“Grass” is as abrasive as AC’s earlier work while holding the melodic touches of their later work. It only strikes the balance between manic and chill because it touches the extremes and every point in between. It’s almost tactile: bringing out pins and needles, and not necessarily in a way that’s pleasant, but in a way that reminds you you’re alive.

And a moment for the rhythm geek: if you put a bass drum in between the beats and replace the main rhythm with a snare, you’d have a pretty straight swing-rock beat, but with no bass drum and a floor tom instead of a snare, the push is completely changed into the head-bobbing beat that Animal Collective became known for.
find it on Feels

The late 80′s and most of the 90′s saw a dumbing down of pop production, but the last 10-12 years have given a re-ignition of the passionate, exciting side of the form, with the Neptunes standing beside Timbaland as true musical architects. The Neptunes take a silly cheerleader novelty song in “Hollaback Girl” and turn it into something that reaches for grand, overwhelming heights. The sticky beat and the keyboard twist of the chorus are tiny stabs with huge wallops, putting this song alongside any of the production miracles of the 60′s.
find it on Love Angel Music Baby

Murdoch found confidence in simply being true to himself and his honest desires, but Barnes went fully decadent, going from “Happy Yellow Bumblebee” and kazoos in 1998 to orgies, performance art, nervous breakdowns and lots of drugs ten years later. His descent into the heavens and hells of sex and art were our gain.

“Heimdalsgate” is a lot more hell than heaven: crises, chemicals, tortured moods. The sound is thin but more than powerful enough to prop up the insane catch of the chorus and the wild swings of the melody.
find it on Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?

Listening to this song again almost ten years later, you can still feel that little bit of excitement that came with it when it was new: that someone had found a way to modernize jazz to make it exciting again, as though the decades of cheesy fusion and conservative throwbacks had never happened. The trumpet and sax tradeoffs (3:37-4:17) make for listening that’s as exciting as anything from the 50′s. We know now that it was an experiment more than a signpost, but for a second there, it really seemed to herald a new jazz, something that I’ve gone back to thinking there never will be.
find it on Tourist

91. Field Music, “In Context” (2007)

Loudness war aside, this decade really figured out how to get production right. Fifteen years earlier, a song like “In Context” would likely have been compressed into something whose promise you’d have had to imagine. In the late years of the 00s, though, even music based in careful arrangements breathes and excites. The stabs of strings in the chorus, the crisp drum sounds, and the dynamics of the walking guitar line give this song a clear, bright sound that’s thoroughly modern but has the same appeal as a track from the 60′s.
find it on Tones Of Town

90. Elliot Smith, “Son Of Sam” (2000)

Every song on this list has some scene(s) from my life that are clear in my head every time they play, but there are few as strong as this one, and it’s pretty mundane: working late with Jon, Mindy and Hugh at dot-com jobs that we soon lost, sitting in the shadowy office and allowing ourselves a distraction into how great this song is. I can get pulled back to the present with moments like the first two lines of the chorus coming so quickly that they almost overlap, or the anti-climax of the smooth “Shiva opens her arms”. I wish I could tell you that it soundtracked some moment of drama or heartbreak like a lot of songs on this list, but that’s just not the case.
find it on Figure 8

89. Mos Def, “Quiet Dog” (2009)

88. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Dig!! Lazarus, Dig!!” (2008)

87. Spoon, “I Summon You” (2005)

It’s all too often that a band starts with a strong debut that they can never follow, so bands like Spoon that only get better with each album are precious and exciting. There’s at least half a dozen songs from their Gimme Fiction or Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga that could have found a confident home on this list, but it’s the brooding acoustic thrust of this song that sticks out not only from from this album, but their entire catalog.
find it on Gimme Fiction

86. The Strokes, “Someday” (2001)

As simply pop as The Strokes got on their first record. I liked the grit they brought, but this song was immediate when I bought the record and it shines the brightest years later, still giving me chills at the raised voice of “alone we stand, together we fall apart”. That I could still love this song even though it was the soundtrack of a car crash I was in in 2002 says a lot about it.
find it on Is This It

85. Vampire Weekend, “Walcott” (2008)

In 2001, The Strokes got raked over the coals for “pretending” to be from the street when they were actually from the penthouses. That both extremes were wrong didn’t seem to quiet the people who complained about their “$200 haircuts”, though how the hell they knew how much the guys in the Strokes paid for their haircuts is beyond me.

By 2008, the guys in Vampire Weekend knew that the world had ways of finding things out, so they figured they’d cut off the haters at the pass, not only making their privileged lives main lyrical points of their songs, but playing up their Ivy League origins in their dress and videos. What we ended up with was one of the most enjoyable beginning-to-end records of the decades, and proof that what matters in music is soul and sincerity, not grit.

“Walcott” was a standout, a travelogue of familiarity with Cape Cod and the petty-but-real concerns whose string-soaked us-against-the-world kiss-off of “fuck the women in Wellfleet, fuck the bears out in Provincetown” may, like the rest of their songs, lack the toughness that so many unfairly demand of rock, but cheers to Vampire Weekend for showing that our obsession with personality and background can get in the way of appreciating that it’s only music that matters.
find it on Vampire Weekend

84. The Juan Maclean, “Happy House” (2008)

Finding out that this song (intentionally) ripped off Dubtribe Sound System’s “Do It Now” dulled the shine a bit, but Nancy Whang’s “Hear what I say…excellent” is such a perfectly delivered and irresistible dance hook that the lack of originality in the piano part becomes totally irrelevant. The Juan Maclean can be maddeningly inconsistent, but when they hit, it’s just about classic.
find it on The Future Will Come

83. The Bees, “Chicken Payback” (2005)

Listen, I can’t defend this song. It’s dumb. It’s ridiculously 60′s, to the point where they apparently even used 60′s recording equipment and instrumentation. But it’s a blast, and dammit, if I’m not allowed to remove my brain every now and then and enjoy a song where I can yell shit real loud, then I don’t know what.
find it on Free The Bees

82. Daft Punk, “Crescendolls” (2001)

A straightforward sample ends up creating something that’s somewhere in between dance floor scorcher and game show theme song. Like the rest of Discovery, it’s so cheesy and sweet that it seems like something you shouldn’t like, my God do you ever.
find it on Discovery

81. Sufjan Stevens, “The 50 States Song (live at Lee’s Palace, Toronto)” (2005)

Too much was made about Sufjan Steven’s Christianity, but not enough was said about his other favorite topic: his love of America. Yes, the whole “50 states project” was discussed everywhere, but I never really saw anyone get to the heart of it: a deep and sincere patriotism, a subject that creates as much discomfort among liberal indie music fans as religion.

As far as I know, “The 50 States Song” was never released, and was only played live as the nightly first song during the tour for Illinois. It comes across as jokey; something to go hand-in-hand with the campy cheerleader costumes that Sufjan and his band wore for that tour, but the song’s heart is as big as anything he did. The part when Sufjan invites all of the instruments to “pack up your bags” embodies his appeal: a wicked sense of humor surrounding a deep sweetness and genuine love and appreciation of the life’s heavy topics.

Likewise for his love of country. The patriotism here is not a blind following of government, but a love of the place that made him. It’s the patriotism that’s always appealed to me, and it always made me sad when people try to distance themselves from their country. Sufjan’s interjection of “God bless America, land that I love” at the end is the kind of heartfelt sentiment that I’ve found far too few thinking people in this country embrace.

When we saw Sufjan at the 9:30 that year, living in DC had a new advantage: most people here are originally from somewhere else, so every state got a cheer when it got mentioned, with my friend Susan and me yelling loud for North Carolina. Not too surprisingly, the Toronto crowd in this recording are understandably not quite as full of cheers.