I was dreading the task of writing an end-of-decade list. After putting it off for a bit I laboriously compiled a list of about 150 songs that I love from the last ten years. Making the list did bring up some excellent songs I’ve not listened to for ages, so I may do some follow up posts just highlighting some forgotten, unsung or muchsung tracks. We’ll see.

I decided to pare the list down to just ten tracks. I thought it would be impossible, but in reality the ten pretty much picked themselves. I only quibbled slightly on points of “what is my favourite on that album?”. The ten I’ve ended up with has maybe three or four tracks that appear on some of the other lists I’ve read around the internet but still feels comfortably personal as a whole. Without further ado, here it is. Five here, five in part two.

10. The Walkmen – The Rat
(From the album “Bows + Arrows” 2004)

This song sounds to me like 45 years of post-rock-&-roll had been compressed so tightly into the bodies of these five blokes from DC that they pretty much had to explode. It doesn’t sound as if they came up with exploding as a good idea for a song or that someone suggested they might want to explode if maybe they didn’t have anything else to do at the studio that day. It sounds like they’re exploding out of their instruments, involuntarily.

My recurring nightmare as a child was of an intangible sense of unstoppable expansion. Sometimes it might feel as if I was being chased downhill by [something] and that even if I could outrun it, its expansion, its swelling, would catch me and envelop me. It might be in the room, growing toward my inevitable destruction. It could be that the earth itself would become porous and, as it ballooned out, would subsume everything (me) on it.
This song sounds like that feeling, except now I’m not so afraid of it. It is more than a little exhilarating.

9. Killer Mike – My Chrome (Feat. Big Boi)
(From the eventually released but essentially shelved album “Ghetto Extraordinary” 2005)

Much of my favourite music of the decade 1993-2003 came from the Dungeon Family. Organized Noize, Outkast, Goodie Mob and their associates. It was, on reflection, a golden age of Atlanta Hiphop sparked essentially by one studio, or one production trio. They shattered the glass ceiling that had previously kept regional Hiphop (i.e. not New York Hiphop) as just that, regional. This last decade has seen most of Rap’s stars come from the south but whilst the south finally blew up, standing on the shoulders of Big Boi, Cool Breeze or T-Mo, the Dungeon Family themselves went more than a little quiet.

After the Outkast album (yes, that one) sold more copies than it is possible to imagine at the end of the decade, it seemed as if the music industry washed its hands of their compatriots. The Goodie Mob, without Cee-Lo, were not about to make them a “Hey Ya” after all.
When Killer Mike, who had been riding shotgun for Big Boi for a few years by then, released “My Chrome” on Outkast’s Columbia imprint in 2005 it felt like the dawning of a new era. I remember feeling like this second generation of the Dungeon Family were almost certainly going to rush the stage and take their place on the thrones that Outkast had carved. Thrones occupied by T.I.s and Young Jeezys rather than Killer Mikes or Backbones.

Sadly it wasn’t to be. Mike has gone on to make some great music but none of it particularly in the tradition of Stankonia. None of it likely to see worldwide success and critical recognition whilst ALSO being great great Hiphop.

“My Chrome” didn’t achieve what it ought to have. The label moved house, the album was shelved but it remains a monster of a track for me, largely due to Mr. DJ’s production. Little hi-hats and splashes tingle across the two channels, the horn stabs are straight out of 60s Batman and under it all there is this odd, out of place, Ska rhythm. Futuristic still and perfectly balanced.

8. Paavoharju – Yllään On Aamu, Korennot Ja Kesä
(From the b-side of the “Uskallan” 7″ 2006)

Rain. A cuckoo. A sustained guitar tone. Piano. Piano. Piano. Interference. Piano. Piano. A sense of foreboding. Disarray. Piano. Piano. Some order. Tennis. Piano. Guitar. Cuckoo. Tennis. Piano. It’s fair to say this is the most affecting ambient music I’ve ever heard. Sometimes it verges on the invasive. Like, you ever wonder how it feels when Professor X or Jean Grey is poking around inside your head? Maybe it feels like this song. I think Paavoharju are willing you to get through it all but I’m not certain. They might be chucking life at you for sport.

7. Madvillain – Meat Grinder
(From the album “Madvillainy” 2004)

“Borderline schizo, sorta fine tits tho”. If rapping is about words (and I’m not sure it is) then DOOM was THE great master of the turn of the century. His work with KMD was brilliant but largely conventional. His first solo outings in the late 90s were dysfunctional, original and also brilliant, but I think his writing definitely peaked with his Viktor Vaughn and Madvillain work in 2003.

No syllables are spare, no line feels freestyled, it is all exceptionally penned, each word thought about and picked carefully. The opposite of Jay-Z’s no-paper technique and before rappers did all their work on their BlackBerries. Some tracks have a lot of real content (“Strange Ways” or “Rhinestone Cowboy”) but the greatness of the album, and it might be my favourite of the decade, is in the joy of playing with words. He’s Edward Lear “doing bong hits on the roof in the West coast”.

Madlib, who is perhaps even more creative than he is prolific, revels in having an MC to work with who is actually worth listening to. They combine so well that any of five tracks could have made this list but I think “Meat Grinder” with it’s lolloping gait and woozy bassline is the perfect vehicle for DOOM’s vocabularic intricacies.

6. Radiohead – Reckoner
(From the album “In Rainbows” 2007)

Radiohead are a good rock band aren’t they? Yes. Brilliant.
Now then, who chopped the drummer up on this eh? Johnny right? Sounds like he was banging on an MPC like some Hiphop type. I hope you all entered the remix competition they did a year or so ago which entitled you to download “Reckoner” in six instrumental stems. If you did then I urge you to spend 4:50 listening to just the drums/percussion track. It is quite something. Once you’ve listened through that, play the full track again. It is quite something. Now repeat for all the other separate parts. It is quite something.

I was going to have “You and Whose Army?” instead but then they’ve got a few tracks like that haven’t they? They don’t really have anything else quite like this. Quite beautiful.

Top 5 to come in Part 2.