Wow! It's been close on a month since the last time I did one of these. I'm not counting the Halloween one. No wonder I have so many possibles bookmarked. Close on fifty, in fact. That's enough for at least four posts. There's going to have to be a cull...
I hate doing that, though. It seems so arbitrary. If they were good enough to bookmark, why should they miss out just because I set an arbitrary cap at around a dozen per post?
I was going back through the blog looking for something a few days ago and I ran into some of those round-ups I used to do back when I used a quote from a song lyric for every post title. Those were insane! Not only did I embed twenty or even thirty videos in a single post, I linked to fifty or even a hundred more... in the same post!
Did anyone ever click through even ten per cent of those? I very much doubt it. I wonder how many of the links still work now. Imagine going back and checking them, then trying to fix all the broken ones! Good thing I'm forward-focused, isn't it?
Maybe I could learn a little from my past, though. That would be the mature approach, right? I could stick to the dozen or so highlighted videos but tag some kind of "Bubbling Under" list on the end. (Geez. "Bubbling Under"? Really? That dates me.)
We'll see if I do that. It'll create a nice bit of tension, waiting to see if it happens. Right now, as I'm typing this, even I don't know if I'm going to do it! Just don't spoil the fun by scrolling down.
Enough shop talk. Let's get this party rolling.
STAR * 69 - SNOOPER
The top comment on the YouTube thread starts with "I am absolutely in love with the crispy, ultra-90s aesthetic this band has going...". Which is weird. It sounds absolutely like late '70s DIY punk to me. In fact, it quite specifically reminds me of this forgotten classic from 1977. That's the trouble with getting old.
LGBTQ+ Lover - EMF
Of course, you can always choose not to. Get old, that is. All you have to do is keep dressing exactly like you always have. Never change your look. Then everyone will totally believe you're still the same age you were when they first met you. That'll work!
EMF weren't officially a one-hit wonder but they might as well have been. The only song of theirs anyone remembers is Unbelievable. They actually had seven Top 40 hits in the UK between 1990 and 1992, which really is unbelievable. And an eighth a couple of years later, when they backed Reeves and Mortimer on a truly terrible cover of the Monkees' I'm A Believer. (I see what they did there. I wish I didn't. Although not as much as I wish they hadn't.)
Since then they've been an on-and-off concern, troubling no-one except the nostalgists who turn up for retro festivals and package tours. Until now, when they've suddenly and inexplicably reappeared with a bunch of pretty good new songs, of which this is the best I've heard. It also has a great sentiment in the lyric, given even more gravitas by the explanation of how it came to be written, which you can find in the YouTube description.
I don't know who had "EMF pen socially-responsible anthem" on their bingo card for 2025 but even if anyone did, I bet they didn't double down with "EMF release excellent trip-hop cover of Bela Lugosi's Dead".
Yeah. They did that, too.
Girls On The Internet - Elita
Well, there goes any good karma I might have built by posting the last one. It's always a judgment call, whether to include anything by Elita. I really like the music but the videos are... well, you know... crowd-pleasing. She only put this one up yesterday and it already has nearly twelve thousand views. Some of the stuff on her channel is up there in the millions. She knows what she's doing.
And then she also posts the most delightfully wholesome, innocent, at-home videos, where she makes sandwiches and puts furniture together and generally chats about her life so maybe it's me. It's usually me. She knows her audience, I guess, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the demographic she's expecting. Nor are you, probably.
Shitshow - Kid Sistr
Talk about girls on the internet and here they are. Only we don't say "girls", do we? Except when we do.
My mother, who's 93, always, without exception, refers to her female friends, none of whom is under eighty, as "girls". My grandmother, who died in the 1970s, would take offense if she heard anyone call any female of her acquaintance a "woman", which I think, to her, meant "common". She believed all females should all be called "ladies" unless you were actively trying to insult them, as in the phrase "that woman!", which she sometimes employed when she was really cross.
I try to tailor my language to the situation and the audience, something I believe is called "register". Or conditioning. Or maybe cowardice. At least I'm not going to claim I'm too old to change my ways. Too lazy, maybe. Too slow, definitely.
Little Dog - Retail Drugs
Guess how I found this one? Go on, guess!
Bah! That was a gimme. You're all right. It was both.
Audrey Hepburn - Maisie Peters
How about this one, then? Any ideas?
Damn! Am I really that obvious?
We'll Always Have Paris 1919 - Tenderness
Okay, I'm just going to explain this one. No more guessing. Tenderness, as I've mentioned before, is the name Katy Beth Young, one half of Peggy Sue (nee Peggy Sue and the Pirates.) has chosen to use for her solo material. Peggy Sue was one of my favorite bands of the 20-teens. I have all their albums on CD.
I also subscribe to their now-dormant channel on YouTube, which did not inform me of this new offshoot. I had to find out about it through the music press, proving there's still value in the old ways. Naturally, now I know Tenderness exists I'm subbed to them too.
Or is it her? Pronouns are such a non-gendered problem for me when it comes to music. Is a band "They" or "It"? I know there's a supposedly correct answer but to me it always comes down to an individual decision based on what feels right.
Even more awkwardly, if a single person adopts a collective name for their work, does that mean they're a "they" now or is he or she still a him or a her? Of course if they went by they to begin with it's all a lot simpler but that's veering back into an entirely different and not entirely grammatical debate...
That's how I became aware of this new song but I would absolutely have clicked on it had it appeared algorithmically and I'd had no idea who it was by because We'll Always Have Paris 1919 is absolutely nailed-on to be my Title of the Year. (I might actually do a list of those...). To over-explain, "We'll Always Have Paris" is a quote from the movie Casablanca (I'm guessing I didn't need to point out that Casablanca is a movie but I did say I was going to overdo it...) and Paris 1919 is a (Superb.) album by John Cale.
That has to be one of the smartest, cleverest, most evocative mash-ups I've ever seen. It's one of those concatenations that both carries a huge emotional freight by dint of the cumulative context and also makes you feel really good for getting it. That's one reason why I loved Peggy Sue so much. They did a lot of that sort of wordplay.
Dolphins - Jenny On Holiday
I'm pretty sure I did this before - featured Tenderness and Jenny on Holiday in the same post then explained who they were. Well if I did, now I'm doing it again. This is the solo project of Jenny Hollingworth from Let's Eat Grandma, another female duo, all of whose albums I also own.
What I didn't say last time, because I didn't know it then, is that there's a Jenny on Holiday album due out in January. I will be buying that, too.
One more soft one and then it'll be time to go loud to the end, I think.
what's the matter baby - veronika smith
Curiously, veronika smith doesn't appear to believe in either punctuation or capitalization in general but she does adhere to convention when it comes to the apostrophe. I respect her choices.
She has a YouTube channel on which she's recently started posting songs she's written under the rubric "i wrote a song". Here's one of the songs she wrote. It's really good. It sounds like Blondshell. I'd love to hear Blondshell cover it.
There are about a thousand million people posting videos of themselves, singing songs they've written, filmed on their phones in their bedrooms, accompanying themselves on acoustic guitar. A surprising number I happen to have seen, mostly at random, have been at least as good as the songs that get picked up by algorithms or influencers and turned into money-making streams. If you ever need proof that most success in certain fields comes from a combination of luck, persistence and being in the right place at the right time, a skim through a few dozen channels like this ought to do it.
This particular song has been up for a couple of weeks and so far forty-three people have seen it. That's about par for veronika's videos. Except, she also posts a lot of shorts and those get far more views. The short for this song has nearly 700. She put it up six days after the full-length one.
Maybe there is some mileage in that short attention span thing after all.
The Deep - Telenova
Okay, let's come up a gear to cruising speed.
I love this. It really rolls. Great video, too. Totally in sync visually and sonically. And those filters...
CONCRETE TREES
ANABELLE CHAiRLEGS
If you could resist clicking on a link to a song by someone calling themselves Anabelle Chairlegs then you have more willpower than I do. Except - and not to give the impression I'm obsessed with either typography or syntax (Even though I obviously am.) - it's not Anabelle Chairlegs, is it? It's ANABELLE CHAiRLEGS, which might give you a clue that it's a band, not a person.
Produced by Ty Segall, whose name I recognized although I didn't know where from. From pretty much everywhere, according to his Wikipedia page.
Pon Direction - pinponpanpon
You know when people say "I don't even..."? And also, "What are they smoking?"
Literally that.
I feel like this is where we came in...
That's just glorious! I clicked through on the strength of Doechii's infallible record. Alemeda was new to me. I checked her out after and she 's got more of these. Earworms, I mean. Try 1-800 F**K-YOU or I Already Dug Your Grave, which would have been in my Halloween selection if I'd seen it by then. Channel subbed!
Ok, that's already too many, I guess. Even though it feels like I've barely dipped the surface. I vetoed a few really good tunes just because they had no videos so I'm going to toss those in as links now...
The first two were on the soundtrack of Nobody Wants This. The Kacey Musgraves number was part of the promotional push but the FINNEAS tune I had to to google after the episode it was in because it was so good. Never heard any of his solo stuff before. I should rectify that. The others are by regulars in this slot who get enough attention already.
If the World Burns Down - Kacey Musgraves
Palomino - FINNEAS
Poor Little Baby - Faerybabyy
omnishambles - bar italia
And finally, as a special treat for everyone who made it this far, the latest from R. Missing. And it's got a kitten in the video!
Ola Tremble - R. Missing
Until next time. Which better be a damn sight sooner than the last time or else we're all gonna be in big trouble...
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