Songs of 2017: Top Twenty

20. ‘Dive’ by Saint Etienne (Nu-Disco)

Kicking off my top 20 with some frenetic, spirited nu-disco. I don’t think I’m generally a huge fan of nu-disco, but for some reason this, and some other totally non-spoiler examples this year, really just burrowed in and couldn’t get out. This is pure escapist fun, well-produced and tightly-controlled in its high energy power.

19. ‘Forever and Then Some’ by Lillie Mae (Bluegrass Rock)

What I think this year really lacked was some really compelling folk. There were plenty of good examples, but time and time again I found the gap being filled with some surprisingly good country music, and this is one of the more wonderful examples. Banjoey, southern twangy, it’s everything I hate on paper, and yet in execution this is just beautiful heartland music with a hell of a lot of love and spirit.

18. ‘Fault Line’ by Michelle Branch (Indie Pop)

I don’t know if I can or need to say that much about this song or Michelle Branch generally; she was a vaguely-familiar name but her album True Romantic was a genuine revelation to me about a third of the way through the year, and this was the highlight song that stayed at the top of my estimation. It’s simply-produced singer-songwriter stuff, really compelling in spite of, or maybe because of, its straightforward pop construction.

17. ‘Farewell Sonata’ by Benjamin Clementine (Post-Music)

So post-music sounds like a bit of a joke genre classification, but if you do yourself the favour of listening to Benjamin Clementine’s absurdly good, and goodly absurd, sophomore effort I Tell A Fly, this opening number will explain everything you need to know. It just pushes audaciously beyond musical boundaries into a weird and wonderful space encapsulating performance art, poetry, satire and post-modernism and somehow combining it all into beautiful music as well. I don’t really get it but I love it.

16. ‘For Thursday’ by Will Joseph Cook (I don’t know, will he?) (Pop)

Is the joke funnier this time around? I know it is, because it’s even funnier despite it being the hundredth time I’ve made it myself. This is just another example of really enjoyable, spirited pop music from this remarkable debut album. It’s an earworm, it’s a bit of fun, but all of this belies the fact that it’s also a really well-written and brilliantly-produced song.

15. ‘Black Rain’ by Creeper (Horror Punk)

In what’s now becoming an annual tradition of me having some bright, fun punk music near the top of my list, this one surprised me a bit by how high it was. Yet it’s also one of my most-played and revisited songs of the year so it shouldn’t have. Silly, theatrical and bombastic punk music, it casts me back to the glorious heyday of bands like the Offspring in the 90s, when this kind of iconoclastic rock music was at the same time guttural/edgy and shamelessly fun.

14. ‘The Serpent and the Sparrow’ by Baby Copperhead (Experimental Folk)

Bringing the mood considerably back down to earth, this delightful bit of pastiche folk was an unsurprising entry into this top twenty. Combining earthy, traditional percussion with swelling strings and an intellectual vocal line, it’s quirky and enigmatic music at its very best.

13. ‘No Ti Amo’ by Lucky Soul (Nu-Disco)

No, no spoilers at all, number 20. But by pure coincidence and for some reason, here’s the second nu-disco song in my top twenty for this year. I described this song as “the 7-minute disco track I never knew I needed” and I would extend that to say that it could be the 7-minute disco track you never knew you needed, as well. It’s really a tightly-produced but indulgent party song; classic disco stuff in all its camp, puffy glory. I don’t quite know why I love this song so much and why I feel it earns its extended length, but here it is.

12. ‘Waking Up Slow’ by Gabrielle Aplin (Pop)

This is perhaps an odd choice to have so high, but there’s a couple of reasons it’s up here. Beyond the fact that it’s just a really good pop song that got stuck in my head a lot, it’s also a song that I’ve inexplicably been enjoying a lot with Bec this year. After it won my song of the week I put it on in the car with the caveat that “you’ll probably hate this” and actually she really liked it. I think it’s just got an oldskool (i.e. 90s) style, lacking audacity, bells and whistles, when songstresses let their voices shine over catchy but unadorned backing tracks, and it just feels unpretentiously lively and enjoyable.

11. ‘Kaleidoscopic’ by Brendan Byrnes (Xenharmonic Electronica)

When Jez picked Byrnes’ album Neutral Paradise and called it ‘Xenharmonic Electronica’ I was prepared to dismiss it as a massive pile of pretentious shit. But then when I picked it as my runner-up album of the week, and this is my runner-up song at the same time, it was a surprise to him that I liked it so much, especially as this is the most xenharmonic and challenging track on the album. But honestly, if there’s one thing that I really respond to, it’s controlled chaos in music (more of this later), and somehow for all its weirdness, its discordance, just notes that sound duff in isolation, they’re all carefully selected here and it’s a compelling, if mildly unsettling, experience. Well I don’t find it unsettling but I can believe it if other people would.

10. ‘Ran’ by Future Islands (Synthpop)

Wow, good thing I didn’t telegraph that there would be more Future Islands coming, or I may have spoiled the fact that there was more Future Islands coming. I can’t give an academically stringent reasoning why this is my favourite song from the terrific album The Far Side, why it won my song of that week award (in a very crowded week for great music) or why this is the sole Future Islands representative in my top ten, but I just find this song pure and simple joy from start to finish.

9. ‘Hail to the Chief’ by Prophets of Rage (Rap Metal)

From pure and simple joy to a great bit of controlled aggression. This track from Prophets of Rage, the Cypress Hill/Public Enemy/Rage Against the Machine supergroup that the world was crying out for without knowing it, is a great bit of rock music, starting with the power riff from Tom Morello and running through the anti-establishment rap vocals from Chuck D and B-Real. Every time it comes on it makes me want to turn up the volume and give it a bit of a headbang like I’m saying “Yes” to every beat.

8. ‘Holding On’ by The War on Drugs (Indie Rock)

I did say there would be more The War on Drugs in my top twenty, or did I? Yes, I did, and here it is. This is another really joyous bit of rock music, quite a throwback in its simple, traditional instrumentation, building chords towards the chorus and unpretentious lyricism. It’s catchy and thoughtful at the same time.

7. ‘Take Me Dancing’ by Will Joseph Cook (I don’t know, will he?) (Pop)

Oh yeah, there’s virtually no surprises in this top twenty are there, because I’ve mentioned pretty much every represented artist before. So I discovered, long after I’d sorted my songs and cemented this firmly in my #7 spot, that it’s technically a 2016 release as it was a lead single from Mr Cook’s debut album, but as I first heard it as part of the 2017 album release, I’m counting it as eligible. It also just needs to be taken in the context of the album, which was really a remarkable debut effort with a relentless happy pop spirit, and this is both the catchiest and most interesting song on there, really wonderfully melodious.

6. ‘Nothing to Find’ by The War on Drugs (Indie Rock)

So it’s probably becoming pretty clear that I quite enjoyed The War on Drugs’ album this year. So I don’t think it’s a spoiler if I sort of use as an excuse for writing these songs up more fully the fact that I’ll talk about the album in more detail on my top 25 albums countdown, and more specifically why I love their sound so much. But this, like Holding On, is six minutes of pure musical pleasure, beautifully composed and with an evocative sense of joy that yeah, just makes me happy.

5. ‘Back to the Source’ by Elsiane (Baroque Pop)

If there’s one thing that I do respond to time and time again, it’s swelling with strings at the right time, and this dark, but stirring bit of music manages that with gusto. When I first heard this song, I described it as a “mass murderer of a song” (in the sense that it’s beyond being a ‘killer track’) and I haven’t really reevaluated that original opinion; it grips me every time it comes on. And it gripped me so much the first time through that it beat out all of Will Joseph Cook’s killer tracks for song of the week. It’s a haunting, beautiful, almost other-worldy bit of music.

4. ‘Full Body Mirror’ by So Much Light (Neo-RnB)

Where is the RnB? Would be the question asked by any actual published music journalists as they read through my list (although my mother is not a published music journalist, so they wouldn’t be reading through my list), but it’s simply a genre I don’t respond well to. Objectively it can be good, but I find it difficult to distinguish the proponents of it because it’s all so samey and often over-produced. Enter So Much Light, who broke through all my prejudices with his quirky and idiosyncratic use of synth instrumentation, that just elevates his great voice (as a sidenote: vocal quality is never the shortcoming of my relationship with RnB) to be a compelling character in his fascinatingly strange music. This was one of a number of songs that I enjoyed off his album Oh, Yuck but I’ve come back time and time again to this one.

3. ‘Pool’ by Paramore (Synthpop)

Yep, there’s definitely room for some more Paramore on the list. Based on what little I know of the (predominantly very positive) reception of this album, I seem to be alone in singling out this particular song as my favourite, but if I’m correct about that then I feel other people need to reevaluate it. Admittedly one of the main reasons I love it is because of the chime sounds that give it a slightly quirky, almost xenharmonic flavour, but it’s also just a wonderfully catchy pop song with a great lyrical quality to it as well. Although I loved most of the album, this song’s stood out for me since the first time I heard it and it had to sit near the top of my year.

2. ‘Hex’ by Mt Wolf (Dream Rock)

It seems that every year there’s one song that destroys me emotionally. Last year it was my song of the year, Aurora’s Runaway, and this year it’s this one, which only lands at number two. As I said in writing up Elsiane, there’s nothing that gets me going quite like stirring strings at just the right moment, and in the case of this song there really isn’t a wrong moment. From the moment Bassi Fox’s empyreal falsetto kicked in the first time I heard it, I was in another world. But the song doesn’t just stir, it’s got an amazing build from its quiet, unassuming beginnings to a riveting climax – much like last year’s number one song. It was a back-and-forth between my runner-up and song of the year for a while and this one ended up just missing the money.

1. ‘Butterfly’s Dream’ by Sundays & Cybele (Japanese Psych Rock)

And the reason that Hex, and emotive power, missed out was that it just seemed to have been the year when I needed mindless fun to get my mind off, you know, the state of the world and whatever. So where last year the carefree enjoyable tracks fell down the ranks, this year I couldn’t go past this nine minutes of beautifully controlled chaos (there we are again). I genuinely have no idea what this song is about, with the lyrics chanted in harmonic Japanese, and I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it transcends cultural or linguistic barriers, because it’s unmistakeably Japanese in its craziness and that’s all part of its charm. I love the guitar wails, the frenetic drumbeats, I love the fact that it’s clearly got its faults with some beats being slightly off, because it’s just a wild, insane musical ride that I never want to get off. It’s fair to say I’ve kept this in mind as song of the year from the first time I heard it, and it would have taken something as deeply complex and layered as this to seriously contend with it.