1. Mindless Self Indulgence - Fuck Machine 🟢
December 2013 was the last time I saw Mindless Self Indulgence! It's all coming back to me now - I'm sure they appear a few times on this disc. I saw them at the Liquid Rooms in Edinburgh on the first of the month and it was the first time I finally got to meet the entire band - I remember Lyn-Z giving me a big hug when I thanked her for her autograph. The album they were touring is the first one I didn't buy so I'd downloaded the new songs that were on their setlist and I tried to listen to them on the bus into town but there was a woman singing on that bus so obviously I listened to her instead. Anyway, Fuck Machine is a standard MSI song - it's rude, tongue-in-cheek fun. It's like classic MSI but the sound is bigger to reflect the advances in technology since their early days. The breakdown doesn't do it for me and the song runs out of steam really fast. The good bit is really good though.
2. April March - Chick Habit 🔵
This song makes me want to form a girl-gang of old school 50s biker girls and go after fuckboys giving them a taste of their own medicine. I think this song appears in a Tarantino movie but not one that I've seen so I can't really comment on that. It's based on the French yé-yé classic Laisser Tomber Les Filles but April has amped up the bass and written some feminist lyrics for cheating men. Her delivery is really snotty and it makes the song camp and fun.
This song makes me want to form a girl-gang of old school 50s biker girls and go after fuckboys giving them a taste of their own medicine. I think this song appears in a Tarantino movie but not one that I've seen so I can't really comment on that. It's based on the French yé-yé classic Laisser Tomber Les Filles but April has amped up the bass and written some feminist lyrics for cheating men. Her delivery is really snotty and it makes the song camp and fun.
3. Davey Havok - Misconceptions of Hell (from Tim Timebomb's Rock'n'Roll Theater) 🟣
I wrote about Davey Havok a lot in my last entry, but here he's doing something completely different - playing the Devil selling the positives of Hell to a man in purgatory. Davey doesn't get the chance to display his musical theatre camp side often enough. He's so versatile as a performer and this side of him is underrated. Misconceptions of Hell is one episode of a YouTube musical so it's part of a larger work but as a stand-alone song it still works and makes me so happy every time I hear it. The lyrics are full of clever references to 'misconceptions of hell', with the River Styx as a fun place to take a cruise, the heat coming from the beautiful girls, the seven deadly sins as parties and God cast as a 'party-pooper'. And the audio doesn't even capture the pink suit and pencil moustache vision of Davey as Dante...
Here's another song that brings me immense joy. It's impossible not to dance when Groove Is In The Heart comes on. The song is one of my mum's favourites from nights out before I came along and it's exactly the sort of thing I'd want to hear in a club (if we ever get to go to clubs again). It's one of those songs, like Tom Tom Club's Genius Of Love, where the words keep flowing along but when you stop to think about them they don't seem to mean anything. It's somehow both retro and modern, timeless but still exhilarating and Lady Miss Kier and the video swirling around her is a psychedelic 60s dream.
5. Billie Holiday - My Man 🟣
After the fun of the last few songs, this is a huuuge comedown. It's one of the saddest songs I can think of, about a woman who's fallen for bad man - an unreliable cheater who doesn't share the all-consuming love that she does. Miss Holiday delivers lines like "He isn't true, he beats me too, what can I do?" with such melancholy, it's devastating. I've heard a few versions of this song but her conviction makes this my favourite. Flawless.
6. Mindless Self Indulgence - Witness 🟢
What a jarring transition, thanks a lot 2013 Rachel. It's more Big MSI - more swearing, more self-centred conceit. The electronic madness is great but the standout of this song is the lyric bravado of "suck on my dick, I'm perfect, I am the best, fuck everybody else, God likes me".
What a jarring transition, thanks a lot 2013 Rachel. It's more Big MSI - more swearing, more self-centred conceit. The electronic madness is great but the standout of this song is the lyric bravado of "suck on my dick, I'm perfect, I am the best, fuck everybody else, God likes me".
7. No Doubt - Hey Baby 🔵
This one reminds me of my childhood when this song was all over music TV. I love the dancehall mood of this which I think was quite popular at the time, thinking back to the Smash Hits review I did with Beenie Man featured, but I don't think I was really able to pick out the genre influences of pop songs at that time. I can't separate it from the black and white and red visuals of No Doubt in this era - Gwen Stefani looked so cool.
8. Tim Curry - I'm Going Home 🔵
I love The Rocky Horror Picture Show, especially the soundtrack which I listened to a lot in my late teens. Given that it's a product of the mid-70s it's obviously full of glam rock influence but I've never noticed until now quite how Bowie-esque I'm Going Home is. The song is Dr Frank-N-Furter's big closing number, like a Judy Garland finale before Dorothy clicks her heels and leaves Oz. It's a lovely song, and another that is forever linked to an image - that of Tim Curry's eyes covered in blue glitter makeup, smudged and faded from frolicking in the pool in the previous number.
Another of the saddest songs. 505 is a huge indie music cliché but it deserves all of the acclaim and referencing and memes that it has generated because it is such an incredible song. I think Alex Turner is one of the 21st century's greatest lyricists, no matter how many times I see "I'd probably still adore you with your hands around my neck, or I did last time I checked" on a social media post. And that big crescendo for the last verse! All of the sounds in this song are perfect, it's another one that I can't fault.
10. Kate Nash - Under-Estimate The Girl 🟢
I remember this being revolutionary when it first came out. People on social media thought Kate Nash had snapped and lost her mind when she decided to give up on commercial indie-pop songs and embrace her inner riot grrrl. I love the primal yelling and prominent bass part that made a lot of people run for cover and question her sanity. The matching intro and outro, that bookend her rage are my favourite parts. She put out better punk songs after this but as a statement of intent it gets the job done. Society clearly did under-estimate this girl.
11. Mindless Self Indulgence - It Gets Worse 🟢
The "it gets better" campaign was in full swing at this point and it was hard to go online or look at the rock music press without seeing young people and musicians talking about suicide prevention and how 'it gets better', a statement that started to feel meaningless. This song is an antidote to that culture and regardless of how worthy the cause for optimism was, it's refreshing to have this out there too. MSI don't go in for patronising self-help statements, instead they write choruses that say "it doesn't get better unless you're pretty, it doesn't get better unless you've got money" and set them to a killer bass drop. They are the great agitators of the rock scene.
12. Be Your Own Pet - Becky 🔵
Another song by a snotty, sassy girl and her band. Becky is about the end of a friendship, hiding the grief of that experience behind a tough exterior. It's written from that early-teens mindset and full of pettiness over friendship bracelets and yearbook quotes and slumber parties, escalating from a fight to straight-up murder: "if only what you wrote in my yearbook was true, then I wouldn't be stuck in fuckin' cell block two". I love the attitude and the humour of the male band mates singing a back-up chorus of "we don't like Becky anymore". So juvenile but so relatable.
13. Kate Bush - Moving 🔵
The queen! In the first song from her first album, Kate Bush sounds ethereal, like she's floated in from a more magical place to grace us with her presence. Moving is soothing but sounds very of its time, and there's something about her band that sounds a bit school orchestra - cheap and amateur, rather than the actual band she'd performed with for years previously. The song is apparently an ode to her dance teacher who deserves acclaim for helping Kate to develop such a singular style.
14. Billie Holiday - Summertime 🟣
Another Billie Holiday standard. It's hard to pick a favourite version of a song that has been performed so many times but this might be it for me. I'm so used to hearing Sad Billie that it's nice to hear her singing something less overtly miserable. She really was a one-off talent.
15. No Doubt - Hella Good 🔵
It's disco! This is what I mean by not really understanding the subtleties of genre in 2002; as a kid, it wasn't obvious what they were doing. It makes liberal use of that disco sound (you know, the one in Ring My Bell and countless others) which is very pleasing. Hella Good is like Moroder working with Blondie and it sounds like it could have been made any time between 1978 and 2020. I feel like I've described songs and artists as 'cool' a lot in this post but there isn't a better word for this, it is so cool and definitely makes me want to shimmy.
16. The Red Paintings - Mad World 🟢
This is here because The Red Paintings were the support band for Mindless Self Indulgence. This is a cover of the sad-boy early-00s version of Mad World, which I hate, but I quite like this version. I remember this band's being fascinating as performance art; I'm sure they had interesting costumes and props around them and I think they painted a guy's body during the course of the set? This song is less compelling than their show was but they do a good job of the cover, with really beautiful strings and guitar parts. It drops points for covering the cover and not the Tears For Fears version though.
17. Mindless Self Indulgence - You're No Fun Anymore Mark Trezona 🟢
I didn't vibe with this song as much as the other MSI ones at the time, but listening back to them now I think it's on a par with the ones I've already written about. I like the Eurodancey 'doo doo doo' bit in this song. None of the songs from this album are as good as the stuff on my favourite MSI album but they're not bad. I had no idea who Mark Trezona was until I looked it up right now - apparently he's a fan who donated $5k to the Kickstarter campaign for this album in exchange for a song being named after him. Pretty cool legacy, I think.
18. The Smiths - I Want The One I Can't Have 🔵
Oh, shut up, Morrissey. The star of this song is Mike Joyce on drums, and obviously Johnny Marr is the greatest of all guitarists and does some cool stuff here too. It's an average-quality Smiths song. "If you ever need self-validation, just meet me in the alley by the railway station" is a bold lyric from Morrissey, king of the incels.
19. Joan Jett & The Blackhearts - Crimson And Clover 🟢
This song is a classic and here we have a cool cover of it. Joan sings the song softly, in contrast to her usual rebel yell. The guitar riff comes in heavier than in the original and the Blackhearts style suits the song well. I love that this song takes place at 2 different speeds which keeps things interesting, and the repetition at the end is like drifting into a dream.
20. letlive. - Banshee (Ghost Fame) 🟢
I love the 'band practicing the room next door' feel of this intro before the song starts properly. letlive. were a great band with clear roots in bands like Refused, Faith No More and Glassjaw as well as some jazz influence. This song has an unusual structure which makes it hard to follow - it's exciting but challenging to listen to and it's a relief when they find their way back to the chorus. This has huge 'first song on the album' energy and while it's not my favourite song of theirs, I will always be thrilled by frontman Jason Aalon Butler.
21. Françoise Hardy - A quoi ça sert? 🟢
Something French! This is pretty and sounds very late 60s singer-songwriter, like she was going for a French Marianne or Joni. The arpeggiated piano opens up like a beautiful sunny country day. I don't know what this song is about but I find it relaxing. The choir almost gives it a vintage Disney vibe.
22. Black Veil Brides ft Zakk Wylde - Unholy 🔴
This song has ruined a long streak of good records. I don't need this. It's very 80s sounding and it has that electric guitar sound that reminds me of dialling a phone, which I hate. I don't need Andy Biersack's low voice, especially not when he starts screaming. The guitar solo sounds like it was recorded underwater. I know that we're supposed to revere people like Zakk Wylde as guitar heroes and I remember that narrative from Kerrang! growing up, but I cannot stand these big guitar solos and I really don't need the Metallica-rip-off post-solo middle eight. This song can go fuck itself, bigtime.
23. Mindless Self Indulgence - Ass Backwards 🟠
The posh English schoolteacher voice that opens this song and is threaded right through is very annoying to me. This isn't as good as the other MSI songs, there's no dynamic to it. The "I go about things the wrong way baby" line is an interpolation of another song and I could not work out what so I had to Google it and I was shocked to realise it's lifted from HOW SOON IS NOW!?
This was a good month for me musically, overall. If we disregard those last two songs, December 2013 was above average, as it turns out.
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