Music is compelling when it’s sad.
This is not news; it’s biology. Our brains are wired to associate emotion with sound, and the idea that we could go from happy to sad at the stir of a violin is inherently interesting.
Across hundreds of years of music making, from Bach to Beck, composers have exploited this fact as a means of exploring the ways we process negative emotion. It gets especially interesting, though, when musicians find a particular angle on sadness. What does it sound like when you’re in denial? What about mania? Heartbreak? Reconciliation?
For fans of music who explore these far corners of melancholy, 2016’s fall album cycle is embarrassingly rich.
First out of the gate is the Floridian punk act Against Me!, whose new record titled “Shape Shift with Me” dropped. Their last album, the raucous “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” of 2014, detailed the transition process of Against Me!’s transgender lead singer Laura Jane Grace. While the band has been around since 1997, “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” won them unprecedented acclaim for its honest, bruising dissection of both what it means to be a trans woman in America and what it means to be frustrated in general.
“Shape Shift with Me,” according to the band, marks a return from some of the glammier trappings in “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” to their more hardcore roots, though it’s not expected to stray too far from that record’s subject matter — one song is titled “Delicate, Petite and Other Things I’ll Never Be.” Early reviews are positive, and note that the album picks up where “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” left off in terms of delivering Grace’s particular brand of vital world-weariness.
If Against Me! chooses to face adversity with a pair of raised middle fingers, alt-R&B act How To Dress Well meets it with a bottle of pinot. Tom Krell, the mastermind behind How To Dress Well, pursued a graduate degree in philosophy, and it shows. His music is thoughtful, slow and full of questions.
“Care,” scheduled for release Sept. 23, will be Krell’s fourth album as How To Dress Well. If it’s anything like the first three, it will belong to the family of the Blood Orange/Kindness/Majical Cloudz haze-pop that helps us understand sadness by sounding like it.
Lead single “Lost Youth / Lost You,” though, is a signal that perhaps “Care” isn’t interested in being like the first three albums. It’s a far more extroverted affair than anything on even 2014’s “What Is This Heart?”, which marked a cranking of the proverbial volume knob in Krell’s music.
This is thanks in part to Jack Antonoff, who produced the track and lends it Bleachers’ ‘80s-tinged big-heartedness, even as it deals with a fairly devastating breakup. Antonoff also lent a hand to the fame of Fun., Bleachers, Taylor Swift and Lena Dunham.
To round things out, we have a new release from an old pro at the classic art of moody piano crooning. Singer-songwriter Regina Spektor hasn’t put out an album since 2012’s delightful “What We Saw from the Cheap Seats,” but on Sept. 30th, she’ll finally release another full-length album titled “Remember Us to Life”.
Spektor’s discography covers a lot of sonic and emotional ground. She’s bounced from stubbornly lo-fi to drenched in studio gloss, from songs filled with dolphin noises and nonsense lip sounds to swelling elegies about love and death. What keeps her interesting is also the thing that often rubs people the wrong way: her whimsy. The hard songs hit harder because we know they’re coming from a generally carefree person.
The singles from “Remember Us to Life” run the gamut of Spektor songs, with some surprising twists: “Small Bill$” is an upbeat hip-hop indebted number, “Bleeding Heart” a quiet, almost cheerily funereal dirge and “Black and White” is a gorgeous, familiar slice of echoey introspection.
Whether they’re armed with guitars, drum machines or good old-fashioned pianos, we owe musicians a significant chunk of our emotional intelligence. These albums and many more like them serve as a kaleidoscopic portrait of complex, knotty emotions that can suddenly seem to make sense in the confines of a time signature.
To quote a deep cut by How To Dress Well, without musicians to help clarify our feelings, “what is there for [us] to say but words [we] can’t remember?”
