Hellbooks Top 100 Music List.... Please Click

[hellbooks]

This is going to be mostly a list of 100 pieces of music that I found eminently listenable, enjoyable, enduring, or otherwise impactful in the past 4 years

(that is, since I did this last). I've listened to lots of music during that time, way more than 100. If you're here, thanks for following along!

[hellbooks]

... Okay but first. Here are some songs that are not going to be on the list.

There are going to be "Walrus classics" on the list but they will not be these ones:

Judee Sill - Jesus Was a Cross Maker
Tanya Tagaq - Uja
Almeda Riddle - My Little Rooster [not for lack of trying to get it on the list, I must say]

There are going to be "schadd classics" on the list but they will not be these ones:

Beverly Glenn-Copeland - Deep River
Billy Woods - All Jokes Aside
Led Zeppelin - Black Dog [and would you believe me if I said this kind of came close to being the one direct import from schadd's own old top 110 list]
Luedji Luna - Lençóis [and while we're at it.... Lankum - Newcastle, quite frankly]

There are going to be "Pitchfork music festival classics" on the list but they will not be these ones:

Yves Tumor - Jackie
Yeule - Don't Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty
Arooj Aftab - Baghon Main
Mitski - The Only Heartbreaker

There are also many beloved artists of the past few years whose work could not collapse adequately onto a Best Song. So those artists, who would certainly crack the top 100 artists list, will not be on the list. Brandy won't be on the list. Patsy Cline won't be on the list. No combination of Parliament or Funkadelic is going to be on the list. Nourished By Time, I'm sorry, but will not be on the list. Adrianne Lenker.... sorry. Against my better judgment Herbie Hancock is not going to be on the list, but you can choose not to believe that. Blood Orange came within spitting distance of the list in multiple different ways but is ultimately stuck on the outside spitting in. SZA, by God, is not on the list. And of course, Angela Bofill was senselessly not even considered for the list.

I am including some of these honorable mentions in part so that you can get extra angry about their exclusion in favor of some of the wacky characters on the list to come.

[hellbooks]

100. Low - Silent Night

Christmas (1999)

So this song, by virtue of bringing up the rear, might seem to occupy the most precarious position on the list. But it actually has to be included because I listen to it at least once a year and, well, I probably intend to at least keep doing that forever. The paramount characteristic on display is the sense that two people are making the music; that is to say, its abundance exceeds the work of one, but its sparsity precludes necessary efforts of a third. Without too easily discounting the good contributions of the various recording and touring bassists that have joined Low's two primary members I'd like to suggest that this particularity perseveres straight through to the best of their impressive late-career works—here I recall the strict, expansive partitioning in

Dancing and Blood

, for one.

But back to this song: that same characteristic here, which is not much more adventurous than some tasteful two-part harmony, nor exhibits any other distinct uncommonness in sound, nonetheless draws around itself so tight its atmosphere that when I, the listener, inevitably, for lack of anything much better to do, and compelled by the wide-open space between in which another might fit, try alongside to improvise a third, I find myself so immediately and uncomfortably intrusive and extraneous, and my voice repelled firmly by the magnetic field that draws the two of theirs together. One wonders (or perhaps hopes, or perhaps trusts, that they didn't) if the bassists ever felt that way.

[Gamma Emerald]

ego

[tris]

whee

[VP Baltar]

Posting

[fireisredsir]

taking notes

[Ythan]

[hellbooks]

99. Irakere - Adagio (On a Mozart Theme)

Performed live (1979)

To shed him of his austere reputation the embattled Mozart enjoyers and rationalist patrons will evoke his exuberance in personality and breadth of his creative facility; and thank god for his legacy that he ever wrote that one, ahem, arse-licking song, which is proof that really must have been a pretty cool guy, right. Whoa, teacher says swears? Okay, but in reality the guy has some great cohesive poetry and enduring reliability as a melodist, with turns of phrase that, if sometimes not as emotionally daring nor startling, are at least always robust and self-justifying, shaping aesthetic objects with great clarity. Although they may as objects be, occasionally, inert.

Anyway the compositional strengths of the Clarinet Concerto in A Major, lay the brickwork for this variation by Irakere, the great Cuban band that bookends an adventurous and economically percussive solo section with two blues verses that—

(okay!!!)

—bloom so fully that the instrument itself strains to contain them. Paquito D'Rivera the clarinetist and Carlos Averhoff who is on the flute (note the gymnastics I had to do to avoid using the word "flautist") are primarily alto and tenor saxophonists respectively. And given that, this song does feel kind of like a footnote, and was written as one actually, to their often more explosively enthusiastic body of work. So let me cheat a little here (and definitely brace yourself for more cheating in the list) by linking to

Juana Mil Ciento

.

edit - sorry I've just been grappling with the thought that I was too harsh on Moz here despite already having apologized for it in the initial post so I did some rewriting T_T

[Black]

I wuz here 2024

[schadd_]

ok that clarinet concerto popped into my mind last week and i forgot that it got irakereated

[schadd_]

didnt know he cranked that one out and then croaked

[hellbooks]

Another thing I learned from the wikipedia page of that is that Mozart wrote it for like a special little clarinet that his BFF made that no one else had, and then afterward the friend just like. lost the manuscript. so afterwards all the music people said "Okay well we're just going to make our own version for normal clarinet then." because of that everyone immediately stopped caring about his special clarinet. And only recently have people been like "okay let's get off our butts and figure out the original version and make the special clarinets again". This might be a slight editorialization of events.

PS. it looks in the concerto performance i linked he is in fact playing it on special clarinet (at this point it occurs to me that i really ought to just say the name of it but ive gamely avoided doing that until now so might as well shoot the moon on it)

[hellbooks]

98. Prince - It's Gonna Be Lonely

Prince (1979)

Prince pulls his punches for the first half, scampering elusively around bobbing analog synth with teasingly dynamic bite, before taking off the mask and, surprise, having been Prince the whole time. That's just the sort of thing that my twisted mind enjoys—when the "good stuff" appears then evades, inviting the patience-tested listener to give chase, toing and froing, and then,

It's gonna be-e-e, lonely!!

A line which, to one's delight, he then proceeds to uncover increasingly esoteric articulations of—take the subsequent aftershock:

It's go-nna be-e lo-onely

—indeed, sprinkle the hyphens willy-nilly across the phrase to still reasonably approximate something he ended up doing in the song. For guitar addicts, to highlight a different track from this early record, here's

Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?

.

[Aisa]

Clicked

[hellbooks]

97. Nihiloxica - Asidi

Source of Denial (2023)

[alt link]



This album is about the experience of being denied movement between countries and the inequity of the agencies and policies that enforce such things. This frustration, bannered by an awesomely unpalatable album cover, is voiced in transparent critiques in tracks like

Interrogation / Welcome

and released in the pulse-pounding, repetitive lines that seem to stretch boundlessly in

Asidi

. The stark, layered panning of the percussion places the listener in the middle of a crowd of voices; here I think of the tendency of a drum circle's hearts and lungs to operate in sync. Lastly, there is the discordant synth, a mirror to the undeniably melodic character of the drum ensemble—it kind of feels like they're doing each other's jobs. The synth patterns churn and spit, at first refusing to cooperate in meter, caging the song into sections. Then as the larger, lower drums take the lead, one feels the air crackling as the energy hollows out, winding up and by virtue of persistent friction, bursting through.

[hellbooks]

thank you for cliicking

[hellbooks]

96. Gillian Welch - April the 14th Part 1

Time (The Revelator) (2001)

Her voice is very good. The relaxed throatiness of it. The subtlest waver graced upon static phrases:

"God moves on the water."

There's a twang in how she says

teehlephone

which feels evocative of more than just her (acquired?) accent—one feels the mouth taking on a sorrowful, sighing shape to mold words in such weary ways. Listening to her music, one soon notices too the devotion to placing the second voice underneath the melody; the resulting effect is top-billing in songs like

Dear Someone

. Here it's used sparingly and, along with the tuneful and liquidly space-filling procession of guitar, underscores particular lines:

"no way they'd make, even half a tank of gas."

Well, that lower harmony, turns out, is a whole nother guy, which just about knocked my socks off when I learned that.

[1]

Lastly, and I suppose not leastly where concerns brevity, I'll talk about the writing. There is an enveloping theme, that three disasters happened on the same day, which does have its solemn charm but isn't particularly emotionally resonant. What comes to the forefront is less the tragic historical throughline and more the way she uses it to connect different parts of her life together, and how, in lyrical reference, she pays tribute to her influences in kind. In doing so, she brings her own musicianship into context, introducing an irony to the detached way she describes the squalid state of the musicians in the song. I really like this blog post's description of the band she watches as not "just grim and hopeless figures," but "almost like alien beings," because I read in her voice the innocent awe of something not fully understood

[2]

, and the repressed yearning to, well, leave it all behind, as they say, as the other world beckons. When the blog writer concludes that this song demonstrates, from a place of solidarity, an unflinching love for the brutal struggle of producing art, I find myself sympathetic but not fully able to co-sign. Regardless of interpretation, the line

"And I wished I played in a rock 'n' roll band"

—the exaggerated futility of this struggle, followed by the almost tragicomically plain desire of it—produces the desired wallop.

━━━━

[1] Seriously, the vocal blending seems incredible, seamlessly uniting what by all accounts is an equal partnership in music-making under one person's name. In the Genius credits of this song, David Rawlings is not credited on vocals, but in songs like Revelator, where the timbre and character of the harmony seems basically identical, he is. I puzzled over this for a long time and eventually found this track credit that also credits him on vocals for this song and also tries to reassure me that it's been verified "using published information" so I'll just close the case for now with this: "...sometimes she loses the sense of which voice is hers and which belongs to Rawlings," Gillian Welch said, in the

New Yorker

, 2004.

[2] In the way she walks aimlessly through the city and stumbles upon the show, and in the line

"I went back to work and back to bed"

: there's a spooky-story quality to it, the fleeting passing of the event a pop-up carnival that's gone by morning. Credit to the writing, because the fiction of the narrator as separate from the world of musicians, to me, is so strongly immersive that when I learned that the band in the song was directly inspired by a group that played after her in a later show at the same club, I recoiled and went, "What? Eugh!" and then "I guess that makes sense."

[hellbooks]

95. "Little" Prelude & Fugue in G minor, BWV 558

Of dubious origin.

Oh, the organ. Not a lot of purple prose in the tank for this one.

[3]

Several years ago, I spent 6 months learning how to play, and as my favorite of the beginner's pieces I learned, it best represents that precious period. The organ forces the unyielding mind through greater dimensions of fugue appreciation; even the staunchest antifuguists fall silent against the unassailable spell of "Oh so I get to do that but with my feet now? Well this is just instantly fun." Also, that ending is one of those occasional strikingly progressive sounding ideas in classical music that makes one hold on to the doomed thought that these dusty old fellas could be brought to our time to sign off on I don't know, Kraftwerk, Kapustin, et al.

[1]

Organ

I was going to talk about the organ in this special segment where I put it in my garden of beloved sounds. But you can see how I already failed to quarantine away from the review the depth of my partiality and affection for the old thing. Many keyboard instruments rely on the lasting reverberance of sound (in a piano, pressing the sustain pedal "undampens" the strings; that sustained sound is produced by the strings being allowed to vibrate naturally and freely). Unlike them, for the organ, the finger forms a uniquely direct relationship with the key—that is to say, when it is pressed, the sound happens, and when it is not, it stops. As such, much of the articulation of feeling is placed in the movement of body: not how hard or with what emotion something is pressed, but when and how it is released, and how one's hand and foot moves to facilitate that delicate moment. This, the exact and careful reckoning of the nature of movement, is another of those addictive things about the fugue. I played on the Flentrop, which, if I may direct your attention to the top corner, you see gently placed among a row of irises. Apparently it's been called "one of the top ten instruments in the Bay Area," a kind of silly assessment but one with which I'm happy to uncritically agree. In fact, this Flentrop is my very favorite instrument in the world. It's been too long for me to remember which stops I pulled but I vaguely feel those longing strands of recognition towards the Koppelfluit 4' and the Flageolet 1 1/3'. Those were good times, lovely times. I'd always sign up for the last practice hour, 11 to midnight, so that I could play as long as I wanted without anyone else waiting their turn. On occasion I'd play till 2 AM, 3 AM (at this point I nervously, repentantly, Google "can you hear someone playing organ from outside"). [2] I would sit at the bench, in the center of the room, pews at my flanks, and the muted yellow of the stand lights would trace the pipes up a distance halfway before succumbing to the thing which at night would open up the ceiling and spill out across the great firmament and interminably beyond. I would sit cocooned underneath that darkness and produce the music with devouring hunger until the room felt too empty to bear. Dazedly I would lock up the church and feel like I'd just bought enough loneliness to last me a year. Perhaps that's the feeling I've been chasing ever since. Forgive me for putting dusty and crusty music on the list but it's that kind of feeling that could make someone fall in love with "Happy Birthday" even! ▪

━━━━

[1] Okay please please please you gotta believe me when I say this was like the first time in my life that I didn't sprint past the Google AI section with my eyes shut and my head down and my fingers jammed in my ears going "la la la la I can't hear youuu"

[2] You gotta believe me when I say that I sprinted past this one with my eyes shut. Loudness: la la la la I'm not listening

[3] Oof. Sorry. This turns out to be kind of a lie.

P.S. Sorry for not talking about the Prelude at all.

[schadd_]

i think that you didnt talk about the fugue at all either

[Ythan]

Bach is the king fugues are the greatest!

[hellbooks]

i think that you didnt talk about the fugue at all either

Yeah...and im not sorry

[hellbooks]

Bach is the king fugues are the greatest!

Making drastic last minute list changes to drive up thread engagement

[tris]

100. Low - Silent Night

Christmas (1999)

Its presence on the list might seem precarious by virtue of bringing up the rear, but this song obligates inclusion because I listen to it alongside its surrounding album once a year and, well, I intend to at least keep doing that forever. The paramount characteristic on display is the sense that two people are making the music; that is to say, its abundance exceeds the work of one, but its sparsity precludes necessary efforts of a third. Without too easily discounting the good contributions of the various recording and touring bassists that have joined Low's two primary members I'd like to suggest that this particularity perseveres straight through to the best of their impressive late-career works—here I recall the strict, expansive partitioning in

Dancing and Blood

, for one. But back to this song: that same characteristic here, which is not much more adventurous than some tasteful two-part harmony, nor exhibits any other distinct uncommonness in sound, nonetheless draws around itself so tight its atmosphere that when I, the listener, inevitably, for lack of anything much better to do, and compelled by the wide-open space between in which another might fit, try alongside to improvise a third, I find myself so immediately and uncomfortably intrusive and extraneous, and my voice repelled firmly by the magnetic field that draws the two of theirs together. One wonders (or perhaps hopes, or perhaps trusts, that they didn't) if the bassists ever felt that way.

dont tell them that started singing along a little

[tris]

you put forward a great case for the organ. i can immediately imagine that i would enjoy the sustainedness of it.