Aaron’s Best of the Decade: #10-6

Stay tuned – the countdown is about to heat up! Amanda and I will follow this update with a standalone post for each remaining track, five through one, every two days from here on out.

#10 The Shins – New Slang
Album: Oh, Inverted World
Year: 2001

“New Slang” is a song so simple, so unassuming, that it’s amazing in retrospect that it became the standard-bearer for the indie crossover to the mainstream.  Yes, it is accessible, but it borrows nothing from the last thirty years of rock radio. The nearest touchstone worth mentioning for the track’s pleasant guitar strum, tambourine clap, and ‘oohs’ and ‘ahh’s? Probably none other than Simon and Garfunkel. Suspiciously, “New Slang” gained mainstream notoriety from its placement on Natalie Portman’s iPod in the film Garden State, commonly hailed as The Graduate for the new youth generation. For a film that often seemed as though it was carefully constructed and marketed to appeal to ‘niche’ youth who wanted to feel different and understood, it was a stroke of brilliance to find today’s counterpart to the classic folk duo. “New Slang”, as much as predecessor “Mrs. Robinson”, is note-perfect. It may not tear down rock music’s conventions, but it makes no missteps or overreaches, settling for simple perfection.

#9 M.I.A. – Paper Planes (Remix f/Bun B and Rich Boy)
Album: Kala
Year: 2007

M.I.A. is incendiary. This is a girl whose background is in Sri Lanka and whose family ties her to the Tamil Tigers, a rebel group commonly associated with terrorist methods. She has been known to fire off a salvo or two when the mood strikes – just thin spring, she labeled Lady Gaga “not progressive, but she’s a good mimic. She sounds more like me than I fucking do!” and danced around calling Jay-Z a sellout.

Continuing the metaphor, then, “Paper Planes” is her own special brand of napalm. Piping hot, explosively catchy, and stickier than bubblegum pop, this track will smear itself all over you and scorch you for almost four solid minutes. This remix, featuring MCs Bun-B and Rich Boy, gives each a chance to spit a verse over the best beat they’ll ever encounter, with plenty of room left for M.I.A. to play pop siren.

#8 Hot Chip – And I Was A Boy From School
Album: The Warning
Year: 2006

Repetition is a powerful thing. Electronic music has always relied heavily upon it, with classic ‘techno’ and ‘house’ taking it to an extreme that (even with gradual evolution over a tracks’ seven minutes) I often found distasteful. Hot Chip‘s unbelievable track, “And I Was  A Boy From School” uses the same burbling four-note riff almost without pause for over five straight minutes, but the effect is completely the opposite.

Alexis Taylor‘s sensitive vocals are so languorously drawn-out that the synth run mentioned above almost blends into the percussion, while your ears lap up the sweet molasses quality of his voice, just waiting for the chorus to drop. Four minutes in, a brief respite allows him to stretch out his voice almost a cappella for the track’s final glorious hymn to dance music.

#7 Grizzly Bear – Knife
Album: Yellow House
Year: 2006

Grizzly Bear has songwriting chops on pretty much anybody this side of Radiohead. They are not limited by tradition, form or function – they can and will go anywhere Ed Droste and Daniel Rossum‘s minds (and drug trips?) will take them. While 2009 masterpiece Veckatimest has gotten them significant attention, their most haunting piece of work to date came way back in 2006.

“Knife” is a slow-burner, developing with ghostly whispers, choral sighs and an insistent guitar line that feigns calm but is brimming with kinetic energy. For over two minutes, the beauty is in the breakdown of each of the song’s parts, but when the chorus hits, it’s like a brick wall. A song with a runtime of over five minutes and only six distinct vocal lines shouldn’t be this lyrically devastating, but it lays hold of your heart strings and tugs with a bit more vengeance each time through.

#6 The Arcade Fire – Rebellion (Lies)
Album: Funeral
Year: 2004

Like my colleague Amanda, who ranked “Rebellion (Lies)” at #11 on her countdown last week, I don’t really need to discuss the elements of this track. Funeral set the template for a strain of emotionally fragmented, borderline-epic indie that has been imitated to death and yet will never go out of style. You will know it when you hear it. You will probably like it, unless your heart is made out of stone, you emotionless robot who never really loved me.

This slot could easily have gone to any of three or four other tracks from Funeral, but “Rebellion (Lies)” wormed its way into my head again and again as the epitome of the Arcade Fire sound, and I gave in. Ladies and gentlemen, the number six song of the decade.