Deep Voices 114: The Best Music of October
Featuring songs from Moin, Cindy, Body Meπa, Tirzah, Florist, and more
Deep Voices: Best of October on Spotify
Deep Voices: Best of October on Apple Music
I was working at Pitchfork eight years ago and the day after Trump was elected we had some tough conversations about what a music publication could, could not, should, or should not do or say. Did we have a role to play? One of the few things we did decide to do was to ask people, on Twitter, what they were listening to. Plenty of people responded earnestly, but one person, a writer I admire, responded by saying, “Shut the fuck up.” Which—fair.
A lot has happened in the last eight years, both in my life and to the world. There’s been tragedy after tragedy. I have changed a lot. I feel much less optimism now than I did then. But—and I am trying not to be unbearably corny—I still really feel that the power of music is infinite. But that power is personal, private. When I was in tenth grade, I was obsessed with a hardcore band called Lifetime and I wrote an essay about them in class. My thesis was that if everyone could hear their music, joy would infectiously spread and the world’s problems would melt away. This was, of course, a literally childish notion. But when I look back at the teen impulse I had to preach, it makes sense. I had very little window to the world but a lot of presumption that I did. So this boosterism was less about knowing what others needed to survive than inadvertently advertising what it was that I needed. A misplaced if well-meaning methodology. I am here, I was saying (I am saying) and I am going to attempt to wring some happiness out of it.
So, what are you listening to? The nonstop sound of dread groaning in your ears like tinnitus? Me too. Aside from that, quite a bit of the new Moin album. Notes on that record, along with the rest of the best music of October, a bountiful month for this art which has consistently defined my life and which, if you’re here, likely has defined yours, is below.
First, some quick Deep Voices housekeeping. These monthly music playlists have previously been paywalled. Going forward, I’m making them available to all readers and adding instead a weekly post of cool stuff to think about, read, listen to, wear, watch, etc. The first one of these published on Sunday and you can read it here. I’m running a 20% off subscription sale right now. If you’ve been considering supporting Deep Voices, now you can do that for the cost of one even cheaper beer a week. Cheers.
Playlist notes:
It feels like there has been a resurgence in jazzy hard rock, or what I like to think of as Last Exit-core. If you’re unfamiliar, Last Exit was an ’80s supergroup consisting of Peter Brötzmann on saxophone, Sonny Sharrock on guitar, Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums, and Bill Laswell on bass. Their music was often skronky and mean—this 1986 live set was likely thrilling to attend—but occasionally (especially on their one LP, Iron Path) they got smoothed over in a funky attempt at a fusion. You’ll be listening rewardingly to a punishing guitar solo only for it to give way into wonky noodling, a frustrating downshift. Imagine, for example, if Francis Bacon inexplicably has shifted into painting Thomas Kincade-style. You’d want him to go back to the freaky stuff.
Despite the uneven results, Last Exit’s influence has reverberated and it’s felt deeply on the second Body Meπan album, Prayer in Dub. Fortunately, the four players who make up the group—drummer Greg Fox, bassist Melvin Gibbs, and guitarists Grey Mcmurray and Sasha Frere-Jones—have few discursions as they tumble through these instrumental power tracks. Fox is a blazingly strong drummer and Gibbs (a former member of Rollins Band) is plodding and patient. The guitars circle the rhythm section as much as accent it. My favorite song on the album is “Scout,” which I’ve included here. It’s 16 minutes long, and it justifies the space. A plaintive guitar line is repeated while Fox, sounding relaxed, makes his way across the kit. Halfway through, things pick up speed, with a slippery section before, on the final four minutes, the song gets properly agitated. Fox hits with controlled force. There’s a dampening quality to his snare work, which gives it a mournful quality. He could obliterate the song but keeps his powers in check.
I really love music like this, music nerd music, where talented players gather with a statement of purpose. Indulgence as big tent. Guitarist Ava Mendoza, who could easily sit in with Body Meπa, (and whose project Mendoza Hoff Revels is fairly close to the band in sound and spirit), has a solo album coming up, and it’s interesting to hear her approach similar territory alone. Without having a rhythm section, “Dust From the Mines” still feels like it has heft, thanks to a slow drone pulses through the background. Mendoza’s playing on the song reminds me of glass shattering. The showmanship and flair she demonstrates towards the end of the track is dizzying. But it’s not gaudy, not showy. It sounds like she’s picking up whatever pieces Sonny Sharrock dropped on Ask the Ages and is seamlessly putting them back together. It sounds like she knows she could play the greatest death metal guitar solo of all time but would rather play jazz.I am contractually bound with my feelings to praise everything Tirzah does, but covering Arthur Russell is a dicey proposition. So I was relieved to find that her cover of Russell’s track “This Is How We Walk on the Moon,” takes exactly zero liberties. With backing from Speakers Corner Quartet, who nicely replicate Russell’s spare cello, Tirzah sings with a low hum. Russell’s original feels like a self-help song, when he sings, “every step is moving me up.” I imagine him surprised that he reached the top of a mountain simply by putting one foot in front of the other. Naivety is tricky business, but Russell’s music captured that treacherous feeling’s sweet side, the side about knowledge being desirous not devastating. Another singer might have found terror in learning that the moon lacks oxygen. For Russell, as well as for Tirzah, they focused on its weightlessness.
Moin’s third LP You Never End is as great as the other two. In the past, they have used sampled audio, but on this album they commissioned vocals. The two songs with artist and writer Sophia Al-Maria’s vocals are striking, with “Lift You” being especially astonishing and beautiful. The band is a charged post-punk trio, but they downshift on “Lift You” with glistening guitar and a stream of cymbal hits for Al-Maria to speak over. Her lyrics are about desire and fear, summarial statements of how she has felt and how she would like to feel. “To read in a time of war,” she begins. She makes her way to, “to worry about getting old, to feel old, to remember I felt older before,” and then, “to fear being poor forever, to fear ending up on the other side of a border.” It sounds like poetry. It probably is.
The song starts with a moment of Al-Maria speaking that I imagine she did not think the band would include. “I just want to say I really appreciate this because nobody’s ever asked to use my voice for a track.” It’s like reading the acknowledgements before the book.Finally, quick note to say that Cindy’s Swan Lake EP is probably my favorite record of the month, well worth checking out if you’re a fan of the Velvet Underground’s quieter songs. Imagine if “Candy Says” was every song. A dream.