Okay to preface this, I think all five of the picks are really pretty good, it is a strong week. I think most of the the time they would all have got like second or third at worst other than Vicetone's track (which on a bad week would still get my pick).
Lindsey Stirling is strong even for her, she gets a real Psycho/Toccata and Fugue vibe going with chorus. It is a cheesy but fun film clip.
Asura is just a nice chill trance track and is exactly the kind of thing that is fantastic to listen to while you work. It isn't earth shattering but I was confident it would be the best electronic track of the week (I was wrong again).
Tonight Alive is late 90s early 200s numetal as fuck and you know I love that shit. They also look like thei got their fashion straight out of Bombfunk MCs Freestyler. I dig it.
Vicetone's is the weekest but is still pretty decent. It rides on the instrument choices for me, but some bonus points for the anthem at 1 minute dropping into a quick Crescendo before doing a full bass drop at,you guessed it,1:20.
Oliver Heldens and Throttle is my favourite of the five, some of it is the bomb arse video, it's just neat and fun to see so many different kinds of dancing in one clip. It is a nice track.
However, Bowie is my favourite artist of all time. Not favourite musician. Favourite artist. He has meant so much to me.when I was very young, Labyrinth was an important touchstone, when I was growing up he was just one of those ever present sort of figures that I knew I should know more of. I knew that a lot of musicians I liked were big into him (being a Nirvana fan and all), but once I got into Universityi picked up my first Bowie album and was blown away by. It wasn't one of the original classics everyone loves, although a few isolated tracks picked up in a vacuum like Let's Dance, John I'm Only Dancing and The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell (a key track to the Stigmata soundtrack,put together by Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins fame) did help push me to buy an album, it was Heathen from 2002 that got me obsessed with someone that has been ever present and shaped half my life. Which is a bit odd given I am me and Bowie has a whole concept album that was written to be a soundtrack to 1984, Man Who Sold The World.
Specifically
5:15 The Angels Have Gone is the track that spoke to me. It is a wistful song about melancholy and inevitable change of life. It presents it in a mix of having missed divine beings and the banality of public transit. Tied together with a really conservative percussion section and that classic wall of sound during the chorus. I realised that this man with albums from the 60s who had a revival in the 80s and wrote a couple of tracks I liked in the 90s had just 2 years earlier put out so hint completely different to all of those and instead of it being an upbeat dance party track like I knew him for was this deep touching melancholic piece (which is especially great when you are a "deep" teenager/20 something nerd). It still speaks to me today. At the time I thought Heathen was this big breakout album for him where he was really just doing what h wanted after years of fame seeking.
I was wrong on both points, Bowie always did whatever the fuck he wanted to do (some of that was fame chasing...) and while I think I was right in that Heathen is the first his success in a series of albums right up to Blackstar that are self reflective easy listening albums that are much more focused on quality songwriting than pushing boundaries, '...hours' from 1999 is a mosh mash of things like Heathen is in entirety and leftovers from Earthling his (underrated and in my supremely biased opinion very successful) 90s dance album really trying to push the boundaries of what electronic party tracks can be (so successful that he did I'm Afraid of Americans off it with Trent Reznor on it). Regardless though it remains one of the more important albums of his to me and 5:15 The Angels are Gone one of my most important tracks of his. Neither at his best but they are both very good.
So when David Bowie dies, releases a song named after the man that came back from the dead, the song opens up with "I'm up here in heaven", is about him dying and how he will live on afterwards. Yes. That is the track I am going to want to share with everyone, along. With everything else he has written that meant something to me. That is something off all 25 studio albums. Even the retroactively weirdly stock so undoing self titled first album.
I could spend the next month happily linking different tracks everyday that I am rediscovering and falling in love with while mourning and binging. The conversations about Running Gun Blues might be a bit weird,but I love it all nonetheless.
