June 2024 in Music
It is December 1, and I am fully five months behind on my monthly playlists, as is tradition. Anyway, here is June.
Beginning with quiet introductions from three Japanese composers, we shift into the plaintive work of The Mountain Goats and Loch Lomond. This is followed by a couple of lush pop songs with an implacable undercurrent, and then by Junkie XL’s runaway score to Furiosa, one of 2024’s most fun deranged movies, and then by Bobby Krlic’s glass-sharpening score to Beau Is Afraid, one of 2023’s most bafflingly upsetting deranged movies.
Any of the tracks from clammbon’s 2007 album Musical or Asobi Seksu’s 2009 album Hush could easily have been included in this list – both albums are delightful buttermilk crepes of warmth. Sing Tomorrow’s Praise stands out as a pearl of a song, doing so many different complicated things which all redound to the same end of joy.
Like all of America this last summer, I spent some of June with Charli xcx’s BRAT, which remains a fun album even if it couldn’t meme Kamala into the Presidency. It’s interesting that it has room for both an extremely frank admission of anxiety about one’s future and purpose in life and also for momentary-hedonist club pop.
I Saw Cinnamon is another nonsensically fun song from Dressy Bessy, followed by a couple of other lighthearted tracks from WEDNESDAY CAMPANELLA and Regal Lily. Black Math’s 2019 EP New Game has a more threatening tone, especially their spaced-out cover of Strangelove, already an ominous song. Used to the Darkness strikes a similar tone.
Big Thief has been one of my favorite purveyors of strange sentimentality for a few years, but I think their 2022 album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You may be even better than their earlier work which originally hooked me. Change strikes directly at our great terror of accepting and making peace with the inevitable passing of what we cannot hold onto; Sparrow is a meditation on our fallen and cursed humanity; Time Escaping has the cadence of a pot lid dancing on its rim under the motile power of steam left on the burner overlong; Spud Infinity is at once profound and silly in a way that feels like a philosophical ray of light simply in its incongruence.
Another interlude of gentle instrumental pieces, including a calming track written for one of the major Japanese booksellers, and culminating in World’s End Girlfriend’s discordant harmony. Minnie Riperton’s Les Fleurs is an old song I only just came upon this year, yet I feel I have been missing it for a long time. And of course Any Day Now is a classic.
Let’s Eat Grandma & Sky Ferreira are both exponents of a kind of driven thickly-produced pop, while Japanese Breakfast is more abstract, and Million Eyes feels like a complex counter-eddy of warm oil. Wolf Alice’s 2021 album Blue Weekend is aggressive, cutting, and precise – which is why it’s so easy to replay over and over again. First Aid Kit’s The Lion’s Roar is a twangy-rock elegy box of delightful regrets.
I don’t really have any praise for Sir Elton beyond what others have said, but as I was dancing my way around my apartment to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, I realized that this is easily the best piece of art inspired or connected to the entire Wizard of Oz IP (and yes that is a dig at the entire franchise). I naturally segued into Billy Joel, who feels like an American cousin of Elton John, musically.
Both Fleet Foxes and Sufjan Stevens are marked by a similar so of expectancy for a coming cathartic storm. Enya’s 1995 classic The Memory of Trees provides an answer of soft dappled sundrops raining on the summer grass. Then we end with two tracks which each are a sort of coda, bidding farewell to the zenith of sunlight as we exit June.
