Brightest Young Things

One moment can make a song.  It can be a hard-earned finale, the sound of a band changing gears, or just a memorable turn of phrase.  It’s the intangible feeling that a song has just flipped the switch to awesome.  However you define it, the effect is usually the same: you find yourself looking forward to it.  Soon enough, you find yourself fast-forwarding to it.  When you play it for your friends, God help the disinterested one who opens his mouth at exactly the wrong time.  How does he always know the worst time to start talking?  I swear, he does it on purpose.  Anyway, every year has its fair share of great moments, and I’ve lovingly assembled an utterly subjective list of 2010’s.  And when I say “subjective,” I mean no other song in the world could have possibly been included here and if say otherwise then you are a dirty liar.

10. Jens Lekman’s “The End of the World is Bigger than Love” @ 3:13

Jens Lekman has a tendency to self-sabotage.  He can’t help cramming one twist too many into his songs.  It’s understandable coming from someone as clever and overachieving as Lekman. But it’s still annoying.  The foot-stuck-on-the-accelerator finale of “Friday Night at the Drive-In Bingo”?  The overwrought bridge of “Shirin”?  Dude needs an editor.

So when the pace of freebie single lets up right before the breakdown of “The End of the World is Bigger than Love”, there’s reason to cringe in anticipation.  The surprise then is how perfectly irreverent – and more importantly, effortless – the litany of things Lekman rattles off is.  Those “things” modestly being that which is less important than the end of the world, Lekman includes the prosaic (loose change, a Brooklyn Target’s pharmacy department), the majestic (an iceberg, a spouting geyser), and the nonsensical (“the spider floating in your cider”).  Hell, it’s all fairly nonsensical, but this song is called “The End of the World is Bigger than Love” – what were you expecting?  And as Lekman often does, he slips in a personal admission (“It’s bigger than my problems/ And I really, really need to solve them”) that manages to humanize the whole thing.

This silly little breakdown pushes “The End of the World is Bigger than Love” towards something sublimely absurd and endearing.  If only Lekman could temper his creative whimsy with such relative restraint going forward.

9.  Beach House: “10 Mile Stereo” @ 1:34

At this point, what is there left to say about Beach House?  It’s been over 13 months since Teen Dream hit the interweb, and in that time far more articulate people have drooled far more articulately all over this beautiful, beautiful thing.  I also never set foot in a J. Crew during 2010 without at least one of its songs soundtracking my perusal of immaculately-wrinkled oxfords, so clearly opinions have been made about this album at the highest corporate levels.  So why bother?  Plus, I’ve heard every time you use the word “dream pop,” a puppy gets kicked in the face.  With that Memoryhouse LP on the horizon, it’s already shaping up to a rough few months for canines.

Still, credit where credit is due, and at 1:34, “10 Mile Stereo” opens up and blossoms like some alluring, endangered orchid, spewing its exotic beauty all over us.  Orchids do that, right?  I haven’t seen “Adaptation” in a while.  Dream pop.

8. Gil Scott-Heron: “Where Did the Night Go” @ 0:43

The largest mark Gil Scott-Heron will leave on the popular culture in 2010 will ironically be transmitted from 1970, from whence “Comment No. 1” – the parting words of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – came gift wrapped for our Beautiful, Dark Twisted Kanye.  Not to be overlooked, though, is this year’s I’m New Here, which finds Scott-Heron very much on his game after almost two decades off the grid.   It’s hard to pick one great moment from it.  The album is spoiled with them.  While “Your Soul and Mine” wins points for dramatic flair (vultures… in my mind?!?), it’s the understated emotional wallop of “Where Did the Night Go” that sticks with me.  The song is short.  You could have listened to all 73 seconds of it by now.  Over a sluggish dub beat, Scott-Heron spends 42 seconds detailing his lonely insomnia and indecision, and then:

Should go to sleep now and say:

“Fuck a job and money

Because I spend it all on unlined paper

And can’t get past, ‘Dear baby, how are you?’”

The way he speeds up the first part of the line, with such decisiveness, only to trail off defeated at the end – back to where he started – is devastating.

7. Surfer Blood: “Anchorage”@ 3:28

Weather.com tells me that Anchorage is 5°F at this very moment.  “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” be damned: I imagine it’s a miserably cold and desolate place.  Surfer Blood feels me, summoning that Anchorage on the first half of its own “Anchorage”: “There’s no nectar there for bees / Only flesh so wolves can be.”  The music is equally a downer, plodding along pensively for three minutes.

The ice begins to melt near the halfway point, a hefty drum build giving way to a monstrous riff and locked-in stomp at 3:28.  Astro Coast is a self-assured debut, but at this moment Surfer Blood has swagger.  Of course, the band does the only reasonable thing and just rides this living, lumbering, breathing beast out for an additional three minutes.  “I don’t want to spin my wheels,” JP Pitts sings as all this goes down.

Sorry, JP, but when you’ve got some chromed out monster truck tires like these, you just let ‘em rip.

6. Belle and Sebastian’s “I Didn’t See it Coming” @ 2:39

“Let’s push things forward,” Mike Skinner once said.  To which Belle and Sebastian typically reply, “No, thank you.”  While the band has made a number of (successful) stylistic shifts over the past decade, its songs are reliably conservative in structure.  Tellingly, the band’s most rewarding songs during this time have come when it has pushed itself of out its comfort zone – into proggy glam of “Stay Loose” or the disco suites of “Your Cover’s Blown”.

“I Didn’t See it Coming” begins unassumingly.  The double tracked drums are a neat trick, but the first 2:38 don’t do much to distinguish it from the rest of Write About Love, a good but complacent record; a record that walks the fine line between “summary of strengths” and “retread.”  When a guitar unexpectedly shoots skyward at 2:39 though, the song begins its transformation into one those next-level Belle and Sebastian songs.  Next thing you know we’ve got squiggly guitars, an epically spacey synth, and Stuart Murdoch taking over the bridge.  The song peaks in its final minute, a chorus of voices bouncing off each other in some otherworldly pop plane.  Stevie Jackson stands out amongst the crowd, turning a line delivered submissively by Sarah Martin earlier – “Make me dance, I want to surrender” – into something bizarrely rousing.

I didn’t see it coming, indeed.

5. Robyn: “Fembot” @ 2:43

“Fembot” isn’t the best Robyn song this year.  It doesn’t chart any new territory for her. It’s intentionally detached nature certainly denies the emotional connection of a “Tell Your Girlfriend” or “Dancing on My Own”.  But I don’t think any other song I heard – hers or otherwise – nonchalantly jammed so much into its’ run length.  It’s basically a three-and-a-half minute orgasm of hooks and electronic blips and awesome.  The thing has at least three hooks that could each sustain entire songs on their own.

At 2:12, Robyn makes way for an androgynous robotic voice, and the first time you hear it, you can’t quite tell if it’s a bridge or the song is fading out.  Of course, as it builds you start to hope it is indeed just a bridge, making the release at 2:43 – when processed robo-Robyn gives way to gentle, cooing Robyn – all the sweeter.  That Robyn begins to pile on the ad-libs at this point adds an extra layer of giddiness to all of it.  It’s a ridiculous song, but there is nothing done with ridiculous done right.

4. Wolf Parade’s “Little Golden Age” @ 2:58

For all its anthemic choruses and powerhouse drumming, Wolf Parade can be impenetrable.   Spencer Krug is largely to blame for this.  The man runs the most basic emotions through a silk screen of symbols and arcane mythology that he alone holds the keys to decrypting.  In contrast, Dan Boeckner is typically painted as the straightforward everyman to Krug's rambling poet. And, yes, comparatively speaking, Boeckner is; he did devote a song to the virtues of sitting on the couch with your girlfriend.  But Boeckner’s been on his own cryptic shit for a while now.  “We built this city on cocaine lasers”?  If you say so.

His “Little Golden Age”, however, is about as direct a song in the Wolf Parade catalog. It's literally about missing college.  Or high school.  Or whatever little golden age for which you pine.  Boeckner spends most of the song commiserating with that nostalgia, at one point projecting the desire to freeze that moment in time.  At 2:58 comes the turn though.  It’s the moment when big brother Boeckner tells us to suck it up.  You can’t go back to earlier places in your life, and why would you even want to?  After all, “the body takes the heart from place to place.”  Aw, dude, give me a hug.

“My little golden age, golden age,” Boeckner barks repeatedly in the closing moments, engulfed by Krug’s caterwauling backing vocals and a limber performance from drummer Arlen Thompson.  (Not to be confused with Deadwood’s Dan Dority).  Let’s hope Wolf Parade’s indefinite hiatus doesn’t have us looking back nostalgically on this little golden age.

3. The Radio Dept.’s “Heaven’s on Fire” @ 0:18

The Tough Alliance, jj, the Honeydrips: Lord knows the Swedes love a good spoken word sample.  And 90% of that time, it doesn't really click.  The Radio Dept. isn’t exempt from such criticism: I can’t say the “Style Wars” sample in “Never Follow Suit” brings much of anything to that moon safari.  But the band’s interpolation of a Thurston Moore interview excerpt on “Heaven’s on Fire” is inspired on a number of levels.   Plucked from 1992 documentary, the sample is classically Moore: a humorless screed against corporate control of rock music.  The band playfully – teasingly - contrasts Moore’s self-seriousness with an ebullient keyboard that enters just as he finishes posing a question.  The moment Moore stops talking, the song explodes in full A.M. technicolor: a subtly kinetic drum machine, a loose Jackson 5 riff, and instant gratification.  With a synth riff, sax blurts, regal piano, and Balearic flourishes to follow, the Radio Dept.’s sustains that sugar high for the song’s remaining three minutes.

The Radio Dept.’s John Duncanson talked about the song in an online interview: “We agree with Thurston Moore when he says that we should destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture. However, since we’re extremely lazy people, we leave the destruction to others and play pop music instead.”  Duncanson’s music may not be inciting any riots, but he’s downplaying the connection between the sample and song.  They’re not lazy people.  If you listen closely, the softly sung words actually sync up with the bitterness of Moore’s:  “It seems like everyone is on your side / We're outnumbered by those who take no pride”.

Once this song bursts at 18 seconds though – flooding your ears with that pure, uncut sunshine – good luck focusing on those lyrics

2. Menomena’s “Dirty Cartoons” @ 3:00

Menomena can be a distant band.  There was something overtly methodical – mathematical even – about their past records that left me cold.  I could admire the technical ingenuity, but in the end, it lacked a human element.  Appropriately, this was a band that once sang: “O to be a machine / O to be wanted / To be useful.”

That all ended with Mines, a criminally underappreciated album.  “Dirty Cartoons”, the grotesque beating heart of the record, is by far the most vulnerable thing the band has laid to wax.  Drummer Danny Seim – who between this and “Tithe” pretty much walks away with Mines – handles vocals, his low baritone emoting a desire as timeless as they come: to return home.  The song begins as a rote acoustic confessional, which unsurprisingly is a red herring.  Drums and keys enter and exit freely.  The song doesn’t really build so much as drift along.  All of which makes the moment at 3:00 – when everything drops out to showcase a rattling tambourine and Menomena’s three members joined together with one voice – all the more disarming.  It’s some seriously cathartic stuff, no matter how far from home you find yourself.

As elements filter back in, the momentum is undeniable.  Seim heightens the pace with his hi-hat, driving everything home.

1. Women’s “Eyesore” @ 3:40

When I try to relay my love for “Eyesore”, I usually get flustered and tell friends to just skip to 3:40 and turn it up as loud as possible.  But, ultimately, doing so doesn’t do justice to what makes the moment so great.  No song earns its payoff quite like “Eyesore”.  I’m not talking about just the 3:39 seconds that precede it. I mean everything that precedes “Eyesore”, which given its closing slot on Public Strain, is the near entirety of the record.  That record is all tension and restraint rolled into a gauzy ball of fuzz.  It feels, er, strained; strained between indulging pop tendencies and perverting them.  So, at 3:40, when Women finally give in and deliver a huge pop moment, it doesn’t just sound like the sun finally emerging on a cloudy day: it sounds like the sun emerging and proceeding to explode into a million shimmering pieces.  Even then, the band knows better than to go all-in; instead gradually working in elements – the introduction of a countermelody; a kick up in percussion – before a blissed-out 90-second fade to white.  It just kills me.

So, um, just skip to 3:40 and turn it up as loud as possible?

Previously in END OF YEAR 2010 LISTS:

• 1/21: Songs To Consider ...
• 1/4: The Top Ten Sneakers of 2010
• 12/30: Top Ten Guilty Pleasures of 2010
• 12/20: Songs That Made Me! Happy in 2010
• 12/16: Worst Music Packaging Of 2010
• 12/15: Best Music Packaging of 2010
• 12/14: Top 10 Movie Superlatives of 2010!
• 12/8: Music You May Have Missed In 2010
• 12/7: Knock-Out Movies of 2010