My Top 5 Songs of 2013

This post, which runs down my five favorite songs of 2012, might come as an anticlimax, given that I've spent the past month and a half intermittently, painstakingly descending from #13 to #6. (I've been busy lately.) But today is February 10, the Grammys are about to begin, and it's time to move on.

So.

#5: Killer Mike, "Reagan"

Too often, it seems to me, the rage in hip-hop is directed at rival MCs rather than, say, the War on Drugs. Or mass incarceration. Or American imperialism. Or the legacy of Reaganomics.

There's plenty of important stuff to be angry about.

Thank goodness, then, for Killer Mike, whose bracing blend of straight talk, unhinged paranoia, social analysis, and righteous anger you will not be seeing on stage at the Staples Center tonight.



"They declared a war on drugs, like a war on terror, / But what it really did was let the police terrorize whoever."

#4: Chairlift, "I Belong in Your Arms"

Sweetness and sunlight, open hearts and banana splits. The aesthetic antithesis of Killer Mike's "Reagan." The aural equivalent of the film Amelie. Lyrics consisting of dadaist joy-bursts. Octave jumps! Synthesizers! The 80s! Just the slightest undercurrent of sadness!

All the girls wear polka-dot dresses, and all the boys are uninhibited by masculine norms!

I want to live in this song, even at the risk of turning into a twee lunatic.



"Because the world goes on without us, / Doesn't matter what we do-o-o. / All silhouettes with no regrets, / When I'm melting into you."

#3: Dum Dum Girls, "Lord Knows"

When music critics have no idea what's going on, they use the word "charisma." Why did the Beatles send young concert-goers into hysterics? They played with charisma. What made Michael Jackson different from every other pop star? He danced and sang more charismatically.

And why does "Lord Knows," essentially a pastiche of The Pretenders and "Crimson & Clover," seem unique? Why is it so moving? So much better than anything else by the otherwise unremarkable Dum Dum Girls?

There's something about the vocal. It's really, really....

(Charismatic.)



"I want to live a pure life, / I'd say that it's about time."

#2: Frank Ocean, "Thinkin Bout You"

Yeah, Mumford & Sons (ruthlessly inauthentic as they are) will likely win the Grammy for Best Album tonight. But Frank Ocean's channel ORANGE remains the best loved, or at least the most intensely loved, record of 2012, combining mass and critical appeal in a way that only Kanye West's finest albums have recently matched.

Lead single "Thinkin Bout You" highlights Ocean's most underrated strength: his facility with melody. Listen, for instance, to how he contrasts the circular, low-register verse with the vertical, falsetto chorus. The effect is one of a private, obsessive anxiety releasing into a straightforward ache.

And then you arrive at the bridge. 2:12. Whoa.

(The nonsensical music video I've embedded below features an alternate version of the song. It's the best I could find in the free, legal regions of the Internet.)



"We'll go down this road / Till it turns from color to black and white."

#1: Japandroids, "The House That Heaven Built"

Hey bro, you play air drums. I'll play air guitar. We'll have the BEST F#@$ING TIME EVER.



"And if they try to slow you down, / Tell 'em all to go to hell."

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #6 (Islands, "This Is Not a Song")

There I was, all ready to despise Islands.

In 2006, the Canadian band had a minor indie hit with "Rough Gem," a shapeshifting number with a peppy riff and a kitchen-sink aesthetic. It got passed around the nascent mp3 blogosphere, placed on a few best-of lists, and developed into a rousing concert closer.

But unlike their fellow montréalais Arcade Fire, who also broke through in the mid-aughts, Islands were not ready to be adored. Their music began to take on a willful inscrutability. Band members quit, returned, and quit again. And a few years ago, frontman Nicholas Thorburn announced in concert that he would henceforth refuse to sing "Rough Gem."

Granted, he was being partly, perhaps mostly, tongue-in-cheek. But it's clear that he was also being a bit of an asshole:

This next song we're about to do - it's an old song, and it's a song we all collectively don't like at all. And I think we're gonna retire it tonight... The song is called "Rough Gem." [Crowd cheers.] You shouldn't applaud, 'cause it's a shitty song... I'm not gonna sing it, 'cause I hate this fucking song so much. And here's how much I hate this song. I puked twice up there and then down there. Didn't tell anybody about it. 'Cause I wanted you to smell it. And now I think the whole venue smells like puke 'cause I didn't clean it up and didn't tell anybody. And then someone jerked off 'cause it smells like cum, so that helps. And then I dropped my phone in the toilet, which was cool. I don't know how that relates to this, but I just thought I'd tell you that. Anyway, so I'm not gonna sing "Rough Gem" tonight...

Congratulations, dude. You're better than "Rough Gem." What's more, you're better than anyone who enjoys "Rough Gem," including and especially your fans. You, my friend, are the greatest hipster of all time.

*          *          *

All in all, I would have loved to have kept hating Islands, to have treasured them as my personal paragon of indie insufferability. But, damn it all, in the past six years Nicholas Thorburn has learned a thing or two about songwriting.

On 2012's underappreciated A Sleep and a Forgetting, he uses a minimal backdrop of piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Gone are the addled synthesizers, the jolting shifts in tempo, the GarageBand trickery. Vocals, lyrics, and melodies take center stage. And they're all stunningly well crafted.

The album's second track, "This Is Not a Song," rides a stately chord progression to violin-section solo straight out of R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts." It's a simple, gorgeous ballad - one that Islands should never give up singing.



"If this is just a song, / Then why-y-y-y-y do I fi-i-i-i-ind it so hard... to move on."

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #7 (Chris Malinchak, "So Good to Me")

Contentment is not among pop music's preferred topics. Ever since the agitation of rhythm-and-blues combined with the anguish of country-and-western and exploded into rock-and-roll, popular songs have thrived on the extremes of adolescent emotion: heartbreak, jealousy, ecstasy.

"You make me so lonely, baby, / I get so lonely, / I get so lonely I could die." "Maybellene, why can't you be true? / Why can't you be true? / You've started back doing the things you used to do." "It's such a feeling that my love / - I can't hide! I can't hide! I can't hide!"

While all of this Sturm und Drang is terrifically exciting, it begs the question: What comes afterward? What happens when you're no longer lonely, when Maybellene cleans up her act and the two of you find yourselves chilling on the sofa, holding hands? Does pop music collapse under the pressure of your tranquility?

Chris Malinchak's "So Good to Me" seems to say no, it doesn't have to. Mellow yet giddy, matching Balearic synthesizers with some Marvin Gaye vocal snippets, this track is about the gratitude one feels for a sustained contentment. It finds glory in maturity. It is the sound of an endlessly re-listenable love.



"Every sky would be blue, / Long as you're lovin' me, / Lovin' me."

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #8 (Kacey Musgraves, "Merry Go 'Round")

There's a lot to like about this sigh of a country song: the push and pull of the backing arrangement; the elegantly elongated chord progression in the chorus ("where it stops, nobody knows"); the conversational yet tuneful vocal; the revisionist nursery rhyme that serves as an outro, anchoring what could have been a drifty tune; and above all, the understatement of the whole affair, the refusal to go big and cheesy, when going big and cheesy must have been terribly tempting.

But in "Merry Go 'Round," the debut single from Kacey Musgraves (who's too talented and pretty to remain obscure for long), the lyrics are the main attraction. Rather than paying obeisance to small-town mythology, as every Nashville newcomer seemingly must, Musgraves says stuff like, "And it don't matter if you don't believe, / Come Sunday morning, you best be there in the front row like you're supposed to." Yeah, it's not exactly a Sinclair Lewis-style polemic. But in mainstream country, you hardly ever hear skepticism toward God and community, much less from an ingenue.

Bracing as it is, "Merry Go 'Round" also tells a lived-in, empathetic story about a place and an ethos. Particularly moving is the chorus:

Mama's hooked on Mary Kay,
Brother's hooked on Mary Jane,
Daddy's hooked on Mary, two doors down.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
We get bored, so we get married,
And just like dust, we settle in this town.
On this broken merry go 'round
And 'round and 'round we go,
Where it stops, nobody knows.

All of this punning on "Mary," "married," and "merry" might seem facile at first. But it turns out to be more than cleverness; the shared phonemes represent a shared disease: a helpless, mechanical repetition. Mother, brother, father, and singer (sister?) are trapped on the same Mary/married/merry go 'round. And ever so delicately, the circles sketched by the piano and the banjo suggest the same thing.



"Ain't what you want, it's what you know, / Just happy in the shoes you're wearin', / Same checks we're always cashin' to buy a little more distraction."

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #9 (Solange, "Losing You")

A few years back, Solange Knowles, kid sister of Beyoncé, recorded one of the most underrated songs of the young millennium. Co-authored by soul specialist Cee-Lo Green, "Sandcastle Disco" coasts on a shuffling beat and a relaxed vocal, then punches the accelerator into an ecstatic, girl-group chorus: "Bay-b-b-b-bay-bay, don't blow me away!" It's pure Motown, a 21st-century answer to "You Can't Hurry Love."

With this year's "Losing You," Solange goes both more current and more mainstream, exploring the downtempo aesthetic preferred by many of today's R&B artists. The ambivalent lyric, alternating between entreaties ("Just treat me good baby and I'll give you the rest of me") and threats ("I'm not the one you should be making your enemy"), wouldn't seem out of place on a Drake track. And yet something of Solange's predilection for vintage party music remains in the song's jubilant, Family Stone-like beat.

Despair and self-assurance, brooding and boogying: it's this emotional and textural complexity that, in a year full of remarkable R&B singles (see: Usher's "Climax," Miguel's "Adorn," and my soon-to-be-revealed #2 song of 2012), sets "Losing You" apart.



"I don't know why I fight it, clearly we are through. / Tell me the truth boy, am I losing you for-eh-eh-ver?"

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #10 (The Mountain Goats, "Harlem Roulette")

John Darnielle, a.k.a. The Mountain Goats, is often called a poet. While he deserves the compliment implied by that label, his talents have more in common with those of a short-story writer.

Consider "Harlem Roulette." Here we have a wisp of a narrative about Frankie Lymon, who died in 1968 of an overdose, just after recording a melancholy tune about "a little town / Where the stars shine bright / And the moon never drowns." Smartly, though, Darnielle never quite tells the story - never shows us Lymon shutting himself in his grandmother's bathroom and plunging a needle into his arm. Instead, Darnielle circles around the tragedy, touching on a few pungent, suggestive images. Engines beneath the city. A New York summer night. Armies in the distance.

As if trying and failing to grasp the meaning of his own song, Darnielle perseverates on an enigmatic declaration: "The loneliest people in the whole wide world / Are the ones you're never going to see again." Who's lonelier: the people observed, or the observer?

And then, in an unexpected middle eight, he flips to the present with shattering specificity: "Four hours north of Portland, a radio flips on, / And some no one from the future remembers that you're gone." Denis Johnson could hardly have done better.



"Every dream's a good dream, / Even awful dreams are good dreams, / If you're doing it right."

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #11 (The Hood Internet, "Fuck with Mo' Money")

A joyous mashup of a classic posse track and some creamy synth-cheese. Like many of Girl Talk's best confections, The Hood Internet's "Fuck with Mo' Money" exposes the goofy, disco-poppy sweetness that bubbles beneath the surface of 90s mainstream hip-hop. Also, an FYI for aspiring mashup artists: always, always include a Biggie verse. In terms of rhythmic articulation, he's the best MC of all time, and it's not close.



"I got the dough, got the flow down piz-at, / Platinum plus like thiz-at, / Dangerous on triz-acks, / Leave your ass fliz-at."

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #12 (Ty Segall, "Thank God for Sinners")

A loud, scuzzy opener from Twins, the third of three (!) albums released by Ty Segall in 2012. Yeah, Segall wrote a ton of songs this year - and many of them were very, very good. Eventually something has to give: either quantity or quality. But in the meantime we can admire the apparent ease with which he bangs out tracks like "Thank God for Sinners": sloppy but well-made, catchy but hardly desperate to please.



"I'm out on the streets, you know, / I'm lookin' for you-ooo-ooo."

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #13 (The Walkmen, "Line by Line")

A deep cut from a deep-career album. Like many of The Walkmen's best recent songs, "Line by Line" works with silence, space, and subtle shifts in dynamics. It's a simple tune organized around a simple metaphor, but by the four-minute mark it accrues a complex kind of tension. And then the strings come in: release.



"Line by line, / Oh, we all scrape by."

SoundLeaf (DIIV remixed by Memory Tapes)

How to turn something good into something differently good.

(Also, how to kill the final minute-thirty of a remix.)

SoundLeaf (Majical Cloudz)

How to make up for a dumb band name.
 

(Thanks for the tip, Peter.)

SoundLeaf (Miguel)

How to turn a bunch of terrible pick-up lines into a genuinely seductive song.

SoundLeaf (Free Energy)

How to ride a D-A-G chord progression.