God! These things just flash by, don't they? Once again, I was wondering if it was too soon for another What I've been Listening To Lately and it turns out it's been nearly three weeks! Past time, then.
Lots to choose from. How many do I have set aside for consideration now? Let me count them... eighteen on the desktop... let me just check the laptop... five more there, so that's at least... far too many.
Sidebar: I don't want to pollute a nice, pure music post with messy computer stuff but since I've mentioned the desktop and the laptop I'll just say I have no clue what's going on now. "Ol' Reliable" turned out to be anything but. When I booted up this morning it wouldn't. It's stuck on some bios issue that I so far haven't been able to fix. But in trying to, I started swapping components between the two machines and now the new PC works again. Go figure. For the time being I'm keeping it on an Integrated Graphics, No Taxing Games diet so no NTE for a bit. We'll see how that goes. My Buy-A-Proper-Gaming-PC plan has been bumped right up the schedule, though, I can tell you that for nothing!
Back to the good stuff and it won't be all old favorites this time, for a change. OK, Blondshell just announced a new album (YAY!!) and several other faves, who also have new albums either out or about to be, have all been pumping out the videos, so we might have some of those. But I do have new names! Here's one now...
Grease Baby - Clutter
Isn't that a great way to start? We'll call it a palate cleanser, if you can cleanse your palate with grease. They're Swedish, as if that matters. That sound is the property of the world.
What's New On The Beat Scene? - Perennial
Hahaha! And you thought the first one was retro? Although what specific era Perennial are retroactively invoking is less clear. It sounds like someone welded the Beastie Boys onto the back of the Sonics. And what the hell is that chorus? Bloody art-house punks!
Perennial are on the Ernest Jennings Record Co. label and as so often happens when I find something good on a label I never heard of, I took a look at what else was there. There was this...
Who could resist a title like that? Still got no idea what it's about and I've read the lyrics but it sounds great. Reminds me really strongly of something, too, but I can't quite put my finger on what. When, though, that I can do. 85-95, around then. It's kinda Brotherhood of Lizards meets Neutral Milk Hotel.
Hmm. We'll be here all day if I keep footnoting my references like that. Okay, just one more from Ernest Jennings and Co. and we'll move on.
Really, Really, Really, Really Sad
Carla J. Easton
Too many reallys to fit on one line. What's the plural of really, anyway? I typed "reallies" first and that triggered a spell check but so does "reallys". What do they want me to do? Re-phrase to something awkward and clumsy like "Too many repetitions of the word "really" to fit."..? I am not a fan of rephrasing perfectly good sentences just to appease some self-appointed grammar nazi!
Whatever happened to Reese Lansangan anyway?
VHS Aesthetic - Reese Langsangan
Oh wow! Never seen that before! It's fantastic. Well, the video is. The song's merely excellent. Shot on a visit to Tokyo with her sister. The video, that is. Not Reese. It wasn't sororicide.
No wonder everyone wants to go to Japan. If I had access to some of those stores I wouldn't be able to get into my house! (Because I'd buy a lot of stuff in the stores. And take it home. And put it in my house. Where it would fill up all the rooms. Please try to keep up.)
That's the last thing she's posted and it was two years ago but she's hardly prolific. I think I'd better subscribe to her channel so I don't miss it the next time she drops a gem like this.
That was a nice surprise. The Philippines by way of Japan. Now, where shall we go next? I know. Australia!
PQC - daine
Damn! I'm such a sucker for a chanted chorus. That's three in this post alone, although I suppose the Clutter is a chanted outro.
I had to look PQC up because it meant nothing to me. All the responses in three full pages of google search, which was as far as I got before I gave up scrolling, thought it meant Post-Quantum Cryptography. That seemed unlikely so I asked Gemini what the acronym might stand for if it wasn't that.
Gemini suggested either Pavement Quality Concrete, Production Quality Control or Protein Quaternary Structure, all of which sounded even less likely.
Gemini, clearly puzzled by what I was up to, asked me "Are you asking out of pure curiosity, or are you looking into specific construction engineering or manufacturing standards?" to which I replied "I'm asking because of the song PQC by daine. I wanted to know what she was referring to in the lyrics and title. From context, none of the options seem likely."
This got me an eight paragraph dissertation on the meaning of the acronym in the context of the lyric, complete with links to a reddit thread (in which no-one knows what it means) and a piece at New Zealand website Sniffers, (where the acronym isn't even mentioned.) Gemini also linked to articles on Stereogum and Rolling Stone Australia as well as daine's own Bandcamp page, none of which make any attempt to explain it, either.
Despite the complete lack of evidence and entirely unsupported by any of the references it linked, Gemini still felt confident enough to tell me "The meaning of "PQC" in daine's song is intentionally left as a bit of a mystery, but it stands for "Plastic, Tragic, Overly-Romantic" (with the 'C' loosely standing for the "Choreography" / "Chorus" refrain or "Classic")." It was lucky that made no sense at all or I might have believed it.
This is a shining example of why I keep saying Gen AI would be great if it worked. It does not work. It hasn't gotten much better than when I first used it, just better at hiding its mistakes. Don't worry, though. It can and will get worse as this excellent observation by Janelle Shane at AI Weirdness concerning the potential disaster represented by AI Agents, chillingly foretells.
Dunno what all that's doing in a music post. Still don't know what daine's talking about in the last line, either. Great song anyway.
Election Day - Lily Seabird
There. That ought to clear all that silty AI out of our heads. Nothing like a bunch of scruffs rocking out in the woods to remind you what's real and what's not.
And speaking of...
Violins - Blondshell
You knew it was coming...
Look, I'm buying the album day of release so this is coming from a place of love but would it kill her to write something with a tune? This one does eventually flirt with melody - that lovely run-out from 3.00 on - but even then it's not exactly sing-in-the-shower material, is it?
And still I love it. I love how her voice rubs and rasps and abrades the air, how she holds every note just a little longer than she should, how here monotony is the melody, how she rides the guitar lines like the surf coming in over shale. She transcends. It's not so much song as it's sound, every time.
I guess that is what grunge was, kind of, It was one of the reasons I never much liked it. But I like this. I more than like this.
Voyager - P. J. Harvey
Here's someone else I like but who I almost never feature here. Mrs. Bhagpuss and I saw P.J. Harvey back in the '90s, when we still went to gigs. She was third on the bill to I forget who now. She was dressed head to toe in firetruck red vinyl and she was doing stuff off her raw, explosive debut album, Dry, which I'm not sure was even out yet.
And now here she is, being invited by celebrity astrophysicist Dr. Brian Cox to write a song about the Voyager space probe for some theater tour he's threatening us with. Some people have the oddest career trajectories, Brian Cox among them.
Drive - FousheƩ
I do like a good walking through New York video. I know it's often done but if you lived there, why wouldn't you? Some cities do the heavy lifting for you.
Siren - Tierra Whack
And you thought that Perennial song was short at 1.49! Tierra Whack says hold my beer.
Time for just a couple more. Let's bang it up.
He's Great - Aitis Band
Aitis Band is a truly terrible name. Is it some kind of pun? It sounds like "Eighties Band" if you say it out loud but they don't sound like anyone I heard in the '80s. They sound like The Orb! It would be a terrible name for a bunch of fifty-something dads trying to recapture their youth by playing friends' parties and the back rooms of pubs but for someone that sounds like this it's just fucking stupid.
How did I ever come to click on it? It's another Ernest Jenning Record Co. signing, that's how. All the others who had much better names were good so I thought, hell, why not? Paid off, too.
Common People - My Chemical Romance
Redbeard often refers back to the satanic panic. We didn't really have that over here but we've had an almost ever-ending sequence of moral panics based around pop groups. Ban them! Deport them! Don't let them in!
I think the first I can remember was that national institution and much loved all-round entertainer Alice Cooper. I remember the Daily Mail trying to get him banned when I was still at school. Then there were the Beastie Boys, of course, inciting their fans to snap the hood ornaments off Volkswagens, not to mention their supposed dissing of disabled kids in some made-up tabloid tale. The Shamen got it in the neck for promoting illegal rave drugs with their oh-so-clever choruses and My Chemical Romance were supposedly going to have our children slitting their wrists when, for some reason, listening to emo got conflated with having suicidal urges.
I never really paid much attention to MCR, I certainly didn't know they rocked out like this. Gerard Way, lead singer and also, somewhat surprisingly, the creative genius behind Umbrella Academy, puts all the anger into his performance that's always been there in the words but which Jarvis always undercuts with irony and that world-weary insouciance he's made his trademark. Really great version of a song all too easily reduced to a pub sing-along.
And finally. Saved 'til the end as a little treat for the persistent and because it's so new I only heard it for the first time a couple of hours ago, here's Charli! Be warned, this is NSFW even by Charli's always-unsafe standards.
Wink Wink - Charli xcx
Sounds like Arab Strap doing Jamie Oliver Petrol Station. And with that, I'm gone.
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