Watch out, Courtney Barnett's about

Aussie alt-rocker Courtney Barnett has taken a break from recording her second album to gift us with a new song, How To Boil An Egg, which is actually not new at all, but eight years old.

"I used to perform this song at all the open mics when I was 21," she said. "It never got recorded, so for personal-posterity I updated it and made this version recently when I was bunkered up in the bush doin’ some demos for my next album. It's a songwriting experiment that doesn’t really belong anywhere else."

Based around a slack rockabilly riff, the song is further proof Barnett's innate lyrical abilities, painting a vivid picture of an artist on the skids. "All my clothes in milk crates, I don't sleep for days," she sings. "Ah, tell me, tell me, tell me / When's it gonna change?"

Tweet

Listen to Lana Del Rey's North Korea song

Last month, while driving home from the Coachella Music Festival, Lana Del Rey stopped to write a song about her "complex feelings" after "spending the weekend dancing whilst watching tensions w North Korea mount."

It went. A little. Something. Like this:

A post shared by Lana Del Rey (@lanadelrey) on Apr 15, 2017 at 2:39am PDT

Last night, she released a finished version of the track which may or may not be taken from her fourth-coming album, Lust For Life. It's no great artistic leap forward but Lana is medically incapable of writing an uncatchy song.

Lyrically, she likens the loved-up atmosphere of Coachella to the "socially-conscious" (smashed off their tits) punters at Woodstock in 1969. The hope and optimism for humanity is still present, she suggests, but the world is still pretty awful.

Then Lana describes what she would give up (everything) in order to go to heaven and sit next to God, going: "WTF, God?"

It's better than my description makes it sound.


Oh, and if you'd like to squint at some handwritten lyrics while playing the above video, then you're in luck.

New song: Coachella- Woodstock in my mind https://t.co/I4JJ8CP2e6 pic.twitter.com/s8cplnW9QI

— Lana Del Rey (@LanaDelRey) May 15, 2017

Tweet

Haim Time comes to SNL

Haim's new single Want You Back is the definition of a slow-burner. Its overlapping harmonies and stop-start structure take time to assimilate and appreciate. But there's no better catalyst to catchiness than seeing the band perform it. You rarely see a group enjoy the business of playing live quite this much; and this SNL appearance just pops off the screen.

Not sure what's going on with Dash's drums, though. The hi-hats seem cluttered and off-tempo - but he seems to be playing in time. Did someone accidentally run his mic through a reverb or delay effect? It's minor blemish but I found it distracting...

Tweet

Katy Perry's Bon Apetit video is an odd kettle of fish

Things are not going well for Katy Perry's new single, Bon Apetit. After scraping into the charts at number 40 last week, it fell to 43 in yesterday's countdown.

Worse still, it's on a downwards trajectory in the streaming chart (where songs tend to pick up plays in the second week), languishing at 56 - just one place above Perry's Chained To The Rhythm, which is now eight weeks old.

For the second single off a yet-to-be-released album by one of the world's few remaining pop stars, that's a worrying state of affairs: Bon Appetit isn't simmering under, it's gone completely off the boil.

And it's a dreadful shame, because to my mind this is one of her best singles in a while. Sure, she's abandoned the promised "social justice warrior" persona and reverted to type with a single-entendre lyric about oral sex ("I'm spread like a buffet," ho ho); but the chorus is pure pop sugar.

Maybe her headline appearance at Radio 1's Big Weekend can turn the song's fortunes around - because the bizarre video, in which a Katy is basted, garnished and put on display as a human smorgasbord, certainly won't get much daytime play on the music channels.

It's up to 8.5million views on YouTube already, so all is not lost. But still, what a strange time it must be in the Katy Perry camp.

PS All I could think of when I watched the video was old Bugs Bunny cartoons. Surely I'm not the only one?

Tweet

Video: Honeyblood - Walking at Midnight

Scottish rockers Honeyblood have just released a video for Walking At Midnight, my favourite track from their audacious second album, Babes Never Die.

It's definitively a post-watershed sort of affair. Imagine Stephen King's Carrie set in a drag club, and you're basically there. It was directed by James Copeman and stars drag artist Virgin Xtravaganzah... a name I bet Richard Branson wishes he'd copyrighted in 1972.

Tweet

The National are top of my #NewMusicFriday playlist

Here it is, then. My (almost) weekly trawl through the release schedule, in which gems are uncovered and turds are buried.

1) The National - The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness
Standing head and shoulders above everything else this week, The National's new single is a swirling vortex of indie curlicues, which builds to a brassy climax, where Matt Beringer declaims: "I can't explain it any other, any other way".

He's described it as "an abstract portrait of a weird time we’re in". I'm just calling it beautiful.




2) Miley Cyrus - Malibu
In which Miley says, "forget the tongue-wagging, boob-baring, perma-twerking controversy magnet, I am in fact an delicate and innocent country-pop crossover artist."

And, to be fair, it works.




3) Calvin Harris - Rollin' (ft Future and Khalid)
"Bubbling summery discofunk" seems to be the theme for Calvin's recently-announced fourth album Funk Wav Bounces Vol 1 (awful title). This latest single would sound great at any poolside party, which shows how far Calvin has come since he emerged as a pasty-skinned teenager from Dumfries.




4) Imagine Dragons - Whatever It Takes
There's something of the Ed Sheeran about the way Dan Reynolds rap-sings the verses of this song, but it rises above that comparison with a truly fist-pumping chorus.

The middle 8 contains a lot of lyrics about punctuation, for some reason.




5) Felix Jaehn - Hot2Touch (ft Hight, Alex Aiono)
A bit of disco fluff that merits inclusion for the lyric "my heart's like a broken cassette".




6) Harry Styles - From The Dining Table
Harry Styles debut album is out today - and I wrote about it at length on the BBC this morning. In brief, it's a stodgy 1970s rock album with a few moments of real beauty. The closing track is one of my favourites, featuring one of Styles' most delicate and heartbroken lyrics; and a beautiful string interlude in the middle.




7) DNCE ft Nicki Minaj - Kissing Strangers
This has been out for a while, but gets an entertaining new video today, so in it goes...




8) Sub Focus ft Alma - Don't You Feel It
A solid, if somewhat unremarkable, summer jam.




9) Now, Now - SGL
US radio station NPR described this as "a heart-throbbing pop song with a karaoke-bar blast radius", and who am I to argue?




10) Sigrid - Don't Kill My Vibe (Live on Later)
This is a bit of a cheat, because Sigrid's EP came out last week. But this Jools Holland performance is one of those "oh, I get it now" moments, where the singer's charisma bursts through the screen and brings the song vividly to life.

Which, it turns out, is exactly why she sparked a record label bidding war last year - and there's a fascinating account of how Island beat the competition to get her signature over on Music Business Worldwide.

And that's your lot. Not a vintage week, by all accounts. But don't forget the Paramore album is out today, which kind of makes up for everything else.

Tweet