Crumbler

When I listen to new music, the quality I’m searching for the most is timelessness: I want to find the songs that, years or decades from now, will still hold up. It’s a fool’s errand trying to guess which ones will continue sounding great, of course, but that’s half the fun. With that in mind, here are 20 songs from 2010 that I know I’ll be listening to next year and beyond.

20. “Say No to Love,” the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. One album and a few EPs into their career, the Pains have perfected a certain kind of jangly summer melancholy. The reverbed voices, the chiming guitars, and around every corner, disappointment: “Something’s coming,” the lead singer tells us, “But nothing ever does … You better say no to love.” And yet the song is still buoyant, even exuberant.

19. “St. Francis,” Delta Spirit. This San Diego band’s History From Below hooked listeners this year with “Bushwick Blues,” but I preferred the album’s “St. Francis,” a ragged anthem of faith and doubt that starts with a drunken guitar and ends with the singer lamenting that he has turned his back on God. That sounds heavy, and it is, but the arpeggiated guitars lend a majesty to Matt Vasquez’s wounded growl that stays with you.

18. “Pobody’s Nerfect,” Wolf Parade. The band’s Expo ‘86 was mostly a disappointment — overthought, overwrought — making its sprawling predecessor feel sprightly by comparison. But “Pobody’s Nerfect” offered tightly wound guitar hero glory. A story (I think) of a long night and a toxic love, the song finds Wolf Parade as in sync as they’ve ever sounded — rhythm section and lead guitars joined seamlessly, in lockstep from start to finish. If the song bears elements of cock rock, the whole never feels (too) self-indulgent. Nerfection.

17. “Rill Rill,” Sleigh Bells. A few moments from now, when the rest of the world has forgotten that this band ever existed, we will all still be singing “click click saddle up, see you on the moon then,” having no idea what we’re singing about, not caring in the slightest. 

16. “Catholic Pagans,” Surfer Blood. A junkie love song with a sense of humor. Over a melody worthy of the Shins’ first album, Surfer Blood conjures a cocaine addict with a crush. “I’m not saying that I’ve earned love,” they sing at one point. “But I could really use it now.” That oughta warm you up.

15. “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” Arcade Fire. They heard Regine singing and they told her to stop: “Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock.” I don’t want the girl to punch a clock, obviously, but I wish she would quit the pretensions evoked by her lyrics — the city-girl snobbishness, the anti-mall hysteria, the potted lectures on urban sprawl. Not because we shouldn’t talk about such things, but because they do nothing but distract from the swirling disco masterpiece that, improbably, Arcade Fire has created here. Rarely have I felt so conflicted about a song I could not stop listening to. Since The Suburbs’ release I haven’t gone more than a few days without listening to it, even though the sentiments it expresses drive me nuts. Maybe I listen just to disagree. 

14. “Not Miserable,” Frightened Rabbit. The Winter of Mixed Drinks offered us a look at Scott Hutchinson’s steady recovery from a shattering relationship, but triumphant moments are few and far between. On each chest-beating, I-will-survive anthem, shadows of self-doubt linger. “Not Miserable” is the song that best captures the record’s honesty: not miserable, no, but not quite at 100 percent, either. By the time the track brings emotional release, after minutes of nearly wordless chanting, Hutchinson has more than earned the moment. 

13. “Call Your Girlfriend,” Robyn. You could make a whole best-of-2010 list composed entirely of Robyn songs — ahem — so I am limiting myself here to two I can’t live without. Around 2:30 of “Call Your Girlfriend,” Robyn’s voice goes glitchy and transforms into a stuttering keyboard solo. The effect is to make the song feel slightly futuristic; a power ballad for the digital age. And it calls back to the very first words of Robyn’s Body Talk cycle — the assertion, proven over and over again this year, that fembots have feelings, too. 

12. “When I’m With You,” Best Coast. Between the weed and the cat tweets and the goo-goo Wavves relationship stuff, Bethany Cosentino’s Best Coast looked on paper to be the kind of band I’d do anything to avoid. And yet Best Coast’s debut could not have been warmer or more engaging — fizzy ear candy, beautifully sung, coming from a girl who for all her platitudes comes across as wonderfully sincere. “When I’m With You” is the song that sold me — starting slow, speeding up, nicely echoing the head-over-heels rush of the kind of love Cosentino describes. A song that felt very much of its moment, but also one that will endure.

11. “England,” the National. When High Violet came out, this was the track I listened to on repeat, cherishing its slow build, pumping my fist during the release. Then I looked up the lyrics. Afraid of the house, stay the night with the sinners, afraid of the house, ‘cause they’re desperate to entertain … God, how I wanted those lyrics to make sense. I tried to see the logic behind them — really I did. But I couldn’t. “England” is made glorious by its horns and easy conjuring of mood; the only way to ruin it is to listen too closely. And so I pretended not to understand English, and listened to it 65 times. It was the right choice.

10. “Angel Echoes,” Four Tet. We’re used to hearing the human voice used as an instrument to express pain, but rarely like this. A woman’s voice has shattered into pieces, and it is left to Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden to stitch it back together. Over his meticulously arranged bed of synths, the vocal fragments convey something tragic but ineffable. A welcome case of electronic music that wholly transcends the synthetic — this song speaks to me, and with every listen I feel like I get closer to understanding what the singer is trying to express.

9. “Zebra,” Beach House. My secret theory about Beach House is that Alex Scally is completely in love with Victoria Legrand. He protests to the contrary — I read an interview this year in which he said the band only works because of their deep and platonic friendship — but I say bullshit. I saw Beach House twice this year, and in each case Scally sat meekly off to the side of the stage, as if intimidated by Legrand’s dark, regal quality. On Teen Dream Scally’s guitar lines are magisterial — elegant and refined, the kind of pieces you would write only for a queen. How else to describe the descending figure that begins the opening track “Zebra” — it sets a stage, cues a spotlight, awaits Her Majesty’s arrival. That’s a build-up that few deserve, but Legrand more than earns the deference. It’s like that throughout the album — Legrand powerfully sad, Scally trailing quietly in her orbit. Each is alienated and melancholy; music is the only plane on which they connect. Written into Scally’s guitar lines is the hope that someday she will understand.

8. “Running Out,” Scissor Sisters. Beneath the most exhilarating track on Scissor Sisters’ remarkable Night Work is a sense that everything the band loves about club life is about to end — the dancing, the sex, and worst of all, the drugs. It’s a song that begins with a man panting over a throbbing-headache beat and ends abruptly, in a kind of sonic overdose. Jake Shears is in full Bowie drag here, presiding over the dance floor with effortless cool. And yet the more you listen the more you’re hit with a sense of despair — Shears’ hedonism has run aground on a rocky shore, and he has no idea where to go next. Night Work is a fascinating document about a particular kind of gay life, and “Running Out” is the song that best captures it in all its joyful, terrifying contradiction.

7. “You Stopped Making Sense,” the Radio Dept. What is it about circular riffs? So many of these looping little musical patterns, rising and descending in perfectly predictable cycles, latch onto my brain and never let go. In “You Stopped Making Sense,” the loop manifests through chimes straight out of Radiohead’s “No Surprises.” Over the course of the song, it evokes a melancholy that the vocalist, for all his best efforts, can barely suggest. It’s a little slight, maybe, but it sticks with you, ever ready for a rainy day or a broken heart.

6. “Royal Blue,” Cold War Kids. Nathan Willett gets knocked down, but he gets up again: “I guess I’ve always been a bit of a fighter,” he sings here, as “Royal Blue” bleeds into Technicolor. The song, a promising leak from the band’s forthcoming third album, finds the Kids swimming till they can’t see land.

From now on, with the sky as my roof
From now on, let the risk lead me to
From now on, somewhere I never knew

There is a lightness here that was missing on the band’s second album; in the latter half, skittering West African guitars buoy the production. But it is Willett’s soulful urgency that stays with you — “from now on” is his mantra, and in this song he makes a compelling break with the past. 

5. “Don’t Do It,” Sharon Van Etten. A song so good that I almost wish The O.C. were still on the air, if only so that it might be played in the background while Ryan and Marissa exchanged meaningful looks for a few minutes. In it, Van Etten admits that she is powerless over a lover: ”If you want to do it, you are going to do it, even if I don’t want you to.” 

It would sound trite, were it not for Van Etten’s voice — which, as has been noted around the blogosphere, contains multitudes. Backed by a wonderfully atmospheric band, Van Etten on “Don’t Do It” evokes Cat Power, Mazzy Star, and even Jeff Buckley. Building slowly to a shattering peak, the song is the best evidence yet that Van Etten’s name belongs in the company of those all-stars of melancholy.

4. “Theme From Cheers,” Titus Andronicus. The Monitor has gotten plenty of year-end love, but almost nobody talks about what is plainly its best song. The rest of the album is preoccupied to a fault with the Civil War; here Patrick Stickles and his mates drop the historicizing and get back to basics: drinking, making bad choices, and apologizing to their parents. Stickles seems way too young to be so concerned that his entire life will come to naught, but the rapid accumulation of details here convinces you: hanging out in a friend’s basement, the police crashing a party, a bitter request for Guinness and Keystone Light and a Friday night kegger. “Theme From Cheers” transforms several times over the course of the track; it offers a suite of despair that at its finest moments suggests a raggedy New Jersey take on “Paranoid Android.” “What the fuck was it for anyway?” Stickles and his buddies sing over a saloon piano at the climax. I don’t have an answer for him, but I sing along anyway.

3. “We Used to Wait,” Arcade Fire. And what has made Win Butler so uneasy this time? Nobody writes letters any more! It sounds like the premise of an Andy Rooney commentary, but in the context of The Suburbs it offers a useful, relatable nostalgia: “What’s stranger still is how something so small can keep you alive,” he sings. On “We Used to Wait,” the band pays tribute to the days when we had to work just a bit harder to connect to the ones we love; the difficulty lent every gesture an emotional weight that disappeared with the arrival of e-mail and cell phones. Even here, I find myself bristling against the band’s overwrought lyrics — you know who else “hope[d] that something pure can last”? Hitler! — but the song is so magnificently constructed, so beautifully paced, that I can hardly object. Those organs at the end — the circular riff, against those enormous drums, and the band chanting wait for it in scary italics — and then the song doesn’t end so much as dissolve, like a bad dream, or the past.

2. “Runaway,” Kanye West. I’m a sucker for the self-loathing male singer-songwriter — it’s why the Wrens’ “Ex-Girl Collection” is one of my favorite songs ever — but it’s rare to find a pop megastar doing introspection like this. That’s why “Runaway” is such an epic, enthralling listen — Kanye just opens up a vein and bleeds, sarcastically raising a toast to the douchebags. Pusha T guests stars as one of the DBs in question, cheating on a girl and then telling her “every bag, every blouse, every bracelet / comes with a price tag, baby, face it.” And after one last verse, “Runaway” descends into all-but-unintelligible AutoTune. We struggle to make out what Ye’s saying, but can’t quite get there — Kanye’s relationship with his fans in a nutshell. “Power” is his superhero entrance music; “Monster” is a warning; “All of the Lights” is pop bliss. But “Runaway” is Kanye at his boldest and most inventive. There wasn’t a more provocative song all year.

1. “Dancing On My Own,” Robyn. I’ve been writing about this song all year, so let’s try a fresh approach. Do you notice how “Dancing On My Own” is a perfect metaphor for Robyn’s career? A worldwide audience fell hard for her when she sang “Show Me Love.” Since then new divas have come around — your Britneys, your Beyonces, your Biebers — and now she’s relegated to the corner of the club, wishing only that we might notice her again. Nobody does, of course — Body Talk barely sold any copies this year, given the hype and the fact that people had three chances to buy it — but Robyn shrugs it off. The key to understanding Robyn’s appeal came in an interview with Mike Barthel earlier this year. “I think of myself as kind of a soft person,” she told him. “Sometimes it’s easier to start with toughness, you know? It’s a good frame for an emotion. It’s a good starting point for when you want to describe something that’s complicated. It gives you a bit of protection when you go into really emotional stuff.” Heartbroken but defiant: this default pose is why we exalt Robyn. So that when we fall short, or when our hearts break, we might handle it with the same resolve. Robyn’s miracle year may not end with worldwide adulation or even a Grammy, but we relax because we know she’s strong enough to handle the rejection. Sometimes you give it your all, and you still won’t be the girl they’re taking home. But cry when you get older. The important thing to remember isn’t that Robyn is dancing by herself. It’s that she’s dancing. 

 (2009 list)