Jonathan Rado is a songwriter, a staid performer, an evangelical producer; the 23-year-old California native's solo project, fashioned on brief sabbatical from his main project, Foxygen, is a deliciously self-conscious piece of esoteric apocrypha. Like character games, or symphonies of nonsense imitation-language, his records are cathartic, designed only to liberate the body and break the awkwardness of obsessive, existential silence. Alone in a bedroom, the holy land where he's been experimenting with recording since junior high, Rado laughs nervously and eats his fingernails, awestruck by the sublimity of the aural world. The smallness of his own anemic voice confounds the babe agape, and only by adopting the task of genre does he transcend his own limitations to stand comfortably at the precipice of sound. On his debut solo album Law and Order, the San Fernando Valley and the Lower East Side flirt over muddy coffee, get married over corned beef, and give birth to a Motown drum beat-but something is amiss. For example, there is no bass line on LA-psychedelic-dance-jam "Seven Horses," and not a single hand clap satisfies the droning singer's gently repetitive request, "If you feel it all, clap your hands." "Hand in Mine" sounds like an idea Johnny Cash had while sleepwalking through a fever dream. The zonked-out guitarist settles back to warm Christmas sleep but dreams only of synthesizers. "Looking 4a Girl Like U" is an opium den, and there in the running shower Prince stands, sultry. He kaleidoscopically unbuttons his soaked, sequined shirt for six consecutive minutes, screaming "baaaaaby" and ego-dancing. On "I Wood," a folk spasm of paranoid schizophrenia, Rado's Bob Dylan vowels pile so heavily upon a White Fence-minor progression that Tim Presley actually materializes on "Faces" to turn off the water and steamy distortion. "All the Lights Went Out in Georgia" is a self-loathing diary entry thrown into a fire, and "Pot of Gold" gets too drunk, freaks out and starts hitting on everybody. So Rado wraps up the album and apologizes to everyone, promising not to invite that guy over anymore.

Dispossession is the second full length from Brooklyn’s Mike Wexler, and his debut for Mexican Summer. An artist who defies easy categorization—a songwriter/guitarist without a traditionalist bone in his body, with an ear for far flung sound-worlds and sonic atmospheres both high & low, Wexler brings all of his manifold interests to bear in carving out a space for a singular vision uniquely attuned to the present moment. Dispossession is the product of over two years of intermittent recording. It features players from the worlds of underground rock (ex members of White Magic and The Occasion), free improvisation (Ryan Sawyer, Nate Wooley, Jessica Pavone), synth and string textures inspired by the likes of Eliane Radigue and the Spectralists, a vocal and lyrical presence of unsettling, near-subliminal depth, and the omnipresent backbone of fingerstyle guitar, without a trace of “Americana” to be heard. The basic band tracks were recorded live, at more or less the moment when the arrangements first crystallized, so there’s a bedrock of spontaneity and a free feeling to the proceedings, complicated by the highly mapped-out nature of the subsequent orchestration, synth washes and overdubs. It’s a record that fits the broken mold of auteurist songwriters who nod to the ideas of forward looking writers and artists in their work, a loose lineage that could include musicians like Robert Wyatt, Scott Walker, or Richard Youngs.
A few words about the title: Dispossession, a word that has a foothold in both the spiritual and material worlds. A rite of exorcism, a casting out of spirits; but also a state of extreme economic marginalization, of being set adrift in the world with nowhere or nothing of one’s own. In mythic terms, humans are the dispossessed—this tribe cast out of an edenic paradise. And in another cosmology, to live in accord with the truth is to acknowledge that ultimately nothing is ours. Back in the here and now it’s a state much of the world is in, and one the rest of it may be headed for, barring we find a way to cast the “demons” out.

The Coral are an English rock band, formed in 1996 in Hoylake on the Wirral Peninsula, Merseyside. The band emerged during the early 2000s.