#810-#806

#810. John Butler Trio - Only One (#87, 2013)

86th of 2013

If you go from 2001 to 2010, you've got 15 helpings of the John Butler Trio. They had a level of success that seemed unstoppable, with a fair amount of crossover power as well, consistently churning out moderately sized hits and monster album sales. I guess things moved on after that. triple j brought in a whole lot of new listeners in the 2010s and they were interested in finding their own new generation of stars. This is the only John Butler Trio entry after 2010 and it only snuck in at the bottom of the list. Somehow I wrote this entire paragraph without even thinking to make an "Only One" pun until just now.

I don't know if anyone else had this experience, but I remember growing accustomed to the JBT line up from when I started listening to triple j and it felt a bit sad when it changed up on the next album. I eventually found out that this is a very typical turn of affairs, the average John Butler Trio member who is not John Butler lasts for about one album cycle and sometimes not even that. I guess I just felt slightly betrayed when I no longer recognised the other guys in the music videos, but then maybe even more when they released "April Uprising", an album with a lion on the front cover and the Brisbane Lions went on to miss finals for 9 years in a row starting after that.

I can't say for sure how much of the sonic shift that happens across their discography goes down to the shifting band or rather just John Butler's shifting creative spark. We're a long way from "Better Than", and an even longer way from "Betterman". I cannot in good conscience say that this sounds like standard John Butler Trio business, because the only thing I hear in this song is the steel drums, they just completely dominate anything else that's pushing to be noticed. It makes for a perfectly serviceable track, just one that's hard to get excited about.

#809. Billie Eilish - when the party's over (#8, 2018)

83rd of 2018

Billie Eilish has gotten so popular over the years that it's very difficult to decide which singles need the most significance ascribed to them. She's the kind of artist with a following that insists on digging deep. She's got nothing short of 9 digit play counts across all three of her albums and plenty of cuts that have long surpassed the average shelf life of contemporary hits. I look at "when the party's over" and feel like I have to treat it as sacred to some degree, because in many places it launched her career to a new level, but I look back on it now as just another step on her inevitable conquering.

I'm probably being influenced by other parts of the world on this. In both the US and the UK, this song was her first top 40 hit. In Australia, it wasn't even her highest charting song in 2018, as another song she polled (and thus I will write about) charted higher about 6 months before this one. That particular song has also long since outlasted "when the party's over" on a global scale and is her most streamed song ever now (though I would not count out "BIRDS OF A FEATHER" one day catching up with the pace it's at). Maybe "when the party's over" was just cashing in the cheque on that previous single and lapping up its kudos. Sometimes timing is everything and it's why I'm always a little skeptical to just take chart positions to heart.

But maybe the real reason why I tackle these questions with regard to "when the party's over" is because I've never really seen the spectacle with this one. Habitually I find myself pitting my own perspective against the average person, where the different things I've encountered lead me to arriving at a different opinion on the confluence. I don't think that's quite the case on this one though. On some level I actually do get it. The song sets a mood, it's sparse, it paints a very clear picture in its lyrics. I suppose I just don't find myself feeling the resolution, if there even is one. I think the repetition on the hook tips too far into a sort of nauseating novelty that stops it from hitting right. I don't feel like the additional verses after the first one do anything to give it more gravitas. It's just a relatively pleasant song I don't find myself ever wanting to put on.

#808. Luude (feat Colin Hay) - Down Under (#65, 2021)

84th of 2021

I'm surprised I haven't spoken much about sampling yet, if there's any place to do it, it's the bottom end of the list when we need to dish out all the uninspired ones. It's one of those frustrating things when you've been in too deep with knowing music past and present, a whole lot of songs that might have sounded fresh and exciting when you were younger, all of a sudden sound trite and obvious. If I heard something like "Hip Hop Is Dead" by Nas nowadays, would I dig the sound of it or would I scoff at the basic Iron Butterfly sample?

I guess that deep down, you want musicians to impress you with their crate-digging. It implies passion, knowledge, and a desire to deliver the best to their audience. Something that's often taken for granted is the fact that musicians pretty much always do have all of these traits. They're in the business because they love music. On the other hand, it is a business, and they've got bills to pay, so it's generally a lot easier to go for mass appeal, sometimes in the most shameless way.

I don't think that Luude is a hack musician. He's been at it for quite a long time now, and the most disparaging thing I can say is that 2017's "Paradise" sounds suspiciously akin to popular trends of its time. He did however have some runaway success with this single, and it started a pattern of seemingly trying to re-capture the magic to diminishing returns. He seems to have stopped doing that now though. There are only so many times you can be intrigued by the prospect of 'What if that song you've known forever had a drop?'.

Irrespective of what he specifically did with it, this release bothered me initially. I have a lot of admiration for Men At Work. They did a lot in paving the way for other Australian artists to hit it big overseas in the early '80s, and they had quite a handful of hits to boot. I don't know whether it's our own doing or if we're being influenced by America, but you wouldn't know any of this by cultural observation. It just feels like their entire legacy is frequently simplified to just "Down Under", a song that feels more like a novelty than anything else at this point. As something of an Australian myself, I just get sick of seeing this song come up over and over again. Behind the funny Vegemite sandwich song is a really tight collection of hits. "Overkill" is one of my favourite songs of all time, at least it has that one episode of "Scrubs". Still, I hear the chorus of "Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive" and think that it could easily pass as a song by XTC, another outrageously underrated band. Colin Hay has a similar low register to Andy Partridge.

It's pretty cool too that Colin Hay actually re-recorded his vocals for this version. It makes it feel more like a mutual honour than a joke. Amazingly this won't be the only time he shows up on this list, and the next time is probably with even more reverence. Nothing but the best for the king I suppose. As far as this goes though, it's hard to get too much excitement out of a relatively faithful (if over-the-top) remake of a very overplayed song. I think Luude has enough ideas of his own to justify it, and given the option I'd probably choose to listen to this over the original most days, I'm just always disappointed to see our reference pools shrunk down time and time again.

#807. Tame Impala - A Girl Like You - Like A Version (#66, 2021)

83rd of 2021

I wonder if Scottish folk feel the same way I do about Men At Work with Edwyn Collins. For him it's less about erasing history as it is him never fully getting his dues in the first place. Still, he had more than a small handful of charting songs in the UK, but then brings along with him one of the harshest ratios between his 1st & 2nd most streamed songs on Spotify you can find ("A Girl Like You" beats "The Magic Piper (Of Love)" by a factor of over 100). He does have a cheat code to get out of this if you include his work with Orange Juice, but on his own he's a very prolific musician mostly known for just one song. I'll give a personal shout out to "Keep On Burning" and "Do It Again", two later career singles of his that are nearly just as catchy as the big one.

Some years ago in 2016, the Norwegian band Sløtface put out a song called "Empire Records". I love it, it's full of their typical brand of fun energy. It made me realise though that I'd never seen the movie of the same name and I felt like I was missing the context on it. I'm not really though, and they're referencing "High Fidelity" just as much (that movie I watched for the first time last year and enjoyed a lot), but it was an interesting experience. I'd previously just known the movie as being the source of how "A Girl Like You" became a big hit. If you also thought this, I'm here to tell you that it's a lie, the song was a hit first, and then they used it in the movie. I guess you could just get away with a retro sound like this in the mid '90s.

Anyhow this is just the standard Tame Impala take on the song. Generally what you get here is the sound of the original song's guitar solo but spread out so the whole thing sounds like that. It sounds fresh enough to not be a complete waste, but it does remove some of the more interesting sounds and ideas from it. I respect the choice of cover though. It's the kind of song that's just a bit too old without finding a new generation that you seem to find less and less of on Like A Version. On the other hand, it's a solid exception to my rule of not being impressed by remakes of the same song in quick succession. A couple of years after this Like A Version, Dove Cameron put out her own spin on it in a song called "Girl Like Me". It fascinates me so much because she did not have to go so hard on it. Her sampling of the main guitar riff packs more of a punch than the original, and makes this cover feel a bit lightweight by comparison.

#806. Ruel - Painkiller (#22, 2019)

76th of 2019

Unless you pay extremely close attention to this stuff, it's hard to make sense of ARIA's Single Of The Year category, a publicly voted one. Rather than the industry nominated and selected categories, this one is fairly objective as it uses ARIA's Charts from the previous 12 months (say, around October to September), and it just gets the biggest hits. To be eligible, the song has to be at most a few years old, not previously nominated for an award (although they seem to break this rule sometimes), and they can't double up on artists. That last rule can be brutal given how many eggs usually go into a single artist's basket for distributing the local hits of a given year, and they have to fill out 10 nominations somehow. The big killer too is the sales window. Any song that gets to live out the full 12 month is going to have an unassailable lead for any late bloomers, and it can result in some funny things getting nominated.

Take "Painkiller" for instance. It's Ruel's biggest hit, both now and at the time. It managed a steady run in the ARIA top 50 starting in June 2019, and lasting until the end of August. This wasn't enough to make the nominations for 2019, but come the 2020 ceremony, this song which had been absent from the top 50 for the last 15 months was nominated as objectively one of the biggest hits of the following year. It's not even the earliest nominee that year because Hilltop Hoods also had a very early bloomer, but their excuse is that it was overshadowed by the previous single in 2019. In reality, not a single one of that year's nominees were released in 2020, it was a strange year I suppose.

Whenever I think about "Painkiller", that drawn out fact is the main thing I think about. The song itself doesn't evoke very strong reactions out of me. I like what he's doing with his voice on the chorus, it gives the song some character and it's an effective hook. I'm torn on the guitar which sounds either fun or wonky at any given point. The verses are very comfortably on the rails, just passing time really. Is this enough words? I've still got 4 more Ruel songs to go.