50. Japandroids – “Wet Hair”
Plenty of bands played the regressive card in 2009—fronting like teenagers on their first acid trip, infatuated with tongue-kissing, yet still so totally over all of it—but few bands aped post-adolescence with the unbridled enthusiasm of Vancouver’s Japandroids. Guitarist Brian King keeps his playing restricted to three—loud, fast—chords, in order to allow drummer David Prowse to go absolutely donkeyshit with the drumrolls. “Wet Hair” elevates their Warped Tour second stage aesthetic to the level of a Zen koan. The verses aren’t more than a repeated single line, but they open up a whole range of 16-year-old, head-spinning questions: What’s it like to French kiss an actual French girl? How, precisely, do you catch a ride to Bikini Island? What, exactly, is the mysterious allure of a girl fresh out of the ocean? –Martin Brown
49. Florence and the Machine – “You’ve Got the Love (Jamie xx Rework) (Feat. The xx)”
I must reference Glee. I’ll save you the debate on the merits of Glee (no I won’t, it goes like this – the show is uneven and bad, but there were a couple of fun moments and roughly 60% of the nation is really rooting for themselves to genuinely like the show because public radio feels like work / liberal hogwash / both). But the show has provided a fisher-price definition of a “mash-up” and the associated benefits: A mash-up is when you take two songs and you mash them together to create an even richer explosion of musical expression. So you take the cool of the XX, get them off of the couch, knock the paraphernalia out of their under-aged hands, give them some of that soul stuff and a multi-purpose beat, and wham, you’ve got yourself universal appeal. Now if you take Bon Jovi and Usher… -Josh Woodbeck
48. Dälek – “Blessed Are They Who Bash Your Children’s Heads Against a Rock”
For the opening of their fifth album, Dälek build a sound collage out of a speech by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in which he recontextualizes Malcolm X’s statement that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” by applying it to terrorism—as in, the terrorism unleashed on America is no worse than the terrorism America has unleashed upon the natives, Africans, Grenada, Iraq, the Sudan, and Japan without batting an eye. It’s a shock-value move that also happens to fall in line with the Jersey-based duo’s ideology, but it wouldn’t work if Wright’s speech didn’t have an inherent musicality to it, and if the ten year underground rap veterans didn’t know exactly what to do with it. –Martin Brown
47. M. Ward – “Never Had Nobody Like You (Feat. Zooey Deschanel)”
I really enjoy the confident, cavalier, and carefree attitude that M. Ward kicks off in the beginning. The songs flirts with a catchy pop-sensibility as it swings back and forth from funky to playful. If you recognize the female voice, it's Zooey Deschanel, who with M. Ward forms the duo She & Him and created the amazing album Volume One in 2008. –Philip Dhingra
46. Fever Ray – “If I Had a Heart”
“If I Had a Heart” opens Karin Dreijer Andersson’s debut solo album by peeling off the few remaining layers of gloss left on the sound of her day-band, the Knife, after their last album, 2006’s Silent Shout. What remains is a bog-monster of a song. In the first half of the song, Andersson distorts her typically delicate voice to sound like a kidnapper calling with a ransom demand. When she finally busts loose with her actual singing voice, she builds to a vocal phrase that could be a disco call, rising up through the murk—that is, if it were about 10 times faster. –Martin Brown
45. Lady Gaga – “Bad Romance”
If you believe semiliterate nutjobs, Lady Gaga makes music to brainwash us as part of the Monarch Project for our Illuminati overlords. So I got pretty psyched when she put out a single that's hook is a string of glossolalic gibberish like in Snow Crash. Kind of a "let's fuck and go kill some innocent people" sentiment, it even sounds like the kind of semi-industrial eastern bloc techno you expect supervillains to listen to. It helps that this is the first Lady Gaga song that's actually enjoyable instead of fun to gawk at. But yeah, it's a message to population, to erase any semblance of morality so they're easier to manipulate. Orwellian anti-thought, equating love with disease and death. It's evil. Rocks too. Ra ma ga ga oh la la. –Sean Witzke
44. The King Khan & BBQ Show – “I’ll Be Loving You”
The approach here isn’t novel, but it’s remarkably reliable and fantastically well executed. Take a simple, happy sentiment like loving your baby. Write a song about said sentiments structured like the hits of yore. Filter it through a prevalent current musical style, preferably one that comes and goes like the garage blues band sound. Make the guitars tight, vary the lyrics a bit from the likes of the Beach Boys and Millie Small, and then sing it like you mean it. Bravo, King Khan, you’ve done it. –Josh Woodbeck
43. Franz Nicolay – “Quiet Where I Lie”
This sounds like damning this song with faint praise and backhanded complements (particularly the names checked below), but it’s like all of its influences without the yeah-buts! It’s like Morrissey without the self pity and weird humping dances! It’s like Collective Soul without sounding generic and meaningless! It’s like Counting Crows if they’d followed Einstein on a Beach with anything memorable at all. It’s like Bryan Adams without an underlying need for ballads! It’s like the Hold Steady without an aging-hipster’s detachment. It’s like John Cougar if he wasn’t full of shit. Basically, it’s everything I want to like in pop rock without any of the hang ups. That’s a delicate balance, and that’s effing commendable. –Josh Woodbeck
42. DJ Kaos – “Love the Nite Away (Tiedye Remix)”
Swedish duo Tiedye perform a minor miracle on their remix of DJ Kaos’ “Love the Nite Away,” recognizing that the original’s juice is all in the vocal, stripping absolutely everything else away, and replacing it with a trend-friendly tropical beat that emphasizes the New Radicals-ness of Kaos’ singing. Back in ’99, Spin Magazine’s Charles Aaron described “You Get What You Give” as “White kids rioting in a Dress Barn.” Ten years later, “Love the Nite Away” is the sound of those same kids having a beach party in a strip mall outlet’s window. –Martin Brown
41. Dan Deacon – “Snookered”
Dan Deacon will probably never again record anything as brilliant as "Wham City," it must be said. However, Dan Deacon probably knows this, and therefore his follow-up to Spiderman of the Rings is both more and less than its predecessor: less sheer volume and gibbering weirdness, more intricacy and actual real-life emotion. It's a mixed bag and it flails as often as it flies, but it points in the direction of an actual career above and beyond his idiotic Will-Oldham-on-pixie-sticks schtick. This is perhaps the best track off Bromst, and certainly our best guess as to where Deacon is headed next: still manic in patches, but otherwise quite musically sophisticated and downright profound in moments. If anything, it brings to mind the type of instant-classic deep cut you'd find on a recent Chemical Brothers album - smart, dense, good drum sounds . . . but it's the otherworldly melody that sticks in your head after the shuffle fades to a different track. –Tim O’Neil
40. Regina Spektor – “Laughing With”
"No one laughs at God in a hospital/no one laughs at God in a war." The opening lines of this song might cause a cringe on first listen, evoking the tired "there are no atheists in foxholes" saying. But Spektor immediately follows that general statement up with the more specific "No one's laughing at God when they're starving or freezing or so very poor", making us realize that while we might scoff at the general principle, there are plenty of people in the world who have nothing to turn to except the belief in a higher power. This only gets emphasized as Spektor enumerates a list of situations in which people cry out for help: when the doctor calls after some routine tests, when it's gotten real late and their kid's not back from that party yet, whenever you're in despair or your life is at its lowest point. But then the chorus hits, and Spektor upends the seriousness, singing "God can be funny/at a cocktail party while listening to a good God-themed joke/or when the crazies say he hates us and they get so red in the head you think that they're about to choke". It ends up being a beautiful portrait of the human desire to understand our place in the universe, and the absurdity of the same, delivered in Spektor's sweetly evocative voice that manages to make complicated lyrics flow perfectly naturally. God can be hilarious, and so can trying to understand and explain him; luckily, we've got songs like this to keep us from being too wrapped up in extra-human matters and remind us of the beauty of life. –Matthew J. Brady
39. Future of the Left – “Lapsed Catholics”
“Lapsed Catholics” begins with a meditation on Tim Robbins’ jailbreak in Jacob’s Ladder (wait for it.) Then, it picks at the scabs of singer Andy Falkous’s Satan obsession, before railing against the titular sinners. Future of the Left buries the song’s lede—“The problem with these people is/ They understand their vices not their faults”—but some of the band’s hookiest melodies take the forefront when the song catapults from glittery guitar twinkling into pummeling rock. The flips from gorgeous to grating, sense to nonsense turn “Lapsed Catholics” into a dizzying, bewildering album-closer from a band that never lets a through-line get in the way of a good song, and never lets its faults get in the way of its vices. –Martin Brown
38. Hypnotic Brass Ensemble – “War”
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble’s War is a deeply, deeply satisfying tune. The conversation these musicians are having is a lively, angry, hopeful and heated discussion where everyone has a voice and an opinion and the energy is palpable. They work together like a machine to create a living beast. Steeped in traditional jazz, imbued with hip hop and tied together by blood, HBE has found a sound is so rich and complex, yet instantly accessible. It compels you to shake your ass (or bob your head, or sway, or whatever the hell you do). –Sarah Engelman
37. Franz Ferdinand – “Lucid Dreams (Album Version)”
Franz Ferdinand is just about the best there is these days at laying down rockingly funky guitar riffs and combining them with lyrics that make you want to get up and dance. Starting out here with pulsing stings of music, they once again pull off their trick of scaling the intensity back for an opening verse before pounding into a chorus that is nearly impossible to resist singing along to. By the time they repeat the cycle for a second verse, and later a bridge, you're putty in their hands, waiting expectantly to jump out of your seat and flail around like a madman to the music. That's the power of rock. –Matthew J. Brady
36. Ou Est Le Swimming Pool – “Dance the Way I Feel”
What is this? I couldn't name the genre if I tried, but it's appealing. It reminds me of a music video from the '80s, the kind with the fog machine and laser lights doing their best to give you epilepsy. The shouted chorus, the way it sounds entirely synthetic, all of it sounds like it's fresh out of 1986 and was accidentally left off the Ferris Bueller soundtrack. It feels like a song that embraced that triumphant moment in an '80s flick when the guy kisses the girl and everyone freezes and fade to black, but not in a hipster douchebaggy sort of way, where it's all "ironic" and your lime green suit jacket and tight blue pants are just something you "threw together." No, this song feels like the real deal, like being a teenager rules, and you can't really dance, but you're gonna do it anyway and have the time of your life. –David Brothers
35. Clipse – “Kinda Like a Big Deal (Feat. Kanye West)”
In rap, you've got to be arrogant. Even so-called emo rap acts like Atmosphere have that feeling of "I'm the best" lurking right beneath the surface, just waiting to come out and slap you across the eyes with hundred dollar bills. In “Kinda Like A Big Deal”, Clipse and Kanye take the false modesty of the song's title head on and kick three solid minutes of "We're better than you, listen to us prove it." It's classic rap, braggadocio in the LL Cool J vein, especially when Pusha T says that "it's a blessing to spend a hundred thou in a recession." Irresponsible? Yeah. Dope? Yeah, that too. –David Brothers
34. Buck 65 – “Blood Pt. 2”
There are two other versions of this song that aren't very good. I mean they're good, I guess, but one is epic for the sake of epicness (sufjans stevens) and one is experimental for the sake of experiment (castanets). There just seems to be no good reasons at the heart of them. Maybe Mr. Buck was thinking along these same lines because with his version we have something really personal and heart felt. A truly poetic free flowing, haunting masterpiece of lyricism really. Every verse is said in the same, almost static, rhythm, yet so much is brought forth. All the details that at first seem random ("purple medal eight place" "lemonade and sweaty sex" "canadian fields of wild rye") culminate into a grand image filled cloud about to burst with rain (the cloud never bursts but leaves you on the edge of your seat in expectation of a drenching). And its all brought together with that wonderful reverb drenched chorus ("you are the blood flowing through my fingers"). An immediate love song classic for me, and one of the best displays of hip hops abilities all year. –Andre Harris
33. Metric – “Help I’m Alive”
Initially, this song seems to suffer from multiple-personalities. It opens with industrial sounds, but then moves into what I can only describe as transition music for Twilight—i.e. appealing to love-sad teens. Fortunately, Emily Haines (who you may recognize from songs with Broken Social Scene, Stars, and KC Accidental) carries this song through its alternating frequencies with such ease and sweetness that you realize, "Hey, I kind of like this type of music." –Philip Dhingra
32. Ina Unt Ina – “Teacher”
“Two weeks to sixteen/leaning against the wall/kissing boys/but my eyes, my eyes are following you.” Ina Unt Ina’s “Teacher” has a hook as poignantly inescapable as a secret, hopeless crush. Watching,hurting, watching, wondering — the lyrics twist about vertiginously, as love makes the singer lose herself and find herself, pins her down and frees her. If there’s a Platonic unrequited bittersweet young love song, this is it. And, yes, that means that the Platonic bittersweet unrequited young love song is totally, and in the best way, gay. –Noah Berlatsky
31. Fires of Rome – “Set in Stone”
Fires of Rome sound at least 15 years ahead of their time, in that they’re getting on board early for 2024’s mid-00’s nostalgia. The band’s debut album, You Kingdom You, lionizes presently-uncool tropes such as glam rock’s vocal overreach and the œuvre of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah; it’s the very definition of an impulse buy. For four minutes, “Set in Stone” subverts all that, largely due to some monstrous drumming and a Midnight Oil-like guitar fragment. It’s not quite good enough to get away with the line “You can get in through the ropes of your vagina,” but it’s at least good enough to earn a follow-up line. –Martin Brown
30. Free Energy – “Dream City”
Delicious, guilty, rot your teeth, candy rock and roll. I could spend plenty of time ripping on Free Energy’s Dream City, but I don’t want to. I like it. It sounds like the hot days at the end of summer, just before kids go back to school, when rocking out and being free is almost everything you want, but not quite enough to keep you from being a little bored with your life. Lyrics like “But it never feels right And it’s never okay Cause we know that every night’s gonna end someday” work in satisfying contrast with the bouncy carefree spirit of the song. And I can feel the weight of my age as the song transitions from a bunch of raucous chants of “na na na na” to the slow and quite sax at the end. Pretty melancholy for a rock anthem. –Sarah Engelman
29. The xx – “Crystalised”
One of the most stirring moments on The xx’s debut album comes when Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft’s voices intertwine at the end of “Crystalised.” Sims and Croft agree on global warming issues—“Things have gotten closer to the sun,” he says; “Glaciers have melted to the sea,” she says—but disagree on where they stand with one another. She begs him to come closer and, according to her, he does. He apologizes for pushing her away. Their voices swoop in and out of one another, interlocking without ever harmonizing—it’s a perfect metaphor for The xx’s version of love. –Martin Brown
28. Bibio – “Jealous of Roses”
Before Bibio released Ambivalence Avenue, his Warp Records debut, back in June, there were long odds on anyone so closely affiliated with Boards of Canada coming up with anything as resolutely funky as “Jealous of Roses.” Here, the West Midlands-based producer sounds more like a lost psychedelic soul singer, dusted-off for a Stone’s Throw reissue alongside Pure Essence’s “3rd Planet,” than a heady IDM scribbler, fond of found sounds and field recordings. –Martin Brown
27. Spoon – “Got Nuffin”
When singing about having nothing to lose, the basic, scaled-back nature of the music here works pretty great. It's a repeating guitar track providing a propulsive, pulsing rhythm throughout the song, leaving other guitars free to noodle around, stretching into discordant wails that somehow only add to the whole, making the song seem like a raucous, near-improvised explosion of emotion. Sure, that's all planned and calculated, but it works; the song draws you right in and has you tapping your toes, feeling you've got nothing to lose either. –Matthew J. Brady
26. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Zero”
I can't pretend to speak for anyone but myself, so I won't, but the fact remains: It's Blitz! was weak sauce. After their first two albums (album one was hard and fast, album two slowed down but felt raw as vivisection) I never expected the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to be boring, but that's just what large stretches of this album are. Damned complacent. There are a few good cuts interspersed, true, but the only truly great cut is the album's first. Somehow in the space of three years between Show Your Bones and It's Blitz!, they transformed from the Stones circa '71 to Bowie circa '76, merely eschewing Station to Station rail travel for sub-orbital launch. This packs a robot punch like Ladytron, but Karen O actually cares just like Billy Corgan did once upon a time. It sounds like the opening salvo of another, better album than the one to which it actually got attached, the kind of album you could put on when you're driving through the city at 4 in the morning with a pack of wild dogs fresh on your heels. This is still the closing number for their 2015 arena tour, incidentally. –Tim O’Neil
"The results have a sliiiightly more populist bent than they typically do"
A)No they don't
B)Don't apologize for it, you silly bitch! One of the things I think is interesting about this site is that the music criticism portion stands up for the populist bent more than most that I've seen.
Posted by: Chris Jones | 2009.12.18 at 04:45
Hey, cool, I done some music writin'! That's four of my top five songs there, and it looks like the most well known (populist?) of them is the one to crack the top 25. But I dug a lot of the other stuff here, especially Metric, Fires of Rome, Bibio, Clipse, Future of the Left, Buck 65, M. Ward, and Ou Est Le Swimming Pool. That's a lot of good stuff, and with maybe one exception, all stuff I wouldn't have heard without being involved in this thing, so that's pretty awesome.
Posted by: Matthew J. Brady | 2009.12.18 at 09:54
Oh wait, make that two of my top five that are in the top 25. The other one is probably well known as well though...
Posted by: Matthew J. Brady | 2009.12.18 at 09:56
You know how many of the songs on my initial list made it onto the final 50?
One of them.
Which means, I strongly suspect, that no one else voted for any of the songs I selected.
So am I bitter? Hell, yeah, I'm bitter.
Damn democracy.
Posted by: NoahB | 2009.12.19 at 12:36
Well, Noah, if you didn't listen to that terrible metal all the time, you wouldn't have that problem. But hey, you got your own list to talk about the top nonsensically screaming doomsayers of the year, so why complain?
I kid, of course. I know I voted for the Amerie song that was on the list of nominees, and I expect it'll show up in the top 25; was that one you voted for? I didn't like the Maxwell or Mariah Carey ones though, so never mind about those.
Posted by: Matthew J. Brady | 2009.12.20 at 10:49
Maxwell was me! (and, full disclosure, I didn't even end up voting for it.)
A couple of Noah's nominees got some votes here and there. You guys will get to take a look at it when I send out the Excel sheet next week. It's pretty interesting.
Posted by: Marty | 2009.12.20 at 11:04
Yeah, I hate to tell your wife, Matthew, but though I gave it a try, I really don't like Maxwell at all. I picked an Amerie too, but I think a couple of folks did that.
The Mariah Carey was me, though. Best damn album of the year.
Posted by: NoahB | 2009.12.20 at 23:47
Neat-o mix.
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Posted by: juliya | 2010.04.18 at 05:55
Nice, I recognize most of them.
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