#735-#731

#735. Spacey Jane - Straightfaced (#28, 2020)

67th of 2020

Out of all of these Spacey Jane entries, this one has to be the one that's suffering the most from middle child syndrome. Not just the idea that it's surrounded by entries I'd feel more capable of talking about, but if you asked me to try and name all of their entries, this is probably the last one I'd be able to come up with. There's just no mnemonic way into it, and it's not even memorably unmemorable. This would be the perfect way to disrespect it as a waste of time but I do think it's pretty good. Just needs a better publicist I guess.

If there's one thing that it makes me wonder about, it's how the reception of this first album influenced the direction of the second one. Depending on who you ask, that might be an invalid statement because having a direction implies going somewhere different. But I look at the results in 2020 and get the impression that, while they may have been influenced on a song by song basis, the overwhelming feeling is a craving for slower tempos. Hence this mid-tempo song lands roughly in the middle. For a band who broke through with a faster tempo song (I'll remember the name of it when I get to writing its entry), they've been few and far between since. I dunno though, it's just pleasant radio fodder about falling out of love with a partner and the complicated feelings on what to do about that. Maybe it could use a resolution or an expanded perspective, but I have trouble figuring out how to end these things too.

#734. Ziggy Alberts - Laps Around the Sun (#42, 2018)

74th of 2018

The Byron Bay Bluesfest demographic of Hottest 100 voters has been lucrative since time immemorial. If this were to keep going, I'd have to find another generalisation to tag it with because by the time you see this post, Bluesfest will have run for the very last time. Except actually by the time I saw this post again, they decided they wouldn't be ending it after all, how dare they. The legacy is served through the numerous times Ben Harper, John Butler, Xavier Rudd, The Beautiful Girls and the like have made it in. It's a demographic that flies in, in droves, but also one that I just have no interaction with on a day-to-day basis. I feel like that can be an important connection to have in general if you're in the mood to be open minded about music. It's so much easier to like an artist if you already know someone you can trust who does. Otherwise it's too tempting to paint an entire demographic in a derogatory fashion and expand the rift of dissent. Why even entertain the idea of liking something if no one's going to appreciate it? Just a wasted effort all around.

I don't know anyone who's particularly charitable to Ziggy Alberts, but you look at his streaming numbers and have to think that we're just inundated with these folk. Last year he had his catalogue re-assessed for certifications and he landed 6 Platinum singles, this single and "Runaway" were both 3xPlatinum. It's a staggering amount of people collectively listening to this guy. Well, mostly his older stuff, as his newer albums have not come close in getting people to move on. The inundation of options to stream oddly makes it easier to just settle in with what we know. Or maybe he just peaked here and there was no need to explore further.

Regardless of my feelings about him or his music, this is a song I've always had time for. He spends a lot of time talking about the plight of the environment, and how easily we slip it out of focus as we're distracted by our own lives. Even Ziggy is distracted, because he shoehorns a love song into the chorus. Still, starting a chorus with 'Lately I've been' is really copying OneRepublic's homework from the desk next to you, the next word is 'worried' so it's possible OneRepublic returned the favour. It works though, kicking the song into a steady gear that allows it to be rather catchy given how wordy it ends up being. I'm fond of evocative metaphors though so the titular phrase is a good one.

#733. Meg Mac - Maybe It's My First Time (#86, 2017)

74th of 2017

I've been sitting on writing this one for weeks. Sure you can make excuses like 'I went to Melbourne for several days', 'I was sick for several days' or 'The AFL season just started and I hadn't gotten into the swing of multi-tasking just yet', but this is exactly the sort of entry that's gonna put me into writer's block. You know how there's the conversation every year about how the #101-#200 section is better than the actual list? I'm not saying there isn't merit to that opinion. If you like your music in the most natural sense, then skipping over the attention-grabbing gimmicks and getting to the less popular but still largely beloved entries by those who voted them, that's admirable. That's always as far as the discussion goes though because there's little to say about it other than commiserations for the very close, and curious what-ifs when artists unleash a salvo of their own. I always find that broadcast a bit tiresome to listen to, although I'll largely blame the schedule being very against my best interests there.

It's where you'll find many a song like "Maybe It's My First Time" though. Songs that don't quite have the big pop appeal to go big, maybe from artists who've thrived on that before. Mostly just the kind of likeable entries you'd be keen to hear on a setlist, but maybe won't buy tickets to finally get a chance to see. That's not the whole section of the list, for many it's the home of many of their votes, and these are words that aren't describing them accurately at all. On the other hand, there are going to be at least 90 songs in that lower section you didn't vote for, and your mileage is going to vary very little with many of them.

Would it be a big shock if "Maybe It's My First Time" landed at #114 instead? Not really. It comes from Meg Mac's debut album, but she'd already had 4 Hottest 100 entries before it. It may be boosted by the hype associated with the official debut, but it feels like just another day at the races at this point. Any gimmicks related to Meg Mac's style and persona with respect to what else is going on with music at the time are irrelevant at this point. You know who she is, and you know what you're getting.

Anyway this is a whole lot of misleading fluff to get in the way of me saying that I do think this is a worthwhile entry on its own. The roughness making up the backbone of her earlier singles is no longer around and there's a nice polish to it. You might not think of it instantly because it's not the title line, but the hook is solid and memorable to me. A jolt of energy with the added percussion and vocal layering. It's just the kind of unremarkable but generally solid performance that I'd struggle to write more than three sentences about if I didn't frame it like I did.

#732. Boy & Bear - Walk the Wire (#63, 2015)

71st of 2015

The start of the 2010s felt like a big changing of the guard in the triple j sphere. A transition brought upon by the combined efforts of social media and triple j Unearthed to give us so many answers in response of 'Who is the next big thing?'. The near simultaneous dissolution of both Powderfinger & Silverchair, the undeniable top of the podium for 15 years prior gave up a lot of real estate for whoever could come through next. I don't think we ever really got an answer to that but there were a lot of curiosities along the way.

To continue this line of thought, 2010 was also probably the year where physical singles ceased to be a dominant force on the ARIA Charts. We'd seen an increasing number of hit songs in the years previously that thrived without it. Rihanna's "Don't Stop The Music" in early 2008 was the first digital only #1 single, Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" followed suit 5 months later. In 2010 however, Eminem & Rihanna reached the pinnacle, having the highest selling single of the entire year with "Love The Way You Lie", solely on digital downloads. Once this became the norm, it began to far outstrip the capacity of the physical market. The rough ceiling of about 4xPlatinum sales in physical stores, while still the marker of a big hit, were dwarfed as it become not unusual for singles to reach 8xPlatinum or even higher whilst still maintaining their top 40 tenure.

These bigger numbers filtered especially towards the bottom end of the chart, with nation-conquering hits sticking around long after making their initial statements, and turning the chart from a matter of 'Something has to go here' into 'Just merely breaking in is a cutthroat battle with the odds stacked against you'. In early 2009, it would take about 1,000 sales to crack the ARIA top 50, and by 2012, that number would hover around 4,000. It tracks that simply more people were buying their music, but it removed the hopes of a lot of local underdogs to have a rallying call to get them that elusive exposure. It takes bands like Gyroscope, who could reliably rally together a bunch of sales in one week to get their lead singles onto the chart into a non-entity as the threshold gets beyond them, and now that's something that's only really replicated on the album chart, where you can occasionally get to #1 with sales that wouldn't even crack the top 100 singles chart.

While triple j is forever a relative niche, it has hovered in and around the thresholds of the chart. You could start to make decent Hottest 100 predictions with regards to the kinds of songs that felt anchored to the triple j audience. Cracking the ARIA top 100 was a reasonable benchmark, but the rare few that could reach the top 50 running on only one set of fumes were the ones you knew were a different breed. 

Boy & Bear finally enter this story at this point. They spent 2010 rapidly growing, and it culminated late in the year when they scored a minor hit out of their cover of Crowded House's "Fall At Your Feet". I liked the cover a lot, but I found myself listening to it repeatedly around New Year's Eve and something clicked sharply into place at that time: I loved it. Something about the harmonies and the re-arrangement of the instrumentation to allow more dramatic shifts in mood allowed it to stand admirably alongside the original. You would never expect that one soft-rock band covering another could produce such a startling result. It was the tipping point that put me, and many others firmly in the Boy & Bear camp for years to come. It's more relevant to a future blurb, but last year I finally saw them live and had a great time.

It was in this brief moment in time that the answer felt like it had arrived, Australia's great new hope was this unassuming bunch of softies that seemed to have just won the lottery on having everyone eating out of their palm. In 2011 they proved that the cover wasn't a fluke as their next lead single "Feeding Line" also managed to spend some time in the ARIA top 50, and entirely off digital sales too. There was no gimmick this time, there truly were that many people excited for a new Boy & Bear single that they had the power to do this. We didn't know at the time that they'd never manage another top 50 single, but the accolades came elsewhere. The album would debut at #2 with very healthy sales just behind the monster that was Adele's "21". Boy & Bear's debut album "Moonfire" was one of 14 albums that were blocked from the top spot by that Adele album, if you choose to include Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" which reached #1 in 1977 prior to the existence of the ARIA Chart. Depending on who you ask, they either completed their transition beyond the triple j sphere, or proved it was a one way funnel for the ARIA Awards when they won Album Of The Year for it. In 2013 they would finally get the #1 album they were unlucky to not get, and in 2015 they'd do it again.

The fortunes would rapidly dry up after that. Amidst the band's rapid rise, frontman Dave Hosking was battling illness. Specifically Chronic Dysbiosis, which I've not encountered elsewhere, but involves an excess of bacteria and various disgusting effects relating to excrement that I'll gladly not read about again. That probably accelerated their decline from the spotlight as they wouldn't follow up this album for 4 years, and they've gone from 'Of course they debuted at #1' to 'Oh they got a week in the top 10, well done!'. Surprises can happen (Missy Higgins made the most recent Hottest 100), but it very much looks like "Walk The Wire" will be the last Boy & Bear song to ever make the Hottest 100.

It wouldn't be unreasonable to say that the interest faded because the songs weren't quite as good either. I felt no strong enthusiasm for this song when it landed in the poll for instance. On the other hand, one of the singles they put out in 2023, "Abraham" was a big return that either proved I was craving the sounds of my late teens, or that it was a genuine return to form. The artwork they used even inexplicably looks like the artwork they were rolling out during their second album, before they quickly reverted back to boring photographs.

"Walk The Wire" is not necessarily a bad effort, I might even say it's pretty good. It just feels a little too locked into its initial groove to ever bolt out with excitement. You've just got this stiff middle-era Kings of Leon kinda guitar riff that never really excites, and never really exits either. I can't help but be distracted by it in front of anything else that does happen in the song.

#731. The Jungle Giants - Sending Me Ur Loving (#8, 2020)

66th of 2020

This could be referred to as starting things off with a bang. The Jungle Giants have accumulated 11 Hottest 100 entries, which includes 1 before and 1 after this period I'm covering. Technically "Sending Me Ur Loving" could be seen as the band's biggest hit. It's their highest charter on the ARIA Chart (it got to #55), and it's their equal highest Hottest 100 entry. It might have you thinking 'What an odd song to earn this distinction', and I'd tend to agree, reading it all as a weird curiosity in the end.

It'll feel more appropriate to talk about the Jungle Giants resurgence when I get to tackling an entry from their 2017 album, whichever one might come first, but it might be valid to say that their chart positions spent years playing catch up as we all came to terms with what they were up to. Their previous single proved they could reach these heights, and then this song was released in January 2020 and got to spend the whole year wondering if it could do the same.

The COVID-19 analogies can't help but come back. An odd bit of trivia that's always stuck with me is that the top grossing film of 2020 in the United States was "Bad Boys for Life", not because it was a particularly significant smash, but because it was one of the only ones that got out into cinemas before March. While the music industry wasn't impacted quite as much as the film industry, it's easy to imagine that a whole lot of artists' campaigns were either delayed or had their promotional efforts squandered at least a little bit for most of that year. "Sending Me Ur Loving" was one of two songs in the top 10 for 2020 that were released in January, perhaps that other song which landed slightly higher could be the "Bad Boys for Life" of the Hottest 100.

It's possible to also wonder if this affected The Jungle Giants' release schedule. Something that's always struck me about this album of theirs (which houses 4 more entries after this) is how drawn out the campaign was. This band used to release an album ever 2 years, and now they're releasing their lead single a full 24 months before the album. It seems to be their M.O. now too as I'm writing this 2 years after "Trippin' Up" was released and it still doesn't have an album attached to them. Lead singer Sam Hales also just got hospitalised after a motor accident in March so I wouldn't be surprised if this just keeps taking longer (he's doing better now though). It seems like an odd coincidence to be talking about health issues for singers in two consecutive entries, and let it be known that the same also applies to the next entry, so I'll let you mull on that for the weekend.

The thing I haven't mentioned yet is the way The Jungle Giants' music has changed over the years. So much so that my iTunes library tags have transitioned from Alternative to Pop to Dance across their 10+ years. Their 2019 single is probably a solid turning point though, I'll try to discuss it more in detail when we get to that one, but it's the first song of theirs I can see that lists Sam as a sole writer and producer. Adding to this, Sam also dabbles in another Brisbane band, that being Confidence Man. He's done production work for them, and as far as I can tell, is still engaged to their lead singer. If you're at all familiar with that group, it might lend some explanation as to how we went from "She's a Riot" to "Sending Me Ur Loving".

At the core of it, the song doesn't sound too far removed from the singles on their previous album, I can definitely hear strong shades of the same songwriting. The main difference is just how they put it all together. There's a lot of sanding over the edges to make it sound just a little bit less like an actual band. From what I can find, the rest of the band are on this song but it never feels obvious outside of one guitar line that comes through on the chorus. I'm not saying that I'm opposed to the band's (or rather Sam's) experimentation over the years, but I feel like this particular one lands as the weakest of the set. It's in an awkward middle ground where it's not committing to either side strongly enough and so its relative pleasantness is outweighed by there just being better options either way.