#66. 'To know me as hardly golden is to know me all wrong'

Band of Horses "The Funeral"

There's something about the chorus of this one that just hits hard. The idea that you spend your life perpetually expecting a funeral to occur at any moment is at once profoundly depressing and profoundly beautiful, especially in conjunction with Ben Bridwell's crooning vocal delivery and the bands' majestic, dynamic backing making the whole thing sound majestically uplifting.

#66. Nellie McKay - Get Away From Me (Sony, 2004)

Hey, Stylus ain't around anymore and someone needs to remind people that this is a fucking great album. So what if the two disc packaging is unnecessary for a release that clocks in a just under an hour, or that McKay's youth works against her a few times when she gets into to heady of subject matter ("It's a Pose" is saved by its chorus but the 'you've committed every rape' line still seems leaden) or that it's a bit unfocused? Look at the results: a 19 year old Norah Jones who instead of making boring music for coffee shops and soccer moms makes an album that flits from rap (the hilarious "Sari") to smooth jazz ("I Wanna Get Married", "Really") to Tin-Pan Alley and back all while throwing out bitingly caustic lyrics aimed at pretty much everyone who might buy this album. It's almost a tour de force in defying listener expectations; you see a cute young girl at her piano but what you get is a woman who isn't afraid to tell you and everyone like you to fuck off before she interpolates "Carolina in the Morning" into a song about the apocalypse.

#67. 'I've pictured you in coffins'

Clinic "Distortions"

I'm a fan of the unsettling, as if you couldn't tell already, and this might take the prize for the most unsettling pop song of the decade. A love song to a coma patient? Prayer to get rid of disease? Does it matter when there's chills down my spine as Ade Blackburn intones 'I love it when you blink your eyes...'? It absolutely does not.

#67. Melt-Banana - "Cell-Scape" (A-Zap, 2003)

Melt-Banana made a pop record.

Melt-fucking-Banana made a pop record?

Melt-Banana made a fucking POP record?!?!

OK, not quite, but the transition from the ADD bursts of hyperfast, impossibly agile 2-minute maximum blasts of Japanese experimentalism to the contents of "Cell-Scape" makes it seem like that. The songs are just as quick and kinetic, but they're actual songs now instead of teh fragments that populated the band's previous albums. And they're somewhat catchy to boot - I personally can't stop humming various parts of "A Dreamer Who Is Too weak to Face Up To" ans "Lost Parts Stinging Me So Cold." It might also be the closest thing to showing the quartet in peak form musically, as Agata's guitar winds through impossibly fast runs, Rika's bass matches that sort of intensity and drummer Dave Witte keeps pushing things along at an unbelievalbe clip. The cumulative effect is like a strobe light for your ears.

#68. 'Will I follow?'

Portishead "The Rip"

If you don't get a little bit of a twinge in your heart when Beth Gibbons croons 'Will I follow?' I don't know what to say to you...

#68. Out Hud - S.T.R.E.E.T.D.A.D. (Kranky, 2002)

The dance-punk revival was of more note for its singles than its albums when you get down to it. S.T.R.E.E.T.D.A.D. is a major exception to that observation though- a sprawling exercise in marrying the energy of dance-punk to the dynamics of post-rock without discounting the individual powers of either genre. It's also a variably moody piece, ranging from the desolate melancholy of "Story of the Whole Thing" to the kinetic "Hair Dude, You're Stepping on My Mystique" and hitting all points in between on the 12 minute centerpiece "The L Train Is a Swell Train and I Don't Wanna Hear You Indies Complain." It pains me to think that something this singular and expressive is gonna get lost in the shuffle of everyone's decade end lists, but at least I didn't neglect it (came damn close though...)

Catching Up With...

So my master plan for doing one post in each category per day is slowly dying given how much I'm wanting to write in each entry. So over the next few days I'll be trying to get caught up with a bunch of place holder posts that I will maybe get around to elaborating on when things get a bit less crazy and I have extra time on my hands. Sunday should see a return to the attempt at two detailed posts a day, but I'll probably return to place holders if things get hectic at some points

#69: 'Don't stop movin' you're makin' me hot'

Nina Sky "Move Ya Body"

I think that the reason dancehall never became more than a small blip on the radar in North America, at least on a populist level, was that it appeared to the common man that the whole genre was based on one single rhythm. Looking back to the 1-2 year period where it seemed that every second one-hit wonder was somehow affiliated to the dancehall scene in Jamaica, pretty much every single one of the biggest hits from that genre were based on the Diwali riddim popularized by Sean Paul’s mega-hit “Get Busy.” So after a half dozen or so mostly good-to-great songs that were all based on that addictive syncopated clapping rhythm I wouldn’t be surprised if a) the fickle consumers got burnt out on it and b) they inferred that the whole genre was based around that beat. I have no faith in the public, essentially, but given how soon after the Diwali-based hits phased out – Lumidee’s “Never Leave You” marking their high point and their essential end if I remember right – another dancehall influenced single with a different type of riddim (the Coolie Dance riddim if Wikipedia is to be trusted, not an aficionado of the Jamaican scene here) became the summer hit of 2004 it’s not hard to think that at least a) was true.

Basically, “Move Ya Body” is the ideal summer song. It’s lightweight, inconsequential, addictive and conducive to dancing. But unlike a lot of summer jams of years past, there’s something about it that stands out. It’s not just the rhythm, although that is a big part of its appeal, but the way that the Albino sisters sing the song without really singing it if that makes sense. I’m not talking about the usual thing that sub-standard R ‘n’ B singers do where they compensate for lack of vocal versatility by drenching every syllable in unearned sexiness, moaning and writhing instead of finding the notes. It’s clear that the Albino sisters could do that, but they make the song sound much more sexy by sounding like they aren’t trying to make it sound sexy. The vocals are almost ethereal at times, like Nicole and Natalie are floating above the rest of the song while still being completely in sync with it. Not something you hear every day in modern R ‘n’ B, and a very welcome approach as such.

Of course, the riddim underneath it is just as important a factor in the song’s addictiveness. It’s also a much more interesting dancehall beat than the Diwali riddim, adding a few more syncopations to the party and not relying so much on the handclaps to carry the track. If you break it down, the rhythm has two basic elements: the bass pulse in a 3/8-3/8-1/4 pattern and an overlay of straight half-note handclaps. That’s what holds the song together, and the way it’s rendered here is nothing short of perfection. Sure it’d be hard to fuck up such a simple pattern, but something about the way it comes across here is so much better than it should be by any sort of logical thought process. Maybe it’s the fact that it represents the sort of quasi-minimalist construct that pop embraced for a while where the beat was allowed to stand on its own without all manner of fun sounds distracting from it. Other than that fluid, almost video-gamey synth line over the chorus all there is to the song’s instrumentation is the beat, throwing it in to the spotlight even more so than the vocals and giving “Move Ya Body” the most unprecedented instrumental hook of the decade. I can’t recall who the producer was here, but whoever it was they certainly put together a master’s class in doing as much as possible with so little in the way of elements.

#69. cLOUDDEAD - cLOUDDEAD (Mush, 2001) and Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein (Def Jux, 2001)

Is it weird that even though I have, in the past, railed against albums that seem to go out of their way to fill an 80 minute disc I still think both cLOUDDEAD and The Cold Vein are two of the best examples of hip hop albums this decade? The latter is a full 75 minutes long and the former just barely misses that mark, yet in both cases the sprawl seems more than warranted. Of course my usual reasons for docking any album for out-staying its welcome is that there’s an obvious element of filler present, whether it’s in the form of skits or just a bunch of half-baked ideas that reek of afterthought. That sort of thing seems especially prevalent in hip hop albums for whatever reason, so seeing an over 70-minute runtime is usually enough reason for me to start out skeptical. Yet in both cases here the length isn’t just justified, it’s downright necessary.

Take cLOUDDEAD for instance. You could make a convincing argument for the material it was culled from to have been edited down for a CD release, but to me the whole point of the album is to demonstrate sprawl in both style and length. There more elements of sound collage and DJ mix in the structure than there is hip hop, with Nosdam’s production stringing together a series of fragments on each track rather than creating what could be deemed as traditional songs. Additionally, the production seems to owe more to Brian Eno and Boards of Canada than even the most out-there production from the Anticon collective, foreshadowing the direction Nosdam would develop further on his solo outings. Even before you figure in the unique vocal styles of the two MCs present you’ve already got one of the more uncompromisingly un-hip hop hip hop albums of the decade based on the structure and sonics alone.

Given the emphasis on structure over content there aren’t many truly memorable moments, but that’s not really the point here. Each individual piece here is a minor masterpiece of sorts, taking a series of unrelated movements and working them together without making the transitions seem forced. When the two MCs and their occasional guests step into the spotlight it’s not normally in a standard way either. Sure the Sole guest spot on “And All You Can Do Is Laugh” is pretty normal, but when it’s just Dose and Why? left to their own devices things take a turn for the delightfully abstract, like the apparent tribute to a friend who committed suicide “Jimmy Breeze” or the almost devoid of rapping in any way, shape or form “Bike”. I’m tempted to not even call it hip hop since it only bears a passing resemblance to any other facet of the genre, but whatever it is, it’s one of the most singular releases of the decade and is thoroughly fascinating even when it veers off course.

Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein is similarly fascinating, but for pretty much the exact opposite reasons. cLOUDDEAD relied on sprawl, ambience and diversity, The Cold Vein – which, truth be told, is probably the better of the two – relies on a much more focused, harsh and concise attack. Now, when I say ‘focused’ I don’t necessarily mean that the whole album sounds the same; the focus is mostly a by-product of the ferocity that MCs Vordul Mega and Vast Aire come at each track with. These are two of the most clever, versatile and intelligent MCs I’ve heard, twisting any number of typical hip hop tropes into a weird mélange of the surreal and the visceral. “Raspberry Fields” is a real tour de force in this area, with the two rappers giving their version of an old rap cliché, the ‘my band is better than your band’ brag track in this case, but elevating it with a torrent of absolutely mind-bending lines. ‘You’ve got beef but there’s worms in your Wellington/I’ll put a hole in your skull and extract the gelatin’ gets all the glory, and rightfully so, but the best part of that whole section is the fact that Vast Aire goes through the first verse twice after he gets the punchline wrong the first time. Then there’s ‘Your girl’s sex technology/I wanna plug in’ which might stand as the best way to express the basic ‘I’ll fuck your girl’ thought that pops up in a lot of that type of tracks. Elsewhere the duo get more introspective (“A B-Boy’s Alpha” and “The F-Word”) emotional (the closing duo of “Pigeon” and “Scream Phoenix”) and combative (“Battle of Asgard”) but they never go at the tracks with anything less than full force. That alone makes its length bearable; nothing would ruin an album like this more than some phoned-in verses or MCs that can’t hypnotize the listener with their flow the way Vast and Vordul can.

Of course it would be a huge disservice to The Cold Vein to not mention the production, as it’s easily among the best work El-P has done to date. Sure it’s just a variant on his usual post-apocalyptic soundscapes that he’s been pushing forth since the Company Flow Days, but each time he brings it out he does enough to push it forward that it never seems to get old. Here it’s not as uncompromisingly bleak as on his solo albums, even getting some rather lighthearted moments (“Painkillers”) to mingle with stuff like the harsh, skittery “Raspberry Fields” or the epic, guitar aided “Pigeon” and “Ox Out of the Cage.” He also makes use of some of the most unprecedented samples I’ve seen on a hip hop album, everything from a pair of Brian Eno tracks mixed with Laurie Anderson on “Raspberry Fields” to second-tier proggers Nektar played against Ramsey Lewis on “Battle for Asgard” with a couple of Philip Glass samples thrown in to boot. It all coalesces under El-P’s hand to make for as consistent and cohesive a set of songs as you’re likely to find in any stripe of hip hop this decade.

#70. 'Nothing compares to a quiet evening alone'

Paramore “Crushcrushcrush”

It would have been so easy to dismiss Paramore. So many things about the band just stand out as red flags as far as my ability to enjoy them would go; the fact that they’re basic pop-punk, the fact that they appeared on the Twilight soundtrack, the fact that they’re teenagers or at least only a couple of years removed from high school, the fact that “Misery Business” fell on the wrong side of the catchy-annoying divide. None of it seemed to point towards the fact that with two singles they’d become almost the gold standard for 00s post-Avril teen-punk in my eyes, and yet it happened. It’s a bit humbling to witness a band I’d all but written off manage to completely knock me off my feet in as little as three exceptional minutes. Humbling but also pretty rewarding. The fact is that between “That’s What You Get” and “Crushcrushcrush” they somehow managed to not only undo the negative image I’d given them in light of “Misery Business” but put out two of the finest examples of pop-punk that the 00s had to offer.

Choosing between the two of those singles was hard, but the edge to “Crushcrushcrush” shouldn’t be seen as a slight on “That’s What You Get.” If I were going about this like my albums list I’d do a dual post on both songs and go into detail about their respective strengths and weaknesses, but as it stands “Crush” just has that slight leg up on its competitor. It’s another instance of a song that doesn’t strike me as a logical choice for a single, and given that those usually stand out for their otherness it’s no real surprise that I’d give it the nod over the more traditional “That’s What You Get.” But it also shows how just a few small tweaks to a band’s sound can make all the difference between the mediocre and the transcendent.

The biggest change between “Crushcrushcrush” and “Misery Business” is the addition of dynamics to the band’s sound. It’s a small change in the grand scheme of things, but the way its applied here is sufficiently interesting to make it seem much more novel than it would otherwise. I’m talking mainly about that recurring bridge between the verses and the chorus where the building, crystalline guitar riff just peters out in favor of that one, massive chord and singer Hayley Williams whispering the title of the song before the chorus explodes. That small section is probably where my opinion on Paramore shifted from ‘mediocre pop-punk’ to ‘really well-crafted pop-punk’; any band that takes advantage of that sort of quiet-loud dynamic without having it sound either clichéd or awkward knows full well what they’re doing.

It also helped that on a lyrical level there was a lot more maturity on display here than the band had shown previously. Sure the concept of a crush is inherently adolescent, but that’s not really what the song’s about as far as I’m concerned. It may use it as a starting point, but the real meat of the song is about overcoming the hurdles attendant to acting out on those feelings. The whispered ‘Crush…crush…crush’ comes across as mocking as opposed to reveling in the sentiment, the chorus culminating on Williams somewhat exasperatedly saying ‘Let’s be more than this’, the bridge where she implores the other party in the song to ‘give me something to sing about’…what it really does is remind me of a couple I know who did the whole dance around actually dating for a good six months before the guy made his move and the girl’s reaction was ‘what took you so long?’ It’s the rare song about a crush that gets the sort of insecurities that you might feel in actually acting on it, or at least obliquely calls attention to them, even in the case where the other person clearly reciprocates your feelings. That kinda puts it in the weird middle ground of being a mature look at some juvenile emotions, but in this case it works because that sort of distance is so rare in pop music these days. Any other songs about a crush that I can remember have simply reveled in the uncomplicatedness of there not being any real emotional connection outside of the singer’s head, so to hear a song, and one by a band so young no less, tackle the more adult look at it is welcome and appreciated.

#70. Lifter Puller - Fiestas + Fiascos (Self-Starter Foundation, 2000)

You know what the most frustrating thing about The Hold Steady’s success is? It’s not that it may have affected a shift in Craig Finn’s writing style wherein he abandoned the complex, out-of-order narrative after Separation Sunday in favor of more episodic tales. It’s not that the band’s sound got more and more hung up on Springsteen-isms as their star rose. It’s really nothing to do with The Hold Steady at all; it’s the fact that in spite of the swell in interest in Finn’s most recent music al endeavor no one’s seen the opportunity to give his first band’s hard-to-find albums a proper reissue. Both their 2000 swan song Fiestas + Fiascos and the Soft Rock compilation are due for a re-release by now, and with the levels of interest the connections – both in personnel and in sound – to The Hold Steady would give it there really isn’t any downside to setting up a 10^th anniversary reissue of Lifter Puller’s material outside of the loss of its cult appeal.

Of course I’m a bit biased here in that I think that Lifter Puller is, on the whole, a much better band than The Hold Steady. If I hadn’t been indoctrinated into the cult of LFTR PLLR prior to the release of THS’ debut album I might feel differently, but really it’s Finn’s former band that hits a lot more of the stuff I like in my music. The music is more angular and bass-driven, the lyrics are the sort of dense, literate barrage that plenty of hip hop MCs would kill for and the overarching narrative gives it a sort of unity not only within each individual album but across the whole of their too brief discography. Even though The Hold Steady could be said to embody some of those qualities to some extent, there’s something about the whole package as put across by Lifter Puller that gives them the edge. Finn in particular seems much more in his element as part of Lifter Puller, and his word-drunk delivery married to the continued narrative that culminates on Fiestas + Fiascos is truly a wondrous thing to witness.

The story that Finn tells across the three LFTR PLLR albums isn’t something that I have a great handle on, but the players are pretty well defined by this point. There’s a quartet of youth, the narrator, Katrina, Juanita and Jenny, nightclub owner Nightclub Dwight and a local loan shark/drug dealer known as The Eyepatch Guy who all seem to move in the same circle to the point where at the end of the album The Eyepatch Guy asks the narrator to burn down Dwight’s club (The Nice Nice) to remind him of a debt. Prior to that there’s all manner of typical college kid antics; police chases, roofies, gay sex, bonfires…you know, typical things that a twenty something with more money than brains would engage in if they ran in the right circles. There’s not exactly character development here, the LFTR PLLR saga isn’t a novel after all, but part of the joys of Fiestas + Fiascos is in drawing the connections between the events described therein to what was discussed in past Lifter Puller albums (the fire was mentioned back on their self-titled debut, Jenny ‘takin’ off her tights in the taxi’ calls back to “I Like the Lights”).

The other part of the joy is listening to Finn work himself into a verbally dexterous frenzy when the mood strikes him. This part isn’t in the same state that it was on the bands’ previous album, 1997’s Half Dead and Dynamite, but there are still plenty of inspired quotables on Finn’s part. For instance:

• ‘I’m like the Pied Piper/Make the kids into rats and lead the rats to the water/I turn teens into fiends, lead ‘em straight to the slaughter’
• ‘One night Dwight got all goofy on the roofies/Now they all call him The Fiddler on the Roof’
• ‘We went from upstairs at the Nice Nice up to Franklin up by 15^th/and Jenny got dressed as they circled the block/Gave the secret knock and stuck her hand in the mailslot’
• ‘My name’s Juanita but the guys they call me LL Cool J/’Cuz I’ve been here for years/and you can’t call it a comeback if you’ve never even been away’
• ‘We were born on these boardwalks and we just started talking/and there’s laws against loitering so we just started walking’

Not quite as top form as he’d been previously, but Finn’s command of the language of his characters sells it just as much as the word-drunk barrages for Half Dead.

Meanwhile, the songs themselves are less sprawling than before (only “Nice Nice” and “Lie Down on Landsdowne” are longer than 3 and a half minutes) and the conciseness works well in a lot of the cases. Sure there’s nothing like “Nassau Coliseum” or “Viceburgh” as a result, but when the tradeoff gives you something like “Manpark”’s 2:33 wind through what sounds like three or four different songs or the straightforwardly catchy “Nice Nice” or the affecting comedown of “Katrina and the K-Hole” it’s easy to forgive the lack of truly cathartic moments – though the last minute or so of “The Flex and the Buff Result” makes for a perfect ending in spite of the turn into horrible production. There’s also a lot more reliance on keyboards here, foreshadowing the lead ole that Franz Nicolay would wind up playing in The Hold Steady, but it’s rare that they detract from the songs themselves. The out of nowhere half-riff that punctuates the ‘rats to the water’ line above really makes that section shine and the interplay between the buzzing guitar and the warmer keyboards on “Touch My Stuff” really elevates the track.

The fact that this is still so much of an obscurity in light of Finn’s newfound popularity is a bit of a crime in my eyes. If you like The Hold steady at all, you owe it to yourself to hear as much Lifter Puller as you can find. Trust me, it’s well worth it to hear what Finn can do without as much inhibition and restraint as he shows in his new band.

#71. 'We'd never be worlds apart'

Rihanna “Umbrella”

The faceless test is the sort of thing I wish more people, especially card-carrying members of the anti-pop brigade, would employ when faced with a massively popular song. What it entails is basically imagining that you are hearing the song for the first time and have no knowledge of who it was made by, where it was made, what its underlying message is or how many other people know and like it. More simply, it entails asking yourself if you’d feel the same way about it if it were made by some unknown singer/songwriter as opposed to its actual pedigree. If I’d started doing this a few years earlier than I did, I might have been able to see something like “Toxic” or “Like I Love You” or hell, even “I Want It That Way” for the gems they are as opposed to getting them wrapped up in my blanket anti-pop stance. Part of me thinks that my recent conversion to mid-level poptard is a sort of atonement for years of ignorance and uninformed hatred of the genre, but whatever it is let this serve as a warning that the upper reaches of this list are much heavier on the mainstream than you might expect.

I think that the first song I used the faceless test on in its earliest stage of chart domination was “Umbrella.” I hated Rihanna prior to its release to be honest, and it wasn’t that she got caught in my anti-pop phase but more that her songs just didn’t do anything outside of annoy me. “Pon De Replay” was horrid, “S. O. S.” was elevated by a perfectly used Soft Cell sample but still grated my nerves, and her other early singles were forgettable at best. So when I heard the rumblings about a new Rihanna single, and one that was actually good this time, I kind of rolled my eyes. I mean, people were salivating over “S.O.S.” too and that hadn’t done anything to change my tune about her. So I heard “Umbrella” and while it certainly didn’t grate at me the way that her other singles did it wasn’t the sort of OMG AWESOME thing that so many were making it out to be. Then I listened to it with a bit more tabula rasa in mind and it all clicked. I can’t explain how the simple act of imagining I had no preconceived notions about it resulted in “Umbrella” becoming one of my favorite pop singles of the decade.

I think a lot of the credit here has to go to the secret heroes of late 00s pop, writer/producer Terius Nash (aka The-Dream) and producer Tricky Stewart. Part of removing my preconceptions about “Umbrella” was ignoring the part Rihanna herself played in it, and in doing that, the production started to really grab me in a way that it hadn’t previously. The synth buildup into the chorus is a real thing of beauty, just a simple five chord ascending pattern but rendered with such a thick tone and slightly off-beat pattern by Stewart it sounds like the most majestic build up in recorded history. No other moment really matches that, but throughout the track Stewart and Nash make great use out of what turns out to be a very limited arsenal of instruments - as someone on RYM pointed out, it’s just a girl singing over a drum machine and some synths, making it closer to post-punk than to R ‘n’ B in the abstract.

That still leaves Rihanna though, the one element that was somewhat of a hindrance to my giving in and loving this track. Let’s just say that her voice is a very…distinctive element that is largely responsible for my initial abhorrence of her work. Something about the Barbadian accent made it hard for me to enjoy her stuff before, and while nothing much has changed in that department for “Umbrella,” her voice just seems to work better here than it has before. It could just be that, like fellow 00s R ‘n’ B royalty Ciara, her voice needs the right sort of environment in order to flourish and the Nash/Stewart team found it here. Given that most of her subsequent singles that I’ve enjoyed – namely the hypnotic, MJ-sampling “Don’t Stop the Music” and “Disturbia” – have more than a little in common production-wise with “Umbrella” that would seem to be the case, but I think it goes beyond that. I mean, no level of production greatness should be able to salvage that post chorus vocalizing, yet it fucking works in a way that it shouldn’t. I’m starting to think that “Umbrealla” was just the perfect storm wherein something mediocre could thrive and evolve into a 4-minute slab of catchy, engulfing greatness. Sometimes things just work like that in pop music, and nothing can really explain them.

I should also say that if Jay-Z had left this track the fuck alone it would have been quite a bit further up this list.

#71. Dan Deacon - Bromst (Carpark, 2009)

It’s really kind of awkward when an artist makes an album that you love then follows it up with something that seems specifically designed to highlight just how much the prior release was lacking. I’m not talking about artists who make a great debut and then do a stylistic 180 between it and its follow up, but those instances where the follow up takes only the best parts of its predecessor and builds on them at the expense of the other elements. The latter type of transformation usually results in a great album that reveals just how much its predecessor was lacking, forcing a bit of a reappraisal of its quality if you’re into that sort of thing. It doesn’t happen a lot, but when it does it’s incredibly satisfying to witness.

I didn’t expect Dan Deacon to make that sort of a leap after his 2007 breakthrough release Spiderman of the Rings. It isn’t that I loved that album so much that I would find it hard to imagine any improvements, but the niche factor it accumulated once there was enough hype built around it made it seem a bit antithetical for Deacon to do anything but continue strictly in that vein. I was expecting a follow up full of “Wham City” and “Crystal Cat” soundalikes, which to be fair would have been very enjoyable if a bit slight, or an album with the same atmosphere of ceaseless giddiness permeating its every pore. I wasn’t expecting a much darker, much more cohesive unit of songs. I wasn’t expecting epic scope. I was not expecting anything like Bromst, and I’m glad that he delivered it instead of the theoretical albums I described earlier.

As different as it is atmospherically, it’s still clearly a Dan Deacon album. The hallmarks of his particular brand of indie electronic are still here in full force, but the way that he applies them here is much more impressive. Spiderman of the Rings was a Technicolor post-electro playground where the rides were all free as long as you knew the words to “Wham City” and as long as you didn’t enter it completely jaded it would be impossible to not have fun. Bromst is that same playground after dark, when the fun is balanced out by the sense that around every corner there’s an evil clown with a helium voice waiting to startle you. You still have fun if you aren’t jaded, but it’s not the sort of fun that Spiderman offered, and because of that it intrigues me a lot more. Something like the albums’ highlight, the eight minute horn abetted “Snookered,” makes the comparison clear; at its heart it isn’t all that different from something like “Trippy Green Skull” from Spiderman but the way its played gives it a lot more emotional heft. There’s pathos in the lyrics, there’s sadness in the arrangement, it’s multi-faceted in a way that I’d never have imagined Deacon could be and that sort of breadth carries over into the remaining tracks as well. Sure there’s still the pure joy of stuff like “Padding Ghost” and “Woof Woof” but on the whole Bromst succeeds in expanding Deacon’s emotional and musical profile without making too much of it.

On top of that, there are no signs of growing pains on Bromst, even as the songs get longer (almost half cross the 6-minute mark) and incorporate more varied instrumentation. If anything it’s an even more assured record than its predecessor in how readily it embraces the broader scope and the changing moods. It actually sounds like Deacon coming into his own as an artist as opposed to the high-quality borderline novelty vibe that Spiderman of the Rings gave off. That’s not to say that it’s so vastly different from its predecessor that they barely sound like they came from the same mind, but as I said earlier it’s like the best parts of Spiderman drawn out in their full glory without the more worrying parts to distract from them. Bromst actually gives me the sense that Deacon is more than a flash-in-the-pan who happened to come out with the right album at the right time, and givesme hope that he could be a leading light in this genre for a few years to come.

#72. 'Here's a message to you Rudy'

!!! "Me and Giuliani Down by the Schoolyard (A True Story)"

When it comes to the longer songs on this list the question that automatically comes to mind is 'do they justify their length?' I'm all for artists who use their more epic tendencies at their own will - hello, post-rock fan here - but when it comes to singles I'm somewhat hardwired to think of them as something a bit more streamlined. Of course one of the joys of the musical discoveries I made in the early part of the decade was that when you get into more underground genres the concept of a single gets obliterated. As such there are quite a few occasions on this list - OK, only 4 - where the so-called singles cross the 7-minute mark, something unheard of in the realm of the pop single. But for each of them it's still a question of whether they justify their length; does the song in question need to continue on past the 5 minute mark or is it meandering needlessly in spite of spreading its best parts over the full length? I'd argue that all teh cases of longer singles here the songs justify their length a few times over, either because it takes time to build the sort of tension that gives the song its power or because the song takes advantagr of the larger canvas to explore a more variable but still logical progression of sounds.

!!!'s breakout single "Me and Giuliani Down by the Schoolyard (A True Story)" falls definitively into the latter category. There's very little tension and release going on here, but the band expertly wind their way through a half dozen equally funky soundscapes without any of the transitions sounding jarring or half-baked. It's the ideal long-form single in that respect, carrying on a set theme - in this case that would be white-boy funk mach-2003 - without running things into the ground through excessive repetition. !!! don't limit themselves to the standard Gang of Four style that most of the dance punk revival was focused on either, there's nods to classic southern funk (those horns!) second- or third-wave ska (Specials quotes!) New Order (that bass line!) and DFA Records (those disinterested vocals!) in various sections. Yet it never feels like the transitions are forced or unnecessary. The way the 8-piece band comes together in key moments to move between two sections, like the build up at about 2:30, gives the song some absolutely breathtaking moments in the midst of the lightweight funkfest that should get even the most rhythm-averse among you to get up and awkwardly dance.

#72. Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness (Enemies List, 2008)

It starts out so peacefully; a lightly plucked series of arpeggios over some warm synth ebb and flow action for nearly 8 minutes. It’s entrancing and gorgeously produced, but there’s an undercurrent of darkness to it too. The guitar riff doesn’t change but the synth pad evolves into a weirdly menacing bit of beauty as the song moves to its close. You aren’t ready for what’s to come but you can sense that it won’t be like this for long.

Then that bass line kicks in, accompanied by cavernously reverbed drums and a spare electric guitar riff. The energy level just got kicked up a few notches and the sound is fuller, more fully realized. There are vocals now as well, not the best out there but they suit the tone of the song just perfectly. ‘I feel the top of the roof come off, kill everybody there as I'm watching all the stars burn out, trying to pretend that I care.’ Those are the first words Deathconsciousness offers you. It should be obvious now that this is not going to be a nice album. The tone of every aspect of the duo’s sound is dripping with detached menace and nihilism, from the relentless bass line that carries on for the full near six-minute track to the reverb heavy mix it never lets up too much on the oppressiveness. ‘We kill everyone with arrowheads, arrowheads, arrowheads. Thank god that's over.’ The lines aren’t said sequentially, the latter part is an overlay as the word ‘arrowheads’ gets repeated on to infinity, and the effect is otherworldly. It may be a bleak album but it’s insidious.

That sort of juxtaposition carries on over the full 85 minute length of Have a Nice Life’s debut. Sometimes it’s within the same song, like the seemingly abrupt shift a minute in to second disc opener “Waiting for Black Metal Records to Come in the Mail” and sometimes it’s between adjacent tracks, as with “Deep, Deep” and “The Future” but it’s a theme throughout Deathconsciousness that the beautiful and sad will always be matched with the intense and loud. The two sides never come into conflict with each other, instead the heavier moments served to amplify the menace at the core of the calm ones and the beauty of the calmer moments projects onto the heavier ones. It’s the sort of trick that doesn’t become apparent until you’ve heard the album a few times, but it does wonders on about the fifth listen when it suddenly occurs to you that the climax of “Hunter” never sounded so gorgeous and the drawn out gloom of “Who Would Leave Their Son Out in the Sun?” never sounded quite as haunted and menacing. I may have liked the album a lot at first, but I only started to love it when that little bit gelled in my mind.

The main thing is that it represents the ideal balance of bleakness and beauty. That’s the juxtaposition at its core - actually it’s less juxtaposition and more of a synthesis - with both elements working in tandem to make the whole album cohere in spite of the songs’ divergent styles. Between that core, the production which drenches the songs in copious amounts of reverb to great effect and the overarching lyrical themes that evolve over the two discs, Deathconsciousness might represent the most cohesive unit of diverse songs recorded this decade. There’s everything from dark ambient pieces like “The Big Gloom” to the slow-burning almost gothic beauty of “I Don’t Love” to the crushing, string imbued metal of “The Future” all rendered as part of a whole despite not sounding like they should coexist peacefully at all. As much as the sequencing likes to play with juxtaposition the songs just work together no matter how far flung their sounds may lie if you looked at them in isolation.

#73. 'Hello , hello, H-E-L-L-O'

The Go! Team "The Power Is On"

If you had told me at the beginning of the decade that one of the most refreshing albums to come out in the next 10 years would sound like a series of 70s cop show themes mixed with cheerleading routines, I’d have probably chuckled. Hell, I might have even let out a huge belly laugh. It would have brought to mind our high school and playing the “Hawaii Five-Oh” theme to accompany our non-existent cheerleading squad at a pep rally, and that image is absolutely hilarious. The fact that The Go! Team mastermind Ian Parton managed to combine the two elements without it being laughable is a commendable accomplishment in and of itself, but the fact that he made a full album in that style that never once got cheesy or unbearable is nothing short of a miracle. Thunder, Lightning, Strike! didn’t make the albums list here, but it stands as one of the most addictive and undeniably original debut albums of the 00s. The synthesis of old-school cheerleader recordings and similar styled raps from front-woman Ninja with all manner of funky, driving instrumentals, both sampled and augmented by a live band, works in ways that defy description. For 40 minutes it’s almost like you’re watching a long buried pilot for a show about a troupe of cheerleaders who go around kicking ass, solving crimes, and entertaining large crowds in between car chases and mudfights, and that show is awesome on so many levels that it’s not even funny

In all honesty though, once “The Power Is On” was recorded he might as well have called it a day. As much as I love Thunder, Lightning, Strike! as a whole, nothing else reaches this level of near-perfection. The interactions between the sampled horns and both the cheerleaders and the live band are miles above what even the other highlights do with those same elements. The overall feel of the track is on a different level too, sounding so limitlessly joyful that it elevates itself into that odd hierarchy of songs that will without fail bring a giant grin to my face in any circumstance. I can’t quite describe what does it, but something about the song just makes it stand so far above anything else that Parton and Co. have done so far that it all but makes the rest of their oeuvre seem like an afterthought.

I think the biggest thing is that the incorporation of the band assembled by Parton is doe much more mindfully here than anywhere else on the album. I sometimes try to imagine what the song would sound like if it were stripped down to just the samples, and it’s impossible to do because the band itself is so well integrated into it that it’s hard to tell where the sample ends and the real instruments begin. I mean, there are some parts that are obviously added by the band – the huge drums that anchor the sparest parts of the track, guitarist Sam Dook’s climactic tremolo picked solo – but outside of those obvious instances it’s a case of incredible synergy between the two sides of Parton’s experiment. Especially during the song’s later part there’s a lot of absolutely perfectly timed bits of back-and-forth between what I’d assume is live guitar and the core horn sample that makes both halves of the equation come alive in ways they wouldn’t on their own, and it’s truly a thing of beauty to witness.

Parton also knows how to vary the dynamics in interesting ways. The song may be structured in a fairly standard way, but the individual sections of the sub-structures are masterfully arranged, taking advantage of the absence of key elements to give the track a new layer of grandiosity. Take out the drums and that part is calm enough to make their return that much more powerful. Take out the horns for a bit and their return is uplifting. Using the absence of certain elements to punctuate their effect on the song as a whole rarely works this well in pop music, but combined with the infectious energy that Parton and Co. imbued the proceedings with it gives the song a sense of importance that none of the other tracks have. That may be the key to it being the stand out from such a consistently good album: it makes itself heard in a way that even the best of its peers can’t.

#73.Yeasayer - All Hour Cymbals (We Are Free, 2007)

It was a bit tempting to combine this with yesterday's album entry. Sure, the two albums really sound nothing alike, but there's plenty of incidental similarities: both are products of Brooklyn's nascent indie scene, both make excellent use of interesting production and multi-tracked vocals, both of these reviews are hamstrung by my having to save my thoughts about their obvious standouts for the other side of this project...not the strongest base to justify the pairing but sometimes it seemed like enough. Of course it's impossible to ignore the fundamental divide between TV on the Radio and Yeasayer, namely that the former are hipsters and the latter are hippies. I'm not being derogatory in either case, but if you want to boil down the personae of both bands to poorly-defined archetypes that's the best you're gonna do.

The reason I label Yeasayer as hippies is that there's a distinct communal vibe to their music. It's not a power struggle between competing voices within their ranks, but four people in perfect sync with each other producing some extraordinarily beautiful moments. The sound is close to Animal Collective's post-Feels freak-pop, but with heavy doses of psychedelia and non-western instruments and absolutely gorgeous layers of vocals that overwhelm the proceedings. It's an album where my enjoyment is more based around feel than any sort of tangible element, which makes it hard to put into words, but something about the combination of influences I just listed makes for a genuinely uplifting sound. All told All Hour Cymbals might be the most unrelentingly positive album of this whole list; the lyrics are mostly upbeat, the harmonies are as major-key as they come, the soup of instruments all combine to make some genuinely sprightly accompaniments and the whole package radiates good vibes in an undeniable way.

It's an odd choice given its surroundings on this list, but Yeasayer pull it off with remarkable skill. The individual songs on All Hour Cymbals are all winners, most notably the late-album stretch of "No Need to Worry," "Forgiveness" and "Wintertime" where the band almost sounds like they've plotted a straight course from Cerberus Shoal's tarpigh era to the last 3 Animal Collective albums without the former's moodiness or the latter's vocal madness. The biggest thing it has in its corner though is that it has its own identity. You can trace the sound back to any number of obvious influences, but more than any band in the recent indie rock boom Yeasayer have a sound that is indelibly tied to them and only them. Between the hazy production, strong hooks - both vocal and instrumental - and stunningly pure vocals it manages to find a sound that no other band can lay claim to, at least not yet.

#74. 'I can guide a missile by satellite'

Flobots "Handlebars"

If you look at them on a purely theoretical level, there should be nothing wrong with Flobots. Just take a look at the components their sound is based on: mariachi horns and strings a la Devotchka and Calexico, live guitars and drums to round out the sound, two decent rappers who wear their leftist politics on their sleeves and good-to-great sense of composition and arrangement. Sounds like the sort of band I could fully get behind, and when their introductory burst is something as good as "Handlebars" it would be hard to imagine a situation where that wouldn't be the case. Unfortunately, and I say this having listened to their major label debut Fight With Tools a few times, the reality is that they boil down to a great single and nothing more. The sound is just the right mix of soulful mexican influences and driving alternative rock, but the production is that shitty major label 'louder is better' style that kills any sort of dynamic range the songs might have. The two rappers aren't the best out there but they're passionate enough to counteract that ...however within a few minutes of the start of the album they've rhymed 'healthcare' with 'Leonard Pelletier' (they do make up for it later with the awesome non-sequitur 'This is outta hand like Buster Bluth'. Yes you can win me over with references to the best sitcom that will ever grace my TV, I'm easy that way) It's a cases of the band's heart being in the right place but nothing else quite lining up properly with that.

Except for "Handlebars" that is. I can't think of many singles this decade that took a deeply flawed group and elevated them to such a high level of greatness without radically changing anything about their sound. All the elements of the rest of Fight With Tools' songs, both the good and the bad, are still on display within "anlebars", but for 3 and a half minutes they actually click perfectly. The mariachi touches are a full part of the song, never coming off as an afterthought, the lyrics are earnest but not ham-fisted, the song flows perfectly through a few different moods and the horrible, horrible production job only really mars the last verse and chorus when the guitars come to the fore. It's the best possible combination of everything that makes the band such a frustrating prospect, amplifying their theoretical greatness over their real-life mediocrity for a little while to create one of the best left-field hits of the last few years.

It took a while for it to grow on me, to be completely honest I dismissed it as a 311 rip-off at first, but a few listens managed to put me on its side pretty fervently. It's another example of how much a well paced build can help a song, but it's also a case of knowing when to use certain elements to their best effect. The trumpets that pepper the rest of the cuts on Fight With Tools are relegated to a stately little solo section before the song goes into overdrive, the violins are subtly layered under the chorus and otherwise provide that resonant introductory plucked string figure and the more alt-rocky elements don't get played until the very end of the song making it seem that much more grandiose. More importantly, the way the song flows through all those sections is a lot more logical than its album-mates. The individual sections are woven together with a sense of purpose rather than inevitability if that makes sense; it feels like the song escalates because it's necessary not because it fits the song into a certain niche. Not groundbreaking by any stretch, but effective nonetheless.

Even more effective are the lyrics. They still occupy the sort of college liberal field that the whole of Fight operates in, where the issues are brought up but not deepened substantially to qualify as anything more than navel gazing, but they're also oblique enough to be a bit less cringeworthy. It's also more about personal accomplishment than any larger political functions, making it much more universal than the democratic screeds Flobots seem to prefer. Really, other than the last verse, which while not the most potent critique of the last US administration certainly has a leg up on, say, "When the President Talks to God," the song isn't political at all, instead using a series of rather common accomplishments to drive home the cliched theme that you can do anything you want. I think what makes it work is that by letting the last verse, where the list of accomplishments gets more vengeful, rub against accomplishments as mundane as riding a bike without handlebars or keeping time without a metronome it trivializes the insane declarations like 'I can ake anyone go to prison/just because I don't like 'em' by subtly putting them on the same level. It's a much more clever way of drawing parallels between the then-current regime and a bunch of kids wide-eyed at the simple things they can do than I'd think possible from a band who, and I do hate to bring this up again but it really is fucking egregious, rhymed 'healthcare' and 'Leonard Pelletier' at one point.

#74. TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain (Interscope, 2006)

The biggest problem I'm finding with doing both a favorite albums list and a favorite singles list is that when there's crossover between the two and I haven't gotten to the single/album when reviewing the album/single it makes the review feel incomplete. This is a bigger problem in the album reviews, because if I can't discuss one piece of the whole it feels like a bit of a cheat, whereas not discussing singles in their larger context can be more easily forgiven. Part of me wants to alter the order I'm doing this in for the sole purpose of discussing the single and album in tandem, but then there's the issue of maintaining something of a hierarchy in both lists. Really, this is a lot of boilerplate to introduce the fact that I'm not gonna talk about "Wolf Like Me" here, at least not in the depth it deserves. There will be time for that later.

It also leads to the question of whether Return to Cookie Mountain could survive without its single. Does it really matter if circumstances make it so that discussing one section of the whole album isn't feasible? I mean, I'm not doing a track-by-track breakdown or anything here, am I? Although that's probably the ideal way to go about discussing an album like Return to Cookie Mountain whose sequencing isn't integral to my enjoyment of it the way it for a lot of the albums higher up the list. It's a case where the strength lies in the pieces as opposed to the way those pieces fit together. That's only the case in the macro though; within each song the way the individual pieces of the mix work together is where most of my enjoyment comes from. Vocalists Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone don't take a straight harmony approach all the time, but play their voices off each other to make for a much more melodically interesting experience on songs like "Province," but the times they come into sync it's like a force of nature. The instrumental aspects aren't as interesting, but there are plenty of moments where producer Dave Sitek adds a distinct touch, the sitar on "Wash the Day" or the horns on "Blues From Down Here," that manages to elevate the tracks more than the vocals could. It definitely doesn't trade solely on the greatness of the vocalists and their unique sense of arrangements, and the production is much more varied than on the band's prior albums, but the moments I come back to are most often the ones where Malone and Adebimpe are pulling more weight.

Hard as it is to not draw on the obvious highlight to discuss that part, there's plenty of other tracks that illustrate just what TVOTR can do when they click perfectly. "Let the Devil In" for instance is one hell of a grower, and it's chorus is probably the single most powerful moment on the album thanks to the combined force of Adebimpe and Malone's vocals. Opener "I Was a Lover" takes some getting used to - especially if you grabbed the album when it leaked and can't help but think of "Wolf Like Me" as the real opener - but the combination of the oddly timed instrumental and the usual vocal interplay is downright addictive after you get on its wavelength. "Blues From Down Here" just slays me on every level, and "Playhouses" is just as frantic as "Wolf Like Me" but without the latter's mania and the three bonus tracks on the version I have are all winners, especially "Things You Can Do" which plays like "Blues From Down Here"'s slightly less awesome little brother. Really the only non-starter for me is the nearly a capella "A Method" which kind of kills the momentum that the first five tracks built up but also gives a bit of a breather before "Let the Devil In" which serves to boost its impact.

The album's not as beholden to "Wolf" as you might think is what I'm getting at. It's the obvious highlight and I'll have more than enough to say about it when it's time comes on the singles side of things but there's 12 other tracks here that do more than enough to justify the praise the album receives.

#75. 'My sexy ass has got him in a new dimension'

Sugababes "Push the Button"

'When read properly, everything is lewd' - Tom Lehrer

I know that interpretation of lyrics is a dicey game to get involved in. A big part of the reason, outside of my preference to talk about the arrangement and production of a track above all else, that I don't go too deep into the pool of lyrical analysis is that it doesn't interest me to get that involved in such a subjective area of the song. If my enjoyment i that contingent on my own personal interpretation of the lyrics as opposed to the myriad of other aspects that could be discussed then it really shouldn't be a part of this list to begin with. That and the fact that analyzing lyrics just never struck me as being all that fun have pretty much put it far down on the list of things to do within the confines of these posts on any sort of consistent basis.

Sometimes, however, the lyrics and their meaning are a big part of what draws me to a song, or in the case of "Push the Button" the element that makes a given single stand out from its competition in the artist's discography. Sugababes wound up having one of the best runs of singles of any artist this decade, and no fewer than a half-dozen were part of my initial long-list, but "Push the Button" stands as their best achievement in my eyes, and at least half of the reason that's the case is it's well-played double entendre of a lyric. It's rare to see the level of commitment the trio, along with co-writer Dallas Austin, have to maintaining a double-edged narrative over the song. One the more innocent side it could all be about waiting for that cute guy across the bar to make his move and stop hesitating, or on the less innocent one it could be a nudge for that same guy to...well, go a bit further north during foreplay. The lyrics paint the picture just as vividly for both interpretations without the sort of stretch you might use to make some other songs have such lewd meanings. It's such a subtle and damned smart play on the writers' part to make both sides as obvious as each other when it comes to even a cursory analysis, the sort of songwriting excellence you don't see too often these days. I appreciate the level of thought that goes into this as compared the groanworthy wordplay of something like "Genie in a Bottle."

But even without that extra push, the song is definitely strong enough to stand on its own. It may only consist of one real riff, the repeated shuffling synth pattern that anchors the whole track, but that riff is probably the most addictive little four bar pattern - hell, one bar pattern repeated in a variety of chords - in British pop music this decade. The little additions it gets during the pre-chorus are a perfect compliment to Keisha Buchannan's rising vocal line, but outside of that the song just rides the simple pattern for its duration. It's almost hypnotic in a way, putting the focus more on the trio's vocals than many of their previous singles. This isn't a bad thing, as all three members of group at this point - Buchannan, Heidi Range and Mutya Buena - were good singers who didn't rely on the sort of vocal acrobatics that far too many female pop/r 'n' b vocalists fall into using excessively. The sort of nonchalance their tone exudes adds quite a bit to the central lyrical conceit(s) as well, giving an additional air of impatience and exhaustion to the lyrics - once again, relevant to both interpretations.

#75. Dälek - Absence (Ipecac, 2005)

Confrontational is really the only adjective that does justice to Dälek's sound. Both the lyrics and the music are 100% in your face for the whole hour-plus length of Abence, and really I wouldn't have it any other way. The main reason that this speaks to me so much is that in order for ti to be confrontational on the level that it is there needs to be passion, and passion is the sort of thing that will draw me into an album before things like quality or oddness. Absence is undeniably a work of passion, both in Will "Dälek" Brooks' relentless barrage of lyrics and the ace production team of Oktopus and Still's dense, unforgivingly dark beats, which is a quality even some hip hop albums I prefer to it on an aesthetic level can't match.

Aesthetically, you could probably dismiss Absence as pretty damned ugly if you're not prepared for it. Dälek set themselves apart from their peers in the underground hip hop scene early on by taking a much noisier approach to their beats. I'm not talking Merzbow-noisy - though some of the more discordant moments do sound like a low-key approximation of some of his stuff - but something akin to shoegaze's most uncompromisingly feedback drenched moments. Combine that with their tendency for song with a much more epic scope (only three of the ten tracks here don't cross the 5-minute mark and only 2 of those aren't over the 6-minute threshhold) and you've got an album that's probably gonn alienate a lot of people for whatever reason. It's not the sort of thing you can give to any hip-hop head and expect them to love it off the bat is what I'm saying, but hand it to someone who's tastes tend towards the more weird ends of music and it could be their gateway into hip hop. Speaking personally, the groups preceding album From Filthy Tongues of Gods and Griots was an eye-opener and a half, essentially making me say to myself 'wait, hip hop can do that?' (shut up, I was 17) by he time "Back Smoke Rises" was half over. Absence is a much more consistent album though, and still remains the highlight of their mostly very good discography.

Broke stride as last of men realized their deep deceit.
This troubling advance of half-assed crews crowd these streets.
Never mind of who I am, son, just listen when I speak
Broken paragraphs hold wrath of a hundred million deep.
Bleak circumstance led masses to only want to dance
A bastard child of Reaganomics posed in a B-Boy stance
Make our leaders play minstrel, Left with none to lead our people.
How the fuck am I gonna shake your hand, when we never been seen as equals?

That's what happens before the beats even start, and even at that opener "Distorted Prose" doesn't really kick in for another 45 seconds or so, but right away it's clear that you're listening to a very angry album. When the crushing wall of noise and beat crash the party it just completes the picture: Dälek are not going to let you off easy at many points in the album. There's the occasional bit of respite, the instrumental "Köner" sounds like an ambient interlude compared to its surroundings, but really Absence is about absolutely pummeling the listener from the word go. The beats are always heavy, slow and harsh, Brooks' lyrics are always violent, passionate and combattive anf the overall picture they paint is bleaker than most death doom albums. Even the most positive sounding thing here, "Ever Somber," is still so steeped in the darkness that it only really comes off as positive when heard out of context. The unrelenting bleakness would be an issue if not for just how lush it sounds, layer upon layer of noise converging over slow drum patterns to create an atmosphere that, no matter how uninviting it is initially, soon envelops you. Since unlike a lot of hip hop albums it's not fragmented by use of different producers, the atmosphere develops consistently over the hour giving the whole album a certain oneness that adds to its greatness in my eyes. It's not the kind of thing I can listen to any time, but once in a while it's noce to be completely steamrolled by the bleakness.

#76. 'The chromosomes match'

Roisin Murphy "Overpowered"

And so we close out the lower half of the list, and I'm only a few days behind the one-post per day goal I set for myself. Honestly, I expected to have given up by now so I'm patting myself on the back for getting this far even if I've been losing a day a week since the beginning of October - fucking job getting in the way of a wholly extracurricular activity...but enough about that, let's get to the last entry in the lower half.

It's nothing new to try and cast a depressing lyric in a happy light or vice versa - look at some of the early Supremes singles for great examples of clouding a depressing lyric with major key arrangements and sprightly production - but I don't think I've ever heard a better example of casting such a sinister light on what would probably be a perfectly serviceable song about all-consuming love/lust as Roisin Murphy's "Overpowered." If you look at the two components in isolation they'd never seem to fit with each other; lyrically it's love and obsession tackled with an eye towards science, musically it's all sinister, minor key claustrophobia. The two sides shouldn't work together, but Murphy and producer Seiji meld them in a way that makes them seem like the perfect compliment to each other, with the instrumental and Murphy's delivery bringing out the unsettling paranoia of the lyrics amd the melody enhancing the beat's most standardly poppy qualities. It's one of those ideal collaborations where the involved players know how to make the most of each other's work and make it seem effortless in the process.

It helps that Murphy's one of the most interesting voices in modern pop music. Going back to her work with Moloko in the 90s there's always been something incredibly alluring about her vocals, the breathy, smoky, effortlessly sensual drawl that made Moloko stand out from the glut of trip hoppers that arose in Portishead's wake. The way she uses her voice on "Overpowered" though is something a bit different. Sure it's still identifiably her, but the delivery is so clipped and cold that it imbues the lyrics - already plenty odd in their own right - with the sort of icy paranoia that the production pushes to the fore. The combination makes for a love song that sounds like a plea for release, each individual line both expressing how perfect the two parties are for each other and why there's something fundamentally wrong with that. It's the wort of duality of meaning that I really love in music, and here it's done with a level of sophistication that I doubt many other artists could pull off.

Or maybe it's just the reduction of love to its chemical components that gets it on the list. As a recent Chemistry graduate it's nice to have some intersection between my hobby and my theoretical career, and having a gorgeous coda about oxytoxins is the type of thing that I get a kick out of on a couple of levels.

Coming up tomorrow: Girl power redux part 1.

#76. The Minus Story - The Captain Is Dead, Let The Drum Corpse Dance (Jagjaguwar, 2004)

I have a weird habit when it comes to albums I really enjoy. Well, multiple weird habits really, but one that I can't say I hear of other people doing is that I assume there's a mild concept involved. That's not to say I try to make every album I love into a rock opera, but it seems that I'm more drawn to an album that's at least mildly conceptual in nature. It doesn't always pan out, but sometimes an album I used to think was decently good will reveal some underlying unified concept and launch itself further up my favorites list. It happened with Rubberneck, it happened with Gentlemen, and now it's happened with The Captain Is Dead, Let the Drum Corpse Dance.

Of course, the album was perfectly pleasant at first, the logical extension of E6's Beach Boys worshiping side (despite having no ties to that collective) stripped of some twee overtones and replacing them with NMH's instrumental variety. Sounds like just the kind of album that could worn its way into your subconscious right? The songs were uniformly strong, from the gloriously pained "You Were On My Side" to the kinetic drum-heavy "The Happy Activist" and hitting all spots in between. The band seemed to be capable players and the arrangements and production worked well with the songs. It had all the makings of a decent indie-pop record.

Then I started to pay attention to some things. First it was the vocals, which start off as an under-layer to "Won't Be Fooled Again" and "The Happy Activist" then gradually move to the front of the mix by the time "The Children's Army" comes along. The it was the specifics of the arrangements, especially on the first few tracks where the vocals seem to have to fight to be heard. Most of the time it was drums that played the biggest part in obscuring the vocals, but not in a way that seemed like bad production. Then certain lyrics started to pull themselves out of the album...repeated references to 'the tyrant', allusions to some sort of congregation, betrayal coming up a few times. I never try to focus on the lyrics, I prefer to think of the vocals as another layer of instrumentation as opposed to a focal point for any given album, but once those few things popped out I started shifting my focus towards them. And then it fell into place.

It's fucking impressive really, a little band from Kansas uses their first widely distributed release to craft one of the most satisfying and un-obvious protest records of the 00s. No one seemed to catch on though, the people I got introduced to the album by were huge indie-pop fans who were taken with the sound of the record. If people disliked the album it was because the vocals were a little whiny (and that 's a fair criticism, but I can overlook it). But sitting there the whole time was a perfectly timed and a well constructed concept/protest record about the state of the world. Like I said, it's really fucking impressive that they pulled that off, even more impressive that as far as I know they didn't draw attention to it. Of course I could just be reading too much into it like I tend to do, but looking at the record that way makes me love it even more. Even if the concept part is a bunch of bullshit that I'm the only who sees (once again, perfectly possible) it's still a fantastic record. If you like stuff along the OTC-Circulatory System axis you'll probably enjoy it a hell of a lot.

#77. Cerberus Shoal - Crash My Moon Yacht (Pandemonium, 2000)

Cerberus Shoal never had a consistent sound for all intents and purposes. Their lineup shifted with every new album it seems, only multi-insrumentalist Caleb Mulkerin and bassist Criss Sutherland remaining constant, and each influx of new members created a shift in the band's dynamics. The band's first incarnation was pretty much Slint with even more emo overtones, then an addition of various other multi-instrumentalists pushed the emo influences down and made one of post-rock's earliest triumphs in 1996's ...and Farewell to Hightide. The most pronounced shift though, occurred when the remaining trio from those two incarnations (Mulkerin, Sutherland and drummer Thomas Rogers) fused with another northeastern trio, tarpigh, for a quartet of albums recorded between 1997 and 2000 (though Mr. Boy Dog wasn't released until 2002 for some reason). This period marks the most fruitful period in Cerberus Shoal's career, with 3 of their best albums alongside their worst (the too droney for its own good Homb) all of which explored a different step towards their current avant-folk by way of musical theater sound. There's still plenty of post-rock influence here, especially on Crash My Moon Yacht and Mr. Boy Dog's largely instrumental pieces, but it's not applied with the same sort of cliched dynamic payoff formula that (slightly) hampered Hightide.

Crash My Moon Yacht was the last album recorded during the tarpigh/Shoal days, and it plays as pretty much the culmination of everything that the bands' collaboration had worked up to since their initial foray (1997's Elements of Structure and Permanence.) The two sides, Shoal's post-rock going avant-folk and tarpigh's odd blend of Americana with eastern instruments, are working in perfect harmony and as the two band's post-collaboration efforts will attest, pushed both bands into a similar sound. Of course when Shoal added Colleen Kinsella to their ranks they went so far down the rabbit hole that it was almost impossible to recognize them as the same band taht made...well, any of their first 6 albums really, and tarpigh weren't active enough post-Shoal to really develop an identity of their own, though 2002's Go Hogh Wild is a nice enough addition to the budding freak-folk scene, but comparing the two bands circa 2003 it was easy to hear where the influence of the collaboration had taken each of them.

The key to the collaboration is that as a trio, tarpigh weren't the most standard of lineups. They had the guitar/keyboard/drums core but they also brought a lot of ancient and non-western instruments into their sound. Oud, shakuhachi, zampoña and accordion specifically get listed in the credits for Crash My Moon Yacht, and their otherness is certainly felt in a pronounced way here. "Elle Besh" for instance floats along for the bulk of its 13 minute runtime on a minimal, almost guitarless bed of odd instruments before exploding in its last minute with an insistent brass pulse and eastern guitar figure that. It's also a great showcase fro the dual drummers, as tarpigh's Eric LaPerna lays on some hand drums over Rogers' normal timekeeping giving the rather placid track a bit more of a busy feel. Really, each of the first six tracks acts as a pretty damn good summation of the powers of this lineup; Shoal bring the sense of dynamics and structure while tarpigh bring hte interestng instruments and the extra layers that elevate the material. I mean, would "Breathing Machines" sound anywhere near as majestic when it finally explodes without the extra players in the game? Would "Long Winded" be anywhere near as beautiful if not for the light eastern touches? It's a great stretch of avant-folk with post-rock touches is what I'm saying, and neither band could have accomplished it on their own.

I left out the lst two tracks from that description because really, they sound like the sort of thing that Cerberus Shoal's next incarnation could be just as responsible for as the one used for the rest of the album. I can't find specific lineup information for this one, but I know that Colleen Kinsella and company joined up with the group at the tail end of the tarpigh era, and "Asphodel" sounds like it might even feature her on banjo and vocals. They're also the only two vocal tracks on the album, which makes them seem like a separate piece from the preceding six tracks more so than the lack of easily discernible tarpigh touches. At any rate, the last pair of tracks are two of the most beautiful pieces that Shoal have ever put to tape."Asphodel" might be the one Cerberus Shoal track that could bring me to tears in the right circumstances, the lightly plucked guitars intertwining around a touching call-and-response between Mulkerin and an operatic female vocalist (not gonna say for sure that it's Kinsella) just hits that sweet spot for me. That's not to say that "Yes Sir No Sir" is a slouch at all, a bit overlong, but worth it to get to that glorious trumpet fanfare converging with Mulkerin and Sutherland's vocals. They may not fit with the previous six cuts but they're probably the best tracks on the album...well other than "Breathing Machines" at least.

Coming up later today: An Elephant 6-styled protest album that no one else sees as such.

#77. 'I toss and turn I keep stress in my mind'

Kid Cudi "Day 'n' Nite"

Stoner introspection is not the type of thing you expect to hear in hip hop. Weed itself may play a major role in the culture, but if it's part of a track it's generally only the action of smoking it or selling it that gets brought up or general thoughts about the wonders of the plant. You've heard it all before, it generally hits the same beats time and time again and it had gotten so old by the turn of the millennium that even Snoop Dogg - who is probably responsible for at least 50% of the white teenagers toking today - gave it up for a spell. So the last thing I expected to hear at the tail end of the 00s was a hip hop song that tackled the more abstract aspects of a good high. "Day 'n' Nite" may not be the ultimate stoner song, but it's certainly among the best stoner hip hop songs, and not just limited to this decade either.

I should clarify that I'm talking about the original version of the track as opposed to the Crookers remix that's likely responsible for a lot of its popularity for the purposes of this piece. The remix is good if a bit heavy on the eurodance, but it really pales next to the initial version. The remix robs the song of that perfect, minimal atmosphere, plays up the mildly annoying 'aw-aw' vocal sample and throws in that cheesy breakdown between the chorus and the verses. It's perfectly suited for clubs, which you definitely can't say about the original, but given the subject matter and Cudi's delivery the original just works better overall.

It's in that completely simple yet undeniably catchy synth riff that anchors the whole track, to be honest. Something about the tone of it reminds me of Aphex Twin's less abrasive non-ambient moments, and when it's combined with that simple drum beat it works as one of those great canvases on which any artist could work magic. Even when the fuzzy overtones come in during the chorus, and more memorably in the last verse, it's still one of the most underproduced - and that's meant in a good way if you couldn't tell - hip hop tracks I've heard, and Cudi uses that to his advantage. Essentially, the more rigid the beat is the less room he would have to move within it, and even though he isn't going all free verse on our collective asses his flow here isn't the kind of thing that would work over a more...shall we say involved beat. Other than that there's the sampled 'wha-wha' that serves as a sort of boundary, only ever surfacing at the end of a line as sort of a punctuation mark on whatever thought he's just laid out.

It also suits the subject matter of the song pretty well. As I said, it's an introspective drug song, not so much glorifying or vilifying the act of smoking up as much as looking at its usefulness. At first it seems to serve a greater purpose, relieving the 'lonely stoner''s stress, allowing him to free his mind on some level, but blinding him to the problems he may have caused by his habit. When it comes down to the repetition of 'To free his mind in search of...' at the end of the third verse, never finishing the thought, it seems to point towards the futility of using pot as an escape, but it leaves a lot to the listener's imagination. I like the level of neutrality it maintains even when it goes into the less savory aspects in the second verse, and the whole thing just sounds so damn good that whatever conclusions there are to draw from it the catchiness never fades.

Coming up tomorrow: The most insidiously creepy love song of the decade?

#78. 'Still my broken limbs you find time to mend'

Editors "An End Has a Start"

Sometimes it's nice to be surprised. I remember giving the Editors' debut The Back Room a snub upon its release simply because the British press were showering them with their particularly obnoxious brand of 'new big thing omfg guys' hype. Given how underwhelmed I had been with the last few of those I figured it would be a waste of time, and besides, I had fuckloads of stuff stuck in my listening queue and didn't need anything else thankyouverymuch. If someone had told me that they were Interpol with more bite to the vocals I'd have gotten to them sooner, but these things happen in musical triage: you try to weed out the lost causes so you can spend time with the ones that require attention.

I still haven't gotten around to The Back Room yet, but after the streak of great singles off it's follow up An End Has a Start I'm actually somewhat looking forward to hearing it. If the triad of "Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors," "The Racing Rats" and especially "An End Has a Start" are at all indicative of what they can do then they might actually get to replace Interpol at the head of the 'post-punk revival bands who sound like Joy Division/New Order' subgenre. "An End Has a Start" leans decidedly towards the latter musically, though Tom Smith's vocals are the same as they ever were, thankfully, and as such immediately grabbed my attention in a way that it's peers didn't. Both of the other singles from AEHAS are damned good, don't get me wrong, but they don't hold a candle to the title track. They're both still firmly in the dark, depressed Interpolian sound that much of their parent album resides in. "An End Has a Start" is a glorious little outlier that maintains the darkness of its surroundings on some levels but moves beyond them on others, and does it while packing one hell of a hook.

The thing you'll immediately notice when you hear "An End Has a Start" is just how sprightly it sounds compared to its surroundings. The guitars ring out in an unmistakably upbeat pattern, the drums are heavy enough on the hi-hat to make it danceable - of all things - and that wash of synths just adds a level of grandeur to it that completes the picture. Basically, the whole song sounds huge, pristine and most of all inviting. At least until Smith singing that is; dude's pretty much the Matt Berringer of the UK post-punk scene, an unrelentingly bitter sod whose voice is perfectly suited for all manner of depressing lyrics. The weird thing is that even though the lyrics here are as bitter as you'd expect the power of the song's atmosphere seems to recast them in a much more palatable light. It's hard to make a rejection as scathing as 'you came on your own/that's how you'll leave' sound like the sort of chorus any number of bands might kill for, but the way Smith's voice goes along with the music in that section does just that. I can't figure out how the band managed to turn some of the most bitter lyrics into the gold that is that damned chorus,but I'm grateful that it happened since the results are this good.

Coming up tomorrow: Chart watching HELL YEAH moment of the highest order.

#78. Chore - The Coastaline Fire (Sonic Unyon, 2002) / dredg - El Cielo (Interscope, 2002)

You want to know the most depressing thing you can do right now? Compare the list on number one modern rock hits from its first 5 years to those of the last five years. To think that the radio format whose first number one hit was something as compellingly odd as Siouxsie and The Banshees' "Peek-A-Boo" has gotten to the point where in a 52 week period over 2007-2008 there were only 24 weeks where the Foo Fighters weren't at number one just depresses me. At its inception the chart seemed to glorify the outsiders of the rock scene, the songs that were actually too far outside of rock's comfort zone to get anywhere on the mainstream side of things. Now the overlap between the two charts is generally at least 80% week in week out, with most of the songs even occupying the same positions on the two charts. With the divide between modern and mainstream rock stations getting narrower and narrower it's tempting to call the modern rock - sorry, Alternative Rock now - charts redundant in the grand scheme of things so long as they continue to ignore stuff that might actually be considered alternative to anything at all. There's no place for the compellingly odd, or even the compelling 9 times out of 10, on rock radio nowadays, and as such plenty of great artists are left behind in a sense, never catching the ear of the public despite having some degree of potential to do so.

I'm not saying that a band as far under the radar as Chore were would stand a chance even on an old style modern rock station, that would be ludicrous, but they do represent the kind of band that could have benefited from a less homogenized rock radio climate. As it is, outside of Canadian indie press and a few airings of the video for nominal single "The Hitchhiker" (marred by a really, really shitty edit of the song I might add) on some of MuchMusic's specialty shows (and an episode of 24 back in its first season) the damn thing was pretty much ignored. Given that the band occupy the highly appealing middle ground between Sunny Day Real Estate's indie-emo hybrid and Fugazi's crunchy post-hardcore it's a crime that the album is so ignored by the public at large, but taking into account the realities of its distribution - Sonic Unyon's a Canadian institution but didn't exactly have much in the way of international exposure - it's not surprising.

Still, if you can get your hands on it and have any sort of affinity for the less chaotic end of the emo spectrum it's quite the find. Not only do the band have a great sense of melody and dynamics - just check out the slow build of the "Electrojet" for example of both - but they're also damn skilled players, content to play out songs in weirdly syncopated 11/4 time ("Electrojet" again.) The two sides of their sound are better integrated here than on their also quite good second album Take My Mask and Breathe, and the best moments see them playing SDRE-style songs with the intensity of Fugazi as on "The Hitchhiker," "Electrojet" and the truly unsettling closer "Virginia Creeper," but the moments that lean to one side over the other aren't anything to discount either. The best stuff may come in the middle but when either end is occupied by the likes of "Americna Machinist" on the Fugazi side and "Dog in the Manger" on the SDRE one it's not exactly a huge climb to the middle. The only real downside here is that as lyricists the band leave a lot to be desired. They're not horrible lyricists by any stretch, and I'm not much of a lyrics guy to begin with, but a lot of thesongs just lack that extra pop that great lyrics can provide. Aside from that though, you've got one of the best relics of the Canadian modern rock scene in the 00s, and a great obscurity to wave in your friends faces.

Back to the topic of bands that deserved the type of exposure that the older version of modern rock radio provided, I can't help but think that if they'd come about a decade earlier dredg would have a much greater public profile. I came to know them through their third album, 2005's Catch Without Arms, and was almost immediately on their side. It was proggy without being entirely reliant on instrumental prowess, emotional without being melodramatic and catchy above all else. Looking into it's redecessor, the pretty much universally revered El Cielo, it struck me as a bit pretentious-sounding in theory. I mean, it was apparently a concept album based on a surrealist painting (Salvador Dali's Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening) as well as phenomena like sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming. That just struck me as the sort of thing that could only fail thanks to its reach exceeding its grasp, although I was more intrigued than anything since it's rare that a band use such things as inspiration for their album. Plus it was widely regarded as the band's best work, and given how much I liked Catch Without Arms there wasn't any was I wasn't gonna listen to it eventually.

My fears about its pretensions overriding any good it had to offer were unfounded it turns out. There's a concept here, sure, but not in the Thick as a Brick/Lamb Lies Down on Broadway/The Wall sense, where there's a story being told over the course of things. It was more in line with the way that some consider OK Computer to be a concept album; the songs have common roots and similar themes, but aren't linked to each other by anything less tenuous than that. It uses the stuff I mentioned above as a jumping off point but outside of a few songs none are fully married to them. Instead of a hard-lined concept album it comes across as nothing more than a consistently great series of songs that all tie in to vague concepts as opposed to any sort of story. That suits me just fine given that the songs are all so damn good. Even a few of the "Brushstroke" interludes come off as near-highlights, especially the lush "Walk in the Park" and the eastern-tinged "An Elephant in the Delta Waves."

As I said, though, the biggest thing about El Cielo is its consistency. There's no real high point because of this, though "The Canyon Behind Her" is about as good as the band gets, but I'll take a lack of readily available entry tracks in favor of having 11 amazing songs to continually throw out there. It also strikes me that dredg are another band that uses the a fairly static palette to create a wide variety of sounds. The basic elements are there on every song, Dino Campanella's african-tinged drumming, Mark Engles' guitar which fluctuates between rich, crunchy power chords and precise, treated riffs and Gavin Haynes' vulnerable vocals, but they apply them so as to make a vast array of songs. You've got some absolutely crushing rock songs ("Of the Room") next to calm, dreamlike ones ("Scissor Lock") and discordant, jagged numbers ("Eighteen People Living in Harmony"). When all the sides come together, like on "Sanzen" or "The Canyon Behind Her" it's absolutely breathtaking, but even when it's not quite as integrated the results are nearly as good.