BEST SONGS OF 2008

Here are my 50 favourite songs of 2008: the ones I really, really, really, really like.

I decided not to include any artist twice, nor any songs from albums I heard last year.

I made similar lists in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

The best way to browse this list is to click the little arrow beside each song and then listen as you read. The things you like you can then download by right- or ctrl-clicking with your mouse. Please buy albums, singles and EPs by bands that you enjoy.

You can also download complete zips of the fifty songs here, via Mediafire.

See also: Dan's favourite albums of the year.

(original photo by lala ladcani)

1. Antony & the Johnsons - "Another World" [buy]
   2008 did not have a "Hey Ya!", a "Crazy in Love", a "1 Thing" - a song so essential that it felt like a new page ought to be added to the calendar. (If anything, it had "Paper Planes".) So my favourite song of the year is not a dancefloor-filler, not an anthem; it is just my favourite. I don't know why "Another World" seems so essential to me, this December... Whether it's Antony's moth- and butterfly-wing voice, the piano like first snow. Whether it's a response to the Year of Obama. "Hope" and "Change" seem like true and important things, this year, things we crave and wish to put in our briefcases, but I sense how fragile they are, and how dreamed. Of course maybe it's just that this is a pretty, sad song. Maybe it's Antony's microphone, full of tears.
2. Lykke Li - "Dance Dance Dance" [buy]
   In February I wrote a premature valentine: Were you born in Sweden? Wait, what? A Portuguese mountaintop!? Was it cold? Sure, I'll hold on to it for you. What do you want me to do? Rattle it? And stamp my foot too? Are we recording a song? Who's that? That's a very large saxophone.
3. Rye Rye with MIA - "Tic Toc" [MySpace]
   There is no single component that makes this song sing. It is, yes, like a clock. Rye Rye slow-loping, MIA tick-tocking, Busy Signal hey-heying, zither-thing glittering, and all of us setting our time to its diamond-hard 6-jewel movement. (Previously.)
4. The Low Lows - "Modern Romance" [buy]
   There's no reason to put a cover-song so high on a list of the year's best except that the Low Lows' remaking of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is beautiful. Dan wrote about this song on New Year's Day. The Low Lows will shake me around in their cup, they'll keep me humble and working inside this sock-drawer winter apartment until something gives way, he wrote. I have to think that something gave way.
5. tUnE-YaRdS - "FIYA" [buy]
   The same way that someone might use every part of a deer, Montreal's Merrill Garbus uses every part of her ukulele. It's a toy and a weapon, a calendar and an engine. And she uses every part of her voice, too: the high part, the low part, the pretty part, the roar. It's four seasons in five minutes and too thrilling to call just lo-fi "pop". No — this is "bang", it's "boom", it's "kablooey". (Previously.)
6. School of Seven Bells - "Half Asleep" [buy]
   Fly to Greenland in a twin-engine plane, your pockets filled with Jolly Ranchers and freshwater pearls. Set down on a flat of snow, like the back of some vast arctic hare. Leave the propeller going & dig. Put your back into it. Yes, the Northern Lights seethe, yes there's much to explore in Nuuk & Kangerlussuaq. But dig. After two long winters it's time to dig. The airplane's roaring beside you, the sky teeming above you, the sting of sweat in your eyes. But sooner or later you'll hit spring.

7. Carl Spidla - "Blackfly Rag" [MySpace]
   Too much to say about this track. "Blackfly Rag" is obviously one of the finest songs I've heard this year, and it's clearly the finest folk song. I mean here's just a dusty live recording of a guy with a guitar, mouthfuls of lyrics and a heart full of blackwing birds. Carl's not channelling Dylan so much as dream. He's planning a CD for next year.
8. Chairlift - "Bruises" [buy]
   A song whose beauty is in the singing - part "Close To Me", part yodel, part spring, part summer, part six-month anniversary. Pop music.
9. Baby Dee - "Safe Inside the Day (ft. Bonnie Prince Billy)" [buy]
   Eleven months ago I wrote, A song that is hurled with so much spirit that it could pin ... tomorrows to todays and wills to oughts. It's a manifesto and a prayer and an inflammatory writ ... the greatest utterance of the word "safe" that I've heard in my life. Dee's day will dim yours, cast yours into half-light and make you aspire to ... find a peace so gloriously hard-fought as this.
10. White Hinterland - "Vessels" [buy]
    "Vessels" is my favourite song on Phylactery Factory and I keep it in a small pouch attached to my belt. I use it when I am lost in a forest, trapped on a glacier, or longing for home. ... I use it when I'm not so sure about myself, and when there's not much light on the water. ... It's always seemed wrong, to me, speaking of "hope" unbordered. Better to speak of enough hope; to stop there. Well there is enough hope here for me.
11. Sister Suvi - "The Lot" [buy]
    People say: okay, Montreal, played out. You've indie-rocked yrself dry, right? Running on fumes? And then we say a lot of things back. We throw fruit; we whip bagels and lob pierogies; we have snowballs and ice-cream cones. We take you the fuck out, you mess with us. I could name a lot of bands, some of the reasons why this city keeps catching me by the throat. But tonight I will name just one: Sister Suvi. ... [Tune-Yards'] Merrill's got the big bad wolf in her gut, blow you down.
12. Kanye West - "Say You Will" [buy]
    His line about "your neck" is one of the creepy-crawliest this year, but still I'm mesmerised by this. "Say You Will" is the opening track on the new album by one of the biggest artists in the world. And its last three minutes are just empty synths, barren drum loop, silence. It's a stupid one-liner, calling 808s & Heartbreak Kanye's Nebraska; but the loneliness here, the desolation, is just as potent as any 4-track-slinging singer-songwriter. Heartbreak has rarely filled so many Walmart shelves.
13. Vampire Weekend - "Ottoman" [buy]
    Dan may not agree, but I love Vampire Weekend. I loved it last year, too, and so none of its tracks festoon this list. Happily, Vampire Weekend released a new one, and it's no less sweet; chamber pop with secret-weapon drums, a "Peter Gabriel" call-back, as wistful a fade-out as any I've heard.
14. Frightened Rabbit - "Keep Yourself Warm" [buy]
    Still think Scott Hutchison's lyrics are turgid, but Frightened Rabbit nonetheless turn it into one of the year's best rock songs - desperate, melancholy, awesome. Scotsmen finding the middle ground between the Constantines and the Foo Fighters.
15. Beyoncé - "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" [buy]
    A song with a thousand handclaps and a hundred bird-coo synth-squiggles. Oh, and some 8-carat "Whoa-oh oh oh oh ohh oh oh ohh oh oh oh." Never have I so wished to be a single lady. (As Tyler writes: It's fabulously easy, you just need to sing all the best notes in the best way.)
16. Fleet Foxes - "White Winter Hymnal" [buy]
    Not a fan of the album, but still love this song as a warm keep-cosy ski-lodge thing, as a beautiful sleigh-ride of a song, a mulberry jingle-bell snowflake of a song. In other words, I like it quite a bit.
17. Y'all is Fantasy Island - "With Handclaps" [buy]
    This song could be called "Mostly Without Handclaps", or "With Guitarline". The handclaps wait almost the entire song to appear, and it's the guitar-line that marks your brain, colours your day, sends you humming a scale to yourself while you wait in line at the fruit-stand. There are handclaps though, and a song worthy of carrying them.
18. The Tough Alliance - "Taken Too Young" (a remix of Taken By Trees' "Too Young") [buy other things]
    The Tough Alliance rediscover "Too Young", by Victoria Bergsmann's Taken By Trees project (& which I wrote about last July). They make it one of the songs of the year. And when I say rediscover I mean they found it in among diamonds, saffron and milkweed pods; in with childhood, sex and distant waters; in with the way you feel, your eyes laying on hers, when all that's green in you curls.
19. Forest Fire - "Slow Motion" [buy]
    I wrote a story about this song in July. It's a sort-of folk-song. "Sort-of" because there it is filled with slams, bangs, booms and howls; like a man falling down a lighthouse stairwell.
20. Adam & the Amethysts - "Bumble Bee" [buy/MySpace]
    Civil and shaking, Dan wrote. It's true. Anchored by drummer-boy snare and a battered guitar riff, "Bumble Bee" pretends everything's cool as cuke, locked up in old diaries. But there under it all - under the friendly fanfare, the slacker doo d'doo, - there's something trembling, buzzing, shaking with black-&-ochre resolve.
21. Elbow - "Starlings" [buy]
    FANFARE.
22. Karl Blau - "Before Telling Dragons" [buy]
    Karl Blau's Nature's Got Away is a weird album, with teeth and feathers and amplifiers. Bits of Harry Nilsson, the Zombies, Spoon, Smog. "Before Telling Dragons" is a forest anthem, recorded in a basement. Girl-group drums buried six feet under and ... words of wisdom from a man who has eaten seventeen wild, unidentified red berries.
23. Styx Tyger - "String Strikes" [MySpace]
    A pop-song from Sweden - but whereas usually that means shyness and shimmy, here it's gold, glitter, croon, and a copy of the Cure's Disintegration. (Previously.)
24. Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire - "Voice in Headphones" [buy]
    This is my favourite song from Lost Wisdom, probably my favourite album of the year. It is Phil Elverum singing with Julie Doiron, one of my favourite singers. That is a lot of favourites, all together. "Voice in Headphones" is about how recorded music - particularly a song called "Undo", by Bjork, - makes Mount Eerie cry. Which is, all snarkiness aside, a good question. (Previously.)
25. Shearwater - "Leviathan, Bound" [buy]
    Like when you're at your piano, scared, and every key turns to grey. Jonathan Meiburg sings about apocalypse, hard and loud, joined by dulcimer, strings and glockenspiel.
26. Withered Hand - "New Dawn" [buy]
    You know how some people, especially old-fashioned people, hang their carpets on clotheslines and then beat all the dust out of them? Or how some people knock their snowy boots against the side of the car before getting in? Here's Edinburgh's Withered Hand using mandolin, guitar, cello and his voice to shake all the dust from him, all the stray feelings, all the loose longings; so that at end of song he'll be just a body and the light in his eyes.
27. Ponytail - "Beg Waves" [buy]
    Ponytail get it exactly right in the opening track to Ice Cream Spiritual: electrically live and still marvellously composed, like a Duke Ellington suite for hoarse throats, scraped knees, joy. It's The Fall, not Deerhoof, I hear clearest in their song - but with fewer regrets, fewer chips-on-shoulder ... beautiful and squalid.
28. Final Fantasy - "Blue Imelda" [buy]
    Final Fantasy released two albums this year. One was recorded at a CBC studio, and one - from which this song is taken, - was recorded at a forest in the fictional country of Spectrum. It was recorded in the 14th century. If this sounds far-fetched, you are not a student of history. "Blue Imelda" has all the hallmarks of Spectrum ca. 1360 - steel drums, tuba blasts, a melancholy to puff seafaring sails.
29. Ne-Yo - "Mad" [buy]
    It's only in my twenties that I came to appreciate the slow-jam - the perfect catchy yes yes yes r&b form, the perfect thing for slow-dances and lip-sync and romantic montages. Though this one I mostly listen to as I tramp in the snow on the way to get some work done. (thank-you s1utsky)
30. Meursault - "The Furnace" [buy]
    BREAKING NEWS: CYBERMAN 3000-D HAD HIS HEART BROKEN THIS WEEKEND. HAS GONE ON RAMPAGE THROUGH COUNTRYSIDE. VALLEYS OF CLOVER BEING BURNED BY CYBERMAN 3000-D'S ROCKET-BOOTS. BARNS SMASHED APART AND LEFT SMOULDERING. TWO SHEPHERDS DEAD. DOGS HOWLING. CYBERMAN 3000-D HAS BEFRIENDED A SWALLOW WHOM HE IS CARRYING ON HIS SHOULDER-MOUNTED ELECTRO-BAZOOKA.
31. Sigur Rós - "Gobbledigook" [buy]
    A pity the Sigur Rós-meets-Animal Collective vibe didn't carry over to the rest of the album, but this is still great. Breathless dashing flashing dancing strum coo dive jump dive jump jump jump go go nightfall fire and dawn.
32. Lord Dog Bird - "The Gift of Song in the Lion's Den" [buy]
    Here's a song for the day the river turned to wine, the city turned to chalk, your heart turned to tin. The same way that a lantern reminds me of a campfire, this reminds me of early Wolf Parade. And from a woefully ignored album!
33. François Virot - "Say Fiesta" [buy]
    François Virot's songs are both simple and crooked - like gnarled hooks you can hang your coat on. The way he sings radio on "Say Fiesta" - well it's silly, endearing and French but it lets the song's emotional oomph come out of nowhere, like an alleycat with violets in its mouth.
34. John Maus - "Do Your Best" [buy]
    You swing through the hills with headlights silver, alone & the forests darkly. Dreams of stags and music-boxes. Down below are a thousand black Mercedes, men with watches, women in sequin dresses. A satellite passes over your head. The motels lie docile as you pass them, singing in low voices, trying to make sure you're ok.
35. Kasai Allstars - "Quick as White" [buy]
    Thumb-pianos like light in lamps; bells, sticks, shakes, slips, a hundred kinds of glimmers. Though the Kasai Allstars are from Kinshasa, Congo, and this is the third in Crammed's Congotronics series, the Kasai Allstars are not some mere Konono no. 2. They are sorcerers, wonder-workers, enchanters pulling hopes from throats and making me wonder, here in Montreal sun, if maybe one day I will touch a magic sword.
36. The Dodos - "Fools" [buy]
    This is what the Dodos do: strum hard at acoustic guitars, beat methodically at drumkits. But a little bit of horns, a little bit of shouting - they go a long way. Before you know it, you've signed on the dotted line.
37. Weezer - "Pork and Beans" [buy]
    It doesn't matter that I am tired of Weezer, nor that Weezer (2008) is a piece of ess. It doesn't matter that "Pork and Beans"' lyrics are effing stultifying. What matters is that, well, [bass riff] this song is dumbly dee oh pee ee.
38. Kleerup - "Until We Bleed (ft. Lykke Li)" [buy]
    Part dance track, part pop song; a soundtrack for dial-tone, brrrrrrr, Hello?, click. (Previously.)
39. Lil' Wayne - "Mrs Officer (ft. Bobby Valentino" [buy]
    It's not so much Lil' Wayne's rhymes, nor even the Wee-oo-wee-oo-wee, that do it. It's the spectacular supple sing of his raps, the way he does whatever the hell he wants with his voice, whatever as old leather. (thanks, liz.)
40. We/Or/Me - "Tell Sarah" [buy]
    This is a very careful song. "Tell Sarah" glows, just of itself, like fireflies in a jar.
41. Pretend You're Happy - "The Other Side of the Earth" [buy]
    One of the last additions to this list - sprawling, messy and brilliant, like Handel's Requiem rearranged for lo-fi drums, whining violins, bullshit and whistles. Takes decades of practice to fuck-up this good. (Previously.)
42. Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit - "Dinosaur on the Ark (ft. Ben Brewer)" [free album download]
    Mwamwaya is everything I used to love about "World Music", before my world got shaken by a thousand other sounds, before I learned that "World Music" is a fucking stupid term. But that's just to say he sounds eminent and good and warm, not unlike Phil Collins, the sort of man I would follow into a desert arena. Plus: it's the best song this year to feature MIA's fiancé! (Previously.)
43. Beck - "Walls" [buy]
    Perhaps the best production of Danger Mouse's life, and one of the finest Beck tracks in years, this song has several interesting bits: Beck's half-a-melody, the drums that clatter like collapsing drywall, the way Cat Power's backing vocals have been sucked as thin as cassette-tape.
44. Jib Kidder - "Windowdipper" [buy]
    Cyber-booty baby-crunk glimmer-bump ghetto-DOS. And genius. (Previously, in short story form.)
45. ((Sounder)) - "Daily I Will Calculate the Distance" [buy]
    Another hardly-muttered-about band made one of the best indie rock albums of the year. It's ambitious, dusty, rumblingly rock - but not an album of singles. "Daily I Will Calculate the Distance" is as close as ((Sounder)) come. Brazen, yearning, crack-lipped, welcome.
46. Ratatat - "Mirando" [buy]
    No idea what this song is for. It's not for dancing, moshing, kissing or meditating. It's not even for riding the bus. Maybe if you have a piano-playing robot to assemble, this is the splendid, somersaulting ticket. I envy you.
47. Young Coyotes - "Momentary Drowning" [MySpace]
    A song that's yell and thump but is still brilliantly slow - relaxed as it booms, as it dings and claps and bobs. Young Coyotes play this music like they've figured it out, like they've solved it.
48. Hologram - "Ghosties" [buy other things]
    Said the Gramophone loves this burgeoning band. One day Hologram are going to be a gigantic baby-blue chrysanthemum and everyone is going to stick their nose in, but in the meantime here we are with a ceramic chrysanthemum pinned to our lapels, the image of what we're dreaming, and we listen to the clanging, beautiful, clamoured song called "Ghosties", and we lug a busted amp waiting for a lover to hand it to.
49. Helvetia - "Old New Bicycle" [buy]
    A ramshackle conversation between drumkit and electric guitar. Sure, vocals chime in at some point - slurring and murmurs, - but it's the guitar + drums that matter. They're the ones that'll figure this shit out, that'll solve all the ills that ail ya. (Previously.)
50. Johnny Foreigner - "Cranes And Cranes And Cranes And Cranes" [buy]
    it'ssort of like Los Campesinos meets Avril Lavigne, but i mean tht in a totally gd way. call+answer+yells, but bttr dynamics, bttr places to sing alng, like instd of thnkng of witty twee songtitls they focusd on BEING AWSOME.

Finally - 50 is an arbitrary cut-off. There were way more great tracks in 2008. Said the Gramophone has written about 500 of them over the course of this year. If you're new to the site, please come again (or subscribe)! We update every weekday, writing about the songs we love. Thanks for reading.

OMG LOL

Johnny Foreigner - "Cranes and Cranes and Cranes and Cranes".

send to: stg

am lovng ths cd by Johnny F. (trrble band name!) it'ssort of like Los Campesinos meets Avril Lavigne, but i mean tht in a totally gd way. call+answer+yells, but bttr dynamics, bttr places to sing alng, like instd of thnkng of witty twee songtitls they focusd on BEING AWSOME. (thrs just 3 of em!) & ths song simltnsly remnds me of ball-games @ school (chalk on pvmt, red ball), alleywy fights (fistswing!), & being arrowstung with love's spring hummngbrd bit. also mks me thnk the kidsll be alrght after all. xxs

[send]

[buy]

2007's Best Music: Songs

We really only have one rule at Said the Gramophone: write about songs you love. In 2007, Dan, Jordan and I wrote about more than 500 tracks. Some of these we have loved for years, others we loved for a few moments, when they hit us just so with the palm of their eye.

Here are my fifty favourite songs of the year.

2007 was a marvelous year for music and I could have easily written about another hundred wonders. But fifty is enough. Lists are arbitrary and sudden. I tried to just be honest with myself. And I made a few rules, the most significant of which is that no artist is represented twice, even though several should have been. (See also my 2006 and 2005 lists.)

The best way to browse this list is to click the little arrow beside each song and then listen as you read. The things you like you can then download by right- or ctrl-clicking with your mouse. Please buy albums, singles and EPs by bands that you enjoy.

You can also download a complete zip of the fifty songs here, via SendSpace. If someone can figure out how to host a torrent, I'll link to that as well.

Tomorrow we will be sharing some words on our favourite albums of the year. I hope we'll see you then.

1. Yeasayer - "2080" [buy]
   It's been a long time since I first heard "2080", dwelling in the grey-whites of Krakow and receiving a communique by email from a friend in Los Angeles. In May I did the namedrop: Fleetwood Mac, Akron/Family, Paul Simon, Arcade Fire, Cree chant, schoolyard song. And the song's still got a thousand sunrises in it.
   


2. Rihanna - "Umbrella (ft. Jay-Z)" [buy]
   One of the best things about 2007 was how ubiquitous this song became. You'd be walking along the street, sorry for yourself, and as the traffic waited at a red light Rihanna's voice would come ribboning out. And you'd be singing "ella ella ella" before you could stop yourself. (I wrote a short short story about "Umbrella" in April.)
   


3. Basia Bulat - "Snakes and Ladders" [buy/info]
   In January I said it, that the drums hurtle at double-speed, ratatat-tat, chasing the singer breathless. So many female songwriters take-it-always-easy, languishing in slow piano chords and then the occasional strident bit. Here it's like the band (Basia, drums, strings) are throwing themselves down a hill, feet scarcely keeping up with their feelings, this close to tumbling head-over-heels into something. And indeed so it is: "like we didn't even notice / oh / the way we'd come undone."
   


4. Okkervil River - "Unless It's Kicks" [buy]
   It's not just one of the greatest songs of the year - it's one of the wisest. Sheff sings with an urgency that is like an underlining of key phrases, like two hands tugging to make sure all the seams hold. And whereas wisdom's so often dull, here it's knotted up in the work of a band who love the Shangri-Las, and Sam Cooke, and the craft of a pop song. I'd not be sad if every Okkervil River song sounded like this: shaker, tambourine, a revelation at the moment you go leaping off the stage and onto the raised hands of the crowd.
   


5. Feist - "I Feel It All" [buy]
   Yes, the girl from the iPod commercials, the girl who against all expectations made an album rougher than her debut, her lavender mixed through with black pepper. I said: The joy of a maybe, of all those million maybes, of a world too big for fate to contain it. For the wild card that's already "in sight"/"inside", the way even a string of heartbreaks makes a necklace, makes a life, makes a subway map. (plus I still say she's nicked her miss piggy ha! yells from arcade fire's regine.)
   


6. Animal Collective - "Fireworks" [buy]
   TO BE PLAYED SO LOUD SO LOUD SO LOUD, KIDS, and WHILE YOU ARE STANDING UP.
   


7. Vampire Weekend - "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" [not yet for sale/info]
   "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa"'s named after a Congolese dancebeat but the song's not in fact a kwassa kwassa, nor is it a slow jam, although it's basically about making out, pale and collegiate, and wondering what the heck you're doing. ... And in the song's final moments we have the sweetest love-scene of any song this year: a scene of white sheets and pink lips and fingers slipping round the curve of an ear, a few bars where we hear just Hammond hum and hands on skin and the bluebird coos of a boy slipping out of one skin & into another.
   


8. Avril Lavigne - "Girlfriend" [buy]
   So Avril was sued for copping a bit of someone else's song. In this case that's basically just getting sued for copying the way someone else was totally awesome. Because when this song goes pounding, girl-grouping into the chorus, everything else is obliterated. And I just want to stay there, happy, and for sixteen bars feel like I can do anything. (Okay, except for actually being someone's girlfriend.)
   


9. M.I.A. - "Paper Planes" [buy]
   Time-travel to August: And the sky will crisscross with sparkling jet-planes, and M.I.A. will be playing on the roof of the YMCA, just her and a sampler and a girl with a bass drum. And I'll learn to play electric guitar so I can learn to play this song - a high, keening guitar-line, lazy-crazy, useless for anything except "Paper Planes", but the only part you can learn. Because the sing-along chorus is literally impossible to sing along to: it's machine-gun pow and cash register kaching, and yet still the summer's second anthem, the best thing since ella-ella-ella.
   


10. LCD Soundsystem - "Someone Great" [buy - $8.97!]
    If this weren't here, "All My Friends" would be. But it's here, and it's great; a song of melancholy and shell-shock sung with click-clack sticks, glockenspiel dings, a circulatory system of synths. James Murphy sings a feeling he doesn't yet seem to inhabit: the peace he imagines tomorrow, yesterday, & on the other side of the mirror's glass.
    


11. Spoon - "Don't You Evah" [buy]
    When I wrote about this song, I wrote about dancing at 1 a.m. at New York's Port Authority.
    


12. Frog Eyes - "Bushels" [buy]
    Most of the songs on this list are just songs. But "Bushels" feels like a whole album, a whole novel, the kind of thing that takes a year to fully feel and set to wax. Carey Mercer is at once horseman and horse, ridden and riding, traversing with his band a landscape of want, lust, loss and loneliness. Past groaning icebergs and screaming peaks, eyries and trenches. And at last in the final 1:15 he finds his home! With his wife he finds it, there where the jingle-bells shake, and it's the most beautiful sound I've heard this year. (Dan taught me about this song.)
    


13. Christine Fellows - "What Makes the Cherry Red" [buy/info]
    Sometimes I walk past my roommate's room, when her door is closed, and I hear this song playing inside, and it makes me so happy to know for certain that she will be okay. (I wrote more here.)
    


14. Hot 8 Brass Band - "Sexual Healing" [buy/info]
    A song that blows my synaesthetic senses to smithereens: it's all stretch and touch, sweetness and joy and those free fucking drums stripping all the leaves from the trees. And a persistently sexy tuba. When Hot 8 finally sing Marvin Gaye's lyrics, it's like the words have crawled right out their throats, desperate as magnets for their lovers' earringed ears. (Dan's post about this song, and the comments that ensued, are grand.)
    


15. Radiohead - "Reckoner" [buy on January 1/info]
    Instead of heartbeat, I've got heartbeats. Instead of tomorrows, I've got tambourine.
    


16. Of Montreal - "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" [buy]
    In October of 2006 I risked fines & jail-time to present a bulleted list of why this song rules. I just want to dance till I'm sick. Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna... LP and their Icons, Abstract Thee EP are two of 2007's great masterworks, together both honest, jubilant, fevered and fucked-up.
    


17. Katie Dill - "The Body's Only Rental" [info]
    It's the way of girls with ukeleles, I think; there's something inherent in them. ... And the song's greater message, this holistic, almost karmic stuff; well it's like the Salinger stories I was reading, weeks ago: Seymour's reassuring buddhist certainties. His gentle. Or the way Salinger can write "I think love is a touch and yet not a touch", and me I don't imagine the inside of a greeting card -- I feel my whole world give a little tremble.
    


18. Britney Spears - "Piece of Me" [buy]
    The curl, creak and creep of her consonants; that feral timbre; the slink of her technicolour coat and all its dusky velveted furs. This song deserves to be here if only for the way she slurs "extra extra", selling so finely a song written about herself but by someone else, the 90s' greatest popstar warped & vocoded into Xenomania cyberpop, the stuff of Aly & AJ and The Knife.
    


19. Miracle Fortress - "Next Train" [buy/info]
    Perhaps there are better songs by Miracle Fortress, one of Canada's great new artists, but "Next Train" includes my favourite five seconds of any song released in 2007. The five seconds recur three separate times, at 0:55, 2:09 and 2:38. It's just a simple "With you," there in the fog of bedroom psych, of kindly noise, in kaleidoscopic pop song. "With you," sung high and soft, a secret faintly traced.
    


20. Bill Callahan - "Sycamore" [buy]
    It's a song that borrows its guitar-line from the song that James, Donna and cousin Maddy record in the living-room on Twin Peaks. And just like that Twin Peaks number it's a track filled with a diffuse and undirected love. Callahan sings crooked platitudes, half-wisdoms, blind man's advice - and do you have a better idea? He's like the guy at the bar who's toasting the bartender, the mirror, the pint-glasses, the hairdos, the everything. Because nothing is a suitable container for the heat that he's feeling; he might as well just share it how he can, and if it's meaningless at least it's still warm. Only one thing seems to bear even a hint of what it truly is to feel how he does. And that one thing is the word "sycamore". Forget "cellar door". Forget "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious". Callahan borrowed one of my favourite words, but it's ok since he uses it as I would. To hold for a sec the can't-be-held.
    


21. Amy Winehouse - "Love is a Losing Game (acoustic version)" [buy]
    Amy Winehouse is not, in the end, in our newspapers because of drugs or drink; not because of Mark Ronson's hot, brassy production; not because of our hunger for celebrity and breakdown; but because of this. Because of what she can do with six strings, her voice, and her heart. (Previously)
    


22. Jay Bharadia - "Snowy Day" [buy/info]
    For when you wake up one night with spraypaint on your igloo, with grafitti streaked and swirling in the sky. For when you hunch down by the hole in the ice, wait for a seal to surface, rap in french. For when you are the only human being for a hundred miles and yet have a song so good that you can already hear people tethering their sleigh-dogs to get the hell over here. The press release says British, thrift shops, French and Indian parents. But me I hear an awesome inuit hip-hop, an iceberg funk, the soundtrack for the night of a lunar eclipse. It's not often I hear a song and pronounce, out loud, the word: "Siiick."
    


23. Orillia Opry - "I Lied" [buy/info]
    "I Lied" is the prettiest, and bitterest, break-up song that you'll hear this year. They sing their sadness with the plainest of adornment, with the evenest of tones. Such a fearsome, gentle chorus: "If you come back / come back with a heart attack". A heart attack! Like it's the easiest thing to sing, like there's nothing tightening in their chest as they stare you down. Like they're not going to go home and do the dishes, and put on a kettle, and forget to make the tea, and like they're not going to sit staring out the blank glass of the window reminiscing, and angry, and like they're not going to go in to the kitchen and see the cold kettle and boil some more water and like as the tap shushes at their fingertips they're not going to begin to cry like a dog, banging their fist against the sink in fury at themselves
    


24. Nico - "Little Stone" [info]
    By a boy who seems to maybe call himself Nico, who's 17 and from New York and definitely not the German femme fatale. It sounds like a song first dreamed, then made; like Nico spent two months in fields & attics & alleyways, trying to find the sounds he dreamed those weeks before, in black and white. It's Hood, Liars, Amnesiac, Animal Collective, and a phone ringing down the wire.
    


25. The Luyas - "Dumb Blood" [buy]
    The Luyas' debut is my favourite album of 2007. A singer-songwriter descends into gnash & noise, she lingers in the thick of all the things it's scary to linger in. And "Dumb Blood" is the frayed end of a heartstring. (Previously)
    


26. Ola Podrida - "Instead" [buy]
    Ola Podrida's album finally came out this year. I wrote about the demo of this song in June of 2006. I said then that sometimes the horizon's a hook. I had no idea.
    


27. Low - "Murderer" [buy]
    Imagine a person you hate getting punched in the face. Imagine the flower of blood. This is a very beautiful song about that, and it's not supposed to let you get comfortable.
    


28. Jose Gonzalez - "Fold" [buy]
    This is why when we listen to sad songs we sometimes do not sing along. We pretend they're other peoples' stories. ... It's the thing we all hope, selfishly, secretly, as we take our lovers in our arms. Please don't let me down.
    


29. Arcade Fire - "Keep the Car Running" [buy]
    I thought I'd end up writing about "Ocean of Noise" or something like that but no, no, I gotta be true: forget the flaws of the lyrics, and Dan's ambivalence, this is the one with its galloping drums its hurrying mandolin its perfect pop piano. (When the piano finally changes at 2:29 - !!!) It's the one with hollers and heave, with doubletime "told-it-to-them", my friends' dear band making sure every fucking candle is lit.
    


30. Essie Jain - "Indefinable" [buy]
    I said in March: If you slow a diamond enough, slow it right down, you begin to see a different glitter: there, beneath the pretty, something sad and beautiful and smelling of coal. There's a desolation to the song, a stillness that recalls the earliest (spooky) work of Kathryn Williams, and Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek". Just Jain singing to the mines.
    


31. SoKo - "I'll Kill Her" [info]
    A jilted lover in heavy eyeshadow and a hungover French accent. SoKo's hate-song recalls Herman Dune but without that band's warm whimsy - her wry wit is more like a hidden shiv, something she can't wait to slip between her adversary's ribs. The year's most unhappy smile. (Dan's take.)
    


32. Parts & Labor - "Fractured Skies" [buy]
    Outside my window there's a blizzard and I can almost, almost imagine "Fractured Skies" as its soundtrack. Only it'd have to be a firestorm, a snow of ash, soot and flame; and there would have to be a million plows, coughing smoke; and there would have to be sirens all around.
    


33. Alasdair Roberts - "River Rhine" [buy]
    A love-song for the one you really, really, really like; the one who makes you feel like you've found your source. (Previously)
    


34. Sandro Perri - "Dreams (Fleetwood Mac)" [buy other works by Sandro Perri]
    Waking and finding your chest is as empty as her wardrobe. (Previously)
    


35. Samamidon - "Levi" [buy]
    If bible stories were shot as photographs, one every ten years. If a family tree was only ever shown in woodcuts. If an old song could be sung, rustling with new winds.
    


36. Los Campesinos! - "You! Me! Dancing!" [buy]
    A new recording of one of my favourite songs of 2006, by Broken Social Scene's wundermensch Dave Newfeld. In June I wrote of a YA fantasy novel: In Susan Cooper's The Grey King, Will, Bran and the Old Ones must hold back The Dark, all of 'em, even the mountain Cader Idris itself. And they do it: through magic, will, determination. But they should have got Los Campesinos on the phone; called them up from Cardiff to Gwynedd; and let them blaze their joy through the shifting ranks of evil, cleaving grief like a hot knife through butter.
    


37. Julie Doiron - "(untitled)" [info]
    When you lie with a friend and they tell you the outline of their heart in a way you had not heard before, the truth a different colour than you thought. And you cannot heal them. This is a song I find it very hard to write about. (Previously)


38. Bowerbirds - "Olive Hearts" [buy]
    A party song wrought in bass-drum, acoustic guitar and accordion. A song of hygge, that Danish word which means good times, close friends, hot fires, cold beer.
    


39. The New Pornographers - "Adventures in Solitude" [buy]
    We know that the New Pornographers can make pop songs, songs as carefully engineered as the newest high-tech roman candles. But here they make a song that's tender, blushing, more first stars than fireworks.
    


40. Meg Baird - "Do What You Gotta Do (Jimmy Webb)" [buy]
    Like Roberta Flack (and unlike Nina Simone), Espers' Meg Baird sings "Do What You Gotta Do" as if the goodbye can itself sustain her; as if by singing farewell she can undo the loneliness before it occurs. (She can't.)
    


41. Froggystein - "The Flowers are Blooming!" [info]
    This song has many sections, one for each time of day. You can wear it as a talisman as you swing your machete, cut through the jungle, wade through the lake, inflate your bike-tires, go inside, find her in the crowd, and kiss her on the mouth.
    


42. Wilco - "Impossible Germany" [buy]
    Even if Sky Blue Sky never sky-blued my sky, Jeff Tweedy remains one of my favourite singers and lyricists in indie-rock. Here however he is terribly upstaged by not one but two swan-necking electric guitars.
    


43. Ravens & Chimes - "Eleventh Street" [buy/info]
    Every now and then the lyrics feel precious, not-quite-right, but I don't know there's something magical in this not-quite-rightness, this groping around and not (not!) quite finding the right words for heartbreak. ... And deep in one channel a mandolin mandolins: strum and strum and strum, hard as it can, just like all of us, not knowing what the hell else to do.
    


44. Times New Viking - "Devo & Wine" [buy]
    When all your best laid plans fall apart and something even better takes its place. (Like developing a taste for frostbite.) (Dan's great take.)
    


45. Grizzly Bear - "He Hit Me (The Crystals)" [buy]
    A remarkable, beautiful, terrifying cover; lust, menace, tenderness and dream. Grizzly Bear's music this year is so savage and so lovely - proof of the breezes that flatten cities, the caresses that break jaws.
    


46. Amerie - "Gotta Work" [buy]
    Only in a year like 2007 could "Gotta Work" be only the 46th best song of the year. A song that will not, will not, will not ever let you collapse. Horns like Moses on the mountain, and Amerie like the girl in the clouds above him.
    


47. The Henry Clay People - "The Man in the Riverbed" [buy]
    This is life, kids: lurches, boo-boos, faceplants, the stares of strangers. And The Henry Clay People explode with their knowledge of this, of life loose, staggering and ripe.
    


48. Sleeping States - "The Next Step" [buy]
    So that you can finally tell them that you love them. (Per Jordan)
    


49. Modest Mouse - "Dashboard" [buy]
    It's not "Float On" but Modest Mouse are trying here for a similar crow-footed pop, nothing too clever but frantic enough to knock the books off yr shelves, yes even the heavy ones.
    


50. Throw Me The Statue - "Lolita" [buy]
    And finally, finally, at number fifty it's the bedroom pop of Throw Me The Statue, of falling blush-over-hiccup for a girl, like boys have been doing since the dawn of time, like let's all keep doing forever - here's to that, cheers & happy new year & amen.
    

Thanks for reading. The comment section is right down there.

[haystack photo is from mirroroworld]

THERE ARE WHALES

Los Campesinos - "You! Me! Dancing!". Last December I wrote about an earlier recording of this song (a track that made by top 50 songs of the year), but this new version is rocketship to that one's horse-drawn carriage. It was recorded by Dave Newfeld, he of Broken Social Scene and You Forgot It In People, one of my favourite producers working today. And the finished result is a frantic mess, a deafening pop song, a band firing on twenty cylinders & adding new cylinders as they go. An electric guitar allumeuse, a bass-drum bricklayer, a glockenspiel chandelier, voices haranguing a violinist. It's like The Delgados are still around, ten years younger, stomping on the upper floor of a barn until the whole building collapses.

In Susan Cooper's The Grey King, Will, Bran and the Old Ones must hold back The Dark, all of 'em, even the mountain Cader Idris itself. And they do it: through magic, will, determination. But they should have got Los Campesinos on the phone; called them up from Cardiff to Gwynedd; and let them blaze their joy through the shifting ranks of evil, cleaving grief like a hot knife through butter.

They're a group that makes me wish I was in a band; it's a song that makes me wish I was a piece of vinyl.

[buy]

Sandro Perri - "Dreams"
Fleetwood Mac - "Dreams"

When Stevie Nicks sings "Dreams", she's still trying to seduce him. There's something tilted in the way she sings "Who am I to keep you down?" She may not mean for the song to be so barbed, such an elbow in the gut of Lindsey Buckingham. But as she sings of a heartbeat that "drives you mad / in the stillness of remembering," the drum-beat is maddeningly clear, an over-and-over that brings you to rest in just that place. And she sounds very good, singing it. And you wonder what it would take to have the chance to harmonize with her.

But when Sandro Perri plays "Dreams", the drums are sparse - the heartbeat itself has almost been forgotten. It's the chorus - fleeting, familiar, gorgeous - that represents the stuff which has been lost. And it's his voice, and the guitars, and the wide open sounds. It's a fitting dream-sound, and there's nothing pointed in it. It's a eulogy without subtext. It's a sadness. He's more bard than former lover, singing the melancholy instead of an ardour.

(many thanks to Shane for the Sandro Perri song)

[buy Fleetwood Mac's Rumours / I highly recommend(ed) Sandro Perri's first EP, but unfortunately "Dreams" is from a limited edition tour-only CD-R]

(photo of Cwm Idwal by Dave JG)

2006's Best Music: Songs

Yesterday Dan and Jordan wrote about their favourite music of 2006. Today, as I did last year, I offer you my favourite songs of 2006. The list goes to #55 and there are mp3s for the top 35. I decided no artist would appear more than once. I regret the lack of pop and hip-hop but I didn't hear very much and not many people sent it to me.

If you like a song, please support the artist - there are links for you to buy each record.

My favourite albums of the year were, in descending order: Destroyer - Destroyer's Rubies, The Knife - Silent Shout, Swan Lake - Beast Moans, Grizzly Bear - Yellow House, Jason Molina - Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go, Espers - Espers II, Beirut - Gulag Orkestar, Final Fantasy - He Poos Clouds, Damien Jurado - Now That I'm Your Shadow, Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury, Fionn Regan - The End of History, White Flight - s/t.

I suggest you buy them all, and let them rattle you.

THE BEST SONGS OF 2006

1. Beirut - "Postcards from Italy" [buy]
   Beirut became a little famous this year, and more than anything it's because two songs available free on his website - this one and "Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)". "Postcards from Italy" is a song so generous with its pleasures, so easy to love: beautiful, breathless, wistful. A pop music rendered in shades of brown, black and gold (beer-brown, night-black, coin-gold), Condon's woozy, heartflushed voice set amid ukelele, piano, gyspy trumpet, and roll-thumping drums. And just when you think "Ok, got it," about two minutes in - there's a whole other song that crests above you, sweet as full longing. "And I would love to see that day / That day is mine / When she will marry me outside / With the willow trees / And play the songs that made / that made me so." (Beirut previously on StG: 1 2 guestpost)
2. Lavender Diamond - "You Broke My Heart" [buy]
   "You Broke My Heart" was first released in 2005 and will be reissued on Matador & Rough Trade in 2007. But it is one of my songs of 2006. Nothing else in these eleven and a half months has so captured the way heartbreak can be answered with resolve, two songs sung in one voice. It's a victory march, with tears streaming. It's a parade down the Champs-Elysees with people cheering from their windows, tickertapes fanning & falling, clouds white as the pages of new books. Becky Stark sings the same line over and over, high as high, transforming heartbreak into triumph. And the drums and bells and piano say the same thing: Yes, yes, yes, oh yes, yes, to it all I'll say yes.
3. Munk & James Murphy - "Kick Out the Chairs (Who Made Who replay)"
   This didn't come out in 2006 either. I guess my list is a bit of a sham. But whenever it did come out, people did not speak of it. And so now here were are with the NUMBA THREE of TWO THOUSAND SIX, and thank god it's finally a song that is fun. LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy shouts himself hoarse singing a nonsense about "kick[ing] out the chizzairs, muthaf***ers!". Who Made Who turns the tiresome original into a thing of loud funky brilliance, a pleasure that's ripe as new peaches-persimmons-pineapples. As limes. You can hear the smile on Nancy Wang's lips as she sings along. You can hear the joy in the cowbell. There's nothing spooky-nasty-dark: it's all free glad glorious awesome life. (Previously on Stg)
4. Yo La Tengo - "Black Flowers" [buy]
   As I said in September, James McNew's got a tawny melody, light as sparrow, but he puts it in a room with sounds of deep blues, reds, blacks. Piano, french horn, violin, and these brilliant clipped synth-strings, like sprouts. The song's sumptuous, a ballad worthy of the radio - it has all the gentle prettiness that attracts people to Sufjan Stevens, the cresting feeling that draws listeners, even, to Snow Patrol or Coldplay (listen to the Chris Martin-like "Oh-oh" at 3:09). ... It's plain and unconflicted songcraft: it rubs my heart til it glows. No fucking around: just glassy, sweet song; dark petals blooming.
5. Grizzly Bear - "Knife" [buy]
   The prettiest song about backstabbing that you'll ever hear. The content of the message becomes detached from its delivery: "Do you think it's all right?" they sing in a chorus of chemical doo-wop, "Do you think it's all right? Can't you feel the knife?" Simultaneously intimate and public, bitter and celebratory, like a hate-letter written in curlicued clouds across the whole Brooklyn sky. (Grizzly Bear previously on StG: 1 2 3 guestpost)
6. Ola Podrida - "Pour Me Another (demo)" [MySpace]
   Ola Podrida's debut album will be released in 2007 on Plug Research. This is a demo version of "Pour Me Another". It's a love song as true as any you'll hear this year. You can hear him trying to get this down, fingers on piano-keys. Trying to tell someone exactly what he feels about her. It's clumsy, careful. It's graceful, brave. All I can hope is that you have someone to give it to. (Ola Podrida previously on StG: 1 2)
7. The Knife - "We Share Our Mother's Health (Trentemoller remix)" [buy]
   The original of this Knife song is very, very good, but divorced from the rest of the album I prefer Trentemoller's version, that wintry electro distended into cold ice. It comes at you from all directions, heaves of melody coming shattering up from under your feet. (The Knife previously on StG: 1 2)
8. Chris Garneau - "Not Nice" [pre-order]
   Previously on StG: This is the inverse of Antony (& the Johnsons). It's as if Garneau's been gathering songs like this, stillness and piano and cello, and he's been collecting all the gaps in these other peoples' tracks. And then with care, yes with pain, he makes his own song - a song made just of the gaps. Of the pauses that make something flicker instead of shine.
9. Ghostface Killa ft. Cappadonna, Shawn Wigs & Trife - "Jellyfish" [buy]
   It's a tribute to the perfect woman, body and mind: "I'm not cheatin' on her or beatin' on her / I spend the weekend on her." The organ sample's feels like nothing but a golden age - some downtown utopia with a Helen on your arm.
10. Herman Dune - "I Wish That I Could See You Soon" [buy]
    The song with the best music video of the year. Prevously on Said the Gramophone: Herman Dune's new album is made with major label lucre: horn section, expensive studio, backup singers. But it's also made with familiar stuff: tambourine jangle, sneaker squeak, rhymes like high-fives. "I Wish That I Could See You Soon" hides nothing. It's about wishing that I could see you soon. It's about seeing a photograph and hearing trumpets; it's about talking to yourself; it's about wanting, wanting, wanting; about there being no way to say and nothing you can do. Part of me wants to re-record it at half-speed, just murmur and lazy-strummed mandolin, singing all the sadness that the song submerges. Herman Dune don't wallow even for a second: they consider the worst-case, they sing it, but then they move on to the more important stuff. To wishing. And wishing is fast enough to dance to.
11. Destroyer - "Rubies" [buy ($8.99)]
    A sprawling, baffling song, all knees and elbows and spurts of juicy-red guitar. Previously: With Destroyer, every line is an aside; no line is an aside; we listen from all sides, and he knows it ... a drumkit that keeps throwing itself across the studio floor ... Bejar's wistful and moony; he's a dandy; he's exact ("typical / rural / shit"), and abrupt ("I won't repeat them here"). He's a Bowie-like frontman and later just a man with ... a plaintive reaching theme.
12. Justin Timberlake ft. T. I. - "My Love" [buy]
    Bar none the best song about Cameron Diaz that I've ever heard. Timbaland's made a love-song with hydra-headed personality: the club-banging synth blitz, the blushing falsetto, the easygoing beatbox, the goofy gremlin laugh that fastens everything to earth. And Justin & T.I. fill it with something that's at once sincere and exquisitely Prince-catchy.
13. Sunparlour Players - "Talk It To Death (live)" [buy]
    Two Toronto Mennonites play a song on glockenspiel, guitar, bass drum and throat. As Dan pointed out, Andrew Penner sounds a great deal like the Arcade Fire's Win Butler used to - it's a voice with a woodgrain of ache, desires sent wheeling up in a series of whoops.
14. Peter Bjorn & John with Victoria Bergsman - "Young Folks" [buy]
    A model duet, times three: 1) the perfect matching of clear drums and loping bassline; 2) Bjorn's tentative voice and The Concretes' Victoria Bergsman out-wearying even Camera Obscura's Traceyanne Campbell; 3) bongos (my most hated amateur instrument) and whistling (my most beloved amateur instrument). (Previously on StG)
15. Sunset Rubdown - "Us Ones in Between" [buy]
    I woke up to this song when Dan Beirne, of this blog, made a music video, of sorts, for it. (The video is archived here.) Before then I had enjoyed it but it was like being in a dark room and not knowing that in the corner behind you was a flame. It's sad and beautiful, shrill and soothing, a song perfectly about precipice. And if you listen to the words (which I eventually did), you'll find that Spencer Krug has quietly become one of the best lyricists in all of indie rock.
16. Christine Fellows - "Vertebrae" [buy]
    She has me at "tigerlilies". Listen and you'll hear what I mean. Fellows lives in Winnipeg. She has toured with The Mountain Goats and The Weakerthans. She plays her organ and sings in her strange, flowering voice - a bit Joanna Newsom, aye, and a bit Regina Spektor. But more solitary, more (yes) kind. And it's a song that is so sad, so moving and sad, speaking with small sweet grace to those hollowed weeks after a loved one's death.

    Kevin sent this to me and in so doing is the first winner of our Best of 2006 contest.

17. Swan Lake - "The Freedom" [buy]
    Swan Lake's Beast Moans is free - not like beer, like jazz. Every few bars, someone opens a cage and lets something loose. I don't think they even know what they're letting go. And the magic here is that amid all these weird-wood sounds, these industrial groans, are hooks and melody and catchphrases easy-on-the-ears. A pop song yoked to the cyclops, with Dan Bejar singing its tale. (Previously on StG.)
18. Gnarls Barkley - "Crazy" [buy]
    Only one je ne sais quoi away from being a stone-cold classic - like Marvin Gaye or Al Green classic, seriously. The bassline is tailor-made for college acapella groups, and Ceelo's vocals seem so slim-nimble that they'd be tailor-made for a tailor-made suit. Something in pinstripes, with seams about to split.
19. Casey Dienel - "The La La Song" [buy]
    Previously on StG: Casey sings her song and then figures out how to sing it better. She plays the piano, singing, singing, words about peaches and clementines and regret. She sings all these words - and then she realises that the tangled-up things she's trying to say - well that bundle of moments isn't gonna come across in rhyming verses. There's a better way: just some "la's", high and reaching, and then a final one, low and sure.
20. Bob Dylan - "Spirit on the Water" [buy]
    Previously on StG: All kinds of lavender as his band plays the most beautiful melody of any Dylan song I can remember: peace and quiet, chance and possibility, bliss and ease, all of it right there in the blush of steel strings.
21. Cat Power - "The Greatest" [buy ($8.00)]
    A dusty (springfield) kinda number, Chan Marshall stretched slow and wanting over a perfect field of drums - hit like so, brush like thus, chime and toe-stepping step. Summer hot, country fair, and ended (thank goodness) before it gets too sweet. (Previously on StG)
22. The Pendulums - "Brand New Song" [buy]
    Psychfolk from Glasgow that captures the whimsy of 70s bands like Gong and The Incredible String Band - daft, zinging, and a splendidly great song. Trombone, violin and Commodore 64s oh my! (Previously on StG)
23. Regina Spektor - "Fidelity" [buy]
    All of Spektor's work relies on her delivery - a thing more often magic in person than on record. But "Fidelity" flourishes in these glossy surroundings, the stuttering strings hanging back just enough for Regina to dare dash forward.
24. Sleeping States - "Rivers" [buy]
    Previously on StG: The river Sleeping States summon is so gentle, so Saturday, that the whole world can go fuzzy. A handful of grass in the bottom of your boat - squint and it's Pavement, it's Grizzly Bear, ... electric guitar, bass, and drums.
25. Hookers Green No. 1 - "Bloody Great Big Fucking Party" [info]
    Previously on StG: Electric guitars swagger and droop, a synth-line wiggles, voices woo-woo from the back. ... It's a crowd of rowdy Scots whose chants will rouse the housewives, whose coo will call the fishes, whose hot-cold sass will fry your egg, flip it into a roll, set it warm in your hands.
26. Espers - "Dead Queen" [buy]
    Electric guitar that smells of ozone, blended voices that smell of foreign, Northern winds. Espers' folk-music is eerie, lovely, rife. (Previously on StG)
27. Antarctica Takes It! - "I'm No Lover" [buy/MySpace]
    Previously on StG: Listen to the exclamation of this song! The band earns the '!'. Listen to the cannonade of percussion, the charge of clap-clap, the hoarsening voices and the go-insane of the piano... the closing horn fanfare like a cavalry of rainbows that the general's added "just because we can! On, men! On on on!" They're from Santa Cruz (!?).
28. Rah Rah - "Winter Sun" [MySpace]
    Saskatchewan's got something going on. First Matthew Feyld and now Rah Rah, from Regina, with a song that heats my bones. Despite the heat of their voices (boy-girl, with the latter recalling Cat Power and Newsom-squawk both,) "Winter Sun" is as blizzarded as the title suggests. The lyrics are double-edged: whether whispers meant for bed or fog, for the lost or the found.

    JW suggested this song and in so doing was the second (and final) winner of our Best of 2006 contest.

29. Lily Allen - "LDN" [buy]
    Cynical and fancy-free; yes, both. Ingredients: sun, lilt, dash of cane sugar.
30. Joanna Newsom - "Emily" [buy]
    It's not a compact song, nor one that offers itself up at first glance. It's hard to twist your life through it: the laces are tied. But for me it's a string of moments: splendours that show themselves like cloud emerging hush from behind the sun. (Previously on StG: 1 2)
31. Fionn Regan - "Put a Penny in the Slot" [buy]
    An Irishman with an acoustic guitar - but he's no sad-sack. He plays as he plays, trying phrases, trying moods, setting it in the same circling strains of guitar. And in the bridge at 2:05, everything goes goooolden. (Previously on StG)
32. Bishop Allen - "Flight 180" [buy]
    Bishop Allen have released ten EPs in 2006 so far, with many good songs therein contained. And this is my favourite. It's more Arcade Fire than indie-pop, something dark and full of promises. Justin Rice sounds ragged and a little scared. The violins sound strained. And when the drums come, they clear it all away.
33. Horse Feathers - "Finch on Saturday" [MySpace]
    I want a fiddle for my best friend. (Previously on StG)
34. Dorian Hatchet - "Fast Runner" [MySpace]
    A girl with a folded voice sings of killing her brother, over and over, while piano scampers, leaps, runs. As much fun as slipping on a patch of ice and for a moment flying. (Previously on StG)
35. Rappers' Delight Club - "Hum" [MySpace]
    Previously on StG: In short, this is four minutes of the looped Elmo themesong, but with kids laying it down. They rap like monsters, like beasts, like cheese-shop clerks. Like kids, really - and beyond the ceaseless sparkle of the song, there's the plain flact of their flow.

For the curious, my favourite songs #35-55 are after the jump.

THE MIDNIGHT BLUE

Los Campesinos! - "You! Me! Dancing!". Cardiff's Los Campesinos! have an exclamation mark in their name, like the Go Team!, are signed to Wichita, like the Go Team!, and blaze fucking technicolour, like the Go Team!. But while the punctuation, the label and the razzle-dazzle are familiar, they don't particularly sound anything like the Go Team!: instead it's the glockenspiel indiepop of The Delgados, The Winks and Ballboy. Boys sing with girls, nonsense is bellowed, calm gives way to dancebeat rock'n'roll. It starts all coy, playin' with atmospherics and anticipation, but come 1:38 you'll know what the song is about - a cycle of guitar, drums and glock that'll wear you ragged. They're a group that makes me wish I was in a band; it's a song that makes me wish I was a piece of vinyl.

[MySpace]

Kim Doo Soo - "Wild Flower". This is from a compilation called International Sad Hits, Vol. 1: Altaic Language Group. It's a record compiled by Damon & Naomi, with contributions by four Asian singer-songwriters who are veterans in their scenes - compared in the press notes to the likes of Tim Buckley, Bob Dylan and Nick Drake. This is by far my favourite cut on the record, something soft and a little broken by Korea's Kim Doo Soo. It opens with a clip from Badly Drawn Boy's "Stone on the Water" (thanks aleska!), violin trembling under disjointed organ phrases. When Kim Doo Soo's voice appears it is balanced delicate on the line between melancholy and maudlin. As the song rises around him - harmonica, plucked fiddle, - and returns to the opening melody, the maudlin aspect's totally gone. It's just plainly sad.

[buy / read Damon's StG guestpost from April 2005]

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Shake Your Fist shares Robin Allender's version of The Snowman's "Walking in the Air". Allender used to record as The Inconsolable. The Snowman was one of my most cherished childhood films: a spinning musicbox version still sits by the bed in my old room at my parents'. Allender's rendition is not quite slow enough, but as Amy says it is a "sugar-dusted murmur" - quiet as my whisper at the first sight of snow.

For something very strange, see IRN BRU's version of The Snowman (and "Walking In The Air"), featuring a fly-over of the Forth Bridge, Edinburgh Castle, Princes Street Gardens, George Square, and other suitably Scottish landmarks. IRN BRU is of course a Scottish soft drink, made of girders.

Scots should join me at Damien Jurado in Glasgow tonight. (Turns out this was last night - dammit!)

(Best of Year contest winner(s) will be announced next week when StG presents its favourite music of 2006.)