The Retrographer, Issue 100 (March, 2 0 2 3)

April 10, 2023

Liv.e, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Crosslegged, JPEGMAFIA, Danny Brown, Davido, Róisín Murphy, DJ Koze, boygenius, Joanna Sternberg, Scree, Steve Gunn, David Moore, the Feelies, and more!

The Retrographer, Issue 100 (March, 2 0 2 3)

Bulletins

  • This marks my 100th issue of the Retrographer across monthly, annual, and decennial issues. 

  • I’m proud of my work and want to thank you for reading whether you’ve subscribed recently or been with me since my first issue back in January, 2015. 

  • I’m planning on making an announcement to celebrate this milestone soon, so please stay tuned.

  • I’ve taken this format – ten songs and one album a month – far, but now I want to shake it up and try something new. For now this will be my last album essay and I will be switching to a much more concise format of just bulletins and ten songs until I figure out what I want it to be next.

  • This publication debuted around the same time as the term “snackable content” was coined, and at the time my stated goal was to “[k]eep the album guide reviews to 5-10 sentences”. That didn’t stick long; I eventually moved to multi-paragraph essays focusing on history, sound, and impact. I suppose I felt too strongly about the music to contain my enthusiasm to any kind of concision. 

  • In my writing, I often find myself in a battle between documenting every notion and feeling I have with an album, and the always-improving practice of editing down. Economy has never failed me, but I’ve almost always failed it.

  • The essays started to weigh on me as I set longer and longer precedents for them. For this last epistle (of this era), I figured I’d try to do it old-school and keep it short(er). As you can see, I’m still not at 5-10 sentences.

  • Looking forward, I want to know what you want: Essays on other music stuff? More fun links? Themed playlists? A podcast? Interviews? Hit reply to this email and let me know.

  • While this newsletter has been a great excuse to memorialize my music discoveries and keep my writing chops, the most rewarding moments working on this passion project have been when I’ve heard from you. I don’t want to lose that connection so please continue to expect these monthly, in whatever new shape they take, and please never hesitate to say hi, tell me what you like and dislike, recommend stuff, etc.

Ten Songs for March, 2 0 2 3 | Listen to these songs on Spotify and YouTube

“Glass Shadows”, Liv.e (Spotify / YouTube) – Chipmonk’d soul over the sort of loping Stevie Wonder chords Tyler, the Creator would make an Instagram story to extol, Olivia Williams casts vibes across two and a half minutes that could be a love song, could be a video game soundtrack, could be both. 

“Nadja”, Unknown Mortal Orchestra (Spotify / YouTube) – Ruban Nielson polarizes for his squashed, downgraded sonic style. Whether you find it schticky or smacking, his gorgeous melodies transcend his aesthetic proclivities, with melodies that poke through like earthworms in springtime dirt.

“Automatic”, Crosslegged (Spotify / YouTube) – There’s something about Keba Robinson’s voice that evokes Katie Crutchfield and Michelle Zauner: an equal capacity for plaintiveness and levity, simplicity and depth. Her wide-open, reverberating harmonies, however, are hers and hers only.

“Lean Beef Patty”, JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown (Spotify / YouTube) – Like a video game speedrun, Peggy and Danny sprint to this song’s finish like their power-ups are about to expire. Brown is barely in the song for a minute, a tantalizing taste of the album to come.

“PRECISION”, Davido (Spotify / YouTube) – David Adeleke has now broken enough streaming records to earn his place as the next most formidable popstar in the world. Expect to hear this album bounding over beaches and ringing through parties all summer long.

“CooCool”, Róisín Murphy and DJ Koze (Spotify / YouTube) – Irish singer, German DJ, American songwriting. Whirring soul samples evoke lost episodes of Soul Train, but Murphy’s cooing chorus takes this song to an uncanny place of naturalism straight out of Minnie Riperton’s garden.

“Satanist”, boygenius (Spotify / YouTube) – Julien Baker’s relationship to Christianity is well documented, as is her formative history with punk and hardcore music. With the heavy artillery of harmonies from Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers, the aural and spiritual overtones saturate this track.

“I’ve Got Me”, Joanna Sternberg (Spotify / YouTube) – A virtuoso musician, Sternberg unspools a disarmingly homespun confessional about the cauldron of self-doubt that forges self-reliance. She is direct and resolute, both hard-earned.

“Jasmine On A Night In July”, Scree (Spotify / YouTube) – At Scree’s release show last month, bandleader and composer Ryan El-Solh explained the title of this album (and song) as a tincture of the beauty and pleasure so often excised from images of his family’s ancestral home in the Levant, obscuring the humanity of the people therein. 

“Rhododendron”, Steve Gunn and David Moore (Spotify / YouTube) – Few recordings are quite so reverent, spacious, quiet. Mark Hollis’s solo work is a reference. The darkness of Moore’s piano evokes an empty chapel, a place of forgiveness and absolution, light and revelation, quiet introspection, peace.

One Album for March, 2 0 2 3

“The Good Earth”, The Feelies (Coyote Records, 1986) (Spotify / YouTube) 

Recently a clip has been going around the internet of Leonard Bernstein explaining the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony. Sitting at a piano beside the German actor Maximilian Schell, Bernstein dissects the melody: There isn’t one. Then he examines the harmony: It’s composed of elementary chords a child might choose. “There is no aspect of Beethoven that you can say – Beethoven is great as a melodist, a harmonist, a contrapuntist, a tonal painter, his orchestration, you can find fault in all of them. If you take any one of these elements separately, you’ll find nobody, there’s nothing there.” He goes on, until Schell asks the question he’s being led to – what makes it interesting? “It’s the form,” Bernstein replies.

Form isn’t visible on the grand staff. It appears in the experience of music, the way that it swells and shrinks, opens to wide open spaces or narrows to tight order. It’s a shape that the combined mass of other elements – melody, harmony, rhythm – sum to. As Bernstein says, it need not be sophisticated or complicated to be right. To move the listener, it simply needs to combine.

What if an artist were only interested in form? That’s not far from Glenn Mercer’s work with the Feelies. Starting with 1980s screw-tight Crazy Rhythms and finding nirvana on 1986’s The Good Earth, he wrote music spared of harmonic variation, melodic meandering, rhythmic complication, tonal experimentation, whatever. His songs were almost as ascetic as Steve Reich’s contemporaneous works with the Kronos Quartet; They changed shape, developing different forms by way of volume, texture, and density, or when miniscule melodic indications presaged incoming changes to the oncoming landscape. The path from the beginning to the end of the song might only be suggested by a fleeting sung passage, the rest wordlessly lifted by the windswept rustle of shakers and acoustic guitars.

The Feelies of The Good Earth are defined by the interplay between Mercer and Bill Million, whose two guitars are undistinguished as lead and rhythm. Producer Peter Buck, guitarist of R.E.M., mixed the two instruments at roughly the same volume throughout, such that solo lines are nearly always shaking against one another like a thicket of beach grass in a late afternoon breeze. Mercer’s voice doesn’t alone bring order to the whirring around it, nor do Stan Demeski’s marching drums or Dave Weckerman’s percussion. Brenda Sauter’s bass playing sometimes joins the fray, sometimes stays a mile below, pushing the apparatus up or lowering it down as it traverses its evolving shape. The Feelies are all one, nothing without one another.

The term most often associated with the Feelies is “jangle” as in, the clink of change in your pocket, a necklace of beads around your neck as you run, something loose underneath your car on the highway, or the ricochet of the tambourine bells on “The High Road”, or the flitting wrists on “Slipping (Into Something)”. There’s the implication of chaos and unpredictability, an unmeasurable texture that never commands the attention of a pattern. You can lose yourself in a jangle the same as you can in a drone, or the sound of rain, or an idling engine. The Good Earth’s 36 minutes travel almost exclusively stochastically, yet arrive somewhere new inevitably, a transforming form never belied by its constituent parts.

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