l0u1s jagg3r's 23 Best Songs Of The Decade!

Songs, not albums. Don’t get me wrong; there will be an albums list at some stage, but it won’t get this treatment. Albums are written about, compared, dissected at the time of their release. The decade’s end only serves to herd up this criticism. Songs, however, are the self-contained, often elusive units which frequently slip by unnoticed, the unified documents of an artistic vision which demand close individual attention.

When writing about one’s 23 favourite songs of the decade, one must make a few difficult decisions. This can be illustrated by the fact that in my initial list, Hood’s track The Lost You was placed at number four, before slowly falling down and then out altogether as I realised that while it was an excellent bit of sampletastic art-pop, and while the noisy breakdown at the end was wonderfully managed, it was really quite a linear and unsurprising bit of music, one that had gotten into that position by nostalgic default, and which didn’t truly excite me any more (not to mention the fact that it didn’t measure up to Hood’s astonishing late-90’s output). Similarly, Spiritualized’s Won’t Get To Heaven (The State I’m In) barely squeezed into the initial line-up, before I gave it a few listens and realised that it was in fact completely irresistible.

What informs my approach to most music is narrative. I like a musical narrative to be strong, to be sophisticated, to challenge, surprise and delight me. More or less every single track here has an unorthodox, unique approach to songwriting. Most tracks here are unmistakeably their creator’s own work. Every artist featured has great integrity, resolve and originality. I have tried to order it according to how much I personally enjoy each song, but the qualitative decisions are flexible, and indeed some days, every track here can sound like the most righteous thing on Earth.

The majority of these tracks are pretty long, and require patience, not to mention repeat listens. Nonetheless, these are the songs which have settled in my mind as the most accomplished and fulfilling musical narratives produced this decade. If you would like to vote in the somewhat arbitrary poll I have provided, please feel free, but you are encouraged to somehow hear all the tracks which pique your interest first. If you would like, I may provide a Sendspace link or somesuch to requested songs. If you want to judge the tracks by the write-ups, feel free to do this also.

Above all, I am doing this to celebrate some masterful music which in all probability wouldn’t otherwise be celebrated in such a manner. I am aware that my tastes are often regarded as a little fruity; tonight I revel in this otherness, and provide a selection of songs which you may have heard some of, but most probably haven’t heard all of. They are without exception brilliant, and have not been chosen as part of a gratuitous and disingenuous desire to be different; they are l0u1s jagg3r’s 23 Best Songs Of The Decade, and they goddamn rock.

1) Ulrich Schnauss - On My Own (6.41) (2003)

This is the only conventional verse-chorus song in my entire list. It’s a clear and present attempt by Germany’s most geared-up Slowdive fan to write a straight-up club banger. But the thing about Ulrich Schnauss is that while he does not possess the crazed, original genius to revolutionise music as we know it, he is as devoted and caring a fan of the music that he likes as any in the business. He is not one of the intangible savants, he is one of us, and this song is for everyone. I cannot think of a single type of listener, a single musical taste, which would reject this piece of music. It is propulsive and instinctual. It is dense and layered. You can hear the love and attention to detail Schnauss imbues into every swoon, every flourish of his kaleidoscopic synthscape. The hooks are timeless, the production immaculate. Above all, On My Own has a killer pop narrative, all doubt, crescendo, and bittersweet release. And yet, I am not ranking it my Song Of The Decade because it is universal. I am ranking it so because I am obsessed with it, and will never grow tired of it. And because if it came on while I was dancing, I would go completely ballistic. I clearly need to visit the European mainland more often.

2) Cardiacs - Ditzy Scene (6.38) (2007)

Ah, Cardiacs. I won’t say much about them. They’re my favourite band. I think that even objectively speaking Tim Smith is the best songwriter of modern times, maybe the best pop songwriter ever. I wish him every benevolence in his ongoing recovery from heart-attack-induced brain damage. I treasure the moment I saw Cardiacs play the Astoria for the last time. I treasure the moment I actually got to embrace my hero and whisper into his ear that two of his albums are the best music that has ever been made. And above all, I treasure the fact that after an 8-year hiatus, Tim and friends put out a single which made a plain mockery of Cardiacs’ 30-year duration. Should a band who had been around since the 70’s have any right to release material which sounds this voracious, this mindbogglingly fresh? All I will say is that if they hadn’t, it would have been tremendously out of character. Fortunately, they do not care to let anybody down. Ditzy Scene is not simply another masterpiece; it is one of Cardiacs’ most substantial, thrilling songs. It is as ferocious in its attack as anything they’ve released, and practically as tuneful. It uses its beautiful 2-minute build masterfully, teasing and luring the listener, before with a genius’ instinct crashing down the walls, dazzling us with the sensory overload of bells, drums and female voices, all while the guitars vault into space. The tune, while cyclic, just seems to keep soaring. And the central solo is directly beamed to us from Paradise, I swear. I mean, it just plays the melody while a keyboard provides a simple counterpoint. But somehow it still sounds like the most righteous thing waveforms ever gave us. Bless this band.

3) Ulver – Christmas (6.15) (2005)

The best track on the best album. They didn’t play it at their first ever UK gig. Actually, they played the two least suitable songs from Blood Inside. They are tricky, uncompromising bastards, and it makes me love them even more. Blood Inside itself is a 45-minute descent into some inferno where music, religion, art, modernism, lore, confusion and humanity are collided at lightspeed and Kristoffer Rygg must somehow catch as much of the fallout as he can in his whirling arms. This song possesses one of the clearest and most powerful narratives on the album, partly because Rygg surrenders lyrical duties to a Portuguese modernist philosopher from the early 20th century, and partly because musically it seems to be built around the premise that no matter how much ass it is kicking at any one moment, it can really be kicking even more the next. Witness the pretty, twinkling intro. Those are not quite sleigh-bells; they’re more percussive, ominous; but they’re not far off. They are soon joined by a string-quartet, playing a beautiful, slight motif. The bells get tricksier. The rhythms blur. A melodic bell, more like a vibraphone, intrudes. It all gets too much. The song explodes. In a stunning transition, it becomes an impassioned avant-industrial vamp, all wail and thump, all violence and dread. This is just the start. You are encouraged to hear the rest. Then the rest of the album. Then the rest of Ulver’s astonishing discography. They are heroes, and what they perceive music as is precious.

4) Spiritualized - Won't Get To Heaven (The State I'm In) (10.33) (2001)

While I was thinking about my Top 23 entries, this is the one I spent the most time considering. Originally, I had it scraping in at number 20, dismissing higher claims on account of the fact it was an overblown gospel exercise, albeit one I unreservedly love. Then I listened to it a few times and just couldn’t ignore the fact that I loved it more than almost any other song you could care to name, or the fact that there are so many things to love about it. Religious devotion and music have always gone very well together. I may be a godless fiend, but faith has given so many creative individuals a focus upon which to concentrate their considerable powers. Not that this is simply the work of a particularly inspired Jason Pierce. He has a few folks alongside him, helping out. Actually, as a collaborative effort it is phenomenal. Not just the 100-piece orchestra. Not just the gospel choir. But look, Reg Dickaty, playing saxophone while seemingly possessed by angels. And look, Thighpaulsandra, being the secret weapon he must be while serving Pierce. However, the song is the star here, because it is a full rapture set to music. Rapture is a fascinating theme for music to take, because it is by nature an overblown, exhaustively expressive vision, and must somehow be matched by the exuberance, the unrelenting massiveness of its imitator. What rapture is also, however, is intelligible. It has the big, brash language of Christianity at its disposal. Won’t Get To Heaven (The State I’m In) uses the big, brash language of Christianity, and unlike Ulver, uses it in a completely unconflicted, forthright manner. Allow me to decipher. The song begins with a shaker, a ticking clock, and the ethereal outer-space synth-bloops of Mr Sandra himself. It is ambient, confused, directionless, floating in space as Spiritualized’s previous album hadn’t quite managed. Vibraphones. Swirls. Then, a piano motif. Unlike Ulver’s, it is wholly upbeat, positive. It is the opening of a flower. Enter guitars, enter a whole fucking orchestra, let commence a quite marvellous (and surprisingly airy) bit of gospel pop. Even at this early stage, one can sense the scale of the project, the army of musicians, the strength of Pierce’s conviction. He is begging to be let into heaven, and he thinks he can do it. This is some pretty damn serious stuff. But it is mellow, and comforting, rather than mindblowing or triumphant like a rapture ought to be. Then, without warning, the third verse is in three-time. No biggie. The tune gets a bit more yearning in this bit, but that is to be expected for a middle-eight. That is a middle-eight, right? The song’s gonna be four and a half minutes long, right? Wind chimes chime. The song slows. Thighpaulsandra’s keyboards bleep, screech and whirr in a decidedly unearthly manner. More of him later. It begins to sound more like it might be taking place in a space-station, where all the best raptures happen. One final chorus. “I believe my time ain’t long.” Still sounding a tad complacent. But then, turns out the song was four and a half minutes long, after all, but some higher power (who is probably called Thighpaulsandra, but more of him I promise very soon now) decided he’d let it go on a tad longer, under his own instructions. At exactly 4.30, Pierce’s guitar starts wailing; an unending, spaced-out drone. TPS’ keyboards emit a clinical pulse, at once pure and energising. The song doubles in speed. The backing vibraphone bass begins to undulate, thrillingly. Tension abounds. Dickaty begins to solo all over the song. He is the wild, unchained dancer at the back of the procession. He is always there. He is doing his own thing. It adds immeasurably to the experience, because he is exuding divine will. In this silly Rapture, he sounds like the most liberated musician on earth. Then, the choir comes back in, this time led by Pierce. “I’m hoping. Praying. Lord, I’m saying. I believe my time ain’t long.” Tens of people, all belting it out. And meaning it. It’s beautiful, this belief. And then, at the 7-minute mark, the unthinkable finally happens.

God appears.

And his name, as I’ve said, is Thighpaulsandra.

The tone TPS extracts from his synths at the 7-minute mark of this song is possibly the most holy tone anybody has extracted from any instrument ever. It’s such a jawdropping moment, Pierce even lets him have a full brass fanfare to introduce himself from. This fanfare is then repeated numerous times throughout the rest of the song, as if celebrating the fact that it still can and sound good doing so. This song is now in the fanfare paradigm. But that tone. God. And Pierce’s droning guitar. And the orchestra. And then the gospel choir comes BACK IN over the top. It’s too much. It’s Rapture. How do they end it? How can they end it? They’ve gotten to Heaven. How do they possibly end it? The strings take over. The song slowly retreats. The strings are playing something conciliatory, something humble. The guitar drones down, spins away into the sunset. A final fanfare. The chords now being played by the orchestra are darker, more elusive. Everything fades, retreats, beauty itself shuts down, the clouds merge again, but they merge over a saved man and a saved musical enterprise. The voices soften, to sleep. All that’s left is for Thighpaulsandra to make a few final bleeps, burbles, and swooshes. He has taken them to outer space; he might as well have the last word. But more of him…later.

5) Volcano! – Palimpsests (7.18) (2008)

This will be a slightly shorter entry than the previous one. Palimpsests has no obviously religious agenda, so I won’t be off on my metaphorical hobbyhorse. However, it concerns itself with the rather more corporeal concerns of everyday working life. I can confirm that Aaron With and his band are lovely, thoroughly intelligent people, and the moustachioed frontman contrives some truly stunning lyrical imagery, even as his three-piece maelstrom whips up a cathartic fury behind him. It comes from their 2nd album, Paperwork, which was up until its penultimate track a worthy but less challenging successor to their incendiary, brain-boiling debut, Beautiful Seizure. However, Palimpsests becomes their best track inside 7 runaway minutes. I would say ‘effortlessly’, but it is clearly a labour of love, a sort of two-part Bolero, somehow switching from 4-time to 3-time halfway through, whereupon the sad, austere morning glow becomes a full sunrise (it helps my lamentably revenant metaphorical cause that With is singing ‘son’ or ‘sun’ repeatedly at this point). Then, it launches into space on the back of Sam Scranton’s propulsive drumming, With’s ramshackle guitar lightning, and Mark Cartwright’s dazzling combination of keyboard bass and flickering electronic noise. The final roundelay is revelatory; With’s fevered exhortations to the worker become sermon; and oh shit sorry folks. Anyway, it ends by completely destroying itself in some sort of processed-beat sample hell, and THAT’S more the sort of religious symbolism these dybbuks might approve of.

6) The The – ShrunkenMan (4.55) (2000)

Matt Johnson has released quite a lot of music, most of it very good. When he released an album more than 20 years into his career, in the millennial aftermath, it was no surprise that it was an excellent suite of affecting love-songs, stern political rants, and industrial anguish. However, one song collected all three in one place, and by some bizarre alchemy wound up being one of the most righteous things anyone put out all decade. The narrative is gripping; no two verses are sung the same way, and the airy acoustic guitars are always offset with the gain and release of the menacing, droning, ever-threatening electric monsters. The beat is both organic and processed, sounding as natural as the weather and as controlled as Kraftwerk. The bassline is persistent in all the best ways. The lyrics are fantastic. The outro is wordlessly eloquent. And it ends with sleigh-bells! Real ones, this time.

7) Foetus – Kreibabe (12.53) (2001)

Ooh boy. This is probably the most controversial song in my Top 23 in the same way that Michael Vick is probably the most controversial man currently playing NFL. It’s the violent inner monologue of a paedophile, ferchrissakes. And yet, even as the first wavering “Is it too late to trade in my mind” filters in over the glockenspiel refrain of “Hush Little Baby” (a thoroughly menacing keyboard/cymbal sample loop has already started, and cruel electronic touches will be with us until the end), we realise that Jim Thirlwell, Aussie genius, has merely adopted another uncompromising persona. He stays in character throughout, and gives us probably his most psychologically devastating case-study yet. His lyrical duel with monstrous, chugging guitars is pure theatre. After a gripping, tumultuous 4-minute build-up, we see Hell. The guitars don’t retreat like they did before, but then explode into one of the most visceral refrains you could ever hear. And then Jim is back, screaming. When he yells what is according to the lyric-sheet “You were born to paedophile”, I prefer to think he is singing “You were born to be defiled”, because the pun is even more devastating that way. This aside, I cannot think of how the song could be more devastating. You see, after that assault (and it is an assault), the song still has seven minutes to run. I won’t go into them now. Suffice it to say that he attacks again, once, quickly, and then in the last third some extremely weird, sinister, and subtle things start happening. Jim Thirlwell is a master of electronic dread. He plays all the instruments. He is in command of his theatre, and the theatre is of the truly damned. There is no let-up. When he isn’t being as violent as the sword, he is as unsettling as the scabbard.

8) Kayo Dot - ___on limpid form (18.00) (2006)

Kayo Dot used to be maudlin of the Well, but Toby Driver who is by the way an extremely talented neo-classical composer decided that his band would stay metal but do it differently. He gave his girlfriend a more prominent role in the band, which never works unless you are Mark E Smith, and recorded Choirs Of The Eye, which was brilliant and revolutionary. However, Kayo Dot’s second album was if anything an even more interesting affair. This highly abstract, experimental form of metal, overdubbed and electronically processed into a studio creation for the initial record, was suddenly expected to flourish under recording circumstances that were as live as rehearsal and performance would allow. Usually I scoff at artists who consciously reject the studio process for a studio album, but in this instance, Driver was justified, because the work produced has a conceptual purity that in parts bewilders, in parts conquers. This song, the longest studio song Kayo Dot have released, does not merely conquer; it eviscerates. It slays. At first this is because Toby has written a beautiful slow-burning art-rock ballad about something or other (it is impossible to tell) with keynote contributions from his stunning(ly talented) girlfriend Mia on violin (she has not only chops but a truly out-there artistic sensibility to match Toby’s) and a host of characters on guitar, bass, horns, keyboards, and probably more. Yet for the first five minutes of the song, they are elegant, they are tasteful, and they are quiet.

Then, a thump. A hard chord. A hint of noise. Echoing feedback. More thumps. More feedback. Unpredictable rhythm. Evil chords. No longer elegant. Evil and developing. We are 6 minutes in now. The ordeal is about to begin. The song’s narrative unfolds a little like a descent into Hell. Plenty of the best songs’ narratives do. But not many of them spend 13 minutes taking you there, incrementally. To compare the amount of noise at the start of the journey to the amount at the end is stupid, however, because by the end, everyone except Toby has abandoned their instruments and is whacking a great big steel can in the middle of the studio with a different beat, as their great leader sends an incandescent guitar spiralling into feedback eternity. In between, we have a build-up as gradual as it is terrifying. I heard this on my iPod Shuffle once while walking through a city. I kept expecting it to change. It didn’t. It carried on down and down and down, pausing cruelly for seemingly longer each time before exploding (unless it decided to catch you unawares). The drumming became more infernally possessed. The noise more agonising. When you first hear that steel can, 13 minutes in, it seems nothing, but after three more people have joined in, it is Judgement.

9) Thighpaulsandra - Michel Publicity Window (26.58) (2001)

Nobody’s boss but his own now, Thighpaulsandra emerges from Jason Pierce’s tyrannical clutches and releases a debut solo album, I, Thighpaulsandra, which is over two hours long and listened to by approximately fifty people worldwide. You’d think being in both Spiritualized and Coil might count for more, but as I’ve said, he is a secret weapon. I, Thighpaulsandra should therefore be all secret weapon, should it not? It contains about 75 minutes of music I would describe as ‘utterly amazing’; three songs on Disc One are especially wondrous. Those three songs together last nearly an hour. Thighpaulsandra likes to stretch things out a little, you see. If I said that Michel Publicity Window (check that length!) wasn’t the longest track on the album, would you believe me? Because you’d be right to. Beneath The Frozen Lake Of Stars isn’t very good, but it is very long. Fortunately, the other behemoth (if the head-warping Lycraland and the Jhonn-Balance-featuring speed-sample-frightfest Optical Black don’t count as behemoths) is a work of priceless art. It’s also a fucking phenomenal pop song. That’s right. There is a truly brilliant bit of classical pop in here. You just have to wait eleven minutes to hear it. Then you have to stick around for twelve minutes afterwards. But it really wouldn’t be the same on its own. He sings about a bolshy-but-directionless young gay man in some sort of exploitative, shamanistic adult world. He has already given us a narcotic, ambient build-up hewn from synth-tones he created on Cloud Nine (he is good at synth-tones), all burbling, droning elegance, pulsing tectonically amid gentle modulations, while the occasional blurt permeates the mist. And then…a propulsive keyboard riff fades nobly in, a slightly more quixotic synth-bass fades in beneath, and we have our pop-song (even as the intro swoons onward, inexorable, glorious, enormous, putting Michel into perspective). The chorus even features rehearsal-room piano, playfully immediate as the musical subconscious pulses astronomy. After that it gets a bit weird and things turn nasty. Screams. Electronics protesting. Schism. Stasis. Ritual murder. Dark Masonic rite in what Sir Viv Stanshall might have called ‘Stockhausen tongues’. Travel there. It is the fullness of consciousness. It is Michel’s life from every angle. It is to be experienced.

10) Shining - In The Kingdom Of Kitsch You Will Be A Monster (5.40) (2007)

Jazz insanity corner. Hard-rock fuckabout album-opening same-title-as-the-previous-album staccato blaring synths drums-down-stairs insanity corner. Then, after beating us about the head and neck, a loping, piss-takingly assured verse. James Bond theme done by mad Norwegians with all the musical talent a person could want. Sirens. Bleeps. Electronics. Feedback. That loping verse. They taunt you. They are fifteen steps ahead of your mind. They have probably listened to some Cardiacs, some King Crimson, and some goddamn weird inner voices. It slows down again. The Mars Volta don’t get that this is how you structure chaos. The narrative is cruel, calculated, wild. This has been composed by people. Riffs at every angle. Woodwind. Woodwind! Electronics. One of the all-time basslines. Retreat, attack. Scant regard for 4/4. Theatrics. Heroics. All over too soon, but just the right length. What the fuck was that? Utterly indefatigable.

11) Lapsus Linguae - The Terse Crimp (3.44) (2002)

Nick Southall started a thread about songs which are ‘rooms with many doors’ and Mares Nest suggested Lapsus Linguae. I hadn’t heard them, so I bought their now-largely-forgotten mini-album. It’s 32 minutes long and basically slays. Anyway, the shortest song is The Terse Crimp, which is odd, because The Terse Crimp also has by far the most going on of all of them. I cannot overstate just how demented this fucking piece of music is. Made by four young Shellac enthusiasts with an aptitude for classical piano and composition, with some of the most aggressively intelligent lyrics Scotland has ever produced (Biffy Clyro? Haaaaaa), it begins with an electronic beat and an ominous little concerto, with some bleepy percussion. Then it launches into a fat, stupid bass pulse. Then Shellac enter the fray, and the guitars bite. The song speeds up. The piano starts to disintegrate. All is noisy. The song changes again. Slows down. So that it can speed up again. So that it can speed up ludicrously. Then back to the first bit. Speed up again. Then the concerto. Then a different bass pulse. Then the concerto, as played by squealing guitars, still ominous, still infected with a kind of righteous zeal. Then a kind of strange middle-eight bit with a taunting sing-song refrain. Then another bit with a catchy hook. The song slows down for about 10 seconds. At which point the singer yells “Kill! Kill! Die! Die!” and the catchy bit comes back except this time with unearthly synths. Then an outro where the faster verse is played back slowly in the background as distorted deep voices grunt. And then speed up. It is less than four minutes long. But, you ask, does it WORK? Ah, well you’ll have to find out for yourself. I’ll just say this. Whenever I hear it, the words ‘oh shit, this is REALLY HAPPENING’ flash into my head. It’s like watching a train-crash unfold in real-time. It’s no attention-seeking post-hardcore whinge. It’s genuine mania. The narrative, need I add, is that of some guilty Catholic lads discovering that they can smash the oppressor and self-flagellate at once.

12) Oceansize – Savant (8.07) (2007)

Oceansize are a great band who cannot quite make the big break their relatively populist art-rock deserves. If they do have a torch-song, this, from their brilliant third album Frames, surely deserves to be it. Message to bedwetters everywhere: you will never evoke a cloudless sky, a romantic escape, an instant of pure musical bliss with anything like the same grace which a single bar of this song possesses; I recommend you use Brian Eno more or something I dunno stop looking at me am I some kind of music doctor? Christ. Anyway, it really is a song of wide mental expanses, clear air and wistful thoughts. The sound is king here, more than melody or structure or performance; it is quite mellow by Oceansize’s often volcanic standards, but still massive in scope and almost unbearably beautiful. They use an odd time-signature at first, evoking elusive elegance, but halfway through, a chanted refrain adds certainty to the fluff, before being joined by skyscraping guitar and lapsing into a full-blooded yell from charismatic frontman Mike Vennart. This leads to a cycle where the chanted refrain is once more repeated, with feeling, and an orchestral breakdown takes us along a well-worn but completely righteous path. The song’s narrative earns its ornate pay-off, still soaring even as the guitars and drums fade away, leaving only a string-quartet which suddenly cuts off, stilling a heart which for eight minutes beat with ineffable valence.

13) Deathspell Omega - The Repellent Scars Of Abandon And Election (11.42) (2007)

Black metal was based on certain strict principles, such as screechingly loud guitar, ferocious blastbeat drumming, howled vocals, and dark religious subject-matter. It rapidly grew dull, so it was nice to see a few bands such as DSO fucking with the formula. Why, this song contains a kazoo quartet, and a Stylophone. It contains three marimba players in different tunings. There is a seven-minute digression involving piccolos. The way they integrate electronic beats into the percussion is truly humbling. Actually, it contains screechingly loud guitar, ferocious blastbeat drumming, howled vocals, dark religious subject-matter, and approximately fifteen megatons of manic malevolent kickass ‘tude. And hey – check out those last four minutes. That riff! That groove! The way it disintegrates! Holy god. The lyrics are all in English and the poor French guy can’t say half the words but it doesn’t matter because he is singing ridiculously intellectual Bataille-inspired theological argument. It may use all the tools of good old black metal, but it sounds more dissonant, more crazed, more unpredictable than anything else that genre produced. It’s about as prog as black metal can get without eating itself, but the ride is thrilling, bludgeoning, fearsome. Listen to it and tell me that modern black metal is boring. Oh ok, maybe there’s a piano in there SOMEWHERE. God.

14) My Computer - Pulling Myself Together (9.27) (2005)

My Computer were a brilliant failure, a devastating success. They were a two-piece band who fell apart spectacularly amid drug abuse, mutual loathing, poverty and despair. They were an acoustic singer-singwriter and a techno whizz, each as desperate as the other, and their dynamic was absolutely unique in the annals of rock music. They sang about drug culture, rave culture, working-class culture, break-ups, survival and destruction. Their songs were started by the songwriter and then twisted into horrendous corruptions by the whizz. This is the best of them all (a nose ahead of 2002’s All I Really Wanted Was A Good Time which is also over 9 minutes long and has probably the best title of any first track on a debut album ever) and it’s practically VDGG-esque in the manner it symphonically runs rampant over youthful emotion. Starting off as a beautiful acoustic ballad, about how ‘we have a future, I’m sure’ then ‘into my future I slide’, accompanied by pathos-ridden Vocodered backing echoes and eventually the most exquisite treated-guitar squelches, it reaches ecstacy after about 4 minutes before plunging into the inferno. First we are treated to a lovely albeit pessimistic piano aria, backed with keening electronics, before the horrors of life are revealed in all their sincere glory; the track descends into a breathless techno car-chase, all bleeping sirens, racing strings and desperate machine voices. And then, at the last, after everything has subsided, a new acoustic guitar-line is played, halting, staccato, on the cusp of vanishing entirely, as the singer concludes that ‘we have no future’. Then, a final synth wash, and twenty seconds of terrified silence. As a statement of existentialist dread and bathos, it’s amazing. As a tale of doomed artistic tension, it’s practically unbeatable. They split immediately after this record. The songwriter, Andrew Chester, recorded one more album under the My Computer name, a solo record called No Computer, and the whizz, David Luke, was barely heard from again. This is the legacy of a manic marriage that probably shouldn’t have happened, and we must be grateful for it.

15) Working For A Nuclear Free City - Nancy Adam Susan (5.58) (2007)

I described this as ‘timeless erotic space-poetry’ once and the aforementioned Nick Southall responded with ‘Fuck the heck, Louis’ but I would like to point out I was OTM in that post. Coming towards the end of Businessmen & Ghosts, WFANFC’s definitive double-length release, this is a three-part trip into something truly euphoric. Fading in amid samples and ethereal keyboards, it suddenly plunges into a guitar-riff as wide as the morning sky, as piercing as a sunbeam, underpinned by a quite lovely bassline. Then, we have the second ambient section, which contains a host of wordless voice-samples, all keening for some sort of communal contact, unable to express how happy this music is making them. The voices fade, the music swirls, and a descending drum-intro inevitably leads us down into a repeat of the riff, which is just as glorious upon second inspection. Then, something interesting happens. Leading us out of the second ‘chorus’ is a sort of club pulse, a subaquatic heart-monitor bleep which underpins a belated vocal section. WFANFC’s vocalist sings a fuzzy mantra (‘electric behaviour, generic procedure, this is your life’) about state control or freedom or something, all 8 lines of it, before we plunge into the third rendition of the riff, which is no longer the riff, but a pounding electro beat, and more wordless voices, this time sounding in gear with the music, energised, massed for action. It ends with a sample, and a discreet fade, and leaves the listener thoroughly sated. What’s with the title, though? Initially I thought each name applied to each section of the music (its subtitle is ‘Triptych’). Now I’m just confused. Maybe it’s a Thighpaulsandra tribute? Ah, would that that were so.

16) Super Furry Animals - (Drawing) Rings Around The World (3.30) (2002)

This isn’t SFA’s first song about telecommunications, but it’s the best, which is quite an achievement given the joyously anthemic qualities possessed by 1999’s Wherever I Lay My Phone (That’s My Home). Predicated on the discovery that if you have the catchiest fucking surf bassline ever, you can get away with ANYTHING and it’ll still be an enormous whopping great pop-song, this, quasi-title-track of the decade’s best and most forward-thinking pop album, is the band’s zenith, simplicity housing astounding sophistication. It fades in amid squeals, drones and garbled mass-communication, updating its predecessor’s synth sparkle into sampledelic mayhem. It has a verse-chorus structure, yes, but with one double-length verse, then one double-length chorus, then one extended outro. It doesn’t need any more. The main difference between the verse and the chorus is the stupidly brilliant bassline, which changes from tension to resolution in the blink of an eye while guitars, synths and samplers screech, hover, gargle and soar. There’s something so dynamic, so energising about the background instrumentation; it’s orchestrated with minuscule precision, each pitch-bend and blip timed with masterful tact. In the chorus, the vocals become even more manic, there’s a completely awesome keyboard solo with a terrific vibrato setting, and then everything collapses into the fading mess of satellites, conversations, mixed languages and incomprehension orbiting the planet, samples on top of samples even as the resolved bassline spirals out into the black. There haven’t been many hit singles conveying this much chaos, this much absently joyful oblivion, and barely any which have sounded this vibrant.

17) The Fiery Furnaces - Chris Michaels (7.54) (2004)

I refer to ‘narrative’ in quite a few of these write-ups, usually metaphorically. In this case, it’s apt in a good number of ways. 2004’s Blueberry Boat had its detractors, but it’s an astonishing record, a no-holds-barred voyage into the Friedberger siblings’ kaleidoscopic imagination (I hesitate to say ‘imaginations’). This is one of the poppier songs on the album, which is frequently a baffling listen to uninitiated explorers, but it’s still a headfuck. In the best possible way, as the terrible two take us on an extremely bizarre trip involving India, time-travel, break-ups, credit-card theft, and all the other things you’ll have read about in the reviews. They also hit us with about 6 different indelible hooks, they hire a truly excellent drummer to play some truly excellent hard-rock fills, and they make the whole thing flow like a spring brook. There are a whole host of potential ‘best bits’ but the moment where Eleanor sings ‘We’re on the top of a Naracan dam’ as not only the song’s best hook recommences but a bleepy, almost subliminal synth-wibble begins in the background is absolutely roof-raising. For me, at least. Choice of my favourite song on BB has wavered, but this has emerged as the most focused and thrilling demonstration of the rangy storytelling mayhem our Fieries never quite topped, despite some admittedly cracking later efforts.

18) Chrome Hoof – Tonyte (5.31) (2007)

This band is the kind of ‘indescribable’ band which is actually highly describable. They are a 10+ piece dance-metal act featuring violinists, horn players, two dudes who used to be in doom outfit Cathedral, a truly demented female singer, guitarists, keyboardists, and a 10-foot goat-demon. They are from London and play a mixture of doom-pop and disco-prog. They don’t half-ass any of their influences. They’re REALLY doom when they want to be, and REALLY disco too. Often at the same time. Tonyte has a 3-minute build-up, all racing beat, echoing saxes, and ultra-funky bass. The breakdown into the verse, when it comes, features some of the best synth-pad disco effects you’ll hear, some truly inspired drumming, and oh fuck what is that bassist ON. It’s pure funked-up metal sex. Then the singer opens her mouth and we go up a notch. We get TWO run-throughs of the verse, just to delay gratification even longer. Then at last, the chorus. One review described the choral refrain as sounding like ‘Oooooh aaaaaah let’s haul Gary Bushell in a bubble’ and I have been unable to hear it as anything else since, to the point of refusing to look up the actual lyrics. It is a mighty chorus indeed. Once that’s happened, the song ends quite quickly (I think we go round one more time then have a brief outro) but we’ve heard what we’ve wanted to hear. We’ve heard heavy funk climaxing all over our ears, micromanaged beautifully by a seriously substantial collection of players. It’s really quite overwhelming. But not indescribably so.

19) The Chap - Now Woel (3.54) (2004)

And now for something a bit simpler. This is a big heavy silly dumb kick-ass rock song, written by a twee, self-referential, semi-sincere North London-based art-pop collective. It’s one of their most straightforward, uncomplicated expressions of musical joy. The lyrics are odd and incomprehensible, but this is how they are and it does not matter. ‘I endanger the anus’ indeed. Anyway, the riff is unstoppable, and seeing as that’s more or less the whole point of the song, I’ll mostly leave it at that. Except to say that the bit in the middle where the riff drops out and there are loads of plinky sound-effects instead is really cool, and quite funny. You’re all ‘hey come back riff! There’s all these weird noises! They’re cool noises but I ONLY WANT YOU’ and then it comes back and plays itself out for ages and then the plinky sound-effects come back over the top of it and it is *awesome*. Also, their song Proper Rock from 2008’s Mega Breakfast is almost as good and you need to hear it.

20) Alexander Hacke - Sanctuary (13.07) (2005)

This is the coolest love-song of the decade. It is the title-track of an album which saw Hacke, bassist for a certain industrial band who enjoy pneumatic drills, travel the world in search of collaborators. Results varied, but this was the clincher, the centrepiece: an ode to his girlfriend Danielle which just happens to be a dark-as-fuck 13-minute industrial nightmare. Oh but it’s so goddamn catchy. He assembles an army of instrumentalists and electronics experts (one of whom has already has a track in this list; any guesses? Clue: he is Australian, slightly fucked in the head, and has no compunctions about exploring paedophilia in song…how those crazy industrial types get around eh?) to assist him in this devotional quest. If I was Danielle I’d be pretty chuffed at the results. The build-up alone is 5 minutes of mounting programmed dread, hovering sonics, screaming percussive synth-beats. Then Hacke starts singing his dirge. Dirge? Love-song? Yeah, it’s a love-song; it’s a trip deep into Hacke’s soul, where he battles all sorts of inner demons, sings in all sorts of discordant harmonies, finds some really pretty funky hooks, and gives a spoken-word monologue about how ‘we’ll spend each day…keeping rrrrats…where they belong’. When he says they’re going to be together forever, he bloody means it. It really is rather sweet, the extent of his passionate mania. And finally, that fade-out, totally austere in its ominous finality, sounding like the exit music of a fallen angel. Happy Valentine’s Day, sweetie.

21) Califone - Black Metal Valentine (6.17) (2006)

Why 23? Why not 20? Who even cares about Califone or gives GY!BE the time of day any longer? These songs deserve write-ups, however. They’re a cut above the pack. Califone is an excellent band who have just released one of the best albums of 2009, but this, from probably their poppiest album Roots & Crowns, manages to both contain their most dynamic, catchy hook, and some of their weirdest field-recording-populated soundscapes. The order in which is does this is inspired, beginning with 5 minutes of swirling oddness, before plunging us into cathartic bliss in its final act; the way in which the drums suddenly come in, playing one of the funkiest, most moving beats I’ve ever heard, right in the last 30 seconds of the song, is heartbreaking. The swirling oddness itself begins with an unsettling keyboard hit, before teasing us with what sounds like some speed-disco as heard from outside a club whose door briefly opens, recorded from an open field at night. The song continues in this distant, floaty, never unlistenable vein, until the final revelation. It’s an act of country-rock certainty when it does come, a sun-kissed paean to something or other, birthed out of modern technological insubstantiality. You want to sing along. You start singing along. The song ends. The effect is absolutely pathos-ridden. It really was too good to be true. But it still happened, and Califone are still a band whose hearts AND minds are open to all that is musical, and this is a rare gift.

22) Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Motherfucker = Redeemer Part 2 (10:11) (2002)

This is possibly the best final track on a final album of any band in history. GY!BE released about 15 tracks in their career, 14 of which were over 10 minutes. Yes, this is the second-shortest studio song they put out, only trumped by a 6-minute coda earlier on in Yanqui UXO, which is their crowning achievement and most focused, destructive realisation of their slow-burn long-build deafening-climax instrumental principles. They ditch the samples, lengthen the builds, and they make everything flow together. However, the truth about GY!BE is that they only needed one song to sum up everything about themselves, and this song is their last. It begins in silence, before swarms of marauding guitars pile on the dread. It grows. It finds two different, equally menacing sections, which it alternates between, the one brooding and melancholy, the other faster panicked, all done with screeching guitars, and all done, interestingly, in two different sorts of 7-time. It builds, flinging itself into the apocalypse it surely describes (check that album artwork!) and seemingly without resolution. But then, after the faster section repeats for longer than it had previously gone, reaching its peak of insistence, everything slows down, the bottom falls out of the music, and the death-drone suddenly becomes an agent of bittersweet idyll. Fearsome becomes utterly beautiful, final judgement becomes whale-noise, the pulse of redemption, and when the drums plunge back in, they do so in a righted 3-time, accompanied by the most optimistic bassline GY!BE could ever have contrived. Noise is deafening once more, but it is euphoric. The track has had to face abysmal horrors before finding its salvation. The narrative is maybe even a little corny, in this way, but GY!BE are a corny band, and it suits them perfectly to go out like this. Violins, guitar-shrieks, free-swinging rhythmless celebration, given a minute’s freedom, then all sucked up in an instant. Farewell, you Canadian anarchists. You tried goddamn hard and made some super music, and you knew when to call it a day.

23) Ulrich Schnauss – Medusa (6.27) (2007)

Ulrich Schnauss, as we now know, is a man who puts everything into his songs, and then if he’s unsure, puts a bit more in. He made a lot of very good music in the 00’s, such as the entirety of 2003’s A Strangely Isolated Place (one track of which may have been especially good), and precisely three songs on the otherwise bizarrely mundane or misguided Goodbye. The three songs justify the album; they are the album’s longest tracks, and they are the ones which demonstrate Schnauss’ obsessive love at its full pitch. He gets two songs in the Top 23 because Medusa couldn’t be left out of my list. Like On My Own, it is a definitive statement of sound and purpose. Schnauss deserves the honour. Unlike On My Own, it is imperiously dark, noisy, and confrontational. It will not appeal to everyone. It is the multilayered swarming electro-shoegaze hell I hadn’t even suspected he might come out with. It’s an absolute Curve-ball, if you’ll pardon the pun. But it isn’t really much like Curve at all, nor is it much like Slowdive or MBV or Seefeel or any other shoegaze band with electronic or avant-garde pretentions. It is absolutely a law unto itself, a unique slab of wonder. The sheer fervour of his construction is terrifying, the depth of the buzzing, shrieking, wavering layers astounding. From the ominous, echoed opening drumbeats to the eye of the storm, 4 minutes later, as a three-note synth motif appears atop the chaos, a motif which can only be described as ‘triumphant’, the whole thing is a work of staggering intensity and craft. Because it’s so noisy, so clatteringly abrasive, you could be forgiven for missing the detail, but it’s there in bucketfuls, from bell-effects to choral harmonies to background swooshes. Some days I think this is better than any shoegaze song ever. These usually happen to be the days I hear this song.

Bubbling under: …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – Will You Smile Again, Hood – The Lost You, The Electric Soft Parade – Silent To The Dark, Von Sudenfed – That Sound Wiped, Boards Of Canada – Dayvan Cowboy, The Dandy Warhols – (You Come In) Burned, Half Man Half Biscuit – Gubba Look-A-Likes, Shit And Shine – Toilet Door Tits, Late Of The Pier – The Enemy Is The Future, Radiohead – A Punchup At A Wedding, Youthmovies – Surtsey, Pulp – Wickerman, Silvery – Revolving Sleepy Signs, Of Montreal – The Past Is A Grotesque Animal, Caribou – Niobe, Thomas White – The Silence Stops Tonight, Grandaddy – Lost On Yer Merry Way, Earth/Mogwai – Teeth Of Lions Rule The Divine (Mogwai Remix), All Saints – Pure Shores, The Beta Band – Eclipse, Six By Seven – My Life Is An Accident, Neurosis – From The Hill, The Secret Machines – First Wave Intact, Wilco – Handshake Drugs, Murcof – Cosmos II, Anathema – A Natural Disaster, TV On The Radio – Young Liars, Esoteric – Circle, Portishead – Small, …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – Luna Park

Poll Results

― joekin' phoenix (country matters), Monday, 9 November 2009 02:52 (fifteen years ago)