Album Of The Week: Joan Shelley Like The River Loves The Sea

The new season of Succession, HBO's great show about the backstabbing machinations of a family of vampiric right-wing media barons, opens with an image of a man's face half-submerged in warm, glassy water. Behind him, fog-shrouded mountains sprawl out. Kendall Roy, once thought to be the heir of this bloodsucking clan, is at an elite rich-guy rehab facility in Iceland, and he is trying to find peace. Kendall has just done something especially heinous himself, but he's momentarily fooling himself, thinking that he can escape the soul-sucking void of his own family. Within seconds, he's pulled back into the churn. That Icelandic landscape represents a lost promise -- a place where you can, however briefly, convince yourself that the rest of the world does not exist. For the tiniest shred of time, Kendall finds a haven.