My Top 100, No. 74: "Lazy Eye" by Silversun Pickups

I cannot believe this song is eight years old already.

I don't know if Silversun Pickups feel like a Smashing Pumpkins update just because of Brian Aubert's Corganesque singing voice, or if there are other reasons. 

But regardless of the band's place in the late-2000s alt-rock pantheon, "Lazy Eye" did manage to turn into one of the catchiest songs of its generation by somehow colonizing a really simple strumming pattern: 1+2+3+4+1+2+...+4... which just gets repeated until you can feel it even when they've moved on to straight eighth notes or some other rhythmic structure. And that's it. The most memorable part of the song, the one you'll find yourself singing for days later, doesn't have any discernible melody, or lyrics, or anything we'd usually describe as catchy. It's not even particularly distinct, but it's the bedrock of this song, and without it, you couldn't really build the various guitar solos or the extended crescendo that peaks in Aubert repeating an earlier melody an octave up, which gets me pretty much every time it happens in rock music.

The other thing I noticed when thinking about "Lazy Eye" at greater length is that the main guitar line has a certain quality to it because the main melody (such as it is) is played on one string with the one below it open, and some part of the guitar line is echoed on the bass, which I'd probably be able to identify as a certain kind of chord inversion if it hadn't been 10 years since my last music theory class.

The point is, this happens in a lot of songs I like, including Collective Soul's "Shine" and, most notably, "Everlong." In fact, the more I think about it, the more comfortable I am dropping an "Everlong" comp on "Lazy Eye," and if you're looking for a reason to like a song, sounding like "Everlong" is a pretty good one.