PopNose V2.0
NYLPM is four years old today, and it’s time to freshen up the format a little bit. What I’ve decided to do is bring PopNose, our MP3 blog, onto NYLPM. Hits ahoy! But PopNose itself wasn’t without its problems, which is why I shut it down in the first place. There was a danger of bandwidth overload, I felt legally somewhat exposed, and besides for all its popularity I had a nagging dissatisfaction with the feature. It wasn’t an ethical thing – our one track per album, 64 kbps zipped MP3s were shoddy and impractical enough to dampen my guilt on that front – so much as a feeling that the format was wrong. It encouraged people to download new music in a kind of voracious algae-harvester fashion, but did it encourage them to listen to it? To discuss it?
Then I remembered something ILM’s Donut Bitch had done a few years ago – a ‘listening chamber’ whereby anonymised MP3s were put up and the ILM readers discussed them ‘blind’. This had been a great idea and I can’t quite remember why it was stopped. Time to nick it, in other words. So here we are – the new PopNose!
THE CONCEPT
We will be putting up (ideally) one MP3 file every day, zipped and Tag-edited so it’s anonymous, and with no info other than discovery credit if we heard about the tune from someone else. The file will be available until the next file goes up (i.e. for about 24 hours). As soon as a file is deleted we will go edit the NYLPM post to reveal the track title, artist, and album info and a short review explaining why whoever chose it likes it, as well as suggesting where you can go and buy a copy.
In the meantime you can comment – and speculate – on the tune here in the comments box. The only request we make is this – if you know what it is, don’t tell! Enjoy your self-satisfaction, post something like “pffft, so obvious, I expected better of you” by all means, but no spoilers please – the truth will be revealed soon enough anyway.
And a final note – these files are as before for evaluation purposes only – we will be deleting them and so should you. They’re only 64 kbps so they’ll sound shit if you burn them anyway!
(Oh, and normal NYLPM service will be carrying on too, of course.)
Without further ado, then –
WIN – “Hollywood Baby Too”: I picked this because Win’s Freaky Trigger album gave this site its name, lo these many years gone. I’ve still not listened to that record since because I dread finding it’s rubbish – this though was my favourite track from their first album, Uh! Tears Baby: A Trash Icon. In the comments box Luc references 1974 and he has a point – what it reminded me of a few years ago was Oasis actually, that decadent Beatley overreach of the Be Here Now period except a whole lot more queeny and plasticky.
Win was an odd thing – a late-doors attempt at New Pop by Davy Henderson, who had been in the Fire Engines. The idea seemed to be to make big, trashy, sexually ambiguous hit singles but it never really worked: even when they ‘sold out’ and put a song in an advert it didn’t do that well. I still like “Hollywood Baby Too” – big dreams on the cheap, if somewhat cynical. You can find Win’s two albums fairly often on vinyl in second-hand shops and you should get change for a pound: on CD they’re a lot rarer, and sadly a reissue seems unlikely since even Henderson doesn’t think much of them now. He’s still doing stuff with The Nectarine No.9 (record company site here; records available from all good etc etc.).
(Come to think of it a Win revival isn’t totally unlikely given the success the Scissor Sisters are having with a not-too-different formula. Hmmmm.)