Yellowcard – “Fields & Fences”

No feeling in music can match the emotional magnitude of one of your all-time favorite bands, one that you grew up with and connected to your entire life, hanging up the mic.  That’s what happened for me with Yellowcard in 2016, and I was fortunate enough not to have to endure one of those ugly breakups – nor a painful-to-watch fade into irrelevancy.  For the most part, even if their radio success waned after Ocean Avenue, YC was very much a strong presence in pop-punk until the day they retired.  Their farewell self-titled LP, Yellowcard, was the ultimate curtain call, and the lengthy finale to that album, “Fields & Fences”, will go down as one of my favorite songs from the band.

“Fields and Fences” will be remembered as the last thing Yellowcard ever composed as a band, and it is downright jaw-dropping and worthy of the role it plays. Commencing as a simply strummed, country-esque ballad (I want to start living I want to be brave, I want to find where I belong / Because I still remember the reasons I write, things that I’ve dreamed for so long), it slowly evolves into something more. Violins chime in midway through, joined by stunning acoustic picking, and as the track begins to wind and turn – almost like a long retrospective walk through the band’s past – it finally erupts into a crescendo of electric guitars, purposeful and echoing drums, and the band’s emotional…

Hey Rosetta! – “Yer Fall” / “Welcome”

The memories I have attached to Hey Rosetta! are fleeting, but very powerful.  As such, I wouldn’t consider myself a fan, but I do have a profound appreciation for Seeds, and in particular the tracks “Yer Fall” and “Welcome.”  The first time that I actively listened to Hey Rosetta! was in 2011, driving from my apartment in Philadelphia to a friend’s wedding.  Not just any friend, but that of my high school crush who I was both fortunate and unfortunate enough to have remained very close friends with for the duration of both high school and college, despite being romantically rejected during my first ever declaration of love.  It’s a wound that I’ll never forget, although now I look back at it through a very different lens that both appreciates her honesty and blushes at my own naivety.

Anyway, Seeds soundtracked my drive up the northeast extension of the Pennsylvania turnpike, air conditioner broken while attempting to blast away the sweltering July heat with all four windows down, and “Yer Fall” did what I imagine is the equivalent of reducing a person to tears.  I’ve never been able to cry when I’m supposed to – breakups, funerals –  much less for the sake of music, but I felt a lump in my throat when Tim Baker burst into the crescendo: “My love, my love is dead I buried it / What a senseless thing! this heart in shreds in the whipping wind!” …

Circa Survive – “The Amulet”

I was late to the Circa Survive party, with The Amulet serving as my first full-album experience with the talented post-hardcore/indie-rock outfit.  Although Blue Sky Noise went on to become my favorite album of theirs, as I backtracked through the discography, no individual song has stuck with me quite like the title track from the band’s 2017 LP6.  The track is an epic, powerful closer to what is, in my opinion, the most cohesive and consistent album in Circa Survive’s catalog.  The verses are catchier than the chorus, which is nice because the majority of the track sways along to that gorgeous melody (“you wanted it so bad, that you didn’t see how fucked it was’) – only erupting in chaos by the concluding minute, where frontman Anthony Green unleashes a series of chilling screams.   The main adjectives that come to mind are tight, sprawling, and mysterious – ‘The Amulet’ is all of these things, existing as the perfect microcosm of The Amulet as well as the best Circa Survive song of this decade.  It’s a dark horse, certain to be overlooked but very much deserving.

Read more from this decade at my homepage for Sowing’s Songs of the Decade.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5JjmQsvmmmOBFnUjP7FLu4

Fair to Midland – “The Greener Grass”

As a rather obvious indie/folk aficionado, I probably don’t have nearly enough progressive rock on this list – and in a decade where there has been some damn good examples.  Fair to Midland is a band that caught my ear in 2011 – their album, Arrows and Anchors, serving as one of the best records to kick off the new decade at that time.  As the years have passed by and blurred into one another, I’ve more or less forgotten about Fair to Midland – a band that dissolved out of a lack of funds of all things.  That’s why reflective projects such as this Top 100 Songs feature are so important to me on a personal level, because it gives me a chance to re-discover albums that impressed me at the time of their release, but fell by the wayside as the music industry saw an uptick in streaming, and access to music became so limitless that gems such as Arrows and Anchors became possible to forget.

When I re-played this album yesterday, some of my favorite hits immediately stood out again.  The roaring energy of “Whiskey & Ritalin”, the unforgettable chorus of “Musical Chairs”, the stirring underlying urgency of “Uh-Oh”, the zaniness of “Rikki Tikki Tavi”, the lush atmosphere of “Golden Parachutes” — it was all as I remembered it, maybe even slightly better (I bumped this remarkably consistent album from a 4.0 to a 4.5, and time will tell…

Fleet Foxes – “Third of May / Ōdaigahara”

Fleet Foxes’ “Third of May / Ōdaigahara” begins as if we arrived in the middle of a show, unannounced – crashing in with drums and hearty acoustic chords atop Robin Pecknold’s all-too-appropriate line of “light ended the night / but the song remained.”  Clocking in at nearly nine minutes, it covers a lot of ground.  It has all the makings of a modern rock epic, ebbing and flowing through different styles and signatures across three totally different sections.  The aforementioned opening partition has more of a classic Fleet Foxes charm, with fluttering acoustic guitars and earnestly sung passages like “aren’t we made to be crowded together, like leaves?”  Compared to what is to come however, it’s merely an appetizer.

The song’s pinnacle arrives with its second section, and its first obvious transition in tone.  On the fourth verse when Pecknold sings “can I be light and free?”, the urgency of the entire song kicks into high gear, amping up the crescendoing guitars while the percussion responds at a furious pace.  It feels like the score to an existential revelation, and that might be just what Fleet Foxes are going for when Robin sings out his penned poetry: “But all will fade. All I say. All I needed.”  Fleet Foxes have always had a flair for crafting pieces that gradually surge with emotion, and “Third of May / Ōdaigahara” delivers once again.  The length might appear daunting at first, but it’s necessary in order to flesh…

Taking Back Sunday – “Death Wolf”

I still remember being pretty taken aback by just how good Tidal Wave was.  I came to expect catchy pop-punk from Taking Back Sunday, but not, however – and especially at this point in their careers – anything that sounds like “Death Wolf.”

“Death Wolf” is the fulcrum – the tipping point – that proves Taking Back Sunday have finally and once-and-for-all found their voice. It takes a few listens to sink in, but holy shit is it beautiful. The faded chants that start and end the song – nobody will know – give it a cyclical feel, and for the first time it’s as if Taking Back Sunday sound like fully matured versions of their angst-ridden former selves. The punk-ish vibes are still here in full force, especially in the verses, but the entire song is glazed over in this summery atmospheric haze that feels more dynamic and mature than any of their past recordings.

It may be blasphemous to draw such a comparison, but Brand New accomplished this markedly with The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, when they grew out of their clever one-liners and discovered the meaning of life. I’m not saying that “Death Wolf” sounds like that album at all, but the feeling is the same. Here it’s as if the band has finally arrived.  The subsequent output is one of the very best TBS songs, and also one of the best of the decade.

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Brand New – “Lit Me Up”

“Lit Me Up” is a simmering brooder; this moody slow-burn whose pinnacle isn’t a guitar solo or chorus, but rather a creepy, electronically distorted “when I grow up, I want to be a heretic.” The song is hauntingly prophetic, as Lacey unwittingly predicts his demise: “Lit me up and I burn from the inside out / Yeah, I burn like a witch in a Puritan town” and then ultimately concludes that “it was a good dream.” Many of the #metoo movement’s detractors referred to it as a witch hunt, so the Salem witch trial depiction, in retrospect, is uncanny and downright chilling. Then, the song ends with an equally spine-tingling reversed audio passage: “If so…you will be dead tonight”. This is one of the only Brand New songs that doesn’t “go anywhere” but is better because of it. One can almost hear the crackling of wood and imagine the flicker of flames dancing against the silhouette of an autumn night sky. Absolutely haunting stuff.

Read more from this decade at my homepage for Sowing’s Songs of the Decade.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5JjmQsvmmmOBFnUjP7FLu4