Songs 60-51 Don’t Wanna Leave This Town

Hey guys. Here’s the end of the first half of the countdown. Before I post the rest of the list over the next couple of days I’ll be counting down the top 50 tonight on my radio show (midnight EST, which is in about 45 minutes….sorry for the short notice) So if you’d like to hear the top 50 in order without having to do too much clicking (and with the added bonus of my mellifluous voice introducing all the songs), check out my show, The World’s Slowest Dance Party. It’ll be archived here if you missed the orginal broadcast. I’m counting down 50-26 tonight and the top 25 next Friday.

Also, in case you couldn’t tell, there’ll be no Starfucker Friday feature today. I’m tired, and it’s late.

60. Handsome Furs, Handsome Furs Hate This City (472 plays last week)

Despite being neither handsome nor furry, Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry made the year’s best electronic goth-country album. It sounds like if David Eugene Edwards from 16 Horsepower bought himself some keyboards or, I guess, like a family-friendly Canadian version of Arab Strap. Handsome Furs Hate This City, my favorite track, pulses along slowly and thoughtfully that would sound equally appropriate for an ice skating date or a long hot summer night with your old friend Jack Daniels.

59. Tracey Thorn, It’s All True (268 plays last week)

There’s something really deeply wonderful about Tracey Thorn’s flat, unassuming voice. Like Sarah Cracknell, only more so, I feel like Thorn is somebody who makes records because she goes to clubs and can’t figure out why the music isn’t moving. Beneath almost every speed-addled club anthem there’s a very, very dull undercurrent. So why not reflect that in the music? The sugary synths might sound happy on It’s All True, one of the only electronic songs on Thorn’s introspective Out of the Woods album, but the song is totally leveraged by Thorn’s plain, approachable voice. (Not that I can sing along with her falsettos or anything, but you know what I mean.)

58. Taken By Trees, Lost And Found (401 plays last week)

And speaking of people who I’d love even if they sang about foot fungus while eating saltines, here’s Victoria Bergsman, the former singer of the Concretes who sort of became really famous this year thanks to her guest vocals on Peter Bjorn and John’s wildly marketable Young Folks. She also put out a solo album under the name Taken By Trees, which, judging from the few songs I heard, was miles better than the album the Concretes put out without her.

57. Super Furry Animals, Baby Ate My Eightball (390 plays last week)

I wasn’t sure whether to include this or not. Albums hit the internet now as soon as they’re released their home country, but still often don’t come out in the rest of the world until some time later. Super Furry Animals’ nifty Hey Venus! won’t be out on CD in the US until next month (although, oddly, it’s been out on vinyl since August) but I included it in this year’s list anyway, because trippy songs like Baby Ate My Eightball (with those insane la-la-la backup vocals) kind of made the second half of my summer.

56. Peggy Honeywell, Creature Like Me (less than 5 plays last week)

I don’t know anything all about country Peggy Honeywell, and if I hadn’t just image searched her I would have assumed, from her woodsy songs and relaxed vocals, that she was about fifty. Her Green Mountain album was probably the best country/folk record I heard all year, with lovely originals like Creature Like Me in addition to slow, peaceful interpretations of folk songs old (Just A Closer Walk With Thee) and new (Ween’s Birthday Boy).

55. The Clientele, Bookshop Casanova (426 plays last week)

The Clientele’s 2000 album Suburban Light is one of the best albums of the millennium thusfar, but I only listen to it about once a year, because it’s absolutely the one and only album to listen to in September, when it’s raining. And like Christmas music or Passover music, it just seems wrong to listen to it the rest of the year. Bookshop Casanova, from this year’s God Save The Clientele, has the band in a slightly brighter place–you can actually kind of dance to it, possibly with that librarian you’re trying to woo–and can be listened to all year.

54. The Polyphonic Spree, Section 27 (Mental Cabaret) (less than 150 plays last week)

I think, judging from the fact that I heard almost no buzz about the Polyphonic Spree’s Fragile Army album and 2007 was awfully quiet for I’m From Barcelona and Billie the Vision and the Dancers, that it’s officially passe to be in a band with 27 of your closest friends. (Unless you’re Canadian–see #92). It’s too bad, though, because the album is probably the Spree’s best yet, with louder rock numbers like Mental Cabaret breaking up the hippified pop that made their first albums tedious after too many listens.

53. Glasvegas, It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry (29 plays last week)

One day while prowling DList, the wimpy gay boy’s Myspace, I came across Cobain In A Coma, the blog that introduced me to Glasvegas, one of my favorite new bands. If there’s one thing that makes me happy (and smile with glee), it’s when Scottish people put way too many syllables in certain lines of their songs. I don’t know why, but I love it, like the part in this song right after the swoony instrumental break. Glasvegas’s noisy, potty-mouthed ballad is a little it on the emo side, but I can’t help wanting to slowdance every time it’s come on.

52. Queens Of The Stone Age, Into The Hollow (2920 plays last week)

After the crapstravaganza that was QOTSA’s Songs For The Deaf album, they came back with the hideous-looking but awesome Era Vulgaris. The hazy Into The Hollow is probably my favorite, buzzing along in the verses, buzzing some more in the chorus, and not doing much else. If, for some reason, someone made a movie about my life where I was for some reason a drug addict, I’d like one of the “drugs are totally cool and awesome and DUDE” montages at the beginning to have this as a soundtrack.

51. Clinic, Children Of Kellogg (less than 165 plays last week)

Oh, Clinic. About seven years ago, or whenever Internal Wranglers came out, they came up with a sound–stompy, a little dark, with muffled vocals and a clarinet. And then they perfected that sound on 2002’s Walking With Thee, revisited it again on Winchester Cathedral two years later, and finally branched out a little on this year’s Visitations (or last year’s, if you’re British. Are you sensing a theme?) Children of Kellogg, one of several really great songs on the album, starts like an Olympic anthem and ends with a saw hacking apart an organ, but the middle is the classic Clinic sound, complete with indecipherable lyrics and major time for the woodwinds.