100 TRACKS OF THE DECADE

Bouncy thrill-seeker with added synths

With this, Maximo Park showed they can do rollicking pop songs as flexible and captivating as Paul Smith’s crotch. It’s the rather marvellous keyboard riff that’s the key here, one which hooks you into the main thrust of the song without making too much of a big deal about ‘going electro’. You can’t help but think it was written with Paul Smith’s drum-rise leaps in mind, such...

Prog-poppers remind everyone about death

“Do you realize, everyone you know some day will die.” Not an obvious idea to present in a pop song, but it worked incredibly well in this highpoint from The Flaming Lips’ ‘Yoshimi…’. Presented as a sweet, necessary reminder of mortality required in order for you to truly appreciate your life and the people around you, it married space-age sonics with heartfelt...

Former shrinking violet comes out fighting

Morrissey’s truly great ‘comeback’ song, a stirring little nationalistic drama which comes across as impassioned rather than bombastic. It heralded the new barrel-chested, gladiatorial Morrissey, who was soon seen brandishing a tommygun on the cover of his ‘You Are the Quarry’ album. The revolutionary spirit was burning strong in...

Xenomania in excelsis, and one of the ’Babes finest moments

Probably one of Xenomania’s most perfect tracks, ‘Round Round’ is mean, it’s taut, it’s sexy and it’s awesome. Preceding ‘Sound Of The Underground’ by several months, it never falls into the slightly nudge-nudge Carry On ‘knowing’ territory that Girls Aloud often do – Sugababes were by far the cooler proposition. The...

Manc thugs go slightly trippy-dippy

The song which announced Oasis' new psych-rock direction on the ‘Dig Out Your Soul’ album, and showed that while the lads had added sitars, drones and joss-sticks to the equation, they weren’t sacrificing any of their rabble-rousing, singalong chops. The difference with the gibberish Noel writes, as opposed to most other similar buffoon lyricists, is that his actually stick in your head:...

The Killers’ ultimate anthemic hug-along

The best The Killers single by some distance, a stirring, huge-hooked, last-song-of-the-night monster which is the only time the band have truly touched greatness. The final refrain of “I got soul but I’m not a soldier” is a meaningless phrase when you think about it, but when you’re yelling it in a field along with thousands of people while your seventh pill of the night...

The breakthrough song was known on tours of 2007 and 2008 as ‘House’

The fact that Animal Collective are to blogging what the electric guitar was to rock and roll music is not their fault. Yeah, loads of idiots like to write a load of nonsense about them in corners of the web that no one with any semblance of a life ever visits, but ultimately, stripped of any context, songs such as the taster for ‘Merriweather Post Pavillion’ exhibit a band who...

Leftfield missionaries score an underground smash

How groovy and catchy can dreamadelic indie ambience get? Well. Pretty damn groovy and down-right catchy-as-hell, as it turns out. On ‘Saint Dymphna’ the Brooklyn five-piece ran their jam-happy hotchpotch through a big fat washing machine, jiggling the hooks into new tangible form and cleaning up their often stifling backdrop of distorted humdrum, making something of an underground anthem for off-kilter electronic fans and indie die-hards...

Trent Reznor ‘loses’ one of his best songs as Johnny’s death finds its soundtrack

When the svengali of Cash’s reinvention Rick Rubin contacted Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor to request if the country legend could cover the song on Rubin’s suggestion, Reznor, replied that he was ‘flattered’ but concerned it’d be ‘gimmicky’. Upon viewing the video, he relented the song was no longer his. The stark, desolate sorrow of the original was translated into harrowing, minimal balladry by the Man In Black. When he died...