#610-#606

#610. Ball Park Music - The Perfect Life Does Not Exist (#39, 2018)

65th of 2018

It feels like the whole set is open now. Kudos must be given to Ball Park Music because among all artists with more than 6 entries on the list, they're the one that managed to hold out the longest before finally showing up. That's full credit to a career of consistency because on average, we should be closing in on their 4th entry already. Well, I'd be lying if I said they were consistent on the Hottest 100, theirs is a train ride that's rockier than most, but it seems to be in good stead of late.

I've had to wait so long to talk about Ball Park Music that so much has happened. Since I started writing this, the Brisbane Lions won a premiership, and Ball Park Music can be spotted cheering them on under the Instagram post about it. Then several months later, they released a song called "Please Don't Move To Melbourne". No ribbing to be found in it, but I choose to believe it's not a coincidence. The city of Melbourne couldn't even field a team in the preliminary final, that hadn't happened since 2006, a couple of years before Ball Park Music formed. Also Ball Park Music got their first ever ARIA #1 album this year, a long time coming with all their near misses. Not to mention they're about to support Oasis on tour.

It's very easy to see Ball Park Music as the second coming of Custard. They also came from Brisbane after all, with a solid run of success that never quite netted them an ARIA top 50 hit. If Wikipedia is to be believed, Custard were absolute kings of not quite making the ARIA top 100 for a while, but they had brewing in them an almost smash hit with "Girls Like That (Don't Go For Guys Like Us)", which got to #52. Custard are still around actually, they reformed a while back and have released a couple more albums. At this point they're an amusing aside to learn about for anyone aware that David McCormack has the huge voice acting role playing the dad from "Bluey". Who knows what future awaits Ball Park Music.

For now I can behold the past, because we're looking at "The Perfect Life Does Not Exist", which comes from the band's 5th album "Good Mood". It's the only time we're going to see the cover here, so I have to marvel at it, it's clearly their best album cover. The song? Yeah, it's pretty good. There's definitely a common thread you can start to feel from a lot of Ball Park Music songs. Sometimes they get a little bit weird, sometimes they don't, but they still give a solid morsel to chew on here and there. Here, you get a lot of big dynamic shifts that come as a surprise when the song teases itself initially as just an acoustic guitar song. It feels like they're taking cues from that slightly more famous Brisbane band, Powderfinger. Now there's a good investigation for one band disappearing right as the other one pops up. I've never seen Bernard & Sam in the same photo before.

#609. Joji - Your Man (#98, 2020)

55th of 2020

Joji has one of the more unusual routes to music stardom. Prior to adopting the stage name, he spent years building a name for himself as a surrealist YouTuber, making content that I'm sure has a genuine craft & appeal to it. I just know that spending 10 minutes trying to verify his nationality through a vlog he posted was enough of it for me. He did prove to be very influential on the music world though, but I'll leave that for a later entry because it's a funnier juxtaposition.

For a time, he actually had two concurrent music careers. Before he released music under the Joji moniker, he made music as Pink Guy. That's music that I think is more easily identified as running under his schtick. Much more confronting and aggressive than any Joji release. Doing both concurrently has allowed him to explore two very different perspectives.

It's possible that it was all just intended to be a side project and nothing more. Whatever the plan was, I don't think anyone expected just how far he'd take it, with a big boost from the monster success of "SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK". Maybe that song has all the makings of a vagrant in the R&B world, but I think it does enough to stand out in its own right. There's a soft tone in the instrumental that's reminiscent of video game soundtracks, with a big explosion of sound that's instantly memorable. Maybe the real juxtaposition is finding out that Pink Guy is capable of something like this, but I suspect that the song's reach went far beyond his usual circle into people who had no context.

That must have ended up being the case as his career continued. I hesitate to say that his moment has passed because he actually hasn't released anything in 3 years, but for a time, he's been reliably charting well with his new singles on release. He does particularly well in Australia which may be due to his tenuous parental link to our country. I mentioned before that I watched one of his vlogs, and that was to reaffirm that he's self-identified himself as being half Japanese and half Australian. I'm not entirely sure if he'd get the same coverage here otherwise, although in saying that, triple j in their stat sheet only recognise him as Japanese, while the only ARIA Award nomination he's gotten was for Single Of The Year, suggesting the industry at large isn't fully behind the idea, and it's just a matter of ARIA counting him in their system.

I remember spotting "Your Man" as a potential hit from the outset. When Joji released his second album "Nectar" in September 2020, this newly released song managed to outperform every other track on the album on streaming release day, even the already released singles. It maybe also got me into the mindset that it was just more streaming friendly than those singles, which were a bit more out there in their presentation. That might go some way into explaining how two of those other singles landed higher in the countdown than this did. I mean, I think they're better too, obviously.

I'm not sure it's ever clicked with me before but since I've had both artists on my mind at roughly the same time, I can't help but want to share a half observation. Namely that I think this song gets one of its most memorable hooks from a Hayden James song I'm yet to cover. They even set it up largely the same way, with a repetitive intro that's cut through by some rapid fire syllables. Replace 'Have you ever loved?', with 'Want another hit?' and see if you feel the same way. They're even both questions, can I make it any more obvious?

In a career of frequently bringing surprises and oddities, this might just be the most conventional Joji song. It does stick out a little bit with its blending of R&B with a dancefloor groove, but it's so tastefully done that it doesn't sound unusual at all.

#608. Ocean Alley - Infinity (#24, 2019)

55th of 2019

My iTunes collections of every notable Ocean Alley hit from 2017 to 2024 means that I have a unique piece of metadata archived alongside it. Everything that goes up on the iTunes store has to get tagged with a genre, and through that you can learn interesting things about marketing, before usually concluding that it's all meaningless. This is a dance song, by the way.

Some artists can't even stay consistent in their own catalogue. I have Lana Del Rey's "Doin' Time" (#823) tagged as Pop while the rest of the songs I have on the same album are tagged as Alternative. I'm not sure who's making these decisions or why. In the case of Ocean Alley, they start off as Rock, but then shift over to Alternative around 2019. It's a fuzzy line, because the first single they put out in 2019, a song that's yet to appear here, is the first in the Alternative set, while "Infinity" came back for one last hurrah for Rock.

I wouldn't normally mention this, but firstly how else do you dive into yet another Ocean Alley song? Secondly, I do think there's some merit to the label. In what would end up being Ocean Alley's title defence year, "Infinity" feels like a different side to what they were showing in 2018. Less of the hazy surfer vibes, and more of a rigid foundation. The guitar tone just sounds so nice here.

#607. Jamie T - Zombie (#43, 2014)

66th of 2014

Of all the inexplicable throwbacks served up by the 2014 countdown, this has got to be the funniest. There are few artists that serve as a blatant flashback to my early times of getting back into music in 2007 more than he does. There's a triple j interview from back then when he was in for Like A Version where Robbie Buck announces him by trying to pronounce his name correctly. Jamie T doesn't tell him how to do it, but just laughs and says he's close enough. It's lived in my head for years just because of one jtv Saturday recording I replayed a bunch of times. But he was already ingratiated to me before that with a series of singles that were getting spun all year. From my perspective he got done a bit dirty by release dates to not have a Hottest 100 berth with "If You Got The Money", since it had ample airtime after it already tried and failed to get in. He'd make up for it 2 years later when the voting worked out a lot better for him, "Sticks 'n' Stones" landing all the way up at #14. He went 5 years without releasing another album and I had no reason to think he'd ever be back, alas.

I'm sure I've said this before, but he's a curious case for me as an artist I always saw as a rapper first and foremost, but he really is just a rock singer who raps a bit. There isn't a whole world of difference in what he's doing compared to say Arctic Monkeys. There's another British artist I may well say something similar about when he shows up here. It's another layer to why he felt so stuck in that period of time. By 2014, Arctic Monkeys had already switched up their sound a couple of times under the fair assumption that the world and they weren't really pining for more variations on their debut album.

When "Zombie" came out, it felt like a half-hearted attempt to keep the fire burning many years later. It was around the same time Kasabian came back with their last UK top 40 hit "eez-eh". More exciting, newer artists weren't able to break through because people couldn't move on from their dinosaur acts of yesteryear (I do have a soft spot for that Kasabian song). Similarly, "Zombie" became Jamie T's last UK top 40 hit as well with a concerted push a decent while after it first came out.

It's really easy (eez-eh?) to paint "Zombie" in such a way, some sort of dried out re-animated husk, kind of like a...yeah it's too easy. It's more like a return with the edges sanded off a little. Jamie T's first two albums sound inescapably like the time they were released. I think this is reflected in his streaming performance nowadays. He actually has surprisingly better numbers than you'd expect, and "Zombie" is rubbing shoulders with his biggest hits to this day. I did eventually warm to it as well, I just think that it lacks in memorable lyrics, or at least I don't think it's as funny (oh oh oh) to sing along.

#606. Spacey Jane - Bothers Me (#75, 2022)

59th of 2022

You know it's funny. You see, my wife is a big fan of your band, she bought "Here Comes Everybody" the day it came out and has been listening to it ever since. More than just that, she wanted to vote for you in triple j's Hottest 100, and did that on the first day, and you know what she said to me? She said it's a shame that there are only 6 of your songs to vote for. Now there's one thing that bothers me, it's that when they counted down all those songs for 2022, all of a sudden there was a 7th Spacey Jane song at #113. Now you don't think that triple j saw a solid number of votes for a song that wasn't even pushed as a single, and thought they could chuck another one on do you? It sure would have been a convenient way to rid them of that Wolfmother record that had been lingering on for so long. Ah it's probably nothing though, I'll get out of your hair.

Oh, one more thing sir, you say that you're no longer interested in toeing the line because you don't need somebody telling you how to act. You wouldn't mind elaborating on that a bit further. I'd hate to think someone as brilliant as yourself would accidentally admit to committing a felony and then putting it out on tape.

Maybe by all accounts this song shouldn't be here. It seems like it lucked out as being arbitrarily chosen as a 6th song to represent Spacey Jane even though it never received substantial airplay at any point. It doesn't even have an impressive stand out performance on streaming, so I'm not even sure the Spacey Heads were all that keen on this song beyond it acting as a stat point in their favour. It was just there and riding so high on the Spacey Jane fanfare at the time that it couldn't help but get in as well.

If nothing else though, this song makes me think of "Columbo". It was well timed for me because I got caught up in one of those renaissance moments on social media where something related to the show goes viral and a bunch of people who weren't even alive for the syndication get caught up in it. Everyone knows it for the inverted format, a murder mystery where you get to see the killer commit the crime and instead spend the runtime wondering how they're going to get caught. It feels antithetical to the whole concept but it's unbelievably effective and you get this wonderful dynamic where the detective manages to come across as bumbling and ineffective, but keeps getting closer and closer to unravelling seemingly perfect crimes. I always recommend watching "Suitable For Framing" as it's a great example of the whole set up with one of the all-time greatest endings. I wish I could experience it all again at some point but "Poker Face" (the TV show) is a handy substitute to have around of late. I could talk about this show for hours probably, it's great comfort food.

When I'm forced to acknowledge it on its own terms, "Bothers Me" is pretty good though. Yes, it's another low tempo Spacey Jane song that isn't looking to thrill, but it's very cosy in its own right. There's some guitar feedback that runs mostly in the background that really adds to the nostalgic feeling. The people who love this album now are going to continue loving it for a long time to come. It's basically laser focused to remind you of the non-specific good times.