Spencer Griffin's New Music Mondays

 SEVEN new songs for the month of December?! It's a Christmas miracle!! Here they are: "Agua" by Porno for Pyros:  It's been a little over a quarter century since Porno for Pyros, Perry Farrell from Jane's Addiction's side project, last released a song! Their biggest (and almost only) hit, "Pets," was released back in 1993, an unusually soft song for a band featuring a musician known mostly for doing hard and often controversial rock songs. Jane's Addiction is generally recognized as being legendary and innovative among alt-rock and hard rock fans for both their lyrical audacity and their musical audacity to combine post-punk, heavy metal, funk, psychedelic rock, and progressive rock into a single entity (and even reggae and folk with songs like "Jane Says"). Porno for Pyros tend to not receive near as much recognition as Jane's Addiction, but Perry Farrell's aggressively nasal vocals are unmistakable, and they shine through jus...

 here they are: "Angelica" by Wet Leg: Anyone who grew up during the '90s like I did probably thinks of the manipulative, pint-sized villainess from Rugrats  when they hear the name "Angelica," but I assure you that Nickelodeon was not on Wet Leg's mind when they did this song! The song is instead about an old friend of the lead singer. The song's Angelica is a villainess in her own right, but not one who picks on babies. This Angelica, instead, is one who wants to party all the time. Why is that bad, you may ask? Well, in this case, it's because the lead singer of Wet Leg didn't really want to be around someone like that. The song is basically a "diss track," but its bright, sunny, catchy sound hides that pretty well. "Character Development" by Allison Ponthier: "Character Development" sounds more like the name of a college course than it does a song title, yet here it is! The title refers to Allison herself and how...