Maria Takeuchi - "Plastic Love" [Buy]

It's been a while! wow time flies!

Thank you for kind comments/emails! I just got really busy with my work.

Nothing really changed for me since last time I wrote here.

I watched a lot of World Cup. When France won, here in Montreal, people drove around with french flag and honking really loudly. I was annoyed. But then, when I was at the light, I saw one lonely guy, who looked like American Pie actor, driving around with a flag. He was alone in his car, with flag, just driving around by himself and honking.

I felt bad for him. So I gave a little thumbs up. Then he started honking really hard and loud!!!!!! What have I done!? Oh well.

Anyways, how do you not rip pita bread? I don't think I ever successfully opened pita without ripping in my life.

Here is nice summer track by Maria Takeuchi, from 1984. Sorry I could only find CD at Amazon US store:(

take care and see you around.

Mitz

Tierra Whack - "Hungry Hippo"
Tierra Whack - "Bugs Life"
Tierra Whack - "Black Nails"

I wanted to write about Drake. I keep trying to listen to Drake, I keep trying to think about Drake. But honestly? It's like 800 degrees outside. Even here in the air-conditioned indoors, the whole enterprise just feels smothering. 25 tracks! Are you kidding me? Like a wall of angry text messages that keeps coming and coming - even after you put your phone down, even after you tell him you're at work, even after you say please and fuck you and okay, okay, okay, I'm sorry, fine, can we please just talk about this later? And still there's 15 more to work through.

This, I guess, is the not the dark but the exhausting side of the gorgeous, goofy, Ginuwine-tinged thirst that Aubrey's persona throws off in its best single moments. The sheer volume of content on Scorpion - all this A-side/B-side shit, all this empty title talk of feelings-plural - is just this dude trying literally every trick he knows to get a grip on your attention so he can twist it back around towards him. Like a little kid mashing all the buttons in an elevator. Hey. Hi. Hey sexy. Hello? Why are you mad at me? What about all the bad stuff you did to me? This is stupid. Why don't you just come over? What are you doing right now? What are you wearing? Are you ignoring me? Can we please just talk? Hello? Hello? HELLO?????

Maybe that's just how I feel about this album right now, or maybe it's how I feel about Drake in 2018, or maybe it's how I feel about Drake in a heatwave: that the only good reason to enter into a relationship with someone like the person at the centre of his stories is that it's fun, and the second it starts to feel like work you have got to cut your losses and duck back out into the sunshine. Leave him to his darkened studio, his blue-black beats, his endlessly deepening mythology of him; let him tell all those same stories to someone who hasn't had time to get tired of them yet. Probably, though, I'll feel different about it in a few weeks - when I've cooled down a little, when my patience rebounds.

In the meantime, Tierra Whack provides an antidote so perfect it almost seems too perfect. It's not fair to compare her complex, freaky, singular project to some dude's eight-hour double-sided Song Of Himself, but if you happen to listen to Whack World for the first time the same way I did - right after you listen to Scorpion for the third or fourth - it's hard not to notice everything this album has that that one lacks. Each of its fifteen tracks is exactly one minute long, and like a good poem, each one is a completely self-contained galaxy of mood and style and voice and subject; a tiny space that feels infinitely vast both in spite and because of what constrains it.

Whack's voice doesn't sound the same on any song as any other, and yet this whole thing sounds like her. She never repeats herself, and she's certainly not trying to prove anything to you except that whatever she has to say deserves your attention. This is not just an album - it's a collection, the kind that gives off a double glow: first each object on its own, and then the thing they do when you string them together. A handful of crystals, cartoon-coloured, charged and ready to change you. Something really and truly unreal.

Watch all of Whack World here.

(photo source)

Dura - "Grace Church Road" [Buy]

Finally getting warmer here, it is above 0 degrees Celsius. We had a really harsh winter. like -20 degrees for a whole week or something during winter break.

It felt like working for exposure for a whole week or unpaid intern.

anyways, it was icy on the sidewalks. I did slip once late at night coming home from my studio. I managed to save myself from landing on my back like a triple axel of a figure skater in my head but probably i looked like a teenager in a mosh-pit, swinging arms frantically and wishing for people understand me better.

I walked home in a night listening to this song after that.

Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel - "Absinthium".
Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel - "Serpentariae".

Atlanta's Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel are a duet, a duo. Their principal instruments are theremin and lap steel. They are evidently well-named. But at the same time that name, for me, suggests an emphasis on virtuosity, musicianship, the unacommpanied gifts of its individual players. In fact, the music of Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel feels more to me about dissolving the individual, forgetting the maker. Scott Burland and Frank Schultz make weather. Both of their instruments are suited to this approach. Anybody who has seen a lap steel being played has probably experienced that sense of mystification: where is the sound coming from? where is it going? It's as if the lap steel player is using his instrument to conjure music from the room, out of bare air. A theremin can give a similar impression. The machine seems secondary to the sound, just accompanying paraphernalia. The term "ambient music" is most often deployed to describe music that's restful, drifting, slowly unfolding. Most of Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel's improvisations are this - but they're also ambient in a more literal sense. These recordings seem intimately linked to the spaces they were made in (or from) and, if the listener plays them at home - loud, on speakers - they get tied up in those spaces too, knitting into the paint on the walls.

Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel is also a cheat of a name because Burland and Schultz use other instruments, or use their instruments in ways that conceal their identities. "Serpentariae" is suffused with gongs, bells, reverberations. "Absinthium" is filled with the clarinet and saxophone of collaborator Jeff Crompton. Around him, Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel dream up clouds, aurora, sunspots, storm-fronts. They make weather overhead. Listening to compositions like these - music these musicians made up, in studio, somewhere far away - I am struck by what a gift they have. Not just that they can make weather, summon it from nothing, but that they can bottle it - like springwater, or earth. Sending spring or summer up from Georgia, to where we shiver in the cold.

[buy / Duet appear next month at Knoxville, TN's spectacular Big Ears Festival]

---

Max Cilla - "La Flûte des Mornes".

Meanwhile, there are other weathers. Purple ones, warm sun on frozen days, melting snow on mountaintops.

[buy]

Tyler, The Creator - "911/Mr. Lonely"
Tyler, The Creator - "See You Again"

Spend enough time alone, this is how your inner landscape starts to sound. Lush, technicolour, cartoon-rounded at the edges, larger than life and then larger again. All this space for you to echo, double back and sing together, in a chorus, in a round. Spend enough time alone and you won't ever sound like anyone else - which a curse, or a blessing, or something else entirely. That's why the best way to listen to these songs is by yourself: in headphones, loud, walking solo through the city, cutting through crowds. Half-buoyed by something bright and imaginary, half weighed down by a mountain of tiny details, the kind that add up. Spend enough time alone, you get to know what romance really means.

[Buy Flower Boy]

Naoto Kawate - "Lakeside Song" [Bandcamp]

Happy new year to everyone!

I had a relaxing time in country side with my girlfriend's family.

on the way back, at the Toronto bus terminal. She was sitting far away from me and I stood up to go to the bathroom soshe did some hand gestures of "where you going?" since the bus was probably departing soon.

So I had to do the handgesture of "Im going to poo." but it was really hard. Slightly bending over and making something coming out from my ass gesture while try not to embarrass myself while she is laughing faraway from me but somehow I succeed it because that is what I did before I learned to speak(im really good at charade)

victory shit right there.
happy new year!

These are my 100 favourite songs of 2017: songs I love more than snow-men, group-texts and royal weddings.

I follow just one arbitrary rule: that no primary artist may appear twice.

I have been making these lists for 13 years: see 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.

The best way to browse this list is to click the little arrow beside each song and then to listen as you read. The things you like you can then download by right- or ctrl-clicking with your mouse.

You can also download the complete 100 songs in four parts:

• songs 1-33 (187mb)
• songs 34-66 (189mb)
• songs 67-100 (231mb)
(mirror: part 1 2 3 / please share any others)
if you have problems with pop-up ads I recommend installing uBlock Origin

There's a Spotify playlist too, although songs #53, #73, #81 and #87 are not available there. If you're a Spotify user, I recommend you read Liz Pelly's outstanding reporting on some of the ways the service harms musicians. Update 11/12/17: Joey B's queued it up on Apple Music. 16/12/17 Now on Deezer (thanks Max) and Google Music (thanks Noah).

#
Said the Gramophone is one of the oldest musicblogs. We are waning maybe but not yet, not yet.

Said the Gramophone has four authors: Emma Healey, Sean Michaels, Jeff Miller and Mitz Takahashi. This list is all Sean's dumb doing - don't blame the others for my bad taste.

If this is your first time at Said the Gramophone, I hope you'll bookmark us or subscribe via RSS. You can also follow me on Twitter or read my novel (it's about the theremin).

Among these 100 artists, 38 are mostly American, 27 are Canadian, 15 are British and there are 2 Norwegians, 2 Germans, 2 French, 2 Swedish, 2 Korean, 2 Kiwi, 1 Australian, 1 Colombian, 1 Argentinian, 1 South African, 1 Malian, 1 Italian and 1 Spanish act, plus 1 Aussie/American split. 45 of the frontpeople/bandleaders identify as women, 53 as men and 2 acts are girl/boy duos. As far as I know, none of this year's songs are by transgender artists. This is the way it worked out; it certainly ain't perfect. Here are some charts of past lists' demographics.

My favourite songs of the year do not necessarily speak to my favourite albums of the year. Songs and LPs are entirely different creatures.

My favourite albums of 2017 were:

• Perfume Genius's No Shape;
• Weaves' Wide Open;
• Leif Vollebekk's Twin Solitude;
• SZA's CTRL;
• King Krule's The OOZ;
• Daniel Romano's Modern Pressure; and
• Wolf Alice's Visions of a Life.

I strongly recommend that you buy these records and listen to them in full.

Some songs that you heard in 2017 may have been omitted from this tally because I heard them before this year, and included them in my Best of 2016.

Finally, some disclosures. I've done paid writing work for some of the artists in this list: Leif Vollebekk, Partner, Land of Talk and Young Galaxy.

Now, without further rigamarole:

1. Perfume Genius - "Die 4 You" [buy]
   2017 was so many things, some of them encouraging, most of them terrible. A few of them truly beautiful. I cannot have been the only one who tried to take shelter in that last category - hiding under the boughs of whatever I could find. This was a year for calling old friends, gathering with neighbours, staring at paintings, swimming in lakes, learning the drums, carrying bouquets, chasing down toddlers, paging through comics, starting new projects, resuming old ones, grieving, baking, resisting, holding hands. I didn't do all of these things, but I did some. I carried my son in my arms and tried to see the world as he does - as a marvel unfolding, not yet set.

   "Die 4 You" gestures to a refuge somewhere else. Not outward but inward; not in children, the clichés of hetero metaphor, but in intimate, erotic love. Gay love, selfless love - a love white-hot and gleaming, sensuous, fearless, rare. "Die 4 You" is not a song so much as a moment. Place and time reproduced in sound: organ, drums, strings, piano, voice. Mike Hadreas sings in a gorgeous, rose-coloured falsetto and it's his own partner, Alan Wyffels, whose baritone surfaces at the chorus, lifting under him. The duet is extraordinary - sexy, hushed, insistent. There is some Sade in it, and obviously some Prince, but also glimmers of less obvious artists: Talk Talk, Portishead, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Glenn Gould, Radiohead. Each of these acts has created lustrous, enduring recordings. With this - and the rest of No Shape - Perfume Genius joins them.

2. Hurray for the Riff Raff - "Pa'lante" [buy]
   A protest song for the past year and the coming one. A song like a small, bodega-sized Fitzcarraldo: Hurray For The Riff Raff haul up their song like Kinski and his steamship and his hill, with climbing chords and Alynda Segarra's mighty voice, the desperate pull of her heart. It's an anthem for carrying on, persisting, from the barrios of Puerto Rico to the slums of New York.
3. Leif Vollebekk - "Elegy" [buy]
   On Twin Solitude, Montreal songwriter Leif Vollebekk reinvented himself. He was finished with Dylan-esque flow, obsessed instead with Prince-y pulse. "Elegy" is a piano ballad with a hip-hop groove; it's got strings but the strings aren't glossy, pretty. They're raw nerves. In a genre diminished by handsome sounds, tasteful arrangements, Vollebekk heads down a different road. Those drums, those strings; that rude, yearning electric bass. The story in the lyrics is underpainted, unfinished. The rhymes are perfectly imperfect - owing way more to Kendrick or The Streets than to Springsteen or Van Zandt. It won't be for everyone - too smooth for some, not smooth enough for others. But for me it's perfectly pitched, luminous. Leif's Astral Weeks isn't far off.
4. Destroyer - "Tinseltown Swimming In Blood" [buy]
   Sometime in the near future, seismic activity sends Los Angeles crashing into Vancouver. Imagine this rainy L.A, full of dead flowers and beautiful women. The sky's gone green. A little Blade Runner, a little X Files or Twin Peaks. And here's the soundtrack. A dreary/dazzling groove, Dan Bejar as hitmaker, a band that isn't New Order playing as if they are.
5. Drake - "Passionfruit" [buy]
   "Passionfruit" is soft and soft-lit, pulsing with a gentle tropical beat. And yet despite the tenderness of these sounds, their sensuousness, they're the bedding for a song of disappointment. Drake is underrated as a lyricist, or his ghostwriters are. "Tension," he sings, "between us just like picket fences." An image, a feeling, as vivid as a silhouette on the horizon, at dusk.
6. Mura Masa - "Love$ick ft A$AP Rocky (Four Tet remix)" [website]
   I adore this remix of Mura Masa's naturally excellent "Love$ick": the way Four Tet strips away at the song's more hackneyed choices and elevates the stranger ones. Instead of blarpy synth horns, Kieran Hebden fills the track with bells and, later, a glittering modified guitar (?); "Love$ick"'s saxophone fleeting saxophone part becomes its heart, with a powerful sense of tactility and touch.
7. Wolf Alice - "Don't Delete the Kisses" [buy]
   Wolf Alice have quickly become one of the UK's most interesting, adventurous indie rock bands - compare "Don't Delete the Kisses"' jittery space-pop to "Yuk Foo"'s (also excellent) garage-rock snarl. Ellie Roswell's verses here are rushing, outpouring - a little Aidan Moffatt and a little Michael Stipe. They overspill the meter, like a friend trying to tell you something important as quickly as they can. The chorus is something else: an echoing, melancholy shout. "What if it's not meant for me?" she asks. "Love." It's the stuff of closing credits - everything else receding in a rearview mirror.
8. The Weather Station - "Thirty" [buy]
   There should be a name for it, a stock phrase: not a love-song, a road song, but a growing-older song. Tamara Lindeman's is painted in uncommon indigo. Startling, galloping, meditative, present.
9. Future ft Kendrick Lamar - "Mask Off (remix)"
   "Mask Off" was the hit I was most grateful for in 2017 - a little midnight thrown willy-nilly over the city, into shopping-malls, convenience stores, pharmacies. Not just its magificent samples - also the folds of Future's flow, mumbled velveteen. He lists drugs as others would recite the names of flowers. Still, I'm grateful then to Lamar: for adding some meaning to what is otherwise mostly meaningless. A stronger story, some cleverer rhymes, a different - kung-fu - knack.
10. Beaches - "Arrow" [buy]
    An avalanche of buzz and fuzz and refraining doo-de-doo, a guitar-pop song that buries me up to the neck. (Thanks Kevin.)
11. Aldous Harding - "Blend" [buy]
    New Zealand's Aldous Harding is one of my favourite discoveries of this year. While other tracks from Party present her as a Joanna Newsom or Charlotte Gainsbourg, "Blend" highlights (for me) her uniqueness, idiosyncrasy. Coo and hush, murmured sweet-nothings - but full of disquiet, capgun pops. It's telling that the video so strongly evokes another brilliant, subversive artist - comedian Maria Bamford. Like Bamford, Harding is fluent in the things our culture expects her to be; but her vision's too clear, her instincts too daring, to settle for that.
12. Weaves - "Grass" [buy]
    I adore Weaves' Wide Open, a rock'n'roll album that bleeds with melody, noise and soul. "Grass" is one facet of this: chill and restless, bridling and rainbow. Jasmyn Burke leads a band of twist-turning guitar; sings a song full of hoping; and the whole length through "Grass"'s metals are flashing from lead into gold and gold into lead, on and radiantly on.
13. Alvvays - "Saved By A Waif" [buy]
    The best Alvvays songs seem like reinventions: as if they've improved on something that already seemed whole, mastered. For me, eevery change in this song - from verse to chorus, from the middle of the bridge to its conclusion - is filled with surprise. Ebullient guitar-pop, analog-fuzzy, with Molly Rankin's sailing voice - and the whole group's ingenuity, sonic sparks fizzing at the limits.
14. Big Thief - "Shark Smile" [buy]
    A brutal, bobbing rock song - love and death anchored by neat drums, foraging guitar, the flick of Adrianne Lenker's voice.
15. Partner - "Everybody Knows" [buy]
    A towering guitar anthem, somehow as much mischievous as righteous. Partner are a stoned Maritime (and millenial) Weezer, rich in wit; "Everybody Knows" is brilliantly constructured and fantastically played. The song builds and thunders, it rocks, it rules. A comfort to the baked, an inspiration to the sober - with scenes that outlast the smoke.
16. SZA - "20 Something" [buy]
    From the year's best R&B album, this is SZA at her most unadorned. Bare voices, acoustic guitar, the searching of a woman in her twenties. A prequel, perhaps, to the Weather Station's #8.
17. King Krule - "The Locomotive" [buy]
    King Krule's The Ooz is a brilliant bad dream, eerie in its sound and brave in its execution. What is this? you think, listening to Archy Marshall's drawl and lurch, his band's art-pop or surf-rock or woozy cabaret zzz. Each song seems like its own play - with set, costumes, storyline. Maybe even its own language. But at the same time it stretches out into a whole, one cohesive work of art - something sick and musical, calling to Scott Walker and Tom Waits and David Bowie and Micachu. "The Locomotive" is not the most propulsive of its songs, not the most keenly catchy, but I am beguiled by it, bound up by its spell. Music for a city in the dead of night: scarecrows in the street, smoke coming out of the stacks, loneliness and alarm. A drowsy dreamer waiting for his train, trying to get home.
18. Mount Eerie - "Real Death" [buy]
    This song should not be on a ranked list; it should not be on a list at all. It should be at #1 or #100 or unnumbered, set apart. Its goal as a piece of music isn't the same goal as the other tracks here. Why count these things together, or measure them against each other? I can't; "Real Death"'s position here is almost arbitrary. But here it is, as you should hear it, as it is part of any conversation of songs and singing in 2017. "Real Death", like all of A Crow Looked At Me, is a document of events around the death of Geneviève Castrée. Castrée, a gifted cartoonist, poet and musician (she has appeared on previous Best Songs lists, as O PAÔN), died in July 2016. Mount Eerie is a man called Phil Elverum. Castrée was his partner, the mother of his young daughter. Elverum didn't write an elegy; he didn't write a tribute or a eulogy. He wrote songs remembering what happened - before, during, after. Bare, unembroidered, transparent and devastating. "[Death is] dumb / and I don't want to learn anything from this. / I love you." And the song just ends.
19. Phoebe Bridgers - "Motion Sickness" [buy]
    Bridgers is fast becoming my favourite in a new class of heartaching singer-songwriters. Her gift's not just her voice and its openness; it's not just her talent for melodies, which dip and dart like gulls. The skill I admire most is her ardours' variability, their give. She sings sad songs without enclosing them all in stillness, or smoke, or beauty. There are minor and major keys; dynamics without gimmicks. It's not just "Motion Sickness"' doubled vocals that evoke Elliott Smith - it's the restlessness of the song, its willingness not to wallow. Bridgers and her drums, guitars, strings - they don't do the obvious things, they excel.
20. Stormzy - "Big For Your Boots" [buy]
    Stormzy pulls no punches in this excoriation. A grime track that advances unhesitating; a stone-cold bodying.
21. Charli XCX - "Boys" [video]
    Charli's ode to the world's multitudinous, variegated gentlemen. Gently electric, gleaming with synths and tropical percussion - but not so wound-up as to sound forced, fake. Instead this pop song is loving. She seems genuinely fond of the boys she's singing to. A throw-back, I guess, to when pop singers didn't have to come on so strong. To when the biggest prizes were coins popping gling from a Super Mario brick.
22. Daniel Romano - "Ugly Human Heart Pt. 2" [buy]
    Psychedelic country music, rinky-dink glam, smart and dumb and devastatingly concise.
23. Hamilton Leithauser & Angel Olsen - "Heartstruck (Wild Hunger)" [video]
    A song of appetite - love, lust, sheer craving. It's old-fashioned in his form, with strings and plinking piano, but mixed like crazy, all crashing and ringing. The Walkmen's Leithauser sings as he almost always does - loud, racked, full-throated. Olsen's performance is more unusual - less "honest" than her typical material; theatrical almost, like a lover in a 40s melodrama. But boy does she sell it. Longing, enunciating, chewing the scenery (?), her fearsome voice pressing against the limits of what the recording can contain.
24. James Irwin - "Carlo What Do You Dream" [buy]
    James is singing here to Carlo Spidla, his bandmate and friend, a musician and man beloved to Said the Gramophone. But his tribute's noisier than the one that I would write, more knowing than the one I could write: an epic of dogged verses, unflagging drums, buzzing guitars like coiling brambles. It's one of those songs that feels like weather. I wish it was always like this, I think. This weather, this season: when everything seems right and just, most things seems possible, and the forecast...? It's for a happy ending.
25. Lens Mozer - "All My Friends" [buy]
    How many times have I listened to this song? The answer is: so many. It was a talisman round my neck, a bracelet I wore for weeks before the snow started falling. Sometimes the best music is mostly repetition, mantras in beautiful handwriting.
26. Broken Social Scene - "Hug of Thunder" [buy]
    My favourite of this year's Feist songs is not anything on Pleasure - it's this. A thing of bittersweetness, nostalgia, beat, with references to Jeff Buckley and Syd Barrett and, in its Cocteau Twins-like chorus, a sound of full-bloom Broken Social Scene. Powerful tenderness, devastating love. (Hug of thunder.)
27. 이달의 소녀 (LOONA/Yves) - "new (이브)" [video]
    A Korean girl-group, LOONA, used this song to introduce a member called Yves. She sings the lead, and the way she sings it makes it difficult to imagine her ever ceding the front spot. "New" is built on a series of cycling loops, like most chart pop, but there's a logic to the way we move through it, a gracefulness to the way it skips from one part to the next. This is music, songwriting, not just a succession of catchy themes.
28. True Blue - "Bad Behavior" [facebook]
    I love a drooping torch-song - a slow-dance under a listing disco ball, the hired band slowly turning into wax. True Blue play a beautiful tune on instruments that don't quite seem right - out of warranty, damaged. Fruit that's sweet-smelling and overripe.
29. Vince Staples ft Juicy J - "Big Fish" [buy]
    For a song about counting money, "Big Fish" is surprisingly grim. Vince Staples' success hasn't mellowed his mood. Credit the rapper for making his vexation so gripping, alluring as well as forceful. Some MCs get swamped by their beats; Staples stomps all over his.
30. Faith Healer - "Try ;-)" [buy]
    Edmonton, Alberta produces a gem of a song. Such a natural sound, cool and breezy, the kind that could have found a home in any decade since the 1960s. I wish everything felt this easy.
31. Waxahatchee - "Never Been Wrong" [buy]
    Loud and unrestrained, with a withering sense of humour. But there's more to Katie Crutchfield's song than rock'n'roll chagrin. The trajectory of her voice, its ragged arc, proves the singer's far from brooding. She's free.
32. Cardi B - "Bodak Yellow"
    Swings like a shark's tail. Swooping and snapping; poised and greedy.
33. Baxter Dury - "Porcelain" [buy]
    "Porcelain" is a reply of sorts to "Miami", Dury's magnificent/awful exploration of sleazy male turpitude. ("I'm the sausage man," he sneers.) Here he hands the mic to Rose Elinor Dougall, who sings her rebukes in a voice like cold milk. It's a #MeToo moment maybe, or else the other side in a toxic relationship. But the whole thing - and the songs as a pair - also feel like an answer to Serge Gainsbourg, whose Histoire de Mélodie Nelson floats like a ghost over all of Prince of Tears. The same wolfish basslines, the same chilled strings; but this time Serge's leering doesn't go unanswered. His victims stare back. (Thanks Steve R.)
34. Ruth B. - "Superficial Love" [buy]
    For fans of Carly Rae Jepsen (whose "Cut To The Feeling" narrowly missed this list) - another Canadian singer making marvelous, airy pop. "Superfical Love" is more afternoon swoon than sugar rush, but Ruth B is still filled with feeling - poised, confident, singing a sure-hearted song of love & expectation.
35. This Is The Kit - "Moonshine Freeze" [buy]
    A limber, intrepid folk-song, with braiding voices, rooting brass, the sense that nothing is settled. For years I've adored This Is The Kit (aka Kate Stables & co); this is among their best. "This is the natural order of things / Change sets in." Everything is either possible or im-.
36. Sun-El Musician ft Samthing Soweto - "Akanamali" [buy]
    A massive hit in the artists' native South Africa, "Akanamali" is a love song you can dance to, as gentle as sunrise. I understand "akanamli" to be Zulu for a poor man; the (controversial) music video pits sweethearted pennilessness against callous materialism. But money doesn't figure into the actual lyrics, which are sung in Zulu, and which lift like the music, onward, upward, full of hope and possibility.
37. Fred Thomas - "Mallwalkers" [buy]
    From Fred Thomas's excellent Changer, which made me fondly nostalgic for early 00s music by the Weakerthans, BARR, Ballboy and even the much-maligned Dismemberment Plan. But Thomas isn't making anything old-fashioned; "Mallwalkers" feels alert, alit, and when it points to the past it's doing so with verve, conviction, hard-won wisdom. This is a song about adolescence but it's not just a visit to high-school, a bittersweet vignette: Thomas digs in, he tries to understand it, explain it out, unpack what most mattered. He tries to figure out what is really left to say about it; what he would say, if some teenager were listening, expounding with fierceness and clarity. "Could it ever be possible to just pause on that feeling?" he asks, as guitars are rising and drums are crashing, the future rushing in. (And then, lustrous: strings.) I am so happy Fred moved to Montreal; I hope he stays; I hope I get to tell him so, some time.
38. Nicholas Krgovich - "Country Boy" [buy]
    Almsot 20 years ago, when I was just a cub, I fell in love with a band called P:ano. They were one of my earliest priate love-affairs. This band was Krgovich's; his music has been with me a long time. But I've changed, and he has too: Krgovich's braver now, less tentative, like a draftsman who works in ink. At first "Country Boy" seems courtly, polite, a stately bit of lounge-pop. With every passing minute it gets more ravishing, more strange. Pedal steel, organ, cherry-red backing vocals... later, swerving fiddles and saxophones. It's naughty and thrilling, gutsy as a duck-call.

39. Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile - "Continental Breakfast" [buy]
    From the year's most fruitful team-up album. A duet about friendship and collaboration - one cockeyed, curious songwriter singing to another, and then switch!
40. Selena Gomez - "Bad Liar" [video]
    In 2017 chart-pop this song felt an astonishing reprieve: understated, almost tasteful, with Gomez smurfing sultrily over chimes, fingersnaps, a Talking Heads bassline. If anything it's still underbaked, a hit in search of its refrain.
41. Sneaks - "Look Like That" [buy]
    Minimal rock'n'roll, dry as bone. Like a car shooting down a desert highway. Like a cat stalking across a hot tin roof. Like a heist in a Subaru. There's a treasure in the trunk, something from Repo Man, Kiss Me Deadly, Pulp Fiction... Be careful what you wish for.
42. Lorde - "Supercut" [buy]
    A song of a relationship in retrospect: that moment of reversing, backward-spooling, memories flashing past like wind across a pennant, film through a shutter. "Supercut" has a kind of breathlessness that's hard to achieve - something in the accelerating drums, the cascading synths, Lorde's quick inhalations. Her memories seem at once potent and disposable, cast behind; there's a sense of barely catching up, of impulse overtaking patience, and everything's lit in indiglo. The supercut gets the pop song it deserves, nine years after the invention of the term: mesmeric, faintly astounding.
43. The Drums - "Abysmal Thoughts" [buy]
    Imagine the Archies singing cheerily in quicksand. (Thanks Steve R.)
44. Deep Throat Choir - "Stonemilker (Björk cover)" [buy]
    Last month Björk released a new album, Utopia. It's a record that breathes, covets, revels, but none of its songs excel for me as individual song. Instead, my favourite Björk track of 2017 is this - a version of "Stonemilker", from 2015's extraordinary Vulnicura, performed by the East London-based "indie"-adapting Deep Throat Choir. "Stonemilker" is a song of sorrow and discovery: the clarity that can accompany heartbreak, that "fierce", seismic perspective. Like Björk herself, Deep Throat integrate string-players, drawing melody from deep. But the choir can also do what one singer cannot. I find myself moved and moved again by the mingling of these voices, the way they move together. "Who is open chested?" they ask - and I think: you, you, this, all I hear here is opening-up.
45. Aimee Mann - "Goose Snow Cone" [buy]
    Aimee Mann's "Goose Snow Cone" began on a lonely day in Ireland, when she was scrolling through Instagram. A photograph of a cat called Goose, with a face like a snowcone. Somehow it remedied the afternoon, I guess, or made its aimlessness feel purposeful. Sometimes all it takes is a picture, a phrase - and then you're writing a song, telling a story, bogging a blog, redeeming all those blues.
46. Sinjin Hawke - "Don't Lose Yourself to This" [buy]
    An electronica of waterfalls, laserguns, woodwinds, tabla, and slamming garbage-can lids. Like something the first AI will sing.
47. Dirty Projectors ft Dawn Richard & Gavsborg - "Cool Your Heart (Equiknoxx remix)" [website]
    Jamaica's Equiknoxx crew add some dancehall bounce to this Dirty Projectors highlight. It's a song about going in circles until eventually, perhaps, possibly, hopefully, breaking loose. Plus: sitar.
48. Nilüfer Yanya - "Baby Luv" [soundcloud]
    "Baby Luv" is one of the first songs to be released by London musician Nilüfer Yanya; it shows extraordinary promise. On "Baby Luv", her singing's almost sculptural - a shape that emerges line by line, motion by motion, over guitar and little else. A figure full of disappointment, not easily described.
49. Land of Talk - "World Made" [buy]
    The world is so much better with Lizzie Powell making music in it. She sings "World Made" as if she's been chugging tonics for the past five years; it's full of lemon, ginger, spruce and black pepper. Shining silver indie-rock, or burnished and gold, a beautiful noise.
50. The Clientele - "Falling Asleep" [buy]
    The Clientele have been at it for a long time now, making luscious, reverb-drenched rock. Misty! Melancholy! Stuff to stuff on your iPod before rambling on the moor. Music for the Age of Miracles saw them broaden their arrangements beyond (gleaming) electric guitars and "Falling Asleep" was for me a career highlight: not just Alasdair MacLean's sighing voice but Anthony Harmer playing santur, a Persian dulcimer, which perforates this song like the sun's last rays through leaves.
51. Juana Molina - "Cosoco" [buy]
    A peacock or bird-of-paradise of a song, summering from Argentina. Frilled and feathered, restless, heartbeating at double speed.
52. Rostam - "Gwan" [buy]
    One of several reveries on Half-Light, the debut LP by Rostam Batmanglij. As a member of Vampire Weekend, Rostam had already demonstrated his ear for arrangements - here the marvel isn't just the mull and dart of the string-section, but the way he so lucidly describes his reverie, love dawning and sustaining. (Read Emma on other Rostam-ery.)
53. Jay-Z - "Marcy Me" [buy]
    Jay-Z's best track in years is this return to the estate where he grew up - a short song like a short film, tactile and intimate, a personal tour.
54. Fever Ray - "Red Trails" [buy]
    When Karin Dreijer got her start, in the indie guitar band Honey Is Good, her music didn't sound so extradimensional. But over successive records with her brother, in The Knife, and solo, as Fever Ray, Dreijer has drawn less and less from organic instruments and terrestrial moods. Synths and sequencers, pitch-shifters and effects - tones of alien pleasure or creeping dread. So it's interesting to hear "Red Trails", where the most prominent instrument - more prominent even than Dreijer's voice - is a fiddle, played by Sara Parkman. This is by no means trad folk music - Fever Ray is as forward-facing as ever. But Parkman's violin provides a texture that's different than anything else on Plunge - hot, dark ornaments within Dreijer's neon chill.
55. N.E.R.D. ft Rihanna - "Lemon" [video]
    As much as Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo may wish to lead a band, N.E.R.D.'s greatest strength remains the pairs production talents. "Lemon" wouldn't be anything without its beat and it still isn't much until Rihanna arrives: she brings the song to life, gives it swing and swag. I could hole up and spend the winter in her verses; I just wish she knew her Star Trek a little better. (Spock's a Mr, not M.D.)
56. Tim Darcy - "Still Waking Up" [buy]
    I love the breezy, blue-jean amble of this song; the way he's a tender lover and a hangdog letdown and a cool cucumber all at the same time. I love the way Darcy sings his head's "full of popular songs". It feels like a song for the same season as Nico's Chelsea Girls. The Ought frontman has always had charisma, even way back to his Crown Vandals days; here his magnetism is effortless, natural, like an accidental rhyme.
57. Young Galaxy - "Stay for Real" [facebook]
    This song was part of the suite that inspired "Falsework", the story I wrote to accompany Young Galaxy's 2016 album. The train, the tower, the off-centre beat - all these things caught in my mind, and they've kept on residence there, gathering force as 2016 became 2017, as 2017 becomes 2018. "Nothing we wish for / ever comes easily," sings Catherine McCandless. I adore this band in their slower mode - hopeful, pleading, the song refracting as it's sung.
58. Oumou Sangaré - "Kamelemba" [buy]
    Glittering afrobeat from one of Mali's most beloved, supple-voiced singers. I adore the way this song emerges from its early, bridling moments and into something light, effervescent, almost astral.
59. La Bien Querrida - "El Lado Bueno" [buy]
    "El Lado Bueno" spends its first minute masquerading as a soft-focus snoozer before shedding its skin, finding fuzzing synths and a Peter Hook-style bassline. Like Stuart Murdoch before her, Bilbao's Ana Fernández-Villaverde has a way of sounding soft and strident at the same time, shy and intrepid, as if "twee" were the codeword for a special forces mission (of love).
60. Gabrielle Papillon - "When the Heart Attacks" [buy]
    If this song's missing anything it's a little more extremism, roughness - a sound that breaks things, upsets the dinner settings. The inherent material, swathed in strings, is captivating, commanding; Papillon's lines fit together like golden bricks. It's a song like an enchanted road and you can imagine whole armies, communities, pouring down it. Papillon's a great singer, but she's also one of Canada's strongest pop songwriters - I hope hitmakers will try giving her a ring.
61. Richard Dawson - "Soldier" [buy]
    Dawson's reputation is growing with every year and album: by now he's among the leaders of the UK's avant-folk scene, the kind of talent that calls for quiet, grateful attention. His songs play this wonderful trick: meticulously composed yet appearing so wild, meandering. They seem like messy uncoverings, truffles discovered in the dirt. The mood evokes shambolic antecedents like Will Oldham or Richard Youngs, but as a lyricist Dawson is much closer to someone like Joanna Newsom: purposeful, fastidious, logging every trembling wish and thought of the characters he imagines. "Soldier"'s soldier is fully transparent to us, brilliantly rendered. (Thanks David.)
62. Zayn ft PARTYNEXTDOOR - "Still Got Time" [new album forthcoming]
    "Still Got Time" does something interesting with space. The production makes it sound like a sped-up miniature - squeezed, tiny, chiptune verging on chipmunk - but Zayn and PARTYNEXTDOOR sing with an easy, natural cadence, as if they have all the time in the world, miles extending on all sides.
63. Deerhoof ft Jenn Wasner - "I Will Spite Survive" [buy]
    Working with Wye Oak's Wasner, Deerhoof's quirky pop gains a sense of gravity, stakes. Wasner and Satomi Matsuzaki gayly promise the impossible - "You can outlive your executioners!" - singing like telepathic sisters.
64. Shakira - "Me Enamoré" [buy]
    Totally infectious - the kind of pop song that seems to spread across everything, catching, starting small and quickly taking over the block.
65. Snoh Aalegra ft Vince Staples - "Nothing Burns Like The Cold" [buy]
    Snoh Aalegra is the second artist in as many years to build a song upon the scaffolding of Portishead's "Glory Box" (see also Alessia Cara's "Here", #60 on my Best of 2015 list; the original samples are from Isaac Hayes). Like Beth Gibbons on "Glory Box", Aalegra's wrestling with an ambivalent relationship; unlike Gibbons Aalegra seems arch, removed, as if her heart's only half in it. Her detachment makes her more of a femme fatale, with Staples as a sidekick; "Nothing Burns Like The Cold" is more about power than grief.
66. Haim - "Right Now" [buy]
    Never mind that Haim's second album was the biggest musical disappointment in a year already full of them. "Right Now" succeeds by being short, simple and relentless. It's barely a song - just a chorus and pre-chorus, pure crescendo. But the strangeness of its composition - stray effects, errant sounds, sloppy drums - turn the crescendo fascinating. Ready for putting in your pocket, playing on repeat.
67. Yaeji - "Drink I'm Sippin On" [buy]
    Dark city, drowsy rhymes, temporary drift.
68. The War on Drugs - "Holding On" [buy]
    Several albums in, it's not clear whether the War on Drugs are getting anywhere with their Sprucesteen pastiches. But that doesn't mean it's not delicious listening, compulsive, salt and vinegar for the ears.
69. Post Malone ft 21 Savage - "rockstar" [video]
    Stop staying out so late, it's not healthy.
70. Lana Del Rey - "Love" [buy]
    For almost the entirety of "Love", Lana Del Rey cedes the foreground of the song. She sings from the back of the mix - calling across booming, chiming orchestration; narrating other people's desires. It gives the track an unusual, wistful tone - a feeling of perspective or maybe, against all odds, of wisdom.
71. Future Islands - "Through the Roses" [buy]
    The song's conceit is either cute or eyeroll-inducing. A singer's confession to his fans: "You see me ... through the lights and the smoke and the screen / ... [and] I'm no better / I'm no better than you and I'm scared." Recorded the day after the 2016 election, Sam Herring wants you to know that he's worried too - and that "we can pull through / together / together." Schlocky maybe, but Herring performs it beautifully, entreatingly, finding each of the chorus's lifts and left-turns.
72. Daniele Luppi & Parquet Courts ft Karen O - "Talisa" [buy]
    I believe my only exposure to Talisa Soto was in the Mortal Kombat movie, when I was 14. So my imaginary doesn't have much to draw on when Karen O sings her song of Soto - stripping, strutting and pouting for Gianni Versace. I can't envision the magazine shoot but I can imagine the streets outside, the scrabbling birds and parked Ducattis, the women in couture overcoats. Parquet Courts have never sounded like they're having this much fun. (Thanks Vinny.)
73. KMD ft Jay Electronica & DOOM - "Light Years"
    My second-favourite rapper (Doom) romping with Jay Electronica over sheer and unrestrained recorder. Expert as a TED talk, stylish as a Vogue cover, and vaguely irritating.
74. Jon McKiel - "Conduit" [buy]
    Like a Constantines song pushed into a machine, compacted, transformed from rock-song into ruby; and then cut, polished, shattered, reassembled shard by shard.
75. The Dears - "1998" [buy]
    You can tell as soon as it starts that this is one of those songs, perfect for driving, for wide skies and telephone poles, billboards and headlights, sun or clouds or stars. But there's still no predicting the grace of the chorus, Murray Lightburn in full maturity, proud as a two-time father, with help from canny piano, Beatles guitar, a pitch-perfect melodica solo.
76. Charlotte Gainsbourg - "Rest" [buy]
    It's ostensibly a song of passion, but "Rest"'s burbling synths and Gainsbourg's worried whisper make the thing sound unsettled, unsafe almost, as if desire is a disease.
77. Rae Morris - "Do It" [pre-order]
    Ebullient electro-pop with a simple, graceful hook.
78. LCD Soundsystem - "How Do You Sleep" [buy]
    James Murphy's kiss-off to Tim Goldsworthy, his former business partner, starts in a place of agony. It takes 3:37 for the beat to drop - but then it's off, stamping, stomping, stepping, dancing, rejoicing in its confidence that the winner was Murphy.
79. Andre Ethier - "Making A Living" [buy]
    Singer-songwriter and painter Andre Ethier, once of the Deadly Snakes, opens "Making A Living" with a nod to his google twin - LA Dodgers outfielder Andre Ethier. Really, this could be a song for either Ethier - or for you, for me, or anyone who's hustling. We're keeping at it, in our ways; we could all use a palm-fronded holiday, some slack-stringed guitar and comforting saxophone. In 2017 especially; but also probably, predictably, ever-after.
80. St. Vincent - "New York" [buy]
    I love "New York" for its mournful, cement-blue verses. Annie Clark so plainly & expressively describes the tragedy of moving away from home, leaving people behind, and returning to find that everything has changed.
81. Hair & Beauty - "I Know It's Not Funny" [buy]
    Half-way between a ditty and a dirge, like a kid leading a wagon to the cemetary. (Thank you Sebastian.)
82. Cashmere Cat ft MØ & Sophie - "9 (After Coachella)" [buy]
    A staggering ballerina, either an adept or a drunk.
83. Ty Dolla $ign - "All the Time" [buy]
    Lascivious and daydreaming, R&B that's outstretched on the divan, waiting for the sound of the key in the lock.
84. Holy Data - "Vacation" [buy]
    Montreal's Holy Data play psychedelic, kitchen-sink pop, crazily swirling but meticulously composed - with shades of the Flaming Lips, Architecture in Helsinki and the mighty Go-Betweens. "Vacation"'s like something from a Murakami story - a bad dream that comes back as a strange egg, hatching under the overpass. BANG, BANG.
85. Khalid - "Young Dumb & Broke" [buy]
    The greatest puzzle of this song is that there is no comma between "young" and "dumb". Khalid has written a charming and lackadaisical tribute to his generation, his ilk, all who are at once "broke" and "young dumb". Young dumb, I assume, is like being old smart or red hot or fancy free. It's like being heatstroked, and happy.
86. Cuddle Magic - "Slow Rider" [buy]
    The slowest pony is the most confident climber. Indie-pop that's all chug and ooh, synthesizers catching their breaths.
87. Train Fou - "Peuple Pollock" [facebook]
    A spectral and subdivided pop song, with shades of yesterday (Yeasayer and Massive Attack) and tomorrow (???). It's loop music, sample music, but with a forward-leaning groove, heavier and more abrupt than we're used to - much of the skeleton's made of trombone blarps, like snippets from an Inception trailer. Train Fou (literally "crazy train") take ridiculous, tacky, naff building-blocks and use them to make music that isn't ridiculous, isn't tacky or even silly: it's confusing but sincere, it's got something to say.
88. Rainer Maria - "Broke Open Love" [buy]
    Rainer Maria return! One of the first bands I ever reviewed, way back in 2003. By then the band were already mid-career; it's been 11 years since their last loud, fervent LP. "Broke Open Love"'s emo does feel like something borrowed from a previous time, but Rainer Maria's sound's still electrifying, explosive, drums and guitar that thrash and catch under Caithlin De Marrais level voice. Sometimes even angsty rock'n'roll seems luscious, sensual, more about touch and taste than psychological distress.
89. French Montana ft Swae Lee - "Unforgettable" [video]
    One of the best things wafting over radio this year. "Unforgettable" feels solidly international, blurring bits of contemporary African, Latin and Caribbean pop. That blurriness extends to other aspects of this music - as if the song's cloudy, watercolour, bleeding into adjacent songs. Oilspots in the air.
90. Tess Roby - "Ballad 5" [buy]
    Most of this track is just biding its time for the final minute and a half, when Roby's gentle mumble and windy guitar-part fall away. What happens next starts with oozing synths and ends with a stunning, looping vocal line, like a bedroom cantata.
91. Nate Husser - "Catherine" [website]
    Nate Husser's view of Montreal's Ste-Catherine street is unrecognizable to me. To me it's the high street, full of mass-market boutiques and harried shoppers, with bundled bags. For him it's a setting for violence, betrayals - vividly rendered, with a diamond-tipped pen.
92. Emperor X - "Low Orbit Ion Cannon" [buy]
    Folk music for the DDOS era - hackers searching, seeking, for an uninterrupted connection.
93. Sigrid - "Don't Kill My Vibe" [buy]
    Don't let the title fool you. Sigrid's pop song has none of Kendrick Lamar's woozy grousing - instead it's adamant, shouting, like a kid who refuses to grow up (or to let a loved-one leave).
94. Big Boi - "All Night" [buy]
    OutKast's Big Boi rides a New Orleans piano loop like it's a juciyfruit bronco. Making light of the darkness, drawing close, swearing oaths.
95. Romeo Santos ft Jessie Reyez - "Un Vuelo A La" [buy]
    Don't be fooled by "Un Vuelo A La"'s comely country waltzing. It's a pretty song of acrimony: Santos and Reyez trading verses about how the other one's to blame for the end of a relationship. You're crazy, Santos sings; You're a cheater, Reyez replies. "Un vuelo"'s a plane ride, but they're not promising each other a holiday - "un vuelo a la mierda" is a flight straight to Hell.
96. Ed Sheeran - "Castle On The Hill" [buy]
    Despite my better judgment, Sheeran's rattling pop-rocker has kept its hold on me all year. It's the way it presses on, insistent, pursuing that galloping melody - and with the faintest quivering sense that maybe it could all fall to pieces.
97. Spoon - "Pink Up" [buy]
    If Spoon were the Tindersticks, with groove and patience, brushed cymbals and Hammond organ. Also: steel drums, reversed tape, a travelogue not quite legible. The best short story I heard this year.
98. New Pornographers - "Play Money" [buy]
    Neko Case and Carl Newman and their throng still brashly, catchily clamouring, this time with cybernetic bandmates, robots commissioned for their chords. Look out for the grand finale, with Neko and Carl's tolling voices, trombones sounding an alarm.
99. Mac Demarco - "My Old Man" [buy]
    Demarco's "My Old Man" almost feels like a Clientele track - honeyed croon, acoustic guitar, an air of golden nostalgia. But Demarco's too jaded for that: listen closer and you recognize the wobble in the organ, the somberness of the words. "Looks like I'm seeing more of my old man in me," the singer repeats, but the key lyrics occur a few syllables before: "Uh-no," he sings. "Oh no."
100. Miley Cyrus - "Malibu" [buy]
     Miley Cyrus's "Malibu" is my 100th best song and I include it almost guiltily. I am not one for guilty pleasures because one should never feel guilty for enjoying a song; here I feel guilty for recommending it. Truth is, seven months in, I'm still not sure if "Malibu" is any good. It doesn't seem like it should be. With its stomping and handclaps, Miley "au naturel", the whole thing seems contrived - a shrewd calculation shoved through a songwriting sausage-machine. That's how it seems. Only: I like it, I like it a lot. And even if that liking won't last me through the winter it's lasting me now.

     Small comforts, enjoy them while we can.

So that's 2017's century of songs, or the way they seem today. There are so many that didn't make it, that I wish I were pointing you to. Thank you to everyone who sent some favourites in. There will be so many I've missed (there are so many I'm already remembering). Maybe make your own suggestions in the comments or on Twitter.

Thanks for reading, sorry for the broken links, please support these artists with your money. (Invest in things that are important.) Be kind to each other, be brave, outlast. Remember: music is magic, an invisible force.