Parade of Lights :: "Just Give It Up"

Tapping the same genome that M83's "Midnight City" and the Big Pink's "Dominos" made deservedly famous, Parade of Lights, a Los Angeles band, release a stunning first single, "Just Give It Up." Made for late nights and the fuzzy neon of downtown, "Just Give It Up" smashes its way through a shout along arrangement rooted in an enormous back beat and a karate-chop vocal loop that offers an implied and metaphorical violence. There is even a hint of the Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy" in the melody. It is, of course, about capitulation. On the surface, this all could be a ham-fisted allegory about sex, but grant them a bit of license and assume this surrender is lyrical, a grand giving in to the imperatives of dark bars and good looking people with downcast eyes, a dance floor burner for the zip codes of our perpetual disaffection.



Download :: Parade of Lights - "Just Give It Up"

Top 50 of 2009 :: 5-2 [Give me a lake I can dive into]

5. Wild Light - "California On My Mind"

In the way The Who used to talk about, music and place and circumstance can intersect in a powerful way. When charging out of San Francisco last March, listening to Wild Light's debut record that Columbia had so nicely sent over, I was caught at the intersection of place-specific lyrics, my disposable income, wanderlust, some record industry contacts and one great song, "California On My Mind." With its seminal lyric and instruction, "Give me a lake that I can dive into" and its vulgar interjection, "Fuck California," Wild Light issued a site-specific instruction. We lost a friend to California this year and I spent a lot of time there. In another year, these would be confounding variables but, in 2009, it was the right confluence of place and time.

4. Phoenix - "1901"

The opening minute and 19-seconds of "1901," are good but not obviously epic. But at 1:19 something changes. The arrangement, running like an escaped inmate, shifts into another gear. The synths notch up a key and the guitars churn, while the lyrics insist, "Falling, falling, falling." Phoenix had officially taken synthesized rock as far as it could go. It is borderline nonsense but it recalled something I read in 2003 about Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out." What made the song so seminal was not that it was empirically good; it was that it could have been just good and it they pushed it to be great. You probably remember where you were the first time you heard the second movement of "Take Me Out." You will remember the second movement, the last step of the chorus, of Phoenix and "1901."

3. Metric - "Gimme Sympathy"



Emily Haines went to South America to write Metric's latest record, Fantasies. We knew this because the band and their publicity staff released a video of Haines, perched soulfully at a keyboard, playing supposed lead-single, "Help, I'm Alive." Of course, sitting at track six on the record was a different song, "Gimme Sympathy." Haines encourages us in the song's first lyrics to, "Get hot, get too close to the flame/wild, open space." It is a meditation on youth, risk and chance. "We're so close to something better left unknown," Haines reflects, before asking if we'd rather be The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. We are encouraged to choose the former, as she asks us to play, "Here Comes The Sun." It might take a trip to Argentina to pull that off.

2. The Big Pink - "Dominos"

It was a text from a friend who saw The Big Pink at Bowery Ballroom. It was a colleague singing the lyrics to me from a mixtape I'd made her. It was a tweet from a photographer friend who saw the band at Lit. They all reflected the dumbstruck inarticulateness that comes when you've seen something so massive, so comprehensive, that you can't quite describe it to others. You hang clauses and you don't finish sentences and you use words like, "Whoa," with no ironic implications. For me it was in July when "Dominos" kicked its way out of my headphones. Since, the industrial-pop hasn't left my side, finding its way into my life at odd junctures and with consistent ferocity. Of course, if words don't totally do "Dominos" justice, you won't have heard it here first.

The Big Pink :: "Dominos"

If love isn't a battlefield, it might be a street fight. After yesterday's cloying meditation on relationships and heartbreak, we're prepared to move on to something else. And coming hotly tipped out of the UK, The Big Pink are more than prepared to handle it. Their record doesn't pretend to have all the answers but debut single, "Dominos" is one answer to the emotional Rubik's cube.

And if love is a street fight, this is surely the angle of the winner (if winning is, well, hurting). The hook lyric is "these girls fall like dominos." The implication is, obviously, that these girls fall far too quickly in love with the narrator. Whether you agree or disagree, he admits, "three words we shared too early on" and "as soon as I love her, it's been too long." Hell, it's vicious, uncompromising cruelty set against a massive industrial pop back-drop. Big Pink unleashes something that, I suspect, is deeply personal and commercially viable. If emotional pain can be marketed to those who feel victimized, you suppose it can be sold to those who inflict it. Is it possible that the felon has a defendant? Absolutely. The constitution more than promises it.

Listen :: Big Pink - "Dominos"
Bonus :: Big Pink - "Velvet"