Five Favorite 21st Century Songs (Thus Far)

A sequel to the recent post 'Five favorite 20th century songs'. Only ten years of the 21st century have past, but I'd like to name some songs that stand out to me as sleeper/keepers/reapers for the century thus far, standing here right now.




'Motion Picture Soundtrack' by Radiohead
From the album Kid A (2000)

The tail-end of the 20th century and the jagged tooth-line that has been the beginning of the 21st century are both ubiquitous Radiohead times. The band is everywhere, under every stone and in every hidden thicket of the music press, in addition to the covers of major music mags for album releases and even for less important reasons (When Thom Yorke is mad about something, which is all the time). We here at Jakob Battick & Friends know what it feels like to be bombarded with Radiohead at every turn and to not necessarily understand the raving gospel 24/7. Mark Dennis genuinely dislikes Radiohead, Roy Macneil is a diehard fan, Milo and his twin sister Joanna were practically RAISED on Radiohead. I find myself a massive fan of Kid A and little else, time and time again (Except for 'Street Spirit' and 'Pyramid Song', which are both so great). This being said, I constantly find myself looking back to Kid A as one of the most righteous albums of the 2000-2010 stretch, for sure.

'Motion Picture Soundtrack' is the surrealistic closer at the end of Kid A, sporting Disney-style (Apparently they were going for something 'Snow White', no joke) harp and operatic female backing vocals amid a somber, weary bed of what sounds like pump organ (Maybe just a plain ol' church-style organ?) and plenty of bittersweet melodic Yorke crooning. Juxtaposition. Juxtaposition. Juxtaposition. It sounds like the audio equivalent of Dark Side of the Moon ACTUALLY fused to the Wizard of Oz, not just a synch up, like the spirits of the two glued together. A devastating and strange end to a (largely) alienating and strange (But rewarding and glorious) album full of odd twists and sounds. The real triumph of 'Motion Picture Soundtrack' is the way in which it manages to fuse the odd to the beautiful and maintain all seriousness, all levity, and all emotional weight. In fact, to these ears, the instrumental quirks of the track only intensify the emotional severity. It's a brave move on a fearless album. Looking back now, it seems incredible and surprising for the first decade of the 21st century to begin with such a pioneering, out-of-this-world record as Kid A.

Did I mention the Sgt. Pepper-style backwards sounds and symphonic floatiness that appear to those patient enough to listen past the silence at the end of the 'real' track? That's the ever-present-on-Kid-A sound of Radiohead throwing a hissyfit and trying to be as obtuse as possible, and it's often intensely fascinating.




'Hiding All Away' by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
From the album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (2004)

After 20+ years of howling and preaching and slaying it seemed that Nick Cave started to get just a little bit tired (Physically, not qualitatively). There was the pseudo-Christian phase of 'The Boatman's Call' and the post-substance haze of 'No More Shall We Part' that both pointed to a perhaps settled, calm, and older Mr. Cave. Only moments of these records (And 'Nocturama') pointed to a revitalized, furious Mr. Cave ('My Sorrowful Wife', 'Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow'). Both sides are honorable, as true Bad Seeds fans the world round know, but there is something to be said for a Mr. Cave that freely mixes the two. Then came 2004, along with the massive double-album 'Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus', and the Bad Seeds shit truly hit the fan. Love songs, death songs, ragers, crooners, ballads, & even explosions of noise and gospel all swirled together across the album's two discs, making for an overwhelming pile of fine songwriting to dig through.

'Hiding All Away' begins as a mid-tempo blues sleaze-out akin to Gainsbourg or Bukowski set to grinding and funking low-end rhythms. It's chock full of nasty, naughty, hilarious puns and built on a nonsense narrative that even Dylan could love. The lyric alone reveals an impish and restless elder Cave spinning tales of psycho-sexual madness, not exactly the portrait painted on 'Into My Arms' or 'As I Sadly By Her Side'. Then, there's the continuing unfolding of the arrangement. As each verse progresses the gospel choir gets louder, you can even hear them laughing at the lewdness of the lyric at points. Fuzzed-out lead guitars snarl and smolder around the edges of the verses, doing honor to the recent departure of lead-axeman and maverick genius Blixa Bargeld, and bass and drums stutter-stop in a herky-jerky fashion full of sweat and tension. Each verse shows just how brilliant The Bad Seeds can be as a backing band, all master players equally able to step off their instruments for a sudden downshift in energy as they are to snap quickly into a self-destructive burst of sound and skree.

The song just builds and builds and builds, then pulls back, and finally switches at the drop of a hat to a Southern-Gospel Armageddon of sorts. The choir goes nuts, the guitars run straight up the neck to high-end buzzsaw style lead parts, and the bass and drums repetitively batter the listener with up-hill/down-hill style runs. The spiritual connects with the sexual (In true Cohen fashion), and the whole kit and kaboodle combusts in paranoid/fervent/terrified/ardent energy. All the while, Nick is hollering and hooting in fine form. This is the sort of track that makes you do a double take and then immediately re-listen, twice. Who would have thought that some of the most vital and ferocious rock n' roll of the 2000-2010 gap would have come from a 47 year-old Australian man who, by all appearances, had seemed well past his days of screaming and kicking since 1997? The Cave/Ellis/Casey/Sclavunos side-project Grinderman went on to only further prove the point, as evidenced by almost pimple-faced Stooges-style tracks like 'No Pussy Blues' and 'Get It On', but the few key moments on 'Abattoir/Lyre' where The 'Seeds attempt to burn down the house are almost unequaled in terms of simultaneous brain and brawn and heart.




"God Bless Our Dead Marines" by Thee Silver Mt. Zion
From the album Horses In The Sky (2005)

Efrim Menuck is in touch with something very deep, very powerful, and very ancient at the same time that it is brand new. Along with the help of his ex-Godspeed and elsewhere pals in Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Tra La La Band he crafts riotous spiritual/political old-world/new-world songs of protest and dreams and hopes and wishes. Montreal's Arcade Fire released the best record of the 2000-2010 stretch with 'Funeral', I'll stand by that through and through (Although I won't write about it here because enough words have been thrown at that monstrous beast of an album), but Efrim and pals really trump their fellow many-membered-and-spirited Montrealers in terms of intensity, expansiveness, and sheer urgency. I know that sounds hard to believe, but one listen to this track from 'Horses In The Sky' should be enough proof for those with open-minds. The songcraft is non-conventional, multi-segmented, and even a little fragmented. The arrangement is part ghost Yiddish Klezmer band and part raging post-Neutral Milk folk-punk-ness (But not the sort played by Andrew Jackson Jihaad or the like). In the last three or four minutes the band breaks into an all-vocal round that will bring tears to your eyes. Milo recently had the pleasure of getting to see Silver Mt. Zion live, and I can't even begin to imagine the sort of emotional resonance parts of these songs must carry in person, when real flesh and blood humans are singing these lyrics at the top of their lungs.

They take patience as a listener, and they take a taste for eccentric sounds, but if you can pay attention you'll find that Silver Mt. Zion is making some of the most powerful, arresting, and moving music out there. 'God Bless Our Dead Marines' is the ultimate gateway into their music, at once accessible while also being experimental, melodic while being noisy and enraged. The lyrics read like a 'Bringing it All Back Home"-era protest song delivered with real clarity and heart. The string players (Many of whom also figure into the wonderful Black Ox Orestar) do their best to pull up the dust and spirits of old, moldy, beautiful folk forms over Efrim's winding and weaving ravings. Little else from the 21st century thus far sounds so out of time, so important, and so groundbreaking.




'Silent Shout' by The Knife
From the album Silent Shout (2006)

Electronic music was never really my thing. I used to be afraid of bands built on machines (Big Black and Air and a few others excluded, for not very good reasons). Then I heard The Knife (Thank you Roy Macneil).

Never before had I heard Electronic music so full of real, honest human emotion and feeling. It was also incredibly stylized, lost in an aesthetic world of its own that was dark, seductive, and sounded alarmingly singular. Now I see the light, I love Kraftwerk, Telefon Tel Aviv, and Cold Cave very, very much.

'Silent Shout' builds slowly from next to nothing (Single-note bass and bass drum loop) into a small arsenal of key textures and patterns. Everything is delightfully icy and at the same time infectiously bouncy. There is a world of atmosphere across the entirety of the album 'A Silent Shout' that is lacking on the previous record 'Deep Cuts'. That's part of why 'A Silent Shout' is so essential, it is an art record at the same time that it's a dance record. I will always be jealous of the bizarre vocal octave-jumper/shifters The Knife uses on 'Silent Shout'. The duo also has an incredible knack for using only the sounds they absolutely need while also somehow building walls of sound out a little more than nothing (And then, to top it off, they stripped their arrangements down even more at their sole live show in Gothenburg, Sweden and still pulled it off).

Wish I could speak in just one sweep
What you are and what you mean to me
Instead I mumble randomly
You stand by and enlighten me

In a dream I lost my teeth again
Calling me woman and half man
Yes, in a dream all my teeth fell out
A cracked smile and a silent shout
A cracked smile and a silent shout

That lyric. It's suggestive enough in its imagery and simplicity that it calls up a whole world in your head, a whole open-ended impression of a narrative. It's almost like Lorca's more terse, succinct poetry. A nocturnal world of dream imagery that is at once enticing and disturbing. The way the lyric of 'Silent Shout' is fused to the open-spaces and pounding kick drum in the arrangement always sticks with me. The Knife has been quoted up and down the block about their obsession with David Lynch, but that sort of aesthetic rings completely true through their music. Everything is just twisted into various degrees of oddness, from the vocal ranges to the hollowed-out and frozen arrangements to the music videos and costumes (PS, do yourself a favor, Check out Karin's cover of Nick Cave's "Stranger Than Kindness" as Fever Ray).

Enough has been written about The Knife (Just like The Arcade Fire), so I'll stop here. But, if you aren't already listening to The Knife you either live in your mother's medicine cabinet or you are (Like I once was) afraid of drum machines and keyboards and sequencers. As a convert to the cause that is electronic music, I can safely say that there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of. Robots and machines probably won't take over the world if you go out and buy 'Silent Shout' today. In fact, if you do, you'll probably thank me later.




'Cossacks Are' by Scott Walker
From the album The Drift (2006)

The Drift is one of the only records out there capable of absolutely terrifying me when I listen to it in the dark. What the hell did the orchestra think of the record when they were recording their string parts? If you don't already know Scott Walker, the man or the music, you can watch Scott Walker:30th Century Man instantly from the comfort of your computer on Netflix RIGHT NOW. Highlights include: Scott directing a collaborator on how to punch a mound of beef to get just the right percussive sound on one of the tracks, old-timey footage of the (glorious) Walker Brothers on TV shows, and interviews with the fine guys and gals who have helped Scott make his very specific and demanding solo records since 1967.

I am not exaggerating when I say Scott Walker has the voice of a long-dead spirit. His arrangements and songs are full of pseudo-dissonances and straight dissonances in varying degrees of listenability. His lyrics are like no other, maddened dispatches from a history-obsessed mind that has read far too much Modern-era Surrealist poetry. There are no genre tags in existence that could do his music credit. If pressed, I would call it 'Undead avant-crooner'.

'Cossacks Are' is the most listenable track on 'The Drift', followed by 'A Lover Loves' (The first and last tracks, respectively). This song splits the difference between Scott's interest in crooning/torch-songs and avant-classical/experimental music the world over, making for an almost melodic listening experience when compared to the rest of the record. The bedrock of the whole track is a stuttering tambourine-laced (yes, tambourine) drum track coupled with a pulsing low-down bass line. On top of the whole instrumental bundle is a spidery, knifing guitar part that isn't that far off from some of The Jesus Lizard's more down-tempo efforts. The hired orchestra lays a steady, tense trebly chord over the proceedings, as Scott wails about cossacks and fields of white roses and cowboys and popes and moving arias and what have you. Really, the lyric book is indispensable. It's heady, gruesome, terrifyingly beautiful stuff.

There are moments in the song where everything drops down to just a pounding bass drum pulse and Scott's floating white-sheet voice. These are the spots where I lose it and have to remember that I'm just listening to a record. That's how powerful The Drift is. To test this out for yourself, download the record and listen to "Hand Me Ups" VERY LOUDLY while laying in bed in the dark.

"That's a nice suit"
"That's a swanky suit"
"Been a pope like no other"
"I'm looking for a good cowboy"
"A rare outcry makes you lead a larger life"
"You could easily picture this in the current top ten"
"Medieval savagery
Calculated cruelty"
"It's hard to pick the worst moment"

But really, The Drift is an unbelievable record. It's full of darkness and insanity, and scraps of Western song-and-dance float on through. 'Cossacks Are' is one of the coolest, weirdest songs to emerge from the darker recesses of the 21st century yet. It took Scott more than a decade to make The Drift, and it may take him even longer to make the next record. We know, though, that when the next record is released it will emit all sorts of unholy weirdness into the auditory soundscape of contemporary music.


HANDY INDEX OF THE SONGS ON YOUTUBE FOR YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE/DISPLEASURE:

Radiohead 'Motion Picture Soundtrack'
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 'Hiding All Away'
Thee Silver Mt. Zion 'God Bless Our Dead Marines'
The Knife 'Silent Shout'
Scott Walker 'Cossacks Are'