The first voice on Amen Dunes’ new album Freedom is a child delivering the pep talk from the 2004 hockey movie Miracle. “This is your time,” the kid booms, sounding messianic. “Their time is done!” Singer and songwriter Damon McMahon doesn’t speak in those kind of absolutes. The true key to understanding this new album, he says, is the second epigraph. It’s the abstract painter Agnes...

If Jack White cannot get to the point on his third solo effort Boarding House Reach, we will: this album is a mess. It’s not the fussed-over mess of, say, a late-period Of Montreal record; neither is it a mess like the nod-off longueurs of ‘70s Sly Stone (though there are ghosts of the latter). It’s more like the clutter a grifter leaves behind when he skips town: a motel room littered with diagrams...

In some parts of Sweden, and Scandinavia at large, the summer sun blazes down from the small hours of the morning until 10 at night. In January, some areas are bathed in perpetual darkness. For a non-native viewer watching a crime show produced and filmed in the Nordic lands, these irregular cycles can distort all sense of time. The self-sacrificing detectives in the Northern countries’ hit procedurals---sometimes...