#122. 'There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right'

The Hold Steady "Stuck Between Stations"

Lifter Puller were, for my money, the single most under rated indie rock band of the late 90s/early 00s. I didn't get hip to them until about a year before half of their ranks resurfaced in The Hold Steady, but they still stand as one of the most accomplished artists in that realm. It wasn't just Craig Finn's lyrics, though the way he basically used Lifter Puller's 3 albums and assorted smaller releases to craft an out-of-order musical novel that never got so pretentious as to announce itself as such is quite something, but the whole band was in such sync with each other, flitting between all manner of styles and sounding equally adept at all of them, at least from Half Dead and Dynamite onward. They were also among the first ultra-obscure artists I was introduced to, even though it happened well after their demise, which I'd say was one of my first steps into the deep realms of music geekery I now inhabit. I could never call them my band, but they felt like it in some ways.

I'm only starting off like that because it sets the stage for why I found The Hold Steady to be such a crushing disappointment at first. When Almost Killed Me came out I was just at the tail end of my immersion in all things Lifter Puller, and given that half of LP was the core of The Hold Steady the album was one of my most anticipated releases of 2004...and then I heard it and it was just OK. I've grown to like it much more than I did initially, but to go straight to it from Lifter Puller's swan song Fiestas + Fiascos did it no favors. In LP Finn was drunk on his own words, not in a self aggrandizing way but just surely lost in his own lyrical outbursts in the most engaging way imaginable. That level of hunger didn't make it over to The Hold Steady, Finn was as wordy and his storytelling as dense as ever but it didn't come across the same way. The music was also a step down, trading the multi-faceted soundscapes of LP's albums for a relatively static backdrop of straight bar rock. I stuck with The Hold Steady because as much as they still lay in the shadow of Lifter Puller, Craig Finn was one of the best storytellers in rock music and I wasn't gonna let anything he did slip by me.

"Stuck Between Stations" is probably the only Hold Steady single that does justice to Finn's lyrical and storytelling abilities. Folding in the suicide of poet John Berryman into a fairly typical Finn lyric about hedonist twenty-somethings adds some of the gallows humour I was missing from earlier Hold Steady tracks and the band's found its groove after the addition of keyboardist Franz Nikolay, so even though they may not be covering as much musical ground as Finn's old band, at least the ground they're covering is some of the best of its kind. Not only was "Stuck Between Stations" the best song Finn had written since 97's "Nassau Coliseum," it marked what I consider the arrival of The Hold Steady proper. Their first two album were probably judged a bit harshly by me since they seemed to be more of a retread of Lifter Puller's concept transplanted into a less appealing millieu than a new band with undeniable ties to LP. "Stuck Between Stations" abandons the meta-narrative of those albums and as with the rest of Boys and Girls in America finds Finn carving out more general little anecdotes as opposed to serving a larger story, which allowed him to broaden his focus beyond the core players of the story and hone his story telling skills in smaller packets.

If it weren't so late I'd spend a few paragraphs delving into the song itself, and it's an embarassment of riches as far as analysis goes. In a nutshell though, it's almost like Finn's taking a look back at his previous work through older eyes and realizing just how vapid the people were. The 'sucking off each other at the demonstration/making sure their make-up's straight' line is as accurate a summation of the main characters of the whole Lifter Puller meta narrative as any: they were exactly the kind of people who would go to any sort of happening just to say they were there and completely missing the point of what was actually going on. His boys and girls in America may have had such a sad time together in retrospect, but at the time they were the ideals in their own eyes, only now that they're talked about in past tense the problems arise. Whne he brings John Berryman into the equation the connection feels loose, but when he concludes that section with the observation that 'we all go down and drown in the Mississippi River' it becomes a bit clearer: he sees Berryman in his creations and knows that no matter where he lead them through his own words it'd never end well. I may be grasping here, but that's exactly what they pay me the big bucks for

The Berryman section on it's own, though, is a marvelous little vignette. Finn's obviously reveres the man and paints a great picture of his last days complete with some of his best lyrics. 'Big heads and soft bodies make for lousy lovers' would be the highlight in any other song, but then there's 'you're pretty good with words/but words won't save your life/and they didn't so he died' to top it, mixing pathos, dark humour in the delivery of the last line and wit in the best Finn tradition. I don't think he could have done anything quite that poignant in his meta-narrative days, and even though his recent material lacks the callbacks and continuities for the most part he hasn't lost his knack for telling a story, and his voice is clear as ever in their telling.

Coming up tomorrow: More smart lyrics or the best way to insult the man you were replaced with.

#123. 'I want lots of clothes and f---loads of diamonds'

Lily Allen "The Fear"

Part of me wanted Lily Allen to be nothing more than gimmick. If she was just your basic pop singer who happened to have a facility with cusses it would have been much easier to just pretend she'd never come up. If it was just the casually tossed off reference to her ex 'fucking some girl next door' that made "Smile" stand out among the pop landscape in 2006 there'd be nothing much to speak of with regards to Ms. Allen...and yet there was more. The fact that barely two lines into her first single she was dropping the f-bomb without any hesitation was ear-catching and the chorus' reveling in how good it feels to completely emasculate an ex was a few miles removed from most post-breakup odes to empowerment but underneath that mild sensationalism there was a rather nice tune. Most of Alright, Still, with the notable exception of the slightly devastating "Littlest Things," follwed a similar pattern: come for the casually vulgar and mean-spirited lyrics, stay for the fact that Allen and her producers knew their way around an impeccable pop song. It's not a transcendent album, but it's much more consistent than a pop album should be.

I haven't heard her follow up, It's Not Me, It's You yet, but based on the two singles it's spawned I have a feeling that my reaction will be along the same lines. The mean-spiritedness is gone form the lyrics on those two, or at least it's not as close to the surface, but they've both got their share of lyrics you'd never expect to hear in a pop single, whether it's "Not Fair"'s 'I've spent ages giving head' or "The Fear"'s casual to the point of insensitivity 'I want lots of clothes and fuckloads of diamonds/I heard people die when they're trying to find 'em,' the real reason either one sticks with me is because they've got a solid base, "Not Fair"'s retro-country approximation especially. Oddly enough though, the reason I'm putting "The Fear" on this list isn't for it's production but for its lyrics.

I've been toying with the idea of "The Fear" as satire since I heard it back in January. On the surface it's a pretty vapid song about what fame is all about today, single minded focus on all things material and perception by tabloid junkies, but the way Allen sings it is more 'can you believe that this is how people actually think?' than 'fame! yay!' Allen's clearly winking at the camera, as it were, when she's spouting stuff like the 'fuckloads of diamonds' bit I mentioned earlier, feigning the wide-eyed naïveté of the newest tabloid celebrity while inwardly rolling her eyes at the inanity of it.

By the time the chorus comes in it's hard to tell if we're still hearing the famewhore persona Allen's adopted/mocked in the verses or Allen herself editorializing on just how bad our tabloid culture has gotten. I prefer to hear it as the latter, mainly because it works better in conjunction with the more-clever-than-it-thinks-it-is Sun/Mirror lead in to the chorus, and the former interpreation puts the chorus at cross purposes with the verses by painting a more complex and somewhat sympathetic picture of the otherwise one-dimensional target of Allen's snideness. The ambiguity is nice to have though.

Coming up tomorrow: Literary references done right.

#124. 'Drowning deep inside your sound'

Of a Revolution "Love and Memories"

I think a big part of what caused my shield against popular music to lower was working in retail for a few years. The first of these postings at least offered us some choice as far as what we got piped in to the store through a (very heavily restricted) satellite radio reciever, but for the most part it was stuck on the 'hits of today!' station so as to appease the majority of the staff. Initially I found this to be the equivalent of torture. Sure, in the back room where I worked most of the time I could hook up my laptop and/or stereo and play what I wanted so long as it wasn't offensive or too loud, but when I had to spend a few hours on the sales floor the constant barrage of what I considered at that time the lowest form of music was too much to take. For some reason I can't tune it out, probably a result of spending as much time as humanly possible absorbing music outside of school and work makes that the one thing I focus in on in a new environment, so the time I spent on the floor was akin to a trek into the circles of hell for my ears.

I don't know when it first occurred to me that I shouldn't spend so much energy thinking of new ways to hate every single song I heard, but once I started to parse out the goodness contained within the sea of mediocrity that was pop radio in 2006-7 it got a lot less torturous at work. Sure I still cringed inwardly at every Nickelback or Black Eyed Peas song that got piped into the store but more and more wheat was rising out of the chaff with each day. The one good thing that I can say about piped in store radio is that without bumpers identifying what each song was I was much less likely to prejudge them based on the artist. Some of the newer songs were easily identifiable, but there were some that I would incorrectly identify in my head until I remembered enough of the lyrics to google away and determine who it was I was listening to. This led to me thinking that "Love and Memories" was either a better than usual Dave Matthews Band song or a higher end Matchbox 20 song for a few months before I determined it was neither. I knew it couldn't be either in the back of my head, the vocals were too clearly enunciated to be the former and lacked the light southern drawl of the latter, but musically it fell right into the same wheelhouse as those two, especially the latter.

It's easy to write off Matchbox 20 and their brethren as your parent's music because...well it is. It's alternative rock that's been thoroughly defanged, sapped of a lot of energy and generally made bland, but as with any genre it's got it's highs and it's lows. "Love and Memories" immediately stood out because it wasn't wholly devoid of energy. Like "Move Along" a few entires back, this is one of those songs where the opening guitar figure works as a bit of an energizing trigger. Once that clean arpeggio kicks in after a couple of bars of slightly off-voice chords I'm a bit more awake and likely to get shit done than I was a few seconds before,and every time it resurfaces in the chorus it does it again. It's such a simple riff too, but the way that it comes in with those pounding, insistent drums just works as a slight adrenaline boost for me.

The drums also offer the song a further leg up on its genre-mates by giving the song a sense of purpose (probably not the right word, but it's close.) The vast majority of what's probably described as adult alternative has the hurdle of being complacent by nature. Even though on a level of pure construction a lot of them are very good, the whole of them is just kinda...there. They exist, but they don't do anything. They have the illusion of progress, but they don't really move in any way. "Love and Memories" may still just have the illusion of movement, but it's pulled off a lot better than others of its type. Something about the verse-chorus transitions makes the whole song feel like it has a final destination that it's moving towards, and even if that isn't real it's convincing enough.

Coming up tomorrow: Meta-pop arrives, finally.

#125. 'Gon' start again where it started at'

DJ Quik & Kurupt "9 Xs Outta 10"

I'm a bit hesitant to put a lot of very recent singles on this list because by their very nature I have less history with them. In time I may realize that "Daniel" is the definitive Bat for Lashes single but as of right now I don't have the same perspective on it that I have on "What's a Girl to Do?" since the former has only been on my radar for a few months as compared to the year and half I've had to parse the latter. I'm sure that if I revisit this list in a few years there will be quite a few instances where I'll tip my had towards a later single for a given artist or displace other entries with some 2009 singles that I just haven't quite had the time to fully appreciate, but for now there's a heavy tilt towards earlier material. There are three singles from 2009 on the list, and one of them is even in the upper reaches of it, simply because they represent those moments when a song comes out that manages to completely floor me.

Of course the problem with songs like that is that an instant pleasure isn't necessarily indicative of a long-lasting favorite. I can't begin to count the number of singles I heard once and fell hard for only to get completely sick of after a while, songs I would have easily filed away for this list after a few listens only to completely forget about after a few months or songs that seemed great at first but slowly revealed themselves to be much less upon closer inspection. The preference this list shows towards older material is also a preference towards material with a degree of longevity, songs that I have no doubt I can put on 10 years down the road and still adore on some level even if that level is only nostalgia. I can't be sure of that with a song I've only had in my sights for a few months, so I tend to err on the side of caution as far as those go.

Of the three 2009 singles that grace this list, "9 Xs Outta 10" is the newest, but it's also the one I have the most hope for the longevity of. I won't divulge the identities of the other two, but I will say that the thing that sets "9 Xs Outta 0" apart from them is the sense of mystery within it. Every time I listen to it, which has been quite a lot since I first came across it a few months ago, it always seems like there's more to it than I've heard so far, like a part of it is slowly revealing itself with each subsequent listen but never quite getting all the way there if that makes sense. The song is so brief and ends so abruptly that it could feel like a case of building up to something that never quite arrives, but it's all there and it's endlessly fascinating.

The key is, like "Crabbuckit" (but on the exact opposite end of the spectrum sonically) it's such a unique sound compared to most rap these days. The beat is jagged and minimal, but not in the inane snap music sense, and Kurupt's rapping matches both qualities. In short, it's miles removed from the smooth, glossy hip-hop that worms its way into public consciousness and it's also miles removed from the type of independent hip-hop that gets good notices from critics. It occupies an odd middle ground that's too harsh for either camp, and as such it's one of the most unprecedented singles in the genre, hell in general, that I've come across.

The key here is the interaction between Quik's beat and Kurupt's rapping. Other tracks may have stronger lyrics and better production, but it's rare to find a track where the two elements are so wickedly interwoven. Kurupt navigates through the thumping drum pattern Quik lays down so fluidly that the two facets of the track sound more like a cohesive unit than two different things. It helps that the beat is so minimal in construction, just a drum loop with a chopped up opera vocal sample thrown in later, that Kurupt doesn't have a lot to weave around, but the beat is easily the focal point of the song too. The drum loop just sounds huge, so heavily reverbed that the spaces between the beats are still thick with the remnants of the beat before. It's the key rule of minimalism, that the space between notes is as important as the notes themselves, deconstructed so that the space is so thick with reverberation that it's more the illusion of space than actual space. Then the opera sample gets laid on top and it's so meticulously chopped up that it sounds less like a human voice than an aural approximation of a strobe light. It's a transfixing beat, one that would threaten to overtake any MC that happened to rap over it.

Luckily Kurupt is up to the challenge here. I'm not too familiar with his previous work, but if he's anywhere near as nimble and intense as he comes across here on his other stuff then you can bet I'll wind up loving it. It's another case where the words aren't nearly as important in content as they are in sound, and his heavy reliance on repetition and consonance throughout the verses compliments Quik's beat rather than trying to outshine it. Although Quik is halfway responsible for my favorite lyrical bit in the song, when he appears poised to take the next verse, gets one-and-a-half lines out and Kurupt just tersely cuts him off with a 'Stop' and moves back to the chorus. It works so well mainly Kurupt seems so coolly in control of the track that he doesn't need the help in the lyrics department.

Coming up tomorrow: Why Matchbox 20 aren't gonna make the list or how to make adult alternative that might actually pass for alternative.

#126. 'No time to get down cuz I'm movin' up'

k-os "Crabbuckit"

Me and hip-hop have an odd relationship. In high school I had a brief flirtation with it at the behest of my friends, but could never quite muster the enthusiasm for it that many of them could. I could appreciate the level of craft that people like Eminem and Busta Rhymes put into their lyrics and delivery, but a lot of the other mainstream stuff just left me cold on all levels. By the time 50 Cent had ascended to the top of the hip hop mountain I was about ready to swear off the stuff...other than The Roots that is. My reasons for holding The Roots in such high esteem as compared to the rest of hip-hop was simple back then: they played their own instruments. I don't think I ever used that in the way a lot of people would, it was never that they were inherently more talented than their peers by virtue of their instrument playing, just that the live instrumentation made them sound so far removed from the rest of the genre that it made me take more notice. It wasn't that they were better because they were also instrumentalists, they were better because they sounded somewhat unique in a landscape that was getting increasingly homogenous, at least at the mainstream level.

The other artist that stood out, albeit on a smaller level, at this time was Canadian veteran k-os. He'd been kicking around in guest spots for other, more visible Canadian hip-hop acts for almost a decade before his debut album Exit was released in 2002, but it wasn't til 2004's Joyful Rebellion that he really managed to take off. The album itself one of the best Canadian hip-hop albums ever, a glorious melting pot of a wide range of musical styles all rendered with organic-sounding production and exceptional songcraft. The fact that it was embraced by the mainstream up here is pretty shocking if you think about it: in a genre where usually the means of getting attention was through flash, shock tactics or blatant pop-baiting here was an album that was fiercely original, uncompromisingly eclectic and low key that managed to not only debut in the top 10 but spawned a pair of top 30 singles in "Man I Used to Be" and "Crabbuckit." In the states I'm pretty certain that it would have been relegated to a tiny label and would have only gained a level of notoriety in the underground.

"Crabbuckit" was probably responsible for a lot of the album's success. Beyond the fact that it was the first single and was in fairly heavy rotation on Muchmusic, it was night on impossible to ignore it in most contexts. It's one of the few clear examples of a song that immediately put me in the headspace of 'I need to hear this album' from the first moment it started. The simple hand clap and bass introduction would come on and it would completely draw me in, and by the time the song took a break after the first chorus for a sax solo I was hooked. Like The Roots it was doing something that was, to my quite novice ears at the time, so far removed from the the genre that it forced me to sit up and pay attention. k-os' previous singles were of the same cloth but much less remarkable, "Crabbuckit" was just phenomenal on all levels and still is.

If you haven't heard the song, and if you're outside of Canada and don't pay too much attention to hip hop this is probably the case, imagine if Ray Charles decided to make a hip hop track in the style of Digible Planets circa Blowout Comb. The base of the track is old school blues more than it is straight hip-hop. The stand-up bass, simple percussion, old timey piano and light acoustic guitar foundation sounds like it was transplanted from the 50s, both in arrangement and overall sound. The song comes across as somewhat timeless. Strip away k-os' verses and you might be able to pass it off as a long-lost jazz-blues record that was just unearthed, but with those verses it has the duality of being both wholly old-school and wholly new. It's a testament to k-os' production that he pulls that off as well as this.

The lyrics aren't that great though, to be honest. The general idea of comparing humanity to crabs in a bucket, where the masses will pull those who try to get out of the muck back down so that we all suffer the same fate, makes a great base for the song, but outside of the last verse the words don't work as anything other than sounds within the arrangement. Now, I'm not gonna make too big a deal of that since my main concern is that they sound good in context, substance be damned, but it's important to note that until the last verse the song is missing something. Then k-os starts actually rapping. It's not the best verse ever, k-os doesn't hold a candle to the likes of Aesop Rock and Doseone as far as verbal complexity and flow goes, but it brings the lyrics to the song's level for one verse. It's a great example of one of my core beliefs, that good lyrics can elevate a song more than bad lyrics can drag it down. Once k-os starts that third verse everything sounds better somehow. The beat seems sharper, the tone seems more complimentary, and the chorus sound much more triumphant coming out of it than it did at any other point in the song. If the first two verses were at that level this would probably wind up a lot higher in the list, but as it is it's still among the best hip-hop adjacent tracks of the decade.

Coming up tomorrow: The newest single to grace the list (and probably a bit on why that is.)

#127. 'My heart grows colder with each day'

Bat for Lashes "What's a Girl to Do?"

I'm not the easiest listener to please generally, but I have my weaknesses. Cellos always make me perk up my ears no matter how bad the song I'm hearing is for instance, and if you throw in a subtle trumpet fanfare in the right context chances are I'll forgive a lot of the less stellar things you put on display. And if you start your song with the "Be My Baby" drumbeat and don't completely lose the plot after that it's possible that you've made me a fan for life. It's a cheap trick honestly. Using one of the most immediately recognizable drum patterns in the history of music creates an feeling of familiarity, making it as though you've heard this song before and all but ensuring you're gonna pay attention past the point where you're aware that this isn't what you thought it was...but I fall for it every time it seems. Clinic's "IPC Subeditors Dictate Our Youth" and The Jesus and Mary Chain's "Just Like Honey" are the two that come to mind instantly, where all it took to get me interested in the band as a whole was using that beat to snap my attention towards the song at hand, and more recently Bat for Lashes' "What's a Girl to Do?" did the same thing.

Of course if the song wasn't up to the standards set by the opening few seconds it probably wouldn't be here, but part of me is convinced that BfL, the alias of British singer Natasha Khan, was created specifically to push all my musical buttons. Not only does "What's a Girl to Do?" have that drumbeat kicking things off, but Khan's right up my alley as far as female voices go, equal parts breathy vulnerability and defiant strength. The arrangement isn't dynamic but the fact that it's based around what sounds like a glockenspiel for the verses is at least an interesting choice. The whole song is drenched a cavernous reverb that's always crisp and never murky, and those handcalps in the chorus are some of the most downcast ones I've heard. It's another song where its simplicity is a virtue, if only because it allows for Khan's voice to shine.

I'd be remiss, though, if I didn't mention the video here. Seriously, if the "Be My Baby" drums didn't catch my attention the video would have drawn me in just as much. The simple image of Khan riding her bike down a deserted stretch of road is indelible enough, but when those hoodied masked men emerge from behind her it's a serious jolt. When they start into a choreographed dance routine on bicycles, and the video plays this ridiculous premise entirely straight to its credit, it makes for one of the most interesting videos of recent years. Like the song, it's taking a relatively simple idea and pulling it off flawlessly, and the way the video informs the song in retrospect (I can't hear those chorus hand claps without envisioning them being done by the biking furries) makes for one of the best song-video pairings in recent history.

Coming up tomorrow: Canada's most slept on rapper or avoiding production cliches for fun and profit.

#128. 'And don't stop'

The Juan MacLean "Give Me Every Little Thing"

Has there ever been a better start to a label's run than the first 10 releases from DFA Records? Two LPs that represented the most outrageous (Black Dice's Beaches and Canyons) and accessible (The Rapture's Echoes, not a great album but definitely an important one) ends of the scene the label was documenting, half-a-dozen 12" or 7" singles from the slim (at this point only 4-band) roster that became calling cards of a sort, putting this miniscule label on the map, a compilation of the A-sides from those singles with a track from each of the LPs. Back in 2003 I downloaded DFA Compilation #1 mostly for the closing duo of LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" and Black Dice's epic "Endless Happiness," and while those two tracks are still among my favorite things to this day ("Losing My Edge" is the one song I'd consider breaking my one-song-per-artist rule to talk about) the best thing to come of that decision was that I got acclimated to the Juan MacLean's much more overtly house-oriented fare. It also tipped my hand towards thaone release that was not part of that compilation, a split 7" with their "Give Me Every Little Thing" and The Rapture's "Killing."

"Give Me Every Little Thing" wasn't like the two Juan MacLean tracks that had graced DFA Compilation #1. It sounded more like a continuation of the two LCD Soundsystem singles, albeit with a much less sarcastic tone and a much more house-oriented instrumental. Given that James Murphy was providing the vocals here that isn't exactly an unprecedented reaction, but the fact is that it was also better than both the previous Juan MacLean singles. Much as I love them, especially "By the Time I Get to Venus," they can't hold a candle to "Give Me Every Little Thing." It's a pulsing, funky, slightly acidic bit of 00s indie-house, and it spoke to me more than the straight dance music of the other two.

Even in its opening minute, where there's nothing but a repeated synth motif, it's already clear that this is going to be a much darker tune than either preceding JM single. Something about the way the initial chord of each bar washes out over the sacatto chords that follow it, or just the general tonality of the chords themselves, but it sets the stage for the tune's less than ecstatic tone. Once the bassline comes thundering in the song's already become one of the best early DFA singles, but that in conjunction with the heavily reverbed synth drums takes the track to a whole other level of greatness. The synths may have set the mood and prepared the listener, but with the rhythm section there's an actual hook to latch on to. The vocals are incidental and recorded in such a way that it's hard to make them out despite their clarity. Small phrases may push their way through the mix, but most of the time they sound as though they're being recorded a few rooms down the hall form the rest of the song. The effect is clever, as you may not quite get what's being said, but the inflection gives enough away that you don't really need to.

Over the course of the song there's some more overt references to the previous JM works, namely some bloopy keyboard lines, but it really acts as a perfect step into the much, much murkier sound of his full length debut, Less Than Human. The fact that "Give Me Every Little Thing" was reprised there and given it's own 12", one with some great remixes courtesy of Cajmere and Music X-Press, is proof of it's endurance as compared to the earlier singles. Theose were perfectly pleasant, but "Give" was unprecedentedly awesome. If not for "Losing My Edge" this would easily be the single best song to dome about in that near mythically awesome 10 release run that DFA kicked itself off with.

Coming up tomorrow: How a great video can make a great song even greater, part 2.

#129. 'You don't care a bit'

Imogen Heap "Hide and Seek"

I never watched an entire episode of The O.C. Not a single one. I tried when my friends were raving about it but it never clicked for me, just looked like any other soap opera about teens or near teens that I'd seen over the years. Of course the big thing was that the characters were well versed i nthe more popular side of indie-rock and its creators were great at choosing music that was a) appropriate to the scene, b) pretty damn good and c) not overplayed at that point. I may not have liked the half episode of it I watched but I appreciated that it was at least trying to use some under the radar artists to soundtrack the mediocrity.

Even though I never watched the show, the scene where Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek" comes on is one that got linked to me a few times. The scene itself was laughable, and the sudden appearance of the last part of the song on the soundtrack was even more so, but the song itself was utterly chilling, and retained that aura outside of that context. Describing the song on paper doesn't exactly do it any justice, but at its base it's just a chorus of Heap's vocals, multitracked and filtered through a voicebox of some sort. No instrumental at all, just vocals. Part of me thinks that this was never meant to be a single, it just has the air of one of those experiments that an artist will throw into the middle of an album for some reason that was never expected to do much other than show the artist on an interesting diversion. Those types of song are rarely this good though.

The first words you hear are 'Where are we?/What the hell is going on?' which is the exact reaction one might conceivably have to hearing the song for the first time. The sound is alien, like if someone decided to record a choir under water, but also inviting. The rest of the lyrics appear to be more abstract images than cohesive story, which is fine as far as I'm concerned. The sound of the words is much more important than the meaning in this case, and the way they sound is just perfect. However, looking a bit more deeply at the lyrics it read like a snapshot of the moment you get bad news. The minutiae of the scene are there in the two verses, but the best part is the fall out after the second chorus. Lines 'Why'd you say that you only meant well, of course you did' are rendered with as much bile as the ethereal underwater choir effect can contain and the final resigned 'you don't care a bit's are as fragile as the prior section was brash. That's as much a testament to Heap's vocal ability as anything. er range throughout the song is awesome to hear, from the smoky, lower register she uses in the verses to the higher, more ethereal voice she adopts for the chorus and all points in between. I wouldn't say she's one of the greatest vocalists out there, but she's got range and knows how to use it without coming off as annoying.

The bare-bones nature of the song itself would make it seem like a logical conclusion to my 'simple elements made amazing by method X' theme, but the reality is that the way it comes across is much more complex than it is simple. The layers upon layers of vocals that make up the song seem to all be treated slightly differently in their production, making their interactions with the other vocal layers play as much more than a simple harmony. The way that as Heap's vocals get closer to the top of her range the extra layers seem to fall away completely is utterly breathtaking as well. Really the construction of the whole song is noteworthy for using such a complex but limited palette to conjure up what sounds like a complete song as opposed to a mere experimental lark without a tune behind it.

Coming up tomorrow: Whatever became of Six Finger Satellite?

#130. 'I see you from the inside out'

Manitoba "Jacknuggeted"

Heartbreak is a tricky thing to convey in song. The natural tendency is to convey heartbreak one of two ways: through self-pity or through violent catharsis. Both of these schools of thought have lead to some great music, more in the latter case than the former even though self-pity is much more prevalent in heartbreak songs, but some of my personal favorites fall into neither category. Just as an example, Seam's brilliant break up album The Problem With Me has a dignified, resigned tone to it's most devastating moments (the 'don't tell me you know, I know' section of "Sweet Pea" for instance) that gets to the heart of the emotion without falling into either the 'poor me' or the 'fuck you' side of things. It's always a joy to hear a song or album so emotionally vulnerable that conveys it in a way that's not what you expect, which is about half the reason why "Jacknuggeted" is on this list.

The way that "Jacknuggeted" sums up the heartbreak at its core is devastatingly simple, and delivered in a matter-of-fact way that makes it much more resonant. It boils down the whole relationship to two lines: 'I met you and then it fell apart/now I'm nothing more than a broken heart.' Really, that's all you need to say to convey the sadness of it, no need to over-describe or dwell on it, just say it and move on. The song doesn't wallow in the melancholy of that line, hell Dan Snaith undercuts it by using a backdrop of hand claps and sloppily strummed acoustic guitar to give the song a genuinely uplifting feel.

In a way "Jacknuggeted" is the most incongruous song on Up in Flames, a melancholy little 4-minute diversion from the much more celebratory ranks of the other 9 tracks. It's a testament to Snaith's production abilities that I never get any sort of cognitive dissonance when it pops up, as the song, for all its melancholy, manages to not sound out of place. If "Young Bride" was a good example of the way arrangements can elevate a number into the ranks of the essential, "Jacknuggeted" is a good example of the ways production can do the same. Once again, we've got a very simple song, almost a campfire sing-along level foundation with simple vocals and loosely strummed acoustic guitars. The ways that Snaith takes that and turns it into a minor masterpiece of psychedelic electronica probably look odd on paper, adding in what sounds like a distant string section filtered through a gauzy haze, that organ swell as the song transitions into its chorus, the slightly out of nowhere outro that owes more to Aphex Twin than anyone, but in context they all work incredibly well to turn a simple littel ode to heartbreak into some class A material for the 00s indie cannon.

Coming up tomorrow: A song that nothing could ruin, not even The O. C. and retroactive autotune hate.

#131. 'Helps to make the days seem shorter'

Midlake "Young Bride"

As the decade progressed I found myself becoming more and more focused on the production and arrangement of songs than on their lyrics. If I had to guess I'd say it started around the time I got into a heavy post-rock phase, as there weren't many lyrics to focus on there so the interest came solely from the instruments and their interaction. Once I started listening to all music with that in mind it became clear that the real make-or-break element of a song was the composition itself as opposed to the lyrics and over all tone. A good song is more easily ruined by shoddy arrangements or bad production choices than it is by questionable lyrics basically, and few great songs get there without some sense of how to work the pieces you have at your disposal to your advantage.

I'm not talking about complexity here, at least not in the 'all members must be virtuosos' sense, just a working knowledge of how to allow the elements of a particular piece to intertwine. If it's done right it's not intrusive to the song as a whole but adds a few more layers to the overall composition. A good arrangement is like good production in that it's never overly obvious but plays a large part i nthe structural integrity of the songs. These background elements of the music can take what are at their heart simple musical ideas and re-cast them in such a way that they sound anything but. Midlake's "Young Bride," for instance, isn't too complicated if you look at its parts in isolation, but the way they get folded together makes for a truly exhilarating song in the end.

It starts with a mournful violin figure over some pretty acoustic guitar arpeggios. As the song continues the same violin figure recurs in different environments and adopts a variety of moods, all sad but all different. If you want a crash course in how arrangement can make or break a song there's a lot to look at in "Young Bride," starting with the way the simple addition of a fairly simple but driving bass line and a drum pattern that's heavy on the 2 and 4 makes the initially mournful violin take a noticeably more positive tone. The different instruments in play shift in and out of the mix at various times, and each time one returns the tone is changed in subtle but unmistakable ways. When the drums pick up the tone is less morose. When the bass fades back in it makes the song more pounding and insistent. The lightly distorted guitar that comes in for the chorus adds a darker edge to the song that goes away as the violin comes back in. None of these shifts are jarring and none of the instruments get shortchanged in the process as each is playing its own simple yet interesting idea. This is the complexity I'm referring to, the way that all the elements of the song are integrated in ways that differ from simply layering the instruments atop each other in a static manner. The result here is much more dynamic and noteworthy than most indie-pop form the decade.

Coming up tomorrow: How to make a song about heartbreaks sound like a warm, fuzzy blanket.

#132. 'You can't fence that in'

Couldn't find an embeddable copy of the video so here's a link to that.
Keith Urban "Stupid Boy"

By virtue of my city's hick nature I'm exposed to a lot more country music than I'd like to be. I live in what might as well be the Canadian equivalent of the southern United States: heavily conservative, full of beer-drinkin', cowboy hat-wearin' good ol' boys, where bush parties invariably involve someone driving a truck into the river. It's a hick town at its heart and we love our country music here. I'm not down on the entire genre though, just the aspects of it that have risen to prominence over the last decade. The patriotism, the appropriation of hip hop's braggadocio (no, thank you Big & Rich!,) the endless streams of maudlin balladry, Rascal fucking Flatts...none of it makes the genre look all that appealing to an outsider like myself.

The major issue I have though is that somewhere along the line most of the more popular artists seem to have said 'fuck it' and stopped bothering to try and differentiate themselves sonically. Listening to a country countdown show is like being shown to a buffet where everything may look different but it all winds up tasting the same. The vast majority of the genre gets wrapped up with exactly the same production style: heavy on the twangy guitar, light pedal steel and other 'authentic' country instruments added almost as an afterthought, vocals mixed so high that they're all you can hear all under an obnoxious pop sheen. So 9 times out of 10 the only thing that differentiates one song from another is the vocalist, otherwise you might as well be listening to the same band over and over again.

Of course there are exceptions, and we'll get to many of them later, but I've never thought of Keith Urban as being one of them. His early singles were always...pleasant is probably the best word for them. I never had any huge stake in them but I didn't groan upon hearing them either. They were prime examples of the hegemony of country radio through and through but Urban's genial manner put them in the top tier of that stuff. Even when he got to the ballads he didn't grate my nerves, which is quite remarkable. There's a tendency for male country singers to use the ballads that invariably wind up on their plate as vessels for over-emoting and vocal histrionics, basically the country music version of those painfully obvious "Oscar moments" you'll see in movies. Urban pulled them off better than most, mainly by not going for the obvious melodrama and keeping it low key and fairly subtle.

"Stupid Boy" is easily the best example of how Urban would take what would have been overwrought in most of his peers' hands and turning it into something much more effective by toning it down. I can imagine if this had been handed off to, say, Rascal Flatts that the defeated 'Stupid boy' admonishments in the pre-chorus would be full of unnecessary vocal runs and probably drenched in sappy strings so as to ensure that the listener really gets just how damn sad the song is. In Urban's hands they're so much simpler, shrugged off chiding instead of vocal olympics contenders. The whole song benefits from this approach, so that even when the last chorus twists it from third to first person (such an overdone little trick, especially in country music) it's almost tossed off like an afterthought as opposed to being hammered home as the point of the entire song. As it is it's an unbelievably devastating portrait of the worst kind of relationship any girl could find themselves in, all delivered without the melodramatic trappings any other artist would imbue it with. Of course on the full version there's a bit of that during the extended outro (I'll get to that part in a bit) but otherwise it's all delivered in a very matter of fact manner, not without emotion but with the emotion kept in check.

It's also a great bit of songwriting from relative unknown Sara Buxton. The situation in the song is one that's seen over and over again, but it's dealt with so deftly, both in Buxton's writing and Urban's delivery, that it feels that much more real than any number of other songs that deal with a situation like this. It's pretty well laid put in the chorus, but there's a lot of incisive observations in the verses and the whole package comes together to make for an indelible and complete picture of emotional abuse. There's also a bit of ambiguity as to what the outcome is. I was talking with a friend of mine about it one day a while back and he was adamant that the girl in the song killed herself to get out of her situation whereas I was sure she just finally got up the courage to run from it. Of course now that the seed had been planted I can see where he's coming from in his theory, but either interpretation works with the lyrics as presented. The part at the end, which I'm guessing was cut from the single version, tips it a bit more firmly into the suicide theory, as Urban finally lets go vocally all but begging to reverse the way things went. Given how collected he'd been in the song proper it's easier to imagine the levels of grief he reashes as a reaction to suicide as opposed to the girl he destroyed finally running away.

The outro also illustrates one of Urban's other secret weapons: the fact that on top of being a capable and engaging vocalist he's also a great fucking guitar player. Country music indulges in guitar solos with clinical precision a lot of the time, letting a studio musician go for an 8 bar run at the same point in each song just before the third verse/chorus, and a lot of Urban's songs are no different. Here however we get a full 2 minute outro solo from Urban that's completely unprecedented by the rest of the song. It's a shame really that singles being what they are this part was probably excised from the radio version (although it is in the song's video) since it's as good a showcase for Urban the guitar player as the song preceding it was for Urban the vocalist.

Coming up tomorrow: An entry that'll probably wind up as an album discussion more than a song one, but we shall see or the proper way to layer your instruments.

#133. 'Your hands are shaking cold'

All-American Rejects "Move Along"

I have a feeling that the songs I'm gonna have the hardest time writing about for this are the simplest ones. If I can't delve into the subtle intricacies of the arrangement or production, offer interpretation of the lyrics or analyze the merits of its effect on pop culture as a whole, there's nothing much left other than my personal trajectory with it, and in the case of "Move Along" my trajectory is as simple as the song itself: I heard it and I liked it. It doesn't tie into any major personal events or friendships, it wasn't one of those songs that I think of as shaping my appreciation of music, it was just a song I got exposed to in a fairly mundane locale, enjoyed and remembered for whatever reason and got slightly excited to hear it again.

There's even less to (over-)analyze with the song itself, no veil of metaphor to strip away on the lyrics, no interesting arrangement choices and nothing above a pedestrian performance. And yet it remains a song that I get excited for every time I hear it. I don't shout along to it, but it puts a bit of a spring in my step. It's one of the entries on the list that always kinda jumps out at me and makes me wonder what the hell I was thinking putting it there, then I listen to it and I remember exactly why.

Let this sink in: The All-American Rejects are probably one of the most successful guitar-based bands of the later half of the decade in terms of singles. They've managed to rack up 4 top 20 pop singles since 2005, not a huge number when compared to any number of more urban or strict pop-leaning artists in this time frame (Lady Gaga racked that up in about 6 months or something) but compared to bands who are ostensibly based in rock of some stripe there's not many that have done better. Yet I have no doubt that when it comes down to it they'll be little more than a footnote in the musical history of the decade. For the most part they're one of those bands whose songs occupy your brain for exactly as long as they play on the radio and then pretty much leave right away, at their best they're instantly catchy but in the long run there's always something better in their little box to force them out.

All that said, "Move Along" is wholly under-rated in the grand scheme of things. It hit me when this went into a bit more heavy rotation on the piped in radio station at work last year that as far as the anthemic end of pop-punk goes there were very few singles that matched it's unbridled...happiness I guess. Most of the other big singles that this type of music were upbeat but tempered with regret of some kind, and while the spectre of defeat does hang over the song it does exactly what the lyrics are advocating: pushes past it and refuses to get bogged down by it.

Side note: Does the lead singer always look like he's about 5 seconds from breaking into tears? It's seriously distracting to watch the video for such an upbeat song being sung by a guy about to start bawling uncontrollably.

As I said, there's not much to discuss in the music itself, although I do like the syncopated guitar riff that starts it out as played out as the pattern it makes is. There's something about the song though that makes it stand out against the very, very vanilla backdrop of Rejects singles. It's got a weird sense of purpose that the others don't. It doesn't strive to be anthemic the way "Dirty Little Secret" did but hits the right notes to make itself perfectly anthemic none the less. It's not as emotional as "It Ends Tonight" but resonates a hell of a lot more than that maudlin pile of shite. I guess it represents the one time AAR got everything in perfect balance and didn't overdo anything. All I can say is at least they did it once.

Coming up tomorrow: An exception to my male country ballads suck unmentionable amounts of ass rule or yee-frickin'-haw

#134. 'Everything has been done'

Metric "Dead Disco"

You Forgot It in People may go down as the biggest pitchfork-aided success story of the decade. How else would a little album on a tiny label barely known outside the Toronto scene get into the hands of someone on the other side of the country in the middle of nowhere? It may have been the first real taste of the power that 'fork would be able to wield to greater and greater degrees as the decade progressed, but at least this time the album it was applied to a) needed and b) deserved the boost it was given. It also helps that it helped raise the profile of a huge number of unknown or under-known bands who fed into the main BSS lineup. A big part of the joys of the first few months I listened to YFIiP was tying the vast array of members to their own projects and keeping an eye on them periodically. Sure this resulted in some duffers coming into my sphere (does anyone remember KC Accidental all that well?) but it also opened my newly adventurous ears to the likes of Do Make Say Think (and by extension the whole of the Constellation Records roster), hHead (Jerk is a Canadain pawnshop mainstay and well worth the few dollars you might spend on it) and Feist. It was the rare case of an album offering a multifaceted gateway to a thriving scene I was too far away from to be aware of otherwise, and I do appreciate it for that.

Of course the one rotating member I was most looking forward to following was Emily Haines. Her work on "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl" provided the single highlight of the album for me, such a pained yet forceful voice that edged between childishly grating and entrancing. At the time it was still a year til her main band Metric debuted with the overlooked neo-new wave classic Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, but when that one made its way into my hands it was well worth the wait. Over the next 5 years they've done a lot to squander the goodwill it built up, but the energetic, effervescent debut was one of the best BSS-related releases I've come across up til now.

"Dead Disco" was the obvious highlight and an inspired choice for first (?) single even though it didn't break them the way "Combat Baby" did just a few months later. It might have been that slightly discordant, siren sounding synth blare that kicks it off, but when under that you've got some tight-as-fuck hi-hat heavy drumming that'd do Clem Burke proud and that rubbery bassline it should be easy to overlook that. Of course when Haines comes in she's miles away from her tone in "Anthems," fiery and defiant as opposed to childlike and ephemeral. It's how the song needs to be sung though, anything this jaded and bitter can't be evinced by the sort of voice Haines emploted on "Anthems" just like that couldn't work with the voice she dons here. I wouldn't say that she's a vocal chameleon or anything, but she definitely has a sense of what type of voice to use at what time, which goes a long way towards her various projects' sucesses.

As for the jaded bitterness of the lyrics...I may be grasping here but it sounds like a fairly cogent critique of the "scene" that surrounds music like this. The idea some people have that they need to do something new to stand out blowing up in their faces and robbing whatever they're doing of its soul. The scenesters who sit around mocking this failure. The refrain of 'everything has been done' followed by the most sarcastic la-la-las committed to tape might as well be the battle cry of the early 00s indie denizen, so invested in finding something new and unknown that they'd blithely overlook anything remotely similar to what's come before. Basically as an indictment of the way the indie scene went from appreciation of the music to appreciation of the obscureness it's not as visceral as, say "Losing My Edge," but at least it offers some comfort to the "failures" in its final section. Haines drops the bitterness in her voice for the last 30 seconds and assures whatever fictional artist just got dismissed by his intended audience 'I know you tried to change things.' The implied bit there is that even though it didn't change anything it still spoke to someone, probably all the comfort anyone needs.

Coming up tomorrow: How fake Weezer overtook real Weezer for 4 minutes or so.

#135. 'God bless you all for the song you saved us'

Deftones "Minerva"

History time: In grade 9-10 Deftones were my favorite band ever. I had gotten both Adrenaline and Around the Fur as Christmas gifts in '99 and played them relentlessly throughout the first half of 2000. I forced them on my more metal-inclined friends to mixed results, and its easy to see why. Despite their dubious association with the core nu metal bands they stood well apart from the rest of the genre. In hindsight both those albums are much more expansive and melodic than anything my other favorites from this time. I probably didn't realize that consciously at the time, but although I focused on the catharsis in their songs I don't think the effective transistions into them were totally lost on me. Anyway, White Pony was the first album I can recall anticipating the release of with any sort of fervor. It holds a special place in my musical development too, as unlike the previous two Deftones albums the more textured and melodic songs were the ones that jumped out at me as being the obvious highlights. I loved the whole album, and 9 years later I still do pretty much unreservedly, but it was the stuff like "RX Queen" and "Knife Prty" that spoke to me more so than say, "Korea" or "Street Carp." About 7 months later Relationship of Command pulled me the rest of the way out of the nu metal hole but White Pony was the initial step in that direction and I can't thank it enough.

When the self-titled follow up to White Pony was released 3 years later I wasn't as anticipatory though. In the intervening time I'd gotten into sort of the beginner level indie rock cannon (Pixies, early REM, 'Mats etc.) so my anticipation was pointed more towards Radiohead's Hail to the Thief at the time that Deftones hit the street. I did pick it up shortly after its release, but more out of a sense of obligation than any sort of need for it. I'd moved on, and as a result I was heavily disappointed by most of the album back then. "Minerva" and the unsettling "Lucky You" aside it sounded like a big step backwards for the band, a regression to the more metal-influenced days of Adrenaline as opposed to a step toeards more textured and interesting waters. More recent listens have made it rise in my estimation, but for the longest time I only had time for the two tracks mentioned above.

"Minerva" especially was what I was looking for. I always think of Deftones as having a slight shoegazer lean to them even back as far as Adrenaline (the guitars on "Birthmark" especially) but I can't think of another time where they were made this explicit. Stephen Carpenter and Chino Moreno create a crushing wall of guitar, not one as impenetrable and feedback laced as the classic 'gazers but lush and all encompassing none the less. It crashes in after a short, discordant interlude and just never lets up for the next four minutes. Truth be told, I was seriously torn between this one and "Digital Bath" for the Deftones song on here, but the wall of guitar pushed it pretty decisively in "Minerva"'s favor, though "Bath" does have Chino's best vocal performance.

That's not to say that his vocals here aren't good as well. I always prefer him in ethereal croon mode as opposed to the more shouty tone his voice takes in the band's more aggressive songs, and the verses of "Minerva" illustrate why pretty perfectly. The tone his voice has in the upper end of his register is similar to Ride's vocalist, albeit after a few years of heavy drinking and smoking in it's ethereal yet strong sound. In the chorus he tones the ethereality down and does the closest thing he can to full on belting. It's not as intense a performance as he could give in the early years, but it works so well in the song's context that it's hard to fault him on that. Given that he spends a lot of time on Deftones shredding his vocal chords even more than in the early days it was a nice bit of respite, and one that didn't carry the detachment of his other calm voiced songs there. In short he was as invested in the vocals here as on the harsher tracks, but applied it in a much nicer way and it payed off greatly. The wall of guitar may be the primary attraction, but a less involved vocal could have sunk the whole song so it's a good thing Chino was up to the task here.

Coming up tomorrow: Canadians do new wave better in all eras, just admit it.

#136. 'Show me a garden that's bursting into life'

Unabashed romanticism is one of those qualities in a song that can easily veer into the realms of the maudlin. The right amount of it makes for greatness as far as love songs are concerned, but too little comes off as overly tentative and too much comes off as...well, Dianne Warren's career. Getting it right takes practice, or at least incredible amounts of dumb luck. Of course the biggest thing that connects the songs I'm thinking about when I talk about getting it right is their simplicity. They don't cloud the sentiment in metaphor or elaborate wordplay, they just come right out and say it. Or in some cases they don't say it at all.

The idea behind "Chasing Cars" on a pure lyrical level sounds a it cliched, but coupled with the musical accompaniment and singer Gary Lightbody's fragile croon and it's sold more than well enough. The idea that more important than being told 'I love you' is being able to just lay down with each other and forget everything else just works in this context, and it's a sentiment that has probably sunk more budding relationships than it's started. It's an unabashedly romantic notion, and any other method of delivery could come off as needy, manipulative or downright creepy. Lightbody avoids all those possible pitfalls by making it fully up to whoever he's talking to whether they want it or not; it's a question as opposed to a statement so the undertone is much more emotionally resonant than it would be otherwise.

But would it be here if not for the music? Obviously not. After that whole dissertation about the way an effective climax can make or break a song you don't think I'd talk about this one without re-appraising that part of the equation do you. I remember someone on a long lost thread over at RYM said that this was a more effective crescendo than 90% of post rock, and I'm inclined to agree with that ruling if not for one thing: the crescendo is mostly an illusion. It's a damned effective illusion, but an illusion none the less. There's the gradual addition of elements to the mix but as far as actual crescendoing goes it's not exactly a slow build to an explosive climax. The song rest s at a slow boil for two and a half minutes, starting with a surprisingly effective two-note guitar motif and gradually adding layers to the mix that may increase the tension but not the actual volume.

The key is that instead of building the tension to its breaking point and just letting go, the band builds the tension and then stops for a little bit before they actually bring the volume into play. In it's own way that little 'ping' that separates the tension building from the release is the star of the song. Without it you've got a much more rote crescendo (just imagine if the near silence was instead replaced by that one chord being strummed as increasing volume until it reached the point it winds up at) and you're robbed of the sheer spectacle of the band crashing in during the 'If I lay here,' which is one of more effective little chill moments in pop music this decade. It's like the gradual fade down in Mogwai's "Like Herod" applied to balladry, making the climax more effective and itself adding a new layer of tension to the procession.

While the climax might be overshadowed by that brief pause it's notable for throwing caution to the wind as far as the romanticism goes. One of the more effective tricks Lightbody uses here is adding to the chorus every time it gets repeated, starting off with one triplet of verse, adding a second the second time around and then revealing the full chorus as the song reaches it's highest point. It's a variation on the (overused in my opinon) trick of changing a single line in the final repetition of the chorus to add a new layer to the song, but instead of altering the perception al lit does here is deepen the state of romantic bliss the song's trying to portray. Use that last half of the final chorus as the song's building up and the game is given away, but withhold them further and it just seems incomplete. They're the closure the song needs to be a piece as opposed to a fragment, and they also manage to toe that line of unabashed romanticism that the song's been balanced on the whole way through.

Coming up tomorrow: How one of the most disappointing follow up albums of the decade spawned the band's best single or wall of noise wins again.

#137. 'Trust me'

I know I already used my 'this is not emo' boilerplate for Yellowcard last week, but of all the bands that get the label misapplied to them none is more egregious than My Chemical Romance. I mean, sure they're excessively dramatic, but the secret to their success is that really they're an alternate dimension version of Queen that grew up on Iron Maiden, Dookie and Tim Burton movies. This is much more readily apparent on The Black Parade than on their breakthrough Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, but even then there's an aura of camp that surrounds them at key moments and manages to transform what would be unbearably dramatic teenage angst into self deprecation. The biggest thing that people seem to miss is that MCR are doing this stuff with their tongues firmly in cheek. It's not meant to be taken seriously as far as I'm concerned, and that's what makes it so much better than I'd initially estimated.

See, MCR were my sister's band more than mine. I got exposed to them by proxy and by virtue of very thin walls. To start with I hated it for every reason their detractors like to throw around. It was so very teenage to my ears; pointlessly melodramatic, angsty without reason and so obviously crafted for this new "emo" scene that I didn't want anything to do with it. Sure "Helena"was getting a lot of year-end list love in 2005 but I wasn't fooled...until I finally took a good listen to "I'm Not OK (I Promise.)" It was still everything I railed against earlier for a good portion of the song, but then as frontman Gerard Way got more unnecessarily manic and unhinged there came two words, delivered in a total deadpan by one of the other guys in the band (fucked if I'm gonna look up their names at this hour.) that just caused everything to come into perspective: 'Trust me.'

It just made me laugh at first because it sounded so out of place: here was this unbelievably angsty song delivered from the heights of melodrama that gets interrupted for a couple of seconds for one deadpan aside. It seemed like a weird studio accident, one of those things that wasn't necessarily meant to be caught on tape but got left in the final mix for some reason. If it wasn't accidental though, it was particularly well-timed comedy at least. Every other time I heard the song that became the part I waited for, a little aside was making me not mind the song every now and then. It took another goo listen for it to fully click for me though.

Basically, not only was it well-timed comedy, it was the key to my not hating MCR anymore. Assuming that the 'trust me' aside was wholly intentional, it pointed to a band that refused to take themselves seriously at all times. If the band wasn't taking themselves seriously all the time, there's also the chance that they were taking themselves seriously none of the time. As such the melodramatic overload of "I'm Not OK" isn't necessarily meant to be taken seriously, and taken with a grain of salt it's much more palatable. In short: two words make the song go from unbearably angsty to knowingly over the top and take the band into the realms of camp. I'm not sure if that's the way they intended it but it works for me.

With that in mind, "I'm Not OK" grew on me as a piece of willing self-deprecation. The melodrama now came with a wink in the listener's general direction, Way knows how over the top he's going at every moment and you're supposed to know it too. Instead of cringing at the vocals and lyrics they started to take on life as a giant joke whose punchline was as brief as they come. Trust me.

Coming up tomorrow: When is a build up not a build up or fake crescendos.

#138. 'You don't deserve this'

And thus ends the lowest tier of the list. I didn't necessarily plan it this way, but some of the points I've been making in the last few posts collide nicely for this particular entry. Jet Set Satellite were one of Canada's bigger flash in the pans of the decade, although apparently they managed a follow up hit to "Best Way to Die" in "Baby Cool Your Jets" so calling them a one hit wonder might be a bit less than accurate. The song doesn't traffic much in dynamics, especially the vocals, my placing it on the list is fueled by nostalgia and it's hardly known outside of Canada. Basically I could cherry pick passages from all the posts I've made up til now and call it a new review, but I'm assuming those reading this (all 8 of you) expect better from me. And even if you don't, here it comes anyway.

I remember vividly a discussion me and a few friends had in math class on day about this song. It was mostly based on the idea that the purpose one-hit wonders serve is to leave behind one absolutely kick-ass song and then just fuck right off and never disrupt that legacy, which is an interesting theory but also one that depends on a much more arbitrary view of one-hit wonders than I have now. Of course the fact that we were having this discussion before Jet Set Satellite even released their second single meant that we were kind of getting our hopes up for the band's one-hit wonderdom, but like "Gotta Tell You" there was just this aura about "Best Way to Die" that all but screamed at us not to worry about anything the band did later, this was where the best stuff would be. And who were we to say differently? As far as most of us were concerned this was a prime slice of rock n roll. Oh to be 14 again...

I considered doing the rest of this from my 14 year old mentality, but thought the better of it. Needless to say that at that point I wasn't the most articulate or discerning music fan. I knew what I liked but I couldn't exactly say what it was that made me like it more or less than anything else I liked. 14 year old me loved this though. He loved pretty much everything about it...no deep analysis necessary. It was a simpler time for me, and the fact that something like this stood out makes sense: it was heavy enough to appeal to the side of me that bought Limp Bizkit albums the previous year (shut up, I was 13 years old,) melodic enough to satisfy the side of me that was developing a slight obsession with The Bends and popular enough that I could find it on Napster mach 1. It's one of those odd crux songs that manages to give you a snapshot of my musical sensibility at the time: somewhat in transition from nu-metalhead to broader horizons but not quite there.

The thing here is that it's also a song that plays better in memory than in the present. I remember the song fondly, it being one of the last vestiges of actual personality on the radio airwaves before the ascent of Kroeger and company, but when I hear it nowadays its flaws are much more apparent. I admire the way it rides one riff through both verse and chorus, only changing up for the bridge, but the riff itself isn't much to sneeze at. The vocalist seems to have only one setting, and that setting is well into the melodramatic end of the spectrum. I still find it catchy, but I can't quite figure out why. It's a good song for sure, but I remember it being a great song, one of the best songs to make it big in 2000. In my initial ranking this was a lot higher up, but hearing it again (and listening to it while writing this post) made it hard to justify that placement. I still think it deserved a spot, if only to highlight how much 14 year old me loved it, but I didn't want to force some songs that were legitimately better down further to highlight that.

Really that's the summation of this lower tier: it's songs that I want to highlight in some way despite the fact that they aren't necessarily 'best of the 00s' material in any broader scope. They are all songs I like a lot on some levels, but not enough to really think twice about them in a broader scope. If I'd thought harder while making the list I'm sure I could have come up with 13 songs that might crowd these out, but it would still feel a bit wrong to leave them off.

Coming up tomorrow: How a single line can turn a song from overly dramatic shit to hilarious self deprecation or is it ironic appreciation or just appreciation of irony?

#139. 'Your love for me came as a waterfall'

One hit wonders are one of my major pop culture fascinations. It's not so much their existence that fascinates me as how many routes there are to arrive at them. There's the long-running artist who just happens to break into the top 40 once and only once, usually in the lower reaches and usually managing to escape the OHW tag by virtue of their extensive niche discography. There's novelty one-offs that were essentially created for the sole purpose of being a one-hit wonder. There's artists who hit it big with their first single and then try for ages to recapture that glory. They're all tagged with the same heading by virtue of all crossing some arbitrary barrier only once. The breadth, both in style and quality, under that heading is staggering. Look at any given year in one-hit wonders over at yon wikipedia and you'll see just how widespread it can be.

Perhaps the best thing about one-hit wonders is the lack of predictability as to what will eventually be in that box. It's also the most frustrating thing since it means that in the end Soulja Boy is not a one hit wonder and Weezer is. Of course every so often you can just tell that a song is gonna be a one hit wonder. Something about it just trips every single wire that leads to one-hit wonderdom and unless the artist has magic on their side (and in some cases not even then) they aren't gonna get out of it. Something like Samantha Mumba's "Gotta Tell You," for instance.

Something about "Gotta Tell You" just screamed 'one-hit wonder' from the first time I heard it. I think it was Mumba's voice. I know America has accepted females with deeper voices, but her smoky tone was so far removed from the usual pop 'n' b fare at the time that I wouldn't have guessed she had a second hit in her. Toni Braxton aside, how often do smoky voiced women manage multiple hits in this day and age? Add to this the detriment that popular UK artists always seem to have when they cross over here. Mumba's had plenty of chart sucessin Britain and her native Ireland, but across the Atlantic she's in a much more well stocked pond as far as female r 'n' b singers are concerned and thus its easier for her to get lost in the shuffle.

Of course "Gotta Tell You" was gonna get huge though. How could it not? That chorus was a near perfect piece of songcraft; the rising strings out of the verses, the synth drum break as it hits, the harmonies...it all just converges into one of the first great pop choruses of the decade. The rest of the song's not quite at that level, but Mumba's voice is enough to charm me and the song as a whole folds together so nicely, especially the background 'yeah yeah yeah's that make the transition back to the verses. It's another one of those songs that just grabs me whenever I hear it. Call it nostalgia or whatever you will, but I just think it's appreciation of craftsmanship in pop music coupled with a good singer.

#140. 'Anything that may delay you might just save you'

Will anyone remember the elctroclash movement? I'm sure it still has its vocal proponents, ones who still buy new Peaches albums and wear Fischerspooner shirts to the clubs every weekend, but in terms of lasting impact it seems to be one of those movements that really wasn't. Sure the big names are still making their stuff, though at least Fischerspooner have expanded their sound, but the genre may as well have died before it made the waves it wanted to.

I'm not mourning it, not in the least, but I'm really wondering why Ladytron got folded into it at the beginning. To be fair I haven't heard their sophomore album Lights and Magic, but 604 always struck me as too icy and detached to get lumped in with the slightly more effervescent trapping of the genre at its inception. You couldn't really dance to "He Took Her to a Movie" or "Playgirl," they had more in common with early 80s cold wave than the rest of electroclash's major names. 2005's The Witching Hour was maybe a bit closer as far as dancability goes, but that's discounting the dark, claustrophobic production. It was almost like post-punk turned indie electronic as opposed to the more fashionable stuff on electroclash. It also contained the single best moment associated with the genre in "Destroy Everything You Touch."

As much as I praise songs with effective buildups, there's also something particularly entrancing about songs that stay at the same level of intensity the whole time. Much as dynamics have come to play a role in most genres, when a song makes no attempt to ramp up or down at any point it's makes the whole endeavor that much more hypnotic. "Destroy" has exactly one build up: th first 15 seconds of the song. After that it rides pretty much the same beat through the rest of the song. It could be boring, but there's little changes that pop up whose presence is made that much more noticeable by the lack of change in the main aspects of the song. Slight changes in keyboard tone, odd little background riffs, things that might pass by unnoticed are so readily heard that they immediately add to the song's character.

But really what it's all about is the vocals of Mira Aroyo. Given that my initial exposure to the band was through 604's "He Took Her to a Movie" I was convinced that they'd switched vocalists for Witching Hour, but looking back it's obviously the same person. The vocals on "Destroy" seem to be distorted in some way, not like guitar distortion but like singing through a slightly faulty microphone, but her icy demeanor fro the early singles is still there. Applying it to this type of song though makes them sound a bit evil in addition to cold and distant. The lyrics aren't really of much importance, but with Aroyo's weirdly intimate yet robotic vocals they manage to achieve an odd sense of evocativeness, especially the key line: 'Please destroy me this way'. If the song is to be taken at face value, that line seems t osignal an attraction to danger or a need to be consumed by it, but with the vocal tome Aroyo applies to it the whole thing sounds a bit...mundane. So dangerousness is mundane and lack of dynamics is entrancing. Is it any wonder that this is the song I'm gonna remember Ladytron for?

#141. 'If I could find you now things would get better'

Let's get something out of the way first: this is not emo. What has become known as emo these days is a weird hybrid of pop punk and arena rock that has nothing in common with even the least hardcore affiliated branches of emo from before. If nu-metal was a lazy way of encompassing all the movers and shakers on modern rock radio in the early decade, emo as it started to get used in the early decade was a lazy way to characterize this new crop of pop-punk bands whose material may have tended a bit too much towards being sad about life in general. Although you can trace out why this happened in some ways (it'll be discussed in a later post since ground zero for this shift is coming up a bit later) it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth the way that a genre as multifaceted and interesting as emo managed to make its way onto elitist shit lists based on what amounts to lazy marketing.

Anyway, let's get to the review for today....

Nostalgia is a powerful force. Anytime things get bad it's easy to convince yourself that by trying to get back to the simpler times, or what seemed like the simpler times at least, is the solution to all your problems. You idealize your youth as a paragon of uncomplicatedness, especially when you've just graduated and are finding that the job market is unforgiving even when you've got a useful degree...OK maybe that's just me. The point is that as you get older the good old days get looked upon with more rose-colored glasses the further you get from them. That's "Ocean Avenue" in a nutshell, albeit focused specifically on a relationship from that time as opposed to that time as a whole, and given it was released just after I graduated high school it's sort of become a touchstone for my own nostalgia.

At the time it was released I wrote it off. I was fully into my most snobbish phase of music geekery and was predisposed to look down on anything that sounded remotely popular unless I was in a more social setting. In other words, I'd dance to "Ignition (Remix)" but feel bad about it later. So "Ocean Avenue" flew right below as I looked down upon it. It was unambitious, glossy, post-blink-182 pop-punk shit as far as 17 year old me was concerned. Sure they had a violin, but it was a gimmick to me back then. Basically, I made the cardinal mistake of music criticism: I went into a new song expecting to hate it and ensuring it lived down to my expectations.

Cut to few years later and I hear it again. Around this time I had started to be less of an asshole about music, but still had a barrier built up against pop. The weird thing was that I immediately associated it with my graduation even though I know full well I didn't hear it until after that. It brought back that haze of graduation night, not the ceremony which meant fuck all since exams were still a few weeks away, but the grad dinner and the all night party the school sponsored (non-alcoholic and drug free, but with a hypnotist that convinced people they were watching porn. Decent trade-off all told) came flooding back. It made me smile a bit more than I'd admit back then, and Even now I associate it with the events it had no association with. A song about nostalgia was ticking off my own nostalgia about a perceived simpler time, essentially.

It wasn't until this year that I embraced it fully, because god damn is it a catchy little song. The drumming alone elevates it over 90% of the stuff in its immediate sonic neighborhood, those chorus fills are simple yet golden and far beyond what your average pop-punk drummer would be capable of. The violin still comes off a bit gimmicky, but in the outro when it actually takes a melodic lead capacity as opposed to getting crowded out by the huge guitars in the chorus it ends off the ong on a plaintive yet happy note. Vocally I can't help but think of a less Clash-aping Good Charlotte, but the delivery is exactly what the song calls for, hesitant yet strong in the verses ad reaching for anthemic grandeur in the chorus. It's a near-perfect summation of the best aspects of the whole arena punk movement even without the unexplained nostalgia factor.

#142. 'I like it a little better when you take it all off'

I don't know when exactly it happened, probably before I became a music lover at any level, but somewhere along the line mainstream rock music stopped being about getting laid. In theory that whole garage-rock revival thing that The Strokes brought about in the early decade should have fixed all that; garage was rock at its most primal and animalized which leads quite nicely to sex-soaked tunes. This was, of course, assuming that by 'garage rock' people were referring to stuff like Oblivians, the Gories or hell even earlier Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, which they obviously weren't. Bad enough that the band most responsible for the whole scene had one real moment of 'hey we're all gonna get LAID!' euphoria ("Juicebox," which sadly isn't on the list) but the bands they shone the spotlight in the general direction of had even less rawness on display. Sure, The Hives had the attitude and charisma to pull it off but they always came off as too sterile on record. The Vines were too mopey and acid casualty-led to appear sexy to anyone, and The White Stripes...well we're saving them for another day. Needless to say, the revival failed to deliver as far as primal sex-crazed mania goes, at least if you weren't Canadian and didn't get to know Danko Jones.

Jones' whole persona is pretty much Andrew W.K. if you replaced 'party' with 'fuck your girlfriend in the bathroom while you're out for a smoke then laugh in your face about it' in his cardinal life philosophy. Of course just like W.K. he's also pretty one-note. You only need one song to get his shtick, and "Bounce" is about as good as you're gonna find. His later offerings were a bit overly slicked over, and his only other early single that I can remember ("Cadillac") doesn't do quite as much for me. But "Bounce," his first single I'm pretty sure, hits the nail on the head as far as garage rock goes. It may be a bit more languid than the rawer stuff I mentioned earlier, grooving instead of pummeling, but it's got the one thing that most of the garage rock revival lacked: attitude. As far as musicality goes, there's nothing too special about "Bounce." It's a basic riff, even more basic solo and fairly pedestrian melody. In other words, it's the exact sort of thing that garage rock is based on. The whole song lives and dies by attitude, and that's not in short supply at all.

Jones makes up for the no-frills composition with his charisma more than his lyrics, which basically amount to 'you look good in everything, but better in nothing. Let's fuck.' Any other 00s garage rock revivalist tries that and he's a joke. Jones pulls it off with style though. Even the cheesiest business in the song comes off as something close to sexy, stuff like the falsetto on 'black kangoooooooooooooooooool' or the lip smacking in the third verse. The key to the whole thing is that it comes across as non-threatening first and foremost. It's more genuine as a sincere love song (OK, sex song if you wanna be a bit more accurate) than with the hint of menace or voyeurism the lyrics might carry in other hands. Jones has it worked out perfectly so he can be both a total horndog and an unabashed romantic when none of the other bands in the revival managed either with any degree of convincingness.