Sing-a-long-a-blog-along

Despite my commitment to being the trendiest indie boy who ever did love, it is easy to fall behind the curve. Two weeks ago, I felt very smug and on trend by covering a Fiona Apple song from her new album, showing just how in sync I was with current trends. Unfortunately, there is no winning in this age of content, and there may have also been another critically acclaimed indie album out that day, an album that I haven't even mentioned yet. You could say that I'm behind the curve, but I refuse to admit that. I will become trendy or I will become death itself. Today's song of the day, therefore, is Rina Sawayama's "Dyntasy" from her new album Sawayama  - inarguable proof that I will always circle back to even the trends that pass me by. Okay, nightmare irony aside, "Dynasty" rips. It is the perfect embodiment of that meme I've forgotten about bright and exciting music underlying deeply depressing lyrics. Listen to those chunky riffs and hypno

As we touched on with "Cum on Feel the Noize", songs with multiple versions are hard. It's fine when it's "Hurt" (Johnny Cash's cover 4 lyf) or "All Along the Watchtower" (Jimi Hendrix fancam? I'm very socially maladjusted), but when there's more than two? Hoo boy. That's why "Personal Jesus" is such a source of stress to me. Clearly, the idea of having your own wee iJesus by your side is a timeless subject which appeals to many, which is why so many have covered it. There's all the covers, and then the remixes, too. It is a towering edifice of grandeur. The Personal Jesus expanded universe is a Lovecraftian deity that towers above mortal perception, which makes it hard to pick out a singular take from it. Which one is definitive? Is there such a thing in this case? Shall we just submit to the glorious will of "Personal Jesus"? In times of stress, I tend to pick the easy option. That's why today&#

I have been washing my hands a lot lately. I know, not to state the bleeding obvious. We have all discovered the wonders of making our hands the absolute cleanest they can be, singing "Happy Birthday" twice while lathering just like our dear leader has suggested. There are, not to state the bleeding obvious again, good reasons to do this. Got to keep them COVID particles, or whatever the shit, away. Nonetheless, there's downsides too, namely that the surface of my palms has often come to resemble the salt flats of Utah. TMI? I don't know. I feel like there's been enough of an eczema uptick lately to make these things less gross, even if it's still gross. I've been weirdly interested in this irony lately. My cracked skin is proof that I am doing what needs to be done - making one bit suffer to save something else. I would try and make a wider point of this, but I can hear Donald Trump's yells of "the cure cannot be worse than the problem"

Yesterday, I did something terrible - I dedicated a full blog post to a song from the Suicide Squad  soundtrack. This was heinous, and I shouldn't have done it. All I can do now is repent. My repentance, as all repentances should be, is to do the bad thing, except good. Today's song of the day, Vince Staples and Richie Kohan's "Home", is also a song from a superhero movie by high profile rappers, except the movie is good and also the song. It's from the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse  soundtrack, and anybody who has seen Spider-Verse ought to tell you that anything associated with it is coated in gold dust. So it goes with "Home", which also has the pleasant nostalgia of being attached to the film's first teaser trailer. The entire soundtrack is honestly a delight, and this is a fittingly epic closer fit for soaring above the rooftops of New York City, an activity which nobody should ever have to perform. Check out that guitar riff from 2:

Earlier this week, while discussing "Black" by Danger Mouse & Danielle Luppi (feat. Norah Jones), I mentioned that it couldn't quite compare to "Sucker for Pain" by Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa and Imagine Dragons (with Logic and Ty Dolla $ign feat. X Ambassadors), one of my favourite examples of beautiful collaboration in music. That got me thinking. Why not discuss "Sucker for Pain" by Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa and Imagine Dragons (with Logic and Ty Dolla $ign feat. X Ambassadors) at further length? Today's song of the day, therefore, is "Sucker for Pain" by Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa and Imagine Dragons (with Logic and Ty Dolla $ign feat. X Ambassadors) from the Suicide Squad soundtrack. What is it that I love about "Sucker for Pain" by Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa and Imagine Dragons (with Logic and Ty Dolla $ign feat. X Ambassadors), you ask? An interesting question. I think it's the sheer chaos of it. I mean, the posse cut is a

My neighbours are playing music too loudly right now. It's frustrating me. Fine, it's early enough that it's not breaking any noise laws, but come on. It's intrusive. Listen to your own music in the privacy of your own home, you know? Not all of us have as good music tastes as me. Today's song of the day, therefore, goes out to my neighbours. It's Quiet Riot's 1996 cover of 'Cum on Feel the Noize', a song - and I cannot state this enough - which is literally just about getting really noisy and nothing else. There's an interesting question here, because this is the second cover of the original tune by Slade. Obviously, I had to pick a version for here, but I did not find this hard. Slade's is fine, but too gauzy and 70s. Oasis' is generic 90s Oasis, but 90s Oasis was pretty great, so it's solid. But come on (feel the noise): Quiet Riot's version walks it. It's shouty and aggressive, which is just what this song needs. I'

Gah. It's 10.30pm, and I haven't done this yet. I am extremely low on creative inspiration and not having a very musical day. Truth is, parts of today have been a bit of a bummer, and I don't feel like writing much. It's hard to stay optimistic during a situation engineered to bring out my inner pessimist. It's true that people, I've been sad. Today's song communicates that well. It's "People, I've been sad" by Christine and the Queens. I don't have the energy to check which album it's from. It's eloquent and bits are in French, so I think that says it better than I could. I am so sorry. It's that kind of day.

I gather that Arctic Monkeys' Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino was a wee bit divisive in certain parts. I mean, I get it. You don't hop from the peppy rock of club indie nights' dreams to weird 70s lounge lizard artistic self-indulgence within one album without rankling a few listeners. Equally, I'd be kind of lying if I said I knew how to tell every single track apart. So much drawling! So much melancholic piano. Still, though, I feel sort of compelled to defend it, maybe because I like pretending my taste is special. And, secondarily, there are some pretty darn good tracks on there. Today's song of the day, "The Ultracheese", the album's closer, is one of those, and I will be accepting no arguments about this. Whatever on earth Alex Turner was trying to do with this album, it works a treat here. "The Ultracheese" just puts you perfectly in the mindset of a man who genuinely believes he is a time traveller, looking fondly back on imag

Psst. Secret. I'm endeavouring to only include music on this blog that I like, or, at the very least, music that interests me. Honest. The thing is that I am trying to do 365 days of this nightmare experiment, and it'd be kind of boring if I just picked out my favourite 365 songs (I don't even know if I can do that! I tried doing a top 100 playlist on Spotify and it was very stressful). Today's song of the day, though, is indeed probably something that'd end up on that mythical top 365. Just as a little indulgence. It's "Pa'lante", the penultimate track from Hurray for the Riff Raff's (another one for the weird-but-I-love-it band names book) 2017 album The Navigator. "Pa'lante" shoots for the format of The Beatles' "A Day in the Life", so it's kind of a wonder that it actually works at all. But man. This is just so much of music can be in such a compact space, if that makes any sense at all. The emotional ran

Woof. That title is a mouthful, even if it's no "Sucker for Pain" by Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa and Imagine Dragons (with Logic and Ty Dolla $ign feat. X Ambassadors) from the Suicide Squad soundtrack. Today's song of the day, "Black", from Danger Mouse and Danielle Luppi's 2011 album Rome,  is probably most/only famous for soundtracking the final scene of the penultimate season of Breaking Bad.  It is a perfect, perfect needle-drop, capturing the melancholy of a moral turning point that's balanced between victory and uncertainty, and I have thought about it for years. Anyway, I'm using "Black" because the other Breaking Bad- iverse show, Better Call Saul , just wrapped its own penultimate season. Okay, I've been blabbing about it a lot on Twitter, but holy shit ! Just look at those IMDB ratings for the last half of this fifth season, and you will, for once, find an accurate reflection of popular opinion. It is television that is so

Okay. Self-indulgent one month celebration out of the way. Now I have to write about music again. Songs. Songs? Songs. I can do this. Some songs are impressive because of their overall construction, and how they cumulatively build up an effect that only fully becomes apparent once you're done. Some are impressive because of particular guitar solos, or a memorable lyric, or some tasty synth. Today's song of the day is impressive for many reasons, but there's one very particular one I'd like to pick out. "Don't Beat the Girl Out of My Boy", from Anna Calvi's 2018 album Hunter  is a great, snarling song all the way through, but at two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, it really hits the jackpot. At that point, Anna Calvi lets out a guttural scream. She holds this for forty seconds, modulating it up and down to the rhythm of the electric guitar, but seemingly never actually pausing for breath. Just when you think there should be nothing left in her l

It's April 19, 2020, and it has been one month since I started this Frankenstein's monster of a song- diary-blog experiment. It's day 28 of the UK-wide lockdown, with no perceptible end in sight. During this month, this blog has accidentally become my main source of how I can tell human time. You might have noticed that the days are increasingly congealing into a gigantic mulch that are impossible to tell apart, after all. Days of the week? Ha. Everything is Sunday is Monday is Thursday but definitely never Saturday now. Dates? Don't be ridiculous. Months are just about possible to keep straight, but don't be trying to actually distinguish where we are in that big blob of time. There is the golden times of Before Corona, there is the endless Now, and there is After Corona, a theoretical future both close and far, depending on which government exit strategy leaks you read. Moving forward or progressing in the endless Now seems basically impossible, because every da

It feels like the right time to really get into Radiohead. I've dabbled a bit before, but I've always been held back from becoming A Radiohead Guy by the crippling fear that I would become too much of a stereotype, even for myself, if I did. But screw it. We're all sad now and whose internal monologue doesn't sound like a Thom Yorke whine? I am therefore doing my best to become the stereotype I always feared I'd be, and I'm starting, as it seems natural to do, with today's song of the day, 'Codex'. It's the sixth track from their 2011 album Hail to the Thief,  and is of no special significance to their career, so I hope you understand my kind of reasoning. Okay, fine, there's a tiny bit more reasoning. Ever since it ended the very confusing Westworld  season two finale (I am not a stereotype!), it has just wormed its way into my head. 'Haunting' is a common adjective for Radiohead, but this is a downright spectral tune that sounds

Keeping up with indie music is hard . It's a cosmic treadmill populated by legions of improbably cool and cultured people with encyclopaedic knowledge of singer-songwriters. I have learned the hard way that it is a fool's game to believe that one could ever master the treadmill. Still, I'm trying my best not to die on the treadmill, which brings us to another new music Friday, an important reminder that it's Friday, and that Friday still exists. New music Friday is a great time for me to realise how little I know about things, such as the beloved singer-songwriter Fiona Apple, an acclaimed artist who I'm ashamed to say I had literally never heard of before today. I know. Today's song of the day is "Cosmonauts" from har new album Fetch the Bolt Cutters , a highlight of a a ridiculously good, triumphant and emotionally searing album that I think I am only able to understand a very small percentage of. Fiona Apple's music, from the tiny bit my

Is everyone on your social media somehow, bafflingly, doing a ton of stuff at the moment? Are they sudden sourdough experts or smashing their 5K personal best, when you were certain they didn't know how to do either of those things? Or - and this may hit closer to home - do you still have to revise for university exams as usual, in spite of the global pandemic lockdown thing? Yeah, me too. The productivity imperative, now that we're all housebound but for the daily allotted exercise that Matt Hancock (not to be confused with Will Smith's character of Hancock, which he played in the film Hancock ) bestows upon us, is real. And, and this may hit closer to home, sometimes there's no choice about that productivity, even if your motivation is down through the toilet. Today's song of the day understands that grind. "Somedays (I Don't Feel Like Trying", a very self-explanatory" track from The Raconteurs' 2019 album Help Us Stranger , is a song

Songs that get more exciting midway through are some of the best songs there are. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be controversial, but it's true. I just love it when a song announces that it's going to be REALLY BIG for the next section and that you ought to buckle your seatbelts for that bit. Like the bit two minutes from the end of 'Paradise City' where Axl Rose screams HOOOOOMMMMEEE  and the song goes really fast. That's what I live for as a garbage music boy. Today's song of the day, then, is catnip for me. For the first three minutes, the late and great George Michael's 'Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me' is just a pretty great cover of the 1974 Elton John track. It's great, but it could be greater. And then, at two minutes and fifty nine seconds, George Michael booms out "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, MR ELTON JOHN!". The crowd goes wild, and Elton John is suddenly there, singing his own song and dueting it out with George in

Yesterday, I admitted something important: my music taste is not nearly as smart as I would like it to be. Obviously, I feel a lot of shame about this. But in the interests of self-acceptance and all that boring therapy nonsense, I will be trying out some self-acceptance about this too. Put simply, it's time to really delve deep into my enjoyment for very bad music. This is important exposure and representation for fools who are entertained way too easily, I think. Today's song of the day is a real hit from the archives of my horrible taste. Digital Sons' 'I Am', which I think was released in 2014, is not even listed on Spotify, and has only 6300 views on its main YouTube page. It's not a good song, and it's not even a particularly varied or interesting one to listen to. I'd like to tell you that I like it for profound artistic reasons, but the truth is that I like it because I heard it on the launch trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man 2  tie-in gam

When I really admit to myself the kind of music I enjoy, 'fun' is a distressingly important thing for me. I know, how grotesquely impure - I am filled with shame, don't worry. I should be better than this, purer than this, but alas - I like it when there are upbeat noises and cool vocals that do trampolining on my brain's pleasure centres. As a dumb music idiot, then, one of the things I really love are riffs. You know, riffs. It's when the electric guitar person strums a lot and it's all exciting. If I'm in an argumentative mood, I might tell you that riffs are, in fact, better than singing, and that we should all be aiming for riff-only music as the apex of the musical form. For now, though, we just have songs with riffs in them. Today's song of the day, 'Bee Karma' from Wand's 2017 album Plum , is a certified song with a riff in it, and boy, is it good. It belongs to my favourite genre of song with a riff in it, which is the kind of so

You might know Tim Heidecker from the labyrinthine On Cinema at the Cinema universe, or his comedy work, or his turn in Jordan Peele's Us, but he also has a fully fledged musical career - you know, he's one of those ridiculously cool and talented Swiss army knife people who can do everything with their eyes shut. They don't make me jealous. Today's song of the day 'What The Brokenhearted Do' is a work of genuine vulnerability in many ways, expressing the discontent and loneliness of a break-up and purporting to be autobiographical in nature. Except it's not really, because Heidecker has been married for twelve years and made up the story of a break-up because break-up albums are interesting to write. As somebody who enjoys the sport of covering up true feelings under a thick blanket of defensive irony, this is honestly inspirational for me. Who needs real emotions when you can just make them up? I hope my therapist doesn't know I have Twitter.

It has not been lost of me that I have been on an accidental mid-2000s kick this week. Kanye West,  the Mountain Goats, Green Day - what is this... uh... MTV? No, that was the 90s. iTunes? I'm sorry, the mid-2000s passed me by a little. I was alive then (hello!), but sort of as more of a passive, emotionally volatile culture sponge awaiting a personality (worth the wait? Don't answer that). Still, we live within a nostalgia-driven world, because the present, for reasons that I will not bring myself to elaborate upon this time, is less than worth looking into. There's no reason why not really remembering a particular time is a barrier to declaring yourself amongst it, right? So I've elected to stay in the middle of the decade before last (oof) for a little bit. Things were fine back then. Aside from the forever wars in the Middle East, the Presidency of George W. Bush, the decline of anything approaching liberal politics in the UK, the build-up to the last recession.

Three weeks! How time flies, or very much doesn't. I don't know, time is weird right now. One thing that is giving our near-formless existence some shape right now is that, while entertainment industries whack the lights out all over, musicians are, for the time being, still piping out fresh new #content for us all to enjoy. It's a balm in these difficult times. Phoebe Bridgers announced an album for June, and it reminded me that June will exist soon, which I think is important. With that in mind, today's song of the day is a new tune, released just today, from Laura Marling's latest album, 'Strange Girl'. It's a fun, wistful track - though the line about embracing socialism just to have something believe in hits too close to home - and the fact that I could have picked any of the new album's 10 songs proves just how darn consistent the whole album is. Laura Marling is 30, and this is her seventh album. I'm struggling with this, because tha

To address the title - yes, the band's name is Let's Eat Grandma. Isn't that great? Let's Eat Grandma! What a brilliant name for a band. Just imagine what it would have felt like to come up with that name. It puts standard indie band names, the kind that all sound like 'The Large Egg' or 'Black Noodle', to absolute shame. Today's song of the day is 'Donnie Darko', the closer from their 2018 album I'm All Ears. My interest was piqued on my Discover Weekly by the band name, but they really had my attention when I saw that this song was 11 minutes long. If there's anything I love more than silly band names, it's ridiculously long songs, so this was a match made in heaven for me. Fittingly, 'Donnie Darko' bangs - a synthy odyssey that swings from dreamy disco to navel-gazing teen melancholia (the band members were 19 when this came out which, wild!). Much like 'Jesus of Suburbia', it's a full damn meal of a son

I've often been told not to wish away my life. It's normally quite sound advice, really. Looking ahead to the future often comes at the expense of the present, and dulls the impact of the future thing when it does come. That advice, I feel, doesn't quite play now. Currently, wishing my life away is precisely what I would like to do - or some of it, at the very least. The objective at the moment is to get through the day and into the next one as quickly and as painlessly as possible. It's a relief, actually, not having to bother with seizing the day. I think everyone's got their own fast-forward point where they'd like to skip to, eliminating all the indistinguishable lumps of time in lockdown along the way. Mine is about September time - my Masters course will be starting, the weather will be getting cooler again, and, God willing, new films will actually be coming out. Still, we have to get through there first, which is where today's song of the day c

I'll level with you, reader (wait, do I have readers? NB for future: check to see if I have readers). I am grumpy today. It happens. It happens more often than usual at the moment for reasons that I do not feel the need to explain. Given the choice, I probably would have weaselled my way out of blogging today. Except I have shackled myself to this daily commitment, come rain or shine, so that is a no go. There will be grumpy days to come, too, and so it becomes my job to figure out how to write during those days anyway. And when I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me , Billie Joe Armstrong comes to me, speaking words of wisdom: let it be  something about American breakdowns. It was during a particularly not great mental health time last year that I aggressively, not-ironically-enough, remembered the joys of 21st Century Breakdown , and since then, the albums that Green Day made before their recent public midlife crisis have been a weird balm to me. I don'

I have not listened to very much of Kanye West's music. Apparently, this is a cultural blindspot. Okay, it's definitely a cultural blindspot. Sue me, I'm white! Wait, no, that's completely the wrong thing to say here. Oh dear. Sorry. Let's back up a little. Yeah, Kanye just passed me by until he was impossible to ignore because he was loudly proclaiming his support for Donald Trump and releasing 27-minute gospel albums. I don't know, he seemed beyond me. Too full of complications and baggage - the kind of culture that needs a whole book of surrounding context to fully appreciate, and maybe the culture that a responsible leftist shouldn't try to appreciate? After some outside pressuring, however, I'm trying my very best to fill in this hole, and therefore today's song of the day is My Very First Kanye Song (For Kids!). More specifically, it's 'We Don't Care, the first full track from Kanye's first album, 2004's The College Dr

Though every post on this blog is a work of titanic effort and skill (how else?), I will admit that it's a little easier on the typing fingers to discuss songs that I figure are at least moderately niche. At least then I am quote-unquote-quote-again 'informing' people about this new song, and that I have something to say. It's a wee bit harder with songs that everybody has already heard. Imagine trying to have a take on the Beatles in 2020. You can try, but it will have been done before and is probably being done right now by someone more talented with a faster typing speed. As somebody who has recently completed a two-term module on Shakespeare, original analysis does not blend very well with popular things. Still, I like a challenge. Well, actually, I don't, but it's a good thing to say that I like. Therefore, today's song of the day is a Popular Song, Pulp's 'Common People', one of those Britpop tunes that bleeds into the synapses of eve

Look out your window. If you're in the UK, that is. And I can't be confident that all of the UK has the same weather today. And I don't know if you're reading this instantly after it was published, because it'll be night in an hour or so, which will make that point wrong. But anyway. Look out the hypothetical window. It's a sunny, pleasantly warm April day - the first genuinely warm day of the year. Premature Isolation Summer 2020 has arrived. UK weather is, and I know how much I'm stating the obvious here, weird. Every time we get slightly close to summer, the weather gods steer too much into the skid, and the result is Premature Summer - 20 degree weather in April. For a sun-averse vampire like me, Premature Summer is always a weird one, but I can certainly appreciate the good that it does for people. And summer is the season of pleasant, uplifting songs. Cast off that Lana del Rey and Lorde filled winter brooding playlist, and listen to something more

Two weeks (huh, that went... both quickly and slowly) into this thing, and I'm feeling the need to pace  myself. I've burned through a lot of music that I truly love in this first fortnight, and I don't want to be there next year, picking through the virtual equivalent of the green and yellow Wine Gums at the bottom of the pack. No, we need some variety in this house. And what better variety than an unspeakably strange medley from a charity drive eleven years ago? I truly believe that the 2009 Children in Need official medley made a real mark on impressionable idiot kids of a certain age, like me. Sure, we'd heard some of these famous songs, but smashed together into a hurried four and a half minute blend? That was genuinely revolutionary. It changed the boundaries of what music can be. Seriously, just listen to this thing. It is a perfect time capsule from 2009 Britain. There's nostalgia - the Jacksons, Fleetwood Mac and Hey Jude. There's Take That for all

Some blog posts are more fun to write than others. I'm just mentioning this for little reason at all. Singer-songwriter, and founding member of the pop-punk band Adam Schlesinger died yesterday from complications of coronavirus. He was just 52. He's not the first, and will sadly be far from the last, major public figure to pass away during this pandemic. Hand on heart, though, his is the first that has hit me as a stark reminder of how unforgiving and brutal this virus is. Though Schlesinger's main contribution to the music industry was Fountains of Wayne, he dabbled plenty in songwriting work for film and television too. Where I, and doubtless many others who were a little too young or not cool enough to get that wave of pop punk, was exposed to the majority of his work was the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend . Across the show's four seasons, Schlesinger, co-creator/lead Rachel Bloom and others co-wrote over 150 songs. Not every single one of these was an all-timer,

Happy April. No, I can't bring myself to do an April Fool's post today. I think that we all deserve a break from that. I was at least tempted to post something stupid, like Waluigi's character theme or something, but I realised that would be a desperation move for a blog that is still meant to be at its full creative powers or something. Plenty of time for shitposting in the future. Instead, we're starting a fresh new month (of horrors) with a song of the day that, to me, is all about beginnings. "Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)" is the first track on Arcade Fire's first album, Funeral , and it just feels like it's full of possibilities. Yeah, the resolutely Canadian Arcade Fire would eventually be subsumed into American pop culture eventually. Yeah, they would go off the boil just a little. But, in five beautiful minutes here, they are a band that could be anything and do anything, at least within the realms of what white 2000s indie bands could do, wh