Top 50 Songs of 2011 :: 50-41 [They're setting fire to my face]

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 2011 and no band may appear twice. Today, we count down 50 to 41.

50. California Wives - "Tokyo" 

Nothing felt more neon than California Wives' "Tokyo" in 2011. It was nothing but synths and guitars, a chorus rooted in a geographic tautology, "They're building houses and lights in Tokyo." The brilliance was relative and it was made manifest in the metallurgic guitar chords and keyboard progressions. It all felt like little dabs of mercury slipping around the surface of a table.

49. All The Apparatus - "Let's Go Ride Bikes"

All Apparatus appeal to anyone who enjoys the work of Los Campesinos and anyone who enjoys fun. But you don't need to be watching that "Grab Some Buds" Budweiser commercial to feel like even your most asinine behaviors hold a life-and-death importance. For this Portland band, it is the simple act of riding bikes outdoors that doubles as a thesis statement, a raison d'etre. It is youth in revolt; youth screaming a silly chorus; youth playing big horns, guitars and chimes. It is unanxious youth in an age of increasing anxiety.

48. Letting Up Despite Great Faults - "Sophia In Gold"



We were arguably more into Letting Up Despite Great Faults' cover art on their 2011 EP, a sepia toned shot of some girl's knees, than we were into their music. This is compliment to that girl's knees and "Sophia In Gold", a snappy little slice of electro-pop that reminds the listener of a more seriously heartsick Jimmy Tamborello. LUDGF finally quit on the girl, whoever she is, saying, "I can't say your lines for you." This is a final act, to be sure, and a good one at that.

47. Ducktails - "Hamilton Road"

Certainly the most underrated chorus of the year belonged to Ducktails, a Real Estate side project, and their song "Hamilton Road". Nothing sounded more like a lazy summer afternoon played over a broken stereo as the band mushed through the awesomely singable, "We sit by the water". It wasn't even two-and-a-half minutes, and it didn't need to be.

46. The Echo Friendly - "Same Mistakes"

First, The Echo Friendly isolate the guitars, then add a clap track and the most distant male and female vocals of the year. If it sounds obliteratingly sad, it is. They're talking to each other, ostensibly about, well, the "Same Mistakes", but it never feels conversational. These two parties divert and merge with each other like two lost sides of a double helix, intersecting for a momentary duet before chasing each other away again.

45. Deleted Scenes - "Bedbedbedbedbed"

We loved that Deleted Scenes gave the world such a head-nodding single in 2011 and we loved that they gave us the central lyric five times in a row. No one made a better case for the lack of a need for a space-bar as the band reflected on a woman who pulled their act together, cut their hair and made them get out of bed in the morning. It sounded like The Shins on too much cold medicine which was entirely great.

44. Gauntlet Hair - "Top Bunk"

Gauntlet Hair are one of those awesome college radio bands with a good gimmick (the reverb thing) and an uncommon boldness. "Top Bunk" snapped like their previous work, only this time it changed time signatures with the effortlessness of Art School Rock. It spun off the rails toward the end, grinding the echo-chamber to a halt. The original statement of purpose still stood: We can make huge music with three guys and an effects pedal.

43. The Radio Dept. "The One"

The Radio Dept. had their best year in history, releasing a double-disk compilation album featuring the previously unreleased, "The One" to go with a decade of singles. It was a slow-drive version of the band's usual cold keyboard, placed firmly on a reggae upbeat. This wouldn't be the same brilliance as "Heaven's On Fire" but it didn't contend to be so, more victory lap than finishing kick.

42. Yukon Blonde - "Fire"

If Family of the Year was going to break out in 2011-12, then Yukon Blonde was determined to be close behind, maybe even transcendent of their genre rivals. Both bands make pop with a distinctly Western feel, "Fire" featuring some slide guitar and an affinity for the apocalypse that you only find in musicians and certain circles of evangelical believers. Since the band qualifies as solidly the former and solidly not the latter, we assume their references to burning water and faces is purely metaphorical, but entirely sticky, a hook that lodged in your brain like it was its last day on planet earth.

41. Dominant Legs - "Hoop of Love" 

There is a world in which you can argue that Dominant Legs' "Hoop of Love" had the single best chorus of 2011. A shimmering slice of guitar pop, the song has a respectable pre-chorus, a vague portent to the take off that happens in the real refrain. Muttered asides about "keeping my mouth shut" blur into the completely elevating hook where the band yelps interrogatives about who will be the one to do a variety of things; they leave these questions unanswered. This fails to mention the bridge, an updated Belle and Sebastian inspiration, full of a flecking strum pattern and a final taxiing to the runway of "Hoop of Love".

Failed Novelist :: "Love Like A Knife"

Only a project so perfectly shabby, so rye, so unannoyingly ironic would call itself Failed Novelist. The creation of Luke Dsico, "Love Like A Knife" shimmers like a 70s dance cut with vocals that evoke a more sultry Casiotone For The Painfully Alone or a sexy Dominant Legs. The lyrical motif, "hey, baby," siezes attention like two blinks and a stare from across a crowded room. The name implies some kind of alternate dream, the artistic shrug of a man who set out to be a write and ended up making music, but that blinking stare comes with a wink. While Luke Dscio might like you to think this was an accident, the crafting is too delicate for that to be true. It just might not be as cool to call your band Underappreciated Musician.

Listen :: Failed Novelist - "Love Like A Knife"
Listen :: Failed Novelist - "Tangled"

Dominant Legs :: "About My Girls"

Easily the best EP of 2010, Dominant Legs officially released Young At Love And Life this week on Lefse. A collection of four songs operating at the edges of the twee catalogue with glittering synths and winking dilettante-ish guitars, this sounds like a stripped down Belle & Sebastian studio session from the Fold Your Hands Child days. On "About My Girls," booming Casio drum loops back an arrangement rife with flirty guitar and keys and we are left with the shabby brilliance of the chorus, "I just can't seem to forget about my girls." It is not unintentionally great.

Listen :: Dominant Legs - "About My Girls"

Dominant Legs :: "Clawing Out At The Walls"

Back in November we wrote one of those generational apologias through the lens of Dominant Legs' one-off "Young At Love And Life." Now, the downcast San Francisco pop duo are ready to release their first proper EP on Lefse, the band are previewing "Clawing Out At The Walls," a pebbled bit of shambling reflection. Centered on a bongo-beat and a lazy guitar line out of the Camera Obscura school, the song soars and dips under its own power, like a halfway broken ceiling fan in a room too hot for its own good. Singers Ryan Lynch and Hannah Hunt revel in this bit of claustrophobia in the chorus, "Don't you see we're clawing out at the walls?" We do see it, it just doesn't sound as troubling as we thought it might.

Listen :: Dominant Legs - "Clawing Out At The Walls"

[Elevator] Dominant Legs :: "Young at Love and Life"

Out of my top 20 favorite acquaintances, less than ten percent are in committed relationships. You could say this involves a troubling trend where the 90s grunge generation found that mastering disaffectedness came with terrifying consequences. Our ability not to be wowed by anything, to be made angry by little cultural slip-ups, to judge-first-lest-we-be-judged has left us strikingly alone. Our one skill: being unimpressed. Oh Love? Yeah, we saw them live a couple years back. They weren't even that good.

And yet, something else is at work. It is not simply a lost generation of youth reacting to over-stimulation, an intellectual community obsessed with post-modernism and a neo-romanticism that mostly involved things like Sex in the City. We aren't bad at love, we're just younger than you think. We will live far longer than we are comfortable with. In fact, it is possible we will see 105. Shot backwards through this space-time, we've been allowed infantalization longer and longer until we devolved into being these mostly taller children. We aren't bad at settling down. We are just young at love and life. Sounding a bit like Belle and Sebastian, Dominant Legs will bear this out for us. We might not remember how to be impressed, but I can assure you that this is impressive.

Listen :: Dominant Legs - "Young at Love and Life"