New and noteworthy

Dopamine and Jesus

Luke Bower

A self-professed matriculant of the late Rich Mullins’ school of transparency, this 23-year-old guitar-strumming Texan captures—at times with a frightening intensity—the struggles that any serious believer faces once he decides to confront his doubts honestly and head-on. Throw in an emotionally turbulent past checkered with therapy and its attendant medications, Biblical conversance, singing as if through clenched teeth, and a sonic palette that puts the “alt” in “alt-country” (bouzouki, anyone?), and you have everything necessary for the Christian music without guardrails of your dreams.

Something There: Remembering Jeffrey Foskett 

Jeffrey Foskett

The Foskett album to own if you’re going to own just one is the 2004 compilation Stars in the Sand. But if you’re going to own two, consider this audio scrapbook. We get a cappella snippets, Foskett pre–Beach Boys, Brian Wilson duets, Foskett cameos (on songs by Christopher Cross, America, Los Straitjackets), and killer covers (Foskett nailing Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” Foskett’s daughter nailing “I Can Hear Music”). Of the handful of previously anthologized solo cuts, “Cool and Gone” is the most valedictory.

Nuit Exotique: Music for Theremin and Piano 

Thorwald Jørgensen, Kamilla Bystrova

I seriously doubt that a Zefir Records exec pulled Jørgensen and Bystrova aside after their last release, 2020’s Air Électrique, and said, “Auerbach, Schillinger, Beluntsov, and Rostovskaya are nice, but how about some familiar composers?” I do note, however, that this album includes Messiaen, Debussy, and Ravel (twice)—and that the eerie, otherworldly beauty of Jørgensen’s theremin feels less like an end in itself as a result.

Enough

Mary-Clair

This surprisingly confident and accomplished CCM debut owes some of its operational efficiency to the producers and co-writers—Mary-Clair herself has credited the album’s most arresting line, “The weight of the world is as light as your heart is,” to Julia Ross. But Mary-Clair is the one giving voice to the sentiments, and because she inhabits them rather than putting them across, she comes across sincere. How else could she sound as comfortable introducing “Crying in the Chapel” to Gen Z as she does missing departed loved ones (“Heaven in the Way”) or pining for her Tennessee home (“Homesick”)?

The Making of Five Leaves Left Nick Drake

Encore

In 1969, a reclusive, smoky-voiced English singer-songwriter named Nick Drake debuted with Five Leaves Left, a pastoral and quietly stunning album of what might now be called “chamber folk.” He would complete two more long players before dying—depressed and possibly suicidal—in 1974 at age 26. A commercial failure while alive, he has gone on to considerable posthumous acclaim, especially in England, where his initial output and three of his seven compilations have gone gold.

There’s now an eighth, a four-disc box on Island Records called The Making of Five Leaves Left. Hampered somewhat by redundancy (Disc 4 is simply the original Five Leaves Left as remastered in 2000), the set nevertheless presents many stripped-down alternate takes and demos that sound as crisp and clear as those on any official album of acoustic introspection. Coming as it does after these, the fully produced final version, replete with woodwinds and strings, sounds fuller and more haunting than ever. —A.O.