With the holiday cheer coming over us, and that familiar growing sense of stress and incapability to give your loved ones what they deserve seeps into us, I can't help but sing a tune and perhaps do a jigg. As you cloth that pagan partytree of yours, perhaps you'd want some good tunes to put that jingle in your tingle. For you, I'm compiling my top 20 tracks of the past year.
I could easily fill the top eleven of this list with every song from Merriweather Post Pavilion but that would be boring, wouldn't it? The opening track of Merriweather is such a wonderfully romantic and just allround beautiful piece of music.
Gax is more melodic and not quite as frantic as many of Rhida's other tracks, held together by an intro, bridge and outro. My love for Boys Noize is undying.
This track really envelopes itself into that blanket of the hypnogogic aesthetic, and never seizes to be so cozy and lovable, delivering an incredibly lush and uplifting experience.
A crazy exersise in music, that I had on my iPod for an extent of six months before listening to it. Yeah, I'm bad at catching up on my tunes. Any track that utilizes the fashion designer with a thousand rings is awesome in my book.
One might wonder why french electro and hip hop hasn't been mixed more in the past. French wonderkid, Danger, shows us all how it's done.
Mumford has produced some great folk rock, and their album released not long ago is most likely after Merriweather my second favorite album to listen through in one sitting. Picking one favorite wasn't an easy task. But just try and not sing along in the chorus on this one, I dare you.
My god, how about that Tim Exile. He's so cool I wanna be him. If Pink Floyd and Modeselektor had a retarded child that in return for his lack of motoric skills got the amplified musical visionary of his parents, Tim would be him. And this track is the best example of just that.
Capturing the essence of dreams with it's mellow yet frantic sound. Closing my eyes I feel like I'm flying over some green and desolate landscape, with beauty it's sole purpose for being.
The track that made the summer forme. I listened to it so many times that I basically lived it. I lived the life of a cybernetic machine, living tissue over metal endoskeleton, and I've just now woken up. But I want to go back.
That's what she said.
I love the way the two voices intertwine in this song. These kids sing so well about teen angst, love and need that I sometimes feel like they're singing about my life.
I wish I knew this Kimberly, sounds like she's that kinda girl that you could just take home and play scrabble with, you know, and just shut up for a bit.
Man, Hurts has produced one song so far, but what a frickin song! This guy will be the shit in 2010.
I'll have to agree with the peaple who hate the term chill wave. But the word, chill, just seems to exemplify this track so well, thus the name.
Blake Miller could lull me to sleep with his amazingly tender voice every night. Everything from the thumping sound in the background, to the wonderfully grated guitar play just speaks to me on such a basic level.
The church organ underlining the vocalists awesome baritone voice makes me smile every time. I wish everything was in pidgin.
Grizzly bear being on this list was really a no brainer. It was only a matter of time before they got their big break. This is the track off the album I'm most in love with, and it's probably the one mostly resembling their earlier work.
A Jackson 5 hit redone by one part Vampire Weekend and one part Ra Ra Riot. Sign me the fuck up!
The soft synths in this tune make it just about the greatest song ever to fall asleep to, and so I have many a time.
The Way this track builds up to it's eventual six minute mark climax is just jaw dropingly awesome.
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It's been a fairly good year, and hopefully you wasted it listening to good music, like I did.
