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…

The Dillinger Escape Plan – “Farewell, Mona Lisa”

There’s no feeling in this place…

Whenever I think of the best metalcore acts of the decade – ha, nevermind – I never think about metalcore.  That almost – almost – led me to overlook what should be an obvious inclusion on anyone’s decade list.  The Dillinger Escape Plan are masters of art when it comes to their ingenious blend of mathcore and extreme metal; this very methodical, calculated madness.  They’ve proven over the span of their entire career to be one of the most important and consistently excellent bands of their subgenre, and to be frank, any number of cuts could have been chosen to represent them on this playlist.  For me, it’s “Farewell, Mona Lisa”, the jaw-dropping opener that kicked the doors down on 2010’s sensational Option Paralysis.

“Farewell, Mona Lisa” captures the despondence of modern times.  It’s a struggle to break free from the mundane paths that life blandly bestows upon us and access a true, original purpose: “Our role is clear, never stray far from the path.”  With the chaotic and complex riffing that swirls about the song’s backdrop, it plunges the listener’s senses into the sheer madness of trying to garner hope from the future during the 2010’s – a time where student loans essentially outweigh their benefits, young people are still living at home into their late twenties or beyond, wielding expensive book-smarts that may not even be applicable to real life, all while contending with unrealistic expectations as well as the intrinsic pressure of knowing that time is passing by.  There’s…

mewithoutYou – “Rainbow Signs”

God gave Noah the rainbow sign…no more water, is the H-Bomb next time?

There’s stark contrast in the implications carried by the phrase, “the end of the world.”  For those with a religious upbringing, it likely conjures images of plague, famine, and horsemen wreaking unfathomable devastation.  To others, they might imagine World War III – cyber warfare shutting down power grids, industry, and commerce, while increasingly desperate leaders launch nuclear missiles at each other from outer space.  mewithoutYou’s end-times scenario is a little of both, and their song ‘Rainbow Signs’ entails all of the intensity and destruction that could come if/when a Biblical and secular apocalypse were to cross paths.

What makes  ‘Rainbow Signs’ so effective isn’t its eccentric storytelling, it’s the personal anecdotes.  Aaron Weiss makes God seem like he has a twisted, sarcastic humor (in the above quote, it’s a reference to God’s promise to Noah that he would never again destroy the Earth with a flood — but he never said anything about nuclear bombs).  He also cracks wise about his hairline, comparing it to Napoleon’s receding hairline late in life after his exile to St. Helena, in what also happens to be the first/only time that the mostly Christian band drops the F-bomb on its listeners.  In the middle of the song Weiss prays in both Arabic and Hebrew.   He even ends the song by recounting an inside joke that only he and his deceased father ever shared.  There’s so much humanity and personality injected into what lesser…