Top 50 Songs of 2010, Part Five: The Top Ten

NUMBER TEN

The National are a band that exist within a single idiom: sad man's mid-tempo indie rock. While their talents are enormous, their arrangements immaculate, their lyrics suggesting a upper-middle class profundity, and just generally a band of pretty great musicians, their albums from Alligator to 2010's High Violet have been crafted in that singular vein. That sounds like a bad thing; it's not. The reason why they've been able to get away with traversing that singular path throughout their entire career is because of just how fucking good they are working in it. It's been almost 12 years since the band formed, and High Violet's opening track "Terrible Love" might just be the finest example of their illustrious career. It starts out National-y enough, with a workman's guitar riff and metronomic bass drum thwomp. But it doesn't take long for its depths to reveal itself, as delicate acoustic guitar notes, splashes of aching piano, and just the faintest notes of contrapuntal violin. And then, by the time we find out that it takes a fucking ocean not to break, the song has exploded with the type of energy only held by the perpetually downtrodden, with the drums completely unable to hold together, the guitars ripe with dissonance, and Matt Berninger's passionate tenor acting as the song's lone anchor. The loneliness of the Monday morning commute has never sounded quite so epic.

Hit the break for the top nine songs of 2010.

Top 50 Songs of 2010, Part Four: 20-11

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.

Top 50 Songs of 2010, Part Three: 30-21

NUMBER THIRTY

I have not been quiet about my distaste for the last two Arcade Fire records relative to their debut masterpiece Funeral. Like Neon Bible before it, 2010's AF release The Suburbs was too mid-tempo, too quiet, too slow, too ho-hum for me to really connect with it in a meaningful way. More troubling are the songs, littered across both Bible and Suburbs, that call to mind Funeral's towering highs. "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)" is one of those tracks. Though only carrying a little more shuffle than most of the humdrum album, "Sprawl II"'s engaging synth lines and vivacious Regine Chassagne vocal painted the suburban escape as somehow epic, where looking past the retail mountains beyond mountains was a glance through the looking glass.

Go beyond the click for numbers twenty-nine through twenty-one.

Top 50 Songs of 2010, Part Two: 40-31

NUMBER FORTY

The "K.R.I.T." portion of Mississippi rapper Justin Scott's stage name stands for "King Remembered in Time." If dude keeps on rolling out jams like "Country Shit," K.R.I.T. will be remembered right this moment, too. A lot of Southern rappers go for porch stoop communal tracks or maximalist crunk. On "Country Shit," K.R.I.T. splits the difference, throwing in a little bit of Dilla-esque spliced vocal samples for good measure, and creates something that expresses the pride and depression, the dreams and the reality of Southern living.

Hit the jump for numbers thirty-nine through thirty-one.

Top 50 Songs of 2010, Part One: 50-41

2010 was a weird year. In the beginning, we had the last remnants of chillwave turn dark, morph into witch house, and create something kind of wholly unsettling, but pretty awesome. We had Vampire Weekend, Titus Andronicus, and the National all releasing stellar and completely different views on indie rock. During the summer, we got glimpses or full servings from rap heavy hitters like T.I., Big Boi, Kanye West and Lil Wayne. Now we're into 2011, and like last year, Racecar Brown is taking a look back at the year that was to determine the best songs and albums of 2010. Without further adieu, let's open the proceedings with Part One of the top 50 songs of 2010.

Hit the jump to see 50 through 41.

The Top Ten Songs of 2009

The last year of the aughts, the aughties, the naughties or whatever you wanted to call them, was a year populated far more by brilliant single songs than cohesive album statements. This has been an increasing trend over the past decade, as file sharing has gone pop, the iPod has become ubiquitous, and the biggest question about downloading music has been how much to charge per month, rather than how much to charge per lawsuit.

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.