Read on for the bullshit:
Hey there!
Well, we’ve somehow mostly all managed to make it to the end of another year. Good work, team.
This was maybe the winter I decided not to fall too prey to the list-industrial-complex - I’ve got my favourites, but I’m also more than willing to accept that I’ve heard, seen and read nowhere near everything I want to to make some kind of informed decision. Either that or the absurd psychology of saying something like “Oh yeah, Oppenheimer? Yeah, that was my 25th favourite movie of the year…” finally got to me.
We also finished up tracking the third Fightmilk album over the weekend. Coupled with the Bethany Cosentino discourse (see below) and the folly of trying to make something without any kind of financial support has, I suppose, given me pause for thought. A calendar year is an easy framework around which to hang a narrative, but the music’s still going to be there when the clock strikes midnight the next year. You can probably tell from the songs I tend to cue up in this thing, but the prospect of someone finding a song when they need it is more exciting to me than there being a longer queue for something new in the moment. Call it an inner battle between popularity and legacy, I guess? Or is that a little hoity-toity?
As far as song choices go this time around, I didn’t want to add to the glut of out-and-out festive music that’s going to be jingling out of everyone’s speakers this month. There’s a few bits that are decidedly more wintery than usual, since songs like that tend to get short shrift in the face of Big Christmas. Otherwise, take this as another stockingful of my short-term obsessions, long-term fascinations, and a few assorted favourites from a pretty stacked year.
I’ll probably take an extra week off at the start of the new year to get my ducks in a row, maybe spend more time snooping around for something new to put into issue 5. Until then, have the best Christmas and new year that you possibly can, and enjoy the radio.
Alex
The songs:
Seasonal theme from Radio Bullshit: Game Theory - Linus and Lucy (The Big Shot Chronicles, 1984/2016)I did warn you.
The Bangles - Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a Doll Revolution) (Doll Revolution, 2003)There’s an origin story for this Elvis Costello-penned song that I can’t quite track down, in which everyone’s favourite literary grump had been commissioned to soundtrack a TV show about a girl group who lived a double life as a crimefighting gang. Whether or not the show would have been any cop is one thing, but at least the aborted project gave us one last great song from one of the all-time great pop bands.
Yo La Tengo w/Nels Cline - Little Eyes (Live at Maxwell's, 2010)Making it to NYC to catch one of Yo La Tengo’s eight-night Hanukkah residencies has long been near the top of my bucket list, because you never know what might happen. The Sun Ra Arkestra sitting in for half a set? Special guests popping up for a cover in the encore? Your favourite comedian kicking the night off? Who can say? But at least the YLT fans who do make it to the Bowery Ballroom each year are savvy enough to tape proceedings, and this soaring version of one of their best songs, with bonus fretboard fireworks from Nels Cline, only validates my annual FOMO.
The Killers - Cody (Pressure Machine, 2021)Brandon Flowers and co deserved more credit than they got for their lockdown record. Co-written by the great pop polymath Jonathan Rado (see previous issue), Pressure Machine is the kind of mature statement record I’d never have figured The Killers had in them, but having spent the last two weeks listening to it almost daily, it stands head and shoulders above any full album they’ve ever recorded. “Cody” is its most stately moment, a reckoning with smalltown religion awash with mariachi horns and a gloriously gnarly guitar solo to ramp up the frustration.
Kirsty MacColl - The One and Only (Electric Landlady, 1991)What do you mean this is the wrong Kirsty/Pogues collaboration for the season?
The Hives - Crash into the Weekend (The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, 2023)As ever, a lot of unexpected things happened in 2023, but none more personally confounding to me than The Hives putting out one of my favourite albums of the last twelve months. The time off seems to have done them some good, channelling all that pent up energy into some of the year’s most thrilling rock and roll, armed with some of its most illogical boasts. Today’s highlight: Howlin’ Pelle Almquist’s threat to steal a guy’s foot purely to have an extra one with which to…well…crash into the weekend. What a guy.
Squeeze - Woman's World (East Side Story, 1981)As with any new wave band, Squeeze’s track record with gender politics is…spotty. When I got into them, my ex outright barred me from listening to the Cool for Cats album based entirely on overhearing one-two punch of “It’s Not Cricket” and “It’s So Dirty”. A few years on from those tracks, “Woman’s World” seems like something of a mea culpa from Chris Difford, painting a Ray Davies-style character study of a bored, lonely housewife (“Sees in a catalogue a shiny new appliance / Another role swallowed by the wonders of science…”), with added sparkle from Glen Tilbrook’s bare-bones baroque arrangement.
Also, when I hear this song, I can’t help picturing Marge Simpson filling time while her oven cleans itself:
Scott the Hoople - Have Faith in Yourself (Spain Capers, 2015)The deepest of deep cuts from the great Scott McCaughey. This goes out to anyone who needs it right now.
Allen Toussaint - Southern Nights (Southern Nights, 1975)Chances are, if you’ve ever heard a song from New Orleans that was made between 1960 and 1980, Toussaint had a hand in it. This comes from his best loved solo record, a song so hypnotically vibey it makes me miss summertime nightsweats. I have still never heard Glen Campbell’s cover, because I simply cannot fathom how the Rhinestone Lineman could have found a way into the song and am too scared to find out.
Also, shout-out to David Toop’s unlikely slow-jam comp Sugar and Poison for putting this song back on my radar. It’s long out of print (if you find a copy, can I have it please?), but it takes you on an incredible journey through the American bedroom. Or, as Toop once reflected on it, “I suppose some people thought it was a fuck soundtrack for manic depressives. Personally, I find that album overpoweringly romantic, even though it's supposed to be a bit disturbing, but then romance is disturbing in itself.”
Tindersticks w/Isabella Rosselini - A Marriage Made in Heaven (Donkeys, 1997)I've relistened to this song quite a bit since putting it on here, and still nothing ever prepares me for what happens halfway through it. Tindersticks are always more interesting to me as a Lynchian Divine Comedy than as the Protestant Bad Seeds, and this is a high camp at its high classiest.
Viktor Vaughn - Let Me Watch (featuring Apani B as Nikki) (Vaudeville Villain, 2003)And now for a very different kind of seduction story.
Even though this was the year I finally let myself sink deeper into the DOOM catalogue, nothing has ever quite topped the grimy limey’s first record as Viktor Vaughn. This isn’t the only track on the album where the villainous DOOM-as-Vaughn gets his comeuppance, but with his manhood at stake, “Let Me Watch” probably boasts its funniest payoff.
Richard Swift - The Songs of National Freedom (Dressed Up for the Letdown, 2007)This kicks off a brief run of “choose your Fab Four fighter” pastiches. Even though this takes McCartney’s much-contested “granny music” as its main source of inspiration, Swift’s ragtime shuffle still ticks all my boxes. The music world is a sadder place without Richard Swift in it, but when he sings “I feel alive” in the chorus, I still believe him. Maybe that makes it worse.
Orange - Judy Over the Rainbow (single, 1994)Meanwhile, in the Lennon corner…meet Rick Corcoran. This was the first and only single that Corcoran’s band Orange ever released (on a major label, no less), sitting too uncomfortably on the timeline - too late for baggy, a shade too early for Britpop - to translate into the hit it deserved to be. Corcoran quickly shunned any errant beam from the spotlight, retreating to his own private psychedelic wonderland as The Orgone Box, but there’s something in the wide-eyed promise of this song that makes me think a better world is possible.
The Semantics - Coming Up Roses (Powerbill, 1993)Another obscurity among obscurities, The Semantics were hamstrung at every turn. Their drummer left to form a piano trio, and a deal with Geffen quickly soured, leaving their most excellent Peter Asher-produced, Zak Starkey-drummed debut in the vault until it got a Japanese release in 1996. By that point, the band had imploded, while their ex-drummer’s new group Ben Folds Five were going from strength to strength. “Coming Up Roses” isn’t quite as compellingly cheeky as some Powerbill’s other highlights but the late Will Owsley’s smartly Beatlesy ballad still has an enduring afterlife as a cult hit.
Avalon Emerson - Sandrail Silhouette (& The Charm, 2023)Just a little note to self to give this record a little more attention before the year is out. “Sandrail Silhouette” opens Emerson’s first song-based album, spinning off from a long and storied career as a DJ, and suggests the start of a reliable pipeline from club dominance to dreampop mastery.
Okkervil River - Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe (The Stage Names, 2007)I’ve been really interested in the conversations going on around Bethany Cosentino in the last couple of weeks, and am pretty much firmly on her side as far as getting lost in the hype cycle goes. In the social media age, the pan-flashes seem a lot quicker, but indie artists have been complaining about attention-as-currency for much longer than that, and Will Sheff has been putting his case forward more consistently and honestly than most. Cuing up something like “Okkervil River RIP”, the opener to their secret 2015 masterpiece Away, may have been more relevant to the discussion, but it’s no more self-aware or self-obsessed as this, still one of the most explosive songs of the peak Pitchfork years. Besides, bands just don't let their guitars get this out of tune anymore.
John Prine - Lake Marie (Lost Dogs + Mixed Blessings, 1995)OK, now we enter the home stretch. If you’re anything like me, you’re the kind of person who intentionally picks a really long book to immerse yourself in over the holidays (this year, the second part of James Kaplan’s biography of Frank Sinatra - I’ve not read the first). So I figured I’d round this out with some longer, wordier songs to get a little lost in, and maybe follow along at home.
Prine died just as I was getting super into his work, and even though I had no right to, I felt the loss hard (at a time when there were a lot of hard losses to feel). I got hipped to this song by the great critic and Nashvillian Ann Powers, who picked this as her favourite song of his on an NPR tribute podcast. Sometimes I don’t agree, and then I hit play and realise that everything I love about John Prine can be found here - the musical simplicity, the lyrical sharpness, and a knack for delivery that could have only come from a one-time mailman.
MJ Lenderman - Tastes Just Like It Costs (Boat Songs, 2022)My favourite record of 2022 is still holding up magnificently, thanks for asking. This made sense as something to chase the Prine track with, since its lyrics take a similar approach - less storytelling than shuffling through a collection of postcards. But by the end of the song, I’m less interested in the “expensive meat” than the “dumb hat”. Lenderman seems like such a chill dude, how could he get so infuriated by headgear?
Counting Crows - A Long December (Recovering the Satellites, 1996)I have nothing of value to add to the discourse around this song, in the wake of its coronation as a new, glum festive staple. I will, however, take this opportunity to apologise to my bandmates for listening to Recovering the Satellites enough times in the run-up to finishing our album last weekend that it may have turned one of the new Fightmilk songs into something Adam Duritz would gladly mewl along to. Yeah…yeah…yeah…yeah.
The Roches - My Winter Coat (Can We Go Home Now, 1995)Christmas songs tend to steal the spotlight in a dazzle of tinsel and fairy lights, but I’m always more taken by songs that evoke the season more than The Season. Yes, these lyrics are a feature-by-feature dissection of the joys of its titular garment (paging MJ Lenderman), which might be a touch precious for some…but can I just tell you about the zipper? Dig the chintzy digital arrangement, which sounds like a late night walk through a deserted Piccadilly Circus, and the predictably perfect blood harmonies of the peerless Roches, which hang gently in the mix like hot breath in the chill night air.