Top 50 Songs of 2013 :: [30-21]

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 30 to 21.

30. Prides - "Out of the Blue"



At the moment when you're reading this in March or June of 2014 and you've Google searched "new Glasgow band Prides" and you're realizing the "Out of the Blue" was one of the best songs of the previous year, don't feel guilty or ashamed. "Out of the Blue", like its title, came from nowhere and crushed the listening public at the point of its release in early 2013, a public still likely drunk on the success of CHVRCHES, and provided a slamming and singable synth symphony to dance yourself clean. That's the word from the future and the past.

29. Local Natives - "Heavy Feet"



In a year that Vampire Weekend thoroughly dominated the mainstream indie rock World Music scene, it was unfortunately easy to forget the dense success of Local Natives' second LP. "Heavy Feet", an alternatively plaintive and storming treatise, rode the back of friscalating drum riff and the soaring vocals of two lead vocalists. The hook lyric, "After everything", though "Heavy Feet" was much more about the present than anything else.

28. The Zolas - "Invisible"



"Invisible" emerged as a yippy and misbehaved single, a one-off from Vancouver power-poppers, the Zolas. Of course, like their other work, the chorus stabbed you in the chest and demanded utter complicity. It wasn't necessarily about Gyges' ring, but it did concern itself with the collapsing architecture of modernity. An incomplete but beautiful treatise on destruction, the listener found themselves singing, "When you need some oxygen, jump into the fire with us", an implication that burning it all down was a collective project.

27. Frightened Rabbit - "Backyard Skulls"



Frightened Rabbit, what else could they possibly have to offer? Listeners rode the misery plane into the hillside, absolute CFIT, on Midnight Organ Fight, before the band told us they weren't "miserable now" on the subsequent LP. It was a head-spinner as we arrived at their latest and its best track, "Backyard Skulls". Were we here to be destroyed or not? The lyrics concerned themselves with the things, the bodies, buried in our metaphorical backyards. Someone always finds these terrible memorials, "a long lost soul, like a skull beneath the ground". The pathos was turned to 11 even if we all, band and listener, knew we didn't feel feelings like that anymore.

26. Smith Westerns - "Varsity"




It was necessarily regrettable that the Smith Westerns best ever song, "Varsity" didn't merit more positive press. The record from which it originated was, unfortunately, poor. Containing only two good songs, "Varsity" was left nearly alone to fend for the band's credible and critical future. "I guess it's a point of view", they sang like relativists in the pre-chorus. The arrangement recalled a high school experience no one ever lived, a remembered self that never existed and a world that was only in dreams.

25. Junip - "Walking Lightly"



The menace of the drums belied the lyrics of "Walking Lightly", which largely concerned the responsible tread with which we collectively traipse the land. Jose Gonzalez whispered his whispering best, ushering the listener into a world, self-contained and complete, where he suggested something and nothing at once. It was one of the great and forgotten songs of 2013. Gonzalez, likely, wanted it this way.

24. Waxahatchee - "Brother Bryan"



If you didn't much care for Liz Phair, despite the endorsement of NPR, you weren't much for Waxahatchee in 2013. If Phair made you uncomfortable, if the hooks were too irremovable, Waxahatchee was a derivative version of a difficult thing. But if you loved Phair, this was as close as you could come to 1993. "Brother Bryan", the best song off a transcendent record, isolated a lonely bass riff and a few splashy drums beneath the singular vocal of Katie Crutchfield. The last lyric that shuts everything down, "In this place I think about you", one more measure and it was over.

23. Small Black - "Free At Dawn"



It didn't make a lot of sense, and it didn't need to. Like most great pop, "Free At Dawn" rooted itself in an initial loop, expanding the idea in imperial fashion, adding a down-beat and then storming through an echoing chorus that never totally got its due in 2013. The substance proved ethereal - "I was feeling as reckless as rain" - and the final movement, an invigorated low-end and a doubling of the first impulse suggested a celebration this describing the freedom of the morning.

22. Phantogram - "Black Out Days"



Phantogram never find themselves far from a huge loop, and "Black Out Days" did not disappoint. Buzzing synths competed with the fecund vocals of the lead singer, who sang things like, "I don't ever recognize your face", before the the chorus exploded into a sky of unrecognizable sounds. While they surely lifted the initial loop from Freelance Whales' "Generator", no one knew and no one cared. It was about the explosion of the short term memory, a discursiveness on modernity that sounded destructive and was.

21. Sky Ferreria - "You're Not The One"



Everyone loved the Sky album - even if it was dark, NSFW and needlessly devoid of hooks in places - and "You're Not The One" surged as lead single and one of the best songs of the year. The pre-chorus ("It's the middle of the night ...") was good enough to be a hook on most other songs but here it merely set up Ferreria at the top of the room on the title lyric. It was a John Hughes slam for an era that barely knows who John Hughes is, a Breakfast Club for a generation that never went to detention for anything. Suffice it to say, negation is the new affirmative and, "You're Not The One".

Modern Merchant :: "Like Minded"

Playing a languid form of the outsider pop that has recently charmed audiences with its deftness and lilting harmonies, Modern Merchant, a Brooklyn four-piece, offer their voice to the chorus on "Like Minded". A bit like Local Natives set in a sultry lounge scene, the band crafts a sparse guitar lick to offset the languorous vocals, eventually soaring with the addition of synthesizers at the edges. The arrangement glides along without obvious friction, a pleasant male-female duet announcing the second movement, a mildly more urgent take on the original conceit, rich and moving harmonies set against a stirring progression. More than just one song, the band's most recent EP, For The Fields, is as good an extended player to come out of Brooklyn this year, offering odes to Grizzly Bear and the aforementioned Local Natives, without feeling a bit derivative.

Young Hunting :: "Baby's First Steps"

LA's Young Hunting, with the forthcoming debut record, Hazel, recently offered a preview in the form of stand-out, "Baby's First Steps". A dark, folk-rock track, "Baby's First Steps" roots itself in a slow-drive chorus before growing increasingly metastatic and dangerous on a guitar-driven closing movement. The initial progression represents a sort of funeral-pop, a measured and troubled guitar line full of elegy and lyrics like, "you look up at the window as the water rushes down/you look through your reflection into the darkness that surrounds you." But, if Local Natives made this type of sorrow just light enough to lift, Young Hunting chooses the same methodology, oozing treble on the silky harmonies in the song's chorus. The final offer, the halting title lyric is as dark and pretty as any Thom Yorke melody, twin visions of a Los Angeles caught somewhere between hopelessness and hope.

Interview :: Local Natives [1.28.13]

Local Natives seized us the first time we heard them on the eve of their performances at SXSW in 2009. This festival appearance, in addition to a stunning first record, Gorilla Manor, got the band signed to Frenchkiss and cemented them as the West Coast's version of Grizzly Bear, purveyors of a distinctive and worldly pop. The band should readily transcend all of this on sophomore release, Hummingbird. I traded some emails with singer Taylor Rice about the band's democratic nature, working with Aaron Dessner of the National, and tracing the band's roots to the living rooms of their teenage years. Our questions and his answers after the jump; Hummingbird is out tomorrow and can be found just about everywhere.

Local Natives :: "Heavy Feet"

Local Natives long ago cornered the market on big group vocals. Each arrangement seemed to swell on human power alone, the spacious guitars and signature pounding tams subordinated to the nearly physical lift of a group of voices racing over the longer, curved, top part of the wing. "Heavy Feet", a track from their excellent sophomore LP, Hummingbird, is a treatise on the type of love and loss that seems to crest in the mid-20s. The chorus is full of claps, a post-apocalyptic lyric, "after everything," and drums that speak the influence of the production of the National's Aaron Dessner. It is a high tide and a washing away, two and three part harmonies colliding to the finish in a race to get us all finally up in the air.

Jonquil :: "Mexico" [Fort Romeau's Graceland edit]

Jonquil came late to the world music meets indie rock party. Arriving after Vampire Weekend, after Local Natives, even after Lord Huron and so many others, the band's tropical pop could quite reasonably have been lost in the collective shuffle of post-Graceland bands. Unless, of course, the band wrote songs with barbed hooks and choruses that skittered around like a runaway piece of ice on your kitchen floor. "Mexico," a song described by at least one close friend of mine as, "so close to being terrible while still being awesome," has here been reimagined by Fort Romeau with the winking Paul Simon reference, "Graceland edit." The warm horns come on in waves, the original song deconstructed and then built piece by tactile piece: First, thumping kick drum and a flirty high hat, then bongos, and, finally, horn punches cribbed right out of "Boy In The Bubble" notebook. Then the deconstruction begins anew, Fort Romeau stripping the arrangement down to its studs and building it again, the sort of creative destruction that make people imagine lasers in the jungle or distant constellations dying the corner of the sky.

The Eastern Sea :: "The Match"

Most creative people have either a healthy fascination with or an abject fear of fire. This is certainly reductionist but we only have a paragraph and The Eastern Sea have less than five minutes on spacious and elevating single, "The Match." Opening with loose guitars and the kind of image-heavy lyrics like, "watching stray cats under cars" and "lighting matches just for fun, running fire along your thumb," the band paints a dark and pastoral summer front porch from which to build the rest of the arrangement. "The Match" unfolds twice - and we won't necessarily presume some kind of form-meets-function thing from illumination to extinguishing - the first around the introduction of drums, a satisfying shift at the 1.53 mark, and then the movement toward the conclusion, an ascent that includes horns and a veritable church of backing vocals. The conclusion is as austere as the opening, guitars replaced by insistent drums, and the crushing final lyric, "Is it you or is it me?" How better to put the fine line between the power of light and the heat of destruction?

Jinja Safari :: "Head In A Blender"

Afro-pop turns beautifully glossy in the hands of Sydney, Australia band Jinja Safari. A blend of Mumford and Sons harmonies, Jonquil's Graceland affectations and the holier-than-thou elevation of bands like Lord Huron and Local Natives, Jinja and "Head In A Blender" aren't only the latest to do this type of miasmatic world music, but they might be one of the best. With a string of one-off singles on their Soundcloud page that are as unexpectedly charming as any band since Fanfarlo's debut demos, the band channels a pleasant tribalism as unoriginal as it is entirely satisfying, the kind of thing that reminds A&Rs why they have a rolling office chair to push back from their desks. "Head In A Blender" features an austere little guitar line behind layers and layers of vocals, a marching beat setting the stakes for a sort of journey where there are stories in the soil and where the lyrics "got caught up in the bloody pursuit of truth" mean absolutely everything. The final movement swings and sways before hurling itself out into the ether, chimes and echos left to sort out the details.

Warships :: "Sleeper Hold"

Warships are the latest Los Angeles band to inherent the responsibility of exporting glossy, American pastoral pop. On first single, "Sleeper Hold", not surprisingly using the same producer as Local Natives, the band relies on flickering guitars and a big swimming chorus. The references trend more toward the "best coast" vision of California as laid out long ago by the Mamas and the Papas (or the more recent plagiarisms of Family Of The Year) as the refrain gets drunk on itself, big "oohs", modulated and instantly singable notation. The title, "Sleeper Hold" purports to wax philosophical about the pleasures of unconsciousness, the most memorable lyric being, "tonight you sleep alone", before the arrangement sweeps back across the viewfinder, drifting to the top of the room under its own power and deserved grandiosity. 

The Local Natives :: "Sun Hands"

The Local Natives are the kids we used as our SXSW math problem all those months ago. We speculated that, against all the economic and mathematical odds, they could make it. We used Rogue Wave as a comparison and we're not backing away from it, though this band is far more collaborative than the Zach Rogue All Stars.

They played the Bowery this past Friday and though I couldn't make the show, I'm absolutely positive they crushed it. Considering the band drove (by their own admission) nearly 24-straight hours to get to the East Coast - you don't come that far not to light some worlds on fire. Label interest continues to be high and new single "Sun Hands" is out on Chess Club Records. It is their most unstable (and I mean that as a compliment) arrangement yet. The scream comes in the middle as the band comes together to insist: "and when I cannot feel with my sun hands/I promise not to lose her again."

There is a pause, slight, before a didactic guitar line explodes into the second-half. If you can picture 800 heads nodding in motion, you'll imagine your way into the shows these guys will be having in 6-months time. See you in the winter and keep your hands warm, kids.

Listen :: The Local Natives - "Sun Hands"

The Local Natives :: "Stranger Things"

A little more than a month ago, we wrote up Local Natives. At least one person hated it. But our sense is, most people are digging in on this band. They're LA's newest crunchy, meditative piano-pop. While the band declined to comment on their label situation ("It's too soon to tell"), it's quite clear there are interested parties from some of the biggest indies. Personally, Saddle Creek would be an obvious home but the math seems to be pointing to XL. Give us three to six months and see if we're right. Until then, the band soldiers on as a truly independent group.

Their latest offering is the sublime "Stranger Things." The Rogue Wave comparisons come easily (the drum-beat, a cousin of the "Michigan" beat that broke me in half during the latter part of 2007). You can even find some Foreign Born in the vocals and some Jump, Little Children (we're talking 1999) in the strings. But the best part is the last part; a grand second movement, built as much to destroy as to construct.

Three minutes in, the song grinds to a halt, reconsiders itself - the group vocals, the claps, the sweeping chorus - and says, "Me? I'm holding out for something better." A piano plaintively lays the structure for the next few steps. A lazy guitar adds itself into the mix - the vocals, as polite as an invitation to dinner, are equal parts pure and broken. Even though we're jagging away from the original arrangement, nothing feels disjointed. A new, still sweeping, melody emerges and it's bigger than the first. "Stranger Things" tumbles to the finish, leaving only a lonely violin to make up the difference at the end. It's a somber end to a somber song. Appropriate, I suppose. And certainly the best thing for an April morning. Stranger things have happened.

Listen :: Local Natives - "Stranger Things"

Local Natives :: "World News" and "Airplanes"

Local Natives are one of the 2,000 bands who tried to takeover SXSW this week. Let's look at the pro and cons.

Cons: There are 2,000 bands there. 400 of them are probably tour-tough and pretty good. 200 of them probably employ full-time publicity staff in some capacity. 25 of them are already signed to major labels and another 100-150 are already signed to "major indies." Your odds of "breaking" in this environment are simply not very good. Also, on the label front, everyone is cash-strapped and panicked. And, even if you are ready to break, there are probably three and maybe five other bands with equally good records and good buzz. I'm not a mathematician but if you carry all those ones, your odds of smashing this festival and grabbing the cash are ... slim.

Pros: We've heard XL Records is looking at this band pretty hard. Which, barring all the negative math above, can break your name pretty quickly. It also helps if your songs are strong (yes) and if your publicity machine is working harder than everyone else (Daytrotter session, blog features, etc.). It also helps if you sound like you could turn into Rogue Wave.

So, what's the verdict? Enjoy "World News" and "Airplanes" and you tell me. Despite what we think of the landscape, the days of bands toiling in brilliant obscurity are over. As a major A&R recently put it to me: if the music is good, people will find it quickly. Indie kids, consider your world officially shattered. Local Natives, consider yourselves officially broken.

Listen :: Local Natives - "Airplanes"
Bonus :: Local Natives - "World News"