Just re-listened to: Like A Rose (2013) by Ashley Monroe. A throwback country-pop gem, alternating well between touching and funny.
Just listened to: Leonardo da Vinci: La musique secrète (2019) performed by Doulce Mémoire under the direction of Denis Raisin Dadre. Seventy-eight minutes of exquisite Renaissance chamber music selected as an expression of Raisin Dadre’s musicological reflection on ten paintings of Leonardo.
I especially like me the sound of some lira da braccio, an instrument which sounds like a slightly more primordial Italian take on the Swedish nyckelharpa. When nobility is built into the very timbre of the instrument, it’s hard to go wrong.
Bonus points for to whoever decided to allow little to no gap between the tracks on this album, a decision that in my limited experience listening to classical recordings is an interest-propelling rarity.
Just re-listened to: I Want To See Pulaski At Night (2013) by Andrew Bird. Pretty. Mostly just layers of strings loops surrounding the one song in the middle. Thus I’m not sure it’d stand up well to fully attentive listening. But still, quite pretty.
Listening to Peter Gabriels’s “Big Time” with the volume cranked up is an excellent way to extract and maintain one’s hold on the verve created by a winning streak but satirically strip out the attendant bigheadedness.
Just listened to: Matthias Goerne’s and Leif Ove Andsnes’ recording of Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis, op. 24 & Kernerlieder op.35 on Harmonia Mundi (2019).
I’m new to lieder. But it’s more than apparent that Schumann was a master at writing them and Goerne a master at singing them. Add to this a world-famous pianist recorded at roughly the same volume level as Goerne’s baritone, and you have yourself a superlative 53-minute recital of German Romantic art songs.
Just listened to: Portraits of a Mind (2023) featuring works composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ian Venables performed by Alessandro Fisher, The Navarra Quartet, and William Vann. Maybe an hour of a tenor emoting impressionistic and devotional lyrics atop a string quartet and a piano isn’t your cup of English breakfast. It, or at least this particular hour of it, is certainly mine.
And maybe you’ll listen anyway to share in Vaughan Williams’ love for Dorian and Mixolydian modes, or to hear strong evidence in the Venables that the craft of contemporary art song lives on beautifully, or to wonder at or join in on the ardently devotional lyrics the agnostic RVW chose to set to equally ardent music.
Just re-listened to: Cusp (2018) by Alela Diane. A gentle yet sometimes haunting song cycle foregrounding self-harmonized alto vocals delivering maternal lyrics over perfectly understated instrumentation. Indie piano folk with just enough vocal reverb to make the songs feel old—which is weird because in the era these songs lightly evoke, no one made records with reverb on them because they were doing it on wax cylinders. But hey, it worked for Fleet Foxes, and it works for her, their obvious fellow Pacific Northwesterner and tourfellow.
Just listened to: The Livelong Day (2019) by Lankum. If you’re an Irish tradster but you let too much North Atlantic rain into your soul, your insides start to transmute into wet peat. For Ian, Daragh, Cormac, and Radie, that meant drone metal started to seep out of their pores. (And it’s getting worse.)
It was a pleasure today to select recordings from which to make custom ringtones for when Sullivan and Éa call me. (I’ve been using “Whistle Stop” from Disney’s Robin Hood for Carla for years.) Éa even advised me on my selection for her, suggesting the winner (the first twenty-nine seconds of “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon & Garfunkel. For Sullivan, I chose the first thirty seconds of Quincy Jones’ “Soul Bossa Nova,” signifying his easygoing demeanor and his prioritizing enjoyment.
Just re-listened to: Supernatural (1998) by DC Talk, an album whose release was the first one I can remember anticipating with excitement, prompting me to assemble something resembling a listening party before I knew those were a thing. (Primary reaction: “Let’s go figure out the weird chord progression on ‘My Friend (So Long)’!”)
Yet I don’t post it to recommend it—despite its considerable formal, vocal, and especially harmonic virtues, it comes off sonically bloated, smugly identitarian, lyrically derivative, and vapidly devotional instead of inventive, moral, artistic, and Christian—but rather to wonder: How am I only just now realizing DC Talk was a boy band?
Just re-listened to: Love Is The King (2020) by Jeff Tweedy. The homey, sentimental sound of a veteran American songwriter, fifteen years sober, sitting on the front porch of his family home at sunset with his amps, his sons, and his elder son’s drum set, strumming perfect little gems of songs into existence on his many guitars, but especially his nylon-string Martin, because he has pandemic time to kill. Some of the songs are sung to his wife. Half of them are honky-tonk. The album gets a touch sluggish toward the end, but that’s because the sun has set and it’s time to go to bed.
Just re-listened to: Carried Along (2000) by Andrew Peterson. Carefully arranged, folk-esque acoustic pop marking the arrival of the most skilled evangelical songwriter of the century. Peterson’s fanboyism for Rich Mullins is evident—and quite welcome. The album’s only flaw is the fanboy’s reedy vocals.
Just re-listened to: Return to Cookie Mountain (2006) by TV on the Radio. Thick, noisy, wordy, loopy apocalyptic post-rock that manages to maintain pop leanings. (We observe once again that minimum viable pop is catchy melodies plus reliable rhythm, which this album has in large, dirty piles.) An excellent would-be Bowie album, as if Bowie had been taking Peter Gabriel-administered steroids in a cavern and as an eerie side effect had developed the ability to sing in two voices simultaneously from his one mouth as long as those voices were separated by octaves or some other such wide harmonic interval.
It all makes for an excellent Halloween album. But despite its spook and force, the pathos is what lingers. And I haven’t even yet paid attention to the lyrics, of which there are plenty. Love is kinda crazy with a spooky dirtywhirl like you.
The album art depicts a nest, but it sure looks to me like a crown of thorns.
Just re-listened to: Jesus Freak (1995) by DC Talk. Is it nostalgia that enables me to delight in it? Surely in part. I was 13 years old and well ensconced in evangelical subculture when it came out. But Smitty’s fellow CCM platinum release I’ll Lead You Home came out that year, too, and you don’t see me writing about that now, do you?
Look, the ingredients that make for pop-rock I like—shapely melodies, generous harmonies, three lead vocalists, and verve—are present here on every track. There’s so much smiling energy—so much more than on their non-CCM contemporaries’ albums—not to mention highly skilled session playercraft on offer that it’s very easy for me to listen past a few awkward rap bars and the album’s religious superiority complex. It’s a pop tour de force. And besides, I’m not really spinning this for the lyrics, although I don’t care what you say, I don’t care what you heard: “Colored People” is a great song.
Just re-listened to: Carrie and Lowell (2015) by Sufjan Stevens. When Christgau wrote of this album, “How best expiate a conflicted grief? Surely something with more tensile strength than musical flower arrangements,” he did capture its aural beauty, but he clearly wasn’t listening to its devastating lyrics. As far as grief albums go, this one is better even than Funeral and Tonight’s the Night. My favorite Sufjan by a substantial margin.
Just listened to: The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow (2024) by Charles Lloyd. Easygoing, desultory, flute- or breathy-tenor-sax-led freeish modal jazz for inspiring hippies at night. Bonus point of interest: The esteemed saxophonist/flautist is 86!
Just listened to: Silence & Music (2017) performed by Gabrieli’s “Rolls-Royce” of a choir, conducted here by their artistic director Paul McCreesh. This is fifteen 20th-century secular British partsongs exquisitely sung and perfectly recorded, thereby gratifying my anglophilia, audiophilia, and love for small-choir singing all at once. Hat tip to the late David Vernier for the recommendation.
Just listened to: Open Your Heart (2012) by The Men. Noisy, abrasive rave rock. Sometimes like Sonic Youth, but often faster and shoutier, hence punk-er. I like it best when droning, as in “Oscillation” and “Presence.”
Hypothesis: A big reason we love books, movies, and recorded music is that they offer to our lower brains a passable simulacrum of company. Inspiring, beautiful, mind-expanding they can be. But they are, at their root, an inferior substitute for basic emotional and relational goods that come from real, live, human company…
…writes the man whose wife of twenty years hasn’t been home in a week and is currently incommunicado on a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Just listened to: Traditional Techniques (2020) by Stephen Malkmus. My first Malkmus solo album listen. His lyrics are as weird as in the ’90s, but I had no idea he could make such pretty music. A very good late-night psych-folk stoner album. The effect is similar to hearing The Velvet Underground’s self-titled album. Also, I’m a sucker for 12-string guitar and playfulness with words.
Just listened to: The State Of The Tenor: Live At The Village Vanguard, Vol. 2 (1985) by Joe Henderson. Heavy saxophone improvisation served over a delicious bed of bass and drums. Are there key signatures? Who cares! Free your mind. Come for the improv sax tremolos, growls, and melodic flights. Stay for the bassist.
Just listened to: Puts: The Hours (2024) by Kevin Puts, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, The Metropolitan Opera, Renee Fleming, Joyce DiDonato, Kelli O’Hara, and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. I don’t know opera, so I don’t know what to say. But as a cap for all the emotional and musical color and drama that comes before, that final trio is remarkable.
Won-won-won-wonderful, even.
As a lighter aside, it is hilarious to hear Renee Fleming sing, “Maybe I should join a choir.” Yeah.
Just listened to: Alive in the Wilderness (2020) by Endless Field. New-age, occasionally jazzish, occasionally groovy acoustic guitar-and-bass record made outdoors in Utah using a solar-powered recording rig. Ambient if you want it to be. A fascinating, short write-up on the making of the album is available on the Bandcamp page.
Just listened to: False Lankum (2023) by Lankum. Irish folksters whelming their traditional ballads with walls of dark sound. They start off most tracks playing, singing, and often harmonizing rawly and beautifully. (The color of the harmonies sometimes gives gives a clue of what’s to come.) Then they keep singing while they bury the songs in mountains of dark, wrenching sonic peat harvested from the banks of the five rivers of Hades. They do it often and consistently enough to call it a schtick, but to call it that is to undersell its power. I can’t recommend the whole without reservation because there’s sometimes too much noise for my taste. However, the album deserves the raves it has received, as well as a good single listen from you and a place on your Halloween playlists. As for me, I’m sure as hell going to dig into their back catalog.
🎧 🎵 The Monkees (1966) by The Monkees: Sunshine, melodies, Micky Dolenz’ voice, energetic session musicians, contemporary Beatles imitation, and a heap of goofballism. One of several album-length reasons I count 1966 as my one favorite years in pop.