songs of the decade: part seven

40. Polyphonic Spree - Soldier Girl



This song feels like love, but the militant, insistent kind, where not only is your heart beating like a marching band, but you're going to follow the feeling as it conquers the world.

39. A Classic Education - Badlands and Owls

It starts with a melody that digs into you, or puts its arms around you and drags you out into the desert or the dancefloor, promising to push any loneliness away beyond great curtain of the night. But unexpectedly, this song has its own sunrise (00.53) and that's where it goes, violins and raking guitars, and vocals curling like the first clouds of a bright morning, all together in one paling sky. This is the kind of song that could really mess up your sleep pattern, just because it demands to be heard as soon as you get back from the disco, or before the blue of night yellows out into morning. But it is a beautiful way to start, and there's no way you could hear it and stay in bed.

38. Dirty Projectors - Stillness is the Move {download}

The sun came up, quickly at first, then slowly, travelling towards me as I walked on, amongst damp and glistening blades of grass, and insects heading homewards, dropping their heads into the sticky earth, and then, in a good mood, and remembering I was writing all this, I made all the flowers around me bloom in vivid and gaudy colours, like drips from some melted rainbow, surprised by my morning sun.I headed away from the dying night behind me, and taken up with a sudden love and ecstatic joy, I began to run and leap and fly in little bounds, and the birds wheeled in the sky and clouds formed and dissolved sadly, and the sun burned fiercely for me, and in the distant greatness the few stars that remained exploded or didn't and every molecule of my being hummed with some content smile, and happiness bloomed out of everything! And I wanted to take that exclamation mark I just created, and place it as a cloud in the sky for all the country to see, and I did. Or maybe I just listened to this beautiful, beautiful song a few times, and let my mind wander.

37. Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal

My father says there was snow in winter when I was a kid, there was white Christmasses, and I remember them. I remember wrapping up and opening the front door, my two little brothers stuffed inside coats like eskimos, tumbling out into the cold. Making thin and uneven snowmen, coal for eyes, dirty black watering out into the white, little teary trickles. It's a long time since I held a piece of coal. We don't live in that house now.My father also says there was real summers in this country, once. When he talks like this he talks like he was back in that old warm farmhouse, briquettes roasting and strips of yellowy fly paper hanging from the ceiling when I looked up. When I was out in the fields, he says. You'd take off your jumper and you wouldn't put it back on you till you went back to school, that was a summer. In my mind he's pausing in the field, the grass hacked to yellow straw sticking out angrily after the harvest, leaning on a pike, but he's not some young man.This song, oddly, is both summery and wintry. It's a little like going into hibernation, no matter the weather.

36. The Avalanches - Since I Left You



This song is all apples and oranges, and the mixed drinks that remind you of them, and smiling faces, and the bodies and behinds you've left behind.

35. Devendra Banhart - At the Hop



If you listen to this enough, long enough for the words to stop hopping, and for the singer to stop smiling, you'll hear the heartbreak hiding behind each verse.

34. Michael Knight - When Will You Collect Your Boxes?


This represents the record as a whole, a break-up song not weighed down by bitterness, with lyrics that come unexpectedly heavy to you, like a friend coming into your home, and suddenly pouring their heart out in your kitchen. It's like an old and forgotten love song, or an old love letter, with dust scattered and stuck in the creases of the paper, over which you once spilled the few words that you really meant. All those feelings tied to the paper, so warm in the past, feeling cold in the present. This is also a song for anyone who once found the person they could always love, even when shopping for curtains in Ikea. This is a song that doesn't bother with any of the normal love songs things, because it's not about the kind of love that only needs two chords and a chorus, it's the kind of love put into a song where the piano tears a little under the weight, but still finishes, and falls silent. When the vocals and the noise vanish, there is a real sense of loneliness, like being in your house or apartment on your own waiting for someone to come home, thinking "this is what it would be like," a melding of longing and wishfulness. This is a break-up song (and a break-up album) but it's not bitter, it's been softened by the warmth, like the wrought frame of a fireplace. Even though there's nobody at home with you, there once was. Looking out at the rain, you're still inside, the embers in the hearth are still red, the house is still warm.

33. Samamidon - Saro

In adapting old dusty American-settled songs like this, Sam Amidon is being pretty damn postmodern about love and loneliness and the unbearable lightness of being apart. It's a bit easier to understand the great depth of these feelings in a historical setting, with oceans between outstretched hands and fingers, but it's not the context that makes this little piece of music great. It's all the little angels fluttering about the poor narrator's head, winging this way on that on violin strings like living puppets, attracted by the longing full-hearted thoughts that send his gaze to the ground he's found himself walking, attracted like moths to a flame. In the weird way that even when caught up in feelings like this one, so alone and distracted by your longing that it's as if you've forgotten to get out of the rain, you are a bit closer to life, or God, or humanity or whatever it is that makes such depth of sorrow possible and real.

32. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - In This Home On Ice



It sounds a little unusual, and I can't necessarily explain it, but some songs appear to me to be shrouded in colour, some weird fog of certain tones, a crashing mix of paint, of certain hues and shades. This has been happening for some years now, and it would seem the colour I like the most is a mix of purple and pink, deep and rich, like some distant mountaintop, or the inking of a sunset with the tinge of night's hem. It is bright and dark like cartoon bruising, the kind of colour that usually only appears in the sky.
This song appears in that colour to me, and I'm not sure why.

31. Parenthetical Girls - A Song for Ellie Greenwich


When Parenthetical Girls sing about love, they don't sing about the kind of love that tells you a heart is a soft red spade-shaped thing. They sing like it's a lump of twitching muscle, involuntarily pulsing and pushing affections around like it does blood. This band makes everything sound beautifully imperfect. They play piano that sounds shaky and nervous, they sing softly in and out of key, they strain every instrument nicely, and maybe with all this, they make a point. Maybe, they're telling us, falling in love is inviting a lot of minor chords into your life, and that's okay. You can find your own happiness in them.

christmas eve

Auld Lang Syne - Writhing Days

To celebrate: a Christmas song from one of the most under-rated bands I've ever heard. It's a real smokey epic, a smouldering yarn from what sounds like an extended family of noises. Trust me, it's a grower.

Merry Christmas everyone!

songs of the decade: part six

53. Bright Eyes - The First Day Of My Life



Listen to this, turning a globe in your ends, dotting the places you've been: I was born here, here and here.

52. Uzi + Ari - Don't Black Out

I've noticed I tend to be quite partial to anything that concerns itself thematically with the link between falling asleep and the cold. I'm not sure why, maybe some sort of Hibernian affinity for the idea of hibernation, or maybe because I'm lazy, or maybe because my family name actually means 'the sleepy'. Anyway, I'm a sucker for that kind of thing, and that kind of thing is exactly what Ben Shepard does here, and he does it brilliantly. This song sounds like it was dreamt up, written and recorded in the midnight hours before slumber overtakes us. It's like a bed I keep coming back to.

51. Feist - 1,2,3,4



One, two, three, and four, like my four children surrounding me, gazing with whatever smile it was that won me, their mother's smile, maybe, simple and homely, and mine.

50. Múm - Green Grass of Tunnel



I cannot listen to this song unless it's dark outside, unless I'm somewhere sleepy and warm, and I can properly appreciate the way the singer here, here voice sounds like a blanket.

49. Efterklang - Cutting Ice to Snow

This song tries so hard to be cold. Look at that title! Hear the piano being tapped at like water dripping from icicles. Still, the sun keeps everything bright, glazing off in the distance, melting snow, warming hearts.

48. The Knife - Heartbeats



This song speaks about one night, but it's the same one night that everyone finds themselves going out looking for, a night of closeness and shared breath and warmth and feeling that we want to seek out. This song gets it so right, it could almost be shorthand.

47. Arms - Shitty Little Disco



A song which seems, when you really turn your head and listen to it, to be put together like some kind of constellation, guitar lines and streaking synths laid out and drawn together against a sparse black background, soft and big and beautiful, and telling some simple story ...in which Todd goes out, gets moody, drunk and sick, but ends up with a girl whose name he kinda forgets. This is the kind of story that sounds much, much better in a song, and he knows it, so he gives the story guitars that are angry yet catchy, vocals that are gentle yet insistent, and a beat that just won't fucking quit.

46. Page France - Say Wolf in the Summertime



Happy but not naive. Poppy but not cliched. Bouncy but not silly. Brilliant!

45. Peter Broderick - Games Again



This is the closing song to one of my favourite records of this year. It takes a melody first played in the album's first moments, and wraps itself up in it, making it bigger and bolder. It's like putting your little imprint on an apartment you've found somewhere when you move in, when you push your furniture at angles to the wall, when you've filled the kitchen with your food, when you've put up your posters and left your books on desks, when you've slept in your new bed until it's no longer new - and then the day comes when you leave. You pack up these things in boxes, tight and full and pressed down, like the feeling you get when you hold back tears. You pick up your clothes, and use the key a final time, and you undo all the things you did with such simple joy. You shut the door a last time, temporarily homeless. You bid farewell to a place you made part of you.

44. The New Pornographers - Myriad Harbor

This song in particular is really something, just for the way that opening melody has the strange effect of both knocking you off your feet and raising you up. It's an incredible piece of songwriting, and as with most Bejar songs, there's nothing good enough I can say about it.

43. Outkast - Hey Ya!



Don't let the laughter here fool you - this song is beautifully put together, and it pulls you together when you need it, with a chorus like a surprise party.

42. Frog Eyes - Bushels



This song is a country all of its own. It must be, because it doesn't sound like anywhere where regular people would live.

41. Sigur Ros - #4 {Njósnavélin}



Like sailing tall ships made of snow invading the sun, to borrow a phrase.

{I know this has been delayed well beyond the point of irony, but my reasons are good.}

how they are

Peter Broderick - Pulling The Rain

If I could go back through my life and assign different songs to different scenes, rescoring them maybe, then this song would be for the times I sat as a child, still and invisible, in darkened cars, hearing the steady patter of rain on the roof, waiting for someone to come back, and take me home, or maybe, like one night, called to the house of a relative, in the silent moonless countryside, waiting to be told it's okay to come in, waiting to know how bad the news is.
This is not a cheery song. But it sounds like it's exactly the kind of song it means to be. It's from Peter Broderick's most recent album, and the rest of the album is as lovely as this.

{Buy}