Best Songs of 2007 – Part I
Entire albums are often inconsistent and rarely excellent throughout, so these songs, in no particular order, will instead stand as my top picks for 2007.
As a glam groupie first and foremost, it’s only proper I put this sugary romp to start the list. Forget any glowing review I could give these guys, this spring they’ll be opening up for the New York Dolls. How about them candy apples?
Now gone solo, this track is Siouxsie’s slow stalk through heartbreak. Her confident snarl belies the mournful lyrics (“What am I gonna do/ Now that I know the truth/ It’s loveless, loveless”) and melancholic xylophone line that snake their way throug the song. Steeped in that bleak romantic style that’s classic Siouxsie.
Bell Hollow’s “Under the Milky Way”—and I only make such a comparison to convey the stunning sound design and lachrymose lyrical choices that make this song so perfect. Listen and try not to fall in love.
Just what you want from Manson – his black and bleeding heart gouged out and held inches before your eyes. As ever it’s dripping with deliciously bad sentiments like, “Blow out the candles on all my Frankensteins/ Hope my death wish will come true,” and extended, OTT hair metal solos. Kill me now.
A filthy groove that would be right at home in a strip club, save for the fact that singer Josh Strawn is commenting on Spain’s civil war. Aestheticizing politics almost as well as The Sisters, boys. Listen and try not to touch yourself.
Demented disco from San Francisco. Minimal yet excessive, the vocals yelp and bite with a fevered glam pitch. (And then you dance your ass off.) Check out yet another band from one of my favorite indie labels, Hungry Eye Records.
Yet another local NYC band making music that brings a blood-tinged tear to my eye. They jokingly call it their “Freebird,” but I’d say it’s more like the gloomiest power ballad that the Psychedelic Furs never recorded. An interview with these chaps shall be up in 2008.
Jennifer Herrema still gives me chills with her dirty, dirty delivery. Mountain meets Metallica with a psychedelic noise rock aesthetic. There’s just no other band mixing as strange a brew as RTX.
New York City’s nouveau dandies still stick to their sick semen-soaked, whiskey-infused sounds that made me fall in lust with them over a year and a half ago. Except now, the recording quality is good! Always a spectacle in person with the music to back up the mayhem, I’d suggest you see this band before the next full moon. U2, The Cult, and The Chameleons are dead, and so the hunt begins…
