10.
After spending most of the previous half hour of Songs of Praise swinging wildly, throwing haymakers up and down the track list, Shame shift gears to close out the album with a seven-minute slow burn. It's not as if they keep it totally reined in, because there's obviously a payoff for everyone in search of the kind of crunch the last nine tracks before it put on display. But the choice to put the Clash setting down to 4 or 5 instead of 10 for the album's last and longest track stands out to me. After being conditioned to expect the nu-punk right out of the gate, it's like "Angie" drew me in by making me anticipate when the build might come. Even as the song approaches the five-minute mark, and you think that build-and-release is finally here, things reset again for one final verse before, finally, erupting into a wall of sound, fittingly enough as a refrain of "in your happy place" takes over. I'm impressed more and more by it every time I listen, even if it stands almost totally apart from the rest of the album.
9.
It's hard to stand up to titanic singles like "Make Me Feel" and "Django Jane" and "Pynk," but there's always something about Janelle Monáe's gospel edge that's grabbed me harder than most of her other tracks. This one starts off with a choir, sure, but it's the funk edge she adds (listen to that damn bass line in the chorus, sheesh) that makes this song so specific to her style. It's an undeniably fun beat and rhythm placed atop lyrics commenting on all the different sorts of inequality Americans face today. It's something only Janelle is pulling off these days. It's also appropriately political, and you'd almost think placing two excerpts of a sermon - attributed to Dr. Sean McMillan - would be making it a bit too blunt, but the charismatic delivery of McMillan's framework for a better America just manages to fit in perfectly. It's just one of those things I can't imagine myself ever pulling off successfully, but then again...I'm just not Janelle Monáe.
8.
Calling this song "dramatic" is probably the biggest understatement I'll make this year. This song is unbelievably dramatic. From the quavering delivery of vocalist Ryan Lott to the choral shouts to the rumbling percussion supporting the ebb-and-flow droning of synths, this checks all the boxes of high drama in song form. It's arresting, though, and manages to stay on the right side of melodramatic while still conveying all these amplified emotions. And it all seems to make the most sense from just after the three-minute mark on through the end, as the choral shouts finally form words to harmonize what's either the song's plea or direct order: "Out of the dark day, into the brighter night." The exact meaning of that line is lost on me - it's most likely about moving on, no longer being grounded in the past or nostalgia, in the context of the rest of the song - but it sure comes across powerfully even without full clarity in the message. That's more than good enough for me.
7.
Somehow, for whatever reason, this track ended up as a B-side to Smell Smoke, Vundabar's wonderfully acerbic fuzz-rock album that took the 10th spot on my list for this year. "Glass Hand's" charmingly grunge-y take on fashionistas vacillates between the momentum of a locomotive for oh-so-short bursts and dreamy stoner drifting. It's a surprising mix of two completely different takes on a single song within that song, and I wish both kinds were even longer. This blend makes you feel both like you should be moving twice as fast to wherever you need to be, and that just bobbing your head along while sitting on the couch accomplishes the same thing. It is its own adrenaline rush and cooling down period.
6.
A lot of times this year, I found myself enjoying being challenged by different songs. Things that sounded less and less like everything else out there stuck with me, attaching to some part of my brain that had really only been occupied by early Animal Collective before. And while I wouldn't really say "Ullswater" reminds me too much of early AC beyond the unusual title, you can definitely hear refinement of some of the same elements: Choppy electronic beat and call-and-response lyrics during the pre-chorus the most notable among them. But there's so much originality on display here, too, particularly during the song's stretch run from about the five-minute mark on through the end, when everything turns on its head to pump up the stadium rock element to just jam out
5.
What starts as a gently piercing elegiac morphs into something more defiant about a minute-and-a-half in, and it sounds like a cloudy fall afternoon by the beach in song form. One of the most important things a song can do is create a setting or scene in your mind as you listen to it, and I find myself by that beach every time this song comes on, no matter what the actual weather is around me. It's a self-sustained environment unto itself. It helps that Nandi Plunkett has such an effortlessly great voice to be layered on top of itself during the chorus, as piano transforms into synth and crashes in waves over her. It's a beautifully strong track, a lot like the rest of Plunkett's work as Half Waif.
4.
This song is a warning. A choppy, irregular, disquieting warning; a harbinger of death; a darkness on the edge of town. Whatever you want to summarize it as, this is the kind of song that leaves you unsettled when you're done with it, and it appropriately closes out the apocalyptic Double Negative with that lingering sense of uncertainty. It chugs along, apparently, at something like 103 BPM, a sort of sloppy number that somehow fits the mood of the whole thing perfectly. And as Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker coo this undead lullaby to your ears in the song's final act, it always feels like it starts to get a little chillier in the room. Double Negative's final phase, from "Dancing and Fire" on through "Disarray," with the album's trademark lyrics - "It's not the end, it's just the end of hope" - to set up the coda here: "Before it falls into total disarray, you'll have to learn to live a different way." These are hardcore lyrics for a song that is absolutely not hardcore, but still packs more than enough punch to deliver a crushing blow on a psyche.
3.
On an album full of beachy, jangly summer jams, no was beachier, janglier, or jammier than "The Hammer," a relative RBCF epic at four-and-a-half minutes that's as blissfully satisfying a song you could find on their debut full-length. It's another album-closing track in this top 10, but "The Hammer" stands more steadily apart from the context of its album; this is the kind of song you can plug anywhere in a tracklist and have it deliver. The dueling guitars/bass/methodically constant drums formula RBCF deploy so frequently is basically perfected here, and the lift of the guitar solo around 2:35 is so wonderfully bright, I could listen to it on a loop by itself for an hour.
2.
One of the things that makes the boygenius supergroup so important isn't just that it's three young women at the top of their game, it's that the three arrive with an EP so exquisitely balanced it's hard to believe they haven't been working together for 10 years. Here, on a track that delivers about five separate staggering blows, Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, and Phoebe Bridgers deliver a fair share of cutting lines - "Trick after trick, I make the magic / and you unrelentingly ask for the secret" is a pretty awesome burn - but while Dacus and Baker take the lead for the majority of the track, it's Bridgers who is absolutely, unequivocally the song's MVP. She only harmonizes, staying in the background, but her contributions in support of Baker's "I'm gnashing my teeth..." wail and the unbelievable closing build with Dacus make this song the star that it is, and she should get credit for her part in that. Spotlighting aside, this song manages to blend three distinct voices in such a way that it never, ever feels like too much, and its multiple payoffs make it an instant classic.
1.
There isn't a lot you need to say about this song that it doesn't say for itself. Over the course of six-and-a-half minutes, we get to bear witness to one of the most masterfully executed slow burns I've ever heard. From a softly, simply strummed electric guitar seed grows an absolute oak of a song, gradually adding parts seamlessly and harmoniously. It's truly incredible how much of an absolute bodyslam this song ends up being; its lyrics tell a pretty cutting post-breakup tale, which would normally be enough on its own, but the last two-and-a-half minutes are what absolutely blows the roof off the whole thing. All of a sudden, the guitars fuzz out, cymbals start crashing, and next thing you know Dacus is unleashing rock goddess wails and nailing you to your seat. It's really, honestly, one of the best songs I've ever heard, and I'm really thankful for it.
