#520-#516

 #520. Empire of the Sun - High and Low (#93, 2016)

56th of 2016

This is going to sound strange coming from someone who meticulously ranked 1,000 songs, but I don't know how anyone can ever feel confident in their own opinions. For that matter, confident enough to share it as something worth hearing to anyone else. If everything slips so easily into a narrative of convenience, surely there's a voice in the back of your head making you consider that maybe, just maybe, you're lying to yourself. You're liking what you want to like, and disliking that which you don't want to like. Can be especially true if you're public about these things, and you're thriving on that expectation from everyone else. You'd get a lot of funny looks if you said 'hey, it's crazy but Chris Brown just released one of the greatest songs of all time'. No one you know wants that scenario to play out, and neither do you, probably.

I brought this up briefly when I was talking about "Alive" (#892), the other Empire of the Sun song on this list. By the time it came out, I was so caught up in my desire to not listen to this group that I was stacking the deck against them. I didn't want to like the new Empire of the Sun stuff, and it was mission accomplished when I didn't. But how convenient is that? I decide to jump ship in advance and it just happens to work out. I'm not going to worm out of my own mental tongue twisters by shutting them away, I want to learn from it.

We got an interesting data point in 2016. Empire of the Sun released their 3rd album, and my view had not changed at all. From that album, we got the lead single "High and Low", and I genuinely had to give them their props again. I liked this song. I was transported to my teen years when "Walking On A Dream" came out and had a rush of clarity that showed it was in fact possible for me to like their music again. The song probably did wear out its welcome eventually, but here I am nearly 10 years later letting them take the win.

There are two particularly funny things about this Empire of the Sun album. The first is that they had the cojones to name a song "To Her Door" (a song they co-wrote with Lindsey Buckingham of all people), and secondly that the US digital version of the album has "Walking On A Dream" as a bonus track, owing to the song having been in a car commercial earlier that year which saw it chart on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time ever. I'm listening to the album now and having a pretty chill time with it. My strange revelation is that Luke Steele's voice has a similar feeling to that of cult, odd music figure Hot Dad. Idiosyncratic but very malleable. This is mainly me writing to myself to remind me to put on "Christmas Pain In Christmas Town" for the holidays.

"High and Low" remains a good time. I'd say it leans into more dance territory than usual for them, but that'd be lying based on my past and present experiences with their deep cuts. Maybe you could say they're playing it a bit too safe with it, but I think it works as a lead single, just a reminder that they're back, potentially better than ever before. I must say now that I much prefer just enjoying their music rather than trying to act like I'm above it all.

#519. Vallis Alps - Young (#27, 2015)

53rd of 2015

I'm not entirely sure what causes this song to win the lottery of success among contemporaries but my best guess is the gut punch of a title lyric right at the end of the song, 'Time forever favours the young'. It's delivered with a passionate conviction that re-frames the entire song prior to that. Regrettably also, it's a line that the band has brutally lived up to, as they found their greatest success right away on their debut EP, only to have it severely cut back by the time their debut album came out. I said this last time about Vallis Alps but it's worth repeating. Going from 13 million streams on the least popular track of their EP to 40,000 on their album is a drop off that's genuinely hard to come across. Do your part to set it right by listening to "Set It Off, Set It Right", it's a bop.

I suppose a nicer way to look at it all is to just marvel at how successful this was. You look at its Hottest 100 position and they're rubbing shoulders with some seriously big names, not bad for a band that barely existed a year before that. In fact there's a vagrant quality to the whole set up. The two members knew each other but seemingly happened upon the idea of making music together by chance. It was never made to be an electronic project, and in an interview on triple j, they were citing Simon & Garfunkel, Bon Iver, and initially writing on guitar. It's fascinating because I get the feeling that being a band wasn't ever really part of the plan, and even this song itself seemed to slowly fill itself out. On one level, it makes me want to pick it apart and scrutinise it as being malformed. On the other hand, I wouldn't be willing to admit how many of these blurbs have started out with no real target to finish on, or wind up on completely unexpected tangents. The creative process is something I'm very interested in, whether I'm the consumer or the creator.

The best thing about it all is how natural it all sounds. It may have been the first song they ever wrote but it has the sound of experience behind it. I say that for professionalism, but also in making it an appealing song to listen to. The song goes for about 5 minutes and gets you through that with carefully spaced hooks. Fun when it wants to be fun, deathly serious when that's called for. Wouldn't say it ever particularly resonated with me but I can certainly appreciate it.

#518. Tom Cardy - H.Y.C.Y.Bh (#11, 2021)

55th of 2021

I have a prevailing memory in my early high school drama classes of being made to watch a documentary about comedy presented by Rowan Atkinson. It's actually freely available to watch on YouTube now, which is a nice change from all the other things I swear I'd encountered but are far too difficult to track down. In it, he talks about comedy like it's an anthropology class, where it's all about bringing certain modes of conflict escalation from all the way back from the silent era. He boils it down to simple terms that are akin to saying that comedy is when something is unexpected. Now, maybe someone was really enthralled by this and was keeping it to myself, but my main prevailing recollection from watching this is that I wasn't impressed, and nor was anyone else. When you're at that kind of age and start to appreciate written comedy a bit more, you're not going to be impressed by abstract silliness (though this is when I note that a Monty Python phase would brew in a year or so). Comedy certainly can't be funny if you explain it!

By accident or design, it is something that's stuck with me two decades later. To double down on a previous statement, comedy craft is something I greatly appreciate. I'll enjoy a joke for what it is, but then potentially gain another layer of enjoyment once I realise how the joke was conceived, and just maybe, an even deeper layer upon realising that they deliberately wanted me to go on that mental journey. Sometimes the funniest version of humour is just the notion that someone spent so many hours to craft something with a meticulous eye for timing, positioning and delivery. My favourite kinds of TikToks are the ones that do anything they can to disarm you for the perfect punchline. Watching the documentary again is making me realise that I had been exposed to the brilliant "Police Squad" at a young age and like the world in its time, did not appreciate it enough. I think the main lesson is that much of comedy is built on iteration. The idea that it's always working to expand the boundaries not just of common decency, but of the crude version of it that comedy has introduced. It's an endless battle of disruption and one-upping that might only make sense if you have the contextual background for it. It's already subjective, but then everyone will enter things via different experiences and there's just no point to policing opinions on comedy.

This is largely why I'm so prone to wanting to defend Tom Cardy in his position as a brief Hottest 100 disruptor. I mean, I'll always defend novelty on principle, but I think under his unlikely facade he has some of the most impressive comedic chops going around. Novelty songs that understand the assignment and operate on a system of absurdity and escalation. There's always going to be plenty of potential for this when you write a song about someone with a chronic obsession of retelling the same childish joke with no regard for decorum. Furthermore, "H.Y.C.Y.Bh" is a novelty song that goes to painstaking lengths to explain the process. To everyone around him, he's the annoying guy who keeps asking people 'Have you checked your butthole?', but in his own mind, he's carefully considering the growing tension and the exact moment to say it for the most potency. By the end of the song, there's enough trust in us understanding the process that he no longer feels the need to share the internal thoughts, we just get the expected punchline in real-time conversation at just the right moment.

Outside of that, the overall prose is very commendable. Even when the song is in chorus mode, he finds ways to change up the lyrics to keep it fresh, and just in general, every part of it is filled with choices that provide so much world-building. Comparing people to bobbing emus, being irrationally mad enough at the ring-bearer to call him a c**t, and just the oblivious way he ends the song by taking pride in how good his joke is, over the fact that no one likes him. This is someone who takes being silly very seriously.

I must admit that I always have trouble with comedy records because they demand a different kind of ear to appreciate. I'm nothing but glowing for this song that I'm still putting in the bottom half of the list. Maybe if I chose to re-adjust the list, I'd chuck this one up a bit higher. Earlier this year I got unintentionally put in a position to perform this song as karaoke, and I can honestly say it opened it up further for me with how much of a thrill ride it is. I think my favourite kinds of songs to perform in that setting are ones that provide ample opportunity to put on different voices. That, as well as being thoroughly aware of what lyrics are just around the corner. If you were looking for a Hottest 100 countdown that takes itself completely serious with a No Fun Allowed sign, well, you know where to look.

#517. Gang of Youths - in the wake of your leave (#9, 2022)

51st of 2022

The problem with obsessively cataloguing and observing popular music is that it forces you to come to terms with the parabolic nature of it. Once an obvious career high has been reached, a decline is inevitable. It's something that streaming numbers practically enforce. Your new album has to start from scratch while the older one is there still racking up numbers. The dust will settle and you'll have to concede that the older album was the more popular one. Even the most successful artists find themselves on ticking clocks, where their new and still highly successful albums are often given a year or so before they inevitably fall behind their predecessor. That's not just less lifetime sales, but less week to week sales. Short of some highly specific virality, it's a race that assures itself that it's already over. It's a trajectory that hints at the next album after that not even being worth looking into, because everything suggests that it'll continue in that same direction.

When you put it like that, what does it all mean? Simply, it's that there are people who bought and/or listened to one album, but not the next one. Maybe they fell out with music in general, or maybe that particular artist just wasn't doing it for them anymore. Unless you're an extremely loyal music fan who obsessively keeps up with new releases so that no one can ever be left behind, you're probably doing this sometimes as well. Even if you're doing all that, in the age of streaming, the volume of spins you give can still contribute to this. I've listened to all three Gang of Youths albums, but I've only spun the 3rd one once. If everyone did what I did, this band would have had a catastrophic fall off. As it stands, they probably stuck the landing, but I see the signs that a lot of people jumped ship.

The best way to look at it is that from what I can see, they kept the superfans happy. Everywhere I looked when "angel in realtime." came out, I was hearing raving fanaticism for a band who may wear their influences on their sleeve, but ultimately produces music that is uniquely theirs. I even felt like international listeners were getting on board with it, the kind of thing that can only happen if Australian fans are so adamant that it's the best thing since sliced bread that they'll shout it to anyone who listens. Once you hear a name enough times, you'll start to believe they're a big deal.

There are parts to this story I want to unpack for a later entry, but I think by the time this album came out, I just wasn't really pining for more Gang of Youths in my life, I'd just had my fill. It put me in an awkward position for this because I want to believe that they're delivering just as much as they did in the past. I didn't hold any particular spite for them, or anyone who was enjoying it. I just wasn't especially interested. It's the "Seventeen Going Under" (#627) situation again, there needs to be a good way to approach these things respectfully, a middle point between adoration and being shady. Sometimes it's just your turn to be one of the difference makers, allowing one album to go Platinum and the next to only make Silver.

Like can I just say it's good and leave it at that? Truly, "in the wake of your leave" fires on all the necessary cylinders. There's a fear of bloat that comes with trying to follow up an already immensely ambitious album, and we've seen many before them collapse under the weight of too many ideas. This song is fairly digestible though. I don't want to start being mean about something that clearly comes from a deep, emotional place of grief (this song is about Dave's father's funeral). It's like all the discourse around that one Mount Eerie album. Some people are so obsessed with categorising all music that the notion something might be taboo just makes people more badly want to pick it apart. Tact is important, save the butt jokes for the butt song.

#516. Holy Holy (feat CLEWS) - The Aftergone (#87, 2021)

54th of 2021

This is my first time talking about Holy Holy, but you must have heard about them, everybody knows their name. It took them a little while to build up steam but they utilised their time in the spotlight quite well. All up, they've got 5 Hottest 100 entries, and while I never considered myself a massive fan of this band, I clearly don't have a bad word to say about any of these songs. Just steady performers who never quite broke through to the mainstream but found their way into a lot of people's hearts. Every generation deserves their own Fauves.

I've got more chances to dispense thoughts on Holy Holy (I have a couple, I promise!), but let's ignore them for now because this is the one starring moment for CLEWS, a duo of sisters from Sydney. I caught onto them from the start with their debut single "Museum". There were strong throwback rock vibes that I was into, but I think they tightened things up a little better with the follow up "Crushed". I don't know where to put that in the 'crush' categorisation because it's literally the first word of the song and doesn't appear after, but that one has massive stadium rock vibes. They're still putting out music as recently as 2025, though yet to make a full album despite having more than enough songs at this point. Holy Holy on the other hand are not putting out music currently, announcing a hiatus in 2025.

"The Aftergone" is a fascinating hybrid, where these two rock bands come together to make...a club song of some sorts? It's still very driven by guitars but the perpetual drum machine just takes it to a different place entirely. The hidden secret to this is that the song was co-written by Kim from The Presets, so it really is a mighty meeting of duos. CLEWS being featured on this song might be overstating it a little bit. They have a small section and some backing vocals, but I don't think they play any instruments on the song. I always find these kinds of collaborations odd because there has to be a bare minimum of involvement if you're gonna make the trek to manifest it. It's good though, mixing it up but still retaining a typical Holy Holy sound.