Simeon Kirkegaard's album "*" arrived, and it’s been rattling around my head like loose change in an empty pocket ever since. This Nordic musician dives headfirst into the murky, churning waters of lost love and the obsessive echo it leaves behind across ten distinct yet interwoven tracks. It maps out a landscape not just of longing, but of the peculiar haunting that follows a...

A rubber band ball, meticulously constructed and then unceremoniously dropped, that's what Outside Pedestrian's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" feels like. Not the ball itself, mind you, but the brief, elastic snap of unexpected order being momentarily... let go. We know the Bach tune. It’s a holiday staple, often served up with a side of polite reverence. But here, Anthony Fesmire’s guitar, David Lockeretz’s...