4:00 a.m. - 2005-12-11
BEST OF 2005

BEST OF 2005

Said the Gramophone

December 06, 2005

2005's Best Music

What follows is some of my favourite music in 2005 - oh, and a contest! It is long but I only do this once a year.

My 22 Favourite Songs of 2005

Twenty-two is an arbitrary number, but a good one. Hopefully you will know most of these but if you do not, each of the twenty-two songs is available for you to download. I hope you like them.

1. Robyn - "Be Mine!"
So what is this song? Besides a rainshower, a sunshower? What is it, besides a chance to get rainsoaked on the street and then to walk into the park? In the park everything will be too green, with flowercolour diluted by the rain and by tears. But it'll be wide and open, with lawns and strips of asphalt for you to run along, with soil and sky and space for your whipping feelings. What is it besides that? It's astonishing and complicated emotions - it's the triumph of acknowledging your own sorrow, an affirmation of sure feeling. In that way it's Dylanesque, Joyce-like: it's subtle and messily real, and Robyn makes it feel so easy to realise. And what else? What else is this song? It's a pop song - yes, for dancing and cheering, with zips and pows, with cellos that stab and whirl til the park's right here in the club, in your room, and there's space for feeling everywhere. (more StG on Robyn) [buy (free worldwide delivery)]

2. Okkervil River - "For Real"

Okkervil River do something else. They draw the red windowshades and they kneel in their living-room - they kneel because they're turning their guitar amps up. Like I said, it's that perfect boom of word and sound, barbed yells and crushing blows. It's sinister but elegiac, scary but true. It's about murder and feeling, voices crying for sensation. "There's nothing quite like the blinding light / that curtains cast aside." The electric guitars are stuck through with spruce branches, with nails, with bits of eggshell. It's like the stamp in the middle of Wilco's "At Least That's What You Said," only instead of Tweedy's guitar solo there's the lamplight of a rhodes, the mounting panic of Will Robinson Sheff, and then a terrible tumble of drums, the searing chorus of pierced guitars, the knowledge that you're hurtling downhill, downstream, downtown, toward the smack and clasp that will make things clear. [buy]

3. The Strokes - "You Only Live Once"
The list's latest entry. But listen, kids - I can't shake the bra-na-na na na of the guitarline, Julian Casablanca's crooked vocals, the doubleclink of drums, the way the "oh-oh" feels already like something I'll sing, ruefully, when I'm 60. And the chorus is but a stall, a sideways-dancin' intermission so that when we return to the verses, it's fresh as daisies in a coffeepot of water. [pre-order]

4. Imogen Heap - "Hide and Seek"

More spell than song, a glamour spread over four and a half minutes: a moment of beauty, a moment of beauty, another. Let's all wear this song round our wrists, let's wonder at it. When does a vocoder begin to sound more human than a human? How do you write such a string of sounds, an almost unrepeating pop-song that still wraps full circle? How can I learn to sing like this? [buy direct from Imogen and avoid evil Sony rootkits]

5. Broken Social Scene - "Ibi Dreams Of Pavement"

A rock'n'roll steamship that wheels straight into the gale, straight into the whale's mouth. Old Blue dives deep, past coral towers and ravines, past death, and all the while there's Broken Social Scene inside - playing a lunatic pop-song, breathing seawater, battered by noise and bliss and that cetacean's pink tongue. If only all "art-rock" was this exciting; if only all rock songs could break surface and so brightly spout. (more StG on "Ibi Dreams...") [buy]

6. Sufjan Stevens - "Casimir Pulaski Day"
The marvel is not that Sufjan Stevens has written another pretty song. (A song of oboe and mandolin, of harmonies and his own tender voice.) The marvel is what he's hidden inside it. It's a song of repetition: repeated melody, repeated chords, instruments one after another repeating Sufjan's simple ditty. Stevens sings small domestic scenes, - the touch of grass on feet, sunlight through a window, a kiss, - and these images too begin to repeat. Echoing snatches of familiar phrase, as if the chorus is wrapped into the story itself, the mundane borrowing part of the mortal, the spiritual stowing away with the sexual. All of this accumulates, piling up with every circle of acoustic guitar strum - til the slightest change catches your breath in your throat, till the perfect repetition makes your heart stammer in your chest. The way Stevens sings "mouth"; the way you see her running, bare-footed; the plaintive/peaceful/pained/precise way that Stevens sings, finally, that "He takes and He takes and He takes". Stevens has made such small things say so much, turned real-life imagies into full-bodied statements of the erotic, the transcendent, the mournful. And all of it in such a pretty song, such a trifling song, a song light as air and too diffuse to even be caught in a stained glass window. [buy]

7. Kelly Clarkson - "Since U Been Gone"

How can I be more clear than the pinpricking of electric guitar at 0:34? The way that glint flickers into fullblown flash - and of course the way the mountain then falls on your head. (Don't worry, you are awesome enough to fight your way out.) [buy]

8. Herman Dune - "Not On Top"

What does a real life sound like, in one's twenties? (Beyond?) It sounds awkward, it sounds sloppy, it sounds well-worn and yet secretly glad. If you're lucky there's a guitar solo like a bird darting in a tree, a cute girl on backing vocals, a chorus like a Tin Man who's already got a heart and just needs to learn some up-to-date dance-moves. "There's 67 better ways to make some sense." Yeah, whatever! (more StG on Herman Dune) [buy]

9. Amerie - "1 Thing"
How did this song sink to #9? Lordy! I wade into "One Thing"'s go-go waters, just bellow my belly-button, and then I let myself be tugged by the off-on flow of the guitar, I let myself get snagged by Amerie's fish-hook voice, the twinkling lights of her "bing bong bing", and above all I get caught up in the ratatat drums. The drums they make me feel like I'm standing up even when I'm falling down, they let me take to the air even when I'm trudging all the way to work. (more StG on Amerie) [buy]

10. Wolf Parade - "I'll Believe in Anything"
You wait for the organ to resolve but first the drums butt in, big as Babel Towers. The rest of the song takes a long time to live up to the sprawling height of those bass-drum Towers. Voices twist, guitars tangle, but we don't go summit-scaling till the chorus at two-minute-something. It's then that suddenly the windsocks are full, that your hands are full of brickwork, that you're climbin' climbin' climbin'; it's then that the gargoyles spread stony wings, blink lunatic eyes, and swoop off into tomorrow. When the Tower falls it's the gargoyles who'll teach the world to talk. (What Jordan said.) [buy]

11. Smog - "The Well"

Quoth i: Every instrument seems to rub a different spot, and Bill Callahan's voice comes coffeecrackly in your ear, perfectly close-and-removed, perfect perfect perfect. ... Every time each part of the song arrives (cymbal shush, violin scrape), it's like a bud springing into bloom. It seems to be on a loop, but there are those little beats of difference, voices answering Smog's song, when everything changes (slightly, slightly). And, of course, it's hysterical. ... [W]here I'm moved is when the drums gear up in the end, in the rainbow moment where all the song's rhymes and themes burst up together, astonishingly written, wry and poetic, a lesson taught, a lesson learned, a joke and a parable. And my heart just swells on a woody springtime day. (more) [buy]

12. Page France - "Chariot"
I read somewhere that this song was about the Rapture. Not the dancepunk band; the big Messianic hooray. That's cool: there's room for that. It's also about plain old small-case rapture, about when a feeling's tugging on you so hard that a thumpthump bass-drum isn't enough, that a tambourine isn't enough, that you need a whole parade of singsong. Let's fill the gardens, friends. Let's take out the nightingales and bluebirds. Let's fix bells to our shoes and clap our hands. Let's put fairytales in our pockets and paint murals on the walls of our mouths. Let's follow a Piper into a mountain and turn the mountain into a cathedral, a circus, a place for us to break bread and quaff wine, and laugh. (more StG on Page France/guestblog) [buy]

13. Sugababes - "Push the Button"
On Bonfire Night we went to beautiful Musselburgh and stood in front of an enormous bonfire. The fire seemed more liquid than solid, something kinda dangerous despite our smiles. They set off fireworks - bam fizz wow! And through it all they played pop music, they played "Push the Button", and me I scribbled down lyrics so that I could google them when I get home. I smile at this song, I love the chorus' slow rev up, but I am pretty sure that if I met The Sugababes in an alley they could stop me breathing just by thinking it. Bam fizz wow! [buy]

14. Dirty Three ft. Cat Power - "Great Waves"

Quoth i: I don't know if I've ever heard Cat Power this mystical, so urgent without being desperate, so in control of her talents. ... Jim White play[s] behind her, [a] rattle and blur that leaps against my heart. Even more startling is that she sings of hurricane and flood, yes you got it, and there are so many images fresh in our mind. "The world is gone." A violin sounds like a ukelele or else it's a plain old mandolin and I imagine ... the individual bodies that are exploding when Chan sings "the bodies are exploding", the individual humans running for cover when Chan sings "humans running for cover", the cars "intersect[ing] in the middle of the sky". ... If there's going to be a song that makes me think of Katrina, me who was in Slovenia when the storm hit, me who doesn't have a TV, me who feels a million miles away and hasn't really been able to care, well then let it be a song that's a swamp, a morass, a thick soup of sound - and also a reservoir, a pool, a gift: every twig, leaf and raindrop, every brush of snare and thump of tom, everything unrehearsed and yet perfectly placed. [buy]

15. We/Or/Me - "Aimless Day"
Funny that a song that felt so strongly of summer becomes so dear in the winter: the glockenspiel's the only warm thing in the room, something to gather round, to stare into. (i wrote a lot more here.) even tonight, it seems to be better than "pink moon". [go see them in Chicago in January]

16. LCD Soundsystem - "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House"
Me, I want LCD Soundystem playing "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House" at my house. The song has me at "H'OW-ow!" and it's still got me when things get spacey and cow-bell-y. "I've got a bus and a trailer at my house." When I listen to this I want to have (started and then) quit cocaine, so that I can open a window on an absurdly clear day and dump a million kilograms of it out the window, laughing madly, and yeah yelling "H'OW-ow!" as it blizzards in my pleasant Edinburgh block. [buy]

17. MIA - "Hombre"
Tiny hammers in my ears, tingtinging to get me into the right mode, beats tenderising me so that when MIA hits her stride I'm ready to join her: dancing like a girl and not like the hombre, imagining the joy that comes when you're out and this song suddenly comes on - like a musical interlude where we're all supposed to dance and bop and bump, glance-glancing at the girl who sings the chorus. [buy]

18. Andrew Bird - "Fake Palindromes"

Quoth i: We need to cut to the meat of the matter in a patented Said the Gramophone run-on sentence. The song's clear and obvious claim-to-fame, the wet and beating heart, the energizing whip-snap, is that killer fiddle hook, that four-note earworm, that vivacious blast, that indian sneer of strings with the thunderstomp of drum-and-shaker. And if you don't fall in love with the tune in the first two seconds, you will when Andrew Bird drawls "coulda died... shoulda died". Or when you notice the weird electric guitar that's stalking through the briar in the back, with long long legs. ... Or when "Fake Palindromes" ends (it ends!) after a scarce two minutes and fifty-two seconds. "I want to drill a tiny hole into your head," he sings. Well sign me up - just let me hear this thing again! Put it on a whirling repeat in a purple room with the blinds drawn. Run through that barrage of images, the formaldehyde-swap, the singles ads, the blood in her eyes. And then open the wardrobe and loose the violins, the super strings, the brown swooping things what lift me out the closed window and straight to the moon. [buy]

19. Stars - "Ageless Beauty (Most Serene Republic remix)"
Quoth i: Imagine my glee when I hear what Most Serene Republic have done with the tune: they stripped the synths away, stowed them in the closets, then wheeled out the stringy guitars and threadbare pianos. They made Amy Millan stand right there in the middle of the ballroom as the candles were getting lit, they asked her to sing just the same, but now it's not a superhero's song. Now it's a song for the scale of my life, for all the goofs and the joys, for the way beauty sneaks up out of dusty corners, the way it manifests itself as glints in peoples' eyes. The song has got today's loveliness and not some shiny tomorrow's: it's got friendship and revelry and good craic. It's got a voice sweet as honey cake and some friends who will gobble it up. [buy]

20. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - "Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth"

The reason this is one of my favourite songs of the year is because of what happens at 4:08. What happens? The same thing that happens a couple minutes earlier. But this time something's come over me, some regression to my Polish countryman's roots, to the tall-boots and high-jumpin' dance-steps. I am whooping with sneakers on, I am rolling my eyes, I am wearing this band's hype like a cape. I am introducing the Medieval poles to disco-beating indie rock, and I bet you they are loving it. [buy]

21. Agent Simple - "Brother"

Finally a song where I feel like Petit Nicholas, skipping to school, my leather satchel swinging alongside me. If Stephin Merritt is gonna be a stuck-up grump, a no-fun bully, it is so good that Agent Simple has been discovered. Finally - a wry and clever friend who writes songs for the Mister Men to sing along to, heads waving in the breeze. (What Dan said.) [buy]

22. Paul Duncan - "Oil In The Fields"
Good combinations: peanut-butter and strawberry jam; white wine and Nico; sadness and inevitability. Duncan is willing on his melancholy march. He knows he must go - "drawn back home again". He's been drinking, dreaming, getting lost in fields of big blooming flowers, mellotron orchids, under the blackgold starry sky. He's been feeling blue, but you know? the blue is turning to a hot reassuring purple. Molars said it well, too. [buy]

Runners up: R. Kelly - "Trapped in the Closet pt. 2", Elbow - "Mexican Standoff", Mountain Goats - "Dilaudid", New Pornographers - "The Bleeding Heart Show", Antony and the Johnsons - "Hope There's Someone", Spoon - "Sister Jack", and on and on...

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