The Dear Hunter – “Waves”

Can a relatively conventional 4 minute alt-rock track really contend for song of the decade? Considering there is always something out there that’s more innovative, brilliant, and weird, I have to admit it is unusual.  However when you are as talented as The Dear Hunter is, any feat is made to look easy.  Effortless is as good of an adjective as any to describe their 2015 smash hit “Waves” – a track that combines all of your standard breakup cliches with a gorgeously bleak burial-at-sea metaphor.  As lead vocalist Casey Crescenzo passionately pleads “I can see the lighthouse”, it feels like bargaining, as images of waves knocking his ship sideways come more and more into focus.  It’s not your typical breakup song because The Dear Hunter is an atypically skilled bunch.  So when the experience wraps up with the utterance “I thought that I knew love, but it was just a wave crashing over us”, it feels all too easy to relate to.

It’s amusing to think that a band as eccentric as The Dear Hunter (who have composed an act in five parts and who also once wrote a 9-EP, 36-song collection) might see one of their most straightforward offerings ascend to the top of their entire discography.  “Waves” isn’t part of some grand scheme or concept, it’s just pure emotion set to the most sweeping melody that the band has ever written.  Sometimes, that’s all you need.

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Swans – “The Seer Returns”

The Seer is the stuff nightmares are made of.  From the witch-like incantations of “Lunacy” through the jarring discordance of “The Apostate”, it’s basically all dimensions of hell sprawled across an immersive two hour experience.  The 32 minute title track would have been an easy selection for one of the decade’s best songs, but when I think about the moments on this album that make me return, it has more to do with the digestible cuts: “Lunacy”, “The Wolf”, “Song for a Warrior”, et al.  “The Seer Returns” also benefits from rare accessibility on an album that is otherwise abrasive – however, it sacrifices nothing in terms of the pure evil that it’s able to conjure.

Thumping along to an addictingly villainous beat, Gira spews some ugly imagery that seems like nonsense upon initial inspection but actually makes a whole lot of sense if you pay it a careful listen.  Some of the lyrics are more cryptic (“Behind the veil of silver scars / There is a special inverted star”…”There’s a jagged deep crack in the crust of the earth, spreading from north to south / Put your light in my mouth”) while others are just grotesque (“I’m down here naked, there’s a hole in my chest / Both my arms are broken, pointing east and west”), but one of my favorite passages is both:  “Ahh, the mountains are crumbling / Ahh, the canyons are thundering / All the people are fucking / They’re…

The National – “Pink Rabbits”

Well…duh.  The National.  Has any band had a greater influence on our current decade? We’ve witnessed High Violet (2010), Trouble Will Find Me (2013), Sleep Well Beast (2017), and we’re about to get hit with one more dose of brilliance with 2019’s I Am Easy to Find.  So as obvious as it is that The National belong on this list, it’s far less certain what track best highlights why.

They’re a band of consistent excellence, and anyone who loves them knows that ranking their songs is futile.  Everyone seems to identify with a different track for personal reasons, and beyond just grabbing a single such as “Bloodbuzz Ohio” or “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness” and calling it their most widely appealing, there’s few ways to objectively approach this.  So I won’t.

The thing is, “Pink Rabbits” still devastates me six years later.  The National are no strangers to forlorn, swaying melodies with downtrodden messages, but there’s something about this tune in particular that resonates with every emotional fiber in me.  It’s a breakup song; well yeah, sort of.  But it’s also about the sting of separation – which the narrator overcomes – only to be confronted by the same girl right as he was on the mend: “I was coming back from what seemed like a ruin / I couldn’t see you coming so far, I just turn around and there you are / I’m so surprised you want to dance with…

Gang of Youths – “Say Yes to Life”

Few modern bands are able to express the simplest of ideas with as much sincerity and passion as the Australian quintet Gang of Youths.  When frontman David Le’aupepe sings one of my all-time favorite lyrics, “And it’s strange, all the things that I’ve run from / Are the things that completeness could come from” on the slow-burning ‘Do Not Let Your Spirit Wane’, I see the twenty-year-old-me rejecting happiness at every turn, favoring a self-destructive lifestyle over accepting maturity and adulthood.  When he sings that he “feels everything” on ‘Fear and Trembling’, only to follow that up by admitting that he’s “terrified of loving” because he’s “terrified of pain”,  I feel the heartbreak in his voice and it makes me look inwards at my own insecurities.  Isn’t that the way all the best bands are?  They somehow put into words everything you’d write if you could, and then sing it plainly and beautifully.

Now, take that idea and multiply it on ‘Say Yes to Life’, possibly the most optimistic and affirming rock anthem to come out since Springsteen was still rollicking in his heyday.  Le’aupepe immediately reaches out to his listeners and engages them, putting himself in our shoes: “If I could reach out through the screen and give you something to believe in I would / But I’m with you in amongst the confusion.”  To quickly intensifying drumming, he spews messages of hope through his own obviously less-than-desirable experiences, eventually…

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…