Listening to Bloomfield Machine's new seventeen-track instrumental album, “Copium,” feels a bit like stepping into a terrarium during a quiet downpour. The title itself suggests a kind of modern, knowing self-delusion, the balm we apply just to get by. Yet, the music crafted by Huntington Beach’s Brian Kassan is far too sincere for pure cynicism. This isn’t the sound of giving up; it’s the...

Listening to John Keenan’s “Wreckage of the Past” feels like being handed the audio diary of a ghost who is not yet dead. This is an 18-song excavation of a psyche at war, made all the more intense by the knowledge that Keenan is the sole architect—producer, writer, mixer, and tormented protagonist. The whole project has the hermetically sealed, slightly feverish quality of a...