May 2024 in Music
I feel like these playlists are getting longer as I rotate through more music each month, but what I actually have to say about any of it is diminishing, so this will be a brief post.
St. Vincent is one of our most interesting artists working today, so it’s unsurprising that the tone of these songs is utterly ineffable and baffling. Kevin Penkin’s Pathway is distressingly portentous. Belle isn’t a real pop-star, she’s a fictional character invented for the film of the same name, and the music was written by a trio of composers, but the voice and lyrics belong to the great Kaho Nakamura. It is the final rising act of the song which really brings into shore a great wave of catharsis, which is always what I am chasing. It’s emotional twin is One by one by one, a collaboration between my favorite composer and Aqualung.
Dermatillomania is no fun as a condition, but it makes an apt title for a song which, like an untamable itch, I keep compulsively returning to. Free Cake For Every Creature was the brief musical project of Katie Bennett, and while I respect the decision to end on a high note, I wish the whispercore had continued its patter longer. Slow Pulp, Tomberlin, Julia Jacklin, and Tancred all feel as though they fit together even if I lack the vocabulary to quite say why. Wasted is particularly potent, while Pens is good old-fashioned alt-rock of the sort I’ve always enjoyed.
I included Mandinka because there’s something in the mesh of sound enfolding the chorus which has a flavor I can’t place or do without. Head Over Heels is a classic exemplar of perhaps my favorite period in music. Anly and PASSEPIED are both joyfully explosive J-Pop artists, too energetic to not feel messy (complimentary). I’ve included Hiroyuki Sawano’s score for Attack on Titan in these playlists before, but it’s such a consistent doorway into the melodic epic when I’m trying to be productive at work. And Basil Poledouris’ score for Conan The Destroyer resolves none of its mystery.
Negoto and Haru Nemuri are two other energetic J-Pop artists, the former’s music bouncing on a candyfloss trampoline, the latter’s urgently surging ahead, direct and serious in tone. Come Alive isn’t a typical track from The ArchAndroid, but there is a unique rough monstrosity in its dance.
I included some of James Horner’s iconic Wrath of Khan score, the best music ever recorded for Star Trek, as a point of comparison for the score to the third (and easily best) season of Picard, which borrows from it heavily – indeed, the whole season is in conversation with fans’ memory of the great film. This is all classic Trek, grand, noble, and soaring.
The Beths have a kind of warm fuzzy guitar in which they blanket sincere vulnerability, and I feel that Asobi Seksu’s album Flourescence has a similar quality. But there’s really nothing quite like the latter’s crystalline prism of late afternoon sunlight. Vangelis also has a fuzzy warmth to his work, albeit a synthesized one, and his version of Jerusalem is a beautiful example of arranging a venerable hymn in the most evocative way possible.
Lift a Sail is one of Yellowcard’s later and less-appreciated albums, but as such it possesses the peculiar melancholy of decline, which creates space for a kind of unpretentious openness. Datadata is quite similar to Sie Liebt Mich, both serving as calming interstitials. Sutechattene is a typically loopy clockwork from Daoko; Daienkai is a typically profound work of feeling from Humbert Humbert, marching to some great End. As for FAMILIA, I find this weirdly captivating, though the band’s name appears to be wholly inscrutable.
Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture has always been one of my favorite works of classical music, and this choral version hallows it, to my mind, into a beatific vision of the Eucatastrophe. It’s a long track, and great at every point, but the penultimate act of the song, when the choirs of angels arise from the descent of the strings, and cranky old Pyotr throws a whole set of tubular bells down a spiral staircase, is perhaps the grandest phrase of music ever written.
I defend The Killers, the soul of the Great Basin, against anyone who mocks them as corny or passe. I found Day & Age to make a perfect denouement after the climax – heartfelt, without taking itself too seriously. Goodnight, Travel Well seemed like the perfect ending to this playlist, but I decided to pin on Summer Road as a kind of postscriptive gesture toward the hopeful future we can’t yet see.
