Black Lips

1. Black Lips feat. GZA – “The Drop I Hold”

On paper, it probably shouldn’t work. In one corner, you have one of the founding members of the Wu-Tang Clan, the legendary New York hip-hop outfit who have wrote some of the best ever songs about drug-slinging and kung-fu. In the other corner, you have the Black Lips, the soon-to-be legendary Atlanta garage rock band who have wrote some of this year’s best songs about religious skepticism and um…drugs. But what started as a surprising hookup at this year’s South By Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, ended up with GZA crossing genres to contribute a few lines to this track off the Lips’ latest album, 200 Million Thousand. Blame my own indecisiveness as the main reason I wasn’t able to come up with a “Best Albums” list this year, but rest assured if there was one, 200 Million Thousand would most certainly be on it. On an album of lyrically dense, soul and blues-infused psychedelic jams, with guitar riffs as dirty as lead singer’s Cole Alexander’s mustache, “The Drop I Hold” was probably the biggest departure. This song features an eerie, almost hip-hop beat with guttural screams and Alexander lazily singing/rapping (dude rhymes “Vietnam”, “atomic bomb” and “blacklips.com”) before GZA comes in with an equally hazy verse. Could garage rock bands with heavy blues influences collaborating with rap artists be the new musical trend in the coming year? The Black Keys recently put out an album as their hip-hop side project BlakRoc, while GZA has announced plans to work with artists including Fucked Up and King Khan. As long as it keeps yielding tracks like this one, then here’s one trend that I can certainly get behind.

2. The Dead Weather – “Treat Me Like Your Mother”

Jack White is my favourite male frontman of all-time. The Kills’ Alison Mosshart is my favourite front-woman of all-time. So you don’t need to be a genius to figure out that I was beyond thrilled when I heard that both of them would be starting a new band, with the killer backfield of The Raconteurs’ Jack Lawrence and Dean Fertita from Queens of the Stone Age, to boot. The result was everything that I had hoped for and then some. While “I Cut Like a Buffalo” and “Hang You From The Heavens” are standouts in their own right, “Treat Me Like Your Mother” – with its cacophony of guitars and crashing drums – is a study in glorious excess. The band is clearly going for a “more is more” approach with this song; piling on tempo changes, shrieking vocals, and surprisingly catchy “M-A-N-I-P-U-late” chants, with thrilling results. The chemistry between White and Mosshart is comparable to a wooden box full of lit firecrackers, and on “Treat Me Like Your Mother”, they sound like their going right for each other’s throats (think a more badass version of Brad and Angelina in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but with more leather jackets). With their debut album, Horehound, The Dead Weather have avoided the dreaded “don’t quit your day jobs” jokes side-projects like this often do (my verdict is still out on Them Crooked Vultures), and have created music that stands outside the involved members’ previous bodies of work.

3. Japandroids – “Young Hearts Spark Fire”

Best Canadian album of the year? Maybe. Best new Canadian band of the year? Un-fucking-doubtably. Luckily for us, Japandroids apparently missed the memo about young bands not being supposed to be this good, and this year we got their fantastic debut album, Post-Nothing. Consisting of nine perfectly-crafted garage-rock songs, Post-Nothing proves you don’t need a full band to make a glorious racket – one guy on guitar and one guy on drums will suffice. Earlier this year, I described the duo of Brian King and David Prowse as “No Age hooking up with Death From Above 1979 at a Red Bull and vodka-fueled dance party”, a comparison that now seems pretty ludicrous in retrospective. “Young Hearts” is the album standout; over a fuzz-drenched mess of bass and Prowse’s frenetic drumming, King sings, “I don’t wanna worry about dying, I just wanna worry about those sunshine girls”. The resulting song manages to somehow feel equally cathartic and a youthful call to seize the day at the same time. If there was any justice in the world, this song would be the official anthem of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. For now, we’ll just have to settle with Post-Nothing finding its way onto this year’s Polaris Prize shortlist, and Japandroids finding their way onto playlists everywhere. The only direction for this band to go is up.

4. Joel Plaskett – “Through & Through & Through”

This song has been a recent topic of debate between myself and one of my good friends – whom typically I see eye-to-eye with musically-speaking – but I cannot convince him of Joel Plaskett’s genius as a singer-songwriter. His loss. With Three, Plaskett proved that ambition suited him well and cemented his status as one of the best musicians to ever come out of Atlantic Canada. “Through & Through & Through” casts Plaskett in the role he was born to play; a lovable loser devastated by a beautiful “wrecking ball in a summer dress”, and contains perhaps some of the best lyrics that the Dartmouth guitar balladeer has ever penned. The reference to iconic Canadian rock band April Wine (Wikipedia ‘em or ask your dad who they were) certainly wasn’t lost on any Nova Scotian over 35, but the line that stuck out for me, was Plaskett’s tongue-in-cheek “You be Israel, I’ll be Palestine” metaphor. To make the hours pass quicker (not to mention block out my many bitchy ex-classmates that I had to put up working with) when I worked in the kitchen of a Jewish camp this summer, I would bring in burnt mix CDs, that would then compete for playing time in the kitchen’s crappy stereo. Unfortunately for myself, my coworkers tastes veered more towards the Jonas Brothers than Justice, but I couldn’t help but smile when ever this song managed to creep on. Special mentions go out to the very talented Rose Cousins and Ana Egge, who provide the lovely backup vocals on this song.

5. Matt & Kim – “Daylight”

What a difference a year makes. Before 2009, most people would have been hard-pressed to identify any songs by the Brooklyn couple, with the possible exception of the ubiquitous “Yea Yeah”. This year saw the release of the duo’s sophomore album, Grand, and all of a sudden they were everywhere: in a Bacardi commercial, on the FIFA 2010 soundtrack (alongside the likes of Metric, Wyclef Jean, and others), and rocking out on Jimmy Kimmel. If you need proof that Matt Johnson and Kim Schifino have gained popularity here in Canada, look at the size of the venues they’ve played over the past two years: last November, I caught them playing an all-ages show at the community hall-sized Whippersnapper Gallery. Fast-forward to this year, where they sold-out Wrongbar during NXNE in June, and packed the Kathedral wall-to-wall only two months ago. “Daylight” is a first-rate example of how a song doesn’t need to be complicated to be catchy; Matt plays the keyboard, Kim thumps away on the drums, they throw in a nonsensical (but catchy) call-and-response chorus (“And in the daylight I don’t pick up my phone, ’cause in the daylight anywhere feels like home”), and you have a recipe for DIY pop gold. Bands from New York City come and go, but with Grand, Matt & Kim have proven that they’ve matured without losing their sense of fun.

6. The xx – “Basic Space”

With so many great tracks, picking a standout from the London quartet’s (now a trio) self-titled debut album proved to be both a blessing and a curse for music critics. The band’s brand of melancholic nouvelle pop and a sparingly used drum machine, combined with lyrics about seduction, isolation and despair in the vein of Joy Division and The Cure, and the almost-whispered, haunting vocals of Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft, was so unique, left most unable to pick a standout. One thing everyone could agree on was that the band have made one of the most unique debut albums of the year. When I first listened to it for the first time, my initial favourite was “Crystalised”, an opinion that seemed to be shared by everyone from Rolling Stone (“This hyperstylish London buzz band makes moody bedroom jams with girl-boy vocals – it’s like R. Kelly for kids with giant eyeglasses, an MFA and a heroin addiction”) to EXCLAIM! (“The xx may be the subtlest band you’ll ever hear”). Ever so slowly though, as the album became my soundtrack for late night walks through the city and before falling asleep at night, I began to sway more towards “Basic Space”. It might be the stuttering, skeletal beat, it might be the clarity that Sim and Croft deliver their lyrics with, but every time I hear this song, I get chills down my spine. This song is that good.

7. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Soft Shock”

Comeback album of the year? While many people were quick to write the Yeah Yeah Yeahs off following 2006′s uneven Show Your Bones; they could never write an another album as epochal as Fever To Tell, they all were too busy with their various side-projects (N.A.S.A.’s “Strange Enough”, which features guest vocals from Karen O, was considered for this list) they all hated each other, etc., etc., It’s Blitz! saw the NYC trio storming back to prove the naysayers wrong. With It’s Blitz, the band managed to reinvent their sound, while challenging the public’s perceptions of what a “typical” Yeah Yeah Yeahs record is supposed to sound like. The album’s first two new wave singles, the synth-heavy and remix-friendly (from the likes of Passion Pit, Animal Collective and MSTRKRFT, among others) “Heads Will Roll” and “Zero”, are probably the most dancefloor-friendly tracks that Karen O, Brian Chase and Nick Zinner have ever written. But no matter how loudly or how softly Karen O is singing, its her emotional vulnerability that she puts on display, that makes these songs get inside your head. On “Soft Shock”, the singer wears her heart on her sleeve, as she gently coos, “Still it’s a shock, shock to your soft side”. To try and compare the song to the band’s still-celebrated tear-jerker ballad “Maps” is unfair – “Soft Shock” is the sound of a older and more experienced band, a band that has dealt with their fair share of fights and make-ups, a band that has been around the world and back (and then some).

8. Dirty Projectors – “Stillness Is The Move”

For those who had forgotten how good this song was – and why it deserves to be on so many year-end lists – all it took was Beyonce’s little sister to remind them. Solange Knowles (who also scored hip points this year for introducing her sister and Jay-Z to Grizzly Bear) recently covered Brooklyn’s Dirty Projectors’ “Stillness Is The Move”, and by most accounts, doing a pretty decent job. This year saw a major changing of the guard in NYC’s indie pop/rock music scene; the garage-rock bands of the 2000s (The Strokes, The Bravery, Interpol) are out (with the exception of the YYYs of course), TV On The Radio announced they’d be taking an indefinite hiatus, and everybody tried to incorporate African rhythms (à la Vampire Weekend) or freak psychedelia (à la MGMT) into their music. Yet the Dirty Projectors stood out from the pack, mainly because they refused to sound like anyone else, and tried musical experiments that no one else would. “Stillness Is The Move” is hands-down the most accessible song on the band’s latest album, Bitte Orca, and its still pretty out there. That slinky R&B beat, Angel Deradoorian’s fluttering vocals that received numerous comparisons to Mariah Carey (in fact, Deradoorian probably did more for Carey’s name than Mimi did for herself this year), all carefully guided by the hand of head Projector Dave Longstreth – it’s a sound that is destined to spawn dozens of imitators in the not-so-distant future, but no one will do it as good as the Dirty Projectors themselves.

9. Phoenix – “1901″

I really want to absolutely hate this band. To paraphrase a local Toronto musician, who shall remain unnamed, Phoenix seems like the type of band that were put together by Urban Outfitters. I don’t really understand why every music blog, magazine, radio station and website couldn’t stop drooling over this French quartet, and why every other artist worth their salt couldn’t help but trying to remix them, with pretty mixed results. I’ve listened to their breakout Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix – an album that’s appeared at or near the top of pretty much everyone’s year-end best of lists – over half a dozen times, but still can’t get into it. Finally, I find it difficult to believe that these guys sold out the Sound Academy (though they did show good taste by picking Holy Fuck as their openers), with fans ponying up forty bucks per ticket nonetheless. But then you hear the chorus of “1901″ (you know, the one that goes “It’s twenty seconds till the last call, going hey, hey, hey, hey, hey”), and it doesn’t matter where you are; whether it’s on the radio while you’re washing dishes, on your friend’s iTunes while you’re helping her put together an IKEA bookshelf, or the DJ plays it while you’re getting your groove on at Dance Cave, you can’t help but sing along – it’s so goddamn catchy. Years from now, our children and grandchildren will ask us what music we listened to back in 2009 when we were foolish young hipsters, and we will play this song.

10. Jay-Z feat. Kanye West & Rihanna – “Run This Town”

Stop laughing! Yes, I’m putting a song featuring three of mainstream music’s biggest names on a list of supposed “indie” (or, as one of my housemates has recently taken to pronouncing it whenever I’m in earshot, “in-DIE”) songs. And here’s why: can you name another Top 40 rap song that goes this hard? If “D.O.A.” was The Blueprint III’s manifesto, than “Run This Town” is Shawn Carter’s victory speech. Love him or hate him, its pretty hard to ignore a musical career like Hova’s: eight Grammy Awards, over 30 million records sold in the United States, and 11 No. 1 albums on Billboard, putting him past Elvis. But this song is one of the album’s best, because it sounds like all three are hungry and have something to prove. Jay’s fighting the backlash that he’s run out of things to say now that he’s almost 40, Rihanna needed to prove that she’d moved on from the whole Chris Brown incident, and as for Kanye, the public just needed him to hear him flat-out rap again. Whatever their motivations, it works: Jay displays all the piss and vinegar of a much younger man, Rihanna provides the kind of warbling hook that reminds of us why the public fell in love with her in the first place, and Kanye comes in at the end to school them both with arguably one of the best lines of this year, “What you think I rap for, to push a fucking RAV 4?” (Toyota reps have yet to issue a response). The only unfortunate thing (for my friends anyways) about this song? “99 Problems” is in danger of being replaced as my new favourite song to drunkenly recite off-key at parties.

Honourable Mentions:

The Rural Alberta Advantage - “The Deathbridge In Lethbridge”
Clipse feat. Kanye West – “Kinda Like A Big Deal”
Grizzly Bear -“Two Weeks”
The National - “So Far Around the Bend”
Raekwon feat. Cappadonna & Ghostface Killah -“10 Bricks”