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- The Retrographer: Issue Six (June, 2015)
The Retrographer: Issue Six (June, 2015)
June, 2015
The Retrographer, Issue Six
Bulletins:
As of June 29th, I am Cymbal's first employee. Cymbal is, forgive the trope, Instagram for music. I'll be joining the team to help turn it into a vibrant community of artists, listeners, and everyone else, which very likely means you! Join, follow me (I'm @charlie) and I'll follow you back. Let me know who you'd like to see on the app, and if you know any hotshots I can feature, give me a shout.
Joni Mitchell has been through some really awful stuff recently, and I hope I don’t seem opportunistic by featuring one of her albums in this issue. I chose Hejira because it was (and is) very important to me at a time of loss different from the one she writes about on her record. I only hope I’m able to turn some listeners on to a great record and a towering artist, not to, as many media outlets often do, capitalize on the public’s attention at a morbid moment.
My sister, Caroline Kaplan, is starring in the TNT drama "Proof." Tune in on Tuesdays at 10, or watch online.
My friend and musical life-partner Ian Wayne is putting out a solo project as Cereal in mid-July. I’ve heard some early cuts and they’re really amazing, and that’s not just because I’m a friend and musical life-partner. Like his Facebook page to be notified when the record’s out. You'll probably see one of those tracks on next month's playlist. Life-partner.
Kendrick Lamar's video for "Alright" is one of the best I've ever seen. If you liked that, make sure you've seen Flying Lotus' similarly luminous meditation on death, "Never Catch Me," which also features Lamar.
My band Milhaus (with music life-partners Ian Wayne and Paulina Mandeville) is playing a show tonight at the Flat in Williamsburg. Attend.
Ten Songs for June, 2015
Florence Welch's voice is towering and shape-shifting, morphing from Sun-era Cat Power to something more encompassing. Her outro horns channel interstellar vastness using, like similarly-inspired contemporaries, the open, quartal harmony employed by American composers of the early 20th Century.
Take his rendition of "Dirty Diana" as pretext: Abel Tesfaye is Michael Jackson with the attitude of Bobby Brown, the hedonism of Danny Brown, and the drug preferences of, well, Bobby Brown. Also: basslines this good, and they're rare, are possessing on a supernatural level.Janet Jackson, "No Sleeep" (Spotify / YouTube)I don't care how long she's been gone, or what Justin Timberlake did, or what FKA Twigs does at her shows. There's only one paragon of android sexuality, only one dominatrix of the uncanny valley, only one eerie, arousing, creepy, sensual, confusing, suspiciously ageless queen of pop.Thundercat, "Them Changes" (Spotify / YouTube)When 2011's The Golden Age of the Apocalypse came out, a friend told me she didn't "get" Thundercat. "It's helpful if you love 70s Herbie Hancock," I offered weakly. Now, in the wake of his contributions to To Pimp a Butterfly, The Epic, and the collective work of Flying Lotus, the value of the bassist's indispensable jazz fusion revival couldn't be clearer.The Very Best, "Hear Me" (Spotify / YouTube)With all the slow-motion portent of Massive Attack's Mezzanine, the London / Malawi afropop trio's newest song is like the storm cloud passing over the balloon-swelling-in-your-chest sunshine of their breakthrough earlier work. Written on the 50th anniversary of Malawi's independence, this song stands in the shadow of post-colonialism.Vince Staples, "Lift Me Up" (Spotify / YouTube)Odd Future broke up. Long before they did, Vince Staples' lyrical prowess was cooly, quietly, deftly moving him out from their periphery to the forefront, distracting from their hype. This album, about the summer Staples' Long Beach hood prematurely stole his innocence, as so many do, again and again, opens with a damning transcendence.Fuck Up Some Commas (Spotify / YouTube)This song is absolutely everywhere: bumping out the back of trucks parked on street corners deep in the night, soundtracking dunk cam vines, undergirding broad-based professional advice. It takes that kind of universality, as well as a super hard beat, to make a song ubiquitous.
It's an old trick on the ear: toggle between a minor chord and a major, adjust the melody ahead of time to anticipate the change so watching the harmony snap into sync with melody feels like prophecy fulfilled. But with a voice like Shamir's, high and effortless, fluidly glossing notes and smearing consonants over video game synths, old tricks sound new.Leon Bridges, "Smooth Sailin'" (Spotify / YouTube)Let's start with what he doesn't have: the aching sexiness, the satin-to-sandpaper vocal range, the dirty-dancing-in-a-sweltering-roadhouse charisma. I list the differences because Leon Bridges, who, at 25, is as far from his birth as Sam Cooke's death was, has just about every element of early 60s soul, from the songwriting to the outfits, figured.Wolf Alice, "Your Loves Whore" (Spotify / YouTube)It's all huge. The drums, the escalating guitar arpeggiation, the high melodic bass, the reverberating production that makes it sound like you're tuning into performance to an empty stadium, the lead guitar that cuts through the sound like a laser through wax paper, Ellie Rowsell's whispered intimations that suddenly tower like a cross.
One Historic Album for June, 2015
After a messy breakup, you may feel the panic: I've got to get out of here. Go somewhere where nobody knows me; where I can't be judged or humiliated for my heartbreak and the melancholy that follows me around; where I can match the loneliness inside with loneliness outside; where I have the time and space to think; where I can remember who I am, distinct from that lost someone who was wrought both in the infrastructure of my daily routines and dreams of the future.
Joni Mitchell did it. She set out on a solitary road trip across the states, from Maine to California, just her and a guitar, in search of the sense of self she lost. On the way, she wrote 1976's Hejira - the Arabic word for "journey" - and displayed life as viewed through the blue lens of heartbreak, through which every oddity and detour along the road becomes an avatar of her loneliness, axioms to fulfillment's futility. The old blues singer Joni meets in Memphis is embalmed in isolating bitterness. Airplane vapor trails in a desert sky transform her into Amelia Airhardt, crash landed on what she had thought was love, only to find it was a mirage, "Just a false alarm." Perhaps most poignantly, she finds herself, on the album's tour-de-force conclusion "Refuge of the Roads," at a highway service station looking at a poster of the earth on the wall. "You couldn't see a city on that marbled bowling ball," she says. "Or a forest, or a highway, or me, least of all."
Mitchell's abiding love of jazz, as significant to her sound career-long as her ascendancy as a folk musician, adapts to fit her mood, integrating more naturally than ever thanks in part to the babbling virtuosity of bassist Jaco Pastorius. Pastorius, whose divisive work as a solo artist and member of fusion supergroup Weather Report obscures his artfulness, shines as an accompanist, lending a truly singular dimension to a record already aiming for Plutonian remoteness.
Having written perhaps the greatest breakup album ever, Blue, four years prior, it's fair to wonder what Hejira offers that it didn't. Mitchell wonders too. "Love's a repetitious danger that you think I'd be accustomed to," she sings. "Well I do accept the changes, at least better than I used to do." Here, love is abstract and changeable, embodying not just as danger and longing, but as resentment, on a "A Strange Boy," or as biting critique, on "Coyote."
Above all, Joni believes love can only find redemption through introspection, and ultimately, self-actualization. "People will tell you where they've gone, they'll tell you where to go," she says. "But until you get there yourself, you'll never really know." The caring voices of those who can't feel her pain only drive her further into isolation. "Doris says have children, Mama and Betsy say find yourself a charity," she lists. "All I want to do now is find another lover." If the album's heartsickness seems to feel at times during the record's 52 minutes like wallowing, it's only because we listeners are occupying the same unburdened emotional state as those well-meaning, if unempathic, voices in Mitchell's life. Hejira is heartbreak in real time, stretching infinitely over the horizon like a desert highway. But it doesn't matter if you grow tired of her broken heart, because she knows there's only one route back home. "I left him then," she sings, "for the refuge of the roads."
Best-of Playlists
Though these playlists are all on Spotify, not every song (including many of my favorites) is available to stream. To see what tracks are missing, go to "Preferences", scroll down to "Display Options," and then switch on "Show unavailable tracks in playlists."