The 20 Best Tracks of 2011 (So Far)

20. “St. Peter’s Cathedral,” Death Cab for Cutie: Recently sober and happily married, the Codes & Keys chronicles Ben Gibbard’s  transition without feeling quite like the standard Rehab Record—a hackneyed, colossal bore—but it does toe the line at some points. In what is perhaps its peak of poppiness, “Underneath the Sycamore,” Gibbard sings “We are the same/ We are both saved/ Underneath the sycamore,” and I started to worry. Bart Simpson had a point when he said, “All the best bands are affiliated with Satan.” It needn’t go that far, but I find nothing ruins pop music more than close affiliation with Jesus. That a song called “St. Peter’s Cathedral” followed didn’t augur well. But whatever the opposite of “chagrin” is, that’s precisely what I felt when the initially (almost) a cappella vocals of “St. Peter’s” kicked in.The song is decidedly atheistic without being aggressively antitheistic (a rare musical feat) and it redeems the LPs line-toeing lyrical elements: Assuming Codes as autobiographical, “Cathedral” conveys Gibbard’s success in finding a degree of serenity, happiness, and hope without the crutches of religiosity or afterlife. The most engaging facet of James Frey’s controversial rehab “memoir” A Million Little Pieces was that, despite a throng of naysayers, Frey strove for sobriety without coming to believe that “a power greater than ourselves could restore [him] to sanity,” or deciding to “turn [his] will and [life] over to the care of God.”

Gibbard croons, ”[T]hese fictions only prove/ How much you’ve really got to lose,” then continues as thunderous drums kick in, accompanied by analog synth sounds that call to mind morse code, “It’s either quite a master plan/ Or just chemicals that help us understand/ That when our hearts stop ticking/ This is the end and there’s nothing past this.” The last phrase of “Cathedral”—”there’s nothing past this”—repeats as the song fades, and this sentiment makes the chipper closer “Stay Young, Go Dancing” something other than the cloying number it has the potential to seem. Ultimately, Codes isn’t about reclaiming righteousness, or some ethical or spiritual purity, it’s about not wasting what little life we’re allotted. About finding a reason to live in this life. And as such, the song serves as decryption key for the rest of the record.

19. “One for You, One for Me,” Bright Eyes: Ironically, Bright Eyes’ “One for You” could be (mis)taken as a song motivated by the opposite sentiment. In reality, the song is less about some grand spiritual truth, and more concerned with alienation. In the lackluster Cassadaga‘s finest moment, “Four Winds,” Conor Oberst sings, “The Bible’s blind, the Torah’s deaf, the Koran is mute/ If you burned them all together, you’d be close to the truth,” then continues in the song’s refrain, “When Great Satan’s gone/ The Whore of Babylon/ She just can’t sustain/ The pressure where it’s placed/ And she breaks.” “The Whore of Babylon,” of course, is generally taken by Biblical scholars to mean “the church” as an institution. And so the message of “Four Winds” seemed to be that when The Other, the enemy, ceases to exist, religion will prove not only unnecessary, but dangerously divisive. The song’s first line illustrates the ironic truth that the enemy is whoever it is that keeps insisting there is an enemy: “Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe/ There’s people always dying trying to keep them alive.” ”One for You, One for Me” picks up where this idea leaves off.

In this, the final song on what is alleged to be the final Bright Eyes LP, Oberst asks “How did we get so far away from us?” in a bridge which divides two verses in which curiously contrasted personages and conditions are counted off: “[O]ne for the Führer, one for his child bride/ One for the wedding, one for the suicide.” The song wraps with the line “[Y]ou and me, that is an awful lie—It’s I and I” and in doing so, it succinctly explicates an idea that has been increasingly present in Bright Eyes’ oeuvre: We are more the same than we are different and treating each other as The Other, as enemies and perpetual competitors, makes life much lousier than it need be. This is as good a place as any for Bright Eyes, as an entity, to end. As a project that originated in raw, trembling songs about loneliness and malaise (which were almost always superior musical creations to the band’s later work), it’s interesting to see such evolution. It’s difficult, in some ways, to reconcile the fact that the man who quite convincingly sang “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” and “Take It Easy” is the same man now singing “One for You, One for Me” with equivalent conviction.

Musically, the song works better than almost everything else on the record. It flows smoothly, and an undercurrent of ambient noises and what sounds like dissonant synth woodwinds and brass feels etherial—simultaneously doleful and complacent, expressive, perhaps, of the realization that existence, sad as is often is, doesn’t always have to be that way—as it floats atop a grounding, almost martial snare beat. Punctuated by little digital notes and, at its peak moments, a guitar that feels somewhat out of place (though not unpleasantly so), “One for You” ends up feeling like falling asleep after getting a good piece of news on what’s been an otherwise terrible day. Which, arguably, is a very concise way to summarize the arc of Bright Eyes.

18. “Satellite,” The Kills: 2008′s Midnight Boom was a frenzied record in the best sense; a record I’d call “freewheeling” if the back jacket blurbs on every McSweeny’s-endorsed author’s text hadn’t ruined the word for me. It was unpredictable from track to track, characterized by unbridled moodiness. The very unsexy, very phlegmy cough that opens the rather sexy “Cheap & Cheerful” has always, for me, served as ideal symbol of the record. Its high points—the off-kilter and wonderfully abrasive “Last Day of Magic,” the wistful “Black Balloon,” the lyrically ingenious and perfect penultimate number “What New York Used to Be” (see how long it takes you to figure out what it is that sex, New York, drugs, love, &c. used to be), and the acoustic and piano closer “Goodnight, Bad Morning”—put on display a duo that had the range to do just about anything, which is why it’s so disappointing that Blood Pressures seems more or less like ten takes of the same song. I’m reminded of Filter’s debut Short Bus: It was a lead single, eight versions of the same song, and two versions of an obligatory slow piece. You were in luck if you happened to like the three songs which comprised the record, and I did. I also happen to like the one song Blood Pressures seems to be trying to perfect, but I think that perfection was nailed down with the deliciously dark “Satellite.”

Allison Mossheart and Jamie Hince’s voices intermingle ideally, sometimes indistinguishable, sometimes seeming like a single schizoid beast, sometimes seeming like two people face-to-face and singing the exact same jealous sentiments at each other. The lyrics in general don’t make a whole lot of sense (a big let down considering how lyrically enjoyable most of Boom was), but what becomes the song’s refrain—”I loved her too long/ Don’t love her, too”—is comprehensible enough and, I imagine, universal. It’s a cryptic way of summarizing the sentiment I have about several of my ex-girlfriends (the good ones): It would be nice if they happened to join a convent once we were through or, at the very least, if they moved far away and never returned. Because nothing’s worse than watching someone you know (inevitable in smaller cities) get together with someone you once loved and thinking to yourself, “My god, I know how she fucks”—which is actually less about the sex than it is about the intimacy; sex just happens to be the most corporeal approximation of that intimacy, of that love. Giving voice to this jealousy, Mossheart and Hince’s voices are intense and, as always,  sexy. I find it hard to believe that The Kills could produce a piece that didn’t drip at least a little bit of sexual tension.

One of the best things about bands that don’t find the use of electronics Sith-like and abhorrent is the ability to produce things that sound unnatural (in the best sense of that word). The song’s guitars are wonderfully clipped and fuzzy; the abbreviated and Pro-Tooled treatment of them makes them sound tightly wound, like controlled chaos, like gnashing teeth, and white knuckles. Stacked atop the plodding drumbeat, “Satellite” is received as a heavy package, wrapped in brown paper folded so severely and precisely as to have deadly corners. Most of the rest of the album comes across similarly, like a line of less perfectly wrapped packages.

17. “Greater Vultures,” Coma Cinema: I’d never heard of Coma Cinema before being struck by this album’s cover art, and lured in by the fact that the artist himself is giving the record away for free (though I did, of course, end up buying it because I will never relent in my insistence that supporting the artist is mandatory). The album is solid, but not spectacular; “Eva Angelina” and “Greater Vultures” are its best musical moments. “Vultures,” however, takes the day because its chorus is so evocative, playing in different ways with the notion of willingness to “eat what the vultures will not.”

The song begins with a mournful analog drone; a guitar, gently strummed in rocking chair-style appears; and there’s something ineffably excellent about the way the drums are introduced. Reverbed vocals are unusually fronted in this decidedly lo-fi song. And though I’ve grown absolutely enraptured by the lo-fi/dreampop sound, this vocal-fronting is a pleasant change, and one which makes it almost easy to overlook the fact that song is strung together in a fairly delicate fashion: warbly synth, snare, and hi-hat are the primary vehicles which allow the track to move forward—if one pays close attention, “Vultures” seems to mostly comprise empty space. The lo-fi analog organ is well-juxtaposed with the alt-country guitar strum that accompanies every iteration of the question: Are you willing to eat what the vultures will not?

Between the punctuative guitar strumming, the vocalist’s stuffy-nosed middle American drawl, and the repeated references to birds of prey, I can’t listen to this song without thinking of how incredibly lonely it can seem in the middle of this country. In the flat plains, wide and bright blue skies (called to mind by the singer’s etherial background cooing) can seem unbelievably oppressive: The flatness of the earth allows one to see the roundness of it, and the sky looks like an enclosing dome. That agoraphobic sense of nothingness one gets there, the feeling of insignificance, prompts the sort of desperation that would definitely compel me to literally or metaphorically eat what the vultures will not if it meant a chance of human connection. Even when faced by the vastness of the world/galaxy/universe, the illusion of safety in numbers persists. “Greater Vultures” conveys that desperation for continued connection, closing with the utterance, “I am willing to eat what the vultures will not.”

16. “Playtime,” Junior Boys: The music released so far in 2011 has an odd number of unifying themes. Coming to my attention late last year with Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti and Deerhunter’s “Coronado,” continuing in a big way in January with Destroyer’s Kaputt, then in February with Iron & Wine, unironic saxophone solos have returned. Equally prevalent is a certain sort of nocturnal music; tunes that are incredibly evocative of the night—fucking, drugging, dying, &c. The Weeknd and The Antlers released entire LPs of such music. “Playtime,” by the Junior Boys, is that sort of song.

Opening with a grating and dissonant hum, “Playtime” soon gives way to plangent keys that sound artificial, a bit like my 1986 laptop Casio keyboard on steroids. A simple 808 beat (also, I think, available on that laptop Casio)  is steady throughout the track, giving way only once near the four-minute mark for the lush strumming of a harp. Vocalist Jeremy Greenspan’s mellow breathiness is reminiscent of George Michael at his best and the song, at an intimidating seven-minutes, well-replicates the sort of long, post-breakup night one could imagine a pre-”Faith” Michael scoring: Sitting at a dimly lit a hotel bar with no intention of moving on or picking someone up, and ready to hiss at whoever turns the house lights up at evening’s end. Nothing’s worse, at the end of that sort of awful evening, than being forced to find something else to do. Going into the seven-minute song, I always have the irrational fear that I don’t have time to see it through, that it will feel interminable; after about thirty seconds, I’m gripped by the opposite fear: I want nothing less than for it to be over, because then I’ll have to find something else to listen to.

Lyrically, the song seems to back up the emotion it creates. Greenspan, amping up that moody tension, sings, “Come a little closer/ Stare a little longer, like competitors do/ Because this fight’s forever/ And if it breaks up we’ll have nothing to do.” Even the healthiest of relationships is always on some level a struggle for power, but if it weren’t, all relationships would be awfully stagnant. Human satisfaction is born out of victory over resistance. “Playtime” seems to understand this and, listening, I imagine myself sitting in that hotel bar, working out way to explain to someone that I’d rather spend the rest of my life fighting with her, than I would spend it bored to tears by someone acquiescent. “Playtime” gets gradually quieter through its last minute. And though I’m generally not a fan of the fade-out as a technique to end songs, in this case it works because it’s emotionally consistent and 100%  necessary.

15. “Strange,” The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: It took me ten spins to grow fond of The Pains’ Belong. I was instantly a fan of their self-titled debut and, the follow-up—produced by Flood and mixed by Alan Moulder: men responsible for some of my favorite records ever—seemed a guaranteed hit, until I listened to it. Sure, I didn’t want the band to pigeonhole themselves in the mid-80s twee sound they’d debuted with, but I was somewhat disappointed that they’d evolved so predictably. Like most of the original shoegaze bands, the debut was a airy and dreamy affair, followed up by something a bit more ragged; and during the recording sessions, someone had suggested, “Hey, what if we distorted the guitars and, like, turned the volume way up?” Belong follows this formula to a degree, but is, after consideration, more than that. And while critics made a lot of fuss over its ho-hum, formulaic opener, “Belong,” I cleave to its closer, “Strange.”

Over a driving percussion line, a jangle-pop guitar strum coupled with a subtle synth line recalls Flood & Moulder’s work with both Billy Corgan and My Bloody Valentine without seeming unpleasantly derivative. That alone makes me nostalgic for being thirteen, smoking cigarettes out my bedroom window, thinking about how lifelong devotion to a girl whose name I wouldn’t remember in six months was definitely the destiny of my heart. By the time I was fourteen, I’d quit trying to please people, trying to weasel my way into places I’d never belong, and I’d discovered the joys of black lipstick and pissing people off. In the years between Joy Division and the rise of Marilyn Manson, this made me a complete enigma: It was pre-Columbine, so I think people were confused as to whether I was going to try to fuck them or kill them. At home, I sat lonely and played air guitar to Corgan’s “Mayonnaise.” But eventually, there was another guy in the same make-up. And then, there were a few girls. “Strange” makes me long—actually ache rather painfully—for that time. ”Don’t tell me that a day will come/ When we dress like everyone/ ‘Cos I can tell you’re strange like me,” vocalist Berman sings. We were all always misfits, but all the trappings—the fishnets, and black boots, and nose rings, and eyeliner—were what allowed us to finally identify each other, and begin forging little alliances.

I remember thinking in 1995, when the Pumpkins released their single “1979,” that it made me queerly nostalgic for the present moment. That seems impossible, but the feeling the song gave me, I guess, was one of certainty that things wouldn’t always be the way they were right then: I wouldn’t always be sneaking out in the middle of the night to try and smoke a joint wrapped in onionskin pages from the Book of Revelation; the biggest drag in my life wouldn’t always be something so simple as an eight-hour dishwashing shift. Things would only get worse, and “1979″ made me begin to miss what had yet to happen. I’ve heard that it had the same effect on people who, at that time, really had a right to miss 1979. Somewhere out there, there’s probably a fourteen-year-old kid, wearing whatever passes as rebellious these days, who gets a funny feeling from  The Pains’ “Strange.” And then there’s me, and the rest of my people (wherever they may be), who are listening to the same song on their way to a dismally unfulfilling job, and finally we have a right to feel nostalgic. “Strange” makes me feel the way “1979″—still one of my favorite songs ever—used to, except now, I’ve earned it.

I remember when everyone traded in their Chucks for the same pair of Nike hiking boots. When everyone ditched their Docs for Adidas sandals worn around the house, over white socks. I remember when a friend of mine stopped wearing shirts that had sleeves too short to cover her tattoos. “Don’t say the hour’s growing late/ Don’t say we should be going straight/ ‘Cos I can tell you’re strange like me,” Berman sings. I may have outgrown my leather pants and lipstick, but I do miss the ability to pick my people out of a crowd. Sometimes, I’ll look around at the bar I’m tending and wonder, “Is she like me? What about her?” “Strange” is about the bliss in knowing who belongs where, but it’s equally about knowing that any assumption that this is a permanent state is a hopeless one.

14. “Life Fantastic,” Man Man: An outfit I’ve been meaning to look into for years, Man Man creates the sort of wonderfully baroque darkness that keeps music intriguing. Recently, I saw Of Montreal in concert and, in the wings of the theatre, I watched the stage show wondering what in the fuck those people were on. Man Man’s music prompts a similar response from me, but the music seems more calculated, less po-mo, as Moe Szyslak defined it: “Weird for the sake of being weird.” After spinning Man Man’s LP, I felt about the music a lot like I did about Marilyn Manson when I was fifteen, before I realized that the latter was just Kiss fronted by Alice Cooper, with music that better matched their outfits. There’s something inherently appealing about inscrutability (see #13)—it’s why Wolverine was always more interesting without a backstory.

Even without lyrics, the title track from their ’11 LP Life Fantastic sounds ominous, wicked. Musically, I’m reminded of The Doors’ darker moments if they’d had better audio fidelity.; vocally, I’m spurred to think of a less gravelly and emphysematic Tom Waits. Singer Honus Honus’ delivery reminds me of a less unhinged and lispy Isaac Brock (and I mustn’t be the only one to make this connection, as Man Man have toured in support of Modest Mouse). But despite all the other aural delights, the lyrics still improve the ordeal. “I’m like a corpse in plastic/ You find while at a picnic/ When you’re just there to kick it/ Now you have to call the police/ And report somethin’ wicked,” “Fantastic” begins; a fairly eloquent metaphor for the exigencies of existence, i.e.: Life is what happens while you’re making other plans, &c. The track continues, “The scene, it turns so grisly/ And the children, they are crying/ You hand them black umbrellas/ Tell ‘em that the world is dying.”

The song’s perky piano seems trepidatious in the choruses and somewhat resigned throughout the verse sections in the face of the discordant string section’s punctuative passages, which sounds like sighing. The explosive drum barrage near the song’s end reflects that wicked, grisly panic of which the lyrics speak, and the song’s return to verse form in the end, underscored by delicate flute chirping, as Honus repeats the two words “life” and “fantastic,” makes one wonder about the phrase. Is it totally sarcastic? “Life? Fantastic.” Or is it sincere, appreciative of the often seemingly unfortunate circumstances of the world. “Life? Fantastic!” The bridge between the first and second verses makes the distinction more ambiguous. “It’s how you dress your scars/ And let them breathe,” Honus explains, but it’s unclear if this explication of the human condition is a lamentation.

13. “Ffunny Ffrends,” Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Speaking of inscrutability, Pitchfork’s Ian Cohen described the debut LP by UMO as ”[S]omething eerily extraterrestrial…as if it were something that fell from the sky completely intact…[y]ou want to poke at it, prod it, and try to carbon date it.” That may be the best record review I’ve seen all year because, indeed, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s entire record, while rather enveloping, is a complete fucking mystery.

I wonder sometimes if I would feel the same way about Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” if I’d never seen Mark Romanek’s sublime video for the radio edit of the song (one of only two music videos permanently enshrined in the Museum of Modern Art). Yes, I’d heard and enjoyed the song before I saw the video, but somehow, the two have become inextricably linked in my head. The song sounds to me like the sepia-toned grimy imagery. The first time I heard the curiously spelled “Ffunny Ffrends,” I was staring at the improbable object on the LPs cover, trying to the point of debilitating headache to figure out what the hell it was (nerd points if you know what that linked image is from). The music, perhaps, became inextricably linked with this not unpleasant, but complete confusion.

The only lyric I can make out completely is “Would you care if I die?” and that’s probably because I was told it was in there; the chorus might be “I’ve lied all of my life/ All of my life/ For my funny friend.”  And that’s all I’ve got. Usually, I’m steered more towards love of a song by articulate lyrics, but sometimes the opposite happens—music is a bi-hemispheric process, anyways. And the persistent beat is a great one; coupled with the fuzzy bass, the song seems to have a good but of groove going on. The repeated guitar melody is preposterously catchy. The way the (male!) vocalist’s decidedly effeminate voice wraps like a vine around that guitar lick is irresistible. With all the fuzz (and what are arguably similar debut LP covers), there will definitely be some comparison to Sleigh Bells.

Overall, the song, beginning with that moribund question, seems less like an artifact from the sky than it does a found and warped home videotape from a year before you were born featuring your mother and her brother arguing about something. Your mother ends up crying, but because you can’t make out the words, you don’t know why.

12. “I Don’t Want Love,” The Antlers: I might argue that almost all of The Antlers Burst Apart is about not wanting to bother with any of the elements of romantic relationships anymore. This is certainly true of at least five of its ten songs, probably true of its instrumental number (which Peter Silberman describes as being “about that moment when you realize you’re completely lost”), and debatably true of three of its other numbers. It’s definitely the case with its clearly titled opener, “I Don’t Want Love.”

Sure, Weezer’s Pinkerton opens with the song “Tired of Sex,” but that song, in reality, is more about annoyance with the meaningless groupie fucking Rivers Cuomo had probably gotten used to. “I Don’t Want Love,” in the context of the album, seems to be about more than that. “If I leave before you,” Silberman sings, “And I walk out alone/ Keep your hands to yourself/ When you follow me home.” The sentiment seems to be less, “Why can’t I have a fulfilling relationship based on love?” (a la Weezer) and more “Just leave me alone.” Indeed, the next line is plain: “I don’t want love.” And maybe because of the year I’ve personally had, I find that to be an exceptionally refreshing statement. I was joking around with a coworker, designing a line of dismotivational posters—Suicide: Because, statistically speaking, you’re probably insignificant, will make no contribution to the world, and if it makes no difference whether you live or die, why bother with all the bullshit?—when I blurted out one I didn’t really consider before I said it. “Sex: Generally a disappointment, but if you’re not always chasing it, your friends will think you’re either pathetic or gay.” To my surprise, this met with approval. At the moment, I don’t feel like chasing tail. And I don’t really want love. Burst Apart, it would seem, is finally the album for people like me. I don’t want love. And there are enough love songs out there as it is.

Besides all of that, it doesn’t hurt that the song is a gorgeous number, well-delivered by Silberman’s falsetto which is, just behind the lyrics, the selling point of the piece. The lines “We wake up with pounding heads/ Bruised down below/ I should have built better walls/ Or slept in my clothes” wouldn’t have the same effect if growled sung monotonously by [shudder] Matt Derninger of indie darlings The National. Silberman’s vocals convey both delicacy and intensity. The more shoegazey elements of Hospice-era Antlers seem to have vanished, but what remains is something more than boiler-plate indie rock. A white noise of synth provides a subtle but stellar palette on which the song builds. And its climax comes with the final phrase of this delicious invective, “If I see you again/ Desperate and stoned/ Keep your prison locked up/ And I will leave my gun at home.” Burst Apart seems to be an album about withdrawing. Not in a self-destructive, Downward Spiral kind of way, but instead about wanting, at least for a while, to be uncomplicatedly uninvolved. And frankly, I don’t really trust anyone who hasn’t at some point felt this way.

11. “Bloom,” Radiohead: As I wrote in my review of the full album, “Bloom” is fascinating. A colleague of mine got baked the other day and listened to The King of Limbs for the first time (for the record, and none of which is meant derogatorily): I didn’t even know he was any sort of Radiohead fan, his definition of Excellent Music will involve the name John Mayer more than once, and this Lp-spinning may have been at his girlfriend’s insistence), and when he told me about it, his response was more or less, “What the hell was that mess?” I wanted to sternly correct him, but that was my first impression of “Bloom,” too.

“Bloom” makes great use of dissonance and subversion. The speedy opening strings don’t seem to mesh quite correctly with either the drum & bass-style looped percussion, or the repeating keyboard pulsations. The persistent ringing, like someone who won’t quit running a wet finger around the lip of a wine glass, doesn’t help. And I can’t even begin to guess at the time signatures here. Something most definitely feels off. The first time I heard the song, it felt sloppy and haphazard—especially when what sounds like upright bass kicks in, playing a groove that seems to belong to an entirely different song. Yorke’s vocals, when they commence, are strangely delivered (and, I’ve found, hard to sing). I was getting dressed for work and, though I’d usually prefer to pay exclusive attention to such an eagerly awaited LP, I was too excited to hear it, while also running late. Regardless, my response was indeed, “What the hell is this mess?”

But after a few listens, it becomes clear that the song is not a gyroscope about to spin out of control; in fact, the song feels like very well-controlled chaos. “Bloom” seems to me the closest Radiohead’s ever come to approximating the aesthetic for which Nine Inch Nails is best known—Reznor’s project is built on loops, dissonance, and the sound of things about to fall apart. “Bloom” seems simultaneously aggressive and fragile—the repeated lyric “turning in somersaults” sums it up well. And the occasional horns which drift in and out (because horns are, as I said, permitted again in 2011) make “Bloom” feel connected to the era of black and white films, where sad, dim streets are fogged by dry ice, and broken men wander aimlessly, alone. If this list were about musical technique alone, “Bloom” might actually take the day.

The song’s cryptic lyrics are an excellent introduction to what I maintain is a concept record more or less about why suicide sometimes seems like the better decision. “So why does this still hurt?” Yorke asks, then answers himself by saying, advising others like him, “Don’t blow your mind with why.”

10. “Powa,” Tune-Yards: Tune-Yards’ 2009 Bird Brains earned a 5/5-star rating from me, and one of the most delightful things about that album is its mythology. Merril Garbus recorded the whole thing herself using Audacity, a program I have on my own Mac. Theoretically, I am properly equipped to cobble together an album of that quality, though of course I’m unable. Something about that is remarkable. But it’s not just the story about that album that makes it great, track by track there’s not a miss on the disc. I was intrigued to find that she’d so quickly followed up the LP with something else, and equally worried that having at her disposal a wider array of resources might ruin things. I needn’t have been. Whokill sounds like nothing else in my collection, except maybe Bird Brains.

At the center of that album, however, is its least idiosyncratic song, but nevertheless its most appealing. “Powa” is a ’50s-style jam that proves on a different level the same thing Whokill proved as an LP. Essentially endless resources didn’t make Tune-Yards any less remarkable; working within conventional song structure and with conventional instruments doesn’t make Garbus any less impressive. The vocal performance on this track is nothing short of remarkable. In its introduction, Garbus sounds like a twee pixie; when she sings “Lightning dances in my head/ Devil, devil, whoa/ Burning steady as a motor/ Not a pebble, pebble, whoa/ Baby, bring me home to bed/ I need you to press me down before my body flies away from me,” its hard to believe she’s not a woman plucked straight from a Harlem church choir; just before the outro, she hits an extended high-C in the style of early Mariah Carey (except, you know, not annoying).

The lyrics, in keeping with the album’s themes of internal conflict, gender roles, and body image, include a couple of exciting turns of phrase. The aforementioned, “Baby, bring me home to bed/ I need you to press me down before my body flies away from me,” is one example; more provocative is, “Mirror, mirror on the wall/ Can you see my face at all?/ My man likes me from behind/ Tell the truth I never mind/ ‘Cos you bomb me with lies, humiliations everyday/ You bomb me so many times I never find my way.” The song as a whole appears to be about the occasional giving in to the comfort we find in the places we’ve all been programmed, by a lifetime of media saturation, to find comfort. “Your power inside/ It rocks me like a lullaby,” she sings. In my last relationship, would it have always been the best decision for me to watch Americas Next Top Model with my girlfriend? Yes. Did I sometimes just say “Fuck it,” and stay late at work to watch baseball while drinking liquor? You bet. Did it feel good? Absolutely. “Hey, honey, wait/ I’m a rebel, rebel,” Garbus sings at the song’s beginning. “Powa” is about the ways in which people who know better end up rebelling: By not rebelling.

09. “Don’t Carry It All,” The Decemberists: The Decemberists held the title of My Favorite Band from 2005-2008 (when I discovered Deerhunter), so I always expect their new LPs to be something revelatory. Oddly, it took me two years to really get into 2006′s Crane Wife and, because I despise the legitimate theatre and, by extension, rock operas, I don’t expect to ever enjoy The Hazards of Love (though “The Rake’s Song” is actually up there on my list of Top Decemberists Tracks). Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, then, that I didn’t enjoy The King Is Dead for a long and disappointing month. It wasn’t until a friend of mine read my list of favored tracks and explained to me that what I’d always adored about the Decemberists were the elements of British folk, which is why I felt The King Is Dead was such a disappointing departure: It’s American folk. Hell, the title of the LP tips its hand. Once that distinction was made, I changed the way I was listening to it and, lo, King became one of my favorite releases of the year.

“Don’t Carry It All” is a killer opening track that smacks of alt-country and other traditional Americana. Prominent harmonica is featured, fiddles play in the background, tambourines rattle. But Colin Meloy’s vocals are intertwined with Gillian Welch’s giving the song an exceptionally pastoral feel. And, if I’m not mistaken, the bass here (and on the record in general) is more prominent than it’s ever been with the band. “Let the yoke fall from our shoulders/ Don’t carry it all, don’t carry it all,” Meloy sings in the chorus. And all in all, the song feels like the band has shed the weight of pretense (the song only contains one word I had to look up and it’s the proper name of a flower) and just decided to play.

Though nowhere nearly as good as Radiohead’s In Rainbows, King feels to me like the same sort of endeavor. I’ve never found The Decemberists pretentious, but there’s no doubt that the twelve-minute prog-rock of “The Island,” from The Crane Wife was carefully calculated to achieve a certain epic, intimidating effect. And The Hazards of Love was quite the affair of pomp, indeed. Radiohead released a series of records that were designed to be innovative, calculated to impress, which is why Rainbows felt like such a breath of fresh air: It was just the sound of five guys playing music they felt like playing. “Don’t Carry It All” embodies this same spirit more than any other single song on the record. Every time I listen to it, I feel like I’ve just watched a friend bounce back from a nasty divorce because “Don’t Carry It All” positively drips with the enthusiasm of relief.

08. “Chinatown,” Destroyer: Aside from last year’s Ariel Pink record, Destroyer’s Kaputt is the best example of the Steely Danification of contemporary indie rock. Jazz arrangements, saxophone solos and, hell, whole horn sections are no longer verboten. In the world of indie rock, there’s always been an incredibly irritating distinction between cool-uncool and uncool-uncool. Cool-uncool is drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon because it’s lowbrow and uncool to do so. Uncool-uncool is drinking Bud Light because it’s lowbrow and uncool to do so. And until recently, it ways uncool-uncool to suggest sax be prominently featured on your next record and, for that matter, to remember that the soprano sax even exists.

“Chinatown” feels like 1984. I havew a few snatches of memory from that year of my life (my fourth), and they all involve walking down the avocado-colored carpet at the mall, looking at the chocolate- and  pumpkin-colored store facades, smelling the ubiquitous ashtrays, and listening to songs that sound vaguely like “Chinatown.” There may or may not be half a dozen keyboards playing at once; a guitar is present, but takes the backseat; and clear vocals are slurred by someone who might be wine-drunk. Brass floats in and out of the song like cigarette smoke and, for a few bars, the song becomes a male-female duet. The bass feels incidental; the song is entirely treble driven. This is more or less how I recall all music sounding until about 1988, when everything suddenly sounded like Guns ‘N’ Roses or Bon Jovi. And it’s not at all unpleasant.

“Chinatown,” no matter what else it might be called (a derivative rip-off, for instance), is undeniably smooth. “Chinatown,” unlike all the nocturnal records of 2011, is sunset music. It’s driving-a-convertible-at-sunset-music. Just having it in the background makes you feel 10% sexier. Having “Chinatown” on in the background makes you feel like you can dance, and like you absolutely must unbutton one more button of your top. Smooth. So smooth that I don’t care how abstruse the lyrics are. Bejar mumbles, “The wind and the rain/ To your detriment you try to explain/ A government swallowed up in the squall/ I can’t walk away at all in Chinatown.” I don’t know what that means. But thanks to the slickness of its delivery and the music in which the line floats, I don’t really care.

07. “Lindisfarne,” James Blake: I remember being very amused when in 1999 I discovered Spacemen 3′s Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To. Around that time I was taking every drug I could find. I had a pharmacist friend who would sometimes find pills in the cuffs of her pants, and I would take them indiscriminately. This was long before drugs.com’s helpful pill identification database or erowid.org. And around that time, I had a friend who said, “If it wasn’t for the way music sounded when I smoke weed, I probably wouldn’t smoke weed.” And in all the antidrug lit, they forget to mention things like that. Maybe the biggest reason people take drugs is that drugs are fun. Drugs, often times, make the world a lot like it was when you were a child: Weird, bewildering, fascinating, new. But eventually, I hit an age where it was no longer worth risking jailtime to keep using. Then I hit an age where it was no longer worth risking my health (later came thirty: the age when it just seemed like a waste of money). But what to do for that particular flavor of fun? The answer: Listen to James Blake.

The entirety of Blake’s self-titled LP is a lot like getting good and high. Some of it is confusing and offputting; some of it is confusing and wonderful. A number of songs almost made this list—”Unluck,” “The Wilhelm Scream,” “Limit to Your Love,” “To Care”—but in the end, I decided the “Lindisfarne” suite (broken into Part I & Part II on the LP) embodies every excellent quality of the record all at once. It’s disorienting. Part I is a capella and mostly spoken word with very few of the oddly spaced fragmented phrases sung. The single element of “music” that appears is more or less the sound effect made famous by William Shatner’s performance of “Rocket Man” (about 1:03 in). Those vocals, by the way, are almost irrecognizably computer altered; Blake takes the popular abuse of auto-tune so far that it becomes an art—he’s the fucking Jackson Pollock of auto-tune. Once you decipher the words, they don’t make a whole lot of sense as sentences, but as small parcels of information, they’re quite vivid. “Looking farther than I can see…She’ll take a shining to me,” Blake semi-sings. “Won’t tomorrow come?” he asks. This part of the song is 2:43 and seems much longer if A) you don’t know that and B) if you can’t see the timer. I had acid trips where I perceived the entire world like this.

Part I is connected to Part II by the shared lyric “Beacon, don’t fly too high,” which is strangely charged with emotion, despite the fact that you have to do a lot of projecting to make that sentiment make sense. And when Part I finally gives way to the sad, gentle melody and mechanized drum pulse of Part II, those spoken and computer-garbled vocals become clear strains: The one jumbled digital mess becomes five James Blakes, all in different auto-tuned tones, but finally grounded by an incredibly delicate, unaltered human element—James Blake. “Cute, but I’ll take the bus/ With fees and favours gone/ Cracks in savers pass/ And a white that sometimes shone.” Blake’s lyrics are, again, mostly inscrutable, but they’re delivered in such a way as to seem both melancholy and relaxed—”sad, but chill” is the most succinct explication of “Lindisfarne” (which is, for the record, an English isle with less than 200 inhabitants) I’ve ever delivered. And I had immobile spells I spent whacked on Vicodin where the whole world felt just like this.

There’s a scene in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation where a Native American, who may or may not be stoned, caresses protagonist Susan Orlean’s face and says, “I can see your sadness. It’s lovely.” On “Lindisfarne,” I can hear Blake’s. And it is. Lovely.

06. “Confetti,” Cold Cave: Cherish the Light Years, a record I don’t really remember discovering, is a creeper for Best of the Year so far. There’s not a miss on the disc, but as I wasn’t in the mood for impeccably produced goth bombast this season, I didn’t see it coming. Light Years is another collection which is unabashedly referential of the ’80s, a seeming amalgam of Joy Division and early-to-mid-career Cure, with smatterings of Depeche Mode, and vocals by a less irritating Peter Murphy (of Bauhaus). But it takes this referentiality and builds on it. The LP, despite its obvious influences, is clearly a product of the 21st century.

“Confetti” is dance goth. The completely sour synth notes that twinkle as the song opens are almost wince-provoking, but actually quite delicious. Equally tasty is the simple, echoing guitar riff that introduces the song before dropping out completely, deferring to multiple synth lines layered in a way that’s somewhat reminiscent of “Ringfinger,” from ’89′s Pretty Hate Machine. Front to back, the track is simultaneously upbeat and disappointed-sounding, and post-vocals, there’s a certain synth line that vaguely resembles a human voice that gives the music a resigned and hopeless feeling (while still never becoming undanceable—thanks to Trent Reznor for twenty years of lessons on just how to do that). All of this perfectly underscores the song’s lyrical component.

The song’s first line—”Waiting for the stars to align/ There is a restless rain cloud in my mind”— couldn’t be much gothier without the words “crying,” “eyeliner,” and “clove cigarette,” being bandied about. But mastermind Wesley Eisold’s lyrics never come off as limp or cheesy; they are, in fact, one of the song’s best features. “I feel guilty being alive/ When so many beautiful people have died,” he sings. And it becomes clear to me why it is I like this song: It’s about the condition of the reluctant villain. Our cultural stories make much of the reluctant hero, hesitant about embracing his destiny (ahem, Mr. Potter). But we rarely consider how discomfiting it is to be considered a villain. There’s rightly no pity lost on Hitlers and Genghis Khans, but what about those folks unjustly suspected of everyday betrayals? Some of us, myself definitely included, seem to draw from others expectations of the worst. People, on more than one occasion, have actually been surprised when our first interaction involves me being nice and, when they tell me so, they don’t understand why it is I look a little upset. If before we’ve interacted in any way, folks assume I’m a monster, well, that’s rather unpleasant to know. ”Confetti” explains why all the bad guys in every toy line always had cooler costumes, and why the ensembles of the depressed goth crowd are always more interestingly put together than the Tommy- & Ralph-clad folks who’ve never been considered misfits: “It’s important that evil people look good on the outside,” Eisold sings. This is because “evil” people feel so bloody awful on the inside. Indeed, restless rainclouds lurk inside their minds. In this vein, Eisold continues, “I may never get it right/ My chemicals, they balance in some other light.”

In the chorus, he muses, “I never thought that we wouldn’t rule the world/ I always think we will/ I keep my teeth gnashed still.” Maybe this is one of those you-had-to-be-there kind of things but, when one is always suspected of the worst and deemed “evil,” it seems only fair that one actually get to reap the rewards that the villains of our cultural mythology always do (at least for a while). There’s a line spoken by Abbé Faria in the 2002 remake of The Count of Monte Cristo: “Do not commit the crime for which you now serve the sentence.” But if that sentence is a life sentence, I have to ask, “Why not?” If I’m always to be automatically considered a villain no matter what I do, I might as well just go for world domination.

Critical Breakdown for Other Nerds: “Confetti” is the song Severus Snape would have sung before he was ever actually a Death Eater, when he was just a kid, of whom people expected the worst.

05. “Slow Motion,” Panda Bear: A version of this song was released last autumn on a limited edition 7″. I liked it fine. When the whole LP was released earlier this year, I found it exceptional as I expected, and “Slow Motion” stood out as the most dramatic of its tracks. I was pleasantly surprised to find, however, that the LP version of the song had been slightly embellished and better produced. The result: A superlative, hypnotic jam. The most noticeable difference is a sound that explodes just after the first cluster of drumbeats—something like taking a hammer to an electrified piece of sheet metal sitting a foot underwater (listen to the song: I’m not crazy). The noise reverberates and adds a perfect sort of punctuation that the 7″version of the track lacked.

Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) has always been excellent at turning noise into music, but he does so in a way that’s different from other auteurs who’ve made their name doing the same (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Autechre, Nine Inch Nails). Tomboy, as a whole, lacks a lot of the layers of not-necessarily-musical noises that Lennox’s 2007 effort—the impeccable, but sometimes borderline inaccessible Person Pitch—was defined by. Typical of the 2011 LP, ”Slow Motion” is a huge step in the direction of traditional pop structure. Despite seeming almost completely accessible, if one really pays attention to the track, there remains an astonishing amount of not-necessarily-musical noise in the mix. And though it’s less prominent than the layered noise on, say, “Bros,” it’s still essential to the song.

Lennox said he wanted the songs on Tomboy to focus on rhythm and he certainly succeeded with “Slow Motion.” There’s an completely compelling rhythm to every element of the song, from the repeated piano chords and drumbeats to the vocals—vocals structured in an almost litany-like fashion. The verses make excellent use of parallel sentence structure; the bridges make excellent use of repetition to the point that they sound incantatory (“Everyone knows what they always say,” repeated eight times in quick succession). It’s a testament to the craftsmanship behind this track that, for all its parallelism and repetition, it never gets boring, only disorienting. As with James Blake, if you’re too old to get high, but you miss the experience, you could do worse than spending some time with “Slow Motion” (and the rest of the record as a whole). Singing along can leave one feeling, well, a little out of it, by the end of the song.

And it can’t be overlooked that the song’s lyrics are, in fact, themselves excellent, though simple. “So they say ‘practice makes you perfect’/ So they say ‘you can’t teach an old dog’/ So they say ‘have an apple a day’/ So they say ‘better safe than sorry,’” Lennox intones, and the perpetual echo of his words only adds to the mesmerically rhythmic structure of the song. What could, I suppose, be called the song’s chorus is a pithy enough insight: “And when I slow it down/ It’s clear just how/ It’s what they don’t say/ That’s what counts.” A lot of attention has been paid to Panda Bear’s ability to create music that gives one pause because of its sonic innovation. Because of this, it’s often overlooked how excellent his lyrics can be. “Slow Motion,” simple as it is, is no exception.

04. “Your Fake Name Is Good Enough for Me,” Iron & Wine: I remember a Rolling Stone review of Marilyn Manson’s 2007 LP Eat Me, Drink Me that mocked the singer for claiming its opening track, “If I Was Your Vampire,” was “epic.” The quip was something along the lines of “Since when is six minutes epic?” And though I’m always hesitant to use the word since, like so many things, it’s been ruined by the indie rock hipster crowd, Iron & Wine’s “Your Fake Name Is Good Enough for Me” is epic. It clocks in at 7:01, but it ain’t just the extra minute that makes this song worthy of the term.

Yet another example of the resurgence of sax, “Fake Name” opens up as a jazzy number that wouldn’t have seemed too out of place on 2007′s 5/5-star masterpiece The Shepherd’s Dog. Sam Beam delivers two verses quickly, each ending with a mysterious refrain “They were singing something/ Maybe they were singing:/ ‘Become the weeds, we will become/ Become the sea, we will become’.” There’s time for a quick guitar solo he then spits a third verse that makes good use of the album’s title (which pleases me, because I’m always disappointed by albums with killer titles that, in context, are flat): “Bet you’re watching all the happy kids/ Kiss each other clean/ They were singing something/ Maybe they were singing.” A second brass-backed guitar solo opens up and then stops abruptly, and the song, at 2:43, really gets going.

Beam spends the next four-and-a-quarter minutes completing that curious song that those happy kids were singing, and he does so in a parallel fashion that’s quite different from Panda Bear’s “Slow Motion,” but equally effective and hypnotic. “Become the rising sun/ We will become, become/ Become the damage done/ We will become, become,” it begins. Some of the more intriguing and exciting enumerations in the list: “Become the love we made…/ Become your forgotten name…/ Become the bandage and the blade…/ Become the caress and the claw…/ Become their crooked words…/ Become, but it could be worse.” Testament to the momentum this list gains as it proceeds is how hard it is to pay attention to the instrumental jam going on in the background: By the time the list comes to its climax, sax is wailing discordantly, a drumkit a rumbling, its cymbals crashing, and an electric guitar is fizzing. But Beam is so charged with emotion that his voice demands complete attention, and its excitement is contagious. I think it’s functionally impossible not to want to sing along by that point and, if you happen to be doing so and also make it through the list, by its end, you’ll find yourself fairly screaming.

“Become both now and then/ We will become, become/ Become again and again/ We will become, become,” the lyrics conclude and, just moments after they do, the drums quit, the guitar vanishes, the sax plays a few wilting notes, and your speakers go silent. The first time I listened to this song (reading the LP’s lyric sheet and already dying to sing along) is that that quiet is something like the static that follows Jim Carrey’s departure from the set at the end of The Truman Show. People have been obsessively watching Truman’s life unfold for thirty-some years and, once he leaves, there’s a tremendous void. And I’ve yet to find a song I can play immediately after “Fake Name” that doesn’t seem woefully inadequate, and as comedic as that movie’s final line, spoken by a security guard staring at a now blank monitor: “What else is on?”

03. “Give Up the Ghost,” Radiohead: “Give Up the Ghost” is essentially the complete opposite of “Bloom,” number eleven on this list, and that’s the reason it ends up here at number three. Where “Bloom” was a complexly executed and enigmatic affair, “Ghost” is raw and immediate. Unadorned. In fact, “Ghost” is by yards the most naked Radiohead’s ever been—perhaps in a sort of competition with “No Surprises,” but beating out any other by-contrast-quite-busy song in their oeuvre: “Bulletproof,” “Street Spirit,” “Exit Music,” “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” “Pyramid Song,” “I Will,” “Reckoner,” &c. I’d also argue that “Give Up the Ghost” is the most dejected, depressed number in the Radiohead catalogue, beating out even the bleak sentiment expressed in “No Surprises”: “I’ll take the quiet life/ I’ll take the carbon monoxide.”

Upon its release, a number of people complained about Limbs’ lack of melodies. Between the preceding “Codex” and “Give Up the Ghost,” it appears that where the album is most strongly melodic, it’s also the most miserable. I’m forced by this to recall a nugget of “wisdom” once offered me: everything sad is beautiful. But for a number of reasons, ”Ghost” stands in stark contrast to the rest of Limbs: the LPs first half is vitriolic and frenetic, “Lotus Flower” is slick and processed, “Codex”—despite its subject matter—is fairly lush and beautiful, and “Separator,” which follows the decidedly suicidal “Ghost,” is upbeat and optimistic. And though the song does benefit some from its context—2011 has seen a number of LPs that are best considered as whole performances with several movements and not shuffled into playlists—it stands alone just fine.

Thom Yorke’s simple request, “Don’t hurt me,” begins the song. It’s whimpered over looped chirping of birds—looped birdsong: something normally pleasant gone mechanical, uninteresting—and a drum pulse that calls to mind a heartbeat. That request is repeated until song’s end and, not despite, but because of its plainness, it’s heartbreaking. Most of the rest of the song, musically, consists of a very little that goes a long way. Gently plucked acoustic guitar. A simple time-keeping (heart)beat, made by patting the hollow front of that acoustic guitar. A certain noise that trails with increasing frequency and volume from Yorke’s words; this noise sounds sometimes like a flat blast of brass, and sometimes like a stretched-out echo of the words from which it protrudes—based on the fact that the body of this song is Yorke singing over a number of his own vocal takes, I’m inclined to believe the latter. About a minute from the end, a small sample of strings begins to loop in time with that brass/voice noise. The song concludes with what sounds like the flapping of mechanical wings—as if those cheerfully chirping birds present at the beginning are on their way out.

Lyrically, the song is equally simple, but no less beautiful for it. “Gather up the lost and sold, ” Yorke sings. “Gather up the pitiful.” The last line of the song’s “body” is as direct as it gets: “I think I should give up the ghost.” A song about resignation, “Ghost” also stands in contrast to much of the rest of 2011′s music: Where other records are unabashedly nocturnal, “Give Up the Ghost” seems to be what misery sounds like in the daytime. And daylight misery is always worse, lonelier, because when one is miserable at night, there’s at least the illusion that all of nature is sympathizing.

02. “Parentheses,” The Antlers: As discussed above, The Antlers put out a record about wanting nothing less than romantic entanglement and nowhere is it less ambiguous than in this song. Opening with an eerie piano strike and built upon a warped percussion loop, “Parentheses” (which, yes, gets points from me for not only mentioning punctuation, but using it in an interesting symbolic way) is one of the best representatives of that strain of nocturnal music I’ve discussed. Every musical element of the song—the crawling bass, the white noise, the sour samples (and echoes thereof), and the aggressively distorted guitar—adds to the isolate midnight ambiance it creates.

When Silberman’s falsetto enters the mix, it feels positively ghostly. The imagery of an entire relationship contained within the brackets of a lover’s splayed thighs is so fantastic that I have trouble believing no one’s thought of it before, though I can’t find reference to it anywhere, and I’ve Googled. And the terminal viciousness of the statement “Close up your knees/ And I’ll close your parentheses” is, at least this year, unparalleled.

But the rest of the lyrics, making apparent reference to the sort of casual post-breakup sex that always means more to one party than it does the other (“I’m a bad absentee/ You know when I want to leave”), are nearly as well-wrought. ”One broken wing/ Soaring and suffering/ Arm in a sling/ I don’t owe you anything” is a clever encapsulation of the exasperated feeling I imagine I can’t be alone in having had when, after breaking someone’s heart (never a fun thing to do, no matter how badly it needs to be done, and how much better off that other person will be in the end), that person keeps trying to lure you back in with sex: You feel bad not comforting them, especially if you still care, but continuing the entanglement won’t solve anyone’s dilemma. That is to say, in this situation, I’ve at times wanted to scream, “Just because I hurt you doesn’t mean I should be the one who has to fix it!” Silberman, however, has phrased it much more eloquently, if perhaps more bitterly: “Arm in a sling/ I don’t owe you anything.”

01. “Coming Down,” The Weeknd: I, like most people, have spent a lot of time in dissatisfying romantic relationships because I cannot find the one that is satisfying. And I have, like most people, at times imagined I am strong enough to walk away; to roll the dice on finding that better love, and remain, while searching, unafraid of dying alone. And I, like most people, have found myself to be grievously mistaken in that assumption of personal strength.

Probably fewer people have spent the bulk of their life clinically miserable and unmedicated, excepting what they could find on the street (“With this money comes problems/ And with these problems come solutions/ And I use ‘em”). But those who have know that those moments when one fancies oneself strong enough to roll those dice always come when good and high, because blissed-out, the world seems a navigable place (“When I’m faded I forget/ Forget what you mean to me”). Which it is not. When the high starts to wear off, the terror sets in. And there’s no other feeling quite like being sickened by the absence of drugs in your system—which, in addition to already feeling lonely and dissatisfied, inevitably makes you feel pathetic and wretched—and realizing just how hideous the prospect of dying alone, unloved, really is. There’s no desperation that’s quite like that desperation. This is always worse when the other party in that dissatisfying relationship happens to be a wonderful human being, just not the human being for you. And suddenly you start to believe that whatever crude approximation of love you’ve been living with is enough. That you can Make It Work. And so you dedicate yourself all over again; you re-pledge your love and declare a redoubling of your efforts (“Pick up your phone/ The party’s finished and I want you to know/ I’m all alone/ And feeling everything before I got up”). This delusion continues for a little while, then the depression sets in when it can no longer be denied that, in fact, that faux-love is not enough. And what can be done about that depression? Depends on what you can find on the street. Repeat, ad nauseum. I’ve spent a lot of time living this cycle, which is why I find the song so perversely romantic.

“I ain’t lied to nobody but me/ And you/ And me/ But you especially,” explains Abel Tesfaye, amidst plangent guitar, the ambient noise of rooms so empty they feel oppressive, and a repeated hiccup sound that calls to mind a consciousness spinning and skipping like a broken record, stuck on the same thought. House of Balloons is all nighttime music, but nothing on the LP feels quite so deep into the dark as “Coming Down.”

But the song can also be understood another way. “I always want you when I’m coming down” is a sentiment I’ve felt too many times to recollect because I’ve spent even more of my life as a single man and, in that case, the situation’s altogether different, but completely the same. Because I, like most people, once met someone who “got away.” It was ages ago. And for years, when I’d find myself miserable about some unrelated issue, I’d find a way to get myself blasted (“Poppin’ again/ I tried to quit again”). And pills, booze, are great ways to get by for a while. “Faded,” as Tesfaye would say, the world seems a navigable place. Which it is not. But eventually, I would come down. All alone. Which is when the terror sets in. Because there’s no other feeling quite like being sickened by the sudden absence of drugs in your system, and lying there, feeling lonely, dissatisfied, pathetic, and wretched, I would always remember her. I’d long to crawl to the phone or the computer and look her up; find her phone number or Facebook, connect and tell her what she meant to me. Of course, I never did. But to this day, every hangover, when I feel wretched and pathetic, I remember her. In those moments, my life is a problem that she could solve. I always want her when I’m coming down. I’ve spent a lot of time living this cycle, which is why I find the song so perversely romantic.

It’s nice to know someone else has felt the same.