Music Monday
by Matt
(What? It’s still Sunday? Screw you.)
This, ladies and gents, is a completely irregular feature of vital importance. There’s a lot of music out there. Some good. Some bad. Mostly bad, actually, but what the hell — plenty of good stuff is just waiting to be discovered, and I happen to know a few artists you lot should be listening to right now.
Exhibit A: Nujabes. I’d never heard of the guy until I gave anime series Samurai Champloo a whirl and experienced his unique hip hop stylings on the soundtrack. Wikipedia puts a ‘cool jazz’ label on his work, a description I’m more than perfectly happy to run with in lieu of knowing fancy music words myself. And you know what? It works. I bounced around between different ways of saying it, but cool jazz is a perfect layer to throw on top of the incredible warmth his beats generate between my ears.
More than anything else — more than any lyrical adjectives I could produce — Nujabes knows emotion. Every single track of his that I’ve heard inspires a comfortable sensation, often some hazy kind of delight I don’t encounter much otherwise. Early morning, I’ll call it — the warm gray, the sleepy and mellow hours before dawn where everything is perfectly content and everything else perfectly possible.
The emotions run deeper than that, probably further down than I can even begin to understand, but that’s the gist of it. Start here and work your way down the playlist, though keep in mind he has a wealth of tracks beyond this list that are all equally superb. Save Mystline for last, if you can. That one is single-handledly the most beautiful piece of music I’ve ever heard, and thus the perfect capstone for his work.
Comments
Good post. I’d say I’d listen, but I’m the one who gave you the cd. I had a great day today, I’ll post about it before the night here is up.
Sounds interesting, I’ll have to give it a whirl. Not on YouTube though, damn thing is blocked in the good old PRC.
Also: I was mildly surprised to check up on your site and actually see THREE new posts. Impressive.
Finally, in reference to that post that’s a few down, thanks for the kindness. I would like to point out, however, that I was recently described on YouTube as, “the wolverine on drugs.” Perhaps that is more apt.