All Time Favourite Songs #60-51

60. Autumn Sweater – Yo La Tengo

‘Autumn Sweater’ is referred to as ‘Indie Rock’s greatest make-out song’, assumedly because of its low-key romanticism, the kind OC and 90210 music researchers fall head over six-inch heels for. Personally, I love it because it’s an amalgamation of Yo La Tengo’s folk leanings, lo-fi shoegaze cuddliness, and intrinsic ‘poptimism’, the impenitent embracing of pop music in defiance of the disdain of purist musical snobs. It isn’t a love song, or a lust song, but a marriage between the two. Ira Kaplan’s soft monotone examines the evanescent moments of anxiousness, the entwined hope and fear entrenched in love’s beginnings.

SEE ALSO: ‘Damage’ – Yo La Tengo, ‘Tears Are In Your Eyes’ – Yo La Tengo

59. I Am The Resurrection – The Stone Roses

Though the concept of being a Stone Roses fan has been hijacked by quiffed, top-buttoned, NME-subscribed ‘Mods’, the same group secretly uncomfortable with Morrissey’s (a?)sexuality and chuffed that Pete Doherty is 10% human/90% uncut cocaine, their music, in particular their incredible debut album, remains the yardstick by which all contemporary British Indie Rock is measured. ‘I Am The Resurrection’ sounds like the epic finale of an ambitious musical, a rapturous resolution of the moral questions posed by the pensive opener, ‘I Wanna Be Adored’. Ian Brown achieves self-realisation and revels in it through a triumphant four-minute instrumental.

SEE ALSO: ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ – The Stone Roses, ‘A New England’ – Billy Bragg

58. Simon Says – Pharoahe Monch

It’s simple. Pharoahe Monch sampled the Godzilla theme tune by taking a four-note, rising brass section, and when speeding it up, decided to make it the lynchpin around which ‘Simon Says’ was built. The end product? Immortality. Monch is revered for his clever wordplay, making his introductory line, a hostilely simple command, ‘get the fuck up’, startlingly effective. Its ‘oh I’m sorry, did you not hear me?’ follow up even more so; ‘Simon says GET THE FUCK UP’. It isn’t smart, but it’s about as enjoyably corrupting as hip hop gets. The ultimate diss-track, directed at no one in particular.

SEE ALSO: ‘Vital Nerve’ – Company Flow, ‘Got Your Money’ – Ol Dirty Bastard

57. Blind – Hercules And Love Affair

Antony Hegarty is the trembling, ghostly voice of one of the noughties’ most brilliant folk bands, Antony & The Johnsons, and yet here he is, the heart and soul of the decade’s finest house track. The composition is flawless; the timing of the hi-hats, the thumping firmness of the bass guitar line, and the exultant blast of trumpet in the bridge. But naturally it’s Hegarty’s song. The fragile despairing over his loss of innocence is awe-inspiringly emotive, introducing the idea that dancing is an innate response in order to feel alive, and to fight against the inevitability of loneliness.

SEE ALSO: ‘House Of Jealous Lovers’ – The Rapture, ‘Me And Giuliani Down By The Schoolyard’ - !!!

56. Stuck Between Stations – The Hold Steady

The music industry is comprised of ingenius composers and expressive poets, but also fantastic storytellers; Bob Dylan, Neil Young for example, or contemporarily, Frank Turner and Conor Oberst. Perhaps the greatest of them all however, is The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn. On ‘Stuck Between Stations’ classic rock guitars and bursts of euphoric piano form the soundtrack to Finn’s just-before-midlife-crisis-crisis, inspired by Sal Paradise’s post-adolescent disillusionment in ‘On The Road’. That’s right. I’m advertising Kerouac and the Beat writers yet again. Lyrically dense, witty, undoubtedly moving, it’s a slice of timelessness; ‘Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together’.

SEE ALSO: ‘Constructive Summer’ – The Hold Steady, ‘You Can Make Him Like You’ – The Hold Steady

55. The Leader Of The Pack – The Shangri Las

It begins with an ominous humming and a coarse thud of a piano chord, an indication of the morbidity to come. ‘The Leader Of The Pack’ settles briefly into spoken-word before Mary Weiss implodes, almost farcically, in anguish; ‘I MET HIM AT THE CANDY STORE’. The clever production foreshadows the accident, in the tumbling percussion and recurrent motorcycle revs. It captures richly the aggrandised melodrama of adolescence, but with the subtext of a destined unfairness reminiscent of a Shakespearean tragedy; the night she’s forced to break up with the fancyeable rebel by her father, he dies in a car crash.

SEE ALSO: ‘Out In The Streets’ – The Shangri Las, ‘Give Him A Great Big Kiss’ – The Shangri Las

54. Nutmeg – Ghostface Killah

The gargantuan entrance theme from the best non-Kanye mixtape of the noughties, ‘Nutmeg’ presents Ghostface at his most proudly domineering, and his most intelligent. The duet of throbbing beat and renovated sample (from Eddie Holman’s ‘It’s Over’) is seamless, and RZA’s guest verse is all kinds of insane, but Ghostface himself is unavoidably the star. He controls everything like a lyrical puppet-master: triple rhymes, double metaphors, more pop culture references than you could shake a DVD of Community at, ‘Aiyyo spiced out Calvin Coolers, lounging with seven duellers’. Arguably the best thing to emerge from the ashes of Wu Tang’s break-up.

SEE ALSO: ‘Ice Cream’ – Raekwon, ‘4^th Chamber’ – GZA

53. Ya Hey – Vampire Weekend

Before Modern Vampires Of The City, Vampire Weekend were the unequivocal masters of guitar-pop, generating incessantly the fluffiest, most refreshingly light tunes in Indie music. Their 3^rd album, though thankfully keeping Ezra Koenig’s colourful wordplay, represented an impressive thematic maturation, covering the three-way relationship between life, faith and death. God is an omniscient presence on Modern Vampires, no more so than on ‘Ya Hey’. Koenig’s songwriting genius shines through in the vibrant arrangement, but it’s his internal conflict over the implications of an omnipotent entity which really hit home, ‘I think in your heart/you’ve seen the mistake/but you let it go’.

SEE ALSO: ‘Walcott’ – Vampire Weekend, ‘Hannah Hunt’ – Vampire Weekend

52. Midnight City – M83

It’s testament to Anthony Gonzalez’s brilliance that ‘Midnight City’ is concurrently an expansive synth-pop dansterpiece and an impassioned, breath-taking defence of club culture. One thing you can never criticise Gonzalez of being is understated; all four of his (consistently magnificent) LPs possess an affable grandiosity, but this blows everything out of the water: the immutable sense of nostalgia emanating from the catchy synths, the vivacious drums in the bridge, and the climactic saxophone in the coda which serves as the ultimate release from the song’s enveloping claws. It’s transcendent, it’s forever. The best pop song of the decade so far.

SEE ALSO: ‘Kim And Jessie’ – M83, ‘Raconte-Moi Une Histoire’ – M83

51. Sometimes – My Bloody Valentine

Loveless is potentially the most written about album this side of Dark Side Of The Moon. Articles range from praising its mind-blowing blend of abrasion and melody, the so-called ‘shoegaze effect’, to a surprisingly convincing theory that it annotates birth, the first hour of existence. ‘Sometimes’ is its most typical track, Kevin Shields’ layered vocals operating the most sedately textured guitar riffs you’ll ever hear. It’s just lovely. There’s no better word for it. While not reaching the psychedelic cool of ‘Only Shallow’ or the arena thrills of ‘When You Sleep’, ‘Sometimes’ stands on its own as their most exquisitely chilled.

SEE ALSO: ‘To Here Knows When’ – My Bloody Valentine, ‘When You Wake (You’re Still In A Dream)' – My Bloody Valentine