#dead oceans

[nofatclips]

Bug Like an Angel by Mitski from the album The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We - Music video starring K.J. Holmes, directed by Noel Paul

[furbybr1dgers]

Mitski and her Dean Custom Zone 4 string Bass <3

[my2016]

Mitski — Puberty 2 (Album)

Exactly 10 years ago, on June 17, 2016, Mitski released her fourth studio album Puberty 2!

[discwolfe]

slowdive - everything is alive (2023)

[iamlisteningto]

Mitski’s Nothing’s About To Happen To Me

[japanesecds]

Mitski - Be The Cowboy

Released: 03 Aug 2019 Japan

[dustedmagazine]

Kevin Morby — Little Wide Open (Dead Oceans)

The allusions come quickly on Kevin Morby's latest album, Little Wide Open. Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, David Berman, and Belinda Carlisle references show up almost immediately (Tom Cochrane takes a minute to arrive). There's a charm to the playfulness, but it functions almost like an establishing shot. Here we are, in the great breadth of American pop music, covering most of a continent. Morby, though, finds something very precise in the “wide open.” He's well situated in the Midwest for this album, but that geographic broad expanse serves as the setting for the particular, for moments in his life, and for the existential questions that arise with close examination.

The album opens with “Badlands” and its “big disaster we call home.” The challenge of sorting a big, beautiful life out of a demanding world runs throughout the album. Morby sings, “I can't tell if I'm in heaven or if I'm in the badlands.” He sounds puzzled, but he knows the truth: he's in both. He feels gratitude even for survival (“Die Young”), largely because he's found a way to fulfilling domesticity even as he's pursued his art, fully aware of the hurt around him, but persisting in the knowledge that “to live is to fly” (even if death offers a similar liftoff).

Morby gets help here from producer Aaron Dessner, who's rich pop sensibilities bring a new tone to the artist's typically midtempo music. The tone wouldn't have worked on 2016's haunted Singing Saw or 2022's Memphis-based This Is a Photograph; now, it's a perfect fit. Little Wide Open is middle America indie rock reaching outward, expanding without losing its groundedness. Likewise, the guest musicians (Meg Duffy, Justin Vernon, and others) make the album bigger without distracting from its specificity, even if it’s hard not to notice Lucinda Williams' vocals.

That specificity turns out to have a universal urgency, frequently based in the idea that time passes quickly and “takes its toll.” There's “a void” as wide as the Midwestern skies that gets us all. One option is to try to escape where we are. That's the sentiment on “Cowtown,” and when Morby wants to fly away, it's hard to be sure he means it in a life-affirming way. There are better options, though, mainly in recognizing the paradox of Heaven and the badlands being the same place, and digging into the life that we find there, grasping it in its fleeting time.

It's the sort of question that motivates closing track “Field Guide for the Butterflies.” Morby sings, “Is it suicide if I die out chasing thrills / Or is it just me trying to grow wings?” It's part of living large in your small space, a big life in the little wide open. It takes some poetry, some friends, some prayer. It's “a world that kills,” but it's also one full of breezes and partnership and tiny bits of bliss that outgrow everything else. Morby sounds at peace in his restlessness and wondering, and he's captured that feeling, even as it comes in all sizes.

Justin Cober-Lake

[thebowerypresents]

MUNA – Music Hall of Williamsburg – May 18, 2026

L.A. dance-pop trio MUNA landed in Brooklyn on Saturday to launch a four-night record-release party, celebrating the recent arrival of the band’s fourth LP, Dancing on the Wall, “an unwavering celebration of pop,” per Clash magazine.

(MUNA play Music Hall of Williamsburg tonight.)

(MUNA play Roadrunner in Boston on 10/1-2.)

Photos courtesy of Andrew Pintado | @drooshotya