On “Goodbye,” P.O.S. is done being an afterthought behind the likes of Brother Ali, Atmosphere, and Subtle. He evolves right before our eyes, delivering his verse like an itch that needs scratched. Anthemic and purposeful, yet never angry, P.O.S. espouses nuanced, grime-hardened wisdom like a barstool preacher; never claiming to have all the right answers, he knows that his path can only offer a faint light for the path you must carve on your own.
I haven’t actively listened to mainstream rock radio in, I don’t know, seven years, but I hope they picked this one up and gave it some solid airtime. Hell, this year’s “Time to Pretend” should be blasting on every rap-hating suburban white kids’ apathetically-stocked iPod, each unbeknownst partaking—nay, reveling—in the best the French have to offer (and in turn, hopefully, abstaining from Nickelback and the worst the Canadians have to offer). For you, if it feels played out already, set it on the shelf for seven years and then fall back in love with it.
Sparse and quietly heartbreaking, “When the Night Comes” is the most beautiful song of the year. Auerbach’s vocals seek to appease the track’s own gentle and haunting vacancy, the emptiness of the night: “And you lay your [...] by the one you love/The one who knows things you do.” Wrapped in his dark and wistful landscape, he leaves us there, with but an unfinished thought. Such is the beauty of your dreams, at once as reassuring as a loving whisper, at once as foreboding as the drowning back vocals and the violin’s off-pitch finale.
It’s not often you hear a track so aesthetically unique and immediately special that it stops you dead in your tracks. Fatboy Slim’s “The Rockafeller Skank” comes to mind, as does Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” and the The Strokes' "Last Nite." These songs change the way people listen to music. “Don’t Haunt This Place” is one of those songs. The drummer's resolution to make one song while the rest of the band makes another is one of the greatest decisions in recent music history. And don’t be surprised if music starts to feel a little bit more like this in 2010.
My couch. Zelda 64. A healthy bowl of cereal by my side. And “My Girls.” Such is how I spent March and April of 2009. Having finally clawed my way through all the ‘Best of 2008’ lists (ugh, right?), I finally got to spend a little time with Merriweather. It was mostly good, mostly great, in fact, but “My Girls” enraptured me. I listened to it enough times that I could carry it around in my head with me wherever I would go, walking about, pondering a simple life for my daughters to come: four walls, adobe slats, and one fine set of speakers to bump my old Animal Collective records.
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