#890-#886

#890. Flight Facilities - Down to Earth (Radio Edit) (#83, 2015)

91st of 2015

There's an interesting rule in the Hottest 100 vote that's been there since at least 2015. They clamped down hard on release dates around that point, ensuring that everything in the list was released between December and November, 2-13 months before the countdown airs. With one glaring exception I can think of that we'll get to eventually, this has been followed pretty well. The additional clause that very occasionally pops up is the exception to this rule, where significantly altered versions of older songs will be allowed into the list. There are some edge cases, but only two times from 2013 to 2022 that triple j actively acknowledged the radio edit on the website. By some stroke of chance, both were Flight Facilities songs that landed only two spots apart in the same list.

We'll get to the other one eventually on this list, but what I find most peculiar is how much legwork this one isn't doing to justify itself. The original version of "Down to Earth" is 4:30, this one trims it just slightly to 3:11. It's like the opposite form of when fragments of songs blow up on TikTok and get an extended version that's 3 minutes long. This edit is certainly brisker in its pace, but compared to the other Flight Facilities example, it's a lot harder to notice. I bought the album when it came out and knew this song well, but I don't think I even realised triple j were playing a shorter version of it at the time.

I've never really been a fan of this song as a single. It's got some marketing power as the title track to the album, but it has the unescapable sound of a deep cut. I mentioned when I was talking about "Sunshine" (#905) that one of the Flight Facilities entries could be argued as abrasive and this is it. One can only be pounded into submission so many times by that hook before getting a tad sick of hearing it.

What it does have going for it is a pretty nice music video. I didn't know at the time who Sam Rockwell was, but I was led to believe that it's a big deal. When I went to type 'down to earth' into YouTube, his name came up in the auto-complete before Flight Facilities. They even give him a feature credit despite not performing on the song. It's pretty stylish. Easy to compare to that famous music video with Christopher Walken, for a song by that British DJ who implausibly will appear in this list eventually. I've spent several years getting a bit better with watching movies, so I know who Sam Rockwell is now, but he'll probably always be 'that guy in the Flight Facilities video' to me.

#889. Matt Corby - Monday (#53, 2015)

90th of 2015

This is a song that is performed a cappella. The entire song is just Matt Corby's voice and hand sounds. That's the gimmick here. Astute Hottest 100 followers know that this provided a very strange coincidence in the countdown, but that's another story for another blurb.

There are 5 artists who have competed on Australian Idol and made triple j's Hottest 100. Of those, Matt Corby feels like he should have had the best run on the countdown. Arguably he still has, "Brother"'s #3 finish in 2011 pulls a lot of weight here. But in the years since this entry, he has done nothing but repeatedly fail to get over the line, despite still having a strong following. In terms of entries, he remains locked in an eternal tie on 4 with Lisa Mitchell and another who will eventually appear on this list. To Matt's credit, all of his entries are as a lead artist (he also has an additional co-write, something the unmentioned artist barely missed out on), but he peaked so early that I'll only be talking about him twice here.

"Monday" polling makes for a solid showing in just how popular Matt Corby was at the time, and how he responded to that. Very few artists would be able and willing to do what he did here, and even fewer would get away with it. This was wedged between One Direction & Delta Goodrem on the ARIA Chart for a week, it's just got no business being there. It's a song that doesn't have a chorus, the only part of it that sounds like a hook doesn't have any words in it, and the title doesn't even appear in the song. It's a level of audacity I can respect, while never really wanting to ever listen to the song.

#888. benny blanco with Halsey & Khalid - Eastside (#68, 2018)

87th of 2018

This is one of the biggest hit songs of all time in Australia. It never actually hit #1 as "Be Alright" (#986) and George Ezra's "Shotgun" kept it at bay for 4 weeks each, but the stranglehold this song had on the charts for the 18 months that followed had me feeling like it might never leave. By the time it finally left the top 40, it still had another 22 weeks left in the tank, riding out through about half of both Halsey & Khalid's imperial phases. Khalid had 10 hits come and go entirely before this song was finished. Even years later, this song spent all of 2023 either in, or just outside of the Spotify top 200 chart. The possibility of another "Eastside" renaissance can never be discounted.

I have to preface with all of that because it's vital context to talking about this song for me. It could easily be just a middling hit that's vaguely remembered, and its low Hottest 100 position goes some ways to selling that fantasy, but this is one of the big guns.

I spent all of this time struggling to make sense of this. It's easy to say that sticking two of the biggest names in music on the same song is an easy recipe, but it can only last so long before it needs to stand up on its own merit. I wonder how many people just think of this as a Halsey & Khalid duet. One of those aspects that had me having a tough time putting this all together was the fact that Benny Blanco inexplicably put his own name at the front of this.

Benny Blanco is not a remotely unknown name. I was very familiar with him at this point because he had spent a decade racking up writer and producer credits on absolutely massive hit songs. He had a huge start in 2008 when he co-produced "I Kissed A Girl" and "Hot N Cold" for Katy Perry and never slowed down.

He stood out to me because for the most part, I really didn't like his production. It was a clicking moment when I realised that so many songs I didn't like all had this common link. I generally think of that overly compressed sound on Maroon 5 songs like "Payphone" and "Maps" to be his doing, and something that did not sit well with me at all. Over time I've warmed to his work a bit more, including some stuff I didn't like at all initially. I remember finding it funny that at the same time I wasn't understanding this song, one of my favourite songs of 2018 was Kids See Ghosts' "Reborn", a song produced by Benny Blanco.

I guess I just found it peculiar that this is the first song he decided to stick his own name in front of because it just feels like one of the last songs I would prioritise the production on. I'll give him credit though; it's a song that doesn't fall into the traps I'd criticised him for before. This song sounds crisp and clean. It also sounds a lot like another song that polled closely by it on the 2018 list, in case you want to study voting preferences to a science.

All of this is to say that I have at least partially come around to this song. I still can't quite grasp having a strong investment in it, something about the song's chorus feels half-baked, like if the catchiest part is the word 'eastside', you need another draft. It's a pleasant enough song to not bother turning off. The vocal chemistry is fine, but it creates a new problem with it being a Benny Blanco song that it all feels like mercenary work, which detracts from it again. Halsey & Khalid didn't come together to reminisce, Benny Blanco used his executive producer powers to make it happen. Also this is that other song here that Ed Sheeran co-wrote, if there wasn't enough hitmaking pedigree.

#887. Chet Faker - Gold (#7, 2014)

88th of 2014

I'll probably say this again, but Chet Faker was far too powerful in 2014. He has a world-beating performance locking down the #1 spot and another 2 in the top 10. That's a stat line that has never been matched in the history of the Hottest 100. It's the kind of thing where you want to dismiss it as a fanbase thing. Like you've got a pretty standard performance that gets juiced up by irregular influence and now it's unrivalled. I've never been able to figure it out with Chet Faker though. It's a path that makes sense on paper with his gradual rise in the 2010s, but the songs just don't seem to really validate it. It's like we were in search of an Australian auteur and rode the closest match to the stars.

I'll be fair though; his hits aren't thoroughly unappealing or anything. It just feels like he coasts off a fairly low bar. I just feel like I'm supposed to like these songs more. The mindset appears to be that he's obviously a fairly astute musician, and I'll hear a little catchy bit and think 'well, that's good enough for me, 3 votes'. On an unrelated note, this song was released one day before Patrick Cripps made his AFL debut.

If the previous two entries of his I've talked about were novelties, we're into the world of pure Chet Faker with this one, and most of the rest of the way. "Gold" fares the worst because it's so plainly announced going in. He puts on some different inflections to mix it up. The general atmosphere is not bad either, I think the various handclaps mesh well. I just always find myself incredibly bored when I get to the chorus. It's just a lot of thrown out lines that don't break up the sentence at the right times. Breaking up 'I'll never love another one', and closing it off with 'love I said it' which doesn't even rhyme. If you read it as an attempt to write 4 lines of lyrics in a pre-determined space, it just looks worse the more I think about it.

#886. Tame Impala - Eventually (2015, #34)

89th of 2015

With the advances in streaming data allowing us to analyse listening patterns more than ever, it has me thinking back to something that's bothered me for so many years. How do people actually evaluate, rate & rank albums? The big thing that always comes to mind is that you're inevitably going to find a lot of albums that are stacked with the songs everyone likes and listens to, as well as the other tracks that are also just there. The measure of a great album seems to come down to a combined score across the whole picture which obviously sounds wrong immediately. I recently watched video compilations of the most streamed albums of each year, and for a lot of them, it's a game of picking out the one hit song that's carrying the rest of the team. Sometimes it's two or three, in which case it starts to feel like it might be a classic. It always feels like you're home at that point. Unless the album project is so blatantly full of artifice like DJ Khaled, I imagine that those big hits can paper over a lot of cracks. I feel like over time this has become a more common way of looking at albums. "Thriller" seemed like an album that used to cop a lot of flak for its deep cut duds, but over time has only gotten increasingly more untouchable. It's got "Billie Jean", "Beat It", "Thriller", "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'", "Human Nature", "P.Y.T.", it's more than passed the grade at that point.

Yes it's time for the obligatory '"Currents" is not that good' call out post. What about those big songs on it though? We'll get to them obviously, but take them away and it's just track after track of uninspired mush. I can still go back to "Lonerism" and be thrilled at every turn, but this (admittedly very successful) pivot leaves me just a touch cold.

"Eventually" is a solid barometer for the whole thing. It runs a whole 5 minutes and doesn't really deserve that much airtime. No number of fake outs can escape how much it just feels like listening to a small handful of 10 second loops over and over again. Is the sloppy drop alongside 'eventually, ahahahahah' in any way cathartic? The song peaks in the first two seconds when it tricks me into thinking it's "Omen" by The Prodigy, but afterwards I'm short of praise.