Selection Bias

If there's one thing watching sixty-five hopefuls, all supposedly at the apex of their potential before breaking out, has taught me it's that standing out from the crowd is hard. I'm more than two-thirds of the way through the ninety acts on this year's Glastonbury Emerging Talent list and so far I can actually remember about three or four of them. 

There's a general level of competence, commitment and authenticity that makes almost every one seem worthwhile but memorable most of them are not. It's also extremely hard to be original these days, assuming anyone even wants to try. I've spoken before about the invidiousness of comparisons but it's all but impossible to tune out the recognition signal every time I hear a particular bass sound or vocal inflection.

That's by way of an introduction to a post that doesn't feature any of those acts. We'll get to the second half of the list when I've made it through the last twenty-five, which is probably not going to happen until next week since I'm working three days out of four from tomorrow. I dunno. I might get it done for Sunday. We'll see.

Today, though, it's the good stuff. A curated selection of the best of everything I've seen, heard and listened to with pleasure over the last couple of weeks. Honestly, it's a relief to get back to it. Sometimes when I put these posts together I wonder if I'm just imagining a level of quality that isn't really there. Having something to scale by has been helpful and instructive in convincing me otherwise.

This really is the good stuff!

Obsessed  - Olivia Rodrigo

Absolutely no apologies for leading with Olivia yet again. She just has the best pop-rock edge right now and this is everything that makes her so great, all packaged up together for instant thrills. The tamped-back, half-spoken verse, the stomping, glam-chant chorus, the vicious, lyrical bile, the mini-movie presentation...

How long she can work this rich seam is another question but it's clearly a long way from being mined out yet. My only complaint is the way these fantastic songs keep arriving, of the new album but not on it. All the big stars do it and I realize it's a sound commercial choice but it's really annoying. I mean, I waited a few months before I got the album and I still didn't get all the songs.

Then again, that's what I get for going hard copy, I guess. And it's not like I'm going to play it anyway. Even I don't listen to music that way any more.

Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl - Yeule

Yeule was one of my big discoveries of last year. This is a cover of a song by another band I'm only just starting to investigate, Broken Social Scene. I've known the name for a long, long time. I used it as the title of my twelfth-ever post here, all the way back in September 2011, when I linked to the Canadian collective's magisterial cover of Joy Division's classic, Love Will Tear Us Apart. Oh, look. I've done it again.

Despite that, it's taken me the best part of a dozen years to get around to looking at any of their own work. It didn't help that I kept confusing them with Britpop also-rans, Ocean Colour Scene and no, I'm not going to link to anything by them. There are limits.

After I heard Yeule's gloriously fuzzed-up, glitched out take (Which sounds deeply reminiscent of Superorganism in parts, a similarity that lies in the song itself, not Yeule's interpretation.) I wanted to hear the original. I'm not going say which is better. They're both just wonderful. Here, decide for yourself, why don't you?

Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl  

Broken Social Scene

I dunno... there's an argument for saying Yeule actually cleaned the mix up. There are some storming live performances of this one on YouTube, many featuring guest vocalists and players, the most astonishing of which has Tracey Ullman and Meryl Streep joining in.

There's a lot of very good music comes out of Canada...

Let It Go - American Culture feat. Midwife

But not this. These guys are not Canadian. I was kinda hoping they might be for the irony but they're actually from Denver. The "singer" reminds me of Gerard Langley from The Blue Aeroplanes, not just in the spoken delivery but he actually looks quite like him. Come to think of it, the guitar churn doesn't sound that dissimilar to the Aeroplanes on their epic, set-closing cover of Tom Verlaine's Breaking In My Heart. I am a sucker for that cyclical rhythm.

 Empty And Silent

Mount Kimbie feat. King Krule

I've never really gotten on with King Krule as well as I felt I should. This is magical, though. The way his voice has been mixed makes it feel so rich and resonant and definitely less scary than usual. It blends perfectly with the slithering post-rock guitar and the stratospherically-attenuated backing vocals. 

As for the video, it's one of the kind I'm starting to favor above a lot of the rest. It looks like someone's phone footage run through a filter, which is probably what it is, and it gets out of the way of the music while also adding something to it. I like the square polaroid frame, too. Seeing more and more of those these days. I might have to start thinking about not resizing those. 

The Donkey - Couch Slut

I don't generally listen to a lot of this kind of thing but for some reason I have been lately. Like many initially unpleasant experiences, if you persist, you build up a tolerance. Whether that's a good thing or not I wouldn't like to say. 

Obviously this reminds me of Suicidal Tendencies but also of quite a few other things. The Gift, for one. This is the "abridged" version, apparently. I haven't taken the trouble to seek out the full thing, if it does in fact exist. I suspect it may not, the abridgement being part of some elaborate joke.

Oh, probably should mention it's NSFW to a degree, although I suspect if anyone is actually in the habit of playing this sort of thing at work, this particular track  is going to be completely acceptable, not to say mild.

Satan Loves You - Chloë Doucet 

I mean, you have to wonder what goes on in some peoples' heads sometimes, don't you? And she looks like such a nice girl, too...

XXL - Young Posse

Now, see, if I was half as clever as I think I am, I'd have programmed this right after American Culture. That might have broken my irony limit for a single post though.

Two million views in two days... hmm. Do I see the next retro-boom hoving into view in the form of 90s hip-hop? I bloody well hope so!

Ketamine - Playboi Carti

That was hip-hop as it was then. This is hip-hop as it is now.

Something Ether - Lil Yachty

Or maybe it's this.

Actually, I have no idea what hip-hop is supposed to sound like in 2024. Or if what we just heard even qualifies. I didn't need to warn anyone about those two, anyway, right? No-one got fired?

Probably time we all calmed down.

Cole St. - Dogs On Shady Lane

There! Doesn't that feel better? This was one of the very few interesting things I found while I was digging through the old submissions piles from last year's NPR Tiny Desk Contest. If I thought the Glasto ETC was a bit uninspiring, boy did that put things into perspective.

Mostly it's the band names or the song titles that do the heavy lifting when it comes to choosing what I will or won't click, which is why I bothered to check this. Going through long lists item by item, looking at innocuous names and unremarkable titles, it very much bears the theory out - routine names tend to produce routine tunes.

I Keep Changing - h. pruz

At this point I ought to slot in someone with a dull name doing an amzing song because naturally there are exceptions. I tried, but this is the nearest I could find and h. pruz all in lower case isn't really that dull. Nor is the title, for that matter. Not really making my case here, am I?

It's about now I usually start wishing I'd saved a banger for last. Then again, I tend to assume there's going to be no-one left by now, which is why I try to front-load the best stuff (And the popular stuff.) these days. 

Still, you gotta have an ending. I found this while I was researching the Steve Harley obituary, in which I stubbornly declined even to mention his most famous song. That was mostly because I felt it had come to overshadow the rest of his work to an uncomfortable extent, although it is objectively one of the best pop songs of all time.

There have been several high-profile covers of it, a few of which were hits, but this tops them all. And I'd never heard it until this week. Take us home, Suzi...

Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me) 

 Suzi Quatro