NUMBER TWENTY
Let's not kid ourselves, people. You have to go back to Madonna to find a female pop star-- hell, a pop star of any gender-- who has captured the public consciousness so thoroughly, who has brought attention to really bizarre matters in such a borderline crazy way, who has cultivated such an insane yet relateable public image. Oh, and who has pushed pop music so much further beyond its borders. Fame Monster single "Telephone" came out at the beginning of this year, and while its music video garnered all the attention, with its Kill Bill pussy wagon, telephone wig, and general fucked up-ness, the song was little more than overdriven, meticulously crafted pop music, with one of the biggest earworm choruses of the year. "Telephone" is pop music for the modern age, loud and in-your-face enough to break through our obsession with Facebook, cell phones, techonlogy in general, while simultaneously embracing the very technologies its attempting to overcome.
Numbers nineteen through eleven after the break.
NUMBER NINETEEN
No joke, if Treats track "Crown on the Ground" hadn't stomped out tweeters all over the world last year, it would for sure have claimed the number one spot this year, the same spot it occupied on this list last year. "Crown on the Ground" was the Audacity of Huge, destroying headphones by mixing heavy metal, hardcore punk, blown-out hip-hop beats, and sugar-sweet pop at the highest fucking volume possible. What makes "Rill Rill" the next best song on Treats is how much it plays against the type that "Crown on the Ground" cultivated. Sampling Funkadelic's "Can You Get to That", "Rill Rill" is still all Alexis Krauss attitude and explosive beats, but slowing the proceedings down just a hair allows the latent emotion behind Sleigh Bells' Dr. Strangelove bombs to come out. "Wonder what your boyfriend thinks about your braces?" A girl sneers. "What about them? I'm all about them." The defiance of Sleigh Bells in two sentences.
NUMBER EIGHTEEN
NUMBER SEVENTEEN
"In media res" is a Latin term referring to the artistic choice to begin a story in the middle, rather than at the beginning. Less "Call me Ishmael" and more "Holy shit, there's a huge fucking white whale in my face." Cleverly, it was the track "In Media Res" that opened Los Campesinos! 2010 LP, Romance is Boring. More cleverly, when the band released the All's Well That Ends acoustic EP, they ended with the same track, with the amended title "(All's Well That Ends) In Media Res." In its original form, "In Media Res" suffered from the same problems as many of the songs on Romance: its dissonance seemed forced, the power dissolved by inelegant craft. On the acoustic version, the noise breakdown gets reduced to single piano notes, and it allows the highs of the aching violins to soar, nailing the depth of emotion and strength of melody that made Los Campesinos! great.
NUMBER SIXTEEN
(Note: "Six Foot Seven Foot" ends at the four-minute mark, another song was tacked to the end to avoid YouTube removal)
"Six Foot Seven Foot," the first single from Lil Wayne's Tha Carter IV, dropped very late in December fucking up the year-end lists of those of us who wait until the new year to actually make these lists. "Six Foot," though, is totally fucking worth the effort. In fact, the way Lil Wayne has been rocking his post-prison swag has been so ridiculous that even estranged producer Bangladesh came out of the woodwork to give Weezy another track. Rocking a sample of the classic Jamaican track "Banana Boat (Day-O)," "Six Foot Seven Foot" is Wayne's triumphant return. After the disappointment of Rebirth and the malaise of the I Am Not a Human Being EP, "Six Foot" erupts with joyous power, with Wayne snapping out punchlines and ridiculous statements ("I got through that sentence like a subject and a predicate.") with all his pre-prison fervor. And Cory Gunz turns in the rapid-fire verse of his life, nailing double and triple timed verses as if he's auditioning for his role on future Lil Wayne tracks. If they turn out as hot as "Six Foot Seven Foot," I'm all for it.
NUMBER FIFTEEN
Madison, Wisconsin's Nika Roza Danilova released two Zola Jesus EPs in 2010. Where in 2009 the haunting power of Danilova's songs were hidden in the murk of basement production values, the Stridulum and Valusia EPs repainted her as a wailing siren, bringing down mountains and raising turbulent waves just with the sound of her voice. And yet, "Lightsick" is probably the most understated of Danilova's nine 2010 songs. But it's precisely for that reason that "Lightsick" stands apart in the Zola Jesus catalog. When Danilova holds back, it seems like she's internalizing the enormous power of her voice, giving strength to "Lightsick" fragility. The hesitant staccato bursts of piano conjure up just the right amount of tension, adding a sense of ambiguity to Danilova singing "When the lights go out on us." Is it a threat? A hope? A fear? Either way, "Lightsick" is the closest Zola Jesus comes to a ballad. What makes it stand apart is its differences both from a traditional ballad and a traditional Zola Jesus song: too tense and powerful for the former, more delicate and beautiful than the latter.
NUMBER FOURTEEN
"Cashflow" is a track from Diplo and Switch's Major Lazer album Guns Don't Kill People... Lazers Do. Like most of Guns, "Cashflow" rocks traditional Jamaican genres like dancehall and reggae, mixed with hints of house and hip-hop. Switch gears for a second. Not to get too technical, but there are four basic types of sound waves: Sine waves, triangle waves, sawtooth waves, and square waves. They look much like you would expect when graphed out on a sheet of paper, and their sounds correspond pretty accurately to their shapes. This year, Los Angeles producer Subskrpt got a hold of Major Lazer's "Cashflow", placed a square wave bomb in it, and lit the fuse. What resulted was an intense explosion of blown-out, abrasive synths that still captured the reggae feel of the original, ratcheting up the intensity from blunted grooves to dance floor madness. Yeah, it took purple cues from the new wave of Joker-influenced Bristol dubstep, but Diplo and Switch's laid back original tune lent just enough hammock-swinging head bobbing to separate Subrkrpt's remix from the pack.
NUMBER THIRTEEN
Back in 2008, the Scotsman of Frightened Rabbit dropped The Midnight Organ Fight, one of the most harrowing records of the past decade. If it hadn't been for the fact that I caught the record two years too late, it would have assuredly made my list of top fifty albums of the last decade. This year, the band put out The Winter of Mixed Drinks. Compared to Organ Fight, Winter was decidedly a disappointment. The bold and dark line that Scott Hutchinson sang about on Organ's "My Backwards Walk" was diluted on Winter, turned into a gray blob on the page. The big exception was "The Loneliness and the Scream," which captured the sad bastard indie rock of Frightened Rabbit at least as effectively as anything on Organ. Lyrically, it's pain is painted in vivid technicolor, as Hutchinson's scream is only effective "to prove to everyone that I exist." At about the half way point, the band kicks up the tempo, trying to find catharsis through willpower, as wordless, defiant vocals personify the song's titular scream.
NUMBER TWELVE
One of Vancouver band Japandroids' greatest strengths has been their vitriol; all rock & roll piss and vingear, an attitude born of love for hardcore punk music, and playing their emo-influenced brand of indie pop at actual hardcore venues, taking thrown bottles until they convinced the crowds through sheer effort. "Younger Us," one of the singles Japandroids released as part of their 7" series this year, both plays to and against that type. Check that blistering guitar solo in the song's second half, which is only a few notes strummed at warp speeds, or the absolute passion in Brian King's wordless vocal cries in the coda and you'll see the power that the band can deploy at any moment. But then pay attention to those lyrics, where King remembers vividly nights where "You were already in bed/ Said fuck it, got up to drink with me instead," but still has to cajole the other nameless party to remember those same moments. Really, "Younger Us" is as vitriolic as Japandroids gets, but its self-directed. "Give me younger us" is both a demand and a plea, an angry explosion and a mournful cry.
NUMBER ELEVEN
It's absolutely inexplicable why "Jump Up in the Air and Stay There" was kept from neo-soul singer Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh). "Air" is one of the strongest songs of this-- or any-- year. The synths vamp through the growing horror of the strings, Badu's wail slowly devolves into an otherworldly howl on the chorus, the beat is ground into an angry powder, and fades into some ghostly background on the verses. This is funky R&B through a paranormal lens, cutting away all the unimportant ish from the traditionally Top 40 genre. It only makes sense, then, for this track to feature not only Lil Wayne, but hands down one of Lil Wayne's most bizarre verses. "I'm shallow. And when you're this high everybody else is ballow. Oops, I meant below" and "I go nuts like a danish" are two feats of logic weird even for Wayne. Both through Wayne's verse and Badu's tension wire vocal performance, R&B's latent background of sex and fear and grooves all become one thing, until jumping up in the air and staying there seems like probably the best option.
No comments:
Post a Comment