Flowers for the living

Irma Thomas, Mourning [a] Blkstar + Toronto live music listings

Spending the summer getting up to speed on the seemingly irreversible decline of the United States and the corresponding collapse in empathy, a notion Elon Musk told Joe Rogan is “a fundamental weakness of Western civilization.”

To counter that, here are two new R&B records rooted in Black American gospel tradition, each of which provides its own kind of…