The bullshit follows.
Plenty to say, but not much to report. Thanks for staying subscribed through the silence. There will be more bullshit before the year is out.
And if you didn’t already know, there’s a new Fightmilk album emerging on 15th November. Preorder your copy of No Souvenirs now, because I’m probably not going to include any songs from it here, despite it handily being our best work.
Alex
The songs:
Stephen Pastel & Gavin Thomson - Introduction to Why I Did It (This Is Memorial Device, 2024)OK. Why am I doing this?
I’m doing this because I got bored of that intro track (sorry Yo La Tengo). I’m doing this because I haven’t put one of these together in over half a year, and you’d be amazed what can happen in that time. I’m doing this because 2024 has been a pretty great year for music, all things considered, and it’s easier to collect my enthusiasms in one handy place. I’m doing this to make some kind of sense of what I’ve been listening to, and what it might mean about where my head’s at.
But as if I was going to let a new Stephen Pastel project go unheralded, let alone his soundtrack for the stage adaptation of David Keenan’s incredible debut novel.
Gal Costa - Baby (Gal Costa, 1969)Bill Ryder-Jones - I Know That It's Like This (Baby) (Iechyd Da, 2024)A lot of time and a lot of ocean stands between these two songs, but it felt wrong not to smush them together just this once - the late Tropicália icon and the West Kirby hermit with the balls to sample her at the top of his latest LP.
Didn’t think I had it in me to enjoy something I’d pegged as quite so 6 Music-coded, but Bill’s carefully orchestrated, plainspoken heartbreak is one of the few things keeping the Memorial Device soundtrack from topping my current AOTY list.
Dayydream - Violet (No Soap Volume 1, 2024)One of the best things about Bandcamp is the ability to end up temporarily immersed in global scenes you have little-to-no idea of. And sure, Scotland’s not so far away, but that hasn’t stopped me from figuring out complex imaginary backstories for the four bands featured on the first compilation from Glasgow’s No Soap collective. Everything on No Soap Volume 1 is worth investigating, but Dayydream are the ones that have left me most spellbound.
The Cleaners from Venus - Drowning Butterflies (Under Wartime Conditions, 1985)Destroyer - Poor In Love (Kaputt, 2011)Guided By Voices - Twilight Campfighter (Isolation Drills, 2001)A three-song tribute to three writers who occasionally write rambling circular songs of droning despair that get me on a truly cellular level. The usually-straightforward Newell is at his most cryptic here, while Bejar is uncharacteristically blunt (and lets those guitars, all shimmering with cocaine-chorus, do most of the talking).
As for GBV song, well, if you can't punch the air with tears in your eyes while this plays, then the system is well and truly broken. Especially since they didn't play this either night I had the chance to do this in person.
Nick Lowe - I Read a Lot (The Old Magic, 2011)I love how the one they used to call Basher ended up having such a great line in sad middle-aged men songs. “Lately I’ve Let Things Slide” might be his most matter-of-fact (“The Beast in Me”, of course, remains the brooder’s choice), but I’ve always enjoyed when Lowe picks a subject and digs in. And also, I have been reading a lot. And it’s been great! Will I make it to the end of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook before October? Who knows! Will I bring something a little more sensible with me next time we go on tour than the time I went to Germany with Fightmilk, all my gear, and a copy of The Brothers Karamazov? Watch this space, I suppose.
The Dismemberment Plan - Following Through (Change, 2001)When I first started putting songs together for this episode, the great Endless Scroll podcast had declared 2024 the Year Of The Plan. That basically amounted to me listening to Emergency & I and Change a bunch between Valentine’s Day and the start of March. Although the former is everyone’s favourite, I of course always felt closer to towards its difficult, awkward follow-up. There’s a surprise.
Jessica Pratt - Better Hate (Here in the Pitch, 2024)A tiny miracle, arranged with eggshell fragility, and recorded as if you’re inside the hole of Pratt’s acoustic guitar. More artists should take The Beach Boys’ Friends as their inspiration point, especially if it means more little moments in songs like when that bassoon hits.
Ivy - Get Out of the City (Apartment Life, 1997)It’s really strange that even with all the fuss about the first Fountains Of Wayne record, plus “That Thing You Do!”, Adam Schlesinger still had time for another project, let alone one which ended up more prolific than his more famous band. Still, its idealistic merging of Anglophilic jangle, lilting Gallic vocals (on the supersize budget of an American record label) makes you wonder what a more Ivy-shaped future could have looked like.
The Lemon Twigs - If You and I Are Not Wise (A Dream Is All We Know, 2024)Everything Harmony was my album of last year. It’s one of my albums of the decade. The title track opened the first episode of this newsletter! So why am I so cold on A Dream Is All We Know? Well, cold isn’t the word - just that you can see the D’Addario brothers doing their working in real time to make sure the pastiches are spot-on.
The warm, analog sounds on The Lemon Twigs’ latest don’t extend much beyond 1966, the year the sixties achieved peak swing. “If You and I Are Not Wise” bears this out - few bands have Byrded better in recent years.
Fabiana Palladino - Shoulda (Fabiana Palladino, 2024)Fabiana Palladino, meanwhile, spends most of her Jai Paul-affiliated, self-titled debut pulling from the wetter end of eighties R&B - think of the work that Jam and Lewis did to help Janet sound her nastiest. And it’s great! Just that its best song decides to pivot in a different direction - somewhere between the taut new wave of early Prince and the murky swirl of D’Angelo’s “The Charade”.
Cymbals Eat Guitars - Dancing Days (Pretty Years, 2016)Joseph D’Agostino and I are the same age. That means that when he was mourning the end of his “pretty years” in this song, he was 27. Christ, we all had so much more learn about ourselves back then.
Kirsty MacColl - Last Day of Summer (Titanic Days, 1993)If I had to pick a single question that runs through Radio Bullshit Episode 7, it’s this one: How specifically do we really need to resonate with sad songs beyond a single turn of phrase or shiver-inducing chord progression? How relatable do someone else’s feelings have to be for us to let them inform our own?
Dame Shirley Bassey - After the Rain (The Performance, 2009)East River Pipe - My Little Rainbow (The Gasoline Age, 1999)Irma Thomas - Wish Someone Would Care (Wish Someone Would Care, 1964)Breaking some fundamental compilation rules with this little three-for-three-four bundle here, but indulge me. Here’s why.
Dame Shirley’s Richard Hawley-penned heartbreaker has recently found a new lease of life as the central torch song of Standing at the Sky’s Edge, and it’s there that “After the Rain” feels truly at home. There’s footage of Bassey trying to get her head around the song in the studio, always striving to make it bigger, take it further - but sometimes, the quietest songs have a way of overruling the loudest singers. There’s probably a good argument to be made for this as one of her finest performances at a microphone.
Rediscovering East River Pipe gave me a renewed sense of enjoying your creative limitations. FM Cornog’s tech setup low, his fidelity medium, and his powers of observation high, and his catalogue peaks with The Gasoline Age, one of the last best albums of the 20th century.
And Irma? Jesus, man, there’s no feeling that she hasn’t got a song for. Also, I was under the impression this was yet another one of the great numbers that Allen Toussaint penned for her (under the name Naomi Neville), but it turns out that this is a Thomas original. “Smiles hide lots of things…all of this goes too.” She’s even more genius than I thought.
David Rawlings Machine - Pilgrim (You Can't Go Home) (Nashville Obsolete, 2015)If it weren’t for the glut of new release stuff I’ve thrown in here, I’d have gladly included something from Gillian Welch & David Rawling’s stunning Woodland, which came out last week and which I haven’t gone a day without playing since. Instead, I’m going to showcase something from one of the records the pair made under the DR moniker, where Rawlings takes the lead and the folk rocks so much it almost rolls. One of the all-time road trip songs, with instrumental passages that all but invite you to curl your arm out of the window and feel the air blow.
Spacemen 3 - Big City (Everybody I Know Can Be Found Here) (Recurring, 1991)There’s always been something pure about the way that 80s indie bands bought into the sound of rave, but unsurprisingly, Spacemen 3 prove the exception. From its tentative start onwards, “Big City” just feels a bit…off - the innocent, saucer-eyed hedonism of the summer of love wasn’t exactly in keeping with the kind of street hassle that Rugby’s favourite sons used to favour. I dunno, maybe it’s my own personal Rorschach moment, but the way Sonic Boom sings “Everybody I know can be found here”…is that the promise of limitless possibility you can hear in his voice? Or has it just dawned on him that his world is as big as it’s ever going to get?