staires!

I talked a lot of shit on TikTok for years, to my wife, who used it for a long time before I finally caved in and started using it. But all it would show me was half-naked women dancing poorly, so I deleted it for a year or two until picking it back up again, and these days my feed is a lot of DIY music, dachshunds, horses acting like big dogs (which I didn't know I had any interest in), and occasionally better clothed women dancing pretty well.

For quite a while, the DIY music I would get was really bad, but in recent months the music has started to get a lot better. Now, you might be listening to this song now, thinking, "Is this supposed to be the better music he's talking about?" to which I answer, yes, actually, I am! No, wait, don't leave!

Well, whatever, I guess not everyone is going to get it, but that's okay. Victor Jones calls this dance punk and, you know, that is probably the best description for it. It's like a bizarro mix of Electric Six and... uh... some other music... like... LCD Soundsystem... god, I asked Google AI and it said Jeff Rosenstock and Gilla Band... what?? I mean, I guess I can see the Jeff Rosenstock comparison, lyrically, especially with Jones' 2025 breakout hit "Shoulder Song", which might be more your speed if you don't like this one.

There's a term people use derogatorily toward music on TikTok, if it's painfully mediocre, they call it "coworker music"–and good lord, if I ever publicly post music and someone calls it "coworker music" I will curb stomp myself–and you know what, if Victor Jones' songwriting wasn't so goddamn strong, this would probably be coworker music, but the kid's got heart, he's got a big ol' heart, and I can feel it in my bones. If you don't like this, fuck you!

Australia week comes to an end, and with a bit of a "throwback", to an artist who emerged right after this blog's first death. So I never got to write about Courtney Barnett back then, which is fine, because I listened to her good songs so many times I got so sick of them I hadn't listened to them for probably 12 years until yesterday, when I realized she was Australian and would help me close out "Australia week". And, again, this is cheating, this is an artist who was/is universally popular and has extremely generic and pre-AI-but-AI-sounding song bios all over Genius; she's mass market! I might as well have posted Gotye!!! No cred, I have no cred, or, as is the parlance of our times: negative aura.

Oh well, at least I am posting what was personally my favorite Courtney Barnett song, and not just the safe pick–Avant Gardener, which if you haven't heard before, go listen to it now, it's good, also these two music videos have very interesting aspect ratios and that's cool. Anyway, that's it, that's all I got. Until next time, Australia.

It's probably cheating to post King Gizzard during our impromptu "Australia week", when I've used bands you've almost certainly never heard of prior to this moment. Everyone's heard of King Gizzard! But have you heard this King Gizzard? Thrash metal Gizzard? Because it rocks so insanely hard.

This album doesn't really sound like any other metal that has come before it, because it just feels way more indebted to video game music than any other vaguely similar band. There's just something Doom, something Sonic Mayhem's Quake 2 sound track about this entire album. It's theatrical, it's heavy, it's scary and thrilling.

This album forced me to open myself up to more types of metal, and I dabbled in a few other bands as a result: Red Mountain, High On Fire, Anthrax, early Metallica, Orange Goblin, and probably some others, but none of them stuck with me the way Infest the Rats' Nest did. No joke, I listened to this album probably over 50 times in 2019 - 2020...

Fine, we're keeping up with this week being "Australia Week", which is difficult because there's no way for me to search my music library for "bands from Australia", I just have to, like, use my fuckin' memory and shit. And that's hard, I'm like 40 now, and the amount of THC I pump into my system every day, gosh, it's a miracle I even remember I have a music blog. But, I do, miracles of miracles, and I remembered this great punk band.

I've listened to this song many times, but never watched the music video. It's a lot of fun. I love the microKORG being flung around and played acoustically, what a hoot.

They've released at least two albums I've listened to, and they're both real good. Check them out over on their Bandcamp.

Man, I love a song that sounds like it represents being on the verge of a mental breakdown / total shutdown, and I think this song is that. It's mellow, but it's also overwhelming. It reminds me of those times where all you can do in an argument is start going, "okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay," because there's nothing left to do, you can't even think anymore, and submission feels like a form of release.

P.S. This is another band from Australia! Cool! Is this Australia Week?

P.P.S. I also think the singer looks a bit like if my wife and I had a son, which is fun.

I'm assuming someone over at Dr. Sure's Incorporated made a mistake, because the album this song is from, Total Reality, has been yeeted off streaming services (as is the parlance of our times), along with essentially the entirety of their catalog. Let's hope it returns, because it's not fair for YouTube to have their music and not Spotify and Apple Music, they're all owned by same soul-sucking corporate bastards deep down, aren't they? Aren't we?

Dr. Sure's Unusual Practice usually sounds a bit more rambunctious, a bit more punk rock than this song is, but I just really dig the deep 90's vibe of this song. Thank god for Australia, churning out some good pop punk, I'll post a few more bands from that continent later on, I'm sure.

This song, this whole album, is a trip. And judging from this music video, the live show leans into all the circus / carnival motifs spread across the whole album; and it looks like a freakin' blast, I wish I had known about this guy back in 2019.

It's funny that in the last song I posted I was basically complaining about eclecticism run amok, in the style of music of the mid-2000's, which this album is severely guilty of. But in this case, the hyper-active variety of instrumentation is in support of a general theatricality that is sustained consistently from the first song (Sideshow, which is an excellent song and maybe better than this song I'm posting now) to the last song.

That doesn't mean the album is perfect, no, I think the first half (up to Sometimes) is really strong, while the back half of the album loses me pretty quickly with silly songs and others bordering on ballads. A song like Shadows is just too much of a joke, more suitable to a Weird Al Yankovic album than as a companion to the first half of this album. But, that's okay, I'm not going to fault Nick Lutsko for being too creative, that would be unfair.

This song is so good. It's hitting the same notes as The New Pornographers at their best, with a groovy funky little swivel in it. It's good! Just listen to it.

But I'll warn you, if you like this song and you expect the rest of its album to sound anything like it, you will be sorely disappointed. The album, "Exactly As It Seems", is all over the place. It opens with house music, then turns into some funky disco stuff that simply does not work very well in my opinion, and never really gets over how quirky it thinks it is. I'm all for eclectic bands melding genres together in bursts of joyful experimentation (I did live through the era in which people unironically liked The Fiery Furnaces, a band Home Counties is undoubtedly inspired by), but there's just something about this album that starts to chafe.

But damn, this song is fun! In comparison to the rest of the album, it's low energy and boring, but I guess that's just who I am now, low energy and boring.

Well, this hasn't aged well. Sydney Sweeney went from being America's Sweetheart to pretty disliked by every liberal almost overnight, so I wonder how Smut feels now. Previously this song made for good (and very trite) generalized feminist sound bytes from the band: "We put the sexy woman in the movie so we can see her be sexy and then kill her for it." That may well be true (I don't think it is, really) but I'm not sure that Sydney Sweeney is the feminist icon everyone wanted her to be.

Either way, this song has a great riff. I'm not sure why Uproxx at one point called this a "punk song", because it's just too clean. The whole album is too clean. This stuff sounds like rock music made for tweens 90% of the time and that's just too bad, because it sounds like they have the skills to make something really raw and interesting. Instead they opted to drown their 'punk' sound in studio polish. Bleh. This song is good in a mix of other music, but a whole album of this is just too much to stomach.

What a fantastic sound this song has, a mix of 90's-00's grunge-tinted indie rock, with a solid Pixies style LOUD quiet LOUD foundation propping it all up. The melody itself is just so, so, so strong. And it's under 3 minutes, so if you really like it, you can just listen to it again and again.

Unfortunately, the rest of the EP that features this song first, Up to Snuff (I am guessing 10 years from now this link will be broken), is not really anything like this song. The rest of the EP sounds too 80's (to my ears) and none of the other songs have a strong melody and dynamics that measure up to this one. So, that's not great, but, this song is so good, it doesn't really matter.