The Singles Jukebox

Next, Tim brings us a two-part rumination on life’s end…

[Video]
[7.54]

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]

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]

Alfred Soto: The point of view shifts from “you” to “we” and “her” match the rhythm of a track that won’t stay put. Kazu Makino sings as if she’s comfortable with secrets, perhaps gravely so: her scenario unfolds like overheard shorthand. 
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Makino’s voice is light and weak. It constantly threatens to go off key, crumple at the pianos in the first half or be cut off once the programmed drums appear, a flat plodding snare driven arrangement that speeds up the second part, but it consistently hovers, refusing to be drowned out. And within the second part, the lilting guitar and piano lingering near the front of the mix settle behind her, little bits of synth trickling out and crackling awake. The first part is tentative and meditative, and her light voice places you in a comfortable stasis, waiting for the softly played drums to fade and you to hang alongside the synths and piano, floating. The brief strums of guitar wake you and Makino’s voice settles onto them, then flits up and onto the snares. “But dying is not so easy” — and neither is singing about it. Maybe the light, weak voice is the right person to voice this anguish and turmoil — a harsher voice couldn’t help but overpower it all. But all our voices are weak when we are vulnerable, afraid, weak. “You sit down for dinner, and the life as you know it ends.” In her voice, it carries weight, it feels exhausted, it’s trying to be at peace. It’s not.
[9]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Kazu Makino’s voice is one of my favorites in all of rock music, and this two-parter is one of my favorite showcases of its power. She tosses out melodic phrases with a pithy flair, every word becoming a staccato’d exclamation or wispy curlicue. There’s comfort in hearing someone blurt out something and being able to understand their intent without having a full sense of the lyrics. It’s moving: She sings about death, and her emotions are as legible as a toddler’s half-formed yelps.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: A downtempo first half that’s wistfully compelling like a melancholy afternoon, or like the charred, spent traces of some bygone tension, or for that matter like these last leftover days of the year; then, just as the mood starts to deepen, a midtempo Little Dragonish half that leads to nowhere from nothing.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: It sounds like a bad dream: Brian Eno gone wrong or Jonny Greenwood gone right. That’s the first half; the second is when it turns out this was no dream, and waking life is a bustling drum pattern that hurries about its day while Kazu Makino flails in somnambulant uncertainty. The mix is impeccable; her gasped lines pull across the track like a moving form smudged in a photograph, and we’re drawn into the background details — all those beautiful muted key intricacies — and barely wondering what we might be missing from the great smear that forms the foreground.
[8]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: Mood music for indescribable melancholy punctuated by bouts of restlessness. A soundtrack tailor-made for my in office ennui. Enough to get me off my couch to dance in the stunning second act. 
[9]

Ian Mathers: I am a known hater of songs that split themselves into “Pts. 1 & 2” (or more!) and then just sound like the same thing the whole way through (doesn’t count if the split was to fit within the physical limitations of your recorded medium, of course), so full points to Blonde Redhead for making the split something I could pick out even without seeing track titles. I find the gossamer first part significantly more compelling than the click track-y second, although the latter is still perfectly pleasant. Call them an [8] and a [6], which makes this…
[7]

Michael Hong: Sometimes I eat dinner in silence with my dad — he’s too busy thinking about his work, I’m too in my head about saying the wrong thing. That’s what “Sit Down for Dinner” sounds like with Makino’s deliberated delivery and the TV blaring in the background. It’s the silence that consumes me, the absence of what you’d hope to hear when the whole family’s seated. I can’t make out what Makino means. A lot of the time, it’s the same with my dad — his presence is comforting nonetheless.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: This year for me has felt so often like a series of questions with incongruous answers — never resolution, always further opening. There is a certain satisfaction to be found in that lack of catharsis, pleasure that can be gleaned from the uncertain and unexpected. In its two part structure, “Sit Down for Dinner” captures some of that feeling, the dreamlike amble of its first half mounting not to some grand climax but something equally illusive, a jazzy groove-piece that seems to recede into further fuzziness rather than clarity.
[6]

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]

Taylor Alatorre: “Adulting is hard / And then you die”
[7]