Existential anxiety is filtered through a sense of optimism on Dragons, the latest from poet Ron Whitehead and his band, The Storm Generation. On the record’s first song, “Poets and Artists,”  Whitehead suggests creative types need to help pull the world away from looming darkness. On “Closing Time: This Poem is for Nobody,”  he dives into how vicious capitalism and a lack of environmentalism is driving us closer to the edge. It’s a scattershot of concepts, but the theme of society being a half-lit pipe bomb circulates throughout, with an open, engaged mind argued as the only way to defuse it.