Cat Stevens Tell 'em I'm Gone

For singer/songwriter Becca Stevens, making music is a charmed form of service—a means of mining her own experience for insight into the beautiful complexity of being alive, in the hopes of providing others with understanding and solace and a renewed sense of strength. But in the early days of 2023, the North Carolina-bred artist felt an overwhelming need to process two monumental changes in her life (the death of her mother and the start of her own journey into motherhood), and soon sought the comfort and catharsis of pure self-expression. By the time she emerged from that period of unfettered creativity, Stevens had completed her new album Maple to Paper: an illuminating glimpse into her most private moments of grief and transcendence, rendered with both stunning clarity and heartfelt devotion to music’s alchemical powers.

London’s Black Cat Bones were one of those bands from the late '60s that served as an incubator for its various members’ later rock incarnations, in this case the bands Free, Foghat, and Bad Company, all of whom drew members from Black Cat Bones. As an intact band, they only released a single album, Barbed Wire Sandwich, on Decca Records in 1969, and then splintered into the future. The album itself is a collection of rather generic period British blues pieces, a bit reminiscent of Cream in sound, although that doesn’t hinder cuts like “Chauffer” and the best track here, “Please Tell Me Baby,” from taking off into some interesting territory.

Seventeen-track anthology focuses mostly on their popular 1963-66 recordings, including "Deep Purple," "Whispering," "Stardust," "All Strung Out," several lower-charting items, and some LP tracks. They milked the "Deep Purple" formula too many times, but this is enjoyably frothy pop, and "All Strung Out" is a genuinely soulful, accurate approximation of Phil Spector's work with the Righteous Brothers. The disc also includes Stevens's 1959 solo single "Teach Me Tiger," a bizarre cover of "I Love How You Love Me" (with battling bagpipes and fuzzy guitars), and one undistinguished track each from 1985 and 1996.

Aporia is a New Age album from Sufjan Stevens and his step-father and record label co-owner, Lowell Brams. The 21 songs on Aporia are tightly crafted, resonating with a gem-like intensity, made in the spirit of the New Age composers who sanded off the edges of their synths’ sawtooth waves. Aporia approximates a rich soundtrack from an imagined sci-fi epic brimming with moody, hooky, gauzy synthesizer soundscapes, suggesting the progeny of a John Carpenter, Wendy Carlos, and Mike Oldfield marriage – but it stands apart from these touchstones and generates a meditative universe all its own.