Seven Songs for the Week #106

As discussed in list #101, the new Pulp album is a reality. Titled More, it has nothing to do with the 1972 Pink Floyd album. I have played this song a lot in the first week. With a new track like this, you wish you could hear it for the second time first - by that I mean there's too much weight on the first listen. After a dozen+ listens it's a great earworm and adds another song to the playlist I want to hear when I see them live in June.

Last week I complained about the production on the Elton/Brandi song. This track is the complete opposite. The drums sound lime drums, you can focus in on the bass or keys or vocals if you want or the whole thing. It's coherent but there's space. This is good producing/mixing.

I am in the middle of Reach For The Stars, a good book about UK pop music 1996-2006. You might not think of this as an era, but it is, and it straddles the collapse of record sales and a shift towards very different marketing of pop music today. Sugababes, who are back in their original configuration, have a debut single that is ageless. [Has anyone done a mash up with Can You Feel It? by the Jacksons?]

I am away in France at the minute, which is nice. This song came on the radio and I don't think I had heard it in the longest time. Gossamer light, there's very little happening in it, but it's quite masterful. Then I looked at the stats. Over a billion YouTube views, by far her most popular song. I am due to see NellyF in August as she's on the bill of the All Together Now and I'm very curious to see how she goes down. She has half a dozen excellent crowd pleasers, and if you were a teen when her first three albums came out, you'd be happy to have her on the bill. She's spending a month on the road playing European festivals near the top of the bill, I'm sure she's going to generate a lot of goodwill.

It was Record Store Day this week. As I mentioned, I was in France, and found myself in a record store that was so indie, they refused to do Record Store Day. While I perused, they were playing this in the background. 19 years old this album is. Radiohead have wasted a lot of time, haven't they? Get on with it! Give the people what they want!!

I downloaded the first season of Poker Face to watch on holidays. Good show. It has Columbo in its DNA. The first ep ended with an excellent Wings song, the second with a Donald Fagen track, and this popped up somewhere too.

It's when you stop waiting for a OKGo record, that an OKGo record comes along, a decade after the last.

Imagine a time, mid-00s... I used to go see Bug in the NFT/BFI in London when it was called Antenna. This was a cinema presentation of cutting edge music videos. At the end of the selection one evening, A Million Ways by OKGo came on and I thought it was the greatest. It was a very early viral YouTube video of the OKGo guys larking in their backyard doing a one-take dance. It meant that my pump was primed for when they properly broke through a few months later with Here It Goes Again, you know, the video where they're each on treadmills.

The OKGo videos would have higher budgets, but they were always worth checking out and if you haven't seen Upside Down & Inside Out (zero gravity), I Won't Let You Down (drones and personal mobility vehicles), or This Too Shall Pass (Rube Goldberg machine) then stop what you're doing and go to You Tube.

Unexpectedly, on Mastodon, someone posted the new OKGo video and it's another one take marvel of robots and real world kaleidoscopes - just go look at it. A new album has come out too, which I haven't listened to yet. But it's nice to have them back. And they look ten years older. Oh well.

The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz9BRl7DVSM

OKGo's Love obviously cribs from Making Plans for Nigel with that distinctive double hit on the closing hi-hat (I think?). So why not add it here, especially as the future of British Steel has been in the news this week, being legislated back into national ownership.