Music in November 2024
November begins with a grim defiance to which I am growing all too used, with I Won’t Lie Down and Still Waiting. Final Hour and Save Me are both broad strokes at the epic, but the latter swings so hard at melodic melodrama that it successfully sells itself without a shred of nuance whatsoever.
Termites is a frothy sonic tsunami that I wish were longer, but it probably is best for its own intensity that the wavelength is short. Next are two tracks from different albums by The Mountain Goats, and like so much of John Darnielle’s work, I find encouragement in the bitter injunctions to live, and melancholy in warm reminiscences.
Regina Spektor’s 2009 album Far features the aching Laughing With, aimed directly at humanity’s primal wound, our Lack; One More Time with Feeling provides a kind of template for hopeful persistence in the face of how we feel.
Holly Humberstone’s Can You Afford To Lose Me? drops its piano notes into a puddle of reverberating synths and filters that is so satisfying it overcomes the glumness of England. Under the Bridge is of course a Red Hot Chili Peppers standard, but this cover by Scala & Kolacny Brothers gives the chorus in particular an auroral height and a weight to match.
Where Are You Driving? matches Laura Veirs’ raw voice with a fascinating instrumentation to produce something with a searching emotionality. Rufus Wainwright’s Oh What A World is a strange composition, a sort of plodding, mounting march that builds into a bounding deployment of Ravel.
Your Ex-Lover Is Dead by Stars is one of the most beautiful pieces of alternative rock left to us by its heyday in the first decade of the century. So is Maps, which rolls in like waves under a stormfront. Souvenir is a soft-edged susurration; Naomi and Me & Suspended From Class both cheeky little ditties.
Zmi, Sigure Ros, and Saho Terao form a bridge of reflective sound into the exuberance of OFFICIAL HIGE DANDISM’s Traveler. Smooth Operator swings with such aplomb that you can’t help but let it lead the dance; Inner Smile has a different sound but the same chutzpah. Tom Jones, of course, really knew how to belt it out with the best of them, and Blondie just keeps turning the dial up as well.
I’ve become a yacht rock guy, only without the yacht; there’s something about this lubricated jazzy odd corner of musical history that gives it power; it wraps itself so fully in its own silliness that it becomes Teflon, impervious to any scorn. And ELO’s 1977 Out of the Blue is plenty silly in its own fun way, as is, I suppose, David Bowie’s Suffragette City. George Harrison, on the other hand, is quietly quite emotionally serious in this strange song of detachment.
I’m not sure how I came across the work of Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, but I am certainly glad I did. Likewise with the Punjabi folk music of Hans Raj Hans, which is hard to not nod along with incessantly.
In 2015 Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur, English composer Johnny Greenwood, and the Indian ensemble The Rajasthan Express, collaborated to produce Junun, an utterly remarkable album which is perhaps impossible to properly describe. I strongly recommend just listening to it. And Khan is a bizarre collision of bagpipes and throat singing.
Andrew Bird and Madison Cunningham’s collab album has all the lilting, wistful tartness one might expect. Comrade reaches a point where it begins ascending an escalator and doesn’t come back down. Finally, See Her Out (Thats Just Life) by Francis and the Lights shimmers like a prism.
