#83: Cover The Walls by Internet Forever (from the The Top 100, 2009-2018)

from the 2012 self-titled album Internet Forever.

10 years ago, the original point of this blog was to list the Top 500 and talk about its contents, with much attention paid to doing song by song reviews. Didn’t really happen! While I reviewed a few tracks, my few and far between blog posts were reduced to Top 20 albums of the year lists and reflections, which I totally enjoyed doing and will continue to do. But now I’d like to get back to songs, of which there are now 600 to choose from (as I added 100 more of my most favorite from the last decade).

I picked randomly and landed on…“Cover The Walls” by Internet Forever. Internet Forever, a British trio of indie fuzz-popsters, emerged in 2009 with this single, but seems to have dropped out of view by 2013. The probability of the band becoming a musical footnote (if that) seems fairly high, with two singles and only one (fantastic) album to their name. I hope they make a return somehow, or are at least not forgotten (and since the internet is probably forever, there’s always hope). Perhaps they’ll be given the comprehensive reissue treatment that has helped me discover a substantial trove of sparkling indie treasures that would have otherwise been consigned to the rarefied vinyl collections of erudite twee-pop fans.


INTERNET FOREVER - 'Cover The Walls' from Extra on Vimeo.

Whatever their destiny, they deserve far more love for this track on its own, never mind a bunch of other great songs.  The band started with some half-joking blog posts about forming a band called – you guessed it – Internet Forever.  Things accelerated pretty quickly, with members trading digital tracks by email and assembling some finished songs on Garageband.  The resulting first single was "Cover the Walls" (b/w "Page of Books"), released in 2009 by the label Twenty Years of Boredom.  After a second single ("Break Bones") and some touring the band entered a proper studio and put together a full LP of slightly more polished tracks (including reworkings of the two singles).  And that appears to be it.  But at the very least (the very, very least), “Cover The Walls” is forever enshrined in the #83 position of my Top 100 most favorite songs from 2009 to 2018.

Why this obscure, fuzzy bedroom guitar pop?  For the same reasons that legions of wallflowers, misfits, and romantics listen to Cherry Red reissues, K records, and the whole C86 musical oeuvre.  I love “Cover the Walls” because it distills the essence of indiepop, the kind Calvin Johnston envisioned, that community-based, DIY music making that was punk as fuck, but never hard or hateful.  That showed that three chords, a beat up amp, and a rudimentary drum kit could yield devastatingly catchy pop songs, if sung from the heart.  “Cover the Walls” is all that.  A simple, almost four on the floor drumbeat, inexpert vocals recorded in the red, fuzzy guitar, cheap analog synths and – most importantly – an impossibly catchy verse and chorus.  I fully recognize this is not for everyone, but for those who like bands like Los Campesinos, The Vaselines, Dear Nora, The Aislers Set, I’m From Barcelona, Twerps, The Pastels, etc., “Cover the Walls” is archetypal. 

I must confess I’m torn between recommending the much more lo-fi version of the song on the 7” (2009) or the slightly cleaned up version on the album.  I’m more familiar with the single but I think it’s clear the album version sounds better.  Check out both!  And check out the 2012 self-titled album.   The blog The Line of Best Fit puts it this way: "this indiepop album is, really, the Platonic ideal of indiepop albumness: a glorious curation of that which makes us lonely, speccy, woolly bastards melt into our own tea." 

And as always, please check out my Spotify channel - you can start with the Top 100 (2009-2018), from whence this song came.