Smokes And Mirrors

Somewhat to my surprise, I find it's been more than three weeks since the last What Have I Been Listening To Lately. That may be because pretty much all I have been listening to for months is the music I've been making myself with Suno. 

I listen to my own songs every day. On the desktop, on the laptop, in the car, at work. I listen to the new ones and the old ones and all the ones inbetween. I listen to them in preference to everything and anything else, including all the things I would have been listening to before. 

Even Lana doesn't get much of a look-in at the moment, although that would change pretty sharpish if she'd actually get on and release something. How long has the new album been delayed now? Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. came out in March 2023 and the follow-up, curently going by the idiosyncratic working title "Stove", is now scheduled for January 2026, having slipped several dates already.

That'll be the longest gap between full-length releases since the start of her career, even including the work she did before she became Lana del Rey. There haven't even been any teaser singles since Henry, Come On! back in April of this year. I guess that's what married life does for you.

When I can tear myself away from the mirror, I have at least been keeping up with some new music, here and there. It's all a little sporadic and random and I haven't been doing a lot of trawling for tunes on my own, mostly relying on news feeds to pop me hints, but I have collected a few good picks for the post I'm about to write. Am writing. Have written, as I do the final edit.

Where to start? Something fast and loud is usually indicated to get the party started. Let's see...

Ah, yes, this will do nicely.

 POSH - The Pill

I mean, where do you begin? They put so much work into the videos, The Pill, don't they? And the attitude! As they say, if you could bottle it...

That drumbeat is incredibly familiar, too. But then everything is, now. It's a blessing and a curse. 

It's the deadpan that sells it, I think. All their songs have it and it just levels the whole thing up. Apparently irony hasn't entirely gone out of fashion after all. 

They remind me of a band I really hoped would go somewhere but didn't, Ice Cold Slush, although now I watch the Slushies again, maybe not so much. Perhaps I'm thinking of someone else. There are a lot of female duos. It's hard to keep them straight.

 Every Ounce Of Me - Jenny On Holiday

Ooh! Ooh! Thematic segue! This is Jenny Hollingworth, one half of Let's Eat Grandma, probably the best female duo of the last several years (I'm including Wet Leg in that, although really I think they should be considered a full, five-piece band, even though they never are.) 

Lets Eat Grandma is another favorite of mine now well overdue for a new album. The truly excellent Two Ribbons came out in April 2022 and there's been pretty much nothing since. Well, they did the soundtrack to that TV show I liked, the one that changed its name half-way through, The Bastard Sone and The Devil Himself, aka Half Bad, which was the title of the source material, an excellent YA trilogy by Sally Green.  

LEG (Never noticed how that acronyms until now.) have not, I'm very happy to say, broken up. They're just doing that annoying thing all groups do at some point, namely putting the band on hold while they "pursue solo projects". They're childhood best friends who became critical darlings while they were still extremely young (Late teens.) and then suffered some personal tragedies and had a big falling out, the reconciliation from which led to the last album. Hardly surprising they both want some time out from each other. It's just good to hear from them again. Either of them.

 Blue Velvet - Princess Nokia

But then, as Princess Nokia so wisely points out, girlhood is a spectrum. 

I know sod all about rap and not much more about hip-hop, even though I've been listening to it on and off since the late 'eighties and I own a very good book on the history of the genres, which I have even read. That book, like most writing on hip-hop, talks about "flow" a lot. I'm not convinced I know what flow is but I'm pretty sure Princess Nokia's is exemplary.

I also don't exactly know what a "drop" is but again, whatever the hell the bass is doing in this one is probably it. Does something to the insides, doesn't it?

 Tip Toe - Tierra Whack

Copy-Paste last two paragraphs. Find"Princess Nokia". Replace with "Tierra Whack". 

 went to bum a cigarette - april june

Why is it that even though I don't smoke and haven't in a very, very long time, I still get triggered by the word in lyrics and titles? And when I say "triggered" I don't mean, as I immediately realized would be the natural interpretation, "triggered to want a cigarette again", something that never, ever happens, but "triggered" as in "immediately pay attention to"?

I might very well have clicked through this when I happened upon it, even if it had been called something else, because "april june", no capitalization, is a an attention-getter. But it was the word "cigarette" that did it. Also the phrase, "bum a cigarette", which I used to hear a lot but haven't for a while. 

I've commented on this before but given the precipitous drop-off in tobacco smoking, (Down to an historic low of just under 12% of the adult population in the UK, as of 2023.) it seems odd that so many songs and music videos feature people lighting up, drawing in, blowing out and rolling up. It is true that the age demographic with the highest incidence of smoking is the 25-34 range, which is bang on for the artists making the music and acting in the videos I tend to feature here, but even there it's not even 15% that smoke. You'd think it would be off-putting to the rest of the target audience, especially with the youngest group, 18-24 year-olds, showing the fastest-falling tobacco use of all. 

And it's almost always actual cigarettes, too. Hardly ever vaping, which has an even smaller take-up, just in case you were thinking that's what all the kids do nowadays. I guess it's just that smoking does still make you look cool, just like your parents always said it wouldn't. Even now hardly anyone's really doing it. Or possibly because.

 Temptation Inside Of Your Heart 

Thurston Moore (Velvet Underground cover)

Let's switch tracks. I've been reading a lot of interviews Lou Reed did with various music journalists over about forty years recently and also reviews of all his albums, so he's fresh in my mind again. First time that's happened for a while.

Lou was my first, great musical crush. I got into the Velvet Underground at a fairly early age, just a few months before Lou's solo career finally took off with Walk on the Wild Side in 1972. I bought every one of his solo albums on release, from Transformer through to New Sensations, twelve years later. I dropped off the Lou train after that but I've picked over the stuff I missed and filled out some gaps since then, so I feel I'm pretty much up to speed on his long career.

This particular number never got a studio release while the Velvets were around but it turned up on the excellent VU compilation, where it was one of the stand-outs. This, in my opinion, is not a great cover. It starts out well but wanders off half-way through. Sonic Youth have always been one of those bands I feel I ought to like more than I actually do and this kind of demonstrates why. Still, nice to be reminded of the song again, although I suggest going and listening to the original.

Lou Reed Was My Babysitter - Jeff Tweedy

Jeff Tweedy and his band Wilco I also feel I should like more than I do. I didn't much like this, the first time I heard it, but it's a bit of a grower. He's clearly doing Lou although he sounds more like Jonathan Richman at times. But Jonathan was doing Lou, too, for a long time anyway, so it's much the same thing.

I strongly empathize with the sentiment behind the song, which in Jeff's words is that "I was babysat by fucking Lou Reed, literally, in my bedroom as a 10-year-old, 12-year-old kid. His music was a more legitimate mentor to me than most of my teachers." That was me, too, although I can't match jeff's impressive 10-12 age profile. I'd have to add a couple of years on the front end of that.

 Aston Martin - Liv de Toma

Enough with the rock. Time for some pop. Also, I just found out how to email a whole bunch of videos  and have them all turn up as little thumbnails you click on and they open in full screen inside the email client. Isn't that neat?

There are a lot of singers doing this kind of thing. Most of them I glaze over after a few lines and some of them stick and it's hard to be sure why. Then a fraction of the stickers go on to break out, like Addison Rae, while most of them just thrash around for a while, going nowhere much. Then they vanish. Or turn into something else.

I'm guessing this will be the only time we get to see Liv de Toma here but who knows? 

She's A Director 

 Mechatok (feat. Isabella Lovestory)

I probably ought to have known who Mechatok was but I didn't. I had to look him up. He's a producer based in London and Berlin (Like they all are if they're not in New York or L.A. I guess...) who's worked with a bunch of people that feature here regularly - Charli XCX, Bladee, Yung Lean...

And now Isabella Lovestory, whose involvement explains why I clicked through. It sounds a bit synthwave to my ears. I do like a bit of synthwave now and again.

 Sad Dog - Madi Gaines

So much for the pure pop part of the post. I'm not sure what Madi Gaines would call what she's doing but not "pop", I imagine. The internet as a whole is pretty convinced it's "queer indie rock/shoegaze". 

A weird thing that's happening now is that I keep hearing songs by other people that sound not unlike the songs I'm making myself. This is one. It's there in the rhythms and the phrasing and the intonation. Maybe I'm making indie rock/shoegaze, too, although I'm not about to appropriate the qualifying tag. Then again, the characters in the songs, they would. Some of them.

My late-blooming songwriting is very, very different from the stuff I was doing back in the eighties. Better, I think, but then I would, or I wouldn't keep doing it. What I'm less sure about is whether that's a direct consequence of my method, re-purposing prose, or if it's that I've developed a different ear, listening to a lot of contemporary artists. If I was one of those old guys who only ever listens to stuff they liked when they were young, would everything I'm doing now sound like it did when I was doing it forty years ago? 

I guess I don't need to care. I'm not one of those guys. Thank god. I pray I never will be.

OK, it seems I had quite a few more tunes stacked up than I thought. This is going to run long unless I watch myself. I think we'll have three more and save the rest for later. But which three?

Maybe not the same people that were in the last one. So no bar italia or Goldie Boutier this time round, good though the songs are. You can always click through if you're interested.

Paris - Mikayla Geier

Here's someone new. Gen Z can't get enough of the jazz, so I hear. I can, quite easily, but I do like a bit of bossa once in a while.

 me, myself and god - Faerybabyy

Don't think we've had Faerybabyy for a bit, have we? Well, we're having her again now, whether we have or not. If I had to give this a one-word review, that word would be "insistent". I suspect you might choose another.

 Make Time/Waste Time - Snowmen

Hah! Saved a noisy one for last, for once. That's a real set-closer they've got there.

I'm having some trouble remembering when I last saw a less likely-looking lead singer. If this was one of those seventies movies that follow the rise of some imaginary rock group from the back rooms of working men's clubs all the way to drugs, dissolution and super-stardom, you know there'd be a scene about half an hour in, when the big record company that just signed them takes the out-of-his-depth manager aside and tells him the singer has to go.

I'm not sure it works that way nowadays but I still have trouble seeing this guy on the late-night chat show circuit. Of course, that's not going to be a problem much longer...

Ooh. Politics. Probably time I stopped.