Amateur Recommendation Hour: Winter

Today’s recommendation is an album that has gotten me through many difficult winter seasons and I hope you’ll give it the chance to help you through too should you need it. As we trudge through the snow, bundle up next to space heaters and fireplaces alike, we can take comfort in knowing that cold climate mundanity is a time of warm reflection for all of us familiar with winters bitingly firm grasp on our lives for what seems like an eternity.

Winter by Akdong Musician, the brother-sister Korean folk pop duo, was their final release before the brother, Lee Chanhyuk served his mandatory military service and as such I believe this to be a very personal work revolving around the complex emotions before his departure. 

Varied instrumentation and genre work well together to make the album feel like a mostly cohesive package. With the exception of the completely unseasonable and frankly strange inclusion of the reggae-inspired track "You Know Me" each track has an undertone of inevitable finality, be it the reflective "Long Way Home" which is a personal favorite of mine, or the wistfully melancholic "Will Last Forever" it is a remarkably somber yet comfortable work that, for me, brings up memories of sun-drenched winter mornings where the snow blindingly glistens our field of vision, or warm fireplace gatherings with family while the sound of the crowds of American football games create a feeling of liveliness that otherwise wouldn't be there with just the five of us sharing a space together on a quiet Sunday evening.

My personal interpretations of this work are about the uncertainty of new experiences, the positives and negatives that they provide, and the reflection of times spent in an extremely familiar and relatively comfortable place before departing on a long journey full of unknown commodities. Considering the fact that this was AKMU's final large scale release before Chan-hyuk's aforementioned military enlistment it's hard not to imagine that inevitability was weighing heavily on his mind particularly in the album's last couple of closing tracks.

Winter can be a really tough time of year. When I was younger I remember wanting nothing more than to see the greens of plants and trees alike stretching their limbs and making their presence felt in the early months of spring, no longer crippled by the piles of precipitation keeping us prisoners from the outside world. However rather than pushing the mundanity of life away, in recent years I've put more of an emphasis on appreciating all of the moments, even snow-caked ones. These are precious moments of existence, I don't want to just wish valuable time of my life away because it's colder or darker outside.