10. Dirty Projectors – “No More”
Dirty Projectors’ “No More” resists easy consumption. It begins with a classical tune-up, then quickly spins into a bizzarro hoedown whirlwind before playing Dave Longstreth’s nasal vocals off a choir of jazzy female voices. Oh yeah, and it used to be a Black Flag song.
If “All My Friends” hadn’t come out this year, Caribou would have taken the prize for turning a potential trainwreck of a beat into a soaring triumph of a song. Where James Murphy used a throwaway piano riff, Handsome Dick Manitoba uses some dude—possibly not even a singer—going “Doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot” as the backbone for this ultimately, inexplicably effective love song.
Deerhunter’s songwriting apex in a prolific year tells the familiar story of calling out a lover’s name in the middle of the night. The twist? Bradford Cox calls out patiently rather than urgently or frantically. The terror of death is still there, but that word—“patiently”—gets chanted over the course of the song, so that it becomes a mantra. And then a curse.
Perfecting the themes of tension and release that comprise most of Person Pitch, Panda Bear’s “Take Pills” begins as dirge before exploding into a dance party in the middle of a forest. He tells you not to take pills, but the feeling is that you already have.
5. The National – “Apartment Story”
4. The Fixxers – “Can You Work With That”
3. LCD Soundsystem – “Get Innocuous!”
2. A Place To Bury Strangers – “To Fix the Gash in Your Head”
“To Fix the Gash in
Your Head” starts off impossible, like someone set a drum machine to speed up
until infinity. From there it gets
terrifying, as layers of noise and distortion coalesce into some kind of Joy
Division-jacking lightning storm. Then,
Olive Ackerman starts whispering come ons like, “I’ll just have to wait til you
turn around to kick your head in.” If it
weren’t so goddamn unsettling, it’d be totally cute.
1. The Arcade Fire– “(Antichrist Television Blues)”
The Arcade Fire begins “(Antichrist Television Blues)” by
juxtaposing the mundane with the hyper-real. The protagonist of the song wishes he wouldn’t have to work in a deli,
as planes are crashing all around him. That poetic imagery doesn’t exist too far out of our reality, but Win
Butler goes on to complicate things even more with religion, family, and
society—all at odds with each other; all underscored by a relentless, Bruce
Springsteen-style arrangement.
2007 was a year of balancing the macro with the micro, with
just about everything else; a year when the best artists wove the tiniest
moments into an epic framework. From the
man in “Apartment Story” asking his woman to hold still so he can pin a flower
on her, to Bradford Cox awaking nervous in the middle of the night, personal
dilemmas took on epic proportions. In
“(Antichrist Television Blues),” those dilemmas have to contend also with
actual, life-shaking problems. Planes! Falling from the sky!
Of course, our protagonist doesn’t know what to do—he’s overloaded—but, at the same time, he’s driven forward by the music and the hope that there’s a right choice somewhere among the chaos. The Arcade Fire don’t just illustrate that moment of overload—they grapple with it, both with the words and music. That’s why “(Antichrist Television Blues)” is our song of the year. Nothing is more uniting than a song that embraces those moments when we don’t know where the fuck we are.
-Marty Brown, 2008
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