Towards a General Theory of Everything

15. “I’m a Cuckoo” by Belle and Sebastian (2003)

2010-03-14T14:23:00.000-07:00

Belle and Sebastian are very similar to Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings to me. Both have never released a bad song; both have sounds that seem to come from a different era, even though the songs are so good that you know that it’d be impossible to keep it from being part of a “classic” pantheon if they were from a different time; both seem immensely popular and influential, yet both likely don’t sell that many records, nor do they play huge venues when touring. To call either of these bands underrated would be silly, but Belle and Sebastian is so good and so consistent that it is truly amazing that their appeal is still somewhat limited.

At any rate, B&S released three new LPs this decade and after the first one, Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, from 2000, people seemed worried that they were on the decline. In 2003 they came out with Dear Catastrophe Waitress and put those fears to bed. They began rocking like they had never before, busting out of the bookish folkie Glasgow sound that made them so popular and taking on different Thin Lizzy-style exploits, like “I’m a Cuckoo”. The new sound was then expanded even more on probably the best album they’ve ever done, 2006’s The Life Pursuit, which had all of their great trademark songwriting, melodies and lyrics, but made it feel like this band could go in a million different directions in the future. If you’re reading this, you know B&S; if you don’t, listen to “I’m a Cuckoo” and see for yourself.

16. “Let There Be Rock” by Drive By Truckers (2001)

2010-03-14T14:18:00.000-07:00

“Dropped acid, Blue Oyster Cult concert, fourteen years old, and I thought them lasers were a spider chasing me. On my way home, got pulled over in Rogersville Alabama, with a half-ounce of weed and a case of Sterling Big Mouth. My buddy Gene was driving, he just barely turned sixteen.

The Truckers have quietly become one of the best pure rock bands around and it’s almost incredible how one band can be so underrated simply due to the silly band name and the absurd cartoon cover art on their LPs. Even with a strong recommendation from friends back in 2001 or so, I bought Southern Rock Opera with much apprehension, simply because the cover art looks one notch above that of a college rock band from Western Michigan. On top of that, their first two albums were incredibly named Pizza Deliverance and Gangstability, essentially assuring the fact that it will be tough for anyone outside of Kalamazoo to take them very seriously. This is a shame, because not only do the Truckers absolutely kill it with their southern rock attack, but they are outstanding craftsmen and great songwriters. Check out “Carl Perkin’s Cadillac” or "Uncle Frank” if you are unsure of this.

I’ve only seen them live on TV (“Austin City Limits”) but reports from the street claim the following: (1) it is a four-dudes-on-the-edge-of-the-stage-three-guitar-one-bass-southern rock assault of the senses -- sick, heavy, Jack Daniels-soaked southern rock; (2) the volumes at one show at The Bowery in 2002 were so extreme that a number of my friends had to spend the night in the basement bar debating the validity of the Society of Friends (that’s right, Quakers); (3) at the same show, Craig Finn of the Hold Steady was so inspired that he went out and formed The Hold Steady. What does this mean? Our friends are losers but the Drive By Truckers are awesome.

And I'd like to say, "I'm sorry", but we lived to tell about it, and we lived to do a whole lot more crazy, stupid, shit. And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw Molly Hatchet With 38 Special and the Johnny Van Zant Band.”

If you like to rock, The Truckers hook it up all over the place, but you can start with “The Righteous Path” or, better yet, go to one of the best songs released this decade,“Let There Be Rock”.

17. “Teenage Wristband” by The Twilight Singers (2003)

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Greg Dulli’s run of great albums started in 1992 with The Afghan Whigs’ “Gentleman” and went all the way through to The Twilight Singers’ last LP, Powder Burns. Because of Senor Sleaze, we know what jail is like, we know how to burn someone’s house down and we know about life as a GUTTER TWIN. Denis Leary called Powder Burns one of the best albums of the past 10 years, for whatever that’s worth to you. Point is: it’s a pretty freakin’ great six record stretch that only came to an end last year with Dulli’s collaboration with ex-Screaming Tree Mark Lanegan on the Gutter Twins Idle Hands LP that was still pretty damn good, but not consistent enough to stand up to his previous releases, all of which are classics in my mind

Dulli has always operated in and written about the darkest corners of the world, but he has apparently abandoned the Class A substances and gone “clean”. That depends on how you define “clean”, I guess. What’s awesome is that Dulli and Leary seem to define it the same way: “Man, I am out of control. I need to slow down. Get me and eighth and a six pack…” Kudos for Mr. Gutter for not being a quitter. So if you see him live, he will probably only be a little drunk and little high and therefore you will likely be spared him talking shit about your girlfriend and walking you through the gruesome scene of Elliott Smith’s death (yes, he did this), but you will not be spared Awesomeness. Check out the late night anthem that is “Teenage Wristband” here.

18. “Clam, Crab, Cackle, Cowrie” by Joanna Newsome (2004)

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“There are some mornings when the sky looks like a road.
There are some dragons who were built to have and hold.
And some machines are dropped from great heights lovingly,
and some great bellies ache with many bumblebees, and they sting so terribly.”

It would seem foolish to write a missive trying to convince you on the greatness of Joanna Newsome, since you probably have an opinion one way or another already. Once again, it’s all about her voice, but in this case I would argue that there are very few voices this polarizing. You either quiver and run from the nails-on-a-chalkboard shrieks, or you think it’s incredibly unique and a beautiful compliment to the music. Obviously I am in the camp of admirers – not so much of her voice, but of the songs and the lyrics and the uniqueness of what she’s doing. You can hear the Neutral Milk Hotel influences, but the reality is that there is nothing out there like Ms. Newsom. Check it out and give it more than one listen, por favor.

19. “1,2,3,4” by Feist (2007)

2010-03-14T14:02:00.000-07:00

I think you’ve officially made it when you are chosen for the iPod commercial. Check that, I think you’ve officially made it when you are performing your song on Sesame Street. That the girl that wrote “Mushaboom” did both of these things seems pretty incredible. But she added a couple of other cool things to this song: (1) the video is fantastic; (2) her performance of this song on Letterman was equally fantastic – she enlisted the who’s who of indie rock (I see Ben Gibbard, Elvis Perkins, AC Newman, Grizzly Bear – damn you Grizzly Bear! – and many others) to aid her with handclaps and backup singing and it ends up being one of the more memorable songs of the decade.

I know people who really dislike Feist, but I am not exactly sure why. It might be because this song crossed over into places you’d never have expected, with kids and housewives singing it all over the country. There are plenty of crappy songs inhabiting our radio space these days, but this isn’t one of them.

'Cause Jersey's Where It's At

2010-03-13T05:30:00.000-08:00

Jersey.

20. “Hold On, Hold On” by Neko Case (2006)

2010-03-10T14:54:00.000-08:00

“The most tender place in my heart is for strangers. I know it's unkind but my own blood is much too dangerous.”

I feel slightly cheap including this song on this list, as WFUV named this the top song of 2007. I look like I am biting off of WFUV, which would be far from my proudest moment.

Neko really came into her own after The New Pornographers started recording together. It seems like she abandoned her country and western sound for something more pop-oriented and nuanced and unique to her – like a combo of the country and pop rock sounds. But there’s much more to it than just that.

I think her last two albums, Fox Confessor and Middle Cyclone, are the best reflection of what she has to offer. What sometimes gets lost behind Neko’s beautiful force of a voice is how perfect her band is for her unique sound – there is a subtle greatness that her band to the overall sound and feel of her records. The voice is the driving force – how could it not be? -- but the latter is what makes her, and this song, great.

21. “The Denial Twist” by The White Stripes (2005)

2010-03-10T14:48:00.000-08:00

Without thinking too much about it, I have been lumping Jack White, Ryan Adams and Conor Oberst together as three of the decade’s best and most prolific songwriters. Oddly, it is Jack White -- the one who has made the loudest, most abrasive music of the three -- that has become the most commercially successful and universally beloved. It is strange that the punky “Fell In Love With a Girl” and the bass-heavy “Seven Nation Army” – unconventional songs as it relates to what is now considered “mainstream” -- were their breakthrough hits, but that probably speaks more to the fact that The White Stripes’ music was the easiest to bridge into a commercially popular genre -- after all, hard rock radio stations actually still exist in some markets. So while Adams and Oberst have a ton in common, White does seem like the one that doesn’t belong of this grouping. But the reason I’ve lumped them together is because they have all sort of separated themselves from the unprecedented heap of albums and songs released this decade in both quantity and quality. While White is likely the least polarizing of the three, I mention them in the same breath because of their final output over the last ten years.

That’s not to discount all of the actual bands on this list, all of whom have done more than just release a few great songs. Hell, bands like Spoon, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill and Camera Obscura, to name a few, were not even included in this Top 100 even though all of those groups are all personal favorites. The point being that rather than justifying my ranking as “this band is better than the other band”, the top 100 list seeks to put it all out there, in one playlist, for everyone to consume and enjoy and argue about. So lumping White, Oberst and Adams together is only natural because it’s three guys basically doing it on their own, with varying supporting casts depending on the record. In the end, all three of these guys has released album after album, great song after great song, year after year, at a similar pace to what we saw with The Stones, Beatles and Dylan in the 60s. We never waited longer than 18 months to hear anything new from either of these three and in almost every case, it was something worthy of your time and money.

To my main point above, there doesn’t seem to be much to say about Jack and Meg White that hasn’t been said already. People love Meg for what she is but Jack is the one that gets the guitar god / genius / legend treatment, and rightfully so. Whether it’s with The White Stripes, The Raconteurs or The Dead Meadow, Jack has killed it.

Once again, it’s impossible to choose amongst Jack’s hits – “Seven Nation Army” or “Hotel Yorba”; “Fell In Love With a Girl” or “Icky Thump”; “My Doorbell” or “There’s No Home For You Here”? The list goes on and on, but I settled on something that had a little bit of everything and if you like to rock, you will not be able to deny “The Denial Twist”. Check it.

22. “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love or To Be Loved)” by Bright Eyes (2002)

2010-03-10T14:42:00.000-08:00

“But where was it when I first heard that sweet sound of humility? It came to my ears in the goddamn loveliest melody. How grateful I was then to be part of the mystery, to love and to be loved. Let's just hope that is enough.”

The first time I saw Bright Eyes was at The Bowery Ballroom in the fall of 2002 at a Saddle Creek showcase featuring, in order of appearance, Now It’s Overhead, Azure Ray, The Good Life and Bright Eyes. During The Good Life’s set, Tim Kasher was wailing away, yelping about some relationship gone bad, commanding the room and making people stop in their tracks. I turned to sip my beer and some girl and her boyfriend quietly tapped me on the shoulder, still in their jackets and scarves, and asked, “Is that him? Is that Conor?” ‘Twas then that it was evident that Conor Oberst’s reputation as a thing to see preceded him. ‘Twas then that it was evident that the buzz bin of the music blogs was taking hold and bands were being hyped to a point where their shows were events, rather than musical experiences. That night was free of screaming girls, but a year or two later that would not be the case, as Conor became The Voice of a Generation and captured the undying love of teenage indie chicks across the land.

The screaming girls made Mr. Oberst, Mr. Bright Eyes, a polarizing figure indeed, someone who was easy to dismiss on that fact alone. Add in the quavering voice, the “new Dylan” comparisons, the confessional, hyper-sensitive, self-aware lyrics and his use of simple three chord progressions and you’ve got yourself a backlash to all the crazy the hype and popularity.

But just like with The Strokes, haters ignored all of those catchy songs, the captivating live performances, the sprawling Americana sound (think Neutral Milk Hotel meets Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions band) and, most of all, the lyrics. The “new Dylan” comparisons are clearly tied to those lyrics as well as the simple folk songs and Conor’s snarling delivery, but in the end, like so many before him – John Prine, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg and Dan Bern – Oberst has had to live with this silly “new Dylan” tag to an almost absurd extent. He was not just the “new Dylan” because he wrote rootsy folk songs, he was also the “Voice of a Generation”. If you saw him performing “When The President Talks To God” on Jay Leno while rocking a white and red tasseled cowboy outfit, it was easy to think that the protest song was back and someone was taking the mantle as someone who was happy to point a finger at “them”. And if you thought that something was going on during that performance, you were right. But much of Conor’s critical ceiling has less to do with a misunderstanding of Oberst as it does of Dylan, a man who wanted no part of being the voice of anything but top 40 radio. To compare anyone to a guy that completely revolutionized music, whose stamp on what we listen to today might be greater than anyone not named Elvis, would be silly.

No, Conor Oberst is not Bob Dylan. If anything, he’s some mix of Paul Simon and Phil Ochs. But more than anything, as Emmylou Harris has noted, Conor is simply a great songwriter that captures things in words that others dance around and miss. He has a unique knack for marrying a catchy melody with a vocal delivery that completely matches the tone of the lyrics, and that is where the “new Dylan” tag seems to apply. The backlash comes when these lazy comparisons ignore all of the other brilliant things that Dylan did that made him Bob Dylan, but that should not diminish anything Oberst has done and it should not diminish the fact that while no one really wants to say it, Conor was, in fact, rock’s voice of the aughts.

“I should stop pointing fingers; reserve my judgment of all those public action figures, the cowboy presidents. So loud behind the bullhorn so proud they can't admit when they've made a mistake. While poison ink spews from a speechwriter's pen, he knows he don't have to say it, so it, it don't bother him. "Honesty" "Accuracy" is just "Popular Opinion." And the approval rating is high, and so someone's gonna die.

Well, ABC, NBC, CBS: Bullshit. They give us fact or fiction? I guess an even split. And each new act of war is tonight's entertainment. We're still the pawns in their game. As they take eye for an eye until no one can see, we must stumble blindly forward, repeating history. Well, I guess we all fit into your slogan on that fast food marquee: Red blooded, White skinned oh and the Blues. Oh and the Blues! I got the Blues! That's me! That's me!”

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Some my most memorable live experiences this decade were a result of Bright Eyes:

“To Love and To Be Loved” at the Bowery that night in 2002 was a revelation – 14 people on stage, horns and energy that you rarely find anywhere, Conor spewing venom and conducting a band of twelve, complete with pedal steel, a full horn section and everything else imaginable. It went on for ten minutes, crescendoing with that final verse that wondered what the hell happened on 9/11 and understanding that the whole world was about to change that more wars were to come. As a frame of reference, I saw Built To Spill and Wilco play a few weeks after 9/11 and neither even wanted to address what had happened, despite, in Wilco’s case, the added, unintended weight of their THF tunes like “Ashes of American Flags”. Conor was the first person to take it all head-on and he never let go until The Bright Eyes moniker went on hiatus in 2008.

In early 2003, with the Iraq war approaching, Conor strode on stage to a packed crowd at The Knitting Factory, sat down with a makeshift band and opened with “Landlocked Blues”, which was then called “One Foot In Front of the Other”. If you were ever wondering what the hype was about, this was the place and the song to see, with Conor’s eyes lighting up as he pleaded for everyone to walk away from the insanity. Rob Sheffield from Rolling Stone was standing next to us and nodding his head as if to say “that’s it, right there”.

In the early summer of 2003, when Long Island’s ill-fated Field Day festival was moved to The Meadowlands parking lot, Conor put together one of the best shows I saw this decade on the following night: Bright Eyes, Jim James and Beth Orton, for $15 at The Bowery. Not only did Orton kill it, but James absolutely blew the roof off with just his guitar and voice and Bright Eyes had one of the strongest lineups I had seen, with a full, tight, well-rehearsed band amping up his songs and rocking the place ‘til way into the early morning.

The seven nights of Town Hall shows in 2007 with Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings were an event for all the right reasons. First, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings were playing. Second, it was at The Town Hall, an absolutely perfect venue in terms of intimacy and stateliness. Third, each night featured a different special guest appearance, from Lou Reed to Ben Kweller to Jenny Lewis to Britt Daniel of Spoon to Ron Sexsmith to Norah Jones. Each show culminated with a rollicking rendition of “Road To Joy” and the night I was there it featured Rawlings smashing a toy piano as everything seemed to fall apart around him.

The Radio City show in the late fall of 2007 featured support from Thurston Moore and the Felice Brothers, but the real kicker was the greatest hits set and an encore rendition of “Lua” that essentially catapulted that song, in my mind at least, into the pantheon of great New York City tunes.

By the time we got to the end of the decade, Conor was touring as something of a solo artist, with the roots rock “Mystic Valley Band” that he assembled down in Mexico to record his self-titled debut for Merge. It was a fresh new experience for anyone who had seen Bright Eyes. Gone were the screaming girls and, it seemed, the “new Dylan, I am waiting with baited breath for the next word to come out of his mouth” anxiety of earlier performances. Instead, Conor was having fun, cranking up his songs and generally killing it, once again at the best venue in New York, The Bowery Ballroom.

And in the summer of 2009, he played Battery Park on the Fourth of July and, as he did at Radio City, closed with a scathing “patriotic” song, called “Roosevelt Room”, a fitting end to the show and the decade.

23. “All I Need” by Radiohead (2007)

2010-02-24T14:16:00.000-08:00

You’d think it’d be hard to choose a Radiohead song, but it turned out not to be the case. As I went back and listened to their albums released this decade, I concluded the following:

If you saw the film Meeting People Is Easy, about the OK Computer tour, you saw Thom Yorke falling apart at the seams. For whatever reason, it did not look like he was effectively BUILT for the rock star thing and clearly Radiohead had into entered a world in which he was not comfortable. Feel free to debate what this says about Thom, but that’s the deal. My man was close to having a full-on breakdown, it seemed.

And so, in 2000, they released “Kid A”, their post-OK Computer-trauma-piece -- Thom’s need to destroy guitar rock and everything they had done on The Bends and OK Computer. It’s a polarizing album. Some maintain that they shat out this mope-fest and critics were so far up their ass that they couldn’t smell the heap of dung sitting in front of their faces. Others saw it as a mini-masterpiece, a moody work of art that reinvented Radiohead as something even more important than the “next Pink Floyd”. Over time, Kid A has aged well, but it remains a frigid group of songs. You sure have to be in the right mood for this album and you sure should listen to this album as a group of songs rather than a song here and there. It’s powerful and all, but I don’t find myself deciding to listen to it all that much. And if that’s the case for Kid A then Amnesiac is it’s “down in a K-hole” cousin, with some excellent moments, but little of the cohesion.

Many thought that Radiohead would return to rawk with Hail To The Thief, but that wasn’t really the case. It took Kid A’s organs, computers and synths out of the mix and re-introduced some guitars, but little offered tunefulness and little warmth. It was a long record and there are some really powerful songs, especially in the live setting, but ultimately it pushed you away, rather than drew you in.

(Pearl Jam seemed to go through a similar exercise with “No Code”, yielding similar mixed results. However, both Hail and No Code would prove to be important bridges to their future album(s) and, maybe most importantly, the long term health of the band.

Enter In Rainbows and, true to the title, the sun is finally out. Tuneful guitars reappear. Tuneful SONGS reappear. And finally there is a little warmth in a Radiohead song. The whole album is so appealing to me because it just feels like the weight has been lifted from this band and they finally opened it up to something enjoyable. And after hearing In Rainbows it feels like Hail was part of a transition back to what they do well.

The songs are not epic on In Rainbows -- they are not even huge statements – but they are allowed to exist and stand on their own as what they are. It’s still moody, but it’s not mopey. And “All I Need” is at the very center of the record, just brimming with optimism and soulfulness. It’s gem of a song and for the first time since OK Computer, I found myself getting this song stuck in my head, humming it and belting it out all over the place, to the chagrin of anyone within earshot. And it’s not a coincidence that In Rainbows is the first time since OK Computer that Radiohead constructed an album that was both inviting and cohesive (Kid A was cohesive but isolating and Hail To The Thief had some inviting moments – “Sail To The Moon” and “There There” come immediately to mind – but in the end it was too dense of an album to really enjoy).

The aforementioned soulfulness is the most refreshing element of this record, and it’s not only found on “All I Need”. “Reckoner” sounds like a stripped down Jeff Buckley song, “House of Cards” whiles away with summery electric strumming, “Wired Fishes / Arpeggi” is also very light, easy and welcoming and “Nude” feels like it could possibly exist on “OK Computer” instead of “Fitter Happier” or “Electioneering”. Radiohead always saves the saddest and most beautiful song for last and “Videotape” gets the nod on this one and it’s tremendous. That’s not to forget the rollicking tunes that open the album, “15 Steps” and “Bodysnatchers”, which are basically the perfect marriage of everything they had done from OK Computer on through to Hail, like they took all the good parts of all those albums and put them into these two songs.

I could have picked any of the songs listed above, but “All I Need” seems to encapsulate their soulful resurgence best, a little example of the things that make people feel so strongly about this band.

Check it out here.

24. “Wrecking Ball” by Gillian Welch (with David Rawlings) (2003)

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Gillian is one of very few musicians (along with Marley, Dylan and a host of others) that has never released a bad song. I seriously cannot think of one song she’s released that I do not like. She has the type of voice that could make anything sound perfect. She sounds like she was born in the hills of West Virginia, but she actually is from LA via Berkley in Boston. I’m not sure where she learned to sing with such authentic American soul, but she claims that it’s just in her blood and after listening to her music, it’s hard not to believe her.

Like any great duo, one could not really be GREAT without the other and though Gillian could make names in the phone book sound good, guitarist Dave Rawlings is a huge part of her sound and remains a unique part of what Gillian has done. The two of them put on a hell of a live show and always rock out great covers like Radiohead’s “Black Star”, Neil Young’s “Albuquerque” and Dylan’s “Queen Jane Approximately”. In the end, there’s not much to talk about with Gillian Welch – her music speaks for itself. Check it out here.

25. “Let It Ride” by Ryan Adams (2005)

2010-02-24T12:47:00.000-08:00

“Moving like the fog on the Cumberland River, I was leaving on the Delta Queen, and I wasn't ready to go -- I'm never ready to go. Twenty-seven years of nothing but failures and promises that I couldn't keep, oh lord, I wasn't ready to go -- I'm never ready to go. Let it ride, Let it ride easy down the road.”

It’s been a long decade for Ryan Adams. It seems like a long time ago that he was a flavor of the month sitting in front of the twin towers, being perceived a grief monger and singing about his favorite city. It’s even longer since Whiskeytown broke up and Adams took off and released an album filled with mini-classics. Since then, he’s been lauded as a semi-genius and a wunderkind, or derided as a hump, a brat, an actress-shagging drug addict, a narcissistic blogger and a thief.

“Loaded like a sailor tumbling off a ferry boat, I was at the bar till three. Oh Lord, I wasn't ready to go -- I'm never ready to go. Tennessee's a brother to my sister Carolina. Where they're gonna bury me? I ain't ready to go -- I'm never ready to go. Let it ride, let it ride easy down the road.”

For whatever reason, the guy has a hard time sorting things out. He hates our vapid celebrity-obsessed culture, but he seems to feed it with his public spats with other rock stars, late-night phone calls to radio stations and the absurd need to answer criticism with long, rambling Phil Lesh-style missives.

Which brings us to the next point: there is no use in trying to figure out what the hell goes on with the guy. Anyone I know who has met him says he’s wacky and charming and out there and hilarious. He’s a self-professed comic book geek, a crazy Merge Records fan, an Oasis-freak, a Slayer fan and someone that, frankly, seems to need tons of loving attention, for whatever reason. I mention all of this only because many people’s view of Adams seems to stem from a decade’s worth of tantrums and stupid news items that in the end mean nothing. Adams will tell you that it’s all about the art, maaan -- that in the end, as a music fan, isn’t that all that really matters? I sometimes draw the line (and raise a middle finger) when he goes into a 20-minute version of “LA Woman” at Roseland or when he shows up crazy late to a show in Tribeca, wasted, with Minnie Driver, and claims to have had all sorts of issues getting a taxi. But in the end, he’s kicked serious ass in most of the live shows I’ve seen and he’s given us an encyclopedia’s worth of incredibly great tunes. The peripheral drama is amusing for a short period of time, but I stopped caring about that stuff after he stopped killing me with “fuck you to the record company” releases like 2003s Rock n Roll.

The truth is, it is impossible to complain about Adams’ output this decade – 11 LPs, if you include Whiskeytown’s Pneumonia. Hell, in 2005 alone, he released 3 full albums, one of them a double LP. You can pick things apart and criticize this or that, but the art (maaaan) does stand on its own. And after the aforementioned abomination that was Rock n Roll he returned a year later with Cold Roses, a double album filled with Grateful Dead-inspired jams, that, for the first time since Heartbreaker did not feel like he was aping someone else, but instead trying to find the middle ground between Black Flag, Gram Parsons, The Dead, The Smiths and Oasis. Since that time -- not coincidentally this was the same time he started playing with The Cardinals -- his music has seemed very comfortable with what it is and I love Cold Roses for that reason.

The most common complaint with Adams is that he needs an editor. Springsteen and Petty, for example, are very fond of reminding us that they have hundreds of songs that were worthy of some album, just not the ones they ended up releasing. People think that if Adams took some time to craft a proper album with a common theme, the overall product would be better. But it’s clear that he doesn’t work this way. His process, the one that has brought us TONS of great songs, is to write songs and immediately put them to tape, capturing the vibe of five guys in a room. There are some relative clunkers on each of his records, but in the end, has anyone this decade written and recorded a larger volume of high-quality songs as Adams? You could say that Jack White has and certainly Conor Oberst has matched Adams in terms of sheer volume of releases, but that’s pretty good company, I think.

All of this leads us to the final fact that I had to choose one of his songs for this list and it’s a nearly impossible task, except that I could all but eliminate many of the songs that he wrote that seemed to simply be tributes to his heroes. To wit:

“Damn Sam I Love a Woman That Rains” – Bob Dylan

“So Alive” – The Smiths

“Magnolia Mountain” – Grateful Dead

“Answering Bell” – Van Morrison

“La Cienga Just Smiled” – Elton John

“New York, New York” – Hootie and The Blowfish

“Beautiful Sorta” – New York Dolls

“Tears of Gold” – Neil Young

“Chelsea Hotel Nights” – Prince

“Sweet Illusions” – Chris Isaacs

“A Kiss Before I Go” – Hank Williams

“Tina Toledo’s Street Walkin’ Blues” – Rolling Stones

“Halloweenhead” -- Weezer

I’m left with 300 other songs, but “Let it Ride” is Adams distilling all of these influences into one tune with great lyrics, great playing and a great melody…and what else is there? Check it out here and tell me you don’t agree.

26. “Fake Empire” by The National (2007)

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“Stay out super late tonight, picking apples, making pies. Put a little something in our lemonade and take it with us. We’re half-awake in a fake empire”

The National are clearly indebted heavily to R.E.M. and this song sounds like something that could have appeared on the follow-up to Automatic For The People had Stipe and Co not decided to initiate their decline by trying to get “back to rock” with the relative abomination that was Monster. (Monster did have 3 or 4 excellent songs, but the bad ones, for the first time in R.E.M.’s career, were bad).

“Fake Empire” a little gem of a song that is boosted in a huge way by the lyrics, which either reference New York City (“Tiptoe through our shiny city with our diamond slippers on…”) or the good ol’ US of A. Like every great tune, it leaves a lot to the imagination, while also keeping your foot tapping.

“Let’s not try to figure out everything at once.” Word, Senor Berninger.

Listen to it here.

27. “Crazy In Love” by Beyonce (Featuring Jay-Z) (2003)

2010-02-15T13:19:00.000-08:00

Don’t you hate all those songs on your iPod that are categorized with the guest artist’s name in parentheses? That one Chieftans album does this. Amy Winehouse’s album does this. Every hip hop album does this. It makes my iPod all out of whack. I don’t like it.

Anyway, you know this song -- it’s probably the best pop song of the decade, a brilliant concoction of radio-friendly goodness. It requires little introduction -- that 70s horn loop sample should do fine, don’t you think? I will submit that you will not have to work hard to like this song, and that will be my statement. A not-so-side-note is that this song was written in D minor, which, we all know, is the saddest of all chords. Also worth noting: I have danced to this song at the Copacabana, the hottest spot north of Havana. Listen here.

28. “Inni Mer Synger Vitleysingur” by Sigur Ros (2008)

2010-02-15T13:15:00.000-08:00

I’ve heard someone say that Sigur Ros is what you hear playing when you ascending to Heaven and what’s ridiculous is how that statement doesn’t even strike me as preposterous.

My brother bought me their first record for Christmas some time around 2000 or 2001, before iPods and music blogs. I knew nothing about them. I put the CD in my then state-of-the-art CD walkman, put my head back on the window of the R train and drifted off into outer space. Most bands on this list are doing something, however subtlety, that is unique to them. But Sigur Ros is on an island unto themselves as far as uniqueness is concerned. The music is ethereal and otherworldly, which is not terribly surprising given that they are from Iceland, a country that is often described as…otherworldly. The lyrics are in Icelandic, or some other made-up language that I can’t understand. And yet, there is nothing clunky about this. In fact, that’s part of the appeal – the vocals and the guitars (often played with a violin bow) come together to make this crazy, beautiful sound. Bottom line: I actually remember that I was on the R train when I first heard these guys.

‘Twas in 2008 that I finally got around to seeing Sigur Ros in New York and from upper reaches of the United Palace, with a tray of checked cab beers at my feet, I could almost see the elaborate costumes worn by these fancy Icelanders. Almost. And while there were more than enough moments of transcendent majesty in Sigur Ros’ 2^nd night in Washington Heights, some of the nuances were lost on me because I was too cheap to buy the $50 seats. So, I won’t hold Sigur Ros at all responsible for the fact that, while this was a terrific show, I was not completely blown away by their performance as I’d have thought I would be. In some ways, it was part of the build up in my mind. I had seen their concert film Heima http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpQ6m2Qf918 over the summer and the version of “Glosoli” was about as good as it gets – velvet underground-style visuals with lights, silhouettes and shadows, walls of beautiful sound, otherworldly vocals and anthemic crescendos. It’s safe to say that those performances set the bar pretty high and it’s also safe to say that that version of “Glosoli” blew me away on a fairly profound level.

They opened that show with “Svefn g englar” and it was predictably spellbinding. The show went on along that same path -- “Hoppipolla” was as uplifting as it sounds on the record, “Gobbildigook” was a celebration with confetti and massive percussion, and “Fijotavik” was sung with a bunch of fake candles lighting the stage. All were perfect. The list goes on and on. They sounded great – just four guys, no orchestra, but a full sound and a voice that is possibly better live than on the records. And even though I was not completely taken away by the show, as a band, these guys are top notch – tight and great on their instruments. I had in my mind that I’d be seeing one of the best live bands around and they did nothing to dispel that thought.

Over the course of the decade, they’ve drifted a little bit from the original sound that made me take notice of them in the first place. Instead of playing the guitar with a bow, they’ve added pianos and some straightforward pop songs, but not to their detriment. In fact, the song I chose here is from their most recent album, and it’s freakin’ fantastic. Check it out here.

29. “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” by Wilco (2001)

2010-02-15T13:13:00.000-08:00

I feel like the release of Wilco’s most recent album, 2009’s Wilco (The Album), and Jay Bennett’s untimely death, have both allowed us to gain some perspective on Wilco’s 15 year career. The first realization is that, eight years later, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot remains the best album in Wilco’s catalogue, followed closely by Being There and Summerteeth. Like any great band at their peak – and Wilco from 1996 through 2001 were indeed great – it’s hard to take a pick of any of these three albums. As with REM’s Murmur, Reckoning and Life’s Rich Pageant, each one fits a different mood. But for me, long after the hype surrounding YHF has come and gone, it still remains the strongest, most cohesive set of songs this band has put together. There’s not anything resembling a clunker on the record and while people always like to claim that it is avant garde and experimental, I actually don’t think of it as much of either. To me, it sounds like that perfect mix of fractured pop rock mixed with timeless melodies. In a weird way, it’s not that much different than M. Ward’s 2006 masterpiece “Post-War”. It’s a little trippy, but not psychedelic, the melodies are nice on the surface, but the songs all seem to have this strong hummable undercurrent that reveal themselves to be better and better with each listen.

“I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” is first song and the centerpiece of YHF in that it sets the template for what is to come. At the time, many of the reviewers were terribly focused on the idea that these songs were experimental and non-linear and I think much of that is owed to this opening track. “Heavy Metal Drummer”, “I’m The Man Who Loves You” and “Reservations”, for example, were all new, improved tweaks on tried and true Wilco song templates. They broke little new ground on that level. But when the drums kick in on the opening sequence to “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart”, you immediately knew that Wilco had moved into a new realm -- for one, you noticed that they had a new drummer and it changed their whole approach to the songs. And when Tweedy’s voice kicks in, you hear traces of “Via Chicago” or “She’s a Jar” in his lyrics, but the whole offering seems way more abstract than anything they had done to that point:

“I am an American aquarium drinker, I assassin down the avenue.”

The song itself, to me, defines the whole feel of this album, and what makes it so great – that many of the best songs are somehow fractured and dense all at the same time.

Wilco would go on to fire Bennett and they would never be the same. A Ghost Is Born was a cool record, if not one I love to listen to all the time. It was a strong set of songs, all fairly cold and institutionalized, as if they came from the white walls Tweedy’s rehab facility. By then they had basically reinvented themselves as Wilco Mach 3 (or, more accurately “Jeff Tweedy and The Wilcos”), with a completely new lineup of kick-ass musicians. They released the enjoyable but somewhat forgettable Sky Blue Sky and then, this year, the enjoyable, but less forgettable Wilco (The Album).

They have not gotten back to that five year period where everything they touched was rock n roll gold. And that’s fine. But looking back now, it’s nice to see that YHF was not just some overhyped media story. It’s their defining moment as a band and it’s definitely one of the best albums of the decade.

Listen here.

30. “The Rat” by The Walkmen (2004)

2010-02-15T13:09:00.000-08:00

“When I used to go out, I would know everyone that I saw. Now I go out alone if I go out at all”

The best dressed men in rock n roll, Los Walkmen, have spent the decade quietly churning out excellent records that, amazingly, have gotten them to the point where I guess they could be called “veterans”. They seemed like one of the first Brooklyn bands to make their mark and create a critical buzz, and then it seemed like they went away until…they came back with a great album to close the decade, You & Me.

“The Rat” is on the 2004 release, Bows + Arrows, and it kicks much ass. Check out a clip from Letterman here.

31. “Twilight Creeps” by Crooked Fingers (2005)

2010-02-15T13:05:00.000-08:00

“Why does everyone always act so tough when all anyone wants is to find a friend? Why does everyone try to hide the heart that, hidden, has no use?”

Eric Bachmann, the main man behind Crooked Fingers, is a tremendously underrated songwriter and Neil Diamond impersonator. “Twilight Creeps” is probably my favorite song he’s written, though there are a lot more where this came from. Check it out here.

32. “10am Automatic” by The Black Keys (2004)

2010-02-15T13:01:00.000-08:00

If The White Stripes (i.e. the other Midwest-based blues-influenced duo) are channeling Robert Johnson via Led Zep via Hank Williams, then the Black Keys are taking the delta blues into the swamps of Mississippi, heading directly north to someone’s garage in Ohio and then heading up to the home of The Stooges and MC5. It’s a very heavy and rugged blues-based sound, and it seems to have that late-night weariness to many of the songs. And while it might be unfair to compare these guys to The White Stripes, the truth is that they both do similar things, with completely different results. The swampy sound that The Keys produce is chock full o’ soul, authentic to their world and incredibly excellent. In the end, it’s just great rock n roll, great songwriting, and great guitar playing. Their most recent album with Dangermouse took things in a different direction and it still came out on top. This is a great band and I think “10 a.m. Automatic” is probably the best introduction to their sound. Check it out here.

34. “Frankie’s Gun” by The Felice Brothers (2008)

2010-02-01T11:31:00.000-08:00

I first heard of these guys through some sort of e-mail blast via Team Love Records, which took me to their MySpace page, which allowed me to sample “Frankie’s Gun” and many other great tunes.

As a fan of The Band, there was nothing to not like about these guys – foot-stompin’, homespun folk rock from upstate New York is a pretty good way to get my attention. (Velvet Underground wannabes, Joy Division imitators and Talking Heads knock-offs make up a large part of my record collection as well, it seems). These songs all sounded great and they sounded even better on the actual record. The thing is, I never expected these guys to be much more than what I’d initially discovered, but to my surprise, they have far exceeded that. Sure, they owe 95% of their sound to The Basement Tapes, but they also grew up in the place that inspired that record. This is not some band from Ohio that moved to Brooklyn to reinvent The Big Pink. These are some kids who grew up together who are playing the music that best suits them. It doesn’t hurt that Mr. Lead Singer Felice is turning out to be a fantastic songwriter and the band itself has carved out a perfect place for itself in the world of live music. Anyone that has seen these guys (i.e. not me) has reported that they tear the place apart with their hootin’ and hollerin’ and accordians and fiddles. They also seem to be the type of guys that will play anywhere, from The Beacon Theatre to a Surf Shop in Montauk – they constantly tour and always impress.

None of their live energy would be possible, though, without the songs and this decade saw these guys releasing a bunch that I play over and over again without ever getting old – “Love Me Tenderly”, “Penn Station”, “Cooperstown”, “Take This Bread” and “The Greatest Show on Earth”.

In the end, though, “Frankie’s Gun” is the one that got me hooked from the outset and it’s the one that will not leave your head for days after listening to it.

Listen here.

35. “While You Were Sleeping” by Elvis Perkins (2007)

2010-02-01T11:22:00.000-08:00

“While you were sleeping, your babies grew, the stars shined and the shadows moved.
Time flew, the phone rang, there was a silence when the kitchen sang.
Songs competed like kids for space. We stared for hours at our makers’ face.
They gave us picks, said, "Go mine the sun, and go gold and come back when you’re done".

The most obvious difference in the music of the aughts compared to music at any other point in time is the instant accessibility of the songs. Half finished songs are leaked, albums are leaked out of sequence, bands are anointed The Next Big Thing before they’ve been together long enough to get a proper album and tour together and, most importantly, the sheer volume of music available right now makes everything somewhat disposable, especially if the listener has gotten that music for free. There are good and bad things to all of this, obviously, but it leaves music fans is the weird position of not being able to really separate average from good from excellent. Over time, the great ones stick around and reveal themselves, but many of today’s current recordings are blending into one another. And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead addresses this in their 2005 song, “Worlds Apart”:

“Random lost souls ask me ‘what’s the future of rock n roll’ I say, ‘I don’t know. Does it matter? Doesn’t it seem to sound all same to me, neither much worse nor much better?”

With all of the having been said, I am here to report to you that Elvis Perkins is the real deal. After his debut album, Ash Wednesday, on which “While You Were Sleeping” sits as the opening track, it was easy to be impressed with the songs and his songwriting. But the songs grew on you with repeated listens and then he released the follow-up, In Dearland, which found him expanding on that sound, churning out fantastic song after fantastic song and really separating himself from the aforementioned group of nice bands that fade away after five listens.

“So I waited for the riddled sky to be solved again by the sunrise.
I made a death-soup for life, for my father`s Ill widowed wife.”

“While You Were Sleeping” uses the standard singer-songwriter template that has grown somewhat tired over the last ten years, but there’s some real depth to the song – the vocals, the delivery of the lyrics – that allows it to transcend that. It could be the emotional weight of the lyrics, what with his father, Anthony Perkins, dying of AIDS in the 1990s and his mom dying on September 11^th, but there’s this real meditative aspect to this song that makes its weight palatable and enjoyable. Obviously Elvis goes for that timeless sound that Prine and Dylan and all their blues and gospel predecessors nailed -- and it works. And in the live setting, Elvis is charismatic and magnetic, commanding the scene and making you take notice. He pretty much blew me away at Newport this year. See if he does the same for you.

“Did you have that strangest dream before you woke? `Cause in your gown you had the butterfly stroke. Did it escape you like some half-told joke when you reached for your plume of smoke?”

36. “Zero” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs (2009)

2010-02-01T11:18:00.000-08:00

Karen O is a performance artist, but she also is a bit of a throwback. She’s a rock star in an era where rock stars are dead, but she has also maintained some of the teenage innocence that reminds the audience that this “act” is just that. She is having fun dressing up in outrageous gear, she’s chuckling as the songs end and the crowd starts cheering and she’s basically reminding you not to take everything so seriously. She may look like a cross between Joan Jett and Pat Benatar, but the show she puts on is distinct to her. I have much respek for this band because they have created something new and unique while looking back to past influences, without losing their own current identity.

I saw a documentary called “Kill Your Idols” on the early aughts New York music scene that tried to draw parallels between it and the “No Wave” scene from the 70s. Obviously, in 2003, when it was filmed, people were starting to see that New York (and primarily Brooklyn) was the new place to be for young musicians. So the documentary sought to go back to the Godfathers of the “No Wave” scene to see what they thought of what was happening in Brooklyn circa 2002-2003. What they said was pretty great -- all these old school downtown New York punks were pissed off that these young bands seemed to be missing the point altogether. The point being that their noisy music was a statement on how not to conform. It was a “fuck you” to the world. It was an outlet for fucked up people. It was funny and interesting to see the scorn they had for The Liars and The Strokes. It also made you realize how great Sonic Youth is to have mixed the best parts of that No Wave sound with some semblance of listenable rock music to make….Sonic Youth.

In that documentary, the YYY’s are interviewed long before “Maps” became an MTV hit and even longer before Karen O was playing to 30,000 people at All Points West Festival in Jersey City. Karen O and Nick Zinner seemed so damn young and naïve in the movie and it made you realize that they were basically just kids trying to make a name for themselves. They weren’t looking to make a statement and while Zinner truly seemed to love all the No Wave noise music from the 70s (he’s a huge Swans fan), it was clear from their interview that they weren’t owed anything and they were simply kids that were trying to go about this in their own way, which they did.

They graduated from Karen spitting beer all over the audience in small clubs to Karen spitting water all over a sea of people on huge stages around the world. Along the way, their overall sound became more conventional, less noisy and easier to digest. “Our Time” from the debut EP was lo fi and abrasive, “Maps” from the debut LP was a nice catchy ballad and “Y Control” was a nice indie punk song, but “Gold Lion” and “Zero” were huge pop songs that would have been the Shriek of The Week and more if progressive radio stations still existed. Even so, “Zero” is the tune I picked here, because it seems to exemplify where they’ve come from and where they are as the decade is coming to a close. It also asks us all to “get your leather on”, which is good for many points in my scorebook.

Listen here.

37. “This Year” by Mountain Goats (2005)

2010-02-01T11:12:00.000-08:00

'I played video games in a drunken haze

I was seventeen years young.

Hurt my knuckles punching the machines,

the taste of scotch rich on my tongue.”

Throughout the 1990s John Darnielle gained a cult following by recording hundreds of songs -- little short stories, vignettes of wacky fictional characters he had created -- to a boombox, full of hiss and all. By the early aughts he had graduated from this world and he started recording in an actual studio and writing an autobiographical trilogy of albums about his teenage years growing up in a broken home in California. “This Year” is from The Sunset Tree, the second part of this trilogy and it’s probably the most quintessential song from that series, in that it chronicles a single day of dodging his abusive stepfather by drinking with his girlfriend, playing video games and then, finally, driving home only to have it all end “as badly as you can imagine.”

It’s a fairly literal song and much of what makes it great depends on the fact that it’s all right out in front of you. And, like any great song, even if you don’t identify with everything there, there are lines and phrases throughout that are universal to any person who remembers what it was like to be 17 years old.

“I drove home in the california dusk.
I could feel the alcohol inside of me.
Home.
Picture the look on my stepfather's face,
ready for the bad things to come.

I downshifted as I pulled into the driveway,

The motor screaming out stuck in second gear.
The scene ends badly as you might imagine,
in a cavalcade of anger and fear.

I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.”

Listen here.

38. “Vincent O’Brien” by M. Ward (2003)

2010-02-01T10:48:00.000-08:00

“He only sings when he's sad, but he's sad all the time, so he sings the whole night through.

Yeah, he sings in the day-time, too.”

Every review of an M. Ward cites his dusty, timeless sound and it is indeed impossible listen to him and not marvel at the fact that his music seems like it is being filtered through an AM radio somewhere in Oklahoma. What’s makes him great, though, is how his music seems old and new at the same time. I think that 2006’s Post-War is one of the decades best records, something every music fan should own, and it’s aging really well as time goes on. I reckon that Noel Gallagher, as usual, said it best in a 2006 interview with Exclaim Magazine:

“I've just got an album in New York by a guy called M. Ward, it's called Post-War. Fookin' hell, man. I've never heard this guy before, and I was doing a photo shoot, as us rock stars generally do, and some guy was playing it in the background. I was like, ''What's that fookin' music?’ And he's like, [adopts American accent] 'Dude, it's M. Ward.' One of the best albums I've ever heard actually.”

“To Go Home” is probably my favorite M. Ward song, but it is a Daniel Johnston cover, so I thought it best not to break the already-broken-rules and include it on this list. (That’s not to say that you don’t need to listen to this song RIGHT NOW.)

“There may be mermaids under the water,

There may even be a man in the moon,

But Vincent, time is running out.

I hope you get yourself together soon.”

That having been said, “Vincent O’Brien” ain’t too shabby either, so make sure you give it a listen here.

39. “The Bleeding Heart Show” by The New Pornographers (2005)

2010-01-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

As the decade wore on, the “super group” tag attached to the New Pornographers began to seem really befitting. AC Newman, the New Porn’s main songwriter has essentially established himself as the master crafter of the power pop song. Neko Case is Neko Case and it seems like the New Porn’s pop sound took her solo career out of its countrified shell and got her and her band to expand their palate for the better. Dan Bejar of Destroyer contributed a handful of quirky gypsy folk pop songs to each New Porns record, all of them typically excellent. The end result is Newman and Bejar basically getting a kick-ass backing band, with Neko chipping in on lead vocals and/or harmonies. If that sounds good on paper, it’s even better on the records. Nowhere is this better exemplified than with “The Bleeding Heart Show”, which mystifies me as far as the lyrics go (“In business of your lives, the perception, it is wrong, mile after mile. The phantom taste drinking wine from your heels.”), but never ceases to rock it out with the anthemic “hey la’s” in the coda. This is a truly fantastic pop song that is incredibly catchy and never not enjoyable to listen to. Check it out.

As an aside, when trying to find you tube links to these songs, I sometimes come across really absurd videos. And sometimes I come across decent homemade ones, like this one.

40. “The Crane Wife, Parts 1 & 2” by The Decemberists (2006)

2010-01-17T09:44:00.000-08:00

The Decemberists were always destined to be the object of our derision, what with their hyper-literate lyrics and absurd tales of goblins inhabiting the world of indie prog rock (is that even a thing?). But not so fast my fren’! These guys are huge for a reason and their first couple of albums were real gems, with songs like “July July” and “California Youth Brigade” and “Red Right Ankle” and “Billy Liar”. Things started to get kind of dicey with 2005’s The Tain, which is what made The Crane Wife LP so enjoyable when it came out.

Ostensibly, The Crane Wife is a collection of tracks based on a Japanese folk tale bearing that same name. It’s pretentious, of course, but that’s what we’ve come to expect of Colin Meloy and there’s a place for this in the world of indie rock. But more importantly, The Crane Wife is a hell of an album when taken as a whole or when taken apart as a bunch of single tracks. It’s definitely one of the best albums of the last ten years and “The Crane Wife, Parts 1 & 2” seems to best exemplify what it does best. Extra points for the fact that it segues immediately into “Sons and Daughters”. Check out “The Crane Wife, Parts 1 & 2” for yourself.

41. “Patty Lee” by Les Savy Fav (2007)

2010-01-17T09:29:00.000-08:00

This band pretty much defines the “post hardcore” genre in that they seem to take many of the great elements of hardcore – wild energy and rocking guitars -- and mix them with angular dance rock to make a nuanced and unique sound that is very listenable. It’s still edgier than your standard Drive By Truckers song, but it’s not a brutal as, say, Agnostic Front. So if Joy Division is “post punk” then Les Savy Fav is “post hardcore” and I love that these guys channel 80s hardcore and punk and 90s indie rock to make this perfect mix of rock n roll for 2009.

“’Patty Lee, turn the lights on, please.

There's something I don't understand.

Patty Lee, turn the lights on please.

This party's gotten out of hand.’

Those were the last words her suitor spoke before he croaked.

In seven seconds he'd be dead, tied to the headboard of Pattie Lee's bed.”

“Patty Lee” is Les Savy Fav’s version of a dance / rock song, and it outdoes any other dance rock song of the decade, in my opinion. People will cite “Take Me Out” by Franz Ferdinand or some other crappy Killers song, but the reality is that “Patty Lee” gets things to a very unique and awesome place without abandoning the aforementioned “post hardcore” aesthetic. The lead guitar is unlike anything in rock n roll today, Tim Harrington’s lead man antics are way, way out there and they have a bunch of unique, kick ass songs to back everything up. Les Savy Fav made one of the decade’s best albums when they recorded Lets’ Stay Friends -- an eclectic collection of great rock songs that doesn’t so much as genre hop as “style hop” – and “Patty Lee” is the centerpiece of the whole record. A must-have.

PATTY LEE.

Apologies

2010-01-17T07:54:00.000-08:00

What with that 17 day bender over Christmas and the whole working on a dream thing (a book I've been writing entitled 'What With That 17 Day Bender Over Christmas'), we have been seriously remiss in posting. Sorry. It will happen again.

Also, once the Top 100 is done, we'll be posting the Best of 2010. Yeah, I know. It's a little late for that. Suck it.

COULD NOT HAVE SAID IT BETTER OURSELVES!!!

2009-12-17T13:03:00.001-08:00

JESUS, HOW DEAD ON IS THIS?!!!

42.“Voodoo Candle” by Jay Farrar (2001)

2009-12-13T13:57:00.000-08:00

An erstwhile member of the seminal alt-country group Uncle Tupelo, Mr. Farrar has become somewhat forgotten in many circles, as he’s been eclipsed in popularity by his old bandmate, Jeff Tweedy. “Eclipsed” maybe is not a fair word, as Tweedy and Farrar have always been going for different things with their music. But it’s fair to say that while a new Wilco album is met with cover stories and magazine spreads and a barrage of interviews and the like, Farrar is operating under the radar, playing to his strengths as a straight-ahead rock-country veteran and churning out solid, but untrendy songs album after album. “Voodoo Candle” is one of his tunes that does push his Uncle Tupelo template in another direction and while it’s not something that will garner the same critical praise, as say, Wilco’s “Spiders (Kidsmoke)”, it is definitely a great tune that deserves some attention, or at least a listen.

43.“Just Be Simple” by Songs: Ohia, A/K/A Magnolia Electric Company (2003)

2009-12-13T13:51:00.000-08:00

Songs: Ohia was the name of Jason Molina’s band when they released the Magnolia Electric Company LP. It’s a truly fantastic record, with a few great tunes (one of them being “Just be Simple”) but it also marked a bit of a departure in sound for Molina. As such, after this record, Molina changed the band’s name to Magnolia Electric Company, and kept intact his Neil Young-inspired countrified folk rock sound. This was pretty confusing for some period of time, but it has resolved itself as Molina has released tons of great stuff under that new moniker. If you like the aforementioned Neil Young or My Morning Jacket or anything resembling countrified folk rock via the rust belt, you will love Molina’s songs. Check out “Just Be Simple” here.

44.“It’s Okay” by Land of Talk (2008)

2009-12-13T13:47:00.000-08:00

This tune is sad and incredibly soulful, oozing with a detached disappointment that seems to fit perfectly with the lyrics. It’s a winner because it so perfectly captures a specific feeling with both the vocal delivery and the bending and sighing of the lead guitar. “Drive All Night” by The Boss has this same sort of feeling, Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are captures a feeling and gets it on screen. It’s not easy to do, but Lizzy nailed this one. Check it out the studio version and the live version.

45.“Phantom Limb” by The Shins (2007)

2009-12-13T13:42:00.000-08:00

It wasn’t until I saw these guys at The Bowery on the Chutes Too Narrow tour that I realized that this was basically a solo project for James Mercer. The band itself was fine, but it was very clear that these were his songs and this was his sound and -- though I am sure I overstating this -- it felt like the band was just there to support him, not necessarily to collaborate with him. They released one more album, Wincing The Night Away, on which “Phantom Linb appears, after Chutes Too Narrow and then Mercer called it a day and now is working on a new album with -- who else? – Dangermouse.

The “breakup” of The Shins has been memorialized in a long, rambling, and very interesting interview with the drummer, Jesse Sandoval, which you can read here.

Anyway, Mercer is master pop craftsman and clearly one of the best in the business at what he does. His albums are all perfectly conceived and sequenced, filled with awesome nuggets and not a song or even a part of a song is wasted. For what he’s doing, his albums are close to perfect. They might not change your life, but The Shins are / were a tremendous studio band in their day. Check it out.

46.“Beanbag Chair” by Yo La Tengo (2006)

2009-12-13T13:37:00.000-08:00

Yo La and I go back 20 years now (Fakebook was one of the first CDs I ever purchased) and it’s not hard to believe what these guys have done over the years, but it is hard to believe that they are still around doing it. Perhaps we’ve been overly effusive in our praise for Hoboken’s Finest, but when seeing them open for Wilco this summer, it was hard not to think of these guys as some sort of Godfathers of modern “indie” rock. Part of that has to do with the fact that their recordings are so eclectic, from indie pop to noise rock to everything in between. Yo La seems at once limited by Ira and Georgia’s soft voices and emboldened by the idea that they can play any style of music.

In a different way, cult favorites like Ween are doing similar genre-hopping exercises, but what makes Yo La so damn awesome is that none of it is done with without sincerity. It’s trite to say these guys are the Velvet Underground redux, but it’s obviously an apt comparison simply because they strike that balance between noise and pop, challenging and accessible, so well. At some point, you’re just preaching to converted with all this Yo La talk, but it’s hard to understate how far-reaching this band’s influence really is.

With all of that having been said, how do you choose just one Yo La Tengo song? It’s obviously not easy, but “Beanbag Chair” stands out to me as a perfect, peppy Yo La pop song. If I were to go in a different direction, it would have to be “The Story of Yo La Tengo”, a mind-exploding piece of noise rock that never loses track of the melody.

47.“Simple Pages” by Weezer (2001)

2009-12-13T13:32:00.000-08:00

I remember people being really excited about Weezer’s Green Album when it came out. And though a segment of the fanbase seemed unhappy about Rivers Cuomo leaving the confessional songs from Pinkerton behind him, The Green Album truly kicked ass. Since then, Rivers had released tons of albums, both with Weezer and solo, but none of them compare to their first three records. In a way, The Green Album seemed to bridge the old 90s Weezer with what would become the absurd aughts Weezer, but taking everything for what it is, I think we should all just be happy that Weezer is still around, doing what they do.

48. “Penny On a Train Track” by Ben Kweller (2006)

2009-12-13T13:29:00.000-08:00

Kweller’s got a few things going for him outside of his very underrated musical talent: he’s seriously impressed / humbled by things like selling out Irving Plaza and opening for Jeff Tweedy. It’s not an act – the dude has this hilarious knack for making you understand that he loves rocking out a few thousand people. And it shows – his live shows are just fantastic pop rock concoctions. His band is great, he can play any instrument really well and he’s happy to be there. His music seems simple, his sentimentality borderline cheesy, but ultimately it all works very well -- his songs never get old and he really knows how to craft a hook. His haircut is also included in our Pantheon of Awesome, and yes, points have been awarded to Sinore Kweller for the crazy red curls.

Most importantly, he’s got a boatload of great songs, but this one had to make the cut if only for the video with his grandma dancing all around in exercise gear. Check it out.

49. “You Go On Ahead (Trumpet Trumpet II)” by Sunset Rubdown (2009)

2009-12-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

Spencer Krug of Sunset Rubdown and Wolf Parade was a busy man in the latter half of the decade, so ‘twas a bit difficult to choose a song from either one of these outfits. Although Sunset Rubdown is seen as his more adventurous side project, I think this is probably the best song he’s released. That’s not to say that there are not a bunch of others that could have been considered though.

Incidentally, Wolf Parade was a band whose first record really impressed me, despite the Modest Mouse comparisons. Luckily, Krug has proven to be much more than a rip off artist as Wolf Parade’s second release went in a different awesome direction and the Sunset Rubdown albums are obviously quite good in their own right.

Wolf Parade is also the source of amusement for me, since I was amped to check them out live at one point after that first LP came out and was then reminded by one of my friends that I did see them live -- opening for Modest Mouse at the Bowery at one of those free Rolling Stone shows. No wonder I left my phone in a cab outside of Piano’s that night. I’ve no idea how good they are live, but people inform me that I seemed to really be rocking out during their set.

Enough about Wolf Parade though, check out the Sunset track here.

50. “Lasso” by Phoenix (2009)

2009-12-13T13:18:00.000-08:00

Due to the timing of this Top 100 of The Decade project, perhaps it was inevitable that 2009 would be under-represented. But even given the fact that it’s hard to have much perspective on the stuff that you like for a month compared to the stuff that sticks and ends up being part of your music rotation for years to come, it was impossible not to include one of the jams from Phoenix’s 2009 LP Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, an album filled with what used to be called “modern rock” hits. By now, you’ve probably seen the 80s brat pack mash-up video for “Litzomania” and heard “1901” on a Cadillac commercial and heard “Fences” while getting your coffee in the morning. There’s a reason for this – Phoenix really did make a great album of singles that are held together by interludes and other strong supporting tracks. It’s really poppy and catchy and the sound is super tight and stylish, which is another word for…French. No matter though, these songs are winners and “Lasso” is the one that I have heard 100 times and never gotten sick of.

51. “Fluorescent Adolescent” by Arctic Monkeys (2007)

2009-12-13T13:14:00.000-08:00

“You used to get it in your fishnets
Now you only get it in your night dress
Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness
Landed in a very common crisis
Everything's in order in a black hole
Nothing seems as pretty as the past though
That Bloody Mary's lacking a Tabasco”

This band is clearly for real, but it was hard to not think that after their debut album blasted through the British charts that they might just end being a flash in the pan. Then I heard “Florescent Adolescent” from the follow-up album and ‘twas clear that that were here to stay. The odd thing about the debut is how damn tight this band was at that time -- I think they were only 21 or 22 when this tune came out. They don’t seem to be breaking any new ground at all, but that Alex Turner shaw is witty and they play their asses off. Check it out.

52. “Fans” by Kings of Leon (2007)

2009-12-13T13:10:00.000-08:00

The less I knew about these guys, the better it was. I swear I have no issue with these cats being heartthrobs, getting huge mainstream exposure, playing arenas and being on the cover of bad magazines. I do have an issue with teased hair, cheesy songs about sex that is on fire (Ok, it’s a guilty pleasure, I have to admit), shitty live shows at huge London arenas and shitty performances on Austin City Limits. I’m not about to waste this space with some sort of proclamation that this is just a boy band that happens to play rock n roll. At least half of this band, including the lead singer heartthrob guy (Caleb), is very talented and has a knack for crafting a kick ass song. We’ve been through this before but, in short, they are too damn perty for their own good.

That said, “Fans” is a great song that has nothing to do with teenie screams or Motley Crue hair styles. I believe Dr. Midnight claimed that Scott Muni would have approved of this jam and I could envision hearing this one on a drive-at-five rock block on 102.7 WNEW, circa 1987, with Muni’s raspy, Lucky Strike-damaged voice saying, “Yyyyes, the KINGS…getting it done for you on this drive…at five…out of Nashville…in Tennessee. Another tasty biscuit on N-E-W, New York.”

53. “In State” by Kathleen Edwards (2005)

2009-12-10T13:07:00.000-08:00

The demise of Lucinda Williams as an artist that is releasing relevant, enjoyable records has been made much easier because of the existence of Ms. Edwards, who channels Williams’ countrified twang and knack for storytelling, as well as some of her dark themes, but seems to be able to create music that is a little more peppy and nice on the ears than what Williams has been known to release.

Instead of swampy Louisiana blues, Edwards brings a more modern countrified indie rock sound that still sounds “authentic”, but isn’t dragged down by the sad drawl in Lucinda’s aging voice. This is not meant as a knock on Lucinda – she’s given us enough to enjoy already. It’s meant to provide some context – Edwards has taken the template that Williams pioneered and blended it with rock, indie pop and country very nicely to create a bunch of albums filled with kick ass songs like “In State”. Check it out.

54. “Godless” by The Dandy Warhols (2000)

2009-12-10T13:04:00.000-08:00

Ever since Dig! was released in 2004, any discussion of The Dandy Warhols seems to be coupled with The Brian Jonestown Massacre. They were friends and then rivals and now I don’t know what they are, but the movie takes you through the insane world of BJM’s Anton Newcombe and leaves us with the impression that he is some sort of misunderstood genius, while the Dandys were a bunch of relatively responsible rock n rollers looking to package their polished, major-label subsidized, psychedelic rock to make the big bucks.

It seems like they got the Dandys right, though time has not really shown Newcombe to be much of a genius. As I have written here ad nauseum, I am a sucker for bands that rip off previously awesome sounds of the VU, The Beatles and The Stones (not to mention Joy Division, Echo and The Bunnymen and Talking Heads), so while I have tons of BJM’s music and while I like a lot of it and while I appreciated his druggy, hazy live show at Maxwell’s in 2005 (and the fact that he was yelling at our very own Dr. Midnight from the stage) it’s hard to say that Newcombe is anything but a guy channeling those things that were already done. He does this really well, but “genius” is not the word I’d use to describe him. “Insane drug addict” is more accurate, methinks.

As for the Dandys, there are probably 100 other bands not on this top 100 list that I like more than them, but this is the age of the iTunes single and this list is about great songs, not bands or albums. I always thought this was a great opening song to a record and while the Dandys never did much else for me beyond this one tune, it still stands alone as a very good rock n roll song.

Listen here.

55. “Bag It Up” by Oasis (2008)

2009-12-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

“I got my heebie jeebies in a hidden bag”

Most of what Oasis does is quite amusing, but their decade-ending breakup has been particularly fun the follow. The tirades, finger pointing, guitar smashing, all of it has kept me entertained. It’s as if they are playing out the rock cliché, tongue firmly placed in cheek, except when you realize that these two guys actually don’t really like each other, Davies Brothers style.

With all of that having been said, it is easy to not be upset about their breakup because it seems like they gave us more than we’d have ever expected. Sure, things this decade were very hit and miss for this band, but the last two records they released were better-than-solid and between them they basically produced ten or more vintage Oasis classics. Their most recent album – the swan song, I guess you could call it -- Dig Out Your Soul, seemed to garner very positive critical reviews, despite the absence of strong hooks, something that is obviously the Oasis trademark. Unlike its predecessor, 2005’s Don’t Believe The Truth, which packed in some new, fresh Oasis-style melodies, Dig Out Your Soul was bluesy and dark. I think the album as a whole was kind of overrated, but it did have some standouts and this song is by far the best thing they have done since the 1990s -- and it probably stands out as one of the better songs they have ever written. Unfortunately, YouTube has pulled the audio to clips of this song, so I can only attach the Rhapsody clip.

Lastly, when I said that The Doves do the whole BritPop thing better than Oasis, I don’t think I really meant it.

56. “I’ve Found a Reason” by Cat Power (2000)

2009-12-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

Did I say I was not going to include covers? I don’t remember, but this was definitely one of the top 100 recorded songs of this decade, so I decided to include it. Even so, “I’ve Found a Reason” is not so much a cover as it is a deconstruction and reinvention of an excellent Velvet Underground song. She tried to do this same thing 30 or more times this decade, releasing tons of covers, some great, some good and many bad, but this one really transcends your traditional “cover” song. Check it out for yourself.

If you disagree with this choice, there are a few other Cat Power songs that could have made the cut:

Actually, anything on The Greatest could have been included in here, and how could it not with that title?

57. “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse” by Of Montreal (2007)

2009-12-03T15:07:00.000-08:00

If I remember correctly, and I could be wrong on this, Of Montreal is one of the bands at the forefront of the idea of whoring their music away to terrible commercials with the sole purpose of taking that money and sinking it into ever-expanding albums and live shows. Of course the hipster whose Daddy pays the rent on his Williamsburg loft saw this as a disgusting travesty -- sellout! -- but even those who had no issue with it could not help but to be turned off by the final product: “Let’s go OUTBACK tonight, life will still be here tomorrow!” It seems truly awful for a seminal band of the Elephant 6 collective to have this happen to their song, until you realize that…they have to pay their rent.

But right around this same time, Of Montreal also started expanding their live shows with increasingly insane theatrics (think Ziggy Stardust for the aughts) and live animals. And all of this was seemingly made possible by the proceeds they received from Outback and other corporations. Or that’s what Kevin Barnes said, at least. And even if Barnes himself thinks it is impossible to sellout in a capitalist world we live in, the fact remains that this whole silly thing had nothing but a positive effect on their music and live shows. In short, if the final product is in no way affected negatively by these terrible ads, does it really matter? Isn’t Barnes dead-on about this?

Like Gwar, I have been wanting to see the Of Montreal live production for a long time, but I always feared that excessive amounts of real bodily fluids might makes their way onto my impeccably pressed oxford, so I passed. Unlike Gwar, this band makes some excellent and unique dance rock that has essentially carved its own niche in the music world. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer, one of this decade’s best records. There are a handful of fantastic songs to choose from that album, but this one was my initial favorite and so it shall remain.

58. “Ion Squared” by Bloc Party (2008)

2009-12-03T15:02:00.000-08:00

Bloc Party made two really excellent albums before getting too caught up in the block-rockin’-beats of their third release, Intimacy. Despite that fact, Intimacy did have a few songs that seemed to take their earlier sound and marry it with big beats and big volume and “Ion Squared” is the end result – Bloc Party’s signature sad rock married with fractured drumming, great Brit Pop melodies and Johnny Marr style lead guitars.

Check it out here.

59. “Us” by Regina Spektor (2004)

2009-12-03T14:50:00.000-08:00

Haters seem to dislike the Fiona Apple-meets-Cat Power aspect of Ms. Spektor’s sound, but that’s actually what I like about Regina Spektor. What I like even more is the fact that she expanded on that template that she popularized on 2004’s Soviet Kitsch, the album that “Us” appears on, and made it into full-blown, radio-friendly pop sound of 2006’s breakthrough, Begin To Hope and, later, 2009’s Far. She’s huge now – instead of opening for The Strokes and Kings of Leon, she is headlining her own shows at Radio City. And good for her. There’s a place in this world for Joanna Newsome, but there’s also a place for Regina Spektor and I am glad she’s cashing in and people are digging her music.

Take a listen to “Us” here and see if you agree.

60. “Agenda Suicide” by The Faint (2001)

2009-12-01T13:09:00.000-08:00

The Faint’s Blank-Wave Arcade from 1999, was a genre-buster, as it was one of the first real hardcore synth pop records to break through and bring back that 80s synth-dance-pop sound. Long before the Killers dumbed this sound down, The Faint were collectively kicking ass with great records and tremendous live dance-rock-light shows. Their second record, Dance Macabre, was a little more of the same, with a few more tweaks, and “Agenda Suicide” is the best example of this.

In effect, this song is the antithesis of Animal Collective’s ode to domesticity, “My Girls”. The Faint not only don’t want four walls and adobe slats, they don’t want any “pretty homes” and they don’t want to be “drones” who “work hard before they die”. Message received, lads.

61.“My Slumbering Heart” by Rilo Kiley (2002)

2009-12-01T13:04:00.000-08:00

Jenny Lewis has carved out a nice little Laurel Canyon-style solo career in the latter half of the decade, but in the earlier half, she and her band, Rilo Kiley, released three very good albums. The best of these, The Execution Of All Things, was released by Saddle Creek Records and it contains off of the stamps of Mike Mogis-produced indie pop records, in a good way. It’s catchy, quirky and it has something that Jenny’s solo stuff does not – the driving lead guitars of Blake Sennett. On “My Slumbering Heart”, it’s not just Lewis’s voice and slacker lyrics that carries the tune, it’s the whole band. I like her solo stuff well enough, but nothing has come close to the excitement generated by some of the best Rilo tracks, like this one.

62.“Twilight Campfighter” by Guided By Voices (2001)

2009-12-01T12:56:00.000-08:00

I only got to see these guys once and it just so happened to be one of their last shows before calling it quits, in 2004. ‘Twas quite an experience, with nerdy GBV fans jumping on stage all night, singing along, throwing beers and rocking the fuck out. I knew I was in for this when I got the tix to see them, but the whole thing far exceeded my expectations as they ripped through 60 songs over the course of 3-4 hours. That’s right, SIXTY songs.

So it’s safe to say that GBV fans are nuts about their GBV and I am sure each one has a different take on their best song of the decade. For all I know, one of the 300 songs that Robert Pollard’s released as a solo artist might be “better” than this one. I mulled over many songs by GBV and I kept coming back to this one, which happens to be another of example of a song that R.E.M. might have recorded had they not lost the plot 15 years ago.

Listen here.

63. “Elephant Woman” by Blonde Redhead (2004)

2009-12-01T12:50:00.000-08:00

Not long after this album’s release, I was up late with some friends in my Queens apartment and this song came on at a volume that would be unacceptable in most party tents. The walls were shaking with its spooky groove and it was not long before my neighbor, who resembled a large frog, was outside my window, gesticulating wildly, cursing and telling me he’s coming for me. The next day he confronted me again, but this time good ol’ Dr. Midnight was by my side and up for challenge. Twas not long before Midnight and I put Froggy back in his place, somehow taking our wrong from the previous night and flipping it on him, making him feel as if he was the one who’d make the mistake by being so confrontational. I got an apology the next day. All of this done with our eyes half closed. Impressive? I think so.

64. “Mississippi” by Bob Dylan (2001)

2009-12-01T12:39:00.000-08:00

It’d be silly to start a missive about Bobby Zimmerman, so I’ll just leave it like this: I’ve heard many versions of this song and all of them are great, because it’s a great song.

Listen here.

65. “Skinny Love” by Bon Iver (2008)

2009-11-25T14:39:00.000-08:00

Everyone loves a back story and the one behind Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago seems to have driven a lot of the critical praise for the album. Real quick: Justin Vernon lived in North Carolina but when he broke up with his girlfriend, he decided to also break up his band and move back to the frozen tundra of Wisconsin. It was there that he spent a winter in a freezing cabin, adopting the name Bon Iver (French for “good winter”) and unintentionally writing the songs that would make him an overnight darling. The tastemakers and music blogs loved the thing long before it was even released, of course, and that led to tons of buzz, which in turn led to Letterman appearances, ABC News specials and Town Hall-headlining shows.

The thing is, Vernon deserved it. For Emma is a mini-classic in my mind, an album with real depth and soul, and something that seems to be timeless and of one particular time and place (in a freezing cabin in Wisconsin, after breaking up with a girlfriend in North Carolina). Whether the back story matters of not is hardly the point. The songs stand on their own – the mix of folk and gospel is perfect and Vernon’s falsetto carries the day throughout. All nine songs are great in their own way, but this one seemed like the most obvious pick.

Listen here.

66. “A Praise Chorus” by Jimmy Eat World (2001)

2009-11-25T14:31:00.000-08:00

I’ve never been much into the silly tags attached to music genres, but even with that said, the one that most mystifies me is the “emo” tag. From what I can gather, Bleed American is something of an emo classic and Jimmy Eat World seems to be one of the Godfathers of the emo genre. Is it because they emote a lot? Is it because they play punk-influenced pop rock that is palatable to suburban teens? I don’t know. What I do know is that Bleed American has 4 or 5 fantastic tunes on it, and this one stands out among them. It’s an ode to rock n roll, for sure, but it’s also about getting out there and making it happen, something only a 25 year old guy can write. This is Jimmy Eat World’s version of “Cigarettes and Alcohol” or “Born To Run” – exciting, catchy, energetic and…inspiring? See for yourself.

67. More Yellow Birds” by Sparklehorse (2001)

2009-11-25T14:28:00.000-08:00

Will my pony recognize my voice in hell?
Will he still be blind, or do they go by smell?
Will you promise not to rest me out at sea
But on a fiery river boat that's rickety?

In the late 90s, Mark Linkous had a near-death experience in London when he took too many pills and ended up in a coma. He ultimately survived and the artistic result of that was one of my favorite albums of all time, 1998’s Good Morning Spider. It’s truly incredible to listen to because it sounds and feels like something that was made from a hospital bed, with the morphine drip on.

In 2003, he followed Spider up with It’s a Wonderful Life, something equally spooky, but also equally fantastic. Linkous’ skill as a producer alone is something to marvel at, as the sound -- the overall feeling and level of intimacy -- he gets out of his songs is hard to find anywhere else.

“More Yellow Birds” is vintage Sparklehorse – a half-sedated glimpse of the sun shining through the late autumn trees with a slight chill in the air. Contemplative, unique, sad and absolutely beautiful.

Listen here.

68. “Light Years” by Pearl Jam (2000)

2009-11-25T14:24:00.000-08:00

This decade found Pearl Jam settling comfortably into themselves, churning out solid album after solid album, solid tour after solid tour – not breaking new ground for them, but releasing tons of good tunes and doing what they do and doing it really well. Some people see this negatively as the same old Pearl Jam, but I actually appreciate exactly where they are at this point. Twenty years after releasing their first record, The Stones officially announced their decline when they sharted out Emotional Rescue and went on to become a touring novelty act (though I still think Tatoo You is a solid album).

Amazingly, PJ is almost twenty years in and they still seem to be releasing enjoyable, relevant records. I was not a fan of these guys when they first blasted onto the scene, but over the years I have really come to appreciate them for what they are – a solid straight ahead rock band with tons of great tunes.

“Light Years”, to me, is the best embodiment of everything they did well early in their career, filtered through their post-Versus need to avoid a simple, catchy song. At times, this has been to their detriment – are good pop hooks really something to avoid? – but it’s hard to argue with their output.

Listen here.

69. “Sunken Waltz” by Calexico (2003)

2009-11-22T10:13:00.000-08:00

With Calexico, it’s easy to get lost in the mariachi horns and pedal steel and incredible musicianship while sometimes ignoring the fact that some of their most simple songs are actually their best. “Convict Pool” is a tremendous song that fits in this category. “Sunken Wealth” is in the same boat.

Washed my face in the rivers of empire,
Made my bed from a cardboard crate,
Down in the city of quartz.
No news, no new regrets,
Tossed a Susan B. over my shoulder,
And prayed it would rain and rain,
Submerge the whole western states,
Call it a last fair deal
With an American seal
And corporate hand shake.

That’s not to say that I don’t love me some epic tex mex jams like “Crystal Frontier”, which, in the live setting is taken to new heights -- a fact that seems to be no secret to anyone these days, as they seem to be the house band for every live tribute and every collaboration. They are the Booker T’s of southmex aughts indie rock, some might say. Their split EP with Iron and Wine, for example, seems to have brought Sam Beam out of homespun shell and launched him into a more percussive, swinging world that Calexico sometimes inhabits.

Anyway, this is a really great live band and their recordings don’t seem to do them much justice, but “Sunken Wealth” still stands alone as a great tune. Check it out.

70. “Let’s Explode” by Clem Snide (2001)

2009-11-22T10:09:00.000-08:00

“A peacock died to cover my lips, so I dyed my hair in all its sweat. But now I’m haunted by these visions of me.”

Eef Barzelay And Clem Snide are criminally underrated. Who rates him, you ask? Well, I’m not sure, but I saw him play a solo gig in 2006 at the Mercury Lounge and there were literally less than 100 people there. On one level, I love being able to move freely, get a brew, get to the commode, break dance, whatever. But on another, it struck me as ridiculous that more people don’t come out to hear this guy’s songs. I would hope that Senor Barzelay could make a decent living doing what he does, because he does it pretty damn well.

Clem Snide was a very good live band that put out two great albums (“Your Favorite Music” and “The Ghost of Fashion”) and few other very good (“The End Of Love”) to good ones (“Soft Spot”), all of them filled with songs that I could have included on this list. Songs about Ryan Adams not being as “weird as you’d like me to think”, about having a kid (“never have I been made to feel less doubtful, never have I been made less cynical”) and songs about…explosions.

“And I don’t want to live forever, when the sky is full of little holes exploding as they take my picture. Let’s explode!”

I chose “Let’s Explode”, because it always seemed to define these guys to me, both on their albums and at their shows. I saw them once at one of those free South Street Seaport shows and when it became obvious that the rain was going to cut the show off after a few songs, he opened with this and blew it out, singing, “I don’t want to know me better”, over and over until we got to Jeremy’s Ale Haus.

These guys have a great ear for a catchy tune, but their real allure is Eef’s lyrics and his quirky, crackling vocal delivery. I saw shows that were really too slow to get you going, but he always kept you engaged with his songs. One example is “Made For TV Movie”, a sad song about Lucille Ball and how, in life, the chocolates always seem to move too fast. My favorite example -- the one that reminds me of the dawn as seen from the roof of my old, big yellow house in Queens -- is “Joan Jett of Arc”, which documents the first time a teenage boy got to know his lady friend. The lyrics are fantastic, but the production, the overall feel of the song, so perfectly captures the summer night, the innocence ending, the fact that the cicadas and crickets had gone silent.

71. “Some Red Handed Sleight Of Hand” by Cursive (2003)

2009-11-22T10:01:00.000-08:00

Tim Kasher’s projects (Cursive, The Good Life) would hardly be possible without THAT VOICE. And as a fan of Minor Threat, old school Fugazi and Kasher, it’s hard not to listen to Cursive without thinking of Fugazi. And I mean that in a good way. I have often said that Kasher’s voice is the exact middle ground between Robert Smith of The Cure and Ian McKaye. In the end, it makes much of Kasher’s stuff very compelling and awesome.

Kasher released a handful of very good albums this past decade, both by Cursive and the Good Life and there were several tracks from both bands that could have been included here, but in the end I knew I would have to go back to Cursive’s 2003 classic “The Ugly Organ”, Kasher’s take on his own self-deprecating statement about his own art and how it is created, as if the things in his life that make their way into his songs exist for the art, and not the other way around. It’s a great album that fits into that “post-hardcore” genre very nicely.

Check out another great tune from this album here.

One of the things that music critic seem to constantly ignore is the power of the voice that is singing the song. How many songs, how many BANDS, exist because they have captivating singers. I am not talking about Beyonce and Mariah. I am talking about rock groups that build a basic sound around a unique vocal delivery. The National comes to mind. People either seem to love or hate Neil Young because of his voice. Imagine if Neil Diamond sang the Neil Young classics – it’d completely change the audience, even if the songs themselves were the same. There are many extreme examples like this, but the truth is that the vocals are the number one thing that draws most people to a song. You might not love Eddie Van Halen’s guitar style, but if you hate Sammy Hagar, you will be forced to disown Halen and profess allegiance to only Diamond Dave-era Halen. You might also be forced to drive 55, which is not something I will promote here at TAGTOE.

Point being that Kasher’s voice perfectly fits his Cursive and Good Life sounds perfectly. Neither could exist without that delivery.

Listen here.

72. “You Were Right” by Badly Drawn Boy (2002)

2009-11-19T14:08:00.000-08:00

I don’t know where I was on the night Jeff Buckley died, but I appreciate that Damon Gough included him in the company of the somewhat overrated Kurt Cobain and other actual legends such as Sinatra and Juan Lennon.

This is a very nice, touching song about all those things that Damon seems to do so well – namely, communicating sappy sentimentality without clobbering you over the head with it. The best songwriters assume some level of aptitude from the listener, but some, like Gough, seem to also excel at drawing out the obvious and building his songs around that. Badly Drawn Boy had some real up and down moments since the debut album came out ten years ago, but a collection of his best songs, like this one, is really impressive and enjoyable to listen to.

Listen here.

73. “Lost Coastlines” by Okkervil River (2008)

2009-11-19T14:05:00.000-08:00

Clifftus McMaximus said it best about these guys – they seem to put a lot of OOMPH into their shit, and they should get some credit for that. I love the album version of this song, but what really endeared me to it was this duet between Will Sheff and AC Newman of the New Pornographers, recorded in one of these guy’s living rooms in Brooknam.

One of the more amusing things that happened this decade was Win Butler of The Arcade Fire’s response to Sasha Frere-Jones’ article in the New Yorker that maintained that there were no current bands that were drawing from black influences. Win went on to argue the contrary, providing awesome sound samples of how the last part of “Wake Up” was basically stolen from “You Can’t Hurry Love”. Since hearing that, it occurred to me that “Lost Coastlines” and “Last Night” by The Strokes all must have stolen from either each other or the same place. It also occurred to me that I am apparently a huge sucker for the bass line from “You Can’t Hurry Love”.

Listen here.

74. “Rubies” by Destroyer (2006)

2009-11-19T14:02:00.000-08:00

Dan Bejar is better known for his contributions to The New Pornographers, but the title track from the Rubies LP – another of the decade’s best records -- is a phenomenal, quirky, rock / folk / pop single that seems to owe a lot to Van Dyke Parks. Either way, this song is hardly epic in the conventional rock sense, but on some level, this thing just grabs me for nine plus minutes and never lets go.

I love all the lyrics to this song, but some really jump out at me: "Quiet Ruby, Someone's coming! Approach with stealth! It's just your precious American underground, and it is born of wealth."

75. “Television Rules The Nation / Crescendolls (LIVE)“ by Daft Punk (2007)

2009-11-19T13:57:00.000-08:00

Daft Punk is playing at my house.

I didn’t set a rule that live song should not be included here, and even if I did, do you think I would have been able to exclude the robot rock duo that is Daft Punk? Highly doubtful.

As such, Daft Punk’s 2007 live LP, Alive, is a fantastic relic of the decade, one that seems to be the aughts’ version of Frampton Comes Alive, with all its silly excesses and hooks and auto-tone and extended grooves. Frampton and Daft Punk don’t seem to inhabit the same world, but I think they both got their respective generations to a similar place. Though I am far from a connoisseur of electronic dance music, the Alive LP is something every music completist should own. I don’t claim to know that much about Cuban music, but I play the Buena Vista Social Club LP all the time. Same with Alive.

Listen here.

76. “In Shock” by Kristen Hersh (2007)

2009-11-16T14:11:00.000-08:00

The first concert I ever saw was 10,000 Maniacs at Jones Beach and it was pretty underwhelming. I was expecting crazy energy and people dancing and partying and I got Natalie Merchant spinning around the Jones Beach Amphitheatre and a bunch of 30-somethings sitting there nodding their heads. This is relevant because the second concert I ever saw -- R.E.M. at the Nassau Coliseum on the Green tour – featured the Throwing Muses as the opening act. They were a huge revelation to me – punky, but conventional; dissonant, but tuneful; cool, but energetic; edgy, but accessible. It was everything I had imagined a rock concert would be. After it, I went to Tower and bought all of their records – one of them cost me something like $14.99 for a tape, a German import. I’ve since lost those tapes, but I still own Hunkpapa on vinyl and I still listen to “Hate My Way” all the time. Strangely, of all the music out there, this was without a doubt one of my favorite bands from high school.

So it’s safe to say that I have a soft spot for Kristen Hersh.

The Muses had some breakthrough hits in the early 90s, like everyone else. Tanya Donnelly really cashed in when The Breeders got huge and through all of this I lost touch with where Hersh was. As it turns out, she has been making great, Muses-style music for all that time as a solo artist. In 2007, I happened upon a review of her new record and ended up buying “In Shock” on iTunes. It brought everything back, but it also improved on everything I used to like about The Muses. Instead of tons of treble and snare drums, there is lush orchestration and baroque sounding strings. The song is deep and layered and powerful and it basically takes everything good about Kristen Hersh’s music and builds on it. This song is a winner, check it out.

77. “Baby C’Mon” by Stephen Malkmus (2005)

2009-11-16T14:05:00.000-08:00

If you don’t like this song, then you and I just don’t like the same type of music. ‘Twas hard for me to choose this one instead of “Jenny And The Ess Dog”, but the lead guitar riff just gets me every time with this one. I couldn’t keep it off this list.

78. “Pounding” by Doves (2002)

2009-11-16T13:57:00.000-08:00

When I re-listened to this song, it made me realize that putting it on this list also allows me to not have consider any Oasis and Coldplay songs, because this song does that post-britpop sound better than any of them.

I love the way this one just bursts out of your speakers with the, ehem, pounding drums and chiming guitars. Within 45 seconds of this song you are rocking to the groove. Doves put on a roof-raising live show that everyone should see at some point and this and “There Goes The Fear”, “Words” and “Pounding” are the centerpieces to those shows. This is an excellent band that has been somewhat underrated and the sum of their best singles is up there with many of the best bands of this decade. Check it out for yourself.

79. “Won’t Be Home” by The Old 97s (2004)

2009-11-04T16:03:00.000-08:00

“You’re a bottle cap away from pushing me too far”

Rhett Miller does not get the same wunderkind / boy genius / teenie heartthrob press coverage that Ryan Adams and Conor Oberst have gotten over the decade, but he has been quietly prolific, releasing record after record, year after year, it seems, either solo or with the Old 97’s. Most of these records are a bit uneven, but every one of them contains some really high points. “Won’t Be Home” is one of many songs that takes their patented “Cow Punk” sound, mixes it with a huge hook and chorus and some great lyrics to create a fantastic and subtley unique sound.

“I was born in the back seat of a Mustang on a cold night in the pouring rain, and the very first song that the radio sang is ‘I Won’t Be Home No More’”.

The Old 97s rock it. When I first heard them, I was turned off by Miller’s voice, which seemed like a bad imitation of Billy Jo Green Day. I came back to them after hearing them all over the place, and one day it clicked. Miller is a great songwriter and the aforementioned solo albums are very solid, but he’s at his best when the Old 97’s get that Johnny Cash “chugga chugga” drum going and that cow punk lead guitar takes over and it lets Miller pitch in as another member of a kick ass ensemble. These guys had a few records that seemed to come real close to mainstream pop rock, but other than that, they have never tried to expand their sound much, and that’s fine. They have a little place doing their thing and that’s how it should stay.

Listen to it here.

80. “Lazy Eye” by Silversun Pickups (2006)

2009-11-04T15:57:00.000-08:00

I make no apologies that this list contains some bands that are straight up rip off artists for a sound that has long since passed. I included Interpol in this list earlier and now we have the best Smashing Pumpkins cover band this side of LA, Los Silversun Pickups.

Maybe I am not giving these guys enough credit. No worries though, this band harkens back to the early to mid 90s and they nail that whole dream pop sound so well that it was impossible not to put them in here. There were a bunch of great tunes I could have included, like “Well Thought Out Twinkles” and “Kissing Families” but “Lazy Eye” made the cut, as even the video is has those 90s style themes to it. Let’s let it stand on its own, though: take a look and listen here.

81. “Ibi Dreams of Pavement” by Broken Social Scene (2005)

2009-11-04T15:51:00.000-08:00

If it sounds like there are a bunch of people playing drums and guitar on this song, it’s because there are. Or at least there were when I saw them blow this out at Webster Hall in 2006. This band or, more accurately, this collection of Canadian musicians (including Feist, members of Memphis, Metric, Stars and Apostle of Hustle) seems to be the vision of Kevin Drew, and as other members of this collection started to branch out / gain bigger success, Wu Tang style, Drew started to release records that defined that fact. But before that happened, they released some excellent records as Broken Social Scene that seemed to take Drew’s ideas and use these collaborations to get an eclectic bunch of sounds. On top of that, the twenty-or-so musicians that make up BSS put on a whale of a live show, creating something of an indie rock orchestra.

The You Forgot It in People LP was definitely their high point, but this song, to me, is their best individual single, with the muscular percussion and symphonic guitars and over abundance of horns. Put this noise on your home stereo on a Saturday afternoon and turn it up, you’ll see.

82. “Johnny Appleseed” by Joe Strummer (2001)

2009-10-20T13:15:00.000-07:00

When this came out, I didn’t realize that The Only Guy That Matters had not released anything that matters in almost 20 years. Looking back on it, and after having seen “The Future is Unwritten” (a great documentary about Strummer), it makes this song into a bit of a celebration of a comeback for a guy that spent two decades being seriously affected by the demise of The Clash. This song is a huge winner, one that will get your ass shaking and put you in a good mood immediately. It reminds you that few people can do it like Senor Strummer.

Hear it here.

83. “Red Vines” by Aimee Mann (2000)

2009-10-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

On The Good Life’s break-up song, “Album of The Year”, Tim Kasher sings about this album as if it’s a classic: “We made love in the afternoon to “Chelsea Girls’ and ‘Bachelor Number 2’”.

I loved “Bachelor Number 2” from the first time I heard it. It’s perfect and cohesive and filled with great songs. And when comparing it to Nico’s classic LP “Chesea Girls”, it actually does stand up. Like Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”, picking a song from this record doesn’t necessarily do the artist justice. “Bachelor Number 2” is best when listened to as a whole, but some of the tracks do stand out on their own and “Red Vines” is probably the best example of Mann’s ability to craft a thoughtful and melancholy pop song.

Her band has always been fantastic and rocking (see “Long Shot” on her “Live at St Ann’s Warehouse” album), but on “Bachelor Number 2” the whole production seems to fit Mann’s melancholy mood and the layered production helps bring out her literate lyrics, rather than drowning them away. Mann owns all of the songs on this album and they very well could have been a part of a very strong singer-songwriter record. But if that had happened, we’d have likely lost the things that make this such a great record -- the band’s layered presentation brings the songs to a different place, mixing perfectly with Mann’s voice to create a great record that everyone should own.

Hear it here.