Crumbler

Each year I listen to music with a single goal: discovering the handful of songs I will cherish for the rest of my music-listening life. My year-end list is not a tribute to the past but rather a bet on the future, informed speculation on what I hope will still sound great years from now. Tomorrow I’ll publish my top 10, along with Rdio and Spotify playlists on the off chance you haven’t heard some of these. Until then, here are 10 I’ll still be listening to well into 2012.

20. “Daily Mail,” Radiohead. It was bound to happen eventually, I suppose: Radiohead released a bad album this year. Not awful, exactly, but King of Limbs was undercooked in a way we haven’t seen from the band since Pablo Honey. A handful of year-end critics tried to argue that there was gold in all that glitchy piffle, but the truth is that the band’s best song of the year was a non-album B-side. “Daily Mail” is a simple piano ballad until 1:40, when Thom Yorke’s piano zig-zags into something darker and more complicated. Drums rise up and horns sound. Yorke free-associates, and Johnny Greenwood remembers he can play guitar. “Daily Mail” builds like a migraine, grim and inescapable. But it turns out to be a thrilling catharsis — and the one 2011 Radiohead song you would actually look forward to seeing played in concert. 

19. “Taken for a Fool,” the Strokes. You thought they were done, it seems like they are done, and yet waiting there on their middling new record was this instant addition to the greatest hits collection. Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr., their guitars still precise as surgical lasers, cut through years of bullshit to give Julian Casablancas some much-needed cover.

18. “Need You Now,” Cut Copy. Releasing Zonoscope in bleakest Februrary, when few of us could tear off our shirts and run down to the beach as “Need You Now” blares from our convertibles, seems like a missed opportunity. Then again, when why deprive us for another four months? The song begins modestly, with Dan Whitford telling his darling not to cry against a bed of shimmering synths. Slowly the band adds layers — soft ooh-oohs from voices in the background, a nice twist in the vocal melody around 2:45 — and suddenly you remember why you’ve been waiting so patiently for the latest from these Aussie disco cheeseballs. (This is the band that named a song “Eternity One Night Only” with a straight face.) The influences are obvious, but the approach is sincere. Play it loud enough and it’s like the springtime is always upon you.

17. “Piledriver Waltz,” Arctic Monkeys. The highlight of this year’s (*rolls eyes*) Suck It and See is a breakup song notable for its empathy. On one hand Alex Turner knows she hates him: “I heard the news that you’re planning / to shoot me out of a cannon.” On the other he knows how much she’s hurting: “You look like you’ve been for breakfast at the heartbreak hotel.” Even when he snipes at her for playing the martyr — “if you’re gonna try and walk on water, make sure you wear your comfortable shoes” — the accusation isn’t hurled so much as sighed. The song wheels to bittersweet conclusion with much left unsaid, and one of England’s best songwriters lets us fill in the gaps.

16. “Heart in Your Heartbreak,” the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. A winning single from one of the most consistent bands working today. “Heart in Your Heartbreak” marries Kip Berman’s wistful vocal to a kicky beat and a sugar rush of keyboards I never tire of. When I saw the band live this year at Slim’s, this was the tune that kept us all pogoing in place. 

15. “Hair,” Lady Gaga. Maybe it’s cloying, or pure fiction: the megastar looking back on her youth, recalling a time when her parents wouldn’t let her style her hair the way she wanted to. And yet contained within this song is everything we love about Gaga: the emphasis on self-expression, the tributes to individualism. It’s a cornball ode sung with such conviction that you never once doubt her sincerity — and its four-on-the-floor rhythm seldom failed to send me running to a dance floor, even if the closest one was in my bedroom.

14. “Countdown,” Beyonce. How many discrete musical ideas are in this song? A thousand? Is every verse actually a chorus? Or every chorus secretly a verse? When did Bey start calling Hova “boof boof”? Did she just make that up or is that something that people say? Is it OK if I start saying it now too? And keep saying it forever? Has so much joy ever been concentrated in three and a half minutes? If Beyonce didn’t exist would we be forced to invent her? Is this real life? 

13. “Eyes Be Closed,” Washed Out. At last some chillwave to get excited about: anthemic, unembarrassed, built with modern instrumentation. Sure, you could still imagine it playing poolside at some boutique hotel, but what surprised me was how good it sounded on headphones. Ernest Greene, sincere as his given name would suggest, infused his synths with real feeling. 

12. “Baby’s Arms,” Kurt Vile. The sound of a hazy, hung-over morning waking up with the one you love. Kurt Vile’s gentle acoustic reverie on the pleasures of his lover’s embrace recalls a young Van Morrison, brown-eyed girl at his side, sailing into the mystic. 

11. “Super Bass,” Nicki Minaj. One advantage to waiting until the year’s tail end to pick out your favorite songs is that you have the time and permission to graze on others’ lists. No song I slept on this year was as electrifying as “Super Bass,” Nicki Minaj’s giddy tribute to the guy who turns her heart into a ghetto blaster. “Super Bass” is so wonderfully simple that when it comes time for a bridge, Ester Dean, who is responsible for the hook, just sings the chorus again slightly slower than before. Pure bliss.

Pop music this year was filled with strange intersections and worlds colliding. Below is Crumbler’s guide to the year in curious covers, strange samples and unexpected collaborations. My nine favorites:

9. Glee brings mash-ups to the mainstream. (Cast of “Glee,” “It’s My Life/Confessions.”) In “Vitamin D,” the show’s cast moved beyond its usual theater-nerd performances of pop hits to give us something new: an effective, highly original mash-up of Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” and Usher’s “Confessions.” The episode was viewed by 7.3 million people; if we questioned the true reach of Girl Talk and his ilk before, after this there could be no doubting the mash-up’s popular appeal. (Here’s the inevitable dance remix, by mash-up artists A+D .)

8. Radiohead’s ‘Greatest Generation’ tribute. As a piece of music, “Harry Patch” is not among Radiohead’s best — or even better — efforts. But I loved the strange places it took the band — to World War I, and to the writings of a man who had fought a “good” war but who’d hated it anyway. In this, a future-leaning band found a close ally in the distant past. Thom Yorke, in a nice show of humility, simply sang Harry Patch’s words over a bed of soaring strings, and any money they made off the single went to support veterans.

7. R&B act launches career on the basis of Imogen Heap sample. The fact that “Whatcha Say” reveals Jason DeRulo to be a terrible person could not detract from the irresistible catchiness of his song, which is built around a 17-second (!) sample of indie-folk chanteuse Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek.” Take away Heap’s words and the song is nothing; add it and the song becomes weirdly sublime. “Whatcha Say” hit No. 1; DeRulo is poised to become a star. America hasn’t leaned this hard on the British since the last time we invaded Iraq.

6. “Single Ladies” covered by folkies. It isn’t overstating the case to say that “Single Ladies” has become a youth-culture phenomenon. The video, itself a knock-off of a viral mash-up of Bob Fosse and freakin’ Mims, inspired a thousand YouTube cover versions, and “put a ring on it” is among the meme-iest pop declarations since “shake it like a Polaroid picture.” I volunteer with LGBT youth once a week, and each week for the past year, at the end of the evening someone puts “Single Ladies” on and a group of 16-year-old savants do the dance better than Beyonce did. But they’re young, and gay, and it’s to be expected. What I didn’t expect was such a knock-out folkie cover of the song. Grand Atlantic re-conceived “Single Ladies” as a lost cousin to the Shins’ “New Slang”; as I said when I first posted it, they took the song from urban jungle to campfire jangle. Jarring and lovely.

5. Okkervil River and the Wrens cover each other. On one hand, no surprise here: the Wrens’ Charles Bissell occasionally plays guitar for Okkervil when they tour. What shocked me was how much new life Bissell and Okkervil frontman Will Sheff were able to wring out of each other’s material. On a tiny, two-song EP, Bissell transformed Okkervil’s early “It Ends With a Fall” into a Wrens song: mumbled, double-tracked vocals, sour guitars, and an ache that leaves you lying in bed all day. Sheff had the more difficult task; if you’re a Wrens fan, there’s a good chance “Ex-Girl Collection” is among your favorite three or four songs. But it turned out there was something relatively easy Sheff could to do make the song his own: enunciate. The original”Ex-Girl Collection” draws much of its power from the fact that the lyrics are so personal and self-loathing that Bissell has to mumble them; Sheff rescues them from obscurity, and leaves them plain for the world to hear: “Ann, hand on hips, accusing me to the rafters / Words burn and spit and scorch right through to the plaster / I’m called ten kinds of a bastard. Curses come faster.” This EP could have come across as self-indulgent; instead it was transcendent.

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