There have been some great albums this year, too, and we'll be getting to those tomorrow. Today, however, is about the singles. From previews of promising 2010 albums to one-offs that sound ridiculous on paper to mind-blasting Billboard chart-toppers from otherwise mediocre albums, here's Racecar Brown's top ten songs of 2009.
In the interests of full disclosure, I only allowed myself one song by any artist to make the list.
"Hellhole Ratrace", the first song many heard from San Francisco's Girls served as the centerpiece of Album, an indelible but dark tune, which it's repetition turned into a mantra of self-preservation. But it was "Lust For Life", that album's opening track, was as effective a mission statement as any of the year. The very first lines (I wish I had a boyfriend / I wish I had a loving man in my life / I wish I had a father / Maybe then I would have turned out right) say everything about Girls you need to know, even if you somehow haven't heard their California from Texas via Hand of God cult story.
There's a timeless quality from the very first seconds of "Lust For Life", as a single guitar chord ushers in skittering shakers and Owens' distinctive vocals. Surf-rock may have made a big comeback this year (Buzz Bands in '09: Wavves, Surfer Blood, Best Coast), but none nailed the Beach Boys-vibe as effectively as "Lust For Life," particularly when the bubbling bass line crops up just prior to the one minute mark.
The phrase "lust for life" typically describes someone going through a Behind the Music-style drug-fueled breakdown and Girls' opening track is full of that same insatiable (and probably drug-fueled) energy. It only makes sense that even "Lust For Life" has to come down, ending on a morose, lightly picked guitar. No high could possibly last that long.
Jay-Z's third installment of The Blueprint (Fourth if you remember The Blueprint 2.1, which Jay hopes you don't) came out this year and was, in no uncertain terms, a massive disappointment. The album's first single "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)" fell flat, failing in large part because of Jay's reluctance to actually say anything scathing about Auto-Tune or the people using it. "Hate" suffered similarly for failing to actually, um, hate on anyone, instead opting for a generic "us against the world" attitude without the focused barb of Hova's best rhymes.
In a way, "Run This Town", serves as the perfect opposing side of the coin to "Empire State of Mind". The former featured Rihanna, normally the queen of pop hooks, sounding dead-eyed and apathetic singing what should be a confrontational question, and was most notable for Kanye's Rav 4 line more than anything Hov sputtered incoherently. "Empire State of Mind", meanwhile, started out just as good, with Jay taking us on his own tour of the city to a tuneful jazz-tinged piano riff, but turned transcendent as soon as Alicia Keys annihilated that chorus, belting out a rather simple sentiment as if her life depended on it.
Placing the two songs back to back only served to show how disappointing The Blueprint III really was. While "Empire State of Mind" exploded with big city, wide screen cinematics and featured one of the God MC's only clever 2009 lines ("City never sleep/Better slip you an Ambien"), "Run This Town" was a half-hearted shot in the dark, somehow off target even though it was never clear who or what the target ever was. Meanwhile, "Empire"'s target was clear and focused, and that was precisely what made it so universal.
There wasn't a lot in the twenty-two songs that comprised Hold On Now, Youngster and We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed that could have predicted "The Sea Is a Good Place to Think About the Future." Those two records flew along at a breakneck pace, like the unabashedly explosive "You! Me! Dancing!", and even when Los Campesinos! slowed down, like on "Knee Deep at ATP" or "You'll Need Those Fingers For Crossing", there seemed to be an undercurrent of frenetic energy that would always, inevitably burst forth. Is there a more appropriate word than "cathartic"?
If it weren't for the fact that the first official single from Romance Is Boring was the frantic "There Are Listed Buildings", with its bah-bahs and guitar bursts, the expectations for Romance would be significantly different; hearing "The Sea" for the first time is almost like hearing a completely different band. The opening drones of the guitars swirl with rich strings and heavy, heady toms. Gareth's lyrics paint a brutal character portrait, so much so that when the inevitable explosion does happen, it's muted and aching, and rather than relieving any tensions, it compounds them.
When interviewed about the album, Gareth Campesinos! said that the new record is "about death and decay of the human body, sex, lost love, mental breakdown, football and, ultimately, that there probably isn't a light at the end of the tunnel," which is pretty heady stuff from a group whose last mission statement was "It's you! It's me! It's dancing!" "The Sea" served as a notice to listeners that the sentiment was serious.
Picking a single song from a concept album is kind of like picking a single brush stroke from a painting. It usually just doesn't make sense. You need to see the whole thing, the whole album or the whole painting, to get a sense of what makes that song or brush stroke particularly striking. Peter Silberman's bedroom project the Antlers, born out of social isolation and an inordinate time amount spent in cancer wards, seems on the surface to be an album of songs that are inextricably linked.
"Two", however, immediately sets itself apart with its insistent mandolin, the first truly bright sound on the record. The intro then blooms into vast swathes of guitar, complimented by stuttering drums and occasional organ drones. It's also the most detailed lyrical offering on Hospice, condensing the conflicting emotions that comprise the album's first six tracks into six harrowing minutes. It's an obvious departure for the album, both musically and thematically; it's the first time Silberman's main character shows strength or hope, lending the track a sense of much-needed triumph when he announces proudly, "After over a year I stopped trying to stop you."
For Hospice to have the kind of hopeful ending that it does (moreso with "Wake" than with "Epilogue"), Silberman needed to provide his character with a moment of epiphany, one "Two" brilliantly provides when Silberman concludes that he's "too cold to care and too sick to shout."
Animal Collective have always been a critic's band. The way that their music has progressed over the years has made them so. From Here Comes the Indian to this year's Merriweather Post Pavilion, the band has not so much jumped from genre to genre as they have absorbed more and more genres into their core sound. It's exactly the type of thing that musicologists love; they experiment without sacrificing what made them interesting in the first place.
Something I, personally, have always found lacking in Animal Collective is a sense of personableness. Tracks like "Leaf House", with its stereophonic vocal flutters, or "Turn Into Something", pretty much a hootenanny stomp, were certainly musically interesting, but they simply failed to connect on a base level. "My Girls" was the moment where the band seemed to tap into something universally human.
The track is undeniably special at the moment that the almost tribal bass oomph joins the glittering synth arpeggios that open the song and the band's call and response vocals kick in, sounding as if they're coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. But it's when that wonderfully harmonized chorus kicks in, complete with fucking handclaps of all things, that the track becomes truly undeniable, for both the critic and the casual listener.
Phoenix's 2006 offering, It's Never Been Like This, was a good record to be sure, but something clicked for Phoenix this year across the board. They were showing up in car commercials, spending weeks on the Billboard charts, and helping to continue the change from indie as a niche genre into something immediate, bracing, and (gulp) pop.
"1901" may have been the first single, the one that got them hocking Cadillacs, turning them into the indie music approximation of a household name, but it was "Lisztomania", the album's punchy opener, that left listeners open to "1901" in the first place. It's those first big, overproduced tom hits that do it, sounding disco and pop and rock and dance all at once, joining the upticked guitars and annihilating any sort of barriers between the listener and their enjoyment of the music.
The song itself is, strangely enough, about the difficulties inherent in that annihilation. "Think less but see it grow like a riot" and "Know how to let it go from a mess to the masses" are words Thomas More sings in the chorus, but there's an undertow of uncertainty to his delivery, as if he's unsure how to do that even when the thundering dance-rock sheen of the track is showing him how.
On paper the grouping looks absolutely ridiculous. Beyonce's sister covering a song by the Dirty Projectors over the same sample that Dr. Dre copped for "Xxplosive"? The fact that the track is even listenable should be surprising. Looking past the surface impressions, though, reveals exactly why this track is so successful. After all, "Stillness is the Move", the standout track from the excellent Bitte Orca was practically an R&B song already, it was simply adorned with Dave Longstreth's guitar gymnastics. And Solange was always into indie culture, famously being the catalyst in getting Jay-Z to that Grizzly Bear show in Brooklyn.
In some ways Solange's cover can't compete with the original track. For instance, Amber Coffman's virtuoso vocal performance, as she weaves through the song's tricky rhythmic timing and challenging phrasing with grace and ease. Or the rising, cinematic strings that close the song and lead into "Two Doves". But there's a relaxed calm that makes the cover more impressive; Solange smooths out the acrobatic vocal line into something instantly ready for radio play, and the "Bumpy's Lament" guitars and locked-in groove of the walking bass line lend the track a sort of hazy resonance.
Either version deserves this slot, but Solange gets the nod here. There was something about her version of the track that, even though the initial impression was just above average, attached itself directly to the brain stem and made repeat listens a necessity. Not many tracks can do that, and it's "Stillness"' triumph that both versions have that rare quality.
2009 was a banner year for commercial music. Earlier list denizens Phoenix hawked Cadillacs with "1901", the Dodos shilled for Miller Chill with "Fools", and Passion Pit's "Sleepyhead" sold Palm Pixis. Matt & Kim were double offenders in the realm of commercialization of their product, as "Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare" soundtracked a spot for NBC's Community and "Daylight" was featured in a Bacardi Mojito commercial.
The thing was, it didn't seem like calculated profiteering at all, rather just another fun way to hear a from a fun group. Hell, this was a pair that stripped naked in Times Square for a music video, who fucked up a hundred times playing on Jimmy Kimmel, and attempted to get as low as Beyonce ("Rub your vagina on the floor low," Kim put it) at Pitchfork Music Festival. But it wasn't until "Daylight"'s opening salvo of slapdash piano plinks that all of this finally seemed as captured on record as it was obvious to anyone who had ever seen a Matt & Kim interview.
"Daylight" is a destructively fun explosion of hip hop-inspired sound-effect blasts, snare rim hits, and layers of vocals and keys. It was perfectly constructed for sing-a-longs, shout-a-longs and everything in between. And no matter how many times you see Kim stand on her drumset during the "float down Grand St. in daylight" line, it'll never be enough. Hell, it's even worth it to watch Joel McHale be snarky and sarcastic for 20 minutes in the hopes of hearing it in the background.
Passion Pit's excellent Manners was kind of the electronic answer to Phoenix's more organic Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Both tempered joyous exuberance with aching sentimentality, inspiring as many moments of quiet contemplation as they did embarrassing bedroom dance moves. "Moth's Wings" sits a bit differently on that spectrum, going for broke on the sentimental side of things, and that's what makes it so intriguing.
The opening dulcimer riff, even when joined by the clanging electric guitars, could go either way; a polyrhythmic dance beat would have fit the introduction's instrumentation just as well. It's when that massive riff comes in on the chorus that we get a true sense of the song's grandiose sadness. Michael Angelakos packs away the falsetto for which he's become so known, and he reaches for notes just barely still in his chest voice's range, reflecting the yearning quality of the song.
Everything about "Moth's Wings" suggests unattainability. Angelakos' voice wants to be strong and confident without its falsetto, but comes off as vulnerable and affecting. Lyrically, there's an unconquerable distance between the two characters, despite half-hearted attempts at compromise; "Come lay with me on the ground." Even the thundering bells of the chorus sound yearning, never quite musically resolving, personifying the emotions of "Moth's Wings."
A band's background typically informs the music they make. It just stands to reason that where the members of a group come from, the events that have taken place in their lives, the music they've listened to, will shine through the music they themselves make. Sometimes the background informs the music so efficiently that any discussion has to include that information. Albums from Bon Iver or the Antlers simply make more sense in the context of their creators' mindsets. Sometimes the story can overtake the music itself. The amazing story of Girls' Christopher Owens is intriguing and certainly shines another light on Album, but it's not necessary to understand that record.
Sleigh Bells don't have an harrowing, tragic, or even particularly entertaining back story, but the history of their two band members is interesting. Guitarist and producer Derek Miller used to be a member of Florida hardcore band Poison the Well (Yes, Poison the Well). Meanwhile, singer Alexis Krauss was a member of RubyBlue, a girl-pop group responsible for such atrocities as "Run Away". It's an incredibly unlikely pairing, but it's truthfully the only pairing that could make "Crown on the Ground" work the way it does.
Miller's history in hardcore lends the track its most defining quality, its unabashedly in-your-face volume, an unforgiving sonic blast, rhythmically tightened by a minimalist dance beat. Krauss' girl-group sass and natural pop instincts then manage to soften the edges just enough to give the track a universal appeal. "Crown on the Ground" crashes and caterwauls, exploding with punch and overdriven everything, like the American answer to Justice's "Waters of Nazereth" or anything off of OK Cowboy. It sounds like Beyonce got into the studio with a pack of angry badgers, or like Fucked Up was commissioned to write a song for Kylie Minogue. Either way, "Crown on the Ground" was an obliterating bomb of vital musical energy, one that was simply unmatched this year.
Interesting Rankings as always!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Yuki! I think? ;)
ReplyDeleteThings this list is missing (IMHO):
ReplyDeleteAnything off of P.O.S. - Never Better. I can't decide between Let It Rattle, Savion Glover, or Purexed.
The XX - Crystalize
Mumford and Sons - Little Lion Man
Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks
And my number one for this year: Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros - Home
It will be great to watch A Chorus Line,i have bought tickets from TicketFront.com looking forward to it.
ReplyDelete