CHRISTOPHER OWENS I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair (True Panther) — If he’d been clutching a towel, Christopher Owens would have been greeted with nothing but sympathetic understanding had he thrown it in. Following a 2017 motorcycle accident that left him bedridden for months, Owens endure a string of brutal bad luck that included the loss of his fiancee and the camper that served as his home, the latter with his pet cat and favorite guitar still inside. Just when it seemed he might turn things around by reuniting with his former Girls bandmate Chet “JR” White. Then, White died at the tragically young age of forty. Owens has emerged from all this darkness with I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair, his first new album in almost a decade. The music is precise and Owens is clearly in a reflective mode, if just cryptic enough in the lyrics to glide the material away from grim memoir. He positions himself as a sort of modern troubadour, maintaining the wind-whipped flame of bygone mellow-ish styles. “I Think About Heaven” has the anxious strumming of seventies folk rock when it was straining to keep up with the bombast of prog, and it’s almost possivle to imagine Jim Croce warbling out the wounded “I Know” (“I’m keeping my head down and/ Doing what is right/ I knew you wouldn’t understand but I/ Kind of hoped you might”), at least until the track escalates to a quasi-psychedelic bouillabaisse. “So” gets into the wonderfully warped pop zone of the Flaming Lips. Some of these songs started life as candidates for that Girls reunion record, and there are times when it feels like Owens in reaching back to the rougher tumbles of those days (the coarse and lovely “Two Words” comes to mind). Mostly, though, he’s moving forward, and why not. The very existence of this music is testimony to the power of perseverance. Muss up with the following cuts: “No Good,” “This Is My Guitar,” and “Distant Drummer.”

LAURA MARLING Patterns in Repeat (Chrysalis / Partisan) — Laura Marling was never going to be mistaken for the MC5, but the London-based singer-songwriter reaches new levels of meticulous delicacy on Patterns in Repeat. It’s her eighth studio album and first since she released Song for Our Daughter just as the world was shutting down in the spring of 2020. It’s also her first release since giving birth to an actual daughter, rather than the imagined one she penned tunes for on the prior release. This album was recorded largely in Marling’s home studio, and it often feels as if she’s trying to convey herself with her customary smarts and forcefulness but without rousing a slumbering infant one room over. “Patterns” tiptoes in with tidy, tiny guitar strums and Marling murmuring lyrics of lovestruck contentment: “To have your children, your flock of birds/ Your branch among the wood/ You’ll try to tell them, but you’re lost for words/ ‘Cause it’s so absurd, how good.” Much of the album calls back to nineteen-seventies folkies such as Judee Sill and Bonnie Dobson, albeit with a touch more flintiness (“No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can” and “Caroline” are both prime examples). Marling isn’t one to stay in one mode, though. “Interlude (Time Passages)” is a crafty instrumental worthy of Laurie Anderson, and “Lullaby” is touched with the offhand pop luxury of Harry Nilsson. Patterns in Repeat might be soft, but Marling’s considerable skill ensures that it hits hard. Consider keeping the following on repeat: “Your Girl,” “The Shadows,” and the title cut.