Why You Shouldn't Bother Picking Up Iggy Pop's 'Asshole Blues' On Record Store Day

Customers, the blues. Simultaneously the most revered and defiled of musics. So much wonder, and so much damage, done in its name. An ongoing trend, unlikely to stop any time soon.

Relatedly, Iggy Pop. So much wonder, and so much damage done in his name – often by his own hand. A man increasingly resembling a piece of weather-bleached driftwood with each round of (still) shirtless photos unleashed on the world. And a seemingly self-destructive nature, career-wise, that somehow keeps you watching like one of those shows of endless dashcam footage of car accidents in slow-motion. So, as if to start undoing the good work of his Josh Homme-led latest revival may we present Asshole Blues (Mag Mag), as the original Stooge simply growls and acoustically strums through expressing his displeasure with someone in his life, something akin to being down at the crossroads in 1927, albeit with a Twitter account. In another sin done in the name of Record Store Day, this will be available on flexidisc (flexidisc!?) if you go order it at your local platter bar, if you really think you need it. Hint: You probably don’t.

If you’re looking for something a little more real, raw, and just damn good let us present Sallisaw Blue (4AD/Remote Control) a stomping road song of weight and presence, and we’re not just referring to John Moreland clocking in at about 130kg. Call it alt-whatever you like, or simply just some form of country and those aforementioned blues coming as delivered through a helluva voice. Yes, he’s a big bugger, and the stomp and feeling of this is real. That it was recorded in a dive bar in Tulsa before opening time, with plumbers working on the pipes in the background, just makes it seem even more right.

Sometimes, the name on the wrapper can be misleading. Rebel Yell seemed to have a whiff of cheap bourbon and one of those shit blues bands with guys still wearing the leather biker jackets they bought in 1982, that now won’t do up over their beer guts. Getting past that line on the email, you find such is not the case. Grace Stevenson makes near-industrial music that can verge on almost oppressive and harsh at times, but High Authority (Rice Is Nice) pins you back in your chair with such assurance you don’t really mind. Her insistent vocals remind you who the boss is. Hint: It isn’t you.

Airling is a totally different type of one-woman band. The title of Give Me All You Got (Pieater) might sound like an order, but Hannah Shepherd makes music that comes at you easily, in waves of gently rolling synths and electronics that is pop for a cloudy afternoon. Similarly, her voice floats across the beds of machines making a construction that piques your curiosity as you feel there’s something more than the obvious going on.

Conversely, sometimes something can seem to have all the ingredients, but might not quite gel. As part of five minute darlings of the mainstream-of-the-alternative Fun, Jack Antonoff felt he needed another – even more poppish – outlet for the songs he was building on his laptop in the back of the tour bus. Thus, this side-project goes under the banner of Bleachers. His bespectacled geeky charm of another white guy who wants to be Prince seems just the thing for the market, and Hate That You Know Me (RCA) follows his previous use of suitably fashionable female voices as counterpoint – Lorde and Grimes, no less – by having the darling of those who claim to love pop in an ironic way, Carly Rae Jepson, present here. Although, if you weren’t told that was her buried among the backing vocals you probably wouldn’t notice her anyway. Sing itself never really seems to get going ‘til it’s just about done. By which time you’ll forget about it soon after. 

If you want a distinctive that can range across a swathe of styles, feel free to welcome back Feist. It might be just me surprised that it’s actually six years since the last work under her own name on the shingle, and even moreso that it’s a decade since 1,2,3,4 irrecoverably lodged itself in your frontal lobes. So, a new Pleasure (Universal). You find yourself perhaps uncomfortably invading her privacy as plucked thought process and questions are interrupted with some neatly gutsy passages muchly suitable for air-guitaring – as she does in the clip. Some mystery remains as to who she is, but this achieves about as much as you can in three-and-a-bit minutes of pop music. 

Some need a few genre bullet-points to even start describing what they’re doing. Sun Sap start off with ‘surf soul psychedelica’ as descriptors, but for Love Is Gone (Independent) add some garage yell to that, and even a blurt of brass that sounds a bit like its escaped from an old Hunters & Collectors tune. They apparently put this odd conglomeration of flavours together on their drummer’s farm, but end up with the kind of song that is bound to be a fixture on community radio playlists soon after you read this. This is what ‘indie’ can be. Whatever that word means. 

In another garage Josh Stewart puts together fuzzy DIY in a manner that somehow makes 15 Years (Footstomp) sound rough, and yet thoughtfully put together. Mr Stewart’s High Tropics is now a properly constituted band unit, that here happily borrows from something like the turn-of-this-century guitar model that would unashamedly mention something like The Strokes – y’know, from when they were good. And from a viewpoint of around 15 years on – see what I did there? – that style still goes all right.