SCALES #25: head inside the speakers
Hello!
Since last we checked in, my 2017 Spotify playlist has exploded in size. If at midyear it was the length of 1 or 2 CDs, a size my mind can grasp as a single knowable object, it has since grown to a length that no longer exists to me as a coherent whole — instead it's a library, a collection, a catalog.
In the spirit of Jia Tolentino's dearly-missed Soundcloud-trawling newsletter, capsule summaries of a few of the songs (collected in a separate Spotify playlist; individual links below):
Lydia Loveless, "Desire": Perfectly-formed character sketch. I've never tired of the acidity with which her mouth curls around the title word here, particularly in the second pre-chorus. (Bandcamp)
The National, "Day I Die": A recent piece by Helena Fitzgerald on being a fan of the band cannily imagined the new album as saying, "Isn't it ridiculous really that we’re all still here doing this same thing, still, even as age, even as we get old, even as time moves on and we should be better than this? And yet we still aren't, and here’s another record." Despite my attempts to find New Things in this playlist, nostalgia and revival have definitely emerged as themes, and this song is a case in point: the return to "Val Jester" (that's Valentine Jester to you!), the mention of Cleveland and its echos of "Bloodbuzz Ohio" (described in the same piece as having "its majestic, wallowing, self-mocking sound, the floor-dragging baritone of the lead singer whose voice sounded like a car driving with the brake on and the unreasonably optimistic backbeat pulling it forward all the same"(!)). (YouTube)
Major Lazer & DJ Mariposa (feat. Nasty C, Ice Prince, Patoranking & Jidenna), "Particula": Unsure whether the rhyme is incredibly dumb or secretly genius, but "particula"/"película" becomes endlessly stuck in my head. (YouTube)
Sufjan Stevens, "John My Beloved – iPhone Demo": Hits a 10 on the Sufjan Having Feelings scale. It might not have all the careful production of the Carrie & Lowell version (there: the half-breath in at the end!), but here Sufjan pours everything he can into his voice: the tone, the timing. (Bandcamp)
St. Vincent, "Young Lover": No doubt that the new album is really good. I've read reviews and profiles talking about the more direct and personal songwriting, but I think I find the more abstracted, transcendent noise in the Strange Mercy and St. Vincent era more musically direct. Annie Clark deploys the deadly, virtuosic, perfectly controlled guitar shredding that defined those albums much more sparingly in MASSEDUCTION: one color in a broader palette. The vocal acrobatics at the end of this song, though, are one mind-blowing stratospheric high—as close as this album gets to the release of "Northern Lights". (YouTube)
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Elsewhere——
A dramatic and effective choice by the "The Messenger" to communicate an urgent situation: Going from long produced episodes about detained migrants on Manus Island to short daily check-ins with Aziz on the days preceding the detention center's closure. Feeling utterly powerless, but I hope Aziz and his fellow detainees are finding a way to make it through their situation.
Examining historical bird specimens from natural history museums to learn about black carbon emissions from the early industrial era.
Strong contender for the cutest artist's rendition of a dinosaur — feathered and raccoon-faced!
Pyramids & muons & (proposed) tiny flying robots.
Beautiful turn-of-the-century watercolors of bats, cephalopods and more by Ernst Haeckel.
"If fresh food affirms the splendor of the natural world, aged food speaks to human ingenuity. What is more human than refusing to accept things as they are, than believing we can make them better?"
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"New Horizons", Pudlo Pudlat (1916-1992), 1987, from "Follow the North Star", an MFA exhibition largely consisting of Inuit stonecut prints from Cape Dorset. From the label: "His prints here provide a wry commentary on the incursion of modern civilization into traditional Inuit culture [...] the power lines towering over the houses take the shape of musk oxen."
Happy November!
—Adam