This installment of the music countdown stops just short of the top ten. I decided to go through four songs in this post for a few reasons. One, I'm excited to get to the top ten, where things start to get juicier. Two, I couldn't come up with any thematic connections like I have for previous posts. With that said, this is still a very important part of the list for me as three of these bands are among my 5 or 6 favorites of all time.
#14: Stones from the Sky - Neurosis
When I was young, I would sometimes play "my music" while in the car with my dad. My dad has a Masters in music, taught band for 30 years, and often listens to classical, jazz, and big band music. Needless to say, the majority of what I listened to was not his cup of tea. He was nice enough to play along though, and didn't often have any bad things to say. Even though a lot of what I was listening to on the radio was pretty terrible, he would rarely criticize it. There did seem to be one exception though: When the guitars in a song were too fuzzy or distorted for his tastes, he would say he couldn't make our the tune, or something else to that effect. I always found it fascinating that that was the one aspect of modern music that he chose to single out. It makes sense though when you think about how using pedals, synthesizers, and such to distort sound largely goes against the precision of the harmony and criticality of the tone of an instrument present in many classical works. However, I think the ability of many musicians to use these tools to create a "wall of sound" is one of the great advances of contemporary music.
One of my favorite examples of such a practice comes near the end of "Stones from the Sky." The first 6 minutes or so of the song is a pretty typical Neurosis tune: A slow building beginning leads to a stronger passage with growling vocals, followed by a long burn-off. Where the song makes the turn from great to brilliant though, is in its final minutes. After we hear the theme come and go, the underlying guitar line takes center stage and starts to increase in furor. With every cycle, the individual notes become less and less clear as the intensity grows. Then, as the end nears, the song starts to sputter in and out as if your speakers are outright refusing to trudge on. It is truly both a beautiful and ugly ending to a song, and I mean that in the best possible way. As you might guess, I have yet to play this song for my dad, because I don't think he would like it.
Runners-up:
Fair warning to all those reading this: the runners-up sections in this post will be pretty long. Neurosis is one of my favorite bands, with a lengthy catalogue that now spans four decades. Narrowing their best work down to a few songs is a fairly ludicrous activity, but I will attempt it nonetheless.
"Souls at Zero" is a relatively straightforward track (for Neurosis, at least) that shows off the strengths of the band in its early days. The song builds on itself through several different themes which pay off in a great way in the bridge and final chorus.
I would consider many songs on this list potential nominees for best song to play during the apocalypse. In the end though, I would have to pick "Purify" as the winner. The song is one of the best examples of how Neurosis is more than willing to take their time and dwell on every chord of discontent. The clincher that elevates this song from great to really great is the terrifying use of bagpipes at the end.
Not all Neurosis fans were pleased with the stripped down sound of 2004's The Eye of Every Storm. I did not share that opinion, as I absolutely love how they are able to get to core of what makes them such a great band. The title track is the best example of this as the instrumentation is extremely minimal as they progress through the song, with near silence pervading the middle section. This quiet rumination pays off greatly when the final section begins and reveals the reason for the title: "Time brings them all home, to the eye of every storm." Good stuff.
#13: A With Living - Do Make Say Think
Do Make Say Think is a band that almost entirely eschews vocals in their music. So you might think it's a bit strange that I'm representing on this list by a song that is a pretty straightforward verse-chorus work complete with vocals. However, there are two very good reasons that this song is here. The first reason is that the song is awesome. The second reason is more complicated.
For the first couple of years that I knew this song, I always thought of it as a song that needed to be played at night. There was just something about the tune that didn't work as well during the day. Maybe it was the calmness of the singer's smooth deep voice or the way the higher guitar notes met the bassline that gave the song the feeling of a cool summer night. Then one day, I finally realized that the songs first lyric ("lying down beneath the stars...") and its later mention of shooting stars might have something to with it.* While I certainly felt a little silly for having missed that obvious connection for so long, it made me think a little more about how I perceive music. While other may hook onto the words in a song and go from there, I generally tend to first notice the melody or the sound and build from that (I'll talk about this more extensively later in the list). Regardless of how one perceives music, I think that this is a great example of how Do Make Say Think was able to craft a tune that mirrors the themes of the lyrics well. Perhaps the fact that they don't normally use words means that they are more skilled at being able to have just the music tell the tale. Whatever the reason, DMST made a song that belongs on this list.
*I always knew the lyrics, I had just never made that connection.
Runners-up:
I could talk at length about several songs here ("Fredericia" is a great beginning to Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn, and I love the moment of laughter in "A Tender History of Rust."), but I'll reserve this space for a song that was thisclose to making the list: "Bound to Be That Way." I first came upon Do Make Say Think not long after moving to Madison after college. To me, the song perfectly encapsulated the feeling that I imagine we all feel when we begin "real life." When we go off to do whatever it is we are doing, we're making a choice to do that. Just as importantly, we're also making a choice not to do the other things that we could be doing. In my situation, I was far away from a lot of my friends and all of my family, and I was doing work that was not at all what I studied in school. While I ended up loving all aspects of my time in Madison*, this song sang to the paths not traveled and how regardless of the decisions I made, life was "bound to be that way." Of course, the song has no lyrics so it could really be about whatever the listener wants it to be**, but it found me at such an appropriate time that I still think it has to be about that.
*Except for the snow and the cold. That sucked.
** Truly great songs often have that kind of flexibility. We'll talk about this more later as well.
#12: Lisbon - The Walkmen
It seems that every sappy montage during the Oscars talks about how films can take you a different place. While I agree that this is true, I think that music can do an even better job of this because it's lack of visuals necessarily invokes ones imagination*. Unfortunately, this aspect of the medium is often underappreciated. Luckily, the Walkmen release a new record every couple of years that shows exactly how to create a sense of being in a specific time and place.
*People often make the same argument about books as well, but I don't think it's quite the same, since music still taps directly into your senses.
Perhaps the best example of this ability is the title track of their 2010 effort, Lisbon. In the first ten seconds, a quiet guitar and snare drum play so low and so far in the background that the focus is instead drawn towards the faint hint of background noise. When frontman Hamilton Leithauser starts in with "The countless eyes dotted in the night sky/I speak the language of several hundred words," you feel immediately transported to a calm night in Lisbon (or at least The Walkmen's version of Lisbon). The song continues on for a wonderous six minutes, alternating between quiet sections and passages supported by the wistful wail of brass instruments, and ends in a muted and content guitar line. The Walkmen's attention to these sorts of details in creating their recordings often propels their work a step above the rest, even before accounting for their ability to write great songs. Rather than simply hearing lyrics about experiences, the listener gains a better understanding of the emotions being communicated through the synthesis of words and music.
Runners-up:
I've managed to summarize the runners-up for my other favorite bands, but I'm not going to try to do that there. The Walkmen are able to succeed at so many different things that it's nearly impossible to narrow down their catalogue to a list of best songs. For example, how can you compare such a catchy hit as "The Rat" to the song that comes directly after it "No Christmas While I'm Talking," a moving piece that barely has a discernable tune?
Instead of talking about a single song, I'll briefly discuss my favorite of their albums, You and Me. While the bombast that is more common in their early work shows itself in songs like "In the New Year," The Walkmen begin the process of paring down their music to its core with maximum effect. Their next album Lisbon would take this to the extreme, but I thought that You and Me did a better job of balancing all of the band's strengths. Some of the early tracks such as "On the Water" showcase how well the band is able to use quiet passages to create a mood, while the fantastic "I Lost You" goes all out with its bittersweet sentiment. No band seems to convey the full experience of being a twentysomething like The Walkmen.
#11: Lateralus - Tool
If you know me well, then you likely know that Tool was my favorite band for several years in high school and college. They've since been surpassed in my estimation by Isis, The Walkmen, and a couple of other bands, but I still hold fond memories of their music and listen to them from time to time (if they would kindly release some new music, maybe I would listen to them more). Part of my fondness for them was spurred my their musicianship and their willingness to write great sprawling songs on a diverse range of topics. But if I'm being honest, then I'd have to say that I also liked them for what it meant to be a Tool fan. They were quite rebellious of the mainstream conventions of rock that I was beginning to grow tired of. Their videos didn't show the band playing the music, instead opting to act out strange and disturbing scenarios through animation and claymation. They're time in the spotlight was far more cryptic and removed that a typical band. In a way, they seemed to detest their fans, but you pretty much always had to take everything they said with a large grain of salt. Being a fan of Tool was a much more complicated proposition than with other bands.
Yet, when all that is stripped away, they've made some really great music over the years. Their heavy themes and their need to accomplish a lot can sometimes weigh down the music a bit, but in the case of "Lateralus," Tool's ambition lifts their work to new heights. The lyrical theme of "reaching out to embrace whatever may come" is great enough on its own. What really drives the song home though, is how it interweaves the Fibonacci sequence into the music to literally depict the spiral motif used throughout the song. The lyrics in the verses swing back and forth in patterns of 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and 13 syllables, and the chorus is a very purposefully in alternating 9/8, 8/8, and 7/8 time signatures (987 is the 15th number in the sequence). After that, the song goes through a great quieter section that is usually omitted from the radio edit, and ends with as anthemic of a flourish as you'll ever get from Tool. Spiral out indeed.
Runners-up:
I can confidently narrow down the runners-up from Tool's catalogue to two songs. "Third Eye" is most certainly an example of the overindulgence that Tool sometimes succumbs to in their songwriting, as both the studio and the live version run about 14 minutes. However, it's such a good 14 minutes in which so many different things happen, that it doesn't really matter. In this way, "Third Eye" is more of it's own EP as opposed to a song at the end of Aenima.
In my previous incarnation of this list, "H." ended up as the #1 song. While I've since found works that better reflect the song's theme of regret and isolation (more on those later in the countdown...sorry that I'm being kind of a Mosby in this post), "H." still holds up well more than a decade after I've first heard it. The fact that it's one of Tool's most pared down works of the post-Undertow era probably doesn't hurt it, either.
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