Tomorrow (the exact +/- 24 hours I am not sure, but anywhere from around 6 hours to 26 hours I would guess), mM7th is going to release their 7th single and I have it pre-ordered.
Before it hits, though, let’s go back to their 6th single and jam out to nice city pop with a very slight touch of funk in the bassline with that slap of a voice, “Two of a Kind“:
I’m going to be honest, even knowing what this song is about I am not 100% sure what it is about? Met someone in the ER and then tried to hit it off during a moment of medical distress? Is Flower Shower Girl a person, a song, or the laundry detergent?
Eh, it’s all good. It’s a great single-take [probably with some trickery] video filmed right in a live street with a twee kidnapping plot and some awesome knit headware.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
Brandy Senki, a frequent feature on the Music Video Picks series, has returned with a new single, “Blood♡Sparks“:
Probably a full contender for2026’s catchiest song about flirtation through vehicular homicide. Let’s see what the last couple of months of the year might bring, though.
Really enjoy the aesthetic of the video and the song is a perfect continuation of the Brandy Senki style.
The one “downside” is that I have spent too long watching Backroooms/etc- style lore and hidden secrets videos this past couple of weeks so I found myself scanning all the various posters and pictures in the background to see if there were any hidden messages.
From around 1:29
Are those two maps down below? 7pm? Wednesday or October 24? What could it all mean!? [Doug’s Note: They do have a concert on 24 Oct coming up and nothing scheduled for Wednesday, 21 Oct…wink…]
Also, HUGE CAVEAT, I don’t care how cute they are…if the cute person asks you to run over somebody: deny absolutely everything. Even if they promise kissy time.
For real for real…
Good luck, Space Pilgrims.
EDIT: Oh, almost forgot. For some reason the song has two versions on iTunes with one marked “Explicit” and the other not. I got the uncensored version but I’m not sure what the difference is [if any]. Might take a day or two for it to filter up [no pun intended].
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
Which brings me to a video that is a bit different than their rest, and an inspiration for all of us wanting to share ice cream with our besties, Scandal’s “Koisuru Universe”:
It’s not their most watching video and not my favorite song from even the same album, Honey, but as one of the top comments used to say: “It is a vibe.”
My second favorite comment I have seen said something like, “When the singer is late to band practice, the band has to figure out something to pass the time.”
With about finally meeting someone that makes it all make sense and not even God can interfere with the attraction between them… I don’t, maybe it’s a metaphor.
At any rate, it is a vibe.
Anyhow, Space Pilgrims, if you want to know: my favorite song from that album is is probably “Take Me Out.” Might be my favorite Scandal song of all time. I don’t really know. They have had a lot of good ones. I’m going to have to deep dive and see how it goes.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
Ok, maybe not so much about cilantro but about being a taste that stands out — for better and worse — rather than something that other people offer. It’s a cute way of using a well-understood food metaphor to flirt.
I support this.
And Veno is a queen of food-based flirtations. From the more obvious “Midnight Lu Rou Fan” to the somewhat subdued request to sip some orange juice in “Don’t Stop the Thrill.”
I really like this song. Ok, NOW…now I’ll try and get through the backlog.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
I have survived a second week of a band-spotlight and this roughly wraps up the first month of this [I skipped a couple of days and weekends] so let’s get to the Durry Week finisher, “Dead Media“:
“Dead Media” started out a bit differently. It was originally a hidden track on their physical copies of This Movie Sucks: a celebration of “owning” songs and not just streaming them.
Now, of course, it has succumbed to the pressure of Spotify and the like, but for a brief-ish moment it was a testament to its own lyrics before it became a testament to its own lyrics:
I’m an addict I admit it But it’s how I make a living Selling cheap tricks But I got it A few more seconds Of your life I’m like a vampire For your time
It is an odd moment for the more socially aware artists to realize that they are part of the noise that they often write against. In another Durry song, “Bully,” we hear the lyrics:
Greetings people of the internet It’s your friend from the real world I’ve been reaching out trying to make contact But all I’m getting back Are really mean comments
Only Durry is not your friend from the real world. At least, not for the majority of us. For most of us, Durry is very much so a band we found through streaming sites and Youtube. Being addicted to the “cellphone light” is how we learned the joy of listening to Durry.
From a whole other artist, you could see Grandson’s “Brainrot,” a video that might feature in the next round so I won’t deep dive too hard. We get a lyric talking about people with their new smartphones having batteries “mined by a kid in a warzone.” Only, smartphone users are Grandson’s target audience.
It is a dissonance rampant in this current era. I can rant about The Algorithm™ all I want but without it, no one will find this blog. Without it, I would never have had Durry’s “Who’s Laughing Now?” or Grandson’s “Blood/Water” recommended to me.
I imagine I am a good bit below the average phone usage of many modern people — it’s not like being on a desktop all day really makes a huge difference, mind — but that phone which represents capitalism at its spikiest and the potential death of a future is also a gateway to a potential better future.
One where we own our own dead media before the AI chatbots buy it all up to consume it and destroy it. The bastards.
Also, Spotify sucks. I use Youtube Music (technically, more like I use Youtube [obvs] and some of the stuff is a byproduct of YTM) so I’m being a hypocrite but they mostly all suck. Pandora at least tried paying people. I…think…Qobuz is ok. Nice FLACs is the only way I use it.
For real, Space Pilgrims, go and buy your shit and then curate and show it off and share it and stuff. Stop letting AI-generated playlists replace your control over your own media. You’ll be dead soon enough.
We are being trained to listen to artists who are being trained to beg us for likes just to keep making art while AI-bros who own the platforms are shilling the heat death of the artistic universe.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
Frankly, it was a three-way tie between “IDK I Just Work Here,” “This Movie Sucks,” and “A Little More Dumb.” I think I like the song for “Movie” more, and the lyrics for “Dumb” more, but the combination of song + video edges out to “Work”.
It is another in their outstanding oeuvre of working class Millennial songs:
They don’t own me They just own the only thing that’s keeping me alive They swear that’s not a threat Cause I could always starve to death I guess I’ll pledge allegiance to the paycheck
The final song is already locked and loaded and next week we return to the backlog, but in between I have an idea for something special to do.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
This song is in between their two albums and shows some degrees of transition between those two moments. Surburban Legend grew out of a few years of singles and shifts. By contrast, This Movie Sucks was a year of a much more concentrated effort.
And, again, in the middle, is a song about feeling like you are supposed to still be a kid when you are also expected to be an adult:
I love dungeons and dragons In the basement with my friends Everybody’s got commitments It’s getting hard to plan
And everyday I’m playing dress up Go to work and play pretend That I grew out of it But I can’t
We’ll be Teenagers forever But not forever young Always on the cusp of growing up But it’s never quite enough
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little) though it started as “daily”. It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see at least the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
If you have heard of Durry, you have probably heard of “Who’s Laughing Now?“, their most viral hit, so I am not going to share that one. Instead, I am going to share…
“Who’s Laughing Now?” was a hit in our household, no doubt. I’m almost positive it was the first Durry video I saw and it was a case of instant love. The argument about whether or not to get a face tattoo lives, as the kids say, rent free in my head…at least some days:
However, it was “Loser’s Club” [yesterday’s pick] and “Coming of Age” that were my Durry-songs-of-choice. I played them both a whole lot. I still play them both a whole lot. I have designed entire music videos about “Coming of Age” in my head.
I also like the idea of having two different songs about coming of age stories on this blog.
A lot of what I enjoyed about this one was the subversion of the traditional “coming of age” from a teen to third-life crisis. A resonance, if you will, with the feelings a lot of us were going through post-COVID-19’s initial blast when we were returning to normal and realizing that the normal didn’t have to be precisely the normal and maybe “normal” was a code-word for “abusive relationship with society”…
Back to the rat race run in place. I just spin my wheel till my my next lunch break. And hope it gets better with a five cent raise.
But I can’t stop until I get paid.
I don’t know which is worse, the commute or the hearse. I don’t think that it’s worth it anymore. Sick of living for the paycheck. Blow it on the weekend. I’m giving up and loading up the briefcase.
I should have known better than to think that this could change.
I should have seen the pattern, how disconnected I became.
Climbing that corporate ladder.
If you need somebody to take the blame: you can call me a quitter.
But I’m calling it a coming of age.
Even as a person who was happy with his job — and I would be shocked and awed if most people wouldn’t essentially agree, disdain requires something of a minority condition to sustain1 — the fun of a certain type of punk attitude is fist-in-the-air, beer in hand, and shouting “FUCK IT” to everything for a full four-minute song.
That kind of joyful rebellion is rampant in Durry and I love them for it.
In the same way that if the shortcut was easy it would just be the way, true disdain requires it to be much more trouble to fix than to let it roll. ↩︎
Despite my initial plan, most likely going to skip the “performer of the week” thing for at least one week after this one just so I can get more backlog out.
The link I copy and pasted for the all posts up until now were slightly malformed in that they came from Youtube but somehow I copy and pasted them wrong. Depending on the browser, and Youtube’s mood, it might work or might not work. Those should all be fixed now with the corrected link that shows up with this one.
Look, I listen to a lot of Japanese Alternative Rock and Shoegaze but it’s less that it is the Japanese (though I appreciate that, as well) and more that I like a particular type of music. This morning, unrelated to this, I was trying to think up a way to describe it and this is what I came up with:
I like alternative rock music where the voice is another type of guitar and the lyrics are the right amount of ironic. Where I can listen to the lyrics closely and really enjoy them but I can also tune them out and treat the track like a instrumental with an almost subliminal sense of introspection. My favorite music is the bit where both truths are true at the same time.
Durry I think fits this. I love a lot of Durry lyrics. I love the Durry siblings’ singing. I also just like the song as a whole, as a vibe.
They have done some creative marketing and video design but for the start I thought it was good to go back five years ago to a brother-and-sister duo on a merry-go-round in what I assume is their local park. In what must of have been the waning days of COVID lockdowns and that broad hope folks were feeling in the 2021 summer. In that light, lyrics like this just resonate, you know?
I said this time last year that we’d be gone but we’re still here Just waiting for our turn to go but no one seems to notice We’re still swimming upstream with the best of us Another summer passes by like water through our fingers Crow’s feet creep a little deeper, creasing like a piece of paper But origami never seemed so beautiful
NOTE: the “swimming upstream” line which is a bit awkwardly given in the video (and the original version of the song) does not actually feature in the album version of the song. I think it was the only cut line but honestly I have not fully double checked.
It is a shockingly simple video to make but both of them are so damned gorgeous and seem to be having so much fun.
Fun which does not forget to inject a bit of irony…
What’s the point of living if you never strive for more? But I’m not keeping score
This will be a bit of spoilers for the tracks I will pick but some videos that I won’t be featuring this week that tap into the “just a couple of siblings having fun” vibe if you want more of that include:
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube. No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
It is dumb hot in Belgium today and I’m ready to sit down with an iced tea in front of a fan and watch TV with Kaz so I’ll keep this pretty quick. The final entry in the Brandy Senki week of MVP is “No More!“:
I’ve been pretty sure I was going to end with this one from the beginning but as I went through each of the other posts I realized it was increasingly fitting. We’ve seen the heartbreak of goodbye with “Last Live,” the fear of growing up with “Coming of Age Story,” and multiple takes on toxic love but “No More!” stands out as a video where the band says, well, no more.
Now, how well the “won’t look back” of the lyrics will actually stick…
…we’ll see whenever they get around to writing a second album or new EP but for now I want to choose to believe it.
For at least this moment, Brandy Senki is taking full control of their destiny and hopefully are having fun doing it.
You also get an entire Instagram Reel of photos flashing by a light speed. You can slow it down if you want to see them but sometimes its fun to just let your brain pick things out over a few watches.
Next week will be another Band Week and yes I know which one, but let’s see which one it is next Monday.
My Music Video Picks [MVP] is a series of posts highlighting various music and dance videos from Youtube (usually). No particular schedule (sometimes lots, sometimes little). It might not even all be music or dance videos. Absolutely picked by me, though. Usually I have to like both the song and the video, but we’ll see.
You can see the most recent songs here: [Doug’s] Music Video Picks [Youtube Playlist]. Size of that list will change as the mood strikes. Playlist might contain spoilers for unpublished posts. Just enjoy.
