New Year, New Tunes

Late last night I made an ad hoc decision to back up my music folders. Haven't done it for a while. This morning I spent an hour sorting and deleting all the duplicate entries that somehow appear when you do this kind of thing in a hurry just before bedtime. For now, anyway, everything's about as tidy as it's ever likely to be, which is to say not very.

It did at least remind me that I haven't done a real music post for a while. Christmas songs are all well and good but as Adam Ant said, "that music's lost its taste so try another flavor". I've been collecting a few new tunes. Let's hear some, why don't we?

First, the acknowledgements. For several of the new acts revealed here, we have Jarret Wolfson to thank. Again. Won't be the last time, either.

As I said back in Blaugust, during Creative Appreciation Week, (Aka The Week Formerly Known As Developer Appreciation Week.) "Jarret's channel offers an amazing insight into the independent music scene in one of the biggest, most innovative and influential cities in the world". New York in case you're trying to guess. Which makes it particularly odd that Jarret's channel is where I first ran into Lovejoy.

Lovejoy don't currently merit their own Wikipedia page but their frontman, Wilbur Soot does. You can click through the link to get the full story on this renaissance man of our times but for those who can't summon up the energy or enthusiasm, the highlights are these: 

• British Twitch streamer and YouTuber.
• Came to prominence as creator of comedy channel the SootHouse (Over 6m subscribers according to Wikipedia although the YouTube channel only claims 1.34m).
• Founder of fictional Minecraft nation L'Manberg.
• Lead writer for the RP Minecraft server The Dream SMP.
  

None of which really prepares you for the wit, wordplay and straight up erudition of Soot's lyrics, which seem to me to place him firmly in a very long line of heavily ironic English songwriters that descends through Alex Turner, Jarvis Cocker and Elvis Costello all the back way to Ray Davies and quite possibly Noel bloody Coward for that matter...

I think we'd better have an example:

Lovejoy - Knee Deep at ATP

Of course, it would be a much better example if Wilbur Soot and/or Lovejoy had actually written it. As Andrew Farrell points out in the comments, it's a cover. The excellent original is by Los Campesinos.

And another example... or perhaps the first...

Lovejoy - It's All Futile! It's All Pointless!

Seriously, fuck the Daily Telegraph, right? It's abundantly clear to anyone who isn't clinically senile that the next current generation is everything the last current generation was and the last next current before that and so on back at least until the 1890s but more likely to the Stone Age...

Case in point: Lauran Hibberd. I forget where I ran into her. I really should keep notes. Oh, wait, I know... it was this great cover of the Kinks otherwise rather horrible Christmas song Father Christmas, whiich I will be using in next year's Advent Calendar for sure (Lauran's version, obvs.)  Like Lovejoy (And the Kinks) Lauran is English, although you'd be hard put to guess from this video.

Lauran Hibberd - Charlie's Car

She's not just from England. She's from the Isle of Wight. With Wet Leg, that makes two acts from the island time forgot that I've actually heard now. And two that I've heard of! ! I can pick out a few structural similarities, too. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? What else happens over there that no-one cares knows about?

Lauran Hibberd - Bleugh

According to her very brief Wikipedia page "Hibberd's music has often been described as "slacker pop"", which is a pretty good description of Wet Leg too, now I come to think of it. It's a new subgenre to me but one I intend to investigate further, assuming it actually exists. Preliminary findings are highly inconclusive.

And now to a third island. I swear I didn't plan it this way. I also swear that until I started typing this paragraph I had no idea that Japan's For Tracy Hyde take their name from the actress who played the lead in the 1971 cult classic Melody, a film I saw once, on television, on a weekday afternoon in the 1980s and which I bought a few years ago on DVD in a brief moment of bittersweet nostalgia for the existential bleakness of the 1970s.

The shrinkwrap on my copy of Melody remains unopened, my spiritual ennui having been sated by viewings of Private Road and Permissive, both of which I bought at the same time. From what little I remember, though, it doesn't surprise me the otherwise forgotten movie retains some status and recognition value in Japan, where apparently it was a major success.

For Tracy Hyde - Subway Station Revelation

Despite missing the connection entirely, it was the odd name of the band that made me click the link when it came up in a YouTube sidebar. It may be shameful to admit it but this is exactly the kind of song I'd probably skip over if it was by an English or American band. Something about the language shifts it from the generic to the specific in ways I probably don't want to explore too closely.

For Tracy Hyde - Underwater Girl

It's easier to find mystery in things you can't understand. As the first comment on the YouTube thread for this one puts it, "I dont speaking Japanese but. There's just a tone about this song that hits different." Well, okay, I wouldn't put it exactly like that...

Sonically, I think there'd be an argument for including For Tracy Hyde in the current shoegaze revival that's been getting some traction in webzines I follow. And elsewhere. One of the top-tipped bands from that cultural shift has to be Feeble Little Horse, who I may or may not have started paying attention to purely because of their name. I do have an obsession with bands named after animals.

Feeble Little Horse also turned up on Jarret Wolfson's channel recently but I was aware of their work before then. The live version of Dog Song 2 Jarret posted is better than the studio version, for my money.

Feeble Little Horse - Dog Song 2 (Live)

I'm not sure I'd even call it shoegaze, although the guitar work certainly qualifies. The vocals are just too upbeat. This next one definitely counts, though, even if it's very short for a shoegaze number, a strong positive in my book.

Feeble Little Horse - Chores

I'm getting the feeling this is starting to run long, although I'm not even halfway through the bands I'd shortlisted for the post. Maybe I'm talking too much. Wouldn't be the thousandth time. Just a couple more, then I think we'd better call it quits for today. I'll save the rest for later. That's the good thing about blogging - there's always a later.

How about a change of pace?

W. H. Lung - Pearl in the Palm

When you watch videos, do you ever find yourself thinking more about what it must have been like to have made them than you're thinking about the song itself? I do, often. Look at the trees in that video. It's obviously mid-winter. He's not wearing a shirt. He's up to his chin in a lake. How the hell is he still grinning?

Also, no-one who really wants to be famous or successful calls themselves W. H. Lung. 

And finally... Maisie Peters. I came across this one while I was tracking down Christmas songs for the Advent Calendar. Maisie released a seasonal number called Together This Christmas as an Amazon Original. I didn't use it (This year.) but while I was checking it out I spotted a very interesting title among her other works...

Maisie Peters - John Hughes Movie

My Christmas wish list this year featured several quasi-academic texts on teen movies and TV shows including a collection of essays called Neptune Noir: Unauthorised Investigations Into Veronica Mars and Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film and Television from Heathers to Veronica Mars by Roz Kaveney. I'm about half-way through the latter right now and enjoying it immensely, especially the chapter on John Hughes.

Kaveney, who's exactly a decade older than me, was in her mid-thirties when John Hughes' high school movies began appearing at the cinema. By the time I started paying attention I was in my late twenties, so my exposure came mostly through television and the video rental store but even though I was well out of my teens and no longer in the target audience, those movies and others like them had a big emotional impact on me. Still do. Even now, I perk up whenever I recognize a reference to Pretty In Pink or The Sure Thing.

Maisie Peters is just twenty-two but she's clearly watched plenty of John Hughes movies. Like Roz Kaveney and me, she's also British, so the seminal tropes and traditions of the American High School come to her as second-hand as much as they do to us. And yet still, somehow, it's as if we all lived those lives. 

You can call it cultural imperialism if you like. I call it art.