I had absolutely no intention of following one music post with another.
That would just be cruel. I also had absolutely no intention of commenting on
the Grammys this year.
I did it once
and I think I got away with it but there's no sense tempting fate.
However, sometimes circumstances conspire and things happen that simply can't
be ignored.
This is one them.
Bizarrely - or perhaps not, if you follow my methodology - there's no tag for
Wet Leg on this blog. There really should be, since I keep writing
about them. (And there is, now.)
A search query
finds ten posts, just about all of them including a video. Anyone would think I liked them or something.
I first wrote about the band on July 22 2021, the same day I discovered them
by way of a post on Everett True's now-dormant blog
How NOT To Write About Music, a problem Everrett seems to have solved pretty handily by just stopping. I
have no plans to follow his lead in that regard but I thank him once again for
introducing me to the band he originally, if wildly inaccurately, assumed to be
"some corporate-funded suck-ass rich kid duo from the Midwest of America".
As everyone now knows, they are not. They're from the Isle of Wight. At the
time, that was pretty much all anyone did know about them. As they've risen to
international fame, more has been revealed, including much that contradicts and
confounds some of the more romantic myths about how the band was formed. They
do not, after all, appear to have fallen quite so green from the tree as once
was thought.
Still, they have no real form before the astonishing reveal that introduced their laconic, affectless, whimsical motorik drone to the world in a video now revealed to be the
Best Alternative Music Performance
of last year - in the eyes of the Grammy electorate, at least. Even if it
actually arrived the year before.
The band seem as bemused by the whole thing as, frankly, I am. I mean, to be
nominated for the Mercury is one thing,
even if you lose, but I always think of the Grammys as an exceptionally American institution.
I'm kind of surprised to find any UK acts in the nominations at all.
Added to that,
when you consider the other UK artists who also got recognized this year,
specifically the ones against whom Wet Leg were competing, you're looking at bands who've
been around for years; bands with global profiles:
Arctic Monkeys and Florence and the Machine. And the rest of the nominees included Bjork ffs!
Not that the video for Chaise Longue doesn't deserve to be included in
its category, where the list of nominees was strikingly similar. It's one
of the best pop videos period, let alone the best "alternative" and not
just of last year but of all time. The song, too, is a classic. I hope its creators remain as
fond of it twenty-five years from now, when it's undoubtedly still going to be
the one number from their back catalog they'll still absolutely have to
play at every gig.
It's a big assumption, that Wet Leg will still be a thing going into the
second half of the 21st century but these days no-one ever stops and one
signature tune everyone remembers and can yell along to is pretty much all
you're ever going to need. Of course, having just won what's probably the
biggest award in popular music for making the best album in their weight
class, first time out, no less, chances are they'll have more than one song to
remember them by, come 2050.
Right now, though, I imagine the whole thing seems like a fever dream. When
Rhian Teasdale made the first acceptance speech, for the Performance
award she made no attempt to conceal her disbelief. With glorious
understatement she observed "This year has been so surprising". For
all of us, Rhian.
It's puzzled me for a while, the way every news report, review or opinion
piece on Wet Leg refers to the band as a duo. It seems odd to relegate the
other three musicians to the role of sidemen. It was heartening, then, to see drummer
Henry Holmes take the mic for the second award and even more heartening to hear him describe the band as "one big, fucked up family."
Given the exceptional level of fame and success this DIY project has achieved
in just a couple of years, I suspect they're going to need that level of
emotional support as they build what could and most likely will be a long and
successful career. My closing comments from a year and a half ago, when I expressed doubt that the promised "string of releases", planned to follow Chaise Longue would ever materialize, look pretty silly now.
To add an element of realism to this otherwise positively surreal story, Wet
Leg did not win the biggest award they were up for last night. While they
dominated the relatively niche "Alternate" categories, they were
unsuccessful in the much more prestigious, non-genre-based "Best New Artist". That was taken by Samara Joy, a jazz singer of some repute, with whose work I am wholly unfamiliar.
A typically wilful and idiosyncratic selection by the electorate, some might say. I couldn't possibly comment. I'll let Chris deVille at Stereogum do that for me:
"You never want to rule out the chance that the Grammys will reward a
jazz artist just to remind you they’re the Grammys. Young singer Samara
Joy could feasibly pull an Esperanza Spalding, given that she’s
unleashing her rich alto on music that feels like it was in the same
ultra-respectable mid-20th century milieu where many in the Academy’s
brains seem stuck."
Curiously, despite having been a very early adopter, a fan to the extent of
having a framed copy of one of their seven-inch singles on my wall, I don't
really listen to Wet Leg all that often. They may have won the award for best
album but they seem to me to be an archetypal singles band, best suited to be
heard booming unexpectedly out of the windows of a passing car as it cruises
by with all the windows wound down or popping up, suddenly and joyously, on
MTV or whatever passes for music television these days. A whole album's a bit
too much of a good thing. I find listening to it all the way through feels a bit like eating an entire box of chocolates on my own, self-indulgent and ulitimately enervating.
Anyway, congratulations to them all and here's to whatever they'll do next.
One thing's for sure; the world's going to be watching, now.
First impression? Ugly damn thing. It's only just beginning to occur to me that
one of the reasons I've not gone with Pantheon the way I expected to is the
aesthetic. I'm not talking about the once-controversial graphic makeover that
removed the grit and replaced it with cute. That's fine. I mean the overall appearance, the
scratchy, uncomfortable spreadsheet feel of the whole thing.
It's in full effect in this image. Everyone does Road Map graphics these days
and lots of them are really pretty to look at. They make me think "Ooh! I might have to go play that again". This doesn't. It makes me go "Ow! My eyes!"
Moving on from the look, there seems to be a lot going on this year but I
notice none of it expands the world, other than downwards. There are new
dungeons "throughout 2025" apparently but we'll have to wait for 2026
before we get "new zones". Well, you will, if you're playing. I don't
think I'm likely to be directly involved.
Given how few zones there are in the game now, 2026 seems a like a bit of a wait. Just about
everything on the list falls under the heading of "ongoing development" rather than new content.
There're a lot of "improvements" and "enhancements" and
"upgrades" in that line-up, along with a few "systems" but precious
little adventure. That's all kept for the grey banner along the top - dungeons, raids,
boss encounters, POIs. Not sure of the marketing logic there.
I saw
an interesting comment
yesterday from one of the people behind the Star Wars Galaxies emu, to
the effect that they discovered you can't just hang an mmorpg in a steady
state and expect people to keep playing. You have to dump new content on them
every ninety days or there's a huge drop-off in population.
I mean, we all know it but it's surprising how many people, players and
developers, try to put their fingers in their ears and deny it. In an odd kind
of way, it might be easier for games in Early Access to hold attention. If
things are going as they should, there'll be a constant drip of new content or
at least disruption to what's there already, which is often just as effective. It's
when the game is supposedly done that the real content treadmill starts up and with it the inevitable droughts.
By the look of this Road Map, Pantheon's a loooong way from having to worry
about that. EA looks like it could take a while. And I didn't even mention the baffling current obsession going on
over there with
FFA open-world PvP. I do wonder what Brad McQuaid would have had to say about that...
You've Got Mail
Over at the home of the game Brad made when he was practicing, Jenn Chan, that most
amiable and charming of Producers, has a couple of letters out. Producer's
Letters are maybe one down from Road Maps - they don't have the graphics for a
start - but they mostly perform the same function: letting players know what
to expect next.
Neither of the letters, for
EverQuest
and
EverQuest II,
has anything very surprising to say. At this point Darkpaw could pretty
much swap out the old SOE mission statement, "You're in Our World Now" for "Business as Usual".
The only item of real interest in the EQII letter is the upcoming Game
Update, Lure of Darkness. It brings back the Void, including a new
Void Anchor in Sodden Archipelago. I bet we don't actually get
one of the whirling vortexes reaching far into the sky, though. I bet it's just a
portal somewhere.
I had quite a lot of fun in Void instances for a while. There was one I used to
run repeatedly for platinum, back before inflation made every in-game source of
income other than selling on the Broker entirely irrelevant.
This one ought to offer me a chance to find out
just how much more effective my Necromancer is in new content, when compared with my Berserker. He usually has to wait for GUs to recede into the past
before he can make any progress with them. I'm optimistic she'll do better. The
Lure of Darkness arrives on the 8th of April but I imagine I won't get around to it right away. I'll get to it before the next one arrives in the summer, though.
The EQ letter is more interesting in that Jenn reveals a few secrets
concerning the thinking behind some of the choices the team makes when setting
up new ruleset servers. There is, of course, yet another of those coming in
June because new ruleset servers are the engine that drives EQ's longevity. To some extent they always have been. The concept goes back pretty much to the dawn of the game.
This one is an "experimental" TLP server. My impression is that
Everquest players are more open to experimentation than EQII players, the
younger game feeling oddly more old-fashioned now and certainly more
conservative than the older.
I don't get the feeling EQII's time-limited expansion server scene has ever
been quite as essential or vibrant as EQ's but it's still clearly vital enough
to the continuing health of the game for new editions to be rolled out at
least annually. This summer we're getting a PvP Origins server, which I would
have thought was limiting the appeal considerably but at least it should keep
the ever-angry PvP lobby busy complaining about the ruleset for a while.
Last but very much not least in this round-up of points of interest from the
two letters, I was much heartened to see the exact same degree of attention
as usual being paid to this year's Pride celebrations, starting at the end of May and running
on into June. Given the current unfortunate political climate it might not
have been surprising to see some backsliding there but no, the two games
remain exemplars of modernity, with Patches of Pride in EQII and
Pride Month in EQ each being afforded the same level of attention as
any of the many established dates in the packed Norrathian calendar.
That's a deal of game news. Shall we take a short break for some music? Yes, I
think we shall.
That Difficult Second Album
Catch These Fists - Wet Leg
Having covered music here for quite a few years now, I find myself in the odd
position of having artists and bands I "cover" in much the same way I
"cover" games. There's no necessity for it in either case but if
you keep up a blog for long enough, after a while you get a feel for what it's
about.
As well as the inevitable "anything that catches my interest", this
blog mostly covers games I play, games I might play and games I used to play,
along with music I listen to, TV I watch and of late developments in AI as they
pertain to everything
else I write about.
As the years go by, there are certain games, shows, creators and performers
that come up over and over and after a certain point I start to feel I
"should" mention it, when I find something new involving any of them.
That's why there's stuff in this post about Pantheon, EQ and EQII and it's
also why there's a video of Wet Leg's first single from their upcoming
sophomore album, Moisturizer.
Because I was an early adopter and because I went somewhat overboard about the
first few singles, Wet Leg have become a band this blog pays attention to,
even though I don't quite feel the same attachment to them I did a couple of
years ago. I like Catch These Fists well enough but it isn't demanding
the same level of attention from me that Chaise Longue, Wet Dream or
Too Late Now did.
The band is currently out there, playing live and debuting a whole load of
tracks from the new album. I watched audience videos of half a dozen of the new songs
and they all sounded good but none of them really wowed me.
Rhian Teasdale has
a definite new look she's really working and the band have what keeps getting
described as a punkier sound. It all looks and sounds like it would be a great time in a club or on a
festival stage. As something to listen to at home, I'm not so sure. I await
the album with interest to see what the songs sound like in their fully
produced form. I will be buying it, anyway, or at least putting it on a list
so someone else can buy it for me.
Horse Latitudes
Here's the oddest MMORPG story of the week by some margin. Have you ever
thought that what the genre really needed was more horseback riding? Or more
murder mysteries to solve? No? Well how about more mysteries to solve while
you're out horseback riding?
It's a niche pitch, for sure, but it's happening. The game is called
Equinox: Homecoming. Nothing like hanging your entire fortunes on a
convoluted pun, is there? As if the concept wasn't high enough already.
It's in production from a company called
Blue Scarab, the guiding force behind which is one Craig Morrison, a name that
may be familiar from his time at both Blizzard and Funcom. The
official website describes the game as a "multiplayer online role-playing game that’s a surprising and unique blend
of cozy exploration and dark mystery. Perfect for fans of horses, murder
mysteries, and relaxing, story-rich gameplay!"
There's a trailer, which looks a bit janky in the way of most
early-development footage, but which also makes me think it might be something
worth keeping an eye on. The pitch is for a “unique blend of cozy escapism and true-crime” but I'm getting some Secret World vibes, too.
Morrison goes on to say
"We're very excited to see what people make of Equinox. We’ve had faith
throughout development that there is an audience out there for different
and interesting experiences... there is definitely a risk, but we're in a
position where we can take this shot and try to provide players with a
truly unique world and story."
We do all keep saying we want developers to try new things, take some risks
and stop copying whatever's just made money. It'll be very interesting to see
if this one goes anywhere. NetEase is backing it so it probably will.
Take Me Home
A few months back, James Gunn gave us a first look at his new take on
Superman in a short trailer that featured
Krypto, the Dog of Steel. The NME keep reporting the reaction to
it as "mixed" but I'm pretty sure just about every actual DC fan did
that thing where you relax a whole lot of tension in your shoulders you didn't
even notice you were carrying. The comment thread on YouTube is that, all
through.
Now Gunn's put out an extended, five-minute version with a whole narrative
section from the movie and it does not disappoint. For a Superman fan there
are all kinds of oddnesses, like Krypto having long fur and the Superman
robots not wearing costumes but instead of detracting from the lore those
differences feel like an evolution of it.
Put simply, this is Superman, in a way almost no version of the icon
since Christopher Reeve really has been. It's also very clearly the
work of someone who understands not just the character but the backstory. Like,
all of the backstory, not just that tedious bit on Krypton before it
blew up, the part that's been done to death about a million times now.
I am more than optimistic about this one. Whether the movie can survive the
current resistance to all things super-heroic evident in the wider
cinema-going audience is another question but I'm confident the longtime
comics fans in that audience are going to be well-served, in the best possible
meaning of the phrase.
And On That Blondshell
Much of what I said above about Wet Leg applies here, too, except for the
implied part about the dangers of over-exposure. This is the third single from
Sabrina Teitelbaum's second album, "If You Asked For A Picture"
and once again I'd say it's good but not great, which is pretty much how I
felt about the other two as well. I do think this one might be a grower,
though. That chorus is sticking.
Where Blondshell differs from Wet Leg in this respect, at least for me, is
that Sabrina's sound is a lot more amenable to repeated listening. Wet Leg
have the immediacy of a great singles band. A lot of their songs sound like
they were made to be heard coming out of car windows or transistor radios.
Blondshell is more the sort of thing you play at home on the stereo on a
Sunday morning.
For that reason alone I'd bet that, even if the two albums are equally far behind
their immediate predecessors in essentiality, it'll be Blondshell's that gets
listened to the most in this house and by a margin. That's already the case with their
debuts, although I've probably watched the Wet Leg videos more than the
Blondshell ones.
Speaking of videos, although I've embedded both of them here, I don't very much
like either. The Wet Leg one is okay but feels a bit like they might be trying
just a tad too hard for the wacky funster vibe they nailed so effortlessly last time around.
The Blondshell video, on the other hand, goes right to the opposite extreme.
It looks like a bunch of pals goofing around but doing it with a degree of self-consciousness that makes it slightly uncomfortable to
watch. Also, they clearly bought the absolute cheapest strollers they could
find, just for the purposes of the video, and they bought them as a job lot. It just looks false.
As for the song itself, I love the chorus and the overall Blondshell sound. The words are typically elliptical
in that way I love about her writing but the subject matter is a little disturbing. It reminds uncomfortably of
"Too Much, Too Young" by the Specials, an unnecessarily harsh and judgmental song I always disliked.
Fortunately, these days you rarely get a new song without a gloss on it from
the songwriter and what Sabrina says about the lyrics makes me happier. As per
Stereogum
“The song is partially about being in your twenties and feeling like you’re
supposed to know everything (your parents even had kids around that age!)
yet you’re truly in the weeds trying to figure out who you are,”
That's a much warmer vibe than the words feel like they support. I find this a lot with Blondshell's lyrics. Possibly because they're so
pared-down, they often feel harsher than Sabrina's explanation of them
suggests they were meant to. It's the good, old intentional fallacy at play again, I
guess, although here it's working in my favor.
Anyway, I like "23's A Baby" best of the three singles to
date. Looking forward to the album in May.
And with that, I'm off to make some music of my own. There may not be another post here until Wednesday, what with me working and also having something to do on Monday but we'll see.
It's really hot today. In my room especially. Too hot to play games or write a
blog post or do much of anything. Maybe I won't bother.
Or maybe I will. It's been two weeks since the last
What I've Been Listening To post and I did say that was the cadence I
was aiming for. If nothing else, they're easy to write. Do I have enough
songs, though?
Hmm. Not at all sure I do. Still, I expect I'll come up with something.
Might be a short post, though. Stop that cheering at the back...
Terri - Micky Dolenz(Paul Westerberg cover)
I bet that was a surprise. Certainly surprised me when I heard it. Last man
standing and he's making it count.
I love the Monkees. They've had an up and down kind of career. I grew
up watching them as a kids' show but they were also in the pop charts, which
might have confused me if I'd been just a few years older. They went out of
fashion to the point of derision and then weirdly came back in with punk, when
the Sex Pistolscovered (I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone. Since then it's
been mostly acceptance into the canon if not outright adulation although it
didn't help that they reformed and made some not very good records.
Not that Steppin' Stone was really a Monkees song. It was written by the men
who made the Monkees, Boyce and Hart, but they shopped it around
to a bunch of bands before the Monkees had the hit with it. And this isn't a
Micky Dolenz song either. It's a Paul Westerberg number although kind
of an unofficial one.
It's from a bizarre solo album Westerberg released as a 49 cent Amazon
download in 2008.
Full story
at Stereogum, which is where I learned it and from where I'm ripping it
off. The album had one, continuous forty-nine minute track and included no
information about the songs on it, not even the names. Apparently this one is
generally referred to by fans as "(Tell Me) Who You Gonna Marry."
Mickey obviously prefers something shorter.
I have never really got Paul Westerberg. He's one of those people, like
Alex Chilton or Nick Drake, who I do get, who constantly comes
up as a reference point for other artists. I listened to his
original version
of this one and it sounds a lot more like
Eve of Destruction
than Micky's cover.
CPR - Wet Leg (horsegiirl remix)
I still haven't acquired the second Wet Leg album. I say
"acquired" because I probably was never going to buy it for myself. It
seems like I would have put it on my birthday/Christmas wishlist last year but
I didn't.
Partly it was over-exposure. There was a while when you really couldn't get
away from Wet Leg. There was a brief respite and then they came back,
firing off singles ahead of the sophomore album and doing interviews non-stop and
honestly I felt like maybe I'd had enough of them for now.
Which was a bit silly given the new singles were all good. Just not as good as the old singles from the first album, which were all great. But it turned out the lack of immediacy with the second batch might have been because they were growers. I've heard some of them a few times
now and they get stronger with familiarity.
That could be significant. The main reason I didn't put the second album on a
wishlist was that, great though all the individual songs on the first were,
listened to all in a row they could be... enervating. That's the bane of all
great singles bands and Wet Leg are categorically a great singles band. It's
why I can barely stand to listen to Greatest Hits albums by anyone, even
people I really, really like.
A good album needs pacing as much as it needs bangers. Light and shade.
Otherwise it's like eating a whole box of chocolates, one after another. I
realize some people aren't going to see why that's a bad thing...
This, though, is very different. horsegiirl (Not to be confused with
Horsegirl.) takes the sugar out and replaces it with a bit of acid. Not that kind. The
sharp stuff you get on acid drops. (Seriously? Acid drops? How old do
you think your readers are? Even you don't remember acid drops.
When you read about those in the Beano when you were a kid, you had to ask
your grandmother what they were...)
Talking to myself in the second person now... I told you it was hot.
CUT THE LINE - deBasement
Okay, I have no idea what that is. I just had it bookmarked. It's great
though, isn't it? I love snippets of conversation used as lyrics. Used to be a
bit of a thing back in the '90s. Don't hear it so much any more, more's the
pity.
"deBasement are a queer/trans electropop-bass duo based in LA, comprised of
Alli Logout (front person of the critically acclaimed punk outfit Special
Interest), and Margo XS (esteemed DJ and in-demand producer who is a primary
collaborator for Kim Petras, Zara Larsson and more)."
Ohh... that makes sense!
MORNING DEW (DONK) - Beyoncé
I'm guessing I don't have to explain who Beyoncé is. Although she
doesn't crop up here very often. She's in the
"I understand why she's good but it's not doing it for me" pot most of
the time. And honestly, I just like the way she goes "DonkyDonkyDonk."
I mean, who wouldn't?
Come and Go - Bodywash
Alright, I'm not going to gab on about who every last act on the bill this
week might be. I have no clue who this lot are although I'd lay good money
they're Australian.
The way this works, or one way, is that I listen to a bunch of new stuff every
day and if I like it I ignore it because I like a lot of things. Just liking
something doesn't get us anywhere.
If I really like it, though, I bookmark it to come back to when I'm
considering candidates for the honor of being included in a post on a blog
that's mostly read by people whose main interest most likely isn't music and
whose tastes most likely aren't all that close to mine. (Then again, this one
has less than a thousand views on YouTube so maybe they'll be glad of even a
couple more.)
If I really, really like something, though, I listen to it a few more
times and chances are I'll go take a look to see what else they've done, meaning when
it comes time to write the post, I usually at least have a vague idea who they
are.
This is one I really liked.
Florida Water Blues - Twisted Teen
And this one I really, really liked. So I looked up who they were. Which
was a mistake. I liked it better when I thought the band was the guy and
the girl in the video. It's not. It's the two riding in the pickup at the end.
Sometimes, the less you know the better.
I still really, really like it though.
Nobody - Computerwife
Takes a while to get going but it's worth the wait. Video needs a
motion-sickness warning.
Couple of covers to end, I think. I did say I didn't have much and it's too
damn hot still to go looking.
Go F*** Yourself - Fat Dog
Their asterisks, not mine. So coy!
Dog Dribble - Getdown Services
Oh, I see. It's like that, now, is it? Maybe it's time to stop. How about we
go out with something tasteful?
The Chain - The Tullamarines (Fleetwood Mac cover)
I liked the Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac, back when even
getting to hear music from five years ago was like finding fragments from the
Great library of Alexandria. Then punk came and they were the antichrist for a
while. Now I can see them in the round and I like some of it and not the rest.
The only bit of The Chain I really like is the bit they used for the
motor racing on TV back in the eighties. And I mostly liked that because it
gave me warning so I could change the channel.
And that, I think, will do for now, especially since my PC just crashed,
either because it's fucking up again or because it's hotter than the surface
of the sun in here. Think I'll give both of us a break to cool down.
To my complete astonishment, yesterday
this popped up all across my music feeds. Superorganism were one of my hot
picks for global superstardom back in 2018. I bought the album, played the hell
out of it, raved about them to anyone who'd listen and then they vanished,
almost as fast as they'd arrived. I'd pretty much written them off.
Four years feels like a long time between releases, for a new band anyway.
Yes, there was the enforced downtime during the pandemic but countless
musicians used the opportunity to realise and reveal all kinds of projects in
the hope of keeping themselves sane and their careers alive. It was all too
easy to assume those who kept quiet had nothing to say.
Then, there'd been those bubbling concerns over the former identities and
out-of-band activities of some of the members, concerns that raised questions
over both the validity and viabilty of the Superorganism collective. Some of
those questions seem to have been tacitly answered with the announcement of
the latest line-up, a stripped down fivesome. The most controversial member,
Mark Turner, known as Emily, is out, along with former
Eversons bandmate Robert Strange (Given name
Blair Everson) and Ruby, who appears to be known as just Ruby.
From the
official videos,
studio andlive
performances I watched back then, both Emily and Robert Strange gave the
impression of being integral to the band's distinctive and original identity;
Ruby, as a back-up vocalist and dancer, was perhaps less central to the
gestalt. Emily appeared to be the Eno of the band, twiddling knobs and
processing the sound, while Strange was the visual artist, providing the high
impact, hyperactive overlays
It's perhaps even more surprising, then, that not only is there a new
Superorganism album due out this summer but that the first single and the
video released to promote it look and sound... exactly like Superorganism from
four years ago.
Seriously, that could be a bonus track they left off the first album.
OJ's vocals are as gloriously uninflected as ever, the mix sounds like
the regular homage to William Burroughs and the video is about the most
Superorganism thing I've ever seen.
Supposedly
Chai, who I like a lot, are in there somewhere but I'm blessed if I can hear
them, nor
Pi Ja Ma, who would be new to me if I could. I watched the video once then went
straight to Amazon and pre-ordered the album, which goes by the
magnificently hubristic title
World Wide Pop.
That means I currently have three albums on pre-order. Not sure that's ever
happened before although I do love pre-ordering things. It just makes me
happy. I get a warm glow from knowing something good is coming.
I've ordered all three in the deeply unfashionable CD format. Seriously, even
sodding cassettes are cooler than CDs these days. I just like CDs, so sue me.
They're shiny and they still smell of the future. Vinyl reeks of patchouli and
the past.
The Superorganism album's not out until 15 July but the other two will be here
much sooner. On the same day, in fact, 8 April. They're each from bands whose
reach has far exceeded Superorganism's grasp, so far anyway:
Let's Eat Grandma and Wet Leg. (Funny how no-one condenses Let's
Eat Grandma to LEG. Let's not start.)
Here at Inventory Full, home of the hits-to-be, we've already had all
three of the singles from Two Ribbons, the upcoming Let's Eat Grandma
album, along with just about everything Wet Leg have officially released but I
do believe there's one I haven't linked yet. It's from Wet Leg's self-named
debut album and it's called Angelica.
In forty-five years of independent traveling I've never once wanted to go to
the Isle of Wight but if that's where the video was shot I do now. There's a
word Stereogum writers like to throw around in thumbnail reviews that
always makes me click through and that word is "woozy". They used it a
few days about the new single from Mrs. Bhagpuss's favorite,
Kurt Vile. That's woozy, sure, but Angelica is
woozy. There are few higher compliments.
All this got me wondering what was going on with a few of my other picks for
fortune and fame from the last year or three. How about those saviors of rock
'n' roll, Starcrawler? I checked
their own website
to be sure but it seems the last official communication from Team Arrow was
this, which I remember from when it came out last July.
I knew how good Arrow and Henri were but I don't think I've ever noticed the
drummer before. He rocks. They all rock, let's be honest. It
would be a bit unfair to leave out the bass player. Not everyone can be
Lemmy... .
Shitkid rocks and she's woozy so she really should be a
superstar. Unfortunately she doesn't seem to have done much for the last
eighteen months. The most recent official release I could find was this from
November 2020. It's called Dream Sequence. I couldn't stop thinking
abut how cold she must have been, filming it, and also whether some security
guard was going to turn up and arrest her, which probably wasn't what she had
in mind when she shot the video. I dunno, maybe it was a warm evening and she
had permission to be there. I kind of hope not, though. That wouldn't be very
rock and roll, would it?
After Shitkid I checked in on Soko. The last album I bought by her was
2015's "My Dreams Dictate My Reality". The follow-up, "Feel Feelings", came out in 2020 and this one, Let Me Adore You, is on it. Judging
from the video she's probably had more important things on her mind since then
than making another record, not to mention she's only made three of the things
in a decade anyway. Albums, I mean. I have no idea how many children she
has.
Oh, alright. Yes I do. She has one son, born November 2018. His name is
Indigo Blue Honey Sokolinski, after
a song by The Clean
(Which, I have to say, sounds astoundingly like the good
Jesus and Marychain and makes me want to hear more.) Given that the
first thing Soko does in the video is whisper something that sounds very much
like either "Burning Indigo" or possibly "Morning Indigo",
whereupon the camera pans down to show her stroking her gravid belly, I
surmise the video was shot, at least in part, several years ago. Also, there's
a fricken baby in it. Bit of a giveaway.
For some reason, all of that made me think of Petite Meller. I can't
imagine why. It's not like they look, sound or behave in any way similar, nor
even that I'm in the habit of thinking about Petite Meller. I mean, who is?
A trip to Petite's
Instagram gives "The Drummer 🥁💂♀️🟠💂♀️🥁New single Out soon" and a YouTube
link that confusingly goes to 2015's
Baby Love, an incredibly catchy tune that I'm pretty sure I've featured here already.
I suspect Petite doesn't curate her Insta with the same rigor as some,
although I'm equally prepared to entertain the idea that I have no clue how to
find my way around an Instagram account.
Luckily, some primary research (The search field on YouTube) takes us to
this from
June last year, in which Petite performs Dying Out Of Love accompanied
by the string section and French horn player from the
Orchestre Français des Jeunes Talents, as she pirouettes through the
hallways of the Hotel de Bourrienne in Paris, looking like nothing so much as a doll that's
come to life. Which is what she always looks like, come to think of it.
Although it's an eerily compelling performance, she seems to be singing
very flat, which doesn't really do justice to the song, so we're going to
have the original video from November 2020 instead.
Now that I've started this, I realize I could keep it up for hours. Possibly
days. Maybe weeks. I've already been at it all afternoon. Better find some way
to bring things to a close.
Fast forward back to the present, then, although I tend to think of
The Regrettes as rock and roll,
fifties/sixties style. They're fast, punchy and they have a rockin' attitude. This one, though, is
altogether different. I've been listening to it on hard repeat for a week.
Can't get it out of my head. Don't want to.
There's something about the transition from the verse to the chorus, the way
it slides, the slight echo on the vocal that comes then goes, the distorted
empty room treatment on the piano, the drums that stroll in after everything
else is up and running... it's one of the best arrangements I've heard for a
very long time. So much going on. I hear something new almost every time.
After I heard it, I immediately wanted to put a post together using all the
best examples of swearing in song lyrics I could think of, only I couldn't
think of many. I thought about how difficult it would be to research so I
dropped the idea. Anyway, "You're So Fucking Pretty" was almost certain
to be the best. What would be the point?
Then I remembered Lana doing "Fuck it, I love you" and the whole thing was back on again.
Earlier this week I saw a couple of news stories that struck me as the
kind of thing I might have tweeted about, if I had a Twitter account I
actually used. Now that Twitter's fluttering like a sparrow with a broken wing,
I'm finally starting to wonder if it mightn't have been worth joining in with the
fun, back when there supposedly was some.
Too late now, as Wet Leg would say.
And since I've mentioned Wet Leg, entirely uncoincidentally by the way, we may as well begin with them. I warn you, though, it's sad news. So sad, in fact, that
I've already rejected several half-decent humorous quips and asides that
popped into my mind unbidden. If you're the kind of person that needs to get a
laugh out of someone else's tragedy you can jolly well make up your own jokes
for once.
I'll quote the NME headline verbatim because it sums the situation up both
respectfully and with admirable clarity: "Wet Leg's adopted donkeys have died after illness". I recommend reading the item in full. It's an exemplary piece of
journalism. I won't attempt to precis it, other than to say that "late 30s" seems like a very good age for a donkey and even twenty-two isn't bad
going.
I know there's been some shade cast on the concept of donkey sanctuaries in
the past, their very existence being framed as evidence of some kind of moral
malaise, but I've always been in favor of them. Donkeys are gentle animals and
many of them have a hard life. I don't see why they shouldn't have some
comfort in their later years. If I had a nice place in the country with
grounds I'd be happy to have a donkey or two wandering about the place.
As regular readers no doubt know to their cost, I'd find it wholly possible,
even acceptable, to spin a couple of thousand words out of that news item but
I can't help thinking everyone would be better served with a couple of
sentences and a link on Twitter. A tweet would also stand a much better chance
of starting a cascade of debate on the nature of charitable giving, the
relative status of grief and bereavement, the foibles of the rich and/or
famous and any number of other potentially stimulatiing topics. Here on the
blog the news will just lie down and die quietly, much like the donkeys who
inspired it.
Then again, is that such a bad thing? Wasn't one of the reasons I never took
to Twitter a nagging concern that a throwaway remark or an ill-considered
witticism might spiral out of control? On a blog, about the worst you're likely
to get is a snarky comment or two, not a torrent of death threats.
For example, take the next two items that surprised me this week. Firstly
there was revelation that Frank Ocean is apparently a big fan of
Garden Center. Not garden centers, you understand, though for all I
know Frank may enjoy a stroll around the gnomes of a Sunday, as anyone might.
No, this is Garden Center, the indie supergroup from Brighton.
I learned this from Stereogum, where it was
reported
that "Frank Ocean is a fan, and he’s played Garden Centre on his Blonded show a
bunch of times." That was in a piece about the band's upcoming album,
Searching For A Stream, which is confusingly both "coming out this fall" and "out 5/19" according to the article.
I wasn't much taken with latest song off the album but I do like the single
they put out last month. Here they are doing it live. It sounds unnervingly
like Genesis circa Nursery Crymes to me, which goes no way at
all towards explaining why Frank Ocean might favor the band when programming
his shows.
The second of the pair of items I mentioned was the news that
Questlove is set to direct Disney's forthcoming live-action
remake of The Aristocats. When I read that, on both
NME
and
Pitchfork, I was initially more taken aback at the idea of live cats playing dixieland
jazz than the attachment of Questlove to the project, although it did seem to
be an off-center choice for Disney, not least because Questlove has heretofore
only directed one (Albeit hugely acclaimed.) music documentary,
Summer of Soul.
Then again, there is a lot of jazz in the original movie, which is set in
pre-First World War Paris, although until I looked it up just now I thought it
was the 1920s. The Aristocats was, for a long time, my favorite Disney movie.
It may well still be, although a cursory glance at the clips on YouTube suggest any number of problematic characters and themes.
I don't honestly remember it that clearly. I saw it at the cinema, on release, when I was however
old that would have made me... twelve, I think, which actually sounds a bit
above the target age, now I come to think about it. I saw it a second time in the 1980s or '90s, in circumstances that now escape me. The high esteem in which I've always held it has more to do with it having a lot of cats in than any genuine artisitic merit, I now realise.
I was aware that Disney were in the process of remaking their entire animated
catalog in live-action format but I hadn't been paying that much attention. I
did hear quite a bit of chatter about whether the Lion King remake was too
uncanny-valley, with the hyper-realistic fur and the lyp-synching not quite
achieving gestalt, but I hadn't really thought long or hard about it.
Somehow, the idea of animals like the Aristocats, who already look and act
like humans, wear clothes (Well, hats and neckerchiefs.), play musical
instruments and the like, being represented in "live action" feels
weirder and a bigger stretch than the more regular animals like the elephants
in Dumbo or the cast of The Jungle Book. I was picturing actual
cats as hep cats and it was concerning.
Reading the news more carefully, I see the plan is for a “live-action/hybrid reimagining”, which makes a lot more sense. With that out of the way, however, I was left
with the uncomfortable realisation that, in reacting with any level of surprise
to either Frank Ocean's or Questlove's involvement in these stories, I was
possibly displaying inadvertent, conditioned racism.
It's uncomfortable to realise that it may be the notion of an African American
celebrity choosing to enjoy something that seems, on the surface, very white
indeed, be that twee/post-punk indie bands from British seaside towns or the
unreconstructed white hegemony represented by classic Disney, that causes the
disconnect. At some barely recognised level (Except, of course, I'm
recognizing it now.) it feels like streams are being crossed.
Which is fundementally a racist position, I guess. Anyone can like anything,
can't they? I bloody well hope so, anyway. That'd be my position. But I'm
aware of where those kind of broad, utopian strokes can lead. It's one thing
to engage in some fairly abstract, gentle self-interrogation on a long-form
blog, where, hopefully, nuance can be found; quite another to fire off a
contextless tweet complete with astonished face emoji. (You can have emojis on
Twitter, right? See, I don't even know that much for certain. I didn't even
realise there was a button in Blogger to add them to a post until this moment
😲 😳)
I'd like to think I'd have been on safer ground with the last pair of stories
that made me momentarily wish I was a twitterer. The first and less amusing of
the two is the news that there could be a remake of the X-Files on the
way.
In theory, this could make a trio with the last two in that the director of
this - once again - very white show is reputed to be
Ryan Coogler, but as it happens, I didn't even think of that until now
because I didn't recognise his name, something which, I understand, has
implications of its own.
I was more concerned with the information that the revamp won't feature either
Mulder or Scully, which on the face of it sounds a bit like
staging Romeo and Juliet without the leads. I was a big X-Files fan
back in the '90s, to the extent that I didn't just watch every single episode
but recorded them all on VHS tapes - which I still have!
Then again, I taped a lot of stuff back in the '90s. I was obsessed with
building an archive, something that now feels both ironic and yet oddly prescient, in view of some of the things I was saying
just a couple of days ago.
I've never watched any of it back and by now I probably couldn't even if I
wanted to. Shame I didn't pick a better storage medium. That's largely because
a) tastes change and b) new stuff keeps coming. I lost interest in the X-Files
to the extent that, until I read the article yesterday, I didn't even realise
there'd already been one reboot that did feature the iconic duo.
I guess if I didn't care about that I shouldn't care that they won't be in the
next one. And I don't. But I bet someone will. Maybe it wouldn't have been
safer ground for a tweet after all.
Finally, something I really can't imagine anyone getting het up over,
something the very idea of which does just straight up make me laugh.
Jarvis Cocker has a cameo in Wes Anderson's new movie,
Asteroid City... as a cowboy.
Oh, come on! That's hilarious!
Cocker has also "contributed to the film’s soundtrack", which seems a
litle more plausible. As it turns out, this is neither Pulp frontman's
first collaboration with Anderson, nor his acting debut. He played
Tip Top, a chanteur, performing a histrionic cover of the 1979
French-language hit "Aline" (original by Christophe) in a promotional video.
In it, Jarvis was animated, by which I mean he was a cartoon. Okay, I'm not making
this any clearer, am I? Jarvis is often animated and cartoonish. This time,
though, he was hand-drawn. I'm not sure it counts as acting. Let's hope the
cowboy Jarvis is live action. I'd pay to see that.
I would pay to see Asteroid City even without Jarvis in chaps. I wouldn't say
I'm a Wes Anderson fan as such but I have seen a number of his movies and
enjoyed them all. I can see why he annoys the hell out of some people
but I like the self-referential artificiality that's become his hallmark. The
trailer for the new movie looks fantastic but trailers often outdo the main
feature. We'll have to see.
If I do get around to watching it, I won't be tweeting my thoughts. They'll
pop up here as always. Twitter is over as a cultural force, perhaps, or
perhaps not. It's still too early to be sure. I can say, though, that its
travails and troubles no longer feature in my daily news feeds the way they
did a few months back.
The last I heard was a report that the massive staff cuts have left Twitter's
infrastructure
hanging by a thread. Even if I wanted to get on board, which I still don't, it looks like the
ship has sailed, even if it hasn't quite yet sunk.
Anyone fancy another Friday Grab Bag? Good, because that's what we're
having. Mostly because I happened to see two or three things and I felt like
sharing I don't have any particular points to make. I just see stuff and want to
share it and this is the best place I have.
As I was suggesting in
yesterday's boost for Blaugust(Wish I'd thought of that at the time - it would have made a better title.)
the blogosphere has become something close to my personal version of a social
network. Leaning into Redbeard's fears as expressed in his
comment to that same post, it feels a deal safer sharing stuff here than, say, on
Twitter or YouTube.
The obvious disadvantage is that almost any other platform at least stands a
chance of a) getting more traffic and b) reaching an audience that's actually
interested in the topics in their own right. Posting here, it's more like
putting up a poster in the convenience store on the corner of the street to
say you're having a sale of your home-made pottery in your back yard.
There's a chance some craft-loving stranger from out of town, stopping
off for a Dr. Pepper and some Flamin' Hot Cheetos to see them through the next
fifty miles, might spot the notice and drop by but it's not much of a
chance. More likely it'll just be a few of your neighbors turning up for a
chat as they handle the merchandise without really looking at it, before
putting it back down and heading off home.
Once again I should probably save this sort of thing for Blaugust itself,
although now I come to study the schedule I see we're not actually doing a
How To Blog week this time. Did we ever or did I just imagine it? Maybe
that was for the Newbie Blogger Initiative. Is that still rolled up
into Blaugust?
Anyhoo...
I saw the above in
a news item
from NME last night. Surprisingly, it hasn't yet cropped up in any of my
other feeds. I thought everyone would be all over it but maybe its old news and
I'm late to the party. Unfashionably late, that is. (I never really got that
whole "fashionably late" thing. I had to learn by hard experience that
"Eight for eight-thirty" really means "Don't even think of showing up before ten".)
This will be the second Dungeons and Dragons movie, I believe. Not that
I know much about D&D. I only played it for about five years,
roughly from 1981, just after I graduated college until maybe 1986, by which
point everyone in the group had pretty much lost interest and/or were no
longer speaking to each other.
As far as I recall, that first movie was both a critical and commercial
disaster. I saw it on TV, I think, although I have virtually no recollection
of anything about it. I do seem to remember it being so bad that it set the
entire hobby back a decade, not that D&D had all that much in the way of
progress towards mainstream recognition to lose.
Times change. Science fiction, fantasy and superheroes are all so mainstream
now the actual mainstream is starting to feel like a genre.
Stranger Things, currently weirdly hot for a show that's apparently
airing on
a dying network, can take a lot of the credit for making D&D, specifically, feel
culturally relevant right now, which I guess makes it a good time to drop the
first trailer for the movie, even though the film itself isn't due until next
year.
I clicked through to watch it not expecting much, but I came away, two minutes
later, quite impressed. The effects look good, which is crucial for a project
of this kind, even though
some people
don't always seem to think it matters that much, but perhaps even more
importantly, the dialog wasn't terrible, the acting was suprisingly
understated and the set-up for the plot made sense.
By the time we got to the coda at the end, which made me laugh, I was of the
general impression that it might be something I'd like to watch, which I guess
is the whole point of a trailer. Also, Whole Lotta Love weirdly works,
which I didn't think it would...
A long way further up my street than either big fantasy movies based on game
franchises or Led Zeppelin, come bands I like doing covers of songs I
like. When I saw the item on Wet Leg covering the Chats'"Smoko" for Like A Version, I got one of those brief, physical
reactions, where the hair on the back of your neck stands up.
Wet Leg are everywhere this year. Everyone knows who they are, not
least because megastars like
Harry Styles
and
Elton John
keep name-checking them, covering their songs and hiring them as tour
support.
I'd like to think that in this corner of the blogosphere you all heard about
them from me first,
well before
all these Johnny-come-Lately superstars got into the act. I, in turn,
discovered them by way of a blog that's now sadly gone silent,
Everett True's
How Not To Write About Music.
Everett last posted almost a year ago, when he gave us the thirty-first entry
in his series
Sixty for 60, in which he was planning on commemorating his sixtieth birthday by sharing
sixty songs from 2021, as nominated by people he knew on Facebook,
thereby adding yet another level of metatextuality to the referal process.
There has, as yet, been no thirty-second entry.
This, of course, makes Everett True a perfect candidate for Blaugust, other
than the fact he's never heard of it and would almost certainly want nothing
whatever to do with it. I would love to imagine him doing a vanity search on
Google some time in the next week, catching all these references to his name,
coming here to see who's been talking about him and ending up rebooting his
blog for Blaugust.
Yeah, not gonna happen.
That Elton John item I linked above deserves drawing out, by the way, in case
you didn't click through. The gist is, he thinks "girls" are making the
musical running these days and the "boys" need to catch up. I very much
agree, although I think you have to be Sir Elton to get away with phrasing it
quite like that.
Elton runs through a short list of examples, including several of my own
personal favorites from recent times: Wet Leg (Of course...),
Let's Eat Grandma and
the Linda Lindas. He also mentions
the Nova Twins, who are great but not in a style that does it for me, and Haim, who
I've never really got.
I've mentioned before how it was Boy George who introduced me to Let's
Eat Grandma. It's very encouraging to see the old guard looking forward
instead of back. And let's face it, it's a better look than
this. I mean, would you want to be that guy?
There is a real problem that I'm sure Roger Waters, who has "no idea what or who the Weeknd is, because I don’t listen to much music", is equally unaware of, namely that
interest in new music is declining. The fear is that
it's being suppressed, even pushed out, by the dead weight of all those classics. Not
Pink Floyd specifically, although I'm sure The Wall and
Dark Side of the Moon play their part.
I'm all for rediscovering, sharing and celebrating the past but not at the
expense of the present and the future, which is why I focus a lot more on
what's new and great than what's old and great here on the blog. Well, that
and wanting to look cool, of course, although cool to whom or for what end are
questions I don't want to think about right now. Or ever.
Sometimes, of course, you can have your cake and eat it as with
Starcrawler's latest. As I write, it's been on YouTube for all of eight
hours but like most of their stuff it sounds like it could have been recorded
in the South of France in 1972. Comments in the YT thread pick out notes from Britpop to
Grunge, proving, as we all knew, that pop has very definitely eaten
itself.
This has turned out to be more of a music post than anything, which wasn't
exactly what I had planned, but what the hell... Since we're on the theme,
I'll reveal I've been collecting tunes for another "New Stuff I Like"
post. I'm thinking of making it into a series. Let's have something from that
and then we're done for today.
I Want An Authentic Tail - Police and Pea- Isn't that magical? Or maybe I mean maniacal. It turned up in some
Songs of the Week list I saw. I'd never heard of them but who could
resist a title like that? There were no links in the piece so I went to YouTube
because everything ever is on YouTube, right?
Well, this isn't. Or not under that name it's not. The only thing I could find
was this:
That one's called Pineal Gland, it's nine minutes long, it's in
Chinese (Cantonese, presumably, since the band's from Hong Kong...) and it's
positively hypnotic. It also has the name of the band in ideograms and that's
how I finally tracked down the tune I was looking for.
As far as I can make out, Police and Pea is some offshoot of the
excellent My Little Airport, several of whose songs I have in my files.
I'm guessing, really, but a lot of their tracks turned up in the suggestions
every time I picked another P&P track so it seems likely, although
MLA are
very much still going.
In the unlikely event anyone's been moved enough by Police and Pea to want to
own some, here's
the Bandcamp link,. Unlike everything else I've covered
today, I don't imagine you're going to find it on Amazon or even
Spotify. Other than that, I think we're done.
Late last night I made an ad hoc decision to back up my music folders.
Haven't done it for a while. This morning I spent an hour sorting and deleting
all the duplicate entries that somehow appear when you do this kind of thing in
a hurry just before bedtime. For now, anyway, everything's about as tidy as it's
ever likely to be, which is to say not very.
It did at least remind me that I haven't done a real music post for a while.
Christmas songs are all well and good but as Adam Ant said, "that music's lost its taste so try another flavor". I've been collecting a few new tunes. Let's hear some, why don't we?
First, the acknowledgements. For several of the new acts revealed here, we
have
Jarret Wolfson
to thank. Again. Won't be the last time, either.
As I said
back in Blaugust, during Creative Appreciation Week, (Aka The
Week Formerly Known As Developer Appreciation Week.) "Jarret's channel offers an amazing insight into the independent music scene
in one of the biggest, most innovative and influential cities in the
world". New York in case you're trying to guess. Which makes it particularly odd
that Jarret's channel is where I first ran into Lovejoy.
Lovejoy don't currently merit their own Wikipedia page but their
frontman,
Wilbur Soot
does. You can click through the link to get the full story on this renaissance
man of our times but for those who can't summon up the energy or enthusiasm,
the highlights are these:
British Twitch streamer and YouTuber.
Came to prominence as creator of comedy channel
the SootHouse
(Over 6m subscribers according to Wikipedia although the YouTube channel
only claims 1.34m).
Founder of fictional Minecraft nation L'Manberg.
Lead writer for the RP Minecraft server
The Dream SMP.
None of which really prepares you for the wit, wordplay and straight up
erudition of Soot's lyrics, which seem to me to place him firmly in a very
long line of heavily ironic English songwriters that descends through
Alex Turner, Jarvis Cocker and Elvis Costello all the back way
to Ray Davies and quite possibly Noel bloody Coward for
that matter...
I think we'd better have an example:
Lovejoy - Knee Deep at ATP
Of course, it would be a much better example if Wilbur Soot and/or Lovejoy had actually written it. As Andrew Farrell points out in the comments, it's a cover. The excellent original is by Los Campesinos.
And another example... or perhaps the first...
Lovejoy - It's All Futile! It's All Pointless!
Seriously, fuck the Daily Telegraph, right? It's abundantly clear to
anyone who isn't clinically senile that the next current generation is
everything the last current generation was and the last next current before
that and so on back at least until the 1890s but more likely to the
Stone Age...
Case in point: Lauran Hibberd. I forget where I ran into her. I really
should keep notes. Oh, wait, I know... it was
this great cover
of the Kinks otherwise rather horrible Christmas song
Father Christmas, whiich I will be using in next year's Advent Calendar
for sure (Lauran's version, obvs.) Like Lovejoy (And the Kinks) Lauran
is English, although you'd be hard put to guess from this video.
Lauran Hibberd - Charlie's Car
She's not just from England. She's from the Isle of Wight. With
Wet Leg, that makes two acts from the island time forgot that I've
actually heard now. And two that I've heard of! ! I can pick out a few
structural similarities, too. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? What else happens
over there that no-one cares knows about?
Lauran Hibberd - Bleugh
According to her very brief Wikipedia
page "Hibberd's music has often been described as "slacker pop"",
which is a pretty good description of Wet Leg too, now I come to think of it.
It's a new subgenre to me but one I intend to investigate further, assuming it
actually exists. Preliminary findings are highly inconclusive.
And now to a third island. I swear I didn't plan it this way. I also swear
that until I started typing this paragraph I had no idea that Japan's
For Tracy Hyde take their name from the actress who played the lead in
the 1971 cult classic
Melody, a film I saw once, on television, on a weekday afternoon in the 1980s and
which I bought a few years ago on DVD in a brief moment of bittersweet
nostalgia for the existential bleakness of the 1970s.
The shrinkwrap on my copy of Melody remains unopened, my spiritual ennui
having been sated by viewings of
Private Road
and
Permissive, both of which I bought at the same time. From what little I remember,
though, it doesn't surprise me the otherwise forgotten movie retains some
status and recognition value in Japan, where apparently it was a major
success.
For Tracy Hyde - Subway Station Revelation
Despite missing the connection entirely, it was the odd name of the band that
made me click the link when it came up in a YouTube sidebar. It may be
shameful to admit it but this is exactly the kind of song I'd probably skip
over if it was by an English or American band. Something about the language
shifts it from the generic to the specific in ways I probably don't want to
explore too closely.
For Tracy Hyde - Underwater Girl
It's easier to find mystery in things you can't understand. As the first
comment on the YouTube thread for this one puts it, "I dont speaking Japanese but. There's just a tone about this song that hits
different." Well, okay, I wouldn't put it exactly like that...
Sonically, I think there'd be an argument for including For Tracy Hyde in the
current shoegaze revival that's been getting some traction in webzines I
follow.
And elsewhere. One of the top-tipped bands from that cultural shift has to be
Feeble Little Horse, who I may or may not have started paying attention
to purely because of their name. I do have an obsession with bands named after
animals.
Feeble Little Horse also turned up on Jarret Wolfson's channel recently but I
was aware of their work before then. The live version of
Dog Song 2 Jarret posted is better than
the studio version, for my money.
Feeble Little Horse - Dog Song 2 (Live)
I'm not sure I'd even call it shoegaze, although the guitar work certainly
qualifies. The vocals are just too upbeat. This next one definitely counts,
though, even if it's very short for a shoegaze number, a strong positive in my
book.
Feeble Little Horse - Chores
I'm getting the feeling this is starting to run long, although I'm not even
halfway through the bands I'd shortlisted for the post. Maybe I'm talking too
much. Wouldn't be the thousandth time. Just a couple more, then I think we'd
better call it quits for today. I'll save the rest for later. That's the good
thing about blogging - there's always a later.
How about a change of pace?
W. H. Lung - Pearl in the Palm
When you watch videos, do you ever find yourself thinking more about what it
must have been like to have made them than you're thinking about the song
itself? I do, often. Look at the trees in that video. It's obviously
mid-winter. He's not wearing a shirt. He's up to his chin in a lake. How the
hell is he still grinning?
Also, no-one who really wants to be famous or successful calls
themselves W. H. Lung.
And finally... Maisie Peters. I came across this one while I was
tracking down Christmas songs for the Advent Calendar. Maisie released a
seasonal number called Together This Christmas as an Amazon Original. I
didn't use it (This year.) but while I was checking it out I spotted a very
interesting title among her other works...
Kaveney, who's exactly a decade older than me, was in her mid-thirties when
John Hughes' high school movies began appearing at the cinema. By the time I
started paying attention I was in my late twenties, so my exposure came mostly
through television and the video rental store but even though I was well out
of my teens and no longer in the target audience, those movies and others like
them had a big emotional impact on me. Still do. Even now, I perk up whenever
I recognize a reference to Pretty In Pink or The Sure Thing.
Maisie Peters is just twenty-two but she's clearly watched plenty of
John Hughes movies. Like Roz Kaveney and me, she's also British, so the
seminal tropes and traditions of the American High School come to her as
second-hand as much as they do to us. And yet still, somehow, it's as if we
all lived those lives.
You can call it cultural imperialism if you like. I call it art.
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