For my 10th-annual album of some favorite songs of the year, the simple rules remain the same, although I cheated a little on both: one song per artist, and no artists represented on previous years' collections.
I've never cast these exercises as the best songs of the year because my tastes are idiosyncratic and because it's impossible to hear everything. The latter is especially true this year: I didn't listen to nearly as much new music as I would have liked ... but there was still plenty to love.
Two Gallants, "Fools Like Us." Sixteen years after the debut of the White Stripes and 13 since the first album from the Black Keys, it's surprising that the indie-rock guitar/drum duo can still be as vital as it is on Two Gallants' We Come Undone. The taut "Fools Like Us" from the outset has a skip in its step but is completely unassuming until the break - when it shifts to a different unassuming groove with a slower tempo. The key for this coarse power pop is being subtly, simply artful: a finely calibrated sense of the weight of each section, and of the proper time to build, hold, and release the tension.
Courtney Barnett, "Kim's Caravan." Although a critical darling for her songwriting, Courtney Barnett is, in her vocal delivery and arrangements, a bit of an acquired taste. Her style is more compelling to me with a foundation of rock, and this song is an odd choice given that it's a crawl to climax. But that method makes sense in the context of its intensifying free association, starting with a sleepy "Water marks on the ceiling / I can see Jesus / And he's frowning at me" and slowly coalescing into a concrete plea - "So take what you want from me" - that neatly captures the relationship between artist and audience.
Brooks Strause, "The Creeping Heart." On The Chymical Wedding of Brooks Strause, the Iowa City singer/songwriter handed off the production reins (and full control of the sound) to Quad Cities producer Pat Stolley, and "The Creeping Heart" is a stunning demonstration of how that process should work. Strause's singing and lyrics are foregrounded, and Stolley's musical backdrop is minimal, slightly alien, and entirely fitting. The music is a precise mix of rigid percussion patterns, clouds of processed bass and keyboard sounds, and organic, spare acoustic guitar - a seductive bed from which Strause beckons. But it's not quite clear whether his intentions are noble, and there's the complicating factor of a title recalling Edgar Allan Poe. The song has an undeniable gravitational force and certainly feels inviting, but there's an edge of menace.
Kacey Musgraves, "Family Is Family." I won't pretend this is a great song, but it's a great song if you have a family that falls somewhere between evil and perfect. The tune is jaunty, the pedal-steel guitar is corny, and Musgraves sings with such good cheer that standard-issue dysfunction feels pretty damned fun. The pluses and minuses come in a rush of pairings - "They might smoke like chimneys / but give you their kidneys / Your friends come in handy / but family is family" - and if it's a bit obvious, it's also full of smartly articulated truth.
Colleen Green, "Things That Are Bad for Me (Pt. II)." In-your-face and jagged, with Green's pleasant voice the only obvious thing to cling to. But her manner has a dead-eyed flatness reflecting the lyrics - a desperation to feel something, in this case by getting wasted: "I wanna do / drugs right now." There's no romance in that self-destructive impulse - or the self-awareness of its effect - and that's underscored by the thudding of drums and rhythm guitar, and the piercing knives of the lead guitar. That's not much of an accomplishment, but there's a rough beauty buried within, in particular multiple guitars and vocal lines coming together in crude harmony in the final chorus.
The Revivalists, "Gold to Glass." Here is a song designed explicitly to provide comfort, with its narrator needing a friend and ultimately offering, "I am someone to help your hard times pass." The words wander and search through bleak times and wallow a bit in misery, echoed by a simple refrain on acoustic guitar that in a handful of notes sketches the song's basic mindset. But the remainder of the swelling arrangement is rich, robust, and loaded with vibrant life. Aside from percussion crunches, the horns, piano, and other elements and flourishes nearly melt together. And if the lyrics are downtrodden, the hopefulness in the singing, growing in certainty, foreshadows the resolution of broken people finding each other.
Kaki King featuring Ethel, "Trying to Speak II." I included Kaki King in my 2010 album, but I consider this less her song than the string quartet Ethel's. I don't mean to diminish King's contributions; she wrote and arranged it, and her guitar work - as always - is stunningly detailed. But her instrument sounds agitated and frustrated here - static despite its busy-ness, struggling mightily to express something - while the contemporary-classical ensemble with grace and intensity paints a rich emotional picture. For the instrumental's first half, Ethel is achingly pretty, but it picks up on the guitar's anxiety and the work turns dark and ominous. The guitar provides the baseline emotion, and the quartet soars above it and then plunges deep below, a musical version of a sine wave.
Ruby Friedman Orchestra, "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive." Darell Scott's song, thanks largely to the TV show Justified, has had a long and varied life. The Ruby Friedman Orchestra's version, featured on the show's 2014 season finale and on the band's 2015 EP, is my favorite. Friedman is a great interpreter - her "House of the Rising Sun" is another spectacularly invested version of a familiar tune - and she gives Scott's song a balanced blend of grit, sweetness, yearning, warmth, and hopelessness. But its greatest feat is generating a perfect mood for the song - evoking rural Kentucky while feeling modern and fresh, but most importantly never losing sight of it haunted nature.
Built to Spill, "When I'm Blind." I somehow completely missed out on Built to Spill in the 1990s, but catching up with the band because of 2015's Untethered Moon has been rewarding. "When I'm Blind" isn't typical of the consistently strong record, but I'm including it here because it transcends the band's sturdy-pop leanings. It spends more than half of its eight-plus minutes jamming on a basic noise-guitar idea, exploring it from high-pitched shards to thick, low-end chunks. The song's opening minute and a half promises the band's expertly catchy guitar rock, but then the tune enters the strangely hypnotic middle section, anchored by frantic yet steady drum and bass but otherwise unpredictably feral. Massed guitars suddenly yet inevitably join in a triumphant climax leading back to pleasant vocals, and the conventional has been elevated by the journey.
Speedy Ortiz, "Mister Difficult." The most-magical moments in music are those unexpected touches that feel of-a-piece with the whole but transform it. In Speedy Ortiz's "Mister Difficult," it's a hushed command from singer Sadie Dupuis: "Boys be sensitive / And girls be be aggressive." Her vocals to that point have a calming lilt, but those words - in the plainness of delivery, the repetition of "be," and the U-turn in the arrangement - demand full attention. In truth, though, the song is a collection of little surprises, crafted with the utmost care. The warped guitar cacophony mixed just low enough to avoid being disruptive. The late-arriving background vocals, and the earlier, ghostly vocal effects. The delicacy of the lead guitar line and the percussion that embody the song's restrained pressure, never allowed to escape.
Two Gallants, "Invitation to the Funeral." Yes, it's cheating to include two songs from Two Gallants, but "Invitation to the Funeral" is such a strong complement to "Fools Like Us" that I couldn't resist; piano replaces guitar, and nakedness replaces rock posturing. It's also a demonstration of Two Gallants' range, as other, similar duos couldn't pull off a song this earnest or heartfelt. The drums are incongruously blunt against the emotional piano, but so are the lyrics - "There is there a foul taste in the air." Yet the song is all about the escalation in the singing, and every other element becomes window dressing. The vocals are rough yet finely controlled yet also naturalistic and expressive, and the closing wails convey dull aches and sharp pains as clearly and fully as any words.
Sleater-Kinney, "No Anthems." When Sleater-Kinney called it quits in 2006, the timing seemed right. While 2005's The Woods had its high points, it also suggested a topnotch band that had played out its ideas; the sprawling aggression felt off for a trio that had so successfully, distinctively, and concisely blended rock, punk, and pop with a different emphasis each time. The reunion album No Cities to Love still errs on the side of muscle, but it's far more streamlined and disciplined, and "No Anthems" is a great summation of the band refusing to repose: angular and loud enough to feel in your bones, but also tightly coiled and full of threat. The band hasn't sounded this defiantly dangerous since Call the Doctor nearly two decades ago.
