#805-#801

#805. Bring Me The Horizon - True Friends (#99, 2015)

79th of 2015

For most artists, getting a #1 album represents the peak of their popularity, or alternatively, the capitalisation that comes after the spiritual peak. Bring Me The Horizon are a strange case in Australia where it's probably more accurate to say that they got successively more popular with each album and only really peaked in 2015 when they already had three #1 albums. It's accurate but a bit of a misnomer at the same time. They first hit #1 in 2010 with their album that has a very long title. They broke the record for the lowest ever sales managed by a #1 album, but they outsold everyone else and that's all they needed to do. Commiserations to The Script who were #2 that week which is the only time they've ever been that high on the ARIA Chart. Bring Me The Horizon scored another #1 album in 2013, which was a little less surprising by then, and it houses two songs I'll eventually write about. That album, "Sempiternal" had some surprising longevity though, and set them up in 2015 for "That's The Spirit" to go to #1, and uncharacteristically achieve Platinum status. As an aside, at this point they still hadn't even gone to #1 in their native UK. In contrast to a certain Abingdon band I'll eventually write about, they just got everything right in regard to timing in Australia.

Let's ignore "maybe" (#826) as it's not really their song, but if you told me that we'd go close to a decade on at the time and I wouldn't find another new Bring Me The Horizon song to put below this, I'd be a little surprised. They have a certain haphazard approach where you never really know what you're going to get. This one isn't even that crazy, all things considered. It's just a song I cannot lend out my full interest and consideration into. It's that title lyric with its twist on the idiom that's too plain to make you take it seriously. I hear 'true friends stab you in the front', and aside from losing the slight double entendre (unless people refer to their chest/stomach region as their 'front'?), it just makes me think of face stabs in "Team Fortress 2". Bring Me The Horizon strike me as the kind of people who might be aware of that reference, so maybe that's where they got it from. They've probably had dumber lyrics than that, but it's given such focus that I can't help but be taken out of it.

#804. FISHER - Freaks (#80, 2020)

76th of 2020

I'm pretty confident in saying that FISHER's Hottest 100 fortunes peaked immediately, and they seemed to be declining in the years that followed. This entry in 2020 has all the hallmarks of being his last entry except he continued to poll year after year, 7 in a row. With a couple of exceptions, it often feels like the FISHER fervour goes completely under my nose. There must be a lot of people just politely enjoying his music and voting for it without making a big deal about it. That seems like the demographic he's trying to hit.

I won't pretend to not be susceptible to the formula but this song does put me in a bit of a bind to talk about. The drops in here aren't extremely different to each other and lyrically it tops out at three instances of the same 7 words. It's probably a song about partying but it is admittedly funny to consider it a song about foot fetishes. 'Shoes come off, and freaks come out', that's the whole thing, make up your own mind. I don't know if these are the same freaks that come out for the mighty trumpet. Hard to see it as anything other than the most redundant FISHER entry.

#803. Vance Joy - First Time (#50, 2014)

79th of 2014

This is the 5th Vance Joy song I'm ranking in the 800s. The side effect to this is that no matter how varied my opinions may be across his discography, we're getting a whole big helping of 'well I'd say it's pretty good but I do have this slight problem'. Jumping backwards and forwards through his discography just so I can keep saying the same thing over and over again.

Well it's mainly this song that elicits the reaction. Actually there's two of those problems here and they're not very interesting. Firstly it's the very undercooked bridge. It all just feels like he left a gap for it but never got around to putting anything there. The other thing is that the cracking in his voice reaches a critical mass here and the end result is a lot of goat noises. In the large pantheon of Vance Joy songs about getting laid, it's definitely one of the catchier ones. He doesn't waste any time kicking into gear which at the very least makes it harder to dread.

#802. PNAU (feat Kira Divine & Marques Toliver) - Solid Gold (#36, 2019)

75th of 2019

This entry finally allows me to divulge the fact that Kira Divine is singing on all of PNAU's entries. It's one of those things that feel like a holdover from a previous era (that PNAU are very much from). It just seems so crazy that the woman who sung on their two biggest hits (by a mile) and is all over the music videos got no credit for it. Of course this song wasn't nearly as big so it's a bit like when someone links the original source of their hit tweet in the replies, no one's seeing it.

This song is probably better than I think to give it credit. Whenever it starts and we're greeted by Marques Toliver's verses, my Chainsmokers alarm goes blaring. It's as if they invented a very specific recipe for having hit songs in the last few years and now more artists are trying to see if it works for them. Just the whole song sitting in cruise control so we get through this unexciting guy's story about someone he knows. I also have to once again append to a post on the day to note that Kira Divine just released a new EP today and Marques Toliver is on three of the songs.

Kira definitely fits the assignment much better and is a ray of light when she gets to take over. Not the best of hooks, it feels like the title is being sung multiple times but it's actually a couple of phrases that sound like it, not sure if the whole thing is fully thought out. It's at its best when she's singing in time with the pulsing of the beat. They know they're onto something when you get surprised by a double chorus at the end, it's very satisfying.

#801. BENEE - Beach Boy (#81, 2022)

82nd of 2022

This is the first of a handful of times that BENEE is going to appear on the list. Her most famous song will not be doing that, sometimes things don't just work out the way they feel like they're supposed to. It works out for me though, as not being tremendously into "Supalonely" while being quite content with what we did end up getting.

We've got to start somewhere and we're going straight to the end of the line. "Beach Boy" is a weird one for me. For most of her career up to this point, she pretty much worked with one producer, Josh Fountain from the NZ band Leisure. It was fairly lucrative and I can't argue with the results. "Beach Boy" is her first Hottest 100 entry that wasn't produced by him. Instead she went to Greg Kurstin, which is certainly a high profile upgrade (he's had a hand in at least 4 more entries I'll be talking about, as well as plenty more in the years prior), but I'm less convinced it works. It feels like a half-hearted recreation of what her music used to sound like. The chill vibe is there, but there's less flavour to go along with it.

I'm not fully convinced by what BENEE's bringing to the table either. The whole song seems to be built on the fact that 'beach' sounds like 'bitch' and she uses the two words interchangeably, like she's trying to hide some sort of plausible deniability on some pretty tame profanity. It's mildly amusing that if I look up BENEE in my music library, I'm always going to see "Ebeneezer Goode" by The Shamen, a song with similar aspirations.