AWmusic

Numbers 1 through 25:
#1 Ready For The Floor by Hot Chip (myspace/video)
Best dance song of the year? Best song too.
#2 Crimewave – Crystal Castles vs Health (Crystal Castles’ myspace/Health’s Myspace/video)
This version is miles better then the original.
#3 Little Bit by Lykke Li (myspace/live)
I’m not only a little bit in love with this.
#4 L.E.S. Artists by Santogold (myspace/video)
Santogold’s least creative but most accessible track.
#5 Hearts On Fire by Cut Copy (myspace/video)
Cut Copy has a ton of great tracks.
#6 Head Rolls Off by Frightened Rabbit (myspace/video)
“Jesus is just a Spanish boy’s name”
#7 White Winter Hymnal by The Fleet Foxes (myspace/video)
#26 on my top songs of 2007 list.
#8 M79 by Vampire Weekend(myspace/live)
The better of the two new songs.
#9 Graveyard Girl by M83 (myspace/video)
Without the poem, this could very well be #1.
#10 Unforgettable Season by Cut Copy (live)
Not the most danceable but my favorite.
#11 You Me Dancing by Los Campesinos! (myspace/video -ep version)
It takes long to get started but worth the wait.
#12 Magic Spells by Crystal Castles
This song is their most artistic/creative venture.
#13 Kim & Jessie by M83 (video)
Another great track off Saturdays=Youth.
#14 Skeng by The Bug ft. Killa P and Flowdan(myspace/video)
Best track off the amazing London Zoo.
#15 Machine Gun by Portishead (homepage/video)
Even if the song is simple, Beth Gibbons does wonders.
#16 Oxford Comma by Vampire Weekend (video)
Number 4 of my 2007 list.
#17 These Few Presidents by Why? (myspace/live)
“Even if I haven’t seen you in years, yours is a funeral I’d fly to from anywhere” – had to break my rule for that line.
#18 Time To Pretend by MGMT (myspace/video)
It’ll be ironic if they have a coke habit.
#19 Kids by MGMT (video)
They do know how to make a decent pop song.
#20 The Twist by Frightened Rabbit (live)
Emotions of a simple dance, captured perfectly.
#21 Everyone I Know Is Listening To Crunk by Lightspeed Champion (myspace/live)
Everybody I know IS listening to crunk.
#22 Teenagers by Department of Eagles (myspace)
My favorite song off In Ear Park.
#23 Furr by Blitzen Trapper (myspace/live)
One of the better folk songs of the year.
#24 Lost Coastlines by Okkervil River (myspace/video)
Jonathan Meiburg vocals puts on the perfect touch.
#25 Street Flash by Animal Collective (myspace)
Anyone excited for Merriweather Post Pavilion? (We’ve heard the leaks)

Apart from the fact it has an obvious motorik rhythm and the song’s thrust is the perfect aural accompaniment to watching cars eat up the white lines in the middle of the road, this Deerhunter track manages to represent the essential dichotomy of travelling in a motor vehicle. The contrast between the moving world outside and still world within a car is significant, like a song called “Nothing Ever Happened” that has a lot happening within it.
Deerhunter – Nothing Ever Happened

Best Song From A Band Named After An Animal
Animal Collective – Seal Eyeing

Putting Animal Collective in this category may be a little too literal, but once again Animal Collective release an arresting stopgap EP between albums and the Water Curses EP will maybe seem like the ideal bridge between Strawberry Jam and Merriweather Post Pavilion when we have the benefit of hindsight, but beneath the aquatic bubbling sounds that introduce “Seal Eyeing” there exists a fragile reverberating piano odyssey made for moments of graceful meditation.
Animal Collective – Seal Eyeing

Best Song Influenced By Pet Sounds
Department of Eagles – No One Does It Like You

The ghost of “God Only Knows” echoes through this track but Department of Eagles deliver pleasing layer after layer of ornate sounds, which only reveal themselves fully after repeated listens. Like many of the tracks on In Ear Park, the rich production values seem to offer an opportunity to get lost in a world of detailed instrumentation, which is surely the intention behind the same techniques used by Brian Wilson, all those years ago.
Department Of Eagles – No One Does It Like You

Best Song To Contemplate The Fragility Of Existence With
Chad Van Gaalen – Rabid Bits of Time

Chad Van Gaalen sings about death on Soft Airplane, sometimes with cheeky abandon in chirpy sounding songs that are designed to get under the skin, but nowhere is the flimsy thread of mortality personified so appropriately than on “Rabid Bits of Time.” When Gaalen sings in his quivering voice, “No one knows where we go, when we’re dead or when we’re dreaming,” it’s like listening to someone telling you something you already know, but never really understood until it is disclosed as simply as it is here.
Chad Van Gaalen – Rabid Bits of Time

Best Song That Ends With A Whimper
Women – Black Rice

“Black Rice” clangs along like a lost art rock classic from a late 60s, which for once doesn’t sound like it is an amateur appropriation, reshaped and regurgitated into a diluted version of the original music that influenced its creation. Glockenspiels tinkle with the guitars to lead to a climax that never comes as the momentum abruptly ends with a limp strum, and after all the musical pay-offs that have become so commonplace it’s refreshing to hear a song that causes you to listen to its journey because it doesn’t conclude with a bang or a fade.
Women – Black Rice

The second album from Department of Eagles has been a long time coming, mainly thanks to the attention grabbing virtuosity Daniel Rossen has displayed in Grizzly Bear, the scattering of interesting demos and unrelated Department of Eagles material that has been floating around the net for aeons, and at the very least, the recent ascent of Mr Rossen’s profile with his other band as they play on Conan, Letterman and tour with Radiohead. Appetites have wetted, heads have turned and collective internal monologues have murmured, “Wait, this Grizzly Bear guy has another band…”
Inevitable comparisons to Grizzly Bear abound, especially when both groups seem to roam in a similar baroque and elegiac musical landscapes with corresponding accoutrements of guitar, piano and strings, but its probably best to forget about the baggage that comes with resemblances and listen to In Ear Park on its own terms, as was intended, as an album from a group that predated one member’s more successful other one and a platform for personal catharsis, wholly embellished and supplemented by a succession of ambitious musical arrangements.
Sonically, the music here closely resembles the kind of experiments done by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks on Smile. “No One Does It Like You” even clomps along like a distant cousin to “God Only Knows” with the kind of layers of percussion and harmony that alerted The Beatles to the West Coast in 1966. This rich instrumental depth additionally evokes memories of late 60s film soundtracks, performed by a Hollywood house band and touched by the hand of Burt Bacharach or Harry Nilsson, but for an entrenched use of ornate retro production techniques in a form of music that is rarely cutting edge, the end result is complimentary as opposed to being reductive.
It’s the substance of the songs that elevate In Ear Park from being a shallow appropriation of rock’s golden age and particularly the emotional depth of the material as it deals with the fleeting nature of existence and the prevalence of loss. The macro of an expansive sound coupled with the micro of the intimate creates an achingly beautiful disclosure, often connected to therapeutic images of the natural world. Parks, rivers and fields are places of abiding memory and the anxiety of existence is divulged in arresting moments of pained eloquence. Phrases like, “My God in heaven, what were we thinking?” or “Oh boy when you’re gone, you are gone” are sung with a haunting poignancy as the fertile sounds (that blossom with each recurring listen) frame the emotional in a lasting and affecting musical panorama.
Rossen has admitted that the material produced for this release was unsuitable for his other unit and perhaps this level of confidentiality is unique to his first band? But it’s doubtful that the lucidity presented on In Ear Park will remain on one single record. This album may capture the personal, when most of the songs are essentially based on the pathos of the passing of time, but these intimations are graceful and inclusive rather than mawkish and self-indulgent, when recalled through the nostalgic visual imagery contained therein. If all albums are caught moments of time, both for a band and in terms of content, In Ear Park is a particularly lush and vivid one.

Department Of Eagles – No One Does It Like You

Department Of Eagles – In Ear Park