#31. 'Show you what all the howling's for'

TV on the Radio "Wolf Like Me"

Sometimes there's nothing more frustrating than an artist who doesn't seem to realize exactly where their strengths lie. There's plenty of examples of this, bands who come across as utterly unremarkable until they hit upon that one particular sound that makes everything fall into place, then quickly retreat back to what they were doing before, artists who seem convinced that ballads are a good idea when they don't have the necessary emotional drive to really pull them off. It's much less prevalent in less popular forms of music, but even there there seem to be enough examples of bands whose talent only seems to come through on a certain type of song, usually one they don't attempt often enough.

Perhaps, TV on the Radio aren't the best example of this phenomenon, I mean, I did put Return to Cookie Mountain on the albums side of this equation after all, but they do seem to shy away from the type of song that initially put them on my 'band to watch radar.' I never got too excited about them until I heard "The Wrong Way," the first time they infused their sound with some sort of tangible energy as opposed to the more languidly paced stuff from Young Liars, but instead of keeping that sort of thing going they seemed to only return to it fleetingly. On one hand that was a good decision since it means that the more energetic version of their sound wasn't about to get played out, but on the other hand that sort of modification of their usual sound suits them so well that it's hard to not actively wish for more of it. It's not an extreme case where the only time they've got anything going for them is when they crank up the energy, they've always got Tunde Adebimpe's expressive vocals and Dave Sitek's production to spice up the less kinetic material and it's not like much of it is outright bad, but the energetic numbers are still where the band really shines.

If you want the best example of why the energetic sound suits the band better, you really don't need to look any further than "Wolf Like Me." Really, you just need to hear the first 30 seconds where drummer Jaleel Bunton pounds out a nice aggressive groove while Sitek and Kyp Malone ramp up the buzzing guitars into a properly cinematic yet lo-fi introduction. When the main riff actually starts the song's already sucked you in ad you are powerless to deny it. All told it's not a very complex or interesting riff, just a simple chord progression at its heart, but as a backdrop for Adebimpe and Malone's vocal sparring it works damn near perfectly. Especially when things get damn near thrashing during the chorus - this aspect is even more apparent on the various live versions out there, specifically the one they performed on Letterman right around the time Cookie Mountain was released - the energy of the performance transports the song to a whole different level than it was at before. Even during the middle section where things slow to a crawl the knowledge taht things are gonna pick up right where they left off gives it a palpable sense of tension that even the best of their less energetic moments can't match.

Of course there's Adebimpe's vocals at the fore here, and as usual they're fantastic, but more interesting is the increased presence of co-vocalist Kyp Malone. Malone's not in the same league as Adebimpe, but his harmonies and counter-vocals certainly do a lot to spice up the song. It's especially apparent during the middle section where Malone supplies the ethereal backing coos while Adebimpe drawls out his lycan come-ons; the best part of that section is the contrast between the two vocal lines as opposed to simply resting on Adebimpe's even more forceful than usual vocals. During the verses it's more definitely Adebimpe's show, and he's on fire for the whole song. It's a passionate, energetic and forceful vocal performance at all points, never letting up its intensity even for a moment but never coming off as too much either. It helps that his voice is such a pure one, even at full intensity it never sounds forced or affected which is tough to pull off at the levels of mania he achieves here.

#31. Natural Snow Buildings - The Dance of the Moon and the Sun (Self-Released, 2006)

I live in northern British Columbia, where the winter lasts approximately from mid-October through to the end of March most years. I've lived here a full 21 years, moving here when I was three because my dad found a job up here, and I've pretty much had my fill of winter in that time. I love it sometimes, don'tget me wrong...sitting out on a hill with friends, hot chocolate spiked with rum or whiskey depending on our mood in thermal cups, taking turns heading down the snow covered hill on a flimsy little plastic saucer that seemed huge to us 15 years ago but now barely contains our frames, rushing back up for more hot chocolate, just enjoying the cameraderie and the scenery as the night goes on. We're all northern lifers so we're well prepared for this stuff, none of us are ever cold and if it gets too much to take we're close to someone's house. That's the sort of shit I love about winter, but the rest of it can pretty much fuck off and die. The icy sidewalks that make the walk to work so treacherous, the driveway that needs shoveling at least twice a week if not more, the temperatures that can get into the -30s for a week at a time...it clouds over the good stuff when you've dealt with it for so long.

Why the rant about winter? Well,despite their being from France I can't help but imagine that natural Snow Buildings have experienced at least a few heavy northern winters. The Dance of the Moon and the Sun evokes every single facet of that time of year; the album is cold to the touch, alternately lurching with caution and reveling in expansive beauty and most of all utterly entrancing as it goes about it. It's 150 minutes over two CDs that never feels overlong or anything less than stellar throughout. The duo's work is frighteningly consistent for most of the releases I've heard - even this year's 5-cassette Daughters of Darkness feels like it goes by much faster than its 6 hour run time - but it seems that they're at their peak here, perfectly alternating between lo-fi electronic soundscapes and acoustic meditations without letting either side take too much of the focus. The songs - all 25 of them - are so uniformly excellent that it's hard to remember them by name so much as just recall the feeling of letting them course through you. OK, that's a lie since there's "Wisconsin" to consider, probably the one song that can convert anyone to a NSB follower by sheer force of its beauty, but even it's all about feeling as opposed to a single hook or identifiable moment. It's the kind of album that the only way to go about listening to it is to lie back with your eyes closed and let it transport you wherever it wants to go.

I associate it with the winter mostly, each song drags up some memory of a winter scene I was involved in so vividly that it's almost like they were creating the soundtrack to it after the fact. "Cut Joint Sinews" brings me back to the time we were driving my friend home down a winding back country road at 2 am and couldn't tell where the road edges were thanks to all the snow, that same sense of creeping dread. "Wisconsin" evokes the sledding nights I mentioned above, but this time we're not sledding so much as watching the snow fall deliberately. I could go on in that vein for a while but the point is pretty simple: this album is evocative unlike any other I've ever heard. I can get into the whole visualization thing with a lot of instrumental albums, letting them conjure up a situation that I find myself a part of, but no other album I've heard does that sort of thing with my own memories the way that this does. It adds to the unsettling atmosphere, the feeling like this music is rooting around in my subconscious at every turn, digging up some scenario I've all but forgotten that it can attach itself to, but it's thrilling at the same time since nothing else I listen to seems to do that.

The personal connections aside though, this is just plain beautiful music. On first pass it reminded me of the best Charalambides material stripped of its psychedelia and blown up to even more epic proportions, but each new listen moves it further into its own realm, one where drones can be soothing and menacing at the same time, where acoustic guitars carry more power than anything you have to plug in, where no matter how long a certain idea gets played for it never gets boring and only gets more hypnotic - seriously, "Felt Presence, Ghostly Humming" should get tedious over its 25 minutes but it steadfastly refuses to be anything other than totally awesome. It's a unique experience, one that each of their other albums that I've heard - so far just Daughters of Darkness and Shadow Kingdom but that will change...oh it will change - replicates to equal effect, but never surpasses the utter thrill of this one. The Dance of the Sun and the Moon could very well become my favorite album of the decade when I re-appraise things in a few years if it keeps going like this, but for now it just has to settle for being completely, unambiguously awesome in every way. I'm sure it can live with that.

#32. 'I wanna take the walls down with you'

D'Angelo "Untitled (How Does It Feel)"

There's a big difference between sexual music and sexy music. Sexual music is pertaining to sex while sexy music is all about the feeling it stirs up in you through all the different facets of its presentation. Sexual music is commonplace, but truly sexy music is increasingly hard to come by. Think about the current crop of pop hits for a minute; do any of them actively do something to make you feel sexy in any way? I'm not talking about Lady Gaga making you feel funny like when you'd climb the rope in gym class or how that new Shakira video is prime wank fodder - and if you say either of those without a trace of sarcasm you are truly a sad individual...just to throw that out there - but if a song in and of itself is enough to get you in the mood, without any visual stimulus. Classic soul is sexy music. Prince's 80s output could be exceptionally sexy as well as sexual. Some more rhythmic heavy music can be sexy. And for a brief period in the early 00s before he disappeared from the public eye, no one was making sexier music than D'Angelo.

I know the notions of sexiness as it pertains to "Untitled" are wrapped up in that video, the one shot pan around D'Angelo's impossibly cut physique that caused so many panties to be moistened and so many dudes to feel uncomfortable, inadequate and slightly turned on, but think about the song apart from that for a second. Better yet, acquire a copy of Voodoo and play the full 7 minute version which lets the song's build up achieve new heights that he single edit just can't match. Just listen to the song in any way you can without also being faced with the images and tell me that the song itself is not one of the sexiest things known to man. Every second that the song builds and builds is rife with utter sexiness even before you factor in D'Angelo's almost Prince-like vocals and intensely sexual lyrics, the sort of slow build structure I'm so fond of with the dynamic tension replaced with something more erotic and tangibly hot. Then you add in the vocals and lyrics and it becomes even more so, as if that seemed possible. There are plenty of reasons to wish for D'Angelo to return to the music world, but the fact that we need someone to remind us all what exactly is entailed by 'sexy' music.

Though really, if you're gonna give all the credit for "Untitled"'s sexiness to D'angelo alone you're kinda missing the point. The production, courtesy of Roots drummer ?uestlove, is responsible for a good bit of the sensuality contained therein, mainly because of the slow build he gets going - this is especially well established in the full length version though the single edit here does get the point across quite well - from the opening almost arrhythmic drum intro through to the swells of brass, keyboards, dirty-ass guitar and multi-tracked choirs of D'angelo's voice. The build up is key, because sexiness isn't a stable state in and of itself; there's a rise and fall to it, and the way that "Untitled" builds and fades mimics that sort of procession perfectly. As more and more layers get added to the mix the heat of the song goes up, gets to its breaking point and stays there for the last minute or so before abruptly cutting out before the last repetition of the subtitle can finish. If we're gonna compare this to any number of other slow-builders it seems to be missing the final act, but the lack of a denouement from the exceptional high of that final section works because the release part of the tension/release duo is held on for so long and kept so intense throughout that any sort of ending other than the abrupt cut might feel like too much. It's a crowning touch on what might be one of the best slow building songs of the decade.

Then there's D'Angelo himself, in full Prince falsetto making sweet careful love to the listener over that masterful instrumental. Sure, the lyrics read like a repository of every sexual cliche in the book, but it's in the way he sings them that the magic occurs. You've heard this type of thing a few times before if you're the least bit musically conscious, but I don't think anyone - Prince excepted - has done so much with that thin of a lyrical pool. Then again, vocally the best moments are the wordless exhortations that escape just as the final swell occurs, the - sorry, it's the only ward to describe it - orgasmic release of that torrent of 'YEEEAAAAAAAAH's that end the track. In those moments the imagery is much more vivid than when there's actual images being painted, depicting the sort of raw sexual release that doesn't require words to describe it. Considering that underneath all that there's a chorus of 'how does it feel's that makes it seem like a text-subtext argument - the main vocal going through the throes of passion while the repeated question of how it feels hangs in the air with every wordless exclamation. The fact that the last repetition of that question gets cut short works for the same reason the whole abrupt cut business works: the question isn't needed at that point, it's fucking obvious how it feels, and it feels fan-fucking-tastic.

#32. Third Eye Foundation - Little Lost Soul (Merge, 2000) and Matt Elliott - Howling Songs (Içi d'ailleurs, 2008)

At the beginning of the decade, Matt Elliott was winding down his Third Eye Foundation project with an album of what could best be described as ethereal drum 'n' bass. At the close of the decade he was making the best John Cale album since the 70s. That's a pretty large leap in terms of style, though to be fair a lot of the stuff on the 3EF swan song, Little Lost Soul, has a bit of a folk bent to it, but hearing the evolution that Elliott was undergoing on a step by step basis made it all seem downright logical. Hell, stretch back to the inception of Third Eye Foundation and you can hear his work slowly being overtaken by surprisingly disparate elements, the feedback-laced mood pieces of Semtex giving way to the darkness of Ghost then the more acoustic-based explorations of his solo debut, it's deconstruction on the just-missing-out-on-this-list Drinking Songs to the dark, quasi-Andalusian folk of his outright masterpiece Howling Songs. It seems like a large berth to cover in 15 years, but hearing it happen in sequence was pretty thrilling and utterly fascinating.

Little Lost Soul was always my preferred cup of Third Eye Foundation as it seemingly combined all the best elements of Ghost - the enveloping darkness mixed with frantic D 'n' B drum patterns - and You Guys Kill Me- the increased hookiness and varied instrumentation. In that light it makes sense that Elliottt would retire the moniker after it's release, not counting the (horribly titled) remix collection I Poo Poo on Your Juju and his entry in the Omupo DJ mix series, because it really does feel like the culmination of all he did in the 6 years that Third Eye Foundation was active. Thus it winds up working on two levels for me, both as a compendium of what 3EF was about and as a great album i its own right. The signposts to his past releases are all over the place here, yet despite their similarities to what he's done in the past each of the first four songs feels like a new take on those ideas. "I've Lost That Loving Feline" could find a place on Ghost without much effort, but it also feels like the evolution of that side of Elliott's arsenal, with the ethereal choral vocals warping around the D 'n' B drum sequencing in a way that's less oppressive darkness and more elegant release. Likewise, the next three tracks could pass for You Guys Kill Me out-takes but never feel like a retread. OK, maybe "Half a Tiger" could be called "In Bristol With a Universal Cooler" without much hesitation, but Elliott's sound was evolving beyond the Third Eye Foundation trademarks, and the songs stand in a marked contrast to the prior works because of that.

After the opening quartet things start to evolve anew with "Lost" where Elliott takes a simple acoustic riff through a hall of spooky sound effects and crisp drums. It still sounds like it could have found a home on You Guys Kill Me but at the same time it feels like the first step towards the more organic material that Elliott would release under his own name through the rest of the decade. And it's an absolutely stunning piece of music besides, feeling like a precursor to The Books if they applied their laptop trickery to American Primitivism instead of indie electronica. As it shifts and mutates over its 11 minute run time, "Lost" starts to sound like a dry run for the sort of deconstruction that Elliott would perfect on "The Maid We Messed" five years later, but as it is it's a quietly stunning song, full of interesting touches that accumulate as it reaches its climax to give it a sort of power that few other 3EF numbers can match. The rest of the album can't help but feel like an afterthought after that, I do have a soft spot for the trip-hoppy "Goddamnit You've Got to Be Kind"'s use of beatboxing but it definitely pales next to the all encompassing splendor of "Lost"

Howling Songs seems to be in danger of doing that sort of thing right off the bat as it's lead off track, "The Kübler-Ross Model," is just as brilliant as "Lost" was albeit in a completely different way. In a way, it plays like a summation of the way the whole of the album plays out, rains of quickly plucked acoustic guitar arpeggios giving way to Elliott's emotively fragile vocals and then building to an earth-shattering climax of overdubbed guitars, mournful strings, piano and light drumming then crashing back down to an understated denouement. The same pattern repeats with each track, but each time it works just as well. The songs may all havet he same backbone, but they're far from copies of each other, each of the lengthier tracks making the patterns work in a different way, whether it's the increasingly frantic strumming and painful string stabs of "A Broken Flamenco" or the mournful vocal catharsis of "The Howling Song" it never feels like the album's one-note despite each track having the same basic pattern at its core. And shit, even if it was one-note when that note is as beautifully played as it is on Howling Songs that type of thing becomes a compliment in my book.

To put it simply, Howling Songs sounds like no other record I've heard. The signposts are all there, a lot of them posting to various facets of John Cale's career, but the result is so utterly confounding in its uniqueness that no matter how many times I've heard the album it always floors me to some extent. The application of the dynamic tension and release of post rock to what could pass for Spanish folk music at some points, the emotionally resonant vocals, the breathtaking climaxes and the deep, resonant production - the way this album fills the room can't be denied now that I've got a nicer pair of speakers - all comes together to make a thoroughly singular piece of music. Each song is it's own little variation of the same pattern, but the ways that they all build so differnetly is never not a sight to behold, especially the delayed release of "I Name This Shop Tragedy, Bless Her and All Who Sail With Her," and even if things start to sound samey to you it's hard to deny that they don't sound absolutely fantastic at the same time. It's the sort of album that I can get lost in, spending the whole 47 minutes it plays endlessly fascinated by the surroundings it constructs in my head. By the time the last lines of the album are said and "Bomb the Stock Exchange" roars to its appropriately cinematic ending I'm powerless to do anything but ride it out and love every spare second of it. It may be a long way from Elliott's initial forays this decade but it ends his journey thus far damn near perfectly.

#33. 'So why is it so hard to get by?'

Doves "Pounding"

It's the drum beat. Simple as that. You wanna know why "Pounding" outranks all but 32 singles released between 2000 and 2009? It's the drum beat. Why did I initially rank The Last Broadcast as a contender for my favorite albums of the decade? At least 50% of it was the drum beat. Why am I currently lying here with a look of determination on my face despite doing nothing more important than a blog post? The fucking drum beat, that's why. OK, I'm overstating it a bit, but seriously, the insistent battering ram of a drum pattern that Doves' drummer Andy Williams lays down here is one of the most energizing beats of the decade. So simple and primal yet so utterly perfectly suited to every single activity that requires motivation or energy. When it first came out I remember using it to power through the last bits of homework or exam prep I had in grade 12 - Jesus Christ, 7 years ago already... - and every so often to this day if I ever need a quick injection of energy it's right there waiting to give me that push. An it hasn't become any less effective for all the times I've used it to do so either, which says a lot about how insistent the damn thing is.

But honestly, it's not just the beat. That's the most important of the elements fore sure but if there wasn't a great tune outside of that I doubt it would have been among the first things to come to mind in the early stages of this process. Ignoring the drums - OK, impossible to do but bear with me here - the other elements would make a damned good song in their own right. Jimi Goodwin's pleading vocal, his brother's excellent pair of guitar breaks, the equally insistent rhythm guitar throughout the song matching Williams' drumming at ever turn...the drums may be the deserved focal point here but that's not a slight on the other elements by any stretch. It all comes together as the last great britpop single, more anthemic and driving than anything its bigger bands could come up with at their peak let alone in 2002 when most people were trying to play the genre off as a thing of the past.

I realize that using the b-word here could be seen as a bit disparaging to some, but think about it: The Doves are basically the band so many wanted The Stone Roses to be - effortlessly anthemic, emotional and poppy without the air of smugness that Ian Brown brings to the proceedings. It's hard to see it as anything but a direct descendant of that whole scene, no matter the connotations, and even so it's miles better than any non-Pulp-produced britpop single ever. It strikes just the right balance between the rousing and the tender - Goodwin's vocals are surprisingly keening without veering into melodrama, and perfectly suited to the song, especially as he rises during the chorus. Seriously, the song would be worth it if only for that first sweeping 'weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee're so down' even if the rest of the vocals and lyrics were 90% tripe. Thankfully they aren't, the song's a basic 'seize the day' thing but so effective in it's ministrations that all you want to do is get out there and live free of consequences for a four minute stretch. Sure, that's still mostly down to the drums but without some of Goodwin's words and vocals the song would be a bit of an empty shell.

Then there's the other Goodwin brother, Jez. He only gets a couple of moments to shine here but he makes more of them than you might expect. Firstly, that rapid chord break after the second chorus where he finally emerges from the back of the mix. It's not a traditional solo, but it certainly feels as monumental as any of the more technically proficient ones out there. The tone of his guitar is just perfect or that section, crunchy without being obviously distorted, sharp and glassy but full bodied. It's not too long of a section but it never fails to send a chill down my spine. Then before the last chorus he breaks through again with that lovely fluid arpeggio - it's been there the whole time but so low in the mix that it's more subconscious than anything. Once again, the tone is beautiful and it gives the end of the song a suitably epic feel despite not changing the sound all that much. His work is arguably just as important as Williams' as far as making the most of the song but the subtlety of it catches me off guard at times, which just makes me appreciate it a lot more.

#33. The National - Boxer (Beggars Banquet, 2007) and Alligator (Beggars Banquet, 2005)

I avoided The National at first, I'll admit. I saw that they were a band from New York and had a 'The' in their name and expected another Strokes/Stripes/Hives garage-revival band and given how those three had grown into disappointments of the highest order I was wary of going down that road here.Even when Alligator was getting its due on plenty of year end lists back in 2005 - nothing like the reappraisal it's undergone in the meantime mind you but respectable placements on quite a few of the lists I took for gospel back then - I didn't pay it much attention. Of course if I'd known they were the American version of Tindersticks I'd have probably gotten on board a long time ago, but I made my assumptions and that was that.

So after the tongue bath that Boxer received upon it release I figured I'd take the plunge and see what all the fuss was about. While I wasn't immediately blown away by it I did have to admit that it was not at all what I'd thought it would be. Matt Beringer's vocals were like Stuart Staples by way of Kurt Wagner and the band was playing what I'd call sophisticated alternative, just oozing class and refinement without losing energy or drive. It was a far cry from the expected, but it wasn't a great album to my ears so much as a very good one.

Then, like a lot of my favorite of the decade it grew on me. Well, grew on me doesn't quite do justice to the way it slowly overtook me. Every listen brought out new joys, from the double-picked guitar line that "Racing Like a Pro" builds itself on or the subtly complex drumming on "Guest Room" or the real meaning behind Berringer's lyrics. Every listen revealed more, and the more it revealed the more I wanted it to reveal more. The more I heard, the more I wanted to hear. The album refused to stop getting better for a while, my mental decimal rating rising a couple of notches with each listen as each of the tracks revealed itself to me. The way it happened seemed almost needlessly drawn out, but as far as slow burns go there wasn't a better one this decade.

Essentially, over the course of three months The National went from a band I was happily indifferent towards to being one of my favorite bands of the decade. Matt Berringer painted such vivid pictures of a lost generation, a generation I'm on the verge of joining, wandering around like it's still freshman year, barely recognizing their peers who've moved beyond that mentality, shutting themselves off from a society they aren't made to understand, yet didn't sacrifice catchiness in favor of potency. The band themselves ride Bryan Devendorf's tight as fuck rhythms with interlocking guitar lines that never draw attention to how much complexity the whole package contains. Sure it gets a little samey towards the end, but the way the album flows is impossible for me to deny. I can still pick out highlights but the fun of Boxer is just riding it out for the full 50 minutes or so and letting it take you on it's unique little ride. The reason it' one of the best albums of the decade is because sometimes I can't even think of it in terms of its individual songs, just the cumulative effect of the whole package.

So after Boxer grew into one of my favorite releases of 2007 it only seemed right that I atone for the sin of ignoring what had become one of my favorite bands in a short period of time, y'know after actually listening to their music. I wasn't expecting anything to match the most recent outing, if only because it had had the time to fully grow on me as I've come to assume all NAtional albums require, but of the three prior releases Alligator was the only one that threatened to overtake it in my estimation. I mean, just look at some of those songs...the subtly shifting "Secret Meeting," the rousing "Lit Up" and "Abel," fucking "Mr. November" which might be the single best song the band's ever laid down, "Baby We'll Be Fine," "All the Wine," "Friend of Mine". In fact on a track per track basis it's probably stronger than Boxer.

However, therein lies the deciding factor: for all it's great songs Alligator doesn't hang together like it's follow up did. The flow of the album isn't awkward or anything, it just doesn't have the sense of cohesion that Boxer has. It's a bunch of highlights looking for a through line to put it one way; I can't get enough of the songs themselves but as an album something seems to be missing here. The question then becomes 'does it matter?' Well, yes it does. We're talking about the crème de la crème here, and without that extra cohesion Alligator comes up short, just barely. I'll probably listen to it more often and I'll sure as hell pump a few of the tracks at alarmingly frequent intervals (according to my iPod I've played "Lit Up" and "Mr November" upwards of 20 time each in the last few weeks vs. 5 plays for anything off Boxer) but it will always pale next to the follow up despite those caveats.

#34. 'You say you're fine, I know you better than that'

Taylor Swift "You Belong With Me"

Sometimes when I look at the pop charts I begin to feel really fucking old. It doesn't feel like it was that long ago that I was the target market, at least demographically speaking, for a lot of the stuff that wound up getting ridiculously popular, but now It seems aimed at kids at least 10 years younger than me. The proliferation of Disney-sponsored acts, the gradual dumbing down of every other facet of music, the rise of artists not even out of high school yet, the way all three of those blatantly pander to the apparently highly lucrative - and highly gullible - 12-14 year old girl demographic...it all makes me feel far above my 24 years. I don't want this to turn into a stereotypical 'back in my day music was blah blah blah and you kids GET OFF MY LAWN' rant, but in spite of how much I've grown to tolerate and in some instances love pop music of a recent vintage, it still seems like a lot of it is aimed so specifically at a group of people that I will never have anything in common with that I question why I even bother with the whole chart-watching and critiquing thing in the first place.

And then "You Belong With Me" comes along and breaks down every single one of my defenses, batters me over the head with adorableness and leaves me with a smile on my face. Taylor Swift should by all rights be one of the artists I'm ranting against above, and yet I can't do anything but smile any time "You Belong With Me" gets played anywhere within earshot. It's possibly the best pure pop song to be released in the last 3 years; there's nothing new or innovative on display here, but it's done so well that that's even more of a moot point than it already was in my book.

Swift's strengths are on full display here; her lyrics are based in cliches - this time the modified-Duckie or the 'why won't you realize how fucking awesome I am compared to your current gf?' - but tackled with utmost sincerity tothe point that the clichedness seems to give way to genuine emotion. There's all sorts of those little moments that seem just sort of tossed off as afterthoughts but that add a lot of depth to the story being told, really that whole second verse demonstrates just how deep the connection between Swift and her would-be beau within the song goes without beating you over the head with it, and the more overt stuff is still emotionally resonant if only because of Swift's inability to be anything other than transparent. In a way it's the rare example of a performer's youth working in their favor; if she'd tried to sound like anything other than a teenager in the throes of an unrequited crush the song wouldn't work, but since she's so close to the subject matter, not viewing it from any sort of appreciable distance she sounds absolutely genuine at all times and the song benefits greatly from it.

For once I won't dwell too much on the sound of the song itself, other than to say that the light coutry touches are a nice underlayer to what is pretty much a strict power-pop nugget, since it just serves as a canvas for Swift to work over. It's antithetical to most of the other singles on the list in that respect, but in spite of its lack of interesting production or focus on anything outside of the lyrics, "You Belong With Me" is quite simply a marvelous little song. It doesn't need anything more than it's got, it knows that and runs with it for the most enjoyable 4 minutes of constantly repeated radio play this year's had to offer. Taylor Swift continues her path towards domination of pop culture unabated, even earning herself place in a meme along with an MTV award. I couldn't be happier about that, honestly.

#34. Brand New - The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (Interscope, 2006)

There are some albums that don't reveal themselves fully after one listen. There are some albums that won't fully reveal themselves until about the 10th listen. Then there are those albums that you need to hear in a certain set of circumstances in order to begin to fully appreciate the depth they have. I'd be lying if I said I was fully in The Devil and God's corner after one listen, I knew it was a solid record and one hell of a step forward from Brand New's previous albums - both of which, it needs to be said, are growers in their own right - in terms of both composition and subject matter, but I wouldn't have dreamed of putting it in my top 100 of the decade. I liked the album well enough, but outside of a few moments - "Handcuffs", "You Won't Know" and "Millstone" specifically at that point - it didn't strike me as a great album.

But I kept coming back to it for some reason. And not just cherry-picking the great moments either; any time I decided to listen to it I'd get the whole thing down. It still wasn't making much headway into great album territory, though more individual songs were added to the list of great moments, but I kept coming back to it more so than a lot of album's I'd consider better than it. I don't know exactly why it kept happening, maybe I had more of an inclination that it could be a great album than I realized at that point, but after about a dozen listens over a month or so it started to click in some ways. The songs seemed to have more of a cohesive theme than I'd expected, not quite the concept album some of its more ardent fanatics claim it to be (more on that in a bit) but it certainly felt like there was a connection between the songs no matter how tenuous.

I don't know what made it finally click, but right after my penultimate year of university I gave it a spin and it hit me in a way that I wasn't expecting. It could just be the fact that it was the first time I didn't have other things pressing on my mind while I was listening - note to any university students reading this, "The Archer's Bows Have Broken" makes for excellent lab writing music - or the fact that it was slowly dawning on me that I was gonna graduate in a year and didn't have much of a plan for myself outside of 'get a job' but at that point the whole album just fell into place in front of me. It was about feeling like a disappointment to all around you, it was about losing everything you live for, it was about growing up without actually being ready to, and instead of being maudlin about it it was all delivered with the sort of maturity I wouldn't have expected from the dudes that made "Jude Law and a Semester Abroad" a mere 4 years before this. It was so obvious at this point that I felt a bit stupid for not picking up on it til then, but once that missing piece fell into place the album took on a new level of greatness for me.

The subject matter here is much more personal yet at the same time more universal than on previous BN outings as well. Songs about fucked up relationships and obsessive love still pop up through out, but then there's things like "Jesus Christ," one of the most well thought out songs about crises of faith I've heard on a secular album, or the absolutely devastating "Limousine (MS Rebridge)" that examines a tragic accident involving a child getting killed by a drunk driver. Even the relationship centered songs seem to occupy a different sphere than the band's previous experience in that area, "Handcuffs" caught between misguided romanticism and borderline stalker-ish obsession without falling firmly on either side and "Degausser" playing out like a drunk-dial turned self-examination that's in turn desperate and insightful.

Seeing how far along Jesse Lacey has come as a lyricist - though looking back there were hints of that as far back as Your Favorite Weapon - was one of the things I appreciated about TDAGARIM from the first listen, but after the click it started to downright astound me how evocatively he was rendering these harrowing little vignettes. Each of the songs, even the ones I'm not overly fond of have this weird sort of power to them that goes beyond their constituent parts, and that's all due to the unexpected depth Lacey's lyrics have acquired over time. The Devil and God is the kind of album I can actually understand people obsessing over, and I mean that as a huge compliment. I don't agree with the sect of people who want to turn the album into a full story about the driver from "Limousine" but I can understand why they've taken the time to interpret the rest of the album in that light.*

To me, as I said earlier, it's an album about loss, plain and simple. Lost potential ("The Archer's Bows Have Broken", "Millstone") lost friends ("Sowing Season", "Limousine") lost faith ("Jesus Christ") lost love ("Not the Sun", "Handcuffs")...there's so much loss through the album that it should feel more depressing than it does, but something in the band's playing keeps it from being a slog. It's got moments of utter beauty slamming into some of the band's most aggressive stuff to this day, moments of tension that let forth some of the most genuine catharsis in any genre this decade. The band's sound has come along just as far as Lacey's lyrics, all but abandoning the more traditional pop-punk/emo sound for something more multi-faceted and dynamic. Just look at the contract between the military precision of "Archers" and the restrained beauty of "Handcuffs" or the way that "You Won't Know" just explodes after a couple minutes of tandem cello and guitar - this isn't the kind of thing I'd have thought them capable of pulling off as well as they do here. Whatever the impetus was for this growth, I'm more than glad that they underwent it and that the results were this stunning, even if I wasn't on board at first.

*Though that sect of people is certainly on to something in sequencing the album as starting at "Welcome to Bangkok" and ending with "You Won't Know". It doesn't fundamentally alter the feeling of the album but it does flow a bit better, plus "Bangkok" is better suited as an opener than as a mid album interlude and "You Won't Know" definitely works as a closer to rival if not surpass "Handcuffs". Try it sometime, it's a nice way to rediscover the album.

#35. 'I wear a coat of feelings and they are loud'

Animal Collective "The Purple Bottle"

Is it odd that I'll say without much reservation that I hate love songs yet songs about crushes generally rank highly in my estimation? Sure, saying 'I hate love songs' is horribly general and probably not all that true, but songs that seem to rub the whole love thing in the listener's face just piss me off, while songs that take a step back and go to the root of it all into the initial infatuation and longing that precedes any sort of love affair have the exact opposite effect. It could be that the crush phase just lends itself more readily to great pop songs, especially if the artist in question takes the time to fully involve themselves in the full on joy and internal exuberance that marks a crush and how that rubs against the nervousness and doubt that accompany them at first. It's a hard mix to pull off, which might explain why there are so many less crush songs than there are full out love songs, but the few times that it's done and done well it all but guarantees itself a spot in my heart.

Essentially, that's why "The Purple Bottle" is here. I can't think of a a purer distillation of the dueling joy and nerves that accompany a hard crush that also manages to be extremely catchy and instrumentally interesting at the same time. While Avey Tare is exuberantly extolling the feelings he has for the object of his infatuation the band is laying down an equally exuberant and relentless track that matches him at every turn. The drums rumble, the guitars are sparse and sparkly-sounding, the keyboards are light and airy and the whole enterprise seems to be straining to contain the sheer jy that everyone is projecting onto the track. Keeping in mind that his is the same crew that went from shimmery avant rock on their 2000 debut Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished to a sort of aimless meandering through acoustic vignettes a merre four years later on Sung Tongs, a group who flirted with unreserved outbursts of emotion before (I'm thinking the sudden 'YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!' at the end of "April and the Phantom" mostly) but seemed more comfortable the more laid back they were. The sonic evolution that they underwent while making Feels was astonishing if only because it showed that tehy really could do pretty much anything and do it well. If you'd told me in 2003 when I was falling hard for Here Comes the Indian that a mere two years later the same band would be making this type of thing I'd have probably laughed in your face, but there we were and damn was it glorious.

It's also worth noting that for once the band's lyrics don't sound like an afterthought. Even if the song's main goal was to embody the exuberance of a crush, Tare's lyrics do al ot of the work in that department. He's clearly over the moon at all times, repeating words til they lose meaning, earing his heart and his nervousness on his sleeve and pretty much acting like a teenager who just saw the girl he's gonna marry and can't wait to tell the world about all the thoughts in his head. When the song moves into that last section and Tare goes on about his 'crush high' it's probably the single most joyous moment in music this decade, and that specific moment has plenty of competition within the song itself if not from any other song in particular. All through its near 7-minute run time - and once again, that seemingly excessive time for a single is all earned - the band and Tare in particular just dive headfirst into the central idea of the song and do everything they can to embody it. The sortof dedication they show to such a basic premise pays off so well that it surpasses all of their other singles, no small feat considering that we're talking about stuff like "Grass" and "Fireworks", two songs that would be top 50 contenders in their own right if not for "The Purple Bottle"'s supremacy in their discography.

#35. Jaga Jazzist - What We Must (Smalltown Supersound, 2005)

There's no question I dread more than the inevitable 'what kind of music do you like?' inquiries that pop up in small talk. It's frustrating to explain that when I say that I generally like a wide range of stuff I really mean that I will flit quite happily from death metal to free jazz to modern classical to pop to folk to drone without a second thought. It seems to confuse people if I say that I'm musically omnivorous or eclectic to a fault, and if I do the whole 'lots of stuff, you probably wouldn't know much of it' I sound like a dick and I hate doing that. I almost wish there was a certain band I could direct people to to get an idea of all my musical likes, but chances are that theoretical band would suck, because while girl-group harmonies, complex arrangements and time signatures and post rock dynamics all work well on their own I can't imagine them all coexisting peacefully in the same song, let alone if you were to add in some free jazz, fluid acoustic guitar playing, dark atmosphere and abstract hip hop to the mix.

The point of this long-winded (me? long-winded? never!) introductory spiel is that any time I find a band that ticks at least three of the boxes I have in my mental list of 'things that make music awesome' I get a little more excited than usual. The more boxes it ticks off, the more excited I get, and even if the music isn't great it gets something of a boost in my estimations by virtue of it fulfilling so many of those requirements. I'm not just talking about the big three - passion, passion and passion - but the smaller sonic touches and genre signifiers that tickle my fancy. Hell I even will occasionally make the list of all the things that a certain album has going for it as it ticks off more and more of the boxes even if I immediately negate it with a much more prevalent criticism. The times that nothing seems to work against the multiple positives are the times I reserve a slot on my decade-end lists for the album.

What We Must ticked off at least a half a dozen of those boxes by the time its first track, the absolutely stunning "All I Know Is Tonight" was half over. The band had passion in spades, skill to match, were playing jazz with post-rock structures and dynamics, allowed for multiple levels of interplay without getting sloppy, had immaculate production and ethereal, almost unnoticeable female vocals wafting in and out of the mix. By the time the song ground to halt for a miniature vibraphone solo I was in a sort of musical heaven that few songs could take me to, and when the whole ensemble rushed back in right after that it was the sort of rush few other bands could provide. I'd been a fan of Jaga Jazzist before, the jazz/IDM hybrid of their first two albums was fun and well played by all involved, but from the first track of What We Must on I became more than a fan, I was enthralled. The minor adjustments to their sound, renewed focus on live drumming vs programmed, more of a collective approach to the main themes as opposed to the more solo-oriented sound of The Stix, the sheer force of the whole ten-person ensemble playing together without becoming overpowering and most of all the extended songs that took advantage of all of those adjustments took them from being a good band to a great one in the space of just less than eight minutes.

Even if the remaining six tracks never quite reach the heights of "All I Know Is Tonight," and really that's a given for any album with an opening cut as strong as that, What We Must still stands as one of the most exciting jazz-adjacent releases of the decade. The ensemble's focus and power shines through on all the cuts, from the choppy rhythms of "Stardust Hotel" to the brooding menace of "I Have a Ghost, Now What?" there's always a healthy bit of ensemble playing that puts so many other jazz groups to shame. Martin Horntveth's return to playing live drums for the most part gives the songs a much more human feeling, its probably the most noticeable departure from the ir previous album and it suits the tighter, more dynamic and expansive sound of this release perfectly. It doesn't hurt that it seems all ten members of the line up at this point are at or near the top of their game on their respective instruments as well, making their group and solo playing that much more electric and exciting.

Really, even if the only thing this offered to me was "All I Know Is Tonight" it would have been a shoo-in for one of my favorites of the decade, but the fact that it doesn't let up that much for the 38 or so minutes after that - it runs just over 45 minutes on the whole, pretty concise for such a sprawling album - is a nice bonus. I may not get quite as much out of the other six tracks but the whole thing has me more than excited for the next step that the collective takes.

#36. 'Don't I look like a Halle Berry poster?'

Missy Elliott "Work It"

Missy Elliott might be the most explicitly sexual pop mega star of the past 15 years. If anyone else carried on the traditions of 1980s Prince and Madonna in combining titillation and raw displays of sexual energy with the frequency that Elliott has since 1997 they certainly aren't coming to mind right now. Sure, a lot of overtly sexual music has been released since Elliott's initial outings, but little of it has the sort of substance that Elliott and her spiritual forebears, nor do the artists have the sort of singular focus on sexuality that Elliott developed during the early days of the 00s. Just looking at her singles discography between 1999 and 2003 shows well over 50% of that output - and all of her biggest hits incidently - being of a highly sexualized nature and on either side of that her profile wasn't exactly high enough to consider her the sort of driving force in pop music that she was in that three year period. I'm not complaining about the lack of variety though since not only was that period good for Elliott on a popularity level but on a level of sheer quality as well, with only the maudlin "Take Away" not having crossed my mind for inclusion at some point. So is it really any surprise the most overtly sexual of those singles is the one that comes out on top?

"Work It" might just be the most unapologetically dirty single to make the top 10 this decade, especially given that it's only real competition, Ying Yang Twins' "Wait (The Whisper Song)", topped out at #15. It's not dirty in the 'need a shower post haste' way that "Wait" is though, smutty's probably a better description all told -same idea but less depraved - but it's definitely one of the most sexual things to reach the top 5 since the heyday of Prince. I mean, this was a song that stayed at #2 in the US for 10 weeks - damn you "Lose Yourself" - while containing references to pubic trimming, promiscuity and cunnilingus so frank that they might make a whore blush. I think the key is that even while that sort of thing is going on the song never puts sexuality ahead of sounding fun. Despite the frankness of the lyrics and Missy near predatory persona the whole enterprise still feels surprisingly light and playful.

I'd give a lot of the credit on that front to Timbaland's (that's his third entry in the top 50 for those keeping score) beat, not one of his most instantly addictive pieces of work but a great foundation for the track none the less. The whistling synth hook - sampled from Blondie's "Heart of Glass" - is just as ear-catching as anything Tim was doing in the early part of the decade, and the main beat is one of his least showy but works perfectly with Missy's rapping. Towards the end when he adds the immortal bell hook from Run DMC's "Peter Piper" to the party it's an inspired move that makes the extended outro one of the best parts of the song in my estimation. Even if it's not as instantly recognizable as, say, the tabla and water-torture synths from "Get Ur Freak On" or the low flute hook from "Promiscuous" it still does just what it needs to do to keep the song from seeming too dirty in the face of it being...well, extremely fuckin' dirty.

Like I said, this is a sexual song - not necessarily sexy but intensely sexual. The thing absolutely oozes sexuality, then rubs it in your face and makes you sing along with it as it does it. That part's all on Missy though; the charisma that carries her through even the laziest of her album tracks shines even brighter when she's working on a real winner, and this is undoubtedly a winner. Given that as a rapper Missy ranges from nothing special to outright lazy she needs that charisma to make this work, and she pulls it off admirably. I don't think anyone else could have pulled off two reversed vocal sections - one in the chorus no less - with the aplomb that Elliott manages here, let alone the utter nonchalance in tossing out a line like 'call before ya come I need to shave my cha-cha' or using the term badonkadonk without sounding like a total idiot. When Missy's on she can make anything sound awesome it seems; gibberish, reversed vocals, come-ons, lame braggadocio, it all comes off so well that whatever weaknesses the song has lyrically don't show through vocally.

#36. The Fiery Furnaces - Blueberry Boat (Rough Trade, 2004)

It's easy to forget just how big of a curveball this was after Gallowsbird's Bark given how far out in left field the Friedberger siblings went on subsequent outings, but in 2004 there was only one way to react to witnessing this thing unravel: Where the fuck did this come from?

If the directions the band took after this managed to dull that part of its appeal a bit it also serves to highlight just how perfectly the duo do things here. The songs have sprawl, unwieldy sprawl, but the primary thing behind them is an almost effortless sense of hookiness and pop-smarts. The music is varied but concise if that makes sense - it's not a cluttered mess despite shifting at least 5 times within each song, even the shorter ones. The combination of that level of variety, the fact that each separate vignette is just as catchy as the last one and that the arrangements are all done with remarkable skill and attention to detail makes for probably the most singularly satisfying pop album of the decade.And yes, this is a pop album. It's catchy, fun, nonsensical and impeccably crafted, all the hallmarks of every type of pop music dressed up in prog clothes with a healthy portion of quirk to go around. No matter what you want to call it, at its heart it's a pop album as far as I'm concerned, and that's not a bad thing.

It's hard to write a review of this without it simply descending into a list of the best parts of the best songs because any attempt to describe the album's sound in any sort of detail would just devolve into a laundry list of all the various hooks and shifts each song goes through. While a bluffers' guide to Blueberry Boat might be appreciated in some circles, describing how the songs evolve doesn't compare to actually listening to them. I can't describe the sort of head-turning awe I experience every time "Quay Cur"'s pleasant organ section stops abruptly for a flurry of electric guitar ans turns into prime Beefheart-ish garage rock, or how "My Dog Was Lost But Now He's Found" redeems its one-joke nature with a never identical set of verse riffs that don't alter Eleanor's vocal rhythms for all their differences, or how you get tricked into thinking that "Chief Inspector Blancheflower" is pointless until Matthew non sequiturs that he joined the police force, or...or...or...well, you get the idea. There's enough of these moments across the 13 tracks - and I'd wager that half of them are in "Chris Michaels," a serious contender for song of the decade - that things like the title track wind up surprising me by virtue of not making that sort of switch too often.

Of course there' no guarantee that you'll feel this way, I've found that every album that the Furnaces release has an equal number of vehement detractors and fervent worshippers so your chances are about 50/50 all told, but for me, this is the type of album I wanted more of throughout the last five years of the decade. I wanted more albums that didn't sacrifice interesting for catchy or vice versa, I wanted more albums that kept me on my toes, and most of all I wanted more albums with personality. I didn't get too much of that, Sunset Rubdown's albums might achieve this sort of thing with time and the more I listen to Anathallo's Floating World the more I think it could pass for Blueberry Boat's shyer brother, but at least the Friedbergers delivered this fusion of all those things at a point where I was primed to get excited for it.

#37. 'When I eat when I'm not hungry I'm sure I feel my face get fatter'

Arab Strap "The Shy Retirer"

"The drum machine makes me want to kill myself" - one of my friends in reference to Arab Strap

The formula that Arab Strap have been using since 1996 is a flawed one, I'll be the first to admit that. For every element of their basic sound that's pleasant - Malcolm Middleton's imprecise but evocative guitar arpeggios, Aidan Moffat's sad bastard drawl - there's the fucking drum machine sputtering in the background. It's a cheap drum machine no less, not one of those fancy ones you hear on pop radio that's almost indistinguishable from a human with impeccable timing but one that screams 'I AM A DRUM MACHINE!' over every minute of the band's discography. It takes away from the intimacy that the duo have in their best moments and the way its mechanical nature rubs against Middleton's distinctly human guitar playing could be interesting if the drum machine wasn't so grating on its own.

And yet when you get down to it the band have some songs that the damn thing can't ruin. Of course by the time their 5th album, 2003's Monday at the Hug and Pint, rolled around the more egregious iterations of the click track were gone, and while the band was still utilizing an obviously mechanical drummer it didn't sound quite as horrible as it had on their first few albums. The songs themselves were also showing a marked progression, still hitting the same lyrical notes as before - Moffat's usual combination of songs about girlfriends, ex girlfriends, getting shitfaced and fucking - but there was a big change: he sounded somewhat happy about it. "The Shy Retirer" especially was more jubilant than any song of theirs since their first single, at least until you looked at the lyrics, and between Middleton's fluid arpeggios and the sampled strings there was more than enough to distract from the obnoxious fake percussion. It was about as perfect as an Arab Strap song could get, not losing any of the distinct elements of their sound but doing something within that framework to make the most of its shortcomings.

Lyrically it's still firmly in Moffat's wheelhouse, still concerned primarily with the pub scene and getting fresh with the fly women, but here it seems to be tackled from a different angle. Any other song would have Moffat either having just struck out or reminiscing about a particular encounter with the nostalgia tempered with an undercurrent of malaise. Here he's almost in the same league as Greg Dulli in terms of sheer bravado, albeit slightly tempered with his normal self-deprecation, s he goes about trying to bring someone home. It's slightly shocking to hear him so involved, although the song's arrangement all but requires it of him, and even more out of the ordinary to hear him bust out something like 'I'm always moanin'/but you jump-start my serotonin' without a hint of reservation. It's Moffat unleashed in a sense, not focusing on the worst of his experiences but revelling in the thrill of pursuit even if its futile. Even when the futility of it comes up it's not dwelt on for more than a brief verse before the song dives back into the more positive sounding main riff and Moffat declaring 'tonight i'm letting go' with more conviction than I'd have guessed he'd be able to muster for such a sentiment.

Like I said, this is probably the happiest the band's ever sounded. The tempo is breakneck when compared to anything they'd done previously ("First Big Weekend" excepted) and the whole arrangement seems to stay in a major key for the full length, not exactly the sort of thing you'd expect from the misers involved. The strings, which do have their mournful moments - the mid-song break especially would sound kinda depressing if it weren't topping out at such a quick tempo - are damn near sprightly during the verses and Middleton's guitar playing is a delight as always. There's still a good portion of self-deprecation and misery, but that's not the main idea this time out and the song is so much better for it. While it's not like I'd approve of Arab Strap going all happy 100% of the time, the few times they dial down the misery it generally makes for a great song, and I wouldn't hesitate to call "The Shy Retirer" the best of these.

#37. The Dears - No Cities Left (MapleMusic, 2003)

Murray Lightburn is not the black Morrissey.

The Dears are not the Canadian Smiths.

No Cities Left is not the 00s The Queen Is Dead.

It's better than any of that.

I'm not trying to downplay the Smiths influence, though it's more full bore anglophilia that seems to be the lifesblood of The Dears' second album, but reducing it to a simple Smiths pastiche robs it of a lot of its charm. Lightburn's definitely got a lot of Moz's wit, though the more often I see Divine Comedy mentioned in comparison the more I hear Neil Hannon as his main influence, but his voice is much deeper and richer than either of theirs. The band's music recalls none more vividly than early Belle and Sebastian, albeit rid of the twee-ness and with the opulence scaled back a lot of the time. Of course it sounded impossibly ornate when compared to the band's (quite good) debut, but even the tracks with an increased insrumental palette still bear the mark of the core band above everything else. George Donso III might be the most under rated drummer of the decade, never getting overly showy but driving each of the twelve tracks along with such ease and poise that I can't help but focus on his work, even when the songs get more involved.

And speaking of the song themselves...well, other than the slightly overlong "Postcards from Purgatory" - which really does its best to earn the near 8-minute length with one motherfucker of a climax, but still could be trimmed a bit without losing much of its power - they're some of the best examples of indie-pop I've had the pleasure of hearing. It's rare that two tread over the same ground, or if they do at least to go about it in a different way. The mood is pretty morose overall, but the album is peppered with enough lighter moments to make it less of a slog through the dark. I mean, any album that houses a single as heart-on-sleeve romantic as "Lost in the Plot" or songs as sunny and optimistic as "Don't Lose the Faith" and "Warm and Sunny Days" can't be described as full on bleak, and even the darker moments have a nice amount of levity to them. "Who Are You, Defenders of the Universe" may spend a lot of time repeating 'I can't love you' with the sort of tossed-off nonchalance you'd expect to hear around the dinner table but it also has lines like 'We're not all blood-sucking leeches / cuz we all have families too / but that don't mean that we really love them / or that we don't' to break the tension. Really, it's only the noisy maelstrom of "Pinned Together; Falling Apart" - which I bet would absolutely kill live, especially given Lightburn's climactic solo - that could be described as full on bleakness, and given that it lies betwee nthe alternately raucous and languid "Expect the Worst / Cos She's a Tourist" and the bouncy "Never Destroy Us" that aspect of it is pretty well glossed over.

All in all the album is one of the few poppier things I still find time for with any regularity. The depth and variety herein are sometimes overwhelming but always exciting, and given how disappointing I've found their subsequent releases it stands as the one time that the band was able to pull off something like this, making that much more special in retrospect. I remember having this at the poll position of my first ever best of 2003 list and if not for the trio of 2003 releases still to come here, all of which I came around to much later, it would probably still be there. A full six years later it still hits me as hard as that first listen, and sometimes that's all I can ask for.

#38. 'I'm just a crosshair'

Franz Ferdinand "Take Me Out"

The practice of taking a few seemingly unrelated songs and fusing them together has been going on for a long time. I know that The Beatles' "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" seems to be the most commonly states starting point for this practice, but I don't doubt that there were others before that who had two compositions that might not have worked on their own but found new life when fused together. It's a tricky thing to pull off with any sort of aplomb; if the transitions between the different parts aren't smooth enough the whiplash is sometimes enough to take me out of the song, and if one of the songs is clearly the superior composition it makes the whole enterprise seem slightly pointless - why not expand that snippet to a full song instead of throwing it alongside a lesser one in a package deal? So the key thing for me whenever this kind of song rears up is that the constituent parts really can't work on their own, something about them just prevents them form being able to be expanded to a full song without sacrificing a lot of what makes them sound so good, and that the pieces fit together somewhat seamlessly. Essentially, the whole needs to be more than the sum of its parts in isolation.

"Take Me Out" is probably the best example of this type of song to come out this decade, but I feel somewhat hesitant to fully classify it as a true example of the two into one sub-type. After all, the first vignette is barely a quarter of the song's runtime and most people don't even remember it when they're talking about the song. I remember right around the time that "Take Me Out became semi-inescapable, a friend of mine posited that any band could take that first part, turn it into a song and no one would even realize they'd heard it before because all people get out of the song is second section. I don't necessarily agree with that assessment, but the point stands that if you ask 100 random people what "Take Me Out" sounds like, maybe five of them would immediately remember the build up while the rest would start aping the main section's guitar riff. Of course there's good reason for that, once the song shifts into that Gang of Four-style riff it certainly takes off into higher realms of catchiness and that is where the song's chorus comes in, but there's a certain importance to that first minute or so when it sounds like the band's trying to give Interpol a run for their money.

Essentially, there needs to be some kind of build up into the main part of the song. Starting it off with the jagged, angular riff would just sound completely awkward, even from a band without the sort of pop aspirations that Franz Ferdinand have. It's a damned good riff, everything from the chunky introduction to the lead licks that guitarist Nicolas McCarthy peppers it with sounds absolutely fantastic, but it can't stand on its own without startig off a bit awkwardly for a song, let alone a single. I'm sure that the band knew they had a winner in that riff, but also knew it needed to be built up to in order for it to work as a song. OF course the way they did it is pretty unconventional in its way. When I think of introductory riffs I'm generally expecting something quieter, maybe a bit slower to start the song off so that when the main riffs hit they sound like the culmination of something special. "Take Me Out" goes in the opposite direction, starting off louder and faster than its main riff and sort of dying down into the jagged chords that signify its entrance into the picture. And it works like a charm, still feeling like a culmination but one that comes about in a way that few other songs would take advantage of.

It also gives the song one of the oddest structures for a pop song I've heard recently. Think about it: it starts with a verse and goes into the chorus, but after that it alternates between the chorus, McCarthy's guitar break and the 'I won't be leaving here tonight' breakdown section without ever adding in a second or third verse. It's the rare example of a song that's pretty much 60% chorus and doesn't feel like it's overdone at all. The song as it stands doesn't need any other verses, and shifting too frequently between the verse riff and the chorus would sound just as awkward as if the song forewent the verse entirely if not more. The more I think about it the weirder it seems that this was ever a hit, let alone as big a hit as it turned out to be. Other than the extreme catchiness of the chorus section there's very little here that seems to point towards any kind of mainstream success. It's a deserved critical darling, but the level of success it had outside of its homeland seems antithetical to just how out of the ordinary it is on a structural level. I mean, how many top 10 (in Canada at least) hits form this decade boast so little in the way of conventional structure?

As much as the out-of-the-box elements of the song add to its continued appeal for me, it wouldn't be here if it wasn't also damned catchy, and that it is. The lyrics aren't exactly anything to write home about, though the verse has the type of suggestively vague imagery that I can get behind, but once the song gets into that damned guitar riff it's among the most addictive modern rock songs of the decade. Set aside the structural and compositional oddities and it's still a solid, hooky piece of post punk that would do many of its obvious forebears - I already mentioned Gang of Four but there's a bit of New Order and even a hint of PIL in the breakdown - proud. Add those in and it's a minor masterpiece from the revival that seemed to spawn more bad than good.

#38. Black Dice - Beaches and Canyons (DFA, 2002)

This is the turning point of Black Dice's career, the moment when their previous noise-rock ministrations gave way to the warped take on electronic pop that made up their more recent albums. It's also quite a bit better than the material on either side of it. Actually that's an understatement; Beaches and Canyons is so far above the rest of Black Dice's output that it's not even funny. It's the full maturation of their experimental/noise period, applying the foundations of the slightly too hesitant Cold Hands to a much more expansive template and adding in some more experimental touches (field recordings being especially prevalent on "Endless Happiness") while hinting towards their eventual transformation into a full on electronic act. It never seems to do both simultaneously, though "The Dream Is Down" definitely has elements of both, and really the only song here that gives a great indication of their later direction is opener "Seabird" but it does both so much better than the band have manged at any time prior or later.

Really the only issue I have with it is that "Seabird" just doesn't fit at all. The remaining four tracks all feel like they belong together and nowhere else, but "Seabird" sounds so completely out of place that it starts things off on a bit of a sour note. Of course it's still among the best of their more electronic moments, easily up there with the fleeting highs from their last three albums if not at the top of the pile itself, so it's not an issue of the "worst" song leading the album off, just the song that has the least to do with what makes the album so damned great.

Once you get past it though, the rest of the album is overwhelming. "Things Will Never Be the Same" is post-rock without the pleasing melody, in its place surges of noise and an intense as hell climax that still floors me even after hearing it so often. "The Dream Is Down" would have worked better as the introduction of Black Dice's electronic aspirations since those elements are folded into a slight retread of the last track. "Endless Happiness" is the one everyone knows thanks to its place on the first DFA compilation, and it's still as good a gateway into the album as you could ask for, containing neither the noisy intensity of "Things Will Never Be the Same" or the loopy electronics of "Seabird" yet feeling like the logical continuation of everything that came before. The crashing waves that end it go on a bit long, that would work better if it were the closer as opposed to the penultimate track, but before that the song earns its spot as the high point of the album. "Big Drop" isn't that though, instead ending the album on one of the most singularly intense climaxes of the decade.

Truth be told there are ways to make it work better...flipping "Big Drop" and "Endless Happiness" and folding "Seabird" into the latter's coda might make this a five star record and adding in "Peace in the Valley" and/or "Head Like a Door" from the Peace in the Valley EP wouldn't be a bad move either - imagine the latter as a build up to "Things Will Never Be the Same". As it is though Beaches and Canyons is a monster of an album, an overpowering yet inviting display of what can be done with post-rock if you don't feel like using guitars with any regularity.

#39. 'Don't I give you what you need?'

Sugarland "Stay"

There's something arresting about simplicity. I may go on and on about the more ornately produced numbers that are myriad throughout this project, but truth be told ome of the best songs of the decade are the ones that do more with less. It's really about what's essential to a song's being, whether it's integral to throw the kitchen sink into the works for the song to reach its full potential or if it works better without anything in excess of a guitar riff and a vocal line. Some songs work better with all the bells and whistles thrown in and other would be stopped dead in their tracks if anything was added to them, and overdoing it on a production level has killed plenty of good to great songs in the past. I don't know why, but it seems to happen more often in country music than anywhere else. Or maybe its just that the desire to be part of that homogeneous mass of sound-alikes that seem to make up 90% of any modern country chart winds up making the few songs that try to keep it simple sound light years more evolved. Either way, simplicity is a fucking virtue in country music these days, and if you want an example of why you really don't need to look much further than "Stay."

It's not hard to imagine another act ruining this song. I can see it now; a big, brash vocal performance, huge melodramatic strings that swell at the predetermined moments of greatest importance and a major-key modulation in the last chorus to drive home the happy ending where the other woman learns to love herself. That's the way "Stay" would go in any other hands, and godadmn if the thought of the song being devalued like that make me angry. Instead, Sugarland's core duo scale the song down to just guitarist Kristian Bush's simple, resonant guitar playing and vocalist Jennifer Nettles' powerhouse performance and a little bit of barely audible organ over the choruses. And by god does it turn the song into a masterpiece, one of the most instantly arresting country ballads to be released this decade. By taking it down to the bare essentials and maybe even stripping some of those away, the duo turn what could have been a disastrous exercise in melodrama into something genuinely affecting and remarkable.

It helps that Jennifer Nettles is the one singing it too. Outside of peak era Reba or maybe Martina McBride I can't imagine any other country girl selling this song half as effectively as Nettles does, mainly because I can't think of any currently active female country singers who can pull off the required level of emotional transparency needed to sell it. Nettles' vocals generally have an air of effortlessness to them, and here that effortlessness translates to a genuine lack of affect and overall nakedness to the performance. I never get the feeling that she's putting on a face here is what I'm saying; far as she's concerned Nettles is living out these lyrics as she sings them and it shows so vividly in her performance that it's impossible to imagine anyone else even trying to replace her. The lyrics in any other hands would be wrung for melodrama, but Nettles gets genuine pathos out of them. The vocals in any other hands would wind up multi-tracked and overrun with vocal gymnastics, but Nettles gets more feeling out of a single vocal track without many extraneous vocal runs. Anyone else would have turned it into theater, but Nettles makes it feel like life. The whole thing is gloriously underplayed and the song benefits greatly from it.

There's also the fact that its subject matter is a bit more novel than your average country song. Sure, plenty of songs deal with affairs, but I can't think of any others that spend so much time actually humanizing the other woman in the classic scenario. Having her go through the same sort of growth that's usually reserved for the spurned wife, realizing that the only way she's ever going to be happy is if she extricates herself from the situation, growing a backbone and walking away from it without hysterics - this is the rare case where the last chorus reversal actually works, mostly because Nettles' vocal performance makes it feel earned. It's not the most revolutionary concept, granted, but it's certainly not the kind of thing you hear every other hour on your local country station, and like I said, Nettles fucking sells it, making the material feel so much more vital than it has the right to be.

Even if it only initially stood out to me because it sounded so foreign to the world of country music- though truth be told the real hook was the video...seeing one of the most effortlessly sexy women in any type of music break down mid chorus still kinda kills me to this day - "Stay" revealed itself to be so much more than just an atypical country ballad. The bare-bones arrangement was only ever noteworthy in the context of the overproduced mass of country radio circa late 2007, and the fact htat out of that context it still sounds like a triumph of excellent songwriting and perfect arrangement is as welcome as it is kinda surprising. I wouldn't have expected a song like this so high up the list even when I was first falling for "Stay", so for it have that level of - oh fuck, there's no other way to say it... - staying power is a truly impressive feat.

#39. Converge - Jane Doe (Equal Vision, 2001)

For an album that's pretty unambiguously defined by its creators as something of a break up album, or at least an album that resulted from the fall out of a break up, Jane Doe feels like anything but something that cliched. It's the distillation of utter devastation into album form, so universal in its projected pain that you could apply it to any sort of loss. I know some people that associate it with 9/11 and the time after that. I know some people who associate with the death of a loved one. I might even know some people who see it as a break up album. I see it as all those at once, and the soundtrack to every slight no matter how minor. It's the purest expression of anguish I've ever heard, and that doesn't even necessarily have to take the lyrics or even Jacob Bannon's vocals into account. Everyone involved in its creation is projecting their deepest pain onto the canvas in front of them, and it's a completely mindblowing thing to witness.

Converge had been good before this, both Petitioning the Empty Sky and When Forever Comes Crashing being among the leading lights in the recently evolved metalcore/mathcore family, but Jane Doe is so far above and beyond them that it's not even funny. It's the greatness that was only ever hinted at on the two previous albums expanded over a full album and then taken into new realms as the band got more adventurous. The final four tracks especially see the band pushing into unexplored territory, starting with the inexplicably weird "Phoenix in Flight" which is at once the most beautiful moment on the album (those soaring guitars!) and the most foreboding. It's not as aggressive as the rest of the album, and it's almost devoid of Bannon's cathartic screaming for its bulk, but it's just as intense in its own way. Then "Phoenix in Flames" rears up and...how to describe it? Ben Koller takes his drum set and proceeds to systematically murder the fucking thing in 20 second bursts while Bannon screams like a man possessed. It's over in 50 seconds but god-DAMN is it intense. "Thaw" might feature Kurt Ballou's best guitar work, especially that wailing riff (you know the one) that reappears as a kind of chorus for the song, and "Jane Doe" takes all the best parts of the 11 tracks before it and merges them into the single best song of Converge's career. In those 4 tracks the album makes the leap from being the best Converge album to being the best metalcore album ever, and the more times I hear that stretch the more convinced I am that no one is ever gonna top it. That's not to say that the first 8 tracks aren't excellent in their own right though. "Hell to Pay" is atypically Jesus Lizard-ish and menacing, "Fault and Fracture" features some stunning guitar runs from Ballou and "Homewrecker" might be the most accessible song in Converge's discography - though it'll still frighten 95% of the general population. Since the album is definitely a cumulative experience they're necessary in order to it's overall impact even if they wind up paling in comparison to the latter tracks, but on their own they still make for one hell of an intense listen.

The intensity mostly comes from Bannon' vocal performance. I can't understand half of what he's saying - even with the lyrics in front of me - but I understand the emotion behind it and that's more than enough. The lyrics themselves read like a more poetic version of your normal break up catharsis, but delivered by Bannon they take on dimensions far beyond that. It's hard to say whether they feel more genuine as delivered in the trademark nigh-on-incomprehensible manner that is pretty much a Converge trademark, but they definitely sound deeper in practice than they do on the page, more intense than they have any right to be thanks to Bannon's blistering performance.

If only Converge had been able to keep this type of thing going for more than the one album. I have nothing against the subsequent releases on one hand, but on the other...they aren't Jane Doe. After the heights of this I doubt anything the band does is gonna have anywhere near the same effect, but at least they got it almost perfectly right here.

#40. 'Memories just keep ringing bells'

Amerie "1 Thing"

The most obvious of song fights you could set up for this decade would probably be the battle of "1 Thing" and Beyonce's "Crazy in Love." The two share so many common signposts that it's impossible fo me to not think of them as a matched set courtesy of producer Rich Harrison; both are straight up love songs whose foundation lies in a sample from a relic of early 70s funk, both were among the biggest hits of their respective summers and both were thoroughly salivated over by critics from every walk of life. So the battle lines get drawn; sure, theoretically everyone likes both songs, but they also have their favorite. And it doesn't shock me that great many of them side with "Crazy in Love" to be honest, but as far as I'm concerned "1 Thing" takes everything that did right, refines it and yet doesn't sound like a strict retread. It also didn't sound like the kind of song that would be a single, let alone a top 10 hit, and you know how much I tend to fetishize singles that don't necessarily sound like singles.

The main reason that "1 Thing" impresses me more than "Crazy in Love" is that it turns its perceived weaknesses into strengths. Each element that has a direct precedent in Harrison's other mega hit seems to pale in its shadow: Amerie isn't half the vocal powerhouse that Beyonce is, the "Oh, Calcutta" sample is, on paper at least, so much less dynamic than the "Are You My Woman?" horn fanfare and the song is so much more dependent on it that if it fails the whole thing could capsize. Yet when I play the two back to back all those pairings seem to flip in terms of quality. They're still true on paper, but in practice Harrison takes those shortcomings and puts them into a context that lets them shine so much that it's hard to think of it as anything but the superior song of the pair. The sample, however brief it may be, makes for a perfect foundation, and the interplay between the original drum break from Meters percussionist Ziggy Modeliste and the light bongos that Harrison overlays it with elevates the instrumental side of the track in a subtle yet irrefutable way. Meanwhile the tense guitar stabs that punctuate each bar are just as perfect in their way, not obtrusive but integral to the song nonetheless. The whole incorporation of "Oh Calcutta" is as good an example of sampling done right as you'll find these days, where the source material is actually used as the basis of a whole different song as opposed to the Puffy school of sampling where the songs sound like covers more than anything else.

And then there's Amerie herself, who acquits herself vocally far better than I'd expected based on her previous hit, the lightweight "Why Don't We Fall in Love." She's nowhere near Beyonce's league, but that's a big part of why the song works. If I had written a proper review of "Crazy in Love" prior to this I'd have mentioned that the one complaint I have is that Beyonce is always trying to be the focal point of the song instead of letting Harrison do some heavy lifting with the production. Amerie is content to let her vocal take a bit of a back seat to the Meters loop, especially tending to fit her vocal lines between the guitar stabs as opposed to steamrolling over it. She knows she's not Beyonce so she doesn't try to do what she does, and the result is a perfect synthesis of the sample and her vocal. It's that respect for the monster of a loop that Harrison constructed that takes "1 Thing" over the top for me, and while I still adore "Crazy in Love" it just can't measure up to that level of symbiosis.

It also stands as proof that record labels are by and large incredibly stupid. Columbia tried their best to bury this, insisting that it needed more punch and polish to be single ready despite both Amerie and Harrison insisting that this was a monster. And I can see why a major label would shy away from something like this to be honest; the roughness inherent to the sample makes it sound underdeveloped if you compare it to the over-worked and dulled nature of most radio singles so their contention that the finished product sounded like a demo makes sense in that scope. Thankfully through a bit of subterfuge on their part Amerie and Harrison got it into the hands of some influential DJs who refused to pull it from rotation when Columbia tried to recall it, pretty much forcing their hand and giving Amerie her biggest hit yet. Further proof that when you've got a pair of consummate professionals telling you that they've got a hit on their hands, you fucking listen to them and set aside notions of what a single "should" sound like.