Masses by Armbruster

https://armbruster.bandcamp.com/album/masses

Rating: 5/5

Genre: American Classical

This music hits hard with sorrow and beauty. Two comparisons came quickly to mind. Jonny Greenwood’s Power of Dog score and Aaron Copland. It’s a bit more melancholy than Copland but it’s essentially doing the same thing: Providing the soundtrack to America’s lost and damaged soul. Perhaps appropriate to his time Copland’s music is more “populist” (a word that has taken on intense ugliness) and optimistic. Armbruster plays to the ghost of a collective idea that probably never existed outside of our fantasies of what once may have been reality. It’s really hard to say. I don’t even know for sure if Copland’s music represents anything but fantasy. Maybe it’s all hauntology. But to circle back to where I started these are beautiful compositions. And they exist.