50 Songs I Listened to a Great Deal in 2005

50. AFX: "PWsteal.ldpinch.D" | I don't know whether it was all bullshit—whether RDJ was unloading old DATs on us, and spent more time composing the "vintage gear" backstory than the actual music—but amid the uneven Analord 12"s lurked just over 80 solid minutes of melting AFX acid. The synths in "PWsteal.ldpinch.D" (named, like many of the tracks, after a computer virus) make my gums ache every time. In October I did a single-disc comp of my favorites called W32.Fanbot.An@lord, which you may or may not be able to find online.

49. Amerie: "1 Thing" (album version) | Caribou and I were so hella pissed—we sampled "Oh, Culcutta" first! Crucially, we lacked the production, vocal, and compositional skills, physical beauty, dance moves and promotional resources required for anyone to care. "1 Thing" took home "Club Banger" of the year at the 2005 Vibe awards, which Amerie blew off in favor of fashion parties. A good call: hip-hop was using her. The multitude of toasts dubbed over this song for Hot 97 "remixes" made me want to steer Polly into oncoming WSH traffic more than once. Eve's heavy-breathing BS on the single mix was bad enough.

48. And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead: "Caterwaul" | See below.

47. Apparitions: "Motor Skills" | This won't be out until January '06, but it's around. The full-length is overreaching in the worst way; like Art Brut's "Formed a Band," this song accomplishes everything the Apparitions ever will. Anything more is too much when you pinch the Undertones, Thin Lizzy, Alex Harvey, Roxy Music and the Pistols in just over two minutes. The light at the end of the Darkness.

46. Arab Strap: "Don't Ask Me to Dance" | You can't just put this one on; you have to come home alone on a Friday night with nothing planned, and only the memories of the ass you made of yourself last weekend to comfort you. You have to be staring at her number on the fridge knowing she doesn't want you to call, telling yourself you're not going to drink tonight. The 808 snare (R) and claps (L) save it from utter wrist-slitting miserablism, but you've been warned.

45. Arcade Fire: "Rebellion (Lies)" | Wait, I hate this band. Ah, but they're growing on me. Glad to see they didn't jump for the moon when they got into a real studio, though they did pay too much attention to the snare drum on this one. Like that's a criticism. Great lyrics, tempo, backing vocals, two-note bass slide, and apart from "Haiti," an overall confidence missing on the undeserving Funeral.

44. Björk: "Triumph of a Heart" | The whole concept of Medulla makes me uncomfortable. I've had a problem with hearing my own heartbeat since I was born. It used to keep me up at night, because I naturally sleep on my side, and whenever my ear ended up flat on the pillow, I would hear my heart beating and get completely freaked out. I didn't and don't like that I can't control it, that it's always there, doing whatever it wants without my input. I've tried to ignore it, to pretend I'm over it, but every night I set my head in a position such that I can't hear my heart. You can try not to hear Björk—to pretend you are over her, or that she is over—but she can no more falter or cease than you can stop your heart and write about it.

43. Bloc Party: "So Here We Are" | I swear to God people have been hyping Bloc Party since before they were fucking born. They released 73 EPs in 2004, and by the time Silent Alarm arrived in February 2005, with the creamy winter landscape and Travis font, everyone was sick to death of them. I was big on "Staying Fat" (and thanks to its proximity to "Formed a Band," associated Bloc Party with Art Brut), but the Leeds/Buzzcocks stuff—"Helicopter" and "Banquet"—never grabbed me. I couldn't know how smart these kids really were, but they indeed held on to their best stuff for the LP, a class move. When I heard this song I was so jealous I couldn't even process it until October. I can't imagine where that leaves Lefty's Deceiver, who recorded it five years ago sans the pouting reverb melodrama (I'm kidding, but I'm not kidding).

42. Cardigans: "I Need Some Fine Wine and You, You Need to Be Nicer" | They're still adorable, and finding themselves again. In the wake of a totally unpredicted '90s superstardom, the Cardigans lost the plot, falling victim to the worst sort of clichés (flat live album, check, selfish lead-singer "solo career," check). Their 2003 reunion record Long Gone Before Daylight was justifiably ignored; though "Feathers and Doom" was great, the songwriting just wasn't there. With Super Extra Gravity that piece is back in place. Still can't recommend them in concert, though.

41. Caribou: "The Snow Capes" | People will release twinkling, blurry, "urban" loop songs like this for the rest of time. The style is static; it's the artists that grow in and out of it. Coldcut, Portishead, Massive Attack, DJs Krush, Shadow—all the people who built this house have long since moved out, but it's always there, begging for a fresh coat of paint.

40. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: "In This Home on Ice" | And people say I'm trapped in the 1990s? I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS. Does anyone talking about this band remember Madder Rose? I have to suppress the gag reflex to deal with this guy's hard-panned two-tracked vocals...the forced sloppiness and cracking trail-offs, "Dude my eyes are totally rolling back in my head right now, I'm in a cred trance." I was in this band six or seven times before I graduated from college; if this can move 30,000 units, the Faint should rerelease their first record pronto.

39. Clor: "Magic Touch" | Wait, what was I saying about the Faint? Raging electro funk with an unfortunate Front 242/Chicks on Speed freakout postponing its grand finale, "Magic Touch" was 2005's "Desperate Guys."

38. Coldplay: "Speed of Sound" | Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman's protracted email exchange on ESPN.com was the most appalling piece of inter-literary indulgence published in 2005. The same way actors want to be musicians and musicians want to be actors, sports writers envy the unrestrained topical freedom music writers supposedly enjoy—"Just riffing, man!"—and music writers are fascinated by the hard numbers, big money and undeniable cultural import of professional sports (qualities we can no longer pretend pop music has in common). It was disheartening to see Simmons swing at this foregone pitch, but he's still the best lead-off man in the game: he was crushing it from Thanksgiving through year's end. Klosterman's nostalgia-fueled backpages column has been surprisingly consistent and entertaining, but his juvenile four-letter hatred of Coldplay (which he's been eviscerated for elsewhere) is really laughable given his unrepentant love of "November Rain." Maura once said "Hating Coldplay is like hating margarine," and I'm inclined to agree. I can't believe it's not butter.

37. Constantines: "Soon Enough" | The Cons are starting to grate on me after four years (which is better than I can say of the Grates, who bored me after a few overexcited listens). I was screaming about the Constantines' debut throughout 2001 and 2002, because not only was it one of the best rock records I'd heard in ages, they were and still are one of the best live acts on the planet. But the see-saw is tipping to the Springsteen end of the spectrum, and I just don't buy the working-class poetry thing from these Guelphs: they're too young to really know what they're moaning about.

36. CunninLynguists: "Since When" | You didn't know I'm the premiere hip-hop writer of my generation? I won't pretend to have paid attention to hip-hop in 2005, but between this "Southern rap is not southern rap" kickoff and the downtrodden death-of-the-backpack dream "What'll You Do," their new album A Piece of Strange is bookended wonderfully (unfortunately, what goes on between these two cuts is less spectacular). The twist in "Since When" is its jazz-funk finale, which seems to be saying to the hip-hop community, "Remember when our heroes played instruments?" without attacking turntablism's legitimacy. You can have it both ways.

35. Daft Punk: "Emotion" | Why wasn't Human After All on any best-of 2005 lists? Because it was terrible—I'm not going to pull that contrarian year-end "Everyone slept on it but I totally got this record" crap on you. Thin on ideas and unapologetically ugly, Human After All's singles ("Robot Rock," "Technologic" and the title track) were last-ditch variations on the band's long-established and apparently exhausted talk box electro style. Creatively speaking, the whole record seems like an excuse to stage the far-superior "Emotion" as its last track, the official slot for dreamy downtempo anthems going back to Orbital's "Attached."

34. Deaf Center: "White Lake" | If I had to guess, I would say Deaf Center's Pale Ravine was Prichard D Jams' favorite album of 2005. They skirt Russian waltz self-parody with the plonkier string-hit basslines, but this Norwegian duo manages to mine all the pensive and creepy spaces David Lynch made his career on without explicitly tipping their classicist caps.

33. Doves: "Black and White Town" | Spitting stomp through early-'80s white soul, a little Hall and Oates, lots of Jam...other bad food puns...

32. Drumcorps: "Saddest" | A terrifying proposition from Aaron Spectre, colliding DSP editing and grindcore blast-beats. You can't genrify something this smart and brutal. Get it for free on Cock Rock Disco's earsplitting 2006 MP3 comp.

31. Eluvium: "New Animals From the Air" | I didn't say much about Matt Cooper's music when I called this the Most Overlooked Album of 2005 earlier in the week, because there really isn't much to say. There's nothing cultural or political or reactionary about ambient music. It's not juxtaposing styles or putting forward an agenda, which is why so many people are so personally affected by and invested in the genre, especially people who pay too much attention to pop music. Tunefully amorphous records like this one, natural and distant and foggy, are our sanctuary from the fractious world of bad hair, PR-bullying and unfounded bravado.

30. Fog: "We're Winning" | Andrew Broder is one of The Good Ones, to pinch a phrase from my favorite act of the year, the Kills. 10th Avenue Freakout is not the most commanding album of the year, and you have to suspend disbelief a bit to deal with his earnest delivery, but I still love that Broder cares so little for the stolid ideas of career and legacy that have sapped the underground's once-defining spontaneity. The ghost of Christmas 2002 is calling, "Don't forget Ether Teeth..."

29. Gorillaz: "Feel Good Inc." | The constellations Gallagher and Albarn, once visible along the same parallel, have been in ascendant/descendant contrast since the turn of the century, Albarn growing brighter as the Gallaghers plummet like ostrich necks toward the horizon. That Oasis' revival rave-up was both creatively and temporally limiting is no great shock, but Albarn wiggling out of his prep-school tee and into no-rules collage rock—without missing a beat—was a huge shock. Don't miss the comprehensive Wiki entry, which can tell you more than you ever wanted to know about this grand but still under-realized concept.

28. Herbaliser: "(If You) Close Your Eyes" | I wasn't entirely convinced by the male-bashing chanteuse-on-a-soapbox slant ("How to Keep a Girlfriend")—and it was too long—but Take London offered the best bawdy brass in ages, drawing from velvet lounge haze as much as an icy concert hall. I just wish they'd mixed Jean Grae down a bit more. Obviously they wanted her whispering in your ear, but the vocal tracks are so high-fidelity, it creates a major disconnect with the blurrier backing tracks.

27. Hood: "Closure" | Cheeky title, but I'd rather that Hood never close their post-rock playbook. They're the only band of this kind (since Bark Psychosis, anyway) without a shred of the macho math-rock angularity that dated similar American efforts.

26. Information: "A Simple Plan" | I don't know if they're on hiatus, or writing their next record, or broken up, but I was pretty happy to see some former bandmates of mine "going for it" in 2005, with the gloss photos, messy hair, and timely sound. When I was around—and it was ages ago, and I don't even think we had a name—we were listening to We Have the Facts and bad shoegaze, trudging through February snow—and there is nothing worse than February snow in Boston—to a frigid factory space, where we played the most ineffectual, neutered-by-committee garbage you could ever imagine. I can barely remember one of our songs, and I wish I couldn't. Sam Endicott turns 34 this year. Fuck it, I'm next.

25. Interpol: "C'mere" | I can't remember if they played this during the often lacklustre pre-Antics shows, but "C'mere" gives the impression of having been a last-minute addition to the album, the weaker version of "Evil" they weren't sure they'd use until, at some point in the studio, the moment hit. Songs this simple are agonizing after the 90th time you've played them live, but if you can put them to tape early on, while they're still fresh, you've bottled the reason people get so attached to pop music. Banks is such a remarkable singer. Singer. Not lyricist.

24. JLIAT: "The Ocean of Infinite Being" | Every other song on this list is from 2005, but JLIAT, a.k.a. James Whitehead, is someone I completely missed until this year. He's combined the shock-value apocalypsism of Muslimgauze with the consistently over-thought and overpraised work of his namesake (A.N. Whitehead), injecting simplistic goth manifestos like "My failure to be defined in society is my authenticity." The mask is desperately stiff and paper-thin, but his process loops are often stunning. MP3s are available from the JLIAT website.

23. José González: "Heartbeats" (Rocketboy remix) | Napoleon Dynamite (and Wes Anderson's films before) exposed that nobody much cares for realism with their nostalgia. The story doesn't have to come from or deal with the times, we just need to hear the songs we listened to, to see the books we read, the clothes we wore and the toys we played with. The Rocketboy remix of "Heartbeats" (the original was featured in the Sony Bravia ad I talked about on Monday) constructs a late-'70s/early-'80s club sound with similar disregard for the eras evoked, and like the aforementioned movies, becomes something more than simple pastiche.

22. Kent: "400 Slag" | It would be simpler and funnier if we could just call them Kalt-leiker (Coldplay in Icelandic), but they're Swedish. Cure synths, Sigur Rós vocals, big, Britpop anthems, bass compressed and EQ'd to brick wall...no surprise this got hooks in me. As much as they've tightened up the music, the cover art from Du & jag döden is probably the worst of 2005.

21. Kills: "At the Back of the Shell" | No Wow was pretty much my favorite album of this year, despite the tedious go-go boots n' demerol imagery, always-suspicious older guy/younger muse situation and initial proximity to the White Stripes' success (in short, he might have mapped this one out). I hope they get together with Bobby Gillespie.

20. Lali Puna: "The Daily Match" | The Morr moment seems ages ago, but Lali Puna's 2005 farewell catchall—the awesomely, appropriately-titled I Thought I Was Over That—reminded me that worse things have happened in the past ten years. Although I can't remember most of the compilations I ended up on.

19. LCD Soundsystem: "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House" | At once the best (and only) Fall/Neu/Nilsson tribute and two-bass recording since "Other Voices," from a guy I previously could not stand. "Losing My Edge" is the worst song I have ever heard.

18. M83: "Teen Angst" | So let me get this straight: if you have a girl breathing "oooh" in your song, you sound like My Bloody Valentine? Even though everything you have ever recorded is dominated by square-wave '80s synthesizers and bad Pro-Tools loops, and not one of your songs has a discernable guitar track? Score one for music critics! M83 were an appalling and appallingly late entry at the exhausting dusk of IDM, and Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts remains one of the most perplexingly bad records I've seen people get excited about. But I'm glad they did, because it generated the hype that allowed M83 to record Before the Dawn Heals Us, a wonderfully fuzzed-out dance remix of Slowdive's discography.

17. Manual: "Summer of Freedom" | I really don't know what happened to Jonas Munk. I guess he was bored with perfection...because the sound he'd developed through Isares has evolved into too-much-is-too-much track-stuffing indulgence on par with eating an entire drum of frosting; I get vertigo from this record, listening to the melodies overtake each other in turn. "A Familiar Place" fights for space among my favorite songs, but when you take things this far, you lose the drama—the more chaotic a song is, the less it can surprise you. Munk appeared on a number of records this year, but the only decent piece to my ears was "Sunset Rider," from Golden Sun, his collaboration with Syntaks.

16. Matt Pond PA: "Holiday Road" | I went to college with Matt Pond's new drummer Dan Crowell (seen seated at Conan O'Brien's desk). He was a very nice guy/kid, but there was a lot of unspoken tension because we played the same instrument. When I was visiting Saratoga a year or two after I graduated, a drunken Dan riled up one of his friends into trying to start a fight with me (which was only fair as I had at least 100 pounds on Dan). It never happened. Prior to joining Matt Pond PA, the last I'd heard of Dan was a New York magazine fashion spread in which he wore only a baggy diaper. I'd pegged him for a drug casualty, but he seems fine now, apart from wanting to play with Matt Pond PA. Their soporific version of "Holiday Road" stuck out to me because some of Dan's bandmates in the Capital Suite (a record I released) used to played it—properly—in a roots-radical/power-pop beer garden side project called the Jack Russell Band.

15. Mercury Rev: "Arise" | So many critics fawn/ed over Deserter's Songs. It felt—and still feels—like these people didn't listen to Mercury Rev before 1998, and were chasing each other's bylines, blindly accepting them as the Cool Band of Our Times. I've listened to Mercury Rev since the week Yerself is Steam came out, and I still think Deserter's Songs is a jumble of nervous, doleful second-guesses ("Endlessly" is "Silent Night" for Christ's sake). This band was already important and defining—dispatching the Flaming Lips—and would have been even if they'd only recorded "Car Wash Hair" and "Chasing a Bee" (but I'll throw in "Coney Island Cyclone"—"NO I WON'T CHICKEN OUT!"—and "Bronx Cheer" to seal the deal). Plenty of critics recognized The Secret Migration—particularly "Arise"—as a long-awaited return to the David Baker era, but I savored the added sweetness of ignorant Deserter's Songs acolytes painting it as a softening of their sound. For the record, I am still pissed Mercury Rev stole "The Dark is Rising" from Susan Cooper before I could.

14. Morrissey: "Bigmouth Strikes Again" (live from Earl's Court) | "As the flames rose to a Roman nose and her iPod started to melt."

13. My Morning Jacket: "Anytime" | I have never cared much for My Morning Jacket. At Dawn? No idea what people were in such a tizzy about (I was never big on Christopher Cross, or Neil Young). "Anytime" and "Gideon," from last year's Z, were quality Who/Springsteen theatrics, but what really gets me about MMJ is that, in five-plus years, Jim James and this hidden-behind-reverb band still haven't figured out what they are (what the fuck is "Wordless Chorus" all about?). Why are people waiting around for these guys to figure things out?

12. The National: "All the Wine" | Why did it take almost the entire year for people to recognize how good this band and album were? I don't think I took it off my walkman from the day I got it. In the end the National were victims of the worst sort of middle-class guilt: indie rock kids and writers thought they should be "over" this stuff, listening to "Gasoline" and "Fill Up My Gas Tank," paying attention to bullshit like M.I.A. and Antony and the Johnsons (the single worst musical act of this decade). If you live in a 95%-white suburb, and are driving around listening to reggaeton as some twisted identity-crisis VPN connection to New York City, you should know most people are listening to the Dave Matthews Band.

11. New Order: "Krafty" | The latest salvo in the neverending Cure/New Order mutual-ripoff cycle, "Krafty" is a note-for-note rewrite of the Cure's wretched 2002 single "Cut Here," done one better by its unapologetic embrace of a stadium-rock chorus ("Just give me one more day!").

10. Nid & Sancy: "What You Want, What You Get" | If you often ask yourself, "How long can we continue to mine the exhausted imagery and attitude of the Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten," Nid & Sancy are the answer, and the answer is 4EVA. People still come up to me when I spin "The Order of Death" like, "Is this New Order?" and I'm like, "No it's Public Image Limited," and they're all, "Oh yeah I love Metal Box!" and I go, "You've never even listened to it, have you," and they're like this. Everyday is Halloween!

9. Owen: "Put Your Hands on Me, My Love" | I hate Matt Pond but I'm ok with Owen? What's wrong with me. I've loved pretty much everything Mike Kinsella's done since American Football; he's the only guy on the planet that can get away with breathy teen-dream dusk nostalgia like this.

8. Plej: "Lay of the Land" | Yes, it's menu music for Wipeout (and I'd love to see Flat Eric hit it), but the future-cute health-rave chillout thing has to come back soon. Too many years of greasy hair, blazers-n-ties and booze.

7. Queens of the Stone Age: "Burn the Witch" | They weren't going to match Songs For the Deaf and probably never will, but as their website loudly demonstrates, this band does not give a shit. They're opening for the Rolling Stones; talking about their import or place in things is just slamming on yourself.

6. Röyksopp: "What Else is There" (Thin White Duke mix) | Couldn't stand their Eurotrash-in-heat LP The Understanding (up there with Kent's for worst album cover of 2005), but Stuart Price (who else) figured out how to properly reassemble this exhausting mid-tempo disaster, heretofore a complete waste of the Knife's Karin Dreijer Andersson.

5. Roy Owens Jr.: "No One's Free" | Bar none the best American rock band since the Strokes, though they have little in common. Equal parts Thin Lizzy, Skynrd and early Bee Gees (Quinn might take a swing at me for it, but I'm sure he loves "Words"), Atlanta's Roy Owens Jr. are back in 2006 after a bad case of writer's block subsequent to their flawless 2002 LP This is An Illusion. This is the only band I have fantasized about quitting my job and joining since I turned 25. Good Times is a lock for my 2006 top-ten, and you can sample a few cuts on their MySpace page. The bounding "Bottom of the Sea" (right-click save as) is also available from International Hits, but "Saturday" and "No One's Free" are being held back for the album. This band should have been huge four years ago; if we let them slip away this time around, we deserve a thousand Black Dice.

4. Sun Kil Moon: "Neverending Math Equation" | I hate Isaac Brock's voice. Until Mark Kozelek restaged this song Bruce Hornsby-style, I had no idea how good it could have been (and re: Bruuuuce, hipsters have been listening to End of the Innocence a lot lately, whether they realize it or not). As far as Brock's heartstrings po-boy backstory, give me a fucking break. I love when these flakes complain about the government and three sentences later trumpet the struggle of "making a living playing music" as if it's something they have a right to expect. Like so many before him, this asshole pushed his self-pitying, childish irresponsibility on everyone within five feet and gleefully absorbed the misery and chaos he created as evidence of his importance. And his handlers kept it under wraps, to the extent that Modest Mouse's cutely-packaged Good News For People Who Love Bad Music sold millions. Eat death, minivan shill.

3. Windy & Carl: "Ode to a Dog" | When you get so wound up by the politics of pop that you write "eat death, minivan shill," it's time to put on some Windy & Carl and breathe.

2. White Stripes: "Red Rain" | Meg's the face of Marc Jacobs for 2006 and Jack may or may not have an album out with smoking-hot Brendan Benson as the Raconteurs this spring. Maybe then they'll give up the ghost of the White Stripes, which is turning into a tension-filled "dance with who brought you" albatross.

1. Wolf Parade: "It's a Curse" | Protégés of my new best friend Isaac Brock, Montreal's Wolf Parade heralded the end of the lupine band name era, a worrying concern for Chuck Klosterman as long ago as August and the source of Brent DiCrescenzo's one great piece in 2005, the Indie Fantasy League (I wonder if Chuck cited Pitchfork...nope! Everyone else has given up on the unspoken Kill Pitchfork tactic of the last two years: cold-shouldering them out of the big leagues. TIME, Magnet, Blender and even Entertainment Weekly honorably admitted to cribbing from Pitchfork with multiple print nods in 2005. But SPIN can't, because, despite decades of cream-skimming nonchalance, they seem to think they should have Pitchfork's watchtower reputation. Yeah dudes, you were totally clocking Dungen!).

I don't have any definitive stats for you, because I'm not tracking my own listening habits (woe to the self-made demographic), but I might have listened to "It's a Curse" more than any other song in 2005. The album's not great, or really anything like this song; Brock's hand was poisonous, but if they go down this T Rex + Iron Butterfly road and not the one Isaac paved with "You are a Runner and I am My Father's Son," they could come up cherries in 2006.