I already had Welcome to the Pleasuredome stuck in my head last week, when I read that Frankie Goes to Hollywood was reuniting for the first time in 36 years; this rehearsal for the Eurovision contest sounds amazing, frankly. That bass line is tasty when played live.

It’s pretty amazing how much of a cross-section of popular music one guy touched at a particular period in time, and how much I enjoyed all of that very different music: Trevor Horn produced this album, Who’s Afraid of? by the Art of Noise, and 90120 by Yes.

Here’s this week’s earworm: Valerie Loves Me, by Material Issue.

I remember this song vaguely from college radio Back In The Day, but more specifically I remember seeing the CD cover at Record & Tape Traders on a mission for new music in college. Pitchfork did a retrospective of the album last week and I fell down a rabbit hole, which then got the song stuck in my head.

Drug Church, World Impact. The vocalist gargles with razor blades, the groove is sludgy but fast,  the chorus is killer and the lyrics are great. This shouldn’t work but it does. I found this band in an article about Turnstile and the future of hardcore, and it gives me hope. I want more of this to restore my faith in guitar-based rock.

This week’s earworm: Sometimes, by My Bloody Valentine. I wasn’t ever a big fan of MBV back in the day; I heard several of their songs and just couldn’t get into it. When the movie Lost in Translation came out in 2003, they used several MBV songs in the movie, and the sequence with this song stuck out with me. It’s the best song on the album in my opinion, and it has all the things I like with nothing I don’t.

I’ve had this rattling around in my head for the last couple of days, after falling down an INXS rabbit hole—mostly reviewing their earlier hits:

It’s hard to overstate just how big this song was in the fall of ’87.

I was watching another video with some clips from the movie Snatch, and this song is the music cue after Brad Pitt’s character Mickey lays out a man twice his size. I loved it when I first saw the movie and finally tracked the tune down: it’s by the Stranglers, an early punk band, in 1982.

Additionally, I’ve got this one stuck in my head alongside it, after finally watching the eponymous movie:

A beautiful, sad, haunting track. I have my issues with Billie Elish’s voice, but this works.

I’ve had the groove from Ocean Size by Jane’s Addiction stuck in my head for several days now.

I like watching this video and remembering how weird and exciting they looked and sounded in ’88, when I showed this to some of my high school friends. This album got me out of hair metal and into a whole new world.

“Giant Peach” by Wolf Alice has been stuck in my head for the last couple of days. They were recommended to me on the YouTubes with a different song, so I fell into their catalog and found a bunch of tracks I really like. This one has a great beat, excellent guitars, and some fantastic double-tracked vocals.

The other one that’s been on repeat in my head is “Moaning Lisa Smile”:

There are some elements to both of these tracks that remind me of shoegaze from the late 80’s, which is, I suppose, why I like them so much.

I’m playing this one on repeat not only because I love the chord progression and melody structure, but because I’m also trying to wipe Fleetwood Mac’s “Everyone” out of my head after hearing it eighty times on Sunday afternoon watching football. This is “Brushed” by Quicksand, a band that scraped the ground floor of fame in the 90’s before breaking up; I’ve mentioned them before here but they put a new album out last year that I really dig. This song builds and builds but right where you think there should be a soaring chorus to release that tension, it fades back and ends abruptly.