So close … we’ll finish just outside the top 10 today.
Playlists: Amazon and Spotify.
- #20 “Take Me Out” – Franz Ferdinand: I can’t remember who said it, maybe someone on Pitchfork, but a great description of “Take Me Out” is a song hidden within another song. Each part could have existed on its own, but would be less than the whole.
- #19 “Boy from School” – Hot Chip: The perfect dance song. Unrelenting beat, beautiful harmonies, subliminal synth line, breaks. I tend to think of Hot Chip as the logical progression of the Pet Shop Boys in the 21st century.
- #18 “Danny Nedelko” – IDLES: The newest song to crack the top 20, this is the song we need now from the band we need now. It is raw, but in its core, it is a compassionate song about people.
- #17 “Life is Sweet” – Chemical Brothers: Soaring, anthemic rave music. Tim Burgess pretty much laid the model for guest vocals on electronic songs with this. Most shocking to me, 25 years later the Chemical Brothers are still going strong.
- #16 “A New England” – Billy Bragg: Billy and his green guitar. That’s all we have here. Yet, someone, the song feels alive even after almost 40 years. Somehow, Billy wrapped but youthful anxieties, politics and folk-punk in a perfect swirl.
- #15 “The Power of Love” – Huey Lewis & the News: It is impossible for me to separate this song from Back to the Future. Do I love this song so much because its inclusion in one of my favorite movies of all time? Is it a perfect pop rock song? Can it be both? Of course it can and if you are so bitter to think that Huey Lewis isn’t good, then maybe you need to question how seriously you take … everything?
- #14 “Screenwriters’ Blues” – Soul Coughing: Talk about mood music. The narrative presented by M Doughty is so perfectly matched by the paranoia-inducing sonic landscape. It is almost more beat poetry than alternative rock, yet it still ensnares you, transports you to Reseda someday … to die.
- #13 “Holland 1945” – Neutral Milk Hotel: Their history is so odd, mostly thanks to Jeff Mangum. Yet, as strange as his music and lyrics might be, this is a nearly perfect pop song. I dare anyone to hear it and not have it stuck in their head for days. Part lo-fi indie, part punk, part mariachi? It doesn’t relent for a moment across its 3 minutes and 12 seconds.
- #12 “Under Pressure” – Queen with David Bowie: Is there a better vocal combination than David Bowie and Freddie Mercury? They could make any song work, but when they do it on a song with an absolutely classic bassline (which some of us were introduced to by Vanilla Ice … but we’ve gotten over it), you end up with one of the best rock songs ever written.
- #11 “Ana Ng” – They Might Be Giants: I don’t want the world, I only want your half.
The Intellectual Thicket 