The top 20 songs of 2011 Part 1: 20-11

So here is the first part of my top twenty songs of 2011. As an introduction, these songs are chosen purely because I liked them and listened to them a lot – nothing more, nothing less. Anyone who reads this blog knows I’m terribly out of step with fashion so you’ll find no Bon Iver, St Vincent or any of that guff here. Sorry, it’s not to be contrary but because that music doesn’t move me. Whatever, here’s the first ten:


20: Run The World (Girls) - Beyoncé
I have long been a fan of any pop song that goes crazy with drums and Lose my breathe was one of my favourite Destiny's Child songs for that very reason. I'm all for any militantly pro-female song and with the snare drum scatter attack of Run the World, I find this song irresistible. I still think Beyonce should have sung "who'll run this muthafucker? GIRLS!" but that's quibbling - a great song.


19: Please Take - Wire
Any song off the excellent Red Barked Tree album could have made this list but this one just sticks in your head. It moves languidly but with purpose and if you're not singing "Fuck off out of my face" by the second chorus, you just don't like music.


18: I'll Hit You Back - Jane's Addiction
I hesitate to write Jane's Addiction as the artist because on one level it doesn't actually sound like them. Perry's vocals seem to have a case of the auto-tuned removing the rough undercurrent that makes him so unique while Navarro tunes out his usual proto-metal snarl for something much more tame. However, every time this song comes on, I find it an irresistible pop confection and start singing along. It's not classic Jane's but it is a good song.


17: Curl of the Burl - Mastodon
Somehow sounding like Trés Hombres era ZZ Top siphoned through Black Sabbath with Queens of the Stone Age-esque swing, Mastodon moves away from their crazy ass mini-rock operas to more straight forward pop. A lot of fans hate The Hunter for this very reason but they’re missing out – the poppier Mastodon is infinitely more fun and their lyrics are just as weird as ever. Haters are going to hate but say what you will, Burl makes me want to dance and seems like a natural evolution in their sound to me.


16: Rumor has it - Adele
This song single handedly converted me to the cult of Adele. Its power might have been diluted somewhat by being violated by those Glee miscreants but I still think this is a great song. Somewhere between its blues-gospel hand clap compulsion and a guitar line that which wouldn't be out of place on a Tom Waits record, Adele's voice rankles and seduces. To be honest, we could do a lot worse than mainstream music embracing the white girl soul revival of Winehouse, Duffy and Adele and this is an exemplar of that genre at its best.


15: In the End – Anthrax
Whatever you feel about classic metal, Anthrax tick all the boxes in this little gem. It’s rare in this age to hear music these days so metal yet so sincere, it’s as if they wrote this song in 1986 and only got around to releasing it this year. Filled with a lot of chug, drum fills and a solo filled break down with guitars that squeal in that way that screams “MAIDEN!”, Anthrax provide us with a late era metal classic.


14: Supercollider - Radiohead
Spoiler alert: The King of Limbs is not even remotely close to making my top 10 albums of the year which seems almost heretical at any other time (a top ten list not featuring Radiohead? WHAAAAT?!) but ahem, it really wasn't very good. I much preferred the EP which came soon after and the slow, electronic glide of Supercollider is hypnotic and diverting. Best of all, Thom Yorke's voice is divine, an instrument of such purity and grace this song highlights just how special it is. I still think this could have been the centrepiece of a rethought Limbs and made it a better album.


13: Especially Me - Low
There is much to adore on Low's C'mon record but there is something simultaneously graceful, haunting and sincere about this song that makes it undeniably moving. Part caring, part accusatory, the song's deeper meaning is carried by understated strings and a winding riff that is instantly memorable. Sure it's got that terrible line about cake and is heavy on the drama but it is somehow perfect in every way.


12: No Church in the Wild (featuring Frank Ocean) - Jay Z and Kanye West
For me, The Throne was a bit of a dud, it just sounded like a couple of rich arseholes singing about how much better their lives are than yours. I guess that's pretty common in hip hop but there was something so unrepentantly decadent about it that it verged on obscene. However, both Otis and No Church in the Wild provided some biting respite from it all by just being awesome. No Church in the Wild is a dark rumination on the dark side of the hip hop life and Jay Z and Kanye have never sounded so committed or fluid than on this track. Kanye has the edge but that's because he's letting his freak flag fly a little bit higher than Jay's.


11: Shook Down – Yuck
Yuck are unrepentant 90’s American indie rock classicists honing the best of that decade with little care for originality while undertaking the task with a bevy of good tunes. Shook Down sounds like a long lost Lemonheads classic and while it isn’t going to displace Evan Dando’s best work, it reminds us of the pure joy of that country-indie-pop sound he exemplified. Packed with the requisite dreamy lyrics and J Mascis guitar toned solo, it’s the aural equivalent of your favourite comfort food.

Part 2 soon...

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Review catch up: Jane's Addiction - The Great Escape Artist

Jane's Addiction are one of the greatest bands of the last 25 years with two classic albums and if you don't believe that you're either stupid, drunk or never really heard them. As such, I really wanted The Great Escape Artist to be something special but unfortunately it's not and it pains me to write that. As a fan, you root for the artist (especially when they only release albums sporadically) and maybe my expectations are too high but there is something really weird and disconnected about this record. It's an ok listen but when it comes to Jane's, the bar is a little (maybe unfairly) higher.

The original Jane's line up was the product of four distinct styles: Stephen Perkins tribal thump, Dave Navarro's slash and burn guitar style, Eric Avery's driving bass and Perry Farrell's shamanic freak outs. I have long said that the original line up's MVP was Avery whose bass lines provided the foundation that propelled the band and gave the platform for the other players strengths. Avery's refusal to return to the band after the re-formation has left them without this crucial element which has changed the bands sound. On 2003's Strays, the band opted for a metallic rock edge that abandoned the bacchanalian carny eccentricities of their earlier work but it still sounded like Jane's Addiction. The new record has a clutch of songs that don't really sound like the band at all which is disappointing.

While I accept that a band changes over time, what I find surprising is that the band members seem to be running in the opposite direction of what makes them so special. Navarro is sometimes AWOL on this album. While his guitar work can be subtle and textured (something he's great at, listen to Summertime Rolls), what makes him special is that he can go from zero to a billion in a blink of eye and simultaneously play lead and rhythm with passion and emotion. On a number of these tracks (particularly Curiosity Kills), he sounds like the Edge covering a late era Cure song and as any Cure fan knows, that's not necessarily a good thing. Perkins seems to be on a leash, the creativity and brutality of his drumming tempered and understated. Farrell is never less than an interesting vocalist but even he seems to be constrained by the new sound.

The record starts promisingly enough with Underground, a mid paced rocker with an insistent groove and End to the Lies which I figure puts the nail in the coffin of Avery ever returning. Navarro unleashes a shit storm of guitar here that sounds massive and ok, ok I'll even forgive Perry for that line ("You were the foreskin, I was the real head.") This is followed by the aforementioned Cure tribute, Curiosity Kills and the underwhelming second single Irresistible Force. Prior to hearing the song, I imagined a Jane's Addiction song called Irresistible Force would be a barnstorming rockfest - I certainly got that wrong. While pretty, it kind of goes nowhere. I'll Hit You Back is a good song but the music could be any band and the only Jane's stamp on the tune is Perry's vocals. That's the disconnect, where is the Jane's sound?

The songs continue in this vein for a while and I'm not sure whether it's the influence of TVOTR collaborator David Sitek or a conscious move on the band to distance themselves from their signature sound. Ironically, the three most Jane's sounding songs are the one's co-written by Duff McKagen who left the band because of musical differences. The twisting guitars lines of Ultimate Reason, the eerie pathos of Broken People and driving Words Right Out of My Mouth seem to echo the sound that we love. Words Right Out of My Mouth might be a paint-by-numbers Jane's rocker but in the context of this record, it's a relief to hear.

I take no pleasure in writing this and the album is far from offensive. I'll definitely be listening to it in the weeks and months to come. However, when you get a Jane's Addiction record it should be something special and this is a passable entry into their canon but not remarkable. To add insult to injury, the deluxe version has a bonus live show featuring some of their best songs which reminds you how far this record is from their best. Still, go out and buy it - it's probably better than most rock releases this year.

One last thing, Perry really needs to give up doing the covers - just sayin'...

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Stop... Censorship?!

One of the records I'm most anticipating this year is the new Jane's Addiction record, The Great Escape Artist which is out in a couple of weeks. I liked End to the lies but I'm a little lukewarm on the second single Irresistible Force. Whatever - I'm keen for any new Jane's record and even though I didn't rate the last one, I still listen to it pretty regularly. They performed on Kimmel this week and ended the show with Stop. The weirdest thing is the TV channel censored the word "Goddamn" at the end of the song (as in "Turn off that smokestack and that goddamn radio"). It's even stranger when Perry yells "Fuck 'em up!" at the beginning of the solo (about 3:02) and that didn't get censored. Does anyone else find that kind of censorship weird - you'd censor goddamn over fuck? Anyhow, I'm a big boy now, I can hear the word goddamn. Oh yeah and Navarro is shredding on that song...

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A song a day: Jane's Addiction – Three Days

Simply one of the greatest songs ever written. If you don't agree then you're a clown.

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Jane's Addiction: End to the Lies review

My love for Jane's Addiction is as deep as the ocean but I have always been of the opinion that once you have the two records you need, anything good they produce beyond that is gravy. Unlike much of my Jane's brethren, I was not a hater of their comeback record Strays - it had some ok tracks, Navarro was smoking as usual but it was overproduced and the bass player wasn't strong enough to drive the music (and that's always been their secret weapon, it's all about the bass providing the musical foundation for the theatrics of Farrell and Navarro).

As the first taster of The Great Escape Artist (due August), this gets me pretty excited about the prospect of some good new Jane's tunes. Rather than come out with a generic rock song that competes with their classics (Strays' Just Because tried and failed), they've chosen to launch the album with a slow burn assault which bodes well for the upcoming record. Musically, the song is dense with torrents of Navarro magic raining from the sky which sounds colossal and has a heavy groove courtesy of TV on the Radio's David Sitek. Further, Farrell sounds fired up and in fine form. Even when he sings possibly the worst line in Jane's history, "You were the foreskin/I was the real head" it sounds like the old swagger is back. Some of Jane's best songs are when Farrell is railing against someone or something and the unmentioned protagonist in the lyrics gets the pointy end of the Farrell stick here (possibly literally given the that line).

There has been a lot of talk about Sitek's influence on the band and while there's some trademark studio trickery here, it doesn't sound like TVOTR because the magic alchemy of Farrell, Navarro and Perkins is too strong to be muted by another voice. I guess we'll have to wait and see how Sitek balances out the equation when the album is released but based on End to the Lies, I think there is the possibility of awesomeness ahead.

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