#695-#691

#695. Kingswood - Golden (#68, 2017)

68th of 2017

In real life, this was Kingswood's last Hottest 100 entry. I've still got another 3 coming up after this one but it's a pretty solid innings. The aftermath has been pretty drastic, however. As a follow up to my comment about Sticky Fingers, Kingswood have not been played on triple j since August 2023. They're winding up with a lengthier 'blacklist' than Sticky Fingers themselves. Digital sister station Double J still gives them some spins but it's a prime example of an artist disappearing from the airwaves with a whimper.

The read I always get on this is that Kingswood changed their sound and pivoted to a more blues & country sound, a far cry from their early days and not really on triple j's radar. I have to give respect for them jumping across so early, years before Morgan Wallen's "Last Night" became of the biggest hits of the decade, you can tell they did it out of love. Not that I'd really categorise it as the same thing, if anything it's Kingswood's earlier music that's more flagrantly commercial.

I had to listen to their 2017 album "After Hours, Close To Dawn" to see if the signs were there early on. It's definitely a more reserved take for them, only the track "Like Your Mother" feels like a throwback to their early sound. It might be worth considering the song "Big City", Kingswood's second most streamed song ever on Spotify only behind "Golden". That song definitely falls under the banner of bluesy country music and maybe it was an encouraging sign for them to continue in that direction. Worth noting though that it's the one big cut from this album that triple j never touched.

"Golden" lands somewhere in the middle of all this. It definitely sounds like the band always has, but it's another one of their slow burns. The main difference is that those songs usually jump into action at some point in time, but "Golden" pretty much never does. There's something to respect about that. No need to force a big release into it, just settle into a pretty groove and ride that momentum into the sunset.

#694. Chet Faker - 1998 (#8, 2014)

70th of 2014

I could maybe see the argument made that it's all relatively superficial, but for all of my skepticism around "Built On Glass" in general and its big hits, I've always had a soft spot for this one. I feel like it has enough going for it that it stands out in comparison. There's a lengthy run time and a bit more of a danceable groove to it. The unmentioned song title gives it a layer of mystery, and I can always fall back on my joke of pretending that he's saying 'we used to be Inner Circle'. Sometimes I can be very easily amused.

With regard to the song title, there is an answer to the mystery. I have to immensely thank the existence of the Wayback Machine, the one person who archived one specific page of triple j's website in 2014, and also one person who left a comment on Genius to send me down the rabbit hole. I'm a great advocate for utterly banal in-the-moment actions and posts online that singlehandedly preserve history. In an interview on triple j, Chet Faker explained that it was referring to a friend he met in 1998 and was close friends with. They drifted apart in the natural course of life, but Chet Faker encountered him again later and found he was trying to take credit for his music. He says in this interview that he's not too bothered about it because he's not trying to make a big deal out of writing music, although he spends much of the interview acknowledging that he essentially performed every instrument on his album. It's only near the end when the closing track "Dead Body" is brought up that he admits that his friend Cleopold (who you might know from working with Miami Horror) performed the guitar solo that closes the album.

It mostly just got me thinking about how 1998 is such a specific time to meet someone if you're Chet Faker and age 9-10 at that point, but I don't claim to know the Melbourne private schoolboy life. I'd love to know if he has any specific signposts for recalling the exact year, I'm usually pretty good at it except ironically everything around age 8-10 because I had the same home classroom at school 3 years in a row, so it all blurs. My username, Dircashede, was conceived in that classroom and only my own inconsequential bit of writing I did at the time helped me figure out which of the three years it was probably in (2002, most likely).

The way this song plays with its individual elements is very interesting to me. A lot of melodies jumping in and out with what feels like little regard, and yet those transitions are what keep me engaged. It pairs itself with what is admittedly a less engaging performance from Chet Faker. The song's only verse feels like he's phoning it in to make the chorus stick out more, and yet because of the transition work, the otherwise awkward decision to end the verse on a '...by the way', manages to be the most memorable part of it.

#693. RÜFÜS DU SOL - Tonight (#91, 2013)

73rd of 2013

I just kind of smashed through all of RÜFÜS DU SOL's debut album in quick succession over the last couple of months. They've still got plenty more to come after this, but it's the last time you're going to see the very pretty artwork for it. It would seem logical with this in combination with the things I've said that I'd think this is their worst album and they only got better, but it couldn't be further from the truth. "Atlas" is probably my favourite album I've heard from them (disclaimer: haven't listened to the two most recent ones). It's just that this selection hides away the intriguing layers they were working with.

I'm not even afraid of them making radio friendly singles at this point, I'm quite fond of "Sundream" and "Unforgiven", the two other songs that were getting played a lot on the radio. They polled at #184 and #191 respectively. "Sundream" became the only top 50 hit on this album thanks to a random week pushing for digital downloads. It probably is the most popular song on the album now but it was very random at the time. "Unforgiven" is tucked in the back half of the album, and that's where I think they shine the most. There's a cold darkness to it all that's only occasionally hinted at on the front half. I'm writing this right now at 6 in the morning, I have a slight affinity for music that reminds me of the night-time. They really chose the right preset for all those plinking keyboard melodies.

I suppose the song called "Tonight" has some ownership to the idea as well. The intro to the song has the right idea, and it's just that intrusive synth line that gets in the way. They're allowed to do this, and if it's gonna be a single they probably should do it. It just ends up not being the most exciting way to go out and say that tonight they're coming alive. Maybe they'll get it right in the future.

#692. Luude & Mattafix - Big City Life (#28, 2022)

70th of 2022

If you don't follow the charts, it can be very difficult to differentiate what truly are the biggest hits both past and present. If something feels distinctive and omnipresent, it might be a safe assumption to assume it's a #1 smash, but it's just as likely it's doing nothing of the sort. My young childhood had me assume that Daphne & Celeste's "U.G.L.Y." was another one of those massive hits, but it peaked in Australia at a paltry #40. Meanwhile around the same time, Huey Lewis & Gwyneth Paltrow managed a #1 hit with a cover of Smokey Robinson's "Cruisin'", taken from the soundtrack of a heavily derided box office bomb. That film "Duets" released in 2000 is also the film debut of a pre-fame Michael Bublé.

Around the mid-2000s, I had some serious cases of blurring realities. I thought Arctic Monkeys were an old band that had been around for ages, I thought Fred Fanning and Franz Ferdinand were members of Powderfinger, and I thought Mattafix's "Big City Life" was one of the biggest hits of the year. In some ways that's not too outlandish as the song was pretty massive in parts of Europe, but over in Australia it was the definition of a middling hit. It reached the top 30 and hung around for a few months during the start of the year (typically a low sales era). It's possible this is underselling it a little bit. ARIA started their Digital Track chart in the middle of its run and it was dropping down from #14 at that point, so it may have sold a bit better without it counting to the chart officially (digital sales being included was still several months away).

We'll never really know what "Big City Life" could have accomplished in the Hottest 100 at the time. It was cruelly placed in that limbo of being a 2005 song that got bigger in 2006, so it was on a Hottest 100 voting list, but not when it could've done the most damage. That's all irrelevant in the end though because thanks to Luude, Mattafix finally got that proper time in the spotlight.

We've been down this route before. We saw Luude doing his cover of "Down Under" (#808). That was a big top 10 hit in Australia, while this couldn't quite crack the top 50. In a delightful twist of irony, this one was released earlier in the year with more time to get people on board, so what's arguably Luude's lesser follow-up hit is the one that managed his best Hottest 100 finish. This finished 37 places higher than "Down Under" did.

It's easy to look at this with a bit of cynicism. Luude's just doing the same thing again, only this time he's bastardising nostalgia as he's pulling out a much more recent and much less iconic song to do it with. That was my way of looking at it initially. I'm prone to coming down hard on this set up, but I think there's room to explore how it can be done well, and this is one such case I believe. It's the kind of re-make that does enough on its own to not feel like it's leaning on the source as a crutch, and I might even catch myself appreciating the way it cleans up the original song like an updated draft. The kind of thing where I'd find it hard to admit, but I'd ponder if it's actually a preferable listen to the original. There isn't a hint of the same novelty to "Down Under" on this, it's a nicely chosen template from which to play around with. A lot of drum & bass-adjacent hit songs are more likely to be treating that as a template instead, letting the hooks do all the work. Genuinely though, there's something really appealing about the rattling build up to this one. It goes out with such a satisfying release that I do start to think it's unlocked something new and worthwhile.

#691. Adam Newling - Sweetness (#98, 2021)

75th of 2021

There always has to be a villain. That's the impression I get from witnessing music discourse everywhere I go. Whatever is happening in the world of music could always be better, and so there's always going to be a scapegoat to haul your complaints onto. When I was especially passionate about following music charts, I would root for some songs, and get unreasonably worked up about other ones. It's especially the case if I feel like they're getting an easier ride to the top, or just edging my favourite out of a top 10 position. It becomes amusing to look back on years later when all of it amounts to very little and you can just enjoy things isolated from both that context, and all the potential overplay of the moment.

I think the best litmus test for how someone's going in general is how they respond to an unknown artist just popping up out of nowhere. This can be either in or out of the respective wheelhouse and it doesn't matter. Pop music fans are especially savage to up and coming pop stars that are perceived as B-listers. In a lot of these cases, the way they're responded to is a matter of what else is going around. If there's a surplus of things to like, you don't want them shaking up the foundations of the house you built. If you are feeling cynical though, you'll welcome a chance for them to create a little dysentery among the ranks.

It's a mindset I try my hardest to stamp out, even when my initial instincts lean into it. I feel like once you get into that thought pattern, you stop assessing things on their individual qualities and merits, and turn it all into a big self-serving tier list. Good and bad become an essential duality where one can't exist without the other. I understand that there's an irony to me saying this on a meticulously ranked list, but I posit that I'm still not acting on this accord. We're barely in the 600s and I've been talking about songs I genuinely like for weeks and weeks. My point is that it's generally possible for most things to be good, because to me, that's a quality of being likeable, not a quality of being better than the rest.

Why is Adam Newling getting all of this preamble? Because there's very little else to say about him. To me, he's a random guy who barely snuck into a Hottest 100 list seemingly out of nowhere, and probably at the expense of something I'd prefer. He doesn't represent a new and exciting sound, it's very old school. He's got guitar, drum & harmonica on deck. My natural reaction is just to say 'who is this guy and why is he here?' knowing full well that it's a rhetorical question I don't care to have answered. I'll answer it quickly though. He's from Cronulla in Sydney, he's half Greek via his mother, and he achieved success through putting his music on triple j Unearthed. It's possible he has some connections to help him out (he appeared on a #1 album in 2021 by an artist who's going to eventually appear on this list), but he's still only here because people who weren't abreast of all that just liked his song.

I think it is the kind of thing that should be celebrated. Even if it's not to your particular taste in every case, it's important to keep these avenues open. There's no way that the world of popular music is made better if only the richest and most famous are able to get a slice of the action. The dream that anyone can make it to the top is a much more hopeful one. It's totally possible that the next one down the line is the one you've been dreaming of.

If you want any specific thoughts on "Sweetness" itself, I apologise but I don't have much on it. Adam Newling has a gravelly voice which will probably be your main take away from the whole thing. The harmonica is a nice touch.