Themed around the celebratory exhale of victory, it could just as easily double as Koffee’s acceptance speech, having arrived on the eve of her historic Grammy win: “I cyaan believe it, no, this ah weh mi mudda conceive / She did tell me fi be di best ah wah mi can be, see mi now, mi ah di prodigy ah mi country,” she coos in the second verse. “Repeat” may be J Hus’ song, but the British rapper yields the spotlight to Koffee, who creates the sonic equivalent of bottled sunshine atop a carefree dancehall production. Or maybe it’s just that the song, with its mix of aching vulnerability and commanding certainty, its romantic guitar lines and marvelously messy music video, is an unimpeachable delight. Maybe that’s why Perfume Genius’ perfect, throbbing ode to infatuation saw me through some particularly dark moments this year. Perfume Genius “On The Floor”Ī joyous, warm dreamscape of a song that’s also about unavailable human contact, feeling slightly unhinged and being stuck inside your own head: “On the Floor” captured just as much of what my year wasn’t as what it was. “Bless the Broken Road” is one several others are called “Home.” This year’s bless-the-broken-road classic is Chris Stapleton’s plainspoken wonder “Starting Over,” in which two weary souls head off wandering together in pursuit of a faraway existence that’s bound to be better, simply by virtue of each other’s presence. Some songs just nail what it feels like to find what you’re looking for after a lifetime of false starts and psychic bruises. It’s a sonic adventure with references to The Wizard of Oz, ending with a group singalong, blaring horns, guitars and whatever else this tornado can suck up and spew out. And the brilliance of this song is how it builds so gently from point A to point B. This multipart tune is an ode to depression in need of a screaming catharsis.
“I Know the End” begins with Phoebe Bridgers dreamily singing about the road’s boredom while romanticizing the quiet life at home. There’s a love-hate relationship musicians have with touring. The video, too, is a thing of intimate simplicity: four people sheltering in place share the things that bring them comfort - books, toy robots, pinball machines and the Steinway piano that is Ólafsson’s companion in his own isolation. With his mesmerizing arrangement of Rameau’s “The Arts and the Hours,” he blurs time and place, as music from the 1760s comes to save us from the noise and chaos of 2020 with measured calm and the promise of peace. Víkingur Ólafsson is a pianist after my own heart - a seeker of unexpected connections, a nuanced storyteller, a cartographer of unexplored territories. Víkingur Ólafsson “The Arts and the Hours” This high-stepping tune, a title cut of sorts for their reunion album RoundAgain, captures the silvery grace and flickering combustion that was special about this all-star alignment in the first place - but even better. They’ve since grown into their stature, graduating to a midcareer prominence and shaping the art form along the way. Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride & Brian Blade “Right Back Round Again”ĭuring their first go-around in the mid-1990s, the members of this quartet were shining avatars of youthful promise, carrying a message of continuity for a jazz tradition more accustomed to counting its losses. Produced by The Neptunes, “Hit Different” features SZA burrowing deeper into the earthiness of rhythm and blues, and exploring the complexities of the genre’s central focus: love, at its most passionate. “Hit Different” opens with an emotive chorus, handled by hip-hop and R&B’s go-to gun for hire and carried by a deceptive simplicity, made compelling by Ty’s gravelly vocals. The first voice we hear on SZA’s comeback single isn’t hers, but that of Ty Dolla $ign. If racism, xenophobia and sociopathic behavior made us want to scream, Black musicians found astonishingly inventive ways of saying “um, did you just start paying attention?” And since we’re still stuck in this storm for the foreseeable future, we present to you a silver linings playlist: 100 songs that gave us life when we needed it most. When we wanted to smile without looking at our phones, buoyant distractions abounded. When the news cycle had us at a loss for words, we found quiet songs to speak for us. If you’ve been living under the rock 2020 dropped on all of us back in March and spent the last nine months finding comfort in the sounds of your childhood (hell, even 2019), we have some good news for you: As crappy as this year has been for anyone with a shred of empathy, the jams were ample. To stay up to date on the stories that matter. WBEZ brings you fact-based news and information.
0 kommentar(er)
