I am a great believer in seasonal music, from the laid-back summer beach track to the frenetic late-season club banger, giving way to the Winter Party Anthem. This last one is no doubt due to my feelings for the season but I doubt I’m the only person to find early dark and city lights and the crisp of frost in the air exciting- my favourite view is the lights down Penglais Hill to the storm-drenched seafront, salt freezing on the wind and smearing the lamps into streaks of brightness. This year Diwali seemed to indicate a final end to the overstretched summer, bypassing autumn entirely like some seasonal divination- the temperature finally dropped and my refusal to get my coat out before November seemed foolhardy for the first time*. Then the clocks went back, I was going to work in the dark and even if my scarf was making me sweat it was with some relish that I opened my music library to dig out the tracks designed for breathing slightly boozy clouds of condensation into your collar, waiting for the tube.
Some acts seem to “get” this- even if they don’t, there’s always a plethora of tracks that do. It’s just possible I’m imagining the season, picking up on tracks I like and projecting them onto the lights over Hammersmith bridge like an emotional batsign but it does seem to be that out of the darkness and mist comes something potent and palpable. If nothing else, a cynical attempt at being the track played at every new year’s party.
The important thing is that these tracks are in a cold climate- none of the summer sweaty closeness, although they’re quite intimate in a ‘piling into the warm’ way- but they aren’t unhappy. They might have a tinge of sadness in the way a lot of songs about going bonkers on the dancefloor do but they’re not unhappy (unlike Sad Songs In Snow which are a different, although equally wonderful, thing entirely) and they’re keen to be your friend.
The most recent song I’ve repeatedly returned to as one of these is Who’s That Chick– wait, come back. That synthesised, uhm, panpipe is so glowingly warm, with a metallic edge- the noise of travelling through the night in a city. There’s a particular minor-key softness to a successful Winter Party Song- no point in the sort of horns-aloft bangers you get in the Ibiza season. There has to be an icy uncertainty to procedings- Katy On A Mission gets there, except that it might be a little too distant.
Before that, Movin’ Too Fast by Artful Dodger & Romina Johnson is the first thing that sticks in my head as having done this for me. It reminds me of Christmas, despite not in any way being a Christmas song- it’s clearly after dark, though and that has to be a winter thing. The fizzing excitement of the darkened early evening is a completely different emotion to even the most alluring, pulsating summer heat.
Of course, it’s quite likely that I’ve made the genre up. But here’s to it, in any case- I can see my playlist taking quite a battering over the coming weeks; everyone finds emotional resonance in different things but I’ve written before about how profound I find the grey areas in some electro that occupies this territory- Night Work by the Scissor Sisters straddled it entirely and occupied that nocturnal lack of surety, blurs and panics across the night filled with a pulsing heartbeat.
Maybe it’s the suggestion that there’s something out there, some nebulous or at least unknown area beyond the immediate lights that makes the illuminatory bloops so appealling? I don’t have a word for the ‘exciting/cuddly’ emotion it generates but it’s one I like a lot.
*My resistance to becoming a pampered urbanite who believes I should be able to walk around without a jumper on at all times of the year is falling but since calendar-Samhain predated the first frost this year I did at least hold out for it.