I know it's only chemical
2023 Mix 7
Each week I skim through about 2,000 songs from Spotify's company-curated New Music Friday playlists. Whenever I find 80 minutes worth of music I like, I make a CD-length mix and write a newsletter about it.
Welcome to the new home of this newsletter! You should notice approximately zero differences from the vantage point of your inbox, but publishing here is much easier than on TinyLetter.
Last week was a “bye week,” in that I listened to all the songs on my mega-playlist and said “BYE” to too many of them to make a full mix.
Instead, you can check out the special 1985 Mix I made, which I’ve crossposted to Substack, along with all the back issues of the newsletter:
Mix 1 // Mix 2 // Mix 3 // Mix 4 // Mix 5 // Mix 6
MIX 7: I KNOW IT’S ONLY CHEMICAL
1. Big Boss Vette f. Coi Leray: Pretty Girls Walk (remix)
I heard this and immediately thought back to the jerk craze of the late 00’s, but when this late 2022 track finally (and seemingly by design?) went TikTok viral a month ago — leading to the inevitable remix with a trendier rapper slapped on (for what it’s worth, I like Coi Leray’s verse, though the original’s simplicity reminds me of Saweetie’s breakthrough, “ICY GRL”) — as far as I can tell no one else made the jerk connection. So maybe it’s just me. But someone needs to get on it: jerk revival! It’s time.
2. Jayda G: Circle Back Around
I’ve been following Jayda G since her extremely chill DJ-Kicks album in 2021, and this title track to a new EP is on brand, a pop-house bonbon.
3. Yamäya f. Khadin Sarr: Karma (radio edit)
Retro Afropop from a British band featuring Senegalese vocalist Sarr. Very NPR, though would probably be more accurate to say very BBC Radio 6. Don’t mind the tasteful reverence in the service of this particular tune, though.
4. Atta Frimpong: Bepo So Dua [c. 1983]
I suppose I was primed from preparing the 1985 mix to admire this Ghanaian funk track included on a new compilation of Ghanaian funk and soul in the 80s and 90s, Borga Revolution! Ghanaian Dance Music in the Digital Age 1983-1996 (volume 2). The curators refer to burger highlife, “a digitised version of highlife music which fully embraced Western contemporary music styles and newly introduced technology such as the DX7 synthesizer and various drum machines,” especially among people emigrating from Ghana to Germany. More about it in a write-up of the first volume over at Bandcamp.
So far this is the first track from the New Music Hindi list that’s made it on a mix, and it’s a gem, could have been an outtake from the second Veronicas album, Hook Me Up.
Didn’t find much beyond PR one-sheet basics after a cursory look about this Iranian singer based in Milan. Sounds good, and transitions well into…
7. ALALA & URBOYTJ: เถียงเก่ง (Bad Mouth)
Thai pop spite-rock! The chorus in particular evokes the confessional rock turn teen pop took in the early aughts (a sample from the chorus: “shut up! shut up! shut up! break up! break up! break up!”). They don’t even make the sort of movies you could put this song in anymore, do they? Maybe in Thailand?
8. Bruses: Señorita Revolución
And to keep the theme going, here’s the Mexican Dollyrots, maybe, bringing the revolution with an annoying whistle hook.
9. Kate Fagan: I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool [1981]
Fun find from what sounds like a proto-Julie Brown hiding in Chicago’s early 80s punk scene. The collection of Fagan’s work is a nice early Reagan era time capsule (from “Waiting for the Crisis”: “We sell guns to all our third world friends! We sell guns if they will sell us oil!”).
10. Nabihah Iqbal: This World Couldn’t See Us
Ninja Tune artist combines spoken word and synth-pop in a way that is just catchy enough to temper the poetic pretensions, delivered in a deadpan appropriate for the pop-goth surroundings.
Somehow completely missed Demi Lovato’s back-to-rock HOLY FVCK last year so was unprepared for this contribution to the Scream 6 (wait, really?) soundtrack, very much in that vein and also the sort of hidden jewel you’d find lying around on, like, track 9 of literally any movie soundtrack between 1996 and 2001. (That is a compliment.)
12. Adam Lambert: Getting Older
I have an ongoing conversation with my friend Isabel about Billie Eilish, who we are convinced is a classical songwriter of a bygone era. In Isabel’s words, Eilish’s songs all have “good bones,” and this is Exhibit B after LeAnn Rimes’s rendition of “When the Party’s Over” on The Masked Singer, where Rimes is so studied she even replicates some of Eilish’s vocal mannerisms like an opera singer enunciating in a foreign language.
This is a smart cover of a very smart song— glam is more direct and showy than the original’s bedroom dirge, and Lambert isn’t afraid to forcefully mark the chorus as a chorus, launching that sucker up into the rafters.
It feels weird to say that someone who was maybe the most popular artist in the world for two years before she even turned 20 and is probably a no-foolin’ genius besides has a tendency to hide her light under a bushel, so the analogy I’ve landed on for Billie Eilish is early Randy Newman, who had his own clear, if idiosyncratic, interpretation of his own work, but also shopped it around to other singers who could highlight the songcraft.
13. KIKI: Get Up
I’ve been listening to The Bird and the Bee’s Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future again with the kids — one kid (the witchy one) is drawn to the song about the witch, and the other kid (the fanfarey one) is drawn to the opening fanfare and segue into “My Love” — and realized I will give any indie band who sounds even a little like The Bird and the Bee a sympathetic listen. Was a little surprised to learn that KIKI are from Bangkok.
Japanese indie dream-pop group, seem to have soundtracked a few anime shows. Barely there, and I wouldn’t for the life of me be able to hum it afterward, but sounds nice in context here.
Ghanaian afrobeats that happened to play after the mol-74 track and sounded like a nice complement, insubstantial but with some obscure gravity to it.
A Ukrainian contender for Eurovision, goofy and carnivalesque, but ultimately lost to Tvorchi’s “Heart of Steel,” a middling song that unfortunately breaks Ukraine’s streak of producing my favorite song in the competition (Kalush Orchestra’s “Stefania” in 2022 and Go_A’s “Shum” in 2021). Would prefer FIÏNKA compete instead, but at least I had the chance to learn while googling her that in Ukraine, the Die Hard series was called Tough Nut (Міцний горішок).
17. Deorro & ETC!ETC!: Hija de Su
Mexican DJ produces an EDM song annoying enough that I could play it in the car while the kids are bickering to help turn their sights onto something else.
18. Clarissa Bitar: Fi Kul Balad
Oud! Oud! Oud! Woo!
19. Surprise Chef: Rosemary Hemphill
Jazz-rock beats to study to, but enjoyed the vibes (mood and instrument).
20. Stoned Jesus: Season of the Witch
Did I banish several shorter and possibly better songs I heard this week to cast-offs purgatory just so I could fit this gratuitous sludge metal take on what sounds kind of like an Alice in Chains song, even though it in no way justifies the thing going on for over 11 minutes? Yes.
21. Rickie Lee Jones: September Song
Rickie Lee Jones just made it on the mix, though, with a nice cover of the Kurt Weill standard from her upcoming covers album. Couldn’t leave a good song by her off after hearing “Howard” for the first time a few months ago in the People’s Pop polls, a funky, haunted little song cobbled together from bones and cigarette ash.
That’s it!
Until next time, don’t hide your light under a bushel, especially but not only if you are a precocious multi-platinum genius.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from Kate Fagan, “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool”