Opening to what sounds like it could well be some post-Edward Sharpe faux-folksy whistle garbage, Philadelphia's Cheerleader quickly redirect, "Do What You Want" toward the sort of synth-accented Americana that holds Ryan Adams at one end and War on Drugs at the other. The whistled chorus is thankfully overrun by a more useful and pregnant question, "Would it be the same?". The plaintive acoustic guitars offset against lyrics like, "These words are haunted by you," casting an unreliability on both our narrator and the object of his affection. The final, title edict, the blithe, "Do What You Want" rings sarcastic, a modern, catch-all, fuck-it-whatever for a free bird you desperately want to regulate back into your arms.
It's a long way from Kevin Drew's work in Broken Social Scene to sophomore record, Darlings, under his own name and its lead single, "Good Sex". A mixture of soaring synthesizers, plaintive guitars and piano obbligatos borrowed right from Arcade Fire's early work, Drew chases toward something fecund and pure. The sensuality arrives from this combination of the sordid and the sanctified, though the sonic aesthetics are straight from the National or War On Drugs playbook, two bands that never exactly typified sex. Somehow distant, vaguely graphic Americana sounds right coming from Drew, like "Lover's Spit" or a lyric like "park that car, drop that phone". The last line, "I'm still breathing with you, baby" remains a statement of existential truth and a romantic survival instinct in a world of devaluation and needless determinism.
The War On Drugs return with wide-open road song, "Red Eyes". Their signature acoustic guitar operating as the base of the layers, adding a subtle synth progression and drums that recall Tom Petty's most pastoral blur. The chorus proves transformative, taking this organized and discrete architecture and allowing it to spiral up and away, a measure of loosely directed chaos before the next verse reasserts order. "Red Eyes" is one of the better rock songs of 2013, an enticing foreshadow of coming LP, Lost In The Dream.
You would be hard pressed to reach full maturity without at least once reflecting, "I've got poison in my head", as Brooklyn's Thieving Irons do so brilliantly on coming single, "Poison." This wouldn't have to be the self-medicated, over-the-counter poison of the suburbs, light American-style lagers in parking lots and basements. It wouldn't have to be the poison you can get prescribed to you by a medical doctor if you say the right things or complain of "recurrent and debilitating pain". It wouldn't have to be the poison that is the beauty and stupidity of youth. It wouldn't have to be poison of toxic relationships and the vague schadenfreude that creeps wearily at the edges of adult life. It might just be Poison, a feedback loop for which there is no milk to drink, no control center to call, no doctor's couch on which to crawl, no 12-step program to engage. "You were always on my mind", the band intones over the top of insistent, down-stroke guitars as the arrangement pounds away, suggesting a different sort of self-imposed and inescapable toxicity. The song crashes toward its conclusion, lost and found somewhere between the finishing kick of "All My Friends" and the Tom Petty-footnotes of War On Drugs, sick, tired, pretty and cathartic.
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 title 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 10-6.
10. Florence and the Machine - "Shake It Out"
Florence Welch went for broke in 2011, and by this I mean she was as willing to use cliche, simile and bad metaphor as I was in the first clause of this sentence. On "Shake It Out", her bombastic and soaring single, she featured turns of phrase like, "regrets collect like old friends", "pound of flesh", "it's always darkest before the dawn", "dragging that horse around", "damned if I do and damned if I don't", "shot in the dark" and, again, "it's always darkest before the dawn". The song was a veritable Mad Libs of familiar figures of speech; it almost read like an athlete's press conference. But, it was specifically Welch's ability to traffic in such common tropes, updating them with her stunning vocals and top-of-the-room melodies, that made her so instantly relational on her second album. Some 27 months ago she was a bizarre woodland sprite playing the Bowery Ballroom, but in 2011, Florence blew away the concept of a sophomore slump with a common touch. If it was her mild weirdness, a Kate Bushness, a nearly garish individualism, that initially attracted label executives, it was her ability to speak to everyone in applicable generalities that made "Shake It Out" and Ceremonials so brilliant. Always fiercely internal, Florence previously kept the world away with a once-in-a-generation voice and by being almost religiously different. In 2011 she spoke to all of us at once, keeping us out by letting everyone in.
9. The Strokes - "Under Cover Of Darkness"
Angles was the album The Strokes had to make, and it sounded like it. Far from being a traditional "comeback" record, whole portions of the album felt workman-like, as if the very weight of the five album deal from RCA hung over every note. This wasn't exactly the Phoenix rising from the ashes. Casablancas checked out of the studio, or maybe the band turned on him; it didn't necessarily matter. Like a punch-drunk prize fighter, The Strokes got it together, not for an album, but for a song. "Under Cover Of Darkness" possessed an uncommon urgency in its opening angular riffs and its half pleading, half promising pre-chorus lyric, "I'll wait for you", a hook that most bands would take as the refrain to their first radio single. The Strokes, finding some of their old magic, pushed the "Good Enough" to be "Great", and the chorus itself was an explosion of ratatat drums and Casablancas' only passionate moment on the record as he bid goodbye to his "adversary and friend". The psychology was rich. Was this the band's goodbye to itself? Was it an admission of how hard Angles was to make? This doesn't even address the lyric about "everybody singing the same song for 10 years." Just how burdened the band was with an acute self-awareness, we'll never know. It was a tired album after a five year layoff, a strange contradiction, but for "Under Cover Of Darkness" it didn't matter. It was the song they had to have and did.
8. The Smith Westerns - "All Die Young"
Seeing The Smith Westerns at Pitchfork two summers ago would never have lead anyone to believe the band was capable of the awesome, funeral pop of "All Die Young". They were young and entirely unimpressive then. By 2011 their status as distinctly "youthful" remained unchanged though the qualitative distinctions about their sound had shifted. "All Die Young" was a throwback single on a throwback record, the opening organ chords and wistful guitars calling some blurry nostalgia of the type that is so easily projected by the listener. It was a slow-dance, at least at first, a languid Box Step through the end of a lazy summer. But the arrangement altered for the final third, an upbeat syrupy sing-a-long rooted in the title lyric. It wasn't a recommendation that we, or they for that matter, die, but it was that kind of blissful fatalism that can only happen in your late teens and early twenties. In days of increasing weight and seriousness, it was a carefree melody and a sense that we would all be alive or dead together. Youthful sentiment mixing easily with an uncommon musical sophistication, the latter free from any trappings of age.
7. The Vaccines - "Wetsuit"
London's The Vaccines were one of those rare rock acts that created backlash before their debut LP ever arrived in stores. Perhaps a product of an increasingly reactionary and fast-moving music journalism climate, the Vaccines emerged from nowhere with "If You Wanna", a sketchy mediafire download sent in the fall of 2010, and were roundly criticized by that very winter. Still, the band's debut LP, What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? was one of the best rock debuts in recent memory and certainly one of the best rock records of 2011. The final single from the record, "Wetsuit" was the destillation of all that made The Vaccines so relevant this year. Singer Justin Young warbled platitudes about youth, introduced for the first time as suggestions and later appropriated as louder, anthemic orders. The song finishes with fist-raising aplomb and lyrics about salvation and purity, the kind of patriarchal generalities that so many rock songs begin and end with. Of course, even reading this, if you are determined to hate The Vaccines there is little anyone can do about it. In all probability, you hate their path to the seven spot on this list, to their record deal, to their festival gigs, as much as you hate their music. You also hate their music. Your vengeance is swift, we get it. But, The Vaccines charmed us in 2011 because they seemed in on the joke. Yes, their rise was mercurial. Yes, their record possessed obvious influences. But, if you hated them, the backlash was their creation. They made you do it, like them or not.
It takes a special band and a special song to have you yelping along on the first listen. It was an aesthetic reaction, done without thought or consideration, a visceral slice of sensibilities you did not know or did not remember you had. Perhaps the War On Drugs had you at the menacing, rolling drums that begin "Come To The City", seeming to move and spread like a cloud bank rising in the distance. Maybe they had you when you thought, "Shit, this reminds me of a U2 song that I used to love." Or maybe it was just a hymn of urbanization that hooked you, like so many, to follow their directions and end up in the city. The arrangement built a wall of sound that allowed the lyrics and melody bounce off it, sing from the top of it, hide behind it. The thrashing guitars and relentless drums were the story as singer Adam Granduciel wailed and yelped lyrics about "rambling" and "moving", one of those American stories about trying to find home between where you're from, where you've been and where you might belong. It ended in series of unintelligible moans from behind the guitars, the final edict being the first one: You will find yourself in the city, young man. You knew it the first time you heard it because it was a sense you always had; move forward, move on. Go forth and go now.
It was a traveling song, an idea, or maybe a notion of space that caused four Irishmen to write one of the best records of their generation. This is surely the beginning of a hackneyed comparison to U2, and their wide-eyed, neo-Tocqueville trip through the American landscape, but War On Drugs latest single, "Come To The City" follows similar paths to the ones Bono found in an American national park just a few hours drive east of Los Angeles. "Come To The City" even features an unmistakeably Bono-style yelp at the 1.45 mark, but the hook just precedes this eruption, a candid lyrical motif, "I've been rambling", with the last word later interchanged for "moving", "drifting" as the band tries on different valencies of the same idea. An admission without being an apology, War On Drugs drive at the root of this wanderlust, the kind of thing every American reasons through at one moment or another: This place is just so damn big, how can you expect us to narrow, to focus, to turn down our ambition? Bono saw the problem from the outside in, but War On Drugs wrestle with it inside, where issues of space magnify and escape is illusory.
If The War On Drugs were a national policy initiative and not a Philadelphia rock band, it would be underfunded and completely ineffective, maybe even culminating with a 25-years-back Nancy Reagan screaming. "Just Say No" at terrifying volume. If The War On Drugs were a national policy initiative and not a Philadelphia rock band, it would feature an after-school program so comically ineffective it would later be proven to increase drug use among young people. If The War On Drugs were a policy initiative it would certainly invent as spokesman a trench coat-clad cartoon crime dog that even the most grounded 10-year old found at least a little troubling.
Luckily, The War On Drugs are a Philadelphia rock band with a brand new EP and a promotional single, "Comin' Through" that evokes cruise-control rock, gliding under its own power with meandering American guitars like a Petty-fronted Real Estate tune. It is road trip music, even if you're standing still, leaving the hysterical 80s and 90s in the dust of something new that feels pleasantly worn in.
