Benjamin Clementine – “Phantom Of Aleppoville”

Benjamin Clementine might be one of the most underappreciated artists of the decade.  Rising from a homeless musician in Paris to the winner of 2015’s Mercury Prize, Clementine recorded I Tell a Fly while traveling the world – from New York to London to Syria – and chronicling what he witnessed, be it sickening wealth, war-torn nations, or alarming poverty.  He’s as authentic as they come, and the combination of his own rough upbringing, along with his boots-on-the-ground mentality to seeing and incorporating world issues into his music, has afforded him a wealth of material worth playing about — and more importantly, worth hearing.

While I’d advise anyone to listen to both of Benjamin Clementine’s albums in full, the absolute pinnacle of his young career has to be ‘Phantom of Aleppoville.’   It ebbs and flows with a blend of grace and oddness that simply can’t be manufactured – and comes along ever so rarely. Spanning six and a half minutes, the song gradually builds up from intricate, trickling piano notes to more graceful and elegant ones. By the time the song is one minute in, the two styles intertwine and dance together playfully, and it sounds like we’re immersed in some eighteenth century classical masterpiece. Clementine’s avant-garde inclinations are on full display when ‘Phantom of Aleppoville’ changes course into militaristic drumming and unintelligible, tribal-sounding chants. The most stunning juncture comes a little more than halfway through, when the song falls into a lush, vocal-centric moment where…

Kendrick Lamar – “m.A.A.d city”

Oh my my.  If only you knew the struggle I endured to try and pick the best Kendrick Lamar song of the past decade.  I’ve been considering it even prior to the conception of this blog series, and since then I’ve bounced between the politically volatile ‘The Blacker the Berry’, the artful storytelling of either ‘The Art of Peer Pressure’ or ‘Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst’, the hook-laden depth of ‘Good Kid’, or purely fun tracks such as ‘Wesley’s Theory’ or ‘Backseat Freestyle.’  As of writing this, I’m still not certain that there’s any such thing as a right decision, so I’m just gonna roll with my gut as usual.

Aaand ‘m.A.A.d city’ it is!

The track focuses in on the violence of gang life, specifically Piru Bloods and Compton Crips (two rival west coast gangs) – at one point comparing every front porch in his hood to a middle eastern war zone.  It commences with a series of threatening verses, “Fuck who you know—where you from, my n****? / Where your grandma stay, huh, my n****?”, and works its way into a real story from Lamar’s childhood where he witnessed someone get killed, even going so far as to bleep out the names of the people involved.  Lamar has been quoted about that specific passage saying, “I’m bleeping out a name. These stories are serious and in-depth, I’m not going to go out here and really, really slander…

David Bowie – “Lazarus”

Art isn’t necessarily just an output, or a mere creation.  It’s who you are.  It flows through your veins.

David Bowie personified that, from his fashion to his role in movies.  The man was a true artist in everything he did, even his own death.  While the general public remained blissfully unaware of the cancer that was slowly killing him, Bowie turned to music to tell his story through 2016’s Blackstar.   The album was unusual not because it was released shortly before his demise, but because the album was created with the artist fully aware of his own impending death – it was a parting gift, you might say.

For that reason, Blackstar was and still is a very unique record.  At a mere seven songs, there’s not a single moment that doesn’t hit listeners right in the gut.  However, it’s difficult to select any track other than ‘Lazarus’ – the song that most directly addresses his death – as one of the most emotional moments of the entire decade.  “Look up here, I’m in heaven…I’ve got scars that can’t be seen” he sings, slyly alluding to the cancer that he was hiding at the time the song was written.  It ends with him saying, “Oh, I’ll be free…Ain’t that just like me?” – foreshadowing his spiritual ascension from this world.  It’s all very haunting, and devastating to think that he knew all along.

Musically the track is downtempo, with jazz influences and jarring…

Fleet Foxes – “Helplessness Blues”

When it comes to pastoral indie-folk, it sometimes feels like the genre has overplayed its hand.  Acoustic guitars, lumberjack cologne — we get it, alright?  Everyone wants to be the next Simon & Garfunkel, and by 2019, we’re a little bit leery every time a group of neckbeards comes stumbling out of the woods.  But not only are Fleet Foxes the exception to that rule, they’re also arguably the band that set the standard for folk music during the 2010’s.  Strictly from an aesthetic standpoint, no other group has as successfully captured that rich, earthy, rural vibe.  In other words, this is the art that all those other bands aspire for.

Fleet Foxes’ discography has been the model of consistency (three LP’s spaced out over nine years, each one critically acclaimed), so selecting a definitive standout track is a difficult undertaking.  2017’s Crack-Up flourished thanks to increased piano/classical elements, and a three-part epic like “Third of May / Ōdaigahara” would have been just as fitting here.  However, the simple beauty of “Helplessness Blues” represents this band better.  To most fans, their 2011 offering Helplessness Blues was the band in peak form, with the title track serving as its heartfelt mantra.  The song exists as little more than a surging wave of acoustic guitars, accompanied by frontman Robin Pecknold’s thoughtful ruminations which are sung with the urgency of a man who can’t see what’s waiting for him around the corner: “And now after some thinking, I’d…

Trophy Scars – “Qeres”

This already feels like the riskiest inclusion on this list so far.  Trophy Scars don’t exactly have the clout of a band like Titus Andronicus or The Dillinger Escape Plan, yet here they are, nestled snug on my cement-as-fuck decade enshrinement.  But let me ease any concerns: they deserve to be here.  OK, feel better?

First of all, Holy Vacants is a nearly perfect album so I brought up the tracks in a playlist, put a blindfold on,and punched my keyboard to see which song would end up earning this honor.  Well, not quite, but it could have been that easy!  The real reason is that no song rocks nearly as hard as “Qeres” – sure, “Everything Disappearing” is a haunting penultimate track (for all intents and purposes it’s the real closer), and “Crystallophobia” is about the catchiest goddamn thing since the plague, but I think I’m talking myself out of the point I was trying to make so I’m going to stop.  “Qeres” dominates Holy Vacants before the clock even hits 00:01 – I kid you not, hit play and look at the timestamp.  Electric guitars are rollicking from the get-go; the song starts this high but then the drums kick in, along with that magnificent vocal duet, and it has already raised the stakes on itself like twenty measly seconds into the song.  And none of that even counts the best part – a dichotomous chorus which thrusts Jerry Jones’ comically gruff voice alongside those harmonious, angelic backdrops – each word highlighted by…