This week’s singles round-up is a day late since I’ve been out of town for a week reporting on rare mushrooms in Star City, but I promise it represents the very best of the new Arkansas music you missed in the last several days, with country songs and weed raps and doom metal that doesn’t sound anything like doom metal. 

1. Bonnie Montgomery – “Check For Your Time”

Here’s an unreleased track from Bonnie Montgomery’s new record, which we all really liked around here. I don’t know why it didn’t make the album — maybe something to do with balance or flow or symmetry or some other kind of ineffable musician logic. It’s very good, anyway. 

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2. Deuce One – “Deuce”

SVGP‘s Deuce One raps about himself (and how people are not fucking with him) over a beat by North Little Rock’s Manic the 17th that sounds like a Bernard Herrmann score turned inside out. 

3. sfits – “Persistence of Memory”

Fayetteville’s Trevor Bloomfield has released two records this month under the name sfits — one of them, “Meditations,” is a mellow beat tape in the J Dilla tradition, with harps and unquantized drums, while the other, “The Birdcage Tape,” (from which this song is taken) is something softer and spacier. On Facebook he says it documents “my times sneaking into the music building at the University of Arkansas to play their pianos.”

4. Rodney CoLe & Dex Bleezy – “Back 2 Back”

A weed anthem from Little Rock’s Rodney CoLE and Dex Bleezy. This one’s dedicated to the New York Times

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5. Jesse Kelly Band – “House In The Sand”

I don’t who this is, but he or they are from Little Rock and describe their music as doom metal though it sounds more like Galaxie 500 — gorgeous dream pop with rudimentary lyrics about rain and mountains made genuinely poignant through reverb. 

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