999,980: Camp Lo — Luchini AKA This Is It

Sometimes- not often, but on rare, magical instances- a song has so much going for it that, even though a large portion of its second half is nothing more than a list of people who be sipping Amaretto, it is highly listenable. Good even. Perhaps great. There are a few recipes out there for creating a fabled “Amaretto-lister”, but Camp Lo’s technique works better than most: lace a lazy, easy-listening-with-a-whiff-of-funk, party-time loop over classic boom bap drums, add an infectious but surreal hook about Luchini (which is, maybe, money? Or some kind of booze? Or rare gems? Who knows?) pouring from the sky, then top it all off with Sonny Cheeba and Geechi Suede’s patented stream-of-consciousness blaxploitation patois. Before you know it, you’re nodding your head as you note that the Chiquita Kid, well, he be sipping Amaretto, and that Ill Will be sipping Amaretto, and that undisclosed folks be sipping Asti Spumante and Amaretto, etc. etc.

Luchini - Camp Lo

999,981: Bedhead — To The Ground

How odd that a beautiful record famous for causing scene-weary early nineties indie rockers to weep openly upon hearing it for the first time should also contain a relentlessly cheerful song about dying roaches. I hereby challenge the world’s dourest man to refrain from tapping his foot and smiling just a little bit, at the corners of his mouth, when he hears this song’s lilting, countrified lick for the first time. The absence of Bedhead’s usual deep-end wash of hazy guitars suits singer Matt Kadane’s signature low key delivery, giving it more room to breathe. Toward the end the band eases off, briefly striping everything away except for a simple guitar part. The effect invokes chills, but poses a serious risk: when everything comes back in, the listener may be irresistibly compelled to bob his or her head about like an idiot, even while using public transportation. I’ve always thought that professional exterminators must have a hard time keeping their spirits up. Perhaps they just make sure to have this song playing in their headphones when they get the fogger going.

999,982: His Name Is Alive — This World is Not My Home, I Can’t Live in This World Anymore, Last One*

His Name is Alive mastermind Warren Defever bookended (with a bookmiddle for added support) his band’s breakthrough record with three different versions of a song loosely based on the classic country gospel jam “This World is Not my Home.” Now, when, say Hank Williams sings about how this world is not his home, the home he’s talking about is his post-rapture mansion in heaven. If the rest of this record is any indication, Defever’s home seems to be some strange and distant planet where Bryan Wilson is revered as a god. The first version of Home on Stars on E.S.P. features fuzzed out guitars mixed with gentler acoustic sections, although here the rollicking fingerpicking brings the source material to mind. The second version belongs with with the weirdo pop that dominates the rest of the record, but keeps that same descending down-homey lick front and center. The straight up satin-robed old time gospel vocal harmonies on the version that closes the album, in context, make this track sound like church music from space. All that’s missing is a levitating organ and a fat man in a purple suit playing a fretless hyperbass. This song, done three ways, will form the centerpiece of a future rant delivered to my children and/or grandchildren about how much they’ve been missing out on since the death of the album.

* NOTE: Since they are essentially the same song, I’m treating Defever’s three versions as one for the purposes of this blog.

This World Is Not My Home / Ho...

I Can’t Live In This World Any...

Last One / Last One - His Name...

999,983: Iron and Wine — Resurrection Fern

The careful listener to this or any track by Iron and Wine may notice something gentle yet persistent lurking amongst the delicately strummed guitars. It is a quiet sound, like that which a woman's soft hands might make as they brush against the sides of her linen skirt, or the final sigh of a single dying bee as it lies prone and motionless within the grass on the far side of an evergreen glen. Many believe that this noise is some ambient artifact of the recording process, or that it is entirely imagined and doesn't exist at all. In fact, this sound is Samuel Beam's singing voice.

Now I have a thing or two to say about singing voices, particularly about the male singing voice. A man's voice must be a full throated manly sound, a thick muscular thing that requires a manful abundance of power and will to control. This goes back for our distant forefathers, naked and screaming, who first used the human voice as our most highly developed weapon against a savage world. Whether they were howling in rage to put the fear of armageddon into the the heart of their enemy, or mewling in fevered lust to attract the choicest mate over to their filthy patch of weed, the tool in question never changed. It was the voice of a man.

By this reasoning I should find the barely there vocals of Iron and Wine to be annoying beyond compare. Instead I find them only kind of annoying. And on the song Resurrection Fern I find them annoying not at all. How is this possible? Well for starters, I'm sure that this song has gotten more than a couple dudes laid. What's more manly than that? Today's modern indie ingenue is only going to find Barry White playing softly in a dimly-lit dorm room to be either campy or creepy. So even if the ladies have gotten it all wrong, it's a good idea to learn to like this shit. Furthermore, double, triple and quadruple tracked enough times and Samuel Beam's breathy little voice gets to sounding pretty cool. I particularly like the way the layered vocals build over the course of this song until, by the final chorus, they become something you might notice. Finally, there are times when the pressure to be a man just gets to be too much. You want out. You want to put your dick on the shelf and take a break from it all. At times like those I have two words for you: Iron...and Wine.

Resurrection Fern - Iron & Win...

999,984: Glasvegas — Geraldine

There is a kind of song that earns an instant F in my judgement. It is the "Even-though-you-are-a-massive-fuck-up-no-worries-because-I'm-here-to-save-the-day" song. Coldplay's "Fix You" is a perfect example. That's the one where they promise to "Guide you home" and "Ignite your bones"(!) in their effort to "fix you." The moment Glasvegas launches into "Geraldine" it's clear we're in for more of this sort of tripe. "When your sparkle evades your soul, I'll be at your side to console. When you're standing on the window ledge, I'll talk you back from the edge" Gah! They're really shooting the moon on this one. But it get's worse. "I will turn your tide, Be your shepard and your guide. When you're lost in the deep and darkest place around, may my words walk you home safe and sound." Oh for crying out loud. Lyrics like this don't just discredit songs. They discredit entire albums. They discredit entire BANDS. That's it. Fuck Glasvegas. They are on the permanent shit list. If my finger weren't so far from the stop button on my ipod I'd be turning this sonic disaster off. Instead I'm forced to endure a whole other verse of similar nonsense, ending with the couplet, "I'll be the angel on your shoulder. My name is Geraldine, I'm your social worker." Hold on a minute. What was that? This song ISN'T about the singer's own outsized self-regard? This song is about a social worker? Oh my god. That's genius. Do you hear me? Pure genius. I love this band. Because of course there actually ARE people whose job it is to do the things that Coldplay, REM and U2 only pretend to do in their songs. They just don't get paid for shit and they don't write crap songs about it. So kudos to Glasvegas for giving credit where credit is long overdue.

Geraldine (Album Version) - Gl...

999,985: Howard Jones — No One Is To Blame

There are three different kinds of guilty pleasures. The first is the fake guilty pleasure. This is the one where you've taken the temperature of the room and you know for a fact that dropping your love of Hall and Oates into conversation is going to score you points. Actually liking Hall and Oates is optional. We've all done this. Moving on.

The next kind of guilty pleasure is more sincere as it requires actual guilt. It's when a song or artist really does fit right into your otherwise unimpeachable taste, they just aren't considered cool. If you like Annie, then it isn't crazy that you also like Britney. Deal with it.

Finally there is the guiltly pleasure that truly is an odd duck in your personal canon. You can smoke them out by asking yourself, "Ok, I'm enjoying THIS, but what if something exactly like it came along?" If the answer is "Hell no!" then you have what I consider a guilty pleasure of the purest kind, that true spasm of the security gates of the mind that lets the wrong thing through the door.

Which brings me to Howard Jones and the song "No one is to blame." I can't really say much about this song, because I honestly can't tell you why I like it. Unlike it's funkier cousin "Things Can Only Get Better" which might actually inspire some solo boogie-down with the shades drawn, "No One Is To Blame" is a mid-tempo slog. Jones has put on his mid-80s Phil Collins bald wig and is spraying fretless bass and lousy lyrics over footage of some aging boomers dry-humping on a neon-washed beach. Perhaps I like this song because it's one stop shopping for overblown 80s production, but I'm sure if I tried I could think of a better example. At any rate there's only room for one slab of schmaltz this thick in my ipod, and it might as well be this.

No One Is To Blame - Howard Jo...

999,986: Thin Lizzy — Running Back

Phil Lynott has totally blown it again, and he knows it—but he has to hope or be consumed. Running Back takes its strength from heart-wrenching ambiguity, and borrows an old trick from the country music playbook: back the words of an abandoned sad sack with an almost obscenely cheerful instrumental, and thus pull the listener in opposite directions at once. An ascending chord progression, accompanied by a bouncy, almost innocent line from the electric piano, strikes the right balance between high spirited naivete and cutesy sentiment. The lyrics, meanwhile, alternate between mopey acceptance and mopey denial—is it not over because there's still the pain, or is it not over because there's still a chance?—but it's a charming mopeyness. Here's a cocky scoundrel who's been legitimately wounded and we feel for him as he struggles to cope. Even the lead guitar can't decide at first what it wants to say before finally gushing forth with a tightly syncopated torrent of notes. Lynott might want us to think he's just fishing for pity, peeking out behind his sad mask to see if we've bought his sob story while his compatriot casually rips up the fretboard, but we know better.

Running Back - Thin Lizzy

999,987: Mayer Hawthorne — Your Easy Lovin' Ain't Pleasin' Nothin'

If it's easy to dismiss this as Motown pastiche, that's only due to the incredible job it does aping the teenage symphonies of the Holland-Dozier-Holland machine. Hawthorne demonstrates total command of the material, with lyrics that ache for a deeper intimacy with the girl who only wants easy lovin' (aww!), and a propulsive back beat that complements the melodic stabs of the horn section. But upon closer inspection it's not so much the cute parlor trick of mere imitation as it is the arrogance of correction: Motown's crime was that it rocked too hard, and Sherrif Hawthorne's mission is to lock it down. While his predecessors often emoted with maximum angst, Hawthorne is content with relatively muted suffering, luxuriating in husky coolness while he sings a bright pop song about heartache. Even the backing vocals are restrained, almost ghostly. It's as if Hawthorne happened upon some old studio outtakes and took an iron to them. And it's that laid-back attitude that lets Hawthorne get away with being lyrically twee, as he sings to the girl about "lipstick on your lips" and self-consciously mispronounces "scared" so he can later rhyme it with "birds"—even his chorus of "yeah yeah yeah yeah"s ooze relaxation.

Your Easy Lovin' Ain't Pleasin...

999,988: Ram Jam — Black Betty

Taking a Lead Belly song sketch that was undercooked even by Lead Belly standards and stuffing it so full of prog-rock pretense that they often seem to be confusing themselves should earn Ram Jam at least a forgotten and illegible plaque outside a defunct studio somewhere. If this makes the song sound ridiculous, that's because it is—wonderfully, joyfully ridiculous. These guys married complicated, multi-segment southern rock guitarmonies to the frenzied and inexplicable tempo changes of British prog, interlaced with percussion effects and double-tracked vocals about a child who went wild, and barely sound like they had any clue what they were doing. The lyrics, ably shrieked by the rangeless Myke Scavone, do little more than serve as a backdrop for extended exercises of guitar interplay, but nonetheless produce the song's most awesome moment when everything drops out but a driving high hat and Scavone starts in earnest with the verse ("bam-a-lam!"). Though it seems like a miracle they even make it to the end of the song (checking in at just under four minutes), Ram Jam found a way to take an old idea—re-purposing the music of dead black people for white listening—and drive it to gloriously overblown heights.

Black Betty (Album Version) - ...

999,989: Ghostface Killah – Shakey Dog

Line for line, rap is pretty easy. Think of something insulting you can say about a hypothetical inferior rapper, divide it into two lines, then make the lines rhyme. Rinse, rap, repeat for three minutes, and you’re done. Even the wackest MC can spew out battle couplets all day, which is why there are so many mediocre rappers out there. Above average rappers, on the other hand, either find a new, distinct voice with which to insult the hypothetical inferior rapper, or they find a way to tell a story, a real story. A story that rhymes and still sound good. Ghostface, who always seemed to be the hungriest Wu Tang member, excels at this, whether he’s railing against an unfaithful former girlfriend (see Wildflower from the classic Ironman album), or here telling the tense story of a coke fueled heist gone terribly, terribly wrong. Ghostface’s delivery is on point as usual, but it’s the details that put this track over the top. The Cuban "maricons" the guys try to rob are “on the couch watching Sanford & Son, passing their rum, fried plantains and rice, big round onions on the T Bone steak...” But of course there’s no steak for hungry Ghostface. His “stomach’s growling ‘yo, I want some.’” Which makes sense. If he could afford t-bone steaks, he wouldn’t be trying to steal cocaine from heavily armed Cubans. Ghostface’s trademark edgy staccato flow punches holes in the blaxploitation soundtrack strings as he tells the story (which rhymes, by the way).

Shakey Dog - Ghostface Killah

999,990: Los Halos – Reasons to Smile

There are a limited number of riffs out there. A very limited number. In fact, so far scientists have only been able to isolate 16. And in the history of rock & roll, each and every one of these 16 riffs has been recycled by all kinds of bands again and again, with only slight variations at best. When a band lays down a riff, the question isn’t whether the riff is a brand new thing no one has ever heard before. After all, there are a limited number of combinations of the notes nearest the headstock on a guitar’s low E string. It’s not a question of reinventing the riffage wheel. It’s a question of how the band handles it. How they carry themselves. Are they intimidated by the riff’s sheer magnitude? Do they buckle under the onslaught of the mighty riff? Does the riff call all the shots? Or do they harness its raw power, channel it, and use it for good? Or better yet, evil? In other words, does the band play the riff, or does the riff play the band? Los Halos plays the riff (the shopworn riff #3, even) with confidence. In fact, if you close your eyes and clear your head, you can almost imagine they’ve discovered a hypothetical 17th riff.

Reasons to Smile - Los Halos

999,991: Charles Mingus Sextet with Eric Dolphy – Jitterbug Waltz

The loping, descending lick that serves as the centerpiece of this cut is like an enormous, gap toothed grin that spreads over the junk-addled schizophrenic street person’s face when, one glorious sunrise, for a few moments the voices in his head start talking about what a wonderful, temperate, crystal clear morning it is, rather than the need to kill, kill, kill. Well, that's what it sounds like to me, anyway. Mingus and crew, including a soon to be dead Eric Dolphy, take this pretty standard Fats Waller... er, standard, and inject it with the secret, patented blend of genius and off-kilter crazy that infused Mingus's best stuff.

Jitterbug Waltz - Charles Ming...

999,992: Justin Townes Earle — Who Am I to say

Any kid of Steve Earle is going to have something to prove if they want to follow in their father's footsteps. On his first album, Justin Townes Earle went out of his way to prove all kinds of shit jumping from style to style in a whirlwind tour of country music's past, each time subtley bending his voice to the task at hand and always sounding in complete control of the situation. But on an album full of high points, the song "Who Am I to Say" stands out for being the one where he takes on his old man. It's the kind of stripped to the bone sensitive fuck-up ballad that's served as the emotional lynch-pin for many a Steve Earle album. But where the older Earle might have taken this time to appear, hat in hand, to declare his love and apologize for all the wrong he's done, Justin gives us a eulogy for a relationship that can't resist one last chance to speak ill of the dead. Each verse starts out trying to make peace, but ends with the knife dug in just that much deeper than it was before.

Who Am I To Say - Justin Towne...

999,993: Camera Obscura — French Navy

For some people, finding music to hate is as easy as finding something that sounds too much like something they love. For instance, "I love Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots sounds like Pearl Jam. Thus I hate Stone Temple Pilots." Fortunately Camera Obscura sound nothing like Pearl Jam. They do, however, sound an awful lot like Belle and Sebastian. Both of those bands started the day with an endearing mix of shaky singing and musical chops could just barely suggest the retro sounds they were aiming for. But while Belle and Sebastian married their ever-increasing sonic sophistication to the same old shitty singing, Tracyanne Cambell of Camera Obscura has developed a voice that can stand up to the mountain-high fortress of strings surrounding her on every song. Granted, it's not a traditionally great voice. It's more like the vocal equivalent of that quirky cute girl you had a crush on in high school. The one who never smiled and over-enunciated her words, made all the more attractive by the thought that you might actually have a shot.

French Navy - Camera Obscura

999,994: Coldplay — Lost!

Here's why you have to cut Coldplay some slack. First of all, Gwenyth Paltrow appears to be as completely awful as everyone says she is, but what made her that way seems to have been marrying Chris Martin. So HOW COULD HE HAVE KNOWN? It's bad enough to have your beautiful new wife suddenly turn into a horrific and public douche, but to have it happen because she's been hanging around with you, that's a double whammy. Second, for all his lyrical failings, Chris Martin writes the most gorgeously pure melodies of anyone we've got right now. He has a talent for locking into a chord progression, never fighting it or trying to find the most clever way to tart it up. (I'm looking at you Dirty Projectors) Instead he is always searching for that perfectly correct melody—the one that makes it hard to imagine anything else in it's place. Which isn't to say that these are painfully obvious tunes. When he isn't soothing us with just the right note, Martin will take that gently surprising melodic turn. Not so much striking out in a new direction, but taking the scenic route to the place you already knew you were going.

Lost! - Coldplay

999,995: Deleted Scenes — Take My Life

As Aristotle wrote in his classic songwriting treatise Rhetorock, there are essentially three different ways to write a song about killing yourself: When most metals bands write their obligatory suicide song, they employ Ethos, convincing you through extended guitar solos that the singer knows what he’s talking about when it comes to suicide, either because he is a seriously bad dude, or because he is already dead, perhaps by his own hand. Most non-metal bands use the Pathos approach, tugging at your emotions by pointing out how very sad it is when someone kills his or her self, and employing acoustic guitars and string sections. Deleted Scenes go with the oft-overlooked Logos technique, telling me, in a cheery, glorious sing along, that once I “take my life” I will be dropped off “in a better place,” logically suggesting that if there is no God or heaven or hell, and your life even slightly sucks, then, faced with oblivion as an alternative... well, anyway, it’s a hell of a catchy song.

Take My Life - Deleted Scenes

999,996: Titus Andronicus — My Time Outside the Womb

As a rule of thumb, you should probably avoid listening to earnest punk bands, especially those with literary pretensions, and/or those that are named for early Shakespeare tragedies, such as Titus Andronicus. I would recommend, however, making an exception for Titus Andronicus, an earnest punk band with definite literary pretensions, named for an early Shakespeare tragedy.

Why make an exception to such a sensible rule? Well, for one thing, Titus Andronicus (the band, not the tragedy) spends a lot of time not sounding like a punk band so much as like a hornless E Street band, if somebody broke into Bruce Springsteen’s state-of-the-art underground Rock Facility and turned all the amps up three or four notches, then turned the vocals down, forcing Bruce to strain his rich baritone voice to the breaking point, resulting in a constant harsh, but tuneful, quasi scream. Unlike a lot of the record, "My Time Outside the Womb" actually does not sound that much like an amped up Boss, but is an insanely infectious stomper with sweet “ooo-ooo-ooo” backing vocals, tons of self deprecating swagger, and not even a hint of literary pretension.

My Time Outside The Womb - Tit...

999,997: Madvillain — Curls

I like to imagine myself heading up the defense team in Aesthetics Court at some future trial, when hip hop stands accused of not being that good. The prosecution will send a parade of critics and character witnesses to the stand, and I will decline to cross examine. The audience will murmur each time, and shake their heads. When the prosecution rests and it’s my turn, I’ll just play this song. Once the judge hears Madlib’s simple but structured, weird but fun beat kick in, he will know that, in the end, justice must surely find hip hop not guilty. And when he hears MF Doom say “Land of milk and honey with the swirls/ where reckless nekkid girls get necklaces of pearls,” (!) he will immediately bang his gavel (his bassiest gavel, on the one) and toss the case out. He’ll have to.

Curls - Madvillain

999,998: Joel Plaskett Emergency — Written All Over Me

Power-pop has a habit of attracting plenty of musicians but few listeners. That may be because pop structure is the ultimate crutch for many a second rate musician. Stick to the script, push all the right buttons and even the Vivian Girls can get mistaken for an actual band. Fortunately there's more to pop craftsmanship than verse chorus verse, and in the right hands you can jettison all that entirely and still leave your audience with candy coated goodness. Take this track by Joel Plaskett, He manages one verse then gets all of five words into the second before deciding that one was enough, mutters "check me out" and solos for the rest of the song. Not exactly a page from the power-pop playbook. And that's only the hardest left turn in a song that built entirely from left turns. Does that make this one of those songs where the artist just strung together all the half-digested ideas that didn't fit into other songs? Maybe, but on this Frankenstein monster the pieces all fit and the seams don't show, and it's that kind of sheer craftsmanship, not a fawning adherence to a time-worm bag of pop tropes that is the REAL essence of pop.

Written All Over Me - Joel Pla...

999,999: Nada Surf — Blonde on Blonde

I was at a Decemberists show at the old Irving Plaza number of years ago, and while on the a bathroom run I noticed a lone dude sitting off by himself in a dark corner of the venue scribbling in his notebook. The headliners were in full swing but this guy had some serious shit to write. I made note of the pompous douchebag and went on my way. On the way back from the bathroom I saw him again and realized that he was the guy from Nada Surf. "Oh, well that's alright then." I thought. He was still a pompous douche but this is a guy who makes pompous douchery work. Take the song Blonde on Blonde. Here we have our lone sensitive hipster wandering the rain-swept streets of New York with his headphones on, seemingly convinced by his own astounding taste in music that everyone around him is a pathetic drone who probably hasn't even HEARD of Bob Dylan, let alone listened to him while walking around the rain-swept streets of New York in a thick cocoon of righteous smugness. What a pompous douche. This is also one of my favorite songs.

1,000,000: Black Eyed Peas — I Gotta Feeling

I can't help it. There's something I find really compelling about this song. For starters, it's too stupid to hate. Then there's the weird melancholy that runs through the song; the downbeat chord progression that makes us feel nostalgic for events in the song that haven't even happened yet; the way that only FEELS like this could POSSIBLY be a GOOD night. This is supposed to be a big rave up of unbridled optimism but you can't escape the feeling that instead it's just some kind of desperate stab at wishful thinking.* It captures, in musical form, that moment right before we realize we should have given up a long long time ago. This is the song for every unhitched sagging made up thirtysomething in a shiney too-tight party dress who ever went stag to a wedding, washed her irrational hope away with too many apple-tinis, then was dumped weeping into the backseat of a cab as her friends returned to the party and the city lights quietly receded behind her into darkness. This song is the death rattle of our youth. L'CHAIM!

I Gotta Feeling - Black Eyed P...