#755-#751

#755. Allday - Protection (#94, 2019)

69th of 2019

The prevailing feeling I had at this stage of Allday's career is that he pivoted to a pretty chill vibe. It wasn't what I'd have predicted, but it proved a good way to market his still unpolished performance. Certainly there's another song of his I'll get to that exemplifies this and feels like the poster child for it. Really though, he's always been making chill music, some of these later songs just smooth things down even more. No bouncy production or anything, just a pleasant waft. Anyway 5 months after this, he released the song "All da Way", a complete pivot in the other direction with a darker trap sound. It might actually be my favourite song I've heard from him, I just think it's neat. This one's pretty good too I suppose. Hey, now that's a "Right Now" (#852) blurb callback.

What might help this song in my estimation is my inability to always distinguish it from his other song. They've both got the same last 4 letters, and by cribbing the title from one of Massive Attack's most famous songs, it's inevitably drawing me to that headspace. With this song in particular though, I think contrary to what I said before, a lot of the change in pace does come from Allday's performance. His runs through the chorus here are silky smooth and add a lot. Now if this is still just a stop gap to more progression for him, that doesn't matter because he hasn't made the Hottest 100 since.

#754. Lime Cordiale - Colin (#34, 2022)

76th of 2022

I may not see eye to eye with Lime Cordiale on everything, but one thing that they got completely right happens in this song. Treating Colin Hay with the same reverence that Austin Powers gives to Burt Bacharach, and going so far as to name the song after him. It's all I could ever ask for. Well, I guess they could've given him a feature credit. I've seen people get them for less. It does make the reveal more exciting though, like when Travis Scott releases a new album with no features and you get to lose your mind when some people show up out of nowhere (SZA on "TELEKINESIS" is a good example).

That's a good detail anyway. I find it hard to elaborate further on the song itself. There's a nice sentimental quality to it, but it's nothing that warrants particular remarks. Perhaps there's something to be said about respecting multiple generations of Australian canon because you could totally imagine this song being called "We Are The People", but we can't go encroaching on Empire Of The Sun's territories. Luke Steele looks like he'd totally cast a spell on you. I was going to remark about how "We Are The People" is about half as old as "Down Under" now but I forgot to carry the one. Now that I've over committed to it, the fact that it won't actually happen until 2035 makes me feel young instead.

#753. Khalid - Young Dumb & Broke (#13, 2017)

78th of 2017

Remember back when future Hottest 100 entrant Taylor Swift released the song "Fifteen", recalling the wistful naïveté of a young teen while she was at the ripe age of 18? At least she was right about feeling "22", but then she had a birthday by the time it was released as a single. Anyway, this comes from Khalid's album "American Teen". It tracks because he only just turned 19 before it came out, and here he is recalling the wistful naïveté of high school kids with that remarkably wise distance of a couple years. Some of my social media feeds have been reminding me of all the stupid and cringeworthy things I was posting when I was in high school. I laugh at that, but then this morning I saw one four years removed from that time and it wasn't any better. You're making a huge mistake here with your multi-platinum smash hit single from your multi-platinum smash hit album Khalid, you just don't know it yet!

I've said before about how thoroughly Khalid inundated the system with hits, and it all starts in 2017, in such a way that there are four or five different songs that could claim some ownership to breaking him through. Technically in Australia, his first top 50 hit is a short-lived (but quite good) collaboration with two artists who will eventually appear on this list, but it's a slight misnomer. His actual debut single "Location" probably broke first but took several months to appear on the ARIA Chart, because we don't always get to have accurate archives. There's about 3 months of chartworthy streams on that song that never got counted, and it missed the ARIA End Of Year chart as a result. It also didn't appear in the Hottest 100, but that's because it was released in 2016, so it wasn't eligible once it got popular. triple j's first actual foray into the world of Khalid was months earlier in 2017 and that song will be appearing on this list. Otherwise, you've got "1-800-273-8255" (#1000) popping up briefly before exploding after a turn of virality, right around the same time that "Silence" and also this song were en route to becoming top 5 hits. Everything was coming up Khalid, all at once. You don't think about the grand scheme of things while it's happening, but there's a case to be made that Khalid is one of the most successful artists to never have a #1 single or album in Australia. My usual go-to answer for this is future Hottest 100 entrant Nelly Furtado, but his 9 top 10 singles quite comfortably stomp out her 5. Otherwise you might want to be looking at Imagine Dragons and Marshmello. Both of them have collaborated with Khalid in the past, he was just everywhere.

This is one of those songs that teeters on the edge of blatant repetition where it's not enough to notice unless you pay attention to it. We're talking about a chorus that rarely skids away from the same few words for a whole 45 seconds. Alas it's the folly of being required to do the most writing about your life when you're a teenager and have nothing to write about. If you can look past that, you're probably just here for Khalid's unnaturally aged vibrato. I think a lot of his later releases smoothed it down, so there's a personality in this you don't usually get.

#752. Catfish and the Bottlemen - Longshot (#39, 2019)

68th of 2019

"Longshot" is our one step into "The Balance", the third Catfish and the Bottlemen album, and still most recent. It's been 6 years now. It's not an album that's been responded to kindly either, severely lacking the streaming success of their first two albums (outside of this single), and it didn't even debut at #1 in the UK which has got to be the most catastrophic failure imaginable. I was running through the list of UK #1 albums last year and I'd have to cap myself on all the bands you'd never think are still topping the charts with their new albums. Snow Patrol, James, Elbow, The Libertines, etc. You'd have to really screw up to fall out of favour so quickly in the UK. This is where I find that they released it on the same week as P!nk's new album, and I can definitely consider that to be really screwing up. Maybe they'll blow all my estimations out of the water with their fourth album, but it is very easy to believe that they picked up a high school aged fanbase early on, but didn't get quite big enough to get ironed on in the same way. People my age are still talking about My Chemical Romance, not to mention that other contemporaneous band who'll appear on this list much later in their career. Just can't imagine anyone saying 'Hey, remember "Longshot"? I miss those guys'. When you're taking this long between albums, that's vital to making the comeback stick. Every day now, a would-be Catfish and the Bottlemen fan is discovering future Hottest 100 entrants Fontaines D.C. instead.

The subtext of all of this is that my favourite Catfish and the Bottlemen song is on this album, the later single "Fluctuate". They weren't quite as big in 2019 so it was never getting a berth. I find it to be an instance where the haphazard tunes just kind of accidentally fall into place, and compound effectively.

"Longshot" by comparison feels like it's going for pop gold by comparison, cramming in hooks everywhere. I wouldn't say they falter in the expected way, they're just not my favourites. That's most of the song anyway, which probably undersells it. The bridge takes a surprising turn away from the boilerplate verse template, and then the last chorus changes up the instrumentation in a way that's easy to miss. It just sounds that little bit different. I'm always thinking about the idea of music that is and isn't 'streaming friendly', and that strikes me as the kind of thing that puts people off without realising. Weird but not in an obvious way.

#751. Hockey Dad - I Wanna Be Everybody (#61, 2018)

76th of 2018

Welcome to the world of Hockey Dad. In case you need catching up, they've got 7 entries from 2017 to 2020, most of them coming from "Blend Inn", that album that's somewhere in the image behind here and also above this message. They're generally pinned as another surf rock band but have more garage roughness to that. Despite how loud they can get, it's just two guys. They're also in the canon of musical things alongside Fall Out Boy and that one Mitski album by getting their name from The Simpsons, so they've always got a soundbite of Bart Simpson saying 'Hockey Dad rules!' to fall back on. Gotta be one of the few good things to come out of 'Going to England' episode.

Just missing out on making the top three quarters of this list is "I Wanna Be Everybody". It's not an especially objectionable song, but we're past the point where that's a pass mark now. I just compare it to all of their other entries and feel like it's the one that offers the least. Its most distinguishing feature is its addition to the canon of songs that use that particular guitar riff. I want to just say it's the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" riff but that's not the first one either. Still, you add in the perfectly timed drum fills and it's amusing just how blatantly they're lifting from that template.