Enter the top 10 – pick a random post
So it’s home straight time, but with 90 tracks down, and 10 to go up, I’ve just discovered a “random post” feature – just click the link below to be taken to a random entry from the past three months of the countdown. There’s a permanent link to randomness in the sidebar, too.
11. Roots Manuva – Witness (1 Hope)
In its timbre and delivery, Witness is every inch the archetypal modern dancehall record – superpolished and futuristic, its sci-fi bleeps body-pop their way across the dubby beats, Manuva’s Caribbean-tinged voice rumbling low around the echoing soundscape. But what relocates Witness closer to Kingston-upon-Thames than Kingston Jamaica, and indeed renders it perhaps the most quintessentially British record on this countdown, is Manuva himself. The now-legendary lyrical references to cheese on toast and ten pints of bitter are planted into the song like Union Jacks on a sun-drenched beach, patriotic and proudly incongruent. His quaint use of “frig” in place of the f-word is uniquely British whimsy too, self-deprecating and modest, but with a knowing wink of naughtiness. But, crucially, what makes Witness such fun is that Manuva sounds so confident and relaxed. His irregular, rugged verses are less like raps and more like languid slam poetry, but Manuva survives that eccentricity on gusto, and then delivers the choruses like football chants. A curious cultureclash of a tune, Witness may have many parents, but in terms of its elevation to the status of hip-hop anthem, it’s something of an only child.
12. Radiohead – Idioteque
…and for their next trick, Radiohead will disappear completely. “I’m not here, this isn’t happening”, Thom Yorke sings, four tracks earlier on the same album, but it’s not until Idioteque appears that every last lingering preconception about how Radiohead should sound is completely erased. That a band with as rich and expressive a palate as Radiohead should choose to dehumanise themselves so utterly is alarming to start with; that they do it so successfully only augments the effect. But the chinkless facelessness of Idioteque is precisely its success – this isn’t Thom’n’Johnny anymore, this is machine and machine and machine, robotic beats usually reserved for anonymous electronica, auto-generated lyrics, primitive computerised drones. The finished product is shrink-wrapped vacuum packed mystery, a giant steel slab of a recording, a huge, windowless building. “This is really happening”, implores Yorke – it’s one of the song’s more incongruent moments: so disconnencted is Idioteque from its surroundings, nothing could feel further from the truth. Even encountered as part of the staggering unexpectedness of the Kid A album, Idioteque remained startling. Belligerent and paranoid, it is the sound of one of the world’s most emotionally scrutinised bands deliberately reducing themselves to machines and abstraction. Both intellectually and psychologically, that’s quite some vanishing act.
13. The Rapture – House of Jealous Lovers
Maybe it’s the apeshit counting in the middle. Maybe it’s every instrument trying to play a solo at once. Maybe it’s Luke Jenner’s petulant scream that never seems to let up. Or that incessant cowbell. Whatever it is, it makes House of Jealous Lovers’ five minutes sound like the biggest free-wheeling abandonment of control ever, like a fairground teacup waltzer that’s come free of its couplings and is careering into the stratosphere while its passengers scream with oblivious glee. It sounds rebellious and unruly, it makes you want to be in its gang. Even before it begins, a cacophony, somewhere, is raging. It’s a glorious, sloppy, kicking-screaming intro, all detuned guitars and wails – and then the groove arrives, the cowbell and bass, and we’re off. Electro-punk tautness is replaced by blare and yell, which in turn is replaced with tautness and then more crunch. House of Jealous Lovers is a rattling rollercoaster of a record, swerving and diving but always rickety enough to induce a genuine sense of danger and keep the adrenaline coursing through the track. It’s erratic and impulsive, maverick and cocksure, and one of the most fun ways to lose it ever committed to tape.
14. Graham Coxon – Jamie Thomas
While Blur were busy creating the most cerebral music of their career on penultimate album 13, their guitarist was pleasing himself outside of school with the most visceral of his. And what a delight. Music doesn’t get much wilder than Jamie Thomas: it’s a blitzkrieg of a record, a panzer attack of precision chaos, all over in the blink of an eye, leaving smouldering remains and a stifled squeal of feedback at the tail for good measure. Nothing is tethered here, and that abandon makes the song so awe-inspiring. If Blur’s authenticity was often questioned because of their constant musical shifts from album to album, the bludgeoned bleat of Coxon’s vocals here – not to mention the brutal guitar work – is simply too feral to be affected. But above all, every emotion bundled up in these 150 seconds feels pure: Jamie Thomas is pure ferocity, pure adrenalin, pure windmill-fists mushroom-cloud-laying sonic assault. Set it against virtually any other track this decade in terms of undiluted zeal, and it’ll surely come out on top.
15. The Futureheads – The Hounds of Love
Most cover versions are attempts at either humour or homage, with varying degrees of success. And while The Futureheads’ attack on Kate Bush has both, in spades, it also has an innate joy that gleams from the record’s every groove. It’s a joy that lifts it above other reimaginings – there are surely few songs that sound as gleeful and as glorious as this, original or no. It actually helps that, aside from a common melody, The Futureheads’ version doesn’t owe much to Kate Bush – that sense of detachment allows it to become its own song. The bellowed backing vocals at the start, the mighty guitar downstrokes that herald the first chorus – these are straight from The Futureheads’ own playbook, and the accompanying sense of anarchy in making light of such a po-faced, earnest record is hugely entertaining. With the rich Mackem accent proudly unhidden and the football-chant delivery, this is a less a cover version, more a transformation: The Futureheads have taken a song of prattling sincerity and created a piece of wide-smiling delight, a boisterous terrace chant of untrammelled joy.
16. Eels – It’s A Motherfucker
In his heartwarming autobiography, Things The Grandchildren Should Know, Eels leader Mark Everett tells a story about this song:
The campaign to elect tragically inept Republican candidate George W Bush to the White House used the Daisies of the Galaxy album as an example of the entertainment industry marketing smut to children. The CD had a storybook-like cover and song titles such as “It’s A Motherfucker” (which was actually a tender ode to the hardships of missing the girlfriend I had recently broken up with), so they deduced that the storybook cover meant it was targeted for three-year-olds or something. It was great. You could download my lyrics from the ‘George W Bush For President’ website.
While this was clearly nothing more than Republican rabble-rousing from Dubya, his campaign team might’ve inadvertently had a point – never mind the cover art, It’s A Motherfucker feels like a children’s song itself. Short and pretty, all tinkling pianos and lullaby strings, the lyrics are undeniably childlike in their honesty: “It’s a motherfucker / Being here without you / Thinking about the good times / Thinking about the bad” – this is hardly grown-up imagery, but that’s what makes the song so affecting. What also makes It’s A Motherfucker so startling is its title. Its coarse maturity – its inarticulacy – is wonderfully juxtaposed against the intervening verses as a splash of harsh, grown-up reality among the daydream. A song this saccharine, with any less offensive a title, would surely enter Hallmark territory. Here, instead, Eels have produced something brutally honest, and beautifully tarnished.
illiant autobiography, Things The Grandchildren Should Know, Eels leader Mark Everett tells a story about this song:
The campaign to elect tragically inept Republican candidate George W Bush to the White House used the Daisies of the Galaxy album as an example of the entertainment industry marketing smut to children. The CD had a storybook-like cover and song titles such as “It’s A Motherfucker” (which was actually a tender ode to the hardships of missing the girlfriend I had recently broken up with), so they deduced that the storybook cover meant it was targeted for three-year-olds or something. It was great. You could download my lyrics from the ‘George W Bush For President’ website.
Despite this obvious reactionary rubbish from Dubya, the Republican rabble-rousing and short-term thinking, his campaign team might’ve inadvertently had a point – never mind the cover art, It’s A Motherfucker feels like a children’s song itself. Short and pretty, all tinkling pianos and lullaby strings, the lyrics are undeniably childlike in their honesty: “It’s a motherfucker / Being here without you / Thinking about the good times / Thinking about the bad” – this is hardly grown-up imagery, but that’s what makes the song so affecting. What also makes It’s A Motherfucker so startling, though, is its title. It’s coarse maturity – it’s inarticulacy – is beautifully juxtaposed in the intervening verses, a splash of harsh, grown-up reality among the daydream. A song this saccharine with any less offensive title would surely enter Hallmark territory; here, instead, Eels have produced something brutally honest, and beautiful spoiled.
17. Wilco – Poor Places
Jeff Tweedy is not okay – countless Wilco songs are testament to this. But what makes Poor Places such a beautiful expression of his unease is that for all the multilayered density of its production, the song still feels like one single outpouring – it’s a whole, irreducible entity (albeit a complicated one), a portrait of Tweedy’s tangled synapses. The brilliance lies in how the track begins and ends: in the space of five minutes, a baleful folk song of distant fathers and sailors being sent off to war becomes a psychotically rocking, foetal-position white-noise meltdown. But Poor Places isn’t some whinge of self-pity; every lyric, no matter how evocative or oblique, feels honest, almost humble. Nor is it simply noisenik posturing without intent; every blast sounds necessary, and is complemented by some other element: the tumbling piano lines ripple against the military snare drums, the snatch of shortwave radio locks in with the increasing fizz of guitar feedback. It ends with Tweedy repeating “It makes no difference to me… I’m not going outside” while the entire record crashes down around him, each element veering in and out of earshot. The sense of bleakness and isolation is inescapable, but when it’s painted in such dramatic colours and with such individualism, it’s hard not to acknowledge the accompanying greatness.
18. Mogwai – Batcat
Batcat is so slackened and gory, yet simultaneously crisp and sharp, that listening to it is like watching a horrendous but unavoidably captivating piece of ultraviolence in super slow-mo. The opening 20 seconds are presented at normal speed, and then bang: the incident arrives and the frame-rate heads skywards. Grizzly overdriven bass guitars snap like bones in a Sky Sports injury shocker replay; the walloped, hissing cymbals spurt super-choreographed Tarantino group-battle blood, each high-def droplet colliding, molecule by molecule, with pristine pressed cotton; the howling guitars are cars crashing across a racetrack, end over end like a ragdoll cast out of a petulant pram. As a spectacle, it’s awesome. And the reason that it all works so well is because Batcat is essentially a slowed speed-metal record, executed with all of the punch and aggression of that genre but with dramatic down-shifts in tempo that simply insist you probe the track’s innards. Then, just to augment the experience, like with all good action replays, Mogwai play it again: the back half of Batcat is simply an even more monstrous performance of the front, and the fiercest track that Mogwai have produced this decade is no less compelling a second time around.
19. Queens of the Stone Age – No One Knows
Plenty of grunting sexy rock songs have been released in the past ten years. What puts No One Knows on top of that pile is that while it’s a terrific grunting sexy rock song, it does so much more than just sit there and smoulder. Sure, the song pounds and slimes with all the sleaze and swagger that you’d expect from a hard-drinking, drug-guzzling, multi-tattooed rock band, but there’s a subtlety to its game too, a complexity in arrangement and tone that hints at depth without ever feeling the need to show off about it. It’s a clever trick, too: despite the delicately mournful backing vocals, satanic whispers and progtastic guitar wig-out with a minute to go, No One Knows remains a propulsive and cocky rocker, but the added flashes of musical flair gives the song’s grit more bite. Crucially though, it feels totally comfortable in its own schizophrenic skin – No One Knows isn’t the sound of a tough guy playing schooled, or a boffin dumbing down, but simply a band who know their capabilities lie just as equally in rockin’ out as in geekin’ down. Indeed, in that respect, it feels like a companion piece of Radiohead’s Electioneering – a rock song at heart, but a tender piece of meat at that.
20. Jimmy Edgar – No Static
Jimmy Edgar was just 19 when he made No Static, which is either impressive or sickening, depending on which side of the bitterness gap you fall. However, Edgar’s years are merely a side show here; backstory or context isn’t required to find No Static a remarkable piece of music. Instead, what really makes the track pop is that for a genre as rigid as electro, No Static is gloriously loose. Right from the off, the keyboard throbs sit just behind the beat, lending the track an instant sense of instability, of ever-shifting velocity. Then comes the deliciously wonky speech sample, cramming too many words into too few beats and, just as you begin to parse that, the beats are cut down and, isolated, that synth wobbles further still. Edgar’s youthful mischief is on full display, and No Static refuses to sit still. However, its volatility is borne of confidence rather than incompetence, and that’s why No Static is so compelling – it knows its own charm, this is no fluke, and observing something so capricious but cocksure is great fun. Only when the speech is diced and repeated over the final minute is there any obvious sign of planning, but in general, No Static is a sort of Mr Blonde character: unnerving and exciting in its unpredictability, a miniature electronic maverick.
The 100 greatest songs of the noughties 