#70
Album: Hats off to the Buskers
Year: 2007
Sometimes a song comes along that just slaps you in the face with how awesome it is, and how much it makes you want to drive pretty fast on a sunny day. Not a complicated impulse, but not everything needs unpacking or intellectualizing. This song, from Scottish rockers The View, doesn't do anything fancy with the standard NME recipe for UK singles chart success, it's just way better at it than the rest of the crowd.
#69
Album: Original Pirate Material
Year: 2002
I'm a little embarrassed that I forgot to namedrop Mike Skinner last week in talking about Jamie T. The latter is a direct musical descendant (well, more like a cousin, really) of the former, who clocks in today at the auspicious number of 69. They both access the same aspects of "contemporary England," and more specifically paint a compelling portrait of disaffected youth as the very foundation, rather than an unfortunate product of that scene. Both artists are by turns rebellious, ambivalent and insightful. "Weak Become Heroes" is a foray into all three. Cleverly framed like a Balearic, piano-loop downtempo piece, Skinner delivers vocals that are more monologue than lyric and rise far above their ostensible club kid cliché. In music, as in life, it's difficult to talk about a great night out in a way that makes it compelling information for someone who wasn't there but Skinner's clear passion about the scene lends his commentary a clear-eyed romanticism. There's beauty in this banality.
#68Album: Heart
Year: 2003
Who would have thought, ten years ago, that divorcé rock would become a viable emotional genre. And yet here we are in 2010, not even surprised that two people with a wrenching emotional past and a history of bitter disagreement can make sweet music together, even after the legal fees have been paid. Not being a White Stripes fan, I'll hold Stars up as the best example of this phenomenon. While they've largely staked their musical careers on their divorce-centric numbers, this is my favorite offering from the Canadian band. Even depressed proto-hipsters sigh wistfully over this one. The instrumentation is dense, lush and deceptively uplifting, sweeping you up in a wave of bittersweet loss. The forlorn, duetted lyrics and a tangible pulse drive it home.
#67
Album: Daytrotter Session
Year: 2007
I just acquired High Violet this weekend and my faith in the The National is reaffirmed! They don't make particularly challenging music; it's just really good music. So I'm psyched to be presenting you with, "Lucky You," my favorite National track from the last decade. Matt Beringer's deep ass voice is at its most swoon-inducing here and ties the song together over what is an almost plodding pace - it's so sparsely embellished you're almost unaware it's happening. Here we have the line, "what you break is what you get," one of life's great truths, sung so matter-of-factly we could be talking about the weather. For its well-crafted niche in the grey area of human existence, for it's humility, for it's romanticization of imperfection and its empty-handed devotion, this is the only kind of love song I want to listen to.
#66
Album: Nite 12"
Year: 2006
I never want to believe Chromatics are from Portland because their sound is, to me, so loaded with a disquieting malaise I just don't associate with the small, youthful, bike-happy city to the south. I know I'm being overly reductive about Portland but I find its lack of useful navigational points singularly annoying and so I get grouchy when I find it's cranked out yet another amazing band. "Nite" throbs with cosmopolitan apathy, a point driven home by Ruth Radelet's lazily articulated vocals, asking pointless questions and posing inane hypotheticals. It's deeply glamorous in its boredom and although it gathers, it never quite breaks. Never has half-assed been so ominous, or so good.
#65
Album: Rakamonie EP
Year: 2006
For reasons I don't quite understand, I prefer this sad bastard version of Robyn's "Be Mine!" to the higher-energy album version. Normally, I'd be a sucker for those urgent strings underscoring unrequited love. But I heard the piano version first and I get a twinge of heartbreak every time I see that pathetic little exclamation point in the title. By contrast, the noisy, angry original just seems like overkill. There's nothing trite about pop balladry when it's done this well, with such barefaced honesty. Robyn's Swedish pixie voice has trouble competing with the strength of the piano chords and the song is structured in such a stumbling fashion (see: awkwardly truncated spoken word breakdown) that it seems like she's trying to get angry and just can't quite summon the energy and when it finally breaks, its force just seems...sad. Le sigh.
#64
Album: Pretty in Black
Year: 2005
Over the past nine years, Swedish duo The Raveonettes have released four albums, none of which is discernibly different from the others but which have all been solidly enjoyable. They walk a fine line between grungy and polished, and their brand of Scandinavian faux punk (which borrows heavily from "Wall of Sound" conventions) is, I've discovered, appropriate for all occasions. "Ode to LA" is huge, full of chimes, sixties rhythms and a naive escapism that hearkens back to another era. LA seems like an odd town to romanticize but the lyrics alight on just the right stepping stones of sunny idealism in the murky sea of freeways and seedy cultural overload. You know you're kind of kidding yourself but running away to California still seems like a great plan. Baby, let's go.
#63
Album: Fleet Foxes
Year: 2008
True story: A few years back, my dad (dirty hipster that he is) went to go see the Fleet Foxes' show with the dad of my best friend from elementary school. At the venue, they ran into my dad's high school friend who, it turns out, is frontman Robin Pecknold's dad. So, do the Fleet Foxes make dad music? Absolutely. Is it also singularly lovely, and drenched in dreamlike not-quite-folklore? Yep. This one is unassuming and buoyant, with echoing, faraway vocals and a great tambourine moment.
#62
Album: The Teaches of Peaches
Year: 2000
Another little tidbit from the annals of Amanda's strange accumulated experience: I saw Peaches, aka Merrill Beth Nisker, former schoolteacher, touring in support of I Feel Cream this winter. At the culmination of the show, she expectorated a large quantity of fake blood over the audience, the lion's share of which landed on my face and neck and clothing. It was more than a little bit gross but strangely kind of cool. At least it wasn't real blood. I have a odd fondness for white girls doing crude, overtly sexual rap-like electronica (like this current obsession). Peaches is pretty much the poster girl for that art form in the Aughts and through a lot of trickle down performance opened the door for the trashy, Jack-swigging whores - I'm talking about you, Ke$ha - of today. In the best possible way, of course. Plus, this a great, stripped-down electro track: whipcrack beats and unembellished, unapologetic vocals.
#61
Album: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoneix
Year: 2009
I've been listening to Phoenix for the better part of the decade and it is with great satisfaction that I (and the rest of the world) can announce that they've finally made their masterpiece in the form of 2009's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Every song on the album is just that good and this is hands down my favorite of them. Don't get me wrong, I love singles "1901" and "Lisztomania" but this one combines the same punchy, clean production work with an urgency and sadness that is immeasurably enriching. "Armistice" is fantastic on its own but benefits tremendously from the framework of WAP, from which the poppy euphoria fades more elegantly with every cut. By the time you're through the instrumental diptych "Love Like A Sunset," the next four tracks trap you in a spiral of wistfulness and regret until you're murdered by the disillusioned perfection of "Armistice." Its final moments - Thomas Mars' imploring "keep your promises" - is pretty much the saddest thing I've ever heard. Because who even makes promises anymore? I feel urgent and depressed just writing about it, and I keep coming back for more.
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