#720-#716

#720. RÜFÜS DU SOL - Innerbloom (What So Not Remix) (#30, 2016)

78th of 2016

We can never be sure what the voters truly want. Yes, there's a voting list and you're supposed to vote for your 10 favourite songs, but there's no accounting for misunderstandings, out of character votes, or a need to settle the score. I don't necessarily want to accuse people of voting for the wrong thing because it doesn't suit my own narrative, but I was looking at the numbers for the last Australian federal election and many electorates varied between 3 & 10% on the subject of informal votes. That's close to a million Australians and they can't all just be drawing dicks on the cards, just a lot of people given clear instructions they fail to follow.

I'll get the fair statement out of the way, I don't think the What So Not remix of "Innerbloom" is unpopular, I don't think people voted for it by accident (I have questions about the votes cast for the non-Flume remix of a 2012 song admittedly). You do have to ask yourself though, if RÜFÜS DU SOL had released "Innerbloom" at a sensibly earlier date, or even a sensibly later date, and it had either naturally polled, or was set to poll in 2016, would this remix get anywhere near the look in that it did?

This is a thought that was complicated a bit by the Hottest 100 of the Decade. On one hand, "Innerbloom" landed at #5, an almighty upgrade that goes some ways to righting the misfortune of it originally landing at #103 because it was released too late in the year to receive recognition. On the other hand, this remix managed to land at #64, which either suggests some associated recognition from sitting side by side on the voting list ('ah, why not vote both?'), or the previously crazy notion that maybe this is still being underrated at #30.

If you need the introduction, "Innerbloom" is the closing track to RÜFÜS DU SOL's second album. It was released as a single in the lead up to the album and proved to be quite popular, but didn't quite hit the Hottest 100 as it's always difficult to do so with a late November release. The song is also 9 and a half minutes long. Despite this, and despite the fact that the lead single on this album managed to become a hit on two (or arguably three) separate instances, it stands as the band's most streamed song of all time on Spotify. While I don't think it's quite the minute to minute flawless panorama of sound that it's aiming for, I do have quite a bit of fondness for it. If you've ever thought that RÜFÜS DU SOL were just a fluffy lightweight band, then firstly you should listen to some of their deeper cuts, but also this goes some way to proving otherwise. Crazy to think that "Like An Animal" (#797) was the single that came just before this one.

What So Not is a producer from Sydney. Originally, the name belonged to a duo of Emoh Instead and Flume, who teamed up at least a year or so before Flume's career blew up. They parted ways in 2015, and now Emoh Instead just produces music under the What So Not name by himself. We'll encounter a What So Not song in this list eventually, and it's actually the last song they made as a duo. In that regard, this is the only proper What So Not entry in the whole list. Amusingly, if I'm not mistaken, it's also the only remix on this list that isn't by Flume. Maybe some people still think he's in What So Not. Couldn't hurt the voting campaign.

I'm not always the best equipped to talk about these things, but compared to "Tennis Court (Flume Remix)" (#955), I do think this remix does a tad more to justify its appearance. One gracious thing it does is that it cuts the song down to less than 5 minutes long. It's not just shrinking the song down either; it feels like a totally new arrangement. The first thing you're hit with is the strings that immediately forge a unique identity for it. They return for a nice effect with the song's admittedly amusing drop. I can't call the whole thing essential, but it's nice to mix up the palate (or does 'palette' also work here?) every now and then.

#719. Lime Cordiale - Reality Check Please (#25, 2020)

64th of 2020

I need to address the elephant in the room here. I could save it up but honestly Lime Cordiale blurbs are the perfect dumping ground for these kinds of observations. Why did we get so obsessed with hotel lobby bells in 2020? I don't have the time or resources to flip through all 1000 songs, but off the top of my head, there are 3 songs in this list that have these bell sounds as a little sound effect in the chorus, all from 2020. "Complicated" (#940) is the first one, this is the second, and the third is yet to appear. I live in constant fear that I'm still forgetting one.

With that being said, this is the only one of the three that really leans into it. The other two are kind of tucked away, underneath the vocals. This can't help but rub it in your face as it fills the dead air like a sitcom laugh track. I tried to muck around with the audio to hear what it's like without the bell and it does just feel very unusual. They keep it in for live performances it seems too, but there aren't very many videos I can find of them performing this one.

This is understandable really because I don't know if this is supposed to be seen as a major release for Lime Cordiale. It's a song that comes from the deluxe version of their album "14 Steps To A Better You", the one from the blog background. That's an album that already had 9 singles in its own right, so it's possible that I've just wound up taking this filler of a song on a ride.

The neutral tone I took for all that probably comes across as more critical than it means to be. I've always had a soft spot for this one. Much like "Addicted To The Sunshine" (#726), I think it just about nails the ideal version of Lime Cordiale's light, breezy pop rock. You do have to get through some odd lyrics at times, a weird pre-chorus, and be okay with rhyming 'check, please' with 'in check, please', but I think it's worth it for one of their catchiest hooks. The bridge in particular deserves a shout, as the song goes on a really peculiar journey for about 30 seconds. One of the best ways to fill out that awkward part of the song we've seen so far.

#718. MØ - Final Song (#43, 2016)

77th of 2016

It's not her final song. I didn't let it happen, and the voting public didn't let it happen either. It is her final song as a lead artist, but it's hard to say that she didn't do her part for the one song that's waiting in the wings. That other song also had to have helped this one on its way to being a hit. It reached #12 on the ARIA Chart, which is pretty good, but it's way more interesting to note its chart run where it reliably climbed every week until it peaked, and then dropped every week at roughly the same pace. Just a really nice looking pyramid, the platonic ideal of a chart run. It's so hard to do nowadays. "Something In The Orange" by Zach Bryan dropped more than 20 times on the way to its peak, and has climbed more than 30 times on its way down, an utter mess.

I fall on this in a similar way to the previous MØ entries. She remains a captivating presence on the song, and that helps steer us over the fact that she's treading on very familiar ground. I look at the charts on the week that this peaked and it's just wall to wall tropical house, or failing that, wall to wall drops in the same style and purpose. Everybody wants to be "Sorry" by that Canadian fellow I mentioned 6 entries ago, but few more than this one. I grew to have an allergic reaction to that sort of thing, but I do think this is a better example of it.

#717. Hockey Dad - Sweet Release (#73, 2018)

73rd of 2018

I just want to assure that you are reading the above data correctly. This song is simultaneously my 73rd favourite song in the 2018 countdown, but also the song that finished at #73 on said countdown. I cannot promise that this will or will not happen again because it would be too revelatory for the 5 #1 songs still to come. I queried a bunch of very clever maths types on this and concluded that there's about a 36% chance on any individual countdown to completely avoid these double ups, under properly random circumstances. It really got me thinking about our ability to even correctly subjectively rank things. It's interesting but highly off topic as a gimmick to pad out a Hockey Dad entry.

I don't know how many people remember Eddy Current Suppression Ring. They never fully blew up, but got a decent following with their raw brand of garage rock. It just seemed like the hype evaporated very quickly after their second album, and that was 17 years ago. If you were into them, you might not have realised that they actually released a couple of new songs back in March, I can't see very much discussion or acknowledgement of this online, even from the band's official channels. I bring them up because they're always my first point of reference for "Sweet Release". The unabashed way the verses are performed feels almost intentionally familiar. If not for a certain band waiting in the wings, it'd feel like the most Australian thing we have here. That's not even the peak of it though, as we're treated to the most bogan reading of 'yeah, sweet release' during the chorus.

If you think it sounds a bit odd, you'd be right. As far as I can tell, this is the only song in Hockey Dad's discography that has their drummer Billy taking lead vocal duty. Regular vocalist Zach just handles the hook, giving new meaning to the titular phrase. I was a bit harsher on this song initially because of that, but I think in general there's a solid helping of raucous energy (a phrase I need to replace eventually before I over-do it), to get over the line, compared to "I Wanna Be Everybody" (#751) which sounds a bit lacking next to it.

#716. Billie Eilish - Happier Than Ever (#5, 2021)

77th of 2021

When talking about "when the party's over" (#809), I mentioned how it's difficult to really determine the significance of individual singles for Billie Eilish given that she so frequently scores hit after hit in a way that suggests her cult of personality provides much of the legwork and the songs themselves are just a natural product of it. Maybe everyone's had that one song that made them a fan at some point over the years, but she's had so many game-changers in her career that she could probably afford to lose one of them and still make a pretty nice looking Jenga tower.

"Happier Than Ever" might just be the most crucial one. It's the title track to her second album, and one whose individual success went a long way towards salvaging a rocky period where her success wasn't quite guaranteed. The two singles she put out just before this were "Lost Cause" and "NDA", both of which failed to really catch on like her singles usually do. Billie managed 7 songs from her 10 track album last year to make the Hottest 100, but in 2021, she couldn't even get all of her singles across the line. Even some of the earlier singles before that, "Your Power" (#836) and another I'll eventually get to, showed the tell-tale signs of a tailspin. An artist with a big first album returning and getting gifted big chart peaks that the songs did not live up to. "Your Power" peaked at #9 on debut on the ARIA Chart, left the top 50 in just 6 weeks, and didn't even return when the album came out, a brutal rejection by the populace. The other song was even more drastic. It wouldn't be unreasonable to sell your Billie Eilish stocks as soon as possible because she looked condemned to being too left-of-centre for major pop success again. Or at best, she'd have a career arc similar to Avril Lavigne, who occasionally papered over her downward trend after the monster debut album success, but eventually also joined the club of artists whose new albums only spend 1 week on the charts now.

With that in mind, I think it's not unreasonable to say that the title track to "Happier Than Ever" saved her career. Sometimes it just takes that one big song to get people on board, or three, depending on which country's album chart you're looking at. This one was a monster though, proving that Billie could still surprise everyone in a good way, and providing a magnet for her potential Hottest 100 voters. It's still the 3rd best polling song for an artist with no shortage of well-polled songs.

I have always had mixed feelings about this song. In case you need a primer, it's a very minimalist song with some light strumming and gentle singing. That's the first 2 minutes anyway. Around the halfway point of the song, it starts to pick up with electric guitar. The drums soon follow and the song just explodes with righteous fury. For an artist who is often so comfortable in a relatively whispering register, hearing her start belting out for this song is a real shock to the system.

I reacted positively to this at first. I wasn't really in need of a saving throw because I actually liked "NDA" a lot just before this came out, it's the closest she's come to replicating her 2019 song "WHEN I WAS OLDER", my favourite thing she's ever done. Just love the vocoder effect on her voice and the nifty electro layers they both dabble with. "Happier Than Ever" was still good though, and I had it pegged as a relative highlight on an album I generally enjoyed quite a bit. Over time though, it never really fulfilled that earlier promise and I found myself increasingly underwhelmed with the product on display. There's a single edit for this song that cuts it down to more or less just the second half, giving the people what they want, but I think by the end of the year I had become the sicko who prefers the first half of the song. The whole thing had cooled off on me a lot after my initial fanfare.

To put it simply, I just don't think it's mixed very well. I want the guitar and drums to soar and give the song the edge that it's going for. It's so frustrating because I think it can be done right. I listen to live performances of the song and it feels like the song sounds like it's supposed to, but this studio version just compresses it all into clashing noise. This became even more clear to me less than a year later. I don't have many chances on this blog to confess my adoration for Lizzy McAlpine's music because she's never made the Hottest 100 before (alas, the breakout hit was a year after eligibility), but in 2022 she released the song "firearm". That song is so on the nose about attempting a similar idea that I had to scramble to confirm it was written before "Happier Than Ever" was released (it was, but it's really close). Either way though, that song in its studio version manages to do just about the same trick except it actually sounds great, leaving my disappointment with what could have been here even greater. Maybe that sounds like I'm just playing favourites but I think I will eventually make it clear when we're done here that Billie Eilish is not exactly a whipping boy around these parts. I also can now say that Billie put out the song "THE GREATEST" on her next album and that one absolutely soars on the same assignment, top 100 in a 2023-2032 version of this blog? I'm more than willing to acknowledge when an artist whose music I adore is not reaching their full potential.