Top 40 Songs of 2009: 10-1

The songs I'll still be listening to 30 years from now...

10. Junior Boys - Parallel Lines
A song that just sounds sleek and polished. Despite the keyboards, synths, drum machines, and vocals, this songs sounds open and clean for the better part of six minutes. The vocals and keyboards sound like a simplified version of NIN's "Closer."

9. Arctic Monkeys - Cornerstone
This is Alex Turner's best writing to date, a guy who seems to have mastered the art of weaving stories of down-on-their-luck pub wanderers. "Cornerstone" is the story like this, but with the brilliant imagery of things like "I smelled her scent on the seat belt and kept my shortcuts to myself." The first two and half minutes are great, but the knockout punch is the song's last verse, a twist in the narrative that is as good of a punchline as any Arctic Monkeys song. Turner's wry wit makes the song more like a three minute joke than a heart sick saga, and he is the one left with the last laugh.

8. Neon Indian - Mind, Drips
If you were to view the medium of pop song (3-4 minute time limit using any instrumentation that sounds good), most bands could be described as painters, using different styles and techniques to produce their painting...or the pop song. Neon Indian's songs are more like a blank canvas that's been filled with bizarre cutouts from different magazines all pasted together... but the end result is usually something very appealing and instantly likable. The magazine cutouts in this song range from unintelligible samples that echo intermittently over the course of the song, keyboard hooks that invoke the soundtrack to Escape from New York, and faded and distorted vocals that function more as an instrument than a device to say anything. The end result is something that sounds totally different than most music I have ever heard, but also sounds better in a really strange way.

7. Julian Casablancas - 11th Dimension
It's always good to hear good new music from one of your favorite musicians, even if that new music effectively signals the end of your favorite band. The writing seemed to be on the wall, even on 2006's First Impression of Earth, that he was itching to branch out from the post punk sound the Strokes perfected, but became pigeonholed into making. Free of the constraints and expectations that come with making a Strokes record, Casablancas went with the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to his album, which failed for the most part, but came together incredibly well on this song.

6. White Rabbits - The Company I Keep
In a year that effectively saw the final nail in the coffin of my favorite band... leather jacket five-piece rock seemed to be a dying art, but White Rabbits remain, and they are pretty damn good at what they do. "The Company I Keep" is just a cool sounding, slow paced rock song about the type of things that cool rockers make songs about... how they're cool but unhappy and women Why reinvent the wheel, right?

5. Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks
If you drew up a vendiagram with one circle labeled indie pop , and one circle labeled men's choir, Grizzly Bear would be the shaded area in the middle. "Two Weeks" features four minutes of arching vocal harmonies that sounds way catchier than one would expect from a song with the elements of "Two Weeks", so much so that Grizzly Bear had a great deal of cross over success behind this song.

4. Discovery - Orange Shirt
A buzzing and whirring hip hop/indie rock/electro pop/dance song, the combines the various stylistic elements of all these genres into the anthem of the summer. As you probably would expect, the music comes first here, but Ra Ra Riot lead singer Les Roskam's vocals fit perfectly well among the skipping drum machines and keyboard effects. Unfortunately for Discovery, the rest of their album could not build off the momentum of this, the first track on their LP (creatively titled LP), but this track stands alone as the catchiest track of the year.

3. Neon Indian - Deadbeat Summer
The more I read Pitchfork this year, the more I got sucked into the whole Chillwave/Glo-fi movement that the site covered extensively. Neon Indian was my favorite of these bands for a few reasons, the most obvious being that their songs just sound the best. "Deadbeat Summer" is basically just a top 40 pop song at it's core, but it's distorted and chopped up to make it become a song called Deadbeat Summer" instead of "[insert peppier word than deadbeat] summer". This song sounds like its title, but not in a depressing, closed-off-from-the-world view of summer through the shades, it's a song that sounds like having fun in the summer, just not doing anything productive or important (and probably under the influence of some psychodelic drugs).

2. Los Campersinos! - The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future
In August I saw this band dancing around a stage at lollapalloza like a group of hyperactive school kids at recess, led by a dude wearing jorts and an Abe Vigoda tshirt, spewing short, catchy, fast-paced indie pop songs. A month and half later, the first song from their next album (due in early 2010) was released, and it was something so radically different from their previous stuff, it required a sort of musical double take. In a stark contrast to their earlier work, this song is dark, string-drenched, epic infused with grown man retrospection. An absolute emotional gut punch of a song. Gareth Campesinos' vocals flow between urgency and defeat as he tells the story of a girl he knew along with some macro philosophizing on life and death, the past and the future.

1. Camera Obscura - French Navy
This was a once in a year song: catchy, replayable, and beautiful. I played it all the time, and it became somewhat of a soundtrack for the early part of this year. Lyrically, the story is simple enough -- a romance abroad doomed to fail -- but it's extraordinarily well written both lyrically and musically, while maintaining the simplicity of a standard pop song. Moreover, it is rare song that could have come out at any point in the past 35 years and still been well-received.