The Past Is Always With Me

Thanks to spending all my time leafing through my own musical back pages these last couple of weeks, I don't have a huge amount of new music by anyone else to share. Neither do I have a lot of random items of interest bookmarked for bullet point analysis.

I do have a few of each though. Time for a bit of the old mix and match!

Let's open with a tune, why not? 

Bonnet Of Pins - Matt Berninger

I've never paid much attention to The National. No, that's not fair. I've never paid any attention to The National. They were the favorite band of someone I used to work with and if she hadn't mentioned them a few times, I'm not sure I'd ever have noticed they existed. Based on this magisterial performance by the band's lead singer I seriously need to take a look at the back catalog. 

This is magnificent stuff of its kind, which sounds dismissive, now I read it back. Not what I meant at all. What I did mean is, this is the kind of thing too many people take a run at and miss. Hard to describe, the rolling, building, tumbling, white-water force of all those words and sounds, rushing towards the moment where it's jump or be swept away. Get it wrong and you're the Waterboys.  Or worse - much, much worse - the Alarm. Matt doesn't get it wrong.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things #4382

I'll follow that with just a brief mention of the most dispiriting musical story that won't get out of my feeds. Just this morning I was greeted by the deeply depressing news that a Seoul court has granted management company ADOR's injunction, prohibiting the members of K-Pop band New Jeans from "pursuing independent activities" under their new name, NJZ.

K-Pop can be a bit of a culture shock all round, what with band members having to text pictures of their lunch to their managers before they're allowed to eat any of it, but this farrago has really exposed the feral nature of the process. About the best possible spin you could put on it would be to call it indentured labor. If you wanted to be hyperbolic you might start throwing around expressions like slave labor.  

However you define it, it's extremely unsavory and goes straight into the "Things Up With Which We Shall Not Put" barrel. Except, of course, we all do put up with it, like we put up with all the rest of the bad stuff that lies behind our hedonistic pleasures and our idle fancies. There is no love in this world any more, as Pete Shelly told us all the way back in 1979. Not got any better, has it?

Also, I'd forgotten just how long that Buzzcocks track is. Over seven minutes! So much for the myth of all punk songs coming in under three minutes, eh? I mean, I was there and even I get fooled by that one.

Of course, I wouldn't even be mentioning any of this if it wasn't happening to the only K-Pop band I really like, would I? It's all about me as usual

Except it's not at all about me, is it? I'm not helping. I didn't even sign the petition, not that anyone asked me. 

Fight the power, girls! Easy for me to say. Weird how guilt makes you feel complicit, isn't it? And don't I ask a lot of rhetorical questions?

WE'RE ALL MADE OF STARS

 Miami Horror (Feat. Telenova)

Of course, as the disclaimers have it, other views are available. "You can be anything you want" says... erm... Miami Horror. Are you quite sure that's the name you want to go with?

This is one of those ones where watching the video changes the entire impact of the track. In audio only, it's an uplifting anthem that leaves you feeling high on life. The images turn it into something wholly other. Worth watching all the way through - well, not the credits, maybe. Nothing clever happens at the end of those. It's not a Marvel movie.

Obviously I came to this by way of the excellent Telenova, which is why algorithms are our friends. Sometimes, anyway, but we'll get to that later. Time for some gaming news.

Play To Earn Is Real, Y'All!

Look, don't shoot me. I'm only the aggregator. I pick this stuff up, I pass it on. I didn't come here with the intention of harshing everyone's mellow. I have to work with what I've got.

Have a read of this. Too busy? Okay, I'll pull out a few choice snips:

"50% of mobile players have now received a reward with real monetary value from a smartphone game"

"72% of that group say real-world rewards are now "important" when it comes to them selecting a new mobile game to download"

“What we are currently seeing is real-time transformation in how gamers choose what they play based on rewards"

The rewards we're talking about here are things like "cash, Amazon credit, or payouts of other currencies of real-world value" and players are getting them for "reaching particular stages or achieving certain tasks within a game".

It turns out that if you give people credit they can spend in regular shops rather than bizarro world crypto crap you can't spend anywhere, people really will Play To Earn. As the article concludes 

"It’s a total rewrite of how and why users engage with gaming content"

Just what we wanted, eh? And if it's working in mobile, you can guess where it's coming next...

 Locals (Girls like us)[with gabby start]  - underscores

I heap a lot of praise on the YouTube algorithm these days but I have some bones to pick with it, too. Like, how come it never told me about underscores before? She's a big deal, too. I mean, just look at the size of her Wikipedia page!

YT didn't bring me to this one, either. I got to it old school, through a link on a virtual inky. Can't remember which one. NME? Ah, apparently I can remember!  Score one for my short-term!

Anyway, Alice Harper Grey is on my radar now. I have her very highly-rated album Wallsocket cued up, ready to listen to. I imagine posts will get written to that one although first I need to watch it, since she's also done it as a single-continuous-shot video. 

At least I think that's what it is. I mean, I didn't check the whole fifty-five minutes for cuts but it looks like that's what she's done. Look, get off my case, alright?

Would You Trust Netflix With Your MMO?

That article about underscores I just linked claims she's "turning her focus to emotion and comfort" so maybe she'll be in the target market for Spry Fox's upcoming cosy MMO, Spirit Crossing. 

I'm not sure I am. I'm having some issues with cosy games. A couple of years ago, I thought they sounded like they'd be right up my queit, leafy, sleepy suburban avenue but that was before I'd played any. They can be kinda... boring, can't they? Nothing really happens. And then it doesn't happen some more.

This one does sound good, though. According to MMOBomb "The game will offer most of the things players associate with cozy games such as exploration, crafting, and customizable housing", which does sound great. And MassivelyOP reckon the promo video makes it look like “Miyazaki Palia.”, which certainly sounds like it'd be an improvement on regular Palia.

Netflix, though... they don't exactly have the best rep for patience, do they? Or sticking with things for more than five minutes. These days their brand is virtually shorthand for "Second season cancellation".  Can anyone see them keeping a low-key, niche-market, borderline profitable  MMORPG chugging along year after year after year? Because that's the business model.

Then again, maybe Spirit Crossing will be the next Animal Crossing. Look at the name. Can't be a co-incidence. That'd keep it safe from Netflix Cancellation Dept. for at least... well... erm.... Nope, not seeing much of a long-term future for this one. 

And that's it for news stories. Let's wind things up with some tunes. Three, to be precise: one original and two covers. 

Gumshoe (Dracula from Arkansas) 

Youth Lagoon

All the good stuff, there. Distorted vocals, lyrics that sound like they'd be fascinating if you could only hear them, glitching Super-8 home movies, lyrical interludes, interpolated found footage, sampled speech...

If I was, oh, I don't know... thirty-five? Forty? this might be the sort of thing I'd want to be doing. It's not the work of a young person, that's for sure. (If I was a bona fide Young Person I'd more likely be doing something like this.)  

Youth Lagoon aka Trevor Powers, which explains why he took a stage name I guess, is thirty-six. I think this sounds like something someone a tad older might have made but he's been doing much the same thing for a decade and a half so it shows what I know.  

There's not much of his very old stuff on his channel. Maybe he wants to move on. This is eleven years old so he'd have been twenty-five when he made it. Feels like the work of someone older, sonically and visually. 

These things are hard to quantify, though. Mrs Bhagpuss and I were talking about cool the other day; what it is, whether it still has currency. I was suggesting I'd seen a strong recurrence of the kind of cool we grew up with and it felt like something more than nostalgia for a time you never knew. I thought it felt like a trend but here it is a decade ago so maybe it never stopped. They do say fashion passes but style is forever.

 Our House - Cream Flower (Original CSNY)

Case in point re that old anemoia we all love so much. Cream Flower, a two-person band (Remember when we called those "Duos"? How sweet and innocent we were, once...) from Manila, are very hard to find out anything about but looking at the pictures on their Soundcloud page I guess they look about, what, mid-twenties?

If so, Our House, would have first come out around three decades before they were born. The song was a centerpiece of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's seminal 1970 album Déjà Vu, which was itself a cornerstone of the then-burgeoning hippie nostalgia boom. The folk-rock supergroup were looking back fondly to the kind of life they imagined their parents might have led, had several wars and objective reality not got in the way. 

So, we have one bunch of twenty-something in the twenty-first century getting all warm and fuzzy over another bunch of twenty-somethings thirty years ago, who were getting all warm and fuzzy over something that probably never even  happened several decades before that. 

Good though, isn't it? And so are Cream Flower. That Manila indie scene really is something.

Can You Feel My Heart (Incorporating Heart-Shaped Box)  

Fontaines D.C. (Originals Bring Me The Horizon/Nirvana)

Geez. That's a mouthful. And an attribution minefield. Can't help feel they missed a trick not calling it Can You Feel My Heart-Shaped Box? Although maybe that doesn't quite set the right tone...

It does feel like picking low-hanging fruit, featuring the Fontaines on the blog yet again. Right now, they can't seem to put a foot wrong. Sorry. Bad choice of words.

Grian Chatten gets all the focus as the lead singer and he has got a very distinctive voice, it's true, but I can't help noticing how really very good the backing vocals are, particularly from Conor Deegan, known to the fans as Deego. Backing vocals are generally underrated in most bands but these really matter.

This is one of those covers where it might as well be a brand new song to me. I've never heard the BMTH original and although Heart-Shaped Box is super-well-known, I couldn't hum it at gunpoint. The only Nirvana album I own is the Unplugged one. I wasn't a big grunge fan back when it was big although I have a lot of time for some of the bands coming along right now who claim its influence. Same goes for drum'n'bass, techno, rave...

Hmm. Might be a post in that.