Hot & Not, Mid & Meh: Iona’s Weekly Tracks (28th Mar ‘24)
HOT
‘Spiralling Out’ — Softcult: Remember Medicine’s ‘Time Baby III’ from the soundtrack of ‘The Crow’? “No they don’t have to take you away”? Those are the vibes here, only twice as melancholy and without any of even the pretence to happiness. One of the dreamiest, loveliest songs about being stuck inside your own misfiring black moods to be released this year.
‘Where The Light Fades’ — Pallbearer: Pink Floyd loom large on this one, a drawn-out time-taker with a lot of lovely vocals, sorrowful guitar leads, and plenty of Opeth-ian sonic experiments. The trade-off is the lack of Pallbearer’s usual crushing heaviness, but the gains outweigh the losses here.
‘Precision’ — Big Sean: Dumb. As. Rocks. And kinda wonderful for it! Big Sean reminding everyone that he’s got lyrical power when he wants to flex it; even the “pew-pew-pew” vocal tic in the chorus (backed by the GoldenEye 64 silenced pistol sound effects I shit you not) are simply perfect — a fine and filthy ode to absolutely hitting it home.
‘Too Sweet’ — Hozier: Turns out even the B-sides of the already excellent ‘Unreal Unearth’ were themselves just as excellent. This is just straightforwardly wonderful work, a beautiful song where that super-simple central chord progression is the foundation for great folk rock, with plenty of surprises — those bells! those harmonies! — backing up the sheer delicious power of Hozier’s voice, both lyrically and melodically on its absolute best form. Seems he isn’t ready to come off the winning streak that album started last year just yet…
NOT
‘Hordes of Chaos (Remixed)’ — Kreator: This is just peculiar. ‘Hordes of Chaos’ is a song I loved back in 2009 and come back to now and again; a pretty well-produced thrash track with a very memorable, very odd ‘hopping’ quality to the main riff, off the last record of a really solid run for Kreator in the 2000s (complete with a deeply silly video). Why this remix was even done, why now, and why it changes nothing besides drowning the guitars within each other and leaving the drums louder, splashier, tinnier and overall far, far worse; these are all questions that completely stump me.
‘ART’ — Tyla: Utterly generic pop with a thin, impact-less trap beat, and some of the worst lyrical puns, metaphors and utterly artless allusions I’ve heard all year; whoever made this poor woman actually sing the line “put me on the wall above the staircase” and “I’ll be your piece” like she meant it should be ashamed of themself.
‘Kaliber’ — Wifeyboi “feat. Drake”: A song I know I listened to, and thought was mostly a puff of air, but which I cannot link you to and makes it onto the Not list solely thanks to Wifeyboi tagging Drake as a guest artist when he actually had nothing to do with the track, seeming just to drive up some clickbait streams.
‘MAGNETIC’ — Wage War: This might be Wage War’s ‘For Those That Wish To Exist’ moment, and that is not a compliment. WW have always had a good ear for fine melodies, but this is the good melodies getting smothering over a sharper edge that needs to be there for the song to have any punch. As is, the breakdowns don’t hit hard enough, the guitars are swallowed in the electronics, the growls are tepid and the chorus is insipid. This is the sound of yet another metalcore act swimming in the wake of Architects and Bring Me The Horizon at their blandest and most easily digestible, and I can only hope it’s not a indicator of a forthcoming album.
‘Thinking (‘bout you, ‘bout me)’ — Salt Cathedral: A genuinely stirring and beautiful central melody line and lyrical conceit that simply cannot maintain itself across 5 and a half minutes without stretching itself to snapping point.
MID/MEH
‘What About The Children’ — Gary Clark Jr. feat. Stevie Wonder: Not bad, but let’s say that there’s a lot better to be found on Gary Clark’s newest record, JPEG RAW, than a Stevie Wonder knock-off that even the real Stevie can’t bring much fire to.
‘Type Shit’ — Future & Metro Boomin feat. Travis Scott & Playboi Carti: Future may’ve made a long and fruitful career as the most downbeat and low-key MC in all of mumblerap, but that’s a poor excuse for the dull showing made by Scott and Carti, two considerably crazier and more energetic rappers. Not awful, but not really worth much comment, which is a sad truth for more or less the entire album.
‘LEAVE ME ALONE’ — While She Sleeps: So was all the metal on this list this week let down by its production and mixing? This one certainly is (the mix is a swampy mess and a frank embarrassment from a band who put out something as crisply powerful as ‘Sleep Society’), but the songwriting really isn’t there for it either. Every element here is lacking the fire that this band can normally bring, and why everyone’s going crazy for it, I can’t understand.
‘The Quest’ — Mac Miller: Hard as this might hit if you were ever seriously impacted by ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, which this samples heavily, there’s not a lot of there there otherwise. However celebrated Mac Miller was in life and death, this song, to a non-stan like myself, only highlights the shortcomings in his technique and limits of his charisma that his untimely death has helped us overlook. “I’m nothin’ man / I just am” is just not the body-blow of a lyric that the song seems to think it is.
‘Ghosts in the Mist’ — Unleash the Archers: Nothing to crow about on the songwriting front — a relative middler that should be buried in the tracklisting, not brought forward as a lead album single — but I always love a reason to remind everyone; Brittney Slayes’ voice is pure magic on virtually any song she puts it to.
© Sam Iona Burgess, 2024
