#31: With swollen appendices

This week’s new* music:
Spotify
Apple Music

*OK so things happened, and as a result this thing didn’t happen for a while. Right after I sent my last newsletter in mid-September, I started building out a new playlist, and then my wife had an emergency appendectomy. Which is as bad as it sounds. Though she’s mostly recuperated now, it was rough for a while—turns out if it ruptures you’re in for a haul.

Now that everything’s mostly settled back in place—our lives, schedules, organs—I’ve vacillated between shelving that old playlist and all the songs I’d been saving since then, or trying to make up for lost time by rounding out the year with a few playlists in quick succession. This week’s installment is me choosing the latter.

Listening notes

• That Proc Fiskal song is endlessly listenable. No matter how many times I hear it, there’s something new to discover around every corner. A new version could be uploaded every day, I wouldn’t even know it. Nuanced af.
• Everyone loves Julie, and why not. They’re one of the—if not the—new shoegaze band of the moment. While there are obvious touches of My Bloody Valentine and Swirlies throughout, I’m enjoying this on its own merits. Especially in the outro, where I believe that would be the first shoegaze guitar solo, which isn’t really a solo at all, but its own thing.
• The dreamy, gothic “Witch’s Hat” from Mark Trecka and Midwife is a statement of a song—insistent, moody, sinewy—and not the kind of thing that comes around much in our vibe-laden era. An instant favorite.
• Conrad Tao is conjuring spirits with that piano on David Fulmer’s “I have loved a stream and a shadow.” Brilliant playing, wonderful stuff.
• Nearing 40, “Bizarre Love Triangle” is anything but new, though this Stephen Hague remix—which is only now seeing the light of day—breathes a shimmery new life into an already perfect song. So it’s new, new for all of us.