Welcome to the first issue of Swimsounds! Sometimes, there’ll be a fun lil theme, but for now we have a mix of fishbowl classics, and some new Swimsounds on rotation.
Without further adieu.
A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off, The Magnetic Fields
To the brim with whimsy, The Magnetic Fields are a lyrical delight. I wear a shit-eating grin each time they bless my shuffle. The album is called 69 Love Songs.
The chorus. And I quote.
‘Well, my heart's running 'round like a chicken with its head cut off
All around the barnyard falling in and out of love
The poor thing's blind as a bat
Getting up, falling down, getting up
Who'd fall in love with a chicken with its head cut off?
Whoa, Nellie.’
Other honourable mentions from the album go to All My Little Words, which coins the term ‘unboyfriendable.’ There’s also I Don’t Want To Get Over You, which manages to reference ‘dressing in black’, ‘reading Camus’, ‘clove cigarettes’, and ‘making careers out of being blue’, in the span of two minutes and 29 seconds.
Also, can we talk about how The Magnetic Fields used the ukulele, banjo, accordion, cello, mandolin, flute, xylophone and the marxophone on this album? Alongside their usual synths and guitars?
Whoa, Nellie, indeed.
Hey Moon, John Maus
Sounds like a cult-classic, yet Maus has only 17,000 followers on Instagram. Not that followers are a metric for judging great music. If you’re in the know, you’re in the know, and if you aren’t, well, now you are.
The more I research this man, the more mysterious it gets. A former professor of philosophy at the University of Hawaii, with a doctorate in political science and a penchant for emotional displays on stage. Such erratic displays of movement and noise are, according to Maus, associated with the hysterical body, and made in efforts to make his performances more sincere.
I’m not going to pretend to understand the artistic or post-structuralist theory behind his philosophy or music. All I know is that Hey Moon is a misty, contented exhale.
Swingin’ Party, The Replacements
I first came to the Swingin’ Party through Lorde’s cover, a deluxe addition to the seminal Pure Heroine (Bowie doesn’t call you the future of pop music for nothing.) Lorde’s rendition is sultry mulled wine to the spritz and jangle of The Replacement’s new wave. I adore them both in their own right, but nowadays find myself reaching for the levity of the 80s. Bring your own lampshade.
Joey, Concrete Blonde
Well, the whole levity thing didn’t last long.
Joey hails from Concrete Blonde’s 1990 album, Bloodletting, and is the band’s most commercially successful song. The lyrics were bloodletting of their own kind for lead vocalist, songwriter and bass player Johnette Napolitano.
Indeed, so personal to her, it was the last set of vocals recorded for the album. In an interview to Songfacts, Napolitano said, “I knew what I wanted to say, but I wasn’t looking forward to saying it.”
Penned about her relationship with Marc Moreland, former guitarist of Wall of Voodoo, the song reflects on Moreland’s struggles with alcohol and the strain of misuse on their relationship.
I remember my Mum absolutely belting this one on Saturday mornings, mid pancake-flip. Maybe it hit close to home, or maybe it’s just a banger. Either way, consider little me successfully brainwashed influenced.
Under The Milky Way, The Church
Are those bagpipes, I hear you ask?!
I thought so. Until I learnt the EPIC solo at 2:21 was played with an e-bow on a fender jazzmaster and recorded by a synth. (For those of you like me, who love music but aren’t musos themselves and don’t know the tech or the theory… e-bows are little electronic doo-hickeys that attach to string instruments. They vibrate, enabling a note to be held for as long as someone so damn pleases. Neat and quite popular in eighties music.
A song about nothing, according to singer, bass player and writer Steve Kilby. I didn’t know a song about nothing could be so expansive, that it could fill me with so much of everything. The sonic cornerstone of my childhood, to be revered around campfires and cast into the vespertine for years to come.
Touching Glass, Toy Shaw
Frankly, my artist of the year, and she should be yours too. The launch for Shaw’s debut, Trinkets, was held at The Workers Club a few weeks ago. Hands down the best gig I’ve been to since relocating. Described as ‘Melbourne’s only electro-country-murder-ballad-lesbian’, what’s not to love?!
And her pen truly is lethal.
‘Four in the morning
The spell spent scoring
I try to sleep but never tire
Sun nearly drawn in
The room's distorting
And I turn my finger round the wire
Then God caught a splinter
Behind the mirror
Resembling you
Memory of gazing
That I had been saving
You can see it in my face, too.’
Genre-evasive and versatile, yet distinctive, with razor sharp lyricism and the vocals of a midwestern siren. I IMPLORE you. Go to one of her shows. Thank me later.
In Undertow, Alvvays
I discovered In Undertow in October last year, in an old friend’s car, rolling along Marine Parade, sun-drenched in a setting Fremantle horizon. Canadian indie-dream-pop band Alvvays detail a failing relationship, with no choice but to let go and submit to the current.
In the liminal months packing up my life in preparation to move away from my home state, I very much felt in undertow. Career, relationships, health, family, you name it, it felt fucked. Like duct-taping a saturated newspaper of my own mistakes back together and attempting to read it. Without glasses. From a distance, everyone just thinks you’re keeping up with the news. Get a little closer and you notice the pages are disintegrating, there’s ink stains everywhere and I’m squinting so hard I get a migraine.
Fast forward almost a year, and all things considered, I’m livin’ da vida loca. This song is dialectic of my angst and my hope in departure.
Parachute, Hayley Williams
It’s not so much what Hayley sings, as it is how she sings it. Her anguish is palpable. Bleeds through cracks in her voice.
‘You could’ve told me not to do it, I would’ve run?!’ 'I would have done anything?!’ ‘I thought you were gonna catch me? I never stopped falling for you?’
Simple, honest, so fucking sad. A lament for what could have been, straight off the back of Hayley’s newest solo album, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party.
(If you ever find out what’s happening with Hayley and Taylor, for the love of god, I don’t want to know.)
Prom, Boyish
Lead vocalist India Shore and guitarist Claire Altendahl’s vocals are a soul ascension akin to the Cocteau Twins. Cherry-coloured Funk’s gay little sibling, Prom is Yearning with a capital Y.
In an interview to Shorefire, Shore and Altendahl explain the universe of Gun, the title of their debut album released on September 12.
“Gun is a fictional town, based on the surreal experiences we’ve had driving across middle-of-nowhere USA over the past three years… The album is a love story set against the backdrop of this town, like it’s the set of a play. While there is a story, what’s more important is the atmosphere we tried to create. We wanted the listener to feel like they’re stepping into a physical place, a self-contained world, and know by the time the last song ends, something in the town has changed forever. This is not a pro-gun album, it’s a pro-Gun album.”
Another honourable mention from the album is Doing It Behind The Marching Band. Hell, not just ‘honourable.’ This, headphones and a dark room. Goosebumps.
I’ve loved Boyish since the My Friend Mica days of 2022, but the duo have been cooking up music in their Brooklyn apartment since the pandemic. Billboard dubs them as ‘the next big thing in the queer indie scene’ and if this album is anything to go by, they’ll tour Australia soon. At least I hope so.
Don’t You Want To Sleep With Someone Normal, Love Fame Tragedy
Love Fame Tragedy is the solo project of The Wombats frontman, Matthew Murphy. Murphy ingratiates himself with ever self-deprecating English humour. As if the title wasn’t enough, let me rattle off the album titles. Life is a Killer. Wherever I Go, I Want To Leave. Five Songs To Briefly Fill The Void. I Don’t Want To Play The Victim, But I’m Really Good At It.
The song even incorporates complaints from his wife via voicemail.
‘Matthew, the request still stands. Pick. Up. Dog. Food. Today, Matthew, please. Ok. Bye.’
Whether Matthew is writing about himself, or a persona - he’s a mess and he knows it. I’d like to hope I myself am not, in fact, a mess, but that chorus is a little too relatable. If you like The Wombats, you’ll like this.
I keep editing this bad boy and cringing, but one of the points of this lil ‘ol bowl is that I get used to putting my thoughts out into the ether once more. Whether they’re sensical or articulate or relatable or interesting or evocative or funny or not. (More on that later.)
So if you made it this far, thanks for reading! Hope I’ve given you an earworm or two. Can you feel it crawling around in there? Ew.
If you have recommendations for me, or would like to suggest a theme for a future issue of Swimsounds… the comments exist! There’s the button!
Boyish! Hayley Williams! I adore you
John Maus be rocking me to sleep like a big baby!