Music Diary, Vol. -21

For the rationale behind this mad effort, explanations here. The full series of Music Diary posts are here. The full playlist is above, also here.

Week of Aug. 14-20, 2023

Lyrics: The Replacements, "Answering Machine"

Song: One of the Pogues’ greatest tracks is also one of its most uncharacteristic: a gorgeous Philip Chevron rock ballad, anchored by a Phil Spector beat, lifted by a Kirsty MacColl harmony, and floating on heavy traces of seafarer’s lore.

Album: Another streaming casualty: a great trip-hop compilation from 1995 that I found at Rockaway Records, which I’ve reconstituted as a playlist. Highlights include Leena Conquest’s “Boundaries,” LA Funk Mob’s remix of “Bug Powder Dust,” and Portishead’s “Revenge of the Number.”

Lyrics: The Beths, "Expert in a Dying Field"

Song: I’m sure I’m not the only one spinning this track today, but let me be the first to rub in the delicious irony that its composer, Hoagy Carmichael, was a lifelong Republican.

Album: Two major pieces, two different sides of De Falla’s genius: the nationalist and the neo-classical modernist. As much as I’m enchanted by “El Sombrero,” it’s his spiky but supple concerto for harpsichord and assorted winds that I cherish.

Lyrics: The Beatles, "I Am the Walrus"

Song: More people should hear this loping, seductive, Talking Heads-esque ecological sermon by the L.A. eccentric The Dark Bob, and not just because it features sweet guitar and a guest vocal by my pal Jack Skelley.

Album: Korngold’s operas and film scores are sometimes a bit rich for my taste, but this collection of his string quartets is a bracing mix: alternately astringent, exultant, warm, circumspect. It’s a keeper.

Lyrics: Lisa Kirk (Cole Porter), "Always True to You (In My Fashion)"

Song: The perfect throwback sound of this Rihanna classic always draws me in, but it’s the sudden flat-VII chord (an F, when the song is in G) of the pre-chorus that always wakes me up. “Fist fighting with fire” indeed.

Album: Much as I admire other Sinatra records, none can touch this 1958 masterwork, whose fine-grained Nelson Riddle charts and unshakable melancholy make it sound for all the world like someone had the idea: What if Debussy made a blues album?

Lyrics: CMAT, "Every Bottle (Is My Boyfriend)"

Song: I guess Dylan didn’t like this Peter, Paul & Mary cover of this bleak, unsettling Basement Tapes tune, not because they smoothed its kinks out into an utterly infectious bit of folk-pop but because they changed the name “Vivien” to “Marion.”

Album: I grew up around Steely Dan fans whose endless insistence on their special greatness only made me resist all the more. It took this perfectly pitched Donald Fagen solo effort to make me listen closely and see the light.

Lyrics: Judy Garland (Irving Berlin), "Better Luck Next Time"

Song: In 1993 Elvis Costello and Cait O’Riordan churned out an album’s worth of songs over a weekend for Transvision Vamp’s Wendy James—and she called their bluff and made the whole record. It’s mostly just passable but this track is vintage Costello.

Album: TIL that this breakthrough guitar pop album from 2009 by Charlotte Hatherley was partly inspired by Alex Ross’s THE REST IS NOISE and the paintings of Kandinsky and Malevich. A great excuse for a relisten (as if I needed one).

Lyrics: Hardy, "Give Heaven Some Hell"

Song: A salutary blast of compassion and spirit from the The Bengsons (H/t Travis Bedard).

Album: East meets West—in this case, Senegalese master Youssou N’Dour and the Egyptian Fathy Salama Orchestra—and the result is a lush, ecstatic document of pan-African solidarity and spirituality.