Dinner Music 118: The weekly lineup
bossa pop lounge, Haitian compas, indie sleaze
This week we’re listening to lounge, many different definitions it, including the literal: “[music] meant to evoke in the listeners the feeling of being in a place, usually with a tranquil theme, such as a jungle, an island paradise or outer space.” I’m taking liberties with the definition. You’ll notice some indie sleaze, like LCD Soundsystem, here, too, which, I argue, is also meant to evoke in listeners the “feeling of being in a place.” Think: Girls on HBO, the karaoke bar in 500 Days of Summer, the crowd of a Neon Indian show, Portlandia. There’s an interesting link between the two, lounge and indie sleaze. Both are eras or movements that were named in retrospect. Sometimes you can only know something when it’s over.
We begin with Classical Current, a cult “easy listening” album by pioneering Brazillian guitarist and musician Laurindo Almeida. What is “easy” listening? Is it bad to listen easily? Here, your experience of the album depends on your attention. The texture of the sounds, the tingles and soft guitar and atmospheric strings, can function like rain on the window, calming, or the sonic quality of the instrumentation can be transportive, can take you inside and outside of your body simultaneously, a sort-of cerebral immanence. We move into a “compas,” or mini-djaz (mini jazz; a stripped down form of compas), album out of Haiti, Patience from Les Gypsies De Petion-Ville. Soft, jazz-forward merengue laced with an island melancholy glows forth in this remarkably quality album (quality in terms of the music, but also the literal sound — many albums from this era and region are incredible but lack good mastering). If you like tezeta (Ethiopian jazz) or bossa nova, you might like this for its similarity and slightly more upbeat variation. Next, we travel into the early 2010s for Cate Le Bon’s Mug Museum, though we stick to the melancholy and nostalgia from the previous albums in Le Bon’s “lament to the erosion of memories.”1 As though Le Bon already knew indie sleaze was ending (or, arguably, had ended), this album offers a stripped version of sad-indie-party-dance sound that dominated the previous decade-ish. Guitar-forward with simple bass and sweet, airy vocals, Mug Museum hardly feels dated the way that other albums of the time do. There’s a timelessness, like Nico’s Chelsea Girl, that situates the album squarely in its era, while leaving room for it to expand into, and be discovered by, new ones. Victor Jara’s El Derecho de Vivir en Paz is another album to do this, at once protesting the global and local situation in Chile, while also imbuing itself with the folk-love of the era. He was a pivotal part of the nueva canción chilena movement, a group of Chilean musicians whose music incorporated strong political and social themes while taking cues from traditional Chilean music. We end on a familiar note: LCD Soundsystem’s self-titled first album.
Enjoy.
The Spotify playlist
Or listen on Apple Music.
Paid subscribers have access to the full Dinner Music archive (via Spotify and Apple Music), an after hours playlist, a “New York Grooves” playlist and more — hundreds of hours of groove, soul, jazz, folk, samba, hi-life, disco, electro, post-punk, funk and more, lovingly selected.
Monday
Classical Current - Laurindo Almeida (1969)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Tuesday
Patience - Les Gypsies De Petion-Ville (1970)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Wednesday
Mug Museum - Cate Le Bon (2013)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Thursday
El Derecho de Vivir en Paz - Victor Jara (1971)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Friday
LCD Soundsystem - LCD Soundsystem (2005)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Pair with
Grilled skirt steak with lemon herb couscous salad. I like to think that deep winter is prime steak salad season, so here’s a vaguely Mediterranean one.
Blanc de Blancs from Sicily. You don’t have to drink red wine with steak, you really don’t. The acidity from a dry sparkling wine can cut through the fat just as good (better, imo) as a red.
Incredible obit for Charles Dumont (co-wrote Je Ne Regrette Rein). “At 44, Piaf was racked by pain after a car accident and expressed little interest in returning to the stage — certainly not with a song by Mr. Dumont, whom she had previously dismissed as “a mechanical songwriter of no great talent,” he recalled in a 2010 interview with The Independent.”
Liz Pelly’s 2017 essay on Muzak. “These algorithmically designed playlists, in other words, have seized on an audience of distracted, perhaps overworked, or anxious listeners whose stress-filled clicks now generate anesthetized, algorithmically designed playlists.”
via
’s recent post on Louise Bourgeois' relationship with clothes.Thank you, thank you. Have a great week.
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18716-cate-le-bon-mug-museum/