The Singles Jukebox

It's rare for us to cover instrumental songs, but Nortey is making sure our bases are covered...

[7.38]

Total writers: 8
Highest score: [10]
Lowest score: [6]
Controversy index: 0.97

Nortey Dowuona: The first seconds of "Hawthorn" are looped guitar. They keep spinning in the back, a solid place to step on for the listener, just waiting for the song to begin, and slightly slipping beneath the newly added guitar and synthesizers, lush and full playing in a loop as well, then building and growing, smothering all other sounds beneath them. Meanwhile, the looped riff just keeps swirling in the left hand channel, waiting for the rest of the song to dissipate -- before it is immediately cut off.
[10]

Kat Stevens: Very pleasant! A bit like when Karl H manages to persuade Rick S to let him do some guitar noodling in the middle of an Underworld album.
[6]

Leah Isobel: My favorite Kate Bush song is "A Coral Room," for its drifty musical simplicity and complex emotional tenor, slipping gently between images and passages and memories. The question the whole song hinges on -- "What do you feel?" -- is both plainspoken and vast, impossible to answer. To write words on a page or musical notes in a sequence is to reach into the water and see what it's like. How does it feel? How does it feel? How does it feel? Earlier this year, I wrote about Vines' Birthday Party, a relatively experimental record for my listening habits; I spent weeks listening to it again and again in different settings, trying to come to a conclusion, pushing for an idea. I still think it eluded me, that I didn't have the capacity to get my hands around it. And yet it's slipped into my favorite records of the year, maybe because it's an outlier. I spent most of my formative years listening to either pop music or Pitchfork-approved indie rock, in the turn-of-the-decade boom times. That music worked to be articulated and likable because there was money to be made in it. Now, of course, everything is contracted. As a sometimes writer and occasional musician, I have (mostly) made peace with the fact that my art will not sustain me economically. I don't even know if I'd want it to. A music made to be monetized probably wouldn't hold what I'd need it to hold. In 2021, when I was living in New York, I met Rachika not at a show or via an interview, but through her day job as an electrolysis technician. She played incredible music while she worked. I didn't know that she was a musician herself until she told me about a show she was playing -- not as an invitation, just as idle chatter. I didn't go. Then I moved away, and then I found out that her music was incredible too. A cross-country move, two lost friendships, a new relationship, a new job, new and unformed ideas and fears and hopes: my context for "Hawthorn," inseparable from how it feels to me. The song curls upwards out of a maybe-sample, maybe-guitar, maybe-synth pulse; I'm stuck on the high plink that opens and closes the phrase, keeps the time, remains somehow unreachable. When the guitars and bass come in, folding and lacing around each other, that plink still sticks out, like the composition is either pulled in its wake or pushing towards the sound. It could be a radio transmitter or a metronome or a distant star, blinking, turning. It's corny to say but it pulls me, too -- whatever it is I'm searching for, however time reveals it or I distort it with my own insistence on rationalizing or controlling myself. I reach my hand into the water. What do I feel? What do I feel? What do I feel?
[7]

Read all our writers' blurbs and rate and join the conversation at The Singles Jukebox mothership!