Has It Come To This?

Out of all the coincidences of my taste dovetailing with the chronology of the calendar year in a consistent pattern, my hands-down favorite has to be the way years tend to wait until riiiiiiiiight before the end before revealing their best songs. Since 2003 - a small sample size by any measuring-stick other than pop music - I've stumbled across my favorite song of the year within two weeks of January 1st every single time: Elton John's "Are You Ready For Love?" when I was working on an old real-time project (although, in the grand tradition of USC alumni, I'm not here to talk about the past), Paul Epworth's single mix of Babyshambles' "Killamangiro" the year after that, and then perhaps most memorably, Guillemots' "Trains To Brazil" twenty-five hours away from 2006. Suffice it to say, I've been looking forward to the home stretch for months - after a run like that, I just couldn't see myself going home for the holidays without a new favorite song of the year.

Didn't happen, or at least it didn't happen yet. Granted, it's still early in the month and I've got just about enough vinyl (YEAH BITCHES, GUESS WHO NUTTED UP AND GOT A RECORD PLAYER) flying over from the UK to shingle a house, so there's still plenty that can happen, but at this point it'd take a miracle to knock off Baby Cham's "Ghetto Story", still unquestionably the best song I've heard this year even if it's not the most compelling one after eight uninterrupted months of careful study. Having said as much, that certainly doesn't mean the process of double-checking has been a total waste - in the last week, I've turned up at least four songs which, quite possibly more than any others that I've heard this year, sound practically tailor-made for my ears, and even if that doesn't make them world-conquerers in the mold of those turned up in years past, that certainly makes them at least worthy of being passed on to like-minded dorks . At least.

The Wombats, "Backfire @ The Disco" - Most people probably know the Wombats - well, at this point, most people still couldn't pick the Wombats out of their group photo, but I have a feeling that's due to change at any minute - from their two singles "Moving To New York" and "Lost In The Post", quite possibly because anyone with two brain cells bumping into each other has been running around howling about how both songs warrant serious discussion whenever the subject of the year's best indie guitar-pop songs comes up (and if you don't know, now you know). And this is perfectly fine; most bands would probably gamely attempt to blow cemetaries full of dead guys to come up with one song as good as either of the Wombats' twin introductory blasts of breakneck pop pleasure, and there's certainly nothing wrong with a band carving out a career on the basis of a handful of great singles (ahem).

The problem, it seems, is that the Wombats may just turn out to be one of the strongest album acts on the planet if their debut LP is any indication. That's not to say that Girls Boys And Marsupials is a great album by any stretch of the imagination; there are at least four songs on here I'll probably never listen to again and maybe another two or three for which my enthusiasm can only fade away in time. But sometimes, great albums don't actually have to properly be great to make their point (q.v. Sung Tongs, which I consider a legitimately capital-g Great album despite being fully capable of counting the number of complete listens I've given it on two hands with plenty of fingers left over) - in fact, you usually know you're in the presence of something special when an album manages to start dialoguing with your brain despite the unavoidable lack of a finished product. In the case of the Wombats, consider the following three points:

1. Girls Boys And Marsupials is a Japan-only release at the moment - I have no idea why the band took off in Japan (aside from the obvious reasons pertaining to the nigh-unto-insufferable quality of their two big singles), but they took off to the degree that Vinyl Junkies Records was able to convince the band to scramble and cobble together ten more tracks to come up with an LP-length record.
2. "Backfire @ The Disco" (which I cannot for the life of me type out without deleting the word "Panic" at least once) is one of these hurriedly-assembled album tracks
3. Everyone in this band is younger than me.

Now obviously I can't speak for you, but when I hear a song as good as "Backfire @ The Disco", a song pulled out of the asses of a bunch of kids in order to fill out a record most of their non-Nihonjin peers were ever likely to see, I get excited. At the very least, it's a better filler track than anything off the last Futureheads album (which, thanks to the inexplicable exclusion of "Area", consists of nothing but filler tracks), packed almost to the point of immobility with deliciously plaintative lyrics and explosively catchy hooks and the kind of background-vocal action that most modern-rock bands can only talk about (I have a sneaking suspicion that there's at least one Bay City Rollers album amongst the Wombats - we can smell our own, y'know). But really, as good as it is, it's the album-trackness of "Backfire @ The Disco" that calls its quality into such high relief - not that it can't (or shouldn't) be a single, but if they're literally shrugging off songs as good as this one for the sole benefit of the other side of the planet, I tremble to think at what they might be capable of doing in the near future. (Girls Boys And Marsupials is available through Vinyl Junkies - their site's in Japanese, so you can either attempt to muddle through the pages or email them at order@vinyl-junkie.com to set up a PayPal transaction.)

Escort, "Love In Indigo" (extended mix) – Out of all the bands I heard this year, I don’t think any of them gave me as strong a feeling as “Holy fuck, they still make that music?” as Brooklyn’s own Escort. But can you blame me? In this day and age, it’s a two-fisted gut-punch to see (1) nine musicians assemble to form anything other than an Arcade Fire-derived marching-band-reject-society/rock band, and (2) anyone even attempting Escort’s seemingly unique brand of lush, almost wholly eighties-free disco music. Note that that doesn’t mean it’s irony-free, mind you; “Love In Indigo” may walk around wearing all the trappings of one of August Darnell’s more straightforward concoctions (a sickeningly low bassline, a merciless piano groove, a practically-stipulated fondness for suddenly kicking its’ audience’s ass into the next gear), but close inspection of the lyrics reveals that, while they’re not not about lust, they’re at least partially about lusting after shoes. But just because Escort’s songs have some modernity to ‘em doesn’t make ‘em modern songs – “Love In Indigo” makes no attempt to employ technology to slicken up its sound, preferring instead to stay locked into its palpably hands-on groove until it’s over. I would have bet anything that we were all too collectively cool to make music like this anymore; thank God I turned out to be as wrong as I usually am. Let’s hope this breaks from the disco template at least enough to put out a full-length! (Click here) to buy the “Love In Indigo” 12” from Turntable Lab)

Explorer's Club, "Forever" – In sharp contrast to that Escort record, I didn’t exactly need the Explorer’s Club to wake me up to the fact that people are still trying to pick up where the Beach Boys left off, or at least no more than I needed Maximo Park to remind me that the kids are still listening to the Gang of Four and so on. But that certainly doesn’t mean that they’re not eminently welcome to sit down at my Feast of Disposable Culture as long as they keep bringing songs as top-shelf as “Forever”, a song which would have undoubtedly stopped me most literallyin my tracks with its overwhelming beauty had I been doing anything other than sitting inert in front of my computer when I listened to it for the first time. Hell, if you want to tap right into the essence of this song’s excellence, you can even bypass all the vocal virtuosity on “Forever” entirely (although why you’d want to do such a stupid thing is beyond my scope of comprehension) and focus entirely on the fidelity of the Spector-esque arrangements, all of which practically conspire to reduce me to an irretrievably blissful wreck; most songs that jack the "Be My Baby" beat tend to throw it right in the foreground and wear it out as quick as Rick Ross wears out a hook, so it' s nothing less than a pleasure to find a song that only seems to employ the beat because it's what makes the most sense for the song. And really, it's that wholly organic feel that makes "Forever" the absolute gem it really seems to be - there's not a split-second on here that sounds forced, just painstakingly crafted. This is, on the whole, something to be desired. (Click here to order the super-limited single to "Forever" from Rough Trade while it lasts!)

Lily Allen, "Everybody's Changing" - I'm pretty sure that if I were to tally up the songs I've played over the last two weeks, Lily Allen's cover of Keane's magnum opus (or at least opus) would be towering over just about everything outside of LCD's "All My Friends". Wait, scratch that - if anything other than "All My Friends" happened to top Lily's version of "Everybody's Changing" playcount-wise, I'd almost get angry at myself; her cover is pretty much exactly what I want a pop song to sound like right now to within two or three decimal places, almost to the point where listening to anything else feels insulting. If this strikes you as a little strange, well, welcome to the club; although I'm in no way allergic to Allen's Art Brut For Chicks act, I would have bet the farm that my dalliance with Lily fandom would have begun and ended with "LDN", and I quite frankly would have stabbed myself in the dick before ever admitting to Keane fandom in this day and hyper-mediated age. But oh well; Lily certainly picked herself out a pretty song to cover (say what you will about those schmaltzy British soccer-momrock groups, but they do know how to put one melodramatic note in front of the next), and she certainly picked a fun way of reworking the music into something that sounds nothing like a bank advertisement (no mean feat, for all the reasons implied in the last parenthetical), and she certainly couldn't have done a better job of sounding like she was having fun singing it - you could practically spread this song on toast. Oh, and posting this song also gives me the opportunity to link to this picture again, and uh damn. (This cover is [obviously] not getting an official release, but you can visit Lily Allen's site in the meantime - or you can visit Discobelle, the mp3 blog where I originally found the track and like eighty thousand other songs totally worth your time)