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100-91,
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10. Everything Everything - I Believe It Now
Forget tip-toeing or straddling or walking a line between styles of music; this track does a gymnastic routine on top of the divider between glam rock and power pop, snatching up the best elements of each every time it does a flip or tumble. The main draw here is the song's chorus - the entirety of the title and nothing but - sung to the rafters in harmonized layers, above a parade of crash cymbal hits and sandwiched by some vocal acrobatics from Jonathan Higgs. It's a banger, period-full-stop. It exists to invigorate you and charge you up. The verse lyrics seem to point toward this being some kind of love song, but in reality, the chorus is so damn convincing and rallying in its delivery that Higgs's belief could be anything and I'd be along for the ride. I believe it too, whatever "it" is!
9. Kyle Craft - Jane Beat the Reaper
Who says songs about vampires can't be fun? Definitely not this song's hero, a (presumed, anyway) vampire named Jane who struggles with her non-human identity. Maybe it's been done before, but this is the first song I can think of that actually tries to
humanize and
emotionalize what it must be to be a vampire. Who thinks of this?! It's wildly creative. Craft's glam pomposity plays this song up and helps make it what it is, completely removing the cheese and turning in a bayou ballad that's compelling and believable and rollicking, from the wailing guitar note intro to the multi-instrument flourish close. In a year filled with strong debut releases - of which Craft's
Dolls of Highland is most certainly a part - this song stands near the top of the heap for its assuredness, both of theme and composition.
8. Bon Iver - 8 (circle)
We could all kind of figure that, when 2011's self-titled release wrapped up with "Beth/Rest," the
For Emma, Forever Ago-era Bon Iver wasn't coming back. Whenever the next BI release was coming, it wouldn't be like what we'd heard so far. As it turns out, funny enough, "Beth/Rest" was the clearest indicator of what the next album's best track would sound like. "Circle" is, like all the rest of Vernon's songs, lyrically opaque for the most part. The link above goes to an officially released lyric video, where the real words are displayed in time with the music. This is especially helpful as the song reaches its final stage, where Vernon and mutated mimics of his voice combine to form some strange musical Voltron. But while the exact meaning to Vernon is, as usual, unclear, there are a few pinholes of light that shine down to help enlighten the thought that this is a song about longing. That's not really the newest territory, especially not given
For Emma's prevailing subject matter, but the injection of some of the stronger emotive singing Vernon's done, plus the wheelhouse subject matter,
plus the "Beth/Rest"-informed, hybrid '80s vibe going on here...well, I mean, that's a
lot to have going on at once. And that realization hits as the song begins to wrap up, with those scratched and burbled vocal parts chiming in call-and-response before they all dogpile, layering on top of one another for a final yelp of "Keep waking up high." Is the longing coming in a dream? Are the feeling real? There are things to grapple with, and the obscure lyrics make it so that the story can, ideally, be made personal to each of us in our own way. It's less about the words on the page telling our story than the sounds behind them painting it for us in varying shades.
7. Radiohead - Burn the Witch
Globally, there weren't many artists whose next release was so heavily anticipated. Really, that's been the case for 20 years or so now with Radiohead, but the feeling surrounding the album that would follow up
The King of Limbs was tinged with a bit of anxiety.
TKOL had a few moments, but became an afterthought very quickly, considered by many to fall well short of the classically high bar the band had its set with nearly everything that came before. People were eager to wash the taste out of their mouths, and so this song's arrival early this year proved to be the after-dinner mint so many were hoping it would be. Fairly plainspoken lyrically, as far as Thom Yorke goes, "Burn the Witch" taps back into that feeling of fear in the back of your head, the uncertain, displaced tingle you can't quite shake. With an increased involvement of strings this time around - mostly thanks to Jonny Greenwood's compositional bent - the lingering air of apocalypse is back around the city limits of our minds, on approach for that "low-flying panic attack" and making sure we remember to watch our backs.
6. Shearwater - Radio Silence
For all their folk roots, it turns out Jonathan Meiburg and Shearwater can really write a rock record, too. "Radio Silence," the penultimate track of this past January's
Jet Plane and Oxbow, is a sprawling stadium rocker, built on the back of an unfurling, smoke machine intro and Meiburg's distinctive, crooning baritone. The crooning doesn't last that long, though, and the full-throated chorus ("Lie in disarray, disarray," a subtle nod to an antenna setup) leaves no doubt about this being a true indie rocker that is of its era. Between references to British intelligence and an instrumental bridge that sounds like Morse code, the thematics throughout the song are just completely cohesive. It sounds like a lost transmission, unearthed and broadcast for the first time across the plains of a countryside.
5. Cymbals Eat Guitars - Well
"A Bruce Springsteen song as performed and sung by a punk band" is how I've heard CEG tracks described elsewhere, and no single song has had me agreeing harder with that concept than this one. The biggest tie that binds is the alternating piano/keyboard lick that fills in while Joe D'Agostino takes a breath in the verses; it sounds like something from
The River sessions. The song itself is a sweeping mini-epic, packing many songs' worth of ideas into a 4:16 runtime that's just long enough to get its point across. You can almost imagine Max Weinberg flailing away on his drum kit during the final minute or so, the dystopian drag strip guitar solo melting into a piano solo and percussive showcase that elongates the uplifting, cathartic feeling that verse lick produces. That's unusual territory for CEG, as D'Agostino tends to keep his eyes turned toward the ground a bit more; but after track No. 2, "Have a Heart," introduced itself as basically a straight-up love song, those old bets were off.
4. Daughter - Fossa
Few bands going these days do doom & gloom better than Daughter, and Elena Tonra's voice is basically becoming synonymous with sobering thoughts and understated anxieties. There are other moments on
Not to Disappear where this convention is bucked - the almost arrhythmic rush of "No Care," the pulsing bass rock-out of "To Belong" - but no song on the album better joins tried-and-true Daughter traits of claustrophobic, blue atmospheres with aggressive (for this band) drums and angry (for this singer) lyrics and delivery. A large part of this song's beauty lies in the sudden jolt of the transition from verse to chorus and the just-as-sudden slowdown back into verse, but the crown jewel of it all is the grand instrumental outro. Taking nearly three minutes to unfurl from mid-track through to the end, the drums, guitars and keys that comprise this jam contain emotion of the kind you might have experienced with track No. 16, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's "Love's Refrain." It's wordless, but all of the feeling behind it feels meant to be implicit anyway. You can hear it either as more joyful or more angry or more relieved than anything else, and that's another thing: By leaving this phase of the song empty of lyrics, your own mind and heart are called to action to fill in the gaps.
3. Mitski - Your Best American Girl
Relationships can be a funny thing. More often than not, they're not going to work out, and that can be for any number of reasons. I'm not breaking any news here, but that kind of preface is important to have in mind when considering a song like "Your Best American Girl." Mitski Miyawaki was born in Japan, was raised in New York, is a child of biracial parents and frequently moved while growing up, and as she told
Song Exploder when breaking down this song: "I was in love with somebody, but I just felt like our backgrounds or the places we come from or how we were raised were just so completely different. And it felt like something that couldn't be overcome by love." This song was written from a place of peace in that matter, but the underlayer of frustration and anger at the dissolution of something that felt so right but just
wasn't can't be kept from bubbling up to the surface. How do you cope with such a mismatch? You can try to adjust some things about yourself, but making too many changes or drastic alterations just wasn't something that was in her cards. The chorus itself is a revelation, a forceful bit of fuzz rock expertly built up from hushed verses by a lilting pre-chorus of "Don't wait for me, I can't come" before launching into some more poignant words:
Your mother wouldn't approve of how my mother raised me
But I do, I think I do
And you're an all-American boy, I guess I couldn't help trying to be
Your best American girl
She gave it a shot. She put her heart into it. But in the end, something stood between them that just proved to be an impasse, and this song is the response to that.
2. Pinegrove - Size of the Moon
In all the times I've listened to this song, I still can't decide if it's happening in the moment just before a break-up, just before a relationship is saved or
ex post facto as a reminiscence. The mood sure seems able to fit in any description. Like the other Pinegrove songs before it on this list, "Size of the Moon" features touches of that Pine Barrens country-rock twang with lyrics that - no matter the moment in which they're told - break your heart just the same. There are some eminently memorable and quotable lines - "I don't know what I'm afraid of, but I'm afraid," "I got caught, you got those Caravaggio moves" - but none stands above the body of the third verse, the culmination of some building tension and exasperation that forces Evan Stephens Hall to angrily yell "FINE!" at the negative, unheard response to "Do you want to die?" The full line, as it plays out, touches on some deeper thought; like Shearwater's "Radio Silence," Stephens Hall's mind drifts toward idle thoughts of death:
Do you want to die?
Fine you're right, but I wonder what it feels like
To stop feeling so alive.
What if we could wake up in five years and things'd be feelin' alright?
I wanna visit the future and dance in a field of light!
The verse comes in a present of darkness, but in spite of it all, there's a brightness to the future that makes it all worth fighting through. That's a triumph that deserves some serious consideration, but if nothing else, it's an idle curiosity.
1. Car Seat Headrest - Vincent
I don't know if Will Toledo is the rock prophet for this wave of 20-somethings. I don't know if he's the next Julian Casablancas or Alex Turner or Win Butler. I don't even know if I'll like his next album yet, whenever that might happen. But I can say for damn sure that this boy can write a damn song. This is the third song on this list from
Teens of Denial, and it's a marvel. I remember first listening to this song in its "radio edit" four-plus-minute
music video version and immediately being hooked. Every time the pre-chorus would kick in and Toledo would shift gears into wild strumming mode and the drums would shift into a somehow
higher gear, I would crank the volume up a bit more. Then the chorus hits like something out of prime-era Walkmen, drums flailing and guitars tinnily wailing and you're like, "well, damn." In its four-and-a-half-minute mode, the song is more easily digested, cutting off some edges and getting straight to the point. It's still really good this way, but after immersing yourself in the full-bodied, 7:45-length original, it feels lean. It's like pigs in a blanket as a substitute for a hot dog; both are really tasty, but there's no doubt which of the two is more satisfying. The intro unravels over three minutes before Toledo takes over, and from there, a song about disaffection and sneering at the 20-something party scene takes over. "Vincent" could be the narrator of the song, idling to the side at one of these parties where the vibe is no longer one he grooves to. It could also be a nod to the artist Vincent Van Gogh ("They've got a portrait by Van Gogh on the Wikipedia page for clinical depression / It helps to describe it"). Whoever it's titled
for, it seems to be
about a class of person Toledo once felt connected with and now no longer does ("It must be hard to speak in a foreign language /
Intoxicado" he posits, and it's important to look up what
intoxicado means and contrast it with what your brain at first
thinks it means in order to fully get this particular point). Maybe in another year, I'd have dropped this song a few pegs for being angsty. And it
is angsty, but there's a self-awareness and intelligence behind it all that helps the me of 2016 enjoy it instead of handwave it. Beyond just being slightly proggy, it's constantly interesting. Lyrically and musically, it's carefully considered even in its wildest moments. It speaks to part of me personally, and reaches me musically. It's my favorite song from 2016.
