Week of 6/16: Telethon, Illuminati Hotties, Lil Gotit, Title Fight
Our weekly dose of song reviews. One from each host. Four very different sounds.
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him), Eric Bennett (they/them), Michael Brooks (he/him) and Miranda Reinert (she/her). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. On Substack, we’re also a weekly roundup of songs. Our format is simple: each of our four hosts picks a song they love and writes about it. There will be one free post every week, and more at the end of every month for paid subscribers. For the sake of your wallet, don’t start a paid subscription on Substack. Instead, sign up at the 2$ tier or higher on Patreon and we will gift you a subscription.
For this week’s edition, we wrote about songs by Telethon, Illuminati Hotties, Lil Gotit and Title Fight.
Telethon — “Selfstarter A.E.”
Miranda Reinert:
I’ve decided recently that Wisconsin is the home to most of the exciting American indie punk I can think of. Is that based in fact? Who knows. Maybe I just like Telethon, that Proud Parents album from 2018, and Barely Civil. It doesn’t really matter because here I just want to talk about how I think this new Telethon song is great. I’m a big fan of their 2019 record, Hard Pop, and “Selfstarter A.E.” scratches all the same parts of my brain that love the frenetic energy of a really good Los Campesinos! song or something by Bomb the Music Industry. It also features a verse by Jhariah Clare, who is brilliant and adds a layer of totally smooth, calmness to the center of the song that I think is just perfect. It’s dynamic and bright and has a tasteful gang vocal so it’s obviously right up my alley.
I’ve listened to this song almost 200 times since first hearing it a few days ago and I think you should also listen to it at least, like, half as many times.
Illuminati Hotties — “Pool Hopping”
Eric Bennett:
Last year, Illuminati Hotties surprise released a mixtape entitled FREE IH: This is Not The One You’ve Been Waiting For. Its lengthy title explains explicitly that despite its high quality, this was not her sophomore album. Now, Sarah Tudzin has revealed that her actual sophomore album will be released in October, and we have its newest single to enjoy for the summer. “Pool Hopping” is a wild ode to indecision. The song is an infectious, high octane indie rock song that plays on all the songwriters strengths; memorable hooks, powerful riffs, and an unmatched manic energy. Tudzin has given us the perfect summer rock song, and after a year of isolation, the brief descriptions of things like stealth makeouts and breakfast takeout sound enticing. Between this and prior single “MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA,” whatever Tudzin is planning next sounds promising. This certainly could be the one we’ve been waiting for.
Lil Gotit — “Get N Dere Gang”
Michael Brooks:
This past Friday was a pretty big day for fans of rap, with new albums from Pi’erre Bourne, Migos, and Polo G. But there were plenty of other albums that dropped that same day which maybe didn’t make quite as much noise, including Lil Gotit’s latest Top Shelf Gotit. I haven’t spent enough time with the project to give my full opinion just yet but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve heard from it, especially “Get N Dere Gang” which is an absolute blast. Over a scorching hot 808 and not a whole lot else, Lil Gotit enlists Lil Keed and Yak Gotti for three minutes of gleeful rapping. Plenty of rappers would use a stripped down beat like this to put on a clinic and flex every rapping muscle they have in their body, but Lil Gotit and company give the track space to breathe and it definitely works for me.
Title Fight — “Blush”
Eli Enis:
I’ve been thinking a lot about Title Fight lately. After reading friend of the pod Danielle Chelosky’s excellent zine (produced by our very own Miranda Reinert) about their 2011 album, Shed, which featured touching tributes by many of my fellow emo/punk writer peers, I felt a strange sense of FOMO. If you really comb through Endless Scroll episodes then you might have heard me mention off-handedly a couple times that I kinda don’t really like Title Fight? I never quite *got* them. Sure, I feel the same way about a million other artists who’ve just never clicked for me, but my lack of interest in Title Fight is especially glaring.
This is mostly because I couldn’t have been much more *there* for Title Fight’s come-up than I was. 2010, my sophomore year of high-school, was the year I started diving heavily into underground pop-punk, metal and emo-adjacent music. The Wonder Years became my favorite band, I loved pretty much any metalcore band who’d played Warped Tour, and I evened out the cringe by getting super into burgeoning post-hardcore acts like Touche Amore and La Dispute. Title Fight were square in the center of that musical Venn diagram, but for whatever reason I thought Shed was both too gritty for my pop-punk sensibilities and too ragged and sharp for the heavy music I loved at the time. Their next album, 2012’s Floral Green, didn’t do much more for me either, though I did develop a strong affection for “Secret Society” and its exquisitely bloody music video, which I wrote about retrospectively nearly four years ago.
By the time Hyperview came out in 2015 I should’ve been a shoe-in fan. I was just starting to finally put down pop-punk and get heavily into shoegaze and dream-pop, and Title Fight were translating that same creative metamorphosis into their art. But no, I still think Hyperview is a boring record to this day, give or take a few songs. Back to the Shed zine, though. I was so moved and elated by everyone’s accounts of how they first got into Title Fight and what their music means to them that I felt like I’d be fucking up if I didn’t go back and find something else to love about this band besides “Secret Society,” which I had long considered a complete straightforward punk outlier in their catalog.
Then I went back to Spring Songs, the EP they put out on Revelation Records in 2013, which I do remember enjoying at the time. By the first 30 seconds into opener, “Blush,” I was banging my head at my desk and making that face where you bite your lip, tilt an eye-brow up and bulge your eyes at how fuckin’ rockin the song you’re hearing is. I had forgotten that Spring Songs wasn’t just a 100% precursor to the muted shoegaze of Hyperview, but a 50% precursor with two of the most bangin’ songs they’ve ever made. The glimmering “Be a Toy” is one of them, and that’s for another newsletter, but “Blush” is the first. A total ripper of a punk song that sinks into a rhythmic pocket and a melodic zone that I actually find inescapably catchy, whereas I find much of Shed to be the bones of great pop-punk/melodic hardcore songs buried beneath haggard yelps and skittery drumming that just never ignite my musical pilot light the way I so desperately want them to.
I find Title Fight so fascinating. I love reading about them, talking about them, talking about that era of music. I love hearing how meaningful they are to my friends and writerly peers, and I kick myself often for somehow never seeing them play when they were around (Rochester, NY, is a tertiary market, I missed a lot of shit). I feel spiritually linked to them as an entity based on my musical foundations, the era I came up in, the people I know, the genre of music that people associate with my writing. Maybe one day the switch will finally flip. Some things take time. As someone who has to shit out thoughts on music every day for a living, and who realistically considers my favorite albums of a given year to be records I’ve only heard roughly 15-20 times, my decade-plus journey to try and like Title Fight feels particularly relieving. I’ll get there. Maybe. “Blush” is cool, though.