#650-#646

#650. Sticky Fingers - Outcast at Last (#51, 2016)

67th of 2016

How do we decide our opinions on music? It's got to be some spurious middle point between total biased favouritism and sheer mechanical enjoyment factors, right? I don't think I've ever seen anyone admit to being pulled by the former, and yet it's hard to escape the feeling that we're all a little closer to that than we care to admit.

I say all of this because there's a pattern that develops in the world of music discourse that is monumentally distracting from it all. Simply, the frightening ease it is to dislike the correct artists due to transgressions that always conveniently lines up with a lack of quality in the music. Because it is easy. You never have to feel guilty about liking their music because the worst people already make the worst music. All I can ever think at that point is that it's being propped up by people who don't like the music first and foremost, and now they've got a great argument to make for it. Or maybe they just don't even consider it, because the sheer personal Haterade sipping goes too deep to even give out the time of day. For anyone not part of this engagement, it's not exactly useful commentary.

I'm probably guilty of this myself all the time. One of many people for which the moment Kanye West stopped making music worth listening to lines up very closely with when his actions became irredeemable. Going against this principle is basically betraying your whole team by not putting your whole heart into it. You just can't say that stuff publicly, like admitting you like some Collingwood players.

So with all of that, I'm supposed to hate Sticky Fingers, and it should be easy to do so. Their music being all crass and out of step with more hip musical movements. I just don't though. "Outcast at Last" is no Steele Sidebottom, but it gets the job done all the same. We're gonna have to keep running into this issue too, because this is still the bottom half of entries for them.

Once again we're looking at their 3rd album, "Westway (The Glitter & the Slums)", and it's probably the toughest sell if you're not on board from that haul. I can just hear the sneer that the title drop comes packaged alongside. It's a nice little pocket of energy though. A very goofy guitar riff holds everything in place, but it gets replaced by some keys in the chorus and that brief moment turns it all into a pretty faithful Madchester/Britpop throwback. Get Bez from the Happy Mondays to just dance around while it's on and I might be onto something.

#649. Vance Joy - Georgia (#93, 2014)

68th of 2014

One of the more notable shifts we've seen with music in the past 15 years is a move away from the previous model of album shelf life. Albums still do have extended stays on the chart, more than ever before in fact, but it used to be demonstrated by way of a drawn out campaign on the radio. Labels pushing new singles every few months to keep the fire burning. It all used to be so standard, and it's the model that brought about the Michael Jackson record, when he had 5 Billboard Hot 100 #1 hits on his album "Bad". Katy Perry tied it in 2011 with her run of singles from "Teenage Dream", one of the last visible examples of this pattern.

It's gotten so much harder to do this now because albums have gotten so accessible on streaming platforms. I was recently trying to determine with someone if it's possible that recent hit albums, like Ed Sheeran's "÷", or even Billie Eilish's "HIT ME HARD AND SOFT" are among the most heard albums of all time, due to the hundreds of millions of streams they amass across every track, well above the estimates of sales for albums like "Thriller" or "The Dark Side Of The Moon". Inevitably, there's no way of knowing because we can't measure how many times those copies got spun across their decades of existence, but I feel like modern albums are reaching a similar ballpark, and probably bridging the gap ever-so-slowly.

Occasionally you do see these post-album single pushes and it's often quaint. The irony of it all is that the artists who are best equipped to pull it off are often the ones who have little chance of surpassing their initial chart benchmarks. Billie Eilish's song "WILDFLOWER" has had a heck of a ride for the past 12 months, and yet in Australia, it's still beset with the #14 peak that it debuted with, a lot of curiosity streams from people who hadn't necessarily figured out it was a keeper. That's not to say the rest of its chart run is a waste, just a curious example of how the old method is getting less attention than the new one.

However, something to be considered with all of this is that when you do see a rare belated hit of this stature, you tend to have to view it as playing with a handicap, and adjust your reading accordingly. There are often examples of this where one of those singles has belatedly run away with the kudos suggesting that its place in the campaign was holding it off. Two Door Cinema Club's "What You Know" was a smash hit buried as a 5th single, and the signs were clearly there when it charted about as high as the singles that came before it.

"Georgia" is another one of these songs. Vance Joy's chart history is littered with two kinds of hits. The standalone/lead singles that vault into the top 20 and thrive for their moment in the sun, and also all the other singles that never had that initial burst, which are unable to emulate the bigger hits. The big exception to this rule is "Georgia", the song that popped up 6 months after the album came out to be a decent sized hit, clawing up to #15 after a few months. It's obviously never going to be Vance Joy's biggest hit, but it's certainly one of his biggest in the long run. That's even if its greatest societal impact is contributing to the death of Heardle, the music clip guessing game that lost the confidence of a lot of players when they kept putting in songs by Vance Joy and the like with massive streaming numbers but little cultural credit. I was pretty keen at the time because it's so rare that I get to flex my knowledge of Australian music to anyone abroad.

I think what takes "Georgia" over the line and made more people take notice is because it's clearly a different side of Vance Joy that we don't really see in the run of singles. There's clearly pressure to try and catch that "Riptide" (#885) (I really should have that number memorised by now) bug again, and so those jolly, upbeat numbers are just about the only songs that make it off the albums. He's still singing about a girl he likes, but for once it sounds like he wants to share a tender moment with her and not just have sex.

I like it. The guitar is gentle but impressively layered so it ends up being the song's strongest hook. You'd have to think that it was robbed of a better standing in the countdown. The vote took place before the song had gotten a proper push, so it had only just started getting played on the radio. Those early adopters must have known there was something in it and couldn't hide their enthusiasm.

#648. Florence + The Machine - Free (#91, 2022)

64th of 2022

Florence is thriving here on borrowed time it feels. There's a drastic decline on the chart fronts after album #3 in 2015 that's reflected in the Hottest 100, which is usually a tell-tale sign that we'll get it again on the next album, which we did. I just did not think there'd be enough force to will her onto the countdown again, and so the only conclusion to be made is that "Free" has the special sauce.

The 5th Florence + The Machine album was released in 2022 with the name "Dance Fever". You may be thinking the same thing I was, which is that it's not exactly the first thing you think of when Florence's music comes up. It doesn't change when you hear the lead single "King", arguably the most proto-typical Florence + The Machine single for not being that sort of thing. I have a very all-or-nothing approach to listening to new music which means that if it doesn't catch my ear right away, I might not ever hear it again. "Free" was such an oddity to me simply because it slipped past this process. When it snuck onto the poll it was like I was hearing a new song for the very first time, and introduced to a whole different perspective, as someone whose favourite song on the album, "Dream Girl Evil", was nowhere to be seen. "Free" wasn't alone though, the other two singles, "My Love" and "King", polled at #141 & #185 respectively. The former feels like it could easily have been the hit instead. It taps into something similar to the big success that came about with that very tall Scottish man on "Spectrum (Say My Name)".

The album does live up to the title to an extent though. The third track is called "Choreomania", which is a term for seemingly unexplainable spontaneous dancing from the renaissance era. What you get on the whole is a mix of what you've come to expect, but the upbeat moments are there, and "Free" probably exemplifies it best. If we're talking about urging some sort of uncontrollable movement, then "Free" just locks in immediately with its rapid tempo. I don't know how much attention it got beyond the Florence die-hards, but it's one of those entries that feels like everyone working their hardest to show those who tuned out that there's still something worth getting on board for.

#647. Architects - Animals (#47, 2020)

58th of 2020

I've known about Architects for a long time. It's partly because they share their name with a song I like a lot by a band I'm still surprised to say will appear in this list later on, but also just from music charts. One of the cheat codes of following the charts is that a lot of artists will get their brief moment in the spotlight. It's especially true of metal bands, who have some of the most loyal listeners ready to buy the new albums on the first week. It makes a quick impression and you can even track their increasing fortunes in real time, as they gain new fans between cycles and chart higher than ever before. Sometimes they get so big that they take on a level of mainstream acceptance. I wouldn't have expected this to happen to Architects but they also stopped following the normal trajectory a while ago as well.

Twins are relatively common in music I think. It's a fun marketing gimmick. It's brought us the likes of Bros, The Veronicas, Good Charlotte, Jedward, Tegan & Sara, you get the idea. Architects fall under this banner as well, founded by twin brothers Tom & Dan Searle (guitarist & drummer respectively). The band had gone through several lineup changes over the years until they were the only two original members left. In 2016, Tom died from cancer. The band had just released their 7th album, "All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us" and made a big leap in popularity, especially in Australia where the album debuted at #2, just behind Flume's album that came out on the same week. I always liked the album cover, simple but effective.

The band continued on, and it feels like in triple j's perspective, it was a big launching point where they started getting a bit more attention. It was certainly the case for me, when in 2017 they released the song "Doomsday", their first new song since Tom's death and directly addressing it. I love it, and really wish it had made it onto the countdown (it reached #139). Later single "Hereafter" made it to #161 the year after, and that one's quite effective too but it made it feel like that was their last shot, the curiosity being over after that.

It turned out that the next album after that was the big ticket. Their 9th album "For Those That Wish to Exist" was released in 2021 and it became their first ever #1 in Australia, and their native UK. By the time it was released, they'd also finally ticked off that Hottest 100 berth. I can think of very few artists that are still making an impression with the youth like this on their 9th album, let alone doing it for the first time. The lead single was probably the key.

Metal and adjacent genres often have a tough time gaining interest with the general public. In 2015 there was a terrorist attack in Paris during an Eagles of Death Metal concert that saw over 100 people killed. There was a charity campaign to try and push their cover of Duran Duran's "Save a Prayer" into the UK Chart afterwards, but it only got to #53. I can't help but think that the band's ironic name was off-putting in winning people over, because I remember seeing more than a few glib comments about the tragedy from people who clearly hadn't done their research. At the time, I felt like "Animals" was the compromise. If you want to support this band on an emotional level but can't handle their usual affair, this is a much more radio friendly track to get behind.

Songs about f**king animals, and animals f**king are pretty commonplace. We're due one every 6-7 years, so we've got to hand it to The Bloodhound Gang, Nickelback, Martin Garrix & Architects for keeping it up. It was a tough sell for me. It's still my least favourite part of this song because it just feels so out of place from a band that does sometimes include profanity, but not usually. It's why I gravitated more to "Dead Butterflies", a later single from the album that sounds pretty much the same but doesn't have to say that we're a bunch of f**king animals (it polled at #132 in 2021). But yes, the adage of the triple j voter picking the song with a rude word in it lives on forever.

#646. Mallrat (feat Allday) - UFO (#70, 2018)

70th of 2018

I feel like I always need to re-iterate to make it clear that the above numbers matching is not a typo. Actually Mallrat nearly matched those numbers just the other day when I was tackling "Nobody's Home" (#652). Given the recorded performance of Mallrat's other entries to come, that bodes for a pretty good showing if she can keep up this consistent pattern.

This occupies a similar space to me as "Nobody's Home" and so I'm once again not in a space to have much to say about it. They both live in the shadow of the more popular single released in the same year. This one does have the bonus of an Allday feature. He's pretty good here. He creates a curious gap in the song, which has both a chorus & a hook that feel readymade to go back to back, but they never do at any point...unless you were to cut Allday out of the song. That'd cut it down to a lean two and a half minutes and probably be all the more unsatisfying for it. I feel the same way when I end a post with one of those limp two paragraph efforts.