Music in October 2024
October begins with the eerie sirens of Susumu Hirasawa, the inimitable futuristic composer. Scala & Kolacny Brothers’ Self-Fulfilling Prophecy builds in ominous beauty; a far more uplifting chorale piece is Quindon Tarver’s Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good). Also from the Romeo+Juliet soundtrack, Craig Armstrong’s original score conveys more longing than it says by virtue of its restraint. And Humbert Humbert’s comforting voices will always find their way home to my ears.
Minnie Riperton’s 1970 album Come To My Garden begins with the gently yet insistently lovely Les Fleurs. Crash Test Dummies’ 1993 masterwork God Shuffled His Feet includes a whimsically atavistic camper’s daydream of primordial life. More importantly, it features Afternoons & Coffeespoons, a song whose chorus I chant inwardly like a mantra, redeeming the anxiety of the future by baptizing inevitable retirement in the hope of “afternoons…measured out in coffeespoons & T.S. Eliot.” The song is an anthem of triumphant defiance spitting in the face of time. And everyone already knows that Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill is one of the greatest albums of the ‘90s – what more is there to say?
Ada Lea’s what we say in private is a sort of bleary, wall-eyed, yet quite pleasing little record. I wasn’t previously aware of The Beaches, but Desdemona is a very crushable cacophony, as are the bouncy technopunk of Reol and the beautifully bizarre 2992, by a band whose name I can’t copy because it’s Spotify, and cannot search because it appears to be written in a kind of runic wingdings I can’t even identify. Miya Folick is a reminder that we live in an age of abundance in terms of great musical artists to keep stumbling across, to the extent that it’s impossible to ever run out. A Pill to Crush feels like sinking into citric acid; jumping back two decades, Garbage puts so many interesting sounds in their music, from the bells in Cherry Lips to the hard-driving warped choral melody in Supervixen. Tripping Me Up is a sunkissed cat; Handle This this Sum 41 with a more resolute purpose than usual.
Money Changes Everything is one of those well-loved classics that is always worth revisiting to appreciate just how many elements get taken for granted. Come Undone is ‘90s Duran Duran, and it feels closer to the smooth pop of that decade than to their earlier work. Hamilton Leithauser’s The Loves of Your Life is defiantly messy, hopeful, and loud. Rostam’s In a River has a slightly more folksy, reflective tenor. Tintinnabulum is classic Adiemus, warm nonsense with a spoonful of sugar. Never Understand is Asobi Seksu rushing to catch up to itself; Pocky & Sake is Sissy Bar experimenting with a lovely, weird instrumental interlude. Chapterhouse is not a band I really know, but I shall have to know them better going forward.
Marginalia #48 has all you want from Takagi’s musical drafts: diegetic weather, piano that feels at once muted and suspended, and the simplest core of a melody that feels like peace. Asirrera’s chorus is plaintive and dovelike; Echo Sax No.4 seems like noodling around on a saxophone, but it somehow conveys a great depth of feeling in its deceptive simplicity.
The Feminine Urge has an incredible melodic climbing line in the chorus, where it feels as though the voice is being plucked like a guitar string. One Kiss Ends It All might be from 2013, but Saturday Looks Good To Me’s album feels like it escaped from the late ‘90s, and is all the better for it. I Won’t Run From It uses its vocal heights to great emotional effect, as Volcano Choir’s Byegone does with its lick that feels like an anchor being suddenly drawn up from the sea. Ohashi Trio put out a new album last year that feels like they were soaking in the folk of half a century past.
Speaking of the past, Billy Joel is an American bard I have underrated and neglected relative to his talent and fame. The Stranger is so insistently compelling, and Scenes from an Italian Restaurant is the sort of song Millennials like me are supposed to hate – a sprawling, indulgent Boomer elegy – and I love it, even if it is the musical equivalent of Grease.
P.S. Eliot’s name is perfect for this mumblecore rock, as is the title of their 2009 album Introverted Romance In Our Troubled Minds. Gillis Mountain is one of my favorite songs from the great Canadian folk singers the Rankins. The evocation of both the sunny day in the present and the nostalgic memory of settlers just a few generations earlier is so strong and keening that I can feel the sunburn and taste the blueberries. The next couple of tracks are windswept fantasy tropes I found on the soundtrack to Riddle of Fire. John Williams’ score to Lincoln is a musical distillation of the longing I feel for a nostalgic childhood love of American history, which calls up both my patriotic fondness for Fourth of July concerts on the National Mall, and my aching for an America where we felt as though we were growing in character, despite our faults. Kazahana resounds with the joyful life only Takagi can release on the stage, and 2.3 Courante has an urgent beauty glimpsed in passing and then lost.
Big Time is Angel Olsen achieving a new kind of mastery encoding settled sentimentality into big sound that doesn’t feel melodramatic. Holly Humberstone’s Paint My Bedroom Black contains a kind of breathy autotuning that is far more compelling than it has any right to be.
Say I Am You is the second record from The Weepies, and I can’t believe I made it 19 years without hearing it, because it is precisely my speed of melancholic encouragement to persist at life, to simply persist, regardless of how awful one might feel. Finally, John Williamson’s 1986 Mallee Boy is one of the greatest pieces of art produced by Australia. Nothing makes me homesick for a foreign land quite like Williamson’s wistful tone.
