Top 50 Songs of 2013 :: [40-31]

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 40 to 31.

40. Challenger - "Back To Bellevue"



The synthesizer work from John Ross remained enormous in 2013, "Back To Bellevue", a single from a forthcoming 2014 LP slamming in and out of a few different movements, never ceasing its desire to traffic in Reading Rainbow aesthetics. The burnt neon of the song's second half, the most intentionally elevating bit of independent music this year, left the listener near the top of the room. It was also about an insane asylum.

39. Salt Cathedral - "Move Along"



Like an ethereal Tune-Yards, Brooklyn's Salt Cathedral presented one of the most compelling cases for the future of "World Music" in the body of single, "Move Along". A series of dreamy modulated pitches, the arrangement lifted off the ground, crackling with energy and insistence. The friscalating guitars chased each other around, but it was ultimately a IDM finishing kick to recall Aphex Twin that transfixed the listener.

38. Magic Man - "Paris



When we wrote about Magic Man in 2010, there was no sense that they would one day attract the eye of Neon Gold and Columbia Records. They were a small band with a tight debut record. Poised to have an enormous 2014, a year where they will likely be pushed to have a Passion Pit-sized debut LP, the band turned in one of the great singles of 2013 with "Paris", the moment after the moment but before The Moment.

37. ALVVAYS - "Adult Diversion"



Like a pumped up Tennis or the reconstituted and cuter Pains of Being Pure at Heart, ALVVAYS stormed out of Toronto with a winking odes a twee and post-punk aesthetic. "Adult Diversion" proved exactly that, a song that lead the listener toward something more adolescent, maybe less serious. Of course, the stakes emerged as higher than expected in the final movement, a doubling of the previous impulses in layers and intent.

36. PAPA - "Young Rut"



It was all Tom Petty for LA's PAPA this year. "Young Rut" held one of those down-stroke guitar patterns that erupted into something explosive in the chorus, Americana with an edge of the coast. It wasn't as simple as "Won't Back Down", but "Young Rut" described some of the atrophy of youth, an underrated trope of the past two generations.

35. GEMS - "Medusa"



A head full of snakes proved an appropriate visual metaphor for the sultry rhythm and blues of DC's GEMS. "Medusa" shared a bit of menace with its low-end, but the essence was in the crystalline and untouchable vocals of Lindsay Pitts. In the second half, she sings, "All the dreams become haunting memories", which sort of sums up the project, the density, beauty and terror of "Medusa".

34. Blood Cultures - "Indian Summer"



No one knew much about Blood Cultures in 2013, a strange and undeniable track, "Indian Summer" from the wilds of New Jersey. The synth-stabs were as good as any since, "Dance Yrself Clean", though the intent here proved vastly different. The essentializing of the lyric, "I'll have to let you go" in the final movement was exactly the departure the listener sought, a recession that was far more explicable than the arrival of "Indian Summer".

33. Fancy Werewolves - "Ghosts of Detroit"



"Shut up, get in," went some of the first lyrics of Fancy Werewolves' "Ghosts of Detroit", one of the best unsigned songs of 2013. The synthesizers showed up for the pre-chorus, just in time for the drum fill that carried the listener to the chorus for the eponymous lyric and one of the refrains from a rock band you hadn't heard of this year.

32. Laura Marling - "Where Can I Go?"



With her obvious love for the folk of the 1960s West Village, Laura Marling, in additon to being an irreconcilable heartbreaker, sounded a lot like cleaned-up, pretty, female Bob Dylan on "Where Can I Go?". However, the initial melody borrowed more from "Afternoon Delight" before spiralling into a full-blown folk trope buffet. The difference was Marling, a vocalist and guitar player of such dignity and power that these old paths felt new again.

31. Wise Blood - "Alarm"



"I can't think," sang Wise Blood on "Alarm" before claiming he needed his "personal space". The arrangement recalled Moby's Play, a soulful piano that plowed along in the background. Of course, the wake-up here was the the horn loop at the top of the arrangement. As news reports, literally, poured in, Wise Blood held the cacophony together with a melody that was as memorable as it was instantly singable.

Harriet :: "No Way Out"

Harriet, an LA band with former ties to PAPA and Dawes, already have one of the best songs of the year, the seminal and eruptive, "I Slept With All Your Mothers." While this debut single was covered in a fun bitterness, on new release, "No Way Out", singer Alex Casnoff describes a moment last April when he ingested far too much weed and his heart stopped. It is considerably more elegiac. He was rushed to the hospital, dosed with Ativan, doctors and nurses saving his life. It's the same piano-base of "Mothers," though more episodic and sparse, a progression toward literal death and then the slow march away. Casnoff outlines this feeling of dying: "you've seen how your body reacts, you've lost control, your body is nowhere," he intones before describing, quite literally, his experiences in the hospital, a doctor who gave him water, someone calling his name. "No Way Out" isn't an anti-drug polemic, rather a mediation on powerlessness against the backdrop of a specific and almost cataclysmic error. The final movement is vocoder harmony, Casnoff and many layers of his own voice singing, "if you hold on, it'll be alright."



Download: Harriet - "No Way Out"

PAPA :: "Put Me To Work"

Organ and piano conspire in the direction of something dangerous on PAPA's best single yet, "Put Me To Work". Barely longer than 2:30, the arrangement finds its legs in a final movement, including an episodic moment of brief withholding, a breath in the pounding piano and drums before a resumption of the assault. It is a perfect mirror for a lyric about being a "shadow boxing champ" dropped earlier in "Put Me To Work", a late arrangement bob-and-weave, all contained in an outright storm of keys, guitars and percussion.

Cillie Barnes :: "Indian Hill" and "Hey Hi"

Paying only cursory attention to the Los Angeles music scene has its benefits. The murky resplendence (see what happened there) of Cillie Barnes came to our attention due to her being sandwiched between LESANDS and PAPA, two bands we like a lot who don't care much for lower-case letters, on a bill at the Satellite in Silverlake next Saturday. Barnes is a face that faux-vintage photographs were made to take. Her two promotional songs should suitably make A&Rs sit up in their seats and check their Internet connections. "Indian Hill" is a 4/4 slow-rock track with a clear ode to The Pretenders, letting Barnes' tweaking, raspy vocals come through the wires. "Hey Hi" is cut from a different swath, more built for the soundtrack of a romantic comedy with some dark edges. The lazy piano progression and Barnes' vocals are almost sweet enough to rot teeth, or at least stick to the roof of your mouth, and maybe this doesn't work if she isn't so pretty, but something saves "Hey Hi" from the commercial pop dust bin. It could be "Indian Hill", so listen in order, and then someone sign this girl to make the record in the style of Holly Miranda, something brittle and beautiful for the rainy days in October.

Indian Hill by cilliebarnes

Hey Hi by cilliebarnes

PAPA - "I Am The Lion King"

No one said you haven't heard this before. In fact, all of these probably seems familiar. Big, tight guitars that feel like they're ripped out of a Free Energy studio session power the breaks in PAPA's "I Am The Lion King". The lyrics are those confessional kind, said with arched eyebrows, a shrug and one of those tautological resignations like, "It is what it is." And for existential questions, PAPA isn't particularly concerned with breaking new ground, rather punching up old semiotic studies of rock. The final push is a rush of guitars and big backing vocals, expanding on the theme of those early guitar lines with a richer (or is it wry?) understanding of the cultural and artistic derivatives. These are tropes, to be sure, but plot lines tried and true, like the cliche in the preceding clause, at once meaningless and entirely comfortable with how much fun you can have when that pressure to feel new lifts and the critical sky clears.
PAPA: I Am The Lion King by Hit City USA

PAPA :: "Ain't It So"

Los Angeles-based PAPA seem to inspire comparisons to the Strokes, though this is a little like saying your extroverted, upwardly mobile, politically-minded friend reminds you of a young Bill Clinton. It isn't particularly fair and remains one of those general specifics. In reality, PAPA seem to channel some of the more muted influences in T.Rex. "Ain't It So" is a slice of glammed out rock with an absolutely gratuitous (and this isn't always bad) key change thrown in during the finishing kick. The guitar hooks, the real hallmark of this band, will stick to your temporal lobe like the name of your first girlfriend, somewhere between absolutely arbitrary and a chunk of important, sepia-toned memory.
PAPA: Ain't It So by Hit City USA