Amanda’s Best of the Decade #15-11

#15
Vincent O’Brien – M. Ward
Album: The Transfiguration of Vincent
Year: 2003
As one of many jobs, I used to work for a distributor of wholesale alternative magazines and calendars during my late teens.  I spent many a summer-home-from-college day entertaining idle crushes on the receiving guys at PCC Natural Foods (some of them were Brazilian, some of them had red hair, some of them were cute little hipsters I ran into at the Capitol Hill Block party), complaining about lifting and squatting (I did these things often), and reading a lot a lot a lot of alternative press.  A card-carrying skeptic, I had little interest “Reiki News” or “Shambhala Sun” and so I spent my time soaking up McSweeney’s, The Onion, Art Forum, Bust and The Believer.  In 2004, The Believer was still a youngish offshoot of the McSweeney’s enterprise and I salivated over their first ever music issue, complete with compilation CD.  That CD introduced me to this song, The Books, and one artist who we have yet to meet here down Countdown Way.  I was instantly hooked by Ward’s Tom Waits-esque, husky growl and poppy folk sound, although it was “Vincent O’Brien”‘s piano that really turned my head.  It’s almost too easy: the muttered line, “Another cheap shot here it comes,” and then that Jerry Lee Lewis-reminiscent riff drops like bottom shelf-whiskey.  You feel you shouldn’t love it so much, and yet nothing keeps you coming back for more in quite the same way.  And you’re dancing like a fool.

#14
Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood – Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Album: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Year: 2005
Here are some things you could do while listening to “Upon this Tidal Wave of Young Blood” that might make it stick in your memory as a particularly awesome song: (1) make eggs benedict; (2) go joyriding on a rainy November night in 2005; (3) talk about Mary-Kate Olsen’s (alleged) cocaine problem in a smoky bar in Nantes, France.  In fact, it is hands down the best song off an amazing album.  It’s also, reputedly, about the Olsen twins who, back in 2005 were not the buttoned-up young ladies we know today.  They were going out to bars and getting in to cars, as it were.  Lead singer Alec Ounsworth’s voice – aptly compared at times to David Byrne’s – ranges from slightly sinister to an almost grotesque caricature of itself as it repeats the words “child stars” until they cease to have either meaning or structural integrity.  Which makes it sound like kind of a dark track (and I suppose it is).  However it shines with paradoxical lightness; the delightful melody that gives the song much of its coherence seems drawn from the same well that spawned 16 Lovers Lane in 1988.

#13
Bleeding Love – Leona Lewis
Album: Spirit
Year: 2007
So, uh, to switch gears for a moment. You know that thing where you’re listening to some shiny Top 40 music and it slowly dawns on you that this polished gem for mass consumption contains some decidedly disturbing imagery?  Yeah, that is definitely going on here: for all it’s oversung runs and orchestral production, “Bleeding Love” is just plain violent.  It is scary and sad.  It is, quite simply put, the most brutal, visceral and honest song about heartbreak (not, after all, a terribly intellectual exercise) out there.  And in 2008, it was the most played on my iPod (and its company that year were all Kitsuné singles so, not a great year in taste, per se).  I wouldn’t really recommend it as a karaoke song, however.
#12
Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken – Camera Obscura
Album: Let’s Get Out of This Country
Year: 2006
Fresh off a stint in France, suffering from a serious case of hating the States and in the throes of a Belle & Sebastian obsession, the best thing that could possibly have happened to me in the summer of 2006 was an album by a Scottish band entitled Let’s Get Out of This Country.  Especially one that includes this near-perfect indie pop swooner.  The song opens over the piping tones of an organ (second only to the bagpipes, and closely followed by the accordion and the harmonica, in Instruments I Like to Hear in Indie Pop Songs), leaps uptempo in one rush of snare drum and strings, frontwoman Tracyanne Campbell’s voice is radiant and clear, and the whole package is a sparkling, soaring, consuming vision of joyous wistfulness.

#11
Rebellion (Lies) – The Arcade Fire
Album: Funeral
Year: 2004
To this day, no one knows which secret chapter of my love life this song reminds me of.  And I’m taking the knowledge to the grave, believe me.  It seems strange to reflect today on the technical elements that make this song great, since they are all pretty much de rigeur now for a certain angst-ridden, bookish subset of indie rock.  To note that “Rebellion (Lies)” manages to be stripped-down yet still lush, champion its brilliantly engineered tension, or express delight at the effective use of piano to reinforce its driving beat would be pretty useless, as every great indie rock song thats followed The Arcade Fire into the decade has borrowed liberally from their example.  Which is its own kind of praise.  And although the Montreal-based rockers have done their fair share of appropriating from their musical heritage, I still remember first hearing this song, all of Funeral really, and feeling sure that I was listening to something perfectly distilled. Something really really Good.