Music Is For Sharing

Wow! Here I am again with what I've been listening to lately, just two weeks after the last time. It's like there's a plan and I'm sticking to it. 

There isn't, of course, and I'm not. It's just been a bumper couple of weeks. The tunes have just been piling in. I noticed yesterday I had more than enough and they looked pretty damn good, too. Plus I do like to put a music post together on a Friday or a Saturday. It just feels right for the weekend.

It'll be a change from the last one, when I was scratching around for enough to fill the page. This time it's all about what to leave out. Is that better? I guess it'll have to be.

Shall we get on? Yes, let's get on. (They do not move.)

 

 If You Take Away The Music Then What Has She Got?

 Charli xcx

Camera - Charli xcx

 Yeah, yeah, yeah... 

I make no apologies.

In the continuing absence of Our Queen (Latest of many promises, it's now two albums. Maybe later this year. maybe next year. Believe it when you hear it, not before, is my advice. I'd take one now and one later but we don't get to tell Lana what to do. I pity anyone who tries.) the artist most likely to fill the gap has to be Charli. Boy, but she's consistent. Consistently great. When did you last hear a bad song by her? Or a mediocre one for that matter.

One thing she doesn't seem to be 100% perfect on is picking the best one. Or maybe she's just perverse. If You Take Away The Music... is the latest of a string of B-sides that sound better than the A-sides they back. Or they do to me. And even then she makes the B-sides hard to get hold of. Only on the actual vinyl or her Instagram account, which is now, apparently, private. Not that I know how Instagram works.

Lucky for us, someone always uploads them to YouTube, presumably expecting millions of hits. Except it doesn't seem to work that way. Camera, on Charli's official channel, has racked up almost a million views in two days. All the uploads of the B-side added together can only just about manage one per cent of those numbers. 

Which do you think's the better song? Granted, Camera has a fantastic video. It's very distracting. Close your eyes and listen, though, and then tell me those two songs are the right way round when you take the single out of the sleeve.

More than halfway through the year and my front runner for #1 when I do my Pick of '26 is still Playboy Bunny, B-side to SS26. I can't actually remember what SS26 sounds like but I can sing you Playboy Bunny. 

You know what? Let's have Playboy Bunny. You might have to sing it yourself because the sound on this live recording, uploaded off someone's phone, seems to have managed to miss out the vocals almost entirely but so what? It looks great!

 Playboy Bunny - Charli xcx

Live at the Scala in London, from one of her parties to promote the upcoming release of her album Music, Fashion, Film. Needs a strobe warning, by the way. Do not watch if susceptible. 

Can I wait for someone to give me that in a few months or am I going to have to buy it for myself? July is such an annoying mid-period for anyone to put out an album, isn't it? Then again, maybe by Christmas there'll be a deluxe edition with all the B-Sides. Modern marketing, eh? 

I guess we'd better have someone other than Charli now. Shame.

 Blue Shadows ft. Karen O - The Avalanches

Now there's a name from the past. The Avalanches, I mean, not Karen O. I can never remember what band Karen O's from. Some New York avant-garde, alt-rock, no wave/new wave post punk outfit, isn't it? Or am I making myself look foolish yet again? Is it the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? That's my bid. 

Yay! Looked it up and I was right! I can tell you, that feels like quite the achievement these days. Mrs Bhagpuss and I comment frequently on our increasing inability to dredge facts we should know from the clutter and decay of what used to be our memories. 

In my defence, I have never owned a recording by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Not on vinyl, not on CD, not even as a download from YouTube. They're in that strange, grey area filled with acts I constantly see name-checked in interviews or reviews but who I never bother to follow up to see what they sound like. Having said that, I bet I've linked a Yeah Yeah Yeah's song here at some point. If I have, though, I've forgotten what it was.

As for The Avalanches, they're stored in my mental filing system under one-hit wonder novelty band, thanks to the excellent and definitely unforgettable Frontier Psychiatrist. That's definitely turned up here before. I'm sure that's a completely unfair summary of their no-doubt illustrious career but there you go. Make one funny record and you're cooked.

Martini Me Fatso - Matt Berninger

Speaking of titles likely to get you shunted into the novelty rack at Our Price... 

An Inventory Full No-Prize to anyone who can explain what the hell he's going on about. 

Representative extract:

"Pick up a tiny bed, and call me with your mouth, please
If I'm getting kicked out, I'm takin' my harmonica"

Full lyric here. Have at it. (Do you say "lyric" or "lyrics" for the entire text of a song, by the way? I dither between the two.)

 Gary - Blossoms

As I was playing the Matt Berninger track, Mrs Bhagpuss came in and said something but I had the music on so loud I couldn't hear what it was, so I turned Matt off and she said "What's that one? I like it." so I put him back on again. When the song finished, she said "I was listening to Gary by Blossoms this morning, for some reason. Do you know that one?" 

I didn't but I do now. And so do you.

 Trusselina Archimboldi - Trusselina

The hippies at the Roundhouse in 1967 would have loved this, in between all that Soft Machine and Pink Floyd. Smart post-punks would have tipped an eyebrow to it ten years later. It would have gone down even better, drifting across the fields around dawn at some rave in a godforsaken field out in the wilds of East Anglia around the turn of the 90s. And now here it is again. Can we have some more, please?

Jumpupw!nya (ft. Tierra Whack, Leikeli47)

 Chad Hugo

Now that's my kind of hip-hop. I bet they'd love to hear they're making the right kind of sounds to please white British dudes in their late sixties. It's got to be the market all the rappers wish they could crack, right?

Apparently that's Chad Hugo's first ever solo track although he's been around forever as one of The Neptunes, the other being Pharrel, of course. I say that like I knew. Being an expert is so easy. Or rather faking it is. I did it all the time when I was younger. Now I just make a feature of my ignorance and combine it with a puppyish eagerness to learn. That's just as much a pose, of course. But then, isn't everything?

I do know who Tierra Whack is, at least. And now I know who Leikeli47 is as well. Or what she sounds like, anyway. And that she likes to wear a ski mask. Lucky me. Lucky you, too.

 F**k The Summer Up ft. Biker Boy Pug 

 Leikeli47

That might have been my Song of the Summer back in 2015, if I'd known it existed.  Is it too late now?

 Light Over There - RIP Magic

What next? I dunno. I'm spoiled for choice. Never going to fit it all in. I was debating whether to leave out everything that didn't have a video but that would be visualist, wouldn't it? And anyway, isn't it supposed to be all about the music? 

Heh. Good one.

You know how I complain all the time, if complain's the right word, maybe observe, that everything sounds like something else now? Well, this bloody well does sound like Bark Psychosis, so there. I saw them one time. They were stunning and it was all sound. No visuals at all. Well, I mean, I could see them. But they just stood there and let the volume do the work. And it did.

 trauma porn - silt

That's not a million miles away, either. Is this a trend? I'm here for it if it is. Bark Psychosis and This Heat. Two of the most influential bands you probably never heard of. Their existential fingerprints are all over these last two tracks.

I hear someone asking for a tune you can hum. Hah. Middlebrows! Okay. Try this.

I Wanna Be Your Man - Hank Heaven

Yeah, not that one. No copyright on titles, as I've had occasion to explain to more than one confused customer over the years. 

 The Loudest - Violet Odette Harlow

Do you get the feeling she's holding back? I wish she'd cut loose. But then, I guess she's not the loudest.

Oh, I could go on all day but I guess I'd better stop. Let's all have a dance and then we'll go have lunch. Or dinner. Time zone depending.

 Young London - Confidence Man

Can't really leave it there without actually hearing Bomb The Bass, I guess...

Beat Dis - Bomb The Bass

Geez! I'd forgotten how good that was. Is. Maybe I should listen to more old music. That's nearly forty years old! When I'm listening to anything that's not totally new, a thing I often do is work out what would have been as far back in time for me when I was, say, eighteen. So if someone's wondering why some teenager doesn't recognise the name of some band that was famous in the eighties, like Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet, I figure out that when I was that age, it'd be like someone asking why I didn't know who was rocking the dance halls between the wars. That's before even Glenn Miller, which might have been the one and only name from back then I could have named.

Then again, the punk band I was in did a song called Bessie Smith, all about how she died because the white hospital they took her to after a car crash wouldn't treat her because she was black. That was in 1977 and Bessie Smith was famous in the 1930s. So maybe I knew more than I remember I knew. 

Mind you, I didn't write it. The bass player did and he was two years younger than me. 

If I ever had a point there, I've forgotten what it was. Time I was gone.