THE APARTMENTS – THAT’S WHAT THE MUSIC IS FOR: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- Oct 14
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 14
THE APARTMENTS
That’s What The Music Is For (Talitares/Riley Records/MGM)
“It's a casino life, but we led it anyway.”
THIS PAST WEEK A FRIEND of mine braced herself for her daughter moving out of the family home the two of them had long shared, and was hit by a convergence of emotions. A convergence that is all-too-familiar, if not always canvassed by parental types – at least the vast majority who don’t write op-ed columns about every thought they’ve had on life, bus trips, and the breakup of Nicole and Keith.
There was pride and joy in seeing this young woman confident and capable and out, a tiny nod to at least some success in parenting. There was also a mix of shock and sadness, and shock that there was sadness, in the impending absence. To which you can add a bit of guilt for some of those thoughts, and curiosity about how and why, and for how long this would last.
This isn’t loss, but it isn’t not loss; a case of undoubted happiness blended with creeping sadness; not the end of the world by any means, but it matters. What is that feeling? The French have a word for it, the Germans no doubt a longer one, but in some way or other The Apartments’ Peter Milton Walsh would capture it.
That’s What The Music Is For, which is out on Friday, is an album about existing in a space where nothing is as straightforward as joy or sadness, present or absent, enigmatic or understood. It’s full of Walsh songs about people who marked him and changed him and left him and loved him, and now no longer here, who exist in memories that are both flimsy and substantial: scarves knotted just so and witty T-shirts that provoked, early darkening of northern Novembers and painting flowers so that they would not die, “Adderall and peaches and waves”.
Most of all it’s about how that ache of absence shouldn’t exist without the warmth of what had been given and received. Of course, you can have one without the other, but you would be lying to yourself to punish yourself. And what’s the point of that?
“I sing this song to try to keep you here/I sing this song so you don’t disappear/I sing this song so I can see the years/If I sing this song maybe you won’t disappear.”
As is the way of The Apartments, the songs are of measured pace and muted range, as if made for nights and only nights, only to discover themselves flowering in the brighter attention that opens up the shadows. Think of it this way, certainly there is Frank Sinatra in bruised mode, but if Bacharach and David were softening the blow, so melodies look outwards and so do we.
Walsh’s voice, treading quietly through rooms always lit to the side, is a little fragile but certain in its direction. He is seemingly an observer and noter of detail, the kind who would be not impartial exactly but able to step back and comment wryly and precisely. Yet regularly, tellingly, that voice fills with loosened emotion that might tremble and then pour through, carrying something raw as well as something wise. Every feeling has the corrugated texture of truth.
And all this is reflected in these arrangements. There are “pa-pa-pas” in the background in one song that feel both whimsically light and weighed down, and in another the almost predatory bass that might have once belonged to The Bad Seeds probing into the night. There’s an elegiac horn that could yet call the hounds on a misty morning or send you to the bar later that night, and then brass that prods your chest to remind you to focus. Here might be piano-and-semi-spectral voices that linger in a windless space or an organ to swell the tone, and there you could encounter a ruminative acoustic guitar within a glistening night sky or a high chiming electric that calls for solace.
It’s another beautiful record. One that pulls at the threads of memory and holds you in a very alive present that’s complicated but still graspable.
“When the fair’s over … that’s what the music is for.”
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The Apartments’ That’s What The Music Is For is out on October 17
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