There is a particular heavy gravity to December afternoons, a specific slant of light that Gavin Fox manages to shoulder and inspect closely in his latest single, "Where I Belong". This isn't the shiny, plastic joy of commercial holiday tunes; it is the acoustic texture of the season as it is actually lived—often separated, occasionally lonely, and universally hopeful. https://open.spotify.com/track/54Xlu7cN2d8UiNJA6K1xG7?si=212baf49bb7d4c7f Fox, a Dublin-based storyteller who wears...

Sophia Mengrosso’s new album, “Unforgiven”, doesn’t so much start as it does detonate, a thirteen-song treatise on survival. Her voice, a thing clearly trained for gilded halls and velvet curtains, instead wails from within a foundry’s clang and fire. The result is a bizarre and beautiful collision, the sonic equivalent of discovering a lost Caravaggio painting lit by a flickering fluorescent tube in a...