velvet oracle
Also published with vols. 01 and 03 on the columns page.
There is a want that has no object. You feel it most clearly on public transport, watching a city you already know go past a window, and you cannot say what it is you are missing. These twelve are the closest I have come to a language for it.
Most songs about wanting tell you what they want. A person, a city, a version of the past, a way out. That is the easy version. It gives the listener somewhere to put the feeling.
The songs here refuse that. They circle something without landing on it. You can hear the writer failing to name the thing and choosing to leave the failure in.
Three of these are anchors, placed early so you can calibrate what I am hearing. Three are Australian, marked below, and they carry the weight of the back half rather than sitting in it as a courtesy. The rest go deep. Sequenced for the train. Around forty five minutes, which is most commutes, which is the point.
The songs that understand this feeling are the ones that refuse to name it. Naming it would be a kind of lie.
The tracks
01 · The Wild Hunt — The Tallest Man on Earth (anchor) Kristian Matsson writes like someone describing a landscape he has already left. He is not going anywhere in particular. He is just going.
02 · Two Weeks — Grizzly Bear (anchor) Sounds triumphant and is not. Ed Droste is asking someone to say something they will not say, and the arrangement keeps swelling anyway, as if the music has not been told.
03 · Blood Bank — Bon Iver (anchor) Two people in a car in a parking lot, saying something almost significant and then not following through. The song ends before either of them decides.
04 · Half Return — Julien Baker (essential) The title is the argument. You do not come all the way back from anything.
05 · On the Sea — Beach House (deep cut) Victoria Legrand’s voice sits so far back in the mix that the words arrive as suggestions. Best track on Bloom and not the one anybody names.
06 · In Undertow — Alvvays (deep cut) The guitars are bright and the lyric is not, and the friction between the two is the entire mechanism.
07 · Tyres — EXEK (Naarm / Melbourne) Albert Wolski will not tell you what any of this is about. Seventh album, first for DFA, and the bassline owes a straight debt to Public Image Ltd.
08 · Trouble — Cat Stevens (deep cut) Under two minutes. The oldest song here and the one that has aged least.
09 · want light! — Dumbhead (Naarm / Melbourne) The palette break. Post-punk guitar dropped over a trip-hop beat, with Billie Raffety’s jazz-trained vocal floating on top. The title is an instruction with no object, which is the whole playlist compressed into two words.
10 · Motion Sickness — Phoebe Bridgers (deep cut) Bridgers writes negative space better than almost anyone working. The title is a commuter’s title.
11 · Lover, where’d you go — Olivia C. Dacal (Naarm / Melbourne) She builds a song the way a producer does rather than the way a songwriter does. The quiet one before the close.
12 · Reckoner — Radiohead (closer) Radiohead closes every Oracle’s Playlist. That is a convention now and I am not planning to break it. Reckoner because it is the only Radiohead song that offers something like peace without explaining what the peace is about.