The Singles Jukebox

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

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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.
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Ian Mathers: I liked the idea of Nayar’s Heaven Come Crashing LP more than I actually wound up playing it, but what “Hawthorn” suggests is: A. I should give it another try B. maybe I like Nayar better at miniature length C. It’s time for Caribou’s Up in Flames (originally released when he went by Manitoba) to get another revival D. All of the above.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The best parts of Heaven Come Crashing were explosions of sound — the breakbeat shattering the ambient guitars and vocals of that album’s title track, the way drones and percussion creep in and envelop “Tetramorph” over the course of nine minutes. “Hawthorn” is too neat of a fragment to have quite that impact, but as Nayar brings in layer after layer of guitar she reaches some alternate catharsis — less a breakthrough and more a resolution, everything in its right place for just a brief moment of grace.
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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.
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Michael Hong: Gorgeous and glassy, yet I keep waiting, not for it to go somewhere, but for it to settle into stillness.
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Will Adams: The loops, the ascending chord progression, the build-up paced like a rising sun: I was surprised to learn that “Hawthorn” was released as a standalone single and not the intro of a longer body of work. But those intros are works unto themselves, too, and gorgeous is still gorgeous in isolation.
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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?
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John S. Quinn-Puerta: Catchy loops and post rock guitar that doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. It beats the sleepy allegations perfectly. 
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