Hotcakes

Here’s my list, it took a great deal of deliberating.

20. Dirty Projectors- Stillness Is The Move

19. MSTRKRFT- It Ain’t Love

18. HEALTH- Die Slow   [Download]

17. Spinnerette- Ghetto Love

16. The Prodigy- Omen

15. Biffy Clyro- That Golden Rule

14. Muse-  Uprising

13. Major Lazer- Pon de Floor

12. Passion Pit- Sleepyhead

11. Animal Collective- My Girls

10.  Them Crooked Vultures- No One Loves me and Neither Do I

When the Vultures released the first 16 seconds of this song as a teaser to the masses, I was not really impressed. It seemed really standard. But I was stupid to prejudge. Add the rest of the 5 minutes to this song and it is actually amazing. When the final part explodes at the end and Grohl sounds like he’s trying to break the drum kit he’s hitting it so hard, it is amazing.

9. The Horrors- Mirror’s Image

This song gets second place for sexiest bass line of the year. The moment I heard this song, I realised the Horrors were actually good, despite their first album.

8. Kasabian- Underdog

I first heard this song on that sony advert with Kaka, and I was loving the guitar riff. After a few views I was asking if anyone knew who the artist was, and the rest was history.

7. Grizzly Bear- Two Weeks

The best song on a brilliant album. the piano riff is amazing. I read on last FM some fool say that they had taken the riff from Dr Dre’s Still D.R.E. Wetters.

6. The Maccabees- Love You Better

Sentimentally means a lot to me this one.  Third sexiest bass line of the year here for me. And some of the best drumming. I’ve seen it live 3 times this year and it’s still not getting old.

5. Fleet Foxes- Mykonos

I love this song. It is definitely Fleet Foxes’ best one. The only reason why I’m not putting it even higher up is because it’s quite old now. Really it came out in 2008, but I put it in on a technicality because the single was released in 2009. It had to be in the list.

4. Yeah Yeah Yeahs- Zero

It was a really tough choice to pick a song from this album. I only wanted one song per artist, otherwise ‘Hysteric’ and ‘Run Away’ would have been in the list too. I saw them live last week, and this was one of the last songs. It represents their amazing change of sound so well.

3. Arctic Monkeys- Crying Lightning

Another tough one to choose from their album. I could easily have put in ‘Dance Little Liar’ or ‘Pretty Visitors’ instead. I chose ‘Crying Lightning’ for the same reason I chose ‘Zero’, it encapsulates the whole brilliant album in the space of four minutes.

2. Bat For Lashes- Daniel   [Download]

Sexiest bass line of the year. Such a chilled out song,  yet so brilliant played very loud. ‘Daniel’ dominated my playlists over the spring. When I first heard it on the radio, I liked it, but neglected it for a while. I’m so relieved I made the effort to come back to it, because it reached number 2.

1. The Big Pink- Velvet

The first song that I heard from the duo, I loved it immediately. I first heard about the Big Pink when someone told me they were amazing in support of TV on the Radio. I gave them a go, before the ‘Dominoes’ days, and Velvet stood out from day one, and still does. It has a huge sound that I like to imagine would come from Pavarotti falling in a car crusher.

So there you have it. Honourable mentions should go to some songs that didn’t quite make the grade or that I left a little too late for me to consider them: Massive Attack’s ‘Pray For Rain’, Portishead’s ‘Chase the Tear’, Monsters of Folk’s ‘Whole Lot of Losin’, Seams’ ‘Nightcycles’ and Animal Collective’s ‘What would I want? Sky.’