February 2023 in Music
All right, back again. Music that I enjoyed listening to way back in February.
Song for Dennis Brown and To the Headless Horseman, The Mountain Goats – I think that John Darnielle is the best lyricist in America, and I have listened to a great many of his songs. Maybe they appeal to me because they tend to be melancholy and seem to important aspects of life, but in extreme particularities and funny little details; maybe it’s because he’s so poetically fluent in religious language; maybe it just seems profound because of the gentle roughness of his delivery. Whatever the reason, I think the world of his work, and these are just a couple of minor samples – they aren’t even anywhere near the top of my list. But they are typical of his work, because they feel like the poetry of someone anticipating his own death.
Drive My Car (Kafuku), Eiko Ishibashi – This is the titular track from Eiko Ishibashi’s score for the eponymous 2021 movie, Drive My Car, a film essentially locked in a tie for my favorite film of that year. When I watched it, I admit I didn’t think about the music that much; like the movie itself, it sits quietly in the background, and is the opposite of showy. But once you do notice it, you realize that it’s perfect, in its quiet introversion. This music feels like being driven somewhere, fast along the highway, into the night, and while it’s peaceful, it’s also struck through with strange chords that mar that peace with doubt.
Songbirds, Homecomings – Songbirds is an attempt to catch some scintilla of remembrance, to crystallize a moment into nostalgia before it can flutter away. It feels warm, like the sunlight late in the afternoon in winter, caught in the glass. Homecomings are terrific at exactly this sort of warmth, sad, yet deeply contented.
I know Songbirds because it was featured in the best film of 2018, the extraordinarily quiet and restrained anime film Liz and the Blue Bird. The next three tracks on my playlist are all from the score to the film, two by Kensuke Ushio, a master of hushed tones that fit the quiescence of the picture, and the titular piece, Liz and the Blue Bird, composed by Akito Matsuda, which is the piece the film’s characters perform in band and practice throughout the film. It’s a tentative, questing piece, driven by woodwinds, and it successfully tells the story of both the film and the picture book at the center of its plot. As for Ushio’s work, so much of it sounds like the diegetic sound of the school the characters inhabit – in fact, much of that is incorporated into the score, and then echoed instrumentally. In a story where everything is tiny details, this is a masterful success at using score as a seamless instrument of narrative. As music on its own terms, it is so enormous in its tiny, restrained softness, like feeling the heartbeat of a sparrow, that it both places me in a trancelike state, while also bringing me to tears.
Golborne Road, Nick Laird-Clowes – this is part of the soundtrack to the excellent film, About Time, and there’s something about the way this simple piano piece that feels like it acknowledges melancholy while continuing forward undeterred, into the wind. Maybe it’s the quick repetition of notes where some stray into both minor and major – it’s always teetering on ridgeline between mourning and joy.
Since You Been Gone, Rainbow – I think I had another song used in a Guardians of the Galaxy trailer on my January list, and this one has the same story for me. I’d never listened to or even heard of Rainbow, but it’s another case of ‘70s rock that is big and fun and you have to bob your head along to it. I’ve nothing insightful to say about it, it’s just a good time.
Blue, Mai Yamane – Blue plays over the end of the show Cowboy Bebop, which I’ve mentioned before, and like its mid-season counterpart Space Lion, I found it immediately arresting and moving. The more I returned to it, the harder it got to move on from it. The song is an elegy, mixing a children’s choir singing Christian praises with operatic rock that presents the final sense of release from bondage experienced by a soul ascending from this sublunary world after death. I admit I am particularly sensitive to depictions of transcendent apotheosis, but this is beautifully executed, and achieves both sentiment and that most prized (by me) of musical achievements – maestoso.
Kazehi, Zmi – This is a great case of the Spotify algorithm handing me a good example of the sort of thing I listen to – gentle, brief piano from Japan. I don’t have that much to say, but of course this brings me to the last couple of songs, from my favorite musical artist, the prototypical master of that same genre:
The Story of Sky & Team, Takagi Masakatsu & Sakamoto Miu – The first track feels like breathing, in and out – not the breath of anxious struggle, but what one imagines actual peaceful breathing to be. The piano dances like seafoam around the vocals which carry us on our own journey through a garden of clouds. And Team is one of many demonstrations of Takagi’s power to make an uplifting and wild piece that in its energetic and vivacious spirit still fully retains the deep sentimentality that pervades all of his work. Where that sentiment is located, I can’t precisely say, I only know that all of his music moves me in some profound yet ineffable way.
