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Previously:
100-91,
90-81,
80-71,
70-61,
60-51,
50-41,
40-31,
30-21
20. Bon Iver - 715 - CRΣΣKS
Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined the man that shaped
For Emma, Forever Ago out in Midwestern solitude, Justin Vernon, would one day create his own ode to
Age of Adz, a glitched-out amalgamation of the folk ideas he made feel so relatable on
Emma mixed with sounds out of the dreams the members of Radiohead forgot they had while creating
Kid A. At first blush, I was sure I liked this song more when I first heard it, back when it was called "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap, but this track is another animal entirely. Sure, the common thread between those two songs is that no other instruments beside voices exist; but something about Vernon's completion of this exercise feels more impassioned. It's not like we all can really impart a ton of meaning from Vernon's vocals - it's kind of assumed at this point that you're only supposed to glean whatever meaning you
think is present in the words, rather than whatever might've been intended - but the human voice singing these words alongside the pitch-shifted and digitally splattered mimics of himself is full of human emotion that is somehow
amplified by these robotic copies. It's weird as hell. "Hide and Seek" laid a foundation in my brain that was ready to support the building that might be constructed by a song like this, but even then I'm not sure I could've seen the wild art deco creation that would spring up around its rebar.
19. Roosevelt - Heart
One of my favorite musical terms in the entire world is "yacht rock." If it wasn't painfully obvious from the name, you can consider it the kind of music the fabulously wealthy would listen to as they cruised some Mediterranean gulf in their 80-foot schooner, their lifestyle an analgesic to the cares of everyone else in the world. It's a soothing mix of synth pop and shoegaze, a dreamy world that only some sunlit inlet can paint an accurate picture of. And so here we have "Heart," something I'd consider a quintessential example of the yacht rock ideal. Everything about the song is carefree, assured, dreamy. Every note is glazed over, every lyrical turn the kind of thing that would lull you into a relaxed sleep if it was repeated into your ear enough times. It's the kind of retro-living track that doesn't have a care in the damn world, and who are we to mess with this kind of bliss?
18. St. Lucia - Help Me Run Away
It's been a good year for retro/synthwave/whatever-the-hell-we're-calling-it. St. Lucia, as we know by this point, isn't in the business of chill music; this is the kind of stuff meant to light a fire under your ass, like if Japandroids had chosen Zubaz instead of denim. The call-and-response repetition of the title into a giant synth downpour, out from which the outro spiral emerges, is one of the finest builds executed in this entire year. The celestial comedown of gently slowing notes is a necessary breather after such a cardio workout of a track. Sometimes you just need to catch your breath, man.
17. Wye Oak - Watching the Waiting
I talked about Jenn Wasner's projects a bit in the previous series in her Flock of Dimes track mention, and so now we, fittingly, have another. The OG Wasner project, Wye Oak, released a collection of songs written and recorded between the release of 2011's
Civilian and 2014's
Shriek, hybrid songs that incorporate dashes of the guitar rock that made
Civilian so singular and the electronic elements that made
Shriek such a distinct curiosity. The album on which you can find "Watching the Waiting" is, aptly, titled
Tween, because these songs had no home on either of those LPs. But there is a home here for them, these strange misfits, and their leader will be this track. None of the offerings on
Tween offer this much enlightenment, or so expertly balance the Wye Oak of old and new.
16. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Love's Refrain
I try to save things that sound like hyperbole for the final set of 10 songs on this list every year, but I can truly say I've never heard anything quite like this track before. It's astounding. There isn't a single word uttered or sung, and yet there's more emotion packed into these notes than many of the previous tracks within this set of 100 combined. A headphone listen is a
requirement, first and foremost, because there are layers and naunces to Cantu-Ledesma's electronic arrangement that are subtle, but necessary for the story this song is trying to tell. It's called "Love's Refrain," in my imagination, because it's meant to be the soundtrack to the moments just before up through the exact time you realize you're in love. There's joy and catharsis in these sounds, and the joyful noise of the song's final two-and-a-half minutes is profound. At some point, you'll find yourself adrift in the noise and static, and that's the genius of this whole thing: The track devolves into straight-up
noise with a little bit of melody hovering behind, but the transition into that sea of sound is gradual enough that you never see it coming. And the touches of falling notes behind the whitewashed wall of sound are the main reason behind the necessity of headphones; you're meant to be lost in this noise, so get lost in it.
15. Touché Amoré - Skyscraper (f. Julien Baker)
I don't think most people would pin me as being a post-hardcore fan. I had my phases with bands like Thursday and tried listening to Deafheaven's
Sunbather, but never found a comfort zone. I can't say I've found a bubble that covers a big patch of land on that estate, but I've found one song in that lane that just absolutely crushes me. It's this one, in case you weren't sure. My initial draw was Julien Baker's name as a feature. I've been enamored with Baker's
Sprained Ankle for more than a year now, and hearing her featured on a project that was gathering some pretty positive attention was enough to finally get me to give a listen. I'm kind of glad I did! I'm basing this song's placement almost entirely on its latter half, a punishing shockwave of the repeated chorus "You live there, under the lights" led by Baker and hardened by frontman Jeremy Bolm's distant yells. We're set up to hear that phrase as a gentle thing after the first two choruses, but once the 2:20 mark hits and the track explodes into mile-high guitars and Baker and Bolm's cranked-up vocals, there's no going back. It's completely overwhelming. It commands you to turn up the volume, to let those two voices consume you. It hits like two tons of bricks and, if those bricks hit just so, will leave you breathless by the time the voicemail plays at the end. That voicemail? The final recording Bolm has of his mother, who passed before
Stage Four was released. Yeah, that's what we're dealing with here. When that kind of force sinks in, it's hard to make an argument against a placement this high.
14. Car Seat Headrest - Fill In the Blank
There's a wry bit of commentary that starts this track - which also leads off for
Teens of Denial - where a young woman's voice, sounding as if she's hosting a college radio show says, "What's up guys, you are now listening to--...ehm...Car Seat Headrest!" The pause, as she hesitates over this unknown commodity, is a bit of self-humbling on Will Toledo's part. Who is this guy, anyway? In taking himself down a peg, Toledo makes "Fill In the Blank" a more relatable complaint anthem, because he's putting himself - or trying to, anyway, and that's always appreciated - on the listener's level. And it's a wide open complaint, free for everyone to interpret or make their own, right from the first line: "I'm so sick of (fill in the blank)." The rest of the track is about being allowed to not like something, whatever it is, and the pushback against someone having their own opinion (topical, given Toledo's recent criticism of Sufjan Stevens's widely-acclaimed 2015 album
Carrie & Lowell, my own No. 1 on last year's list). It's never whiny, it just sounds fed-up, and lord knows there's plenty to be fed-up about anymore.
13. Weyes Blood - Do You Need My Love
From Karen Carpenter to Vashti Bunyan, all people can seem to think of or feel when they hear Natalie Mering's voice is an opened time capsule from the early 1970s. As Weyes ("Wise") Blood, Mering lets those past styles resonate into the present and gives us this, a profoundly emotional song in a top 20 that is becoming stacked with tracks designed to capture and evoke pure feeling. The lyrics of the chorus consist of one simple question - "Do you need me the way I need you?" - stretched into a beautifully tortured plea for an answer. It's heart-rending and uplifting all at the same time, because I can feel my own chest swell even as I feel it crack when Mering sings out her question. It's like she's pointing it right the hell at
me, accusing and prodding and demanding to know...do
you care? Do
you give a shit? Because here I am, this is me, and it's time to put up or shut up. "Passion is the only thing, passion must mean everything / I felt your body scream to be set free from the pain of what's gone / I'll move you along" hits like a galvanized nail to the sternum, packed with that need for a response and an empathy and understanding that makes the hurt feel that much more real.
12. The Sun Days - Don't Need to Be Them
Sweden is so great. At least, I feel like it has to be, because it's produced this band and this song, which is the most unabashedly grandiose, soaring titan of a powerpop song I've heard since something (anything) off of
Twin Cinema. It glows like a 100-kilowatt searchlight into a clear night sky, like the sun reflected in pools of water as seen from an airplane, like the face of someone who still believes in Santa on Christmas morning. Elsa Holmgren is the vocalist's name, and she's got
pipes. She belts the chorus out in the purest sense of the word, crushing high-rise notes outside of going falsetto and holding them with ease, blasting your ears with a joyful noise reinforced by sticky-sweet guitars that up the ante with turbo strumming once Holmgren has said her piece. It sounds like sonic joy, and all I'm left feeling after the song is over is feeling just that and wondering how I can get another fix.
11. Pinegrove - Then Again
An infectious road trip anthem, a pumped-up
"Load Out/Stay" for the 21st century that takes about one-fourth the time to play out. Travel, exhaustion, the anxieties of both and the "illogical" way crowds relate to and sing along to songs as they're performed all come together to craft a song that's sung with lots of heart. As with the two previous Pinegrove tracks at 49 and 67 - "New Friends" and "Old Friends," respectively - there's that dislocated country twang in both Evan Stephens Hall's voice and the bent-note guitar playing that gives the track its unique feel. I'll never be a traveling musician and never know what this kind of life is like, but if I had to picture it, it'd end up being something like how this song feels; rolling down the road to the next "unusual town," drained but invigorated at the same time.
Next:
10-1
