Dried roses is my roundup of music, new and old, that I've recently enjoyed. Sometimes I try to write something profound about love, but inevitably end up using the word ‘apocalypse'.

Adrianne Lenker - Live at Revolution Hall

There's a moment on Adrianne Lenker's sprawling tape collage of a live album, Live at Revolution Hall, where she introduces 'Born for Loving You’ as a love song, and then proceeds to explain that all of her songs are love songs, because… Well, she doesn't quite find the words in the moment. Perhaps it doesn't need an explanation. Seeing Lenker live, hearing a new Big Thief album for the first time. Those are earthlike days, days where I feel incredibly connected and in love with my surroundings, lucky to be sharing a world with such music, such beauty. This album, rich with rumble, tape hiss and distortion, feels especially alive, precisely because it's not pristine. It's a well-worn mess. It sounds like it was cut yesterday, and could've also been playing on some 1950s country station.

Lenker loves so deeply, that it can make her come across a bit too hippieish at times (like that time she called out a fanmade bumper sticker). It's also her greatest strength as a songwriter. I no longer constantly listen to her music, but whenever I need a reminder that “love [is] without measure”, it's always there.

I haven't needed any reminders lately. I got 'civil partnered' in March, and although it came about for bureaucratic purposes, we ended up throwing a party after all. Knowing we wouldn't ever get 'properly’ married, this was the perfect excuse to bring everyone we loved together in one room. Some came from 800 metres away, others travelled 8,000 kilometres; some friends I'd known for sixteen years, others we'd met only months before. We billed it as 'a musical celebration of love, friendship, and bureaucracy', had friends and family play some of our favorite songs (The Mountain Goats' 'Going To Port Washington', Shania Twain's 'You're Still The One', and the folk traditional 'Shenandoah', among them), and made sure to be DJing ourselves for part of the night (our 'first dance' was to ‘Corona’ by The Minutemen, our last song a Lebanese cover of 'Stayin’ Alive’, with ample Yugoslav disco in between).

Somehow, none of Lenker's songs made an appearance, but writing this almost two months later (listening to Live at Revolution Hall), having so far struggled to find the words, suddenly this album feels to me exactly how that night felt. A complete amalgamation of old and new, a frenzy of unfinished conversations and unbridled expressions of sentimentality that, on a different night, might've felt corny (Lenker prompts a singalong to 'Happy Birthday', where we sang 'Take Me Home, Country Roads' in transatlantic jubilation). It's a haze, in all honesty, with so many memorable moments, that it reverberates in its overwhelming entirety. A big messy bundle of love.

Destroyer - Dan's Boogie

As I'm writing this, there's a nationwide power outage in Spain and Portugal. It reminded me I should finally get my emergency kit in order. Where can I go that sells walkie talkies? Is that even a sensible thing to purchase? I'm listening to Destroyer's new album, Dan's Boogie, and thinking about how I've come to find (or look for) the apocalypse in so much of the music I listen to. It helps, not to make sense of it, but to undergird a certain mental fortitude, in preparation of collapse. Bejar's music makes very little sense, and very rarely points to something tangible. But this is the first record of his that gave me a glimpse of his anxieties, most significantly on 'Cataract Time'. It's a pretty obvious reckoning with getting older, with entering the final chapter. "Every day we give up time, we pour the drink into a vast glass." It's a song, Bejar has said, about "wandering through the streets and not recognizing the streets, not recognizing the world around you". It's about the decay of the spectator, and the decay of the spectacle in front. Bejar: "The speed at which the world wants to erase itself these days, whether through some violent act or just a slow fade. It seems to be a feeling that sticks with me, and when I write, I seem to write to that point a lot. I seem to point myself at it." He told Stereogum that something like the world erasing itself "[stops] being academic and [gets] really real when you get old." It's this increased refusal to hide from collapse (his and the world's) that's made Bejar's latest string of his albums perhaps his best. They even sound like a ramshackle eulogy to a lost world, made by someone who has always been a bit befuddled by the culture. It's puzzling and ugly, but ends on a remarkably potent bit of advice. "Go / if you must / There's a whole world war out there / waiting for you tonight / Travel light."

Wildflowers

• Jo Schornikow - Quiet Excerpts. This album by an Australian organist is somewhat structured like a church service. Or I guess it reminds me of what a church service can do to my brain. Its prelude is over ten minutes of pipe organ, followed by some incredibly blissful ambient pop. And so it constantly shifts gears between solemnity and cerebral distraction. The mind sharpens, and then drifts again.

• Dean Wareham - That's the Price of Loving Me. This might be Wareham's best album since his Luna days. It sees him reuniting with producer Kramer, for the first since the final Galaxie 500 album. But with that very, very chill sound, come some rather poignant lyrics. 'Bourgeois Manqué', which addresses the death toll of the Gaza genocide and the McCarthyist persecution of student protesters, is the most immediately topical, but there's plenty more sprinkled throughout. Closing track 'The Cloud is Coming’, which was written for Noah Baumbach's adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel White Noise, may well have been the impetus for all of that.

• Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Gift Songs. Probably my favorite ambient album of the year so far. Gift Songs was apparently "subtly influenced by Cantu-Ledesma's parallel practices as a Zen priest and a hospice worker" and such prolonged attention and care is definitely felt in the music. The way you can hear the pump organs breathe is especially moving. It reminded me of another recent discovery: Štefan Szabó's clouds and pulses, which may sound mechanical and methodical, but is also very much the product of the personal connection between the one playing the keys and the one pumping the bellows.

• William Tyler - Time Indefinite. William Tyler was my gateway into cosmic americana, upon discovering his 2016 album Modern Country. I'll admit I have moved on from that sound somewhat in recent years, but as it turns out, so has Tyler. Bar a few glimmers (‘Star of Hope' sounds somewhat like 'Highway Anxiety’ from the grave), this is brand new territory. A ghostly place, tearing at the seams, haunted by its past, unravelling beautifully. Postmodern americana, is that something?