How It's Done

It was going to be another Grab Bag Friday here at Inventory Full and then this happened so now it's a music post instead. although, honestly, Lana's first new song in a year deserves a post of its own.

Okay, okay. I'll try to restrain myself.  First, let's all just take a moment to reflect on how fortunate we are to be living in this moment. 

Too much? Nah, not really. Just listen.

Henry, Come On - Lana del Rey

There's a well-known physiological phenomenon called "Frisson", caused by "a rush of the neurotransmitter dopamine throughout the body, evoking a sense of exhilaration and pleasure". Most people experience it, something between half and two-thirds of us, apparently. I certainly do.

For me, it's usually an intense but relatively short-lived sensation. If I'm listening to a piece of music that gives me the thrills, it will most likely happen only once or twice, only for a few seconds and only at certain particular moments.

Listening to Henry, Come On for the first time this morning made my skin tingle for the entire five minutes and eleven seconds. At several points I felt dizzy. Once or twice I found myself short of breath. These are literal descriptions of the physical sensations I experienced, not metaphors or figurative language.

After half a century of taking popular music probably too seriously, I can now say with certainty that Lana del Rey is my all-time favorite. My favorite songwriter, my favorite singer, my favorite recording artist, my favorite performer. Well, I haven't actually had the good fortune to see her live yet, so maybe I should hold off on that last one...

I confess I was a little worried whether she could keep up her astonishing run after the serial magnificence of the last four albums, from Norman Fucking Rockwell to Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd? Surely there has to be a limit to her genius.

Well, maybe, but on this evidence we haven't found it yet. This is as astonishingly good as the lead singles from the last four albums were. She just does it again and again. I'd say effortlessly but I doubt that. Nothing this polished happens by chance.

As the Stereogum piece I linked at the top suggests, there's more than a hint of Brooklyn Baby in the chorus and I love that. I really appreciate callbacks and Brooklyn Baby is one of my favorites. If the new album, The Right One Will Stay, turns out to be an amalgam of earlier eras, I'm very much there for it.

I could go on (And on. And on...) but I'll take the chance I just offered myself to grab onto a thematic rope and haul myself out of here.

Chambermaid - Suzanne Vega

 Mrs Bhagpuss is very keen on Suzanne Vega. I mean, who isn't? She's high class. 

If this sounds a little familiar, there's reason. As Suzanne says in the description, "‘I Want You’ by the great Bob Dylan is an unforgettably beautiful song that has stayed with me for years, in melody and meaning." Callback, again, and beautifully done. She even sings it like Bob.

I never mention Dylan much here, partly because the great man used to keep his back catalog off YouTube so there was never much to link to. I think he may have softened on that in recent times. He's close to the top of my personal pantheon of songwriters and singers, all the same. I love his voice, which is not something even all Bob Dylan fans readily admit. I Want You is one of my faves, too, so this really does it for me.

 Spike Island - Pulp

This is not going to be one of those music posts with a bunch of weird songs by scary people you never heard of. I imagine that will come soon enough but just lately what I've actually been listening to is quality new work by people I've featured here many times before. In many cases, people who've been around for a long, long time.

Pulp have been around since, what, the mid-eighties? Forty years, I'd guess, which frankly sounds insane now I put it down in print. Is that really possible? Let me just check...

No, that's wrong. It wasn't the mid-80s. Pulp got together in... 1978. WTF? Three more years and they can celebrate their fiftieth anniversary!

Well, that made me feel old. I saw them in a small club in the early 90s, just before they blew up, and even then they must have been going for a decade and a half. Anyway, they've been back as a live unit for a good while and now they've recorded a new album, their first for almost twenty years. And guess what? The first single off it sounds just like the old stuff. I'll leave you to decide if that's a good thing or not but it works for me.

The video is a curiosity. It's a bit of a have-cake-eat-cake affair with the director leaning heavily on AI but ironizing it so it's okay. Not sure what I think about that except that it's going to look a bit dated in about, oh, a week or so. Anyway, the song's good.

I have, let me see, four more. Shall we have another biggie? Yes, let's.

  Rain - Sunday (1994)

Well, it's a big deal to me. I was properly stunned to see this sitting right at the top of the algorithm's suggestions next to Henry, Come On. Any other day, this would have been the lead.

Sunday (1994 )are my current darlings and like Lana they have yet to put a foot wrong. This is right up there with all their others and, as importantly, it's one hunded per cent Sunday (1994). There's a huge risk to being this consistent, especially when that consistency is tied so very tightly to a constructed aesthetic. How long they can or would want to keep it up I wouldn't care to guess but I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts, which I hope is a very long while.

One of the the things I like most about their songs are the lyrics, which do have a certain aesthetic and existential relationship with Lana's that's hard to miss. They always include them in full in the description, which suggests they think they're worth paying attention to. I agree. They are, although if they ever make it big, I suspect there may be questions asked about storytelling and authenticity. Lana would know all about those sorts of questions, too.

Evangelic Girl is a Gun - Yeule

I bought (Or rather was given..) Yeule's last album and I've played it a lot. On this showing, I will be getting the next one, too.

As to what she's singing about, I have no clue. I'd have to look up the words because I for sure can't hear any of them. I don't even know what the title's about although any song title that has both "Girl" and "Gun" in it is going to get a listen from me. Evangelic, not so much. It's the title of the new album as well, though. She knows what she's doing.

(I did just look up the lyrics. Sex, drugs,violence, all the regular stuff. Still not much the wiser.)

 Two Legged Dog 

BC Camplight (Feat. Abigail Morris)

And finally, someone new. Kind of. BC Camplight is new to me and to the blog, anyway. Abigail Morris, of course, is the lead singer in The Last Dinner Party. It's her contribution that got the tune included here, too. That chorus is gorgeous. Rest of it, I'm not so sure about.

And that's about it. It would have been much better if I'd held off from using the new Wet Leg and Blondshell songs until now. They'd have fitted the theme perfectly. Unfortunately, I can't see the future, even my own, so I already shared those last Friday.

A while back, I did say I had four more to post today, didn't I? I was thinking of the Beach Bunny number Big Pink Bubble but on listening to it again I don't cleave to it as much as I remembered. By all means click through and tell me I'm wrong.

Instead, because I have absolutely no shame or sense of proportion, I'm going to finish with something of my own. I can do that now! Yesterday I made a decision on the new YouTube channel and set the first three videos to Public. Obviously, no-one has watched them yet. 

And almost no-one will, I imagine, which may be just as well. My main concern isn't about the songs themselves but the involvement of AI in creating them. People do tend to have opinions on that and I'm not sure I want to hear them in the comments so any attention they get is going to be charged with negative potential.

I won't say any more because I'll probably do a whole post on publishing them at some point, which will be the last in that particular series. I may also post the videos here as I make them public, although not all at once. I'll have to have a think about that.  

For now, though, here's one of the three that are up so far.

Rain Always Knows - That Darn Cat

I wasn't really planning on crediting the songs to "That Darn Cat", which was only meant to be the name of the channel, but the alternatives would be either to use my real name, which is not going to happen, or to make up band names for the subsets of songs that seem like they might be by the same people (Which they certainly all don't.)

I tried that but it felt very weird and I didn't much like it so I guess I'm stuck with That Darn Cat. It's a bit like how I ended up being called Bhagpuss. I guess I can live with it.