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.)
I first came across this site while searching for a CD copy of the “Uh Tears…” album, which I remembered as a lost pop masterpiece from 1987. I got hold of a copy and, it’s still a great pop album, but it’s VERY dated.
“Hollywood Baby Too” is my favourite track too, but I don’t know anyone else who can abide it. I think you’ve got to give it a chance – there’s a lot going on in there, and without the will to see it through I could see why casual listeners might just wander off.
Most people, of course, only know “You’ve Got The Power”, and then only because of the advert and its appearance on a free NME cassette. It is still one of the great unexplained mysteries of our times how it was never a huge hit. The album got a heavy push from London records at the time, with huge displays in the Virgin Megastore in London, which is where I bought my original cassette copy. Surely a re-release of the poppiest track could have paid dividends?
I understand this may all have been discussed before, before the earlier comments were lost, but I’d be interested to hear other people’s opinions on this.
“Hollywood Baby Too” – complex pop masterpiece or dog’s breakfast?
and Tom, if you haven’t re-listened to “Freaky Trigger” yet, don’t!
I still haven’t!
Both “You’ve Got The Power” and the album sold heavily in Scotland – after all, the song was used in a McEwan’s advert – but the sales never really happened down South…
Spooky, I found this album during a recent tidy of my music collection. Although I remember the Tennant’s album I only got the album fairly late on (1994, maybe. On casette) but I still listened to it fairly constantly around that time and wasn’t bothered by the very 80s production on it. I’m not sure what I’d think now, but I imagine(hope!) I would still be favourable. And I’m afraid that Hollywood Baby too was my favourite too (You’ve Got The Power and Charms probabaly running it a close second).
I’m always faintly surprised that I’ve yet to see anyone cite them as an influence. As someone who loves the “clever” end-of-pop, I would have always thought someone else I liked must have dug what they were doing.
I think DJP may have hit the nail on the head, in that, success-wise, Win were a purely Scottish phenomenon, and they probably didn’t really take hold south of the border.
Their songs were big and ambitious, certainly clever, but they didn’t always work, but when they did (as they did on most of the first album), they were up there with the very best in late 80s pop. I believe they had record-label problems in between their two albums, which delayed the second by a year or so, thus losing whatever momentum they may have built up.
I’ve never heard Win quoted as an influence, but the Fire Engines certainly are, regularly (although again, their sphere of influence may be rather Scotland-centric). Among the most obvious, there was a one-off collaboration with Franz Ferdinand a couple of years ago.
Sorry to re-awake this long-dead thread, but if anyone is still looking for a CD copy of “Freaky Trigger”, it’s recently been re-issued by RPM with four extra tracks.
It’s still only their second-best album (of two), and if you haven’t listened to it yet, Tom, I’m not sure you should do so now.
Davy Henderson is still making interesting music with his new project, the not-very-commercially-named “Sexual Objects”. Their recent LP had a few moments which harped back to this sound.
Thanks VS! I was quite tempted to pitch a review of the record to places but thought I shouldn’t break my embargo.