#620-#616

#620. Alison Wonderland - Church (#31, 2018)

66th of 2018

When I was in high school I remember starting to notice a bunch of people exclaiming 'church!' and I had absolutely no idea what it meant or why they were saying it. At around the same time, I discovered that T-Pain had a song called "Church", although I never heard the song because it wasn't a hit in Australia and even if I got past the curiosity-blocking thought that I probably wouldn't like it, back then it wasn't easy to just listen to songs on demand! I eventually learnt two things. Firstly that the phrase is basically a substitute for 'Amen!' and is just an enthusiastic way of agreeing with someone. The second thing I learnt is that the T-Pain song is an absolute banger. I guess Alison Wonderland's one is pretty good too.

It's been three days to you but for me I'm writing back to back entries on Australian artists who think they're being very clever with their punny names. We'll encounter her a few times, but the short version of the story is that she was inspired to make electronic music after hearing "Silent Shout" by The Knife and obsessing over the album, and its emotional resonance. I can rep that notion. The Knife have made so much great music following their own ideas in ways that can be both chaotic and beautiful, sometimes at the same time. So much so that this won't even be the last time I can introduce an Australian artist who was inspired to make music by The Knife.

I wouldn't necessarily say that I can hear The Knife's influence in her music although I suppose it does operate on a level beyond just making mindless bangers. "Church" is one of her biggest hits but it's still centered around a toxic relationship. I like to imagine that she's still co-opting 2000s slang around the title phrase except I think she just means it literally. Not sure how much the metaphor resonates with the younger generation, but what can you do?

The thing that struck me with this at the time is that it felt like a concerted effort on the part of EMI to try and market Alison Wonderland more as a pop star than a producer. When I compare this to her other entries coming up, that are also a few years older, I get the sense that this song is written with the vocals as the focal point, a bit different to her older songs where her voice feels like more of an instrument that can get drowned in big choruses. On the album, there's even a song, "Here 4 U" where she isn't actually credited as a producer. A lot of the album has noted producers Joel Little & Josh Fountain credited in different places, and I listen to it and just hear a slightly more chaotic version of what they might make with Lorde or BENEE. I'm not saying this is a terrible thing, but there's something about those earlier releases that stood out a bit more to me. This feels like becoming the very system she used to disrupt.

#619. Flume (feat Vera Blue) - Rushing Back (#2, 2019)

58th of 2019

This is one of Flume's biggest hits ever and it's not even on an album. It was a top 10 hit thanks to the Hottest 100, but I always forget that it was already doing very well before that, and after it as well, spending 8 months in the ARIA top 50. Admittedly a good contributor to this was an aggressive playlist push on Spotify. They were seemingly intent on letting this song see out all of 2020 with solid figures, and it ended up as the 27th biggest hit of the year, even with a sizeable number of sales stranded in 2019. It's the kind of thing that makes you stop and think, 'Why this song?'.

The lazy way to look at it is to say that it's arguably one of Flume's most high profile collaborations. On a technical level it's not, but in terms of fanbases with the ability to cross over, a Vera Blue collaboration is going to do a lot more than the usual. Flume was already scoring massive hits that didn't have big name vocalists, so why not give it a little extra juice to go further?

Flume teaming up with Vera Blue is a long time coming. They ironically had their chart come ups at roughly the same time, Flume with his self-titled album out around the same time Vera Blue was making a name for herself on The Voice. Two years after that, Vera Blue would release the song "Hold". Flume hears it, and gets in touch. In 2016, Vera Blue appears with Flume for his Like A Version appearance, alongside three other artists who will eventually appear on this blog, mostly alongside Flume. They covered the recently viral Ghost Town DJ's song "My Boo", and I'm a big fan of it. The vocal harmonies completely shift the energy of the song while still retaining the core appeal. Maybe I am just glazing that one particular vocalist but I also love what Flume does with it to make it his own.

Vera Blue is obviously a huge get for this song. On the surface, this has the feel of a song whose verses exist to make space between the choruses, but she can make the most of the time she has largely to herself. She saves more of the vocal flourishes for these moments after all, hitting all the high notes. Flume occasionally predates the subtle foreshadowing meme when he occasionally disrupts the peaceful tune at that point. When you get to the chorus, it feels like it's building a little on what was happening in "Some Minds" (#637), letting us have fun with the peculiar tune of rapid bleeps, but not disrupting the song's structure in the process. If you imagine Flume to be a spewing robot, you can even listen to the chorus and treat it like a duet, as they take their turns to do very different things. No one does it like he does.

#618. Methyl Ethel - Twilight Driving (#97, 2015)

62nd of 2015

We had to get to one of them eventually. This song is remembered not just on its own terms, but for the fact that during the 2015 Hottest 100 broadcast, it was accidentally played out of sequence. For about 4 minutes, the whole country believed it to be the #98 song, only for a correction to be issued after it finished playing. It's the only mistake of this nature I can ever recall, although some may recall "Talk Is Cheap" (#862) starting up in the background of another song during the 2010s countdown. It's been 10 years and I cannot help but think of this incident any time this song (or the #98 song) ever comes to mind, just an amusing bit of lore to add to it.

I wasn't really aware of it but at some point in the past handful of years, Methyl Ethel has adopted the Tame Impala version of branding. It's the borderline gaslight of suggesting that what was previously understood to be a band is actually just one guy and a bunch of other session musicians who show up on tour. It mostly tracks that Jake Webb is the sole writer & musician for most Methyl Ethel songs. Why am I only just finding this out now though? It's just, how much more betrayal can I take?

Methyl Ethel has been rather successful though. This was the first taste of that, although one that always feels a little misleading in hindsight. I would describe Methyl Ethel's music as art pop. Mostly conventional and catchy, but under layers of the occasional off kilter idea and all manner of literary references. Of all the Methyl Ethel songs I can name, this is one of only two that actually just uses its title properly in the lyrics. It's just so oddly conventional.

Well it's almost conventional. This song has the makings of an acoustic guitar jam but instead it's just layered in thick reverb that makes it tough for anything to cut through. Jake has said in an interview that there was an intentional idea initially to come across as androgynous, which is probably why his voice is rarely clear on this song. It's very difficult to recall any lyric that isn't the title phrase. It is a very uniquely Australian line though, cautioning for kangaroos on the road at night. When I was a kid there was a camping ground I'd regularly get driven down to, and the road to it was a haven of kangaroos crossing the road. I can't confidently recall if I witnessed any incidents but it's a very real danger that was put into me a long time ago.

#617. Jack Harlow - WHATS POPPIN (#42, 2020)

56th of 2020

I play a lot of Jackbox games. There's a wide range of quality but on the whole, it's a refreshing resource for social party games that usually has enough material to survive playing over and over again. I've spent an inordinate number of hours playing Drawful and the like. The most recent game they've put out is the Survey Scramble, a game compilation that utilises their wide audience reach to create possibly the largest ever Family Feud style survey, which they proceed to play around with in various set ups. The first game is mostly just you trying to guess the top prompts, but the sheer volume of prompts they have ranked gives you a lot of amusing results to work with.

The most addictive game in my experience is Squares, which turns the survey board into a game of Noughts and Crosses, where each square pertains to a different section of the survey result. The middle square for instance is the difficult to intentionally hit #16-#20 section. Early on when I was playing the game, the prompt was something like 'Attractive cartoon characters', which is pretty ridiculous but also difficult to get into the mindset of what could possibly be a popular result. I'm bringing all this up because I won this game thanks to "WHATS POPPIN". I remembered Jack Harlow making an offhand reference to Shego from "Kim Possible" and it gave me the confidence to put down a guess that I never would've backed myself to make, and it gave me the winning square. Thanks Jack, your horny years watching the Disney Channel won me some brief bragging rights.

First impressions are important. It's your one chance to make a statement before all your foibles are set out on the table for everyone to either continually notice, or simply remember and feel certain have continued to always be there. This is why it's good that this post is set up in such a way that it's so hard to imagine that this entry, with a completely irreverent tangent about cartoons would possibly be the first entry anyone reads on this blog. When it comes to the music world though, it's a foundational moment when everyone's trying to figure out if you're a flash in the pan or a lasting star, and how worthwhile it is to get on that train.

For a lot of artists, their biggest successes come while everyone's still figuring this stuff out. Nickelback's first hit was their biggest, Imagine Dragons were most reliably churning out hits at the start of their career, stuff like that. They'd eventually become a scarlet letter on the playlists of enough people that it can end up putting a serious cap on their potential from there. Justin Bieber is a rare case I can think of where an artist had the stigma attached to them super early, but he was able to shake it off later in his career. It just took a lot of years of growing up to do so.

"WHATS POPPIN" will always stick out in Jack Harlow's discography because it was the one moment that he was a fresh face. We just had no idea what we were in store for when we bought into this track. Maybe in hindsight you can look back at it and point out all the corny bars, but he comes across with such a bravado in this song that it's easy to overlook it. It's that admirable quality of rapping with enough confidence that you trust he knows what he's doing.

Jack Harlow makes a lot of references to sports in this short song. I always find it amusing that he compares himself to John Stockton, a name I only know from playing an old NBA video game where he was notably the only white guy on one of the All-Star teams. It sits a bit better than Post Malone calling himself "White Iverson". On the remix he compares himself to Gilbert Arenas and makes the obvious realisation that his surname rhymes with 'arenas', a punchline that Eminem had already used 5 years prior to this. Like sure, it sounds snappy, but I don't know how you could possibly think that no one else has made the connection. My basketball knowledge has limits though because I was going to question his lyric about being with the basketball team and then name-dropping the Cardinals, because how was I supposed to know that there was a college basketball team call the Louisville Cardinals that have nothing to do with the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. You'll never catch me memorising college basketball facts for Jeopardy!, that's a bridge too far.

About that remix, I've never really gone out of my way to listen to it. It's a pretty ominous remix, one that was very successful and helped get the song to all of the chart peaks that are attached to it. On the other hand, Jack Harlow managed to get DaBaby on his song a year before he imploded his career with homophobic remarks, but more startlingly, he teams up with Tory Lanez mere weeks before he was charged with shooting a certain female rapper in the foot. Lil Wayne's also there and has largely kept his reputation intact since then (you can tell I wrote this before "Tha Carter VI" came out, but a poorly received album isn't new for Weezy). One out of three is actually quite bad.

#616. Golden Features & The Presets - Paradise (#75, 2019)

57th of 2019

Golden Features belongs to the pantheon of artists who are noted for wearing masks that keep their faces hidden. We've already had Daft Punk, there'll be another one later on, but this is the homegrown Australian version. It's a memorable gimmick. Golden Features' mask is so blocky that it's almost comical. You can barely even see the eye holes most of the time.

In an interview, Golden Features mentioned that he used to be a graffiti artist until he became an adult. It's relaying the idea that you can create stunning art but are unable to take credit for it, pure love of the game type stuff. He hoped to achieve something similar with his music but found that too many people fixated on the image instead of the music, so he gave up on it. He'll still wear the mask, but it's a lot easier to find photos of him without it nowadays. I'll try and do my part and not mention it again across his 3 entries he has here. Technically he has a 4th also but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

He's become a pretty big name in the Australian electronic music scene, but it's hard not to acknowledge the other big ticket for this entry, as it's also the first of 3 entries for much bigger titans The Presets. The lion's share of their success was prior to my original list cut off, and after some shaky years it didn't look like they'd ever poll again, but they managed to steady the ship a few more times. This is the most recent entry for both artists.

"Paradise" makes a strong case for one of the most common song titles in my music library. This is one of 6 songs I've got with that exact name, and that's not including the slight variations that have also appeared. The surprise contender in all of this is probably my favourite, a Norah Jones song from 2024 that really impressed me.

This must be a dream collaboration for Golden Features, who saw The Presets live back in 2008, and had one of his first ever releases be a remix of their song "No Fun" in 2014. "Paradise" comes from a collaborative EP between them, with differing amounts of influence across it. You can definitely feel a strong Presets vibe with the title track "Raka", while this is song intended to feel more like Golden Features' work. I can definitely feel that, although in saying this, The Presets have been known to make music like this before too, it's just more often spotted through their deep cuts.

"Paradise" is a nice bit of sophisticated dance music. Just real lo-fi beats to relax and or study to. Maybe I go into it wanting something bigger, but it's not without its hooks either. All up, it's well crafted from a bunch of folk who are all too familiar with the process at this point.