#715-#711

#715. Vera Blue - Mended (#29, 2017)

70th of 2017

Sequencing an album must be difficult. Ideally you just have to make 12-14 certified bangers and call it a day, but realistically there are going to be peaks and valleys and it's important to sequence them correctly. You can tell it works sometimes when I go out of listening to an album feeling like I have a consistently solid time, but then when I actually look back at it on a track by track basis, there are only maybe 2 or 3 standouts. A middling effort can easily be disguised if it's between two highlights.

The first track has to get you off on the right foot though. I remember a decade or so ago thinking that a lot of Australian albums seemed to understand this assignment, so often leading off with a non-single that nonetheless had the punch and excitement of one, and maybe sometimes they'd even end up getting the honours later down the track. On the flip side of this...literally, is the closing track, the last thing you're left with. It can be advantageous to end on a strong note, but it requires some level of trust between the listener and artist. It's great to go out with a bang, but you don't want to backload it so much that people just stop listening before they get there.

"Mended" is a relatively rare entry on this list that serves as the closing track on its album. Or at least, it's supposed to be the last track. Vera Blue later released a deluxe version of "Perennial" that includes two previous singles (one of which will appear on this list) tacked onto the end. That's the only version on Spotify now and there's no indication that it ever wasn't like this. I prefer the album in its original standing. I've never been much for an awkward extended encore no matter how good the songs in question are. Once you've been informed that it's over, you want to catch your breath and leave. It's especially awkward when a song like "Mended" feels like the perfect closer until it isn't one. There's a lot in common with the sound of the opening track "First Week" that strengthens the sequencing.

I quite like "Perennial" going back to it for the first time in many years. It is in fact well sequenced with its collection of singles and non-singles that sound like they could be them. I do have to add a community note to the song "Said Goodbye To Your Mother", where Vera Blue suggests the person who said it's better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all must belong to the latter group. This is certifiably not true because it's an Alfred Lord Tennyson quote, someone who belongs to neither group as he married, had children, and his wife outlived him.

"Mended" is not a song I felt strongly about at the time but it has grown on me a decent amount since then. It definitely belongs to the camp of songs that sound just a little bit like "Fix You" by Coldplay, or at least ascend to a similar kind of climax. The years that have followed have provided me with an all-time favourite song that also fits this template, a song that will not appear on this list but I'm sure I'll bring it up when it's more relevant. For now we're just sitting on a pretty good interpretation of the idea.

#714. The Jezabels - The End (#83, 2013)

77th of 2013

This time I can efficiently dole out the joke. This is the end. After a brief tenure towards the top of the pedestal, this is the last time The Jezabels ever appeared in the Hottest 100. Granted, I may be overselling the tenure of a band who only ever appeared 4 times, but at the time I positioned them very similarly to Boy & Bear. They were a band who were capable of doing big numbers and the future seemed bright. Where did it all go wrong?

On the record, it feels like the weight of heavy expectations did them in. They started their career with 3 successive EPs that vaulted them higher each time. Their second EP "She's So Hard" managed a rare feat of reaching Gold sales (before streaming) without ever hitting the ARIA top 100, while the 3rd EP "Dark Storm" even managed to reach the ARIA top 40. They'd do it again a year later with "Endless Summer", the lead single to their debut album. Both did quite well, "Endless Summer" taking them to Hottest 100 top 10 glory, and the album joining Boy & Bear in the gang of albums who had Adele rain on their parade. Only difference is The Jezabels never had their happy ending because their second album was blocked by MKTO of all artists. Their 3rd album charted a little lower and then the band went on hiatus in 2017 and haven't released anything since.

Reading about every new Jezabels release is bundled with comments of disappointment, where they've either missed the mark or changed their sound away from what drew people in. If you can't keep making hits, you stop making new fans and just watch the numbers keep dropping. For many people, this trajectory just makes sense and it's hard to argue they were hard done by.

My perspective of this band is just completely different to everyone else's, I think. I felt hot and cold with the early music they put out, usually only getting proper appreciation after the fact (looking at songs like "Hurt Me" and "Easy To Love"). The main problem I had is that their single selection would chicken me out of the full length projects. I'm only just now listening to their debut album for the first time, because I'd always look at it, I'd think of the pretty good lead single "Endless Summer" and think that if that's the best they've got, I'm in for a chore of a listen.

Something that helped click The Jezabels into place for me was when I first saw them compared to a band from Cincinnati, Ohio who will eventually appear in this list. They shared the common thread of potentially seemingly like the most boring band in the world but having a relentless drummer who almost singlehandedly put a spark into their sound to make it work. Once I could see what they were doing, it all made sense. The other factor was that the next single on the album was "Trycolour", a brilliant piece of post-punk revivalism that completely countered my trepidation into sheer wonder. At that point the only reason I didn't listen to the album was because I was a year away from Spotify and then just never got around to it.

I did keep listening to The Jezabels after the fact though, and managed a lot of fondness for their second album "The Brink". Once again, I felt like the single choice was a distraction, "The End" doubling down on the same issue I had with "Endless Summer". Given the low finish for the song in the countdown, it feels like a lot of people checked out at that very point and went no further. For me it's their best album. A welcome trimming as the only one under 50 minutes, and just filled with some of their best songs period. Particularly the title track which feels like the perfect progression to link the old and new sounds, while "Look of Love" is probably their best attempt at writing a proper pop song without losing any of the excitement in the process. I think the increased use of synths is done very tastefully but I can see how some might find it a betrayal. The 3rd album is literally called "Synthia" and delves even further into that. I didn't like it quite as much but it has its moments. Particularly I like "Pleasure Drive", even if its synths sound like they come from a similar pedigree to the "Donkey Kong" (not that one, I mean the Gameboy one from 1994) soundtrack which amuses me greatly.

I suspect if we ever do get any more music after this, it'll be something very different. The band is still semi-active on social media. The lead singer also has released solo material I've generally liked in recent years. This is the part where I bring up the fact that in November last year, following the result of the US election, she posted a selfie with a MAGA hat to get a reaction out of people. A lot of confused rhetoric followed where most of her statements were not very clear but nonetheless got her on the side of the anti-cancel brigade. Or maybe it would have done so more if she got enough attention for it. This also happened a few weeks after her solo album release and as best as I could tell, her sales actually declined in the following weeks. While I'm still not sure what she was really trying to say, the rest of the band distanced themselves from it on a social media post soon after and have said nothing since. The lead singer has in recent weeks used International Women's Day as a means to shovel in some clear anti-trans rhetoric, so that's harder to get around the veil of plausible deniability. Once you get into this rabbit hole it's hard to get out, because it's clear who is and who isn't still welcoming. It's a pity though, the band made some great music over the years.

#713. Meg Mac - Grandma's Hands (#46, 2014)

73rd of 2014

It's been a long time coming but we've finally reached the second Meg Mac cover that I promised way back when I was talking about "Bridges" (#971). This is definitely the more well known of the two original songs but I did not know about it at all at the time. "Grandma's Hands" is of course a Bill Withers song, but wasn't in the periphery of his songs that I knew. Compared to "Ain't No Sunshine", "Lean On Me" and "Lovely Day", this quaint 2 minute song doesn't quite have the gravitas to get brought up again.

Meg Mac goes some ways into providing that gravitas. She extends it out to a whole 4 minutes and provides a significant swell to the sound of it that really explodes in the second half. She's not given much to work with so she's mostly saying the title over and over again, but it's done in a way that you'd never realise she re-arranged it so extensively, it feels like a natural interpretation that was always hidden in the original idea. In case you were wondering, Meg Mac does not change the part of the song where 'Billy' is directly mentioned by grandma. I remain agnostic to that whole discourse but it's worth noting.

While I was largely indifferent to Meg Mac at this point in time, at the time, this particular recording was something that rubbed me the wrong way to a significant degree. A song you can't help but feel like you're stuck with as soon as it starts playing, and one where it feels like a sick joke, an act of chicanery that when I thought I could be safe from it, it lands in the top half of the Hottest 100 and I have to continue thinking about it 10 years later. And she gets to be a singer!

Normally I wouldn't be able to tell you when things changed for me, but this is an exception. I have the receipts from my old Twitter account backed up by last.fm. On September 17th, 2021, I was listening to my shuffle playlist that prioritises Hottest 100 songs I haven't listened to very often, and "Grandma's Hands" came on. It was on this listen, having gone several years without hearing the cover that it started to resonate with me. The big build-up at the end specifically. About a year after that, she released a new album and I found myself liking her music more than I ever had before, with some similar ideas to what's employed on this cover. I don't know if that's a coincidence or not, but in any case I certainly derived some amusement when this likely bottom feeder just kept sneaking higher and higher up on this list than the 2014 me would ever fathom.

#712. MEDUZA (feat GOODBOYS) - Piece Of Your Heart (#29, 2019)

65th of 2019

There's a common discussion thread around triple j and whether or not it's late to the party on certain artists. It's usually relating to the biggest stars around and the reality of the picture is that it's not as if triple j is unaware of the artist, but whether or not they're interested in making them part of their playlist roster. That makes it a game of speculation. It's easy to look in hindsight and say 'triple j obviously should've played The 1975 years earlier', but I don't know how you can honestly say you knew in 2013 that they'd still be relevant 10 years later. Let he who has never pre-emptively dismissed an artist cast the first stone.

As is often the case, the derision is mis-aimed, and if there is criticism to be levied at following trends instead of making them, the reality is usually much more banal than is made out to be. That is, if the purpose of these kinds of discussions is to deliver a brutal 'gotcha' to triple j's music programming, then there are constant sources of this pretty much every year. Not in the big names though, but in the minor fashion, where artists are doing quantifiable numbers probably completely under your nose unless you're meticulous about these things.

triple j do this so frequently with dance music. The genre thrives on new names who are plucked from relative obscurity because they managed to come up with one song that tickled enough people's brains to make them want to hear it more. As proof of how difficult that is to do, they usually stay that way, because it's a lot harder to cultivate an audience on an image that's not necessarily present or being examined. MEDUZA are a slight exception to the second part of this, because they did manage multiple hits, both in the ARIA Chart sense, and the fact that they have two more songs that'll appear in this list. On the other hand, they're a prime example of the first part of this, a pattern I've seen repeat time and time again.

MEDUZA are an Italian house trio. They formed in 2018 and very quickly broke through with their debut single "Piece Of Your Heart". The song was released in February 2019, and reached the UK charts in March 2019. By April it was #1 on the UK Spotify chart but hadn't even touched Australia's chart. Sometimes the UK is just onto this stuff faster, but it should be noted that the featured GOODBOYS are in fact British, so that might contribute to it. Oddly enough, Italy was one of the last countries for the song to break through in, and it didn't do particularly well there.

It reached the Australian charts in May 2019, and by June 2019 it was in regular rotation on triple j. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. Technically following rather than leading, but doing so in such a banal way that no one would ever dare rant about it at the risk of sounding deranged. It gives off the impression that there's always someone checking the charts for triple j to figure out what to do, but they only do it every so often, so they don't have the chart watcher brain of immediately listening to every new entry every week. The mere act of listening to new chart entries is so foreign to the general populace that you can get bragging rights of being among the first 1% of people to hear everything just because of what the shelf life is like. Well, unless you only just listened to "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey when it entered the ARIA top 50 this year for the first time ever. triple j get to remain more up with the trends than 95% of people, and so to at least 95% of people, there's nothing untoward or unimpressive about this variety of crate digging. Part of being who I am as a person means that for better or worse, I'm so frequently part of the small percentage of people who are left in the other group for various things, so I'm prone to noticing these things.

I think triple j and radio in general thrive on these kinds of hit songs. The ones that can readily slip into the playlist because they have a proven registration for the hit party, but they're the kinds of hits that aren't going to alienate many listeners. Maybe you could argue a case against what happens in this song's first chorus, where Joshua from GOODBOYS breaks the 4th wall and pre-empts the meaningless melody that he's about to present. It's a fascinating decision because it gives the song some amount of character, but maybe by the time the second chorus rolls around, all you can think of is how blatantly these guys have rubbed their nothingness in your face.

With this being MEDUZA's big breakout hit, and the template from which all future hits are judged upon, it might feel weird that it's the one I'm starting with. I do think template is the right word for it though. There's a good solid foundation in it, you're instantly treated with a rather moody synth tone for a radio house song, but they only do the bare minimum after that. I felt like their later efforts fared better when standing side by side with the blueprint.

#711. The Weeknd - In Your Eyes (#53, 2020)

63rd of 2020

Sometimes you don't get what you want. It's unfortunate but inevitable that the world does not revolve around me. On the other hand, it might be a blessing in disguise, if for instance you're able to count all the times you thought you knew what you wanted, got it, and then realised you didn't want it after all. Who knows what other horror scenarios I'm being graciously denied without knowing what they could be holding back?

That's a really dramatic way to say that when I first listened to The Weeknd's 2020 album "After Hours", I immediately ear marked "In Your Eyes" as a desirable single. I got what I wanted, and found myself questioning that initial thought as it didn't feel like it lived up to my own unspoken hype. Maybe it's fine after all, there are worse songs that could wind up getting heard over and over again, some of them are adjacent to "In Your Eyes" on the track list, but maybe I could enjoy this song to the fullest if it stayed as a deep cut. An additional thread in this tale is that the album's title track was technically released as a single, and it's my favourite song The Weeknd has put out in a very long time.

I definitely still like "In Your Eyes" now that the time has passed though. It doesn't commit itself to any particular melodies for too long to allow them to get grating, and still sounds relatively fresh 5 years down the track. If I'm being brutal, it's the kind of low ceiling that The Weeknd so frequently settles for that makes me so critical of what he puts out. As a continuation on what I said about "Blinding Lights" (#786), it's just not exciting enough to justify the fervour he generates.