It’s really hot, so let’s not hang about this week. It’s showtime!
The Chats - Get Fucked
I’ve never been to Australia, but based on the music I like from that particular land mass - Radio Birdman, The Saints, Amyl and the Sniffers, Cosmic Psychos - I reckon it’s a pretty good time. Trashy. Working class. Nihilistic. A bit like Grimsby under pummelling sun. Have you ever been to Grimsby? It’s wild. One of those towns that totally explains why so many people voted for Brexit. Anger. Sadness. Disfunction. But also an innate instinct to laugh at the looming abyss. I don’t have a great understanding of the socioeconomic make up of Australia, but if it’s anything like Grimsby - and I’m fairly certain big bits of it are - I think I can understand why the place routinely produces so much good punk rock. Punk rock, I should say, isn’t a musical form that is a great vessel for smart political statements - The Clash, great songs, many terrible ideas, here’s Joe Strummer wearing a Baader–Meinhof t-shirt onstage - beyond that of simply calling your album Get Fucked. Punk is a great musical form to convey rage, less so considered rhetoric.
The Chats have got a new album out on August 19th. It’s called Get Fucked. It doesn’t say very much intelligently, but everything it does say is important. And exciting!
Incidentally, this is a very good podcast about why great musicians so often have utterly wretched politics.
Demi Lovato - ‘Substance’
Truth be told, I don’t know why anyone would want to be a popstar in 2022, and Demi Lovato’s life in recent years is testimony to said profession really not looking like it’s very much fun anymore - or more over, creatively satisfying, which I think is supposed to be the trade off for having your life probed and prodded around the clock. I blame, as I do many things, TikTok. Record label marketing departments weren’t supposed to look at ISIS hostage videos and think, ‘yup, that’s the way we market our artists’, but here we are. I do like Demi though. I like anyone who is knocked over and gets back up. People with mental illness are my people and I’ll always have their back. She believes in UFOs, which means she’s a real one. And this story about her at a Dimmu Borgir show made me smile. And this is a good song, in an early-Paramore-y-styley. I think you’re supposed to think the song is about drug abuse, and maybe it is on some level. But I think it’s about more than that. I think it’s about how our pop culture has become pop detritus. And that’s a pretty bold artistic statement right now.
Torus - Sail EP
The Buckinghamshire band have a new EP out tomorrow. All of it is pretty good, but it’s the song above that’s my favourite, largely due to it featuring a guitar solo that is brazenly pruned from the Soundgarden (that didn’t really work). I like a lot of rock music that can barely break into a stride. Sabbath. Kyuss. Melvins. There’s actually a sliver of early InMe in here I think, who are a band you don’t hear nearly enough people talking about any more. It’s hard to tell who from the rock scene might break through from underground to overground because it would take a seismic cultural shift - and economic, given how difficult it is for a band to be sustainable in 2022 - for that to happen right now. But I’d put Torus at the front of the maybes.
Seriously, this is a good song, is it not?
Lit - ‘My Own Worst Enemy’
I’ve just read back the entries to HITMIALTTW - as nobody is yet calling it, but I think I’m going to keep tying to make it a thing - and it’s all very glum so far. I’m okay actually. I don’t know why I’m being so grumpy. Here’s a genuinely perfect song to try to readdress the balance. I actually interviewed Jeremy Popoff for The James McMahon Music Podcast earlier this week. Listen to that here. Nice man. One of those people who calls you ‘brother’, mind, which isn’t something I’m fond of unless you’re Hulk Hogan, and even then. I met Hulk Hogan once. His PR said to me, “you can ask him about anything but don’t ask him about the sex tape…” But yeah, this is a good song.
Oh yeah, Lit have a new album out right now. It’s very enjoyable!
Beabadoobee - ‘Sunny Day’ (but all of Beatopia, really)
Look, I know we’re not supposed to have enjoyed the warm weather this week. I know I’m supposed to have joined Extinction Rebellion and be spreadeagled on the entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel right now. I know I’m supposed to be freaking out and howling at overhead airplanes. But I have OCD. I can’t allow myself to freak out excessively about things, because when you’ve stopped freaking out about things, I won’t have. I have a very poor exit ramp for not freaking out about things. And a very poor track record for not freaking out about things. I have to pace myself. And so I confess that I sat on my porch and enjoyed as much sun as I could handle this week, while listening to the new Beabadoobee record which is really enjoyable if you like lazy, ethereal indie rock. There’s also a dancing frog in the video above and you really can’t go wrong with a dancing frog. Oh no you can’t.
It’s probably a good idea to join Extinction Rebellion actually.
Tegan and Sara - ‘Yellow’
I used to know someone who was a twin. We’d be eating dinner and all of a sudden she’d buckle and shout something like, “my brother is in trouble!” I think she was probably pretending, but who knows really. Stranger things have happened. Anyway, this is a really lovely song by a band I’ve always liked and always been a bit frustrated that they’ve never quite broken big like you might have expected them to. The video is obviously a nod to ‘Yellow’ by Coldplay, which is obviously one of the best music promos ever. It was filmed in Studland Bay, you know. Studland Bay features in the opening scene of Monty Python's Flying Circus S1, where Michael Palin staggers out of the sea, collapses and enigmatically groans, “it’s…” And it’s also the bit of England that Churchill most feared German invasion from. Turns out a lot of my favourite things happened in Studland Bay. Not that I like the idea of a German invasion, but I do think World War II is probably the most interesting thing that ever happened.
I’m great fun at parties, I really am.
Interpol - ‘Gran Hotel’ (but all of The Other Side of Make-Believe, really)
Weirdly, Interpol are a band I’ve liked more and more as I (and they) have grown up. That doesn’t normally happen. I normally know what I think of a band by at least album two. I think they’ve become an excellent band, I really do. Maybe they always were and I was too busy listening to fucking Gallows or something. Not that there’s anything wrong with Gallows, far from it, but there are big periods of my life where I wasn’t really listening to anything other than men shouting. I do sometimes wonder what I missed. I can’t recommend the new Interpol album The Other Side of Make-Believe enough. It’s deliciously sad. They’re a band built for these times.
Fucking hell, what is with these blurbs this week. Lighten up James. Nobody died. Oh.
All of the Happy Mondays catalogue, but especially this banger
I have this vision of Paul Ryder turning up at the gates of heaven. They’re like, “can’t let you in Paul. You did too many drugs and robbed stuff and maybe even killed some pigeons…” And he’s like, “actually, there’s some question whether we actually killed pigeons or whether it was just a cool scene in a film’, and besides, I wrote the bass line to ‘24 Hour Party People’”. And then they’re like, “Oh okay then Paul, in you go” and Paul Ryder of the Happy Mondays takes his rightful place in heaven, deserved to him as a cog in one of the most effortlessly innovative bands of their era.
Rest in peace Paul. Thanks for the funk.
Loose Articles - ‘Chaos’
One of the many things I miss about how music culture used to be - and you might enjoy this episode of The James McMahon Music Podcast with Mogwai if you’d like to hear two ageing indie kids moan about all the other bits - is the fetishisation of record labels. There are record labels that I own every release by, so assured that their logo on the sleeve meant that the music contained within would be something that I would enjoy. There’s not a lot of that about these days, but Alcopop! Records is a label who come close to preserving that spirit. One of that label’s new charges are Loose Articles, from Manchester, who make a right old racket in the best possible way. They sound a bit like The Raincoats, but with a bit more chutzpah and guitars that are much more in tune than they are not.
Not just working class, as they would say, but ‘working and class’. I like that.
Lightning Seeds - ‘Sunshine’
I do a fair bit of work for a radio station these days. Writing articles for their website. It’s not everything I dreamed of when I got into this lark - I wanted to be on the radio! - but then it’s been a weird half-decade, they’re fucking lovely people, they look after me, and I enjoy the work a lot actually. I also really enjoy listening to the radio all day, because I hear loads of things I never would do otherwise. This, the new single from the Lightning Seeds is one such example. It’s a lovely song. Brazenly twee. There’s not a smidgen of cynicism in it. Which feels like a nice place to leave things this week, no?
The 90s are well and truly back. The Torus singers voice has a hint of Scott Weiland about it too I think. Cool tune.