Previously:
120-101,
100-91,
90-81,
80-71,
70-61,
60-51,
50-41,
40-31
Spotify Playlist
30. Wolf Alice - Heavenward
The older I get, the more I seem to enjoy songs that come blanketed in
sound; songs that balance volume with depth and create these layers of things to hear all at once. I mean...re-reading that sentence, I realize that that's what all music is (duh), but listen to this song's intro and chorus and follow along with me. With effects on top of instruments - all of them playing their notes in step - combining with Ellie Rowsell's ever-climbing vocal turn, create this mix of stadium rock, shoegaze and drone that mix melody and white noise almost effortlessly. It's a rowdy dream.
29. Spoon - Hot Thoughts
Oh hell yeah, that's a xylophone. Or a marimba or something. But anyway, more than just having that twinkling badassery as part of their rhythm section here, I really enjoy this slightly nefarious side of Spoon's sound. There's a darkened urgency to a lot of their songs
Hot Thoughts, and the title track leads the album off appropriately. It's a microcosmic table setter for what's in store: Just the right amount of doom-and-gloom, or at least as much as you can have in a song with a marimba.
28. Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit - Cumberland Gap
Isbell and his troupe usually do a great job with heartfelt, measured music that prods the heart with intelligent, well-thought ballads and odes. Less frequently, that typical level of smarts is instead applied to something that instead opts to just rock out. Ta-da: Here's "Cumberland Gap," which plasters Isbell's gently-drawled delivery upon a surprisingly frantic beat and traveling bass lick.
27. Dirty Projectors - Cool Your Heart
Thanks to a nice assist from Dawn Richard - and a memorably disorienting, fascinatingly-edited
music video - this is my favorite duet of the year. Everything that goes into this song, on paper, feels like it should create a mess: Vocalists aside, the brass, sparse and staccato synth and bongo drum hits...don't necessarily seem like they'd come together to make this slick, bouncy jam. But here all of that is, and the song is definitely a jam.
26. Creeper - Hiding With Boys
Packed with all the riffs and theatricality of vintage My Chemical Romance, Creeper manage to deliver a song about being in love with a vampire with just the perfect amount of schmaltz. It's full of funny lines like "hiding the evidence of dying, you clung to cigarettes and cheap perfume," and "loving you is killing me" (wink wink), but the narrator here is pretty serious about the whole thing and would prefer you acknowledge his love as genuine, please and thanks! It's gotta be tough to find a happy mix of bombast and inanity, but Creeper (on a concept album about this whole affair, no less), manage to execute it all with a fairly tremendous amount of success.
25. The xx - Replica
One song I was pretty attached to, years and years ago, was Seal's
"Love's Divine." Something about the piano/keyboard lick the song was built off of resonated with me like none before really had. It was twinkling, crisp, and ushered in the song in the wake of a thunderclap and orchestral swell. I hear similarities in sound between that riff and the one that permeates "Replica," the finest track from the latest xx LP,
I See You. And though the themes vary between the two tracks, there's an undercurrent of redemption they both share. For Oliver Sim - who takes lead vocals on this one - there's more of a personal connection to past personal struggles, and the difficulty in accepting our wrongs and finding ways forward. Maybe he's not quite there yet, but the the wordless interludes of celestial synth bursts and Romy Madley Croft coos sure make you feel like he is close. And maybe we all are, too.
24. Lorde - Green Light
A power anthem about pressing on in the wake of a breakup, Lorde's most urgent song to date features a step forward in songwriting that was already considered solidly precocious on
Pure Heroine. "I'm waiting for it, that green light, I WANT IT" Lorde clones wail in the background of the chorus, Ghosts of Poptimism Future from the future version of the still-heartbroken Lorde in the present tense of the verses. It's the feeling of progression, from cathartically belting out a song at a traffic light, stopped and waiting for it to turn green, to hitting the gas and powering through the next 0-to-60.
23. Charly Bliss - Westermarck
Eva Hendricks has a singing voice that comes dangerously, dangerously close to being cartoonish. It is
so distinctive and occupies such a contrasting niche to the music it complements, that sometimes it hardly feels real. To that end, I can foresee it being off-putting to hear, kind of in the way Colin Meloy's nasally academic turn at the front of The Decemberists doesn't always hit home for everybody. Me, though, I find it enthralling in its uniqueness. Not quite pop punk and just left of indie, Charly Bliss go full throttle on the endorphins to drown out the heartbreak of having someone leave you for your cousin (ouch).
22. Los Campesinos! - I Broke Up In Amarante
We have another breakup song here, but it's not chronicling the end of a relationship; instead it's an autobiographical tale of Gareth David's peaks and valleys during the recording process of
Sick Scenes. Amarante is a Portuguese town apparently not far from where the album was finished, and snippets of the lyrics (at least according to David's notes on the song's
Genius page) seem to confirm the overarching themes of anxiety and stress, of futility and Sisyphean struggle. Maybe we can credit the band and its members for pulling David through, and could consider the final chorus - where David tries singing the chorus solo, but eventually admits defeat and quickly mutters, "nah, I'm gonna need you to help me out here" to the rest of the band - as a nod to that support.
21. Grizzly Bear - Three Rings
Ed Droste made it a point to say, ahead of
Painted Ruins' release, that the album would not be focused on his 2014 divorce from Chad MacPhail. But as we hear two different tones within this song - from gentle and reassuring to pleading and borderline desperate - it's hard not to imagine this as a stand-in for the kind of back-and-forth that may have been sadly prevalent in the latter stages of that relationship. In a less specific way, it's universally applicable to all of us: "I wanna show you my best side...I wanna make it alright...Don't you know that I can make it better? Don't you ever leave me" are lines that carry plain emotional weight that we've all had to lug at some point, too.
Next:
20-11
