#625-#621

#625. Gang of Youths - Blood - Like A Version (#41, 2017)

60th of 2017

Once upon a time there was a band called The Middle East. I have to start it like that because talking about them without context has to chance to not scan correctly. They were fairly short-lived, blowing up in 2009, and then breaking up in 2011 just a few months after their debut album came out. They've occasionally reunited to play shows here and there, but have released no music since the one and only album.

I was never a particularly big fan of them. You can point back at 2009 and consider the amount of Muse and other particularly bombastic bands I was listening to, and probably connect the dots for why this very delicate folk-rock project was not to my liking. That's my cover although I don't think I was necessarily opposed to what they were doing, just the end product. The songs I heard from The Middle East tended to meander and never settle on a strong foundational tune. In general, a band I saw lauded but never really wanted to be part of the hype train. Sometimes this happens and the artist in question never really has a commercial break, so it really is media hoopla to an extent, but The Middle East did make the Hottest 100 a couple of times (and #101 once), with an album that sold pretty well, so people were definitely on board.

"Blood" is probably the song that makes them stick around to this day. It gets used in a lot of movies as a musical sting, and why wouldn't it? It's like our own home grown Sigur Rós, in a slightly more pop friendly disguise. They've even got a whole 2 minute ending that sounds monstrous, with no lyrics to go along with it at all, just a cathartic release of energy, to go along with the gut punch of talking about a grandfather who lost the love of his life to cancer.

That one last verse is probably why this exists and it's here. You'll notice I haven't mentioned Gang of Youths once here and that's because I'm not adverse to doing that sort of thing, and also because they have 9 entries on this list. This is the first, and it's the only one that's not actually their song. They've actually done Like A Version three times, first covering LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends" in 2015, and most recently, Travis's "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?" in 2022. Big sweeping arrangements are basically their bread and butter, and these are perfect avenues for it, but it's understandable why this one in particular would resonate the most. Gang of Youths lead singer David Le'aupepe's former partner had a terminal cancer diagnosis and a lot came out in those years which was written about in length on the band's first album. We'll get to a song from that album eventually.

On all those grounds, it almost feels too obvious for Gang of Youths to cover this song. You can pretty much imagine exactly what they're going to do and not be surprised with any of it. It doesn't mean they shouldn't do it of course. There's a value for setting the record straight on what's probably a good idea to bring out, and I'll always appreciate shout outs to niche parts of Australian canon, hardly the last time I'll need to say something like that here. This is a song that so easily fits into what Gang of Youths are about that it could make you second guess yourself and think it was always their song.

Hearing "Blood" in this context definitely unlocked something in the song for me. It really made me appreciate what people were seeing in it in the first place. All that emotional swell was hard for me to fully lock into when the main sticking point were cutesy xylophones and a whole lot of 'ah ah ah'. Translating it to the Gang of Youths playbook lets me see it more as a template for what's going on in the song itself. I still don't love it, but it clicked into place so much more effectively after hearing this cover.

#624. Hayden James (feat Running Touch) - Better Together (#78, 2018)

67th of 2018

It's possible that someone who has made the Hottest 100 has the same birthday as me. It would be in the realm of 'Not very famous birthdays' and probably just be a member of Loon Lake or something. It's hard to hunt these things down because a lot of musicians just don't have public profiles for that sort of thing, and even with those who do, it's not always easy or possible to have enough information. As far as confirmed birthdays go, I don't have a match, and the closest I've got is an unlikely pop star who will eventually appear on this list. This could possibly be improved if the stars align to allow Jin from BTS to contribute somewhere (which I honestly can't rule out). He's less than a week older than me. Possibly the same age as him because of time zones is JT from City Girls who has already gotten somewhat close, as she is on Drake's song "In My Feelings" that landed at #135.

I thought I was onto something with Hayden James when I saw his birthday listed as November 28th, 1992. As far as I can tell, this is a Wikipedia fabrication brought about by one bizarre editor who spent a couple of hours one day in 2023 inserting a bunch of missing birthdays for mostly a bunch of African female soccer players and British media people. Almost all of them were given plausible birthdays and almost all of them were November 28th. This is the Wikipedia vandalism I find most interesting because what is their endgame and what is their targeting strategy. Anyway, Hayden James' birthday is probably in the middle of August. I'm seeing a listing for August 15th, 1992, but Hayden James himself did an Instagram post last year for his birthday on August 16th (he posted from Spain so there might be time zone shenanigans), while Dom Dolla shouted out his birthday several years back in a tweet on August 13th. Maybe the 1992 part of it is just completely wrong as well. Maybe Hayden James is a birth week kind of guy. This post is going live a few weeks before his supposed birthday. Depending on when it is, maybe I'll check back in for more conflicting evidence for the next Hayden James entry.

Who is Hayden James you ask? He's a producer guy from Sydney. He's signed to Future Classic and is one of the biggest beneficiaries from when Flume's heightened success did a lot to draw attention to the rest of their roster (think Kendrick Lamar with TDE). He's done very well for himself with numerous Platinum singles. They haven't been updated in a while, but it wouldn't surprise me if nearly all of his 6 Hottest 100 entries I'm talking about have reached Platinum sales (just the last one I'm not certain about).

This song features Running Touch. As a solo artist, he's been a perennial fixture below the Hottest 100, appearing most years from 2017 to 2021, with this being his only entry into the main list. He's also a member of the group Ocean Grove who made the top 200 once themselves. Running Touch serves as both the vocalist and a co-producer on this track.

This was coming off a bigger hit, but it was still quite popular in its own right. The #78 finish it managed is possibly a misnomer, an underperformance given its late release, in November, while the song didn't actually peak on the ARIA Charts until after voting had already closed. There's proof positive since it won an APRA Award for Most Performed Dance Work in 2020, implying that 2019 was the real year of "Better Together".

If you know Hayden James, you have a good idea of what you're going to get here. It's a lot of moody beats with crisp, clean sounding synths layered together very tastefully. Running Touch's voice occasionally gets chopped up and layered with different focal points. The chorus turns him into another component of the music, and in general provides a strong contrast between light and dark. I think Hayden James is quite good at packing in more hooks than you'd expect, often in a way that makes the whole set up feel misleading, in a fun way.

#623. Frank Ocean - Solo (#59, 2016)

65th of 2016

Is this what is known as a cultural reset? There are plenty of albums just as old as "Blonde" that have stuck around for a long time on the charts (note: not ARIA because they've never been counting it since the streaming era. It probably should be in the top 50 but I really don't know), but I get the impression that few are as life-affirming or personality-defining as this one. A lot of people are going to declare it their favourite album of all time today, and listen to the whole thing in full, again. Quite a lasting legacy for an album that has zero crossover chart hits.

I don't want to go through the whole story because this won't be the last time I talk about Frank Ocean or this album, but naturally I was pretty on board all of the way. Like a lot of people, I discovered his music through his association with a certain collective whose most famous member (if it isn't Frank Ocean) will eventually appear on this list. I was there for his mixtape with all its strange sample flips and video game interludes alongside classic cuts like "Novacane" and "Swim Good". I was there for his debut album, the thing that really took him to the top with so many classics. "Thinkin Bout You", "Sweet Life", "Super Rich Kids", "Pyramids", "Lost", "Monks", "Pink Matter", hardly a dip in sight. It was accidentally how I ended up giving Kendrick Lamar a proper chance, because Metacritic's aggregate was favouring "good kid, m.A.A.d city" over "channel ORANGE" and that just sounded impossible for me to believe that there was a better album. He was primed to be an absolute star though.

Things got weird after that. I've honestly never really kept up with the details, but Frank Ocean finally released his second album in 2016 and I've never listened to it. It's reportedly a visual album called "Endless" that shows footage of Frank Ocean building a staircase. The supposed theory is that he released the album to fulfil a contract with Def Jam, and then immediately trolled them by releasing his proper follow up album "Blonde" one day later. It all just seems too funny and satisfying to be real, so I'm always imagining the full details are much more mundane. In any case, Frank Ocean extended the trolling to everyone else by releasing next to nothing over the next 9 years, just a handful of (admittedly great) singles here and there. I'd love to be glazing "Biking" or "Chanel" on this blog but they didn't quite make the cut, "Chanel" is another one of those unlucky #101 finishers. Maybe there's a small chance that he pulls off a surprise release by the time this goes live, but nah, we have a better chance of seeing "Silksong" before that happens.

This Hottest 100 countdown makes for an interesting time capsule. One where "Blonde" hadn't fully gotten over its awkward release and occasionally unexpected new ideas that not everyone was ready for. There are some very inconsequential albums that were nonetheless getting more votes at this time. The other oddity is that in this time capsule, the most popular song on "Blonde" was apparently "Solo". Admittedly this is all a story that continues to develop, and every now and then a new song from this album seems to capture the world's attention, but I can pretty confidently say in this moment that "Solo" is not really one of those songs. There are 7 tracks that have more streams than it on Spotify right now, and many of them are beating it by a mighty margin.

I have my own favourites from this album and "Solo" has never really been one of them. I was used to this from the previous album cycle. triple j latched heavily onto "Lost" in 2012, pretty much singlehandedly making it a hit and I was so underwhelmed with it. It took a long time for me to properly come around and appreciate it, so I like it a lot now. I won't say it's impossible for "Solo" to go the same way, and I'm at a better starting point with it, but it is lacking those adventurous moments that other tracks have in spades.

I do still think "Solo" is good, I just have high standards for Frank Ocean. I really like the vocal production, it really lets the different vocal ideas stick out and hit their mark. Something I've come to expect from Frank Ocean is a lot of clever wordplay and double entendres. Just the title of the song is a sneaky way to fit in feelings of both loneliness and depression into one word. Maybe I just long for something more than an organ for the whole song as it starts to get a bit dry. That organ is actually being played by a possibly unexpected British singer, who we'll see on this list one day.

#622. London Grammar - Hey Now (#35, 2013)

67th of 2013

There is probably a certain age you reach where something snaps in your brain and your willingness to go ride or die for artists you'd never heard of before just vanishes. There are certain points in time I can think back to and look at how many artists whom I had not heard of before, but I was able to quickly assimilate them as if they'd always been there. 2009 and 2013 certainly come to mind. Technically it's still something I experience. Four of my five favourite songs of last year were by artists I had scarce to zero knowledge of prior to that year. But plucking out stuff like that is honestly a lot easier than going along with the popular crowd, which is probably why more people are doing this, and fewer new artists seem to be able to break out in a big way as a result. Because if you're left with backing up just the artists who are having their big break, you get so few options. A more jaded person than me would've never bought into the London Grammar hype for one second.

I can't vividly remember my introduction to London Grammar, just that I slowly heard successive singles and found myself liking each one more than the last. A comment I left early on suggests that I thought going into it that 'London Grammar' sounded like the name of a rap group. I'm not entirely sure where I pulled that from (maybe the Australian hip-hop group Astronomy Class) but it's very amusing in hindsight.

When a band is just starting out, I just find it so difficult to believe they're going to nail it on their debut album. It's usually the same with TV shows as well, the first season is always the one that hasn't fully clicked with what works and what doesn't, and feels like a stepping off point. Just like how we're littered with a lot of bands who nail it on the second try rather than the first. Prior to this album, London Grammar had only released one EP, and two of those songs, the title track "Metal & Dust", and also "Hey Now" ended up on the debut album. It's possible that the band would disagree with the assessment, but it's frightening just how much they had figured themselves out so early in their career. Early London Grammar just sounds right.

Maybe it's just the songwriting that needed work. I can't help but be self-conscious of the fact that there's a song called "Stay Awake" on the album, and a little further down the track listing is "Metal & Dust", a song that rams home the same hook. I can only imagine that they wrote the two songs so far apart in time that it just didn't even process, but it so quickly reveals itself and it's just such a weird blunder to make. It's not clever or interesting enough to be a motif.

"Hey Now" is also a fairly typical London Grammar song. A light moody instrumental that you might notice, but it all just exists to let Hannah occasionally do her thing which is to make us all look like ants as she sings to us from the mountaintops. That's always been their secret weapon and it always works. I bought the album around when it came out, and a few months later I even downloaded one of the bonus tracks because I was so stunned by what she was doing on the record.

"Hey Now" only isn't really a big favourite of mine because it's not fully committed to that bit. The big vocal moments are still there, but they're split up by slow verses. It makes for a contrast, but I look at this song title and I think of Hannah's huskier, lower register. For the other singles, I think of the high notes first and it's a much better place to be in. I guess I should also say that I really thought for a long time on the second verse that she was saying 'f**k you'. I'd say that misconception set me up a few years down the track when Dot Major (the one who looks like a young Harry Styles) did voice acting work on "Disco Elysium" as Cuno, the monumentally punchable kid with the most endearingly grating voice going around, saying all kinds of foul things. Or at least that was until they released the final version of the game and replaced him with a much less fun voice actor. Hannah finally did let out an f-bomb in 2021 on the song "Lord It's a Feeling". That's like getting me to swear without censoring myself, you need to have really f**ked up to managed that.

#621. Chet Faker (feat Kilo Kish) - Melt (#65, 2013)

66th of 2013

Firstly, "Melt" is a great title. It gives off a Mad Libs vibe with how it's put in the song, but if you're gonna do that, at least it's evocative. It's all backed up further by how good a stage name Kilo Kish is. Satisfying alliteration, syllable distribution is solid, and makes me think of delicious quiches. Did I get distracted for a moment? I dunno, but let's see Paul Allen's nom de plume.

"Melt" holds an interesting standing in that it was technically the first song released from Chet Faker's debut album "Built On Glass". To only land at #65 feels like a let-down, but maybe the sheer voting power of Chet Faker wouldn't be unleashed until the next year. Some say that the voters actually sat down at that other pond, feeding those ducks (this is me gesturing to the other thing Chet Faker put out in 2013), but it could be that there was just no room for a man and his collaboration with a budding New York singer. Hopefully me stripping Chet Faker of his last solo lead artist duck doesn't trigger a panic attack. Look at me chucking in all these roughly 1998 references on the Chet Faker post that isn't "1998" (#694). That post hasn't even gone live yet, there's still time for me to put them there. Maybe this is overbearing, but well that's just like, your opinion, man.

It might have helped that I got to sit on this song by itself for the longest because it really did end up being my favourite on the album. It feels like it's bridging the gap between old and new for Chet Faker, something you hear very blatantly in the first 20 seconds with an abrupt beat switch. When Chet Faker's delivery picks up and adds the backing vocals, I'm reminded of his cover of Blackstreet's "No Diggity" and almost want to sing that over it. It's a bit of a Frankenstein chorus that doesn't have a consistent melody or clear focus ('pew pew pew'). Maybe in that regard it's an accidental success, but I'd rather hear a concerted attempt to stick out rather than coasting on simplicity.

Outside of my novel introduction, I do think Kilo Kish is a great addition to this, and a sign that maybe Chet Faker should collaborate with more women to provide a contrasting verse. Her delivery is smooth with a welcome confidence for an artist who hadn't been making music for very long at this point. She has the most memorable line on the song when she admits her verse is only half-sung. This made me check out what she's been putting out lately and I have to say I like what I'm hearing. I have to make one last parting 1998 shot because she starts "digital emotional" by saying 'Kilo Kish wants to know', which has to be a response to the smash hit "Are You Jimmy Ray?".