Music in November 2023
The most recent album from The Mountain Goats, Jenny From Thebes, has a fresh, rain-washed feel to it. Darnielle’s work is often lo-fi, but this is crisp and clear, shining like a freshly-washed car, and like all his work it’s an exquisite entanglement of melancholy and optimism. This sort of music is perhaps better calibrated to the actuality of life than any other – but there’s also a sort of inexplicable mystery, because I can’t explain quite why it’s so profound.
Jo Yeong-wook’s score for the 2016 film The Handmaiden is a quivering tapestry of trepidation and anticipation, which weaves itself into ever greater splendor, like a silkworm spinning its thread. Meanwhile, Martin Dirkov’s score to last year’s Holy Spider is oppressive and ominous, a soundtrack that wears a hard grimace.
Then we have two great songs from the ‘80s – Randy Crawford’s One Day I’ll Fly Away and Vanessa Paradis’s Joe le taxi. Both create a sort of warm and dreamy cloud upon which carries the listener away.
I was really into Mae back in high school, and I think their album Singularity still holds up really well, especially its pitched-up synth lines.
Rainbow after tears is exactly what its title suggests. Just as the original rainbow of the Noetic flood, Saho Terao’s song has the feeling of life springing back into bloom, shaking off death’s torpor and greeting a surprising new tomorrow.
Next are three more ‘80s songs, all with the feeling of being simultaneously within and without – under and endless low ceiling of grey clouds, off which the music echoes endlessly. This is exactly what I love about this period of music.
I don’t really play video games aside from Civilization VI, so I have no familiarity with Cyberpunk 2077 or it’s soundtrack, but I stumbled across this track from musical duo Let’s Eat Grandma, and I just really enjoy it.
As for The Perfect Girl, ok, I admit it, this one I am familiar with strictly from memes – but after hearing a few seconds of it enough times in various memes, I decided to find the actual song, because it’s so magnetic.
Bitter Sweet Symphony is a classic for a reason – there’s nothing quite like its iconic, endlessly-looped melody, which builds and builds and processes through time and space, and carries with it an indomitable, improbable positivity.
The last three songs are from ELO’s fantastic 1977 album Out of the Blue, which explodes like fireworks crackling across the night sky. This entire album is indescribably wonderful – or at least it is for me.
