Top 50 Songs of 2013 :: [10-2]

Welcome to our annual countdown of the 50 best songs of the calendar year. Songs must be from an EP, LP or demo released during 2013, and no band may appear twice. Today, we count down 10 to 2.

10. Pure Bathing Culture - "Dream The Dare"



It was nothing but post-Beach House jams from Portland's Pure Bathing Culture on "Dream The Dare". In a swimming and viscous arrangement, they still plead, "give me forward motion". The chorus proved to be this propulsion, caring the listener to a sophisticated chord progression and resolution in the second verse. The enduring lyrics, "Come on" and "It's a cage, your chest, do you like what you find?", both urging us forward and outside of ourselves, a most important message in the age of the Snow Globe-sized kingdom of the self.

9. First Rate People - "Dark Age" and the Challenger remix of "Dark Age"





In a rare (and cheap) tie, First Rate People ties with itself and the Challenger remix of "Dark Age". Another song about getting older in a terrifying age of modernity and isolation - they call this, "a note on your phone to remind you tomorrow, 'new keys for a new cage'" - FRP saw their original source material done with even greater bombast and nostalgia by John Ross of Challenger. While we await the 2014 material from FRP member Jon Lawless and Ross (the band name Jo(h)n seems like it would work here), the two synthesizer masters occupy a dual spot for one of the best songs and best remixes of the year.

8. Marika Hackman - "Bath Is Black"



Recalling the harp tones of Joanna Newsome and the British austerity of Laura Marling, Marika Hackman provided one of the most promising breakthroughs of 2013 with "Bath Is Black". It is a world of cold water and old soap, bodies covered in tar and stuck together. The second movement, a little synthetic woodwind push-up, snaps against Hackman's lilting vocal. Full of layers and complexity, "Bath Is Black" never concerned itself with making anyone feel good; the justice proved poetic at best. "You're not coming home tonight," the last and most important lyric, was either edict or realization, and either way it killed.

7. Rainy Milo - "Deal Me Briefly"



If there's a likely and currently unheralded heir to the Lorde throne in 2014, Rainy Milo presents a compelling case beyond her precocious age (18), her solid production connections (Chet Faker here), her label association (EMI to Lorde's UMG) and her winsome but take-no-prisoners voice. Lily Allen isn't a bad comparison save its obvious limitations. "Deal Me Briefly" held one of the best choruses of 2013, a body-rolling, "You let me go so slow" as Milo fights with and against herself in the refrain. It was immediately addictive, demanding attention and a slow dance in the age of the diminishing attention span. In 2014, she may well be living the fantasy.

6. Wet - "U Da Best"/"You're The Best"



Wet wasn't kidding with the title, "U Da Best" when this dropped in the spring. By the time they were Columbia signees with the Neon Gold imprint, the title had changed to "You're The Best", the first sign that the band positions itself for a dominant, corporate 2014. "You're The Best" demolished itself on lyrics like, "All I know is when you hold me/ I still feel lonely, lonely when you hold me", resisting easy treatment and crafting a complex modern love song. Even in an era of increasing superlatives - everything is now "the best" or "the worst" or "the funniest" or the "dumbest" ever - "You're The Best" and its final edicts of "figure out the rest"
and "quit while we're ahead" suggested a rich landscape beneath. The hook stabbed and stuck, a bubbling guitar arrangement that held the transformative vocal of Kelly Zutrau. The listener falls in love with her immediately, left, like her, to figure out the rest later.

5. Born Ruffians - "Needle"



"Needle" bore the marks of being a hip-hop song disguised in rock garb. Born Ruffians opened the locus in a Fleet Foxes-homage before "Needle" lifted off with propulsive guitars and head-nodding rhythms. It was more of a tweaker than anything the Foxes would have made, an enormous and washing chorus that sat on the ceiling looking down at the listener quixotically. The visual simile proved alternately bizarre, "I belong to no one like the watermelon," and meta-cognitive, "I belong to no one, a song without an album." Strange and instantly singable, "Needle" offered the way "away" as final edict of the chorus suggested, alone as the new together.

4. Haim - "The Wire"



Formally and informally, I said enough disparaging things about Haim that I shouldn't be allowed to include them on this list, but, "The Wire," like all great pop, is simply undeniable. The lyrics are generic, and this is one of the great strengths of this song as it transitions to heavy-rotation at Top 40 radio sometime in early 2014. "The Wire" ripped and pulsed, a borrowed Thin Lizzy guitar and a clap-track designed to break necks, the yelps and undulations of the chorus resounding as the singable modulations of a modern teenage wasteland. For the worse, 15 years ago teenage girls idolized Britney, Christina and Jessica. Now, they have Haim and Lorde, two artists who largely write their own music and are comfortable being perceived as weird, girls who successfully recast what being girls can be. For that alone, "The Wire" and "Royals" should be the two most important songs of the year.

3. Lorde - "Royals"



I remember where I was the first time I heard "Royals," always a mark of a song's durability and impact. Ready to hate it - Lana Del Rey leaves this writer immensely flat - "Royals" instead charmed instantly. I quickly became a Lorde Birther - there was no way she was actually 16, I thought - before becoming a Lorde evangelist: This girl, who cares how old, was the absolute Truth. It was just "Royals," the rest of the Love Club EP was promising, as was "Tennis Court" and then her debut LP. They were songs where the image was about destroying imagery. Maybe a partial closing argument for postmodernism, this teenager could make meaning out of the abscence of meaning. More accurately, she could salvage meaning from imagery. Above all, "Royals" was a great jam, the hottest and most essentialized version of the R&B diaspora.

2. Arcade Fire - "Afterlife"



"Afterlife" was the "Sprawl II" of Reflektor, the second-to-last song and proof that the band still had a great pop song in a challenging record. For an album about division and the terrible forces of modern life, "Afterlife" was the most human of songs, privileging our screams and shouts, proving that these tiny human voices could make something from the madness. It made you want to fall in love, or to struggle in saving the love you had, asking the pregnant question, "When love is gone where does it go?". The answer was nowhere, as Butler sang, "Afterlife, what an awful word," there was no next movement, just this. Of course, given the stakes of life and death, or maybe, more accurately, figuring a way to live coherently while alive, "Afterlife" asked for, maybe even demanded, our energies.

Slow Machete :: "Grey Eyed Bird"

A looping and brilliantly exotic slice of pop, Slow Machete's "Grey Eyed Bird" emerges from a cacophony of samples to coalesce into a brilliant, organized architecture. The project is a mixture of six Haitian vocalists and DC-based producer, Joseph Shaffer. The outcome is something that is equal parts Lord Huron, Pela (the vocals especially recall the "The Trouble With River Cities") and Tune-Yards. The difference here is the moral authority, not exclusively Western, Developed-World artists doing Developing World pop. The globe trotting proves decent and equitable, not the unintentionally exploitative pseudo-imperialism of a band like Vampire Weekend. Given that Arcade Fire's coming record is said to be inspired by Haitian rhythms, it makes sense to get closer to the essence, a project in which Slow Machete appears to be actively engaged.



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Evan Andree :: "Falafal"

One of the best, and most unexpected, songs to come out of the community of unsigned artists in 2013 is Evan Andree's "Falafal". The phonetic get-around in the title is an analog for "Feel awful", the song's real title lyric. Breathy synthesizers and plaintive guitars open and close the arrangement, the middle full of Andree's affected falsetto. It's a plea for common ground, even if the common ground is troubled: "I want to share something with anyone else," he sings before spinning into the sky under the power of the song's chorus, "I feel awful, feel awful/ Won't you feel awful, feel awful with me?" Objectively, it isn't the most inspiring edict, but the hook is an electric mixture of Arcade Fire tropes and Oberhofer execution, a refrain with snapping downbeat and soaring, singable, four-note signature. It will be in your head for days, demanding repeat, a towering pop monolith to the depths of codependent misery.

Eliza and the Bear :: "Friends"

Fists raised against an obfuscated enemy, youth in the vagaries of revolt, Eliza and the Bear continue to craft their everything-is-happening-all-the-time pop on latest single, "Friends". The shout-along vocal refrain, "I've got friends, I've got family here," is both reassurance and battle cry, a protective outrage and a communal love in the same breath. The high-fret guitar works adds an element of drama as the band storms through a taut little arrangement, like being dropped into the second-half of a song from the first Arcade Fire record. Eliza and the Bear are poppier by a large margin, an ebullient horn continuing to announce their arrival, for it is only a matter of time before these songs seemingly about everything are seemingly everywhere.

Tournament of Hearts :: "Shake It Off"

The opening sounds give allusion to the chord progression of "Wake Up," an initiation to Los Angeles band Tournament of Hearts' single, "Shake It Off". It is potentially irritating maneuver - like staring down a stranger who looks like a slightly less attractive version of someone you used to see quite seriously - that instead rings with a more muted but still substantive power. It isn't "Wake Up," - and how could it be? - which along with "Fake Empire" will be one of the songs that will retroactively define the second Bush years as "Teen Spirit" defined the first, but it emerges as big room music, something aimed firmly at the decorative molding between the wall and the ceiling. "Shake It Off" is no think-piece, self-serious synths and guitars with a bit of chunk, a title lyric designed to turn into both chorus and edict.

Ra Ra Riot :: "Beta Love"

Ra Ra Riot jag in a new direction on latest single "Beta Love", afraid and ebullient for the future of their band and their sound. Put another way, it's a long way from the strings-first rock songs they arranged at Syracuse. They played in basements before storming the New York rock scene in late 2006 with a set at Canal Room that offered a take on orchestral rock that put even Arcade Fire on notice. And then the band struggled to bring their intensity to the studio, to record accurately the ruckus from the stage. It never quite happened, save maybe on the bouncy, Honda-approved single, "Boy" from their 2010 LP. On "Beta Love," treble is the move. Buzzy keyboards strain against their outer markers and Wesley Miles, one of the best voices in indie rock, eventually ends up soaring almost into auto-tune and, finally, lands awash in layers upon layers of his own voice. The strings make their requisite appearance, a charming bit of the baroque in "this city of robot hearts" as Miles describes the hyper-modernity of "Beta Love." It is pretty and a little disturbing, smiling into the void, synths aimed at the sky and neon lighting what little we can see, the language and fear of the future in the same song.

Eliza and the Bear :: "Brother's Boat"

Essex, UK band Eliza and the Bear have redrafted gravity on expansive and hooky single, "Brother's Boat." Like a distended and outraged Edward Sharpe, the band traffics in the same always-be-rising orchestral pop first outlined by Polyphonic Spree and later darkened and perfected by Arcade Fire. "Brother's Boat" is more electric guitar driven than any of the aforementioned bands, they are also a perfect "indie crossover," the kind that makes A&R's from Columbia think romantically how this song might look in the trailer for whatever becomes next year's Beasts of the Southern Wild or, better, as the closing 25-seconds of an advertisement for a Nissan automobile. An intern should be scrambling down the hall from their cubicle before the final chorus; this is that good. The two driving lyrics, "just let it go," and "you left your family home," are as brutal as they are oblique, that kind of general, life-affirming pop onto which the listener can project a multitude of personal specifics. By the final, crashing conclusion, it is not just the arrangement that touches its outer markers, it is a band more than ready to expand beyond itself.

Freelance Whales :: "Locked Out"

I once disparaged Freelance Whales as "Lou Pearlman's Arcade Fire." It was a joke that required at least a cursory knowledge of 1990s pop culture, a sort of backhanded compliment to Freelance Whale's tight sound and nearly adorable assortment of Urban Outfitters-clad members. It was the kind of thing you say too loudly between sets at Music Hall of Williamsburg. Their music felt cloying, almost claustrophobic, the lyrics about Hannah taking the stairs, "elevator" rhyming with "Now and Later." It was the end of indie rock, or so this writer would have told you then, either undaunted or unconcerned with the fact that indie rock's obituary had already been written nearly a decade earlier. (Editor's note: In a sense, this marks the coterminous beginning and end of indie rock, or perhaps, the death of indie rock as a real thing meaning "independently released rock" and the beginning of it as a style genre.) So, Freelance Whales are back with a new record, Diluvia, and a new song, "Locked Out" and it is a bit more atmospheric, still prominently featuring chimes and adorable male-female harmonies. The last movement and last lyric, "We have the rations to go anywhere," turns the aesthetic outward, making this a journey and making us all prepared for it. This is ambitious and worthwhile, not a bit planned and packaged, unlike, say, a retroactive apology for a biting comment from three years ago.

Bright Moments :: "Tourists"

A session and touring horn player for Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem and Beirut, Kelly Pratt releases his latest solo work under the name, Bright Moments, an allusion to our best selves. The album, Natives, and its first single, "Tourists" is amalgamated World Music, horns holding serve along side swaying melodies and a piano chord progression that resolves in such sweet fashion it nearly rots your teeth. This is Pratt at his finest, winking at Zach Condon, slightly un-Balkanized Eastern thematic pop making its way out from under some lazily big ideas (travel, tourism, airplane sound effects, etc) like afternoon sun waiting for a cloud bank to blow away. The whimsical synths won't or can't provide the marching orders, neither can the hand claps or Pratt's lilting falsetto, but the piano progression and the horn intro and exitlude do. This is fresh and buzzes with life, an earnest strike at making it on your own. Pratt's next-to-last lyrics, the potentially pedantic, "Go on, go on" even feel authentic and real. A guy who played with and for everyone else, now plays only for himself, exactly the type of travel we need.

Listen :: Bright Moments - "Tourists"

Scenes From The Suburbs :: [Review And Comment On A Police State Lest We Kid Ourselves In 2011]

In Scenes From The Suburbs, Spike Jonze's symbolic film accompaniment to Arcade Fire's 2010 release, The Suburbs, a cadre of white Houston teens face off against one another and their families under the umbrella of an ever-present, menacing police state. SWAT teams in black hoods patrol the streets, even at one point gunning down an innocent in cold blood, an image that looks all too real to anyone with a YouTube account in Bahrain, Syria, Egypt, Oakland or Detroit. The film's narrative fulcrum involves the two main characters held against a chain link fence as their friendship crumbles under the questioning of a faceless police officer. They've done nothing wrong, and this is the point - the metaphorical figures of state security forces holding the place for the unsettling panic of kids with so little to do, even less to stand for, slowly being ripped apart by something they do not understand and cannot quite make out. The violence in the Suburbs is lyrical, imaginary and important, but these invocations have weight. For in too many parts of America's inner cities, you can recast Jonze's work with teenagers of a different color, pull the film shoot out of the subdivisions and into the street, and these bits of symbolism become all too real.

Top 50 Songs of 2010 :: 5-2 [Now we're screaming, "Sing the chorus again"]

5. Tokyo Police Club - "Breakneck Speed"



It was a comparatively laid back song from a frenetic band that dominated the spring and summer of 2010. For a record that began with ambient beeps, Tokyo Police Club's Champ had its first single sitting tight in the three hole waiting to stumble out with shabby guitars and slurring lyrics exploding into a sea of hi-fi guitars. These dynamic shifts proved to be the genius of "Breakneck Speed," especially with its driving metaphor, motif and lyric, "It's good to be back/good to be back," opening at the 1.12 mark and defining the emotional character of a band releasing their first record since 2007. It was one of those fist-swinging, life-affirming, shout-along moments, "It's good to be back". You couldn't sing it loud enough.

4. Beach House - "Norway"

"Norway" made you a little seasick if you listened to it closely enough. The tonal quality of the keyboards warped up and down in pitch only slightly, but it was more than enough for the listener to feel a mild disquiet, take a deep breath and try to focus on the horizon. This was the sound of unsettling. However, Beach House on "Norway", like the rest of Teen Dream, was comfortable in their treatment of troubling themes because the melodies behind these cold medicine keyboards were simple, beautiful pop. Even "Norway," for its challenging verses, is breathless, pulsing and remarkably singable in the chorus. This does not even account for the bridge - and surely, no one wrote better bridges in 2010 than Beach House - and the way it frames the final chorus, a sea of twirling vocals lifting Victoria Legrand up as she moans into the storm. It was enough to just breath it in.

3. The National - "Bloodbuzz Ohio"

The drums announced their return, and in the case of "Bloodbuzz Ohio," the drums did not equivocate the return of the Kings of Indie Rock in 2010, The National. Like a fighter running combinations, the band open "Bloodbuzz" with rapid fire percussion before laying over a steady piano progression, finding in this combination a strange and less stable cousin to "Fake Empire." Berninger fires his lazy wisdom in his head-spinning trip back to the band's roots in Ohio, reflecting both on his impermanence there, "Ohio don't remember me," and the current economic status quo, "The floors are falling out from everybody I know." But there is surprise affection in this return as Berninger muses with regret, "I never thought about love when I thought about home." The power of this nostos carried the National through a tour de force album, a return in its own right to the frustrated brilliance of Alligator, proving that which was left in the dark, behind and forgotten, is not just fuel for reflection, but what moves us onward.

2. Arcade Fire - "We Used To Wait"



One of the most moving songs of the year was about standing still. Win Butler and Arcade Fire crafted the fantastically tense, "We Used To Wait" to address exactly this disjoint. Butler too, along with many of his contemporaries, stares into his personal history with a mixture of fascination and horror. It is his delicacy in handling the source material that sets both song and record apart. Bulter's curiosity is evident, though not particularly judgemental, as he sifts through seemingly bland vignettes of his youth, like the romantic sloth of postal delivery. There aren't easy answers here, suburbia cast equally as terrifying and beautiful. In fact, Butler's complex and divided feelings about his own upbringing, the ability to find richness in superficial American experience, are the soul of The Suburbs and the emotional core of "We Used To Wait." The record's unsettling cover art revealed the key. We are poised behind a car in the driveway of the subdivided neighborhood of Butler's youth. The only glimpse of ourselves will be in the rear view mirror as we move forward (and backward) to explore what is in front of us and what is left inside.

Arcade Fire :: "Sprawl II" [Thunderlust Remix]

A week ago we drove into Houston on I-10 with Arcade Fire on the stereo and highway ramps zooming around us like tangential plot lines. In aching suitability, Win Butler's opus about Houston sprawl played while we navigated the same roads that, allegedly, were built before the towns. Of course, none of this was about us. We weren't from there, only acting as modern tourists in a pavement still-life, critically-acclaimed album on our stereo and New York City licenses in our wallets. If this was Kipling it would be called the Northeasterners' Burden. We can be insufferable.

But there was something moving about Regine's insistence on the album's last full (and maybe best) track, "Sprawl II." For a minute we were living in the sprawl, waiting at long lights and trying to find parking at a BBQ joint our friend recommended. This American life is confusing and expansive, and it is increasingly paved and far flung, making our connections daily choices between life and death. Thunderlust will bear this out for us in glittering and propulsive fashion, turning the navigation of the sprawl into a head-nodding, wide-eyed journey. We are, for four minutes, all together.

Arcade Fire - Sprawl II (thunderlust remix) by thunderlust

New York's Top 5 Arcade Fire Moments

In honor of the end of a week already too full of the band, we celebrate with Arcade Fire's Top 5 Moments in New York City. They range from the sublime to the downright quirky. For those of you there for either of the last two night's shows at MSG, you have our jealousy and our respect. For those of you in the crowd for any of these, it doesn't get any better.

#5 - Playing Union Square in the middle of the night (2006)

The video is grainy and the songs weren't all theirs (this, New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle") but it undeniably happened in the middle of the night near 14th St.



#4 A 20,000 person sing-a-long (2010)

In the band's triumphant return to New York they closed the Garden with their signature song and all the back up vocals you could ask for. Not their most transcendent moment but certainly their largest (Internet audience, this includes you).



#3 Playing David Byrne with David Byrne (2005)

After 2004's Funeral the band attracted its share of rock star Illuminati. In 2005, David Byrne took the stage with the band at Irving Plaza to play one of his hits, "This Must Be This Place (Naive Melody)". Byrne looks like a spastic waiter at a Salsa club, but the band sounds great and the moment is entirely its own.



#2 Playing in the crowd at Judson (2007)

Arcade Fire took the stage at Judson Memorial Church by playing an unplugged version of "Wake Up" from the belly of the crowd. On the Neon Bible tour, Butler developed a habit of walking through the audience as either entry or exit, establishing a clear sense that the boundaries of viewer and performer would be as blurry as possible.



#1 The United Palace Theater take-over (2007)

Butler encouraged his audience to crash the stage and after a brief skirmish with security, this is exactly what happened. The band played "Wake Up" surrounded by bodies, obscuring them almost completely from view. Butler then stepped forward, through the maw and led a group chorus. To cap it off, in one of the all-time Rock Star moments, he stepped over the seats and walked straight out the back of the theater . I imagine him walking out on to the streets of Harlem thinking whatever thoughts you think after crushing 3,000 people at once. I am, of course, biased to this instance because I was there. Rolling Stone would pick up my photographer's pictures but not my review (it's cool, no hard feelings). To those in the crowd, it is the stuff of legend, hopefully like the MSG shows will be remembered by the time their next record is out in 2013.

Arcade Fire :: 2003 and 2010

Arcade Fire sold out two nights at Madison Square Garden, and they will broadcast the second show live tonight over the Internet at 10pm EST. There was a time in 2003 where they played rock clubs and wondered if "Wake Up" and "Keep The Car Running" would ever light anyone on fire. This video is from that time, before they were capital letter anything, before anyone arbitrarily loved or hated their albums. This video below is the first known Arcade Fire performance put to tape. This was a time when they packed against each other and played a tiny rock club; Tonight, they'll take 20,000 people to The Suburbs.

ARCADE FIRE Live 2003 from Bennett on Vimeo.

Arcade Fire :: The Suburbs [LP]

Arcade Fire's latest long-player, The Suburbs, released tomorrow morning, will be as frustrating and amazing a record as 2010 has to offer. The band's fans will be forced to choose if they like 2004's Arcade Fire or if they can accept a version of the band that is at once evolving, reflective and undeniably more adult. Gone are the rebellious (Lies, Lies!) statements of grief and youth, unless you count the suggestion in the middle of "Month of May" that kids should uncross their arms and, well, dance more. In their place is a record about growing up, about getting older and coming of age in a sprawling and intentionally fake American empire. In 2003 Win Butler, just 23, wrote Funeral about death and anger in the eyes of youth. In 2009, Butler, on the edge of 30, wrote The Suburbs about his childhood, getting out and that something inside us all that just might implode.

The Suburbs is not just an older man reflecting on his youth, it is a richer, more fully-realized version of a band coming to grips with its power and methodology. The rapid and drastic arrangement shifts that defined Funeral are noticeably absent here. There are no severe second movements, save the satisfying builds on "Rococo" and "Suburban War," and this iteration feels more logical than necessary. These are inward glances, not rocket-propelled marching orders, even during the haunting coda to "Suburban War" where Butler intones, "All my old friends/they don't know me now," as a church of thudding drums and strings builds behind him. There isn't always a twist here, sometimes just a mid-tempo reflection on things stuck deep in the schisms of the American psyche.

This is not to say the record has no soul. "Month of May" is a thundering statement of purpose, both outlining the meta-reasoning behind the record ("2009, 2010/wanna make a record how I felt then") and a State of the Union for the children of this disjointed, strip-mall America the band finds so horrific and fascinating. If there is a moment of direction, of easy answers, it is certainly when Butler moans, "I know it's heavy, I know it ain't light/but how you gonna lift it with arms folded tight." If the kids are going to make it out, they'll need to get on their feet and move around first.

Of the many lyrical motifs that tie the album together like all these pieces of knotted string, Butler is most transfixed by stasis, the time wasted and lost. We rode around in cars. We waited for something to happen. Our youth was protected and patient. The band finally suggests something different: that we dive into our consciousness, explode our myths, our upbringing and find connections in the maw of pseudo-idyllic suburban life. For a group that has been so outwardly expressive, so unrestrained, this marks a different pathos. Before we raise our fists, we must turn in on ourselves, find the beginnings we deny and settle the rebellion within.

Arcade Fire :: "Month of May" and "The Suburbs"

As we predicted with terrifying accuracy, Arcade Fire have returned with a new record, The Suburbs, set for release in early August. We've got the streaming player from the band so you can take a trip through the first two songs, "Month of May" and "The Suburbs". "Month of May" is a burner, full of down-stroke guitar and can-you-keep-up drums. "The Suburbs" is a slower mediatation, referencing the saloon piano tones of Ambulance LTD and The Walkmen. If Neon Bible found the band at war with souless faith, on The Suburbs, they've moved their conflict from the city and taken it back to your parent's garage.