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For the last handful of years, I've looked toward making these song and album lists as a way to look back fondly on a year, no matter how good or bad on the whole. It's a positive ending because, at least to me, it's all positive. These are all good songs, all good albums, and a wholly good way to summarize the last 11-plus months while also looking forward to what might come next. Sometimes, it's okay to tune out the bad and focus solely on the good for a little while, and that's what I hope to do here.
So, like with past years, the usual disclaimer holds: The list is ever so slightly skewed toward variety of artists (in total, we've again got more than 70 different artists among the 100 tracks), and is by no means completely comprehensive of the year in music. So let's go.
100. Eskimeaux - Power
Beauty and the Beast and Nietzsche, and seems to end on a note of optimism with a pretty bridge believing "love lies in new things," and finishing on the chorus's last lines of "Oh! What power can be drawn / From just a day of being alone." It doesn't hurt to look for silver linings.
The wolf-in-sheep's-clothingness that makes this song so strangely charming is immediately evident. Right from the get-go, no instrumental lead-in, Gabrielle Smith likens her state of mind to a praying mantis and wanting to "rip your head off every time this starts to feel right." The pillowy edge around her voice seems to both defy and accept the resignation in her lyrics, seemingly focused around the end of an increasingly one-sided relationship. It references both
(As an aside: Felix Walworth is a really impressive drummer to see live. He's dutifully good on this track, but often kicks things up a notch on Eskimeaux songs when on stage.)
99. Merchandise - I Will Not Sleep Here
"Blood is thicker than water / But both can go down the same drain" is the most eminently quotable line from this nearly-seven-minute ballad from Carson Cox & Co., a bleak, wet-blanket message that lands like a buzzkill amid other lyrics that reference - among other things - Marc Antony and the beheading of John the Baptist ("Iokanaan") in the Oscar Wilde play "Salome." You don't typically expect rock ballads to be Decemberists-level with lyrical booksmarts, but Cox and Merchandise have always had a clever way with words. This song is contemplative and reflective, and paints a detailed picture of an overactive mind so consumed with the machinations of sleep that it's unable to actually find it.
98. ANOHNI - 4 Degrees
A political song released in a deeply political year, the artist formerly known as Antony Hegarty delivers a ferociously cold decree, condemning a whole boatload of living things to extinction via the unchecked rise in global temperature. The four degrees mentioned in the title are the four degrees Celsius the world's average temperature is forecast to increase by the year 2100, a potentially catastrophic transformation that would wipe out a large swath of the life on this planet. ANOHNI's tone here comes across eager, excited that the possibility of this destruction is a mere four degrees away. How it
should land, ironically, is with the realization of just how close something like this is to happening. Only four degrees. And though I largely try to avoid proselytizing when it comes to politics, this is a message delivered with such musical power and force that it simply couldn't be omitted.
97. Field Mouse - A Widow With a Terrible Secret
Living on the slightly more caffeinated side of shoegaze, Rachel Browne and Field Mouse deliver a song about abandonment and the repercussions of our actions. Where previously the band had preferred to float on the periphery, the uptempo drums and grunge-y guitars change the mood of the message to something a bit more awake and immediate. The song's most gleaming moment, though, comes in the 80-second instrumental outro, a pulsing, driving rock arrangement that uplifts as it recalls memories of Los Campesinos before gently gliding into an abrupt ending.
96. Jimmy Eat World - You Are Free
Yeah,
that Jimmy Eat World! After a smattering of efforts that sounded wayward, like a band a bit lost in search of itself, the group have a strong single that's far more reminiscent of their
Clarity/
Bleed American heyday (and that's already 15 years ago, sweet lord). Jim Adkins's lyrics are uplifting and, while bordering on schmaltzy or cloying, really never seem to cross the line into pure cheese. Really, that's the fine line this band walks when they're at their best. If you're looking for pop rock with a positive message, whether it's to buttress a bad day or reinforce a good one, this is as good a choice as any.
95. The Lumineers - Cleopatra
The Lumineers' 2012 self-titled debut was an album riddled with sadness and melancholy, a collection of songs whose common thread was loneliness and detachment. Now, on the title track of their second release, that sadness bubbles over into a story largely inspired by a real person frontman Wesley Schultz met in the Republic of Georgia. As the early part of the song details, "Cleopatra" rejected a marriage proposal from someone she loved dearly because she was still shaken up by the recent death of her father. The proposer, heartbroken, left town (his memory maintained in muddy footprints that harden on her carpet) and never returned. And so now, in spite of the brighter tempo and melody, we once more have a true Lumineers song: Rife with feelings of heartbreak and a search for convalescence that, in this case, is only arriving through old age and pending passing. It's true-to-form for this band, and though the tale is a sad one, it's rendered with a kind of skill that makes it pleasant to listen to, even as it breaks your heart.
94. Rogue Wave - Look at Me
There's some opaque feeling to the lyrics of "Look at Me" that I just haven't really been able to see through clearly. It feels sneering, proud and...anti-government? It rolls off as if it were some sort of protest song, for sure; its three-word chorus is repeated over and over with barely even a tonal shift, the drums and hand claps chiming in just as it arrives to provide a beat to march and chant to. Whoever or whatever it was written about, this song sure doesn't seem to really have a fond place in its heart for them.
93. Animal Collective - FloriDada
You can always count on an Animal Collective song to be one of the strangest on any playlist. It's just an immutable fact of life. You can't escape it. The first time you listen to ANY of their songs, you're left unsure if you hate it or actually kind of...love it? This, the band's ode to the state of Florida, is meant to serve as some kind of antidote to the poisonous label that being from Florida seems to be anymore. There's always some kind of messed up story coming from the state of Florida, and Avey Tare (Dave Portner's band alias) is just kind of fed up with it. So, here is the band's own strange Dada-ist (get it) tribute to a state that, they feel, has too much of a bad rap. The sound is a throwback to their 2005 psych-fest
Feels, with its tribal drums and call-and-response vocal play by Tare and Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) and goddamn insane
music video (
seizure trigger warning, for real). It's entirely possible that you'll hate no song in this list more, but you might also be surprised by it. I hope.
92. The Range - Copper Wire
What at first comes across as a disjointed mash-up of pitch-shifted vocals and oddly-metered rap verses undergoes an amazing transformation about two minutes in. The verses, sampled from a 13-year-old English artist, hit home for James Hinton. As he
explained to Stereogum, he connected with Kruddy Zak's words because the two share a common pain tied to the year 2009; Zak with the emotional transition that comes from growing up and being an adolescent, Hinton from losing his mother. It's an interesting bit of context that ties together two otherwise unrelated, unassociated people across the greater part of a generation. And there's a strength to be gained from shared experience, even if it's of pain. And so that's how "Copper Wire" comes across to me: Wishes of some good days gone by are completely and wholly natural, and the wistfulness that comes with the longing is something that should be embraced, dealt with and used to reinforce who we are as people.
91. Steve Mason - Water Bored
A hush-sung ode to the innocence, naivete and trustworthiness of youth, Mason's cynicism for the evolution of, as
he puts it, "wonder of the heavens to being a lab rat in 10 years" shines through the lullaby of his voice. The cynicism breaks for a moment during the bridge, though, when Mason wonders, "if it's all so beautiful, shouldn't you save it?" Yeah, we should! Really, something that's getting harder and harder to find anymore is a moment of pure enjoyment or wonder, without consequence or qualification. In the face of growing corporate presence and the soft elongation of work hours, nostalgia for moments and times of excitement we experienced as children, when those concepts didn't exist yet in our minds, shouldn't just be condoned; it should be encouraged.
Next:
90-81
