Hot & Not, Mid & Meh: Iona’s Weekly Tracks (1st Mar ‘24)
HOT
‘Dancing in Babylon’ — MGMT feat. Christine & The Queens: Where’d this little delight come from? This lovely little power ballad is all 80s synths and heart-in-mouth vocal performances distilled through MGMT’s offbeat oddness and the gorgeous voice of Christine (of ‘The Queens’ fame). It’s big and weird simultaneously, and it shouldn’t work, and yet here it sits on the top of the list for the week.
‘Caught in the Treads’ — Gatecreeper: They’re awful, they’re vile, and I love them. Gatecreeper coming in with a grisly track drawing heavily on the Swedish death metal bands of old (Dismember, Grave et al). Stompy drums, scrungy riffs, screamy vocals, it’s all I could possibly want.
‘The Serpent & The King’ — Judas Priest: After the little wobble that was the middling ‘Crown of Horns’, Priest came back with a beast of a metal track. A barn-burner, a rager, a real monster; a track so good the superlatives write themselves. Rob Halford in particular is in fine form; how this man can still hit those incredible, ‘Painkiller’-level notes at his age is a thing to marvel at.
‘DOWNSIDE’ — I DON’T KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME: I don’t know how (probably the algorithm) but I found them too, and I love this weird and wonderful rock ‘n roll now I’ve found it.
‘Saturn’ — SZA: No-one but SZA could take a beat this spacey and disconnected, sing their absolute heart out over it, and make the two extremes work so well.
NOT
‘Love On’ — Selena Gomez: A pretty good pop-funk track gets spoiled by the mostly dreadful lines (“Why we conversing over this steak tartare / When we could be somewhere other than here / Making out in the back of a car?”) and the singer’s really dreadful, charisma-free delivery of them. So many little verbal tics that try to bring personality to the song, and every last one falls flat.
‘Shampoo’ — Kodak Black: If Kodak Black wants to rap about shitting himself in public, good for him, but there’s no reason I should have to listen to him on the matter, especially if he seems barely able to summon any energy to tell the story.
‘Mustang’ — Kings of Leon: Sixteen years since ‘Only By The Night’, and KoL get less interesting, less fun, less engaging, less worth anyone’s time with every last release.
‘I Will’ — Central Cee: I’m not saying I’m impressed by rank chauvinism, but this is definitely Central Cee really trying hard to impress upon me just how massive a douche his persona can be. Dumb, horndog rap that’s so preoccupied with making the singer sound like a charmless idiot, it completely forgets that being sexy might’ve been more fun for everyone concerned, even him.
‘MIDS & MEHS
‘Friendly Fire’ — Linkin Park: It’s just not all that, lads. I’m sorry. I’m all for a reassessment of Linkin Park given the distance gained since Chester Bennington’s untimely death, but there’s just not much to consider here; a B-side from ‘One More Light’ that sounds less of a piece with that light-as-air album as, say, with ‘Minutes to Midnight’ and that album’s “troubled” relationship to the politics of America in the mid-2000s (read: it sounds like a rather limp, Bush-era anti-war ballad). Not without nostalgic, melancholy charms, but beyond that there’s very little to say.
‘All I’ve Got’ — LF SYSTEM: Usually I’m all in for LF SYSTEM and this is still certainly fun for a few spins, but even for an artist who thrives in a repetitive genre like club dance, this is too basic and with too few ideas or playful qualities to rate it higher than ‘OK’.
‘The Dream of Delphi’ — Bats for Lashes: Colour me intrigued; this isn’t great stuff to be sure, but I’m struck by the Bjork-y qualities of indie weirdos Bats for Lashes just enough to want to keep an ear open for their work.
‘L’Envol’ — Alcest: What Alcest want to be is much more interesting than what they are. They *want* to take mellow vibes and raging noise and thread the needle between the two moods, and the ambition is hard to fault, but they’re still struggling to make the shoegaze and black metal genres blend successfully, and the result is yet another song that never quite works, even if it’s got the usual lovely melody or two.
‘don’t let me go’ — Machine Gun Kelly: As emo hip-hop about suffering goes, this isn’t good. Not musically (too lo-fi and bland), not technically (MGK’s flow is still kinda awful). But there’s something striking about it. The messiness of the song, the slapdash quality and the almost amateur production, somehow loops around my cynicism and lands a blow on the feels, sounding a lot more sincere because of its rawness and lack of polish. Not exactly heartbreaking, but more powerful than I gave it credit at first.
‘Richtivities’ — Saweetie: It’s been a good few weeks for hip-hop singles thanks to Glo-Rilla’s ‘Yeah Glo!’ and Latto’s ‘Sunday Service’, and I was hoping Saweetie would make the hat-trick, but alas, just a little short. The beat’s good and strong, but Saweetie herself is the letdown; bars a little too short, flow a little too stiff and monotonous.
© Sam Iona Burgess, 2024
