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  • 047 :: WAITING

    047 :: WAITING
    2025/08/28
    FEATURING

    Tether by Annahstasia, released by drink sum wtr in 2025. Listen / Buy direct
    • "Villain"
    • "Waiting"

    TRANSCRIPT

    What does it take for a piece of music to capture our attention? Can it come down to just one thing, a singular instrument, a miraculous voice? That's all I needed to hear. With a single phrase I am captivated, fascinated by this individual before my ears, unlike any other I've heard before. Such precise phrasing, such precise control, jumping between the guttural and the angelic, hovering in its delicacy before landing firmly back on its feet.

    And yes, this singer's voice recalls others'; and yes, there's so much else that's remarkable about this music. I don't mean to downplay that. The production is a perfect complement, the song is a perfect vehicle, but I can't help it, I just keep coming back to this voice.

    And I feel like there's a lesson here, that for all the music that's been made before, a voice can still surprise us, can still stand out as utterly unique – that in the vast universe of sounds, we're still discovering new stars. And so here I am, transfixed by this star's brilliance, bathing in its light, marvelling at its individuality, the exact frequency of its sound, a world unto itself, opened up before us and beckoning us to jump in.

    And we're not done. I couldn't just leave it there. We have to hear at least one more from this singer that I can't get enough of, and sit a little longer with this singular voice: its cooing vibrato, its breathy rasp, its mesmerizing weave of textures, its masterful delivery. It shouldn't be possible for a voice to contain such contradictions – both hard and soft, harsh and tender, assertive and muted, masculine and feminine. But that's what holds my gaze and keeps me coming back for more: the singer's ability to span the full range of vocal expression in a single performance, to encompass all of us, all we feel, all we can be.

    But make no mistake: This singer is no abstraction, no mere amalgam of different vocal stylings. What is so remarkable about this music is how all these diverse qualities cohere in a single individual, to form a unique personality. To be confronted so fully with the reality of another person, in all their infinite complexity – it's not often that music gifts us this experience, but I don't mind a little waiting, if that's what it takes to find music like this.
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    10 分
  • 046 :: PARADISE

    046 :: PARADISE
    2025/07/29
    FEATURING

    Paradise by The Westerlies, released by Westerlies Records in 2025. Listen / Buy direct
    • "Paradise"
    • "Fight On"

    TRANSCRIPT

    Such a timeless thing, music – despite the fact that it exists in time, is inextricably bound to time, somehow it's able to transcend it.

    I could tell you that this song was released this year, was recorded not long before that, but this says so little about how the song actually sounds and feels. What I immediately hear is history and tradition, or something deeper than that, something elemental, the very essence of music itself: a communion of voices, some human and some instrumental, coming together in harmony and forming something greater than the sum of their parts – a hymn, a prayer, an ode to the paradise that awaits us, which, in its bewitching amalgam of elements, seems in a small way to make that paradise manifest before our ears.

    Perhaps this is to be expected, as this is explicitly spiritual music, as its lyrics make plain. But its purpose is not to proselytize. It's as if the musicians are borrowing these idioms to reveal the spiritual power inherent in music: its ability to make palpable worlds beyond our own, to make us feel the touch of a higher power brushing up against our side.

    And there's something else I can't help but notice: As the song proceeds, its subject shifts from "I" to "we", and the singer turns to address us, their "comrades through the wilderness", their "partners in distress", to assure us that "we have a home in glory". I hear this as a reminder that paradise is never reached by oneself, and is only ever discovered in the collective – in the same way that music is an intrinsically relational phenomenon, a special alchemy that emerges between the disparate pieces it brings together: between melody and harmony, between singer and ensemble, between music and lyrics, and between musician and listener.

    And on that note, let's hear more of this alchemy in action. Because I don't want that first song to give you the wrong impression about this record, which is a collection of songs by a brass quartet, occasionally accompanied by a vocalist, but for the most part just playing on their own, weaving together their different tones and timbres into a tapestry of totalizing sound. And because it's a quartet, you can still make out its four different strands, its chorus of voices, some sustained, some staccato, some high, some low, some quiet, some loud, some melodic, some harmonic, and some almost textural. And because it's a quartet, there is also something to it above and beyond its individual members, a manifest image that comes into view from each instrumentalist playing and moving in concert with one another – in a word, there is music.

    I'll admit: A lot of the joy of this music for me comes from its novelty. I don't spend much time listening to brass ensembles, and so I'm especially struck by the distinctive pleasures of the form: the punch of the articulation, the interstitial breaths, the thick bass of the trombones, the squeal of a trumpet, the dynamic fluidity, the sheer power of horns. It's all the expressiveness of voice, amplified by a bell, and thus transformed into a clarion call. It calls us to attention. It calls us to assemble. It calls us to listen and behold.
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    9 分
  • 045 :: TOTAL

    045 :: TOTAL
    2025/06/30
    FEATURING

    caroline 2 by caroline, released by Rough Trade Records in 2025. Listen / Buy direct
    • "Total euphoria"
    • "When I get home"

    TRANSCRIPT

    If this is the first time you're hearing this music, I envy you. And actually, if this is your first time, maybe stop listening to me talk about this music and give yourself a chance to hear it firsthand, unadulterated. I'll still be here when you're done. And I'll still be hearkening back to the first time I heard this music, when it still felt like a jumble of unpredictable rhythms, a band of musicians just barely hanging together, a little orchestra teetering on the edge of collapse.

    Because the thing about this song is that, once you've heard it enough times, everything starts to feel like it's in exactly the right place. And even though I still recognize how the song is playing fast and loose with its rhythm and synchronization, it no longer has for me the palpable quality of unruly chaos. To the contrary, it now feels like a carefully choreographed dance, its every step planned out to fall precisely as it does.

    Of course, the truth is somewhere in the middle. What this music really consists in is moments of deliberate serendipity, of intentional spontaneity. It was never meant to be just as it is; it was just meant to be performed in such a way that it could be, in such a way that it would result in something as beautifully chaotic as this. But in being recorded, this performance becomes reified into seeming like the music's true form, the only way it ever could be performed, the exact way it was always meant to be. And the more I listen, the more like this it seems. But I can still hear, however faintly, an echo of my first encounter with this music, when it still felt utterly unknowable, unforeseeable, and unreal.

    And even as the music slows and softens into something more legible – a simple and steady progression of chords repeated under a plaintive melody – even still, it remains uncanny. Listen closely and you can hear a distant throbbing, the muffled reverberations of a late-night banger, like the song is being performed in the bathroom at a party, and the party is starting to push through.

    It's a wild thing to leave in the mix, or not "leave" but "put", because of course this is meant to be there. The song wasn't actually recorded in the bathroom at a party; it was just made to sound like it was. So the question becomes, Why? Sure, it helps to create a tableau, a setting of sorts for the singer's inner monologue as they contemplate leaving the party and returning home. But it also makes me wonder if there's an aesthetic to the experience of being in a bathroom at a party, a sonic palette with its own distinctive character that can be deployed and appreciated in other contexts, too: the sound of distance, isolation, interiority, overwhelm, the fear of missing out, and the desire to be far away.

    And just as it's all starting to click into place, the party disappears, replaced in the background by some crickety static, while the foreground shifts to some decidedly unmetronomic rhythms. It's like we've stepped out only to immediately lose our footing. Which is how it feels sometimes, is it not? Again, the longer I sit with this music the more it seems to be exactly as it should be, with all its sharp corners and rough edges and uncertain tempo – because all of it creates a feeling that couldn't be created in any other way.

    And I haven't even mentioned the lyrics yet – the lyrics, which express at best a fragment of a thought that gets jumbled and repeated across the song: "When I get home / I might just ask / What you need to". The song never tells us what is needed, or if this intention is ever played out. It holds us, rather, in that liminal space of mental inarticulation, as an idea gets tossed around one's head without even being fully spelled out.

    If music can be about this, then music can be about anything. Or, put another way: Anything can be made into music. Everything has an aesthetic. There is beauty in even the smallest of moments. And there is art to help us see it and make it come alive.
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    12 分
  • 044 :: HERE

    044 :: HERE
    2025/05/23
    FEATURING For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) by Japanese Breakfast, released by Dead Oceans in 2025. Listen / Buy direct "Here is Someone""Mega Circuit""Picture Window"TRANSCRIPT The best music, in my opinion, simply makes us listen, captivating our attention so fully that everything else falls away. So I guess it goes without saying that that's what this music does for me, unspooling with this lush, rococo exuberance that audibly shimmers in its brilliance. Sounds upon sounds upon sounds to just get lost in. Its cup runneth over, and I just want to drink it all in. There's something new and wondrous around every corner, to hold our focus and delight our senses – even these pitchy little flutes, with their unexpected pathos. This song is like a secret garden I've wandered into and now never wish to leave. And then there are these lines, that break my heart every time: Watching you from the yard Life is sad but here is someone Someone Someone Someone Someone There are many ways to hear those lines, but to my ear they recall that experience where we are suddenly jolted out of a depressive and anxious state of mind by the apprehension of a concrete individual before our eyes, in all their particular beauty and infinite possibility. Even if only for the briefest of moments, our attention becomes fixed on something outside our selves. And sometimes that's all we need. And sometimes that's what music does for us, too. So let's keep listening. Because this music will keep holding our attention, even as it changes in its sound and its feel, and even as it turns its own attention elsewhere. If that first song was showing us a way out of life's sadness, much of the rest of the album seems devoted to cataloguing its diverse and many causes: absent fathers, unfaithful partners, or, as in this song, "incel eunuchs". It's looking the enemy square in the eye. But here, too, the music shows us a way out of this ugliness, through the sheer jauntiness of its groove. It dazzles with a cornucopia of sounds: little rattles, big drums, a pulsating synth, and a tender accompaniment on guitar. It's enough to make you forget about everything wrong with boys these days. But that raises the question: Is this song offering deliverance, or distraction? And as if on cue, the singer delivers this chilling couplet: Well I better write my baby a shuffle good Or he's gonna make me suffer the way I should In this final turn, the song presents itself as written for one of those disturbed young men, as a means of pacifying the violence within. And although this might make it seem like some gross performance, a coerced pantomime of country western swagger, what I hear is a note of radical hope: that if anything is gonna reach these boys, if anything is gonna turn their attention away from the false gods they worship, it will be music, if we can just get them to listen. And now, a different kind of struggle: a song where the narrator is the one in need of saving, and where the cause of life's sadness is the enemy within, the singer's own mind, and in particular an anxious chittering of intrusive thoughts, permeating their experience and overtaking their consciousness, like this: Are you not afraid of every waking minute That your life could pass you by? Again, it sure doesn't sound like a song about obsessive compulsion, with its soft throb of slide guitar and pedal steel. And the chorus is weirdly affirming of these mental preoccupations, with its sweet refrain of "All of my ghosts are real". There is no denial in the lyrics, only acceptance. But in the music, I hear emancipation. It's yet another juxtaposition of sadness and salvation, with music appearing as the saving grace. And really, that's what this entire album is about: the push and pull between mental distraction and refocused attention, between the forces that plunge our minds into darkness and the moments that make us come up for air and see the light. The point is not to deny anyone's reality. Life is sad, your ghosts are real. The point is to show us that there are other realities out there too – that alongside all the death and violence and infidelity, there is beauty and joy and music. There's enough out there to save us. We just need to turn our mind towards it and let it in.
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    11 分
  • 043 :: ABSOLUTE

    043 :: ABSOLUTE
    2025/04/28
    FEATURING

    Cupid & Psyche 85 by Scritti Politti, released by Virgin Records in 1985. Listen / Buy direct

    • "Absolute"

    TRANSCRIPT

    Imagine, for a moment, that it's 1985, and a British band of post-punk Marxists have decided to pivot into pop. What would you expect their music to sound like? Abrasive? Ironic? Overly cerebral? Perhaps that would be the most likely story. But what if I told you it sounded like this? Angelic, mellifluous, radiant, and undeniably groovy.

    I don't usually like to do that, to historically situate what you're hearing before you actually hear it. I like to let the music just speak for itself. But in this case, I believe the context helps, to prime us to be surprised and to notice these curious little details, like the fact that this radio-friendly bop is a love song addressed to the "Absolute". And if you're wondering if I mean, like, the Absolute in the Hegelian sense? I do, and they do, too.

    But let's not get too heady right away. Because the most important thing to notice about this song is how immediately infectious it is, reveling in its newly expanded palette of synthesized sounds to create a sonic concoction that never ceases to delight and surprise. And yes, it does have a certain sheen to it – but what a sheen it is.

    I say all this to underscore the fact that this song, for all its self-awareness, is never condescending. It's fully in it and committed; it's pop music through and through. And that's what allows it to be a little bit meta.

    So let's get into it. Let's talk about this love song to the Absolute. Because the way I see it, it's a distillation of what pop music is always actually about: the musical expression of desire, in all its thrills and throes. And here's the thing about desire: We like to talk about it as if it's for some particular person, but it's never that simple. The object of our desire is always some ideal, some figment of our imagination, some distant glimmer that beckons us from beyond what's in front of our eyes. We cannot actually grasp it; that's why we desire it. So isn't it just more honest to address your love song, not to pop's paradigmatic "boy" or "girl", but to the transcendental principle of a perfect and self-sufficient form of being?

    And if that all sounds like a little much for a pop song, the good news is that you can set all that aside and just luxuriate in the sound of this music, because this song is never overbearing with its philosophy. But make no mistake: This album is full of these bits of wisdom, these incisive one-liners that encapsulate the fundamental nature of desire better than anything else I've ever heard in a pop song, lines like:

    There's nothing I wouldn't do / Including doing nothing

    I got a lack, girl, that you'd love to be

    Now I know to love you / Is not to know you

    These are lyrics I never thought I'd hear in a pop song. But what I love about this music is that, as philosophical as it gets, it never stops sounding like this. Because it knows that this is the sound of desire, in all its ecstasy and magnetism and larger-than-life feeling. The music reifies, even as the lyrics deconstruct. It's the essence of desire made manifest. It's absolute idealism at its finest.
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    7 分
  • 042 :: NEW

    042 :: NEW
    2025/03/14
    FEATURING

    LOWER by Benjamin Booker, released by Fire Next Time in 2025. Listen / Buy direct


    • "BLACK OPPS"
    • "NEW WORLD"

    TRANSCRIPT

    I never cease to marvel at how music in an instant can evoke a feeling or create a mood – and what's more, that it's able to do so in perpetually new ways, just through the careful selection and novel juxtaposition of sounds: a lacerating guitar tone, accentuated by a reverberating chime, layered over a beat that's all fuzz and thump, accompanied by a ghostly voice.

    It's this voice that really did it for me, drew me in and made me listen, to something so immediately delicate and chilling. This raspy whisper, singing ever so softly, in a way that should scarcely be audible, and yet, pervades the mix like a miasma.

    And even as everything else gets dialed up for the chorus, the main vocal stays as it was, still just barely breathing out the words, but now doubled by a second voice, singing higher and louder as if howling from a distance, as the rest of the ensemble creaks and buckles under the weight of its own crescendo.

    It's a sonic landscape that's steeped in dread, which makes it a fitting soundtrack for the song's lyrics, which allude to the tyrannical gaze of state surveillance and its clandestine acts of violence and oppression. If this music sounds hostile, that's because it's describing a hostile world.

    But there's a little prayer inside the mayhem:

    Give a little love...
    Have a little dream...
    Hallelujah, dying fighting
    For a life I ain't had yet

    It's not quite hope, but it's a note of resistance, a counterpoint to the overwhelming sense of unease that otherwise permeates the song, a reminder to hold it together even while the world around you is falling apart, fraying at the seams, and disintegrating into noise.

    But perhaps, through the static, something new will emerge: a sound still bruised by the world's roughness, but a little softer and brighter and, dare I say, hopeful.

    The voice is just as chilling as before, though it now seems to speak with greater ease and self-assurance. Its tone is matter-of-fact, even as it addresses its own oppressor and describes its own subjugation, as if it is strangely at peace. And again, as we move into the chorus, the main vocal is multiplied, swelling into a lush choir of sonorous voices, washing over us like waves on the shore.

    What a turn from the previous song. But I can't help but hear it as a response, countering the last song's images of racial domination with a pithy encapsulation of the master–slave dialectic:

    You can't be who you are without me
    Beneath you...
    Down here

    If this song sounds breezily confident, it's because it's flush with the knowledge that, as bad as things are, this is not how they're supposed to be. And even if the singer can't say when a new world will arrive, they at least know that they are it.

    And maybe we can hear the new world arriving right now, in this music, as a strange beauty begins to form out of an assemblage of musical debris – a winding phrase from a violin, a touch-tone keyboard, a metronomic piano, a pounding guitar, a boom-bap beat, and then, the sky opens up, making way for the infinite heavens, the glittering stars, the limitless future, and one last refrain.
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    10 分
  • 041 :: WONDER

    041 :: WONDER
    2025/02/14
    FEATURING

    "As" by Stevie Wonder, from Songs in the Key of Life, released by Tamla Records in 1976. Listen

    TRANSCRIPT

    Classic songs are classic for a reason. And this song wastes no time. It just immediately launches into this immaculate verse, a silvery melody set atop prismatic chords, all to express that most quintessential of messages: "I'll be loving you always". It's an encapsulation of what every pop song strives to be, and we're not even a minute in. And before we get there, the song will already start veering off in its own direction, transforming all of a sudden into this gospel-inspired chorus, with these new and almost haunting harmonies, which turn the song into something mystifying, riveting, and rapturous.

    But the song won't hold us there, at least not yet. And so we return to the sweetness of the verse. But even here, we can start to notice a gnomic quality to the lyrics, with lines like "As time knew to move on since the beginning" or "As now can't reveal the mystery of tomorrow". What is this? Is it a love song, or a treatise on metaphysics? Or is it the genius of this song, to recognize that love cannot be expressed in any other way or in any other terms, because love is a greater power that lies beyond the grasp of words?

    Though we can start to feel a tremor of that power in this refrain, with its dark chromatic tension and full-throated call and response. And this is also where the lyrics reach their most evocative pitch, with a series of impossible similes like "until the day that eight times eight times eight is four", or "until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky". Obviously, what the singer means is that their love is everlasting. But the song sure makes you feel like something deeper's being said.

    And this is where a lesser songwriter would've left things, and where commercial radio would start crossfading it out, as indeed they do, per the radio edit of this song. And this would be sufficient; these first three minutes are already a monumental achievement of pop songwriting. But on the full album version of this song, there's still four minutes left, and the songwriter is just getting started, and is about to blow the whole thing wide open.

    Suddenly the singer assumes a whole new voice and tone, replacing their loving proclamations with preacherly exhortations. They're now speaking directly to us, and they're about to mince no words, in my favourite lines of the song:

    Make sure when you say you're in it but not of it
    You're not helping to make this earth a place sometimes called Hell
    Change your words into truth and then change that truth into love

    This bridge is truly a bridge to the back half of this song, which feels like it occupies a whole new plane of existence. Because it's now clear that this song isn't just about some ordinary love, everlasting as it may be. It's also about a higher, more transcendent love, which is not the typical stuff of pop songs. Perhaps it's about the singer's love for God, or about God's love for humanity, but in my mind it's most centrally about the universal love we're all meant to have for one another, and that love's absolute transformative power.

    There's no way to truly describe this love in words. The only way to get at it is analogically, through a series of impossible similes, or by extension from a never-ending romantic love, or by means of a seven-minute sonic opus that stands as a musical exemplification of that love's endurance and supremacy. It's enough to send shivers down your spine.

    But what amazes me most about this song is that, up until this year, I had never truly heard it. I may have caught flashes of it in the background, heard it playing here and there, but I had never sat down and let it speak to me. I should've known better; classic songs are classic for a reason, after all. But maybe there's a lesson in that, for the power of love is also easily missed, even though it is always there, at the ready, just waiting for us to take it up, as it always will be, until the day that you are me and I am you.
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    9 分
  • 040 :: VIDA

    040 :: VIDA
    2025/01/15
    FEATURING

    Curyman by Rogê, released by Diamond West Records in 2023. Listen / Buy direct

    • "Pra Vida"

    TRANSCRIPT

    It's a new year, and this isn't a New Year's song, but that doesn't stop it from feeling like one, from feeling like the song I need to have with me to face the year ahead: this energy, this vitality, this exuberance.

    Just listen to this rhythm section: the classical guitar strumming in punchy syncopation; the bass keeping a steady downbeat; a ganzá rattle subdividing the rest; and this pitched percussion instrument off on the right – an agogo perhaps? – tapping out a spirited samba beat.

    Could it be any more full of life? It's like the music itself is dancing and laughing and beckoning us to join in.

    And so it's fitting that the song's Portuguese refrain instructs us to "let it go, let it be, let's live". A simple imperative, but what else needs to be said?

    And look: This isn't my first samba. I've heard grooves like this before. I've heard performances that are similarly vibrant and vivacious. I'm not saying that this song is like no other samba that's come before it. But there's a distinct joy in hearing it done this well, in hearing an ensemble come together like this, and in feeling that indomitable samba spirit come alive.

    So let this song serve as a model, and let this be my new year's wish. May your spirits be this uplifted. May your voice be full of song. May your body be always dancing and your heart be never still. May your mind be free from worry and your soul just be free. May you let it go, let it be, and live.
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    5 分