Stone Woman Gives Birth To A Child At Night—Mount Eerie

I’ve spent much of autumn’s turn to winter coasting around California in a sedan. I’m surprised at how long it’s taken me to give the roads their fair due with amount of time I’ve lived in California while owning a car. When Mount Eerie’s been on, I’ve found myself stopping more frequently to contemplate whatever’s knocking at the threshold of my attention—a scenic vista or a mundane slice of time. Awareness has taken on a wide range of flavors from slow and viscous to bold, sweeping, and dynamic. It’s an appropriate soundtrack for being present nowhere in particular.

Circles—Thrice

There’s something I truly appreciate about the way many gems from Thrice’s wide-ranging discography allow themselves to be found and sat within time and again. Beggars is one of my favorite records and Circles is a highlight that’s equal parts somber and expansive, with a small measure of twinkling hope. The lyrics characterize humans as intrepid yet futile in our perennial quests to cast ourselves into the dark and build upon what we know despite our ultimate ignorance, blindness, and fallibility. I haven’t watched these guys play in over 10 years (since the last dates of their farewell tour pre-reunion); perhaps it’s time to indulge a little nostalgia.

Hey Listen—Drug Church

Drug Church’s Prude was one of my favorite releases of 2024. It doesn’t break much new ground sonically, but the songs are well written despite their structural and lyrical simplicity. The tracklist is built with vignettes—often crushing ones—of life on the other side of cracks in modern life that many people would rather just pretend aren’t there (along with the people who’ve fallen through them). Hearing Hey Listen reminds me of an unlucky kid I used to get into trouble with when I was running low on luck myself. It makes me feel abruptly anxious and awfully guilty; sapped and resigned to abject cowardice, shame, and disappointment, yet ultimately grateful. It is indeed tough to find an upside, but there’s no hope for luck without the intent to search. Thanks to Carlos Jarquin for listening to me yap about sad shit. Go tell him about a song that means something to you.

Hollywood—Toro y Moi, Benjamin Gibbard

The end of last year saw me falling back into old patterns of landing myself in some total bullshit in Hollywood. Changing—truly and permanently changing—is a tall order. I guess I’m working my way up to it, but it’s really nobody’s business to even try to help me with this stuff anymore. On an entirely separate note, instrumental production is resonating with me here as creative inspiration. I’m sitting on several years’ worth of 8-bar guitar loops that need arrangements to call a home and I had a fun time bringing some field recordings of indigenous chants and my gamelan percussion fiddlings over to a local session with hex_ earlier this month. I need to finish things!

Heavyheart—munro

Leave it to genre-bending Internet music provacateur in chief Yung Skrrt to run with the meme until it gets far enough out of hand to yield an exquisitely curated 27-song compilation release from Tabula Rasa with a complementary merch drop. munro’s track was the stickiest in my rotation, but the gamut covered by the other contributors showcases some really exciting production. 212 BPM. 5/4 time. Super crunched out sounds. Thank you to Drew for the tweet that started it all, and of course Thank You Dream Girl.

HEAL—Machinedrum, AKTHESAVIOR, Deniro Farrar

Machinedrum’s curatorial efforts on the compilation mentioned above came fresh off the heels of a deluxe LP release. 3FOR82_D3LUX3 brings even more solid cuts to the table than the original release from back in the spring and this track found me again at the right time in life to embed itself deeply in my rotation. It’s been over 10 years since the Vapor City era and somehow this guy is still finding new things to execute very well. I enjoy the range of experimentation in his crossovers into black music. Not everything hits for me—e.g. I don’t dislike the Jesse Boykins III collaborations, but it’s easy to find R&B I’m more fond of. Kane Train with Freddy Gibbs (2020) was a smash by comparison; a definitive step up in Machinedrum’s ability to find a pocket in hip-hop production with vocal features. HEAL (2024) takes that deeper than production and performance into the realm of transcendent emotional appeal. It’s perhaps a tad less instrumentally inventive but still exquisitely arranged, sitting behind the vocal where it needs to yet still placing melodic variation and dynamic highs where they fit best. Stellar and moving vocal performance and message: life is hard… find a way to push through.

Lullaby—TURQUOISEDEATH

I’ve been riding around at night a lot with TURQUOISEDEATH. I’d comfortably put Kaleidoscope in the 2024 sleepers category; definitely unexpected replay value. Solid balance of ethereal ambiance, danceable tempos, and pedal to the metal breakbeat-filled DnB/jungle-esque goodness—not terribly novel, but thoroughly enjoyable.

If you’ve read this far (thanks), you probably like music quite a lot. Message me on X (Twitter) if you’d like to get some 🏓 Playlist Ping Pong going or chat about music.