Episode 85

Welcome to Songs That Don’t Suck, with your host, Mark Bradbourne.

What’s up friends, welcome to Songs That Don’t Suck, I am indeed Mark, I am your host and every week I listen to hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of newly released songs. Most of them are not worth the digital space they take up on a hard drive, but every now and then I find a few to share with you right here on the podcast. If this is your first time listening, thanks so much for checking out the show. For my long time listeners, you know how I feel about you, I love you, alright. Before we get into it, I got something that I found that I need to share.

So it involves AI and you know, it’s a blessing and a curse the way I see it. More of a curse when it comes to the music field, but Spotify is facing criticism for a recent scam that was uncovered on their platform. So apparently there were some AI generated covers being made of popular songs and these were being inserted into public playlists and these covers were racking up millions of listens and getting paid. These so-called artists had no social media presence and honestly their bios were very chat GPT like in the way that they were written. Some redditors actually found this pattern, so shout out to them for bringing it to light. But these fake groups covered songs across all decades, a bunch of different genres, a lot of country music and absolutely had no original content whatsoever. So basically what’s happening is you pay a little bit of money to license the song to cover it and you can record it and you pay a percentage of what you get to the original artists and then you keep the lion’s share. And Spotify does not have anything in place, policy or otherwise, that does not allow artists or it doesn’t ban artists from using AI tools. So from a legality standpoint, this is completely okay. Now Spotify did remove some of these songs, but there’s a lot of debate over how we handle this content and the discussion really centers around who’s being exploited in this situation. I think it’s two, right? It’s the artists who are being covered by these fake AI bands and then Spotify to a lesser extent because they’re paying out the money, they don’t care. Now there is a conspiracy theory out there and I will say that it is alleged, I don’t have proof one way or the other, but there are some that say that Spotify is actually generating these AI songs in an effort to keep more money for the company itself. Yeah, I don’t know. Some days it seems plausible with some of the things they do as far as royalties and how things are paid out to artists, but yeah, I’m not going to go there again. Conspiracy theory, no proof at all. But what this does is these AI songs and these scammers basically, they thin out the royalty pool for actual artists, which that just sucks, that there’s no nice way to put it. And it’s again, AI being the worst possible thing that it can be for actual artists. As always, the thing that I will tell you, if you are a fan of real artists, go and see them live, buy merch directly from their websites or when you see them live at shows, support them directly. Don’t buy shit from Amazon or their label website. Go to the artist website and if you can buy stuff through their site, do it that way. This is the best thing that we can do to support artists.

All right, before we get into the new music this week, I am starting to form a hypothesis that artists seem to tend to avoid releasing music around holidays, at least in the US. You know, obviously that’s what I’m paying attention to because I don’t have to work. I have a three day weekend. And the evidence that I have this week is this week sucked. Like it was abysmal. I listened to more songs this week than I have in a long time. You know, usually I’m a few hundred, you know, three to 400, I easily listened to 600 songs. I was deep into playlists that I had never listened to before. It was so bad I was actually unsure of what I was going to do. It was so bad that my wife and I actually had this conversation.

Found anything yet? We ain’t found shit.

Now that’s paraphrased. So I took a break and then I started to like really kind of think about the podcast and I was like, you know, I’ve found a lot of artists over the last 18 months or so that I’ve been doing this podcast. And it’s odd because of the more than 200 unique artists that I found last year, very few actually pop up again in my new music, you know, release radar and things like that. And I can only assume that my Spotify algorithm is a nightmare on the back end because of the amount of like music that I will go through and skip through and listen to. So I decided that I was going to actually go through all of the unique artists that I had found last year and see if they had actually released anything new that I missed. It was very possible stuff had come out and it fell under the radar for me. So this week I have found four songs from songs that don’t suck alumni that I’m going to share with you in case you miss them too. So let’s get into it.

The first song this week is Glass from J Solomon. I really loved the original track that I found from J Solomon. I initially found him back in episode four. The song was called Home super catchy and oddly one of my favorite parts of this song was right at the end when the song was over, the drummer drops his sticks onto his snare drum and it kind of makes this clattering sound, which to me it proved that it was real. And I love those little studio artifacts. There’s a lot of recordings that I’ve done where I know that there’s little artifacts where things that I’ve done just kind of proves that it’s an actual recording of a drummer and not just like, you know, computer generated drum tracks. Anyway, Glass has a lot of the same qualities that I loved about home. I’ll be it, I find this one a lot more poppier versus the very indie rock of home. There’s a really great quality about J Solomon’s voice and it just, it fits really well in my ear. I really like it. The production value is really good. But at the same time, it doesn’t feel overproduced if that makes any sense at all. It’s just, it’s good. The bottom line, honestly, Jay Solomon just writes a damn good song, turns a really interesting lyric, and I’m glad that I went back and found this new release from him. So here’s a little taste of that latest release from J Solomon. It’s called Glass.

The second song this week is Ghost Story from Too Many Temples. So back in Episode 38, I discovered a track from Too Many Temples called Woven, and I remember it just being really striking to me and making a comparison to the Beatles song Tomorrow Never Knows. There’s a lot of similar traits. There’s this kind of Middle Eastern drone. There’s a sitar that is present. And there’s what I will describe as a single chord delivery, you know, that it’s really the vocal that carries the track, the same way that Tomorrow Never Knows does Woven does the same thing. It’s fantastic. If you missed it the first time, I highly recommend if you are a Beatles fan, go back and check that out because it’s really, really good. Now the latest one from Too Many Temples, Ghost Story, for me, it picks up some different influences, a little more modern, you know, maybe a little more oasis, maybe Travis for some of their heavier songs like Blue Flashing Light. But Too Many Temples is noisier, and it’s more raw, and I really like that. It’s almost like an early Black Keys recording in that regard. So if you kind of dig that almost DIY feel in a really well-crafted song, you should join the 74 monthly listeners that they have, which is criminal, and check them out. Here is a little bit of Ghost Story from Too Many Temples.

The third song this week from Songs That Don’t Suck Alumni is No Place To Be From The Rolling People. Last year I found these guys in episode 32 with a track called Disguise, and I think the most shocking thing to me as I was listening to that and I started to research them is at the time they were 19 years old. Talk about super talented 19 year olds. Disguise was just this straight rocker inspired by a lot of fantastic British bands to be honest, and they kind of mold it into their own energy filled sound. This new track comes off their new EP called Before It’s Gone, and it picks up right where Disguise left off for me. Great vocals, just overall arrangement is fantastic, the production is top notch, and again I think I made the comment that I was like who is behind this group of 19 year olds? Because whoever it is, I feel like they’re well funding them for the quality of recordings that they’re getting, and I love that. I love to see somebody like getting behind really talented people. And one of the things that they do really well are the use of dynamics, and I’ve mentioned this before. A lot of artists, especially modern artists seem to forget about the power of dynamics and how everything is just played at and mastered to 11 so that it does not give your mind a break to actually understand and feel the music. It’s just constantly punching you in the forehead. So hey, give a quick listen to No Place To Be from The Rolling People.

The fourth song this week is Bone To Pick from High Fade. Episode 28, the track was burnt toast and coffee. This little funky three piece that’s tighter than a brand new Tupperware lid, man, when I think about the landscape of music that just kind of sits today, High Fade truly stands out as something really unique. I remember picking up this track after it went viral on social media, they were kind of busking in the street, and like just, it was amazing to watch these guys play live. When you listen to the recording and you’re like, oh man, to get that level of precision in such a complex piece of music, they’ve got to spend hours and days and weeks in a studio to just get it there because it’s flawless. And then you watch a live video of them and you’re like, holy shit, they’re just that fucking talented. They did come through Ohio last year and I cannot remember, I had some sort of conflict and I was not able to go to the show. It might have been an out of town show on like a Wednesday, which is hard to do. But I’m really, really hoping that they come back soon because I need to make every effort to go see this musical magic in person. They’re just far too talented to not be enormous. But I also understand that funk and soul, this type of stuff, there’s not a huge market for it. But man, it is so, so well done. Check out Bone to Pick from High Fade.

That is it for this week. You can find all of these tracks linked easily to all the major streaming platforms on the website. Go to SongsThatDon’tSuck. net. You’ll find a little widget in the middle of the screen there. You’ll see the song title, the artist, and the links to all those platforms. You can catch up with us on social media, Instagram threads, Facebook, TikTok, and X. We try to post there, although TikTok’s being a bit of a bitch at the moment, but I digress. Anyway, thanks again for listening, really appreciate you taking the time. And as always, please, please, please go out and support these artists. Thanks for listening, and until next week, keep searching for and listening to songs that don’t suck.