10. Spring Break 1899
I didn't care much for Murder by Death's newest album, but its final song is a work of beauty. It has a dust-trodden downbeat whiskey-hangover feeling to it, and its ending is a perfect evocation of how longing can go on and on and on. Its final haunting full-heart sung words "Could it be you?" ring on and on and on in your head when the album finishes.
9. White Boy
"Too old for Hamlet/Too young for King Lear." Every song on james's massively good new album
Hey Ma has its great line or two, and that is this one's. The chorus is an eruption that bursts through your chest. Its uneasy phrasing is part of its charm. This song is one track that proves why the new james album reminded me that trumpets can be used to wondrous effect in pop music.
8. Cats R People 2
This song is fucking fun, through and through. While probably not the best song on Qutizow's wonderful
Art College (which Christopher Wheeling wonderfully reviewed, leaving me feeling like I had nothing to add to what he said and hence writing nothing), this song has made its own warm nest in my heart. Knowing Quitzow as a friend, this song just seems to emanate the kooky, eccentric loveability of who she
is and speaks well of her love of cats. I like to picture cats shaking their heads back and forth, scratching turntables and singing "Treet dem wif respeck!" while listening to it. For people who like to dance and who love cats, this song offers it all, right down to the Prince spelling of the oxymoronic title.
7. Overjoyed
I've been loving this song for a few years now, since I first saw Gary Levitt perform it an open mic he was hosting. I remember one night there were these two people who did old-time country kind of songs, a guy and girl from the middle of the country. The guy had an old twangy guitar. Outside, I taught the two of them how to play the song and the three of us stood outside in the cold, playing and singing it. Gary walked outside into this sight, which must have been pretty strange: three people covering a song of yours when you haven't even released it yet. He worked hard on it, bringing it through several drafts which I offered some critique on. While I listened to it the most in 2007, it finally saw release this year on Setting Sun's
Children of the Wild Not many songs truly capture what it is to be child-giddy filled with joy, but this one does. And yet it has its moment of frailty, admitting in its quietest moment, "We climbed up too high/We're falling."
6. Yes (Second Half)
Coldplay came back with a vengeance this year. I was done with them after the atrocity that was
X+Y. But this album is really good. It is genuinely good. It has undeniable pleasures. Even people who didn't want to admit to liking Coldplay had to admit that with Brian Eno on the decks, this album had some pretty delicious moments. The most delicious moment for me was the second half of track six, "Yes." The album has an annoying tendency of jamming two completely unrelated songs together on one track, and such is the case here. The first half of "Yes" finds Chris Martin using his lower register (finally) to sing his typical almost-there lyrics (unfortunately) over a vaguely Eastern-tinged musical backdrop. The second half is blissed-out bright and fuzzy drum-pummeled goodness. It has the potential to transport me into a happy place just above the earth where I sit or stand whenever it comes on. Martin is singing, but we don't know what. Which is a good thing.
5. Crimewave (Crystal Castles vs. HEALTH)
This song is perfect. I have listened to it more times than is good for my health. The HEALTH outro makes it, serving as the perfect juxtaposition to the perfect artificiality of the rest of the song. The vocal/vocoder melody is perfect, simple, yet unsingable, and, as with entry number six, undecipherable. Which is probably a good thing.
4. He Doesn't Know Why
Fleet Foxes might actually deserve the hype they're getting. They are the first hippieish band I have enjoyed in years. Their Beach Boys/CSN vocalizing and harmonizing are amazing, perfectly swooping into strange shifts in key. They conjure a world of connection with nature and innocence on the verge of loss. This song is my favorite of the bunch on their debut album from this year. Why? The middle part where the music stops and gets understomped in the midpoint with two bass drum kicks in unison with two thrusts of full band as the chords move up the scale, while the singer's voice rides high on the silence in resignation: "There's nothing I can do." Countless times I have made up songs to myself walking and driving around alone with similar sentiments and words. What can I do? I don't know what to do. I don't know what to think anymore. There's nothing. There's nothing I can do. Whether there's anything Fleet Foxes can do to top this remains to be seen.
3. Better
#1: I never thought Guns N' Roses were actually going to come out with another album. #2: I never would have thought anything as cool as this song would be on it. While many people may have been let down by the new GNR, I expected very little from it, and was blown away. This song, co-written by Robin Finck, has numerous parts to it, shifts in tempo and key in numerous sophisticated ways, struts like a pole-dancer in its verses, rocks in your face in its choruses, tears you open in one of its bridges (which shows that it has been written by the most widely beloved guitar player Nine Inch Nails has ever had), and is built around a haunting, fragile chimey sing-song part. This song rocks. The end.
2. Discipline
This song is the perfect dance song. It is stupid and sexy and endlessly catchy and addictive. When I first heard it, I was like 'this is cool, but kind of forgettable, and certainly nothing to write home about after the awesomeness of
Ghosts I-IV.' But then I kept listening to it. And listening to it. And listening to it. Dancing around my living room. Nodding my head to it in the office. Singing along to it in the car. I could not get enough of it. It makes me stop thinking whatever I'm thinking. My head drops down to my butt and starts moving. It is more proof that Trent Reznor is a singular genius who does not consider himself above making good, catchy pop and writing the occasional song about sex. While
The Slip's "Head Down" is more accomplished and interesting work of art, it is not as addictive and innately enjoyable as this seemingly throwaway gem. I've listened to this song over forty times this year. That has to count for something.
1.Chemtrails
If every song on Beck's
Modern Guilt was as good as this song, it would have been the best album of the year. Unfortunately, this song was a tease that had nothing to do with the album Beck put out a week later. This song has a different producer, a different band, a different feel—everything. The guitar solo at the end is amazing. The ecstatic bass-playing, coupled with the vigorous everywhere drumming make for an orgasmic climax, starkly juxtaposing the song's initial quiet creepiness. Organs and Beck's novacaine-removed vocals, singing about conspiracy theories and mass death, like the future cousin of "Five Years," the prophecy made complete. I listened to this song thirty-three times before the album came out on my computer alone. That's not counting walking around Vassar Campus with my headphones on. And then the album came out and I listened to it a bunch more times. It is one of the most genius creations Beck has made in a long career of genius things. It may be his final hurrah.
We Call Upon the Author
This song is too good to rank. It came at me like a fresh left hook of "What the fuck?!" to the face. I played it for my class in Lyrics as Literature and handed them the lyrics photocopied from the lyric (poetry) book(let) that came with the album, and they had the same reaction: What the hell is this and what are you doing to us? Unfortunately, I wasn't able to follow it up with the lesson I had been planning because life got in the way, but I'm glad I was able to crack open their minds a bit more with it. This song does things that haven't been done in music before. Rambling sixties-organs; cycling whirly-gigs of nothing recognizable; a stomping chugging drumbeat and bass line; a poem powerfully declared and half-sung in a way that Allen Ginsberg would have loved to hear, Cave reaching peaks of emotion, referencing his literary father and his astounding novel, the lack of unity in self-hood, the complex of terrible things happening on every level in the world right now and "what it does in your brain" and winds up talking about a friend Doug stopping by with a book of Holocaust poetry ("Hey Doug, how ya been?"), all the while sublty and ultimately tackling the issue of calling upon God, the author of the world, to explain this fucked-up creation of His, and how God does not and cannot answer (in any way more satisfying than Job; see "Kingdom of Ice" on Wovenhand's
Ten Stones, which also spawned this year's bonus hidden best song—"Not One Stone"), anymore than Cave can answer the questions of kids all hopped up on
And the Ass Saw the Angel, a book he wrote mostly on heroin in the late eighties—he was a different person then and his memory is not all there. In the meanwhile, the unstoppable juggernaut takes a few unexpected reprieves from its poetic onlsaught to provide a completely surprising electronic breakdown that would have sounded at home on Saul Williams's album from last year
The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, which hisses and shimmers away like a desert mirage at the end. If the rest of
Dig Lazarus Dig!!! was this good, it would not only the best album of the year, it would not only be the best Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album, it would probably be the best fucking album ever made. Before the album came out, Frank and I were at the Plug Awards as Cave got the lifetime achievement innovation award, and we howled out the title of this song over and over again. Cave delivered. This song can change your life. Next time it rains and you feel beat down by time and circumstance, play this song loud and"shake [yr] fists at the punishing rain!!!"
