20
Need You Now - LADY ANTEBELLUM
In the US, Nashville country-rock trio Lady Antebellum have become monstrously big with indecent haste. This second album shifted well over a million in its first month and is still flying. It’s up there with Grammy-magnets like Beyoncé and Gaga.
Need You Now is a huge hoary pop seduction, with a chorus it’d take a heart of stone to resist. Immediately, it announces itself as power-anthem paradise, evoking such guilty-pleasure godhead as Alone by Heart or I Drove All Night by Roy Orbison/Cyndi Lauper.
It's maybe the most romantic song ever written about a drunken booty call. Singing about the draw of an old beau on a lonely night, singer Hillary Scott is emotional but not too dramatic: a Carrie Bradshaw type, making do with diminished expectations. Answering her, Charles Kelley sounds more old-fashioned. He croaks, he growls, he spits out the crow he's eating.
You’ll briefly, secretly love it with a passion for about three weeks before TV talent-show kids start devaluing it. That is one belting chorus. “It’s a quarter after one, I’m a little drunk but I need you now...”
Been there, done that...
19
It Kills Me - MELANIE FIONA
Melanie Fiona Hallim is a Canadian recording artist from Toronto, Ontario. She was born to Guyanese immigrant parents (mixed with black, Indian, and Portuguese ethnicities) and grew up in the inner city of Toronto. Living in a music filled household, Fiona says she always knew music was her passion. Her father was a guitarist in a band and would allow her to sit on the stage when she was younger as he practiced, and remembers her mother playing music at home; everything from The Ronettes to Whitney Houston.
Her debut album The Bridge was released in the summer of 2009. "It Kills Me", became her breakout song on the Billboard Hot 100 where it cracked the Top 50, along with topping the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. The song earned Fiona a Grammy Award nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance. The Bridge also earned her a NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding New Artist.
18
Bad Romance - LADY GAGA
Lady GaGa's songs do not exist to please you, why should they? You have to look after yourself when you enter Lady GaGa's world, and if you do not, you may find yourself impaled on a spike. The spike could be made of latex or rubber or stainless steel or shiny plastic or even human hair, but it will hurt like hell and the inevitable pool of blood will make a mess.
Lady GaGa does not appreciate mess, unless it has been made by Lady GaGa.
The amazing thing is that even though all of the above is true, there's still a bleeding, fragile beating heart at the core of this song which anyone can relate to. A song which is about a failing, obsessional kind of passion for someone who is clearly bad news. And it's a passion which is strong enough to reduce GaGa to gibbering nonsense syllables, and speaking in tongues (assuming French counts, of course). These are the best bits of the song, naturally:
"ra ra ah ha ha, roma roma mah..."
"Bad Romance" was the moment where the music didn't just live up to the (self-inflated) hype, but surpassed it. The track is epic in construction-- by the time she gets to the bridge, more than three minutes in, the realization that there are hooks yet to come is thrilling. It helps that RedOne's production matches the songwriting's torrential drama; the churning, earth-shifting low-frequency synths are a programmatic reflection of the singer's unsteady, perhaps unwise, infatuation. But it's Gaga's performance, the wholly unapologetic fools-rush-in carnal energy, that commitment to emotional bravery in a context of increasingly twee chart pop, that makes this song feel so necessary.
Bad Romance, which features cheesy rave synths, the now typically Gaga stomping beat and a controversy-lite lyric (“I want your ugly, I want your disease”). Melodically, it recalls Black Celebration-era Depeche Mode and keeps up Gaga’s habit of referencing herself in her songs. Admittedly, Warhol would have loved it.
17
Excuses - THE MORNING BENDERS
In a smart bicoastal alliance, the Morning Benders — a band from Berkeley, Calif. — enlisted Christopher Taylor from Grizzly Bear to produce its second studio album, “Big Echo”, along with Chris Chu, the band’s leader. Their shared fondness for California pop gloss with experimental underpinnings, from Brian Wilson and psychedelia to Fleetwood Mac, has transformed a straightforward, 1960s-loving, folk-rock and Merseybeat band into one whose songs exult in texture. Now Mr. Chu’s voice is awash in vocal harmonies, electric and acoustic guitars, exotic keyboards and ripples of reverb. Sometimes lush, sometimes turbulent, the arrangements make Mr. Chu’s melodies more luminous while they open up mysterious spaces behind lyrics that ponder continuity and collapse. It’s a splendid transformation — and now the band has moved to New York City.
In this song, Christopher Chu's warbly croon floats along with a kind of lazy charm, and later an a cappella break accentuates a distinct 1950s doo-wop influence.
"Excuses" possesses a simple sweetness, proving you don't have to be "difficult" to sound so gloriously complicated.
16
One Life Stand - HOT CHIP
The title track of HOT CHIP fourth's LP is an otherworldly fusion of infectious tropicalia and synth drone, and the kick/snare drumbeat is the extra push that makes it a toe-tapper.
The nerdy/sexy/sweet electropop lads open ONE LIFE STAND the way Basement Jaxx might, spare bass and synth portending some sort of explosion, but then it turns to slick dance rock territory, the disco guitar, Joe Goddard’s molasses-coated backing vocal, etc. The hook is sweet, because Hot Chip’s got a way of mixing their booty shaking with genuine pathos. Alexis sings “I only want to be your one life stand / tell me do you stand by your man.” It’s a bit heavy for a club-floor come-on, but then Taylor’s already spent an album sounding the warning, and another telling you he’s ready for the floor.
15
Odessa - CARIBOU
Dan Snaith is a Canadian electronic musician who records under the name of Caribou. This is the opening track and first single from his 2010 album, Swim, the follow-up to his 2008 Polaris Music Prize record, Andorra.
ODESSA's main reference point is the icy geek disco of Hot Chip, Junior Boys, and Erlend Øye. Dan Snaith tricks out the sound with ESG-style sound bombs, a little chicken-scratch guitar, clanging polyrhythms playing off a globular bassline, and eventually, a piano cribbed from an early-90s house track that feels right at home. Snaith works with restraint, riding the beat for all its worth and keeping his affect more or less in check.
Like Hot Chip, Caribou’s new disco bent doesn’t focus on that hot club ecstasy so much as a weird, strangely melancholy sensuality. Added to the video – a woman stumbling and driving through fog, smoke, and ghostly, disconnected memories, “Odessa” tells a strange, captivating story of love, loss, and escape. And it works like a charm.
14
Giving Up The Gun - VAMPIRE WEEKEND
"I got the idea for the song from a book my dad gave me called Giving Up The Gun. It's a history book about the time when Japan expelled all the foreigners from the country, closed off all trade and stopped using guns and reverted back to the sword. It seems unimaginable now that humanity could willingly go back to an older technology. It got me thinking about whether you could give up all the things that you have and go back to a simpler way of life."
Frontman Ezra Koenig
13
Afraid Of Everything - THE NATIONAL FT. SUFJAN STEVENS
Brooklyn’s The National are the absolute antithesis of an overnight success. Together for over a decade, the group’s slow ascent to international acclaim has been emotional. While several critics have clicked with albums of swollen heart and bruised soul, a handful have mistaken deliberate, delectable languor for dismissible listlessness. But those who’ve embraced Matt Berninger’s baritone, and subsequently each fascinating detail that trails in its wake, have discovered a band for life – for love and loss, euphoric highs and exhausting lows. For everything, always.
"Afraid of Everyone" is anxiety and paranoia and not knowing how to deal with it. It's desperately wanting to defend yourself and your family from the chaotic forces of evil, and you don't even know what they are, or who's right or who's wrong and what to believe.
Detroit singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens handles harmonies on this track.
"Sufjan came in one day when we were struggling with 'Afraid Of Everyone' – that song was very difficult to make happen – and he just started playing the harmonium and singing along with it. He made up this little melody and he layered it four times – that gave the song a whole different dimension. That was his contribution."
Guitarist Aaron Desner
12
Little Lion Man - MUMFORD AND SONS
Folky music doesn’t stay quiet in the hands of Mumford & Sons, an english band that is part of the latest iteration of trad-rock from Britain. They have rediscovered the modal melodies and unflinching lyrics of traditional songs as foundations for their own. Marcus Mumford, the band’s songwriter and lead singer, merges those folk roots with the often glum but upbeat rock of Dave Matthews, showing a similar grain in his voice.
Together, Mumford & Sons — the four band members are not related — reach back to the way British families once harmonized closely on traditional songs. Their tunes echo sea chanteys, Celtic ballads, and jigs and reels, while also reaching across the Atlantic for bluegrass. They play mostly acoustic instruments, with plenty of guitar strumming and banjo picking. Yet their dynamics aim for settings much bigger than porches or parlors; the songs are as volatile as grunge.
Mr. Mumford sings about soul-searching, pondering troubles that intertwine the romantic, the spiritual and the existential. He’s not exactly easygoing; in the songs on this album every doubt is a chasm, every breakup a disaster.
The rousing chorus of “Little Lion Man” admits, “It was not your fault but mine,” with a tune as jovial as a pub singalong. For all the torments and uncertainties, Mumford sings about on this album, there’s the momentum of a hoedown to carry him through.
Personally I’ve long enjoyed the song, but felt much more moved by the video . A rougher, more emotional performance is conveyed in the clip than comes across in the song itself. There is a sense of urgency that adds depth that wasn’t recognizable prior.
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