68. Sufjan Stevens – To Be Alone With You
I have a strong emotional connection to this song. In fact, everyone I know who even KNOWS this song has a strong emotional connection to it. It's just one of those pieces of art that's universally specific - a wide group of people understand it on a miniscule, DNA level. I feel like I know exactly what Sufjan is saying. I've felt these exact stirrings before. The 19-year-old girl knows what it's like to sheepishly want to have someone to herself. The 39-year-old woman knows what it's like to give up everything to just be with one person. The 15-year-old boy knows what it's like to think he's in love, but not know what that feels like yet. Everyone is drawn into this song because they know what it's about, and they feel it too. And the best part of the song? They are ALL WRONG.
The songs about Jesus. Yup, listen to it again. It's about Jesus giving up a normal life for faith, and Sufjan is singing a sad song of appreciation to his savior. The first time I heard the song, when I got to the last line where Sufjan says "And I never knew the man who loved me" I just kind of though, oh, ok, he's gay. Turns out, nope. He's signing directly to Jebus H. Christo. But the solemnity and devotion of the song only seems more appropriate when you listen to it with the correct mindset. That's really what the song is about - devotion. Whether it's a private, aching yearning to just be with someone, or a stringent faith in the sins of the father (full disclosure: I don't know what that means) this song has a universal appeal, an insular quality that brings everyone listening into its sweet, silent, gorgeous folds. What would you do to be with the person you love? Would you swim across a great lake? These are the kind of questions that great unconventional love songs force upon us. And Sufjan's most touching and personal song is one of a handful that express religious devotion in a way that doesn't just not alienate, but it pulls literally everyone in.
69. Sigur Ros – Gobbledigook
So yeah, ok. It’s probably the least Sigur Ros-y song Sigur Ros has written. And it kind of sounds like Dave Matthews playing guitar over an Animal Collective backing track. Which is most listeners’ personal hell. But give it two or three listens, and you’ll realize that this departure is an adventurous, risky, and ultimately satisfying about face for a band that honestly did not need to change it’s formula at all. But they said fuck it and changed it up anyway.
It’s also the happiest song ever written. Ok, that’s obviously embellishment. But I can’t help but feel like Jonsi THOUGHT he was writing the happiest song ever. It doesn’t come across like an attempt to branch out though – somehow, even though the song completely eschews all the common adjectives assosciated with the band’s most well-received work (epic, grandiose, long, slowly building) it still sounds like the exact same band, the same emotional heft, and the same graceful teetering between understatement and balls-out overload.
Listen a little closer and allow yourself to be engulfed in the flourished. Screw it, move with the song a little bit. If you’re so inclined and not in a cubicle, jump around a little bit. How about this song being the unlikeliest personal dance party of the year? From 2008’s album whose titile I’m not about to try and type out all 35 words of, this song, unlike anything else in the band’s stellar catalog, isn’t just moving in an emotional way. It literally moves you. Up out of that chair. And from 2:25 on, we still get our piece of straight up Sigur Ros. The classical build, a chorus of La’s building to a thumping, romping conclusion. Now get the hell up and move.
70. Air – Playground Love
Let’s go ahead and describe Air in five words. Let me see. Chill. Electronic. Pop. Uh, air-y. And French. I think those five descriptors pretty accurately represent what this band is about, and pretty much what they sound like. They’re very much a throwback act, referencing the history of French music, from touchstones like Serge Gainsbourg and Jean Michael Jarre (do yourself a favor- look him up) to up and coming Gauls like Phoenix. But their laid back, synthesizer cloud-puff songs prove to always do something new, something that hasn’t been done before.
Although their landmark 1998 album Moon Safari is undoubtedly their masterpiece, “Playground Love” from their score to the 2000 film The Virgin Suicides is their best known work. With it’s fluttering strings and chiming bell tones, the song fades in like an afternoon breeze at an outdoor café. The cooed vocals crawl lazily into the mix, double-tracked and muted. By the way, can you tell who that is singing? Give up. I’ll give you a hint – he sings a song whose name is quite similar to the name of this blog. Yup, the two bands are friends.
The cheesy saxophone aside, this is old-school art-house tension masquerading as tongue-in-cheek. At a criminally short three and a half minutes, “Playground Love” floats in like a message in a bottle from some Mediterranean beach jockeys, cigarette smoke and shades and a one-third full bottle of red wine. This song is possibly the most egregiously, well, European thing in the top 150. And with it’s cinematic sweeps and Gainsbourg-throwback melodies, it soothes and slinks like only the French know how.
71. Idlewild – Roseability
Forget Dismemberment Plan. This is my pick for most underappreciated band of the decade. Easily. Let me tell you a little story about 14-year-old Drew getting into Idlewild.
I read about their brilliant 2000 album 100 Broken Windows in Spin. Where from a good amount of my middle-teen tastes sprung forth. You know, back before non-music fans bought the franchise and put Fall Out Boy on the cover. Anyway, I digress (Spin blows). I went to the local record store, which, yes, we still have one of those, and yes, I still call it that, and picked up the album on import. This was before you could find the really good obscure shit online. If it was Spice Girls or heaping amounts of virus-laden porn, you weren't finding this shit on Limewire.
I brought it over to the house of my Other Nerdy About Music friend, and we went down to the basement and threw it on a crappy '90s silver boombox. Not one of the cool detachable speaker ones, mind you. The shit with the speaker built in. What passes for a clock/radio now. And we listened to what up until that point in my life was one of the greatest albums I had ever discovered. It was totally different. Like some kids from across the pond were working on music on an isolated island, foreign from evolution and outside tampering and natural selection - the shit was confined. Turns out that island was Scotland.
And it turns out Idlewild sounded like hundreds of other bands I love. They fit perfectly in the lineage of spittle-and-rage + melody + emotion music that had been progressing since the late '70s. The Buzzcocks to Husker Du to harder R.E.M. to Nirvana to Idlewild. It's all the same shit. Brilliant, lovely shit.
So that brings us to "Roseability", a song which my puny 14-year-old brain envisioned becoming the biggest song in the world. This band was going to be huge, and I was there on the ground floor. I was going to be able to hold this over those other oblivious fucks for years, well through college. But then nothing happened. No one in the US gave a shit. And Idlewild lightened up and eventually started making mediocre pop-rock that now makes it, well, a little embarassing to back them up so much.
But this song means the world to me. Listen to when the noise kicks in at :34. That's prime Nirvana. It's amping up the volume, yes, but it's also pushing the emotion into a new fuckin stratosphere. And those little angelic back up vocals when Rowdy Roddy sings about Gertrude Stein. It's vitriol and muscle and some sadness and a beautiful ear for melody. And nothing pulls at my heart strings and reminds me of a different time in my life than when he shreds the word "Dissatisfied" at :57. That was the most real, endearing thing I had discovered in my life. And it kind of killed me that no one else cared.
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