able to decide who should die

WHO MUST DIE

NECROPOLITICS

NECROPOWER

Fuck life!

mass death

disposable lives

macabre agenda

racist machine”

The words to the songs are shouted and growled, and the music comes on like a full-on hurricane, just like the hurricane the band wants to see blow away the power of Brazil’s extreme right. This album is not for the faint of heart or the delicate of ear. But it is for those who are angry and ready to drive out the fascists and start building a better world!

Nano Stern, Aún Creo en la BellezaI cannot tell you how many times I have gotten down and depressed about the world and put on music by Nano Stern to lift me up and keep me going. If Ratos de Porãu gets right in your face and makes you look at all that’s wrong, then Nano Stern is the one who helps you look even further. Really, as different as their styles are, they kind of go together in a weird way. Seriously, listen to them back to back!

Nano Stern’s new album, Aún Creo en la Belleza (I Still Believe in Beauty) from beginning to end, is all about encouragement, but it is not shallow. Stern knows about repression and an extreme right bent on crushing the people.. He was born in the final years of the US-supported dictatorship of Agosto Pinochet. As a Chilean, he is heir to a tradition of popular struggle that has famously been propelled by poets and singers, from Pablo Neruda to Violeta Parra and Victor Jara, right up to the current plethora of musicians who are part of the struggles in the streets.

Stern’s music shows a tenderness and love of beauty that underlies every word he writes, and every note he sings. This new album is an encapsulation of evolutionary optimism. Indeed, it is a statement of faith. Stern has said that he believes “in the beautiful, a religion of the possible.” That meshes well with the less mystical, yet just as hopeful words of Ché: “Be realistic, demand the impossible!”

The opening song Inventemos un País (Let’s Invent a Country), addresses this age of pandemic, climate disasters, neoliberal exploitation, and wars, and calls on the people to maintain, to resist, to survive, to come together to create a new country, a new Latin America, a new world. This internationalism is underscored by the guest appearance of Peruvian poet Omar Camino.

Asked by an interviewer, “Why do you still believe in beauty?”, Stern responds, “Because in this world… it seems to me that doing so is necessarily a vindication…. Beauty has been relegated to a merely decorative role, and attending to it ends up being a countercultural issue. I allow myself an etymological escape: vindicate, from the Latin vindicare, implies the recovery of something lost, and it is in this sense that the “still” becomes essential.”

 

Nano Stern is a musician’s musician, a multi-instrumentalist who began studying violin at the age of three. Likewise, all the musicians he plays with are masters of their instruments. The compositions are presented so lovingly and effortlessly that you almost forget how much work has gone into them. Even without the words, the music is so intricate that from the first listen, one knows that these are musicians who have dedicated their lives to Beauty.

Tanya Tagaq, Tongues It can be a deep misunderstanding when people describe music as  experimental, which usually implies a novelty and strangeness to the ear. One could describe Tanya Tagaq’s music as experimental, certainly as different from the usual fare. But it is also as old as the first life form that was able to grunt out a breath or create some microscopic waves rubbing its cilia together. While Tagaq challenges our smoothed over and watered down conceptions of music, she does so by taking us on a journey that cuts through caverns of geological strata to a place that is both primordial and futuristic. She takes us someplace where sound gives birth to music, where anger and beauty dance together, where the loneliness of “civilization” and “colonization” crumble before shouts of defiance and cries of liberation, where the children of the future are cradled by the ageless.

Tanya Tagaq is many things. What she is not is easily reduced to one or two notions. Tagaq is Inuk, from among the first nations colonized by the occupation of North America. If you look her up, pretty much every review you find will begin by saying she is a “throat singer”. That’s sort of like saying that Beethoven was a pianist. Yes, she is a throat singer, and much more. She is a wordsmith, a sound shaper, a person who pulls deep and complex responses from the listener, challenging preconceived notions. She is an iconoclast who destroys buildings to get us back to the very Earth upon which our buildings have been raised—to create new structures on ancient foundations. When Tagaq sings, Shiva dances. Tagaq’s words destroy to create.

Her words can also be overwhelmingly simple and to the point. Why say more than what needs to be said? The entire lyrics to her song Colonizer can be reduced to the following:

“Colonizer…

Oh, you’re guilty….

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Her song, Tongues, defies the colonizer with its insistence not only on survival, but on freedom,

“They tried to take our tongues….

You can’t take our blood

You can’t take that from us

You can’t have my tongue….

I don’t want your shame

It doesn’t belong to me

You can’t have my tongue

Inuuvunga (I am an Inuk)”

Tanya Tagaq is tough, loving, and tender. In her song, Teeth Agape, she expresses a parent’s and a caregiver’s protectiveness:

“I will sharpen my claws

Bare my teeth…

One tongue

Cannot speak of the

Fight that comes from survival….

Touch my children

And my teeth welcome your windpipe….

I will hunch my shoulders and wait

Claws sharpened

Teeth agape”

Her song Do Not Fear Love can be experienced as a guided meditation, exhorting us to

“Inhale small fears….

Exhale large fears

And large words….

Inhale small fears

They whisper and they travel to your mind…

Observe them

And thank them

For trying to protect you

They’re trying to protect you

They’re trying to protect you

Exhale acknowledgment of the beauty within your instincts

And the courage

To love small fears

Inhale hard love…

Inhale all the goodness and the love that is given to you

Exhale calmness and acknowledgment of the beauty within the courage it takes to

Not fear love

Do not fear love

Do not fear love”

Midnight Oil, ResistHonestly, I didn’t even know Australia’s Midnight Oil was still around! I thought they disappeared with the 1980s, but they’ve been keeping up a pretty steady output, it seems! Well, you know, reviewing music is not my profession, so please forgive my ignorance. However, from what I gather, their music and lyrics have continued on, but not changed much since the days of their hit single Beds Are Burning. The music still sounds very ‘80s, and the words are straight ahead, no subtlety here. The title of the album says it all: they’re calling on us to get our acts together, to resist, and to save this world. And they’re making us old folks feel understandably ashamed of the world our children and grandchildren are inheriting. Right from the first track, Rising Seas, they make their indictment:

“Every child, put down your toys

And come inside to sleep

We have to look you in the eye

And say, “We sold you cheap”

Let’s confess, we did not act

With serious urgency

So open up the floodgates

To the rising seas”

Give the record a listen. They sing about many themes—ecology, racism, colonialism, and the struggle to save this planet. You won’t have any trouble understanding what they’re trying to tell us. It’s all in the album’s name: Resist!

I truly hope this new music guide has been useful to you. If it has, you’ll be glad to know that more is on the way! There are several 2022 albums I wanted to review but didn’t get to. And there are some that are coming but haven’t yet been released, including new works from Ana Tijoux, Charley Crockett, and the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, to name just a few. Expect a follow-up in December, just in time for your holiday shopping!

If you find this guide useful, and if you support the work AFGJ is doing to build a new, better, beautiful world, please show us some love and support us today with your tax-deductible contribution! Thank you—and enjoy the music!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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