April 2023 in Music

As before, I’m just going to highlight songs I have something to say about, not go through every single one. For me, the rewarding thing is actually making the playlist, which serves as a snapshot of what I was listening to at the time.

I love Peter Gabriel, and I found his score for The Last Temptation of Christ haunting and weird, with all the mysticism that term implies. In particular I became fascinated by the track It Is Accomplished, which drops a set of tubular bells down a staircase to announce the final break of tension, the catharsis of the world. Jerry Goldsmith turned in a surprisingly classical, old-Hollywood overture for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (a film I personally had underrated). The lush strings sound like they could belong to a golden age picture. Florence + The Machine’s Between Two Lungs is about building up steam until achieving a sort of runway, breakneck pace – and that’s perfectly typical of her music, and why it works so well.

I’m a La La Land defender, but if the movie suffers from anything it’s that its first two tracks are so much better than anything else in the film. There’s a sort of traveling line of melody in them that is a complete earworm and came to dominate my brain for several weeks.  I’ve always found Janelle Monae an undeniably great talent whose work is always catchy, and St. Vincent’s Nowhere Inn is a welcome addition to a subgenre of southwestern-inflected music that is both warm and bleak.

For his film Suzume, Makoto Shinkai wisely brough RADWIMPS back for the score, and they in turn brought in Kazuma Jinnouchi’s eerie cyber-choirs to create the score for an movie all about eldritch locations.

I love The Sundays, and I found that Summertime is upbeat, but it insists on happiness in a sad voice, whereas Cry is melancholic in a contented, almost satisfied way. Finally, Tanukichan’s And More is an all-subsuming flood tide of composite warm noise.