DISAPPEAR WITHIN DISTANCE

This isn't goodbye. Just that the monumental tussle with words I've been building up to as far back as the middle of the year has at last begun. I'm writing, you see. Not just one specific thing but many. Which is my rather disingenuous excuse for not writing. Not writing here, at least. Not that I've been writing much here of late, I know. Do I owe anyone an apology for that? Sorry, then. And know that I mean that.  But in my defense, where life used to be what arrested the steady updating of this blog, this time it's been waylaid by more writing. I'm talking partially about pieces of mine that have shown up the past few months in places like Vault and Esquire and the Philippine Star and the Singapore Cinematheque Quarterly, among others, that I've chosen, for some reason or the other and entirely mine, not to cross-publish here. But I'm mostly talking about work that will not be showing up here either and will not be showing up for quite some time but will inevitably show up, in the forms the cosmos has meant for them to take and with the requisite measure of chest-beating and town-crying that befits someone like me who tends to physically wince at the prospect of self-promotion. I'd leave it at that as I'm also terribly averse to making pronouncements before the time is right, and it won't be, not for a bit. Everything in its right place.

All this, of course, is meant to disclaim and perhaps reassure that the silences you have been, and will continue to be, subjected to are not by-products of sloth. New writing will crop up here from time to time, I suspect. And I remain committed to my traditional yearend evaluations. This piece of internet turf is more junkie habit than thankless duty for me, I can't stay away from it too long. Also, more films continue to get made.

Not to get too melodramatic nor too precious nor too self-absorbed even, but the year has been a particularly challenging one for me, with regards to work, and by work I don't mean livelihood, and I don't recall any stock-taking that ensued in the wake of any pitfall to be this severe and decisive, nor this pro-active and crucial either, and I suppose that deserves some gratitude on my part. Much as it can dangerously be a persuasive deterrent, frustration has always been a reliable and enthusiastic impetus.  I'd like to fashionably proclaim this a hiatus but that would imply that I'm taking some form of holiday from writing, which I've reiterated enough times in the course of these three overlong paragraphs I'm not. Quite the opposite in fact. So call it what it is. I know most of you are used to the vacuum at this point. All I'm saying is not to get too used to it. And thank you for getting this far into my self-indulgent leave-taking. And to please be around for the eventual return.  I promise it will be all manner of winful and epic.

A MURDEROUS DESIRE FOR LOVE

In the dream, I was watching the Smiths sing a song I hadn't heard before and will never hear again but was beautiful nonetheless, and crying the sort of tears you cry at revival meetings, that suspension between ruinous and lifted that I merely imagine it to be given that I've never been to a revival meeting, nor  to a Smiths gig. It was an odd dream out of how, one, I dreamt it in the 90s after the Smiths had parted ways to become a constantly metamorphosing back catalogue, and two, I've never had much of a hard-on for gigs, an indifference I pin on the 90s as well, as the thought of the bands that mattered to me coming to Manila back then was beyond the ken of logic as to be impossible, forcing the pragmatic in me to take measures by throttling down any residual enthusiasm I might have originally nursed. The Smiths were my Beatles almost. They certainly were my Byrds, at least. And, hackneyed as it seems given the subject of the piece, they were the only band I literally dreamed of watching.

We all trace it back to Morrissey and Marr, of course, and whatever it was they had between them, that rarefied push and pull that transpires between frontman and guitarist, only with them it was more exacting, with no room for graying the area, for overlap. Morrissey took care of the morose wit and the erudite melodrama and Marr the ebullient melodicism and that way he had with his Rickenbacker that few could touch. It was the most fundamental division of labor between a frontman and guitarist, mirroring the stringent classicism of their repertoire: here was a band that never had a dance phase, a hip hop phase, an electronic phase, any kind of phase. A curious dynamic, sure, but one with a particular elegance. Once their alliance was severed, though, iffiness set in.  Marr tended to disappear inside every band he was eventual member of, becoming more rampart than color, never as exuberant nor as vivid.  But Morrissey was going out on sonic limbs, stumbling at first from the lack of a melodic crutch to prop him up, but eventually finding his sea legs. That's why I only have Electronic albums but have everything Morrissey put out since leaving the Smiths. And why May 13 was a date I would physically punish myself for missing.

But my tenacity was almost thwarted by the usual galore of deterrents: there was the excruciating lack of funds, the false rumors of tickets selling out, the eleventh hour scheduling of a shoot on the day of the gig and lastly, the lack of company to go with.  I had friends in the crowd, sure, but I didn't want to move from my place to go looking for them.  I would, later on, move around that is, looking for vantage points for each number. But before that, I just diligently nursed my overpriced vodka, waiting for the endorphin of anticipation to spike. It did but it didn't last. The sirens blared. And the band stepped out.

No measure of sobriety could dampen the euphoric surge of the opening song. How Soon Is Now? was both almost a given and out of left field at the same time. The effect of hearing its' colossal, ominous tremble pushed to 11 like that was physiological. Louder than bombs, right. My body couldn't make up its mind if it would pee in my pants or bawl in ecstasy. I did neither, thank god, but my knees were shaking as I screamed myself hoarse:"I am human and I need to be loved."  Alma Matters was the next song, quite possibly my second or third favorite Morrissey song, and the only one on that short list he sang that night, and was like my own bullish tantrum slash tenet:  " . . it's my life to ruin my way. . ."  Our angsts diverged many ways and it's not like his music put up a mirror to my own index of failures, my own ineptitude at happiness, but the songs always felt like fistbumps of solidarity, and almost comforting in how overblown and funny they most of the time got."This is not pop music. This  is opera!" he would proclaim later.

There's no way to parse a gig on paper that will make it meaningful to anyone else outside of enthusiastic reportage, it's bound to be different for everybody, and there was an immeidate spate of disappointments among people I knew, conspiracy theories even, of sets cut short, and of over-privileged brat hecklers in the front row. Admittedly, I came in there hopeful for a revue: The Best of Morrissey and the Smiths. I didn't get that, of course. But I was singing along to every song anyway, and he was working the table so fiercely, hearing First of the Gang To Die amplified by power chords or  Shoplifters of the World Unite raised to its anthemic rafters or Meat Is Murder with inappropriately, and therefore appropriately,  distressing images of animal torture, made me not mind the absence of The More You Ignore Me or Interesting Drug or I Want The One I Can't Have or Frankly Mr.Shankly. But I was still waiting for the last button to be pushed that would tip this over into the eternal. I started tearing up halfway through the first verse of the penultimate song: "Oh mother, I feel the soil falling over my head . . . " I Know It's Over was magnificent but tears were not enough, it turns out.

But  then Morrissey reclaimed There Is A Light That Never Goes Out  from Zooey Deschanel, and honed his encore, and the gig with it, to near-perfection. There are days I envy his resolute belief in the hopelessness of matters, and long for the force of will to surrender myself to the lassitude it brings.  But I am cursed with an innate optimism and an immense capacity for waiting. And mine has always been a blind, dumb hope in that light that never goes out never going out. In being reminded how desperately, how literally, I take that title, how I clasp its implications to my chest, and how I probably will until the day I die, I felt the night tip over into the eternal at last. I felt a  prickle of rapture appropriately tinged with sorrow.  I felt, in fact, both ruinous and lifted.

ARMAGEDDON HOPEFULS: MY 2011 IN MUSIC

"The culture with which I surround myself is a reflection of my personality and the circumstances of my life, which is in part how it should be." " (Nick Hornby)

In the end, it all came down to pleasure for me. Not that there's no melancholic surfeit here, there was the need to mope and to rant, mostly over the loose ends every year leaves you with, the ghosts I can't give up, the wolves at my door, all that. But the release you get from the songs you mope and rant to should count as pleasure,too. This list is unapologetically biographical as the connections I make with pop music cuts closer and closer every year, and I can only hope it's also bullish and solipsistic and contrarian, inadequate as cultural dowsing rod, charting rather the turmoils and ecstasies of my year and the reprieves inbetween. The far more burning urge was to dance, or rather, to reconnect with what made me fall in love with music in the first place and the small wonders that love can do for me: the hook-happy endorphin surge. I figure if the world really is coming to an end this year, then none of whatever troubles us now matters, except perhaps what little burst of pleasure we can muster in the face of it, partying, even if it's only in our heads, while hurtling to our doom on a headful of butterflies

Let's do this, then. Albums first, the records I listened to as wholes, then songs. As per usual.

1. Wild Beasts, SMOTHER
2. King Creosote and Jon Hopkins, DIAMOND MINE
3. The Indelicates, DAVID KORESH SUPERSTAR
4. Perc, WICKER AND STEEL
5. Rob Crow, HE THINKS HE'S PEOPLE
6. Mogwai, HARDCORE WILL NEVER DIE BUT YOU WILL
7. Fleet Foxes, HELPLESSNESS BLUES

8. Korallreven, AN ALBUM BY KORALLREVEN

9. TV On the Radio, NINE TYPES OF LIGHT

10.Taken by Cars, DUALIST

40. Panda Bear, Last Night At The Jetty: Tomboy was not so much sonic upgrade as it was sonic upsize, less a taking in of new colors but more a robust re-iterating of old ones, but while it doesn't get as obtuse as Young Prayer, it doesn't get as touching either, only this doo-wop colossus, with Noah Lennox grasping at a failing memory in full-on harmonic grandeur, does stand out, by a transcendent Brian Wilson mile.

39. Woodkid, Iron: Turns out I listened to this more times than anything off the new Beirut, which is surprising given how much of a Zach Condon fanboy I am but is no way meant to imply it was his failure or that Yoann Lemoine, who is all of Woodkid, is a rip-off artiste, just that I was distracted, and that this shares that similarly archaic old world aura.

38. Childish Gambino, My Shine:

" . . . why nobody wanna admit they like me just a little bit?" I'm not sure if the ramshackle nature of Donald Glover's rap is an aesthetic so much as a diffidence that works in his favor, here in particular where he vents his frustration at not being taken seriously with the sort of heightened bravado you find in the heat of the moment but tends to dissipate after you've flustered yourself saying your piece, which in this case, is a spot of bother I'm intimate with myself. " . . . when these motherfuckers gonna understand I'm serious?. . ." I feel you, man. I so feel you.

37. Toro Y Moi, Still Sound: Death Cab for Chromeo, something like that, and apologies to Chaz if that comes off reductive as his funk-lite inversion is fancier than the mashup implies, tempering the opaque introspection of his words by turning up the warmth of his sound for sound's sake ethos that's obviously residue from a love for Stereolab, making it perfect for a song about the comforts that come from the shapes sound makes.

36. Frank Ocean, Swim Good: Love breaks down, as it tends to do, and either Frank's committing suicide or merely using it as a metaphor for how much he's had it and is moving on. The title's an exhortation, of course, to himself, to anyone in the same rut. It also describes the sensuous way the song moves.

35. Avril Lavigne, What The Hell: For the rinky dink organ and the hollaback propulsion and Avril going all punky naughty frisky sexy on us and dispensing truths while she's at it. ". . .love hurts whether it's right or wrong . . ." Damn right.

34. Owen, The Armoire: The center not holding, when the place you call home grows clammy with un-belonging, is a hurt that’s hard-up for solace, and in using junk furniture to articulate the displacement that comes from it, Mike Kinsella doesn’t really offer any, but he does one-up his own tiny gift for quotidian minutiae, one-ups even Dallas Green, whose new one as City and Colour lacked the catch it used to the first few listens in. Not that I've given up on it, or on Justin Vernon, but I'll have to get back to you on those two. Mike's got this covered anyway.

33. An Horse, Know This, We've Noticed: Their Sleater-Kinney auras disperse a little here, but not my much, and not that it needs to. I’m thinking it has a shot at being my Our Deal for this year even if it lopes rather than smolders, if only for how emotive the rah-rah in its chorus gets and for how it invokes Dusty as much, even if it's only in spirit.

32. Adele, Turning Tables: It really was the year the world threw its arms around Adele, wasn't it? Oh, she's earned it, been earning it since 19 , and ubiquity aside, the pissed-off exuberance of Rolling in the Deep can withstand the neutering a thousand talent show contestants can visit on a song and is something whose swampy voodoo curdles with age. But this was the one that got to me, and gets to me still, the song not even Glee could butcher, the song that could possibly top Chasing Pavements as her career-high. " . . .close enough to start a war, all that I have is on the floor . . . " All that minor key roil, all that simmering indignation.

31. Wild Flag, Romance : In which Carrie Brownstein and Mary Timony and Rebecca Cole and Janet Weiss form a supergroup and rekindle their collective punk-pop perk and feist by attaching hooks on them big enough to haul cargo on, which in the 90s, at the height of their powers, or at least of their hipster relevance, would come off like some fluke post-grunge crossover, but in 2011 felt no less than truly alternative.

30. Fucked Up with Madeline Follin, Queen of Hearts: Pried loose from the massive punk rock opera it’s embedded in, you do get a sense of autonomy that gathers its own brunt without sucking at the teat of the big picture, which is to say you could make a single out of it, which is precisely what they did. Riffs with traction catchily pile-drive to its own blaze of pop rapture, and being the part in the story where boy first meets girl, the shaft of light near the end when Madeline from Cults opens her mouth makes both narrative and aesthetic sense.

29. Chad VanGaalen, Peace On The Rise: Feelgood hit of the summer turned lo-fi lullaby for the rest of the year, as disheartening as it is comforting, as broken as it is pretty.

28. Lykke Li, I Follow Rivers: She may not have the same husk and wallop but this girl group mutation had as much, if not more, gumbo and raunch as Adele's stompers, and as I'm not really in any mood to pit one against another, I'll take both, thank you, but give this a few nudges up the list, as I prefer Adele when she torches it down, and because that tinpot drum figure that snakes throughout is as exciting a use of percussion as the digital castanets on Robyn's Dancing On My Own.

27. Shabazz Palaces, Are You . . .Can You . .Were You? (Felt): " . . .my mind hides behind the music . . .” And that music is the sort that begets coinage along the lines of avant-chiaroscuro and dub-noir and prog-hop, the beats stretching and spacing out as if into a stoned soul fugue. If this is indeed MC Palaceer Lazaro a.k.a. Digable Planets’ Ishmael Butler’s manifesto, the music’s just the thing for hiding behind : nocturnal, obscure, sexy.

26. Drake with Rihanna, Take Care: Fuller of sound, and somewhat more assured, over time, the new Drake record might reveal itself as the closest he's gotten to a masterpiece, but given the limits of my immersion, and also given the catchiness of its hook, it's the title track that I lived with for quite a bit, more than Marvin's Room, more than Crew Love , if only because the he said-she said volley between Drake and Rihanna gets so delicious, I hardly notice when Gil Scott Heron butts in on the conversation and by the time I do, they're at it again. " . . .if you let me, here's what I'll do, I'll take care of you . . .", sings Rihanna, words she filched from Bobby Bland, of course, but is an endearment as eternal as it is cliched that also happens to be my last word on certain matters myself.

25. Niva, Ghost In My Head: That tasty R & B chorus repeating " . . .I think about it all the time . . . " as if it were a mantra of something Niva both dreads and relishes, should feel incongruous but isn't, infusing the spry little synth(dream)pop bubble instead with a buoyant prettiness that sends me for no reason and is on here for even less.

24. M83, Midnight City: That riff, that ebullient synthesizer clarion call like OMD sans the intolerable sappiness,the riff of the year full stop, cracking the song open and grabbing you by the loins then bolting and letting you chase it across the verses, half leitmotif half fugitive, until you back it into a corner near the end, throbbing in the backdrop teasing you to come closer, just before it detonates and takes you, willfully, gleefully, in its ecstatic blast radius.

23. Metronomy, Everything Goes My Way: " . . .when I took you back, I thought you'd up and run away, but you're still here, you're still here . . ." Halfway through, Anna Prior comes down from her disbelief as if to countenance her giddiness with a dash of reality-checking doubt by telling us how bad a boyfriend her ex was, but it's really only to give him room to sing a few lines to corroborate her optimism, before she goes back up into its ether. As irony-free a reunion of exes as Peaches and Herb, but at least twice as bubbly with delight at the thought.

22. Summer Camp, Better Off Without You: " . . .I'm better off without you . . ." so Elizabeth Sankey sings, and you know she's trying to convince herself as much as us, but the euphoric swell with which she sings it wins you over so, you take her word for it and hope she does, too.

21. Arctic Monkeys, The Hell-Spangled Shalala: Could be the tunnel vision that comes from being a fan, which is sometimes the point and the fun of being one, but Humbug and Suck It And See were not as regressive as the world claims, more like spurts of forward motion, really, albeit one bigger than the other. The pining on Love Is A Laserquest does get epic and has dibs on poignancy but this bouncy, impressionistic love song manages to slake my throwback fix without drowning me in my nostalgia, reminding me what made me love them and why it's a good thing they didn't stay that way, not to mention that it has the line that is not only my second favorite lyric of the year but what my year essentially boiled down to: " . . .I took the batteries out of my mysticism and put them in my thinking cap . . ."

20. Meyer Hawthorne, A Long Time : Rigorously old school as his artifice comes off, the touchstone here is really Hall & Oates, and that fertile period when they were mashing every mutant subgenre within arms' reach into the Philly soul that was their base matter. This earnest paean to Detroit may not be as protean nor as arch, but it has a keyboard riff so sexy it would've been sufficient to clinch this one for me, in case Meyer didn't have either the chops nor the largesse to write a song to go with it, which of course he does.

19. Mastodon, Curl of the Burl: There's the sci-fic erotica of Stargasm, sure, wearing on its sleeve as much as it can the prog they seem to be eschewing for now. Or perhaps the devastating elegiac prettiness of The Sparrow. But for each new vein they tap on the new record, I kept coming back more and more to the meat and potatoes, which in this case, is the Skynyrd/Sabbath crunch of the single, which opens with what could well be the couplet of the year: " . . .I killed a man 'cause he killed my goat, I put my hands around his throat . . ."

18. Those Dancing Days, Help Me Close My Eyes: " . . .I breathe with a hand on my mouth, I refuse to get poisoned and I swallow my shout . . ." A song that's not only about trepidation but also sounds the way it feels, its verses nervily pulling back, as if gathering the courage to build to a chorus that's not quite as sure of itself as it wants to be but has enough rouse in it to feel as if it is.

17. Jennifer Hudson, No One Gonna Love You: " . . . don't dare send me straight to voice mail, babe,I'm just gonna text you, hope it ain't no issue . . . " And she's telling you she's not going, boy. But don't be so quick to walk away. " . . .I've been through some things, please don't hold that against me . . . " She has and you shouldn't. Insensitivity aside, though, that throb of meta does help nuance what gets by on how underdressed her approach to R & B has always been, not letting any production garnish cross the path of her voice, which, like her love, is all she's got and often all you need.

16. Slow Club, Horses Jumping: Rebecca and Charles have always traded in everyday despair but passed, at all times, through a sieve of hope only here it gets so jubilant as to be almost defiant. "Good love is hard to regret, when you know it was real . . ." goes a line here, before it comes to the emotional boil near the end that's nothing shy of inspiring: "I wanna live where each hand you're dealt is enough so you never feel like you want to bluff, and every road that you drive gives you the crashes that keep you alive . . ." Hands down my favorite lyric of the year. You can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes, maybe you can.

15. The Streets with Claire Maguire, Lock The Locks: Mike Skinner's last bow. Wistful yet unrepentant, wry yet poignant, the last track on his last record is a last goodbye to the pop life, evoking the weariness he claims is his urge for leaving , buoyed by the certainty of his departure and the smoky way Claire makes that torchy chorus stick.

14. Destroyer, Chinatown: I suspect Dan Bejar's above mocking his own devices and that his tongue was as far away from his cheek as it can get when he sang this, veering as it does into a China Crisis by way of Walter Becker soft-rock haze right down to the cryptic lyrics and a sax solo that may be more Spyro Gyra than Bill Evans but goes on anyway to defy its predisposition for elbowing a song dangerously past anyone's thresholds of cheese, giving it updraft instead. Sibel Thrasher's harmonies are an unironic, unsurprising boon, too.

13. Radiohead, Separator: " . . .every woman blows her cover, in the eye of the beholder . . ." The last track on what turned out to be the second Radiohead album after Hail To The Thief that would inexplicably recede from both my attention span and eventually my memory mere weeks after first listen, but for this love song as hallucination, crooned oddly, mysteriously, gorgeously.

12. Memory Tapes, Wait In The Dark: " . . .this is how it ends we just stand each other up . . ." Dayve Hawk, like anyone with a pop gene as skittish as his, understands the protocols of pop heartbreak , how the lyrics confess pain and the music signifies relief, it's the most elegant of structures, the most empathic of co-dependencies. He also says insomniacs are like ghosts, two conditions I found myself in and find myself still, and this is a love song sung through the eyes of one or the other, about the separation anxieties of being so close and yet so far, set to his most effervescent singsong yet.

11. Fando and Lis, Nang Gabing Umiyak Ng Dagat: Full disclosure: I directed the video for this and my name does pop up on the album sleeve as "associate producer",which really only means I heard the tracks before anybody else did, but yeah, I'm biased, but then I also am with the 39 other songs here, and nepotism aside, this song and I do have a fair amount of history. I've always heard it stripped to the bone but adorned now with Khavn's piano curlicues and the way Ledh's voice aches and comforts and wounds, it becomes a song of unfathomable regrets for me to drown my own in.

10. Asobi Seksu, Perfectly Crystal: " . . .we've become what we've never wanted . . ." Almost a pastiche but not really, the way the latter-day Cocteau Twins swirl melds with the tasty My Bloody Valentine guitars that come in at the right moments and never overstays its welcome, and over which Yuki wails dreamily about the clarity that sometimes comes from disillusionment.

9. Flaming Lips and Neon Indian, You Don't Respond: Pardon the hipster obscurantism, as this was buried inside a one-off collab EP, one of many Wayne Coyne seems terribly fond of doing. I confess to never having been taken with their experimental nerve as I am by their pop fluency and a little pissed they could never quite manage the graft on these detours, as that would be wondrous, or at least sounds like it could be. This isn't quite that but it does come really, really close. Much as it's a cul-de-sac of a song, going around in circles, its glitchy anticlimax is weirdly catchy.

8. 2NE1, Lonely: It was only a matter of time before they slowed the party-hearty down, and not to say that this lithe, and rather grand, ballad doesn't have the goods, in and of itself, but it really is their unique alchemy that gives it a boost, and proves itself capable of turning anything Dara and Minzy and Bom and CL touch into gold.

7. Mates of State, Unless I'm Led: If you assume that every time husband and wife Kori and Jordan sing about a relationship, they're referring to the one they've been stalwart in maintaining all these years, then the minor key anxieties here are a glimpse of what they constantly find themselves up against and what they find the grace to overcome.

6. Low, Especially Me: Low has this utilitarian dependability that makes being a devotee less contingent on blind faith, and makes the occasional game change go down like magic. Having been a fan for so long, I never doubted their capacity for beauty and the way they draw forth balm from it. But this ghostly? This majestic? And this attuned to the truth? " . . . 'cause if we knew where we belong, there'd be no doubt where we're from, but as it stands, we don't have a clue, especially me and probably you . . .”

5. Rihanna, We Found Love :" . . .we found our love in a hopeless place . . ." Don't we all? The eight words that everybody will be singing and that rather ingeniously nails the way woe and desperation and euphoria push and pull at and sometimes bleed into each other inside not only nearly ever love song but nearly every relationship. Go by the words alone and it does seem doomed to futility, only Rihanna sings it with a strident sense of purpose to flip the script, which Calvin Harris' rapturous disco synths not only encourage but celebrate.

4. The Antlers, Putting The Dog To Sleep: ". . .my trust in you is a dog with a broken leg, tendons too torn to beg, for you to let me back in . . ." Peter Silbeman proves himself a few stations above the one-hit miserablist I always took him for, as every verse of longing, every cry for love teetering on meltdown, every plea for mercy met unheard on this tearjerky waltz, reveals a blade tucked in its folds, taking little nicks, drawing blood, hurting so bad, which is to say, so good.

3. Jay-Z and Kanye West with Frank Ocean, No Church In The Wild: Frank Ocean breaks the math down for you: " . . .human beings in a mob. What's a mob to a king? What's a king to a god? What's a god to a non-believer, who don't believe in anything? . . . " And Kanye and Jay-Z's spiritual crisis has to do with religious excess and existential voids and the obscene grandiosity of their own multimillionaire lifestyles, appropriately charged with apocalyptic urgency by that sinister Phil Manzanera blues riff.

2. Yuck, Get Away: Dinosaur Jr. for voltage plus Sebadoh for sustain plus Teenage Fanclub for immediacy, meaning its energies will dim over time but will re-up over time, too, and when it does, nothing can quite touch its catchy din for ecstasy, as is the case with it now.

1. Cold Cave, Confetti: Reining in the anthemic bombast that gave the new album crank, but hanging on to the Wayne Hussey affectations that serve him well, Wesley Eisold reverts back to the New Order he rode in on, milking a doomy sultriness from his overwrought melodrama, which, in all matters new wave and goth, is not a redundancy of excesses but a principle of faith.

GOD IS A BULLET

Amok

Directed by Lawrence Fajardo

Written by John Bedia

"What,like a bullet, can undeceive?" (Herman Melville)

Amok is well-oiled tumult, a chaos mechanism of wrong place-wrong time dynamics fed through a portmanteau that has everybody looking to Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu as point of reference, if only for how both hew to similar tropes of threading a line through disconnected lives suddenly thrown in the glare of blood and harm. But where Inarritu gets overwrought in preaching a grand design, not to mention a troubling hard-on for closure, Amok is more haphazard, has little to say that hasn't been said before, but so much to say it with, neither overreaching nor belaboring. If nothing else, it's a technical feat, of logistics and guerilla tactics and cutting. It's rigorous, precise.

The bustling intersection where it all comes down is both milieu and metaphor, and the one thing shared by the motley ensemble of has-beens and also-rans it corrals: they all just happen to be in the area. The cocky cop on the walkway waiting to rendezvous with an asset (Efren Reyes Jr., funny), the faded stuntman living alone with his rancid nostalgia and a rent girl sleeping in his bed (Mark Gil, funnier), the put-upon brother driving his cranky sister around and stuck in traffic (Archi Adamos), the ex-cop with a baby on the way and a chip on his shoulder (Dido De La Paz, a walking tour de force). If it wobbles here and there, it's mostly from spasms of bad acting and the patois ringing false. But in never lingering on one character longer than it should, it blurs the chinks into forgiveness. Brief snatches are all we get to see of these brief lives, not so much arcs as they never get to complete any. It's the point of everything here: how our stories don't so much end but are cut short halfway through the telling and often in a random blast of doom. There's a weariness to its nihilism that's more wounding for being so resigned. The world is a clusterfuck. And God is a bullet.

TISOY VS. THE PUNKS: ON MTV, PHILIPPINE CINEMA AND YOU CAN DANCE IF YOU WANT TO

Google “music video” and you can trace its origins as a practice as far back as the late 1800s. Oh, it was performance footage for the most part, but isolated pockets were going out on limbs, laying in the ramparts. Jean Luc Godard had an indirect hand in matters, about as much as the direct hand Richard Lester had with his Help!. That entire syntax he came up with in A Bout De Souffle, the shakycam and the jump cutting and the whiplash rhythms, it was all prescient without knowing it, virtually the cloth from which music videos would be cut. You go to it and you go to films like Bob Rafelson’s Head and Nicholas Roeg’s Performance and to little oddments like Dylan’s iconic Subterranean Homesick Blues and the Who’s Happy Jack and the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever and to the lab experiments Todd Rundgren and Devo were conducting. You go to these not just for the DNA signatures, though. You go to these for having the bright idea that you can make little movies from songs without having to pick through Hollywood musicals for surplus or training a camera on some guy and having him sing to it.

They were all taking from other, myriad strains of cinema instead, or even other, myriad strains of culture in general, and in many ways, were pushing the form even before they had a name for it, and really, even before they were even aware there was a form to push. Pushing it closer to short film, to experimental narrative, to conceptual piece, closer to the music video as we know it today, notwithstanding all the excesses it accrued. Boiled down, all those primordial music videos name-checked back there, among others, were borne out of the need of independent filmmakers (D.A. Pennebaker, Peter Goldman) to do something and bored rock stars to feed blood back into their pulses, tiny little spurts of experimentation to while away the time waiting for the zeitgeist that would detonate all of what they were doing to calcify, blissfully unaware of the footprints they were making.

The task at hand here is to find, if any, similar overlaps between Philippine pop cinema and Philippine music videos, the bearing of one on the evolution of the other. But I’m not sure if I can say some parallel evolution took place. Ever since the local music industry appropriated the form, there has been a steady increase in production values and with the outbreak of the digital revolution, a proliferation of music video careerists, the music video becoming a refuge for Filipino film school graduates with nothing to film and, down the line, for anyone with a digital camera. Oh, there was already an active independent experimental cinema in the country lining the fringes back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when MTV first broke, our own Pennebakers and Goldmans if you will, in Raymond Red (Manila Skies) and Joey Agbayani (Lola) and later in Aureus Solito (The Blossoming of Maximo Olivero), but by the time they became the emergent bands’ go-to men, the music video had more or less become the global music marketing parlance it is, meaning the template was set, the laws laid down, leaving no room for a learning curve.

Not that any was needed, the short film being the métier of nearly every independent filmmaker recruited to make a music video—and something like Aureus’ longform video for the Eraserheads’ Ang Huling El Bimbo (aka The Last El Bimbo) almost instinctively went against the grain anyway. For the most part, there were catalogues of tropes to nick, styles to mimic, concepts to retro-fit, rules to break and unbreak. A learning curve would only amount to a lot of fuss you didn’t need, moreso when the form practically came with an instruction manual. All you had to do was crack it open and dig in. Other than the most rudimentary transfer of energies, there really was little significant overlap between cinema and music video. Go to Maryo J.De Los Reyes’ iconic but crummy Bagets (1984), though, and the argument turns a slightly different shade. Its gaudy colors, its editing rhythms and its incessant fondness for montage was a template in and of itself for the local youth comedies of the ’80s, that misbegotten horde, whose most beloved trope was the tendency to suddenly break into elaborate song and dance at the oddest moments and not in the culturally endemic manner of Bollywood, would count among its vile ranks such epics of trash as Hotshots and Campus Beatand the almighty The Punks among many, many, far more misbegotten others. Bagets and the rest of its sort seemed suspiciously and terribly influenced by MTV.

Not to dismiss leakages and osmosis, not to mention how slavish appropriation of whatever’s working for the West has always been domestic mainstream studio-made cinema’s particular brand of kung fu, but there’s a sudden breaking into elaborate song and dance too, in Ishmael Bernal’s (Himala) postmodern-before-there-even-was-such-a-thing-as-postmodern Tisoy!(1977). But it comes in at an even odder time, just after the title credits, so it’s not as if you’re ready and it’s not as if he throws a rope before plunging us into it but there you go—street sweepers in full-on Busby Berkeley mode! It’s nowhere near as well-oiled as the Busby Berkeley invocation would suggest, sure, there’s another proto-MTV sequence involving a traffic jam that’s more wittingly and precisely realized, but it’s a ballsy move even for someone who has built a career on ballsy moves. It throws you on enough of a loop so you start expecting that nothing here will settle into a groove you can see coming. And it doesn’t.

Nobody talks much about Tisoy!. Not when they talk about Bernal, not when they talk about the heights of ’70s comedy, not when they talk about ahead-of-its-time. Which is a bit of a shame. Rather, and rightly so, everybody talks about Mike De Leon’s Kakaba-Kaba Ka Ba? (1980), which starred Christopher De Leon and Jay Ilagan too, and came three years later and has the same subversive energy and has one or two dance numbers as well but feels a lot less anarchic and a lot less funny and a lot less fun put up against this.My aunt remembers Tisoy from college, back in the late ’60s, in all its iterations: the Nonoy Marcelo comic strip, the play that came out of it, the eventual TV show, the Lauro Pacheco movie with Jimmy Morato and Pilar Pilapil, all that. Tisoy was their youth cult, their generational totem, their Scott Pilgrim. Their Bagets, if you will. But even she hadn’t heard of this. And even if she did, it’s possible she wouldn’t recognize it. Nonoy Marcelo wrote the script for this one, sure, and roped in his comedy titan cousin Bert Marcelo, who has been the constant through all the versions. But the Bernal Tisoy!was not so much a remake as a turning on its head. It’s a relic of its time—it’s near-topical in jokes, mostly pivoting on local cinema at that time, only working after some digging into, for one—but I saw it just a few weeks ago, some 33 years too late, and it’s temperament is weirdly fresh, weirdly now.

I bring it up and Kakaba-Kaba Ka Ba?, too, because they both predate MTV but both too are uncannily possessed of a grasp for its rhythms and energies and language, as if they were as prescient without knowing it as Godard was. And who knows if maybe they are. That something as arch and irreverent and out-there as Tisoy! would have bearing on something as safe as milk and dull as bathwater as Bagets and the rest of its sort may be a little too much to suggest but the membranes that connect them make sense. It’s something far older than MTV here. And might have its roots in something embedded in our cultural psyche and in the psyche too of Philippine popular cinema of the ’50s and ’60s and even the ’70s, in the vaudeville aesthetic it sucked at the teat of, in the belief of entertainment as being everything to everyone, in that urge to put on a show… right now.There is something oddly, sweetly, wondrously intrusive every time someone dances in a movie that isn’t a musical and it’s done right or even if it isn’t but feels like it was or even if it plain isn’t. A breaking of the fourth wall almost, a spinning off into another planet, even the ones that enmesh themselves in the action through a sieve of logic, like the Madison bit from Godard’s Band of Outsiders or when John Leguizamo and Mira Sorvino dance to Marvin Gaye in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam; but more so when it doesn’t, like the exhilarating coda to the Takeshi Kitano Zatoichi and that lovely bit near the end of Quark Henares’ Keka that feels kindred with the dancing in Tisoy! and Kakaba-Kaba Ka Ba?. They’re all digs, sure. But you can parse a hum of affection coursing through it. Not obviously and, really, I’m mostly just guessing. And possibly projecting my own peculiar affection on it, itself most likely colored by an idiot love for crap and a tinge of nostalgia for it. Oh, it’s silly and naïve but it’s this naïve silliness, this utter disregard for everything, that counts for its untrammeled enthusiasm, for the purity of its unwitting anarchy, and for my screwy fondness for it.

Originally published at Cinelogue.

*Image taken from Video 48.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FORGETTING: MY 2010 IN MUSIC

" . . .(with) downloads . . . you can listen infinitely without knowing often what you're listening to." (Brian Eno, from an interview in Pitchfork)

At it again.

More music is being made and put out there now than there's been at any other point in history and unlike any other point in history,too, you can have them all, if you have the stamina and the appetite and the will and the life to burn. That,and a broadband server. I have a little bit of each and I listened to a ridiculous amount of music in 2010 mostly because it was out there and I could. But Brian Eno was right. I've forgotten what half of it sounds like. This, then, technically, is the half I remember, give or take. Or at least what made it through the filters in one piece and stuck.

There are two lists here. The first is for albums and comes with no annotation as I'm lazy like that. I apologize for the lack of domestic product. This year, I plan to get out more often and remedy that. I didn't have the heart to separate the two Sufjan Stevens records, as they weren't meant to be anyway. And I'm counting all three of Robyn's Body Talk EPs as more of a whole than the comp album she released from bits and pieces of them. Barring the obvious pick , for me and for yearend lists (Kanye West,Cee-lo Green), the rest of my listening turned out to be wildly catholic, even more than 1999, taking in, as it does, the gleeful return of stalwart old favorites Superchunk and Gil Scott Heron and a thoroughly forlorn Tracey Thorn, my new fetish for three strains of pop (dream, K and J), as well as the robust jazz-funk of The Budos Band, the DIY psych of Coma Cinema , the orchestral manoeuvres of Owen Pallett, the jubilant pop of 2NE1 and the weirdly comforting goth balladry of Zola Jesus.

The second list is for songs, not really singles, as I'm terribly misinformed about these things, having lost the old vigor to swim the media bath for coordinates. I used to hoard copies of SPIN and Q and Mojo to use as maps for the hunting and gathering of pop that consumed half my life and money. These days, with zero danger and less at stake, I forage blind. And I don't really care. Turns out, though, that most of these were singles, which is odd and neat.

One of the rules I set for myself is that nobody from one list can cross over into the other. It's a rule I was tempted to break several times - - -with Robyn and 2NE1 and Kanye and Cee-Lo from the albums list and LCD and Teenage Fanclub and The-Dream from the songs list. The other rule is that no one gets two slots on either list.

I wrote a decade-ender list of albums and songs that both peaked at 40 and ran the risk of leaving out a lot, which happened. I wanted to keep this at the same number but I got as far as 20 for the albums and up to 46 for the songs and ran the same risk, with Allo Darlin' and Nicki Minaj as casualties. I ranked both lists, too, as ranking is my new toy. And like most toys, it's both a bit of fun and possibly immaterial. Love was my only gauge and love's impervious to hierarchy. I also didn't go as far as including albums and songs released before 2010 that I heard for the first time and played a lot last year as that was not the point- - -sorry,then, City And Colour and Skeleton and the Girl-Faced Boys and Clazziquai Project and Empire of the Sun and Jesus Walk With Me.

Besides,if I had, we'd be here all night. And this is late enough as it is.



1. Zola Jesus, STRIDULUM II
2. Cee-Lo Green, THE LADYKILLER
3. Rangers, SUBURBAN TOURS
4. Kanye West, MY BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY
5. Robyn, BODY TALK I-III
6. Superchunk, MAJESTY SHREDDING
7. 2NE1, TO ANYONE
8. Crystal Castles, CRYSTAL CASTLES 2010
9. Chew Lips, UNICORN
10. Evenings, NORTH DORM
11. LoneLady, NERVE UP
12. Sufjan Stevens, ALL DELIGHTED PEOPLE / THE AGE OF ADZ
13. High Places, HIGH PLACES VS. MANKIND

14. Budos Band, THE BUDOS BAND III

15. Owen Pallett, HEARTLAND

16. Rose Elinor Dougall, WITHOUT WHY
17. Coma Cinema, STONED ALONE
18. Young Heretics, WE ARE THE LOST LOVED ONES
19. Gil Scott Heron, I'M NEW HERE
20. Tracey Thorn, LOVE AND ITS OPPOSITE

47. David Sylvian, Playground Martyrs
It was always Sylvian's vocals, from Brilliant Trees on, that made me his bitch, more than his sober artpop, really, but it didn't take long for me to get around to loving that,too. He's the closest thing I have to a Sinatra, to a devotion hinged almost entirely on mechanism. This is a torch song disrobed until there's close to nothing left, attaining a spectral quality, in both the consistency of the songform it co-opts, and in the threads of melody flitting through it that his voice divines then exposes.

46. Christina Aguilera with Ladytron, Little Dreamer
Bionic worked despite not being as all that as I'd hoped, but on paper, the pairing up of Christina with Ladytron for two bonus tracks smacked of a car crash slightly less grotesque than the car crash the pairing up of Christina with Cher turned out to be but a car crash still, and yet the parts match both times without a seam out of place, more so on this sci-fic lullaby whose prosaic sappiness, sung as if to a child but could well be to a lover estranged by either geography or maybe death, gains a warm, eerie glow.

45. The Pipettes, Stop the Music
The new Pipettes did somewhat jump the shark, their kitsch-disco tropes getting the better of them, but for this fabulous scorcher, which gets by on little more than that slinky Latin beat and the spring it restores to their step.

44. R.Kelly, Number One Hit
It sounds like it could be one but it will never be, of course, which is both its pathos and its power.

43. Techy Romantics, Photos Fade

" . . .stepping off the platform of you and I/ I'm leaving it all behind . . . " When that stacatto guitar riff comes in on the second verse it makes the romantic suicide invoked by that first line seem like the sweetest of freedoms even as Camyl herself isn't quite so sure but goes along with it anyway.

42. Efterklang, Harmonics
They traded off , on Magic Chairs, that sense of playfulness and sprawl they're expert at for a coherence and immediacy they don't have the sea legs for yet, but a delightful teeter-totter is struck here, nibbling away, as it does, on its own self-imposed boundaries.

41. Kylie Minogue, Get Outta My Way
The disco inside you is your friend. Take its hand. Give in.

40.The Silver Seas, What's The Drawback?
" . . .she's stopping traffic and moving through time/she's like a 45 record in the back of my mind . . . " If there's an argument more persuasive than this for the strip-mining of ELO as a sonic influence with as much mileage as Gang of Four, I haven't heard it yet. Except, perhaps, if you count the new Manic Street Preachers, which I do.

39.Free Energy, Hope Child
That torch they carry for Thin Lizzy would be corny if it didn't actually give their songs balls and those balls crunch. Crunchy balls,yeah.

38. Foxes In Fiction and Galleries, Borders
Bedroom recordings became something of a substitute habit for me last year, taken in as much by process and principle as I was by product. Warren Hildebrand was a constant go-to man for most of it and this collaboration stuck with me the most, a song about distances that induces the yearning that comes from it more than anything did, except for the actual distance itself.

37. Lucky Soul, White Russian Doll
That cartilage of Motown by way of Johnny Marr that bolsters its indiepop stomp is what makes being subsumed by a lover, as if you were a matryoshka doll, feel almost triumphant.

36. The School, I Want You Back

As fired-up as that other song with the same name is in feeding its romantic anxieties through a primary-colored ebullience - - -with a dash of mariachi horns for gravy. Insanely catchy, terribly uncomplicated, nothing you haven't heard a hundred times before but wouldn't mind hearing again, which is sort of the point of pop music but very seldom is these days.

35. Katy Perry, Teenage Dream
" . . . I've finally found you, my missing puzzle piece, I'm complete . . ." Oh Katy, I bet you say that to all the boys.

34. Twin Sister, Phenomenons
New wave revivalism that feeds off aura more than nostalgia and artifice. There was a lot of those last year and there was a lot of those I liked - - -Wild Nothing, Radio Dept., Twin Shadow - - -but this tasty pastry and the equally tasty EP it came from one-ups nearly all of them.

33. Gobble Gobble, Lawn Knives
" . . . crackle crackle flake/ let no one know . . . " Wild, inspired nothingness that exudes, in equal measure, a nutso bob and weave and a frantic joy the sort of which was nowhere else to be found last year. My radar is thusly trained.

32.Standard Fare, Love Doesn't Just Stop
No it doesn't.

31. Warpaint, Undertow
Possessed of a similarly hazy smolder as Hope Sandoval and Miki Berenyi, these lovelies earn my enthusiasm to disappear into it with this lovelorn ballad that feels like its title, perking up near the end as if breaking surface, but mostly ebbs and flows in a sensuous whirlpool of faintly sinister bliss.

30. Women, Eyesore

Of a piece with the album in that it still sounds uncomfortable in its own skin which is part of what makes it tick, but this time all that coarsened, fitful grayness is in service of a brighter shaft of melody that is, if not optimistic, then hopeful. Also, that guitar riff at the start drips all kinds of juice.

29. The-Dream, Florida University
Not that we'll ever be given the satisfaction of consensus, but in the real world, girls can be assholes, too, and here's The-Dream spewing on one of those, his ex. " . . .I was the realest thing you've ever known/ I can't wait to say I told you so . . . "Scorned boy venom that's more cocky than furious, but near the end, after the chorus that explains the title (" . . . this is short for Florida University . . .F U . . .F U . . .FU. . . FU . . . "), it throws in a mocking fake Bieber sample that makes the song not only cut like glass but draw a little blood, too.


28. Uffie, F1rst Love

I was going to write something here about how all pop music boils down to a matter of context and use as example the way this attaches a kitschy 80s sample - - -F.R.David, no less - - -onto a not-much ditty and makes a tiny gem out of the graft . . . but if I'm going to be very honest, I'm stone in love with this for no particular reason. Uffie is the captain of my heart, at least for the 4 minutes 57 seconds it's playing.

27. The National, Sorrow
Lays it on a little thick, sure. " . . .sorrow found me when I was young/ sorrow waited, sorrow won. . ." Like a clenched fist, this is all pent-up seethe building up to a detonation that never comes because that would mean some form of release and I'm not sure that's what Matt wants. " . . .'cause I don't want to get over you . . . " I feel you,man.

26. Los Campesinos!, Straight In At 101
Not getting enough sex - - -a universal lament, almost - - - makes Gareth antsy and skittish and he throws a fit and takes the song with him which is good for us if not necessarily for him.

25. Teenage Fanclub, Sometimes I Don't Need To Believe In Anything
The last sentence of what I wrote about #36 applies here. Somebody should tell Norman Blake and Gerard Love that doing the same thing twice has long been outlawed by the tastemakers of pop because they keep doing exactly that and do it wondrously both times. I like how the bit that goes ". . .taking a ride on a subway train/ to feel more alive when you get back out again . . . " makes me feel like the lyric says and that's even before we get to the guitar din in the chorus that I might've seen coming but when it does is the wind beneath my wings.

24. Utada Hikaru, Goodbye Happiness
A happy pill of potentially perpetual efficacy. And yes, the irony of that isn't lost on me.

23. Sleigh Bells, Treats:
I do have all of 2011 to burrow into the album as I got around to it a little late and didn't pay it much mind at first, save for this monolith of guitar bombast that's every bit as 80s as Jean Claude Van Damme, every bit as buff and full of itself,too. A blow-up doll for my infatuation with powerchords. Even better than the real thing.

22. Memoryhouse, Lately (Deuxieme)
The feeling I get of being submerged and the line about breathing through machines and also the one about asking to be shut off makes it seem this is about the benign forcing into corners and making peace that happens in the nearness of death, and maybe it is, but I've learned not to take things as they seem, as this could be about other,less fatal forms of dying. It's so beautiful regardless, it makes succumbing to one or the other almost something to look forward to.

21. Jenny And Johnny, Big Wave
The recession confuses Jenny Lewis and you can tell from the anxious albeit effervescent tremble that the confusion frightens her a little, too.

20. SAWA, Swimming Dancing

Wakarimasen*but when teengirl fantasy Kawauchi Sawa throws herself into this vortex of trance and swims(dances) against the current, the sensation was/is a euphoric few could touch.

*"I don't understand"

19. Arcade Fire, Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
Merely catchy where they used to be opulent and weird along with the catchy, I never quite got The Suburbs,or it never got to me the way Funeral did and still does, or I didn't give it enough time and probably should. But the unsentimental nostalgia of this magnificent chamber disco oddment, in which Regina Chassagne sings herself to rapture, took hold. Time will reveal that it really is their masterpiece. Or you could take my word for it now.


18. Girls Generation, Run Devil Run
The partial ruin of Oh! was that it was tasteful here and there when it should've been tasty from end to end, but what ultimately rescues it are the skyscraper beats the girls strap on here and all the alpha-female sass they pump it up with as they stride across the land like a nine-headed pop monster crushing nearly everybody under their heels. Also, a massive attack of cute.

17. Vigo, Where Are You My River?

Not so much a kundiman deconstruction as that implies a taking apart and a putting back into place to get to the bottom of things and this is a band that's too familiar with the form and its tales of love gone missing to need to do that. More a kundiman reconstruction, then, a summoning of the necessary auras and demons to make you feel as at home with all that treachery and bleeding.

16. No Age, Glitter
Pummels you still, if you're worried about a softening of blows, but it is the swooniest they've gotten and you can make out what Dean Spunt is singing but not so much that you don't have to still lean in, as leaning in against the chaos of its surfaces to pick up signals is what makes their punk special.

15. LCD Soundsystem, All I Want
This Is Happening was not a record wanting for peaks but it's to the exhausted glitter of this krautpop love song with its payload of feedback at the end that I come back to again and again and again. " . . .all I want is your pity/ all I want are your bitter tears . . . " Not so much a Berlin-era Bowie rip as it is a gene-splicing.

14. Krakow Loves Adana, Cold and Closed
" . . . floating speech/ except the words we need/ and with some time there might return the fire/ but love was always a fragile kind of truth/ life was always a fragile time for you. . . " More than its intolerable wounded loveliness, this is up here out of the number of times I played it and play it still. Like with hangovers, sometimes the medicine for melancholy is more melancholy.

13. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti , Round and Round
Taking soap and water to the scuzz that Ariel Pink used to lather his records with is an aesthetic cop-out only to those who saw lo-fi as a moral stance rather than a trope you can discard as soon as the shtick wears itself out, which it will if the bells and whistles of your pop are the songs anyway. Multi-sensation studio-centric popcraft up there with Todd Rundgren if his prog gene had been even more squirrely, and every bit as epic as that suggests.

12. Deerhunter, Helicopter
Even before reading the Dennis Cooper short short story it was based on, there already was a niggling sense that, for all its weepy beauty, Bradford Cox is singing about the sort of loss you don't come back from. And when he gets to the line " . . . now they're through with me . . ." the blood temperature tends to drop.

11. Paul Weller, Aim High
In a way, a returning to the whole modern retro duality that gave his rather fertile and unjustly reviled Style Council period vitamins, reinvigorating Weller even more than he already is. This is a glimpse of what could have been if he'd seen it through to its endgame. Biases aside, and going by the keening soulful swirl here, it would've been grand.

10. Janelle Monae, Cold War
" . . . I was made to believe there's something wrong with me . . . " Janelle's a tornado, death-defying and beholden to a thousand fancies, most of which she indulges in the record she was roundly exalted for, making this exhortation to self-belief a will to power on a winning streak. With digable Kelindo guitar solo as extra jackpot.

9. Best Coast, Our Deal
Bethany wants to break the deal and be more than friends but she can't so a stray cuddle after sex is the most she can hope for. That sleeve of guitar fuzz Girlfriend wore its subservient heart on had a charge running through it, sure, but it merely nips at the heels of this gigantic ballad and the way it wrings from Ms. Cosentino's disappointment the sort of sweet, sweeping melodramatic ache that would make even Dusty Springfield weep

8. Drake with Alicia Keys, Fireworks
" . . .you never see it coming you just get to see it go . . . "That's Drake in the corner, that's Drake in the spotlight, losing his religion. Not much of a rapper, not much of a singer either,and his 2Pac metaphor's a little weak but somehow that makes the melancholies of affluence and celebrity that beset him more poignant than it probably should be.

7. Crystal Castles with Robert Smith, Not In Love
The futuristically-named Ethan Kath and Alice Glass do crop up on that other list, sure, but this shouldn't really count as breaking a rule, or at least can be cut some slack on a technicality, being, after all, a re-imagining so thorough it comes into its own. And roping in Robert Smith really was last year's pentium chip of stunt-casting.

6. Alicia Keys, Unthinkable (I'm Ready)
“ . . .you give me a feeling that I never felt before/
 and I deserve it, I know I deserve it
/ it's becoming something that's impossible to ignore/ it’s what we make it . . .” Alicia looking down a drop we've all been on the edge of before, so you understand why she's feeling a little vertigo and a little open to harm and a little peril in her bones and also why the song throbs with such suspense. Plush, caution.

5. Peryodiko, Agawan Base
The way it pulls its anthemic punch at the last minute in that soaring chorus that makes you feel as if everything's forgiven, is like a catch in the throat that reminds you it isn't.

4. Beach Fossils, Face It
That utopian lope, not quite summery, not quite the feeling of sand between your toes, but like a gust of wind in your face telling you that you'll get there at some point. And just when you thought the pretty guitars couldn't get any prettier, they do and do they.

3. Rihanna with Drake, What's My Name?
More than Beyonce's “. . .to the left . . . “ , it was the way Rihanna turned her eye-rolling smirk of a ". . .puh,leeze . . . " into an assassination on the majestic Take A Bow that was the cocky height of pop kiss-offs. She's no stranger to empowerment, and she’s grown into it so that she doesn’t even need to flex as hard. " . . oh na na /what's my name? . . . " Oh, she wants the boy bad but he's only having her on her own terms. Don't misconstrue ". . . you're so amazing you took the time to figure me out/
thats why you take me, way past the point of turning me on/ you 'bout to break me, I swear you got me losing my mind . . . " as a giving in. It isn't a surrender, it's a taunt.

2. Minus the Bear, Excuses
" . . . running out of excuses/ when we know what the truth is/ I’m into you/ when you hear this song/ you’ll say you knew all along/ you’re into me too . . . " I still can't make up my mind if this was/is my mantra of denial or my fight song. But half a year after I first heard it, I'm still taken with the way it simmers sexily so.

1. Local Natives, Wide Eyes

". . .they told me how they fear it/now they're putting it on their tongues . . ." The Body of Christ theories hold , if only for this line, but it's not dropping acid they're really singing about but the confounding spectacle of the Buddha Boy , at least on the bit that goes ". . .no food and water for the better part of ten months/ quietly he sat between the folds of a free trunk . . ." As much about the disarming tenacity of the faithful as it is about the bewilderment it arouses in those of us who can't muster up the courage. That's wondrous in and of itself but the supple, kinetic sonics catch up fine.