The Spotify library had all sorts of odd gaps and discrepancies anyway because I went through several periods of not listening to as much music, the return to obsessive listening came with my hearing Vera Sola in early 2024, and then I used YouTube Music for most of 2024 after that. 😝

I wanted to know who the vocalist is on a few tracks on this record. Lacking in-app credits, I went to Ozone's website, and the discography does NOT give detailed credits either. It does tell me his trio Trinfinity, with Shimpei Ogawa and Kunito Kitai, plays on it, but the vocalist isn't credited!

One thing I'm not seeing is credits, though of course Spotify is woefully inadequate in that area too. You can view track metadata (which is how I edited that censored Allie X title yesterday) but that's not going to give you detailed info on who plays on each track.

Some albums are marked as "hi-res lossless"- you will not be shocked to learn this includes ECM's releases- but I don't think I'm enough of an expert to tell you if that makes much of a difference (especially on laptop speakers!). But overall sound quality is much better than Spotify.

But also the list doesn't seem to really be organized chronologically- I found a new Makoto Ozone album (and honestly I had no idea he was even still actively recording!) a couple rows down and it just came out this week. Not on Friday, but on Wednesday, who's looking for new jazz on Wednesday?

And now at the very end, on the final song, we get electric guitars. We also get a dude shouting, which is never good in a Yamaoka context, why not Mary Elizabeth McGlynn doing the thing she usually does in later SH soundtracks? This is just a mediocre rock song.

Of COURSE the song called "Deja Vu" is also a direct lift from SH2, that was the most obvious thing possible.

The picture's from Twin Peaks, one of the major characters sees that horse just before passing out (from her husband drugging her to keep her from finding out he's a demonically possessed murderer).

On the other hand, Yamaoka's insistence on calling him "Red Pyramid" in the track titles also suggests maybe it doesn't go quite as bonkers as the previous films in how they depict PH? Probably not, after all it's Gans directing again.

There's a track called "Spider Lady" immediately followed by one called "Red Pyramid Spider Sting", and this makes me think the plot of this movie deviates just a little from the source material.

Sure, piano was always prominent in those scores, but it seems like this is entirely splitting the difference between atmospheric piano and quasi-industrial crunch evoking SH1's score, with none of the fantastic guitar solos, and I'm really not sure why Yamaoka made that choice.

The weird thing about this soundtrack is how little guitar there is, I'm not sure I've even heard an electric guitar on any of these songs and that was such a hallmark of the Team Silent-era SH scores. Does he just not do that anymore?

I don't really relate to Berman's unambiguously positive view of his mother in "I Loved Being My Mother's Son", my feelings about mine are a lot more complicated, not least because she never wanted a daughter but that's what she got even if she never knew it.

And of course there's the incredible video for "Darkness and Cold": Berman and his wife were already separated at the time of its filming, and her appearance in the video underscores how far apart they'd grown and how painful that realization was for him. youtu.be/JZKMa-ByLBQ?...

Sometimes it feels like nothing less than that would satisfy some fans, and I've never understood that. If you genuinely love the music, why does it matter how well it sells?

One of the weirdest things about this record was how much "was this David Berman's suicide note?" discourse raged in its wake, and... duh? The first single was called "All My Happiness Is Gone", for fuck's sake! He couldn't have spelled it out more clearly!