Mike Hause – So It Goes
Malcolm McLaren, in his infinite wisdom and with his impish instincts, designed his Sex Pistols to be what he called “sexy assassins.” Now, bondage trousers aside, a more fitting description, perhaps, would be “fashionable revolutionaries,” kids who looked and seemed to know more about the world than their parents did.
And what was The Revolution proposing? An acceptance of the decline of the Empire, a willingness to accept the great nothingness. It was charisma-driven nihilism, but The Revolution was all but abandoned. Turns out that people like this world, dumb and corrupt as it is, more than they would’ve liked living in the Middle Ages or through WWII, as the fathers of the Sex Pistols had done.
If that feels about right, then you may well be thrilled to hear Mike Hause’s “So It Goes,” a pop tune about gratitude. Nah, this isn’t the church-endorsed anthem you might expect. In fact, this is clever and bittersweet the whole way around. It’s also melodically contagious and entirely non-revolutionary. It’s a song about how the world today is pretty wonderful in a lot of important ways, and, once in a while, it’s nice to think about those.
Brave Magnetic – Still Here
The past is in the past, and there’s no reason to just stand by and cry over it, or write over-emotional tributes to it. Things have to change, and people have to learn to accept this and take the punches. I say this because I don’t want you to think either me or Brave Magnetic are the kind of people to be obsessed with retro-pop.
All I’m saying is that you ought to know and recognise when what you’ve been buying for years has had the recipe changed so that it includes fewer of the ingredients that used to make it what you sought in the first place. Pop music’s gotten kinda dull and, frankly, a little dumb and basic.
Brave Magnetic is only looking at the past as a way to guide the band’s music toward the future. “Still Here” is a song that’s built around sophisticated melodies and chord progressions. It’s a song that benefits from a warm, expansive production treatment. And it does all this while being more than just a demonstration, but an anchor toward that old pop recipe that worked so well and cost so much to produce. This is what we still need!
