221. "No One Knows" by Queens Of the Stone Age

Lyrically there are some inversions of phrase that go counter to usual speech idioms, which annoys me, but that may just be me. There are also some pretty cynical lines in this one, distrusting "rules," distrusting "pills," distrusting whether anyone knows anything. It's a dangerous soil to plant yourself in. But it's a hard rock song, and for that world it's pretty par for the course.

Musically, gee, there is so much to love. The jaunty pace, the ragtime feel, the inspired Dave Grohl drumming, the scaling chorus guitars that drop into grinding resolutions, the savage middle instrumental with its rousing boil-over of triplets, the Black Sabbath-esque solo/free form that follows.

When the instrumental finally drops out, except for the bass, it's all about the swift drum fill leading the instruments back in. Grohl is a master of creative one-beat pick-up fills. These style points make a song.

Where does heavy music truly live these days? What is its venue in our culture, other than the dive clubs and the occasional festival in the sticks? On a daily basis, this is more brain music than anything now, driving (fast) music at best. $50 reward to the person who finds this music a fitting new habitat. Until then, it'll be bashing around my skull.

220. "No Excuses" by Alice In Chains

This is a blues song in the original tradition - a vehicle to talk about tough times.

Alice In Chains were, according to Chris Cornell, the most "suburban" of the core Seattle grunge bands, coming from a relatively well-to-do area outside Seattle proper.

That doesn't mean their music spoke to pure suburban, well-to-do experiences. This song exemplifies the working-class imagery that made this music a rare inspiration to the lower-class kids I grew up around in my North Dakota settlement:

"It's okay
Had a bad day
Hands are bruised from
Breaking rocks all day
Drained and blue
I bleed for you
You think it's funny, well
You're drowning in it too"

Musically, the short droning guitar measure is a modernization of a traditional blues measure. Blues works in short phrases, where the guitar phrase calls, the vocal wails in response, short syllables at a time. There is something about this pattern that satisfies and expresses a tired mind. The singing harmonies are trademark Alice In Chains, incessantly parallel. In some songs, it's too much; here, it's really put to classic use.

And like the best Alice In Chains songs, the chorus is a definitive melodic burst, singable to the deaf heavens.

219. "Nicotine & Gravy" by Beck

Just one of the most fun epics in all music creation here.

You know my favorite part? In those choruses, listen for the "rolling" piano building up to the end of each measure. Man, what a tricky, subliminal effect. You want a song that pays insane attention to dozens of little details? This is your mural.

But no, my real favorite part is the cacophony of merging vocal lines near the end, the overlay of many great melodies presented over the course of the song. Pure bravura!

So many phases in this song, each unbelievably effective, like escalating levels of music heaven to challenge Dante's famous hell. Like Dante, there is only one Beck, and he's all ours.

218. "New York City Cops" by The Strokes

The simple, fun, heavy rock of the Strokes. Catchy parts, excellent changes, and a beautiful Julian Casablancas singing performance.

Good line: "They act like Romans, but they dress like Turks."

The song was left off the band's debut album because, just weeks prior to the album's release, the September 11 attacks had made criticism of the New York City police force near treasonous. Remember when treason was convenient?

217. "New Slang" by The Shins

The Shins don't sound like this anymore...

This was their break-out tune, the one that got them discovered and signed. And it eventually raised their profile with its inclusion in the soundtrack for the movie Garden State.

Garden State is a movie that will stick with you for a while after you see it. The song and the film share a major theme - this strange disillusionment with one's hometown. The song talks about it in a really apt way: If maybe the singer had felt a little more included, a little more accepted, he sees how he could've easily made himself right at home and been happy there forever, right along with the bakers who wake at dawn and ply their trade for the daily traffic. There was just something keeping him disinvited.

Garden State, in a way, tries to complete the arc of the song in a hopeful way, dramatizing this turning point where the main character actually finds love on a trip back to his hometown. I can tell you first hand, there is no experience truly as heightened as finding that person who will marry you, and you instinctively know this with an amazed certitude. In that experience, the hometown in Garden State actually ceases to be just the hometown for both of these people, and it becomes the setting for something absolutely new to them. The movie ends on this great kind of cliffhanger where all the possibilities lay out ahead of these two people who have found each other, and you really hope you are watching the origin of some great, long story between them.

Francois Truffaut actually explored a similar arc decades earlier, but he didn't just stop in the first act; he continued to make engrossing sequel films about the same couple, following them caringly, then painfully to divorce, and even further to a kind of rapprochement. He probably would've made a sequel or two more, but cancer robbed him from us. Now, Truffaut's male lead was performed by one of the most charismatic film actors of the 1960s, the feisty Mr. Jean Pierre Leaud. I don't know if I could handle multiple installments of Zach Braff. And Natalie Portman had a Republic to die for... So I think we're good where Garden State left off.

I've totally de-railed this post.

The lyrics really are impressive, so full of novel wordplay and metaphoric detail:

"I'd a danced like the king of the eyesores"

"Dawn breaks like a bull through the hall"

"God speed all the bakers at dawn may they all cut their thumbs,
And bleed into their buns 'till they melt away."

The music structure is two full verses, then a shortened verse the third time around. There are three choruses, but the third uses new lyrics as a kind of resolution. I love little structural decisions like this to keep the song from being boringly symmetrical. 

It's all held up by a guitar part for the rainiest of rainy days.

I close by praising the vocal melodies of James Mercer, here in his early period. This is what truly makes the song. He is one of the masters of the long phrase, unfurling these elegant, calm lines with assured series of chord changes underneath to compliment, breaking standard time signature so subtly in places as to be almost unnoticeable.

His gifts are plainly apparent in this song, which is why he was so frustrated writing it, not knowing if his talent would ever find appreciation, where he was at or anywhere else. But it turns out he had good friends who championed him, got this song heard by the right people, and for him, it worked out. We all heard what we were meant to hear.