Noughties By Nature #59: Super Furry Animals - Slow Life

This is not the only album closing, techno/rock epic of Super Furry Animals’ career. Come to think of it, it’s very much an older, subtler version of The Man Don’t Give A Fuck in tone. It’s the one that integrates the two to most astounding effect, though, and makes the most cutting use of very few words indeed.

It takes intriguing new turns at every stage, throwing everything from swishy strings to harmonica to thunking beats into the mix without ever jarring. In particular its eerie, cut up opening, fragments of sound echoing around, before melding into a selection of Cian Ciaran’s finest bleeps and back again, builds up momentum and anticipation so well that not only do SFA still use it to come on stage to, The Flaming Lips have done too.

With all that in the music the words don’t need to do much to set the scene, and there’s a numbing list of dominance ("Move you/Buy and sell you/ Terrorise you...") that briefly interjects before everything unites behind the immense, taunting, one line chorus. At first I thought it was "[it] rocks, our slow life", a continued satirical display of complacence which would fit with the distant massed "I simply need my slow life!" In fact it’s actually "rocks are slow life", a stern and taunting warning that vengeance will eventually come from the very Earth itself. There aren’t many bands that could pull that off.
Iain Forrester

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Phantom Power]

Noughties By Nature #58: Why? - Gemini (Birthday Song)

"I want a verb and you give me a noun". Now, Shakespeare's sort of touched on this linguistic imagery. In fact, I could probably name many more poets that have used a similar tactic in their own work (that's if I knew a lot more about poetry). But I don't expect your average modern day poet, not even the most rebellious of sorts, could anticipate themselves writing this next line: "What do you dream up, when I tongue you down?". Vulgar but beautiful, let's not forget that Yoni Wolf can be quite the poet himself.

And yet Gemini (Birthday Song) shouldn't just be famed for its words on sex (the joys of it and the frustrations of the lack of it, in this song's case). This is the most grabbing song on Elephant Eyelash, a truly eye-gouging attention seeker of a song. With its settled, streamlined guitar chords and yes, that slightly clichéd use of metaphors, you'd be forgiven for thinking this is a bog-standard love song. But Wolf's voice is unique and as mentioned, so are some of the lyrics and no matter how hard the band tries, it's unlikely they'll ever muster up the life-affirming atmosphere - growing and growing throughout - that does this wonderful song so much justice.
Jamie Milton

[Spotify]
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: Elephant Eyelash]

Noughties By Nature #57: Spiller feat. Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Groovejet (If This Ain't Love)

1999 wasn't the best year for Sophie Ellis-Bextor. Her band Theaudience had split, there was little chance of a solo career and she was reduced to modelling as a devil (albeit a sexy devil) in adverts for gaming websites. I don't think she expected the end of the nineties to turn out like this.

So it was a surprise that she was involved in the first real chart battle of the noughties. On one side was Victoria Beckham releasing her first solo single 'Out Of Your Mind' (well, solo if you ignore Dane Bowers & True Steppers); on the other was Sophie and DJ Spiller with Groovejet (If This Ain't Love). The tabloids loved it, it was considered to be a 'personal battle' to see who was the Real Posh.

Of course the winner was Sophie with the laid back tunes of Groovejet perfectly matching her languid vocals. The question "If this ain't love, why does it feel so good?" never being answered in the song, other than through the way Sophie asks it. It's always the catchy songs that manage to get lines through under the radar and a song that promoted sex purely for enjoyment rather than love certainly did that.

For once, the indie kids beat the pop brats - although the victory was slightly dampened by the pop direction that Sophie took after this single. But if she didn't do that we would never have had the punchline "Murder on Zidane's floor", and what would the noughties have been without that?
Ben Hall

[Spotify]
[YouTube]

Noughties By Nature #56: Wyclef Jean - Perfect Gentleman

A Pachelbel’s Canon-esque synth line. A relentless electro drum loop. The blurred lines in the minefield of male chauvinism and chivalry, feminism, morality, family values, sexual politics, and the need for education. No, it’s not the Manic Street Preachers: it’s ex-Fugee Wyclef Jean’s sensational bombast of strip-club etiquette and stripper love, Perfect Gentleman.

Wyclef loves strippers, he says most men do, but he wants real emotion: "the kind of tears that money couldn’t buy". He meets Hope. Hope is beautiful, lithe and supple. She only go-go dances to pay for her schooling, she’s solely it in for the money. She’d love to be taken "away from her, so far/ … no more stripping in bars". Sir Wyclef of Jean rescues her and takes her away to Mexico on a big white horse. Dear reader, she married him. So far, so fairy story, but he is very keen to point out that she is not a ho, a hooker, because this makes her acceptable to his mother.

I think someone could probably write a thesis on the sociological aspects of ‘Perfect Gentleman’s lyrics, but musically there is no need. It’s a perfect pop song, it’s catchy, bouncy, gritty, controversial, beautiful, makes you think, makes you dance, and sometimes, if the weather is right, it makes you cry.
Jamie Woods, Super Kawaii POP!

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: The Ecleftic]

Noughties By Nature #55: Johnny Boy - You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve

It started with a drumbeat. No, scratch that. It started with The Drumbeat. In the almost fifty years since Be My Baby first forced Brian Wilson to pull his car over and rethink his entire career, The Drumbeat has reared its head more times than it's worth counting; but, bearing in mind Just Like Honey's soporific come-on, and the happy-go-lucky cutesyism it introduced on Eighties Fan, it's rarely been employed as truly to its original intent - as downright fucking ecstatically - as on Johnny Boy's 2004 tongue-twistingly-titled James Dean Bradfield-produced non-hit You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve.

It's the most sugar-coated anti-capitalist rant since Stereolab's Ping Pong, but what makes the song shine is its sheer relentless euphoria; where other acts bemoaned the state of the nation over pseudo-electronic beats or crusty acoustic guitars, the mysterious Johnny Boy are not only celebrating the uselessness of their ideology, but their right to have that ideology in the first place. Let's not forget that the song's first line is "I just can't help believing." Festive glockenspiels twinkle in the background, fireworks (no doubt aimed at the stock exchange) shoot across the speakers, a party in another room screams "YEAH YEAH!" and "OOH BABY" like their throats won't go sore - it sounds like the world's about to end. Then again, maybe that's what we deserve...
Alex Wisgard

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Johnny Boy]

Noughties By Nature #54: The Hold Steady - Killer Parties

Compared to some of this great band's output, Killer Parties seems relatively quiet and unassuming. There's this long, languid, "we'll start when we're good and ready" intro, that somehow feels menacing without trying to. (Natural One by Folk Implosion always struck me the same way). Then Craig Finn comes in, his line almost feeling likes it's an afterthought, as though they could happily jam through this groove for hours but hell, he'd better say something, telling us to be vague if anyone asks us about Charlemagne (ridiculous, as after listening to this album on repeat for about 6 months in 2004 i was anything but vague when telling people about Charlemagne, or Gideon, or Holly for that matter). He proceeds to offer us advice as to the proper way to respond if challenged by someone (why were you there? why did you leave?) as though we're a gang getting our stories straight after that final bank job. This is 5:48 chronicling a feeling that something has gone wrong. Something that felt really great to begin with.

It's a song that feels like it's about young love and experiencing life, about not experiencing life, a song about survival. It's not the only Hold Steady song to include the line "almost killed me", but it's the only one where it seems to be delivered tinged with regret.

It's a song that comes from one of the genuine stone cold instant classic albums of the decade, that includes more great lines and moments than most bands can manage over the course of a career. An album that always feels it's about to lose it's way, because no band comes in swinging this confident on it's debut.

It seems fitting that the album finishes with this, and with the line "we woke up in Ybor City". This song feels like the morning after. It feels like you've just had the greatest time of your life, lived through it and you know with unshakeable certainty that it can only go downhill from here. You know that life should be this endless search for unattainable perfection, and it's unfair that you'd get there so soon.

You know you'll probably spend the remainder of your time on this planet trying to find your way back there, if you could just work out where it was. But you really don't remember, you just remember that you departed from your bodies.
Ryan O'Grady

[Spotify]
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: Almost Killed Me]

The Weekly Sweep

A Place To Bury Strangers - In Your Heart [Myspace]

Animal Collective – Brother Sport [Myspace]

Broken Records - Out On The Water [live YouTube]

Calories - Let's Pretend That We're Older [Myspace]

Felix - Death To Everyone But Us [Myspace]

Frankie & The Heartstrings - Hunger

Future of the Left - Arming Eritrea [YouTube]

Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks [YouTube]

His Clancyness - Vampire Summer [Myspace]

Internet Forever - Cover The Walls [YouTube]

Joe Gideon & The Shark - Civilisation [YouTube]

Johnny Flynn - The Mountain Is Burning

Los Campesinos! – There Are Listed Buildings [YouTube]

Lucky Soul - White Russian Doll [Myspace]

Mat Riviere - FYH [Myspace]

Mumford & Sons – Winter Winds [live acoustic YouTube]

Penfold Gate - Pirates [Myspace]

Rose Elinor Dougall - Fallen Over [Myspace]

The Wildhouse - Ficca [mp3]

Yeasayer - Ambling Alp [mp3 from Stereogum]

Noughties By Nature #53: Ballboy – Avant Garde Music

It’s the words that elevate Ballboy above the crowd and this song grabs you from the start. "The girl who works in the record shop, says I'm not avant garde enough”. With the tone set a classic Ballboy song ensues, driven along by the keyboard, whilst Gordon tells his story.

As ever with Ballboy the lyrics are biting and funny (the story behind the "and the Queen is waving to me" line is priceless – see YouTube) but there is also a cracking tune and some great juddering guitar, drums and keyboard as Gordon sings the “Sometimes i think i don’t know anything at all” refrain.

Its not Avant Garde, but it's quality indiepop.
Matt Gaynor

[Spotify]
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: A Guide For Daylight Hours]

Noughties By Nature #52: Bright Eyes - When The President Talks To God

Our label, Wichita Recordings, came together in the early months of 2000 so it makes me doubly sad as we all look back to conclude that the "noughties" was probably the worst decade for popular culture in 50 years.

UK music has been dominated by talent show contestants who in previous decades would have been happy as Redcoats or making an appearence on Opportunity Knocks, the only commercially successful "bands" being either utterly bland or part of some attempted return to the horrors of Britpop. Meanwhile the usually dependable US counter culture seemed to consist of comfortable middle class white musicians happy to make "clever" music which had nothing to say about the wider world. Where previously we'd witnessed punk, hardcore, rap and techno we now had a bunch of arty types who seemed utterly apolitical. All this matters so much more because it was all played out against a background of the worst excesses of right wing politics since the Reagan/Thatcher years with unjust "wars" being waged around the planet as the "leaders of the free world" actually claimed to be on divine missions to save the planet from "terrorists".

At the height of the madness I went to see Conor Oberst do a very rare solo show under the name Bright Eyes at London's ULU. Oberst had been the first artist released on Wichita and had been vocal in trying to prevent the re-election of George Bush in 2004. Now, just three weeks before the election, at this show he unveiled a six minute "protest song" titled When The President Talks To God that was by turn biting, funny, sad and vicious and ultimately showed up the lunacy of having the world run by a guy who was taking "orders from above". Bush won the election anyway of course but Conor went on to have the number one and two singles in America as well as two albums simultaneously enter the Billboard top ten.

He used this success to secure a slot on the high profile Jay Leno show in the US where he performed the song in its entirety wearing a ten gallon hat and showed up all of us who'd done nothing to reflect the worst of the world around us during a decade that contributed nothing of lasting cultural value.
Mark Bowen, Wichita Recordings

[Spotify]
[YouTube (ULU)]
[YouTube (Letterman)]

Noughties By Nature #51: Saul Williams - Black Stacey

In a just and rational world, the stunning and eminently quotable work of Saul Williams would have seen him hailed as the Messiah by now. Black Stacey is part confessional memoir, part consciousness-raising rallying-cry, all righteous, fluid articulacy over flowing, portentous beats. Willliams' cool, composed and self-possessed narration, refreshing as a slug of cold water, argues down braggadocio in favour of a clear-eyed self-respect. The song's apotheosis is its languidly swaying chorus laid down over the steady piano-led pulse of an artist who knows where he's from, where it's at and where we should be heading. Someone get the man a pulpit and a personality cult.
Rhian Jones

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Saul Williams]

Noughties By Nature #50: Broadcast - Come On Let's Go

Where the machines learned to love. Over their decade-plus existence Broadcast have been guilty on occasion of being a little austere, not remembering to earth themselves as they explored the possibilities of sci-fi electronics in a four minute song. This doesn't automatically make them poor, of course, and there have been just as many moments when they've lightened up and embraced more colloquial pop shapes, but Come On Let's Go is above all of these the moment where everything coalesced, where their humming, droning antique synths found a match between emotional pop pull and the psychedelic sonic experience.

It's a record only an English band could make, as much as Broadcast owe a debt to the US psych underground (and indeed The United States of America). There's something pastoral about the melodic sense in these modulations, full of airy space and dreamlike qualities. Someone we know recently called Trish Keenan's vocals sexy. Don't know if you'd conventionally go that far but they're certainly attractively, unaffectedly honeyed and warm, the better here as she chides her subject for looking elsewhere for love when she's been here all along ("What's the point in wasting time on people that you'll never know... When everybody's disappeared you won't be alone") But for the space age spy theme backing it could almost be 60s beat boom girl pop. As it is, it's music to drift off into the embrace and the ether with.
Simon STN

[YouTube]
[Album: The Noise Made By People]

Noughties By Nature #49: Dan Deacon - Snookered

There's a Marmite quality to all the best bands - they may inspire adoration or revulsion but the key thing is that they don't elicit a half-arsed shrug. Many of my peers loathe Dan Deacon, and even as a raging fanboy it's not difficult to see why - he's kinda irritating, unsubtle and relentless full-on, like Animal Collective on a sugar high. But I've been entirely enamoured with this song since the first I heard it - it's the clear victor of my Last.Fm “Most Listened” list by a factor of almost 4:1, and that doesn't even register the hundreds of plays I haven't scrobbled. The ultimate distillation of everything good about Deacon's previous work, it doesn't contain a single element the oversized Baltimorean hasn't used before, but the entirety's executed so utterly perfectly that I'm frankly left in awe. From the solemnly glacial glockenspiel intro, it slowly swells into a multi-layered symphony of throbbing synths, propulsive drum beats and distorted children's choirs that may at times sound like a Gameboy having a seizure but nonetheless maintains a certain beautiful melancholy throughout.
Adam Elmahdi

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Bromst]

Noughties By Nature #48: The Concretes - You Can't Hurry Love

It's widely discussed/written by people who probably know LOADS that the perfect pop song is around three minutes long, maybe a bit shorter, never less than 2:30 for sure. In 2004 The Concretes popped out THE perfect pop song in just under two minutes. Not a moment is wasted or misused, every note matters so much as each part gropes for the next and follows the previous just right. It doesn't outstay it's welcome. I'm sure I didn't pay attention to how long it was when I first heard the song, it's so short and fantastic there simply isn't time, it was all the strung out verse melody and that trumpet solo and the build up to the chorus punchline dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun, if anything, it feels shorter than it's grand run time and when you're watching music television with no way to repeat before the Libertines run on again it seems shorter still.

Something about using a title that's already got so much attached to it (just like The Replacements did with Let It Be) stinks of not needing to compromise with what you name your material as it's infinitely better than what came before it. The Concretes had a couple of other really ace singles, their second album In Colour was great in patches but Victoria Bergsman featured on one of the other great songs of the noughties and eventually left the band. They're still going but it's unlikely they (or anyone else really) will ever be able to match this most perfect pop song.

The song is sweet like one of those romantic comedies of the moment, our female narrator is conversing with (we assume) her boy and letting him know that "love ain't far" and not to hurry it. It'll probably end well for them if he heeds her advice.
Simon Lawson

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: The Concretes]

Noughties By Nature #47: The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster - Morning Has Broken

Somewhere between the guitar-orientated music press hype for The Strokes and The Vines - chronologically this is, not stylistically - came No Name, a movement of bands so disparate that even its title - literally The Scene With No Name - heavily implied that the journalists desperate to liken them couldn't be bothered to find a unifying feature of the bands involved. Unusually for such a broad umbrella term, most of the bands stuck under it were remarkably good tunesmiths, even those most derivatively taking advantage of the recent garage revival (hello Hoggboy, M.A.S.S., thisGIRL). The catalyst for the whole thing seemed to be a UK tour of toilet venues with the sterling line-up as follows: in the naughty corner, ready to gob into your pint, Portugese Damned-indebted badboys The Parkinsons; in the charity shop corner, ready to bedazzle, astoundingly taut Fall-loving noiseniks Ikara Colt; and, in the evil corner, in the car they got their name from, Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster.

So keen were NME at the time to shoehorn in any reference to the New York quintet as possible, TEMBD were once declared to be like "the Strokes in a cement mixer". However, with the onslaught of their first single Morning Has Broken there was evidently much darker forces at work, bubbling as it did with the sort of gothic swamp-rock that made The Cramps look like Teletubbies and felt as if it would induce frothing at the mouth if performed a second longer. When Guy McKnight - later reduced to a punchline in The Mighty Boosh, but still to this day an awe-inspiring frontman - garbled from the darkness "He was born on Christmas Day/He's going to get you whether you like it or not", you really did wonder whether Jesus was going to spear you through the heart. The incomprehensible B-side Alex made a much more flabbergasted impression, but Morning Has Broken was the perfect appetiser for Horse Of The Dog and remains the peak of 21st century psychobilly.
Thomas Blatchford

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Horse Of The Dog]

Noughties By Nature #46: Lambchop - Up With People

"Heard Lambchop's Up With People advertising something on the BBC" says the awesome Superman Revenge Squad on his uncharacteristically cheery This Is A Happy Song. And he's on to something, because there's little that's as upliftiting as the first minute or so of Up With People, from the gentle whoosh and chatter amongst the band as it opens right up to the whoop of joy someone lets out before Kurt Wagner's vocals start; truly, to listen to the first minute or so of Up With People is to be reassured for a few precious moments that everything is going to be all right somehow.

Obviously, songwriters being contrary buggers, This Is A Happy Song quickly turns to the author's conviction that his happy song is no good ("if it's the worst song on the album I don't care") and the most prominent lyric of Up With People is about how "we are screwing up our lives today". Now, usually my near-total inability to decipher what lyrics might be about is usually rather frustrating, but in this case I'm pretty sure that I'm at an advantage: if I could work out what "a kind of welfare state of the soul" might be it could in some way diminish the loveliness of what surrounds it. Better to live in ignorance and swoon as the horns kick in and the song climaxes in a welter of over the top "oooh"ing. Yes.
Matt Sullivan

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Nixon]

Noughties By Nature #45: Ryan Adams - Afraid Not Scared

I brought the Love Is Hell album pretty much on a whim. Well, not a complete whim, as I'd read some good press about it, but I wasn't intending on getting it until I saw it, cheap, in my local music shop (which now, like so many other wonderful music shops, has shut down). I was on my way home, stopped off, and picked this up. On getting home I stuck it on for a listen, sat down on the end of my bed, and didn't move for nearly two and a half hours, listening to it twice non-stop. By that second run through, this song had me blubbing by eyes out, sat on my bed.

See, Afraid Not Scared is the most fractured, broken and heartbreaking song released this decade. Even now, five years on, I'm not ready for how much it hits you square on like an emotional juggernaut. It's as simple as Adams and his guitar and his voice, and that's it. It's astonisingly stark and brutally raw, especially as he howls out the coda of "I'm getting really cold and I'm looking at you and you're not moving". The music is brittle and simple, creating space for the song to breathe and the emotion to come through. If you're not even moved a little, tiny bit by this, then I fully believe you have no soul.
Oliver Billenness

[YouTube (live)]
[Album: Love Is Hell]

Noughties By Nature #44: BrokeNCYDE - Freaxxx

The last ten years have seen a lot of changes in music. Thanks to the digital technology, and more specifically, the Internet, people’s perceptions and attitudes to music have completed changed. Whilst we can’t be certain which bands specifically will be remembered by the history books, we can say for certain that the noughties is, without a doubt, the era of the internet band. Having almost completely changed the way people find and digest music, the Internet has provided ample opportunities for new bands to sell themselves. The Arctic Monkeys used Myspace, as did Lily Allen, and Little Boots was all over YouTube before she hit the big time; however, The Arctic Monkeys would have made it big regardless of their friend count, and both Lily Allen and Little Boots already had their deals inked before their marketing people even dreamt of Web 2.0. No, the first true band of the Internet age was a much more questionable affair. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you BrokeNCYDE.

For the uneducated, BrokeNCYDE are a screamo-crunk or crunkcore group from America, which is as bad as it sounds. This is not the point. The point is that without the Internet, BrokeNCYDE would not and could not exist. Without the internet, no-one would have ever heard of BrokeNCYDE, there would not be hundreds of message boards threads entitled “Worst band ever”, there would never have been a petition to get them removed from The Warped Tour, there would have never been a fake ‘Mothers Against BrokeNCYDE’ website, they would never have been asked about said website in an interview, Warren Ellis* would never have blogged about them, we would never had to suffer the horror of crabcore. Frankly, BrokeNCYDE are some next level meta-shit. Without the advances in home recording that noughties computer technology has given us, BrokeNCYDE would never have been able to develop a sound and come into existence.

Yes, BrokeNCYDE are truly horrible, and I hope I never have to watch this video again (my favourite part is the guy screaming in some girl’s unblinking face), but this is also important. In a time when families go on day trips to V Festival and parents take their children to see Kings Of Leon, and no-one baits an eyelid at a band called Anal Cunt naming a song You're Pregnant, So I Kicked You in the Stomach, it’s probably a good thing that teenagers have a band to claim as their own, a band that anyone over the age of about 16 finds abhorrent and repulsive. If the noughties were the first true digital decade, then BrokeNCYDE are the first truly digital band. God bless the Internet.

PS. Two more points:
1. The original Mothers Against BrokeNCYDE doesn’t appear to online anymore. It was at www.mothersagainstbrokencyde.net
2. There is a crunkcore group called Millionaires who toured with BrokeNCYDE. They’re pretty shitty as well, but I believe that if they were ten years older and came from Portland, people would love the shit out of them.
David Pott-Negrine

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[EP: BC13]

(* The cult graphic novelist, not the Dirty Three/Bad Seeds violinist)

Noughties By Nature #43: The Ting Tings - That's Not My Name

So, I'm standing in a tent at Radio 1's Big Weekend, and I'm tense, for a lot of reasons. Stuff to do with work, stuff to do with where I am in my life at that moment, stuff to do with who I feel I'm becoming as the years go by. It's boiling hot, but I didn't bring shorts, so I'm wearing long trousers and a sun hat, and basically dying in the heat.

Then a familiar drum pattern starts. It's a song I already know I love. I loved it the first time I heard it on Jools Holland. I loved it so much, I started writing about it straight away.

And what I wrote was this: "Simple tasks, such as leaving my desk to get a cup of tea, or making important ChartBlog phone calls, or doing anything which takes me away from listening to this song over and over again, have become impossible. Meanwhile, my right foot is pounding away on the floor, in a manner which should only be familiar to tap-dancers and people who walk on hot coals for a living."

In the tent, the singer launches into her ranting first verse, it's bitter. She's yelling at herself, at the people in her past who dismissed her without a second glance. She's settling scores, left and right, and she's not going to take this crap any more. Abruptly, her and the drummer - there's no-one else on stage - stop. She pants a few notes, before launching into the chorus, which is part My Sharona and part Mickey by Toni Basil, but with Sleater-Kinney overtones.

I'm rooted to the spot, not dancing, not singing, just staring, and swallowing hard.

A second verse, a second chorus, and the singer goes into a counter-melody. It's at this point I realise there are tears blossoming up and out of my eyes. The music swells, the drummer sings another countermelody, there are noises, scrapes and whistles, and then...

BOOM! The rhythm of the song changes from perky two-step to MASSIVE ROCKOUT, the countermelody continues, un-supported by human voice, while the singer shrieks a variation on the chorus, and the drummer mumbles his bit quietly, all at the same time. And I'm crying, really fully properly crying. All of that pent-up frustration is pouring out, and I don't care, because I'm somewhere else, fully alive, fully awake and BUZZING.

I don't know of any other measurement for goodness in music, certainly not one that is worth a damn. This song rules all.
Fraser McAlpine

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: We Started Nothing]

Noughties By Nature #42: The Libertines - Time For Heroes

Not the spuriously-compiled Best Of issued in 2007 by those intent on picking clean the bones of a band long-buried, but the five-years-younger standout single from a band lean, hungry and arrestingly articulate. Its guitar-led opening clamour was urgent enough to turn heads away from the barren wastes of contemporary indie and onto the sea of possibilities and passions that swirled in the space between stumbling drumbeats and Doherty's smoothly confident evocation of a once and future urban utopia. Amidst flashes of modern May Day folklore, Time For Heroes forged its own mythology of young bloods, obscene scenes and stylish rioters, its lyrics rich with in-jokes, countercultural cast-offs and quietly camp wit. How long had it been since the charts were troubled by a piece of such grammatical, political and aesthetic perfection as the line "There are fewer more distressing sights than that of an Englishman in a baseball cap"? The song throws open the doors to a kingdom of self-reference and self-reverence and, with a knowingly urchinish doff of the cap, ushers you into Arcadia and urges you to consider yourself at home. The Libertines flame was soon to be extinguished in a whirlwind of smack, self-destruction, supermodels and speculation on Pete and Carl's domestic harmony, but while it lasted, this was a band on fire.
Rhian Jones

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Up The Bracket]

Noughties By Nature #41: Mint Royale feat. Lauren Laverne - Don't Falter

Who would have expected the decade's best love song to come from as strange a pairing as this? The cross between the sweeping end-credits strings and breezy, pseudo-tropical horns and shuffling breakbeat work far better than it does on paper, while Miss Laverne swoons and sighs her way through some of her most charming, optimistic lyrics ("When you're with me, it's always summer") as if Kenickie never broke up. What's more astounding is that this is one of only two times she's been involved with a 'major' single in the last ten years (the other being The Divine Comedy's gorgeous, and remarkably similar-sounding Come Home Billy Bird): proof if proof be need be that, great though she is at that presenting lark, the pop charts are a sadder place without her around.
Alex Wisgard

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: On The Ropes]

Noughties By Nature #40: The Delgados - Everybody Come Down

The Delgados made probably my favourite song of the 90s with Under Canvas Under Wraps and made a series of critically lauded and Peel adored records for much of the next decade, though real popular acclaim eluded them. To some extent this song, the lead single, from their final album, can be seen as a last throw of the dice, a simple bouncy song with a catchy chorus that moves away from the complicated arrangements of previous records.

However, the happy tune belies a darker lyric with a familiar musical theme of unhappy life in a small town - “Got a slap in the face from the mafia who ran the place” - in this case Castle Douglas in southern Scotland, and wanting to escape. But the song itself is a superior example of guitar based pop music, with Emma Pollock’s gorgeous voice to the fore as the instrumentation drops away towards the end before the whole thing comes to a grinding halt as if the power had been turned off.
Matt Gaynor

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Universal Audio]

Noughties By Nature #39: Colour - Unicorns

Having split up earlier this year, there's been there's inevitably been a fair bit of eulogising about Colour's untouchable brilliance in recent months. In my opinion their back catalogue was patchy at best, but this song (along with a couple of others i could almost as easily have chosen) is as perfect a pop song as you could hope for. Blissfully catchy lyrics that pass in an instant and hooks that are as fleeting as Colour's career (proportionally, anyway) - but the song is always pulling you back in time for the next one. This is the kind of tune you'll leave on loop for hours once it clicks.
John Helps, Maybeshewill

[YouTube (live)] (Also on their Myspace)

Noughties By Nature #38: Dizzee Rascal - I Luv U

It's been a startlingly fruitful decade for underground urban music, with UK garage ready to claim British cultural dominance at the turn of the century – a strain of fortified R'n'B that, despite having future laughing stock Craig David as a figurehead, and having limited itself from its eclectic origins in Larry Levan's Paradise Garage years earlier, still maintained its sleek edge. While it had its own seminal cuts that still stand the test of time – Wookie's slinky Hot Chip-approved Scrappy, Lisa Maffia's ukulele-tinged Brit-crunk banger All Over, and of course 21 Seconds – the overall impression of two-step now is of a tame catalyst for what was to come. Contemporary history is already telling us that 'garridge' morphed into a bassier, brasher, more intimidating sound with some haste, and while a track like More Fire Crew's incendiary Oi! or Wiley’s Eskimo can perhaps claim to be the first instance of grime reaching the overground, it was a boy from Bow who would kick the trap door off its hinges.

Hearing I Luv U for the first time was, I'd wager, perhaps the only instance this decade that could readily be likened to hearing, say, Afrika Bambaataa or Sex Pistols for the first time, the pop-cultural equivalent of an atomic bomb going off; you got the sense, within the first few bars of woofer-threatening bass stabs, firecracker-like beats and Dizzee’s hectic, accusatory flow that things would never, ever be quite the same. While it displayed evidence to why grime got its name, forsaking the sheen of two-step with aplomb, I Luv U also narrated a frank and often despicable glimpse into the minds of the a promiscuous, nihilistic Brit ‘yoof’: “I like your girl so you better look after your girl, or I might take your girl and make your girl my girl” etc. Yet somehow it became liberating, especially since both male (played by Dizzee) and female (“That boy’s some prick y’kna”) got their side of the argument in this three-minute explicit soap opera, escalating to the point of no return. A fictional tale perilously close the bone – convincing enough to prompt an open-letter remix response from another rising grime star Shystie – I Luv U alone painted Mr Rascal as the sharp, thrilling poet laureate of broken Britain. The startled lad handed the Mercury gong has now transformed into the darling of party-minded UK electro-house instead, but for making a startling first impression Dylan Mills can at least claim with sincerity that he gave the ringtone generation an opening gambit of considerable dexterity and substance.
Thomas Blatchford

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Boy In Da Corner]

Noughties By Nature #37: Justice vs Simian - We Are Your Friends

The best dance track of the noughties. We Are Your Friends started off as an entry into a college radio dance remix competition and ended with murderous stabbing synths and the funkiest bass line that Daft Punk never wrote. There are very few electronic dance tracks that can feel as hands in the air celebratory as We Are Your Friends, yet despite the enormous happy vibes it spits out the song never sounds like a big slab of cheddar in a keyboard sandwich. We Are Your Friends is designed to make you feel deliriously happy, unless your name is Kanye West, who launched an outburst at the MTV Europe Awards when the Justice vs. Simian video beat his own video to an award.
Robin Seamer

[Spotify]
[YouTube]

Noughties By Nature #36: Robbie Williams & Kylie Minogue - Kids

The art of great pop is that it plays on the artist's personality. For example, Mis-teeq had an in your face attitude, and their music slapped you about the face for 3 minutes, making you pay attention. Sugababes' back catalogue is based on the fact that they're fairly good looking girls who might be sexual deviants, and their music is the equivalent of a bondage session with Jessica Alba. Which brings us to the topic of Robbie (the cheeky chappie of British pop) and Kylie (the sexy antipodean minx).

And that's where Kids is truly brilliant. Originally written by Robbie and Guy Chambers for Kylie, and then turned into a duet on Robbie's request, it works for both these two characters. Robbie gets his rocky, anthemic chorus and (if you have the extended version) his funny, cheeky boy persona on the rap at the end. Kylie makes teenage boys across the land feel funny in their pants with the line 'I couldn't do what I wanted to do when my lips were dry' and gets her seduction on throughout. It almost, almost shouldn't work, but somehow it does, and two of the biggest popstars of the decade collided to produce pure pop perfection.
Oliver Billenness

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Sing When You're Winning]

Noughties By Nature #35: Saturday Looks Good To Me - Meet Me By The Water

Some songs are just dangerous. Meet Me By The Water is one of those songs. It's a three-minute piece of indie-pop propaganda that makes you wish to be by a riverbank with a battery-powered record player and a scene-girl pulling at her laddered tights as the sun goes down. All of which sounds incredibly romantic when you're trapped in a tiny room with a bed, hunkered over a computer at 3am trying to finish writing a miniature programming language. I can tell you that the reality of the situation involves a lot more ants, forgetting to bring a spare set of batteries and bickering over a vinyl collection than this song indicates.

The brainchild of Ann Arbor's Fred Thomas, a virtual band with an ever-changing line-up (though they're currently on an extended hiatus), SLGTM is one of the decade's hidden gems, an American indie-pop band that owes as much to Dexy's Midnight Runners as they do to any of their contemporaries. All Your Summer Songs (where this song is culled from) is probably the highlight of their career so far, a kitchen-sink blend of Motown and Phil Spector with a disarming dash of indie hipsterism that'll make your heart bounce and your mind whirl. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to find some batteries.
Ian Pointer

[Spotify]
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: All Your Summer Songs]

Noughties By Nature #34: Stars – Your Ex-Lover is Dead (Final Fantasy Remix)

I nearly went for One More Night or This Is The Dream Of Win And Regine as the finest respective individual moments of this pair of Canadian acts, but this meeting of minds actually trumps both.

The song casts singers Torquil and Amy as the ex-lovers, unexpectedly reunited and confronting their feelings through the course of an awkward taxi ride. They don’t want to give too much away (not least because he can’t remember her name), but by the conclusion they’ve reached a cautious but touching acceptance that things turned out for the best. It’s the opener from Set Yourself on Fire, setting its tone of sweeping romanticism with a bittersweet edge perfectly.

Owen Pallett takes the song and strips out all of the horns and drums and drums that propelled it, replacing them with a gorgeous piano and strings arrangement that ramps up the tension. The alternating verses of the pair already felt like a drawn out dance around how they really felt, but in his hands it sounds satisfyingly like one too.
Iain Forrester

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Do You Trust Your Friends?]

Noughties By Nature #33: Snow White - Bored, Somewhat Detached

Perhaps the most defiantly runty of the decade's squalling angular litter, the late and disappointingly little-lamented Snow White were always too good for relegation to a residency at Nathan Barley's Nailgun Arms. Their comparative strength lay in a Sonic Youth-derived lo-fi sensibility, song titles like It's Not Art, It's Paedophile Porn and a preference for sneering over self-aggrandisement. Debut single Bored, Somewhat Detached sticks out like a spike through the floorboards, the recording's muffled and murky quality making the band sound as though they're being held hostage in a coal shed. Full of densely scribbled white-hot guitar overwriting staticky bass and a buzzsaw vocal drone, rarely has a song done so exactly what it says on the tin with such bloody-minded and furious aplomb.
Rhian Jones

(If anyone knows of commercial availability or a legal stream, let us know in the comments)

Noughties By Nature #32: The Bobby McGee's - Ivor Cutler Is Dead

Although originally called No Friends it seems entirely appropriate that the opening track to The Bobby McGee's’ first EP should lament the recent death of one of Britain’s finest poets, musicians and gentlemen; fitting because The Bobby McGee's are akin to, and yet somehow simultaneously absolutely nothing like, Ivor Cutler. They’re alike because, as Ivor Cutler Is Dead attests, when they want to they can channel the same sort of charm, tenderness and beauty that even when singing about depression and loneliness can be warmly comforting. But they’re different because it’s difficult to imagine Cutler lamenting his solitude with such direct, astute, open-hearted melancholy, vocalists Jimmy and Eleanor playing two Smiths-loving hopeless romantics doomed to a life of arrested development and unrequited love. No wonder they’re the inventors and embodiment of tweecore (not in the Los Campesinos!-referenced sense of mixing indie-pop with hardcore metal, but in the sense that they’re just very, very twee), seeing as their lyrical Peter Pan complex – where the hallmarks of close companionship are sharing drinks and watching Top Of The Pops together – is a lot more disarming than it is cloying or mawkish. This cutesy ditty plays the Jekyll to the Hyde of some of their more boisterous songs – Billy & Tracey and Molly’s Lips, off the same Yes Please! EP, have the chorus “Fuck you!” and “Kill yourself!” respectively – but like a sigh can replace the need to scream it dissolves the desperation and yearning of its content to become almost anthemic; all this despite being a tranquil campfire song accompanied by the band’s trademark lilting ukuleles. Jimmy says it’s the best song ever written, because his mum says so – she’s definitely got an ear for a tune, then.
Thomas Blatchford

[EP: The Bobby McGee's? Yes Please!] (Also on their Myspace as No Friends)

Noughties By Nature #31: Pelle Carlberg – Clever Girls Like Clever Boys Much More Than Clever Boys Like Clever Girls

Whilst the British charts were full of fake RnB for 12 year olds, if you wanted to find some pure pop in the 2000s then Sweden was the place to look. Taking some cues from the C86 generation and mixing it with the shiny pop sensibility of St Etienne, Labrador records led the way with the Acid House Kings at the forefront. Pelle Carlberg featured on their highly recommended Sound of Young Sweden series as Edson, but it was when recording under his own name he hit perfection.

Seemingly a cautionary tale of falling for the wrong person - “Should have listened to what mama said” - this is unashamed pop music with handclaps from the first beat. It’s catchy as hell and does what pop music should reminds you of summer and makes you happy, it gets to the chorus and you need no more, variations on the chorus repeating til end.
Matt Gaynor

[YouTube (live)]
[Album: In A Nutshell]

Noughties By Nature #30: Hot Hot Heat - Bandages

Bandages is the great forgotten guitar pop record of the decade. It’s a nutty blast of a tune that scrapes away at the surface and makes the listener want to bounce bounce bounce. It is the ultimate drunken student indie disco soundtrack, full of frazzled riffs, shrieking vocals and a structure that grows and grows until it orgasms in a hot sweaty climax.

There is nothing particularly unique about this song. Everything you hear during its three minutes and thirty seconds of thrusting at your earlobes you will be familiar with, but it’s a familiarity that is delivered with such passion, that you can’t help but wilt and give in. The Canadian band have never produced anything as good as this since, which is probably just as well because we don’t think we could take much more without passing out.
Robin Seamer

[Spotify]
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: Make Up The Breakdown]

Noughties By Nature #29: The Research - C'mon Chameleon

Pop music: a series of grand treatises on the human condition (or, at least, the part of it that involves getting off with someone, not getting off with someone, and all possible variants thereof), interspersed by people going "la la la", "ba ba ba" and possibly "shooby dooby doo" if the opportunity arises. I don't think The Research have ever gone "shooby dooby doo", but they were very good at going "la la la", and so good at going "ba ba ba" that they called a song it. The first The Research album features lots of splendid wonky keyboard tunes, delightfully cooey girly backing vocals and much in the way of faux-innocent treatises on the human condition, essayed by a chap calling himself Russell The Disaster; all of these are good things. However, it is C'mon Chameleon that we turn to here as the intro to the single version is really quite stirring (particularly for those of us who always assumed that playing the keyboards would be easy and were never able to produce anything better than, well, the intro to C'mon Chamelon by The Research) and because it is the only song that dares to ask the all-important question: "What's the scientific name for truth serum?"

Sadly, record company shenanigans followed (there is the possibility that someone at EMI thought that The Research could sell millions of records; it's impossible not to admire the optimism of everyone involved) and some time later there was a second album with the wonky keyboards and girly backing vocals largely ditched, as if they'd somehow lost track of the point. Shame, that.
Matt Sullivan

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Breaking Up]

Noughties By Nature #28: Billie The Vision And The Dancers - There's Hope For Anyone

I used to be pretty smug about my Billie the Vision & The Dancers standom, on some “Hah, the wider world isn’t yet ready to embrace a mixed-race transvestite tweepop act featuring nobody called Billie and a chick who looks like Jessica Stevenson’s corpse, I am soooooo liberal” tip. But then they went and had a #1 hit in Spain off the back of a beer commercial, and I kinda felt like the legions of fans who’d supported Bran Van 3000 through the underground must have felt at the turn of the previous decade. Happy that they’re getting paper, a little annoyed that fucking with this music doesn’t make me special.

I think BtV&tDs are special, I’m not 100% sure. They’re precious, certainly: this isn’t your disarming Glaswegian mumble school of twee, it’s straight outta Stockholm with songs about “a crazy night in Oslo” with The Pipettes (you remember, they did that cover of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”), a song that namechecks Bree Van de Kamp, and endless references to a fictitious character called Pablo: Wes Anderson injected with Sunny Delight.

They work best when they’re downbeat, though. “There's Hope For Anyone” is just a wondrous plea bargain from a man who’s corrected his mistakes and can’t see why someone wouldn’t take him back. “Lily, look at my hands, I am not shaking anymore”. “I am willing to change, and I would pledge my hands to get back to you somehow”. “Lily, look at my bank account, I am not gambling any more”, a line that especially rings true for anyone who has wished terminal illnesses on Kieron Fallon’s immediate family at any point this decade, all spread over a track that sounds like the music Tullycraft would make if they were real people. Let’s just hope they’ve invested that beer cash wisely, they deserve a comfortable retirement after making tracks like this.
Dom Passantino

[YouTube]
[Album: Where The Ocean Meets My Hand]

Noughties By Nature #27: Amanda Palmer - Oasis

It’s the fag-end of the future's first decade and, in the land of the free, darkness is spreading under the shadow of a right-wing fundamentalist ascendancy that threatens reproductive rights and freedom of information. Who you gonna call, if not Boston’s finest punk-cabaret force of nature? On Oasis, Amanda hammers out a relentlessly breezy Beach Boys clap-along, face set in a rictus grin as her teenage protagonist recounts My Rape and Consequent Abortion: the High School Musical Version. This satire on received expectations of feminine behaviour sees life’s little misadventures pale into dismissible insignificance before our heroine's life-affirming receipt of a signed photograph from Oasis. And why not? Described by Palmer as ‘pro-choice but anti-stupid’, the song's strength lies not in trivialising real and immediate horrors, but in rendering them absurd enough to laugh at, and by extension pointing up the equal absurdity of their treatment in the social and political sphere. In a predictable if appropriately head-desking twist, the song’s subject matter meant that both the single and its Palin-baiting video were subject to an airplay ban in the UK. God knows what the Gallaghers made of it, but Oasis remains a jaw-dropping counterpunch for times when laughter is the most powerful weapon to hand.
Rhian Jones

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Who Killed Amanda Palmer]

The Weekly Sweep

Animal Collective – Brother Sport [Myspace] (Where their current profile picture teeters between 'pleasing' and 'awkward')

Au Revoir Simone – Another Likely Story [live YouTube]

The Bitter Springs - And Even Now [YouTube]

Bombay Bicycle Club - Always Like This [YouTube]

Brakes - Why Tell The Truth (When It's Easier To Lie?) [YouTube]

Broken Records - Out On The Water [live YouTube]

Camera Obscura - The Sweetest Thing [YouTube]

Felix - Death To Everyone But Us [Myspace]

Field Music - Measure [Myspace]

Florence & The Machine – You've Got The Love (XX remix) [YouTube]

Frankie & The Heartstrings - Hunger

Future of the Left - Arming Eritrea [YouTube]

Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks [YouTube]

Internet Forever - Cover The Walls [liveish YouTube]

Lucas Renney - These Same Stars [live YouTube] (Ex-Golden Virgins singer gets his Bill Callahan-ish acoustic lament on, with some of Midlake backing)

Los Campesinos! – There Are Listed Buildings [YouTube]

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - Higher Than The Stars [Myspace]

Rose Elinor Dougall - Fallen Over [Myspace]

Wojtek Godzisz — Rosette Nebula [Myspace]

The XX - Islands [live YouTube]

Noughties By Nature #26: Ash - Clones

Ash, then. Probably the best singles band of the last fifteen years, if we're honest. Meltdown was bigged up by everyone in Ash as being a departure for them to a heavier direction. It turned out that, of course, it was basically pop music with louder guitars and twiddlier solos than before. But Clones stuck out like a sore thumb from the rest - it was, as described by the band themselves, 'some heavy shit'.

The near tribal drums in the tracks intro are so deep as to invoke irritable bowel syndrome in the most hardy of listeners, and then the song quite literally explodes into a riff the Muse fans wish could have been on their last two albums. All the while, Tim Wheeler's lyrics touch on what a shame it is that everyone looks the same, a feeling that can only have increased amongst people as the decade has worn on. Of course, it's still got the singalong-a-chorus that almost all Ash songs have, and it's still, in essence a pop song. But that propulsive riff lifts it above almost everything that Ash have done post-1977. It's properly, actually brilliant.
Oliver Billenness

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Meltdown]

Noughties By Nature #25: Mclusky - To Hell With Good Intentions

In 1968, Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich gave an address to middle class American students on a mission service in Mexico about the hypocrisy of their charity, with a speech he called “To Hell With Good Intentions.” Illich was known for his often sarcastic, but clearly angry tone. That’s also a damned good description for the music of Mclusky. While it’s possible the members of Mclusky could be unfamiliar with the work of Ivan Illich, lines in their ferocious classic of the same name as Illich’s speech like “My love is bigger than your love” are fitting for the imposed benevolence of America’s middle class on poverty in other countries that pissed Illich off. As the old saying goes, the path to Hell is paved with good intentions. Mclusky and Ivan Illich would surely agree that we’re all going straight to Hell.
Nick Olsen

[Spotify]
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: McLusky Do Dallas]

Noughties By Nature #24: New Order - Crystal

The last ten years have seen New Order finally come to terms with their previous history, embracing Joy Division in a way that they had never done so previously, cementing their place in British music folklore with the films 24 Hour Party People and Control, and releasing yet another Greatest Hits collection with half the tracks being incorrectly labelled or pulled from the wrong source. Business as usual, then. We even got another split with a similar level of acrimony as their post-Republic break-up. This time it looks like they'll never play together again. But back to happier times, and their first single from Get Ready, their comeback album released long ago in 2001.

Yes, it's partly responsible for The Killers. Please don't hold that against Crystal. It's a celebration of all that New Order have ever been; twenty years of dance and rock reflected in a mirrorball. Everything is in its right place - the keyboards, the drums, Barney's gibberish lyrics, and yes, the bass of Peter Hook, driving things along just like it always does. It's the sound of a band remembering just why they were so good together. Nothing else on Get Ready or the follow-up Waiting For The Siren's Call came close to recapturing the old glories, but Crystal showed that they could still be as good as they were in the Factory era.
Ian Pointer

[Spotify]
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: Get Ready]

Noughties By Nature #23: Los Campesinos! - You! Me! Dancing!

All you ever need, in the field of creative endeavour, is to have a brilliant idea, and to do it brilliantly. The rest takes care of itself. Los Campesinos! are a band who have a lot of brilliant ideas. Whether you believe they execute all of them brilliantly would normally depend on the kind of music you're into, as it's clearly a taste thing. However, on this song, you're either with me or you're wrong. Sorry.

You! Me! Dancing! is blessed with a brilliant central refrain, one which sounds grand on twinned distortoguitars, it sounds grand on glockenspiel, it sounds grand on keebs, it just. Sounds. Grand. When it begins, happiness descends from on high, like a tortoise from an eagle's claws, right between the eyes.

Naturally, this being a pop song from an uncompromising, lyric-driven hardcore indie band (albeit an uncompromising lyric-driven hardcore indie band with an abiding love of Kenickie), this is a song which a lot of the band's fans dismiss for being slight, or throwaway. THAT'S how good it is.

Not that it IS slight, you understand. How could it be, with lyrics like this?

"I always get confused, because in supermarkets they turn the lights off when they want you to leave, but in discos they turn them on"

Or this?

"on the way home, it seems like a good idea to go paddle in the fountain, and that's because it IS a good idea, and we're all like how Rousseau depicts man in The State of Nature - we're undeveloped, we're ignorant, we're stupid, but we're happy."

Hardly 'I Like To Move It, Move It', is it?

Apparently Los Camp's third album is gonna be their masterpiece, but it's not out until next year, which gives us just enough time to play this until the mp3 is worn smooth. And believe me, we WILL.

PS: Extra points are awarded for having an incredibly exciting introduction, which I've always meant to use as an alarm clock ringtone thing. Imagine the kind of productive day you'd have after a start like that.
Fraser McAlpine

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Hold On Now, Youngster...]

Noughties By Nature #22: Kate Nash - Foundations

Some songs have a structure and style that instantly defines them as ‘classics’. No doubt many end of decade lists will feature songs by The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, White Strips, Arcade Fire etc. All the kinds of songs that journalists wet themselves over and will discuss in future years in Q/Uncut/Mojo type publications. It’s pretty damn likely that Foundations by Kate Nash will not be considered by many as such a classic. If you do, let me come round and make love to you, for we have a massive connection.

So why choose Foundations? Well, from the moment Nash kicked and skipped out of Myspace it was love at first listen for this writer. From the early gigs where we first met her before she signed a major label, to the day she sent me a message saying "OMG I’m number 2 in the mid-weeks," I felt an unexplainable bond with the music of Kate Nash that I haven’t felt before or since. "You said I must eat so many lemons ‘cause I am so bitter, I said I’d rather be with your friends mate ‘cause they are much fitter," is one of the funniest, cleverest, cockiest and most memorable lyrics we have ever heard. No argument. Yes of course the My Fair Lady gawd blimey LDN accent may have irritated the pants off many, but Foundations was an edgy, poignant and brilliantly constructed pop song that stood out like a sore thumb in a chart full of R‘n’B footballers wives tosh.
Robin Seamer

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Made Of Bricks]

Noughties By Nature #21: The Unicorns – Les Os

At first I was pretty hesitant as to whether I should actually put this forward as one of my songs of the decade. You see, like the rest of The Unicorns’ first (and only) album, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone, Les Os isn’t really a ‘song’, in the conventional sense; no verse, chorus, or middle 8 here thank you sir.

While The Unicorns might wilfully reject such trifles as ‘conventional songwriting’, on Les Os they rattle along playfully, throwing away killer hooks the likes of which so many self-consciously ‘kooky’ indie bands (here’s looking at you, The Wombats) would die for. The vibrant, sprawling pop these boys peddle on tracks like this only show how much of a shame it was that they split up so quickly; had they gave it a few more years, right now we could be looking at something really, really special.
James Edwards

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?]

Noughties By Nature #20: Lupen Crook - Junk N Jubilee

Reportedly recorded in Mr Crook’s hallway, presumably during one of his rare fixed-abode phases, Junk n Jubilee is scene-savaging par excellence, flecked with spit and sarcasm. Its tune is built around a steely scrape and skitter that sounds like the malfunctioning of a music-box, and a spray of squealing laughter that makes you tense with the urge to put your fist through the window of the Hawley Arms. Lupen’s pinched-tight vocal squeezes itself through the gaps between, with all the disgusted Cassandrine despair of the only sober passenger on a nightbus home from Dalston.
Rhian Jones

[YouTube]

Noughties By Nature #19: Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi - Hear The Air

My downstairs neighbours aren't bad people - they were incredibly decent when the boiler flooded their kitchen, for example - but they do have the unfortunate habit of arguing very loudly on a regular basis, often late at night when I'm trying to sleep. Alas, unlike the bickering couple in Hear The Air their hollerings tend not to involve disgust at the other's habit of listening to Pavement; then again, if they were to involve gallons of semen I'd rather not know about it. I'd imagine that if their rowing was set to relentless guitars, occasionally bolstered with some pleasing keyboard noises and the odd dramatic silence, this would probably improve matters as well. And if only they'd realise that the rhythm is soothing we'd all get a lot more sleep.

It was all the more surprising that Hear The Air was so thoroughly ace, because Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi were deeply ordinary. I saw them a few times, usually as second band on in a Camden backroom, and was never exactly impressed. Perhaps it was the presence of guest vocalist/guitarist Rachel Tomsk (of whom I know precisely nothing, other than that I saw her play the song with the band once and that she was introduced as being in another band, and that she was quite cute) that raised them to a level they'd never come close to again, or maybe it was that anything more than insults and rollicking guitars was beyond them. Still, one great single is more than [insert name of the terrible yet inexplicably successful band of your choice here] ever managed, so good for them.
Matt Sullivan

[YouTube]
[Album: Vague Us]

Noughties By Nature #18: Brakes – Cheney

On holiday in New York with a mate, looking for a band to see. I want to go and see The Besties, he wants to see Brakes. I’d just finished explaining how a band formed by the spare drummer in BSP were unlikely to be great, when we realised the venues were next door to each other and we could do both.

Brakes are good, then they play Cheney and i’m hooked.

If you are trying to make a point don’t faff around and include some cryptic line in the third verse, just tell us what you think and move on (or play it again). “Cheney, Cheney, Cheney, Cheney, Cheney, Cheney, stop being such a dick.” Eleven seconds of perfection. Point made, there is no need for anymore. And it reminds me of Napalm Death.
Matt Gaynor

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Give Blood]

Noughties By Nature #17: Bearsuit – Hey Charlie Hey Chuck

Although the death of John Peel prompted countless obituaries to cite his love of the White Stripes as evidence of his continuing relevance, really it was Bearsuit who exemplified the reason his place at Radio 1 still mattered – they made sweet, raucous, heart-breaking and bone-rattling kitchen-sink indie-pop (“In an era when almost everything is quite like something else, Bearsuit are not quite like anything”, lest we forget) that would not have been heard anywhere else other than, say, Norwich Arts Centre and yet so quickly would mean so much to so many. Their earliest singles still retain both a charming pop sensibility and a thrilling clatter of noise and screams that their occasional stage get-up of teddy bears swilling around in fake blood provided an apt metaphor for. Hey Charlie Hey Chuck, starting with the sound of (apparently) a toy turtle on the floor that – due to the opening line “There’s been an accident, oh no...” – instead sounds like panicked heavy breathing, perhaps reinvents the loud / quiet dynamic the best, making something sometimes sounding so serene simultaneously seem so sinister. Considering the lyrics are said to be about the human race having to ditch Earth and travel to a planet shaped like Charlie Brown’s head, that’s no mean feat. They may not quite have juddered the planet from rotating on its axis, but try and tell me that the Norwichcore scene at least half of, say, the last Indietracks line-up would even exist were this song never written.
Thomas Blatchford

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Team Ping Pong]

Noughties By Nature #16: Arcade Fire - Rebellion (Lies)

Funeral provides an interesting bisection in the decade. Before it: New Rock Revolution. After it: Fleet Foxes-fronted inclusive Americana, Modest Mouse and the Shins having US number one albums, the return of, to coin Mike Scott of the Waterboys' phrase, The Big Music. Hearing this some time in the second half of 2004 - it's easily overlooked now that they were as much a blog band as anyone - it was striking just what ambition it had, not to be successful or such trifles but just to take this unerring song that just builds and builds right over the top with its army of staccato piano, driving revving guitars and the odd violin flourish. Win Butler increasingly sounds like a man possessed by nothing more than the idea of "here's the sun/moon, it's alright" in a song about a life through the prism, suggested in Funeral's first half, of childhood as a source of imagination. A song that's bombastic doesn't have to be overblown or overpowering, it just needs to sweep you along.
Simon STN

[YouTube]
[Album: Funeral]

Noughties By Nature #15: Airport Girl - The Foolishness That We Create Through Love Is The Closest We Come To Greatness

Indiepop doesn’t come up with many epics. The three-minute perfect pop song ideal still seems to be held in high regard, long after commercial producers have padded the norm out to four and a half with reprises, extra choruses, key change, instrumental parts and longer intros (or it seems to be anyway, there’s probably an interesting graph waiting to be made of song length on number one albums over time)

And rightly so! Brevity is important in music, so explaining the brilliance of The Foolishness that We Create Through Love Is The Closest We Come To Greatness is tricky, as it clocks in at just over six minutes. I suppose part of it is the spontaneity in the lyrics that seems to force you onto the dance floor. “Just when I thought the chance was missed… well that’s when we kissed” being the moment that the song is hinged around. It just demands you dance to it.

The Foolishness… is also important for other reasons. It was unashamedly indiepop at a time when the genre was scattered all over the place and hard to find. For someone in the early days of discovering the genre at the time, this song seemed to say that it wasn’t all over. Dancing to Airport Girl at Indietracks in 2008 was proof of that.
So, um, I suppose if I have to explain it using the three-minute perfect pop song ideal, this is two perfect popsongs. Back to back. In the same song.

It saves you the bother of having to get up to put the stylus back to the start every other time too.
Dunc, The Autumn Store

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[YouTube]
[Album: Honey, I'm An Artist]

Noughties By Nature #14: Klaxons - Atlantis To Interzone

With rave air horn noises, a snatch of a female sampled vocal and a shout of “DJ,” the Klaxons deliver you into their hyperactive, almost violent, cacophony of a song that was soon to become the flagship for the dreaded term Nu Rave. But the fact remains that this is a blistering piece of music, that is constantly surprising, exciting and even three years later sounds energetically fresh. Atlantis To Interzone is the sound of speed addled teenagers thrusting glow sticks into each others backsides at an orgy. And loving every moment of it.
Robin Seamer

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[YouTube]
[Album: Myths Of The Near Future]

Noughties By Nature #13: Rachel Stevens - Some Girls

The Official Sport Relief song of 2004! Somehow, it seemed to completely escape the person responsible for making the decision that Some Girls was almost all about the perils of the casting couch and ambition. "You can get what you want...you might just have to get down on your knees...but, hey, champagne!" is perhaps not the right message for a charity to be sending out. Or maybe the sparkly schaffel beat won out over the lyrical content. Anyway, the single was a hit, entering at Number 2, saving Stevens' career after lacklustre sales on her first album, "Hunky Dory". For a moment, it looked like she was going to be one of the UK's biggest pop stars of the decade.

She never managed to capture the moment ever again (and you could make a decent argument that Richard X never managed to top this work, either), and her second album, despite being adored amongst the Internet Popist crowd, failed miserably. Rachel Stevens went off and did a successful run on Strictly Come Dancing, though the fates conspired to leave her the runner-up once again. Pop is a cruel mistress.

Do seek out the Richard X Extended Mix, which makes the links back to 70s glam rock even more explicit. Twice as long and almost twice as good!
Ian Pointer

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Funky Dory]

Noughties By Nature #12: British Sea Power - No Lucifer

It should have all been so easy (easy! easy!).

Produced with no little grandeur by G!YBE figurehead Efrim Menuck, Do You Like Rock Music? was supposed to have been the album that made British Sea Power go stratospheric, and with Waving Flags, they'd got their foot in the door. All they needed was one final charge, and when 'No Lucifer' was announced as the follow-up, success was assured...so they decided to sneak the single out on 10" vinyl - and even then, only featuring an inferior alternative mix of the track.

It's this wilful shunning of any form of convention that made British Sea Power one of the decade's most compelling bands, from the onstage bearfights, foliage and Kendal Mint Cake-distribution to the unique worldview of their lyrics - this is, after all, a band who opened their debut album with a track of plainsong, followed by a song hailing Dostoevsky's good looks. Like when Julian Cope surprised the universe with World Shut Your Mouth, No Lucifer is the sound of a band transcending their eccentricities and making something Very Special Indeed. Built from parts so disparate - wrestling chants, thunderous drums, keening little-boy-lost vocals and the kind of microsymphony that Brian Wilson might have made had he swallowed the Boys' Own Manual - that they shouldn't have worked on their own, let alone together, it's arguably their finest three minutes, and the sort of mini-epic that should really have inspired more people to try this at home.

Then again, thinking about it, it's probably a good thing it hasn't.
Alex Wisgard

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[YouTube]
[Album: Do You Like Rock Music?]

Noughties By Nature #11: At The Drive-In – Invalid Litter Dept.

They may well be remembered for much more raucous, nihilistic things: the flailing limbs, large hair and battered venues; the torch-bearing of palatable hardcore; the re-emergence of well-read rock, straight-edged before it became just another badge on your rucksack, the band once declaring that “the most punk-rock kids are the ones with books in their hands”; and, of course, this generation’s where-were-you-when-you-saw music TV moment in front of a slightly taken-aback Later… audience. However, Invalid Litter Dept. shines out of the centre of Relationship of Command for a reason. It’s not difficult to accept that their sand-beaten white-hot ferocity may generally not have been matched since. But when their weighty alt.rock dissipated, leaving room for plaintive piano and taut atmospherics, as well as giving Cedric’s lyrics – later to arguably become a parody of themselves – chance to weave morbidly caustic imagery, the band sounded angrier than ever. And no wonder, considering the song exists to rail against the murders of female factory workers in the band’s Mexican hometown, crimes largely ignored by the police. Incidentally, that the intensity created here is a prototype for the sort Mars Volta would later infuse with prog perhaps proves why they would always be better than Sparta.
Thomas Blatchford

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[YouTube]
[Album: Relationship Of Command]

Noughties By Nature #10: The Streets - Weak Become Heroes

In the millennial fervour for a generational spokesperson, unassuming Cockneyfied Brummie Mike Skinner proved an unexpectedly engaging contender. Original Pirate Material's chronicles of metropolitan male working-class life supplied the deromanticised dark side of Doherty's moon-faced adulation of urban squalor. Third single Weak Become Heroes, much more than a paean to the occasional perfection of chemical excess, was an elegiac triumph of looping piano and closing-credits strings that worked as both retrospective and epilogue. Rooted in the distinctly twentieth-century Summer of Love and the Government vs Repetitive Beats wars of the early 1990s, Weak Become Heroes stakes the same claims as Underworld’s Born Slippy for dance culture’s transcendent and egalitarian qualities, stumbles open-handed and grinning through Sorted for E's and Wizz while that song’s narrator looks on in studied contempt, before meandering home, one ill-judged takeaway poorer but rich in memories, as the night’s fluorescence fades to a drizzly grey dawn. Alternating clear-eyed observation with quiet reflection, Skinner tips his cap to his own heroes and influences, and sets the cap on a fractured fifteen-year dream in masterly fashion that leaves us ready to wake up, shake it off and move on, if not up.
Rhian Jones

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[YouTube]
[Album: Original Pirate Material]

Noughties By Nature #9: Eels - Mr E's Beautiful Blues

Eels seemingly don’t care about popular opinion, often following a fairly accessible album with something dark and gloomy, so its perhaps fitting that despite being a single and probably their ‘poppiest’ moment, this song is a hidden track on the related album.

It starts with a burst of static, a piano melody, a phone beeps, before the real tune kicks in. I have no idea what it's about, knowing Eels it could be about death, but it sounds so happy, there are harmonies and E exclaims "Goddamn right it’s a beautiful day".

It’s a simple song with the same melody present throughout, but there’s a lot happening and a variety of implementation. The sound of the circus coming to town in summer.
Matt Gaynor

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Daisies Of The Galaxy]

Noughties By Nature #8: Deerhunter - Vox Celeste

Deerhunter’s Weird Era Cont. was more of a mixed bag than Microcastle, containing plenty of solo compositions by members of the band, but the highlight of both discs was Weird Era’s Vox Celeste. It’s not as complex as some Deerhunter songs, but maybe its beauty is in its simplicity. The hazy vocals and noisy guitars immediately call to mind My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, but My Bloody Valentine never had a bassline this energetic, and the vocals, though difficult to discern, seem passionate enough to give it a human quality missing from most shoegaze. Anyone fans of the genre upset by Kevin Shields’ unfulfilled promises for new material should be more than satisfied with Vox Celeste.
Nick Olsen

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[YouTube]
[Album: Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.]

Noughties By Nature #7: Monkey Swallows The Universe - Sheffield Shanty

Sheffield Shanty is a dreamlike portrait of an alternate world that’s deftly painted in both the detail of its charming words and its languid music, subdued acoustic guitar and xylophone glittering like the stars used to navigate in it. Most exceptionally, despite its playfulness, it’s also a song soaked in an almost supernatural calm. To some extent the feeling is down to the sheer spaciousness of it, the willingness to let silence creep in at the edges, but it goes beyond that.

The plot in short: the city is flooded, "the seven hills became seven seas", but there are houses to be sailed, flags to fashion, and somehow everything’s coming up Nat Johnson. When ‘still the rains come’ it’s not with fear or foreboding, just with a powerful, unhesitant, acceptance. Listening feels like luxuriating in a world where time stands still and all worries are gone, all pressures are off, even as its images remain desolate.

It even pulls of breaking into Paul Simon without damaging the mood in the slightest. Plus "when you call me, you can call me... Captain" and the guitar sigh that follows is a moment that’s heart-warmingly affectionate and intimate. Then off we drift, towards High Green, with all the time in the world.
Iain Forrester

[YouTube (live)]

Noughties By Nature #6: Blakfish - Jeremy Kyle Is A Marked Man

Brutal and sarcastic pretty much sums up Blakfish's back-catalogue - both musically and lyrically. Taken from their EP See You In Another City, Jeremy Kyle... - despite the social statement its title suggests - seems to follow the more innocent plot of superhero vs supervillain and the ensuing distress. It's this simple but slightly abstract approach to the lyrical content, combined with an absolutely glorious chorus melody, that make it the pinnacle of Blakfish's career so far. This will kick your teeth in with such sublime accuracy that you won't know what's hit you.

John Helps, Maybeshewill

[YouTube]
[EP: See You In Another City]

Noughties By Nature #5: The Indelicates - Sixteen

Sussex contrarians the Indelicates have established themselves as one of the sharpest and shiniest pins to push into a popular culture gone once again smug, bloated and prickable. Their much-anticipated but little-hyped album American Demo suffered in places from a disappointing production that saw too many songs fall short of their vital and visceral potential. The band's third single Sixteen, however, had no shortcomings. Around a po-faced piano hook and Julia’s precise lilywhite trill, the song skips along, giddy with laughing in the face of scenesterettes before crashing to a halt in mock-terror of turning thirty. Neither the first nor the last lampooning of a cult of youth and stupidity, ‘Sixteen’ sparkles nonetheless with an accomplished irony and unashamed intelligence still glaringly absent in those against whom the band define themselves.
Rhian Jones

[YouTube]
[Album: American Demo]

Noughties By Nature #4: Comet Gain - My Defiance

When you see them live its got to be a surprise that Comet Gain ever managed to keep it together long enough to record something as great as the Realistes album, but record it they did and My Defiance is its crowning glory.

It sounds messy, it sounds cheap, the opening riff is great but obvious, but it has passion and a desire to get a message across. There are some fantastic lyrics - “I’m not scared anymore as my heart is broken and my heart is split in two” - and a great hook as Rachel chants “I want you, I need you” whilst the music spirals background. It’s powerful and insistent and leaves you breathless at the end. So you play it again.

Its the record you play after catching a glimpse of the X Factor to remind you why you like music. It proves you don’t need to like U2 to love rock’n’roll.
Matt Gaynor

[Spotify]
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: Realistes]

Noughties By Nature #3: Kylie Minogue - Can’t Get You Out Of My Head

"La la la la la la la, I just can’t get you out of my head, boy your lovin’ is all I think about." You only have to read those lyrics and you can probably hear that hypnotic minimalist disco beat pounding and thumping in your brain. Even now that futuristic white hooded split dress from the video is probably being visualised in your brain. Iconic is almost an understatement. Can’t Get You Out Of My Head is Kylie Minogue’s greatest moment. The evidence? The song was a number one hit single in forty countries, selling a staggering four million copies. In the UK it stayed in the singles charts for half a year.

But commercial success aside, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head deserves to be in any list of greatest songs of the decade. Why? Because it is one of the perfect pop songs of all time, not just this decade. So, what defines perfect pop ? A catchy hook. Check. A great melody. Check. Not more than four minutes long. Check. Instant disposability combined with massive longevity? Check. A song that makes you feel alive? Double check. Can’t Get You Out Of My Head meets all the criteria. But the perfect pop song is not just about ticking all the boxes. It’s about connecting emotionally with the masses in a pure and perfect kiss. Can’t Get You Out Of My Head achieved this in a way that very few singles this decade have. Four million people can’t be wrong.
Robin Seamer

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Fever]

Noughties By Nature #2: Art Brut – Formed A Band

Their name may have been a reference to Jean Dubuffet and Eddie may have confessed a deep love for Van Gogh, but Art Brut's entrance into the annals of rock with the call to arms Formed A Band may quite easily have been some sort of relational aesthetics experiment gone utterly right. Like a version of KLF's The Manual for a Libertines age, people did follow the command to do as they do ("dye your hair black! Never look back!") with aplomb; Team Band, having obeyed the instruction from a stage in Chicago, ended up touring America with them, while Art Brut 3 became The Space Peacocks, a man from West Virginia formed Art Brut p, and We Are Scientists became Art Brut 47. Regardless of the Situationist hi-jinx though, the song itself – still superior in its earlier form as released on Rough Trade – continues to be an exhilarating rally cry, doused liberally with a defiant sincerity which could easily have prompted another new phenomenon called the aural double-take. It remains a regret that their modest success means the Top Of The Pops dream may never happen, but the song "as universal as happy birthday"? Close enough.
Thomas Blatchford

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[YouTube]
[Album: Bang Bang Rock & Roll]

Noughties By Nature #1: Sugababes - Overload

Is it placing too much on this one song to suggest that this is where the pop as more than flyaway get-rich-quick studio concoction revolution began? Well, strictly there's quite a bit of studio work on it, not least from Neneh Cherry and Massive Attack (Blue Lines) production guru Cameron McVey, but the record emerged at a time when pop as a concept had been compartmentalised and ground down by the likes of A1 and Steps - primary coloured thrills for the kids, because anyone over that age will be listening to Travis. Added to that, they were a girl group, and such was the influx of post-Spice Girls girl groups that it was well established that PRs and journalists weren't so much as listening to demos from 'bubbly' groups of girls wanting to be the next Made In London or Thunderbugs. As such the London label reputedly sent promos out with no biographical information or pictures at all.

If you're doing that, you have to think the song is going to stand on its own two feet. And, oh, it does. It's not difficult to plot a line from the shuffling, shifting beat that coupled with the four note repeated bassline is too slippery and underground clubby for R&B as it was known then, breakdowns and surf guitar solo to Girls Aloud's Sound Of The Underground. For all the vocal attempts at modern girly sweetness it's an oddly dark track, as if trying to mirror its "one way ticket to a madman situation" with some sort of 3am rave existentialism.

They re-recorded this for their Best Of. Fools.
Simon STN

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: One Touch]