Music in December 2024
I finished my last monthly playlist for 2024 weeks ago, and then life intervened and actually posting it became a very low priority. It is encouraging that things are now stabilized to the point where I’m getting around even to this again.
German duo Grandbrothers’ 2017 album Open is a wordless work of chilled pulses of light vanishing toward the horizon. Honey stands out as a methodically emotionally dawn, like crocuses breaking out of the snow. Tierras de Fuego, The Bubble in the Wine Glass, and Flight all claw their way into the vertical, albeit in different ways.
Kaho Nakamura’s Their Lives was captivating enough before I looked it up and realized that, translated, it begins with the line “Oh, God! The end of the wilderness with no way out, So bright!” and continues in that vein. It’s an endless chanted injunction to live and to go forward, despite the wilderness. Za Ninngenn’s sound is more of a pop-symphonic metal, slickly dramatic.
Oh No is a parable about how miserable we make ourselves through our phones; it’s also a good demonstration of Wet Leg’s droll humor; also I just like that Pizza Rat is mentioned. Pop It is more easy-listening Nintendo synthpop from Anamanaguchi. Singin’ In The Blue Sky has school marching band energy in a very endearing way.
Rostam continues to consistently toss out fascinating nasal tracks with an eclectic mélange of ingredients. Rufus Wainwright seems to be almost a throwback, orchestrating like a big band, belting like a ballad singer, but the actual music is unmistakably 21st-century in its complex melodic ferocity.
apathy is an interstitial tone poem; Lately is a stripped-down ramble; Only The Strong has precisely the sort of gently grim outlook I gravitate toward musically. Tomberlin’s happy accident embeds plaintive guitars in a mass of warm bleeding sound that delaminates as it peaks. Bess Atwell’s Love Is Not Enough expresses the genuine wistful doubt, expressed on Twin Peaks, that dares to name the ultimate fear: the possibility that love is not enough. The Fear of Losing This has all the muted frailty that Florist can muster packed into it.
Courtney Barnett never disappoints, and the chorus of Fear Is Like a Forest grabs your ankles like the Pacific undertow, and pulls hard. At the River feels like a particularly relaxing dream, dancing its way down the beach. Skullcrusher’s You are my House weaves a sad, sparkling tapestry out of a lonely room. The back half of Ethel Cain’s Sun Bleached Flies breaks out into a majestic elegy that feels like late-afternoon sunlight pooling on the floor by the window. Manami Kakudo’s album oar sneaks by one quietly, as if trying not to wake the listener; Fuyumi Abe’s poets has a live wire of warm synth propelling it gently along.
I listened to a lot of Charlotte Church when I was growing up, and her recording of Bizet’s Habanera holds up well, dripping with the coolness of a tropical night. Jimmy Fontana’s Il Mondo is everything I like in a grand old big Italian number.
Mannheim Steamroller’s take on Good King Wenceslas throws the curtain up on the Christmas season with synthetic bravado; Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s An Angel Came Down is perhaps corny and self-indulgent, but I just like a big unembarrassed swing. Maria durch ein’ Dornwald ging is an appropriately reverent advent hymn in which the theotokos passes through a wood of thorns, and causes it to flower. Rest Your Head is a minimalist painting of a frozen field and a quiet wood in the fading dusk.
The Mountain Goats’ 2004 album We Shall All Be Healed is another of Darnielle’s confounding lyrical contraptions, and like many of them it runs doggedly, head-down, straight toward Apocalypse, and find a humor in resignation that feels like some kind of rebel triumph. Labrador is one of the most emotionally and melodically potent songs from the great Aimee Mann, which is high praise. I really love this one.
ghostpia is Homecomings waving farewell through a wall of golden seafoam; Hanare Gumi also says a heartfelt goodbye, complete with tributary horns. Yujiro Kudo’s Kokoro has a childlike humility in its scope. Finally, Humbert Humbert continues to release heart-plucking folk music in 2024.
