Spotify
Previously:
100-91,
90-81
80. DIIV - Dopamine
There's a soft, hazy edge to every sound DIIV put into a track, enough to make just about any of them sound like they could fit on a go-to-sleep playlist. Even "Dopamine," one of the lead singles from the 63-minute marathon album
Is the Is Are (released in 2015 ahead of the album's 2016 drop date), has these undefined ridges to drums and guitar alike, and even though this isn't a sleepy song, it's very easy to get caught floating along with it. Especially when the bridge hits, a beautiful interlude that loses none of the song's tempo or momentum and instead carries it one step closer to the stars. Even the bridge's lyrics talk about getting a glimpse of heaven. Nas said 22 years ago that sleep is the cousin of death; it's the same concept here, but in a far more peaceful way. Yeah, I don't know, those are two artists who really aren't even kind of related, but that's what I think of! Hooray music!
79. Fear of Men - Island
Fear of Men's "Descent" was one of my absolute
favorites from 2014, a poignant track about the death of a relationship. On "Island," Jess Weiss's gentle, sad vocals lay atop a heavily muted and softened drum machine (at least, it's so precise as to sound like one), blanketed by a ghostly whirlpool of a vocal sample all along. Weiss calls herself a "woman of wax," likening herself to an island (wonder where the song title comes from) in that she doesn't "need to feel your arms" around her, and asserts that all of this is plenty fine, thanks. "Used to be scared to be misunderstood / Now I don't care if I'm not what you want," she disdainfully posits, and you can almost imagine her waving her hand at you as she does. There's something in her voice and this song's performance that sounds like it's been through defeat, but this song is coming from the other side of that battle, resolute in its present and its composition.
78. Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam - In a Black Out
People who grew up listening to The Walkmen can recognize Hamilton Leithauser's voice in an instant, that scratched, nasal, slightly intoxicated croon - if you could go so far as to call it that - is unique unto Leithauser alone, and every track he sings on - be it a Walkmen track or here, with Vampire Weekend alum Rostam Batmanglij on their joint project - is uniquely his. You might have heard this song on a commercial, and its success is a nice win for both Leithauser and Batmanglij. The extra ears that will be drawn to its arpeggiated guitars and Leithauser's pained elegiac vocals will, at worst, recognize it as something distinct. At its median and better, the song dawns upon us as an exercise in a beautiful kind of restraint; the bridge supported by an angelic choral backing is among one of the prettier things you'll hear this year. If he wants, Leithauser can really
let it rip, but his restraint here is what helps make this track special.
77. Hiss Golden Messenger - Heart Like a Levee
Folk can't be an easy genre to navigate, but more often than not, I still find myself thinking it's one of the most consistently beautiful types of music out there. M.C. Taylor's Hiss Golden Messenger is one of those projects that always makes me think the genre is nearly infallible, regularly producing some of the more heartfelt and heart-rending songs in the market. If absolutely nothing else, this song contains one of the finer lyrical stanzas of any song on this list: "Sing me a river / I'm a peach tree jumper with rain in my shoes / If you let me, honey / I'll set the world on fire for you." Read it, and it's nice. Listen to it, and you'll believe it.
76. Haley Bonar - Stupid Face
I may ruin this for those of you who haven't listened to this song before reading, but there's a certain magic to songs that only have two verses, repeat the lyrics of those two verses, and yet still feel like new and different words despite sounding nearly identical. Maybe it's the fuzz surrounding Bonar's voice, the mixing that buries the guitar deep below drums and synth that distracts, but it didn't really even dawn on me until reading the lyrics on a screen that they were replicas. Go figure. Anyway, that's one thing that stood out to me among a few others on "Stupid Face," a chugging fuzz-rock song that feels rah-rah in all the right ways.
75. Ra Ra Riot - Bad Times
And speaking of Ra Ra, we turn the page to more direct synthrock here. It's more than just synths, though, because this track pulls out all the stops: Prominent bass mix, drums that sound like timpani, a chorus that aims for the ceiling and hangs there like a bat wearing eyeliner and volumizing hairspray. It's Ra Ra Riot at their best - a greatest hits from this band would blow the doors off of lots of places - and grandest; they aim high and hit their mark.
74. Gordi - So Here We Are
Bless Stereogum for having any idea who Gordi, stage name of Aussie Sophie Payten, was or could become. The power of Payten's performance calls to mind some Imogen Heap (thanks to some familiar vocal distortion), but remains free and clear of being anything but its own animal: A vocal tryst, a rendezvous at night just after it's rained and the streets reflect the phosphorescence of the lamps overhead. It's gently cold, giving you a chill just before it wraps a blanket about your shoulders.
73. Mass Gothic - Every Night You've Got to Save Me
Noel Heroux used to front a band called Hooray For Earth, a widely unknown outfit that saw some radio play with a couple of singles but saw a large chunk of their catalog fail to gain mass appeal. So it goes (I'm still stung by Pilot Round the Sun's failure to stay together and move beyond Philadelphia), but from the ashes of one band, other projects can emerge as their own Phoenixes. Spell check tells me Phoenixes is real and I've spelled it correctly. Anyway, Heroux's solo project is called Mass Gothic, and it incorporates some of the more pounding percussionist aspects of HFE but, particularly on this track, sounding more optimistic and hopeful than usual. This track, strangely, serves more as a thematic break in the middle of this self-titled album, framed by more morose tracks. But "Every Night...," despite a lyrical phrase or two, is anything but morose. It might even be...jubilant?
72. Minor Victories - A Hundred Ropes
I may not remember a single music video more readily than the video for this song, a super-slow-motion sequence of a horde of samurai emerging from a corn field on some sort of attack, entirely in black-and-white and without any sudden surprises or plot twists. The onslaught is coming, and you get to watch what was probably a 20-second sequence take nearly four minutes to unfold. That's not to say "A Hundred Ropes" goes all Dickens and dilly-dallies around the point; it's always immediate, always focused and ever-present on that caffeinated side of shoegaze, like Field Mouse earlier in this list.
71. Beach Slang - Art Damage
No band right now captures that slightly drunk, ears ringing from a live show feeling quite like Beach Slang and their driving post-punk. The lyrics often talk of feeling alive and saying things like "hell is cheap and I'm loose." They're Japandroids' older brother, a little more world-weary, but still capable of blowing a door or two off their hinges.
Next:
70-61
