Music in August 2025
I’m not familiar with Akino Arai’s work, but I really like the particular brand of laid-back melancholy warmth she uses.
Moyai is triumphant, processional, and a little bizarre.
Mistake is yet another case of the Middle Kids being both openhearted and jaded in a wonderful way.
I love fullhearted earnestness, and nothing is more fullheartedly earnest than Christopher Willis’s score for The Personal History of David Copperfield.
The Riddle is brought home by the trackless Celtic yearning of Cécile Corbel.
The Brightness is such a fragile album from Anaïs Mitchell; it’s kind of heartbreaking.
Dan English’s work on Sky Record is just so darn interesting.
A Race for Our Autonomy is a good word from MAE that I needed to hear. To forfeit is to start, indeed.
White Horses is definitely the song on this playlist that has been most caught in my mind, suggesting that perhaps music does, indeed, have magnetic properties.
God Help the Girl is apparently a film musical, which is surprising because I pay much more attention to movies than to musical releases, but when I put this on the playlist I thought it was just an album. It’s certainly dramatic enough.
Ha Ha Hey from Girl Most Likely is circa-2011 sad alternative done really well.
A Matter of Time, Laufey’s 2025 release, is as smooth and strong and rich as her voice. Sabotage, in particular, hits too close for comfort.
Wreck is Neko Case back at the top of her game, with all the urgent and fearful hopefulness of a nascent love that rushes on beyond the end of the tracks.
Carousel builds to the kind of wall of sound culmination that I’m such a sucker for.
Michael Nyman is a composer whose work crops up here and there in different films, but it has mostly eluded me so far. I will have to change that.
Girls is a song I’ve probably posted before, but listening to Masakatsu Takagi dance lightly over the keys never gets old.
Mother, Pray For Me is one of the most emotionally affecting songs I’ve encountered, and specifically one of the most vulnerable and honest reckonings with the incredible heartache of children and parents who come to be separated by faith.
