Every Bookmark Tells A Story

Looking at the songs I've bookmarked since the last time I did this, I'm wondering If I might have had an agenda. Some are just really good songs, or songs I really like, or new songs by people I favor, but several I've clearly noted down because I had some sort of point to make or because I thought I might hang some anecdote or story from them. 

Is that good? Does it suggest some sort of structure or - god forbid - plan? Dunno. I guess... just pull a few up and see what happens?

Supergirl - Springbok Nude Girls

That's a place to start, isn't it? Blimey, charlie! I'm guessing no-one's heard of the band unless I have any readers in South Africa, which is where they're from and where they were, as far as I can gather, quite well-known at one time. 

I'd never heard of them until a week ago. You might assume, with good reason, I only discovered they existed because of the title, which would clearly have caught my interest. I mean, I have an entire blog dedicated to the Maid of Steel in my feeds... (I thought it was in the blogroll as well but it's not... it is now!)

That's not how it happened. Something else by them came up, purely at the whim of the algorithm, and unsurprisingly I found the band's name click-worthy. I mean who wouldn't? Presumably that's why they picked it. 

With some trepidation I clicked on it and it turned out to be an alt-rock band in the vein of, oh, I don't know... Faith No More, maybe? Eleventh Dream Day?  Even The Church, dare I say it? Something in that area. 

I do have a weakness for that kind of ragged, blissed-out braggadocio so I carried on listening and it was pretty good. That track wasn't Supergirl, it was Blue Eyes, which I think is their best-known song in their homeland, which is presumably the only place any of their songs are well-known. I liked it enough to see what else they'd done and that was how I came across Supergirl. Once found it I obviously had to be heard and now here we are, all listening to it together.

As to whether it has anything to do with the actual Supergirl, I have no idea. If anyone can make out the words, perhaps you'd like to let the rest of us know what they're about. The lyrics aren't anywhere online that I can find. I bet it has nothing to do with Kara Zor-El, though.

Tell me I never knew that

caroline ft. Caroline Polachek

Looks like I'm doing all the ones with a story attached first... Okay then.

So, Last week I was reading a really good novel by Holly Brickley called Deep Cuts.  It's out in hardback and I'd seen it a few times at work without thinking much about it until one day at lunch I noticed a proof of it lying around, which had presumably been there for a few months at least. I picked it up out of curiosity and read on the blurb that it used the "indie sleaze" era of the noughties as a setting, a period I slept through, musically-speaking, thanks to EverQuest, but which I'm now starting to rediscover for myself with all the inauthentic fervor of any young person mining a golden age for nuggets. The irony is stifling.

It's a very good novel. I wholly recommend it. Since I read the proof, not the published version, I'm legally obliged neither to review it or quote from it (Says so right on the cover.) but I doubt Harper Collins are going to sue me for saying it's a great read with relatable characters and a lot of very interesting background detail about the period. Also a huge number of specific songs get mentioned, many of them very good. I'm thinking of doing a YouTube playlist of them all. 

Anyway, the story features the formation of a band called Caroline and when the main character hears that's what they're going to call themselves... let's say she doesn't think it's a great idea. But it's the name of the lead singer's dead mother so she really can't say much against it. 

I don't know why caroline called themselves caroline or why they chose not to capitalize but it was weird that they turned up in my recommends at the same time I was reading the book. I listened to the song because of that but I'd most likely have listened to it anyway because of Caroline Polachek's involvement. I don't know if the band would want to hear it or not but the song really goes somewhere else, somewhere better, when she comes in.

In Heaven - Princess Chelsea

This is a cover of the song from Eraserhead sometimes known as the Lady in the Radiator Song. It's Princess Chelsea's tribute to the late David Lynch and it absolutely does the great man justice. Princess Chelsea can do no wrong.

I'm a very poor example of a David Lynch fan. If asked, before he died, I would have said he was one of my favorite film-makers. Still would, actually, although now I've had cause to think about it I'm not convinced it's a justifiable position for me to take. After all, how many of his movies have I even seen?

Not many. Blue Velvet, which made a huge impression on me and did quite a lot to shape my taste in cinema back in the eighties. Wild at Heart, which ditto. And Fire: Walk With Me, of course, but that's Twin Peaks at the movies. Apart from that, though... well, I own Mulholland Drive but I haven't watched it. 

I've never seen his most commercially successful movie, The Elephant Man, or his big-budget mainstream miss, Dune, and I've only seen part of Eraserhead, late one night, when I came home and switched the TV on and there it was, half-way done. Most of my reverence for Lynch comes from his TV work with Twin Peaks, not so much from the movies.

And this sounds straight out of Twin Peaks. Which is great!

Laid - Miya Folick (James cover)

Another cover. Seems I've given up on saving the good ones for covers posts. Probably just as well.

For some reason, every time I see Miya Folick's name I think she's one of the actors out of Stranger Things. That, in fact, is pretty much the only reason I clicked on this, when it came up as a recommendation. It certainly wasn't because of James. I don't like James.

Miya Folick is not in Stranger Things and if I was going to be less hipster about it, I probably do like James. I mean, I don't want to like them and I for sure don't want to admit to liking them but I do perk up when I hear one of their big, rollicking, singalong refrains and they are the sound of good times in the sunshine, so it seems a bit churlish to pretend I don't appreciate it.

That, though, is where covers are the hipster's friend. They allow people who are too cool to like people who aren't cool enough and to enjoy things that are popular without it looking too much like that's what they're doing. So, thanks Miya, for not being in a super-popular TV show and for covering a very catchy song I'd otherwise not be listening to right now.

 Kratom Headache Girls Night - Asher White

I only listened to this in the first place because of the odd title and the first thing I did after I'd heard it was google what "Kratom" meant. So now I have that in my search history. Thanks Asher.

There was a time when I'd have known but that time was long ago. I don't even like it any more when my thoughts aren't entirely mine. Funny, that. When I was an adolescent it was close to my dream, to get out of my head, even though I was always comfortable enough inside it. It was never a desire to escape from anything, more a wish to find a way to somewhere else, somewhere interesting things might be happening.

Later, when it had just become a thing we did, the thing I did, the thing that made the world a more interesting place for me, was to sharpen it, not warp or hide or reshape it. And now I just prefer to leave it as it is and work around the parts I don't like. I don't even drink any more. Well, barely ever. Like a couple of times a year.

I'm not going to be giving Kratom a go, that's what I'm saying. Especially if it's going to give me a headache. 

Also, parts of the melody remind me the hell of something else but I can't quite figure what it is. Driving me nuts...

Personal Film Reel - Izzy Provenzano

Getting anyone to look at a YouTube channel is a challenge. Too big a challenge for most people. Almost all videos that get uploaded - nearly fifteen billion by now - never get watched by anyone. Well, okay, not quite, because the person who uploaded them probably watched them once or twice, just to check they were working. 

In fact, according to a recent BBC investigation, the median is 41 views. Getting past 130 puts you into the top third of watched content. I have several with that distinction although not on the new channel. I still have a final post to write about my AI Music Project and that's on setting up the YouTube channel for it. I won't pre-empt it here but I'll just say that it's my dream to have 41 views for anything I've posted there.

One thing making the channel has tipped me to is the extreme difficulty of getting any kind of traction at all. It's not just me. I've started to pay attention to how many views some of the videos I watch are getting and it varies wildly. 

I've long had a predilection for posting obscurities here, artists and songs and videos that have been on YouTube for a while - years, often - and still have hardly any views, even though they're excellent in some way or other. It doesn't surprise me that there's truly great work going unseen. What I hadn't noticed and what does surprise me is that many of the songs I'm finding through reviews or news items on the likes of Pitchfork, Stereogum or NME also have extremely low view counts, even after a few weeks. 

More surprising still are the relatively tiny viewing numbers for new videos by bands whose names I see cropping up often, working bands who get played on the radio and draw audiences at clubs or in small tents at festivals. Sometimes, not that uncommonly, they have fewer views by a margin than their channels have subscribers.

The Asher White track, for example, which I saw promoted on at least two large music sites, has managed just 800 views in two weeks. The official video for Witch Post's magnificent single The Wolf has four thousand views after a month and they're a real buzz band in certain circles just now. As for Izzy Provenzano, who put that rather professional video together, it's been a week and thirty-four views. 

Something's killing video stars and I doubt it's the radio.

Caterpillar - Florence Road

If we're talking buzz bands... 

I've seen them compared to the early Cranberries. Actually, I've seen it said that the two are all but indistinguishable. Seems odd to me. I never liked the Cranberries but I like Florence Road. It's certainly a very old-fashioned sound, though. The Cranberries were definitively '90s but this sounds almost seventies at times. 

Well, that was succinct for a change. Let's see if I can keep it up and get a few more in before the end.

 Headphones On - Addison Rae

Here's someone who doesn't starve for views. 2.3m in two weeks. Until very recently I wasn't aware Addison Rae was a TikTok graduate. I mean, I know all music comes to us through a TikTok filter now but she actually was a TikTok star with a huge following (88m) before she started acting, then singing. She's been mega-famous for more than five years but the first time I paid any attention to her was with Diet Pepsi, which I loved.

I love this one, too, especially that two-note whine at the end, which reminds me so stirringly of Venice Bitch. I could hear that used a lot more. I seriously do not care if people were influencers or reality TV stars or if they're industry plants or nepo babies. Who gives a fuck? It's all about the work, or it should be, and if the work is as good as this...

 What Was That - Lorde

Been a while since I liked a Lorde song. I wanted to like Solar Power but I really didn't, much. Then there was the stunning collab with CharliXCX and suddenly she's right back. This feels new and desperate in the best way. And since I've been talking numbers - 2.8m views in a week.

She's back, alright.

Poplife - umru & underscores

I really wanted to end with Model/Actriz' latest, Diva and ElleBarbara doing Operating Thetan: Unknown because they're bangers but neither has a video yet and it seems like a lame way to finish, with statics. Do click through, though.

Instead, I'm going with the ever-reliable underscores followed by Lexie Liu for an all-pop ending that's really no pop at all. Well, pop-art, maybe.

Pop Girl - Lexie Liu

And with that, we're done. A few didn't make the cut but maybe they will next time. Music isn't milk, after all. It doesn't go off just because you leave it standing around for a while.

The Past Is Always With Me

Thanks to spending all my time leafing through my own musical back pages these last couple of weeks, I don't have a huge amount of new music by anyone else to share. Neither do I have a lot of random items of interest bookmarked for bullet point analysis.

I do have a few of each though. Time for a bit of the old mix and match!

Let's open with a tune, why not? 

Bonnet Of Pins - Matt Berninger

I've never paid much attention to The National. No, that's not fair. I've never paid any attention to The National. They were the favorite band of someone I used to work with and if she hadn't mentioned them a few times, I'm not sure I'd ever have noticed they existed. Based on this magisterial performance by the band's lead singer I seriously need to take a look at the back catalog. 

This is magnificent stuff of its kind, which sounds dismissive, now I read it back. Not what I meant at all. What I did mean is, this is the kind of thing too many people take a run at and miss. Hard to describe, the rolling, building, tumbling, white-water force of all those words and sounds, rushing towards the moment where it's jump or be swept away. Get it wrong and you're the Waterboys.  Or worse - much, much worse - the Alarm. Matt doesn't get it wrong.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things #4382

I'll follow that with just a brief mention of the most dispiriting musical story that won't get out of my feeds. Just this morning I was greeted by the deeply depressing news that a Seoul court has granted management company ADOR's injunction, prohibiting the members of K-Pop band New Jeans from "pursuing independent activities" under their new name, NJZ.

K-Pop can be a bit of a culture shock all round, what with band members having to text pictures of their lunch to their managers before they're allowed to eat any of it, but this farrago has really exposed the feral nature of the process. About the best possible spin you could put on it would be to call it indentured labor. If you wanted to be hyperbolic you might start throwing around expressions like slave labor.  

However you define it, it's extremely unsavory and goes straight into the "Things Up With Which We Shall Not Put" barrel. Except, of course, we all do put up with it, like we put up with all the rest of the bad stuff that lies behind our hedonistic pleasures and our idle fancies. There is no love in this world any more, as Pete Shelly told us all the way back in 1979. Not got any better, has it?

Also, I'd forgotten just how long that Buzzcocks track is. Over seven minutes! So much for the myth of all punk songs coming in under three minutes, eh? I mean, I was there and even I get fooled by that one.

Of course, I wouldn't even be mentioning any of this if it wasn't happening to the only K-Pop band I really like, would I? It's all about me as usual

Except it's not at all about me, is it? I'm not helping. I didn't even sign the petition, not that anyone asked me. 

Fight the power, girls! Easy for me to say. Weird how guilt makes you feel complicit, isn't it? And don't I ask a lot of rhetorical questions?

WE'RE ALL MADE OF STARS

 Miami Horror (Feat. Telenova)

Of course, as the disclaimers have it, other views are available. "You can be anything you want" says... erm... Miami Horror. Are you quite sure that's the name you want to go with?

This is one of those ones where watching the video changes the entire impact of the track. In audio only, it's an uplifting anthem that leaves you feeling high on life. The images turn it into something wholly other. Worth watching all the way through - well, not the credits, maybe. Nothing clever happens at the end of those. It's not a Marvel movie.

Obviously I came to this by way of the excellent Telenova, which is why algorithms are our friends. Sometimes, anyway, but we'll get to that later. Time for some gaming news.

Play To Earn Is Real, Y'All!

Look, don't shoot me. I'm only the aggregator. I pick this stuff up, I pass it on. I didn't come here with the intention of harshing everyone's mellow. I have to work with what I've got.

Have a read of this. Too busy? Okay, I'll pull out a few choice snips:

"50% of mobile players have now received a reward with real monetary value from a smartphone game"

"72% of that group say real-world rewards are now "important" when it comes to them selecting a new mobile game to download"

“What we are currently seeing is real-time transformation in how gamers choose what they play based on rewards"

The rewards we're talking about here are things like "cash, Amazon credit, or payouts of other currencies of real-world value" and players are getting them for "reaching particular stages or achieving certain tasks within a game".

It turns out that if you give people credit they can spend in regular shops rather than bizarro world crypto crap you can't spend anywhere, people really will Play To Earn. As the article concludes 

"It’s a total rewrite of how and why users engage with gaming content"

Just what we wanted, eh? And if it's working in mobile, you can guess where it's coming next...

 Locals (Girls like us)[with gabby start]  - underscores

I heap a lot of praise on the YouTube algorithm these days but I have some bones to pick with it, too. Like, how come it never told me about underscores before? She's a big deal, too. I mean, just look at the size of her Wikipedia page!

YT didn't bring me to this one, either. I got to it old school, through a link on a virtual inky. Can't remember which one. NME? Ah, apparently I can remember!  Score one for my short-term!

Anyway, Alice Harper Grey is on my radar now. I have her very highly-rated album Wallsocket cued up, ready to listen to. I imagine posts will get written to that one although first I need to watch it, since she's also done it as a single-continuous-shot video. 

At least I think that's what it is. I mean, I didn't check the whole fifty-five minutes for cuts but it looks like that's what she's done. Look, get off my case, alright?

Would You Trust Netflix With Your MMO?

That article about underscores I just linked claims she's "turning her focus to emotion and comfort" so maybe she'll be in the target market for Spry Fox's upcoming cosy MMO, Spirit Crossing. 

I'm not sure I am. I'm having some issues with cosy games. A couple of years ago, I thought they sounded like they'd be right up my queit, leafy, sleepy suburban avenue but that was before I'd played any. They can be kinda... boring, can't they? Nothing really happens. And then it doesn't happen some more.

This one does sound good, though. According to MMOBomb "The game will offer most of the things players associate with cozy games such as exploration, crafting, and customizable housing", which does sound great. And MassivelyOP reckon the promo video makes it look like “Miyazaki Palia.”, which certainly sounds like it'd be an improvement on regular Palia.

Netflix, though... they don't exactly have the best rep for patience, do they? Or sticking with things for more than five minutes. These days their brand is virtually shorthand for "Second season cancellation".  Can anyone see them keeping a low-key, niche-market, borderline profitable  MMORPG chugging along year after year after year? Because that's the business model.

Then again, maybe Spirit Crossing will be the next Animal Crossing. Look at the name. Can't be a co-incidence. That'd keep it safe from Netflix Cancellation Dept. for at least... well... erm.... Nope, not seeing much of a long-term future for this one. 

And that's it for news stories. Let's wind things up with some tunes. Three, to be precise: one original and two covers. 

Gumshoe (Dracula from Arkansas) 

Youth Lagoon

All the good stuff, there. Distorted vocals, lyrics that sound like they'd be fascinating if you could only hear them, glitching Super-8 home movies, lyrical interludes, interpolated found footage, sampled speech...

If I was, oh, I don't know... thirty-five? Forty? this might be the sort of thing I'd want to be doing. It's not the work of a young person, that's for sure. (If I was a bona fide Young Person I'd more likely be doing something like this.)  

Youth Lagoon aka Trevor Powers, which explains why he took a stage name I guess, is thirty-six. I think this sounds like something someone a tad older might have made but he's been doing much the same thing for a decade and a half so it shows what I know.  

There's not much of his very old stuff on his channel. Maybe he wants to move on. This is eleven years old so he'd have been twenty-five when he made it. Feels like the work of someone older, sonically and visually. 

These things are hard to quantify, though. Mrs Bhagpuss and I were talking about cool the other day; what it is, whether it still has currency. I was suggesting I'd seen a strong recurrence of the kind of cool we grew up with and it felt like something more than nostalgia for a time you never knew. I thought it felt like a trend but here it is a decade ago so maybe it never stopped. They do say fashion passes but style is forever.

 Our House - Cream Flower (Original CSNY)

Case in point re that old anemoia we all love so much. Cream Flower, a two-person band (Remember when we called those "Duos"? How sweet and innocent we were, once...) from Manila, are very hard to find out anything about but looking at the pictures on their Soundcloud page I guess they look about, what, mid-twenties?

If so, Our House, would have first come out around three decades before they were born. The song was a centerpiece of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's seminal 1970 album Déjà Vu, which was itself a cornerstone of the then-burgeoning hippie nostalgia boom. The folk-rock supergroup were looking back fondly to the kind of life they imagined their parents might have led, had several wars and objective reality not got in the way. 

So, we have one bunch of twenty-something in the twenty-first century getting all warm and fuzzy over another bunch of twenty-somethings thirty years ago, who were getting all warm and fuzzy over something that probably never even  happened several decades before that. 

Good though, isn't it? And so are Cream Flower. That Manila indie scene really is something.

Can You Feel My Heart (Incorporating Heart-Shaped Box)  

Fontaines D.C. (Originals Bring Me The Horizon/Nirvana)

Geez. That's a mouthful. And an attribution minefield. Can't help feel they missed a trick not calling it Can You Feel My Heart-Shaped Box? Although maybe that doesn't quite set the right tone...

It does feel like picking low-hanging fruit, featuring the Fontaines on the blog yet again. Right now, they can't seem to put a foot wrong. Sorry. Bad choice of words.

Grian Chatten gets all the focus as the lead singer and he has got a very distinctive voice, it's true, but I can't help noticing how really very good the backing vocals are, particularly from Conor Deegan, known to the fans as Deego. Backing vocals are generally underrated in most bands but these really matter.

This is one of those covers where it might as well be a brand new song to me. I've never heard the BMTH original and although Heart-Shaped Box is super-well-known, I couldn't hum it at gunpoint. The only Nirvana album I own is the Unplugged one. I wasn't a big grunge fan back when it was big although I have a lot of time for some of the bands coming along right now who claim its influence. Same goes for drum'n'bass, techno, rave...

Hmm. Might be a post in that.

Blue Notes

It's been too long since the last one so here's a music post for Friday. For me, Saturday's the better day but this needs to get done and I don't have any better options so...

Listening of late has been... odd. I do tend to get caught up in the folds sometimes and this has definitely been one of those weeks. Fortnights. Whatever.

I could fill this post with what I've genuinely been listening to or I could go with all those interesting and/or excellent tunes I've been bookmarking as I come across them in my feeds. Problem there is that although I must have thought them all well worth sharing at the time, I can't say with any conviction I've actually listened to many of them more than once or twice.

Hmm. Decisions, decisions...

Of course, you know what the answer's going to be. All of it. Could be a long post.

Let's start with the sound that has no name. Well, I imagine it does but I don't know what that name would be. I'll try to describe it: pale, quiet, delicate music made by pale, quiet, delicate people, the kind who find bedroom pop just too brash and noisy. 

Some of it gets tagged as "ambient" or "lo fi ambient" but my definition of ambient music won't stretch as far as acoustic guitars and singing. I don't know about yours. There's some technological leakage here and there but always discreetly done. Glitchcore and hyperpop this is not.

There's clearly some sort of a scene going on because half the songs I've listened to are people covering other people doing the same thing. Also a lot of covers of better-known bands that tend to sound not much like the originals. 

It vaguely reminds me of the anti-folk movement of the noughties and twenty-teens but those guys went out to clubs and played gigs and met each other face-to-face. I get the impression these guys don't.

At least two of them definitely have met though because now they're a couple. They make songs together, appear in each others' videos and leave love notes in their mutual comments on YouTube. I know but it's sweet. Really, it is. If there's one thing entirely absent from this scene, whatever it is, it's cynicism, so I'll thank you to leave yours at the door.

Enough talk. Let's listen. I warn you, this is going to be a relatively low-energy start to a music post, but I'll do what I can.

 Algernoon - nickateen

Nickateen was my gateway drug to whatever the hell this microgenre is, although I'm not entirely sure they're a part of it. Also I have not the least clue now how I got to Nickateen in the first place. I guess I probably clicked on a link out of curiosity thanks to the title and things went from there.

I'm also not at all sure in retrospect that nickateen is even part of the clique I'm struggling to define. They're a bit more literary, a bit more glitchy. It is the source of the links that took me into the rest of it, though, so I guess they have some denominator in common, at least in the mind of the YT algorithm.

The striking opening is Sylvia Plath reading her own poem November Graveyard, which is a bravura move if ever there was one. The rest of the lyrics have something to do with Daniel Keyes' disturbing novel Flowers for Algernon, or possibly the movie that was made of it.

Actually, Flowers for Algernon has been adapted for so many media over the years - movies, TV, stage, musicals, radio - that who knows how nickateen found it? Or cares. It's just great they did because this is what we got and we're lucky to have it. 

That movie clip is quite distracting, though. I'm guessing it's Jean-Luc Godard. It usually is.

 gun girl - nickateen

Once I'd heard Algernoon I went straight to nick's back catalog and listened to everything they'd done. Didn't take long. There were only six songs. Every one of them is wonderful though. I hope there are going to be more some day.

No video for this one but with soundscapes like these, who needs moving pictures?

what may have been 

@mirandarain//@myheadisempty

Isn't that just the most soothing thing you ever heard? And the video is so incredibly wholesome, with the dog and the cuddling and all. Yet somehow it manages to be quite spooky, too - in a really nice way. 

It's so calming. I listened to it twice as I was typing this and I literally felt my blood pressure dropping. That's the defining feature of this sound, I think. That and sadness.

Let's have some more from just miranda on her own. She's the less prolific of the two. Her channel on YouTube only goes back a couple of years. myheadisempty's goes all the way back to 2010 but I think a lot of it is actual ambient stuff, which doesn't do much for me other than put me into a daze.

a letter to the person i used to be -  miranda rain

miranda only has seventeen videos on her YouTube channel and ten of those are covers. Her most recent work is all either originals or collabs with her beau, though, and she has a lot of socials so this may not be everything.

It's extremely hard to gauge how "successful" or "famous" these performers are. Traditional measures don't really apply. miranda has only a little over a thousand YT subscribers and on her channel most of her videos only have a couple of thousand views at most. That very much makes it sound as though she's incredibly obscure and unknown.

myheadisempty, however, her partner and collaborator, is very much better known. He's been posting music for fifteen years, he has more than 170k subscribers and some of his songs have over ten million views. One of the songs he and miranda have recorded together, a way out - has a quarter of a million views on his own channel and just over a milion on another. I don't know what counts as success these days but if I'd made something that a million people had listened to I think I'd claim it.

if u wanna stay - miranda rain (sweatcult cover)

A couple of covers from miranda rain and we'll move on. This is a song by Sweatcult, of whom I'd not previously heard. I had heard of softcult and at first I thought it was them but it's not. 

If U Wanna Stay, which the people who wrote it capitalize normally so now I really don't know which version to go with, looks to be their best-loved song with almost 18m plays on Spotify and 3.3m views on YouTube. miranda's cover is waaay better than the original for my money, mostly because the Sweatcult singer has a really grating voice.

an art gallery could never be as magnificent as you 

 miranda rain (Scruffpuppie cover)

The original is even more downbeat than the cover, if you can imagine that. (You don't have to imagine it. Here it is. Listen for yourself.)

I was taken by the title, as who wouldn't be, but I was more than somewhat surprised to find out there's at least one other song with almost exactly the same name: An Art Gallery Could Never Be As Unique As You by mrld. Can that be a co-incidence? Maybe it's a quote but I don't know what from if it is. Then again, no-one ever knows what my quotes are from so I oughtn't to complain.

Warsh_Tippy and Zelda - Whatever, Dad

And finally in this part of the program, something of a classic of the genre, I think. Whatever, Dad is the name of one of Eliza Santos' many projects and it feels like the forerunner or maybe the progenitor of this whole thing. 

There's a Reddit thread from six years ago where someone's asking "if this is like a genre" so they can go search for more of it. They don't get much in the way of a meaningful answer, just much the same touchstones and suggestions I came up with myself. I guess we'll just have to settle for calling it music.

Time to switch tracks, I think. Always assuming anyone's still awake. Seriously, all of these songs should come with one of those "Don't listen while driving or operating heavy machinery" warnings.

Transparent - Claire days

Okay, not such a leap, I'll grant you but I didn't want to give anyone whiplash. We'll slde over gently.

Typography is crazy these days, isn't it? I had a whole bit about it up there near the begining, where you might have noticed the capitalization is all over the sodding place, but I took it out for reasons of flow. I feel I really have to say something about it now, though, because if I don't it's just going to look like I mistyped Claire days name and never noticed. 

No, that's how she styles herself. All the typography here is taken straight from the named artists' channels or Bandcamp or website or wherever. I love the energy but it's hell to transcribe sometimes.

Anxiety - Doechii

Someone we've heard of! About time! Doechii has been getting a lot of attention lately, all of it very much deserved. I had her previous single, DENIAL IS A RIVER (For some reason it's all caps but let's just not...) bookmarked to showcase here but somehow it never happened. 

Know what? I like that one even better than Anxiety so let's have it too.

DENIAL IS A RIVER - Doechii

Now that sounds really old-school to me. It's the exact strand of hip-hop that I love and she does it brilliantly but I'm not exactly sure why it's being treated as something so new. It sounds super-90s to my untrained ears.

She has amazing stage presence, though. That might have something to do with it. I watched a whole festival set she did the other day and she was mesmerizing. She's headlining the West Holts stage at Glastonbury on Saturday this year, at the exact same time Charli XCX will be topping the bill on the Other Stage. I'm only going to be sitting here at home watching it on TV and even I'm annoyed by the scheduling, which is intentional to stop either stage being overwhelmed. Gonna be a real Battle of the Bands except without the bands.

 Towards Horses - Real Lies

Talking of things that remind me of other things and other times.... 

Bloody goes though, doesn't it?

One more by Real Lies to drive the point home. This one's got a video.

 An Oral History Of My First Kiss - Real Lies

They've been around for a while, it seems, although I only came across them a couple of weeks ago. It's one of those names you never really notice, which is fine when you're famous but not so great for getting people to give you a try when you're not. I mean, only this morning I clicked on links for Pure Bathing Culture, Teen Mortgage and Black Moth Super Rainbow, all purely on the strength of their names.

None of them are in the post though, are they? Read into that what you will.

And finally...

 Two Times - Blondshell

If there's a new Blondshell you're going to get it, just like if there's a new Lana. Both of them have albums out this year so get used to it.

And we're done. Thanks for stopping by. Let's do this again in a week or two.

The Past Is A River

And so we come to the music post that lost the coin-flip a week ago: new stuff. Well, new to me. Some of it may not feel all that "new", either artistically or chronologically. Then again, when does it ever?

In terms of time, I've noticed a curious trend in the YouTube algorithm of late. As has been noted by many, many commenters in the threads I've read, YT has started recommending videos with low viewing numbers from its earliest days. Things that have been sitting there all this time, seen by hardly anyone. Songs and performances that first appeared on the platform seventeen years ago, just after it became available to the public, but which have barely managed to scrape a couple of thousand views since then. 

Obscure oldies have been popping up as recommends for months and people seem to love it. In fact, contrary to how it was a few years ago, when the algorithm was widely held in contempt, these days I see nothing but praise for the way it's introducing new viewers and listeners to things they never knew existed. Thread after thread, packed with comments from people either thanking the algorithm for sending them there or blessing their luck, as fits their worldview.

I've certainly discovered a few things from 2005-7 that I had no idea were there but which I'm very glad to have been shown. I might collect some of  those up for a post of their own some time but today I'm going to focus on another highly positive aspect of the algorithm - the way it consistently introduces me to bands and solo artists I hope to go on listening to for years.

I think that's also changed. I've been using YouTube as a discovery mechanism for music for at least a decade now and my memory of much of that time is that the process used to be quite hit-and-miss. I had to flip through a lot of suggestions that didn't interest me to find something that did. 

I won't say I had to sift a lot of dross to find gold because the older I get, the more I come around to the idea that most things have  some gold in them, somewhere - it just isn't always valuable to me. It remember searching for it being heavy going at times, though.

Of late, by which I probably mean in the last twelve months or maybe a little less, the hit rate does seem to have improved. A lot. That's partly why I have such a ridiculous backlog of music I want to share. I'm finding more to my taste in general and specifically, more people who consistently produce work I like. 

That could be down to improvements in the algorithm. It could also be that what I choose to watch on YouTube has become more coherent, providing the algorithm with a better purchase on my tastes and preferences. 

Not that I make it easy for them. I never "Like" anything on the platform or indeed on any social media so that ready checklist doesn't exist. Even without my marking up my favorites, though, I imagine the algorithm has access to my full viewing history, including how many times I've watched a video and whether I watched it all the way through or gave up after a few seconds. 

Is it sophisticated enough to extrapolate my likes and dislikes from that? Who knows? It's certainly the case that the musical suggestions it offers are orders of magnitude more likely to be relevant than the political or topical videos it thinks I might want to see. I virtually never watch anything like that so I imagine it finds it quite hard to get a handle on what might appeal.

It could also be that my focus has narrowed. When YouTube was new and exciting, I used to dot about all over the place, actively seeking out music from around the world, present and past. These days I'm more concerned with drilling down into whatever interests me at the moment, looking for more and better examples of trends I'm following or aiming to expand my understanding of certain genres or styles.

There's also the possibility that increasing use of curated music sites like Pitchfork, Stereogum and NME, along with a few music blogs, has shaped my entry-point into YouTube in such a way as to influence results there. I do tend to use those sites for musical triage, only clicking through to watch videos on YouTube whose descriptions make them seem like things I'd be likely to enjoy or at least find interesting.

Whatever's happening, it's leading me to discover a surprising number of acts and artists I feel I might be listening to for a while, not just in the moment. That's not always been the case, something that becomes uncomfortably apparent as I look back at music posts here only to find I can't even remember some of the songs or acts, let alone what they sound like.

Whether this signifies a permanent shift in the way I listen to and learn about music is impossible to predict. A few months from now I might be doing things completely differently. Or the algorithm might go back to suggesting nothing much I want to hear, like it was doing a few years ago. 

For now, though, here's a post featuring only acts the algorithm has flagged up for me this year, all of which I've found interesting enough to listen to multiple times and whose back catalog I've been happy to explore. I might even go so far as to buy records by some of them. 

Always assuming they make any, that is...

 Stained Glass Window - Sunday (1994)

Absolutely no apologies for opening with Sunday (1994) again. They are, by some distance, the most exciting discovery for me since Blondshell. If we're talking repeat plays, by the way, Blondshell's debut album has no peer. If it was vinyl I'd have worn a hole in it by now.

That said, I'm starting to see a worrying trend in my listening. One in which I am very definitely, as will become apparent later, by no means alone.

I've been assiduous in excising every hint of the all-too-prevalent belief that all the best music just happens to have been made precisely when you yourself were in your teens and early twenties. In side-stepping that trap, however, it appears I may have fallen into another, whereby my brain receives anything that sounds as if it was recorded between 1990-95 as some kind of divine message from the infinite eternal. 

I may need to watch that. Then again, why fight it? The nineties were great, weren't they?

Stained Glass Love - Telenova

This wasn't the Telenova track I was going to use but who could resist the synchronicity? Not me, obviously . It makes a really a good example of the point of this post, though. These are bands and artists from whose repertoire I could pick almost anything at random and expect to get something worth sharing. 

There are lots and lots of examples on this blog of great one-offs by people who never really did anything much else of note. And that's all part of the popular music myth. You only need that one, killer tune and you're made. 

Oddly, I find albums filled with killer tune after killer tune quite difficult to listen to more than a handful of times A band with a sound I love, those I can play forever.

Sometimes it's all about the vibe. Mostly, really.

Money Mullet - The Pill

Case in point! I really can't imagine listening to a whole album by The Pill over and over again. I haven't even played Wet Leg's debut that much, even though I loved every track on it when they all came out separately beforehand. Some bands are just meant to be singles bands. It's a shame singles aren't the driving force they once were. A true singles band is a joy forever. Just so long as you don't try to listen to the albums.

The Actress - Goldie Boutlier

Goldie Boutlier, on the other hand, I could listen to all day. It'd be a rich diet but I can handle it. I've had an appetite for this sort of thing for a while now and I'm very far from sated. As we're about to find out.

Every act so far has featured on the blog already, which is why I'm restraining myself to just the one more by each of them today. We're past that now. Here comes Tiger. I've been listening to a lot of Tiger...

 Living In The 90s - Tiger del Flor

I very much am not the only one to be having nineties' daydreams just now, and here's the headline evidence. I guess it's at least time. Past time, really.

It's hard to remember just how long ago the nineties were. Thirty years to the middle of the decade. What I do, when this sort of thing comes up, which it so often does, is think of myself at fifteen, then project as far back from there as the nostalgic target is from now and see where it lands me. 

I was fifteen in the early-mid '70s so thirty years back would be the fricken' Second World War! It  was literally history as in it's what I was studying for my O- and A-Levels! I sure as hell wasn't wishing I was living there! Or listening to the big band sounds of Glen Miller and his Orchestra!

Geez. No wonder Gen-Z feel nostalgic for the noughties and even the twenty-tens now. Anything further back must seem like the dark ages... 

Time moves so damn fast...

Heaven Is A Harley - Tiger del Flor

Time, they say, is a river but it's also a continuum. Tiger was just telling us how she wished she was living in the nineties but now here she is referencing... what? The fifties? The sixties? All those neon motel signs. And the bikes. They look kind of  '80s although I know nothing about motorbikes.

That's it, though, isn't it? All time is the same time, once it's gone.

James Dean - Tiger del Flor

There's "influenced by" and then there's this. Still, I guess Lana's moved on now, so there's a slot open. Sooner Tiger than a few others who've been eyeing it. 

There's more where those three came from but I'll save them for another time. Count on it.

Scorsese - Viola Odette Harlow

I'm always at least sort of working on a post where all the titles are the names of real people but I keep using the best ones so I never get to finish it. One day.

I just love the distortion on this, by the way. More singers should fuzzy up their vocals. And use megaphones.

Child Actor - Glüme

I haven't switched tracks here. Glüme is Viola Odette Harlow. Also, she was indeed a child actor so we can probably take this as biographical. 

If you google her, the top links come from (Or go to, depending how you see it.) IMDB, where it will tell you "She played Shirley Temple on Broadway and has continue to tap dance all her life. Her dream is to bring back the great American musical." 

Not with tunes like these, she won't. Or we can hope not, anyway. That would just be weird.

 Arthur Miller - Glüme

And she's at it again with the name-checks. She doesn't rate Arthur Miller much, does she? I've had his autobiography, Timebends, for at least forty years but I've never read it. Don't suppose I ever will.

If we're going to talk about the long shadow of the past, let's just think about the fifties for a moment. I spent most of my adolescence surrounded by the trappings of that forlorn but never forgotten decade. It was all over the pop charts and the cinema screens, then. You couldn't get away from it and most of us didn't want to or not entirely. We just wanted to be choosy about which parts we cherry-picked.. 

I went hitch-hiking through France in, what was it? 1977 or '78 and I spent half the trip with rolled-up black and white posters sticking out of my backpack. I bought them in some French store because you couldn't get such cool posters back at home just then or not where I lived anyway. And who was on those posters? James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, of course.

Even then they were both the best part of two decades dead. Now, here we are, both of them in the grave for sixty years and teens and twenties still idolize and fantasize about them just like I did. And love or loathe the people who knew them. 

We live in a palimpsest and the text gets harder to read year by year. I blame Lana. If anyone's made the tragic-heroic past cool again it's her. It's always her. 

 Pretty Youth - Punchbag

Finally, just to break the rules I set for this post, here's a band I've only heard two tunes by. Then again, as far as I can tell, two is all they have! And neither seems to have anything to do with Old Hollywood or the glamor of the past. Then again, it's early days for Punchbag yet...

Here's the other. You'll have to watch it on YouTube, I'm afraid. Some moral guardian seems to have reported it to the authorities. How very 1950s of them.

Fuck It - Punchbag

There's live footage of the band doing a half-hour set so they must have a few more songs, although not that many more, I'd guess. With this kind of energy, they're either going to blow up or implode so enjoy it while it lasts or until you've had more than you can stand.

From here on in I think I'm going to have to blank the record and forget about catching up. It's never going to happen. Next time, I'll start afresh. Doesn't look like there's much chance I'll run short.

The Drugs Don't Work

Remember when I said I was working on a music post that was going to be all songs about drugs? Well, that's not going to happen. I started writing it and it didn't go as well as I expected. For one thing, it turned out I'd already used several of the best songs already. For another, what I had left to work with wasn't as good as I remembered. And worst of all, it didn't really flow.

Believe it or not, I do try to program these music posts, at least a little, so there's a rhythm or a mood or a theme - something that carries you through from one end to the other. It often doesn't work as well as I'd like but this one didn't work at all. So I junked it. It may come back some day, if I get enough new examples worth sharing, which, let's face it, is bound to happpen because if there's one thing musicians like to sing about it's their drug habits. 

Or maybe I'll just do a playlist instead. For now, though, I'm going to go somewhere entirely different, namely back to where I usually go: random stuff I've picked up from here and there over the last week or so and tried to force into some kind of uncomfortable coherency as though I had a plan. 

Good stuff, all of it, I hope. Gotta try and keep those standards up, which frankly was not happening in the drug post. 

There were exceptions, though. Like this one:

(He'll Never Be An) 'Ol Man River
TISM (This Is Serious Mum) 

I'm guessing any readers from Down Under (God, that's such a dated expression now, isn't it?) already know who TISM are. I was going to add "or were" because I thought for a moment they'd broken up but no-one ever truly breaks up any more and then I remembered I'd watched footage of them performing live about a year ago so present tense I guess. I bet no-one reading this outside Australia and maybe New Zealand has even heard of them all the same, regardless of their current status.

Australia is such a weird place, isn't it? Not just because of the really quite very weird stuff that happens there, seemingly all the time, but because of how little news of any of it ever seems to filter out into the wider world. I mean, I get that it's a long way away but we have the internet now and as far as I know the Australian government hasn't banned TikTok yet.

I'd never heard of TISM until a few days ago but I've been digging through their extensive back catalog on YouTube and cross-checking the historical record and from what I can gather they were some kind of big deal in the twenty-teens. I'm not entirely clear if they're a band or a satirical theater troupe. Both, I imagine.

Controversy was or maybe is their lifeblood but this is by no means the most offensive of their songs  I've heard. That's the one coming next, so brace yourselves. As for this one, in case you can't make out the lyrics, although you should have no problem because their enunciation is admirably clear, the chorus goes

"I'm on the drug, I'm on the drug
I'm on the drug that killed River Phoenix"

It's about celebrity deaths and how we all get such a kick out of them, which is hardly a new idea but seldom have I heard it expressed more amusingly and with such force. They don't restrict themselves to drug-related casualties, either - Mama Cass's sandwich gets a mention - but the focus is on the drugs as you can tell from all the jacking-up gestures. Tasteful it is not.

I've Gone Hillsong - TISM

It's a lot more tasteful than this, though. I had absolutely no idea what Hillsong was until I looked it up. It's a "charismatic Christian megachurch" that started in New South Wales and expanded to cover the entire planet, apparently. Except for the bit where I live, thankfully. 

They do say the devil has all the best tunes.

Man Made Of Meat - Viagra Boys

Mrs Bhagpuss likes to amuse herself by pointing out how girly and twee it all sounds every time she walks in and hears me listening to something. Yeah, well, not always! I'm fond of a bit of macho, male posturing now and again, always provided it comes thickly coated in irony. It looks like we're getting an extra-thick ladling today.

Viagra Boys (No definite article, for reasons, presumably.) have the worst name, even allowing for the irony, but they're Swedish so I suppose that gives them a pass. I have an unreasoning suspicion of Scandinavian indie music, something I can't even begin to rationalize, let alone excuse. Any other part of the world and I assume authenticity but anywhere north of Germany and my bullshit detector goes into overdrive. God knows why. I'm going to have to take in to be recalibrated or risk missing out on some very good stuff indeed. 

The Sign of a Man - The Moonlandingz

Not the sign of a man made of meat, presumably. Although the Moonlandingz and Viagra Boys do hit a lot of the same notes. And I don't mean that literally. Or do I?

Pony - The Men

This is just getting silly now. I have been listening to a lot of garage bands lately, though. And I do have a documented musical pony fetish. I mean theory! Musical pony theory!

Gay Bar - Electric Six

Okay, that's the last of these, I promise. And yes, I know it's twenty years old and everyone's heard it before but I hadn't, not until a few days ago, because I have a lost decade at the beginning of the millennium, musically speaking, so anything from about 1999 to 2012 is pretty much new to me.

Also, I have a great cover of it I want to share, when I get around to doing another covers post, so it's a good opportunity to remind everyone of the original.

Hopper's On Top - The Waterboys

Did I lie? I don't think so. I'd call this a transition. It is quite macho but it's mid-tempo. Still, seven in a row with male vocals has to be some kind of house record.

Also, I never thought I'd share a Waterboys track here. I don't much like them and I even more don't like the kind of scene I associate with them. I mean, it's only a couple of steps from there and you're listening to U2. Okay, three steps, let's not be unreasonable.

Mrs Bhagpuss likes them, though. We have one of their CDs in the car. I mean a CD they're on, not one we stole when we were at that party at Mike Scott's house. Which we totally weren't and which never happened. (It didn't happen.) Or did it? (No, it didn't.)

The Whole of the Moon is a good tune, all the same. It would be churlish to pretend otherwise, but if you've been trying anyway, like I have, then I have a cover of it by Fiona Apple that's going to render your position intellectually untenable. That'll be in the covers post, too.

As for this one, I really only listened to it because I read they were making an entire album about Dennis Hopper and that seemed so bizarre I couldn't ignore it. Glad I didn't, now. I wonder if the rest of it will be as good. Hard to imagine but we can hope.

The New Alphabet - Delivery

Help! I climbed up on this thing and now I can't get off! Also, we're back in Australia and everyone's in some kind of cult. I'm scared!

Okay, I really need to turn this thing around. Let's see what I can do... Oh, I know...

Let's have some songs about horses!

Horses - Mallrat

Alright! We're still in Australia but I think we're safe now. Mallrat did this live on the Kelly Clarkson show or so the link I followed yesterday told me but when I got there she was in a field with a guitarist and a horse which I thought gave a whole new meanig to the concept of playing live on a TV show.

Kelly Clarkson is fun, isn't she? I watch a lot of her leftfield covers (Not Leftfield covers - that really wouldn't work.) but I don't believe I've ever included any of them here, mostly because she tends to do shortened versions. Maybe in that covers post that I really seem to be hyping now.

Goodbye Horses - Q Lazzarus

Aka that song from Silence of the Lambs. I saw Silence of the Lambs at the cinema on release, back when I saw every Jodie Foster movie the first moment I could. I carried on trying to get copies of everything she'd done until the late '90s. I think I got it all up to when I stoppped caring, including the stuff she did in Europe when she was recovering from that whole Hinckley thing. 

There are a couple I own that I've never watched, like The Accused and Nell, and I will certainly never watch Silence of the Lambs again, I'll tell you that for nothing. Took me too long to get over it the first time.

I may have been a little obsessed but I think I'm over it now. There are pictures of Jodie up in the house even now, though, so maybe not. And I would like to watch True Detective...

Er, I seem to have strayed away from the point a little. I meant to talk about Q Lazzarus not Jodie Foster. I'm thinking of doing a whole post about the mysterious, enigmatic artist who "disappeared from the public eye in the mid-1990s" as her Wikipedia entry puts it. A bit like me, then. Maybe she was playing EverQuest, too, although I kinda doubt it.

Not to harp on about it but I have a couple of interesting covers of this one that might turn up in a post sometime soon.

Switch Over - Horsegirl

Okay, so it's not about horses. It's close enough. 

One more makes a dozen, which I always think is a nice number for a music post. I think we've had enough thumpers. And enough rock. Let's end with something a little more soothing.

Baby Little Tween - Okay Kaya

I don't know, though. That might be the most disturbing of the lot. Just goes to show you don't have to shout and jump around to scare people.

Until next time, which won't be long.