Top Twenty Songs of 2019
*insert introductory preamble here*
20) The Judge - Alexandria Maillot (Indie Pop)
This is a really, really late ring-in to hit the top twenty, from the very last week of the year is this excellent bit of slightly baroque pop. Maillot's voice - good, but mostly just serviceable throughout her album - comes out to star here in this beautifully constructed pop track punctuated by pizzicato strings and a nice progressive breakbeat. Became infectious enough in the short time I've had with it to crack the top tier.
19) Now's the Time - Moon Taxi (Funk Pop)
This one only got runner-up in its week of release and has leapfrogged the song that beat it - "Dose" by Ciara - to hit the big leagues. Probably unsurprising in the end as this is just a full-blast feel-good track with a great poppy energy and a lot of big dirty sax. Moon Taxi were one of Jez's big favourites of last year, and this follow-up as part of a two-track EP really brought home why he loved them so much (I liked them too, but I feel this is their best track)
18) The River - Aurora (Dreampop)
This is the highest-ranked song that only got third place in its respective week, and there's a reason for that (well, technically two). But Aurora is of course no stranger to my top of the year countdown as the winner of my 2016 song of the year (with "Runaway"). This is another bit of bewitching pop, with good energy and a touch of a mystical aesthetic that nobody really delivers better than her.
17) It Doesn't Matter Why - Silversun Pickups (Post-Punk Revival)
Apparently this, and the previous track, can't be separated by much, as this was one of the reasons "The River" only got third place, with this beating it into runner-up position. I was aware of Silversun Pickups as a concept before hearing their album this year "Widow's Weeds" but this song was a key reason that album was a complete revelation to me. It has all the best hallmarks of that album with a weird suspended set of chord progressions leading to a cathartic key change about the two-thirds mark. It's a great bit of progressive post-punk music.
16) The Code - XIXA (Psychedelic Desert Rock)
I love a good evocative song, and this track definitely does a great job of evoking a particular time and place. It's also a weird quirk of mine that I love old westerns and that aesthetic way more than I should, or you'd think, so this bit of desert rock that calls up that sense of lawlessness and in-group loyalty really hits the spot. It may be a bit gimmicky but I just love the cinematic feel it has to it: cold, ruthless and yes, a little bit camp. Definitely my jam.
15) Serbia Drums - !!! (Indie Pop)
Not really sure I can make a good defence of this track from !!! (pronounced "chk chk chk"), but I just really dig the dynamic melodic riff and drumbeat that accompanies it. I can't say I'm particularly in touch with the meaning behind the title or any of the lyrics, but it's ultimately a really excellent bit of power pop that makes me feel like dancing.
14) Karma Girls - Indochine (French Pop)
Apparently this song was actually part of a 2017 album but incongruously released as a single this year, and that being my first encounter with it, makes it eligible for this year's list. The other thing I'll qualify this with is that, at one point this song came on in Bec's presence and she said "this is a very 'you' song" and I couldn't help but agree. It's basically just cheesy 90s Eurodance (from cheesy 90s Eurodance band Indochine) the way I like it. I feel like this song, with its fade out and build sections, demonstrates the sort of music we could get if Eurovision songs could extend beyond three minutes. And you know, maybe they could cut down the vote-reading-out segment a bit more.
13) The Best Has Yet To Come - Pale Ramon (Psychedelic Rock)
I warned there would be more Pale Ramon to come in my previous post, and here indeed is some more. This is the opening track from their self-titled album and really sets the mood in a brilliant way. This song starts at one level and seamlessly transitions up and up and up to have this huge, epic rock sound by its culmination. It is also true that the first time I listened to this song properly, I was driving to the hospital to see my baby daughter the day after she was born, so this song does hold a special place in my heart too, but really it's just the repertoire of evocative rock effects they employ to create such a complex sound, that's why it's here at #13.
12) House vs House - Blanck Mass (Electronica)
Blanck Mass is another artist making their second appearance on a top 100. In 2017 he made a song called "Rhesus Negative" which I loved for its pure mindless chaos and that hit #60 of that year. With his album in 2019 and this track in particular, he evolved that mindless chaos by introducing a simple element of melody. It retains that slightly raucous electronic grunt underneath but builds layers of vocal chanting, xenharmonic synth and a catchy riff to go with the beat. As with all great electronica, it's repetitive but without seeming like it, by the frequent introduction of something new and surprising.
11) Swallow Me Whole - Lupa J (Art Pop)
This was a really strong year for industrial music, but in the end this song is the only one from that broad church to hit the very top tier. This song pretty much single-handedly turned me around on Lupa J's entire album (of the same name) by creating this synthesis where all of the previous songs of despair and yearning came together. This song has all of that aesthetic but draws it into a weird, unsettling musical universe full of strange harmonies and throbbing industrial drumbeats. I should say that this song - and Lupa J generally - owe a big debt of gratitude to Björk, who I occupied the second half of the year discovering anew in a full retrospective, and it's largely down to Björk that I have learned to enjoy stuff like this that put me otherwise out of my comfort zone.
10) Songbirds - Silversun Pickups (Post-Punk Revival)
If you've been paying attention, you might be able to guess that this is the other reason why "The River" by Aurora only got third place in its week of release, as this was the top song of that same week. This was by far and away the standout track of Silversun Pickups' excellent album "Widow's Weeds", built on a killer couple of menacing guitar chords and with this amazing set of punk-adjacent harmony driven by Brian Aubert's plaintive voice. It's just a great bit of rock music I can relisten to over and over (and have).
9) Old Tar Road to Sligo - The Walker Roaders (Celtic Punk)
Now to explain the meteoric position of this potentially anomalous bit of Celtic punk, at number 9 of the year. I was never conscious of the Pogues when Shane McGowan was still actively making music but I developed a very strong affiliation for them after that fact. And this track comes the closest to emulating the iconic sound of MacGowan's Celtic rasp with this drinkalong singalong style and therefore I adore it. Of course, the Walker Roaders - a Celtic punk supergroup consisting of the Pogues' former accordion player and members of Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys - have the pedigree to achieve such an iconic sound, and here it is.
8) Till the Dance Do Us Part - Frankley Everlong (Disco Punk)
Two punk-adjacent songs in a row, and fittingly so, because from a very early point in this year I earmarked 2019 as the year that really revived punk rock music to my mind (when I say 'a very early point in this year' it was specifically when I heard this song the first time). This is an astoundingly fun bit of raucous punk delivered at a cracking tempo with a bit of synth and a weird dance beat. If you were ever asking "what is punk music missing?" and the answer may be a super-fast pace and strange disco beat, this song will definitely be for you as it is for me.
7) Nothing Is Safe - clipping. (Experimental Hip-Hop)
This is probably the song that actually surprised me the most how high it's ended up, but it's quite simply a phenomenal bit of songwriting, composition, and delivery. In my opinion, there's a non-zero chance that Daveed Diggs is the greatest musical genius of our time, but it's hard to discern that sometimes because off-kilter, unstructured and often formless hip-hop is how he tends to apply that genius. When the aesthetic comes together like this though, in this haunting soundscape that adds dramatic layer after dramatic layer up to its explosive climax, well it just expands my horizons of what hip-hop, and music in general, can be.
6) Ghost Horses - Tides From Nebula (Post-Metal)
It's surprisingly hard, given that I don't attend to lyrics that closely, to get me on board with a purely instrumental track. But this absolute behemoth of a rock track is an unstoppable force - and I invoke that imagery because that's the exact aesthetic it conjures up for me. It starts with almost three minutes of developing crescendo before it kicks into top gear and from that point on just feels like an incredibly powerful piston engine at full speed. And I don't mean to evoke the idea of some modern, streamlined machine - I mean it in a full steampunk kind of way, an old clunky beast but charging forward in ways unimaginable to its creators. There are so many moving parts here but they all just thunder down this song leaving a gobsmacked me in their wake.
5) The Barrel - Aldous Harding (Art Pop)
I feel like I'm selling out a bit having this song in my top five, because it's won literally all of the obscure song awards imaginable this year (and now it can add "top five song on some Australian's end of year list" to its accolades) and Aldous Harding's album "Designer" has made literally every end-of-year list (except - spoiler alert - mine). But this song had pretty much cemented this track from the first time I heard it on NPR's "All Songs Considered" podcast. The instrumentation is definitely the selling point here - yes, the clarinet is underutilised in modern music, but the playful guitar strains that underline this whole song are also amazing - but Harding's quirky lyrics and delivery all add to this unique soundscape that's ultimately just incredibly affecting, to me.
4) Ivory - Adam French (Indie Singer-Songwriter)
Now this song has to take the record for the biggest "come from nowhere" victory (well, fourth place). Yes, it won my song of the week when it was released, but nothing else from French's album "The Back Foot and the Rapture" warranted a second look, and a few weeks after the fact I'd completely forgotten this song's existence. Luckily I do revisit all my song winners, and this song grew, and grew, and ended up exploding all over my face when I realised how good it is. It feels like a somewhat standard piece of singer-songwriter music, but it's also immaculately produced to create a number of layers of interesting sound throughout. And the key point that I missed when forgetting about it was how brilliantly, and seamlessly, this builds to its dramatic conclusion. I won't forget it, or the name Adam French, again.
3) Alive - Gon (Baroque Pop)
This is another very late ring-in, coming out late October and only allowing me a month to come to terms with it before forming this list. I didn't really need a month though, as the week it was released I pretty much had it on perpetual repeat on my commute home. Starting with Gon's gorgeous classically-trained voice, this song creates the perfect symbiosis of classical and dreamy pop with its piano and string foundation, and the verse and chorus structure. This is really just a magical bit of music from start to finish, and it may have climbed all the way up to the top of my year if it had had more time to get that close to my heart.
2) Harmony Hall - Vampire Weekend (Art Rock)
This feels like another song I probably don't need to sing the praises of (congratulations, one of the world's most famous bands who's been on every end-of-year list this year, some numpty in Australia also digs one of your songs), but for most of the year this has been a shoe-in for this spot or higher. It's a perfect example of when a band is in complete control of their sound: the chorus and hook are perfect and catchy and great; the lyrics about dangers of the echo chamber are thought-provoking; but then they have the audacity to break the song down into a little piano interlude, for absolutely no reason at all and yet make it completely work with the rest of the song. At the end of the day this is a very likeable bit of pop music but the composition is nothing short of genius.
1) Tarhatazed - Mdou Moctar (Tuareg Rock)
Speaking of genius, here in the very top spot is a piece of music I can describe in no other terms. Mdou Moctar is a Tuareg guitar player who burst onto the (obscure, niche) world stage this year with his unique modern twist on traditional Tuareg folk music, and this song absolutely compelled, captivated and beguiled me from about two minutes into my first listening. The tone of his guitar firstly, driving forward what is clearly aesthetically quite traditional Nigerien folk strains, is electrifying (no pun intended). But following the opening passages of what is clearly the traditional refrain (modernised), Moctar unleashes the full power of his guitar in this scintillating solo section. His prowess can't really be denied objectively, but what he delivers in the latter half of this song is more of an unhinged fury, and it creates this completely arresting synthesis of old world and new world musical sensibilities. For years I've listened to lots of guitar folk and Afrobeat music from the same geographical region (as a sidenote, I'm aware that Niger is very different from Mali is very different from Ghana is very different from Nigeria etc) and I've willed it to be brought to the same kind of explosive life as Moctar brings this. I love the music generally, but this is really the apogee of a decade-long struggle I've had with a cultural remove, trying to have it come to me and speak to me in a really personal sense, and this song manages that powerfully.
So that's my songs of the year. I'm still in the process of writing up my top 25 albums and that will be posted in the next couple of days, depending on the progress I make.
20) The Judge - Alexandria Maillot (Indie Pop)
This is a really, really late ring-in to hit the top twenty, from the very last week of the year is this excellent bit of slightly baroque pop. Maillot's voice - good, but mostly just serviceable throughout her album - comes out to star here in this beautifully constructed pop track punctuated by pizzicato strings and a nice progressive breakbeat. Became infectious enough in the short time I've had with it to crack the top tier.
19) Now's the Time - Moon Taxi (Funk Pop)
This one only got runner-up in its week of release and has leapfrogged the song that beat it - "Dose" by Ciara - to hit the big leagues. Probably unsurprising in the end as this is just a full-blast feel-good track with a great poppy energy and a lot of big dirty sax. Moon Taxi were one of Jez's big favourites of last year, and this follow-up as part of a two-track EP really brought home why he loved them so much (I liked them too, but I feel this is their best track)
18) The River - Aurora (Dreampop)
This is the highest-ranked song that only got third place in its respective week, and there's a reason for that (well, technically two). But Aurora is of course no stranger to my top of the year countdown as the winner of my 2016 song of the year (with "Runaway"). This is another bit of bewitching pop, with good energy and a touch of a mystical aesthetic that nobody really delivers better than her.
17) It Doesn't Matter Why - Silversun Pickups (Post-Punk Revival)
Apparently this, and the previous track, can't be separated by much, as this was one of the reasons "The River" only got third place, with this beating it into runner-up position. I was aware of Silversun Pickups as a concept before hearing their album this year "Widow's Weeds" but this song was a key reason that album was a complete revelation to me. It has all the best hallmarks of that album with a weird suspended set of chord progressions leading to a cathartic key change about the two-thirds mark. It's a great bit of progressive post-punk music.
16) The Code - XIXA (Psychedelic Desert Rock)
I love a good evocative song, and this track definitely does a great job of evoking a particular time and place. It's also a weird quirk of mine that I love old westerns and that aesthetic way more than I should, or you'd think, so this bit of desert rock that calls up that sense of lawlessness and in-group loyalty really hits the spot. It may be a bit gimmicky but I just love the cinematic feel it has to it: cold, ruthless and yes, a little bit camp. Definitely my jam.
15) Serbia Drums - !!! (Indie Pop)
Not really sure I can make a good defence of this track from !!! (pronounced "chk chk chk"), but I just really dig the dynamic melodic riff and drumbeat that accompanies it. I can't say I'm particularly in touch with the meaning behind the title or any of the lyrics, but it's ultimately a really excellent bit of power pop that makes me feel like dancing.
14) Karma Girls - Indochine (French Pop)
Apparently this song was actually part of a 2017 album but incongruously released as a single this year, and that being my first encounter with it, makes it eligible for this year's list. The other thing I'll qualify this with is that, at one point this song came on in Bec's presence and she said "this is a very 'you' song" and I couldn't help but agree. It's basically just cheesy 90s Eurodance (from cheesy 90s Eurodance band Indochine) the way I like it. I feel like this song, with its fade out and build sections, demonstrates the sort of music we could get if Eurovision songs could extend beyond three minutes. And you know, maybe they could cut down the vote-reading-out segment a bit more.
13) The Best Has Yet To Come - Pale Ramon (Psychedelic Rock)
I warned there would be more Pale Ramon to come in my previous post, and here indeed is some more. This is the opening track from their self-titled album and really sets the mood in a brilliant way. This song starts at one level and seamlessly transitions up and up and up to have this huge, epic rock sound by its culmination. It is also true that the first time I listened to this song properly, I was driving to the hospital to see my baby daughter the day after she was born, so this song does hold a special place in my heart too, but really it's just the repertoire of evocative rock effects they employ to create such a complex sound, that's why it's here at #13.
12) House vs House - Blanck Mass (Electronica)
Blanck Mass is another artist making their second appearance on a top 100. In 2017 he made a song called "Rhesus Negative" which I loved for its pure mindless chaos and that hit #60 of that year. With his album in 2019 and this track in particular, he evolved that mindless chaos by introducing a simple element of melody. It retains that slightly raucous electronic grunt underneath but builds layers of vocal chanting, xenharmonic synth and a catchy riff to go with the beat. As with all great electronica, it's repetitive but without seeming like it, by the frequent introduction of something new and surprising.
11) Swallow Me Whole - Lupa J (Art Pop)
This was a really strong year for industrial music, but in the end this song is the only one from that broad church to hit the very top tier. This song pretty much single-handedly turned me around on Lupa J's entire album (of the same name) by creating this synthesis where all of the previous songs of despair and yearning came together. This song has all of that aesthetic but draws it into a weird, unsettling musical universe full of strange harmonies and throbbing industrial drumbeats. I should say that this song - and Lupa J generally - owe a big debt of gratitude to Björk, who I occupied the second half of the year discovering anew in a full retrospective, and it's largely down to Björk that I have learned to enjoy stuff like this that put me otherwise out of my comfort zone.
10) Songbirds - Silversun Pickups (Post-Punk Revival)
If you've been paying attention, you might be able to guess that this is the other reason why "The River" by Aurora only got third place in its week of release, as this was the top song of that same week. This was by far and away the standout track of Silversun Pickups' excellent album "Widow's Weeds", built on a killer couple of menacing guitar chords and with this amazing set of punk-adjacent harmony driven by Brian Aubert's plaintive voice. It's just a great bit of rock music I can relisten to over and over (and have).
9) Old Tar Road to Sligo - The Walker Roaders (Celtic Punk)
Now to explain the meteoric position of this potentially anomalous bit of Celtic punk, at number 9 of the year. I was never conscious of the Pogues when Shane McGowan was still actively making music but I developed a very strong affiliation for them after that fact. And this track comes the closest to emulating the iconic sound of MacGowan's Celtic rasp with this drinkalong singalong style and therefore I adore it. Of course, the Walker Roaders - a Celtic punk supergroup consisting of the Pogues' former accordion player and members of Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys - have the pedigree to achieve such an iconic sound, and here it is.
8) Till the Dance Do Us Part - Frankley Everlong (Disco Punk)
Two punk-adjacent songs in a row, and fittingly so, because from a very early point in this year I earmarked 2019 as the year that really revived punk rock music to my mind (when I say 'a very early point in this year' it was specifically when I heard this song the first time). This is an astoundingly fun bit of raucous punk delivered at a cracking tempo with a bit of synth and a weird dance beat. If you were ever asking "what is punk music missing?" and the answer may be a super-fast pace and strange disco beat, this song will definitely be for you as it is for me.
7) Nothing Is Safe - clipping. (Experimental Hip-Hop)
This is probably the song that actually surprised me the most how high it's ended up, but it's quite simply a phenomenal bit of songwriting, composition, and delivery. In my opinion, there's a non-zero chance that Daveed Diggs is the greatest musical genius of our time, but it's hard to discern that sometimes because off-kilter, unstructured and often formless hip-hop is how he tends to apply that genius. When the aesthetic comes together like this though, in this haunting soundscape that adds dramatic layer after dramatic layer up to its explosive climax, well it just expands my horizons of what hip-hop, and music in general, can be.
6) Ghost Horses - Tides From Nebula (Post-Metal)
It's surprisingly hard, given that I don't attend to lyrics that closely, to get me on board with a purely instrumental track. But this absolute behemoth of a rock track is an unstoppable force - and I invoke that imagery because that's the exact aesthetic it conjures up for me. It starts with almost three minutes of developing crescendo before it kicks into top gear and from that point on just feels like an incredibly powerful piston engine at full speed. And I don't mean to evoke the idea of some modern, streamlined machine - I mean it in a full steampunk kind of way, an old clunky beast but charging forward in ways unimaginable to its creators. There are so many moving parts here but they all just thunder down this song leaving a gobsmacked me in their wake.
5) The Barrel - Aldous Harding (Art Pop)
I feel like I'm selling out a bit having this song in my top five, because it's won literally all of the obscure song awards imaginable this year (and now it can add "top five song on some Australian's end of year list" to its accolades) and Aldous Harding's album "Designer" has made literally every end-of-year list (except - spoiler alert - mine). But this song had pretty much cemented this track from the first time I heard it on NPR's "All Songs Considered" podcast. The instrumentation is definitely the selling point here - yes, the clarinet is underutilised in modern music, but the playful guitar strains that underline this whole song are also amazing - but Harding's quirky lyrics and delivery all add to this unique soundscape that's ultimately just incredibly affecting, to me.
4) Ivory - Adam French (Indie Singer-Songwriter)
Now this song has to take the record for the biggest "come from nowhere" victory (well, fourth place). Yes, it won my song of the week when it was released, but nothing else from French's album "The Back Foot and the Rapture" warranted a second look, and a few weeks after the fact I'd completely forgotten this song's existence. Luckily I do revisit all my song winners, and this song grew, and grew, and ended up exploding all over my face when I realised how good it is. It feels like a somewhat standard piece of singer-songwriter music, but it's also immaculately produced to create a number of layers of interesting sound throughout. And the key point that I missed when forgetting about it was how brilliantly, and seamlessly, this builds to its dramatic conclusion. I won't forget it, or the name Adam French, again.
3) Alive - Gon (Baroque Pop)
This is another very late ring-in, coming out late October and only allowing me a month to come to terms with it before forming this list. I didn't really need a month though, as the week it was released I pretty much had it on perpetual repeat on my commute home. Starting with Gon's gorgeous classically-trained voice, this song creates the perfect symbiosis of classical and dreamy pop with its piano and string foundation, and the verse and chorus structure. This is really just a magical bit of music from start to finish, and it may have climbed all the way up to the top of my year if it had had more time to get that close to my heart.
2) Harmony Hall - Vampire Weekend (Art Rock)
This feels like another song I probably don't need to sing the praises of (congratulations, one of the world's most famous bands who's been on every end-of-year list this year, some numpty in Australia also digs one of your songs), but for most of the year this has been a shoe-in for this spot or higher. It's a perfect example of when a band is in complete control of their sound: the chorus and hook are perfect and catchy and great; the lyrics about dangers of the echo chamber are thought-provoking; but then they have the audacity to break the song down into a little piano interlude, for absolutely no reason at all and yet make it completely work with the rest of the song. At the end of the day this is a very likeable bit of pop music but the composition is nothing short of genius.
1) Tarhatazed - Mdou Moctar (Tuareg Rock)
Speaking of genius, here in the very top spot is a piece of music I can describe in no other terms. Mdou Moctar is a Tuareg guitar player who burst onto the (obscure, niche) world stage this year with his unique modern twist on traditional Tuareg folk music, and this song absolutely compelled, captivated and beguiled me from about two minutes into my first listening. The tone of his guitar firstly, driving forward what is clearly aesthetically quite traditional Nigerien folk strains, is electrifying (no pun intended). But following the opening passages of what is clearly the traditional refrain (modernised), Moctar unleashes the full power of his guitar in this scintillating solo section. His prowess can't really be denied objectively, but what he delivers in the latter half of this song is more of an unhinged fury, and it creates this completely arresting synthesis of old world and new world musical sensibilities. For years I've listened to lots of guitar folk and Afrobeat music from the same geographical region (as a sidenote, I'm aware that Niger is very different from Mali is very different from Ghana is very different from Nigeria etc) and I've willed it to be brought to the same kind of explosive life as Moctar brings this. I love the music generally, but this is really the apogee of a decade-long struggle I've had with a cultural remove, trying to have it come to me and speak to me in a really personal sense, and this song manages that powerfully.
So that's my songs of the year. I'm still in the process of writing up my top 25 albums and that will be posted in the next couple of days, depending on the progress I make.
posted by Sean's Beard at 7:42 PM
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