Next, Tim brings us a two-part rumination on life's end...
[7.54]
Total writers: 13
Highest score: [10]
Lowest score: [5]
Controversy index: 1.48
[7.54]
Total writers: 13Highest score: [10]
Lowest score: [5]
Controversy index: 1.48
Tim de Reuse: It's a Joan Didion quote, from The Year of Magical Thinking: "You sit down for dinner and life as you know it ends." Didion continues this train of thought by mulling over "the question of self-pity." But Kazu Makino has no time for this. She chirps enigmatically: "No pity." There's a trickster's lilt in her enunciation, as if she's snatching pity away from you. Through both parts of this suite she describes shocks, traumas, getting "hit," abandoning plans, and deaths that come in an instant, but grief does not find purchase here; her characteristic half-formed sentences flow structureless over gently galloping ostinati, dodging banshee-scream synths, forming too slippery a surface for anything to stick to. "No pity" as a taunt from the ambivalent cruelty of loss, but also "no pity" as in "get up." Her nonchalance and fragmented delivery make the freight train of grief seem like a momentary tumble, communicating a kind of resilience that full sentences would be too brittle to get across. For a song very much about death, it performs an unthinkable magic trick: it makes it hard to imagine doing anything but continuing on.
[10]
Harlan Talib Ockey: "Sit Down for Dinner" does capture the deluded anxiety of Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, but it's also seven minutes long with only strange, fleeting glimpses of a narrative. Circles without haunting.
[5]
Peter Ryan: Pt. 1 is an allusive moving target, Makino's voice bending and melding into an echo of the barely dissonant guitar arpeggio line, evoking disaster & shadows of unspecified griefs; at the risk of trying to hear this too literally, Pt 2. tightens the focus on more (but not entirely, of course) specific endings -- she dials in the feeling of being far from home when the time comes so artfully, economically, bluntly. More than what's there, I'm caught by what isn't -- hand-wringing or time for apology. Empathy, yes -- "I know you don't deserve" -- but pity, no.
[9]
Taylor Alatorre: "Adulting is hard / And then you die"
[7]
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