The Inventory Full Pick Of The Year - 2025

It's New Year's Eve. Time for the Inventory Full Pick Of The Year. Oh, wait...you already knew that. It was in the title. The portentous, pretentious title. 

Putting the name of your blog in the title is the blogging equivalent of talking about yourself in the third person, something Inventory Full has been doing an awful lot of all through December. Should we be worried?

It's not even as though the title is self-explanatory. It requires some clarification. Music is what we're talking about. I'm sure as heck not going to go back over the entire three hundred posts and pull out all the so-called highlights. I'm not a crazy person!

Songs, though... that should be much easier. And, actually, I already did the prep. Twice. Once back in November or thereabouts, but I left the list on the hard drive of the old PC, and then again last week.  It seemed like it would be easier just to do the whole thing over again.

I'm not digging out the stats to prove it, but my sense is that I did fewer "What I've Been Listening To..."posts this year and left longer gaps between them. Partly, that's because I don't think it's been a particularly stand-out year for music. It's been fine but 2024 was epic, so I guess 2025 was always likely to suffer in comparison. 

The main reason for the shortfall, though, if there was one, wasn't so much lack of good tunes as it was too much AI. Go on, blame AI for everything, why not? It's not like it's going to argue. More like it'll tell me how right I am and what a great insight that was.

But in this case it's true. I spent countless hours making my own music using AI, time that would otherwise most likely been spent searching for and finding music made by others. Probably most of it would have been made by humans, too, although it's getting increasingly hard a) to pick out the sound of humans through the ever-increasing AI signal and b) to tell the difference when you do.

I did manage to make a handful of significant discoveries all the same, foremost among them being Sunday (1994) and R. Missing. I bought all the CDs Sunday (1994) were willing to sell me (One of each, that is, not carloads of the same one. I'm not some kind of crazy hoarder.). I would happily have done the same for R. Missing only she doesn't do physical. I guess that's why her channel was my most-viewed of the year on YouTube.

For the post, I went through all the posts in 2025 with a "Music" tag and pulled out any songs I could both remember and remember listening to more than twice. I deliberately stopped at thirty because the Top Thirty was the thing when I was growing up, before it turned into the Top Forty, which I never really believed. Also I didn't have forty solid picks.

Here's the longlist. 

• Sometimes You Have to Work On Christmas (sometimes) - Harvey Danger  
• A Winter Fairy is Melting a Snowman - 木村カエラ (Kaela Kimura
• Apple Of My Eye - Aimee Fatale
• Girls On The Internet - Elita
• Make Time/Waste Time - Snowmen
• iPod Touch - Ninajirichii
• Cowbella - Bar Italia
• Jamie Oliver Petrol Station - CMAT
• Manchild - Sabrina Carpenter
• went to bum a cigarette - april june
• Diet Pepsi - Blondshell
• Devotion - Sunday (1994)
• Kelly Was A Philistine - R. Missing 
• Pony Yeah - R. Missing
• Henry, Come On - Lana del Rey
• Rain - Sunday (1994)
• "23's A Baby" Blondshell
• The Wolf - Witch Post
• Braces - Sept
• Algernoon - nickateen
• Fuck It - Punchbag
• 1-800-Call-Me-Back - M(h)aol 
• Tired Boy - Sunday (1994)
• Blonde - Sunday (1994)
• TV Car Chase - Sunday (1994)
• The Summer Ends - Blondshell
• You Let My Tyres Down - Tropical Fuck Storm
• 鹽焗雞$alty Chick - 今晚好想好想打俾你
• (He'll Never Be An) 'Ol Man River - TISM (This Is Serious Mum)  
• POSH - The Pill

If I had nothing better to do, I might go through the whole thing and add links but I do have better things to do and no-one needs links anyway. There's a perfectly good search function right here on the blog if you're that interested. 

The list isn't in order, which is why I haven't numbered it. That would imply preference. It's almost in reverse chronological order but only because I started at the end of the year and worked backwards. Then I thought I ought to have something by The Pill, who I'd left out because I couldn't decide exactly what it was by The Pill that I ought to have. And when I made up my mind I just stuck it on the end, so that one's out of sequence. Probably others, too.

Acts on the list that I bought CDs by are:

Bar Italia

Blondshell

Sunday (1994)

I also downloaded the Ninajirichii album.

Somehow that seems to make those feel like I liked them more but I'm not sure that holds. For example, I put Addison Rae's album on my Christmas wishlist but no-one bought it for me. And now she doesn't even make the longlist, except by proxy, so what does that mean? And I asked for the second Wet Leg album, even though I didn't like any of the singles all that much. And then I got it and listened to it and I like it better than the first album, even though i like all the songs on the first album better than any of the songs on the second album. But Wet Leg aren't even on the long list so why are we even talking about them?

People do have to make records before you can buy them, too. Not everyone does, these days. I would have very happily bought CDs by Witch Post, Aimee Fatale and R. Missing if they'd made any. And, of course, Lana del Rey, who's now two years overdue for a new album but instead appears to have retreated into married bliss with the Everglades answer to Crocodile Dundee. 

All the others on the list I watched/listened to on YouTube. Repeatedly or they wouldn't be on the list at all. I ought to mention a couple that didn't make the cut - my favorite title of the year by a mile was "We'll Always Have Paris 1919" by Tenderness. The song didn't make the longlist, though. 

My favorite video was Sabrina Carpenter's Manchild, which did, but that didn't make the Top Ten. Go figure. Also, I didn't watch KPop Demon Hunters until last night so Golden didn't get a chance. It might have made the longlist at least, had I watched the movie when it came out instead of waiting weeks for no good reason. Maybe it'll be in next year's list, by when it'll be stale as biscuits.

I'm going to pull out a Top Ten now and it's going to need some rules. No more than one song by any artist and I have to have at least one thing to say about why I chose it. Also, they aren't going to be in any particular order. Not of merit, anyway.

That's enough rules and enough talk. Let's party like it's 2025!

Diet Pepsi - Blondshell (Covering Addison Rae.)

Performance of the year for me, as far as interpreting a lyric goes. Also cover of the year, although Magdelana Bay doing Ashes To Ashes runs it close. That nearly made the list but I couldn't really say I'd listened to it often enough. 

Sabrina recorded Diet Pepsi as a special for Sirius XMU, which isn't that far off singing it to herself in the shower. I see the link I used in the original post is now dead. Fortunately it did eventually find its way onto YouTube officially and also into her live set. 

I think as a vocalist she's probably my current favorite after Lana. She has an incredible, paradoxical ability to give a lyric an intense emotional charge, while at the same time her voice appears to lack any affect. It makes all her own compositions feel fogged and frightening in the best possible way. 

That effect is in overdrive on the second album. Where the first felt like an instant classic from the moment I heard it, the second took a lot longer to come through. She seems to hold so much back, lyrically and vocally, the songs are sometimes barely there at all. I'm all up with her now but it took a while to get there. 

As an interpreter of other people's songs, though, she's far more accessible. She did a superb cover of American Football's The Summer Ends but her take on Diet Pepsi topped even that. Addison Rae's writing is a lot more direct and she clearly has more time for a melody than Sabrina, who sometimes seems to be actively avoiding coming anywhere near one. The two approaches meld perfectly in this magnificent cover. It's notable that of the three Blondshell songs on this list, two are covers.

Tired Boy - Sunday (1994)

Not an easy choice. There are five Sunday (1994) songs on the list and there's next to nothing to choose between them. This was the first single and it's been in my head, on and off, all year. But then, so have they all. Oh, I don't know. I had to pick one and I've picked this. Could've been any of them. They're all magisterial.

Also, I've just discovered that using the word "Magisterial" in a Suno prompt gets you a vibe like theirs. I don't suppose they'd want to know that. 

 Pony Yeah - R. Missing

This is how I found her. I click on pony songs. Wanna make something of it? I used to think all pony songs were all always good and for a long time all of them always were but it's surprising how many there are. The streak had to break sometime. Still, it's a solid indicator. Better than tiger, which is also good. Anyway, this is a proof.

It's scary, isn't it, how random things are? If she'd called this something else I might never have known she existed. Although I would always have clicked on Kelly Was A Philistine. I mean, you'd have to, wouldn't you? Titles are so important. And so powerful.

And yet I have no idea what this song is about. Not ponies, that's for sure. 

The Wolf - Witch Post

Banger of the Year! I would totally have lost my shit to this on the dance-floor in the 90s. That fucking riff! That chorus! The supersaturated sound! 

Again, I just worked out that adding "supersaturated" to a Suno prompt is a magic trick. Add "all needles in the red" for extra raw. Now if I can just figure out how to make it overdrive the vocals instead of having everyone sound like a goddam choir-girl...

Cowbella - Bar Italia

Wouldn't you like to see Witch Post and Bar Italia up against each other in the final of a Battle of the Bands in the back room of a dive bar? Or in the nightclub scene of a Swinging Sixties movie? Some bands should never be seen in daylight. Most of the good ones, actually.

You Let My Tyres Down - TFS

Or Tropical Fuck Storm if you prefer, which I do. I just used the acronym in case it stopped the video flagging as Adults Only but I bet it didn't. I won't know until I publish but I'll leave it however it lands. (In fact it doesn't even work in the Preview so that's a wash.)

This isn't new. I think it's one of only two songs in the post that didn't come out in either 2025 or just before and even those two are from the 2020s. I listen to a surprising amount of Australian music these days which might be because a surprising amount of Australian bands are really good. They certainly seem to have this kind of spiraling, violent guitar squall cornered, anyway, along with the existential hooligan singing. It's all a bit Clockwork Orange sometimes. 

Braces - Sept

This is an odd one. I'm not sure how I stumbled across it. It's much more of a vibe than a song. It has that indefinable, plangent guitar sound I associate with South American indie rock. Quite a lot of the comments in the YT thread are in Spanish, too, which makes me wonder. The video seems like the most mannered, unreal vision to me but the comments are full of people going overboard about authenticity and their own lost teenage years, which does make you wonder where the hell these people went to school...

And then of course I had to google to see exactly where the band does come from... and it was a lot harder than you'd think to find out. Gemini doesn't know: "They appear to be an independent, indie music act based in the United States, as indicated by various social media and music platform snippets. Further details regarding their specific city or state of origin are not readily available in the search results."

I did a bit better on my own, once again demonstrating the value of AI assistance. This Instagram interview makes it pretty clear they're from Southern California. They also mention a bunch of other bands I'm gonna check out because they name some good names...

Apple Of My Eye - Aimee Fatale

One of the top comments reads "i had this on loop for a week straight im actually obsessed". I wouldn't go quite that far but I played it over and over when I first happened upon it. Haven't heard it for a few weeks and it sounds just as good now as it did then. She doesn't have a lot of songs out. Nothing in physical format but there's a live set on YouTube with several numbers I haven't heard yet. I'd listen to them all but the sound, particularly the vocals, is so muffled it's hard to tell how good the songs might be if you could hear them properly. 

Henry, Come On - Lana del Rey

I almost left this out just because every time I hear it, it reminds me just how damn long it's been since we heard anything new from Queen Lana. I don't think there's been a drought like this since I joined the cult back in aught-12. We didn't know how blessed we were, all those years.

Lana, Come On! 

A Winter Fairy Is Melting A Snowman 

 木村カエラ

What can I say? I spent longer thinking about this final spot than all the rest put together. I even went back through all the posts to see if I'd missed anything essential. I found a bunch of songs I might just as easily have included as most of the ones I did but no, I'd caught everything that really had to be here.

Then I thought about what would be the coolest one to end with, because you would, wouldn't you? And what would be the least cool, because that, too. 

In the end, though, I decided I ought to be honest and finish with the song I've probably listened to more often than anything else on the entire list. Which is this one. Really. I played it over and over going into Christmas and I just played it three times back-to-back as I wrote this paragraph. It's just... well, it is, isn't it?

And that's that for 2025. You could do worse than play these ten at your New Year's party tonight. You are having one, aren't you? You're not just playing video games and going to bed early again?

Fair enough, if you are. That's what I'm going to do! 

It's Like That And That's The Way It Is

When I went to log into EverQuest II this morning so I could carry on with the new, excellent, awkward and frustrating Darkpaw Rising update, I spotted a link in the launcher to the transcript of a recent AMA by the EQII team on the new, excellent, not at all awkward or frustrating forums. I thought I'd have a quck look at it while the game loaded so here I am, nearly an hour later, not having played at all.

It's a long and very interesting read although much of that interest applies only to people who might actually play the game. A few of the topics and answers, though, I felt had some wider resonance so I've pulled them out for consideration here. I recommend anyone who currently plays the game, or used to and still cares about it, take a glance at the whole thing but for everyone else, this will probably be more than enough.

Since I can't keep my opinions to myself, I've added my thoughts as well. It's my blog so I can! 

 Q: Is there a possibility of opening up some art assets for community contributions as well?
Caith: Nope.The player studio project that many of the Daybreak games had going for a long time were both legal headaches as well as not viable financially. The amount of art resources (hours) required to work with a contributor far exceeded the amount of resources the teams could have simply allocated to an artist to complete the same work.

The thing I like most about this AMA is the way no-one balks at giving the real reasons for why things are done the way they are. Answer after answer comes down to some combination of not enough people, not enough time, much more complicated than it sounds, causes more problems than it solves or players didn't like it. Almost nothing is sugar-coated. It's like there was no marketing rep guiding the conversation and the Head of Studio, who was, actually wanted players to understand how game development works.

That said, I imagine the part Caith left out was that under SOE's ownership a whole load of projects were greenlighted that clearly couldn't have been profitable. They were presumably underwritten by Sony, a company that has long seemed quite comfortable with losing huge amounts of money. Perks of being a rounding error on the account sheet of a global multinational I guess.

Cut to the chase. You want me to kill 'em, right?

Q: Are there any plans or discussions involving a game wide stat/number squish? Is it just too much work for the team you have now or is it something that may possibly happen in the future?
Caith: There has been much discussion, but there are no plans for a game wide stat reduction for a variety of reasons. One of the primary reasons it is unlikely to happen is how content is designed in the game. EverQuest 2 was designed in a way that gives developers a lot of freedom in how they implement content, which allows them to make the content more flexible and unique. The downside of this is that developers can implement things in innumerable ways, and any rebalance of that content would be a manual process. So in short, a stat reduction would require hand tuning of almost every encounter in the game.

It might have worked for WoW, although the jury is still out on that, but it will never work for EQII. The part Caith left out is that EQII players fricken' love their big numbers. There'd be an outcry if DPS wasn't measured in trillions per second. 

At least, the folks still playing on the Live servers like it that way. Everyone else long since migrated to TLE, where the numbers are so much smaller and smaller numbers and simpler stats is one of the tentpole features of the upcoming Origins server, so someone at Darkpaw reckons on having cake and eating it too.

Q: Are the "suburbs" ever going to be returned to at launch state?
Caith: This is extremely unlikely to happen on a live server due to the amount of quest and NPC updates that have been made over the years, NPC’s have been moved and quest dialog updated to reflect the move, much less the quests themselves updated to function in the new zones they are in, etc.
Kaitheel: Our newly announced Origins server will allow you to step back in time and experience the cozy neighborhoods and all of the quests they had to offer!

There's some hard information about the upcoming Origins server buried in the AMA. The above answer confirms the long-lost neighborhood quests will be included, which is something I wouldn't have bet on. Elsewhere, it's also strongly suggested the intention is to get as close as possible to the original game as it was at that time and that the motivation for doing the server is to encourage both former players and brand new ones to take a look.

It is odd to think that the best way to get people to consider playing a game in 2024 is to make it look and feel like one from 2006 but I guess WoW Classic is proof that it works. Pretty soon everyone wil be doing it, if they aren't already.

Q: Will you bring back LoN?
JChan: Legends of Norrath was great when it was here, but we have no plans to bring it back currently. Spinning back up a whole new development team or taking away current developers to work on it would put stressors on the team right now that are just plain unhealthy for our long-term future. That being said, there's always the possibility that our situations will change in the future.

The answers to many of the questions boil down to some variation on "We're a small team and we're already at full stretch doing live events, expansions and updates." and that's the context of Jen Chan's answer here but that last sentence is intriguing in a couple of ways. Firstly it hints at a potential change for the better in terms of resources at Darkpaw and I don't see any sign elsewhere in the AMA of general feel-good platitudes so maybe she knows something...

Secondly, it doesn't explicitly rule out a return for Legends of Norrath, the EQ-themed collectable card game that shuttered eight years ago. I only recently deleted the game files from my PC on the final assumption it was gone forever, not that I actually played it when it was around anyway. I wouldn't have thought there was a chance in a billion it would ever return but given that plenty of other questions in the AMA received a firm, unequivocal "No, never", I guess now we can't rule it out.

Watch in amazement as I battle two bosses at the same time!

Q: Finally, when is DBG/DarkPaw going to seriously address tradeskilling. You know how long it has been since there has been new craftable bags or boxes, or totems? Not to mention, at one point in time we could craft the beginning gear and Jewelry needed and make a bit of change. Other than food/drink, spells, not much else anyone wants.
Caith: Bag space is a DB and systems issue, a ton of the functions in the game iterate over every single item that a player has in their inventory, including every bank slot, every house slot, etc. We are, and will remain, extremely stingy when it comes to increasing inventory space, because as soon as we do the next question becomes “when are you going to fix lag and decrease loading times”.

Ah, inventory! How we love to hate you and hate to lose you. I'm fairly sure EQII actually has the most generous inventory allocation of any game I've ever played, so clearly Darkpaw's definition of "extremely stingy" is a little different than mine, although I realise Caith here is talking about the parsimonious present and future, not the profligate past.

In general, though, this answer is a great example of the way giving in to the demands of one set of players is always likely to cause problems for another or, in this case, for everyone. Who'd be a game developer, eh?

Q: Could you all please bring back the map help for npcs, quest items and such?
Kaitheel: We have no plans to remove the current map system in game, where the quest givers and quest update conversations are given specific quest icons, but the short-lived blue regions on the maps that give direct locations of quest steps are not something we plan to bring back. They were useful, we agree, but they had some significant downsides. Downsides that outweighed the usefulness.

These blue regions presented every active quest target possible at that moment on your map, naturally drawing your attention to the map. We observed how little attention was being paid to the dialogue, the story, even the characters to fight and the world one was traveling through. It was not helpful for building the world, telling the stories of the world, or your immersion therein. Even I found myself paying more attention to the blue splotches on my map than I was to the quest journals or NPC conversations. The quest I was doing, my motivation, the quest givers – all of it was buried behind the ease of these blue regions on the map. So, coupled with the significant amount of time that they took to create, we chose instead to give more helpful journal text, with more specific points of interest, and labeled sections of the zone on the maps.

Kaitheel is the epitome of the quest guy. He loves writing quests and he wants everyone to appreciate them. Answer after answer in the AMA reflect it, just as answer after answer from Caith suggest he'd really rather be honing his stand-up at an open mic night somewhere. 

I tend to agree with Kaitheel on this although I did quite like the big, blue splotches when they were around. They were added in the era when all MMORPGs were backpedalling as fast as they could away from the origins and traditions of the genre. In attempting to remove all the obstacles and put in all the labor-saving devices, most of them cut-and-pasted ideas and mechanics from the wave of imports sweeping in from the East. That's when every older game added flying mounts, too. 

We still have those but now we're not allowed to use them until we've been everywhere on foot. So swings the pendulum.

This isn't the time to start another debate about immersion but I'd just mention that I wouldn't be enjoying each new expansion in EQII half as much if I couldn't open the wiki and copy the co-ordinates for every quest target into EQIIMaps to get a glowing trail and a map marker. If Kaitheel believes most players are finding their way by in-game landmarks, he's fooling himself. All that really happened when they took out the in-game quest markers was that the trade passed to a third party provider.

And now with the UI

Q: The exp gain in zimara went from one extreme to the next, could you all please balance that some?
Caith: The experience gain in Zimara is an example of where we would prefer it to be. It takes actual work to level up, and you have multiple routes to obtain experience, some requiring more attention (questing) and giving larger rewards, some requiring little attention (grinding mobs) and giving much lower rewards.

While we're on the subject of old chestnuts and dead horses... Is anyone ever satisfied with the rate of xp or leveling in any MMORPG? I very much doubt it. It's the Goldilocks story without Baby Bear. 

I'm almost at the end of the signature quest line for Ballads of Zimara with my Berserker and he's 10% into 128. I very much doubt he's going to hit the 130 cap before he runs out of quests. He might not even hit 129. I'll have to do repeatables or else try and finish the Collects, if those even give xp any more. 

I'm broadly in favor of relatively slower progress but this puts me right off  levelling another character, even with the suppposed 50% bonus for characters on an account where one character has finished the Sig Line. As for the future, when this becomes a step on the levelling ladder that has to be taken before you get to current content, you can forget it. It was fine having to revisit older expansions when it took a couple of sessions at most to hit the cap but a couple of weeks is too much by a lot. I guess I'll be finding a use for all those level boosts I stashed after all.

Also, how could the phrase "actual work" ever belong in any description of a process in a video game? I fear that, when the act of creating something other people use for entertainment becomes too closely tied to your own sense of identity, it's possible to find yourself losing perspective...

Q: Do you have any plans to reduce the number of spells? we have to use 3rd party addons to get an additional hot bar because of the honestly absurd amount of spells/clickies/buffs some classes have? Maybe allow us to combine some buffs to 1 button?
Caith: We’ve talked about it, and introduced some ways to reduce the amount of spells players need on their hotbar or rotation, but the resulting pushback from the playerbase has always been more negative than positive. Everyone wants less abilities, but not this ability, or that ability, or any of MY classes abilities. Ultimately, with the amount of UI performance degradation, less abilities on hotbars showing cooldowns, etc, the better as far as I am concerned.

As above, here's another great example of how giving in to one group's demands just exacerbates complaints from another. It's akin to Wilhelm's Law, which states that every feature in an MMORPG, no matter how widely despised, will prove to have been someone's favorite when removed.

Personally, I love my ten hotbars, at least six of them filled with spells I might and usually do use in combat. I can't remember what all of them are called - I can't even remember what some of them do - but I wouldn't want to be without any of them.

Q: I know it is impossible to make everyone happy and I love that H3 is difficult and not for everyone. Can we get a raid equivalent?
Caith: It is comparatively easy to find six likeminded players that enjoy an extreme challenge to get them into a challenging heroic dungeon, when compared to the task of finding a raid guild who all agree that they want the same level of challenge, failure, regroup, retry. The larger number of players seem to drastically increase the likelyhood of a player or subset of the players are frustrated and angry and only here because they feel like they have to be, thus leading to overall dissatisfaction with the content.

And finally, a word of pure common sense from Caith. I never liked raiding and never did much of it but when I did, back in EverQuest, raids could have as many as 72 people. Can you imagine the time it took just to get everyone facing the right way? Is it any wonder I decided it wasn't for me?

Stockholm Syndrome doesn't actually exist but if it did it sure would explain why some people say they enjoy raiding.

And on that not at all controversial note, I'm off to do what I meant to do four hours ago, namely play EQII.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year Next Year - The Violent Femmes

New Year Lists. Bad Idea, Right?

New Year! Ah... dontcha just love it?  Yeah, me neither.

One thing I do quite enjoy are the recaps and the forecasts, everyone either telling you what was great about the year that's just gone or what's going to be even better about the one that's coming. I often find a lot of stuff I've missed going both directions that way, plus I'm narcissistic enough to relish that sense of affirmation, when someone else points up something I also like, as if somehow that validates my opinion.

I've read of few of those lists already. Looking backwards, there's

Elton John's Favorite 15 Songs of 2023 

Stereogum's Best Pop Songs of 2023  

Kieran Press-Reynold's Top 10ish Songs of 2023 . 

Looking forwards, we have

The BBC Sound of 2024 Long List 

MMO Bomb's 22 Upcoming MMO Games Releasing in 2024 

Massively OP's Most Anticipated MMO Award 

and our very own Naithin's Coming Games of Interest.

I'm absolutely certain there'll be plenty more when we hit the turn of the year but for my purposes those are plenty already. I did consider doing my own, comprehensive retro and prospective lists but frankly that's a lot more research than I feel like doing right now. Instead, I thought I'd just riff off those and beef the whole thing up with a couple of easy wins of my own. Never say I don't take this sort of thing seriously!

First up, it's self-congratulation time. Not that many years ago, I was almost completely out of touch with contemporary music. MMORPGs had eaten all my available bandwidth. I could have told you far more than you ever wanted to know about which massively multiplayer games were failing, flailing or flourishing and I'd have been able to give you some solid leads on potential entrants to the field worth following. 

At the same time, not only could I not have told you what acts were tearing up the Top 40 charts, I wouldn't have been able to recognize more than a handful of the names if you'd told me. To my shame, the decade and a half from the turn of the millennium to around 2014 or so is a blank void in my memory when it comes to popular music. As someone who'd previously never felt out of touch with the prevailing trends in thirty years, realising how far I'd let myself fall behind was a traumatic moment of self-discovery.

It explains why I feel so smug now, when I see names and songs on these lists that have also appeared in posts here throughout the year. Well, that and the unfortunate fact I can be a smug git about these things at the best of times. Still, I can't help seeing it as a recovery from near-disaster. I'll never get those lost years back but at least I've stopped the rot.

We Can Be Anything - Baby Queen

Among the artists I've enjoyed in 2023, who also appear on one or more of the lists linked above, are Baby Queen, Chappell Roan, PinkPantheress, New Jeans, Caroline Polachek, 100 Gecs, Charli XCX, Feeble Little Horse, bar italia and The Last Dinner Party. All of those have turned up in What I've Been Listening To Lately posts this year, some of them more thah once. 

Ahead of them all, though, and topping two out of three countdowns above, comes Olivia Rodrigo. Like Wet Leg the year before, Olivia released a string of electrifying singles, all exploding with infectious energy and studded with smart, scintillating one liners. Best of all was the exhillarating, addictive, anarchic Bad Idea, Right? I'm not going to pick a song of the year but if I did...

What I am going to do is list the ten songs featured in those WIBLTL posts that I went on to listen to even after their moment had passed. The bittersweet truth about almost all pop music is that it's ephemeral by definition. It's joy is in the now. When I look back at the posts I wrote this year, I barely even remember some of the songs at all. As for humming the chorus of most of them (Assuming there ever was one.) - forget it.

The following ten, though, I remember very well indeed. I listened to them all, over and over, around the time I wrote the posts and plenty of times since, too. In no particular order, they are

Candy Necklace - Lana del Rey Feat. Jon Batiste

Engine - Slaughter Beach, Dog

Speed Drive - Charli XCX

We Can Be Anything - Baby Queen

New Jeans - New Jeans

A&W - Lana del Rey

What Was I Made For? - Billie Eilish

Alma Mater - Bleachers

Veronica Mars - Blondshell

Bad Idea, Right? - Olivia Rodrigo

Of the ten, the outlier is Alma Mater. I have never liked anything by Bleachers before. It probably isn't going too far to say I've actively disliked the few songs of theirs I've been careless enough to hear. Why I like this one so much is unclear. I'm expecting it to be an aberration. Hoping, really. I'm not sure I could cope with being someone who likes Bleachers.

Veronica Mars is, I think, the only song on the list not from this year. It's from 2022. It's also almost certainly the song on the list I've listened to the most times. For a while I was listening to it every night, right before I went to sleep. I haven't heard it for too long. I'm going to listen to it right now...

Yep. Still just as magnificent. Also, this just in... Joiner, which I very nearly used here instead of Veronica Mars because it's nearly as good and I listened to it on repeat for a good while earlier this year, turns up on Barack Obama's Top Songs of 2023. Now that's a meeting of the minds I would not have predicted!

Obviously I listened to a lot more Lana than those two tracks but here I'm only talking about songs I listened to through the blog itself. Yes, I do go back to the posts and use them to play stuff. Lana, I can listen to on CD. 

Speaking of CDs, a format whose demise, along with every other physical format, appears to have been overstated, of the artists listed in this post so far I bought CDs by Lana, Olivia Rodrigo and Bar Italia, or rather I had them bought for me. I also asked for and received an album by someone who doesn't appear on any of the lists - yeule. I haven't taken it out of the shrink-wrap yet.

daizies - yeule

So much for music. How about games? For this I'm going to take the simple solution of listing everything on my Steam Wishlist. If it's on there, I must be looking forward to it, right?

First, though, let's assess the nearly two dozen titles MMO Bomb threw out. There are four titles on there I've already play-tested: Past Fate, Tarisland, Reign of Guilds and Once Human. Past Fate was okay but a bit grim and worthy; Reign of Guilds the same only more so. Both Tarisland and Once Human I really enjoyed (Still am enjoying in the case of the latter.) and plan on playing when they release.

Of the remaining eighteen, the only one that really interests me is, inevitably, Nightingale. I mean, we're all waiting on that one, right? I received multiple emails from the developers asking me to apply for the beta this year, all of which I declined because it has a very strict NDA. I'm not interested in play-testing anything I can't blog about, these days. I'll be there when Nightingale launches, though. So will you. Don't pretend otherwise!

Pax Dei and Blue Protocol mildly intrigue me. I'll try them if they're F2P. The rest either I don't know enough about to form an opinion or they're not my kind of thing at all. Of the games mentioned in the MOP post, nothing else is anywhere near close enough to release to be worth thinking about. 

Obviously I'll be playing the new EverQuest game, if it ever happens, although since I'll be pushing seventy by the earliest possible release date, it had better have some strong accessibility options. Light No Fire also looks interesting but I've managed without No Man's Sky this far so I'll probably pass.

None of the games on Naithin's list mean anything to me except for Baldur's Gate 3. I really want to play that but I haven't yet because a) it's far too expensive and b) I'm not convinced my PC will run it. I'm waiting for a decent sale and then I'll risk it. 10% off in the Steam Winter Sale is a bad joke, by the way, Larian.

If I do get BG3, it'll probably run, just about. I upgraded a couple of things this year and those websites that scan your PC and tell you how crap it is now tell me I can run over 98% of all the games they monitor. A year ago that was more like 50%. Time will keep moving on, though, and technology with it, so I don't imagine I'll be able to say the same this time next year.

That just leaves my final list. All the unreleased games on my Steam Wishlist, which I suppose we could take to be the ones I'm looking forward to for next year. And here they are:

Nighthawks

Old Skies

Schrodinger's Catgirl

Sovereign Syndicate

Albert Wilde: Quantum P.I.

Nightingale

Once Human

The last two I've already covered. They're also the only multiplayer titles. The rest are single-player, as far as I'm aware. I'll buy Nighthawks, Nightingale and Once Human on release, at full price; the others when they go on sale, if at all. 

And that's my round-up/look ahead for 2023/24. I'm working all weekend so maybe I'll get a final post in for the last day of the year and maybe I won't. If not, here's wishing everyone a Happy New Year. 

Can't hurt to say it twice.

You Say You Want A Resolution

Janelle Shane, author of "You Look Like a Thing and I Love You", which I said I was going to buy back when I posted her wonderful AI-Generated Christmas Carol, is now the first ever "Futurist in Residence" at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building. 

I still haven't gotten around to buying the book but I will. I am, however, following her blog, which is now on the blog roll to your right for your future convenience. Or futurist convenience. One of those.

As her first public act of professional futurism, she's populated the AI generator at the SAIB website with resolutions generated using an iterative and selective process she describes in detail on her aforesaid blog. 

The post includes a link to the generator and I was going to use it to generate some resolutions of my own to post here. Unfortunately, having spent about fifteen minutes combing through the various pages of the Smithsonian's website, I can't find it. 

I'm sure it's there. It's probably just hiding. Maybe it's shy. Or else it isn't ready yet. Maybe that.

Either way, I'm not missing the opportunity. Luckily, Janelle has a long list of the kind of resolutions the AI came up with, or at least the ones that she's willing to let us see. Apparently the AI has some odd ideas, as you might expect from something that learns everything it knows by trawling the internet.

Anyway, here's the list in full. I found it hilarious. Also not entirely impractical. Some of these you could do and it would probably be good for you if you did, too.

• Record every adjective I hear on the radio.
• Act like a cabbage for a month.
• At 4 o'clock every day I will climb a tree.
• Speak only to apples for 24 hours.
• Jump in front of a moving tree.
• On the day of the first snow paint a canvas red.
• Dress in a way that only a ghost could love.
• Make pancakes out of grass at midnight each night.
• Find old man Winter, hug him and let him know everything will be ok.
• Ride out of town holding a pelican.
• Under every rock I come across for a month I will write "all power to the rocks".
• Every day for a year, at a random time, shout "sausage".
• Make a film about the last sock in the world.
• Put on a red shirt and scream 'I'M NOT WEARING PANTS!' every time I leave the house.
• Throw a party for insects.
• Try to convince the dog next door that he is wearing a coat of moonlight.
• Every time I press a button I will say 'this is my favorite'.
• Search my apartment for secret doors or hidden staircases.
• Wear two superman outfits at the same time.
• Every time it rains I will stir my tea anti-clockwise.
• Every night for a week I will wear a hat lined with lettuce.
• I will begin to believe that the trees that I see everyday are my friends.
• Every time a bird flies past me I will remember to breathe.
• Throw a birthday party for my favorite tree.
• I will from now on tell every dog I meet that I am training to be a dragon.
• Every time I see a panel van pass me I will dub it a "Slice-a-Wagon."
• Crawl on the ceiling like a spider for a month.
• Attempt to find peace living with an army of puppets.
• Wear a dinosaur costume to every public event I attend.
• Go to the beach every day for a week and shout the names of colors into the ocean.
• Go on a three-day backpacking trip dressed as a turnip.
• Create messages that only the wind can hear by blowing on the blades of grass.
• Give a piece of cloud to a complete stranger.
• Make a mask out of grass and wear it while I'm sleeping.
• I will now treat every worm I see as if it is an old friend.
• When I hear a strange noise in an empty room I will assume someone is saying hello to me.

I really must buy that book. That's my resolution.

While we're on the subject of AIs, here's something that will either make you think "Hey, that could be the next big thing in eSports!" or give you nightmares for a month.

Honestly, with a paddle that size, it really doesn't look like that much of an achievement but the cyborg apocalypse has to start somewhere.

New Year's Resolutions - #1 Don't Join A Cult

So...

I said I wasn't going to do a music post for New Year because I couldn't find enough good ones. 

I lied.

New Year's Resolution - Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura are amazing, aren't they? They ooze sophistication. If I had to define "Music for Grown-Ups" (Something I'm never going to do, though I wouldn't mind being asked.) I'd go here first. Maybe Joni Mitchell, then here.

New Year's Resolution - Otis Redding and Carla Thomas

Okay, if we're talking grown-up music I guess that's where we're going. Sixties soul. Did it sound this adult back then? Not to actual adults, maybe. I seem to remember they were always going on about "Do you call that music?" Hah! Didn't know when they were well off! Anyway, don't look at me - I was nine years old when this came out.

New Year's Resovolution - Donovan

It always seemed like Donovan saw himself as some kind of advanced being sent here to explain feelings to the rest of us but no-one would ever have accused him of being a grown-up. Just look at that title if you need proof. I bet thirteen year-olds all across the south of England were hella impressed. This came out about three years after the Otis Redding so I would just about have been one of them but I wasn't quite there, yet. You'd have had to have given me another twelve months and I'd have been bang on it.

New Year's Resolution - Lil Tjay

Crashing back to the present or something aproximating it, here's Lil Tjay. Donovan might appreciate the sensitive piano intro but it's a hippy-free zone from there on in. There's autotune and then there's AUTOTUNE! He put out a Christmas number this year and it's even better. I'd have used it, if I'd found it sooner. Maybe next time, if we're spared.

 New Year's Resolution - DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ

Remember that Camera Obscura tune? Oh, come on! You must do. It was only, what, about ten minutes ago and that's if you actually listened to all the other songs, which I know you did not. Well anyway, here it is again, in a fantastic remix by DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. Is that the best name ever or is that the best name ever? I'm not giving you a choice. Doesn't sound so grown-up like that, either, does it? I guess that's the whole point.

 New Year's Resolution - Lootpack

Here's an odd thing. As I'm putting this post together, I'm flipping back and forth to YouTube, clipping the links and each time I do, I use the back button to refresh. I leave the same seed in the search field ("New Year's Resolution song") and every time I get different results. Is that meant to happen? This would be a whole other post if I'd done what I usually do, download all the songs first and work from there.

New Year's Resolution - The Limousines

I mean, c'mon, seriously? I'm not kidding here. There are way, way more songs coming up now than the first time I did it. What's going on? And there are some good ones, too! This is going to run long. Bloody Donovan wouldn't have made the cut if I'd known what was coming, that's for sure. (Okay, he probably would. I always find Donovan really funny for some reason, plus it's worth wading through all the hippydippy nonsense to get to that tabla solo.)

New Year's Resolutions - Meekakitty

Or something like that. It's a little confusing. 

At one point I was going to build the whole post around this one, until all that other stuff came up. Those other songs, I mean. First off, I don't even believe this one's called "New Year's Resolutions". That's just what the person who put it up has titled it. 

It's on a channel belonging to someone called xXFyesanXx, where it was posted eight years ago. It's a fragment of a copy of a cover of a song called "So Much" by Asiah Mehok. Here's the original.

It's lovely but the cover has it beat, possibly because of the arrangement but more likely because of the performance, which is by Tessa Violet aka Meekakitty... At least I think it is... Reading through the thread, it seems the full-length song used to be on her channel only now it isn't, for reasons unspecified. There are a couple of links in the comments that supposedly take you to that version but if they ever worked they don't now. I wish they did. I'd love to hear it all the way through.

I thought Tessa Violet was a new name to me but when I dig into it I think I've seen a couple of her videos before. Like this one, maybe? 

 Crush - Tessa Violet

I've seen quite a few videos set in supermarkets, though. I'm not sure. I feel like if I'd watched this I'd have it safely tucked away in my massive folder of YouTube downloads. (It's so big I've had to start a new one.) Anyway, with 90m views she's hardly obscure.

I've subbed her channel now, not really for the songs, good as they are, but for the videos, which are great. 

Told you!  I could jump from there to Titanic Sinclair to Poppy in some kind of six degrees deal but I'm not gonna. Okay, I am. I just did. 

I recently resubbed to Poppy's channel after a couple of years away. She seems to have gotten some of the metal out of her system and she's back to the kind of oddness I always liked.

Blow Away - Poppy

There's more than five minutes of that. It never does anything else. I've watched it twice already and it's playing in the background as I type this.

Begin the New Year as you mean to go on, eh? That's my resolution.

I've Got A Little List

Following the great tradition, established all of a year ago (shame I didn't think of it earlier) here's a list of all the songs and lyrics I used as the titles of posts in 2018. Last year I put them all on a YouTube playlist. This time there are a few I'd rather not admit to in public.

Instead, I thought I'd do it as an old-school list, the kind we used to do all the time back in the APAzine scene of the 1980s, with explanatory notes and comments. They were ubiquitous then. People sometimes felt they had to aplogize for relying on them. It was seen as lazy in certain quarters.

Compiling this lot, I have to say, felt like the opposite of laziness. It was a lot of work but very enjoyable. With the technology we take for granted now, which would have seemed like science fiction then, every song title goes to a video, just because it can. A few are NSFW but it's the holidays and no-one's at work, so let's live dangerously.

Take it away!

Touch My Stuff (You Can Die)   -   Beachbuggy. A longtime favorite of Mrs Bhagpuss.
Inbetween Days   -   The Cure. Ditto.
I Wish   -   Skeelo. One of the few - the very few - titles to receive a comment.
I'm Gonna Buy Me A Dog   -   The Monkees. This Davy Jones version predates it, too.
Waiting For The End Of The World   -   Elvis Costello and The Attractions. Fantastic keyboard  work from Steve Nieve. I used to like Elvis a lot but he's blotted his copybook so many times over the years it's hard to remember why.
Gold!   -   Spandau Ballet. I wish I could say I was thinking of this by Prince when I came up with that one but I really wasn't.
Please Let Me Come Mooch Round Your House   -    The Lovely Eggs. I pretty much wrote the post just so I could use that title.
Get Lucky   -   San Cisco. Daft Punk cover. There are several fantastic versions, not least this by Daughter. The original is, of course, sublime, but San Cisco's is my favorite of them all.
Love Plus One   -    Haircut 100. The post title was "Where do we go from here?" although the lyric is actually "Where does it go from here?" As we will see, I have pronoun issues. The answer, by the way, is "Down to the lake, I fear" !
Can I Kick It?   -   A Tribe Called Quest. Post title was "Can I Click It?" I freakin' love daisy age hip-hop. A friend of mine, dead now, made me a mixtape once with this on it. He called it "Can I Kick Lou Reed?", which is a thought most of us must have entertained at one time or another.

Perfect Blue   -   Lloyd Cole and The Commotions. All-time favorites of mine. Lloyd can do no wrong on record although he's not much live.
Pirate Love   -   The Heartbreakers. Amazing footage from CBGBs with Richard Hell on bass. How did we even live before YouTube?
Trash   -   Suede. I can't remember now, whether I was thinking of this or the New York Dolls number. They're both superb so I guess it doesn't matter.
Up The Hill Backwards   -    David Bowie. Definitely not one of my favorites of his.
Odds And Ends   -   Susan Cowsill and Brian Henneman. Originally by The Band. Post title was taken from the chorus, Lost Time Is Not Found Again, which Bob himself presumably took from Proust. To my surprise there's no sign of The Band's version on YouTube but the pick of the covers is this one, featuring Susan Cowsill from The Cowsills, who's just a year younger than me!
Drive, She Said   -   Stan Ridgway. I do like me some Stan although the idea most likely came to me from the movie (Drive He Said). There actually is a movie called Drive She Said but I only discovered that when I was researching this list. It looks pretty good, too. One thing I do know, I certainly wasn't thinking of the band of the same name. They're awful!
Opportunities   -   The Pet Shop Boys. Neil Tennant looks about twelve here.
Honey Trap   -   Best Youth. I have an unwritten list of titles I want to use just so I can link to the songs because they're so good. This was on it.

Already Home   -    Alex The Astronaut. And so was this.
Who Does Lisa Like?   -   Rachel Sweet. Storming version, backed by Fingerprinz, with Rachel's voice sounding like it could cut sheet steel. The post title was "What Does Lisa Like?" but let's not argue over a pronoun.
A Crow Will Remember Your Face   -   Silver Servants. This wins the prize for most obviously shoehorned-in post title of the year. Could have sworn there was a video...
Off To The Races   -   Lana Del Rey. I worship Lana. She's probably my favorite singer/songwriter of all time now. New Years Resolution:  get Lana into more post titles.
Putting Out Fire With Gasoline   -   David Bowie. And Georgio Moroder, as if you could miss him. I wasn't so keen on this when it first came out but it's aged very well.
Picture This   -   Blondie. This hasn't. It's a lot more plodding than I remembered it. Great lyric though.
Long Distance Runaround   -   Yes. I thought long and hard before I used this title for a post. Did I really want to out myself as a Yes fan? Does anyone? The second gig I ever went to, aged about thirteen, was Yes. They opened with the whole of Tales from Topographic Oceans, all 80 minutes of it, and it hadn't even been released yet so no-one had ever heard it before. It's a wonder I ever went to another gig after that...
Read It In Books   -   Echo And The Bunnymen. Makes you want to wear a greatcoat, doesn't it?
This Used To Be The Future   -    The Pet Shop Boys. With Phil Oakey from The Human League. I'd never heard this until this year. Great slideshow video but the comment section's a bit off-message, to put it mildly.

Shellshock  -    New Order. The post was called "Never Enough", which was what I remembered the song being called, too. Typical New Order trick.
Don't Sit Down Cos I've Moved Your Chair   -   Arctic Monkeys. I kind of missed out on Arctic Monkeys when they were the Next Big Thing so I'm coming at them from behind, so to speak. The new album is just wonderful.  
Ain't No Mountain High Enough   -    Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. I really don't have much to say about this, other than they both died too soon. Especially Tammi.
World In My Pocket   -   Nyck Caution Feat. Joey Bada$$.  You couild fit what I know about contemporary hip-hop into one of those five-slot bags that drop in GW2 starting areas. I know a good tune when I hear one though.
Purple Haze   -   The Cure. Well, now... this is embarrassing. Turns out I used Purple Haze twice this year, once in its own right and once as a tweaked lyric (Excuse Me While I Scorch The Sky). I didn't realize until I was compiling this list and what's more I never liked the song in the first place.
That Joke Isn't Funny Any More   -   The Smiths. Or as I had it, This Joko Isn't Funny Any More. Neither is Morrissey, for that matter.
Summertime Sadness   -   Lana Del Rey. Here in the shape of a great cover by Miley Cyrus. I love Lana covers. They emphasize just what a magnificent songwriter she is. Miley gives it a hard edge that's almost scary.

Roll Your Own   -   The Fabulous Poodles. I saw The Fab Poos play in a deconsecrated church, not two miles from where I'm sitting,  around the same time this video was recorded. They were very funny. Pub rock really hasn't aged well, though, has it?
I Am Always Touched By Your Presence, Dear   -   Blondie. Or as I so wittily had it, "Presents". Why is it Debbie Harry always looks as though she'd rather be anywhere else? I saw Blondie on their first UK tour, supporting Television. I'd be hard put to say who was the more wooden, although I did literally fall asleep during one of Tom Verlaine's interminable guitar solos...
Something Changed   -   Pulp. God, I miss the 90s.
I, Me, Mine   -   Elliot Smith. I'm not much of a Beatles fan. I was very wary of using this as a post title but I checked beforehand to make sure there was a cover I could live with. I'm not much of an Elliot Smith fan either, come to that but at least his version's short.
Give Him A Great Big Kiss   -   The Shangri-Las. The post title - He's Good-Bad But He's Not Evil - comes from one of those fantastic spoken exchanges the Shangri-Las made their own.
What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love And Understanding?   -    Brinsley Schwarz. Better known in versions by Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Sherryl Crow... Even Puddles Pity Party has more views. The original, featuring Nick Lowe, who wrote it, is still the best.
Psychokiller   -   Talking Heads. I toyed with The Ukelele Orchestra Of Great Britain and the recent version by DJ Sneak & Charlie Sputnik but of course, when I wrote the post, which was called "You're Talking A Lot But You're Not Saying Anything", I was only thinking of Talking Heads, so let's go with that.
New Age   -   Shilpa Ray. Like Shilpa, I discovered The Velvet Underground when I was very young. Changed everything, really. The song starts around 4.18 but the pre-amble is illuminating. The post was called "It's The Beginning Of A New World". Rachel Sweet did a great cover of this one, too.

Long Summer Days   -   EMF. Did I mention I miss the 90s? Shame about the sound quality but worth it to see the boys in their full "glory".
Walking My Cat Named Dog   -   Norma Tanega. I reversed the order of the species for the post, for reasons that kind of made sense at the time. I only discovered Norma Tanega a couple of years ago. How did we even live before YouTube? Wait, did I say that already?
Head Full Of Steam   -   The Go-Betweens. I was criminally negligent when it came to Antipodean bands in the 80s. I'm making up for it now. I actually came to the Go-Betweens via Robert Forster's son's band, The Goon Sax, who I just love. I'm sure that would please both of them.
My Emptiness   -   Ciudad. Everyone knows about Japan and Korea but there are vibrant  indie scenes in China, Indonesia, and The Phillipines, where this lot come from, too. How did we even... okay, okay, I won't say it!
Resurrection Shuffle   -   Ashton, Gardner and Dyke. They don't make 'em like this any more. Thank god.
East Goes West   -   The Panthers. Nine minutes of 1960s Bollywood psychedelia. Sounds like at least three different records welded together. See that Radio 6? I could do that.
Days Like This   -   Van Morrison. Everyone's at their best on Letterman. Even Van.
Ice Cream For Crow   -    Captain Beefheart. While we're on the subject of difficult f*ckers...
Soft Kitty   -   Mayim Bialik.  Or Blossom, as I always think of her. Schnurrt, schnurrt, schnurrt.

Brass In Pocket   -   The Pretenders. 1980 going on 1970 going on 1958. Sounds better now than it did then.
World Shut Your Mouth   -   Julian Cope.  I was standing about three feet away from him once, while he was swinging abround on that bizarre mike stand. It was very distracting.
Missing   -   Everything But The Girl. The Todd Terry remix, natch. I loved The Marine Girls but EBTG were hit and miss, I thought. I read Tracy's memoir earlier this year. She doesn't seem to enjoy herself much. This is a great lyric, though. Her words look surprisingly strong on the page, unlike most songs.
The New World   -   X.  I used the full album title, More Fun In The New World, which couldn't have been more on point for the piece in question. Surprisingly mainstream rock for a band of X's pedigree, I thought. Good, just the same.
Disconnected   -   Camp Claude. What a shouty crowd. Sounds like they were having a great time but I'd rather hear the band. I guess I could upload the studio version since I have the album...
Shutterbuggin'   -    Buck 65. There are two remixes of this on YouTube (Aetoms and Emancipator) and they're both superior to the original but only the official version has a video and it's a good one. Buck's more of a performance poet than a rapper, I'd say, although I wouldn't say it to his face.
Memories Can't Wait   -   Talking Heads. The lyric I used for a title was "There's A Party In My Mind" although looking back at the post it's hard to figure out why. The title of the song itself would probably have made more sense but until I looked it up just now I had no idea what it was. My head is full of fragments of songs but I don't have an index.
Clothes, Friends, Photos   -   Peter and Kerry. "I know that I have got to let you go. Because I feel like I’m Ted Hughes and you’re Sylvia, and I’m dragging you down". I mean, come on! Heartbreaking. There's a good live version where they look like they were just voted "Cutest Couple in Cuteland" for the third year running. They were The Guardian's New Band of the Week in December 2012 when their first album came out and as far as I can tell they haven't recorded anything since.

Pictures On My Wall   -   The Mad Scene. Another Echo and the Bunnymen tune, which is where I know it from and where I borrowed the title. I prefer this 90s cover. I had no idea who The Mad Scene were until I googled them thirty seconds ago to find they featured someone from The Clean and someone else from The Go-Betweens. No surprise it's better than The Bunnymen, then!
Maybe Someday   -   Teen Hearts. There's a Cure song of the same name but I was actually thinking about this pop-punk banger. There's some weird part of me that's eternally lost in a fug of suburban adolescence. You're just lucky there's no emo on this list. Maybe someday.
Santa's Got A Brand New Bag   -   SheDaisy. I absolutely was not thinking of this when I used the post title "Brand New Bag". I literally just discovered it this minute, as I was searching for the song I thought I meant, "Brand New Bag" by Lloyd Cole and The Commotions - which turns out not to exist. I realise now that I'd conflated two of my favorite Commotions singles, "Brand New Friend" and "My Bag" to make an entirely bogus song. Oh well, it's Christmas, so what the heck.
Rocket Roll   -   Zolar X. Glam punk from outer space! Post title was "Go-Go-Go-Go Go Rocket Roll-Roll-Roll-Roll", which just about says it all.
Going Back   -   Dusty Springfield. A Goffin/King composition, covered by everyone from The Byrds to Freddie Mercury but by no-one better than Dusty.  Post title was "I Think I'm Going Back".
Ashes To Ashes   -   David Bowie. It's that man again. There's an astounding range of covers of this online, everyone from Celine Dion to Lamb of God. Hard to see why. You're really on a hiding to nothing, covering something like this. Best leave well alone.

And that's all the song titles and lyrics I used in 2018. But... 

I also used a few band names and album titles! May as well have those, too. I'll just pick a track entirely not at all at random...

That Dog   -   Never Say Never. From a TV Show that looks like it came from another planet, let alone another decade.
Swell Maps   -   Read About Seymour. There doesn't seem to be any live footage of this incredibly influential post-punk ensemble (Pavement, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., REM, Nirvana and Stereolab all cite them as an influence). The two brothers, Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks (not their real names - oh, you guessed...) both went on to make a host of great records before they died, separately, far too young. I guess Phones Sportsman and Jowe Head might still be around.
Slow Club   -   Disco 2000. I don't like Slow Club. They always seem like the kind of band I ought to like but I just don't. I thought several times about the wisdom of using the name for a post title but it just fitted too well not to. This is a really horrible cover of a great Pulp song but it's still better than any of their own dirges.
Pony Pony Run Run   -   Walking On A Line. I have a theory that any band with "Pony" in the name is always going to be worth a listen. Having Pony twice doesn't make you twice as good, though. Or good at all, necessarily.
Ourselves The Elves   -   Cincinatti Clocks. I love this. Love love love it!. You wouldn't believe how many times I've tried to come up with a way to work "Cincinatti Clocks" into the title of a post about MMOs. Finally had to admit it was never going to happen. The band name, though, that's a gimme.
Pictures At An Exhibition   -   Emerson, Lake and Palmer. If I thought hard about Yes, imagine what went through my mind when I pulled the trigger on this. I suppose I could claim I meant the Mussorgsky but I was in fact channelling my fourteen-year old self. He had a lot to learn. I still like Yes. ELP, not so much. Or, indeed, at all. And if anyone's made it all the way to the end I strongly advise not clicking on that final link. It goes to a full live version of the entire album and I refuse to be responsible.

Thank you and good night!