Music in April 2024
It’s a rainy day in August, Alaskans are already eulogizing our beautiful summer in the past tense, and I have a cold, so I am going to pretend that this is why I am just now getting back to updating my monthly playlists going all the way back to April. By this you are to understand that I have made excellent use of the intervening months, written half a novel, done five camping trips and a score of hikes, and eaten fifty watermelons. None of this has happened, of course.
Perhaps because it’s been so long, April’s playlist proliferated like a fungus in a forest, and is longer than I had anticipated when I began it. I may in turn abbreviate my coverage of its contents to compensate.
1999 was famously one of the greatest years for cinema, and the film from that year which made the greatest impression on me, Magnolia, owes not a little of that to its use of Aimee Mann’s soundtrack, which bookends the playlist. One just feels like the right place to start – it’s a musical approximation of a turn-of-the-century computer booting up, light by blinking light, fans spinning up to greet the uncertain future.
Also formed in 1999 was the band Saturday Looks Good To Me, whose honeyed guitar tracks all seem to stick together sweetly. From warm American music I pivoted to cool, rushing animecore, and to a synthesized screensaver of a song that recycles the same computer-generated lines incessantly like a hypnotic washing machine – and it hypnotized me. Yorushika, as always, is a return to the human and the emotionally quick and open, with superb background foley. While we’re in Japan, I slipped in another of Kanho Yakushiji’s versions of the chanted Heart Sutra, which I have already brought up on this blog, with the caveat that I’m not a Buddhist and that if anything, the beautiful form of the chanted sutra seems to me to contradict its message that form is emptiness, and emptiness form – but then, I think that beauty is substance.
It's very important to listen to the Top Gun: Maverick score at eight in the morning when you’re starting the work day and slamming back your first coffee. Trust me, it helps.
An eclectic group follows this. There are a couple tracks from Weyes Blood’s 2016 Front Row Seat to Earth album, hesitantly reverent in its gentle melancholy. Vagabon is an even more woebegone artist, whose In A Bind smells like camp smoke in cold morning fog on a leaden northern lake. But there’s also more straightforward British pop by Holly Humberstone and Foxes, which feel like the rejuvenating drop of cold rain; and of course, Chappell Roan, whose music is anything but cold, and whose talent cannot be gainsaid. And Fool’s Gold simply a fantastic banger – Jack River goes done in the books as another Australian with a warm, sandy voice.
In 2012, David Byrne and St. Vincent collaborated on a joint album, in what has to be one of the great passing-of-the-torch moments from one generation’s genius weirdo to another’s, cut from the same cloth. The upbeat-yet-aggressively-discomfiting Who unsurprisingly feels perfectly of a piece with both their oeuvres.
I included a number of tracks throughout from Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird, my new favorite product of Melbourne, beginning with Transient’s space-bound medley. CHAI and Mrs. GREEN APPLE are both good examples of frequently goofy Japanese rock/pop – goofy in this case being complimentary. MATCHA must have been written while snorting the green treasure, and the latter’s recent album, ANTENNA, is a typically saccharine affair where the balance of sentiment and silliness is perhaps a bit over the line, but in a way that’s cute. Sukima Switch is similarly emotional but without the glammed-up production. Mei Semones’ Inaka, on the other hand, seems deceptively muted and stripped down, while actually being deeply complex in a way that effectively mirrors the shifting gusts of autumn wind in the actual inaka, the part of Japan that is on the road to nowhere, gradually being overrun by boars, macaques, and wild hydrangeas and more and more houses go unoccupied. The best part of Japan.
The works I picked from the great French composer Maurice Ravel have this in common with Jerry Goldsmith’s eternal score to Star Trek: The Motion Picture: they both build in a slow, dreamlike fashion, spreading like a dreamlike oil over the waters. More is implied, in awe or in threat, than is made clear.
The next few tracks are all different old tunes I pulled off the Licorice Pizza soundtrack, which together create a blanket of warm, bouncy nostalgia. Beyond that, these are just really good, and I’m glad the movie brought these up to me. Dressy Bessy’s eponymous 2003 album is a much more recent slice of the same nostalgia, this time for the unpretentious fun of the alternative turn of the century.
Cécile Corbel’s 2019 album Enfant du vent only reinforces my sense of awestruck gratitude that this almost-too-good-to-be-true character exists. We must never forgive Paris for its suppression of Breton culture until the recent past. Corbel is working entirely in the realm of enchantment – a term which of course derives through French from the Latin ‘cantus’, ‘song’.
I pulled a number of tracks from an Alternative ‘80s playlist I picked up, but the one that really lodged in my head was the oddly-specific I’m In Love With A German Film Star. There’s just a specific ambience to the early ‘80s that I’ve been chasing for years, and The Passions have it bottled. And I paired another St. Vincent track with another ‘80s cultural ancestor, Kate Bush – two brilliantly strange artists.
Bubble was a pretty mid anime movie that is not terribly memorable, but it’s a good example of Hiroyuki Sawano’s ability to create a virtual cavernous space within a piece of music. We see this as well in his collaboration with Kohta Yamamoto on the final Attack on Titan score, which somehow manages to musically match the energy of an entire world trampled into gore under a cathedral of living bones.
I keep coming back to Asobi Seksu, but they deserve it. Their self-titled debut album cuts through a gloom like a sunshine buzzsaw. For me, this is the ultimate sort of comfort music, which nonetheless maintains its creative wit and cheeky charm.
Then we’re back to the ‘80s, first with Japanese city pop, one of the great rediscovered genres in the age of the internet. It is, of course, fully entwined with American music, just as the two countries had by this point become interdependent, as is right. And there’s just something wonderfully wistful about The Smiths, a poetry of the unfulfilled. Rise is at turns anthemic and awkward in a way I enjoy. And David Byrne’s Life Is Long is tacked onto his ‘80s association, actually released in 2008. It’s a reflection on the past and the purpose of life, one worth hearing.
By this point, Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird seems to be solidifying its position as my favorite band I got into this year, and their best track is the rousing Best Face to London. Who else even sounds anything like this?
I’ve returned to Joe Hisaishi’s darkling score to The Boy and the Heron, and the coldness therein feels deliberative and inexorable. More moody orchestral scores follow, including Justin Hurwitz’s ethereal Sextant.
Lucky for You is a perfect example of a warmly melancholic marriage of harmonies dipping in and out of the stream of repeated notes. Bon Iver’s The Wolves is a similarly moody piece, which builds into a nonetheless hopeful resolution.
Tancred is not a new name to me; I’m familiar with both Tancred, King of Sicily and Tancred, Prince of Galilee. Apparently this Tancred is neither of them, confusingly, but her 2018 album Nightstand quietly has the same mailed fist and steel edge of her armored namesakes. Angie McMahon has appeared on my playlists this year already, but I returned for Serotonin, which builds a song around the rhythm of anxious hyperventilation. The sense of trying to slow down one’s racing thoughts and act deliberately is worked into this song in a way that is true to life. Flag is another cleverly-crafted gently constructively piece of encouragement from a Japanese singer.
Jon Brion’s Synecdoche, New York score pulls the very stuff of life out of my heart. It is heavy, yet resolved. Mark Orton’s Nebraska score is a twangy elegy for the silly sadness of growing old. And at the tail end of the playlist I slipped in a few Japanese songs which scintillate with a small, still hope.
As I mentioned earlier, the real standout of April was the Magnolia soundtrack, which I returned to to close out the list. Momentum actually stresses me, because it entertains the fear I harbor: that in pursuing my planned routine, I am making a fatal error, and wasting my life. I’m not sure that this fear is right, however – it can be necessary to disregard even a plausible doubt in order to do anything in life, and we are not the sum of our achieved ambitions. Still, it hits a little close to home. Deathly begins as a gentle case of that entanglement of joy and regret that I so adore, only to break into one of the most magnificent guitar crescendos I’ve ever heard. Save Me is a prayer for deliverance from our own self-doubt and selfish hearts. Its eye is fixed, rightly, not on our faulty stars, but on ourselves. I’m not alleging that Mann set out to write with a view to the Gospel, but I read it in. And Driving Sideways is the perfect ambiguous exit; nothing is finally resolved or answered – and that’s ok.
