Crumbler

And now the pulse-pounding conclusion to my favorite songs of the year. (Here’s nos. 20-11.) I’ve put together a Rdio playlist of all of these songs, plus another 26 that I really enjoyed. (I very nearly [and should have] expanded this list to 21 if only to re-sing the praises of the Joy Formidable’s “The Greatest Light is the Greatest Shade.”) I was also going to put together a Spotify playlist of these tracks, but then I realized that doing so would only encourage people to use Spotify, and if I’m ever going to convince people that Rdio is a superior product (in design, social features and new music discovery) than I am going to invest a little more energy promoting it. For starters, if you join and follow me you can watch next year’s best-of playlist grow and change over all of 2012, making my entire blog obsolete while also killing the enjoyable suspense of the last-minute year-end reveal. Do it!

Anyway, here are my best guesses at the songs I’ll be listening to in 2012 and beyond. 

10. “Ladder Song,” Bright Eyes. Here the subject is too painful for hyperbole; Conor Oberst has to approach his friend’s suicide from an angle. “No one knows where the ladder goes,” he begins. “You’re gonna lose what you love the most.” He talks about staying up late and reading science fiction, a recurring subject in The People’s Key, and about long days made longer by “a twisting mind.” He longs for an escape — to “the center,” to “the concert,” to some vague celebration — but it never comes.

“Ladder Song” breaks your heart just before its end, when Oberst at last sees his dead friend in the sky above him: “See now a star is born, looks just like a blood orange. Don’t it just make you wanna cry?” As a matter of fact. “Precious friend of mine,” he sings. We mourn with him.

The words “You’re not alone” appear three times in “Ladder Song,” with the line repeated twice as it ends. “You’re not alone in anything,” Oberst sings — to his friend? To himself? — “You’re not alone in trying to be.” There’s a final puzzle in that line; has Oberst trailed off in mid-sentence? Is making peace with the idea his friend acted out of a sense of necessity? I keep coming back to this song hoping that the pieces will assemble themselves into an answer — much as I imagine Oberst returns to the subject of his friend’s suicide time and again in hopes of making sense of it. The song expresses with grave eloquence its own confusion, the way loved ones left behind by suicide are tortured with questions of what might have been. The path of understanding turns out to be a ladder to nowhere. But we climb anyway.

9. “You,” TV on the Radio. “You” was the first song on Nine Types of Light that I fell in love with. In the past I resisted embracing TVotR fully because much of their music, particularly on Return to Cookie Mountain, sounded to me like a bunch of too-serious guys spending all day in front of laptops working out equations. The facade began to crumble on their masterful Dear Science, though, and here on “You” the mask has fallen completely. That may be one reason Nine Types has been received less warmly than the band’s earlier work. But its directness should have given it a broader appeal. There’s a real honesty at this song’s climax, when Adebimpe cries out in falsetto: “In our dreams we were making it right.” And when he sings “right,” his voice goes up a register, and he breaks the word in two. Scoff at the poor emo Brooklynite if you like. I just turn it up and think of what Wilde said about preferring bad poets to their superiors: “He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.”  

8. “Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out,” the Antlers. On their previous album, Hospice, there was no room for arty dream logic like the kind proposed by his song’s title — Peter Silberman was stuck in a real cancer ward, and the tales he brought back from it were nearly too bleak to listen to. But on the great Burst Apart, Silberman has at last gotten some distance from the emergency room. The result is a record that feels surprisingly loose; “Teeth” settles into something like an actual groove. The frontman’s fellow Antlers sound stronger here than they ever have; Silberman is supported by chiming mandolins, cacophonous guitars, and as the song crescendoes, a discordant wall of noise. Meanwhile, there’s something sexy about the way Silberman repeatedly sings “Try, try, try,” throughout the song, tagging the beats precisely, as if coaxing a reluctant lover into bed. He passes out before he succeeds, though, and the dreams are upon him again. 

7. “The Grey Ship,” EMA. The true power of this song doesn’t begin to reveal itself until nearly three minutes in, when an underwater chord emerges from the sonic depths like a sea monster surfacing in search of lunch. It’s a repeating eight-note riff that recalls Nirvana — “All Apologies” in a song where there are none to be found — but before it starts to sound too familiar, a sour wash of synths muddies the picture. Then Erika M. Anderson’s voice returns, double tracked, singing in harmony and counterpoint with herself. Her words, dusky and quavering, betray real pain; the “grey ship” of the title refers to the ships used in Viking funerals. And soon enough a Viking army of guitars has sprung up around Andersen, ferrying her across the roiling ocean with mesmerizing force. As the lead track on this year’s astonishing Past Life Martyred Saints — my favorite record, by a comfortable margin, of 2011 — “The Grey Ship” only hints at the haunting sonic shock-therapy to come. But for those who can’t bring themselves to hear the rest, this song stands on its own as a cabinet of dark wonders. 

6. “Civilian,” Wye Oak. A slow-burning lament in which Jenn Wasner lays bare her solitude. Drummer Andy Stack keeps time as Wasner’s guitar shreds wildly in the darkness. I originally heard this as a song about grief, but have since come to understand that its true subject is loneliness. “I am nothing without a man,” Wasner sings. “I don’t need another friend.” Her bed empty, she imagines her lover as a ghost sleeping beside her. What kills me about this song — over and over again — is the way Wasner channels her rage into that operatic guitar line. Loud, desperate, at odds with itself — it expresses everything her voice does, but with amplified power. A triumph.

5. “Midnight City,” M83. The night Anthony Gonzalez came to play San Francisco I had a fever. Increasingly miserable but determined to see the band, I dragged myself to Mezzanine only to find that the crashingly loud synths were almost unbearable. I stuffed a pair of big, foamy earbuds into place, hoping to drown out most of the noise, and removed them only twice — once for “Kim and Jessie,” the 2008 song that made me fall head over heels for M83 in the first place, and again for “Midnight City.” For those four minutes I forgot my fever, my body, myself. The whole crowd thrashed in time to those synths, and that hook — Gonzalez’s voice, as it turned out, distorted till unrecognizable — shook the rafters. When it finished I had to leave, lest I pass out from my illness. But there was no following this one anyway.

4. “No Church in the Wild,” the Throne. There’s something about that insinuating guitar line that kicks off Watch the Throne — I hear it in my head all the time, walking around the city. It’s the sound of a man on the make, of life as a perpetual hustle. Rap Genius tells me the riff comes from Phil Manzanera’s 1978 track “K-Scope,” and it does, but barely — Kanye slowed down the sample and pushed it underwater, where it undulates like a moray eel. Together, the Throne contemplate morality: Jay-Z gets religious; Kanye ponders monogamy. Frank Ocean presides over it all with his koans about power — what’s a king to a god? What’s a god to a non-believer? “No Church in the Wild” has a beautiful integrity to it, and to play it is to hear a series of dazzling pieces spin around until they finally, improbably, interlock. Watch the Throne may have contained simpler pleasures, but it had no finer song than this one.

3. “Calamity Song,” the Decemberists. I loved it first for two reasons — one, because it was the best R.E.M. song I had heard in 14 years; and two, because of its small poignant reference to David Foster Wallace. “It’s well advised to follow your own path,” Colin Meloy sings, “in the year of the chewable Ambien tab.” In Infinite Jest, of course, the years are named after products, and in 2011 it was hard to imagine a product better suited to our sleepwalking times than that salmon-colored pill. Slowly I awoke to this song, to its incongruously cheery descriptions of the end of the world. An earthquake roils California, “scores of innocents die,” and by the outro we’re all singing ah-oooh, ah-oooh-ooh-oh. Guest star Peter Buck jangles us gently into the arms of the angels, and we make our peace with eternity. If I ever meet Meloy I will clap him on the back: It took six albums, but the Decemberists have written a perfect song. 

2. “Calgary,” Bon Iver. Every time “Calgary” comes on I’m always like, THANK YOU FOR CRADLING ME IN YOUR SADNESS JUSTIN. I said that on Twitter this year — joking, but barely. This year “Calgary” was a security blanket for me, a totem to ward off incipient depression. It functioned this way despite having the saddest melody I heard all year: keyboards perpetually descending to a lower note, as if falling asleep, or drowning. The lyrics are a hash — it’s storming on the lake; a fire is going out. “I was only for to die beside,” Justin Vernon sings, in his aching falsetto. His is the defeatism of a Midwest winter: the belief that the snow will never thaw, that the sun will not come out. What hope there is comes from Vernon’s voice, which I cling to like the dying light of afternoon.

1. “Rolling in the Deep,” Adele. I know. Really, this? I looked far and wide for a better song than this one, for something less populist, less obvious. But after a hundred or so listens I still marvel at the transformation this song captures. On 19 Adele had never been in love, so her songs came across as aspirational. The twist on 21 is that once she finds love, it bites her back. With “Rolling in the Deep,” she at last finds a subject worthy of that magnificent voice: vengeance.

This is the way to announce your womanhood: pop gospel with a handclap beat and a choir of Furies backing you up. It’s the song I listened to more than any other this year: That kick drum beat, stalking you to the gates of hell. The falsetto you’regonnawishyou / neverhadmetme, performed by backup singers on leave from the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. And above all Adele’s voice, its curlicues and filigrees, its wounded-grizzly wailing. It’s a song so crazy in love that it sounds like it’s coming from inside a straitjacket: glass shattering everywhere, words you can’t take back, the unfairness of it all.

I heard songs this year more formally inventive than this one, more explicit, more indie. But when I think of 2011 it’s a simple story of innocence lost that I’ll remember most. A tale as old as time: Go looking for a boyfriend and come home drenched in blood. You never forget your first.

Songs for Next Year: 2010 | 2009