Apropos of Saucecraft heaping praise upon me for my extraordinarily good taste in music, I thought I’d share with you the things that have been floating my boat this week. Consider this a taster for Rolling Stones Top 500 Songs of All Time, 2038 edition.
First up is Deathloop City Lights. Yes: incidental music from a video game. I’m that far out on the bleeding edge.
Deathloop is a newly released video game which essentially fuses Groundhog Day with Doom and an oddball sense of humour. It appeals to me greatly.
So, I’m merrily playing it, sneaking up on enemies and blowing their brains out, when I pass an abandoned truck with the radio left on. And this song is playing. And it’s beautiful. Properly, properly beautiful. Give it a listen: the dude sounds like him from The Decemberists, and it’s got this lovely skipping rhythm that drops in a third of the way through.
Turns out, it isn’t licensed music; someone actually wrote this beautiful song to just play in the background during a short section of a daft, insanely violent video game. 2021, man – I love it. Hopefully, it will arrive on the streaming platforms so I can play it to death. Until then, it’s a YouTube only treat.
Next up is something entirely unrelated from the really quite excellent Tyler The Creator album that came out earlier in the year.
Corso is an absolute banger, but it also has a brilliant video – I am loving everything about it: the way it’s one long shot (not normally a fan, but it works nicely here), what Tyler is wearing, his moves and his flow. The guy is a star. Bonus marks for the bit at the end where all the little kids are staring at him in muted disgust.
I’ve been listening to this on heavy repeat for a few weeks now and – predictably – it sent me down a bit of a Tyler/Odd Future rabbit hole.
My first stop on the nostalgia train was Odd Future’s legendary performance on Jimmy Fallon, circa a decade ago. Well worth a watch, even if you don’t care for the music: it’s a great TV moment, Tyler and Hodgy beats, backed by the Roots and scaring the shit out of middle America with the balaclavas, the garden gnomes and the weird looking girl they demanded in order to appear.
There’s something brilliant about the weird physicality on show here: Tyler has this strange, insectoid way of moving, and an aura of pure danger hanging over him. All arms and legs and menace.
Sandwitches is also a great tune: the weird, lurching beat, the shouts of Wolf! Gang! Wolf Gang!, and most of all the awesome couplet: “The Golf Wang hooligans is fucking up the school again/and showing you and yours it’s cool to break the rules again”. Love it.
Plus. Plus! Mos Def appearing from nowhere at the end, totally buzzed at what he’s just witnessed and shouting “Swag” over and over again for no reason until they go to commercials.
Bonus video in the unlikely event anyone is still with me: Odd Future playing the same track at SXSW in 2011. Insane energy coming off the crowd. So good.
And that’s it. No overarching theme, no real thought given to this post, and very little hook for anyone to respond with anything other than a welter of rotting fruit and bitter remonstrations. Just a short interlude to say that I love music, new and old. I don’t care where it comes from or whether it sounds good to anyone else, so long as it sounds good to me. And – this week – this is what sounds really really good to me.
God, I hope the YouTube links work.
Bonus: here’s a pretty great article on the night Odd Future played Fallon. Well worth a read…
https://www.complex.com/music/odd-future-jimmy-fallon-nbc-10-year-anniversary-interviews
See? You’re doing it again. Infectious enthusiasm, persuasively articulated, bags of boyish charm – but I know if I click on this stuff I’ll feel the usual sucking chest wound of betrayal. Melody as engaging as an amusement arcade. Beats as powerful as tapping a cereal box with a pencil. Production values of a ringtone. All the human warmth of an algorithm. Thank you for the hazmat stickers, Bing!
Top tip I learned many years ago from the inkies: when the review itself is entertaining, never listen to the music in question. It’s a reliable bet that the reviewer is generating their own fun out of necessity, and even if they’re not, it won’t live up to your raised expectations.
Not in this case though, obviously – all of the above is ace.
ISWYDT. Just – no.
“generating their own fun out of necessity” – yep, we’ve all done it.
Tcoh. Arriviste popinjays for millenials. Let’s have some actual grit.
Here’s my latest ear worm:
Very nice. I enjoyed the line about the principalities of unreality. Sound like a good place to vacation.
The whole album is full of bizarre imagery. Their best yet.
Video game music is one of the most lucrative genres these days for a composer to get involved in. It takes tremendous skill to write lots and lots of short pieces that can blend seamlessly into each other as the player progresses through the action.
There’s a very interesting series about it on BBC Radio 3, with interviews with composers etc. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009rfp
Love that Sandwitches Fallon vid.
Now put some more young person’s music recommendations here.