Music in September 2024
Life Is drops one straight into the stream, intersecting ripples concatenating and reproducing themselves out toward the shore.
Heroes is of course Bowie’s best work, but the whole eponymous album is good, and My Rights Versus Yours is another refreshing breath from Challengers, one of my favorite albums. There is a kind of wellspring of melancholy-tempered and thus melancholy-proof optimism. Sinead O’Connor’s later work isn’t her best, but her voice has a peculiar quality that makes Where Have You Been? stand on it’s own. Regina’s 2004 album Soviet Kitsch is a strange delight which dances through the eerie white Moscow night.
Wipala, Inkuyo’s Inca flute track featured on the Baraka soundtrack, makes me want to head directly for the Andes and not look back, and Flying lives up to its name with an abundant surge of energy reaching for the sky. world.execute (me); is another weird indigo dream from Mili.
Tigers Blood, Waxahatchee’s newest album, is a beautiful Texas elegy, and Spilt Milk and I Figured You Out share a country air with different moods. Hello Rain gazes contentedly at drops erupting on the surface of the puddles, and Man in the Moon is great sleepy Portland garage indie. Angie McMahon’s 2024 EP Light Sides may be short, but its weight exceeds its runtime.
Orinoco Flow is probably familiar to most people, and it is certainly Enya’s most memetic and catchily silly track, but it got that way for good reason. Sunbears! The Floor is Lava! feels less like their early work, and more like something cribbed from Walk the Moon about ten years ago, but it’s nice to have such boundless energy, and I Found Heaven has an excellent resonant sound. The guitar riff in Red Shoulder is impeccably catchy, like an autumn eddy dragging the listener under.
Russian techno remixes are way outside my normal wheelhouse, but Uebok Gotta Run, as bluntly loud and crude as it is, is just fun. Born to Lose is Sleigh Bells dropping a hammer on your knees in a joyful way, while Many Moons is Janelle Monae at her most spacy and weirdly profound. Montaigne’s Please You is a shout for liberation from her superb 2019 album Complex. “There’s a forest in my gut that just wants to feel a pancake” is a lyric that sticks in my brain because it is strange and heartfelt and also makes me hungry. Manhattan is CHVRCHES back in a chorus of light.
Tomberlin’s 2018 album At Weddings is soft, strained, sad, and undeniable, and Ada Lea’s work is likewise bitter with tannins like the oversteeped earl grey I used to drink. The Greatest Love is London Grammar at full flush of symphonic scale and depth; The List is Maisie Peters at her closest, most heartfelt.
Back in their heyday I recall a lot of jokes about the exaggerated and undeserved popularity of Coldplay, and I think there was some truth to that, but Viva La Vida has really held up with age for me, twisting its way like a worm through the brain. Mitski’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We is yet another masterpiece to add to her procession of artistic triumphs. When the full chorus suddenly burst out in Bug Like an Angel, the hair on my neck stood up, and I knew I was going to love the album; When Memories Snow has a weird and tortured horn element, and Star has the force of a benediction.
It's Infinite is a nice little piece of sad indie, like so much that I love, and Big Thief’s Capacity is a whole album of it, and quite a lot more beside. Bookmark is essentially that – just a momentary musing on the piano from Tota, all the more affecting for its muted brevity. Cecile Corbel’s new album of Arthuriana, Graal, is a good addition to her oeuvre of contented Breton fairy-dances. The late Ryuichi Sakamoto did some of his last work composing the score for Koreeda’s Monster, one of the most moving films of 2023, and Sakamoto at the end of his life is as great as he ever was, perfectly capturing both rising, unspeakable tension, and then elegiac resolution. Finally, I suspected I would like the work of The Weepies as soon as I saw their name, but let’s be honest, I came to Say I Am You for the wonderful Deb Talan. These three songs are particularly special and aimed directly and with no hint of dissembling at the core human need to be known and loved.
