Week One: SOUND | Peter Grudzien – The Unicorn Dracula – Songs of Love & Melancholy

This week, I’ve got two albums that dance around the themes of Sacred v. Profane, reveling in collective solitude, prophetic hermeticism and meditation on the exalted minutia of the Here & Now. Like a flower from concrete, Peter Grudzien, the “first gay outsider country singer” and lifelong resident of Queens, NY, triumphs through chronic paranoia and makes the marginal magical with the righteous oddity of “The Unicorn.” Dorys and Eli, of Miami’s Dracula, reanimate the dusty green bones of American folk standards and balladry with a thread-bare but supernaturally elegant romancero lilt on “Songs of Love & Melancholy.” Squeezing blood harmony from a stone, this duo managed to quell the aural insanity of 2019’s Savage Weekend with a hushed, sublime 20-minute performance I won’t soon forget. At any rate, both albums are well worth a spin for weary window-gazing. – DT

Peter Grudzien – The Unicorn
Dracula – Songs of Love & Melancholy
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Album art for, Songs of Love & Melancholy, by Dracula