F— the Rules
a blog about songs
Nothing says that my taste in music isn’t that of most people than the fact that about half the plays of Gaze’s Eric Idol on the various music platforms is me playing the 74-second song over and over again for the past ten years. But seriously, what isn’t there to love about this song with its vocals bouncing between the two singers (one of them being Rose Melberg of The Softies et al fame) until it climaxes at “How do you have him at your fingers so?” Yeah?
The high-pitched vocal harmonies of Jeanines’ songs hide the fact that at its core this is a punk band. The three-piece from Massachusetts (recently upgraded from a duo) write simple tunes that are very catchy and, in true punk spirit, often rather short. And why not? If you like the 92 seconds of On and On so much, as I do, why don’t you play it, erm, on and on? Oh, and do go and see them live if you can; I saw them in Paris this summer and they were pretty great to watch – and dance to.
I discovered the largely forgotten Del Shannon through Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!, Bob Stanley’s excellent book on the history of pop music. The late Michigan singer-songwriter sounded as if the Crystals decided to make country music – listen to that high pitched “Why why why why wonder?” here in Runaway. And in case you were wondering: that bridge in the middle of the song is a ‘musitron’, a kind of analog synthesizer which appears to have only ever been used on a few of Del Shannon’s songs. So maybe we shouldn’t have forgotten Del Shannon.
Etran de L’Aïr comes from the Nigerien desert. That is Niger, not the better known Nigeria. The band sings in the local Tuareg language and thus the cd booklet includes lyrics written in the Tifinagh script (as well as a Latin transcription and French and English translations). I think that is cool. I also think their music is really cool. ‘Desert blues’ they call it, but unlike most American blues, this is uptempo, really catchy, and music to dance to, not to mourn a lost love to. Which actually makes sense for what once started off as a wedding band.
Debsey Wykes was one-third of Dolly Mixture, an early 1980s Cambridge band who pushed post-punk towards what later would become indiepop. Being an all-woman band somehow helped with that. About her time in the band, Wykes recently wrote the memoir Teenage Dream. I am terribly behind on reading books so I don’t see myself reading it any time soon, but I do enjoy the reviews, such as this one in the Guardian last week. And of course there’s the music, such as this very teenage and very punk-in-spirit song which has long been my favourite of theirs.
The Primitives — a 1980s indiepop band from Coventry, best known for their minor hit Crash — are playing some 40th anniversary reunion gigs at the moment. That’s awesome if they happen to play near you. This is not The Primitives though. This is Fortitude Valley. A band from the north of England (though with Australian roots) and one of many modern bands on the edgier side of indiepop that are indebted to The Primitives. And this song in particular is as catchy as those were on Crash.
A post on Bluesky by the band reminded us that it would have been Stereolab‘s Mary Hansen’s birthday. Would have been, if it weren’t for the fatal cycling incident she suffered in Dcember 2002. This song, from their 1996 album Emperor Tomato Ketchup, is one of my favourites from the time Mary was in the group. And I’m pretty sure it’s her doing the ‘doo la la’ in the background to Lætitia Sadier French lyrics.
Members from fellow Bay Area artists Ryli and Chime School play on Joel Cusumano’s songs, but this is power pop, not indiepop. So a little bit more muscle and a little less twee. And on this Two Arrows, also a lot of fun: a catchy tune, a rhythm that never loses its pace and vocals and instruments that perfectly respond to each other, resulting in a song that I can’t stop adding to my music player’s queue.
I don’t feel very qualified to describe John Glacier‘s music, but let’s call it a dreamy version of grime. She — look at you assuming her pronouns given her name — lives in London and this song in particular feels very London to me: that feeling of sitting on a mostly empty bus on a rainy evening as it takes you to your destination somewhere in zone 3 or 4 of the Big Smoke. “If you’re looking for respect I’ll drop respect too / We can build a bed of roses on the lawn.”
I hadn’t listened to Estonia’s Pia Fraus (you’ll notice I have a soft spot for artists from ‘unusual’ places) in almost two decades but the band is still going, apparently, having released several albums and singles while I wasn’t paying attention. Pia Fraus made noisy shoegaze long before it became cool and still does, with two new singles out in 2025. I love this one in particular: a simple dreamy pop song covered by several layers of foggy noise.
I took a 12-year break from focusing on music and pretty much the last thing I remembered was that the Pains of Being Pure at Heart were really, really good. And then I came back and they still were, even if they since had disbanded. Last year, the band reunited for a number of gigs though, while this year the great Slumberland Records put out an album with ten songs taken from early singles. The perfect dreamy reflection song Higher than the Stars, originally released in 2009, is my favourite. “Now you can’t think straight / Because you’re not straight”.
The great American satirist and singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer passed away this summer, more than half a century after he quit making music because “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize”. It’s one of many great anecdotes about Lehrer who, incidentally, was also a fellow mathematician. I have a special affinity for this song about Wernher von Braun as the lines “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department’ says Wernher von Braun” are often quoted in discussions around ethics in cybersecurity.
In Tullycraft’s indiepop classic Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend’s Too Stupid to Know About, Sean Tollefson boasts that at least he knows “the difference between a Boscoe and a Bruno”. This is Boscoe, Frank to be exact, formerly of Wimp Factor 14 and The Gazetteers and now in The Ekphrastics. All three make pretty laid back, jangly story-telling indiepop. The former remain my personal favourites, but this is a really nice song in that same vein from the Ekphrastics’ third album that was just released on Harriet Records.
Every week, French newspaper Le Monde shares three African songs from past or present. Which is a good way to keep up with my French and also to discover artists I had never heard of. Such as Ghanean singer Ata Kak, who mixes electro-funk and hiphop with the local music genre of highlife. Daa Nyinaa was originally recorded in 1994 and released on an album of which only three copies were sold (according to a slightly biased Wikipedia page) but his songs have since been rediscovered and streamed millions of times and it’s not hard to hear why.
Music platform Tidal (like Spotify, but your money isn’t supporting AI war) is getting all confused and lists Massage’s records among music to accompany various kinds of relaxing massages. I’ve never felt very comfortable getting those kinds of massages, but — awkward metaphor alert — the kind of dreamy synth pop the Los Angeles band makes accompanies my kind of relaxing. Daffy Duck in particular, a song which they released earlier this year, has those calming late summer, late afternoon vibes that makes you want to play it again and again.
NYC’s Fcukers was founded by two people who, according to Wikipedia, “grew out of” the indie rock they used to play. It’s not for me to say whether the indie dance pop they now make is more grown up, but it’s certainly a lot of fun to listen to. I’ve seen the band being compared with Saint Etienne (who are retiring, so could do with a successor I guess) though this recently released track I Like It Like That is a bit more dance and a bit more less than the British trio. But I like it like that.
New Zealand’s The Beths have released four albums of pretty decent indie rock but this one song humbles the rest of their oeuvre. Mother, Pray For Me is a very stripped-down song in which singer Elizabeth Stokes, accompanied by just a guitar, sings about her mother — a first generation immigrant — and her mother’s relationship with religion. “I don’t have what you have / I don’t seek what you seek / But I’d never take it away / Mother, pray for me”
Madagascar has been in the news a lot lately and as with most of the world, that’s not because things are going great. Let me just suggest you do read up on the news while I share this song by The Dizzy Brains, a garage punk band from the nation’s capital Antananarivo. I love this song, from last year, not just because of its addictive staccato rhythm but also because you can hear how the Malagasy language is closely related to Malay, for the first people to discover the island were Indonesian, not African (and certainly not French!).
I once managed to get Seattle’s twee pop heroes Tullycraft – a band that no one but me in the Netherlands seemed to care about – to play Amsterdam and then as a reward got to spend a whole day with the band. Life as a fan probably never got more exciting than that. Two decades later, Tullycraft is still going strong, each new album containing a few gems. Such as Tarrytown, my favourite of their latest album, with its catchy lyrics full of inner rhyme about being “Lost in the rhyme with the rain keeping time”.
With a few exceptions (Johnny Cash, mostly, and then only some songs) I am not into country music. Yet I absolutely love this song by Tyler Childers (from eastern Kentucky, unsurprisingly) and have been listening to it regularly for months – and even more often find the opening lines (“Back before birthdays were something she dreads / Back before children had settled her friends”) randomly popping up into my head and even start to sympathize with Childers as he tries Oneida to fall for him. (It’s really this song only: I’ve tried more of his songs and they were all pretty meh.)