WHERE I LOVE YOU THE MOST
The November, 2023 Music Roundup
Hard to imagine, now. But back in September, when the only tracks I had for this fall’s list were the Anna Setton and Tom Jones cuts below, I thought this was going to be all lightness. Playful through and through.
The world, and its effect on the music that wound up mattering to me lately, had other ideas.
But there’s still lightness here. Some. As counterbalance, I guess. Or just reminder of what better days taste and sound like, so we remember why to long and fight for them.
WHERE I LOVE YOU THE MOST: The November, 2023 Quarterly Music Round-Up
I have no idea what Gen Z’ers would say their music is. But I have parented a couple, and I’ve been teaching a long time, and these tracks cut close to something I sense in a lot of the no-longer-kids it’s my privilege to know.
As always, the feeling’s in the flavor at least as much as the words. This South Texas bunch relies to a surprising degree on a weary but expansive sense of song, in the sense of guitar figures to hum, actual choruses to murmur. They sound exhausted even when they’re loud, which may be their most distinguishing characteristic. Which, right, means Tyler Jordan sings like Lou Reed. But Lou Reed bruised. Lou Reed not saved by rock and roll but more openly in love with it than Lou was when he wrote “Rock & Roll”. Lou Reed hopeful, but doubting there’s reason to be.
All that said, the words matter. The longing here isn’t new—for a less grinding Capitalism, for anything other than “working all day long/For someone else’s dream to come/Strip the value right out of my bones”. When Jordan wishes “I was 21/somewhere swimming in the sun”, I can’t help wondering if he ever even had that summer, or just got sold the dream of it. Crucially, he refuses to turn his back on high school friends who joined bike gangs, voted Trump (“I don’t think they’re evil/Even when they’re awful”), because he knows it’s going to take us all “to get us out of here”. Less a call to arms than a refusal to accept that that call can never come.
Anna Setton—O Futuro é Mais Bonito
She’s Millenial, not Gen Z, but like Tyler Jordan, she sings with more sweetness—however suffused with that Brazilian melancholy verging on fatalism—than the world she has inherited deserves. Again, these are ages-old pop motifs (she has nothing to offer that person glimpsed in a spark of campfire light, except everything she’s got). Unlike previous iterations of the archetype, though, from Jane Austen’s Fanny Price to, I don’t know, Lorde’s “Royals”, her impoverished condition feels more likely to be permanent. And yet—given the unexpected liftoff at the chorus, when the percussion starts to shuffle and the saxes honk themselves awake—what she’s got might still be enough. Maybe. Someday.
The chorus of “O Futuro”, roughly translated, goes “The future is more beautiful/And it’s going to be”. Setton’s vocals—clear, unadorned, melisma-free—suggest a quiet determination so ingrained, one could mistake it for belief.
Speaking of belief...
Like those Don Cherry records from the ‘70s that I still love, this track from Sanders’s Message From Home album is world music from some other (sweeter) planet, where the late, legendary saxophonist, known for his “sheets-of-sound” and squalling outbursts, can team with Bill Laswell, kora master Foday Musa Suso, and guitarist Dominic Kanza to produce something that sounds new but feels old.
First, that groove grabs hold, rocks and gently slaps underneath you. Then the flutes go wild, trilling around in the mix like birds or missiles, depending on the shore you’re hearing them from. Either way, they draw your gaze upward. Instead of squalling, Sanders’s sax hums, calls out. Probes. Asks what, if anything or anyone, is out there.
Music, at the very least. And people to hear it. Maybe even make it with.
Qkumba Zoo (or Qzoo?)—DNA (Joe Nina Mix)
Or, as Qkumba Zoo put it, “I’d rather like/to smell as well as hear/the roses grow...We could dance in the desert/I could kiss the tingle in your fingertips/12 strands of DNA/Ooom-dada-ooom...”.
This comes from a 2000 album released, apparently, only in vocalist Levannah’s native South Africa, four years after the dancer/sculptor Tziki, who was also in some way part of the band, committed suicide. Allmusic says virtually nothing about them. Wikipedia says they had an international hit called “The Child (Inside)” in 1996. News to me.
But as with Anna Setton’s songs, it’s the twisted strands—joy-in-melancholy/melancholy-in-joy/melancholy-of-joy—that makes it so entrancing, In the burble of the beat, the sing (not shout)-along chorus, the sway of the thing, it celebrates the magic of being here at least in part by foregrounding the inevitable not-being.
Which, as I type that, feels like a pretty fair summation of almost all the fiction I’ve ever tried to write.
Tom Jones & the Art of Noise—Kiss
Right, erm, which home is this from?
Seems more than likely that whoever conceived it meant it to be funny. Or cryptic, a la Shatner-does-Sinatra (or Pulp, or Dylan, or anyone).
But the way I always understood Prince’s never-ending, cosmic “World Series of Love”, everyone capable of the feeling could come. So I’m betting Prince would have loved the shit out of this.
Tom sure sounds like he does.
Dean Wareham, on the other hand?
Luna’s frontman has always had (or at least presented) an ambivalent relationship to the “star” aspects of pop stardom. By his own accounting in his (terrific) memoir, Black Postcards, he essentially shattered his first band, Galaxie 500, by deciding that someone had to be the focal point, and it might as well be him. On the other hand, as presented in Tell Me Do You Miss Me—one of my favorite music documentaries, about anyone—he adopts an affectionately rueful attitude toward being forty-something, in a band full of forty-somethings, on a (supposed) farewell tour that has all the glamour of a wave out a Greyhound window.
That movie got made in 2006. He hasn’t stopped waving yet.
This cut popped up on a 2007 compilation called Guilt by Association. I have no idea what Wareham thought then or thinks now of Paula Abdul. But he treats the song—or maybe the memory of hearing it over and over on the radio on a tour bus headed for another small-club/small-payout night—with a detached wistfulness. In his affected lack of affect, “Do you really want to love me forever” blurs, inevitably, into “Did you ever?”
And proves no less addicting for the change.
Hans-Joachim Roedelius and the various incarnations of Qluster/Cluster have been at it even longer, since 1970 or so. They started out noisy, as so many do, and Roedelius—definitely a devotee of the Bill Nelson when-does-he-even-eat school of perpetual music making—still devotes at least one or two of his however-many annual releases to surprisingly challenging collaborations.
But my favorite work of his has always been these shimmery, elusive washes of piano and electronics. Brian Eno gets a lot of (deserved) credit for inventing what we now call ambient music, but much of the languid, summery ambience on the second side of his seminal Before and After Science album gets generated by Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, his late C(Q)luster partner.
The broken chords in emblematic Qluster compositions like this one feel warm, melodic, and yet never quite resolve. The pulse, too, recalls Steve Reich-ian minimalism, except it keeps blurring, threatening to slip its rhythmic moorings. The musical equivalent, maybe, of a Rothko color block, its edges perpetually on the verge of (un)forming, its warmth more trapped and cradled in the canvas than generated.
Evgueni Galperine (w/Sergei Nakariakov)—Cold Front
He’s French, but because of his Ukrainian and Russian roots, and even more because of the elegiac quality of his compositions, it’s hard not to imagine Galperine drawing inspiration from the dreadful state of pretty much everything. But his music feels bracing. He associates himself with minimalism, but his work sounds more skeletal and spectral. In place of any Glass/Reich pulse, we get blooms of electronically altered brass, sampled strings that could be performed by humans except for subtly impossible tone colorations or the speed at which they’re sometimes plucked or sounded. Plus a whole lot of empty space.
Sometimes—more often, maybe, than I am supposed to admit—it’s just the sound, man.
The opening of this, with its woodwinds whirling over and around each other, reminds me of Paul Dresher’s “Channels Passing”, one of my favorite minimalist compositions. Favorite compositions, period. What I love about the Dresher is the way it keeps changing shape but not essence. Listening to that piece, watching cumulus clouds form...same thing.
The woodwinds that kick off this track don’t so much change as get draped in, dropped into, or flung against new environments, then left to unspool or curl inward or fight for their lives or fill like a sail. First come oddly gauzy vocals, saying words I almost get in a tune I almost hum. They are not actually recorded backwards, but the effect is similar. Then come surprisingly forceful brass-y chord clusters. Then the beat erupts, too slow for drum and bass, but with that drum and bass skitter, and sets the whole thing tumbling toward the horizon.
One seriously rich and flavorful stew, this. Gathering traditions from across Malian pop and folk music, adding dashes of flamenco and Latin and American blues flavoring, and periodically just turning loose his spectacular band or his own flying fingers to bat a rhythm or groove around, Koité manages that trick Peter Gabriel’s Real World crowd always attempts and rarely manages: he sounds like the griot he is, and also a musical citizen of the world, and also a spectacular and inventive guitarist, and also himself: commanding, relaxed, welcoming, joyful.
Even when he’s singing about people he wishes would get off their asses and do something.
Jess Williamson—Time Ain’t Accidental
Strip these to their core, and they’re old-school love-you-maybe-shouldn’t songs. Except these cores are molten, radioactive, warming because they’re still live. She reads him “Raymond Carver by the pool bar like a lady”, loves him most “in the dim light/on the side of the highway in the middle of the night”, and especially with “his face ‘tween my legs”. Ditto for the damaged survivor at the heart of “Stampede”, best remembered “in the dark of the back deck/where I loved you the most”.
Williamson has a band, Plains, with Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, but these songs are at once rawer and more immediate than Crutchfield’s tend to be. The choruses come big and radio ready, the phrasing deceptively effortless. But Williamson’s vocals have broken-glass edges, and she’s not above flashing them. In fact, she tends to linger over those moments, as though mesmerized by the refraction.
The cultural critic Erik Davis—a high school friend I haven’t seen or heard from in decades, which somehow makes him the perfect reference point here—got off a great line years ago about Neil Young in a review for Spin, which I believe went, “He’s an old man now. Always was.”
Lori McKenna was writing with the rueful wisdom of late middle-age long before she reached it (hence song titles like “The Old Woman in Me”, which kicks off her latest album), chronicling the everyday with icy clarity wrapped in warm tunes. This one’s a perfect primer, a catalogue of cautious wishes for a young(er) ’un. Some—making a few “dreams come true”, getting up after falling—are the ones you’d expect. But the payoff is a signature McKenna bullseye, as she reveals one rarely mentioned key to happy later life: “If you get one thing that’s a given/I hope you have happy children”.
Wise and lovely as usual, though maybe one wish shy—the one about also having happy parents—of definitive.
Anna Domino—The Light Downtown
In a Land of My Dreams, someone would finally somehow lure Anna Domino away from making hats or whatever else she’s been Caught up in for the past twenty years (including making fricking hats) and drop Sixteen Tons more Rhythm on her and let her loose. Forever. She’s one of the singers I most wish had sung/would sing more, and you can ask why, but I’m not sure I can tell you.
New Yorker cool without New Yorker detachment? As she herself once put it, she wants “to talk in sing-song”, except she already does that. She phrases not as though she studied the Great American Songbook but sprouted from it. And when she gets the right groove around her, she radiates the only kind of glamour that has ever mattered to me: faces at windows, drinking the world in.
Just click one of the hyperlinks above. You’ll see.
Sophisticated? You bet. But also hungry. As she put it all those years ago, “Behind the rhythm/a desire to belong”. Or, as she muses on this 2012 track I’d never heard before—thank you, universe—that materialized on a recent rerelease bonus disc: “Not even the living/can pacify me.”
This Berliner’s phrasing is bumpier, the unflappable urbanity spiked with feminist theory and absurdist humor, but she radiates Domino flair all the same. The prickle in the guitar lines might suggest icy remove, but as with Anna, there’s just too much her here to suggest detachment. That picnic where “The Girls” are dancing with “sticky fingers” in a “wide apricot sky” may not be one you’re invited to. But that doesn’t mean they mind you dropping by, or just standing out of the firelight and smiling. And sure, she can seem (and is) formidable, and she sprechstimmes theory like she means it, but on the other hand she “would love to have lasagna/Not in my hair though”.
My youngest kid will be in Berlin next year. I can think of no higher compliment (to Albertine, I mean) than to suggest that they would get along.