The Retrographer, Issue 63 (February, 2 0 2 0)

March 01, 2020

Bonny Light Horseman, RMR, Waxahatchee, Soccer Mommy, King Krule, Perfume Genius, Grimes, Tame Impala, Victoria Monét, Aminé, Cat Power

The Retrographer, Issue 63

Bulletins

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

“The Roving”, Bonny Light Horseman (Spotify / YouTube) – A supergroup of Eric D. Johnson, Josh Kaufman, and Anaïs Mitchell sail into this gorgeous song three tracks into their self-titled album. No one stands in Mitchell’s way as she chronicles a love ending: “I knew her love was changing / By the roving of her eye.” 

“RASCAL”, RMR (Spotify / YouTube) – The message is simple: “Show me a better way / Promise I'll quit this game.” In balaclavas and bulletproof vests, RMR beautifully croons over Rascal Flatts’ elegiac “Bless The Broken Road” from Hannah Montana - The Movie. If it seems to initially make no sense, consider the broken roads each follow.

“Lilacs”, Waxahatchee (Spotify / YouTube) – Something about Katie Cruchfield’s music takes you right to bumpy rides on country backroads. Her lyrics can be positively Dylanesque, too: “I run it like the crop of kismet, I run it like a dilettante.”

“bloodstream”, Soccer Mommy (Spotify / YouTube) – Sophia Allison would’ve been a beloved songwriter any time since the guitar went electric, but it’s great she’s herself here now, writing breezy melodies for anxious stories. “Happiness is like a firefly on summer evenings / feel it slipping through my fingers / but I can't catch it in my hands.”

“Stoned Again”, King Krule (Spotify / YouTube) – the hype on Archy seems to have died down just in time for him to make his best album. Retaining his noirish, horror-genre delivery, grinding atop this late-70s Wire arrangement, he makes “10th birthday, got a puppy” sound positively deprived.

“Describe”, Perfume Genius (Spotify / YouTube) – Mike Hadreas is special. He begins every album cycle with something that sounds different; new for him, but plucked from an alternate past. His melodies are unforgettable and each time he reveals something epic, yet dignified, purposeful, like how the plucked, twinkling backdrop of the second verse shines behind his cloud of distorted guitars.

“4ÆM”, Grimes (Spotify / YouTube) – A Matrix-core song with a hook that cycles around the premonition “You’re gonna get sick, you don’t know when” that came out just before the novel coronavirus began to descend on humanity like a biblical plague might be too timely.

“Breathe Deeper”, Tame Impala (Spotify / YouTube) – Easing into the smooth sounds of Lakeside and Dedication, Kevin Parker has made an album so intricate and considered it seems to have obscured concern for songwriting altogether. This is its most tasteful and decipherable moment, a soundscape that revolves piece by piece to a jagged coda that slips into nothingness.

“Moment”, Victoria Monet (Spotify / YouTube) – A pretty brilliant, simple concept: What if a pop star gave you a chance. “Look what your mind's imagination can do / Making shit true.” But it’s the – ahem – moment 2:12 when the most beautiful strings appear, like something out of a Carlos Niño and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson arrangement.

“Shimmy”, Aminé (Spotify / YouTube) – Adam Daniel sounds like a dozen rappers at once, but that doesn’t make him sound derivative, it makes him sound potent. He follows Drake’s Toronto playbook with Portland in this song’s delightful video, brimming with memorable lines with wisdom past his age – “That is not your necklace – and that whip ain’t yours, that’s the IRS’s.”

One Album for February, 2 0 2 0  

Cat Power, “Moon Pix” (Matador, 1998) (Spotify / YouTube)

"I got woken up by someone in the field behind my house in South Carolina," Chan Marshall told her unauthorized biographer Elizabeth Goodman. "The earth started shaking, and dark spirits were smashing up against every window of my house. I woke up and I had my kitten next to me… and I started praying to God to help me.”

It was 1997 and Marshall – who performs as Cat Power – was living in a barn in South Carolina with her partner Bill Callahan, but that night she was alone. “A voice was telling me my past would be forgotten if I would just meet him – whoever he was – in the field. And I woke up screaming, ‘NO! I won’t meet you!’ And I knew who it was: the sneaky old serpent. My nightmare was surrounding my house like a tornado. So I just ran and got my guitar because I was trying to distract myself. I had to turn on the lights and sing to God. I got a tape recorder and recorded the next sixty minutes. And I played these long changes, into six different songs. That's where I got the record."

Marshall wrote half of her lonely, spectral Moon Pix to as a cross to ward away terrors closing in on her one awful night. Her story is supernatural, but the act of using composition like a mantra – to steady and center a rattled world – couldn’t be more prosaic. The music that Marshall found to calm herself, bare as winter trees, carries equal and opposite power to the nightmare that necessitated them. “You're already in hell,” she cried on “Moonshiner”. “You're already in hell.”

Most tracks on Moon Pix sound like they were recorded live in a spare, empty space, the only sound for miles around. Recording was a fever dream too: it was made in less than a week with a pick up band she had shared bills with on past tour. Her guitar doesn’t always sound in tune. Elements of her arrangements – like her lift of the Beastie Boys’ backwards “Paul Revere” drums on “American Flag” – often feel like placeholders for a more finished album. Moon Pix sounds as extemporaneous and prayerful as the night she composed it.

Marshall’s fear of hell came from somewhere deep in her past. “I knew about God and church and Satan and all that shit—demons and prophets,” she told Pitchfork many years later. “If you do this and do that, you’ll go to Heaven, you just have to be good. But if you do this, you’re bad, you’re terrible.” But – just like that night in South Carolina – she also saw the counteracting power of the natural world. Satan dwells everywhere, but natural phenomena, like a kitten or a musical idea, save her. “It must be the colors and the kids that keep me alive,” she sang. Or, put in words in that later interview, “Nobody ever talked about the clouds, how every cloud looks different: low clouds, high clouds, fast clouds, slow clouds, blue sky, dark blue, light blue, planets, moons. No one ever talks about that shit, or goes to church for it. As a kid I knew the grass and I knew the wind. I knew that. That was very clear.”

This body of songs was a talisman against impending evil, the light that drove away those dark spirits rises through her melodies. Each song stages a landscape of darkness within which Marshall conjures some hope. Amid “American Flag”’s yellow haze of guitar distortion, she breaks into shoo-be-doops; an avian flute flutters beautifully as she contemplates her worthiness of God’s love on “He Turns Down”; A hybrid of her nephew and Will Oldham shines through the cursed night of “Colors and the Kids”: “Yellow hair, you are such a funny bear.” Maybe no moment on Moon Pix calls this light forth like centerpiece “Metal Heart”, a plea to being true to yourself that rises in the last stanza of its last verse to interpolate “Amazing Grace”. “Come and rescue me,” she sang on “Cross Bones Style”, “because you have seen some unbelievable things.”

Around the time Marshall was touring the album, she was asked how she hoped it would make people feel. She was uncomfortable with the question, but she gave the best answer she could: “It’d be that you’d feel good, instead of feeling bad.” Decades later, she articulated herself more clearly. “It feels like I’m alive today because of being able to write those songs,” she explained. “Instead of darkness, instead of other choices humans make, I chose to write songs. Moon Pix was my salvation as a very mixed-up young person.” She made an album to save herself. “The reality is that I wasn’t as fucked and alone as I believed I was at the time.”

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