Has It Been That Long Already?

It seems like forever since I last did a What I've Been Listening To Lately. It has, in point of fact, been exactly a month. The last was on 25 July. 

I started a couple of times to do another but the painful truth is that almost all I've been listening to for months is me. I love myself so much I don't care to listen to anything else. That sounds wrong but it's uncomfortably close to the truth.

As it so happens, though, I have just about managed to collect enough options to make a new post that doesn't sound like the scraping of the bottom a particularly empty barrel. I have... wait, let me count them... fifteen songs bookmarked and... hang on... I'll just go get it... yes, another half-dozen on the laptop.

Hmm. As a rule, when I come to do these things, I might have that many after a week or so, not a month. But still, should be enough.

And there are some crackers, which is all that matters. Like this one for starters.

 Snowball - The Patti Smith Group

Horses is my second-favorite album of all time, probably. I mean, I haven't made a list lately. I'm going to, though. When I was going through all my old zines, looking for the fiction fragments, I also had the questionable pleasure of revisiting many of the Best Of lists I compiled in the '90s. 

It was very much a thing then. It's not at all hard to see where the internet obsession with lists (Listicles if you really want to raise hackles.) came from. At least one person I can think of had a whole zine that was nothing but lists and we all did them sometimes. I did them a lot.

So I can say with certainty that in the mid-late '90s, Horses by the Patti Smith Group was my #1 runner-up (To Dolly Mixture Demo Tapes, of course.) and for all I drone on endlessly about only being interested in new music nowadays, I'm not at all sure those two wouldn't hold their spots still.

Horses is a perfect album. It doesn't have a single filler track and the pacing is sublime. For that reason alone, I was somewhat apprehensive at the prospect of hearing a "lost" track from the same sessions, one that didn't make the cut for the finished item. 

These days, there's an awful lot of that sort of thing. Far too much, probably. Only about a day before I read about the 50th Anniversary re-issue of Horses, with its alternate takes and four previously unreleased tracks, I'd listened to something similar from the upcoming 50th anniversary re-issue of Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run (1975 was some year, apparently. Didn't exactly feel like it at the time but never mind.) a track called "Lonely Night in the Park" and I'd had to stop it half-way through, it was so dull. It was pretty obvious why Bruce left it out of the running order.

Snowball, the first of the four previously-unheard PSG tracks is very, very different. Not only is it a really great song, it's very easy to imagine it slipping into that perfect running order without disrupting it in the least. It sounds very much like Patti's first single, the magnificent Piss Factory, (Okay, technically the B-side to her equally magnificent cover of Hey Joe...), still one of my favorite songs of all time, with Richard Sohl doing his inimitable thing on keyboards and Patti declaiming the way only a performance poet can.

Snowball is good enough that I actually want to hear the whole special edition anniversary album now and usually I try to avoid those things. Who wants their dreams spoiled with a load of also-rans?

 All My Friends Are So Depressed 

 Joyce Manor

Alright, this one's just werid. We all know Joyce Manor, right? Mid-Western Emo demigods, most famous for the supernal Constant Headache? Well, I thought I did...

And to be fair to myself, when I first came across them a few years ago, I did read up on their history and listen to a selection of their back catalog. None of it seemed to contradict that impression.

Apparently, they were never considered hardcore emo, more like pop-punk/alt-rock. And they started out as a folk-punk duo. People just will not stay in their damn lanes any more.

Even so, none of that would have prepared me for something that sounds almost exactly like the Smiths circa 1985, only forty years too late. And if even if it had, I certainly wouldn't have been ready to be told it was inspired by Lana del Rey and 100 Gecs. Can you hear it? I don't think I can.

 Fundraiser - Bar Italia

It's all either 1975 or 1985 this week, isn't it? Who are Bar Italia channeling today? Pretty sure it's the Cure although there's a hint of Bunnymen in there somewhere. Do you ever find yourself wondering if time's running backwards?

Elton John - Miya Folick

This is a first. Someone wanting to move like Elton John. I mean, sing like him, sure. Play the piano. But move?

Also, my research informs me that, contrary to Miya's wishes, she would not have been able to "move my body like Elton John/In 1970 with his palm shades on" because he didn't wear that particular piece of signature eyeware until 1973. I guess, since she's imagining it, she could imagine he could dance, too.

Anyway, it's great. Chorus sounds sooo much like Blondshell. Sabrina should cover it. Maybe Elton could, too. Sorry... Sir Elton. 

Ride or Die - villagerrr

When you click on the video for a track called Ride or Die, you don't expect to see someone trucking their kid around the farm on a ride-on mower. 

I discovered recently that there's a name for all the stuff that sounds like this, of which there's plenty, but of course I didn't bookmark the page where I read it and now I can't remember what it's called. I find it very restful although it's often pretty bittersweet. It's kind of like American and Heartland Rock and Mid-Western Emo boiled down and bottled with plenty of sugar to take the astringency and the harshness out.

 Fabulist - The Cords

Look! Coming over the hill! It's 1986! 

Debut single from their first album, due out next month.  

Nothing's ever going to stop now, is it?

 Pillow Face - Pearly Drops

FFS! I told you not to cross the streams! I'm assuming Pearly Drops is named for the seminal Cocteau Twins's single Pearly Dewdrops' Drops. I mean, they could hardly not be, surely?

Don't sound very 1980s, though, do they? Thank the lord. Even hyperpop can't escape the event horizon of pop music's eternal past, it seems. 

I'll take it.

 

 

MS. PAC-MAN - Sudan Archives

First NSFW warning of the post although it's only for the lyrics and who plays videos at work with the sound on anyway? In fact, isn't NSFW a dumb concept? I guess it comes from the days when people would web-browse at work and have to tab out quickly when the boss came round but does anyone even do that any more? Don't most places have intranets and blocks on anything sus these days?

NSFHWTKAA would be better. What? Oh, go on, you can work it out. Not Safe For Home When The Kids Are Around of course. Except it's more likely to be the kids watching stuff that's going to freak the adults out. 

Not sure what any of this has to do with Ms. Pac-Man but I thought it was thematically appropriate. Plus, good tune.

 

 The Bomb - Lydia Night

If I'm gonna be brutally uncool, this is more my speed. Also sounds unsettlingly like some of the stuff I've been making, albeit with fewer blood rituals and chainsaws. 

The video, which starts out looking wholesome enough, is weirdly disturbing. I've never played dodge-ball. Is it really that harsh? 

 Bird Parts (Ft Harmony) - Grumpy

I don't know any more than you do. Don't look at me. I just pick them, I don't explain them.

Harmony's name brought me to this one but it really, really doesn't sound like anything I'd ever have associated with her. There's a real vibe for tuneless tunes now, isn't there? In fact, now I come to think about it, that might be almost a new sound for the 2020s, one that doesn't hark back blatantly to something someone was doing in another musical era (I hate the term "Era". That could have been my Low Stakes, Hot Takes thing.)

Again, the beginning reminds me of Blondshell, whose second album, much though I love it, does not have a great many tunes you can hum in the bath. Kind of coming around to the idea now, not least because I find myself using it too.

 Bitter Everyday - Wednesday

Case in point. Gemini confidently informs me there isn't a post-grunge band called Wednesday and their Wikipedia page calls them "Alternative Rock" but it's post-grunge isn't it? Or is it post-grunge revival now? Sounds like Dinosaur Jr. anyway. 

When are tattoos going start being really uncool, I wonder? It's gonna happen some time. Who wants to look like their parents, growing up? Even if their parents were cool when they weren't parents.

Okay, I now have the opposite problem to  the one I thought I was going to have at the top of the post, namely that everything I've bookmarked is really good so now I can't fit it all in. I like to keep it down to no more than a dozen tunes per post and that just leaves room for one more...

Who's it gonna be?

 Nice Shoes - Steve Lacy

Well, he does keep saying "Make it stop". So I will.

Also NSFW (I'm going to say that "W" stands for Wherever.) 

Spiritual Cramp, Still Blank, Dust and Witch Post's great acoustic version of The Wolf are going to have to wait 'til next time. By when, no doubt, there will be too many new tunes for them to get a look-in.  Just as well I linked them now, then, isn't it?