My Top 100, No. 77: "Sing Me Spanish Techno" by the New Pornographers

The nice thing about going beyond the normal four- or five-piece standard rock band is that you can put out a ton of noise when you want to.

It's one thing to have five people in the band who can sing, but it's harder than you'd think to get the most out of them.

"Sing Me Spanish Techno" is just overpowering harmony on top of overpowering harmony, and the density of the vocals--even when the individual voices are kind of high-pitched--gives off a carnival atmosphere. And not the part of the carnival where you just sit at a picnic table with a couple pounds of funnel cake and enjoy the sun, either.

This song has about four seconds' worth of feedback before we get the recurring guitar motif, which is 1) loud and 2) bounces up and down melodically, so it feels like the song starts by winding a clockwork mechanism, then kicking you in the seat of your pants. Only instead of falling over, you bounce from one wall to the next. This song sounds like a roller coaster looks, if you're not terrified of heights. It's jarring and aggressive (but, like, playfully aggressive; it's like being menaced with a turkey leg or something) to start, and the chorus locks into a groove. Like, you can feel the gears shifting from the wobbly silliness of the verses to the chorus, which chugs along. 

I don't really know what else to say, other than few songs on this list are more fun, and none sounds more like being tossed into a swimming pool.