Wow! We're seriously overdue for a "What I've Been Listening To..." post. When was the last one? November?! Geez... Dereliction of duty or what?
So, obviously, after all that time I must have a huge backlog of tunes, right? Yeah, not so much, as it turns out. December was all Christmas music and I really didn't listen to a lot of new stuff in January.
Does anyone? January's never a great month for new music. People tend not to want to punt their best stuff into a dead zone and the post-New Year slump is as dead as it gets.
Still, the cycle is unbroken these days, what with 24/7/365 entertainment media, so there have been a few highlights. And once you get close to February, everything picks up speed again. I think we'll have more than enough to choose from.
Let's get on.
Punk Rocky - A$AP Rocky
That's going to be in my Videos of the Year, I'll tell you right now. It's funny and smart in all the best ways. Winona's Beavis and Butthead tee (Which is actually the Misfits as the boys, or so someone says in the YT comments.) the cop taking a drag behind the squad car, Danny Elfman on drums... I'd say it was Lynchean except Tim Burton's doing the album cover and there's Winona right there so I guess it's Burtonian. Or is that Burtonesque?
Whatever it is, it's great and so is the song. Is that even hip-hop now? Rocky doesn't really deal in genre any more, does he? I guess that's a good thing.
Venom - COUCOU CHLOE
There's a case to be made for Punk Rocky as some kind of synth-punk variant but you wouldn't want to be the one making it after this just played.
God's Lonely Man (feat. Iggy Pop) - Anna Calvi
Now it's glam-synth-punk! Let's ram it all together! Why not?
Anna Calvi is one of those names I kind of recognize without really having any clear idea why or from where. Probably because she's been nominated for the Mercury three times. She has a massive Wikipedia presence that suggests I ought to have heard her long before this but I swear I never did. I'll be rifling through the back catalog now, for sure.
As for Iggy, he just goes on, doesn't he? On this he sounds almost identical to the Iggy of The Idiot, which came out just shy of fifty years ago. Terrifying. I bought that album on release, too. Of all the sixties hedonists, who'd have had Iggy on their bingo card to still be making great music in his late seventies, let alone great music that sounds like the stuff he did in his prime?
For that matter, who'd have pegged him still to be alive? One of the great career arcs, for sure.
Dashboard Mary - Modern Woman
Another really good video. Well worth watching all the way through. It builds in intensity just like the song does.
Modern Woman are new to me but they've been around a while. They fit right into the echoing, empty space left vacant by the much-missed Peggy Sue.
Speaking of whom...
Day of Atonement - Tenderness
Best track so far from the soon-come debut album by Katy-Beth Young, formerly one half of Peggy Sue, now recording solo under the sobriquet Tenderness. Everything she releases is pure class but this has some extra warmth, I think.
Looking forward to the album, out in March.
Worry Angel - Witch Post
I've expressed a certain anxiety before about this feature turning into nothing more than a roundup of the latest releases from acts whose YouTube channels I follow and these last two tracks do nothing to alleviate those concerns. If these people will keep putting out great songs and videos, though, what am I supposed to do?
Witch Post feature on the NME's list of 100 Essential Emerging Artists For 2026. I scanned it eagerly, hoping - not to say expecting - to see a whole bunch of names I recognized. I mean, I sub NME so surely I'd have at least heard most of these acts mentioned, if not actually heard anything they'd done.
Hah! Fat chance! Guess how many names I recognized? Two. Seriously! Two. So low it doesn't even qualify as embarrassing. It just isn't.
The two? Witch Post, of course, and Florence Road. I thought it was three for a moment when I saw Punching Bag on there but Punching Bag is a different band from Punchbag. I like Punchbag a lot more than Punching Bag so one point to me.
I guess I ought to work my way through the whole hundred and give some feedback. It can't be worse than the bloody Glasto emerging artist lists of the last couple of years. I trust NME a lot more than the people who book Glastonbury. Still. A hundred. It's a lot.
Legs In A Snare - Lip Critic
Here's someone new. Okay, I know it doesn't sound new. What does, these days? It goes though. It goes hard.
Arms Wide - sadie
Sometimes all you want is autotune and a string section. All you need, I mean.
Or maybe you'd prefer a song you already know?
Making Plans For Nigel
H. Birdbath & Andreas Bonkowski
Alert readers may have noticed a significant drop-off in the number of covers appearing here of late. Two reasons.
The positive: I've been holding most of the good ones back for an all-covers post.
The negative: Dull covers are ubiquitous now. Inventive ones are really hard to come by.
There was a time, it seems long ago now, when to come across a cover of a favorite song was a charming surprise. Now it feels like I'm deluged with the things day in, day out. Most of them seem to try and stay as close as possible to the source, which is very boring and largely pointless. I still check the ones that look like they might be unusual but it takes a lot more to trigger my enthusiasm than it used to do.
Not quite sure why I noticed this one, other than it's always good to hear the song again and the way she sings it is slightly off, somehow. I like that about it. Her name helps, naturally. It came up on a recommend for a song called Dead Air and who could resist clicking on someone called H. Birdbath?
That one was an original and, once again, it falls into that slightly atonal dark-folk pit where Peggy Sue prospered. I liked it and followed through to see what else there was and there was Making Plans For Nigel and now here we are.
Boylife in America - Dominic Fike (Cody ChesnuTT cover)
Here's that awkward question again: if it's a cover of a song you never heard before, is it truly a cover? Not going to answer that one. Or even try.
I had not heard the original, though. Or of it. Or even of the original artist. Cody ChestnuTT with the idiosyncratic typography was new to me although looking into it I'll give myself a pass. It seems it was seen as a fairly obscure pick from Dominic Fike when he covered it for TripleJ's Like A Version recently. He also covered the South Park theme tune but I never liked South Park.
And now we're pushing into double figures so I guess I'd better wrap things up. Plenty left in the barrel. What to choose? hemlocke springs? Frost Children and Ninajirichi? Fcuckers? Goldie Boutilier? Telenova? All very familiar names here. Let's try again.
How about
Ants In My Room - Carter Vail
Hmm. Is that a justified pick? Or is it cutting in and by cutting in I mean cutting out something more deserving? Novelty or quality? Does it matter?
No questioning the quality with that one. Joyce Manor have gravitas to spare.
Hands up, who knows who Mark Chen is. Not where he lives. No-one's expecting you to know that even if they do.
No, Mark Chen is not Lead Researcher for OpenAI, no matter what google just told you. That's a different Mark Chen. If Joyce Manor were telling us they knew where he lived I think the whole song would have a much darker vibe to it.
Their Mark Chen is - or rather was - "a singer and songwriter for the bands Summer Vacation and Winter Break". Two more bands I never heard of. Here's the pitch. And here's what they sound(ed) like. Very long, silent intro on that video, by the way. The song itself is barely a minute long.
I credit Joyce Manor with inculcating me into the elusive joys of midwest emo and its related sub-genres even if I'm not sure that's what they play any more. They mostly sound like a really, really good rock band these days, or they do to me, but what do I know?
SPEAK SOFTLY - Campe Claude
And finally, a band I've liked for a long time now. They don't make a lot of records and they never seem to get anywhere but they persist.
As do we all.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment