Tunes? We Don' Need No Stinkin' Tunes!

Well, it had to end sometime. For once, I didn't forget. I just had too many other posts to write. But here we are again, a week late and, for wonder, no more to cull than ever. A couple of dozen in the bank. About half of them won't make it. Place your bets now.

I don't really like this part much. It's like... no it's not. Let's not get over-dramatic. It's like being offered a tray of cakes and only being allowed to choose one. Or in this case, a dozen. But who can eat a dozen cakes?

The real problem isn't the culling, it's that the longer I leave this each time, the harder it is to remember the tunes. This is supposed to be all about what I've been listening to - it's in the label ffs - but if I was going to be true to that brief, every post for the last eighteen months would have been ninety per cent of my own making. My own songs are almost all I listen to most days and most days I listen to plenty of them. I mean, I have enough now for at least twenty albums...

But no-one wants to hear that and my appetite for discovery is undiminished. I spend as much time as ever hunting down new tunes. It's more that, where I used to come to these posts with a folder of songs I'd heard at least two or three times, often more, now it's mostly only once, the time I found it and bookmarked it. 

My process now (Don't you just curl up inside and wither, any time you hear someone start to lay out their "process"?) is 

• look in the folder
• pick something 
• play it again on YouTube long enough to remember it 
• select or reject 
• repeat until empty.

Also programming, of course. Programming is always fun.  

It's a different process to how it used to be and maybe not as organic. Let me give a full disclosure notice: of this batch of twenty-three I can remember eight with some clarity. Of those seven, I can remember the actual tunes (The chorus, usually. Sometimes a riff.) of just three. 

Then again, to be scrupulously fair, quite a lot of them don't really have tunes, as you'll soon hear. Tunes seem to be increasingly optional in popular music. As does popularity. Or music...

Does all of this invalidate the feature? Not really. It's a discomfiting fact that all through the time I've been putting up these posts, I rarely could remember even a third of the tunes without reminding myself with a re-listen. If I leaf through my my back pages, as I quite often do, most of the music posts are filled with names I barely recognize, let alone the songs. 

But then, it's not about longevity, is it? And certainly not familiarity. Or not mostly. It's about excitement, discovery and novelty. The posts where my percentage recognition skyrockets are the ones stuffed with old faithfuls. I can remember the tunes of the Lanas and Sunday 1994s and Olivias and the rest of the regulars alright (I'd put Blondshell in there but as we all know, Sabrina doesn't really do tunes.) but it would be a sad old feature if I just went around and around my favorites twice a month. Wouldn't it?  

Anyway, enough about my process. Let's have some tunes. We can all discover them together.

JUST MONIKA: A DDLC song
[by Random Encounters] (feat. OR3O & Adriana Figueroa)

OMG! Thank you astryuuna! 

Provenance: Astryuuna posted a fourteen second clip of herself, under the title PSA, in which she appears out of the dark to ask "Hey! it's 10pm. Do you know where your children are?". She also linked to a four second clip of her in near-darkness, saying something indecipherable in Spanish. She was clearly in cosplay as someone, as she almost always is, and for once I thought it might be someone I'd seen but since I have no visual memory I couldn't work out who.

Luckily, everyone else in the comments could. Plus she'd typed JUST MONIKA three hundred and eighty-four times in the description. (Yes, I counted them.). So I typed JUST MONIKA into YouTube and this video came up.

Forty-seven million views it's got. In eight years. So much out there. It's been in my head ever since. Now it can be in yours. 

I might post the astryuuna videos for Halloween. Oh, wait... that's tomorrow! Well then, I guess this is my Halloween gift to you, a day early. 

And since it's Halloween...

 Halo Jelly - R. Missing

Every R. Missing song is Halloween-appropriate. She really knocks them out, too. I only post maybe one in five, if that. They all sound the same and none of them have tunes. Don't you love that? 

I love that.

 Dogs - Land of Talk

We had a cat so balance requires some dogs next. Not a cover of the Who classic, sadly. That one has a tune. 

Hey, I'm really leaning into the whole "no tunes" thing now, aren't I? It's like listening to the new music show on Radio 6!

 this will be the last time - if i was a pony

So, how did I find this lot? Well, they have "pony" in their name, which is one of my big signifiers, so I might well have stumbled across them organically but in fact I was following a breadcrumb trail that started with...

D'you know, I actually have already forgotten where it started. That is so awkward. I'm going to give credit to Chasing Fridays, which is where I read the article on laptop twee but I don't think that was where I first came across the name of this new sub-genre. Of course, now I'm primed to notice it, I'm seeing "laptop twee" all over the place.

Laptop twee itself isn't new. It's been around long enough to have a Wikipedia page. According to that, apparently I've been listening to it for a while without knowing: Feeble Little Horse, the Femcels, Bassvictim... all familiar names around here. 

Trending Raps, the Instagram page that Chasing Fridays piece links to for authority, calls laptop twee a "crossover between indie and electronic music". A fuller gloss goes "Blending the sweetness of twee pop and 2000s indie with glitchy electronic production, laptop twee brings together intimate vocals, homemade recordings, acoustic textures and digital experimentation." Sounds like a lot of stuff I've already been listening to, only I didn't know it had a name.

From those sources, I got a few examples, quite a few of them already known to me, but instead of link-hopping I went to YouTube and just typed in "laptop twee". Didn't get me as much as I expected but it got me the Laptop Twee Starter Pack, so I'm good for now. 

I've got more of this stuff that's not in those links, too, but how much do we want? 

Well, we want this one...

 gold teeth - horse laugh

Is that laptop twee? I don't fucking know! I mean, it might as well be and it was in with the rest but I can't remember how I even found it. It has, like, 150 views on YouTube. But then, Worldpeace DMT, who are close to the best-known act in the genre as far as I can mark it, only get a few thousand. Maybe no-one who cares uses YouTube any more. Is YouTube for old people now?

 

 Ivy - Worldpeace DMT

Genres are weird, anyway. I quite like Worldpeace DMT, as it goes, but I mean, this is just folk music, isn't it? And Ivy is singer-songwriter with occasional distortion. Great videos, though.

I seem to have screwed myself over with all this laptop twee musing. I knew it should have been a post all its own. Let's see if I can wrangle this pony back into the paddock.

 CATWOMAN - Doechii

I can see that one's gonna blow up...

Also, is that Al Pacino she's doing there?

 Where Is Gone? (with Rosalia) - Fontaines DC

Talking of songs with no tunes, that's the whole of the new Fontaines DC album, if you believe the internet. This is on it. Does it have a tune? Judge for yourself.

My friend has been plugging Rosalia to me for a while now. And to Mrs. Bhagpuss, who now has the latest album on her wishlist, I notice. I don't know what it is about female singers with just one name that begins with R but somehow I have an internal resistance to them. Rihanna, Rosalia, Robyn...

Oh, but look who's here!

 Popstar/Punkrocker - Robyn

Just need something by Rihanna now. Maybe next time.

I prefer that mashup to either of the originals, too. That lack of affect just does me. And that's a prime example of a super-catchy tune that isn't really a tune at all. It's damn near all on one note...

 Valery (Please don't be mad at me)

Caroline Rose

Absolutely the best title of the week.  As you'd expect from someone who names their album "Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall". Giving me strong Brenda Kahn vibes with a side order of Angel Corpus Christie. I just wishlisted the CD.

Hystérique  - yeule

Apparently this is yeule going mainstream. Well, pop, at least. Or so I read...

I'd bookmarked the official audio but as I was grabbing the YouTube link I saw someone had done a lyric video so that's what we got. It's a whole other song when you know what she's singing about. Although whether those are the right words is anyone's guess. I still can't pick them out past all that processing.

Two more for a Halloween Thirteen and I'm out.

 don't tell me we've grown apart - Grolth

Is this laptop twee? I thought we were done with that for today but, I mean, if it isn't, it might as well be. I can't remember how I found it now, anyway. 

Good though, isn't it?

 Ghost Rider - PARTY DOZEN

We've had PARTY DOZEN before I think. Pretty sure, actually. It's not like there are a lot of drums/sax duos out there and I've definitely posted at least one already. I had their new one bookmarked but this is a lot more seasonally appropriate.

And with that I shall leave you. Don't, as they say, have nightmares.