#665. Kim Churchill - Second Hand Car (#94, 2017)
63rd of 2017
It's fairly common for someone to come out of nowhere, get a surprise hit that doesn't necessarily sound unique, and so just feel like they won the lottery on a particular sound that was being craved. They lack the marketing push to get examined as an artist beyond the song and get replaced by the next guy. Kim Churchill could easily have been one of those guys with his first hit that I'll reach in due time, and maybe I'd still think of him that way if "Second Hand Car" hadn't snuck in 3 years later. I like to think that it was a worthy placement for a song that lets him double-dip, because this is still good enough to be a breakthrough hit on its own.
I don't know if there is an exciting Kim Churchill story. He's just a folk & blues guy who never got quite Xavier Rudd big, but worked hard enough to distinguish himself. This song comes from his 5th album after all, persistence really paid off. He built up enough good will to debut in the ARIA top 10, somewhere in the middle of new albums by Queens Of The Stone Age and Fifth Harmony. Fifth Harmony have never impacted the Hottest 100 although Camila Cabello got playlisted for the first time in 2024 with "I LUV IT", an extremely polarising song that couldn't even ride those reactions into being a major hit (I think it's pretty good).
"Second Hand Car" probably sounds a bit old-fashioned in 2017. The multi-tracked vocals are a funny choice for sure, and while it's not really the same genre, I can't help but think of C2C's 2012 Hottest 100 hit "Down The Road" when he busts out the harmonica. One classic trick that never gets old though, has to be the surprise second chorus. You think you've got it figured out early on but then he saves the best bit for straight after, probably why I always think favourably about this song.
#664. Headie One (feat AJ Tracey & Stormzy) - Ain't It Different (#48, 2020)
59th of 2020
There's a pivotal time in my childhood when I took my first crack at being a trivia distributing machine. I think I was influenced by the 'Music Mix-up' game on the local radio station where they'd play short clips of 5 songs back to back, and spend days or even weeks getting listeners to solve it song by song for the chance to win a large Coke & pizza from Pizza Haven or something like that. Even if I couldn't always ring in (they had a rule on waiting a number of months between repeat calls), I just wanted to figure it out anyway. So little going on in my life at the age of 8.
I started watching the music video channels on occasion that possibly introduced me to songs before they wound up on the radio. This might not actually be true but there are several songs I felt like I was introduced to on TV for better or worse. "Stan" by Eminem, still terrifying even when it's tidied up. Another song I definitely remember encountering for the first time on TV was "Butterfly" by Crazy Town. It's a song whose endurance in pop culture feels like it's owed to people just like me who heard it at a formative age and just never forgot about it.
Granted, it's never been a huge favourite of mine. When I ranked 2,000 Hottest 100 entries a decade ago, I put it in the 1500s, equivalent to about 100 places lower than this. It sits in this weird space of rock where I'm not quite sure what the target audience is. It's a miracle kind of hit because someone had to be digging into the world of nu metal to prop it up and be looking for something like this. Once it's out in the open, how can you not just get those 'come my lady' hooks stuck in your head?
I am now allowing the elephant to stand in the room. "Butterfly" has another trick up its sleeve in the way of sampling Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Pretty Little Ditty", a 1989 instrumental from "Mother's Milk". It's nice sample picking. When you listen to it now, that 20 second section sticks out like a sore thumb that's asking to be used. So much so that Headie One and co. have used the exact same sample. On the books, Crazy Town play no part in this exchange, and don't get a share of the writing credits, but you'd have to be lying to yourself if you don't think "Ain't It Different" is banking on nostalgic recognition of "Butterfly".
UK rap in the 2020s has been fighting the wave against the US taking over, as well as rap in general not having quite the stranglehold it had in the previous decade. You know a genre is hitting hard when you start seeing B-list artists getting uncompromising hits. Headie One started this way. His first big hit "18HUNNA" is boosted by a Dave feature right at the height of his powers, but otherwise is cold and menacing. He ended up getting his biggest hit by using a recognisable sample and also getting AJ Tracey & Stormzy on board, the kind of song that's destined to be a hit.
I'm usually a bit cynical about these calculated plays for crossover success, it just feels too easy sometimes. Not to mention, I'm very outspoken about re-using samples that have already been done. "Ain't It Different" feels like it's doing it tastefully but I still have to bring out the judgemental eyes. Still, I end up pretty positive on this one overall. It's a brisk listen where everyone gets a chance to jump out and be exciting with their verse. I end up enjoying Headie's verse the most, just think his delivery tends to pass the phonebook test the best.
#663. Dom Dolla - Pump The Brakes (#61, 2021)
72nd of 2021
I try to be fair to every song. The lowest bar to reach for this is to actually listen to them before making any judgements. It sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly easy to fall short of this, even if you know better. The world of songs being used as brief partial stings is a world where you can hear the same part of one song so many times that it'll feel omnipresent, even if most of it is completely foreign to you. If you only need to go as far as 'oh yeah it's the song that goes...', then you'll trick yourself into thinking you've done the bare minimum.
I'm pretty sure I've failed this mark many times in the past. Hard to account for all of them, but something that comes to mind is my long time addiction to music clip quizzes on Sporcle. It all goes back to 2009 when I was trying to find things to do online during exam study, and it's one of a few things that let me dive into the perspectives of people who knew more about music than me, and learn from them. If my ability to recall music is at all impressive, you can thank a lot of those quiz making folk. I'm pretty sure that's where I picked up the song "Technologic" by Daft Punk. It's one of the more well known songs from their otherwise unpopular 3rd album "Human After All". It's a minimalist song with a robotic voice that's elaborating on the world's most complicated version of "Bop It", which is to say the whole lyrics are just 'x it, y it, z it'. Just hearing a small section of it was enough to decide I hated it. Admittedly, this is a funny song for all this because there isn't much in the way of a surprise shift anywhere in the song, but it's still dishonourable and I've tried to do better in the future.
The only reason I'm bringing this all up is because I'm talking about "Pump The Brakes", and it's very hard to escape the comparison between the two songs. This song has plenty more lyrics in it, but the voice is very similar, and many of those words follow a similar cadence and a high concentration of verbs. I felt certain that it was a particularly lazy effort and it diminished any interest I had in Dom Dolla going forward. It's still his lowest song here but it's fair to say that I understand it better.
We're only getting a small slice of the Dom Dolla story here. He's got 3 entries here, but just in the two countdowns after this he's increased his tally with 5 more. If that's not enough, all 5 of those songs have landed considerably higher than any of these early ones. His star has just shot through the roof in the last couple of years, in a way that few other Australian artists have managed. His song "Saving Up" is still the last Australian song to hit the ARIA top 10, back in February 2024. He plays shows to huge crowds, and my experience of watching sporting events of late is that you're never too far from hearing one of his songs somewhere. He's definitely facilitated it with a bit of a direction change, I don't hear much of songs like "CAVE" or "Dreamin" in this ("girl$" on the other hand, yeah that could've been released at this point). But I always welcome a fresh face that isn't afraid to challenge the pop norms a little bit.
Taken on its own terms, "Pump The Brakes" is pretty fun. It's a very repetitive beat that's just stuffed with car sounds, but I just get lost in the groove of it, and then marvel at how surprisingly well all those sounds fit (and if nothing else, he got Lewis Hamilton to use it in a video, crazy thing that happened). If you took the car key unlock sound out, it'd just feel so empty, while it's probably one of the most tasteful uses of a siren into an instrumental, it's signposted and probably the song's best hook. It just manages to work against all odds.
#662. Birds of Tokyo - Lanterns (#22, 2013)
71st of 2013
My taste in music has gotten pretty far down its own rabbit hole in the past several years, but long before that, I had what still feels like my most jarring realisation of this. For a few years, our city council was putting together free live music concerts every year. They didn't slouch on the line ups either. The first one was headlined by British India, and the last by The Jungle Giants. There's also the remarkably funny in hindsight moment that one of those obscure opening bands turned out to be Spacey Jane, which I'm pretty sure is still the only opening band I've seen move on to considerable success after the fact, but I've got my fingers crossed for RATBAG.
The headlining band I didn't mention was Birds of Tokyo in 2017. This was like a perfect dream come true moment for me where it's hard to imagine something better catered to me within the realm of being practical. Well, there was also that time when Muse toured Australia with Birds of Tokyo as support, my two most listened to artists of all time at that point (they're still #1 & #3 respectively, hard to see it changing), although I wasn't in the spirit of going to see live shows at that age. I might not have been quite as enthusiastic about Birds of Tokyo at this time, but on the other hand, this was coming while they were still promoting their 2016 album, which I can talk more about when I get to its title track that barely polled. The short thing to take away from this for now is that I liked that album.
Looking at what a Birds of Tokyo setlist looks like now, it really feels like I got in at the right time, they only seem to play one song from that album nowadays, while I got to see a good chunk of it. If I got everything I wanted, there'd be a lot more from the first two albums, but I won't be greedy. I'll just cross my fingers for 20th anniversary tours that are hypothetically very close, oh dear. For me, it was just banger after banger and I had a great time.
The general audience didn't seem to feel quite the same way. This makes some amount of sense, you're going to get a very different crowd when it's a free show and not people willing to shell out specifically to see the band. Birds of Tokyo are from Western Australia but I'm not going to pretend that they're continuing to write the universally recognised canon of the state. We're talking about an album that debuted at #3 and was gone from the top 50 in less than a month, it's hard to be enthusiastic about music you've never heard.
I didn't mean to talk about recognising music snippets on back to back entries (it's less jarring to me when I wrote them two days apart, but I understand you probably just read the other one), but I do think I've gotten pretty good at recognising songs pretty instantly. The opening notes have that effect usually. I was absolutely bested in one public instance however, when the music slowly starts to rise and you're about to hear the keyboard riff to let you know that "Lanterns" is about to begin. I couldn't hear any distinctive features though because it was already being swamped out by a crowd eager to hear an instantly recognisable hit. It was such a weird moment for me when the song doesn't really rise to the occasion with a bang, but perhaps that same recognition factor ticked in for everyone else, they've probably heard "Lanterns" more times than I have, and I'm not short on hearing it myself.
I've been intently following Australian radio airplay charts for many years now. A peculiar fact now that wasn't surprising at the time is that "Lanterns" was the most played song on Australian radio in the year 2013. Things have shifted a bit over the years, but back then it was understood that rock bands had a little bit of an advantage in how the numbers were accumulated. In 2012 it was "Lonely Boy" by The Black Keys, in 2011 it was "Animal" by Neon Trees. Last year it was "Stumblin' In" by CYRIL, which feels like an accurate picture of where radio has been at for the last decade.
It's fair to say though that "Lanterns" earned that distinction for being so popular in the first place, which has always surprised me. Birds of Tokyo had a big commercial breakthrough in 2010 when their song "Plans" became their first top 50 hit, hanging around for quite some time but falling brutally short of the ARIA top 10 as it hit #11 on two non-consecutive occasions where it looked a real chance to get there. Later on it climbed back to #13 after the band performed at the ARIA Awards. It's possible that could have taken them to the top 10 if it hadn't been an infamous ARIA Awards remembered for gaffs like Jessica Mauboy talking about Tame Impala's 'de-butt' album, Bob Katter inexplicably being there to mispronounce ARIA, and the whole ceremony taking place awkwardly outside with a general off-the-rails vibe going throughout. Birds of Tokyo won their first ever ARIA for Best Rock Album (they've since won another one but also lost after being nominated 17 times, brutal Sydney Swans kind of ratio), and they also played "Plans". It's totally possible that the song could have finally hit the top 10 if so many people hadn't tuned out from the disaster before they took the stage. Their self-titled album had also hit #2 earlier that year, so they got the double whammy of unlucky chart positions.
Everything changed in 2013. As if to make up for the chart injustice, "Lanterns" immediately broke the curse by debuting at #5 on the ARIA Chart. Two weeks later it was sitting at #3, sticking out like a sore thumb in a top 20 whose only other Australian presence was a David Guetta song featuring Sia at #19, no, not the one you're probably thinking of, but "She Wolf", and no, probably not the song of that name you're thinking of. None of it made any sense to me, but as a fan of Birds of Tokyo who also had the significance of the top 10 instilled in me a few years before it brutally played with my heart (Muse also had a very unlucky #11 hit in 2010, they've never charted higher than that), it was so nice for destiny to throw me a bone like that. I wasn't really sure what about "Lanterns" warranted the excitement, but I wasn't mad about it at all.
Birds of Tokyo started attracting a lot of criticism for their change in sound in 2010. A lot of fans of their earlier work were pretty quickly turned off, but I never really felt that way. Their self-titled album might not be quite as rough around the edges, but it still had plenty of excitement to deliver. Even the album's softer moments like "Plans" and "Circles" had a lot to like about them structurally, it never felt like the lazy sellout that it was branded as.
When it comes to the 2013 album "March Fires", it's a bit easier to understand the sentiment. If you're looking for the next "Silhouettic" you're absolutely not gonna find it here, and "Lanterns" is a very good representation of what they ended up doing on this album. It's a lot about the instruments blending in together to make a more atmospheric experience. Grand, sweeping sound is what it feels like they're going for here, or if you want to be cynical, music for nature documentaries. I still wouldn't say sellout here either, because it doesn't feel like it's a more commercially palatable sound, I do think they're doing what inspired them here. For a lot of people it's probably just a bland mush, but I do think it's worth checking out the near 8 minute track "White Leaves", which repurposes this sound into something akin to post-punk revival with the drumming.
While I like "Lanterns", it's hard to escape the feeling that it's become an albacore around their neck. The pressure to replicate it has been on full display for many years since then and I've had a lot of trouble getting enthusiastic since then. They put out their latest album in 2020 and it felt like the point where I was finally hearing what everyone's been saying for a decade. But then the hits also dried up so it's not like they are successfully catering to a different audience. Maybe writing all this is making me realise that the Birds of Tokyo discography isn't quite as tainted as it feels (4 out of 5 albums still fine by me), but I sure do miss the excitement I had for new music from them. I was reading all their blog posts for this album cycle, but now I see a new single every year or so and just instantly move on after the curiosity spin. Maybe there's still a chance to turn it around and go somewhere else, but I don't know. I just miss when everything was in working order.
#661. ACRAZE (feat Cherish) - Do It To It (#48, 2021)
71st of 2021
Historic chart positions are just a suggestion in the long term. For anyone who doesn't deliberately follow them, the odds that they're familiar with a song because it was a hit in their parts, or unfamiliar because it wasn't, are something that diminish with every year. You'd think there'd be some tangible differences in the way we perceive what's put in front of us but the nuance just seems to disappear. "Do It To It" is a sampling of the song of the same name originally just by Cherish (and featuring a rapper named Sean Paul, but not that one), a decent sized hit in the US but couldn't quite crack the top 50 in Australia when the bar was remarkably low to do so. It's possible that it's one of many songs that got short-changed by the general weirdness of 2006 charts, but it doesn't seem to be the case. I just think that it didn't really sonically fit in with what Australia was listening to at the time.
This ACRAZE version though? Now we're in the world of house music where Australia's more than ready to get on board (while America struggles to do the same). Whether this was tapping into any nostalgia for the original version or not, it seems to matter not. In fact it matters so little that this became a slightly bigger hit here than it was in New Zealand, the country where Cherish's original version arguably had its biggest success, reaching #3. It could very well just be that it's serving primarily a generation that's too young to remember it either way, but it's peculiar how little it all seems to matter in the space of 15 years.
I quite like the original version of "Do It To It". It's very of its time, one of many songs trying to capture the magic of what Dr. Dre managed to inject into "In Da Club", but it has a good tempo to it and some strong vocal runs. I'm a big fan of the part in the music video where they put on an MP3 player that's playing "Do It" by Cherish, indicating a late change in the title.
The ACRAZE version is something of a guilty pleasure for me. When people say this usually, they mean when they like something that's obviously bad, but usually for me, that really means songs that are signposted as being supposedly bad. It very rarely means anything other than an obnoxious or novel song. A "Mambo No. 5" or a "Strawberry Kisses". But it takes a lot of craft to make songs like this. To me it's better applied when the song feels genuinely low effort and uninspired, which doesn't necessarily jump itself out of the page.
ACRAZE's procedure with this song is to just take the hook from Cherish's song, pitch it down and slap a house beat over it. It's not even a bad house beat either, it locks you in, and it's accompanied by a synth that has the impending urgency of a ticking clock. I'll even give him a slight bonus point because he isolates a singular 'ohhh' that appears at the end of the second chorus (but the second most famous Sean Paul raps over it). It's always reminded me of that rather effective hook in Ciara's song "Oh", and I love the way it's used here. That's all we've really got here. I've always had a soft spot for the elements in play that I like, even though they don't really mesh well, but you just get the feeling that a better producer could have gotten more out of it. This song absolutely dwarfs all of ACRAZE's discography since, which is always a poor message to be sent across to the guy whose one big hit is effectively a cover.