Top 50 Songs of 2011 | Songs 20-1

there's totally a lack of good NYE shots, so I'm recycling this one

Picking up where I left off the other day, here's my the rest of the entries on my year-end Top 50. If you missed numbers 50 to 21, click here, and if you missed the Honourable Mentions, click here.

20 | Memphis | "I Want The Lights On After Dark"

Memphis' Torquil Campbell will always have a soft spot in my musical heart, if only because he provides the male vocals for one of my favorite bands, Stars. Memphis is one of his side-projects, along with Dead Child Star, and if he can put out more songs like this one, he can keep doing as much side work as he pleases. There's an underlying sense of sexiness here - probably just from the come-hither delivery Torquil's always used for his romantic-pop stylings - oddly coupled with some palpable sense of fear or insecurity, denoted by the song's title. The "I was never really..."s he spouts only add to that sentiment, and the song is propelled by steady drum hits, tuneful guitar, and an uplifting chorus. Ending with repeated chants, the tune offers a lot, and stands as a testament to Campbell's formidable musical prowess.

19 | The Black Keys | "Lonely Boy"

"Machine-gun guitar". I'm pretty sure that's how Pitchfork described the opening stanzas of "Lonely Boy", and I really can't improve upon that description. The song starts off with that bang, and never lets up. Following the garage-rock ethos of the rest of The Black Keys' work, "Lonely Boy" is another feather in the group's cap - they make rock'n'roll seem easy.

18 | Fucked Up | "The Other Shoe"

A lot of these songs have little vocal quirks that really catch on with you and don't let go. Here, it's the relatively deadpanned initial delivery of "we're dying on the inside" over and over, a morbid proclamation that almost seems to build into confounding elation at some point. The lyrics are a real strong point on this track, as its one of Damian Abraham's better turns vocally, his yells and the guitars performing the perfect balancing act. "You can't be comfortable/with all the things about to fall" is another line that sticks with you, and they make sure of it, Abraham going overboard by yelping each word in the phrase in a neat see-saw fashion. The easy dismissal of Fucked Up is to call it screamo, but that ignores the amazing guitars, the great percussion, the skilled backing vocals, and the thoughtful concepts behind all of their work. "The Other Shoe" fits that just fine.

17 | Yuck | "Operation"

For the life of me, I can't figure out where these guys stole that catchy riff from. "Dun-dun-dunnn...dun-dun-dunnn...dun, dun dunnenenene....dun, dun dunnenenene". I tried Big Wreck, Sonic Youth, all the 90's bands I could think of that supposedly form the inspiration (source material?) for this bunch, but nothing was resembling what I was hearing in "Operation". Now, this isn't actually a story of discovery, since I still don't know why it sounds so familiar. It is however a testament that if you're new and you do something really well, a lot of people will think you probably stole it from somewhere else. Full credit to Yuck in that case for shredding so well on this song that I thought they were lifting riffs from other groups. When your shtick is that you're a 90's-mining rock band in the 2000's, being original is quite the accomplishment.

16 | Austra | "Lose It"

Ah, the keyboard is to die for here, at least until Katie Stelmanis' voice comes in and she puts her opera-trained pipes to work. As mentioned in the previous section of this list, what Austra is doing is unprecedented, layering otherworldly-amazing vocals over dance-y electro beats and bloops. "Lose It" is one of my favourite examples of that, with the various affectations of Stelmanis and the group's other singers coming to life spellbindingly over the propulsive electronic instrumentation underneath them. I swear I could listen to this song all day.

15 | Mother Mother | "The Stand"

Easy number one material here, and it probably is for a lot of people. The most interesting part of "The Stand" is that it's basically a naughty/philosophical/foreboding conversation set to song - and it manages to work astoundingly. It's unfathomably catchy, has some of the most memorable lines of the year (what's space like? "it's like paradise/spread out with a butterknife"...what?!), and that's even while there's all sorts of instrumental craziness going on around it; like, I swear I heard banjo and trumpet. There probably wasn't a more fun, funny, interesting, and awesome song this year. Maybe it didn't capture the top spot for best song, but it was certainly some of the greatest entertainment.

14 | James Blake | "The Wilhelm Scream"

I don't know if any of these songs gave me the shivers this year, but James Blake's performance of this song on Jools Holland's late-night show in the spring may have been the greatest live thing I haven't seen with my own eyes. To be able to reproduce electronic music so proficiently live isn't an easy task, especially given Blake's use of negative space in his recordings, valuing silence just as much as sound. The build is brilliant in an unnerving way, and Blake's lamentations on dreaming almost make you feel afraid of doing it yourself. For such a seemingly dreary song lyrics-wise, there's undeniable magic anchoring this song sonically, and it makes for the greatest kind of performance when married to James' top-notch singing. He may say he doesn't know about a lot of things in the song, but it's hard not to know this song was one of the highlights of 2011.

13 | Gauntlet Hair | "I Was Thinking..."

Fuzzed-out rock had an off year after so much success these prior few, and I have to say I missed it. I didn't discover these guys until the fall, but I'm sure glad I did. I've heard some Japandroids comparisons, but Gauntlet Hair is a different kind of beast - for one, there's a much sunnier vibe to their tunes, rife with bright guitar and the far-away-sounding vocals that are so synonymous with solar-tinged songs nowadays. "I Was Thinking..." is a weird tune in that I don't really listen to the music, and I barely know any of the words, even though I've played it dozens of times. I just kind of listen to the thing as a whole, almost as if the song is something that just "happens", and I'm there while it does so. I don't interpret it the same way I do other songs, or try to find or assign meaning, or pretend I'm playing guitars or drums or sing along to it. It just is. It's a strange thing for a song to be, and it's even stranger for something like that to be appealing musically, but its existence as a kind of "pleasant noise" doesn't really need to be explained. It's just pretty cool that it's like that.

12 | James Blake & Bon Iver | "Fall Creek Boys Choir"

Ah, I was wrong: it seems James Blake is making his fourth appearance on this list, not the three I thought earlier. The fact he does so with Bon Iver on this tune is just icing on the cake. Now even though many of the lyrics in this song are just as unintelligible as Gauntlet Hair's above, it's actually kind of fun to sing your own words along to it as best as you can guess: "I've been fucking up your road"? "I'll get foreclosed"? "Oh red phone"? I'm joking because it's hard for me to take this song seriously when it's Autotuned to the extreme, and when you can barely tell which one is James Blake and which is Justin Vernon. The saving grace is that the duo's choice of music to accompany their hilarious vocal romp is magnificent, and bordering on beautiful. If the Fall Creek Boys Choir was a real thing, I'm pretty sure they would dress really goofy, have laughably strange voices...and you'd somehow still love every minute of it.

11 | Grimes | "Vanessa"

Wait til 0:18 in, and once this song actually drops, it's five solid minutes of the neatest pop you'll hear all year. I don't know if I believe Claire Boucher's claims that she barely knows anything about reading or making music, but if she can make such amazing, sprawling tracks at such a young age with next to no experience whatsoever, then it's scary the kind of musicians (if that's even the right word) might come out of this digital age. Her voice isn't perfect, but that doesn't stop "Vanessa" from being a joyfully dark trip through electro-pop, keeping you wanting more from the up-and-coming artist. On a completely unrelated note to this song, I love that she called her EP "Geddy Primes". I'll leave you with that one for a minute...

10 | BRAIDS | "Lammicken"

BRAIDS ARE AWESOME. I don't know why they capitalize their name like that, but that's pretty cool too. Another group I saw perform live at Halifax Pop Explosion, their avant-garde musical stylings keep you guessing at which direction their songs are going to explore next, and their vocals keep you focused while the chaos builds around you, like on this particular tune. Basically four solid minutes of build, the payoff is astounding, and you'd be hard-pressed finding anything else this year or any other that sounds a thing like "Lammicken", or most of BRAIDS' other music for that matter. I love the direction they've chosen to take with their work, and this song is obviously no different, cramming a ton of emotion into one line repeated over and over again. Can't wait to hear what else this group has up their sleeves.

9 | The Rural Alberta Advantage | "Stamp"

It was hard to escape "Stamp" this year, and that was a great sign of success for The RAA. It was on the radio, the video was a cheeky hit, and the instrumental soundtracked a Molson Canadian ad of all things. 2011 treated these guys well, and even if their album had a few irrational songwriting quirks to it, it was great to see them make it on a bigger stage after putting out a debut album as stellar as Hometowns a few years ago.

8 | Hey Rosetta! | "Yer Spring"

Okay, now I remember getting the shivers to at least one song, because it was this one, on a drive home one night - and I'm pretty sure during their entire set when I saw them this summer, as they outperformed Broken Social Scene in my opinion at M Fest. "Yer Spring" is the perfect synthesis of Hey Rosetta!'s ballads and rockers, providing acute bursts of emotion alongside heartfelt lyrical swathes. "Oh man, I hate this part/when the car sails off the bridge/my knuckles white/my water rushing in...am I rising up?" just cuts through you, especially as Tim Baker's distinct voice repeats that last bit again and again, raising his own voice each time to mesh perfectly with the sentiment of the line. The various sections of "Yer Spring" are all shout-along-able, and the ebb and flow of the music makes it the perfect representation of the watery East Coast of Canada this bunch is from. Probably Hey Rosetta!'s crowning achievement right here.

7 | HEALTH | "Goth Star" (Pictureplane Cover)

So, this is kinda like a cover of a cover of a cover, as one of my friends pointed out that Pictureplane's original used Stevie Nicks' voice from a Fleetwood Mac tune for the distinctly-detached human voice sound-effect that pretty much makes up the chorus of both versions of "Goth Star". The greatest part about this song is that HEALTH is usually an industrial-electro-rock band, making squelching masses of guitar and drums somehow coalesce into something you can call music (and that description might belie the fact that I actually like their music). The surprise here of course is that the floaty vocals and tinkling sounds throughout completely throw off that notion of the band, and the fact that it's apparently one of their favorites to play live makes me feel oddly justified for liking these guys - it's like having a particularly talented friend you didn't know was also really good at something else.

6 | M83 | "Midnight City"

Somehow, this tune admirably follows up "Intro" on M83's album, which I gushed about in the Top 50-21 earlier. Anthony Gonzalez unleashed a masterpiece with "Midnight City", the snyths blowing the roof off of the song time after time, his vocals providing the in-between verses, and even throwing in a sick sax solo for good measure. The drum fills are another highlight on this track, coming in just before the instrumental chorus - which is something that deserves its own little write-up. It's always nice to see a song that draws on something like a non-vocal chorus as its proverbial earworm; that takes a lot of work by a master musician, or at least one with a keen knack for what's likely to get stuck in people's heads. Many people in the "indie" world may have probably become disillusioned by pop music's insistence on formulaic hits, progressing from verse to chorus to verse to chorus to break to chorus, one song just like the other. When that chorus instead transforms into something played and not sung, it throws that little bit of variance into the equation that elicits just the right amount of differentiation to pique your interest. "Midnight City" does exactly that exceptionally well - on Top 40 radio, "Midnight City" would have its titled repeated ad nauseum in whatever chorus its producers had chosen for it. Here, M83 lets the music do the talking, and benefits for it.

5 | Shooting Guns | "Public Taser"

Now, here's an example of song that let's the music do all of the talking. "Public Taser", and indeed Shooting Guns, came out of nowhere this year, and from the minute I heard the song, I knew I had a new favourite. I've already used adjectives like "bad-ass" and "awesome" all over the place here, and those just begin to describe this track. It makes me want to learn guitar. It makes me want to discover Black Sabbath for myself. It makes me want to grow really long hair and become a headbanger. It makes me want to do some kind of drug that would complement this song the best, so I could be on it and play this as the soundtrack to my trip. It makes me want to put it on in my car and take a drive around the city at night, or at least through some kind of montage like the start of a Sopranos episode. They say a picture is worth 1000 words? This song doesn't even have any - it just makes you want to do 1000 different cool things.

4 | Sloan | "Unkind"

Oh Sloan. They're so classic that when I first heard "Unkind", I thought it was some old song of theirs that had fallen through the cracks and resurfaced in time for me to catch it on Radio3 one random day. It's everything these guys have been doing so well for two decades. The guitar is fresh, the drumming provides that kick present in most of the band's work, and the lyrics are the usual fare - it's just the way that everything comes together that makes this song pure rock'n'roll bliss. I hope Sloan goes another 20 years, and keeps putting out amazing work like this that long from now too.

3 | Junior Boys | "Banana Ripple"

Wowowow. When I bought this CD and threw this track on, I just started involuntarily moving along to it, and I haven't stopped every time since. I swear the CD hasn't even left my car, and when I need a pick-me-up or something fantastic to listen to driving around on errands or when no one can agree what to listen to, this is what gets thrown on. It's so damn catchy, it's so perfectly executed, it's such a treat that you don't even realize that it's nine minutes long. I'm serious, there are maybe four or five other songs this long and this astoundingly listenable - and I mean that I've heard in my whole life. "Do" by Do Make Say Think, "Remind Me In Dark Times" by Shout Out Out Out Out, "It's All Gonna Break" by Broken Social Scene, and "Yeah (Crass Version)" by LCD Soundsystem are the only others I can think of, and nothing else is really close. That's really saying something for a song that only has two, maybe three distinct parts. Junior Boys don't capture you through endlessly looping dance beats, or mind-numbing vocal repetitions - they somehow combine their voices and the music into a compelling whole that you never truly tire of. I don't know if "Banana Ripple" is the biggest surprise this high on the list, but it's one of the most pleasant ones; a song I'll keep enjoying forever I hope.

2 | BRAIDS | "Peach Wedding"

After I saw BRAIDS play their show, I had to make sure I saw the band at their merch table, mainly to speak to their cute-as-a-button lead singer and tell her how much I enjoyed the show. Waiting for them to get there, I figured I'd buy the split 7" single they had for sale, mostly to help support the band. What I didn't realize was that along with that vinyl, there was a free download of the track "Peach Wedding" that was their side of the 7" (Purity Ring's "Belispeak" was the other). One neat and really geeky thing about the download was that while most high-quality songs are 320 kbps, and 8-12 MB large depending on their length, "Peach Wedding" was 831 kbps and 35 MB - I didn't even know such high quality existed in mp3's. Figuring I had a real gem on my hands without even listening to it, I grabbed my headphones and immersed myself.

Whoa. The waxing and waning of the snyth in the background, coupled with the water droplet sound effects splattering away in the background, added to the airy and beautiful singing, all rendered a completely spellbinding track. Why this hasn't even had on play on Radio3 is beyond me - it's BRAIDS' best work, which is truly saying something for a band that made the Top 10 for Canada's prestigious Polaris Prize for best album of the year. There is so much fearless emotion in "Peach Wedding", even though you have no idea what she's actually singing about, or even saying most of the time. That mercurial nature lends itself to a feeling of awe that overcomes you, being moved by something so unknown. I might be the only one who liked "Peach Wedding" this much in 2011, but anyone who hasn't heard it doesn't know what they're missing.

1 | Diamond Rings & PS I Love You | "Leftovers"

When I first put together this list, I put this at number one and never looked again. I kind of just left the list on my desktop for the holidays, and I was taken aback when I typed it out again for this blog - "I put 'Leftovers' at number one? Really?" Then I started to remember just why I loved this song: it's two of my favourite artists of the last couple years coming together for a rousing performance. Diamond Rings provides the vocal gusto, while PS I Love You bang their drums and strum their guitar in aid of the musical mission. Maybe it's the divergent styles - both musically and aesthetically - of the two different components as well. Diamond Rings is John O'Regan, a synth-utilizing, 80's-ish male diva who embraces gay culture and performs in Hammer Pants, full make-up, and gets pretty bejeweled on stage. PS I Love You is basically a drum and guitar duo banging out ferociously fuzzed-out tunes - and their most recognizable member is so because he tips the scales at probably over 350 pounds.

Anyways, I haven't spoken much about the music here because I think it speaks for itself: O'Regan deftly tells the story (genderless, as he always does) of a love interest who's traveling, or otherwise just away. "I've got your number and I've know that you've got mine/ten digits scrawled across upon your screen/and if you call I will be waiting on the line/ready to come over, I'll be leftover" may be quite simple, but the way Diamond Rings weaves the whole tale together and makes you feel part of it is the true accomplishment. Relatability is always essential to songs sticking with you and making a lasting impression, and if you've ever chased anyone (like I did for most of 2011), this song will speak volumes to you. So yes, "Leftovers" really was my favourite song of the year.