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- The Retrographer, Issue 46 (October, 2 0 1 8)
The Retrographer, Issue 46 (October, 2 0 1 8)
The Blue Nile, Promnite, Ciscero, GoldLink, April George, Cheakaity, Eric Church, KEY, DRAM, Kenny Beats, Kodak Black, Offset, Travis Scott, Robyn 6LACK, Ty Dolla $ign, Future, Juice WRLD, Young Scooter, Sam Gendel, Sam Wilkes, Damien Jurado
The Retrographer 46 (October, 2018)
Bulletins
Don’t forget for a second what we lost in Aretha Franklin.
Speaking on behalf of all former jazz band geeks: Louis Cole is doing something special right now. Like really special.
Garth Brooks apparently got on Facebook in the last few years.
Know who to not mess with: trumpet players.
Looks like Instagram is finally maybe catching up to Cymbal.
“Exist”, Promnite (Spotify / YouTube) – Disco lives, still in this day, as the hymnals of a church where dance is both revelation and redemption. Like Todd Terje, Promnite frees you to lose yourself in it like your problems are behind you, the only person in the astral plane of the dancefloor.
“Function”, Ciscero, GoldLink, April George, and Cheakaity (Spotify / YouTube) – Function, meaning both what we do and the event we do it at. The good and the bad, the party and the violence, the love and the hate, all part of one way of being.
“Higher Wire”, Eric Church (Spotify / YouTube) – Church fills stadiums from Texas to Alberta but he’ll never lose the ability to make you feel like you’ve caught him rehearsing on the barroom stage at soundcheck before doors open for the night. “Appalachia, moonshine, crazy.”
“Time Of My Life”, KEY, DRAM, and Kenny Beats (Spotify / YouTube) – You might just do anything in the right kind of mood. “Love to love, I love to love-make”, the endless party DRAM says, and it’s easy to believe him. Three minutes that pass in just a moment.
“ZEZE”, Kodak Black, Travis Scott, and Offset (Spotify / YouTube) – Why didn’t this come out in May? The perfect cap to Travis Scott’s ascension to pop’s VIP room, with a particularly smooth Offset in tow. Kodak is as goofy as ever –but wouldn’t you be if you could say, “project baby, now I stay in Calabasas!”
“Ever Again”, Robyn (Spotify / YouTube) – A funky, subdued end to a swirling fantasy of an album, ranging from near-future beach parties to cryptic hotlines. It’s a resolution as much as anything else: “Never going to be brokenhearted ever again!”
“Switch”, 6LACK and Ty Dolla $ign (Spotify / YouTube) – A perfect album title: East Atlanta Love Letter, but this song might as well be called Freaky Friday. 6LACK fantasizes about life away from the spotlight that shines brighter on him with each passing month.
“Jet Lag”, Future, Juice WRLD, and Young Scooter (Spotify / YouTube) – Drip; sauce; style. Call it what you want, Future and Juice WRLD bookend a generation of artists, old and young, whose art begins and ends with distinctive feel. Their overlong collaboration peaks on this, its opening track.
“KIEFER NO MELODY”, Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes (Spotify / YouTube) – Sleuths among you may recognize Sam Wilkes as a regular bass sideman for Louis Cole. Here he pairs with saxophonist Gendel for a short but distinctive record, perfect for rainy fall days in New York.
“The Last Great Washington State”, Damien Jurado (Spotify / YouTube) – A friend put this on as I was falling asleep on his couch last Friday and it had a way of summing it all up: the quiet of that moment and the noise of our moment. “How long have we been here? I can’t quite remember my name.” He said Jurado wrote it about using our phones too much.
One Album for September, 2018
Romance, to Paul Buchanan, isn’t deliverance or revelation; It’s not a slow dance in front of a breathless clutch of admirers; It’s not, as, Leonard Cohen once sang, a victory march. Romance is intimacy and imperfection; a quiet, solitary memory; the shape of what’s not there. “In love we're all the same,” Buchanan sings. “We're walking down an empty street.”
Buchanan’s band, The Blue Nile, formed in Glasgow in the early 80s and released a brilliant record, A Walk Across the Rooftops, in 1984. A guitarist and songwriter, Buchanan was joined by PJ Moore, a keyboardist, and Robert Bell, a bass and synthesizer player. They signed to Linn Records, a label spun up by the electronic drum company whose sound was made famous by artists like Prince, Tears for Fears, and A-ha. The Linn drum, like the digital aesthetic palette the New Romanticism and Sophistipop of the 1980s immortalized on John Hughes films and radio-dominating hits, summoned a counterintuitive pathos and humanity given its inhuman origin.
Like Bruce Springsteen a decade before, Paul Buchanan’s deep, desperate vocal delivery voiced a kind of ragged, mature devotion – Stanley Kowalski on a Roland cloud – that lived in the shadow, not the shine, of love’s glory. Sometimes, as he sang on his first album, this meant love in a time of heartbreak, “Tinseltown is in the rain, I know now love was so exciting.” Other times, he painted love as magical realism, realer even than the rainy Glaswegian streets he traversed.
Buchanan fought writer’s block for years after A Walk Across the Rooftops. When it cracked, songs came together all of a kind. The album they became, 1989’s Hats, is about love when it is prosaic, when no one is looking, when it is all that remains.
Hats begins by establishing a number of themes that will return: A little town; railroads; a cold refuge in another’s eyes. “Over The Hillside” acts as passage into the little world of Hats: “Walk me into town, the ferry will be there to carry us away into the air.” On the other side lives a lonely land of love. “The stars in your eyes,” Buchanan sings, ”don't explain.”
Hats’ instrumentation – rhythmic guitar, bass, and Linn drum enshrouded in synthesizers – is as foggy as the world that surround Buchanan. “Where's the love that shines every single time I'm near you?” he asks. “Where's the love, that's all? All I want is you.” Love lives in a connection not returned, and sometimes in one that’s been severed altogether. “The cigarettes, the magazines, all stacked up in the rain,” he tells. “There doesn't seem to be a funny side. It's over now; I know it's over but I can't let go.”
But when it breaks, it breaks with incredible clarity. The empty street Buchanan sang of isn’t him alone; it’s alone together. “Let's go walking down this empty street.” he invites. “Let's walk in the cool evening light” The evening – the world – may be cold and lonely, but it sparkles with life in the presence of love. Hats climbs this hill, from longing to loss, like a bundle of love letters stowed in a drawer. Modernity – in the throngs of people in a parade, or powering the blinding downtown lights, or out among the neon signs – are an assault on the quiet, private love of the Blue Nile: “The city wins while you and I can't find a way.”
And yet, despite the assault on it, love prevails. “Who do you love?” He asks. “When it's cold and it's starlight? When the streets are so big and wide?” How could love survive given the fight the real world puts up? What should two ordinary people do to survive such an assault?
Buchanan knows. “Only love will survive,” he sings. The album closes with a valedictory, not a victory march. “Quarter to five, when the storefronts are closed in paradise, meet me outside the Cherry Light,” he says. “You and I walk away. An ordinary girl will make the world alright.”
Best-Of Playlists
Though these playlists are all on Spotify, not every song (including many of my favorites) is available to stream. To see which tracks are missing, go to "Preferences", scroll down to "Display Options," and then switch on "Show unavailable tracks in playlists."