Music in December 2023
The final monthly playlist of 2023 is bookended by Joe Hisaishi’s score for what seems like Hayao Miyazaki’s swan song, The Boy and the Heron. This score repeats a few themes at critical junctures in the story, when everything goes silent, and suddenly the first piano chord announces itself like the Last Dawn, and all the shadows of every cloud and tree dance over the green.
In another original score to an anime film, RADWIMPS once again transform themselves from a rock band into a gentle and stripped down musical chimera, and also collaborate with yet another singer, to great effect. Suzume is all about the strange otherworld spaces that lie just beneath our own world, and its score perfectly evokes that sense of vast, mystical hollow space, with all its strange beauty.
The inclusion of the next few songs are all symptoms of me being chronically online: Amour plastique featured in a series of memes about Napoleon coincidental with the release of the film (I love it when the humor of the youth latches onto something historical); Duvet popped up in a set of even more obscure memes that I’m not even sure I fully understand; Crystal Dolphin was one of the many contemporary remixes based off ‘80s city pop to feature in a specific genre of youtube film edit that I am obsessed with; and Necromantic is pure meme fuel, where the meme is essentially just about how darn catchy it is. But that’s the thing – all of these are genuinely good.
Strange Conversations takes its time to work up to a sort of reverential musical alchemy that successfully evokes the feeling of sacred space. And No Surprises has a similar sort of powerful rip tide current, driving inevitably through a beautiful melancholy. Whereas Wake Up injects its own melancholy into the body of an uplifting chorus – yet still manages to come out strangely sad. I remember back when I first heard this a decade ago, I was fully obsessed with it.
I had never really spent a lot of time listening to Springsteen, but after hearing an excellent podcast about him, I’ve come round. Dancing In the Dark feels particularly appealing to me, because it’s a musical expression of frustration at one’s own inability to get anything done – which is something I feel almost every hour.
New Order’s Ceremony seems to creepy and mumble its way shyly by, to the degree that it almost doesn’t fully arrive – you might miss it as it goes past, but that would be your loss.
I listened to Michael W. Smith’s classical album Freedom a great deal in the first decade of our century, and now I’ve returned to it after a long break, to find it as great as I remembered. There’s a wonderful musical clarity and urgency to its melodies, like rivulets of cold water over rocks, and it does a far better job of being ‘epic’ than most modern orchestral music that goes out of its way to try. It is at turns sweeping and domestic, vast and close.
I have a whole playlist of choral carols I like to hear at Christmas. There’s nothing quite like the dignity of an English choir, proceeding with a steady old hymn, and playing on both the beauty of the cold snowy night and my own incredibly sharp longing for England.
Then, more ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION, the old reliable rockstars of my year, bringing the warmth of the summer sun to darkest winter. And after, more Japanese film scores: the wonderfully fluid and rippling work of Umitaro Abe, and more of the brilliance of Hisaishi, in all his imaginative sonic diversity. There’s nothing more peaceful and calmly beautiful than Summer.
A rougher note is struck by Great Grandpa’s Rosalie, a raw nerve exposed to the cold grey rain I know so well. This is masterfully done.
I got into Kenshi Yonezu and Kensuke Ushio’s work for the show Chainsaw Man, which has both the aggressive energy its title implies, but also a muted quality – which extends to Ushio’s other work as well, which is always beautifully deflated.
Finally, I end the year with The Boy and the Heron once again, which is itself the perfect sendoff. The entire film, right down to the score, is about reckoning with a life already lived, and the impossibility of legacy – or at least of controlling it. There is no perfect way to say farewell, to set all things in order as we planned – as I learn again and again, day after day. But in that great collapse, there is a kind of ultimate release, like splitting an atom, when the veil of reality is rent, and the possibility of eternity shines through.
