There are songs that arrive carrying a room with them: the studio air, the private impulse, the public ache outside the door. In the case of Black November's 'Burning Desire', that room appears to be Mix Sound Studio in Thessaloniki, but it also holds the heavier air of Greece after the Tempi train tragedy. The cover single, does not treat admiration for an older composition as...

Some doors do not close with a slam. They remain half-open, daring a person to walk back through them after the room behind them has grown small and airless. The past can be persuasive that way. It offers familiar furniture, old names, a version of comfort that asks too much in return. "Backwards, Baby," the latest single from Caitlin Kent-Halliday, begins from that human pressure...