I'm not a music guy anymore. I used to be, but no longer--I've had three great writing loves in my life: fiction, sports and music, and I can only do two of them at a time. So as of right now, I haven't written a song or picked up my electric guitar or clarinet in almost five years, and the days of seeking out new and interesting music on my own are pretty much over. That's why I'm only doing eight songs--I don't have an original take on 100, and six of the eight songs on this list I got directly from either Paul Boye or Dany Sloan anyway.
But I experience music differently, I think, from the people who spoonfeed it to me anymore--only three of these songs are on Paul's top 100, for instance, though an equal number are off albums that put a song on his list but were left off themselves. And rather than trying to know all about modern music, I've decided to figure out why I like a song, ideally to figure out objective criteria. That's the purpose of this site, which I haven't posted on since May.
Anyway, all these songs were released in 2013--the real No. 1 song of 2013 for me was unquestionably "Call Your Girlfriend" by Robyn, which I only found out about this spring, but actually came out in 2011. In descending order:
8) "Wait for Love" by St. Lucia, from When the Night
When the Night, in an insane music year, was my favorite full album, and this spot could as easily have gone to three or four other tracks from the record. "Wait for Love" is an exceptionally well-written pop-rock track that climbs not only dynamically but in pitch as well, ascending from a bomb-ass bass line to a chorus that's heavy on falsetto.
It starts with just the bass and some synthy ephemera, then adds in, piece by piece, one vocal part, keyboards, cymbals, and then just gets generally louder. If I'd written this song, the dynamic contrast would've been obnoxious, probably with a full beat of silence before the chorus, but the crescendo from the verse to the chorus isn't that pronounced, a "how-do-you-boil-a-frog" elision from mezzo piano to mezzo forte. And by the time you're in a minute in, you get hit with the song's real party piece, and after that point you've got to just kind of bob your head and tap your foot and hope you're not driving for the next two minutes and thirty seconds.
Because that's when you get the quarter note triplets.
I once tried to make a list of the elements that make a pop song catchy, and came up with a list of about 30 rhythmic and melodic figures, but quarter note triplets stood out. The quarter note triplets in this song--you get them with the synth in the prechorus, but they're more pronounced in the vocal melody of the chorus--take you out of the groove you've been sitting in and nudge you a little bit each time, then grab you by the lapels on your jacket and toss you onto the dance floor and all of a sudden you're wearing a lei and khaki shorts and drinking rum out of a coconut through a straw.
Then the chorus ends and we start the whole process over, but with different building blocks to the chorus, including some punchy backing vocals, and then, everything but the steady synth and the lead vocals cut out for three beats before the pickup notes to the chorus. If this were a Dr. John song, there'd be a huge glissando at this point.
That the band is named for a small Caribbean island nation would probably put you in mind of a tropical aesthetic even if they sounded like A Perfect Circle. But this song is the closest I've come to partying on the beach in 2013.
7) "Let Go" by RAC, ft. Kele and MNDR, from Don't Talk To
This is a lovely bit of techno-post-punk melancholia from some guy I'd never heard of with Kele Okereke of Bloc Pary and MNDR, who I'd last seen providing the lead vocals for "Bang Bang Bang" by Mark Ronson and the Business Intl. It's a very steady, very repetitive beat that allows Okereke to really sit back and stay within himself. Okereke's always had a tremendously emotionally evocative voice, but in songs like "Flux" and "I Still Remember," loud and high and unhappy turns a little shouty. His voice coupled to this song is everything I liked about old, sad Bloc Party, but less analog and more mellow.
You should also check out the video, which I wanted to embed here but couldn't. It's about an extremely good-looking man who resembles a young Ben Kingsley with a wonderful mustache, who struggles to deal with his girlfriend, who looks like a goth Keira Knightley and loves to eat people. I want to live in the way this video looks, and it probably makes me like this song more than I would otherwise.
But where "Wait for Love" is a tribute to quarter note triplets, "Let Go" is a tribute to giving you exactly as much music as you need and not one beat more. It's almost invitingly simple throughout, with a steady bass and drum line without, and Okereke sort of hip leans his vocals into the void they fill. Never loud, never fast, "Let Go" settles into a groove and lets you live there.
6) "The Wire" by Haim, from Days Are Gone
This is the best-written song of 2013, by a band that might as well have been created from a checklist of things I like: keyboard-heavy a chick rock/power pop group that goes about its business with an earnest archness. "The Wire" is Weezer by way of Pat Benatar, blending vocals from all three Haim sisters in the cheekiest breakup song I've heard in years.
Haim's been the subject of quite a bit of backlash, most of it deserved--they're twee, and weird, and the product of stage parents, and Danielle Haim is really not a very good singer at all. I don't know that I've heard a criticism of the band or its music that wasn't entirely valid, and yet this album was on repeat on my computer for most of the summer.
I like that the "I just couldn't take it / I tried hard not to fake it" melody brings you up to the top of the stairs to the chorus, then goes back down to the ground floor and takes you there again. I like the interchanging lead vocals--if your lead singer is the worst vocalist in the group, you might as well pull off some boy band-style handoffs along the way. I like how shamelessly heavy this song is on three-part harmonies. I like that the lyrics wouldn't be horribly out of place in a normal conversation and still fit with the rhythm and phrasing of the melody--not doing this is my biggest pet peeve in music, and the reason why the most outspoken homophobe can't possible hate RENT more than I do.
I like that they're totally cool with dropping the beat, and that the bridge has the strings and running chromatic triplets out of a mid-90s pop-rock ditty. This song is sophisticated, calculated and completely beguiling at the same time, and it's wonderful.
5) "Slipped" by The National, from Trouble Will Find Me
Most of The National's albums have one song that's slower, softer and sadder than the rest, and that song is pretty routinely my favorite track from that record. There's a time for music to be fun, but the music I love the most is sad music you listen to when you don't like yourself very much and want to like yourself even less than you do already. So in the tradition of "Runaway" and "90 Mile Water Wall," The National broke away from the polyrhythmic, higher-energy flirtations of the earlier tracks on the album, and went back to the place where I love them the most.
"Slipped" swells and rocks in its own way, and the lyrics are typically clever, but listening to this song is like getting dumped, walking out to the end of a jetty at sunset and just sitting there hoping the sea comes in and you get to feel nothing instead of sadness. It's beautiful and warm and desperate, and the line "It'll be summer in Dallas before you realize" will stick to your soul.
4) "Youth" by Daughter, from If You Leave
Five of the songs on this list came from albums that I was kind of lukewarm about. But "Youth" is the fusion of styles that I didn't realize I should've asked for. It's the rambling and swelling post-rock of Explosions in the Sky, complete with rapid-fire drums and ringing guitar parts. It's also the breathy, expansive vocals of Florence and the Machine and the desperate, accusatory tone of Deja Entendu-era Brand New. The end product, at least in this song, is the best of all three parts: dramatic, ambitious and heartfelt.
(And I'm breaking my own rule here--"Youth" was on 2013's If You Leave, but I prefer the version that was on the Daughter's 2011 EP The Wild Youth. Sorry.)
This is radio-friendly post rock, where the whispered laments of the first two verses really earn the concussive bass drum of the choruses, then in the third verse, lead singer Elena Tonra goes up the octave, while behind her a running cymbal roll and a buzzing guitar line build and build, like Fender trying to simulate what bees sound like. Of the eight songs listed here, this is the prettiest.
3) "Hey, Doreen" by Lucius, from Wildewoman
I was going to cap this list at five songs, but during the early stages of reading Paul's Top 100 list, I came across this track. The rest of the album I could take or leave, but holy shit is it hard to have more fun than listening to "Hey, Doreen." I was going to do a point-by-point explanation of the specific musical points that make it so enchanting, but I'll just say this: Imagine Fitz and the Tantrums had a loudmouth sister, and imagine that she crashed a Ferrari full of clowns through the front wall of your house. That's what this song is like.
2) "Song For Zula" by Phosphorescent, from Muchacho
I lied. I said sometime in August, I think, that "Song for Zula" was going to be my favorite song of 2013. And it's not. Sorry. It's close to perfect, though.
"Song for Zula" won me over with the first line: "Some say love is a burning thing / And it makes a fiery ring." The way this song twists the classic Johnny Cash line from its original form into the sequel: what happens when you fall in love and get your heart broken? The play on the Cash song is only the start of the lyrical cleverness. Love is a cage, a paralytic agent, an animal--all expressing betrayal and heartbreak after having been taken in by the facile love expressed in pop music.
"Song For Zula" is part of a running theme in songs on this list: it's a very, very simple song with one very strong asset (the lyrics, in this case) and all other components subdued and out of the way so they can't mess anything up.
The best argument for this song is just to go and read the lyrics as it plays, because the music gets across the kind of trapped, aching, disappointed feeling, but lines like "See, honey, I saw love / You see, it came to me / It put its face up to my face so I could see" drive home that feeling more than you might think when the poetry of a song is so often window dressing to the music. This is like country-and-western W.H. Auden. "Song For Zula" makes you want to feel what this man is feeling, not because it sounds particularly pleasant, but because the feeling is so beautifully and clearly laid out.
One last note--this is not mankind's first attempt at a long, melancholy song without a chorus. I remember experiencing Antlers' "Two" and Airborne Toxic Event's "Sometime Around Midnight" and thinking "Wow, this would be really cool if they ever went anywhere with the original theme." This is how you pull that off--you play just slightly with the melody and the dynamics and leave room for instrumental breaks. Just in case anyone was wondering.
1) "Blurry Nights" by Hayden ft. Lou Canon, from Us Alone
I spent my first four months or so with this song not realizing how good it was because I kept getting tripped up by the time signature changes in the chorus. I remember driving overnight from Madison to Columbus in May and spending a large portion of the state of Indiana going back over and over the chorus trying to count it out. In the meantime, I didn't enjoy it as much as I would later, and I think it was in the interim that I declared "Song For Zula" to be my favorite track of 2013.
Hayden is a Canadian dude who looks like my AP chemistry teacher from high school, and while I don't think any of his other songs were bad, necessarily, this one stands head and shoulders above the rest. It's a folksy duet about, essentially, a drunken one-night hookup. The chorus, which I'll reproduce here, involves the most relatable musical production of asking someone to go home with you: "I don't know how to do this / But will you leave with me right now / Nothing good could ever come from this / In the long run, but let's not dismiss / All the fun we could have tonight if we forget how we might / Feel in the morning light."
There's no real incredible melodic, harmonic or dynamic part to this song, and it's kind of drowsy and meandering, but for some reason I find it just profoundly charming. I'm a sucker for cheesy duets, and this is kind of like "Islands in the Stream" for people who drink weird coffee and wear mustaches.
The final note: Lou Canon's voice. I've got a Spotify playlist for songs by female singers who make the hair stand up on the back of my neck. And there's the occasional belting jazz voice and the occasional bawdy, sort of tavern wench aesthetic on the playlist, but Lou Canon's got a faint, airy voice that gives you the distinct impression of being breathed on, and I can't get enough of her. I'm blushing right now.
"Blurry Nights" makes me want to go out and fall disgustingly, fawningly in love with the first person I meet. You don't get to the emotional state that makes "Slipped" or "Song for Zula" or even "The Wire" possible without having been here first.
