Trying to write more constructively about art I like. Music is harder to describe than anything else, and many of us on this forum have strong opinions about it. This was excruciating. I couldn’t figure out how to include classical music. Hitting Post on this fills me with instant regret.
ten of captain’s favorite albums as of november 2024 (ready to disown by december)
Symphonic Suite AKIRA by Geinoh Yamashirogumi (1988)
Once upon a time in 2009, someone had set the piece “Tetsuo” as the background music for some Windows Moviemaker montage they’d published to Youtube. I heard those gamelan chimes and… electric… bells…? and was on another planet.
I’d be a poseur to say this wasn’t my first exposure to the genre of music it appropriated. I also can’t pretend to prefer Ecophony Gaia or Rinne, or even that I would have ever heard of those if not for the AKIRA album.
async by Ryuichi Sakamoto (2017)
My favorite tracks on this album are the quieter ones, like “disintegration,” “walker,” and “tri.” But actually “ZURE” is my favorite, which isn’t too quiet, but which gives as much a sense of when notes decay as when they are struck. But “LIFE, LIFE” is my favorite. “water state 2” also.
One Saturday morning in December 2018, when the sun was out and reflecting off snow piled high in the yard, I listened to this album front to back while sitting in the middle of the floor. Good time.
Carnage by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (2021)
Not very familiar with older Bad Seeds records, but I do love the recent stretch of albums where the lyrics are more free associative (i.e. about horses) and the music more moody and yearning. Carnage leans fully into those qualities as it is not a Bad Seeds record at all—Nick knew all I want is Warren’s percussion and synth loops. Though Ghosteen sounds similar, and some days I choose it instead.
Elaenia by Floating Points (2015)
It’s not really appropriate to call most of the tracks on this album minimalist, but that word does get at something about the whole record. The second track, “Silhouettes,” is pretty elaborate, although I love that the drums are allowed to “do the talking” over the strings, vocals, and synthesizers.
“Peroration Six” closes the album by building steadily for five minutes before crashing into abrupt silence.
Four of Arrows by Great Grandpa (2019)
Sometimes the first two or five songs on an album makes me call it one of my favorites; this whole album is great, but very often I’ve started it and not needed to finish it. Really love the unusual meter to the vocal part on “Dark Green Water” and “Digger.” A melancholy album for melancholy time.
Dark Green Water
The Future by Leonard Cohen (1992)
A family friend gave this to me as a birthday gift, and I didn’t understand it at all. After I got to know Cohen through his other music I came back to this, and suddenly all the corny instrumentation made sense. For all the humor in Cohen’s lyrics, the music is radically sincere. Not his best album, but the one I return to the most. Bring back the melodica…
Lenny and me, yeah we’re buddies.
Closing Time
G_d’s Pee at State’s End by Godspeed You! Black Emperor (2021)
Godspeed doesn’t rely on typical rock structures, but neither is their music very harmonically or melodically complex. It’s the music of texture and time, a squeaky violin and electric guitars wailing on single notes or hammering the same riff for several more seconds/repetitions than expected. That makes up lengthy stretches of this album, anyway, but when the guitar (and double bass) comes in on track 1 it’s like a rallying cry, anthemic and imprecise, after which the other guitars come in and play the same climbing riff in rotation. I like Godspeed’s use of field recordings, which in the absence of lyrics (and along with album art, artist statements, their film projections) grounds the music in the material world.
The newest album is great, too.
Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes (2011)
Rock music played with acoustic guitars, layered vocals, and variously decorative traditional instruments like the violin, mandolin, and hammered dulcimer.
Lyrics vaguely describe an apparently distant past in order to express emotions of the present. Terms like “dowry” and references to working in an “orchard” or being at “Innisfree” create an atmosphere that is at a glance naively retrospective, but in context is more futurist, looking forward to a time when we might cast off the noise of modern living, a time of spiritual fulfillment.
Listening to this brings me back to one September when I helped a friend move into his first apartment after college in Barnesville, Minnesota. Definitely a fall album.
Bedouin Dress
Off Off On by This is the Kit (2020)
Rock music played with acoustic guitars, layered vocals, etc. The power of the banjo. Kate Stables transmutes half-sentences without subjects into evocative, weighty lyrics.
Maybe a goofy thing to say but I’m not usually one for downtempo rock songs, so when a group can make them work like in “Slider” and “Was Magician” it’s always a nice surprise. For the former it’s something about the meter of vocal line and the lead guitar not quite lining up with one another; for the latter, the vocals rely one simple melodic phrase, repeatedly, for nearly five minutes, and it works.
Was Magician
To Be Kind by Swans (2014)
Read anything from someone who knows the band’s discography and they’ll describe this album as “the groovy one.” The first track, “Screen Shot,” is built on an infectious bass line—a great song and one I wrongheadedly wish the band would try to imitate more often. “Just a Little Boy” jumps to the opposite end of the spectrum, that is it’s not very groovy. “A Little God in My Hands” brings the dance energy back. “Bring the Sun / Toussaint Louverture” falls like a concrete wall on your head.
The vocals here are a standout: short, simple phrases serve the music well, which music is huge, heavy, slow to develop, and full of percussion from two drummers.