Music in August 2023
This playlist got a bit shaggy. In part this was simply a lapse of attention on my part; but it was also and unwillingness to edit. What little I will add in my defense is this: August was a month of albums and long drives on which I repeatedly listened to those same albums, and I had a devil of a time choosing just two or three songs from each, and not the whole thing.
We begin with one of the most exhilarating openings to an album, in this case Electric Light Orchestra’s fantastical 1981 opus, Time. These first two songs, played back to back, catapult the hearer through a time warp into a vision of the future, and they feel like being launched down a luge-track made of hyperspace rainbows. Each time I play this, I find myself compelled to cease all work, turn up the volume, and stand up.
The Barbie soundtrack was, to no one’s surprise, equally eclectic and energetic, from the earworm dance track to defiant punk to Ryan Gosling’s instantly iconic soliloquy of Kenergy.
Completely shifting gears, we’ve got a classical dance from the Pride and Prejudice score, a rawly-sentimental cathartic confession from the appropriately-named Dashboard Confessional, then the wonkaesque clockwork spirals of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, whose name sounds exactly like her wind-up toy music, and then rerulili’s vocaloid cascade rushing like a slinky on speed down a staircase.
I found Bjork’s collaboration with Dirty Projectors frank-faced and open. And then I did make like a middle-schooler and I went all the way back to MCR. Perhaps it is cringe, but to be perfectly honest they really did have a command of their bombastic and grandiose sound, and I do find it effective.
The next couple of songs are fun alt songs, but Camille’s She Was was probably the best thing to come out of the film Corsage – it methodically and inexorably unspools, and as it plays one sinks deeper underwater.
Long Time is another whisper of bruised hope from Haruka Nakamura, an artist I have become obsessed with over the last few years. Somehow the inclusion of the creaking of the mute pedal adds the same quality to the music that you would get by having an elderly person or a child read verse in a cracking voice. But by the end, the music rises into a benediction, gaining power, glowing in the dark.
Winter Song just feels nostalgic and emotionally full, warm amidst the cold. It’s a fitting representative of an album titled The Ghosts That Haunt Me.
The rest of the playlist is likewise drawn from albums that I became obsessed with, starting with Florence + The Machine’s 2018 High As Hope, which plays out just as its title suggests, with gospel-inspired ascendant spirals of acclamation, split with full-throated emotion. No Choir in particular feels like a bird climbing into a twilit night. I’ll return to this at the end.
Then there’s the album I probably listened to more than any other in August, The Cranberries’ No Need to Argue. The entire album is a raw nerve singing with pain and brokenness, expressed in some of the most beautiful musical terms of the nineties.
For his score to Babylon, Justin Hurwitz echoes his most effective line from the La La Land score, as well as creating several new ones. It’s a heady, jazzy concoction perfect for that particular jaded-yet-adoring view of old Hollywood.
This year, or should I say last year, Sigur Ros released an album that contains some of their best work in years. I listened to it in what I believe to be the ideal environment: on the reddening tundra of the Denali highway at sunset. The image of the shadows creeping over the gilded land, pockmarked with sapphire pools, temperature dropping in anticipation of autumn, looks exactly as this music feels.
In 2022 John Darnielle put out another fantastic album, Bleed Out, filled with darkly defiant screeds. It’s a strange collection of at times threatening ramblings, and it’s a work of typical genius, the musical equivalent of Cormac McCarthy in its particularly America violence.
At the end, I came back to Florence’s album, culminating in a track that makes as good an ending as ELO does a beginning: The End of Love reaches a particular hinge point, when Joshua comes down from the mountain, where the choir that was missing from No Choir crescendos like a mounting cumulonimbus, and I come out of my skin. That’s what music is for.
