Okay, so my wife says I have to start putting the names of what I’m listening to, outside of the video thumbnails, because she can never tell what I’m writing about if she’s reading Here is the music I am listening to this week on the tube. Which is weird, because we work about 100 yards away from each other all week every week, and I certainly know what she’s listening to. I mean, there’s only so much of The National a man can take, and I reached my limit some time ago.
Look, I know this is early this week, but I’m going on holiday for the first time since before COVID and I don’t want to be writing this by the pool.
Lots of Slothrust, which incidentally, is a very good name for a band
One of my favourite genres of music is indie-rock-of-the-college-rock-variety that is made by people who are far too young to be aware of the niche vein of great-but-increasingly-forgotten music that their music references. A great example of this is the Exeter based indie rock trio Muncie Girls - a band I was truly obsessed with at one point - who sounded almost exactly like Veruca Salt. I once told a member of that band this, and they said, “we sound like the character in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?” and I immediately turned to dust. Anyway, I've been in a Slothrust spiral recently. They’re from Boston, obviously. They’re on tour in July. I’d say I’d see you at a show, but you won’t, because they’re not playing in my house.
Lots of Show Me The Body (mainly Dog Whistle, their second record, from 2019)
You know what I don’t like? It’s a looooooooong list, but music fans who say, ‘well, they’re not doing anything new, are they?’ That’s second only to ‘all their songs sound the same’, which is just a wild thing to say to someone who loves the Ramones like I do. Both of these statements are stupid utterances and ill thought out reasons not to like music. I could form a band completely unlike any band you’ve ever heard, right now, and nothing about that would necessarily mean we are any good. Hang on. I will. We’re called Racoon Wanker (not as good as Slothrust) and I blow through the snozzle of my vacuum cleaner in the verses and cough up the dust and grime in the choruses. We don’t sound like any band you’ve ever heard and we’re absolutely rubbish.
Where am I going with this? Well just that Show Me The Body, a hardcore band from New York, but that dip into sludge, hip-hop and all sorts of other esoteric influences, are both really good and sound unlike anything I’ve heard before.
Fiona Bevan - ‘The Bad Book’ (but also Tapestry by Carole King)
I went to see the Celebrating Tapestry concert at the Jewish Community Centre in London last week, an evening which saw a quintet of incredible musicians - Michele Stodart, Kathryn Williams, Beth Rowley, Fiona Bevan and Astrid Williamson - run through Carole King’s absolutely-perfect-in-every-way 1971 album Tapestry. This, you should know, is one of my favourite ever records. A record which connects mother and son, several decades apart, a fact unbeknown to each other for many years, in their most desperate moments of bedsit hell. Music. It’s fucking wild.
Only, before the band performed Tapestry in full, each woman played one of their own songs. Okay, not the drummer. That would have been boring. Just her bashing away for five minutes. But this excellent song, by the magically throated pop elf Fiona Bevan, has been lodged in my head all week.
Wet Leg - ‘Psycho Killer’ (from BBC Radio 2's Jo Wiley Sofa Sessions)
Obviously no-one in their right mind should be going anywhere near ‘Psycho Killer’, but I think Wet Leg pull this off actually. Mainly because they don’t appear in awe of it. They saunter in, they have a giggle, they add a little lick of something their own, they giggle some more and then they and the cover version falls apart. Something that is so often forgot in discourse about Taking Heads is just how fun they were. There wasn’t a lot of piety to them. They weren’t always lost to cerebrality. I mean…
Incidentally, I’ve recently become a bit obsessed with how fast Wet Leg are playing their breakthrough hit ‘Chaise Longue’. This is the fastest version I’ve found so far. I honestly think they could keep it within two minutes if they put their mind to it.
Lisa Scott-Lee - ‘Electric’
I interviewed Steps for The James McMahon Music Podcast last week. You can listen to that here. We talk a lot more about giraffe than I expected going in. An unexpected result of doing that (very enjoyable) interview is that I’ve spent much of this week circling the wormhole of sporadic brilliance that was Lisa Scott-Lee’s solo career. This is a very good song. It’s also filthy. Seriously. Think of something filthy. Then listen to the song and lyrics. It’s almost certainly filthier than anything you’re thinking of (and if it isn’t, then I demand that you unsubscribe yourself from this newsletter).
Haunts - ‘Underground’
I was very sad to hear that Banks, from mid-to-late-noughties punk wonksters Haunts had recently passed away. This is a song I remember liking a lot from the moment they had in that decade. That wonky ‘we’ve heard The Rapture and we like it’ thing got really old after a while, but I always thought that band had so much more to their arsenal than that. Turns out I still really like it. Rest in peace dude.
Sports Team - ‘The Game’
I would like a ten part investigative podcast chronicling how Sports Team got hold of John Otway for this video and I would like it commissioned right now.
I really like Sports Team. I think they’re fun.
The Ever Living - ‘Total Impasse’
The London band have a new album out next month. It’s called Artificial Devices. If you’re not a fan of blackgazey-alt-metal then keep scrolling because there’s some pop perfection coming up any moment now. But if you are, then I urge you to check out this lead off single from said record. It crushes, especially in its final moments. It’s almost doom. Just brilliantly horrible. I mean, I’m a big fan of music that is fun and silly and sexy and uplifting and all of that stuff. But there’s part of me that also thinks that if you’re not making music that sounds like the end of the world, at this precise moment in history, then what’s the fucking point, y’know?
Jane Wiedlin - ‘Rush Hour’ (but lots of other versions of that song too)
Away from Spoook, I’m writing about some super sad shit right now. And so I keep coming back to this ABSOLUTE POP RAGER from the The Go-Go’s rhythm guitarist Jane Wiedlin, which has been a go to pick-me-up song all my life. I have a principal memory of the song from recent years. During my early days at the rock magazine I used to edit, there was a succession of anonymous Twitter accounts that would either badly impersonate me, tweet things like ‘all your staff hate you’ or ‘you’re fat and ugly and mental’ at me, or tweet mildly threatening but certainly unsettling things like, ‘we know you’re faking’. Just what a person with OCD-on-the-paranoid-end-of-things needs! And so I remember sitting in a café on Shaftsbury Avenue a decade or so back and binge eating (which is what I used to do when I was unhappy and frightened), listening to this song on a loop. Which maybe proves a straw man argument that I-the-ex-NME-journalist-was-faking, but, y’know, I like Judas Priest more than any of you. And so here I am listening to it again. Only with a book deal, an amazing marriage, great friends, a growing media empire, a relatively functioning brain once more and thus probably happier and more content in my own skin than ever before. So fuck yers.
Paul McCartney - ‘Singalong Junk’
Happy 80th birthday Macca! Which has seen me listening to McCartney solo records all day, which has led me to remember that this instrumental cut from his 1970 debut solo album McCartney is a truly lovely piece of music, within a catalogue that is unparalleled in its brilliance, by a man who deserves all the lemon drizzle cake and more (yes, Paul’s favourite cake flavour is apparently lemon drizzle, I Googled it, it’s this kind of pursuit of journalistic excellence that you come to me and Spoook for).