Music in February 2024
Even in a leap year February remains the briefest month, but I didn’t let that stop me from making by far the longest monthly playlist since I started doing this a year ago. As always, I won’t compel myself to go through every track, or force myself to come up with something insightful to say when I have nothing to offer – the point is that the music speaks for itself and is worth listening to.
I’ve been going down a Middle Kids rabbit hole for several months, so I was delighted when they started 2024 by releasing a new EP, and Terrible News has some of the fiercest energy yet, and seems almost defiantly depressed. In almost the same vein, I’ve fallen under the power of The Beths, who have a scratchier and more diffuse edge but a very similar spirit. Both of these are bands that emerged in the last five or six years, and I feel with them the alt-rock of twenty years ago has been fully reincarnated.
I had never heard of the delightfully-named Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird, and the song Bluestone came to me unannounced on the river of the Algorithm and left me feeling like the fisherman who finds a golden lamp inside the mouth of his catch. There’s something innocent and pure about the wonderful chorus of brass that accompanies this song I don’t understand, yet still feel warmed by.
In much the same way I stumbled across Angie McMahon’s song Letting Go. Perhaps it’s a bit on the nose, but these lyrics cut to the quick as I struggle with accepting the gradual loss of dreams and control that comes with time. And the reassuring chorus enjoining the hearer to ‘make mistakes’ is perhaps what I need to hear. Melbourne has once again produced a wonderful talent.
The Last Dinner Party is yet another young band with a brand new album from 2024, filled with dynamism and melodic drama boosted by a multiplying crescendo of layers of accompaniment. On the other end of the new young artist spectrum is country artist Jess Williamson’s Hunter, which seems to tapdance on tiptoes, following its own lyrical advice to give the listener space.
I had a Shakira phase in college, but I hadn’t really listened to her since, but I was not sorry to go back in time to repair that. She’s simply inimitable. Going much further back, Dexys Midnight Runners are mostly remembered for Come On Eileen, but the rest of the 1982 Too Rye Ay is well worth recalling. Plan B is a perfect example of their jam-packed sound, exploding with sounds you’d never mistake for anyone but them.
I moved forward to some of my beloved ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION’s more recent work this time, and found it increasingly meditative and melancholic, but in that warmly satisfying way that brings a kind of peace, especially their 2018 song UCLA. Their 2022 album Planet Folks has songs that soar into a kind of benedictive choir, where the guitar sounds like the sparks of lightning bugs that flit by the highways in July.
Enigma Variations 9: Nimrod is the first thing I think of whenever I think about Edward Elgar – not only his magnum opus, but the ultimate perfection of what an adagio can be. It achieves a grandeur that can only be put on slowly, like a coronation robe; then, having achieved it, the music immediately bows and gently recesses.
Belle is not a real artist, despite what Spotify says, and we must give credit to the actual singer-songwriter who plays the character in the eponymous film, Kaho Nakamura, who is fantastic in her own right. I don’t think Belle is one of Hosoda’s stronger films, but A Million Miles Away demonstrates that even so, it contains a wellspring of feeling.
The New Pornographers’ 2007 album Challengers has been one of my favorite albums for most of its lifespan now. It’s the perfect encapsulation of the manic pixie dream music of these voices of Vancouver. And Dawes’ I Can’t Think About It Now is just one of many great songs from All Your Favorite Bands. Like so much of their work, it skulks down the bleak desert highway of the Southwest of the mind, lighting flashing on the horizon. Ruby is a typical banger from Charly Bliss – a word I’d apply to almost everything they’ve released.
Andrew Orkin’s score to Cathy Yan’s directorial debut Dead Pigs is as gorgeously odd as that film. It’s got big toybox energy. I’m not familiar with Orkin, nor with Laurent Dury or Dascha Dauenhauer, but I shall have to acquaint myself with them more going forward.
There’s loads of Daoko songs I could pick, but I went with one of her most villain-core works, delightfully devilish dances up and down the ivory keys, and one that is almost the opposite – breathy and light.
Flogging Molly are wonderfully on brand with a song that makes even me, no fan of boxing, want to grab a time machine and head back to the 1890s to shake The Hand of John L. Sullivan. And while we’re on the subject of Celtic music, last year the Breton composer, singer, and harper Cécile Corbel graced us with a new album that could only have been made by someone from Finistère, who was raised on the road by parents who ran a traveling marionette show (I am not kidding).
I’ve posted excerpts from Shiro SAGISU’s fantastic score to the last Evangelion film before, but I’ve been remiss to not include Voyager – Gravestone Without Date, whose repeated chorus seems to embody the elegiac catharsis of the film, the laying of one’s life’s work and passion and trauma to rest.
I had to put Silver Rainbow and Black Rainbow together, admittedly because of their titles, but they are also both otherworldly creations of two of our most original musical minds. And I believe I have posted from Sufjan Stevens’ wonderful Illinois album before, but The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us! brings the reverence of a whispered prayer and the astonishment of a sudden sunrise to an insect encounter that seems to be much more than it appears.
Lizzy et Marco is just a fun tune to swing back and forth to, and Come to Atlanta is incredibly infectious for sounding as if it was recorded by whispering in one’s ear over a jazz set. Then I included two tracks from musicals. In February I had the unexpected opportunity to see the music SIX, about the unfortunate wives of Henry VIII, and of course Anne Boleyn’s song was just too cheekily catchy for me to leave out. Having included one musical number, I threw in 30/90 from the film tick, tick… BOOM!, in which our most consistently sympathetic leading man, Andrew Garfield, sings about the existential terror of reaching 30 at the end of history without having achieved anything. I realize this sort of thing sounds just as silly to people older than me as the other day when I heard a panicked 22-year-old bewailing their age and the rapidity of life relative to their dreams, but I really do relate to this more and more – the distance between what I expected to do and what I have actually gotten done keeps widening in a way that seems to daily ratchet up the anxiety that I am falling further behind even as I become more productive (but with too slow a delta-V). Ultimately it’s all a matter of dealing with the acceptance of death and having the right view toward eternity – easier said than done.
The modern synth-fantasies of CHVRCHES probably owe something to Kraftwerk (or maybe they don’t, I don’t know much about musical history). It seems like a stretch, but the bones are there. Grand Island’s score for Arctic Space Odyssey sounds like something in the wind on a sub-zero day, when the sun-dogs are loose. I think I’ve previously mentioned Jóhann Jóhannsson’s final work, his adaptation of The Last and First Men, but The Navigators is a perfect example of it’s deeply unsettling approach to deep time. The navigators of the title are humans – but humans of such a remote future, billions of years hence, that they are completely unrecognizable and utterly alien.
I love The Killers but I wish they wouldn’t ask me how I know that I’m right if I’m not nervous anymore – that’s a little too close to home, to be honest. As for Ricochet, Bowie himself called its gait ungainly, and one critic described it as an artistic low point – and fifty years later I have to say that these are deranged things to say about what is clearly a haunting and monumental work.
Perhaps this makes me basic, but I do find U2’s Stuck in a Moment to be profoundly encouraging, and have done so since I had it on my iPod mini back in high school. The next track is a bit long, but its sprawl is well-deserved, as a part of Masaaki Yuasa’s fantastic anime movie musical Inu-Oh, which fuses traditional medieval Japanese storytelling ballads with rock and roll, both in the music and the narrative. It’s a terrifically playful and original twist on the story of the narrativization of the Genpei War, and it’s a ton of fun.
The last two songs are both examples of what I call Japanese Gentlecore, the sort of music that reminds you of raindrops striking the surface of a clear pool in the afternoon sunlight.
