Amanda’s Best of the Decade #30-26

#30
Young Folks – Peter Bjorn & John
Album: Writer’s Block
Year: 2006
I have just learned (thanks, Wikipedia!) that the tune of the whistling featured in “Young Folks”  is actually something called the “Oriental Riff,” a longstanding sonic cue used more recognizably in “Turning Japanese,” by The Vapors.  The Oriental Riff usually indicates a certain tendency towards Orientalism, self-aware (see above-referenced Vapors track) or otherwise, although its origins are uncertain.  Which is all to say, I find this quite funny because to me that whistling has always sounded like the popular Australian nursery rhyme “Kookburra,” played on something that’s running out of batteries; starting off bright and accurate drooping as its power drains.  I also find it quite funny that I’ve been expounding for 111 words on – or rather circuitously around – the whistled riff that made this song famous when I’ve privately always thought that it was the bongos that made it great.  And you guys probably thought this was going to be just another post where I get all weak in the knees over Swedes again.  Incidentally, does it seem to anyone else that Victoria Bergsman, formerly of The Concretes, currently of Taken By Trees, is Sweden’s only female vocalist?

#29
Blood – The Middle East
Album: The Recordings of the Middle East
Year: 2008
Speaking of Australia, and speaking of whistling, here is “Blood,” by now-defunct Queensland collective, The Middle East.  Remember earlier in the countdown, when I complained about Sufjan Stevens and how gimmicky his particular brand of “sparkle folk” (if you will, that’s just what the genre wants to be called in my head) seems to me?  Well, if I had my way, all Sufjan Stevens’ songs would sound like “Blood,” although all his albums came out first.  There’s a dignity here, a sense of timing and decorum that waits until the warbled, strained lyrics, “and the cancer spread and it ran into her body and her blood/and there’s nothing you can do about it now,” before bursting into gut-wrenching glockenspiel, trumpet and chorus of childlike voices.

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#28
Can’t Stand Me Now – The Libertines
Album: The Libertines
Year: 2004
This wave of Britrock never did much for me.  As is perhaps obvious, I’m not overly concerned with guitars or artfully snarled lyrics – or if I was in the mood, I guess I would just listen to The Clash.  But there’s something charming about Pete Doherty and  Carl Barât’s creative-partnership-in-the-shitter anthem that gets me every time.  The song flirts delicately with sounding like a breakup tune as it weaves together clean, punk drums, straightforward, catchy guitar licks and the sad-as-balls duet of these two fey lads falling out over drugs and musical contention.  The version I first heard is actually a Pete Doherty acoustic solo version.  He’s inserted a verse about first cigarettes and learning to play the guitar; whether it’s to make it more like a song of romance gone wrong or simply to further twist the knife, the song is infinitely more poignant and still perfectly balanced, like a cigarette dangling nonchalantly from the lips, over softly churning guitar bravado.

#27
Boys of Melody – The Hidden Cameras
Album: The Smell of Our Own
Year: 2003
“Gay church folk music” is what The Hidden Cameras are purveyors of, according to their frontman, Joel Gibb.  The Toronto-based collective crafts one hell of a buoyant indie pop tune (most with gayer lyrics than “Hey Hey Guy”) and count Owen Pallett/Final Fantasy and The Arcade Fire’s Win Butler among their alumni and collaborators.  On “Boys of Melody” they take a break from golden showers and fleeting public restroom sexual encounters to more fully realize the spiritual aspect of their self-identified genre.  An “Ave Maria”-reminiscent harp lifts their signature, shuffling, perky pop to celestial new heights as Gibb’s feather light voice, backed by a full choir of other Hidden Cameras, delivers one of the sweeter melodies of the Aughts, as at home in tall grasses and rolling planes as under vaulted ceilings. Although I don’t really ever see the church going for these guys, not with all the tight asses on their album cover.

#26
Gravity Rides Everything – Modest Mouse
Album: The Moon & Antarctica
Year: 2000
Chances are, if you like indie music at all, or you did in the early 2000s, you are already intimately familiar with this staggeringly beautiful album.  If you are at all like me, you’ll also probably appreciate that Isaac Brock’s lisp is at its least prominent on this one.  So all I’m going to say about the transcendent “Gravity Rides Everything” is that I used to think “3rd Planet” was my favorite song on this album.   And then, in early 2008, I was having a tantrum – one of those affairs you can really only engage in when you’ve got the apartment completely to yourself and are pretty sure the downstairs neighbors are at work as well – when this song came on.  I was so taken that I had to stop, halfway through sweeping my entire desk contents onto the floor, to play it again.