The Best 20 Tracks of 2009 (Part II)

Now then, on to the serious business. The auditory sprinkles on the fairy cake of popular music, if you will. It’s part two of my musical year in review, the top ten, the big boys, the best of the best of the best. Have yourself a cup of tea/tumbler of brandy/speedball (delete where applicable), and listen to some tunes, stupid.

10. Fuck Buttons – The Lisbon Maru



The epic centrepiece of by far and away the most exciting album of the year, ‘The Lisbon Maru’ showed Fuck Buttons delivering on the noisy promise of 2008’s debut Street Horrrsing tenfold. An exercise in suspense and release, every tiny development in its relentless march is plundered for maximum impact, from the gradual introduction of the drums, cymbal by cymbal, to the eventual heartstopping wall of feedback that drenches all before it in euphoric drone.

9. HEALTH - We Are Water



A track that gives the impression HEALTH just want to liquefy your brain, by any means necessary. With no let up in the breakneck beat (I personally nominate BJ as one of the most technically gifted rock drummers around) and constant, shuddering screeches of pure noise jettisoned from mangled guitars and keyboards, the track plays itself out across three minutes of amphetamine-riddled lunacy to a point where you would expect most bands to call it a day, before going even more insanely furious and stepping things up still further. And then it does the most effective half-tempo shift you’ve ever heard, to give you a chance to digest the complete awesomeness of what you’ve just experienced.

8. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Zero



I’m leaving the video up for this one, partly because I love them for ripping it out of Jared Leto’s tremendously self-indulgent promo for ‘From Yesterday’, and partly because you need to look at Karen O in this video. Look at her. Isn’t she brilliant? And I want that jacket. Oh yes. Anyway, the song is three minutes of pop awesomeness better even than Blondie, and just goes to show that guitar bands ‘discovering’ synth doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Unless of course, the guitar band in question is Snow Patrol. Or The Editors. Or… okay, it’s only a good thing when Yeah Yeah Yeahs do it.

7. The Big Pink – Velvet



‘Dominos’ may have got all the indie club airplay, but it was this, the first single from The Big Pink, that really grabbed the attention with its printer jam rhythms and layers of guitar squall. Okay, you might accuse them of doing epic-by-numbers rock, but since when was that a bad thing? Please, oh please, let this herald the start of a shoegaze revival. Then in a couple of years time, when all the scene kids are buying Fender Jaguars and stacks of FX units, we’ll be able to say “Thanks, Big Pink – you may have been insufferably over-hyped by your friends in the music press, but at least you fought the good fight against the landfill indie jangle.”

6. DOOM – Gazillion Ear (Thom Yorke Remix)



The accumulation of wealth has proven such fertile subject matter for hip-hop for so long, but ‘A Milli’ this most definitely is not. In retrospect, Thom Yorke’s wandering, skittish beats provide an ideal complement to DOOM’s labyrinthine, arrhythmic flow – loose, unsettling, never anything less than intense. Yorke opts to use a more frantic, ranting delivery than the original cut, serving only to heighten that sense of claustrophobia with its breathlessness. But nothing detracts from the lyrical dexterity of the man in the mask as he throws the thesaurus at the usual range of bizarre pop culture references from Jake the Snake, to ‘Ernest Goes to Camp’, to the Large Hadron Collider, throughout a third person verbal deconstruction of the “villain man” who “won’t stop rocking ‘til he’s clocked in a gazillion grand” and “had his PhD in indiscrete street haggling”. As usual, it would take a sharp ear, an encyclopaedia and a few hits of mescaline to pull out every double meaning and fractured reference in there, but then, that’s half the fun, isn’t it?

5. La Roux – In For The Kill (SKREAM’s Let’s Get Ravey Remix)



Bass! How low can you go, as a wise man once asked. The answer, if I’m any judge, is very low indeed, because it will sound awesome. I know I’ve put the youtube player above, but seriously, don’t waste this shit on laptop speakers, it’s just not right. The best thing to come out of the ‘girls with synths’ explosion of ’09 (well, apart from lots of girls suddenly owning synths, which is, obviously, brilliant) was the rich seam of remix-ready lady vocals, once the annoying casio tones were stripped away. La Roux became this year’s answer to The Gossip by following their lead and producing a string of pretty awful singles which magically became fantastic the second a good producer got their hands on them, the epitome of this trend being SKREAM’s take on ‘In For The Kill’. All huge dubstep growls and bravely isolated vocals, the track is almost nothing but anticipation, the point of release held off for as long as humanly possible, audaciously pausing, even, for a few seconds of complete silence before the drop finally arrives, authoritative and driving, bringing home the final rush of endorphins.

4. The Horrors – Sea Within A Sea



Ah, krautrock. Is there any more nourishing morsel in the goth selection box? Easy to imitate, difficult to master, beloved of ‘difficult second album’ers everywhere, it’s one of those Marmite genres, not just because people tend to either love it or hate it, but because it almost seems to deliberately provoke that divide. It can be truly awful repetitive dreck, the rock equivalent of minimal techno, or, as here, manifest itself as a staggering work of genius. Brilliantly, seamlessly weaving its way across eight minutes, shifting moods and textures right across the spectrum, ‘Sea Within A Sea’ is first downcast, then hopeful, expectant, and finally, triumphant, as glorious arpeggiated trills and vocal chanting showers everything with unexpected revelation. Who cares if it’s a trick ripped straight out of producer Geoff Barrow’s Portishead how-to guide, when it works this well? Good on The Horrors. If you’re going to do art-rock cliché #1, then at least do it right. Incidentally, against all received wisdom, I’m actually pretty ambivalent towards Marmite. Gotta love that krautrock, though.

3. HEALTH – Die Slow



Second entry in my top ten for HEALTH, and much of what I said above for ‘We Are Water’ goes for this track too, but it achieves a higher ranking purely by having a slightly catchier chorus and also by sounding more like several angry robots having cathartic group sex.

2. Animal Collective – My Girls



The genius of Animal Collective is their ability to take digitally manipulated and synthesized sounds, and somehow make them sound completely organic. And of course their Beach Boys-esque harmonies and exuberantly joyful delivery don’t hurt either. Swelling from a primordial soup of noise, the good vibes are layered on top of each other thick and fast in an aural hug of swooping, cheering sound. The sentiment of the lyrics are no less slushy, as Panda Bear vows to build the “four walls and adobe slabs” of a house for his wife and children, his girls. Much like a good Spielberg film, it’d all be almost nauseatingly twee were it not for the craft, enthusiasm and sheer ecstasy of life displayed in the music, urging you constantly to join in with handclaps, harmonies and synchronised whoops of delight. Listen, experience, and be moved. It’s what music is all about.

1. Fuck Buttons – Surf Solar

7-inch Single Edit:


The full ten-minute album version:


EH eh-eh-eh eh-eh-EH!!!!! 2009 – The Year of Fuck Buttons. They made the best album, and with this cacophony of whirling loops, shrieks and good old-fashioned distortion, they made the best song. Listen to either the epically scaled album version, or the three-minute ‘pop single’ version above depending on how long you like your ears to be assaulted for - both are, simply put, total brilliance. It’s something of a tired line in music journalism to describe artists as ‘noise terrorists’, and it’s not a cliché that I would ever think of using, I’m just saying that if ever there were a song to soundtrack both the literal and metaphorical ‘fucking-up-of-shit’, this baby is it. Every time it comes on I lose all control and just start running into things, doing jumping jacks, smacking the floor with my outstretched hand over and over again – anything to express the relentless outpouring of energy that comes with hearing that cyclical, twisting beat and those huge blasts of depraved white noise. There was nothing else that sounded quite like this in 2009, but then there’s probably nothing else that sounds like this ever. 2010 better have something pretty special up its sleeve.

The Best 20 Tracks of 2009 (Part I)

Here it is then, my musical year in review. I was initially planning to do a top ten albums like last year, but when I started making a list I quickly realised what a truly awful year for albums this has been. The only two exceptional albums I’ve heard in the last twelve months were Fuck Buttons’ Tarot Sport and Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion. If you have ears and £20 of Christmas money left to spend, I suggest you go and buy them now, or you will be shunned when I encounter you on my travels. Decent efforts like HEALTH’s Get Color, The Horrors’ Primary Colours and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ It’s Blitz abounded, but somehow it doesn’t feel right to celebrate albums that I feel are merely good rather than transcendental. And as for The XX, sorry indie credibility, but I just don’t understand them and I fear that I never will. But this being the season of goodwill, I must shed my Grinch-like demeanour for at least a few hours. Regardless of my personal worries about the whole ‘death of the LP’ thing being heralded in music publications the world over, there have been plenty of fantastic standalone songs to concentrate on showering with hyperbole, so here without further ado are my top 20, starting today with 20-11 and continuing at some point next week with the eagerly anticipated 10-1 countdown. Eagerly anticipated, that is, if you are no good at forming subjective opinions of your own, or just feel like bitching me out for not including ‘Dominos’. Shit, that’s a spoiler, sorry.

20. MSTRKRFT – 1000 Cigarettes



Best one-sentence youtube review I’ve ever read: ‘This track really punches you in the balls’. I couldn’t have put it any better myself. MSTRKRFT have translated the gut-vibrating energy of their DFA1979 bass driven sucker punch into a yet more frenetic bass driven electro-skronk. And for those of you who didn’t know, I don’t ever use the term ‘skronk’ lightly. And that’s all that I have to say about that, apart from the fact that I have probably thrown my arms in the air and danced to this song more times this year than anything else.

19. The Maccabees feat. Roots Manuva – Empty Vessels



Bit of a late entry, this one. I heard this on the radio last week (6music really does perform a valuable public service by being the only vaguely tolerable radio station out there), and since then I must have listened to it about thirty times, which is usually a good sign. For me Roots Manuva is the forefather of what NME would call the ‘urban poet’ explosion (just FUCK off) of recent years, and Mike Skinner, Arctic Monkeys et al owe him a huge debt of wry, grittily humorous gratitude (Jamie T doesn’t get included in that list because he’s not an ‘urban poet’, just an urban twat). Anyway, it’s good to see him back kitchen-sink philosophising and cramming as many celebrated musical references as he can into his verses. The Maccabees, for their part, deliver a handful of pleasantly downbeat cooing hooks that make the whole thing entirely suitable for daytime, before going all ‘The Chain’ for the coda.

18. Destroyer – Bay Of Pigs



So, instead of an album, Muse decided this year to put out a bloated wreck that somehow managed the neat trick of being impenetrably pretentious to even the most hardened Yes fan, whilst simultaneously containing some of their laziest, most insipid ballads yet (seriously, note to Matt Bellamy: you are a very, very good guitarist, but your lyrics are awful, so please stop forcing us to focus on them). Anyway, someone had to fly the flag for prog, and they came in the unexpected form of Destroyer, who went for a sort of ambient 9 minute take on ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ with lyrics by Neil Hannon. It takes a whole 5 minutes for the bass and the beat to come in, at first glitching before resolving themselves into a pleasant Flight of the Conchords style singalong which, just as it gets into its stride, fades out. I don’t care if you don’t think this is prog at all, it infuriates and amuses me like the most indulgent half hour gong solo ever, and I bloody well loved it.

17. Manic Street Preachers – Peeled Apples



This is probably my equivalent of one of those best director gongs handed out for lifetime achievement rather than a particularly life-changing piece of cinema (I’m looking at you Marty Scorsese). But hey, Nicky Wire’s bass sounds filthier than it has done in years (now if we can just get him making inadvisable, unsolicited comments about famous people again we’ll be in business), and it’s the first Manics track to be blessed with Richey lyrics since ‘Kevin Carter’, plus there’s a really emo Christian Bale sample at the start, so let me have this one.

16. Radiohead – These Are My Twisted Words



Radiohead decided this year to trade in their frankly ludicrous long-player conversion rates for a more scattershot flurry of download single releases, but if that means more regular doses of Radiohead, I guess I can’t complain to vehemently, right? This is far from the best thing they’ve ever done, but let’s face it, Thom Yorke farts out songs that most UK indie bands would be quite content to build an entire career around, and sometimes it’s just refreshing to hear Jonny hitting up the whammy pedal again, even if it is in a little more subdued manner than on 'Just'.

15. Jay-Z feat. Alicia Keys – Empire State Of Mind



However fed up I am of Jay-Z’s increasingly targeted cross-promotional sales pitch flows (and it’s clear that he’s not really even trying here), there was no other hook this year more likely to make me pull diva-like vocal performances in my kitchen when it came on the radio than this one. So shut up.

14. Fever Ray – If I Had A Heart



Criminally, I still haven’t heard the Fever Ray album, despite ‘kind of like Kate Bush produced by The Knife’ sounding like possibly the best musical elevator-pitch ever (actually, after writing that sentence I realised what a fool I’d been, took a break, walked into town and bought the thing). It was a toss-up between this, the lead track, and its Fuck Buttons, steam-powered remix for inclusion in the list, but the original wins out in the glacial lovely/creepiness stakes, assisted by the fact that otherwise I could be accused of going on about Fuck Buttons a tad too much.

13. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Heads Will Roll (A-Trak remix)



All the best bits of the original, but with more sexy Karen O yelping and a decent portion of squiggly bits that sound a bit like a synthesiser jizzing its pants. Also, mad love for being the only BIG HOUSE KEYS revival track that’s even vaguely listenable. Well, not just listenable, bloody brilliant, and with my favourite mentalist middle-eight break down ever.

12. Shakira – She Wolf



First off, big English graduate props for creditable use of the word ‘lycanthropy’. But honestly, I was already addicted to the intoxicating blend of flamenco guitar, eighties synths, string breaks and husky vocals before I even saw that video, which needless to say only propelled the thing even further into the stratosphere of genius. Awoo!

11. Thom Yorke – Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses



Isn’t life amusing? 2009 brought us the sheer ridiculous glee of witnessing Thom Yorke and Flea sharing a stage, surely the strangest musical personality mismatch since Morrisey teamed up with the fat one from Bowling For Soup (not really). Of course, with hindsight it all made a crazy kind of sense, when you consider the proportion of the Thomster’s basslines that really bring the funk. Like this here, created from an early version of the In Rainbows track ‘Reckoner’ (if you listen really carefully I think you can just about make out some of the chords), but warped into something like the most mental cut off The Eraser via skittery beats and one of those basslines that makes you pout like you’ve just smelt a bad smell (that’s why they call it ‘funk’, kids).

Strengthening Resolve

As the new year is almost upon us, I thought I'd join the countless swathes of writers contributing their own unoriginal twopenceworth to the already bulging sack of articles about the yearly irritant of new year's resolutions. God, but I'm so fucking original.

The main problem with doing these things on New Year's is that it's the worst possible timeframe to attempt it in. You've just had your post-christmas break from alcoholism and gluttony, and are just gagging to start the cycle again. Then you go out and it's advisable, if not compulsory, to drink your own weight in booze (especially as you've built up such a tolerance during the winter months, when there's nothing else to do). For the next week, you're experiencing the hangover and can hardly motivate yourself to stand up, let alone go jogging, and even if you could get out of the door, it's just too cold. This is why people always look healthier during the summer months. Aside from ceasing to look pasty and malnourished, and being able to leave the house without being dressed up to resemble a sock stuffed with fabric, it's the only time of year when it's logistically possible to actually do anything healthy. Going to the park to kick a ball around becomes a pleasure rather than insanity. You start happily eating salads instead of condensed chunks of fat. And you do all this without the pressure of some ill-conceived yearly self-betterment programme.

My own resolutions are far from high definition (YES! A technology pun!). I'm constantly resolving to do things, not just at those moments when, due to some arbitrary fluke of calendar making in the distant past, we all get to watch the numbers click round to zero again and go "aaah". I've already resolved about four times on this very blog to post more, only to be scuppered by my own absentmindedness, lack of organisation and short attention span (DAMN you, facebook tetris! Why can I not just let anyone else have a higher score than me?)

My other regular resolution is to exercise more, not in the gym, which as a proud and self confessed skinny emo streak of piss I hold a moral objection to, but just by jogging or swimming enough that I don't have a near heart attack every time that I need to run for the bus. Trouble is, there just aren't enough hours in the day for something that I so loathe doing. How do these people who work out regularly manage it? Unless they actually enjoy the gym experience, which I can't even begin to believe. Even when you remove the factor of trying to exercise in skinny jeans and eyeliner without everyone around you laughing themselves into an epileptic fit, you're still left with the sheer humiliating drudgery of it all. It somehow manages to combine mind-numbing boredom with intense physical discomfort, all the while asking you to pay for the experience, rather like purchasing a membership to the museum of R&B, knitwear and vegan cooking, where for a nominal fee the staff will hold your arms apart and take turns beating you around the torso with wet sacks of cement, but you can't shut your eyes because they're stapled open like that scene in A Clockwork Orange, forced to watch an endless parade of chunky sweaters and deep-fried haloumi, the warblings of R. Kelly only drowned out by the screeching of the curators as they laugh themselves silly at your discomfort, crying with laughter, for two hours, laughing, laughing, laughing.

Gosh, that was a long sentence. Excuse me while I lie down and catch my breath.

Anyway, that's why this year I'm resolving not to make any resolutions (and paradoxes be damned). You see, I'm much more content to be a disorganised whirlwind of poor decision making and occasional laughable attempts to better myself than some sanitised, asinine model of the perfect human being. Flaws and failures are a good thing, they make it all the better when you somehow manage to do things right for a change. So join me, ye huddled masses yearning to break free from the tyranny of health club membership. Drink, smoke and abuse your body to your heart's content (no overeating, though, if there's one thing I can't stand it's fat people). I think I'll start right now. There's a bottle of rum left over from christmas downstairs, it should do the trick.