staires!

This is another DEVO cover, of the most excellent song "Pity You", which had to be covered under a different song name for record label related legal reasons. "Pity You" is right up there in the greatest DEVO songs pantheon, at least my pantheon, and this cover might actually improve it in several ways–which is probably easy because it's all five members of DEVO playing the song. This is like "DEVO with Toni Basil", and it fucking rules so hard.

It's also accompanied by this fever dream of a music video that is probably one of my most favorite archival pieces of 80's film I've ever seen. Everything about this is so excellent, from beginning to end, just insane. To be paired with such a great song, ugh, it's not fair.

What's also not fair, for Toni Basil, is that she only did four DEVO songs. (The other two on this album are "Be Stiff" and "Space Girls", both very good as well; later there's the DEVO song "The Only One" with Basil fronting, too.) Gerald Casale semi-co-produced her self-titled album later and, sadly, it's no good (aside from Mickey, of course); and the non-DEVO songs on this album aren't any good either. Sorry, Toni, if you're reading this, I desperately wanted to like your albums, but they're just not for me. Those three DEVO songs, good lord, it's actually proof I don't live in a simulation crafted just for me, that there isn't a full album or two of Toni Basil fronted DEVO songs.

Yeah, I’m just going to hit you with another Gates of Steel cover. This one is by sludge metal band Eyehategod. I really, really like this cover a lot.

There’s someone on YouTube who says they don’t like the half-time parts and that person is unbelievably wrong. The half-time parts destabilize the song in the best way. One second you’re grooving along and then suddenly you’re slowly head-banging; it’s like hitting the softest brick wall. I just love it. It feels so weird, and genuinely brings something new to the table, something all the other covers I’ve heard so far do not.

Apple Music came out with an AI-assisted prompt-based playlist creator, so I put in the first thing that came to my mind, "DEVO influenced metal," which I thought sounded kind of absurd. But little did I know, it made perfect sense. One of two genuinely good covers in the playlist (which only had 3 songs total, Apple Music AI giving it the ol' college try, I see) was this cover of Gates of Steel, by Surgical Meth Machine, which I did not know until this very moment is a Al Jourgensen side project, though this song is played at Ministry shows, so how much of a side project is this really, but whatever. I mean, okay, being fair, being as fair as I can be, this sounds like more like an Andrew W.K. song than a Ministry song.

While I was hunting this song down again, I was surprised to see five different covers of Gates of Steel, most of them metal / hard rock bands, but there's a really bitchin' ska version by Skankin' Pickle. I guess this shouldn't be a surprise, as Gates of Steel is right up there in the holy pantheon of great DEVO songs, if not all the way up at the very tippy top of the energy dome. What a great song. It doesn't matter how it's covered, those chords are emotive no matter what they sound like.

I think I was first introduced to this song back in 2006, and I fell in love with it. I think I listened to it so much that I grew sick of it and forgot about it for 20 years until last week, when I was shuffling a playlist titled "I Miss 90's Indie" on Apple Music.

When it started playing, I felt myself bolt upright in my seat. I've missed this feeling, this strange haunting song, the repetitive lyrics somewhere between a dirge and a prayer. There was a time I would have thought this song was about someone, but I think it really isn't. The song doesn't feel like it's longing for someone, more like it's hoping for something terrible to finally stop.

I’m posting the live version of this song not just because it is possibly better than the recorded version, but also because I was there. I was at this show. I was among the first people to hear this song played live at a Spoon show, and it was the same day this single was released. That’s pretty great.

I have a lot to say about the history of my Spoon fandom but this is not the time, place, or song to do it. So I’ll hit you back later when the time is right. (Uhh, you wrote about it back in 2024... - Ed)

My dog loves this song.

My dachshund is very finicky when it comes to eating his food. He's not so bad that I have to hand feed him each bite of kibble, but typically I have to do some sort of activity around him to motivate him to eat. This can be relatively simple, typically I have to kick a ball around on the floor near him, occasionally letting him grab it and take it over to his food bowl, where I reclaim it and kick it around some more as he eats.

Sometimes that does not work and I have to introduce variants of this behavior: sometimes I have to pick up the ball and bounce it off the floor and catch it repeatedly; sometimes I have to play wall-soccer with the ball; and other times, I have to play music. That's where this song comes in.

I discovered this song thanks to TikTok, which seems to be the theme of this week as the last three songs I've posted have been TikTok discoveries. Since I don't have a commute anymore, the ball-kicking-or-bouncing periods of the morning and evening have become prime "listen to new music" times for me. This is how I discovered that my dog loves this song.

Now, maybe it's just the result of "it's always in the last place you look", but I feel I've seen solid evidence that this song gets my dog excited enough to eat his food fairly reliably, when no amount of ball kicking or bouncing has enticed him.

And who could blame him? This song fucking rules. It's so funky. It's infectious. I'd sing along, but I don't think my mouth makes the right shapes. Apple Music Sing has karaoke mode for this song with anglicized Japanese so people like me can sing along, but when I do it, it sounds like I'm performing the Simlish version of the song, it's just not right.

This video is a lot of fun, too. In the YouTube comments, someone says the whole video was shot in one take; another person disagrees, saying the cuts are only well disguised. What do I think? I have no idea, I use TikTok, I don't have the attention span to sit through an entire music video without getting distracted. You watch it and tell me. You could talk about this song over on my Discourse server if you really wanted to. Really!

It would also be unacceptable for me not to call out the chick bassist. What is it about a chick bassist in a band that makes every guy on the internet go "omfg, a chick bassist, so bad ass, wow", like it's so unheard of, as if she were wielding a battle axe three times her size? Keep it in your pants, fellas.

This is such a fun song and feels like such a throwback to the late 2000's / early 2010's.

I see someone in the YouTube comments, multiple someones really, saying this song is very 90's.

WRONG. YOU ARE WRONG.

But whatever, we can't expect everyone on the internet to have the right knowledge needed to describe music accurately. There are people in the YouTube comments saying "grunge vibes". What? What in the actual fuck? There isn't even a distorted guitar in this song. And how many grunge songs had horns in them?

Are these people stupid? IS EVERYONE STUPID?

Man, this annoys me. But that's okay, because this song is pretty good, and the video is cool, too!

I took a stab at listening to the other songs on this album, which isn't out yet, and they really didn't do it for me. They were actually too early-2010's for me. Like, this song, this song is not good, I don't like it, this is some "we are young!!" bullshit, make it go away.

But Easy! This song, this song is good. It's too bad Tōth's fans might be idiots, but maybe that's just YouTube for you.

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...