That Music List: LIST 280 - 14/11/2026 (Feature Fest #3)

(The post-Indietracks washing line, our back yard, 28/07/2015. Prolapse didn't play this or any other renewal of Indietracks, but as my most recent t-shirt purchase at the time the TCR top was always going to get an airing that weekend. Retro gaming fans might just recognise the figure on the right of the photo also. Picture is the author's own)

Hello again,

Following on from Lists #245 and #257, this week I bring you the third renewal of Feature Fest, the occasional showcasing of as many of the portfolio of twenty-five different That Music List features as I can fit within the usual ~120-minute running time.

I've managed to squeeze in twenty (including all of the lesser-spotted ones), and of the five that missed the cut four have appeared within the last three weeks and the other (Straight In At...) will appear three more times between now and Xmas. Job done, then.

I don't have any sizeable essays to write about any of this week's choices, you'll perhaps be relieved to learn, but a few of them do warrant a word or two.

The arrival of a new Nouvelle Vague album reminded me that I've never thought to include any of their sublime bossa nova reinterpretations in any of our cover versions specials (daft, really, given that cover versions is exactly what Nouvelle Vague are all about), or indeed in any other List at all before now.

I'm happy to rectify that situation belatedly here, courtesy of a Then and Now taking in a track from that new collection of Depeche Mode covers alongside a quite mesmerising take on The Cure's A Forest from two decades prior.

The theme of loss inadvertently recurs a few times during this week's List, and it probably behoves me to acknowledge that the continuation of Nouvelle Vague following the passing in 2021 of co-founder Olivier Libaux hasn't sat 100% comfortably with absolutely all of their fanbase. Ditto the various departures, albeit not of this earth, of singers Camille Dalmais, Élodie Frégé, and Mélanie Pain; though on the evidence of this new reading of Enjoy the Silence, you'd do well to convince me that Skye Edwards of Morcheeba doesn't has a voice or presence that fits the Nouvelle Vague idiom neatly.

If Nouvelle Vague make magic from some already pretty nifty tracks of yore, my favourite song of the whole of 2022, It's Over, If We Run Out of Love by David Holmes, turned base metal into pure gold.

I won't bore people with my broader thoughts on Oasis, Oasis spin-offs and their respective material here, beyond noting that Acquiesce is the one such track which stands the greatest chance of ever appearing on a List in its original form.

This is the Place, from the 2019 EP of the same name by Noel Gallagher's post-Oasis vehicle High Flying Birds, did little for me when first seeing the light of day. Take the lyrics from its two verses, however, add them to a chorus and middle eight proffering raging-against-the-light optimism in the face of mounting odds, and set the whole thing to a pulsing synth line, a shimmering guitar riff, Raven Violet's well-judged deadpan and a rhythm track with the perfect combination of restraint and spank, and the alchemy is complete.

Given the acclaim afforded to several of his solo studio albums, the work produced for Killing Eve as one third of Unloved, and a number of his soundtracks, I'd tentatively suggest David Holmes hasn't necessarily always been feted as much as he ought to be as a singles artist. All I know is that in It's Over, If We Run Out of Love and 2008's Martin Rev collaboration I Heard Wonders, David has delivered two of my favourite singles of any genre so far this century.

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Postponed from the other week, when they had the audacity to bring out an ace new single deserving full attention, it's Prolapse's turn to get the A Loved Album treatment. Their third longplayer, to my mind 1997's The Italian Flag represented the perfect point at which the Leicester mob's idiosyncratic mixture of punk bloody-mindedness, post-punk sharp edges, surreal verbal sparring and Krautrock repetition let in just that bit more accessibility and - whisper it - almost poppier sensibilities in one or two places to produce their strongest, most coherent body of work. There aren't many albums about which I can say the first song I don't love to the point of madness doesn't come until ten tracks in, but The Italian Flag is one, such that the appearance already in previous Lists of all of Deanshanger, Cacophony No. A and Three Wooden Heads still presented zero problems where finding another four choice cuts for this week was concerned.

One side of the multifaceted and briefly prolific late-1990s outfit Metrotone, just as adept at producing engaging, slightly fuzzy indiepop tunes as they were experimental, post-rock instrumentals such as Arran. A duo who included in their number one Anthony Harding (the same A Harding as in Avrocar and July Skies, I wonder?), Metrotone's discography reads like a roll call of some of the best post-rock/drone/almost-pop imprints of the time - Earworm, Wurlitzer Jukebox, Bad Jazz. This particular track, however, formed half of a one-off single for a less heralded Norwegian small-batch label in MykeDroner. I imagine they were thrilled the collaboration yielded such a captivating single - the other half, the whispered, downbeat pop of Just So Very Stupid, will surely feature on these pages one day also.

One of I believe just two singles - about three years apart - in the career of visually striking south Manchester pop/post-New Romantic act Colour Code. We've touched before on the phenomenon of strong local support behind a single leading 1980s chart compilers to suspect rigging and consequently withhold sales from calculations of chart positions - see the sad story of You've Got the Power by Win as told in List #247. I've no knowledge as to whether Dance with the Times suffered a similar fate, though as a single played so extensively in the northwest on the likes of Piccadilly Radio that a measure of broader success otherwise seemed almost assured, it wouldn't surprise in the slightest to learn it did. Either way, what success eluded Mark Duffy with Colour Code would find him later as songwriter, producer and, it would appear, house renovator.

A fresh Tangle of Jangle featuring one of the most beautiful three and a half minutes of new indiepop I've heard in many a moon from Claud, a now New York-based solo bedroom pop artist not long added to the Dead Oceans roster (Slowdive, Phoebe Bridgers, Khruangbin, etc.). What a joy it is to still be discovering artists whose entire recorded history is extensive but didn't commence until TML's hiatus years; I'm going to enjoy catching up on Claud's four albums at leisure. Talulah Gosh and The Aislers Set, whose respective Indietracks sets in 2009 and 2016 both fell under the never-thought-the-day-would-come bracket, round off this week's jangly trio.

(Another of my hopeless, there's-a-band-on-there-somewhere photos notionally depicts The Aislers Set - Indietracks Festival, 31/07/2016. Picture is author's own)

Something mature, confident, subtle and beautifully realised by Vanessa Paradis, as taken from her 2010 live album Une nuit à Versailles. She was always so much more than a teen popstrel or a muse for messrs Kravitz and Depp and deserves to be acknowledged as such.

The classic debut single from Model 500, for most of its existence a solo project of the sadly recently passed Juan Atkins. As such, its inclusion over any of the equally amazing work by Cybotron was entirely deliberate, that having been more of a collaboration between Juan and Rick Davis. No UFOs is pure Detroit techno, pure Juan.

Another poignant choice, more so than I realised before I researched further, is a Susan Fassbender song that isn't Twilight Cafe (which will never not be my favourite one-hit wonder). It's fairly well known that Susan passed away at the start of the 1990s, and it's been touching to see over the years how Susan's songwriting partner and guitarist Kay Russell - who'd gained equal billing by the time of Twilight Cafe's non-charting follow-up single Stay - of which the beautiful Comment ca va was the b-side - had kept her friend's legacy alive through the online curation and release of their archived demos and other unreleased tracks. News to me until this week, however, was that Kay herself had passed on in September 2024 after a brief illness. Active in music to the last, both albums to date (2020, 2024) by 80s-inspired synth-poppers The McKenzie FIX extensively feature Kay on co-writing duties.

A ridiculously famous film star seen in his earlier modelling days, oiled up and wearing not very much at all in a promo for what was by then the - count them - sixth release from The Shamen's ubiquitous Boss Drum album. I do wish I'd got round to showing my wife's late stepmum this promo, obsessed as she was with the gentleman in question's sizeable portfolio of blowing-stuff-up action films. And nothing else about him. At all. Honest.

J xx

Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 09/11/2026).
Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.
Click here for a directory of updated older Lists.

FAVOURITE SONG OF THE YEAR: 2022
DAVID HOLMES ft RAVEN VIOLET - It’s Over, If We Run Out of Love (2022)