#90

#90. Vera Blue - Temper (#72, 2021)

1st of 2021

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That's 2021 for you, not a bang, barely a whimper. I don't think it warrants any grand declarations beyond it just being a particularly unlucky year for my voting prospects. It's the only year where nothing I voted for made the top 100, and if that's not enough, only one vote of mine made the top 200. Given the size of the voting list, someone picking at random would likely do better than me. Several artists I did vote for got in with other songs. The one exception was a bit of a close miss with Holly Humberstone's "The Walls Are Way Too Thin", a rare song that lifts a similar riff from The Police's "Every Breath You Take", but doesn't immediately get dragged down by that over-familiarity. It got to #123, with the potential to get high enough if it wasn't sharing vote space with her other song, "Scarlett" at #169.

There are other songs I'm rather fond of in that second half too, "NDA" might be my favourite song from Billie Eilish's second album, Clairo has "Amoeba" which is at her typical best. Inexplicably I'm very fond of Drake & Travis Scott's team up on "Fair Trade". One of those songs that takes their usual dark, moody sound and makes it sound captivating. Then you've got AURORA who has never made the Hottest 100 before managing to channel the opening line of The Walkmen's "The Rat" with her song "Cure For Me", but make it goofy and fun. Lastly, as I say before, I was so close to partially salvaging it with MAY-A's "Time I Love To Waste" landing at the unlucky #101 slot, which I'd probably have a little bit higher than this. I've seen people make countdowns where the #1 spot is a big statement that the whole list stands behind, but sometimes it's just the best of what you've got. As a year in music, I'm very fond of 2021, which has a serious contender for my favourite song of the decade so far (by an artist who will eventually appear in this list), but it's time to wrap it up with...just another non-album single by Vera Blue.

I do find myself associating this song pretty strongly with "Lie To Me" (#94). They both came out at roughly the same time of the year, a year apart. Both landed at roughly the same spot in the Hottest 100, and I liked them both about the same. Ask me another time and I might even swap them on this list. Maybe it's all just her perfectly manipulating the voter set by releasing singles at the optimal time. She had one of her best performances with "All The Pretty Girls" (#215) released in October, so here's another one. It also had the bonus of being the only song she released at all that year, and that might be why she's so suddenly fallen considerably out of favour since. "Temper" is actually her last song to register in the Hottest 200 entirely.

I don't think I'd typically lean into a song as light & airy as this one, but I do think it's very well crafted. A lot of that comes down to the performance, firstly where Vera Blue shifts it up on the pre-chorus. If I was confident enough at making declarations from thin air, I'd say it's thematic and she's expressing her mood shifts through her vocal melodies. She treats her temper as an uncontrollable aspect of her and evidently just runs into it unexpectedly. It feels like she borrows from OneRepublic's workbook after that by starting the chorus with a 'Lately,', but otherwise uses it more as a build-up of tension that isn't released until the song's actually hook comes in. Then, as if to counter the set up in the verses, she actually raises her voice up higher for that, giving the song a surprising amount of dynamic range for what it is. After that, we're mostly just going through the motions to fill out the next two minutes, but I'm pretty sold anyway.