July 2024 in Music
I didn’t think I was a ska person. Apparently I was wrong. Clueless ambushed me with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and I went off down a brassy rabbit-hole back to the ‘90s. For me, this is head-banging, get-up-and-dance stuff. Old favorites ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION and Asobi Seksu are here as always to join the fun.
And then of course there’s Kate Bush, too flighty and weird (complimentary) to be pinned down and described. Jessica Pratt is new to me, an artist who sounds as if she’s dislodged in the timestream, with a voice like no other. Blood Bank is melancholic even for The Mountain Goats, and at the same time hopeful, like the secret it alludes to – the one we don’t know how to tell, but perhaps, if we could just get it out –
Frances Quinlan’s 2020 album Likewise has a sort of wryly ambivalent resignation to circumstance about it, which is a posture I often struggle with. Bright Eyes voices a kind of wounded sentimentality packaged in the resentful bitterness of punk, and their repurposed Beethoven riles me up as a sort of war cry. Angelo De Augustine and Elliott Smith, by contrast, both seem to whisper.
Vig Mihály’s score to Almanac of the Fall, Colin Stetson’s horn composition, and Sufjan create a meditative bridge into Big Thief’s album Two Hands, a eulogy for ourselves spending itself in negation. But Yuji Nomi’s violin arrangement of Take Me Home, Country Roads restores a sense of a future in hope.
Kaneyorimasaru and HOLYCHILD both rock out in quite different modes, the former as summery J-rock, the latter as the advance guard from 2015 for this last year’s Brat-pop summer. Appropriate for July, John Williams’ 1996 ode to America, An American Journey, functions almost as a score to the Spielbergian version of America’s self-image, and makes for great Independence Day listening for all patriots. Summon the Heroes, his theme for that year’s Atlanta Olympics, has perched atop the pantheon of beloved trumpet pieces for me. By the final act of the song, the highest chairs reach auroral altitudes.
Thymia is another warm-sad piece, like much of what I enjoy. I actually included the real Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on my June playlist, and the cover of it recorded for the film Rocketman is not trying to compete with its immaculate original, but I liked the way in which it deconstructed the song for story purposes, and then exploded the final crescendo with a kitchen sink orchestra. Have All The Songs Been Written? hits directly at the inner doubt most artists feel about their ability to actually create anything worthwhile; but it is also speaking to the core anxiety of every person who has ever wondered if they are perhaps wasting their life, missing their shot; and it speaks to the aching moment of trepidation on the threshold of risking it all to try to reach someone when you aren’t quite sure whether or not they will take your hand.
People most likely remember Billy Joel’s 1989 album Storm Front for We Didn’t Start the Fire, but I wanted to highlight how many other great tracks it has, from the New England elegy The Downeaster ‘Alexa’, through the driving, sincere vulnerability of I Go to Extremes, to the epic send-off of the Cold War, Leningrad, and the reverent epilogue, And So It Goes, which in one line perfectly captures the essence of self-giving love: “…and you can have this heart to break.”
Then it’s a detour through the late ‘70s, a very silly time in music which I sincerely enjoy. Much more recently, The Arcadian Wild released Lara, a rock-skipping dance of neo-folk.
The next few tracks take a very different tone, a sort of muffled, rhythmic dread, from Jim Williams’ score to the cannibal film Raw, to Marcus Fjellström’s library music which was used to accompany the Erebus and Terror into the maw of the Arctic in the show The Terror, to Adam Janota Bzowki’s atavistic score for Out of Darkness, a film set 45,000 years in the past that actually feels its age.
Then it’s a couple of Beatles songs that feel more sentimental to me than most of their output (and I am above all a sentimentalist); Aaron Copland’s American masterpiece, Rodeo; and of course, to sing us out, As Time Goes By.
