2010: Best Tracks Part 2 – Henning.

December 15, 2010, 2 comments

So Tonje told you something about a relaxing day at a café or something, right? Right. Except that it wasn’t a café, it was a bazaar where we spent our afternoon. After ending up with roughly 33 best tracks after an initial first round of picking, she started bargaining for bigger and bigger lists, and after hours of tough negotiations we finally agreed on a top 15 list instead of the originally planned top 10. After that, the so-called café turned into a slaughterhouse when Tonje knocked one nice tune after another out of her list, so if you’re a musician and you remember feeling a stabbing pain in your chestal area yesterday around 4 p.m. CET, then most likely you were just being erased from the long list. And though Tonje is right in claiming “We love you all equally and thus we hate lists”, there’s no way of abstaining from this beloved routine, so without further regrets, here are my top 15 tracks of 2010:

#15. Herbcraft – Road to Agartha
If songs were journeys, this one would cross continents. Road to Agartha is a mind-boggling experience of this year’s most beautiful psychedelic folk and the ultimate statement regarding that thing we used to call New Weird America. Marvelous and visionary in every possible sense of those terms.

#14. Julian Lynch – In New Jersey
Whenever 2010 became too hectic and stressful, I knew I could come back to this song. If suburbia life is like this, sunshine and birds and trees and happiness, I might reconsider planning my future in the city. Ok not really, but this sounds so tempting when Julian Lynch is telling you.

#13. Keep Shelly in Athens – Running Out of You
My dance track of the year. With the complete change of mood, turning the mystic/ethereal into an outright disco stomper, with vocal samples suddenly exclaiming “Break it down” which would have led to a complete failure in almost every other constellation imaginable, and with the most hazardous synth fanfare since The Final Countdown, Running Out of You must be called a truly bold move.

#12. The Sweethearts – Burnin’ Through the Night
Whatever one might think about David Keenan’s term “hypnagogic pop”, the concept itself or the inclusions and exclusions, it certainly had a strong impact on this year’s underground music scene (supposedly mainly through Altered Zones and its contributors, of course). So I won’t say the things Outer Limits Recordings/The Sweethearts come up with necessarily are h-pop (though I think they are), but in any case Burnin’ Through the Night is one of those tunes you’ll never grow tired of listening to precisely because there’s so much more to them than you could ever notice on first encounter, the inheritance and reinterpretation of so many lost years of music that you don’t need a half-conscious state somewhere between being awake and asleep to feel all those memories coming back to you. Oh, and this one is also a crazy amount of fun, too.

#11. Twin Sister – All Around and Away We Go
I think it was March when I wrote that All Around and Away We Go has this year’s most irresistible and most beautiful chorus, and it turns out that I haven’t changed my mind about this seven months later.

#10. Elephant Paintings – Shores
There are two versions of this song and the one you can play above is actually not “by” Elephant Paintings, being that certain Albuquerque, New Mexico duo consisting of Emma Crane and Bryce Hample that has delivered one of 2010′s most fragile and intimate collection of songwriting with their self titled cassette, with Shores being the album’s most beautiful song. This is Emma performing alone as The Arsonist, and her acoustic guitar drenched in reverberation and subtle bits of tape manipulation as the only effects in this stripped down piece of sadness, combined with her beautiful, unobtrusive voice, make these four minutes nothing less than pure, devastating magic.

#9. Real Estate – Out of Tune
2010 was not the year of Real Estate. Which is only fair cause 2009 already was. However, our favorite Garden State offsprings nonetheless managed to provide one of my absolute favorites of the last twelve months, or actually maybe even my favorite Real Estate tune so far. Out of Tune is a gorgeous song, not “beachy” or “lo-fi” but simply amazingly beautiful garage pop by some insanely talented friends from Ridgewood, New Jersey (plus Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin on synth), who happen to like watching cars on the 95, and seriously, who couldn’t connect to this certain kind of suburban blues?

#8. LA Vampires & Matrix Metals – Berlin Baby
There might be a little bias involved concerning the song’s title, but you could also consider its inclusion a mere proxy for all the wonderful things Amanda Brown has done for us this year with LA Vampires, Pocahaunted, and of course Not Not Fun and 100% Silk. But apart from that, “Is it the champagne talking?/It says I want you/And I guess I do” is a ridiculously fabulous line.

#7. Emily Reo – Witch Mtn
Emily. My friend Emily is not only one of the loveliest human beings on Planet Earth but also one of the most devoted musicians I know. Whatever is gonna happen next year, I’m sure Ms. Reo will come up with something worth waiting for. Witch Mtn is of otherworldly beauty, I think that’s all I have to say about this one.

#6. Girls – Broken Dreams Club
In a way being the sad sequel to last year’s masterpiece Hellhole Ratrace, as if Christopher Owens eventually had to find out that success doesn’t necessarily pay by happiness, and now almost all hope is gone. Musically, the song itself is an amazing and surprising step ahead for the still young band, adopting almost every technique of classic American rock music without ever making any compromise. We’ll try to help you out.

#5. Autre Ne Veut – Drama Cum Drama
The apotheosis of synth pop. I could’ve picked every single song of Autre Ne Veut’s close to perfect album, but I kept turning to Drama Cum Drama, a song that easily bridges three decades of popular music with stupendously few means. This is, in a strict sense of the term, unbelievable music.

#4. Hype Williams – The Throning
Now that the London/Berlin duo Hype Williams is getting more and more popular, including Stereogum coverage just today, comparisons with Salem ant the so-called witch house movement increase – which is of course bullshit. However, it is actually almost equally impossible to name Hype Williams along hypnagogic father figures like James Ferraro or Spencer Clark. Though it’s hard to deny certain similarities concerning the cultural technique of recycling de-contextualized elements of past decade’s popular music, tracks like The Throning show a more radical, almost disrespectful approach of total deconstruction. Of course in a very obvious this is still Sade’s Sweetest Taboo, but it is undressed in a way that more or less nothing remains of the original’s twisted yet sweet romanticism, and it is somehow still a captivating, irresistible piece of pop music. Something that Salem will never come up with.

#3. Beach House – 10 Mile Stereo
I guess everything has already been said about this miracle of a song. From a musical point of view, we could keep on discussing if this is only dream pop but also shoegaze or rather some transcendental form of it, but everything that could be analyzed here must fall silent once Victoria Legrand starts begging that it can’t be gone. And indeed, we’re still right here.

#2. Games – Shadows In Bloom
Together with the accompanying, sick video, Shadows In Bloom is two and a half minute, true-to-the-letter power synth pop that seriously speaks for itself in its own ill way of perfection. The only thing I want to add is that one year ago, we all might have turned this down with a shudder. But it’s not 2009 anymore.

#1. Herzog – Cautiously Optimistic
Though this might be considered a too obviously personal choice, even with some distance to myself, this remains my song of the year. Actually, this is the one position in my list that has never been questioned during the whole process. What makes this song so extraordinary to my ears is the fact that despite being melancholically toned, it is everything but sad. On the contrary: Whatever last year might have been like, there’s no reason whatsoever not to remain hoping that after all, everything will turn out right.

Photograph by Florian Reischauer.
Pieces Of Berlin
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By Henning