A lot of artists try to make soft-spoken, electronic-tinged indie rock, and most of their efforts inspire yawns. Juana Molina is among the most interesting practitioners of a style that the Postal Service took to the bank. The eerily gorgeous Un Día is her best collection yet.

Juana Molina, "Un Día"

But what really excites me about “Chest Fever” are the organ/drum/bass bit that runs from 3:01-3:34 and the section where Helm sings, “as my mind unweaves/I feel the freeze down in my knees.” Link these two parts, beef up the percussion to 21st-century specs, and add some shakers and you could have a killer soulful house track on your hands. Any producers out there want to take a crack at it? I will pay you… something.

“Chest Fever” [album version, illustrated with the wrong LP cover, lulz]

“Chest Fever” [live version, with long, amazing, Bach-inspired keyboard intro]

God that sample is annoying. No wait, now it's stuck in my head. It won't go away. Weezy's flow... he really sounds like he doesn't give a shit about anything. He really will cancel a show if security won't let him carry his gun on stage (his glock is sick). Every rapper boasts, but when Wayne says "Muthafuckah I'm Eeeeewwlll" you actually believe him. This album cut is much better than the mixtape version, without all that extraneous yelling and sample bullshit. This track is infectious; Lil Wayne is a "venereal disease" like he claims. "A Milli" is the best song ever (this week).

Tha Carter III comes out on Tuesday.

Please suspend your reflexive nostalgia for this song. Please don't think of Eddie Grant as a goofy one-hit wonder. Please listen to "Electric Avenue" with open ears, because it's a fucking serious song, and it's a great song, in the truest meaning of the word "great."

"Electric Avenue" flies alongside tracks like "Paper Planes" and "Waters of Nazareth" as an electro-pop innovator, simultaneously of its time and ahead of its time. It is as black and militant as anything by Public Enemy or Peter Tosh. It is an iconic moment that most of the world took for an MTV novelty.

There may have been no traditional "instruments" used in its creation--it's all drum machines, synths, and reverb, and brilliant, spacious production. Grant's punkish "AYE!" that opens the track, ground down by a digital/analog motorcycle rev; the lo-fi keyboard blips that were in vogue in 1983 and still in vogue 24 years later; a group-sung patois chorus wickedly cool and minimalist: These disparate elements add up to a dub-rock banger equally appropriate for your pre-teen roller disco days, a Brazilian favela streetcorner, or a mustachioed hipster DJ at Sing Sing.

And then there's the lyrical content and the video, both of which reveal gritty themes. Eddie Grant is originally from Guyana and grew up in London, home of the original "Electric Avenue," the city's first district to be illuminated by electric lights. The video takes place in a dark beachside ghetto--Grant's homeland? Kingston? Rio? Certainly not the bright lights of London. And there he is, intense and singing from the couch in his living room, which could be anywhere. Counter that image by a pair of faceless motorcycle riders (Daft Punk was taking notes back in '83), cruising through the slums, down to the beach. There they find Grant struggling through the waves, away from "the dark side of town."

Grant is a revolutionary:

Now in the street there is violence
And then there's lots of work to be done
No place to hang out our washin'
And then they can't blame all on the sun

Workin' so hard like a soldier
Can't afford a thing on T.V.
Deep in my heart I abhor ya
Can't get food for the kid
Good God

(Name another pop song to use the term "abhor.")

Who is to blame in one country
Never can get to the one
Dealin' in multiplication
And they still can't feed everyone
Oh no

The video shows the result of multiplication--the children that suddenly populate Grant's empty bar, the children that can't be fed. This is harsh, hardened stuff. Grant gets up from watching Shark Week on the couch and splashes into real life, landing half-dead on the beach, ready to swim out to broadcast to the masses on Electric Avenue. "Rock it in Miami!/Inna Brixton-ah!" he chants on the fadeout. The whole world must hear his song.

The video--weird, impressionist, a la MTV in the early days--is wrapped in a pixalated fog that would make Michel Gondry proud.

"Electric Avenue" is a fucking serious song, a great song, the Best Song Ever (This Week).

Voxtrot - The Start of Something

I wish there was an exact science behind catchy pop songs, some sort of undeniable formula that would explain why I like certain songs and not others. Of course, the formula would be different from person to person, but if you could figure out your own individual 216-digit number (that of course starts with 3.14) you could unlock the mystery of why certain music appeals to you.

I am trying to figure out why I like this Voxtrot song so much - what it is about this particular song that stands out against not only all of their other songs (which are usually good but not great), but also all the other bands that try to embrace this sound but generally don’t succeed at it. Like Sam mentioned in his Up & Coming posted below, it is impossible to talk about Voxtrot’s music, particularly their 2005 EP Raised By Wolves, without mentioning the Smiths. “The Start of Something” may very well be Voxtrot’s attempt at rewriting “This Charming Man,” but if there was ever a song that could be written again and again in variation without my complaint it might be that one. If there is one aspect of the Smiths’ song that Voxtrot has captured beautifully it is the “charm” of the original. Both are undeniably feel-good songs, walking down the lane with a bit of a strut and a small, sideways smile.

Past this point though, I’m not sure what it is about the song that separates it from all the rest as “great” in my mind. I like sound of the recording, the guitar tone - some technical aspects, sure, but that hardly impacts the overall listenability of the song over the writing and performance. I guess what really matters is that over the last three days of blizzard and typhoon, listening to this song in my car has helped me not want to drive it through a chain link fence and into the reservoir by my house.

Eric already extolled the synth-pop slickness of Mobius Band's set opening for Matthew Dear, and he's totally right: The Brooklyn trio made infectious, intelligent music that was both restrained and eloquent.

They saved the best song off their latest album, Heaven, for the end of the set. As I said in my Up & Coming this week, "Friends Like These" is the jaded inverse of LCD Soundsystem's sentimental "All My Friends." The song's slow-swinging chorus is pretty much the perfect musical tempo, funky and pendulous but rendered with a goofy white-guy bounce that's irresistibe. It's offset by a simple keyboard counter-beat and splashy cymbal work, while layers of stippled digital effects add sonic density to the otherwise bouyant instrumentation and Peter Sax's plain-but-trenchant vocals. It's an immaculately structured pop song that sounds totally original and sort of familiar.

Yeah, it's Monday, but it's never too soon to hear the Best Song Ever (This Week).

Click here to hear Mobius Band's "Friends Like These." Hat Tip to Hype Machine.

Here's something awesome:

It's so awesome, in fact, it's this week's Best Song Ever!

I'm a sucker for the optimistic fantasy metal (so much so that I even really liked Nelson's "After the Rain" when I was a kid... which I know isn't "metal," but when you're eight it is) and Dragonforce's "My Spirit Will Go On" caters to my strange guilty pleasure perfectly with fast-as-shit guitar solos that go on for minutes, and lyrics that contain all of the following key words and phrases required to make a fantasy metal song successful: Misery, death, demon, sanity, land of a thousand souls, carry on through the rain, memories of the slain, evil, point of no return, payment in blood, death is the destiny, power of the demon, horizon, war, wings of eagles, debauchery, and blade of death.

And check out the chrous:

In winds of torment forever more you will cry for just...

One more time to escape from all this madness
One more time to be set free from all this sadness
And one last time to be the one who understands
My soul and my spirit will go on, for all of eternity

If you can't appreciate this song, either genuinely or ironically, then you're a fool. I dare you to play drums that fast, I dare you to play guitar that fast, and I dare you to grow your hair that long. Dragonforce is the shit.

This song, the cornerstone of Devendra Banhart's new Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, has been taking up a large portion of my life. For a couple reasons: 1. I can't stop listening to it at home, especially at night, especially when it's raining, and 2. It's eight minutes long.

But goddam it's the best eight minutes of anything I've heard in forever. Here's what I said in my review in this week's issue:

The album properly begins with "Seahorse," which is the most electric, expansive eight minutes put to tape in years. The song is an epic acoustic/electric wish fulfillment that weaves the pastoral spiritualism of "Astral Weeks" with the shamanic sexuality of "L.A. Woman" and the unbound headiness of "Dark Star." Repeat listens prove it merits more praise than can be given here; the album is worth buying for that song alone.

Yes, it's a fullblown hippie freakout, and it sounds fucking fantastic.

Some songs can be pronounced timeless on arrival; "Seahorse" is one of them. It spans genres and eras; it floats, soars, and roars through a palette of moods, but it retains a cohesive, dramatic uplift through it all. That movement builds a story in the song, one that starts with a twangy barefoot meditation before jogging into a jazzy autumnal pirouette before launching into outer space gospel. Banhart really flexes all the variations of his voice here, sounding more plaintive, more spectral, more potent than ever before. I said it before, and I'm saying it again: Epic. "Seahorse" is the Best Song Ever (This Week).

Purists, nay-sayers, be damned. I love the Chromatics' cover of Kate Bush's "Running up That Hill" from their new album, Night Drive.

Chromatics - "Running up That Hill (Demo)" (Courtesy of 20JazzFunkGreats)

You know what's the worst thing about being smart? Making mistakes with people you love that you can't fix. It sends you into a downward spiral of depression and self-loathing. This is an example of a thought process:

"Aren't I a smart person? Smart people are supposed to solve problems, not create them. Now this person, who I really like, might hate me. And I have no way to repair the damage I've done. All I've got is my brain, and even that fucked up. I have nothing, and now this person might be gone from my life, and it's my fault. Smart people should be able to prevent catastrophe, that's what makes them smart. I am no longer worthy of this person's presence (if I ever was)."

You get the idea, but the thoughts are endless.

When this happens to me, I want to flee to some place seperate from other people. I want to beat myself up, because I figure that's the only way I'll learn. Suffering from self-hatred has it's advantages, and even if you ruined something that could have been really amazing for you, you deserve what you get. Even if it was an innocent mistake. Those are the worst kind, because you lose your innocence instantly. Everything gets complicated.

That's what this song is about. Johnny Cash made more mistakes than any of us, but the difference between him and us is that he knew how to tell people how it feels to fuck up. This song doesn't make me feel any better about what I've done, but at least someone knows how I feel, even if he's dead.

[Ignore any cheer in the song that you might imagine. He doesn't mean it. The instrumentation is too jaunty in this video version, but it's the only full version I could find on Youtube.]

There's never been a song to better portray the dark side of gangsterdom than "My Mind Playing Tricks on Me."

This is one of those hiphop songs that you know EVERY. WORD. BY. HEART--an ensemble piece by three guys that live the life, that know the material they're rapping from experience, that describe it in painful detail. And with a sense of humor--Willie D mistakes "three blind crippled and crazy senior citizens" for his arch-enemies.

There are so many awesome lyrical details and killer points of delivery, especially in Willie D's verse: the way he pronounces the "W" in "sword," for example.

I remember the first time I heard this tune--An older friend from New Jersey was visiting me in Florida, and he played it for me while we were sitting in his grandma's car. I was immediately entranced, and I went out and bought the cassingle (that I still have, miraculously). I never got into NWA or much West Coast gangsta rap, mainly because it felt so cartoonish, caricatured, so far from my South Florida high school existence. Geto Boys certainly made larger than life music, but this track was the most real, honest, and prickly portrayal of G-ism that I'd ever heard. At the time I had just started smoking weed, at which point everyone not in your immediate weed-smoking circle becomes the enemy. Weed-headed paranoia ran rife in my crew of friends; it sounds bad, but that was part of the fun of getting high.

My favorite verse, by Scarface:

Day by day it's more impossible to cope
I feel like I'm the one that's doing dope
Can't keep a steady hand because I'm nervous
Every Sunday morning I'm in service
Praying for forgiveness
And tryna find an exit out the business
I know the Lord is lookin at me
But even still it's hard for me to feel happy
I often drift when I drive
Having fatal thoughts of suicide
BANG and get it over with
Then I'm worry free, but that's nonsense
I gotta little boy to look after
And if I die then my child'll be a bastard
I had a woman down with me
But to me it seemed that she was down to get me
She helped me out in this shit
But to me she was just another bitch
Now she's back with her mother
Now I'm realizing that I love her
Now I'm feeling lonely
My mind's playing tricks on me

That's about as raw and real as hiphop can get--seeking solace at church, getting lost in thought behind the wheel, considering suicide but staying strong for family, missing the lost girlfriend... This was before "emo rap," and this is Scarface, a motherfucking gangsta, but dude's about as troubled as a human can be.

Interestingly, "My Mind Playing Tricks on Me" is an example of the radio edit being a stronger version than the original. A bunch of rhymes are way stronger without the profanity--"I got my hand on a chrome-plated trigger" is more descriptive than "I got my hand on a motherfucking trigger." And in Bushwick's final verse: "It was dark as death on the street" sounds a lot darker than "It was dark as fuck on the street."

But that last line

"...My hands were all bloody from punching on the concrete. Ah man homie! My mind's playing tricks on me..."

Damn! That's hard.

And there's no chorus! It's all about that guitar lick, sampled from Isaac Hayes' "Hung Up on My Baby." That lick, and this song in general, has been sampled and suggested left and right since this song appeared in 1991, most recently by Clipse--direct descendants of Geto Boys--on Hell Hath No Fury.

A five-minute-long hiphop song with no chorus that's totally unforgettable... minimalist, unique, one of the most visceral hiphop songs of all time--and certainly the Best Song Ever (This Week).

Is he in a state of arrested development or something? I wish I had been in the studio for this performance on some morning news station in Georgia. They seem totally freaked out:

What a freak! But I lurves him, and I lurves the song "Snake Mistakes" so much I picked it for this week's Best Song Ever.

You can listen to it here.

I'm pretty sure this song is about three things: a snake making mistake, someone getting mad at bees, and someone having a really cool dad. Any of the following could be possible: Dan Deacon feels like a snake, Dan Deacon gets really pissed at bees that hover, Dan Deacon has a really cool dad. But somehow I really don't think Dan Deacon is writing about himself. I think he's writing from some alternate universe where he could inhabit the bodies of multiple beings at once and direct them in a massive piece of theater that could solve global warming.

SRSLY!

Oh, and it's funky as hell.

There are so many awesome elements at work in "Close to Me": Robert Smith's queasy, breathy vocals; a great horn line (plus a kickass sax-vs-trumpet solo in the middle); that dinky keyboard/percussion accent; that quietly humming organ that swells beneath the whole thing; and most importantly that badass breakbeat that's actually totally funky. It all comes together in a masterful arrangement that will stay with you for days.

Smith warbles about that excruciating, intoxicating moment where the mere proximity of love, just the potential for it, is enough to pop your eyes out of your head. It's an universal human emotion that this song conveys perfectly. I believe Smith would rather long for love than have it--which is an alright outlook, if you think about it.

"Caterpillar" is similar in that poor Robert still refuses to tarnish the object of his desire--this "caterpillar girl"--by actually obtaining it. "You flicker and you're beautiful, you float inside my head"--that's as close as he's gonna get. She changes willfully, habitually, more than a guy can keep up with.

And the song--it's all about that chorus, that beautifully sung chorus and its gorgeous, gospel-ish melody. It's one of the most uplifting, almost spiritual melodies I've ever heard in a pop song. An acoustic guitar strums underneath, a clean conga tap keeps pulse against castanets and keyboard chords. The beginning, too--that weird violin and scratched piano strings. It's the sound of butterflies flocking, or maybe the sound of metamorphosis. The whole thing is another exquisitely arranged gem.

Both of these songs prove that goth got soul and the Cure is quite fucking good, which is why they tie for The Best Songs Ever (This Week).

It was originally on the Epitaph comp Punk-O-Rama III, and more recently it was also included on a two-disc collection of NOFX extras called 45 or 46 Songs That Weren't Good Enough to Go on Our Other Records.

I can't find an MP3 or video to link to, so you'll have to hop on Soulseek, Napster, Limewire, or whatever you kids use to steal music, but first let me tell you about what you can expect.

It's just a NOFX song. It's not going to stop global warming (if such a thing even exists), and it's not going to apologize for the Holocaust (if such a thing even happened... Oh come on, I'm kidding!), it's just a really fucking fast and whiny passionate punk rock song from the '90s that's remembering how great things felt before punk rock turned into a business and a trend (by a band who was around for the before and the after).

All it takes for me to appreciate this song is to concentrate on the blistering drumming and the pissed off lyrics. I know it ain't genuis poetry, but at least it's honest.

Remember the good old days
Remember the sound
Remember the sweet mustiness underground
No, I don't feel the need for relivin'
Some things are better off dead

The words work so well with the energy of the song. I know NOFX is more of a joke than I’m admitting here. Hell, they'd claim that as quickly as you would, but a) I like them despite that and b) this song is loaded with an urgency that their goofier material never came close to possessing. It's about a dying scene, a dead friend (Tim Yohannan of Maximum Rock N'Roll, I assume), and the fight to never forget the past while still trying to stay relevant to the future. And if any band knows about that battle, it's NOFX. And I think they capture that really well in under three-minutes.

Weird to take a NOFX song that seriously, right? I think so too.

(If you can't find it and want to hear it, e-mail me. I'll send it to you. Just don't tell the authorities.)