Music in September 2023
Before I had even finished watching the excellent Return to Seoul, I had JungHwa Lee’s haunting 1967 melody Petal lodged firmly in my brain, where it remained for quite some time.
My next obsession was Japanese Breakfast’s 2021 album Jubilee, which has a sort of magnetic pulsating quality – I just got stuck on it. Paprika, for instance, bubbles with rising and falling lines, crisscrossing in a sort of musical plaid. Be Sweet jaunts along with a retro sound pulled out of last century, while the melody of Tactics has the same compelling pull as a vortex in flowing water.
St. Vincent’s Slow Disco feels like raising the curtain on a play – if the play is actually a plain of grass under a rising wind, flecked with drops of flying rain.
The Beths’ Expert In A Dying Field may be a metaphor for a break-up, but as someone who invested years of dreams and efforts to the pursuit of the academic humanities, a field that really does feel in decline, and who did eventually have to call it quits – well, let’s just say the vehicle of the metaphor hits a little close to home. It’s also a superb piece of music.
Another album I got really into was Middle Kids’ 2018 release Lost Friends. Bought It has a rough plaintive quality that works for this sort of earnest rock, and Edge of Town is a total foot-tapping earworm.
I think I mentioned another song from Crash Test Dummies’ 1991 album The Ghosts That Haunt Me Now in a previous post, but it really was a September album (and it feels like one). Both the titular track and At My Funeral function as a gentle act of peacemaking with death, finding comfort in relationships even at the limn of mortality.
World’s End Girlfriend’s new 2023 album, Resistance & The Blessing, is an excellent piece of dark composition, whether that’s eerie piano lines or MEGURI’s demented mechanized waltz.
I had not really listened to Sufjan Stevens much before, but I was vaguely aware of him as an artist I would like. His 2005 album Illinois blew my socks off. This music combines an intense emotional fragility with the anthemic power of a swelling choir. And it also contains probably the best entry in the bizarrely populous subgenre of songs about Superman.
Among John Williams’ many great film scores, it can be easy to overlook the quieter ones, but this would be a mistake. One of my favorites is his warm and tender score to Lincoln. This music feels exactly like the grandly nostalgic and gently patriotic loving imagination of America in the 19th century. It’s impossible to visualize any other place or time.
In September I revisited several different albums from ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION, one of the all-time greatest Japanese rock bands, all of which, as they say, go incredibly hard. You just have to listen to them - to any of their work. You’ll be nodding your head and pumping your fists in no time.
Next I included several wonderful pieces of early ‘80s Japanese city pop, a genre of mostly know through more recent remixes used as backing for a very specific subgenre of Japanese cinema and anime music videos. But the original genre is incredibly catchy and fun.
Yokaze, by Itoko Toma, is a classic Andrea pick – a bit of sad piano music that includes all the ancillary noise of the pedals. It sounds like tears falling into a pool of still water inside an echoing chamber.
Kawaranai Mono is the sentimental credits song from Mamoru Hosoda’s 2006 masterpiece The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and the sentiment definitely works on me.
Enya’s On My Way Home feels like sailing over a sea of warm olive oil, and while that may sound strange I mean it as a compliment.
The last two tracks are from Daniel Norgren’s score to the best film of 2022, The Eight Mountains. Both are elegiac meditations on loss and the fleeting nature of all that we love in this world, yet the music is touched by a kind of sweetness.
