#125. Thundamentals - Smiles Don't Lie (#32, 2013)
24th of 2013
If you ask me what my favourite Tame Impala album is, well it's "Lonerism", but if I'm feeling in the mood to be more obtuse, I'd say it's "Melody's Echo Chamber". That's the self-titled album from the project by French singer Melody Prochet. Kevin Parker was dating her at the time and produced the album. It finds the best form from Kevin's soundscape of guitar noodling and drums that are pushed right up the mix. But on top of that, you can't say Melody's Echo Chamber without melody, and that's what really pushed it over the edge for me. I worship songs like "Some Time Alone, Alone" and "I Follow You" for utilising this enveloping sound, and sounding so pretty and delicate at the same time. Melody's career has continued without Kevin and continued to expand the project in interesting ways that make the debut album feel a little less ambitious, but there are advantages to both. It's all just a very specific sound that appeals to me, recalling the perky elements of Grant Kirkhope's "Donkey Kong 64" OST. Not something I really hear very much except wait here it is on this Thundamentals song.
The timing of it all, the way the song starts with that distinct synth melody, it feels deliberately indebted to Melody's Echo Chamber. You won't get any outrageous guitar solos here, and it's obviously background fodder to Thundamentals, but it's the glue that keeps this whole song together. Not since "Runaway" has hitting the same note over and over again until you don't managed to evoke so much.
I think officially, their Like a Version of Matt Corby's "Brother" put Thundamentals on the map, but "Smiles Don't Lie" feels like the song that took them to the next level. They're not just taking someone else's tender song; they can write their own. It almost feels like they're trying too hard to be approachable. A love song that's non-committal, and introspective about the fact. I don't know who's singing the hook on this but Tuka & Jeswon are already the least threatening rappers going around and it absolutely suits them perfectly to sound chill on production that fits perfectly with the vibe of the song.
#124. Slipknot - Unsainted (#86, 2019)
10th of 2019
First of all, it's pretty incredible that Slipknot are here. At the time, they broke the record for the biggest gap between appearances, having first appeared in the year 2000 with "Wait and Bleed". That record has comfortably been beaten again by Kylie Minogue, but it doesn't stop the insanity of this situation. Slipknot picked up their first entry in the very early days when everyone was making sense of what they were and where they fit. Older millennials were all about this kind of act that seemed to challenge the status quo and felt dangerous or threatening. In the years that followed, Slipknot weren't really a mainstream force anymore, despite being incredibly popular. You were either a fan of them or you didn't really have to deal with them at all. As a show of their commercial prowess, they scored a #1 album in 2008, and did it again with their next two albums as well. During this time, I didn't really ever hear them on triple j, getting just sparing amounts of airplay prior to "Unsainted".
I feel like I can't have a conversation with anyone about Slipknot because ever since I started actually hearing their music, nothing has lined up with what I've ever heard about them. I had a metalhead friend in school who was very into them, and the reputation and name were enough to swear me away from ever looking into it. They were so outside of my periphery that it felt like going outside of my regular comfort zones anyway, and it's not like I ever heard anything encouraging about them. The idea of the scary, heavy band who all wear masks, it's supposed to invite an audience I'm not part of.
None of it really adds up to me. Maybe my perception is distorted from how much death metal & adjacent genres I heard via my older brother growing up, but Slipknot don't remotely feel like icons of counterculture. I guess they are ostensibly just because you're not going to hear them out in public very often, if ever. The main thing I want to acknowledge though is that they're actually incredibly pop friendly. Beneath the veneer of fear, you've got a band who so consistently dabble in catchy melodies. "Wait and Bleed" was the first one I ever got to knowing and I was surprised at just how easy it was to get into. I keep hearing more stuff from them and it's the same story every time. It helps that Corey Taylor is undeniably an incredibly gifted vocalist, with a massive range at his disposal. Often though, the rest of the band are similarly in step, and not especially hard to keep up with.
"Unsainted" is another one of these songs. I don't think it's necessarily the most obvious crossover hit they've had. There's another version of history where triple j really latch onto "The Devil in I" or "Duality" and they get the same treatment. We take what we get though and I immediately clocked onto it as a song that hits the balance especially well. I was a little surprised to see it here in any case because I just wouldn't have expected the voter base to have the right overlap with the Slipknot crowd to make it happen. "We Are Not Your Kind" was a bit of a critical re-appraisal for them though, a better reviewed album than usual, which might be the necessary ingredient to make this happen. I don't think anyone clued onto the potential record and the history that could have been made. As a funny bonus, it was the second time that an iconic heavy metal group made their Hottest 100 return immediately after a Kanye West song, as this placed 1 spot ahead of "Follow God" (#811), while Metallica's last entry in 2008 came just after "Love Lockdown". We love the chaotic juxtaposition at the bottom of the countdown.
I've never gotten sick of "Unsainted" though. I don't know if I'd call it their best hook because I've got a strong soft spot for "Surfacing" off their self-titled album, a song you'll never catch me singing along to. "Unsainted" manages to be at least a little bit more family friendly. Corey's absolutely having a field day on the hook, and the song even has a choir. If you'll pardon the pun, I just appreciate the duality on display, light and dark. When nearly all of the token metal entries tend to come from The Amity Affliction, this kind of novel change of pace is extremely welcome.
#123. Halsey - I am not a woman, I'm a god (#71, 2021)
4th of 2021
I'm a little surprised that Halsey is still signed to a major label. In my regular dealings with typing up music releases each week; I've gotten quite accustomed to seeing it as a stock check. In many cases, you can see the writing is on the wall if an artist's commercial viability is slipping, and it usually means you'll catch them releasing their next album independently. That's also when they just completely disappear from the conversation as we witness the power of promotion and what happens when the budget shrinks considerably.
Halsey is a bit of a unique situation. They were signed to Capitol records following early breakout success, hinting at the cult of personality that you can't often manufacture. It proved dividends as Halsey's career thrived for several years. Things eventually slowed down, you might actually be able to pin some of it to the album I'll be talking to, which lacked the crossover potential of their earlier albums. It was produced by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross after all, it's a completely different side to Halsey.
In a story that became very infamous as capitalism dystopia, it appears as though Capitol weren't willing to let things ride. They stuck with Halsey, but things came to a head in 2022 when Halsey spoke out publicly about their upcoming single "So Good". Reportedly, the song had been ready to roll out for weeks, but Capitol didn't want to release it without road-testing it on TikTok. At the time, I remember seeing some skepticism towards Halsey for this, as if what they were saying was part of game, the latest in a series of gimmicks to get people to pay attention to a song and artist they'd otherwise ignore. This was just a few months after the singer GAYLE had viral success with the song "abcdefu" after making a TikTok video asking her audience to help her come up with an idea and immediately clocking onto a comment that said to make a song that incorporates the alphabet. That comment coming from a marketing manager at Atlantic Records, the label she'd just signed to. When Halsey finally did release the song, it was supposedly with full support from Capitol to do the right thing, but the situation made Halsey leave the label and sign up with Columbia instead. Lately we've seen sombr openly admit that he road-tests choruses of songs he hasn't actually written on TikTok, which feels like another sign that Halsey was absolutely telling the truth in this case.
I'm writing this just after Halsey released a deluxe edition of their latest album, more than half a year after it came out, and I was just so surprised to see Columbia still attached to it. Halsey hasn't really had a major hit since 2020 and I feel like they must have known what they were signing up for when they made this deal. Maybe they're playing the long game. The big success of Zara Larsson in the past year has shown that good things can come to those who wait (even in her off years, Zara was still signed with Epic), but Halsey is also a decent amount older, so it feels like an unlikely gambit.
But enough about that, let's talk about Halsey's interesting musical direction in the 2020s. Maybe it shouldn't all come as a surprise. Even early on, there were hints of dark undertones in the music and themes, and after Halsey had the biggest solo hit of their career (#931), it was very quickly followed up with "Nightmare" (#656), which showed that it wasn't all just a game to find nothing but the safest choices for singles. Not long after that, we had the song "Experiment On Me". It's not a mainline Halsey single as it comes from the Birds of Prey soundtrack which I've spoken about before (#141). It's absolutely my favourite song I've heard from them. A wild left turn via collaborating with Bring Me The Horizon (and interpolating "Young Folks"). Much like when T-Pain turns off the auto-tune and stuns, hearing Halsey rise to the moment is a reminder that artists often have a lot more in their repertoire than what we're usually privy to.
Having that as a lead-in to the next Halsey album worked well for me, as I was a little more ready for it, and ready to trust Halsey's process. The whole album is pretty solid, but this lead single is a highlight for sure. At this point we're nearly 3 decades removed from when Nine Inch Nails nearly topped the countdown with "Closer", and we're seeing what can still be done with that template after years of refinement. While this doesn't quite pack the same punch as that song, it does show it as a solid re-arrangement of ideas, taking that song's extended outro and using it as a skeleton for the regular part of this song. The middling commercial performance is an indicator that it's all probably a step too far, but I'm glad it makes it in here as some form of validation that it's not always just about tapping into the same majority audience every step of the way.
#122. Violent Soho - Covered in Chrome (#14, 2013)
23rd of 2013
Maybe there are some rules that dictate what's capable of being popular, but the beauty of it all is that these tend to act more as rough guidelines. Sometimes it's possible to subvert them if you have just the right idea, something that doesn't follow along with the crowd, and instead hits on something visceral. From that point on, the world's your oyster. Maybe you won't have the hit to end all hits, but by sticking to your guns, you get something that's going to stand out just a little bit more. You look at all the special occasion Hottest 100s and there's a familiar pattern. Everything largely follows its original trajectory, save for those who get a little more promotional backing behind them. Being an extra-long song helps as well, just to make it stand out more.
Then you've just got the oddities. 6 years ago, when picking out the best songs of the decade, voters came out in full force for "Covered in Chrome". Seemingly, it's a song that acts as a lightning rod for all Violent Soho support, but also for everything within its periphery. If you want to vote for a garage rock song that lets you forget about all your inhibitions, "Covered in Chrome" is there for you. Its very refusal to fit in with everything else may just be part of the appeal, and a core tenant of what's always been so fascinating about the Hottest 100. The idea that it's very fun to disrupt the formal declaration of popularity by getting behind something that feels so antithetical to 'intellectual' ranking. Sure, your other songs might speak to personal experiences, perhaps evoke something sentimental inside. Your other song has heart, but "Covered in Chrome" has 'hell f**k yeah'.
The interesting experience I've had going to live shows is finding out which songs work the best in the setting, and how it doesn't necessarily correlate to your favourites. It's a nice starting point, but I've found myself re-assessing it all at once, because sometimes after you've gotten through that rush of 'They're playing my song!', it doesn't pan out as being especially exciting. That's when the primal experience comes out. I recently saw the band Gyroscope, and found they have an interesting setlist that splits pretty evenly across their 4 albums. Their earlier music is a lot more raucous than their later stuff, but you wouldn't really question it in the moment, with later cuts like "Some Of The Places I Know" and "I Still Taste Blood" having a lot of untapped energy in the studio versions. Still, it was those earlier cuts that I found myself enjoying the most, and not even necessarily the ones I'd usually ride for. "Fast Girl", "Doctor Doctor" and especially "Safe Forever" just go to another level when you're surrounded by people screaming along. Sometimes I feel a little out of touch with what are a band's most revered songs until I see them live and realise just how well they translate.
I've never seen Violent Soho live, but I have to imagine that "Covered in Chrome" is absolutely one of these songs. I don't even think the studio version necessarily suffers, just that there's an understood amount of compression that can't be overcome. To feel every reverberation of every instrument feels like the dream to me. To say nothing of the fact that the song has its own dedicated mosh section in the chorus. I don't think it's even necessarily to be part of the mosh pit, but just witnessing it first person is one of those great reminders of the joy that music can provide. The way it can get everyone to come together, forget about whatever troubles they might have, and just release themselves, it's so cool. I don't know if Violent Soho had high aspirations for this one, and it's not even my favourite song of theirs, but I can easily understand how it singlehandedly turned them into stars. No one is doing this as well as they are.
#121. N*E*R*D & Rihanna - Lemon (#66, 2017)
16th of 2017
The first time I knowingly became aware of N*E*R*D was in 2008. Their third album was coming out and the big single on the radio was "Everyone Nose (All the Girls Standing in the Line for the Bathroom)" (I did not realise there was a pun because I never saw it written down). I knew nothing about The Neptunes or really who Pharrell was. It wasn't really the best introduction, just a knowingly obnoxious song. I never really filed away the group in the shitlist, I think because I never really had an issue with anything else they put out. The next single had a slur for a title but otherwise is much more approachable.
Over the years, I'd hear more of their back catalogue (they didn't really extend the forward catalogue very much for a while), and it'd become my main route for affinity for Pharrell's work. "She Wants To Move", that's a rap rock classic right there. "Maybe" also very good too but I have a special affinity for the Sander Kleinenberg remix that triple j must have been playing. It gives the song an oddly heightened sense of urgency, and thanks to the robot voice included, is probably the reason I wince whenever I see the group's name pronounced as 'Nerd', rather than spelled out letter by letter.
As far as legacies go, it's hard to figure out what to do with N*E*R*D. The group were never particularly popular, just a curious side-quest for some of the hottest producers of the 2000s. I suppose the stakes changed a little in the 2010s, when Pharrell cashed in his credibility to inexplicably score 3 of the biggest hits of 2013. Add in a lapse of time, and suddenly there's a justifiable way to explain interest in a rap rock group for a decade and a half ago. Well, that's not the full story, is it? What we really landed on here was a minor hit that only really got a chance to make that happen because Rihanna's name was attached to it, and later, Drake.
Really, "Lemon" in the year 2017 gave us that classic dichotomy of the uncontrollable hitmaker and background artist both dragging each other to their standards. Something like Silk Sonic (#218) I suppose. "Lemon" had some curiosity to sneak it into the chart, and then you may have even forgotten, but it was actually far more popular a few months later when Drake hopped onto a remix of it. This wasn't just one of those quick 'remix for a high peak' moments (well, maybe it still was), because that version genuinely outstripped the original's popularity. If that's not enough, then even this version I'm talking about is completely cut out of consideration in favour of an edit that cuts out the first 73 seconds of the song so it starts with Rihanna's verse. To me, I'm completely accustomed to a version that hardly anyone's ever heard, and it's the normal version. The music video also cuts out half of Pharrell's first verse, because no one ever really listens to the same version.
A funny story about the song is that there's technically another notable version that did the rounds. Specifically on triple j, they had what was dubbed the 'Kingsmill REMIX' of the song, for the simple reason that Richard Kingsmill cut down the silent break towards the end of the song. triple j's entire system has a failsafe where it'd go to an emergency backup broadcast if there's ever more than 5 seconds of silence, a problem when a hit song has 7 seconds of silence. As a weird bit of cosmic irony, triple j actually did go off the air accidentally about a week before "Lemon" was released. The lesson here though is that even triple j have never played the proper version of "Lemon", because it was haunted. Now let's all celebrate, with a cool play of Dinosaur Jr.'s "Turnip Farm".
I don't know if you can call it heightened brand loyalty, but I got strangely excited to see the return of N*E*R*D, and while there's a world where I might have been highly put off by "Lemon", I got pretty heavily behind it. Not just that, but a bunch of other songs on the album too, particularly "Don't Don't Do It" with Kendrick Lamar. Not the only time he's worked with Pharrell, this is a forward sell. "Lemon" is just very addictive with its intense but minimalist production, and if I'm really being honest, it's just another great vehicle for Rihanna's welcome pivot to occasional rap queen. I've really warmed to the idea that "Bitch Better Have My Money" is one of her best ever singles. Here, she has all that same confident bravado and I love it. The truth set me free, realising that I had a lot of respect for both of these artists after all, even if the first thing they did was piss me off.
No comments:
Post a Comment