This song is so good. It's hitting the same notes as The New Pornographers at their best, with a groovy funky little swivel in it. It's good! Just listen to it.
But I'll warn you, if you like this song and you expect the rest of its album to sound anything like it, you will be sorely disappointed. The album, "Exactly As It Seems", is all over the place. It opens with house music, then turns into some funky disco stuff that simply does not work very well in my opinion, and never really gets over how quirky it thinks it is. I'm all for eclectic bands melding genres together in bursts of joyful experimentation (I did live through the era in which people unironically liked The Fiery Furnaces, a band Home Counties is undoubtedly inspired by), but there's just something about this album that starts to chafe.
But damn, this song is fun! In comparison to the rest of the album, it's low energy and boring, but I guess that's just who I am now, low energy and boring.
Well, this hasn't aged well. Sydney Sweeney went from being America's Sweetheart to pretty disliked by every liberal almost overnight, so I wonder how Smut feels now. Previously this song made for good (and very trite) generalized feminist sound bytes from the band: "We put the sexy woman in the movie so we can see her be sexy and then kill her for it." That may well be true (I don't think it is, really) but I'm not sure that Sydney Sweeney is the feminist icon everyone wanted her to be.
Either way, this song has a great riff. I'm not sure why Uproxx at one point called this a "punk song", because it's just too clean. The whole album is too clean. This stuff sounds like rock music made for tweens 90% of the time and that's just too bad, because it sounds like they have the skills to make something really raw and interesting. Instead they opted to drown their 'punk' sound in studio polish. Bleh. This song is good in a mix of other music, but a whole album of this is just too much to stomach.
What a fantastic sound this song has, a mix of 90's-00's grunge-tinted indie rock, with a solid Pixies style LOUD quiet LOUD foundation propping it all up. The melody itself is just so, so, so strong. And it's under 3 minutes, so if you really like it, you can just listen to it again and again.
Unfortunately, the rest of the EP that features this song first, Up to Snuff (I am guessing 10 years from now this link will be broken), is not really anything like this song. The rest of the EP sounds too 80's (to my ears) and none of the other songs have a strong melody and dynamics that measure up to this one. So, that's not great, but, this song is so good, it doesn't really matter.
I spent the last two days using AI to build out a tool which allowed me to go through and clean up all ~400 or so posts that used to be on this site. In the end, 369 old posts that were about single songs have returned from the grave, for better and for worse, though admittedly I left out some of the worst (or at least most questionable) posts.
Reading three years of your writing can definitely help put your life into perspective, a perspective you may have forgotten about. Most of my writing on this site was either complaining about women or lusting after them. Nothing really in between those two points, though there were a couple outliers where I complained about all the people I used to know back then.
And don't get me wrong, in this case, all those people were worth complaining about. It's 15 years later and I don't know any of those people any more, not a single one. A couple years after I hit the period of unemployment that led me to shut down this site, I cut all ties with my previous life and focused on building a new one, and it worked out fantastically. If you read this site back in 2010, you should know that I'm still depressive and angry, but my depression and anger tends to be externally focused, away from my life, and more toward the the people and systems that keep us oppressed. In some of my old writing, you'd swear I was supporting these systems of oppression, especially in some of the posts that I did not carry over from the archive.
On that note, I tend to be an archival purist, but, man, it felt like if I brought some of my old posts forward it would seem like I was condoning what I said in them, and I don't, so I left them behind. Internet Archive has them, so I'll never be able to run for public office without changing my political opinions about 180 degrees to match my prior rhetoric. I get that part of the allure of my site was the way I shared my life, no-holds-barred, but good lord, "who would want to be such an asshole"?
It was also interesting to go through the archive and see which bands are still around and which vanished into the ether. My batting record here isn't particularly great, as a few bands I said will undoubtedly be big ultimately went nowhere. But it was a pleasure to see Ha Ha Tonka release a new album just two years ago, which features this song about how quickly time flies. The members of the band have gotten married, started families, and watched themselves get old, which I've also done (except my children are dogs) in the same time. Other bands, like blog favorite Viva Voce, saw their marriages disintegrate along with their bands and music careers entirely. I luckily emerged from my 20's relatively unscathed, which I can say now that I've got a full decade in between me and my 20's; the scars have all healed or been replaced by new, different scars.
It's a trip. Who would have thought we'd be here, so many years into the future?
Wow, I can't say I've ever tried to listen to Cults since, you know, Go Outside, which felt like it was about 300 years ago, and was on the staires! summer 2011 mixtape. Well, good gosh, that may have been a mistake, because this song is very good. The piano is like a warm blanket turned sinister and spooky by (assumably) a synthesizer's pitchy swirly static, a voice changer, and some reverb. I don't know what the lyrics mean, but it doesn't feel like it really matters. The song is, as the kids say these days, an absolute vibe.
On one hand, I am glad that there are still young men making rock’n’roll music. On the other hand, “ELLiS•D” is a terrible name for a band and typing it is just enough of a pain in the ass that I guarantee it will cause harm in the long term. (But at least Ellis Dickson didn’t name his band “Andrew Jackson Jihad”, phew.)
This song is a lot of fun, and I really enjoy Ellis’ hyperactive ‘Gene Vincent on crack’ vocal stylings. But, being fully honest, it’s too much for more than a song or two. By the third song on this EP, I was over it, I couldn’t do it anymore. It’s as exhausting to listen to as it is to perform it, I’m sure. But, man, this specific song is a lot of fun!
I didn’t really think about how hard it was to run this website originally, having to come up with something to write about music. And now, doubly hard, that I am old, boring, and my relationship to music doesn’t have that urgency it did back when I thought liking music was something that was going to save my life in some way. This is now just the hobby of an old man, doting on his stupid website no one reads but will serve as good fodder to make an algorithm’s creative writing just a touch more interesting. Ah, yes, I am still egotistical, even well past my nascent years.
Anyway, none of that has anything to do with this song, a little delightful mashup of something that sounds a bit like a surf rock guitar riff and relatively modern south England Sprechgesang venting about microplastics. Ah, even Gen Z can sound a bit Millennial from time to time, eh?
Wow, what happened to pop week? One minute I’m here, next minute I am somewhere else entirely different. This was meant to be one of the songs in my pop week series, obviously. This song is loud, hooky, and maybe doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I want to know why that number is so specific. If anything it sounds like the narrator of the song is the pathetic one if they’re keeping track that precisely…
Let’s just call this pop week now, because we’re adding songs to the lineup that weren’t even in the original list of songs to post. But this song came up in my rotation, and I think it fits. It’s bombastic, it’s anchored by a simple riff, and the lyrics are infectious. It counts!
Good lord, I said it was the weekend of big pop songs and then I forgot to post this song yesterday. I bet the old staires didn’t post a lot of music like this, because my taste in music used to be a lot less fun. I don’t even think I liked LCD Soundsystem back when I was originally writing about music over here.
Anyway. This song rules. The bass, the bass, the bass, what else needs to be said? The song lives and dies by that bass and the Duran Duran chorus. I dunno what else to say, this song is just so much fun.
