#765-#761

#765. RÜFÜS DU SOL - Desert Night (#34, 2013)

84th of 2013

"Atlas" is a pretty chill album. Nice artwork too. There's a symmetry that's been lost ever since they had to change their name, which also lines up with when they stopped making albums with 5 letter titles, maybe there's something in that. Something I felt dead certain on at the time is that the three Hottest 100 entries they had landed in the exact opposite of how I feel. This is clearly not the case anymore.

I suppose I've just become a fiend for a catchy hook. The other two tracks manage to figure that out, but "Desert Night" is a song that leans hard into its build up only to go back to first gear soon after. I suppose what I'm saying is that this would make a fine album track but I'm not sure why it's a single?

#764. Andy Bull - Keep On Running (#57, 2013)

83rd of 2013

I don't know if you've ever encountered one of those TikTok videos where there's something mundane going either to the side or in the foreground that's just engaging enough to keep you looking at it. I generally imagine some kind of grating action, but really it probably could be anything. The music video to this song provides multiple examples. It's all synced up to the beat of the song too so it's oddly hypnotic even though there isn't much of anything really happening in it. There is one amusing moment towards the end where the tempo ramps up briefly and all the subtlety goes out the window.

Last time I wrote about Andy Bull (#853), I had trouble finding things to say. This is happening again, and it'll happen once more I suspect when I get to the last one. He's just a fairly uncontroversial popstar without much of a gimmick beyond a slightly different vocal style then you might be used to. "Keep On Running" is just a fun little song and there isn't much else to it. Lucky for him he put the album title drop in the lyrics to this song because it's easily the most popular song on it.

#763. Machine Gun Kelly (feat Halsey) - forget me too (#36, 2020)

72nd of 2020

Something that's always stuck with me was someone talking about the once controversial 2000 album by a very popular UK band. This album was hard to swallow for some as their new rock saviours had made a pivot into electronic sounds. That's what I remember when I went to listen to it as well. If you actually categorise it though, you've got the opening track making an immediate show of it, and then like, one other song? Most of the album isn't too far removed from the expected rock sound. But in a more general sense, it shows how readily these perceptions can set in, and how easily you can convince yourself it's true. If it can be true with regard to an album I've actually listened to dozens of times, imagine if it were an artist, or even discography that I'm clearly not going out of my way to explore. Anyway, welcome to Part 2 of the "maybe" (#826) blurb, except I guess this came first.

I don't want to just talk about "Tickets To My Downfall" though, what about mgk in general? It's one where I don't want to trust the narrative because for all the hate he gets across the board, I feel like most people only really ever heard some combination of "Bad Things", "Rap Devil" and "my ex's best friend". In the case of "Rap Devil", mgk's diss track to Eminem, that's a war that I generally see Eminem declared the winner of. Of course that's gonna happen. Stans are gonna Stan even when Eminem is making fun of mgk for being one. If you ask me, I do think "Killshot" is probably the more biting and effective song, but "Rap Devil" is more enjoyable to listen to because it sounds better (although he really served Eminem that auto-tune chorus up on a platter. Between that and the "Recovery" lyric, there are finally consequences for making easy mistakes to be called out upon).

As for "my ex's best friend", it just feels weird to me that the big hit from mgk's break out pop punk album is such a dodgy representation of it. It sounds more like a trap song with a half-hearted rock sound to cosplay the idea of pop punk but not committing to it. That's in addition to being barely 2 minutes long and having a blackbear verse. That just makes me wonder when people laugh at this career pivot, how many of them have *only* heard that song, and amidst its radio success, heard it so many times that it feels like they've heard "Tickets To My Downfall" over and over again, but really it's just that one. Anyway, we're not covering that one because triple j were fairly selective about the mgk they broadcasted in 2020 so "forget me too" is the only one, and the last time I have to wax paragraphs about mgk.

I come into "Tickets To My Downfall" with the uncommon situation of having listened to "mainstream sellout" first, so if I'm being honest, I wasn't seeing that much difference between the two. Maybe the skits were more intrusive on this one. Nonetheless, listening to "forget me too" makes me feel like this genre experiment wasn't for nothing. Any issue I have with that other song, this one better understands the assignment. The guitars come with more crunch and tempo, and we trade in for a better guest star as well. We'll see a bit more of Halsey experimenting with genres in this list, and suffice to say, I'm a fan.

#762. Spacey Jane - Skin (#15, 2020)

71st of 2020

Hottest 100 discourse has always been an endless back & forth between the folks who want there to be more breezy, lightweight songs by Australian bands with little international attention, and those who think there's too much of it. That's gotten especially true lately as the carved out real estate has gotten under serious threat. In any case, where you fall on that spectrum really defines you on a song like "Skin", either a masterpiece example of what music is about, or three minutes of nothing better spent elsewhere.

Where I land on it is that it's a Spacey Jane song that doesn't really have that big 'it' factor to it that you could squint and find in other songs they've put out. I always think of it as just the slower one that doesn't really do anything until near the end, and I could easily believe that I just spent 5 minutes getting there. I can definitely find better examples elsewhere in their catalogue, but it's something at least. Just mashing away at those keys really adds a good amount of excitement to it.

#761. Kira Puru - Molotov (#75, 2018)

78th of 2018

I really have to apologise to Kira Puru. They've had a history in having to point out to festival line up posters that they've misspelt their name, which must just get so annoying. I'm sadly guilty of doing the same thing. My dumb excuse is that I mostly knew them initially for featuring on a song by an Australian rapper (who will eventually appear on this list), but I frequently scrub off the feature credits on my iTunes library to make for tidier last.fm stats. I spent a lot more time hearing the name than seeing it written. Vowels are tricky. A lot of the time we just kind of mumble through them in a way that you could sometimes put any of the main 5 in and it's believable. I run all of these posts through a spellchecker before they go live and nearly every mistake I make is not knowing if it should be an 'a' or an 'e', there are just so many words to memorise.

I won't make the same mistake again though in this case. It certainly helps that Kira Puru managed to carve out a solo career. I never loved this song in particular, but was thrilled to see it find a place on the countdown. It was payback for a year prior, I voted for their song "Tension" which I thought had the makings of a varsity entrant, but sadly didn't really go anywhere. That was the year in which I was the very first voter in the countdown though, so I guess technically speaking, they started off the voting in the top 10, and no one can take that away from them.

"Molotov" rides a fairly similar wave to "Tension". A similar focus on the bouncing bass lines with both of them. I think I was pre-empted in a similar way in 2017 with my love of Selena Gomez's song "Bad Liar", an odd song that samples Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" and comes through far better than it has any right to. If we look away from that minimalism though, I can see that "Molotov" provides a bit more upbeat closure to it. The hook is tried and true though. Everyone loves "Poker Face", why not find a new thing to stick 'muh-muh-muh' in front of? I'm not sure the actual chorus result is quite the payoff that's promised. It's giving off those crowd chanting vocals from Usher's "OMG" that I've always thought to sound a bit cheap. I'm not usually that interested in Punk Goes Pop-style covers, but there's potential in this. I just want the whole song to go nuts I guess.