Music in August 2024
This playlist kind of got away from me in terms of length, but in my defense I listened to a lot of music in August, starting with the jubilantly shouting merry-go-round of I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, a collaboration album between Hamilton Leithauser and Rostam. Haru Nemuri’s 2022 album SHUNKA RYOUGEN is a roiling conflagration tearing through late summer’s dry weeds. Bellevue mellows into a warm summer medley, while the great Australian singer John Williamson’s recording of True Blue has lived in my head since I got a CD of Australian folk songs twenty-four years ago. In Love With a Ghost is a different sort of electronic quiescence than the acoustic piano I usually prefer, typified by the Great Takagi’s Ageha (Gassho), which like so much of his best work is recorded with all the ambient noise of the locale and all the momentary idiosyncrasies of the people there, caught as in amber. Takahiro Kido’s Sakura makes a more muted melancholy, while MEITEI’s Oiran II warps traditional sounds into eerie strains. I am so happy to have stumbled across Marmota’s Tuvan throat singing, straight from the Steppe, which carries me along like the wind in the grass, and I am likewise delighted to have discovered Bulgarian folk music, in all its wan grandeur. Rounding off these instrumentals is the ominous triumph of the conquistadors, Vangelis’ Conquest of Paradise. I am told the film was a flop; as far as I’m concerned, the album certainly is not.
In 1999, a year my generation will probably freeze in popular culture as the ultimate locus of nostalgia, the Last Good Time, just like the Boomers did with 1955, The Magnetic Fields put out a massive three-disk album, 69 Love Songs, which actually does have exactly that many tracks. Each of these is unique, and each is touching and humorously romantic, and I love them. I want to particularly shout out the delightful whistling noise of I’m Sorry I Love You, and the fact that they actually wrote a song about the great semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure, possibly the last person I expected to show up in popular culture. Similarly warm and comforting is The Red Birds’ 1971 album Takeda No Komoriuta, featuring the sky-reaching Tsubasa wo Kudasai (Please Give Me Wings). Secret Shine and Pale Saints both offer fuzzy sound from the start of the ‘90s, which slips nicely into Hitsujibungaku’s honestly.
There are so many strange and lovely elements to The Girl’s Distracted, especially the strings that come in near the end. Slaughter Beach, Dog’s 2017 album Birdie is a distinctly mopey record in a way that plays well during a rainy-day August. Barrie’s Unholy Appetite, by contrast, might be sung in low tones, but it is undeniably upbeat and optimistic. The Slingers’ Little Conversations is a eulogy with a point worth being reminded of – that life is a dance we must learn in reverse; we don’t know what we should have done until it’s too late. Also, the descending piano chords at the end of the song are magnificent. Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird’s 2022 Smiles of Earth is definitely an oops-all-bangers record that has to be heard to be believed.
Bear McCreary has written some excellent scores for Battlestar Galactica and The Rings of Power, but he can be a bit self-derivative, and his Foundation score is on the whole far too close a copy of his work on ROP, but there is something in the sound that feels expansively deliberate, like slowly crossing the starry road. Marco Beltrami’s score to the remake of 3:10 to Yuma is not simply a successful ratcheting of tension; it carries within it the great moral suspense of the final setpiece. Gary Gunn wrote one of the most lushly enchanting original scores of recent years for A Thousand and One, and it sounds like nothing else I know.
James Street Tonight has a chorus of longing that rises and falls like the tall grass under the breeze. Aimee Mann’s 2002 album Lost In Space is another masterpiece to follow up her soundtrack to Magnolia. There is a resigned authority in her voice, giving the last word on the world she depicts. Minnie Riperton’s It’s So Nice (To See Old Friends) is just the sweetest thing. I miss you all. Go Places is a cool grey day after rain, like so much of The New Pornographers’ work.
Then I’m back to ska and the ‘90s with Where’d You Go, truly a silly song (complimentary). Classics of Love is perhaps even sillier, and its beat must be acknowledged. And then, of course, is Chumbawamba’s great fin-de-siecle working-class album, Tubthumper, a kind a grandly ironic end of history sound we just don’t get anymore.
Death Penalty Dog: is a song whose meaning I don’t quite know, but I do know that it is angry, and wonderfully so. Arcade Fire’s work on Neon Bible, however, has the energy of a dove beating its wings against a cage, trying to break free. Regina Spektor’s 2006 album Begin to Hope is a complete tour de force in her strange oeuvre. Just My Imagination may be late Cranberries, but it fits right into their wistful work. Learn To Like It and Pendulums are both folksy songs to come to terms with life to. Pilgrim is Enya’s answer to Robert Frost’s wooded crossroads, imbued with all her otherworldly reverence. It’s Blitz! is the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at full power, able to seem both threatening and vulnerable at turns.
Carter Burwell’s score for Carol is one of the most beautiful pieces of film composition of the previous decade, so methodically mournful, emotionally unbound but restrained in its expression of that. Javelin is yet another wonderful work from Sufjan, whose emotional consistency is one of the great mainstays of my listening habits. Finally, we end with the end of ELO’s Time, one of the best albums of the early ‘80s, which looked into the future we now live in with curiosity and a sense of adventure, yet still longed for home.
