#580-#576

#580. Spacey Jane - Lots of Nothing (#3, 2021)

61st of 2021

If you're of the mind to question the state of play with triple j's playlist, and how they're prone to playing a lot of music that they might not have beforehand, then look no further than the 2021 list. The top end is filled with pop stars and novelties, leaving very little room for what feels like typical triple j affair. Spacey Jane played their no thrills game and nearly came out on top anyway. You'd have to wonder, if the voting played more like it usually did, if Spacey Jane had a chance to go all the way to the top. Maybe they'd end up with their own version of "Hoops" (#895) given that I don't think their popularity has ever really been caught up to by the pundits, but it probably would be more representative of the kind of result that older listeners are craving a return to.

"Lots of Nothing" has a deceptive intro, the speedy light guitar starting point takes us straight into the world of post-punk revival, while the drums compliment it very well. The drumming sticks around but you do lose that guitar for most of the song, so I just feel like I'm being teased by the potential of Spacey Jane being a very different band, if they chose to do it. It wasn't long before this song came out that BENEE also released her song "Happen To Me", which I feel committed much more strongly to that template. That's my segue to pointing out that there's a version of this song with BENEE on it. I don't think it provides much to improve the original song, BENEE's new verse just slips in without causing much of a stir. Definitely a symbiotic collaboration given the different audience reach the two artists have.

I do think this one's pretty good. Despite my aforementioned betrayal, it's still a comfortable range they put themselves in. Once again I find myself relating surprisingly well to the songwriting. Being that person who often has a very muted reaction to any bad news. I want to say that a lifetime of neurodivergent masking will do that to you. We can all still break though, and it would be wrong for me to not point out the very different reaction Caleb gives on the next single, but that's a story for another entry.

#579. Thelma Plum - The Brown Snake (#66, 2022)

56th of 2022

I think ideally, every city wants its local river to be iconic. Unfortunately there's just not enough mental space for that when inevitably, we're just talking about a linear flowing line of water. If you ever see a photo of one of them, you're only probably recognising it from what's surrounding it in terms of man-made structures.

The Brisbane River is a pretty memorable one though. Maybe not necessarily for all the right reasons, few rivers look less potable than it, but the way it curves around with the city integrated on all sides of it feels very satisfying. I'm not sure how common the term of calling it The Brown Snake is, before or after this song, but it's a nice way to embrace it in an optimistic fashion.

Thelma Plum was born in Brisbane and grew up there too, so the fondness is probably genuine. Something I found out by accident when I was looking up old AFL highlights is that about a decade ago, Thelma Plum was seen going out with future Brisbane Lions legend Joe Daniher, being spotted at music festivals together and getting strangely chatty on social media (the strange part is learning that Joe actually used Twitter). I'm not saying that she spurred him on to get traded up north and help her local team win its first premiership in two decades, but do you know who else is from Brisbane? The Butterfly Effect.

If we start looking at the song itself, it's difficult to look at it as anything more than a reproduction of Thelma Plum's usual affair. A song built around a speedy staccato percussion line is definitely something we've seen before, or rather will see when I get to it again. That's not a bad thing either way, just that it can't help but come up short. Great singing performance though.

#578. Billie Eilish - No Time To Die (#90, 2020)

52nd of 2020

In 2021, on a whim that was not my own, I began a quest to watch every single James Bond movie. I would say that the timing was perfect except that by the end of the cycle, the movies got flicked to a different streaming service and I had to start renting them instead, a Machiavellian manoeuvre. I did however succeed in watching all of them, including those two strange non-Eon ones, just in time for "No Time To Die" to come out in theatres. The last movie I went to see before COVID-19 was "Knives Out", so Daniel Craig (and Ana de Armas I suppose) has always been here to bridge the gap for me.

You'll hear many similar accounts on this but to me the fascinating thing about the James Bond franchise is twofold. Firstly that it has thrived for nearly a lifetime (the first film was released in 1962). I'm always interested by any brands or protocols that were created a hundred or so years ago that are maintained to the point that nobody being served by it initially is even alive anymore, yet it persists as a fundamental part of our lives. The second thing that's interesting is that they are not particularly stellar movies anyway.

I mean that in the nicest way possible, because I'm absolutely the target audience for this kind of thing. I got tickets to see the new Final Destination film in an advance screening, the first time it had been shown in my state. At that time I was in the midst of going through all 170 hours of the unholy Danganronpa and Zero Escape crossover event that exists just because people like me throw their money at it. But even these kinds of sloppy or overambitious media properties can make a gesture towards something poignant, something you can take away from it and think about in your life. James Bond is almost allergic to the notion of being anything more than a silly romp about a womanising secret agent who uses fun gadgets to defeat cartoonish villains. I enjoy these films but it's so hard to think of any I'd recommend as really nailing the mission statement. Often I feel the fondest about some of the less well received ones, for warping so far into the absurd it hits a different echelon of entertainment. Films like "Moonraker" (Bond goes to space!) and "Die Another Day" (death lasers, ice fortress!).

If you've watched these movies before, you might have found a big shift that comes around in the Daniel Craig era. There's a semblance of emotional stakes that aren't usually seen in the earlier films (the one exception is "On Her Majesty's Secret Service", the film where Bond gets married, and shortly after becomes a widow). I've seen mention that this is a direct reaction to the popularity of the Austin Powers franchise, which lampooned the entire set up so drastically that they couldn't help but change course. "Casino Royale" is a thrilling action movie for it, very different to the original film of the same name which remains one of the most bizarre movies I've ever seen that technically got an Academy Award nomination (and ironically, inspired the Austin Powers franchise through its soundtrack hit "The Look of Love"). "Skyfall" takes it further and if I had to pick one, I would say it's probably my favourite Bond movie. I won't pretend to have a strong recollection of the two films surrounding it.

"No Time To Die" on the other hand? A pretty solid outing. It was the 25th Eon Bond film and gets very wrapped up in being referential to the series as a whole, but it makes for a good cap off to the era. We're not quite at the point of the longest gap between Bond films ("GoldenEye" came out 6 years after its predecessor), but we are getting close to it.

In addition to all the cinematic tropes, a staple dating back to the Connery era is the obligatory Bond theme song. It makes for brilliant marketing that introduces additional cultural weight into the franchise, especially when the songs have charted particularly well. Duran Duran's "A View To A Kill" was a Billboard #1 hit for instance, surprisingly the UK would have to wait until the theme to 2015's "Spectre" (whose singer will eventually appear here), although that's another oddity of sales patterns. Adele's title song to "Skyfall" probably would have also hit #1 but had its best sales split across multiple chart weeks, ironically a mistake that Adele was on the other side of one year earlier when "Someone Like You" blocked Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" for the same reason. It's still never happened in Australia, but "No Time To Die" became the highest charting song ever in the franchise when it reached #4. It left the charts fairly quickly after this and so it has a chart run that resembles Billie Eilish's usual patterns rather than the film, although to be fair, it also was just unlucky to slip out into the wild right before the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving it as a movie-less theme for 18 months. The song was over two years old when it finally won an Academy Award, the first of two that Billie Eilish has now won for Best Original Song.

If James Bond is an antiquated franchise of a bygone era, then its soundtrack goes some ways to embracing it. Very rarely does it feel like it's leaning into contemporary times, and instead swamps itself in familiar motifs. There's a reason why whenever you hear certain dramatic songs with strings, you feel compelled to make the comparison, because these films have cornered that specific market. Especially lately they've done a good job of choosing performers that are wholly unsurprising because they slip into it so easily. It's one strange way that you might find yourself looking at Billie Eilish as the slightly more modern equivalent of Adele.

Where it lands for triple j feels like an extension of the station's brand expansion in the 2000s. This is around when the station went fully national and started to branch itself online and on TV, with a clear exploration of its interests beyond just music. You had more of a focus on various aspects of culture, including films, naturally. I'm not sure triple j had ever really started playing Bond music before, but in 2008, the attachment of a certain hot property name (who I almost just spoiled but then I remembered he does have an entry here), alongside otherwise non-triple j darling Alicia Keys got the song "Another Way To Die" into the Hottest 100 that year. A year later and triple j even included the soundtrack to "Twilight: New Moon" as a feature album, to the confusion of many.

Now, "No Time To Die" is the only time they've exercised this decision since then, but depending on who they wheel out next time, you have to suspect it's something that's a little more likely to end up on rotation than ever before, given the station's programming shift. For this one though, Billie Eilish was just a few weeks out of having topped the Hottest 100, having never not been a triple j darling at any point since 2017, there's no way they weren't hopping on board with this one.

In contrast with what I had said earlier, I think Bond can make a change to one's outlook. Or at least, spending half a year engrossing yourself within all the ins and outs of the franchise will do something to that effect. When this song came out, most of the Bond I knew was either just "GoldenEye" or the popular video game that accompanied it. When I sat in the theatre a year and a half later, I was filled with all these morsels of information. Like just how old Roger Moore was at the end of his tenure, or how genuinely one of the coolest stunts ever done in a film is accompanied by a goofy slide whistle and a goofy side character who appears in two films. Or how nearly 10 years to the day before Natalie Wood drowned while accompanied by her husband and future Austin Powers actor, her sister Lana appeared in "Diamonds Are Forever" as the sacrificial lamb who gets drowned halfway into the film. I became so engrossed in all the lore that it just became something more to me.

I like this song now. It was easy to discard initially but the grandiosity of it all got through to me. Maybe on another level, it was just the sheer relief, one of the first signs to show that things were getting a little bit back to normal, and what better way to do that than with a film that was fundamentally made before anyone had any reason for concern. Is it Billie Eilish's most interesting song? Not really, but it does successfully allow her to explore a different side of things, and appreciate her capabilities. I think it foreshadows some of the more dramatic moments on her 3rd album.

#577. The Rubens (feat Sarah) - Never Ever (#21, 2018)

63rd of 2018

"Never Ever" is a good record, but one that I find myself increasingly picking at. It's a song that leans into a serious angle with dramatic stakes, which makes me more inclined to look at all the songwriting decisions, and whether it all comes together, or it's just coasting off the established mood and completely falls apart. Oh, sorry, this must be confusing but I was actually talking about the All Saints song of the same name.

20 years before The Rubens, we had another song called "Never Ever" with a conversational tone, about a breakup. Some interesting accolades as well. A #1 hit in Australia for a lengthy stay, and before that, it completed a rare climb to #1 in the UK, having spent the Christmas season hovering around the top spot. In the time before streaming, it was the song that sold the most copies before hitting #1, close to a million. A moment that sticks with me from the Robbie Williams biopic "Better Man" is them all being at a party when it gets announced that "Never Ever" has debuted at #1, an amazingly ironic mistaking of the facts given that it was one of the very few #1 hits of its time to not do so (All Saints had four other #1 hits and all of them debuted at #1, Robbie Williams' seven #1 hits did the same).

I was drawn into the song through its gravitas. Whenever I read about All Saints, I keep seeing discussions about how they were marketed in contrast to the Spice Girls, I see words like 'sophisticated' or 'cool', with implications that there are objective qualities on their side. I'm always curious about if this is a symptom of successful marketing getting in the way. Because while "Never Ever" has elements that point to artistry (why else would there be a minute long spoken intro?), it makes all the fumbles much more jarring. I don't want to point at the A-Z lyric, but instead just in the chorus when it takes 19 words to rhyme 'felt so sad' with 'feeling really bad', the exact same number of words Halsey used in "You should be sad" (#745). I'm not going to hate on All Saints, I think they've made some great music, but sometimes I just get these chances to tangentially talk about topics that are too long for Bluesky posts, so I indulge the opportunity.

It does work in linking with The Rubens though for this particular song. It has all the hallmarks of serious business. The piano backing is dramatic, and the back & forth lyrics feel considered, going for the Gotye & Kimbra angle but with far more chances to provide rebuttal. The dynamic feels a little different when it's a whole band and one singer, so it feels like there's a home crowd advantage. The end result though feels like a deliberate stalemate, not much of a commitment into identifying asymmetrical circumstances.

I should probably note that if you haven't heard this song before or don't recognise this voice, it's one we've encountered before. It's the return of Sarah Aarons, after appearing on "Keeping Score" (#817) as Paige IV. She's giving herself more visibility by using her actual name, but it's as far as she'll go, and next time we see her she'll just go back to being uncredited. Maybe that's just what she'd prefer, and it's just that in the case of this song, it'd be very jarring to not see the additional vocalist credited.

In any case, much like the All Saints song, this undercuts the mood just a little bit with its lyrics. There's not enough insight into the complexities of the emotions, which is strange given the set up! You've just got two people who cheated on each other and are trying to figure out if they can go on together with suspicious minds. We're in 'Everyone Sucks Here' territory, which fits in with the expletive line to finish it off, neither able to accept their own culpability in a moment of self-centring.

I do like the pre-chorus set up though. It's very mundane, just Sam turning off his phone because he doesn't want to talk and then being surprised that Sarah shows up in person. It's the one time in the song you actually do have different situations in play, and I always like looking at the way one person's actions & intentions get interpreted by someone on the same side of things. A light bit of dramatic irony for your Rubens experience. Otherwise I found myself landing favourably on this for feeling like a Rubens song that isn't trying to carry on the torch from their only mildly shifting sound. Then again it's still not the last time I'm talking about them here, so it's a good thing I'm not the one who's swearing I never ever.

#576. DMA'S - The End (#60, 2018)

62nd of 2018

Probably the least prophetic time that a song title like this has been invoked. This was so clearly not the end that it never really had a chance to even be the last DMA'S entry. It's always difficult to decide whether you should chronologically sort the list experience from top to bottom, or bottom to top, but DMA'S had 3 entries in 2018, and this one landed in the middle. It wasn't even the last single released from this album. There's no way that anyone could possibly pin this one to the end, and even I can't do it when ordering the list, because how on earth is "The End" going to be a DMA'S song that evokes extreme reactions?

Previously when talking about DMA'S, I mentioned how the band's modus operandi through which I engage with them is slower tracks, just because those are the tracks that keep getting voted in. I have to wonder about who's really imposing this situation though. There were 6 singles released in 2018 from DMA'S second album "For Now", and of those, the two that had nothing to show for themselves in the Hottest 100 were the title track and "Break Me", basically, the two more upbeat singles they put out back to back just before the album. They're the two that got the least airplay on triple j, and it makes you wonder if we were guided into this result by the playlist. I just think it would be nice to see another side of the band, because while "The End" is quite good, it runs so closely to the other two entries I'll be talking about in the future that it almost feels redundant.

It's a strangely written song. A song about the effects of depression that is so aware of how dour it comes across that it feels compelled to inject some energy into it. Saying 'I can feel the end' over and over again with the same pace as the verses might be too miserable for everyone involved. It unexpectedly becomes a showcase for just how impressively the production values were stepped up on this album, as the guitar feedback doesn't overcrowd it, and the song feels genuinely warm and pleasant as a result. Maybe that's the one thing it's got going for it against the other two singles.