Is It That Time Already?

Do you ever get the feeling someone's messing with the timeline? I was thinking about what to post today and I thought, well, it's Friday... I could do a What Have I been Listening To... But then I thought, oh, no, I can't really do another yet. I only did one last week. 

Still, memory being what it isn't, I checked. The last one was all the way back in July. Three weeks ago! I swear that can't be true but I just went through every post since then, in case I'd forgotten to add the label or something, and it is.

So, that's today's What To Post? dilemma solved. Or it will be if I've bookmarked enough bangin' new tunes. 

Sidebar: I'm amazed we're still saying "banging" and "bangers".  I'm old. I'm really old. By the time I get to become aware of any new coinage it's already been devalued and about to go out of circulation. I tend not to bother picking it up if I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to put it right back down a few weeks later.

But this one's been hanging on for what seems like forever. I guess I first noticed it a few years back, which puts me about a decade behind the moment it entered the mainstream, sometime in the 2010s. I asked Gemini "Can you plot me the timeline for the appearance and adoption of the words "banger" and "banging" to describe music?" and it gave me a lengthy essay, starting in the 1970s with heavy metal, heading through the 90s to rave (Where, now I'm prompted, I actually do remember it being used.) then drum&bass and UK garage, bleeding over into hip-hop around the turn of the millenium and finally entering the wider culture in the 2010s.  And it's stuck there ever since, probably because it's really useful and pretty much self-descriptive. 

Hey! That can count for my entry in the Blaugust community "research something" project that I saw someone talking about the other day. I'd link to them if I could remember who it was. Pity all the research I did was ask an AI but there's the modern world for you. Now I suppose I'll have to footnote it too, even though I already explained the AI use in the body of the text. Footnotes to sidebars. What are we becoming?

I think we'd better have some music.

Robotboy - Yung Lean (Robyn cover)

I was going to link to a post I wrote about Drain Gang, back when I first heard about the Swedish collective, which was many years after they started but before some of them got famous enough to hang around with pop stars like Charli xcx. Only apparently I never wrote that post. Or never published it. Search can't find it, anyway. Which is... worrying.

I was going to make the point that, while I might have been late on the case where Yung Lean was concerned, at least I got there eventually, which is more than I can say about Robyn. She's in the disturbingly large file marked "Vaguely Know Who These People Are But Haven't Ever Heard Anything By Them". 

I'm going to put a stop to that right now. Let's have Robyn's original and see how it compares. I ought to film myself doing one of those "First Time Listening To..." videos and put it up on my YouTube channel. That'd be the best way to make sure no-one ever saw it.

Robotboy - Robyn

Wow. That's annoying, in the best way. I bet it drove people mad, coming out of the radio back in 2003. If it was a single. Was it a single? No, it wasn't. Only an album track. As you were then. 

I prefer Yung Lean's version anyway but then I heard it first. 

 I Used To Kill - daine, aldn

As the excellent Tom Breihan pointed out, that's basically an emo song with a lot of smear. Also a real clickbait title. Good work all round.

The Afterglow - Lily Seabird

And that one's an emo song with a singer-songwriter skin. Everything is everything else, now.

Hammond Song - Wolf Alice 

Next to the big folder of acts whose names I know but who I haven't taken the time or trouble to listen to is another, maybe not quite as big, marked "Acts I Ought To Like But Don't, Much". Wolf Alice is in there. I have heard them a few times but while they seem fine nothing really grabs me, which makes me a bit puzzled for all the attention and plaudits they get. 

And alongside that folder, there's yet another, this one titled "Acts I Thought I Liked Based On One Song Until I Bought A Whole Album By Them And Found Out It Was Just That One Song..." Yeah, I need to come up with smaller names for these folders, don't I? That's never going to fit on the label.

I heard Hammond Song by the Roches on the radio back in the '80s and I bloody loved it. The harmonies! The sadness! Just overwhelming. When I saw a cassette of one of their albums with the song on in some charity shop I bought it without hesitation. And Hammond Song was pretty much the only thing on there I liked. So that was 49p wasted.

This version, which is pretty faithful, features two guest singers because there's only one singer in Wolf Alice (Ellie Roswell.) and you can't really do Hammond Song on your own, unless you're one of those buskers who spends ten minutes setting up the loop pedal before every song so they can harmonize with themselves. The guest vocalists are Bria Salmena, who I hadn't heard of and Julia Cumming from Sunflower Bean. 

Here's the Roches original. And them doing it live. Listen and marvel.

 Coldplay - Coco & Clair Clair

Let's just hope that's the one and only time the word "Coldplay" has to appear here. They really are singing about the horrifically dull band, too. Just proves you can make a silk purse...

One One - Coco & Clair Clair

One One makes two. And those final few seconds are genius.

 Heavy Tobacco - Angela Autumn

Remember how I keep saying I never hear anything nowadays that doesn't remind me of something else? Yeah, well, about that...

What even is this? Can you hang a genre on it? I can't. It's got #americana in the description but if it's Americana, it's Americana that fell down a mineshaft. Or got pushed.

Want more? Of course you do!

 Millionaire Money - Angela Autumn

Is there such a thing as Goth Americana? There might be a bit of Violent Femmes in there... that's all I got.

 Draw Blood - Told Slant

So, I heard this one and I thought it was nice enough but I wouldn't have used it here only someone was talking about Told Slant being some kind of New York institution and I do have a thing for New York bands and if there's a sound a city can have, as people often say there is, then New York's a city that has it. Anyway, I thought I'd see what else the guy or the band or whatever it was had done and boy, howdy...

 I Am Not - Told Slant

Now that takes me back. When I first started to emerge from my EverQuest-induced decade-long Rip Van Winkle coma, one of the first musical trends I latched onto was anti-folk. That would have been around the time this video was shot, at what's very clearly a private party in someone's New York apartment. I thought I'd scraped up most of the names in the movement back then but I must have missed this lot.

The biggest name, I guess, was probably the Moldy Peaches and then Jeffrey Lewis, as seen on this guy's shirt. This guy, by the way, is Felix Walworth and doesn't he have that something about him? Yes, he does. It's specifically that something that will never, ever get you more than a cult following.

But it did get his band a wikipedia entry. Not a long one but they're still going so who knows? I guess I can add this to my Blaugust Research Project too, although I didn't read the rules so I have no idea if it ought to count. No AI, anyway. Wikipedia is like AI made out of raffia, though.

All that anti-folk stuff predated my adding music posts to this blog. I ought to do a post sometime and bring a bit of it back. Still sounds good.

 WannaCry - Ninjarichi & Porter Robinson

Begin with a banger, end with a banger. That's what I say. If the post seems a bit thin with a lot of repetition there's a reason for that. It is. 

Okay, that's not a reason. 

The reason is, my PC was playing up again and in the absence of any better ideas, I disconnected the drive with the OS on and replaced it with one from an old PC. And that worked, which is how I'm typing this. Only, the drive I took out had the installation of Firefox with my bookmarks on it. This Firefox has bookmarks from 2025. I've had to work from memory. Lucky there's anything here at all!

On the positive side, it looks like the drive may have been the issue all along, even though none of the checks seemed to find anything wrong with it. I hope so, anyway, because I have a new drive coming from Amazon today and with a bit of luck by the end of tomorrow I'll have a working PC again, always assuming I can install Windows without anything else going wrong.

If not, I'll be posting from the laptop again, like I did yesterday.

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

So we're really doing this? Okay, then. I asked Gemini a question. Gemini answered it. I summarised the answer. And that's that.