fredag 28 Dec 2012, 16:22

100. Night Light - Jessie Ware
99. R.I.P. (feat. Tinie Tempah) - Rita Ora
98. I'm Addicted - Madonna
97. I Belong In Your Arms (Japanese Version) - Chairlift
96. Sidewalk - Loreen
95. Speak In Rounds - Grizzly Bear
94. Flowers In May - Simone White
93. Five Seconds - Twin Shadow
92. Stormande Hav - Timoteij
91. Said and Done - Amanda Mair
90. All That Matters (The Beautiful Life) - Ke$ha
89. I've Got Your Music - Saint Etienne
88. Swan Song - Jessie Ware
87. Valley of the Dolls - Marina & the Diamonds
86. Everything Is Embarrassing - Sky Ferreira
85. Bara För En Natt - Timoteij
84. Loaded - Agnes
83. Liar Liar - Mollyhaus
82. Bad Girls - M.I.A.
81. Nobody Knows - Darin
80. Too Late - Thorunn Antonia
79. Never Stop Coming Back - Freja Loeb
78. Laura - Bat for Lashes
77. Disparate Youth - Santigold
76. Jamaica - Van She
75. Oblivion - Grimes
74. Lies - Marina & the Diamonds
73. Intro Intro - Little Nikki
72. Trust - Sin Cos Tan
71. Off to the Races - Lana Del Rey
70. Who's Gonna Love Me - Soso
69. Spectrum (Say My Name) (Calvin Harris Remix) - Florence + the Machine
68. Sun Goes Down (feat. The Knocks & St. Lucia) - Icona Pop
67. Keep You - Wild Belle
66. Devotion - Jessie Ware
65. Amnesia (feat. Timbaland & Brasco) - Ian Carey & Rosette
64. Genesis - Grimes
63. You're the One - Charli XCX
62. Esta Noche - Azealia Banks
61. drops - iamamiwhoami
60. Come Again (the Quetzal) - Soluna Samay
59. All the Rowboats - Regina Spektor
58. Inn I Deg - Gabrielle
57. Pixelated People - Jess Mills
56. Got Paid - Katy B x Zinc x Wiley
55. One Last Time - Agnes
54. Everytime - Loreen
53. Flytta På Dej - Alina Devecerski
52. Come Near - Lykke Li
51. Church and Law - When Saints Go Machine
50. Lies - CHVRCHES
49. Stimela - Wynter Gordon
48. Giddy Up - Dragonette
47. ill Manors - Plan B
46. Only the Horses - Scissor Sisters
45. Met Before - Chairlift
44. Lost - Frank Ocean
43. Aaliyah - Katy B x Geeneus x Jessie Ware
42. The Mother We Share - CHVRCHES
41. It's Gonna Be Long - Amanda Mair
40. Where Have You Been - Rihanna
39. Call Me Maybe - Carly Rae Jepsen
38. Feel It - Bright Light Bright Light
37. White Foxes - Susanne Sundfør
36. Leave the Lights On - Meiko
35. On the Metro - Girls Aloud
34. Bordet - Gabrielle
33. I Knew You Were Trouble. - Taylor Swift
32. Love in a Foreign Place - Gossip
31. DNA - Little Mix
30. Wildest Moments - Jessie Ware
29. goods - iamamiwhoami
28. Skinnarviksberget - Amanda Mair
27. King of Hearts - Cassie
26. Something New - Girls Aloud
25. Running - Jessie Ware
24. Figure 8 - Ellie Goulding
23. Settle Down - No Doubt
22. Blue Jeans - Lana Del Rey
21. Løkken - Gabrielle

20. Sweet Talk - Jessie Ware
"You can't be here / How long 'til you disappear"

From the louche, yet somehow menacing swing of those compressed synths to the chime of the gloomy beats that strike up next, 'Sweet Talk' is an intoxicating mixture of cautious sexuality and suspicious mysticism. When Jessie goes high - "just keep up with that TALKING" - it's a chilling surprise, for she's so soft and subtle, almost cowed, for the remainder of the song, crafting one of Devotion's most archly '90s songs and recasting the jaunty r'n'b sounds into a dark tale of forbidden attraction. 'Sweet Talk' is a tantalisingly sensual, confoundingly relaxing song, the apothesis of Jessie's subtle project of gentle intoxication.

19. kill - iamamiwhoami
"Come on / Just kill this"

'kill' is the masterpiece at the centre of kin. It seems the truest realisation of the vastness of imagination at work here, as well as the most musically representative of the mixture of propulsiveness and erratic trickery shown across the album. Jonna Lee's vocals pierce, less with menace than with detached madness, during the swirling pit of a chorus, deepening for the crisper black magic of the verses. But the song really flies from the 4:30 mark, when the instrumentation winds to a quicker pace, the vocals pile up and enhance each other's tones (frantic, morbid, ghostly) before dropping out altogether and leaving the synths to wear themselves out. In that, 'kill' becomes a song beyond the restrictions of Jonna's physicality and the truest realisation of the mystery of the entire outfit.

18. September - St. Lucia
"I just want you to remember / Before you get carried away"

First, the crisp, bell-like synth beat sets the base, before their deeper, rounder cousin joins it at the same pace and percussion begins to effervesce around them. Then the dreamier synths start to run across, like comets streaking over the sky. The keyboard melody strikes up, snatching at the melancholy undertow of the song, before the fiercer beat overwhelms again. Then, a full two minutes plus into the song, the vocals - the falsetto, and the shouted harmonies - arrive. For the chorus, they swing and sway with the synths, "carried away" with their continuing pulsation; for the middle-eight, the falsetto notes hold, turning the vocal into the strike of an instrument, almost. 'September' is quite simply a vibrant, dynamic, blistering piece of electronica - never clearer than the final minute of the song, where the vocals dissolve into a frenzy and the synths go euphoric, all peaking in a gambole of clattering glory.

17. Ghosts - Laura Welsh
"And there's a sadness / Deep down in my soul"

No song this year was more devastatingly simple than this haunting composition. The heavier piano notes feel painful, hit with venom or distress, or perhaps the rebellion of which Welsh sings - "I won't let them take me in". The loneliness and desolation of 'Ghosts' is a remarkable achievement - the soundscape feels barren even when more instruments and the taunting backing vocals tune in, and the ghosts pile up, harmonising behind Welsh's own voice. There's a fierce strength in her vocals to match the will of the lyrics, although the final break, the ghostly fade of a curtailed note, suggest a dark ending. But having experienced the cracking peaks of Welsh's vocals, you remember that she didn't go easily, and your heart clenches.

16. Belispeak - Purity Ring
"Drill little holes into my eyelids"

The darkest reach of Shrines, I feel, or at least the song that most vividly broke through my consciousness with the electrifying creep of the synths and alarming shock of the black magic lyrics. The reedy fragility of Megan James' vocals is alternately worrying and frightening - is she scared, wandering, lost in fear, or is she the agent of these morbid suggestions or bodily dissolution? This is a track to stalk your nightmares, but I am endlessly drawn into its skittish swirl of glassy synths and uneasy gloomwobble. You might even call it a drug.

15. I Love It (feat. Charli XCX) - Icona Pop
"You're from the '70s / But I'm a '90s bitch"

Your ears may never be assaulted as much as they are, constantly, throughout 'I Love It'. The duo yell, in chorus, every word of the song, a two-and-a-half-minute lasceration of an outdated ex, a sisterhood standing tall and rocking in solidarity. The vocals are some heavy metal shit, but the base is all pop - whirring, ceaseless synths and a thumping drumbeat that practically propels the listener off the dancefloor. It's impossible to resist the chant, to be carried away in the girls' rebellious youth, their reposte to a tired generation. It's almost a mockery of the 'YOLO' generation, circling through time and space but always returning to that proclamation of adoration. It's independence and camraderie, freedom, abandon, delirious energy.

14. Let's Have A Kiki - Scissor Sisters
"Kiki / So so / Oui oui / No no"

"What's up, it's Pickles. Leave a message." 'Let's Have a Kiki', is, like many of the finest Scissor Sisters songs, all about Ana, but it doesn't begin with her. That opening line also shows the complete game Jake sidelining himself, joining the audience for Ana's flamboyant narration and the backing singers for the remainder of the song. 'Kiki' is the novelty hit of the year that tragically never was - alive with a sense of joy and camp that most such ridiculous songs never are. It came complete with a dance routine that may have even prefigured the song, although it doesn't take much digging to get to a fully conceived musical base - the percussive shake, the rhythmic wildness, the eclectic instrumentation that makes the Scissors' inventiveness shine bright. And live? Well, you can't even imagine.

13. Terribly Dark - Frida Hyvönen
"I'll put myself on fire if I find a spark"

It starts terribly dark, here, heavy piano notes and a foreboding, reedy synth building pace to reach Hyvönen's first words. She moves quickly, a speed that soon betrays her fear and confusion ("I hear shots, shots from the forest") and lyrics that suggest an immersion in nature, but also a distance from it, a wariness of its mystical qualities. Shades of Echo Beach abound in the chorus, and the almost comedic strikes of the brass temper the overwhelming morbidity of the song, especially when she desperately, unexpectedly asks "Do you think we can dance?". But confusion overwhelms again, and when Hyvönen starts singing different lines at once, both at vivid, breakneck speed, the delirium marks its definitive rule: a woman taken into the darkness of the forest, never finding the fire she needs to escape.

12. Losing You - Solange
"I gave you everything / And now there's nothing left of me"

The snatches of an almost feline call that begin 'Losing You' instantly grab the attention, a wild samba beat that gets the hips moving immediately. When producer Dev Hynes then throws in the melancholy synth melody on top, and then follows it with a bubbling, effervescent companion, the effect is a vivid one of the lights somehow dimming - this is a song of the moonlight, a lament with a tapping toe. Solange's voice has always been smoother and more tactile than her sister, a whisper compared to B's commanding force, and on 'Losing You' the sensual qualities of it have never been more apparent. As she sings the chorus again, rising out of a slower den of noise, the effect is almost one of triumph, the same repeated words turning into a note of triumph as the ad libs dance in the background. The animal snatch and the handclaps keep jiving to the end, diving out on a final note of unqualified '80s darkness, despair and loss the final impression.

11. No Church in the Wild (feat. Frank Ocean) - Jay-Z & Kanye West
"And deception is the only felony / So never fuck nobody wit’out tellin’ me"

If not the finest beat of the year, then certainly the most instantly exhilirating and iconic - and certainly advert-ready. The gnarly guitar that runs throughout 'No Church in the Wild' gives it an instant baseline of menace and unrest, a rolling constant of the political violence and religious questioning that make up the subject of the lyrics. Ocean, one of the defining artists of the year, provides a harmonic counterpoint to Jay and Kanye's notably troubled rapping - their cockiness absents itself, the opening to an embossed album proving to be an unexpectedly preoccupied quagmire of drama. The compulsion to the song, primarily through that beat, but also through the wails and sirens and monkey cries and Ocean's soft concern, make for an unsettling experience.

10. Princess of China - Coldplay & Rihanna
"You're holding in your hands the two halves of my heart"

A song that doesn't lose the feeling of utter strangeness even after so, so many addictive listens. There isn't really a chorus, just peaks of screaming, both from synths and from Rihanna, whose often abrasive tones are used to their finest effect on the wailing, repetitive, echoing sections. It's a bewildering mixture of refrains, colliding in unexpected ways and creating a collage of mysticism, drawing on Orientalism, prog rock, modern synth-led pop music and god knows what else in the most peculiar of ways. There's some sort of inscrutable pain here, a majestic tragedy - lost castles, stolen stars, broken amour. It still seems like a song that should disgust the ears, but the power of it, in part due to the sheer starpower on display - familiar voices used in surprising ways - makes it an undeniable, endlessly fascinating, eerily engrossing masterstroke.

09. Pyramids - Frank Ocean
"What good is a jewel that ain't still precious?"

How to even begin with a song of this breadth, this muchness? Within the channel ORANGE album, this somehow doesn't overwhelm, with its many pieces conncting as parts of the larger, complex whole. Alone, though, overwhelm it does, announcing itself with the chiming synths before seguing into the deeply cool calls of Ocean's voice, more aggressively used here than on much of the album. The gliding segues are the thing - "we'll run to the future" - tumbling away from the melee of sounds into a different configuration, crashing together amongst the exotic flavour of the lyrics and the futuristic scapes of the instrumentation, tinged with '80s (that synth heyday once again) nostalgia. All over, 'Pyramids' mixes past and present, biblical tropes colliding with images of a dystopian future, all winding through the many strands of dark musical invention. Songs like this don't come along every day.

08. Euphoria - Loreen
"An everlasting piece of art"

It did come to the point where the reputation preceded the song, overloaded as it was with the duty to breakdown negative preconceptions of what a Eurovision song can be. Fact is, those clattering synths in the background are pure David Guetta, and even Loreen's trademark melancholy is transmuted into a more serene positivity geared towards what approaches a generic sense of club excitement. But it's still in her that the magic of 'Euphoria' lies. Quite apart from that dance routine - which I attempt to re-enact every time the song plays in a club, to everyone's embarrassment - the song itself moves in scattering, wildly free motion, with that build out the middle-eight a thing of true exhiliration. 'Euphoria' succeeds so beautifully because it doesn't overload itself with complexity, instead allowing Loreen's flying vocals to make the eponymous feeling one of pure musicality.

07. Teen Idle - Marina & the Diamonds
"The wasted years / The wasted youth / The pretty lies / The ugly truth"

'Teen Idle' captures, more than any song on Electra Heart, the album's mixture of self-effacement and performative bravado, in its fragile, wistful portrait of a regretful young woman. The absolute delicacy of the song is breathtaking, with Marina's vocals nearing falsetto, seemingly afraid to make too loud a noise lest she crack the lamented reflection in the mirror. The production builds to a trembling crescendo as the song climaxes, a whirring synth noise resembling a tragic music box, but it's in Marina's lyrics and her vocalisation of them that the song's true majesty really lies. She captures the precocity of life, the largess that miniscule failures become in our own heads, the ugliness of the realisation that adulthood is suddenly, horribly, unforgivably upon us. And yet in this, you sense that Marina recognises the beauty with which she delivers these feelings, the entire paradox of her self: the outward beauty, the inner disgust, the essential humanity of her entire charade.

06. Summertime Sadness - Lana Del Rey
"Kiss me hard before you go"

It was when I saw the video for this that everything clicked into place for me and Lana - specifically, when her body falls, in one held breath, over the cliff. The song hangs on these falls, with the notes in the chorus pausing, imperceptibly, for a moment, before the next comes along. The words "summertime sadness" sum up what Lana basically does - turns an essentially positive experience into a dour, painful one. But both she and this song are more complicated than that. 'Summertime Sadness' is a song alive with sadness, yes, but also with nostalgia, the glow of memory - there's a pleasure in the sadness, a romanticism that makes itself apparent in the echoing presence of Lana's vocals. Lana realises the completeness that melancholy brings to life, and the repeated emphasis on the title brings the lingering delight on her blue remembrances to the fore. The rhythmic movement of the beat never drives the song into the ground, but perhaps over a cliff - forever moving through the air, like Thelma and Louise, a triumphant defeat.

05. Running to the Sea (feat. Susanne Sundfør) - Röyksopp
"Like savage horses kept within"

The mournful, deliberate notes of a piano begin 'Running to the Sea', sounding more like the devastated finale to a song than its careful beginning. But as the synths and chimes build up on top, coupled with the smooth, ringing vocals of Sundfør - another ideal vocalist for Röyksopp, and one that sounds a darker note than the collection featured on Junior - the song takes shape as the oceanic epic that it is, an instant entry into Röyksopp's panthean of effortless beauties. The faintest touch of a ghostly choir make the pacey synths of Sundfør's absence almost the highlight, if it weren't for the restrained harmony of her efforts on the chorus. Röyksopp's trademark craftsmanship of turning familiar synths into unspeakable emotional weight is more in evidence than ever, with the song building into an overwhelming hatch of Sundfør's repeated confusion ("And the river grows inside of me") and the insistent thumping of the snare drum. This arrived late, but the majesty was immediate and undeniable.

04. Find a Boy (feat. Mic Righteous) - A*M*E
"No more sad / And no more lonely"

From the moment that beat starts rolling, punctuated by the increasingly loud crashes of a synth, I am hooked. You need the extended version for the full effect - the beat rising, unimpeded, for a full forty-five seconds before A*M*E's detached vocals finally chime in. The beat is a compulsion, a staccato, waving deliberation, but A*M*E's vocals smoothly roll over it until they join in the erraticism of the chorus, stalling on the search, the need for a boy. It sounds like the call of the dispossessed, a robotic search for a boy. If you go by Mic Righteous' fierce imposition of a rap, it might be exactly that - he chastises the modern performance of the search for a mate, the routine of maintaining an appearance and the requirement for the male and female to pair off. A*M*E isn't swayed, and her insistence on the title becomes almost hypnotic, a statement of desolation that she is willed so perpetually to this quest, repeating the impossible demand that the boy love her "all the time". The ceaseless roll of the beat makes this dubstep-tinged song embed itself in your memory, the ironic soundtrack to your own endless search for love.

03. Push and Shove (feat. Busy Signal & Major Lazer) - No Doubt
"On another level like we're doing yoga"

I gradually worked on perfecting the lyrics to this song, and, given a few more weeks, I think I'll be word perfect. Which, considering the speed with which Gwen and Busy Signal deliver the verses here, is quite an achievement. What 'Push and Shove' has in abandon is swagger. The ska rhythm swings beneath the rapid fire of the verses, seeming to quicken towards a chorus that never delivers. Delivers on energy, that is - instead, Gwen's voice grinds to a mournful resistence, a playfully hurt kiss-off. She's soon back on fire again, throwing out words and jibbering nonsense that works as a weapon of enforced delirium. 'Push and Shove' combines the slower timbre of much of the album with the skittish, vibrant energy that usually effervesces from Gwen. It's a five minutes that marches past, and before you know it the song is looking back at you with a taunting tongue sticking out of its mouth.

02. Fear and Loathing - Marina & the Diamonds
"I wanna feel completely weightless / I wanna touch the edge of greatness"

Weakness and desperation become one singular, epic masterpiece. Vast, sweeping and ethereal, 'Fear and Loathing' is more prominently an intimate, naked portrait of Marina, her performative tendencies left entirely to the production for Electra Heart's majestic closer. All the frequently elaborate backing vocals will deign to contribute is a taunting hum. Marina's voice echoes, but it doesn't float - her desolate vowels always fall back into the earth, grounded by the depth of her sadness. Few other singers can imbue the extension of a lingering syllable with such soft pain as Marina. Few other songwriters can interpolate such vast emptiness of their souls into such tactile, brief lyrics. 'Fear and Loathing' is a song few could dare to craft, because this takes an artist fearlessly leaving privacy at the door, throwing their every fear and weakness into their work. That it is delivered in such beautiful, majestic form is more than we could have ever asked for.

01. And I Will Kiss (feat. Dame Evelyn Glennie) - Underworld

The Olympics were, for most of us, a once in a lifetime experience. I attended none of the events, and was rather preoccupied with my own petty love life worries tied up with the opening ceremony, which I hardly had the greatest of expectations for in the first place, despite some friends involved who insisted on its awesome spectacle. The Olympics turned out rather well, as it happened (the love part less so), but never did I expect this to come along with them. Combined with the visual spectacle, this is quite simply on a level above most musical composition, a conception of literally epic scope that immediately legitimised Danny Boyle's creation as a truly magnificent piece of art. The synthwork here is truly electrifying, building the refrains across breathtaking minutes at a time, streaking sounds over the top and underneath and teasing with others so that their final delivery makes for even more delirious reception. There are, quite literally, no words, just the rush of tribal sounds and choral rushes, uniting people across the historical breadth of the visual story. The volume is immense - the music feels like it's filling an entire stadium. I feel myself inside this music, and that takes something very special, particularly when words are entirely absent. When the final whistling strikes up and the song begins to twirl down to a finish, I am lost.