The Single Life: The Verdict On The Latest From Sufjan Stevens, Fatboy Slim, Billie Eilish & More

Sometimes things are just in the zeitgeist. Or just waiting to be plucked from the ether. Or apparently struggled with for many years. Or can sometimes just dovetail nicely with the new movie that has ‘our’ Margot Robbie up for a variety of Golden Globes, SAGs, and with the obligatory ‘Oscar buzz’. Sufjan Stevens has always done a nice line in character studies – up to and including chronicling his own family as he did in Carrie & Lowell. But apparently he’s struggled with working out the slightly screwball American tragedy of Tonya Harding (Asthmatic Kitty) for a couple of decades. Eventually he’s come up with this seemingly sincere observational cautionary tale, rather than skating on the thin ice (see what I did there…?) and giving it the too-ironic take that someone like Father John Misty may have put on it. But Stevens does give himself the option of two versions: a grander comic opera take and a softer stripped back variant, where the truism that “The world is a bitch, girl…” is more a resigned sigh than a fist shaken at the fates.

And sometimes the judging panel gets it just right. The awarding of the Grant McLennan songwriters’ prize to Jeremy Neale just kinda fits. For the artist sometimes known as Sega Dreamboat does have that mix of wry amusement with the world and everything in it and a craftsman’s skill in making the pop music. It what could be the ‘See ya later…’ Post-It note on the fridge before the awarded cash allows him to settle in New York, London or Berlin for a while, he gets in the yuletide spirit (sort of…) with Christmas (Turn This Around) (Remote Control) which he says is a seasonal song for those who don’t much like this time of year. I’m with ya, kid. But eventually love conquers most, and a toy piano solo takes it home as it should.

For those longing for simpler times, Kitty, Daisy & Lewis present their Christmas tune live from their studio, where the equipment, musical style, and even the decorations are still referencing somewhere around 1959. Just One Kiss (Sunday Best) has the guitar a’twanging and piano a’twinkling as the conventions would have it – complete with the bad taste jumpers of the season that makes it something of a relief that we celebrate Santa’s delivery of the baby Jesus as the temperature heads upward to the melting point of pudding. This is the Durham siblings mostly unadorned – except for those appalling sweaters – which is maybe a better approach that the fiddling with their own form they sometimes resort to.

Particularly among the somewhat less relevant than they were British music press, they’re always looking for the next thing – usually when their last thing has become commercially successful. Thus, various outlets want to start having Billie Eilish as ‘the new Lorde’. But good lord people, we’re not even done with the last one yet. True, Ms Eilish is one of those freakishly precocious talents – she’s just turned 16, for god's sake – with a fearsome awareness of self, and the swallowed vocals coming over electronic beds that can change gears and ideas from verse to verse. &Burn (Interscope/Bossy) comes with bonus rap flavours and cred from Gorillaz guest and Sprite lemonade spokesperson Vince Staples to further send the UK pundits into paroxysms for at least the next four minutes.

Similarly, some of those same tastemakers have decided the reference points for Goat Girl could be our own Courtney Barnett – with a side order of The Fall just to spice up the mix for various generations. OK, sure. So, Scream (Rough Trade) is slightly more grumpy in its world view, the conversation not as charmingly offhand as our Courts can be. Look closer, and they are of an older-style DIY indie scene of warehouses and gigs in friends’ homes, with feminist hints that should probably have them placed more alongside something like our Camp Cope. But the Poms don’t know enough about the quality of them. Yet.

One who does know at least some of what’s going on here is the venerable Fatboy Slim, who’s decided for an upcoming tour here to take on the whole nation. Thus, Norman invites various antipodeans to have a fiddle with various of his previous works on an EP called, rather descriptively, Vs Australia – which comes complete with Reg Mombassa artwork to make it feel even more local. First sample of same is our Kite String Tangle taking to Praise You (Skint), and once you get past the feeling you’re getting old when its pointed out the original happened in 1999, you find an interesting alternative view of the tune. KST’s Danny Harley makes the gospel feeling rather more ethereal and airy. It’s softer, echoey – and hopefully can be part of my personal 2018 campaign to remove the term ‘banger’ from the musical vernacular. You’re welcome.

And, generous chap that he is, Donny Benet has also left us with a new year’s gift suitable for playing as the morning after the fireworks eve before takes hold. Melodie (Dot Dash) has a strange feeling as it unfolds, almost recalling – of all things – an almost Steve Kilbey-like tone to Donny’s conspiratorial whisper-to-a-croon post-coital musing as he strolls to the pool deck, where he’s left a towel on the sunlounge to reserve it before the German tourists got there. Things roll along gently yet inexorably because, as ever, he has thought of everything.