Music in March 2024
March was the Month of Dune. I crammed myself into the lower rows of the theater on Friday the 1st, opening night, to stare up at Chalamet’s comically-exaggerated chin thanks to the curvature of the IMAX screen. I returned twice more, to see it from every vantage point over the course of the month. What stuck with me most from that first viewing was the overpowering sonic experience of Arrakis; when the spice harvester begins its percussive dance, I felt myself physically vibrate in sympathetic resonance. But far more than the sound design, I became obsessed with Zimmer’s score, which I think rivals Interstellar as his best work in a voluminous career. The music truly echoes the course of the story, synthesizing the disparate themes of the first film into a purposeful, majestic, horrifying concert. I’ve put several tracks throughout my playlist, but the final one, Kiss The Ring, opens such a vista as words cannot describe.
But I must move on. But the theme of overwhelming, mechanistic power continues in Sufjan Stevens’ album The Age of Adz, whose titular track sounds like a musical adaptation of Metropolis (although of course we’ve already seen that done, and excellently). And the eponymous refrain of I Want To Be Well expresses what may be the central tension in our lives: do we want to be well? Woodkid’s Iron continues the theme of fanatic, driving force, building and building an escalating tension as it plunges from the clifftops into the unknown.
There are a few other scores in this list besides Dune. Cho Young Wook’s baroque chamber piece tells you exactly what sort of spider’s web Sympathy For Lady Vengeance will be; Amine Bouhafa’s work on The Summit of the Gods haunts the mind and suggests within itself (though I have not yet seen the picture) the first of Everest’s many ghosts joining its spectral chorus; Kevin Penkin once again opens a cavernous eldritch space within a piece of music with his score for Tower of God; Joe Hisaishi, taking a fairly different tone for a very different kind of film than his Ghibli work, creates a fatalistic melancholia in scoring the incredible, bleak HANA-BI; and Carter Burwell demonstrates the worth of restraint and simplicity in his arrangement of What a Friend We Have in Jesus, used to wistfully reconcile the passing of a quarter century of life in the final moments of True Grit. Amid all these, we find the master of sentiment himself, the Great Ennio Morricone, at work on Cinema Paradiso, a film so utterly sincere in its sentimentality that, like its score, it overcomes every objection of trope or triteness and compels the audience to weep.
Sentiment is so often the key for me – I am in that regard, simple. For instance, I am not a massive Lana Del Rey fan, but these tracks she released last year are so fragile and openhearted that they cannot be denied. Returning to the forward current of the musical river, London Grammar’s album Truth Is A Beautiful Thing rolls on like the Styxian Thames under the cold night fog. And We are the massacre, World’s End Girlfriend’s bizarre elegy, fuses the sense of dark fear (are those screams in the background?) with the somber catharsis of honest tears and a crescendo of noise which brute-forces its way into a kind of alien harmony.
Chick Habit, If You Should Try To Kiss Her, and Trailer Song all appear on the soundtrack of 1999’s But I’m a Cheerleader, and they have a particular mood and moment frozen in warm amber. Then there’s music from Necry Talkie, always upbeat and sunny, and Vaundy, similarly jaunty. Softcult, on the other hand, is a poison-tipped fragment of neo-grunge, whose gall is transmuted by Florence+The Machine’s alchemy into a frenetic spiral, dancing its way up from the dust and into the daylight.
And yes, I did put in ABBA, who I love. There’s nothing like some good old disco. Picking up that spirit of fun is clammbon, who spin it into a melody of gold. Hitsujibungaku are full-throated and warm, while DAOKO is sinuous and cool. Then, of course, there’s Takagi’s album Tai Rei Tei Rio, with joyful dances of life and folkish hymnodies. You And Whose Army? begins lazily, before tipping over into a waterfall of blood.
I stumbled onto Laufey’s album Bewitched, and was immediately captivated by this jazzy time-warp that sounds like it was recorded about seventy years ago, if not more. I’m not an artistic conservative or radical – I’m an artistic omnivore: I want more and more and more of every possible thing, and so it’s a shocking delight to find music that seemed consigned to a past era revivified with entirely new songs, sung by a young voice in an old mode.
Another artist that was new to me this month was Asobi Seksu, whose 2006 album Citrus has all the tart buzz of its namesake. There’s a kind of warm sonic bath created by the liberal dispensation of so much guitar, which reminds me a little of The Sundays, but with a very particular aftertaste. I like it. (<This is the caliber of criticism money can’t buy; you have to get it foisted on you for free, like a brochure).
Confess feels like raw sugar cut with pine sawdust, snorted entire. 2 Cool 2 Care sounds very Canadian (complimentary) for some reason – but it turns out Burch is from Detroit, which is almost Canada. In Losing My Mind, Montaigne’s usual raw vulnerability is set to an amazing souped-up tune, impossible not to move to. And Making It Through voices a proposition that I have started seriously considering – that perhaps “just making it through is the lesson” – perhaps the Gospel we’ve received is not one that demands glorious achievement, but simply living, as time runs out, as it should, could be enough.
Finally, I became enamored of the score for the video game Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (which I have not played). English composer Jessica Curry managed to create a haunting, elevating, and ultimately transcendent choral work, which adapts from scripture the lament of those who wait in suffering on the relief of the Lord, hoping in fear.
