ALTER.NATiON
Selection from PASTE The 50 Best Songs of 2018
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06-01-2019 (2)
Melbourne-based trio Camp Cope’s biting punk track “The Opener,” from their 2018 album How to Socialise & Make Friends, starts like a typical breakup song: “Tell me you never wanna see me again / And then keep showing up at my house.” But as the track progresses, it morphs into an intense, overt call for gender equality in the music industry. Lead vocalist Georgia “Maq” McDonald has a guttural reaction to the sexism her band has faced as she yells, as loud as she can, “Yeah, tell me again how there just aren’t that many girls in the music scene.”
Neko Case’s seven-minute song winds like the long interstate it references: I-5 runs along the West Coast of the U.S., from the Mexican to Canadian border. A duet with Mark Lanegan, who is known for his solo work in addition to collaborations and his work with Queens of the Stone Age, “Curse Of The I-5 Corridor” is a haunting combination of lyrics and sound. The song reflects on the past, and uncovers an unsureness of the future and what it could have brought. Lines like “in the current of your life I was an eyelash in the shipping lanes” and “I fear I smell extinction in the folds of this novocaine age coming on” reveal these aspects. Lanegan’s voice at times becomes an eerie echo to Case’s, lurking in the background, and adds to the tension the song’s instrumental breaks carry.
“Disgraced in America,” from Montreal post-punk band Ought’s album Room Inside the World, is a song led by Tim Darcy’s melodramatic, at times Bowie-esque and other times Ian Curtis-esque, lead vocals, which are so painstaking, impactful and heart-wrenching, they would make an enthralling a cappella track. The track also includes robotic keyboards, jangly, melodic guitars, crying horns and chaotic, dense percussion worth getting lost in.
Disco beats had a moment this year—and so did cowboys. The slick disco blips appeared first on Kacey Musgraves’s “High Horse,” a dance song fueled by cowboy metaphors, then again, a few months later, on arguably the best song from Mitski’s Be The Cowboy, “Nobody,” in which the indie-rock monarch employs tight basslines and movie-score drums to make a thumping, sweaty dance track. Mitski shouts into the void to anyone who can hear her: “I’m just asking for a kiss / Give me one good movie kiss.” As her despair worsens, the song just gets louder, faster and groovier. Who knew the sound of loneliness could be so irresistible?
Are you 22? Or, were you at one time 22? Then you know. You know what it feels like when the protective bubble of youth begins to wrinkle and then pop, when adulthood arrives before you were done being a kid. You remember that all-consuming confusion—and stress—born out of questions like “Who am I?” and “What the hell am I supposed to do with the rest of my life?” Sunflower Bean are all-too familiar with those qualms. Each member of the New York City trio, one of the most consistent groups working in indie-rock today, was 22 when they recorded Twentytwo in Blue, and, on a single track, they flawlessly capture the anxiety, beauty, fear, sadness and excitement that permeate a human being’s 22nd year of earth-dwelling. Not to mention, “Twentytwo” is one of the most smartly and creatively composed songs to come out of this year, complete with an achingly melodic chorus and unforgettable riffs...
While it might not have made the cut as our pick for the best song of the year, Parquet Courts’ absolute banger “Wide Awake” deserves the award for the funkiest. This song is everything you need to get your body, well, “movin’ and groovin’, “ain’t ever losin’ the pace,” as the song itself says. The percussion, lead flawlessly by drummer Max Savage, drives the track with a Latin-inspired rhythm that somehow fits just fine in a New York City rock band’s repertoire. Thrown on top of that is arguably the grooviest bass line of the year by Sean Yeaton, layered unexpectedly with A. Savage and Austin Brown’s raucous signature guitar stylings...
Though this magnificent fragment of Will Toledo’s brain technically debuted on the nether-regions of Bandcamp back in 2011, the Twin Fantasy rework is nothing short of exquisite. If every rock song was this immaculate, we’d call it “gold” instead of “rock.” One reason it’s so fantastic is the song’s percussive underbelly: A swarm of pedal effects, drum loops and good ol’ fashioned kit noise carry the song through its near-seven minutes, as Toledo talks us through the song like a math problem, asking, “Is it the chorus yet?.” For all its magnificent sonic arrangements, though, the lyrics are even heftier, a testament to love, life and the fragility of the vessels that hold it all together: “Don’t you realize our bodies could fall apart any second?”
MGMT’s “Me and Michael” from their latest album Little Dark Age is musically about as ’80s as they come with its gleaming synths, booming electronic percussion and VanWyngarden’s soaring yet poignant Pet Shop Boys-esque vocal lead. The chorus is catchy to the point where it’s actually infuriating that someone hasn’t come up with this perfect, ebullient sing-along melody before. This ode to male friendship sounds like the mega-hit that they haven’t quite mustered since 2007’s “Kids” or “Electric Feel.”
2018 was the year of the “white voice.” Moviegoers will recognize the phrase from Boots Riley’s afro-surrealist hit Sorry to Bother You, in which a black telemarketer finds success employing a cartoonishly caucasian-sounding voice when calling customers. Tune-Yards (who scored that film) explored a similar concept six months earlier on “Colonizer,” a surprising and raucously arranged anthem of self-interrogation. Like much of its surrounding album, the song is an examination of white privilege, with Merrill Garbus grappling with the “white woman’s voice” she uses while telling “stories of travels with African men.” It’s not satire, or at least not the outward-facing kind. “A lot of people assume I’m commenting on another white woman or that it’s ironic or sarcastic, but it’s actually just true,”
There was the old Noname, the one who ducked and dodged around the fluttery rhythms and subdued melodies of her debut EP Telefone like a shy hummingbird, beautiful but weightless. But with “Blaxploitation,” from her new album Room 25, Noname is finally ready for all the limelight. She spits out lines like “Penny proud, penny petty, pissing off Betty the Boop / Only date n****s that hoop, traded my life for cartoon,” with a previously unheard vigor over a bass-line that pops. No one is safe from Noname’s polemic—not the artists that blow up and move to the yuppie Wicker Park neighborhood in Chicago, not those mammy-stereotype “Power of Pine-Sol” commercials, not even Noname herself for indulging in noted anti-LGBT restaurant Chick-Fil-A.
Why pick one summer crush when you can marvel at them all? That’s the question at stake on the wonderfully raunchy “Boys,” which finds Lizzo grasping and declaring her sexuality via a series of delicious male typecasts. She’s not picky, either, singing, “I like big boys, itty bitty boys / Mississippi boys, inner city boys.” An overtly groovy bass line flavored with high-pitched electric guitar carries the song through. A dance-y boasting of sexuality, “Boys” is a flirty summer jam.
The phrase “dream pop banger” would be a contradiction in terms if not for this glorious song, the centerpiece of Wye Oak’s album of the same name. Jenn Wasner, who has spent a decade honing one of the greatest voices in indie-rock, sings about the inexorable urge to seek patterns in chaos, repeating the title with mantra-like fervor: “The louder I call, the faster it runs / The louder I call, the faster it runs.” And then the song seems to do precisely that, growing faster, louder, more joyously overwhelmed, as it spins around and around its central refrain.
Camp Cope, Neko Case feat. Mark Lanegan, Ought, Mitski, Sunflower Bean, Parquet Courts, Car Seat Headrest, MGMT, Noname, Lizzo, Wye Oak
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