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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: Videos

  • PAUL’S TOP 100 OF 2010 – PART 1: 100-91 “Who cares if you disagree. You are not me”

    Starting this weekend through to the end of the year, with the help of my Inner Casey Kasem, I will be posting my own personal Top 100 Songs of 2010 on my facebook page (to be followed by summary blocks here on SonicClash.com). These are the songs that have rocked my world (or at least my car stereo) the hardest for the last 12 months.

    My eligibilty rules for the songs are as follows:

    Songs must have been released on an album domestically, or charted as a single domestically or internationally, in 2010. Songs that appeared on a 2009 album are eligible to appear if they were released or spent most of their chart life as a single in 2010.

    Because rules are made to be broken, there are two exceptions to the rules above on my list: Both songs were released on albums in late 2009 (and both those albums were represented in my 2009 list), and probably shoulda-coulda been released as singles this year but never were. One of the songs was licensed prominently for a wireless service commercial (featuring the artist) and also showed up in an episode of a prime time TV series. The other was an album highlight so loved by the artist’s audience as to inspire a couple of facebook groups lobbying for it to be the artist’s next single.

    There is one song on the list from an album released late in 2008, but which charted as a single earlier this year.

    There are two songs that I included in my 2009 list that ended up becoming U.S. Top 20 pop hits in 2010. If I hadn’t already included them on my 2009 list, they’d be here. They are “All the Right Moves” by OneRepublic and “Bulletproof” by La Roux.

    There are a total of 91 artists represented in my Top 100, including artists listed as featured artists on songs.

    One artist is represented 4 times. Two more appear 3 times. The artist who topped my 2009 list is here twice. The artist who tops my list this year is also represented twice.

    53 of the 91 artists are American. 22 are from the UK. 5 from Canada. 3 from Sweden; and there’s one each from Norway, Iceland, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, France and Australia.

    3 of the songs on this list have gone to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. 4 of them have topped the Billboard Country Chart. 3 were #1 in Canada. 6 were #1 in the UK.

    And away we go:

    #100
    #100: “LOVER, LOVER” by JERROD NIEMANN
    Singer-songwriter Jerrod Niemann’s career has had a few false starts, but things changed when he became the first act signed to Brad Paisley’s label Sea Gayle, and what a first act! His debut single for the label – a cover of a 1993 single by the Australian folk-rock group Sonia Dada – hit #1 on the country charts and even crossed over to the Pop Top 40. I love the harmonies in this song… and Jerrod sang all of them himself. Just like Billy Joel and “For the Longest Time”.

    #99
    #99: “I DON’T BELIEVE YOU” by THE THERMALS
    Portland, Oregon’s Thermals are better known for writing nerdily incisive, political punk rock rants. Their latest album ‘Personal Life’ is a collection of nerdily incisive songs about, like, relationships and stuff. In other words: Suck it, Dianne Warren. Bite me, Danielle Steele. The video for the album’s first single stars former Sleater-Kinney guitarist and current NPR blogger Carrie Brownstein.

    #98
    #98: “MIAMI 2 IBIZA” by SWEDISH HOUSE MAFIA vs. TINIE TEMPAH
    “I told her ‘wear suspenders and some PVC and then I’ll film it all up on my JVC’.” Probably the best dance song about making naughty home videos since the Andrea True Connection. I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that London rapper Tinie Tempah’s accent makes the song’s trashiness seem more palatable. But I also love the way he strings together initials with the skill of a government agent or military officer.

    #97
    #97: “STOP FOR A MINUTE” by KEANE and K’NAAN
    One of the more unexpected collaborations of the year, Brit-poppers Keane were joined by Somali-Canadian rapper K’Naan for this fine little sing-along duet. And this wasn’t a one-off: K’Naan co-wrote and sang on two tracks from Keane’s latest album Night Train. The other one, “Looking Back” is built around an interpolation of Bill Conti’s theme from Rocky.

    #96
    #96: “FIRE WITH FIRE” by SCISSOR SISTERS
    Four years ago, they were channeling Leo Sayer, but the lead single from the Sisters’ long-awaited third album Night Work sounds like a long lost movie soundtrack power-ballad by Survivor. If I were doing a countdown of my favorite videos of the year, this one would probably be in the Top 10. To me, it’s a just a perfect combination of song and visuals, and I have a weakness for gratuitous public displays of awesomeness.

    #95
    #95: “KING OF ANYTHING” by SARA BAREILLES
    “You’ve got opinions, man. We’re all entitled to ’em. But I never asked. So let me thank you for your time and try not to waste any more of mine…get outta here, fast.” Sara Bareilles makes her toast to the douchebags! Taylor Swift may name the names of the ex-boyfriends she’s writing about, but Sara Bareilles is the girlfriend I would never cross. She’d write a song taking me down with more withering disdain and biting sarcasm than a Sarah Palin speech – only way, way sweeter – and make me love the song enough to sing along with it and share it with everyone on my facebook page.

    #94
    #94: “THE RABBIT” by MIIKE SNOW
    What N*E*R*D is to the Neptunes, Miike Snow is to Bloodshy & Avant, the Swedish production duo behind Britney Spears’s “Toxic”. Miike Snow’s self-titled debut album has been likened to a cross between a-ha and Animal Collective, but this song sounds more like it might have been written for Adam Lambert. And it’s video is so NSFW: A bearded Arnold Jackson, dressed like an early 20th Century colonial governor and flanked by a harem of scantily clad and oh-so-flexible women (who all look like they came out of 80s rap videos), snorts the cartoon essence of 2 Live Crew during a re-enactment of the As Nasty As They Wanna Be cover shoot. Much sand humping ensues.

    #93
    #93: “I WANT THE WORLD TO STOP” by BELLE & SEBASTIAN
    Now that nobody’s paying attention, Stuart Murdoch and his band Belle & Sebastian (which he’d formed with ex-bandmate Stuart David in the mid-90s as a school project) are making some of the best music of their career as demonstrated on the Glaswegian band’s 8th studio album Belle & Sebastian Write About Love. I love the low-key urgency of this song, and it’s heightened in the video by the constantly shifting camera angles that suggest movement while the band members themselves stay planted in their spots. There’s also something endearingly un-rockstar-ish about the band’s stage presence. My facebook buddy Brian says of Stuart Murdoch: “he obviously has a fine sense of rhythm, [but] he looks and moves like someone who doesn’t, at all; he reminds me of my Uncle Gordon (MIT School of Engineering) back when he’d only had his first one or two strokes.”

    #92
    #92: “ON MELANCHOLY HILL” by GORILLAZ
    As romantic, sweet, and sad as its title would suggest. This is one of my favorite Damon Albarn vocals ever, understated, uncharacteristically unironic. I love the line “you are my medicine when you’re close to me”, and I always get strangely choked up when he gets to the part about the manatee.

    #91
    #91: “ANIMAL ARITHMETIC” by JONSI
    In which he lead singer of Iceland’s Sigur Ros demonstrates that he does indeed have a non-falsetto register. Also: percussion. Frenzied layers of booming and clashing percussion. The kick drum is ready for its close-up, Mr. DeMille.

    And that’s it for now. Click here for #90-81.

  • Three Bands from Three Decades in New Reunion Albums from O.M.D., Tonic, and Azure Ray

    Azure Ray’s ”Drawing Down the Moon”
    Every year brings its share of unlikely reunions, some welcome, some not so much. But this year sees three reunions from acts that few but the most devoted fans were even aware had broken up, or that they’d ever existed all that much outside of a semi-forgotten hit or two. Coincidentally, they each represent one of the last three decades of alternative pop and rock.

    The most recently broken up of the three groups is Azure Ray, the duo of singer-songwriters Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink, who, after releasing their fourth CD Hold On Love in 2003, both embarked on solo careers. Maria Taylor has since released three CDs of increasingly commercial folk-pop, while Orenda Fink, aside from her two solo albums, has also released music as leader of the band Art In Manila, and in O+S, a partnership with dj Scalpelist. Though their solo careers have taken them in diverging directions, neither of them have drifted too far from the haunted, delicately technologized southern gothic sounds they produced in the early ‘00s with songs like “Sleep” (heard pretty prominently on the soundtrack of The Devil Wears Prada) and “New Resolution” which boasted one of the last decade’s most strangely fascinating videos.

    Azure Ray “New Resolution” (1993)

    Their just-released reunion album Drawing Down the Moon sounds less like a “Now, where were we?” follow-up to the duo’s 2003 album than it reads as the proper follow-up to each of the individual singer-songwriters’ previous solo projects, as if the two roads diverging in the wood had merged back together. Produced by longtime associate Eric Bachmann (formerly of Archers of Loaf, currently of Crooked Fingers) who is shown on the back cover holding both women facing inward to his brawny southern bosom (it’s this kind of disturbing/amazing cover photography that makes me endlessly grateful for the endurance of the LP format). To my mind, their latest single is the closest thing to a potential radio hit as they’ve ever released.

    Azure Ray “Don’t Leave My Mind” (2010)

    Representing the 90s is Tonic who released their self-titled reunion album this spring and even scored a minor hit on the adult pop charts with a scrappily appealing acoustic/electric rocker called “Release Me”. Tonic is best known for their forbidding post-grunge classic “If You Could Only See”, a dark, Forensics Files-ready epistle from one man to the husband/boyfriend/lover of the woman he loves: “Maybe you’d understand why I feel this way about our love and what I must do / if could only see how blue her eyes can be when she says – when she says she loves me.” Cue the apocalyptically stabbing guitar hook and the trailer park murder plot.

    Tonic “If You Could Only See” (1996)

    Tonic released three albums in the late 90s, never replicating (or even approaching) the success (or the ubiquity) of that debut single. In the ensuing years lead singer Emerson Hart has pursued a solo career and in 2007 released one of my favorite recent pop ballads “I Wish the Best For You”. The new album largely steers clear of the shadowy intrigue of their biggest hit, opting instead for sunny pop/rock melodies that recall Vertical Horizon. My absolute favorite song from the record is called “Daffodils” and had I first heard it on the radio, I probably would have mistaken it for a Del Amitri reunion single – it’s got great harmonies on the chorus and a sweetly yearning chorus with Hart leaping up into a clear falsetto. You can check out samples of each of the new album’s track at the band’s website, and while there, leave ’em your e-mail and they’ll send you a free download of “Daffodils” for your troubles.

    Finally, there’s the synth-pop duo of Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys collectively known as Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, who, in the 80s scored a massive hit with “If You Leave” from the Pretty In Pink soundtrack. Though the group’s fortunes faded in the late 80s, they continued recording, releasing three studio albums in the 90s. Still their latest record, called History of Modern, marks the group’s first new music since since the Clinton Administration. Lead single “If You Want It” is a great big sing-along anthem that, as one YouTube commenter put it “sounds like x-mas”. It’s got a beautiful video as well, featuring a ballet routine as performed for the duo in a darkened theater. Really great stuff.

    Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark “If You Want It” (2010)

  • Boys Will Be Boys, and Men… Will Be Boys in Three Awesome New Videos

    Three terrific new videos by just-barely-under-the-radar artists center around men doing what men do best: being boys. Approaching the similar subject matter from three distinct points of view, from the simply fun and nostalgic, to the tragic-comic-pathetic, to the reflective and hopeful, they’re all individually great in their own right. But taken together, it seems that Philadelphia alt-hip-hop duo Chiddy Bang, indie blues duo The Black Keys, and slam poet Sage Francis have inadvertently created a coming of age suite that John Hughes would have loved.

    Already an international Top 10 hit, Chiddy Bang‘s debut single “The Opposite of Adults” (built around a sample of MGMT’s “Kids”) celebrates the carefree life of a kid – basketball, skateboarding, ogling girls at the playground – with rapper Chiddy (Chidera Anamege) promising (with apologies to Mommy) never to grow up. The video attaches cardboard cut-out looking adult faces to live action adolescent bodies as the duo relives all the various awesomenesses of their childhoods. Such as opening a box of cereal to find the prize (A Chiddy Bang 7″? Swwwweeet!).

    Chiddy Bang “The Opposite of Adults”

    The song may not be explicitly about childhood, but the video to the Black Keys‘s latest single, the Danger Mouse produced “Tighten Up” from their latest album Brothers, has to be one of the greatest videos about a lust triangle among the monkey bars. Singer Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney sit on a park bench watching as their sons (who, we learn in a hilarious exchange of dialogue before the song starts, may not be the best of pals anyway) compete for the attentions of an elementary school hottie. But their efforts to be the responsible, intervening grown-ups go horribly, horribly wrong.

    The Black Keys “Tighten Up”

    “It was the best of times. It was the end of times.” In this incredible new video from his latest album Li(f)e, Sage Francis sits among an array of chairs suggestive of a school classroom – only with a wooden coffin where the teacher’s desk might be. Taking a look inside, Francis finds a trove of snapshots and artifacts, and reflects variously on religion, media, and technology before drifting back to memories of his adolescence. His first crush. Discovering his passion for words. Discovering hip-hop. Contemplating suicide, and contemplating the things he wants from life. Contemplating the apocalyptic paranoia that is being a teenager, and contemplating the wisdom he’ll pass down to his children’s children if he’s lucky enough to live long enough to meet them.

    As the classroom chairs around him fill up, he’s both teacher and student in what Prince once called “this thing called life”. His verses are loaded with richly specific details – like the love note written in code and wrapped up in ten layers of Scotch tape, but deposited in the wrong locker – and poignantly self-deprecating punchlines. The video has a familial intimacy to it that culminates in a sweet little moment between Sage Francis and the kid who plays the young Sage Francis. It’s the kind of song and video that makes me want to write a deeply personal thank you note to the artist. (Thank you, Sage Francis.)

    Sage Francis “The Best of Times”