#365-#361

#365. Boy & Bear - Harlequin Dream (#55, 2013)

49th of 2013

There's a modestly important prequel to the Sarah Blasko post I did a while back, which is that it wasn't my first time seeing her. About a year earlier, she was touring as a support act for Boy & Bear, as they were going through a 10th anniversary tour of their second album "Harlequin Dream". It was a good package deal. I probably wouldn't have gone out of my way to see them otherwise. Sarah didn't have a band and only played about 5 (mostly on the new side) songs so if nothing else, it was a teaser that made it all the more necessary to cough up when the better opportunity presented itself. If I remember nothing else from that part of the show, it's that a woman directly in front of me heckled for the "Flame Trees" cover to make it to the setlist. For all I know, this was never the plan. Setlist FM is never quite as comprehensive as I'd like it to be, but the few shows that were documented didn't have it, there might be some truth to the idea that one person really had all that influence.

I did enjoy the Boy & Bear part of the show too, in spite of the very rude person behind me who obliviously bumped me dozens of times. Since they were touring the album, they started the show by mostly (put a pin in this one for another day) playing the album in order. It meant playing a lot of songs they hadn't played in a very long time, but it also meant the title track had to come into the picture very early. If you're familiar with this song and its reputation, you'll hear it and immediately start thinking forward a few minutes, who's going to play the sax solo?!

It's a slight regret that I didn't trust them enough to see it coming. I do have a brief video I recorded at the time of the saxophonist, but it doesn't truly capture the exciting spirit of it, when a man you haven't seen before just walks onto the stage as if he's always been there and delivers the crowning moment. Going back to 2013, this was the legacy of "Harlequin Dream" (the song), the pleasant Boy & Bear song with this unbelievable moment of hype tucked away at the end. I'm not convinced I'd be talking about the song at all if not for it. Afterwards during the show, they admitted that the saxophone was like a magic trick they prefer to pull out later in the set, but they didn't have much of a choice this time around. You might not think it, but Boy & Bear are a very funny banter band.

That's not to say that I didn't always enjoy the song for the rest of its pieces in the first place. It was always one of the meatier cuts from the album for its excellent control of mood and tempo. It's finding the right level of intensity with its stuttering guitar that gets the absolute best out of Dave's falsetto delivery. The pre-chorus to chorus transition might just be my favourite thing on the whole album. It's just a shame, I suppose, that I'd already done this ranking list by the time I got to this experience because it has me wanting to bump it up a little higher.

#364. Amyl and The Sniffers - Hertz (#28, 2021)

31st of 2021

I like to be on a steady pace of being far too prepared with these posts. It's nice to be able to fall back on the chance to take a couple weeks off and not lose any apparent pace (I'm pretty happy to say I haven't missed a single scheduled post day since I've started), but it can have its draw backs as well. Every day is a new set of events that could possibly be relevant talking points for me. Like how you're seeing this post after the 2025 Hottest 100 has come and gone, but I'm writing this back in November without any of that juicy context. I think I got lucky this time. I've been pacing ahead of schedule, but have still been lucky enough to arrive just after the biggest week of Amyl and The Sniffers discourse ever seen. I'll open the curtain fully and say that it's November 19th, 2025. The band have just had a massive free show in Melbourne cancelled by police, getting further press when they used the opportunity to shout out a whole bunch of smaller venues and garner further respect. Also just tonight they practically swept the ARIA Awards, winning every industry voted award they were nominated for, including Album Of The Year. They've also become a rare Australian artist of late to chart anywhere as Fred again.. recently sampled and credited them. It's a lot more to acknowledge when about a week ago I was prepared to just write about how the song "Hertz" has been very recently beaten into the ground by a car commercial.

How did we get here? By usual standards, it's a pretty short story. They got together in 2016, found their present line up in 2017, and released their debut album in 2019. That debut album was released on the label of a certain internationally famous Australian band, but effectively was independent. It reached #22 in its first week which is a positive sign that they were making waves. The two subsequent albums debuted at #2, both behind notable North American rappers (I can say one of them is Drake). This clearly is not a passing fad anymore, Amyl and The Sniffers might just be the future of Australian rock. Considering the increasing positions globally, you might even be able to take the Australian qualifier out of that.

Most popular music fits pretty directly into one of two extremes. You've got music that so aggressively makes you pay attention to it, and music that does the opposite, blending into a desired trend to get picked up by proxy. The latter has certainly seen a boon in the age of streaming, and it's probably the most obvious change in the nature of popular music. The former still has potential, however. When it's competing with more and more of the latter, it'll be prone to stand out more than ever before. Amyl and The Sniffers fit squarely into the former group and they know it.

The first thing you'll probably think when you hear them, is just how much Amy Taylor's voice stands out. Maybe not the first in this wave of overly Australian vocalists, but in an up-tempo punk rock environment, it's reaching out to far different worlds. Probably some gender politics come into play, because we're not usually used to seeing women be so proudly vulgar, as some future artwork will make abundantly clear. They're gonna rub a lot of people the wrong way, but it's securing the lifelong fans that's the most important thing here.

I am not one of those people but I have generally been enjoying the music along the way. "Hertz" is the only one here because the next couple of entries don't come along until 2024. It was quite surprising to hear it at the time. One of those 'they've really made it' moments for a band that could easily have trucked along without that recognition. It's not just a curious gimmick of the moment though, this is a song that has really stuck around. When triple j did a countdown for the best Australian songs of all time, this was the highest ranking song of the 2020s thus far. You can chalk it up a bit to the state of popular Australian music lately and how much of it is previously popular artists coasting, but someone had to rep the current decade and that's the power of standing out. I don't know if it's necessarily my favourite option, but it's a snappy song that goes in and out in about two and a half minutes, so it's a nice little entry point.

#363. Sofi Tukker - Drinkee (#60, 2016)

41st of 2016

I need to share this because it's tangentially relevant, but mostly because I think it's funny to send a time capsule to myself two months from now. Recently I have been absolutely assaulted by "The Girl From Ipanema". It's been in multiple movies I've seen, it's come up in a trivia context, I can't seem to get away from it. If you don't know it (I won't judge), it's a monstrously popular 1960s song from Brazil. It won Record of the Year at the 1965 GRAMMY Awards as well. It's originally entirely in Portuguese, although I think the more famous worldwide version has lyrics mostly (but not entirely) in English. There aren't many songs that have gotten famous all around the world in Portuguese. I suppose I can think of the winning song in the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest (though it's not one that's stuck with me), or failing that, we also have "Drinkee".

This feels like cheating, however. To say "Drinkee" was popular worldwide is stretching the definition pretty thin. It has achieved notoriety in Brazil, Italy and Australia, and that's about it. A very scattershot representation that makes it to three continents and crosses multiple language barriers. I wish I could rationalise a reason for how this happened, but I cannot. They were lucky to get some airtime over here and we were more than happy to lap up this song that's absolutely incomprehensible. They try to spot us one word in the title, but they're cheating a little bit, as it's spelt 'drinque' in Portuguese. It does mean 'drink' so you're probably okay there, but maybe you too have been fooled into thinking that the opening line is 'come dance with me', not even remotely close I'm afraid.

I do find the language barrier to be a little superficial at times. I feel like it posits a greater portion of music fans are deeply focused on entire lyrical screeds and not just gelling with the general vibe of it all. Maybe a simple platitude to latch onto is all that matters, otherwise some serious questions need to occasionally be asked with regards to what becomes popular sometimes. I can only guess that it's those occasional sequences that sound like English words that allow Sofi Tukker to get away with it. It's like getting to the end of that R.E.M. song's verses when you hear the distinct title drop poking its head out.

Otherwise I think "Drinkee" stands out as a song that just doesn't sound like much else around it. It's not just a song that has Portuguese lyrics, it's a song that has about 4 lines of them that are just repeated endlessly (it's about 12 times) and it's the song's second job to just mess around with that fact and keep us entertained for 5 minutes. The guitar does a very good job with this, coming in super slow as if to combat the pace of the singing. I don't know what genre you'd really put this under, it's supposed to be dance, but it feels like a strange allocation. The most appropriate moment is when the beat goes away in the middle to build up to what is effectively a drop later on. Maybe it's the most obvious trick to string you along, but I won't pretend it doesn't work for me every time. Give me more incomprehensible hit songs. They don't even need to be from Sofi Tukker, though I suppose that will happen.

#362. Remi - Sangria (#85, 2013)

48th of 2013

When the GRAMMY nominations come out, I tend to have a look to find out which Australian artists have made it in. There's a very strong America tendency to it all which can expose itself the most when it comes to any international country. You could be just as relevant in the bigger picture, but when none of your fans are on the voting committee, it's moot. Still, Australia tends to do reasonably well, usually good for a few names every year. They really like nominating RÜFÜS DU SOL in the Dance categories, I suppose it's an area we do well in (although it should be noted that their international recognition wasn't 'unlocked' until the 2020 awards). I also tend to probably need someone else to run through the list instead of me because I can miss some names here and there. Names like Hiatus Kaiyote.

The 2014 awards were a pretty lean one for Australia. You had a solitary album nomination for Tame Impala, and an R&B nomination for Hiatus Kaiyote, which was actually a collaboration with a pretty notable US rapper. I know the band quite well now, but it's not often that I get introduced to someone from my own part of the world via the GRAMMY Awards. Maybe that's not entirely true though, because they were getting name dropped all year on triple j in 2013 at the end of "Sangria".

This is a strange way to segue into all of this, but it's genuinely the first thing I think about with this song. So many shout outs on this one. Many are just directly involved with the song, but then there are names I do know, where I'm just thinking, 'yeah, Michelle Grace Hunder is a great photographer but it feels out of nowhere'. Nice bit of connecting lore with it all I suppose.

I am potentially here to drop a bomb shell because I'm not sure how known this fact is: Remi was a band. It is an individual moniker of the rapper, but they've always been a whole thing. We don't stop shouting out J Smith. I guess easy to fall into the trap when he's always referring to himself with singular pronouns, but there isn't a way around that. Don't worry, I didn't realise for years either. I always saw...them as plucky underdogs, getting a lot of praise through the traditional triple j Unearthed cycle, but not really having the necessary pop appeal to cross over in the era of 360 and Chance Waters. A good sign though that there was more to get out of Australian hip-hop at the time.

I did think they had catchy songs of course, just not with that next level of polish. "Saggin" is loads of fun, but sounds like it came out nearly a decade before it actually did. "Sangria" catches up to a slightly more modern era, if you can overlook it leaning on the well-worn path of Australian hip-hop using woodwind samples. It's very much in the world of loose, fun SoundCloud tracks, just that it's one that caught a little more wind than you'd expect. I was a little shocked to see it actually land on the list. I wasn't sure how I felt about it at the time, think I just heard it so often that it became part of the radio tapestry and I couldn't hear it as a song anymore.

This song has aged tremendously since then. Even within the bounds of something that isn't touched up to hit the mainstream, it's just full of those nifty little hooks that keep me engaged. One of the best introductions going around with how immediately it takes you into its world, with a chorus that feels incredibly Allday coded. Remi Kolawole is able to keep up the pace the whole way, but I do have to shout out Sensible J & Dutch because there's a lot of heavy lifting just in the instrumental. Remi never really had a big breakout after the fact but I'm so glad we've got this one here. One of those moments where the triple j voters do an excellent job of time capsuling the year that was with something that might otherwise just slip through and be forgotten over time. I mean I can't say I've thought about "Seconds" by Ghost Loft in over 10 years.

#361. RÜFÜS DU SOL - Alive (#19, 2021)

30th of 2021

You say their name and then they appear. Otherwise I am going to spend this opening section dealing with the most important thing about "Alive". It's something that I'm jumping the gun on by writing right now, but will feel woefully out of date by the time the post goes live. The title lyric in this song sounds a little like he's saying 'Feliz Navidad'. Now that we've made it here, we can wrap things up I think.

If I am pushed for more words, I want to point out that this is a culmination of something I've said in several RÜFÜS DU SOL blurbs previously. RÜFÜS DU SOL have slowly built themselves up as a massive festival headliner around the world, even in countries where they have no visible charting profile. That comes with a lot of pressure because once you're that big, you're gonna get people tagging along in audiences that aren't familiar with your music. Maybe their minimal, chill electronica works perfectly in a pair of headphones, but if you're playing big stages and arenas, you need something to fit that. It feels like a conscious decision on their 4th album to play into this, and "Alive" encapsulates it perfectly. Big sweeping sounds, big sweeping platitudes, big sounding songs.

I've not experienced "Alive" in that kind of setting, but even through headphones, it just sounds immense. Another song that shows its lengthy runtime as a potential threat, but doesn't really wallow around in needless stalling or an unearned coda. Maybe I am just a little more partial to some of their more radio ready tunes, but when I want a big monster of a song, this is a good one to go to.