ALBUM | "I've got to get out of this tree, off of this limb. I'm a woman acting like a kid," Margaret Glaspy sings on the title track of her new album EMOTIONS AND MATH, but the 12 songs filling this excellent debut mark the 27-year-old singer/guitarist as mature beyond her years. Raw riffs and attitude-filled lyrics take songs like "You and I" in a punk direction, while tunes like "Situation" reveal a bluesy base underneath the snarl. Throw in some killer hooks and vocals that burrow into your head with some honeyed raspiness, and you have a remarkably assured first album from an artist worth tracking into the future.
TV | It's impossible to easily explain what comedian Maria Bamford's brilliant Netflix sitcom LADY DYNAMITE is about. At face value, it's the sorta fictionalized, kinda biographical story of a comic as she tries to get back in the Hollywood swing of things after her mental illness forced her to her Minnesota family home for an extended recovery alongside her beloved pug, Bert. But you don't really want to take anything you see here at face value — Bamford's comedy is delightfully absurd, and over the course of the show's 12 episodes, she accidentally performs at a pro-gun rally, dates a gay meth addict and deals with two borderline insane agents.
READ | When Muhammad Ali died last month, the outpouring of think pieces was overwhelming. Still, check out Mikal Gilmore's lengthy Rolling Stone profile in the July 1 issue titled "THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME." It's a brilliant distillation of Ali's life, in which Gilmore writes, "Ali signified America as it moved through decades of hatred, fear, violence, as it doubted its better promises, sometimes touching transformative grace, other times unchaining its worse paradoxes, from dilemmas of civil rights and purpose of war to disputes over one of its fundamental ideas, freedom of religion." If you only have time for one Ali tribute, this is it. n
