I still remember seeing the Jezabels at CMJ in 2010, the band that arrived at the festival with the best recorded material and the best chance of latching on with a major. Of course, they didn't, and it wasn't the fault of the live show, singer Hayley Mary operating as a force of nature on shitty PA systems across Brooklyn and the basements of the Lower East Side. The band won't play the 2013 iteration of CMJ but releases latest single, "The End" as their return to recording and return to form. "The End" is breathless ride through Mary's upper register, glowing synths and racing guitars providing the antidote for lyrics like, "You gave me your hand/ I gave you dirt." This here-it-is-you-get-nothing sentiment rings triumphant through the chorus, emerging with a clear sense that "The End" is essentially about closing the loop on one epoch and beginning another. Mary sings, "I want to know," and we all do too.
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, no
band may appear twice. Each post contains a lyric from one of the ten
songs to follow, a hint and a hook that stuck out clearly in this group.
Today, we count down 30-21.
30. The Jezabels - "Endless Summer"
This was the year and the album where the Jezabels washed over the American consumer like a rogue wave. Well, it didn't happen, but it wasn't for fault of "Endless Summer", an alternately austere and bold piece of pop music. Singer Hayley Mary cast herself in the sharpest form of relief, the single best voice of the year, a vocalist entirely unrestrained and simultaneously in total control.
29. Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. - "An Ugly Person On A Movie Screen"
The mix of electronics and silky vocals gave Detroit's Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. an easy entry point to the pop listener of 2011. Building on a successful 2010 EP, the band returned with a well received full length (just ask Paste Magazine) and a track five, "An Ugly Person On A Movie Screen" that blew the collective doors off. Or maybe it was the roof, a musical convertible with the power to pick up the breezy, send the clouds home early and sound sunnier than anything else you heard this year. The chorus was full of woozy "nahs" and lyrics like "You don't know how your caged bird sings". It was, of course, critical of a world too focused on aesthetics, even if the aesthetics here were fantastic.
Sometimes it is a lyric, even just one, that sticks out so squarely it makes the whole song ache with relevance. For Typhoon on "Summer Home" it was the soaring and fragile, "it's how we start over" set on repeat in the bridge. The band attempts to follow its own recommendation, stripping the arrangement down to nothing, before building it again, though never returning to the edicts of the bridge. It was a delicate brand of folk music that Typhoon pulled off in 2011, built at once for destruction and again for framing, its edges serrated but not ill suited to construction.
Friska Viljor rarely makes any sense to the American audience. The name intimidates us, this before we even get to a song title we don't recognize. Can't you name yourselves after an animal like these American/Canadian bands do, we think? But, Friska Viljor don't care, and they're making the most fun music in the world right now. "Larionov" is an explosion of horns and kick out the windows drums. "You know the answers to the beating of my heart", they sing as their arrangement absolutely explodes around them, and maybe you reconsider how you felt about the consonants in their name and you go pick up their recent album.
Youth Lagoon, like Beirut before him, is a precocious, multi-instrumentalist from a part of the country that most Eastern Indie Music Elites label as good for American Indian Art to be used as a t-shirt design in Williamsburg. But the American West couldn't hold this bedroom collection, and "Afternoon" was so full of rich melodies and nostalgia that it didn't feel a bit indulgent or dishonest. Youth Lagoon is really just a kid, but then again, so was Condon.
If you are planning on getting in a relationship in New York City in the next few months, listen to Auditorium's "Sunday". Hell, this song is so sweet, you might end up dating it. Realistically, it describes a rosy-hued picture of life on Prospect Park West, marching up toward Grand Army Plaza and the Great Lawn with a cup of excellent coffee in hand, all in perfect time and harmony. This is your shift at the Co-Op set to music; this is your life but better.
24. We Barbarians - "The Wait Is Over"
Having seen their live show twice now, it is undebatable fact that We Barbarians are the best rock band playing in New York City right now. On their most recent EP, "The Wait Is Over" slotted at track two, a combination of glossy pop hooks and big guitars. The band bears inexact comparisons to early We Are Scientists, but their energy is different, an explosion of resurgent vocals and thrashing breakdowns. If this is modern barbarism, we will throw open the gates of the city and let the invaders in. But then again, they're already here and they're already dominant.
23. Polarsets - "Leave Argentina"
In the year that closed LCD Soundsystem's official career, bands like Polarsets proved that: 1. the cowbell was still very much alive and 2. Dancing in rock music was not as dead as James Murphy's band. "Leave Argentina" was an absurd trip to South America, full of references to "debonaire" sensibilities, nudity and, predictably, cocaine. The final movement put the listener inside the machine as the band screams about feeling drunk and glamorous. It didn't bring indie rock back to the club - it was already there - but it moved it onto the dance floor and made it do the windmill.
22. The Rural Alberta Advantage - "Barnes' Yard"
One of those albums that is so firmly in our collective rear view mirror by December, it would be easy to forget that Rural Alberta Advantage released a record this year and even easier to forget that the best song on it wasn't the promotional single, "Stamp". "Barnes' Yard" surged unexpectedly from the speakers, a breathless and aerobic exercise in acoustic pop. As usual, the final denouement lay in Nils Edenloff turning his neck into turnpike of surging veins, screaming into your iTunes with no regard for your safety or his own.
If there was one band that absolutely should have made more noise and sold more records before their demise, it was certainly Stricken City in 2011. "Some Say" was the band's last single before going on permanent hiatus and their last chance to convince you to buy one of their records. The song was divided into a few distinct movements, a soft open, a crackling first third, and an outright explosive final act. "Some Say" was post-punk with an updated ethos but, more likely, it was the song and the band that you missed.
After running through set opener "A Little Piece," Jezabels keyboardist Heather Shannon and guitarist Samuel Lockwood look to the soundboard at the back of the Mercury Lounge and request more center vocals in their monitors. Like the rest of the room, they want to hear Hayley Mary. With apologies to her bandmates, the diminutive black-clad Aussie is the only person in the room who will matter for the next hour. In short order, she rips through "Endless Summer" and "Easy to Love," her impossibly powerful, soaring voice bolstered by the sound tech who turned her up in the mix. He understands. We all do.
Mary, drinking tea from a cheap bodega cup throughout the set, starts off tightlipped and serious -- barely acknowledging the crowd between songs -- but loosens up as she sheds layers of leather. During a quiet moment, one of the collected Australians in the audience yells out "Are you going out?" The singer smiles and answers ruefully: "We've got a lot of driving ahead. It's actually all we do ever." You find yourself hoping she doesn't sing in the van. The windows can't handle those pipes.
"Mace Spray" is good. "Try Colour" is great. "Hurt Me" is (once again) briefly transcendent. Mary finishes singing the last song of night while the band's final notes reverberate around the room. She grabs her tea from the amp, walks off stage, and, amazingly, disappears into the crowd.
The Jezabels are releasing their second free mp3 off their enormous debut record, Prisoner. This cut, "Try Colour" is another one of their shuddering, spacious tracks, almost in the spirit of "Hurt Me" from last year's She's So Hard EP. Singer Hayley Mary shines again, a menacing and brittle presence, uttering lyrics like, "Stuck like the star light, you pick your own fire, baby", at once sensual and distant. The final movement brings together thundering drums, rippling guitars and Mary's confessional lyrics, "In my dreams I've been a stranger." The arrangement washes away, unsettled as a matter of course. This band will be back in the States soon enough and you will have to reconcile whether you are in the small but growing group of people who have experienced them in person or if you still haven't seen Hayley Mary turn herself into the human torch on stage. I'll bet you a whiskey they close with Prisoner-closer, "Catch Me" and the biggest 30-seconds of music you'll hear in 2011 as they storm out of the bridge. But try, "Try Colour" for now while you reason out which side you're on.
Big news from the Jezabels, one of the best bands on the planet, now officially set to release their debut LP, Prisoner, on September 16. The first peak at the contents of the record is first single, "Endless Summer", opening with the band's trademark rolling drums and menacing keys. The signature is still the mercurial voice of singer Hayley Mary, an instrument with which she rages through the middle of the band's arrangements, pushing out to the edges of her range and modulating between distant pitches with absurd ease and aplomb. Everyone (this writer included) says Kate Bush, but a more refined comparison might make Mary the darker, less-British cousin of The Sundays' crushing singer Harriet Wheeler. And this is the trick,"Endless Summer" appears both dangerous and vulnerable, at once ready to kill and be killed. Come September, I suspect those tables will have turned and the target will be the American music public, set to get absolutely run over by The Jezabels and Prisoner.
Hayley Mary, the electric singer for the Australian four-piece the Jezabels, dressed all in black, demanded attention as the lights went down at The Bowery Ballroom just after dusk yesterday. As a part of the expansive Aussie BBQ, an event that brings together up-and-coming bands from Down Under, the Jezabels and Mary represented the most hotly buzzed of the assembled acts. Enriched comparisons suggested something of an updated Kate Bush, but Mary and her band wouldn’t give in easily to heuristic juxtaposition, favoring a more romantic understanding of their art, transmutative and entirely elevating.
The band was in sharp form from the start, opening with the spinning “Little Piece” and building their keyboard and guitar arrangements from the ground up. As appeared typical for them, their songs grew in menace as they progressed, with rolling-thunder tam drums and Mary’s powerful melodies sailing out over whipping guitars and enormous keyboard progressions. It would be a short set—a necessary evil in the Aussie BBQ format—and the band briefly thanked the audience between songs, although they clearly wanted to pack in as many cuts as possible. With seemingly little fanfare, Mary obliterated the audience on the night’s second song, “Easy to Love.” It was both title and fact.
The Jezabels closed their set with “Mace Spray,” “Hurt Me” and “Dark Storm.” There were those airplane-runway-takeoff moments, like in the final chorus of “Hurt Me,” when its keyboard progression moved solidly to the ceiling as Mary wailed into the darkness and we were all pushed back in our metaphorical seats as the band took off. And in the context of a cheap visual simile, the Jezabels were certainly on their way up, even as they unceremoniously closed their set, thanked the crowd and broke down their gear. Their power to transform a lighthearted afternoon festival into something deeper, seeming of desperate importance, was unmistakable. And for 35 minutes on a Sunday afternoon, they were the best band in the world, demanding attention and headed somewhere above all our heads.
As is the custom in the indie rock universe in this coming second decade of the 21st century, it is not simply enough to know about something, you must know about it first. Furthermore, you must make outlandish predictions regarding the future success of said thing. In this case, it is music. In this case, it is 2011 and our predictions for the bands and artists who will be taking off wildly in the coming year. After the jump in no order, with regard for your future listening and the wisdom of the crowd, your Elevator 2011 bands.
10. Crystal Castles - "Not In Love" [Ft. Robert Smith]
Crystal Castles, mostly known for their ripping electoclash, found a slice of pop brilliance in 2010 with an assist from Robert Smith. "Not In Love" was rooted in a simple chorus of industrial synths and Smith's lithe, rye vocal modulating the title lyric. It was a cover of a Platinum Blonde original, but that robbed none of the top-shelf pop in the chorus, a 1980s tune recast somewhat anxiously as one of the best hooks of the year.
The Jezabels were the darlings of all the bands we saw this year. Their Kate Bush-tinged pop was best framed on "Mace Spray," a song that lyrically addresses the need for self-defense in an increasingly pessimistic age. The piano chords are spacious and the vocals from singer Hayley Mary eventually take the elevator to the top in the chorus, where the arrangement crashes around her voice, sounding equal parts vulnerable and threatening. With one of the best singles of 2010, the Jezabels already marked themselves as one of the best young bands to watch in the next 12 months.
Over the summer we saw the two singers from GROUPLOVE kiss each other on the mouth. This wasn't necessarily scandalous, and our voyeurism was joined by the other fifty or so people in Los Angeles' Troubadour. It was a moment of raw emotion of exactly the kind that the band describes in "Colours," a song rooted in a simple acoustic guitar progression that ends sailing and screaming over a fractured landscape. The band insists on "leaving the ground to find some space," before assuring us, "it really ain't that bad." The final movement is a tautological edict, "We call it ... life!" GROUPLOVE was uniquely positioned to describe this great, common human experience, screaming, shouting and floating above it.
7. Spoon - "Got Nuffin"
There was no more menacing combination of drums and guitar in indie rock in 2010 than on Spoon's "Got Nuffin." It defines the very need for down stroke guitars, before spiraling off and finding a few demanding piano chords to go with all the purpose of Britt Daniel's structure of guitar, bass and drums. The lyrics describe a moment of hope in an era of hopelessness. "I've got nothing to lose but darkness and shadows," Daniel reminds us as, we assume, he spends all this time losing only to find the freedom from constraint as the necessary descendant. It isn't a grand social gesture, some weak marching orders against the backdrop of a broken American life, just the private commentary of one man who sees his way out of the tunnel.
"Girls Night" was the one song of 2010 that seemed to unflaggingly cross boundaries, unifying disparate people behind a single bouncy keyboard progression. The vocals, the male-female back-and-forth kind, circle each other flirtatiously, throwing looks across the room and daring the other to come over. Their overlap is part of the charm, weaving in between one another, roping us closer and closer to First Rate People, a fantastically promising group from Toronto. No one else brought R&B to indie rock this year; no one else made something this irrefutably catchy. No one else is building these kind of would-be-hits for a mixtape you haven't made yet. This song is the hope that these two voices will cross the room and talk to each other, the hope that this is great and the hope that you will tell someone about it.
Sometimes when you see a band live, you just know they are the real deal. Seeing the Jezabels at Fat Baby during CMJ was exactly this moment. With three enormous EPs in the can, a full length on the way in 2011 and certain label interest, they are one of our break out acts of the next year. Last week we traded some emails about fear of cruise ships, shooting pool and what the hell is next, you know, other than being the biggest little band in the world.
Already written about in a million little places, The Jezabels are making their bid for something real in the next few hundred hours. With a three EPs released over the last 18-months, the band bring their latest, Dark Storm, to New York for CMJ where they are one of our odds on favorites to emerge with serious buzz and the interest of a rain-making label here in the States. On "Mace Spray," the band doesn't break down any musical boundaries, only reinforcing and polishing old ones. The immediate reaction is Kate Bush, a more modern and, frankly, less weird version, but with the same gift for soaring melody, a curator of the space over our heads, all in the vehicle of a powerful and achingly unique female vocal. The Jezabels will play this city in the next few days and you can assume that all this fractal rhetoric will end up somewhere over our heads.
