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The 10 Best Bright Eyes Songs
“To me, Conor Oberst resembles Patti Smith a great deal,” R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe told me in an interview back in 2008. “As a performer, as a magnet. He’s just got that thing that she’s got.” The...
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The 10 Best The Band Songs
The Band has a deserved reputation as one of the true oracles of American music at its essence — their seamless distillation of blues, jazz, folk, country, rockabilly, and soul can tell a 200-year...
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The 10 Best Deerhunter Songs
“I want to be the Patti Smith of now, with something like ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger’ blaring out of kids’ speakers. I fantasize about that, but I’m not going to be that. I’m just not that dangerous,”...
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The 10 Best LCD Soundsystem Songs
It’s kind of a stretch to connect James Murphy’s most recent dismissal of an LCD Soundsystem reunion with the release of “Get Lucky“, which happened within a few days of each other, but it’s still...
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The 10 Best Fiona Apple Songs
Where are you, Fiona Apple? After a banner 2012, the singer-songwriter recently cancelled her only scheduled appearance for 2013, at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound festival; she also torpedoed a slew of...
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The 10 Best Suede Songs
Before there was Britpop, there was Suede. Way back in ’92, Blur were already around, having dropped an album no one much cared about. Pulp had been around forever, long enough to have had their shot...
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The 10 Best Arcade Fire Songs
Over Memorial Day weekend, it was breathlessly announced that Arcade Fire were in the process of mixing their new album. Few other details have been released about the follow-up to 2010′s Grammy...
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The 10 Best Magnetic Fields Songs
There’s a scene in the trailer for the 2010 Magnetic Fields’ documentary Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt And The Magnetic Fields where a cab driver asks Stephin Merritt, “Why are they making a...
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The 10 Best Pink Floyd Songs
Time has a marvelous ability to render the absurd familiar. Mankind can harvest vast energy from the basic stuff of matter, using means that only people with considerable higher education can even...
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The 10 Best T. Rex Songs
“My brother’s back at home with his Beatles and his Stones/ But we never got it off on that revolution stuff/ What a drag/ Too many snags/ Now the television man is crazy saying we’re juvenile...
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The 10 Best Daft Punk Songs
In 1992, Daft Punk’s once and future idol Brian Wilson said, “It was a childhood dream of mine to make music that made people feel loved.” That same year, Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel de...
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The 10 Best Beach House Songs
Baltimore’s Beach House are perhaps the most unlikely indie success story of the past few years. They play the game by their own rules, turning down high profile tour slots and TV advertisements, and...
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The 10 Best Townes Van Zandt Songs
Townes Van Zandt, the elegant Texas troubadour who authored some of the finest songs ever written over the course of his 52 troubled years, was always quick to make it known that he was very much in on...
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The 10 Best Shins Songs
The Shins were one of the preeminent pop acts of the ’00s, often mentioned as flirting with becoming their decade’s version of R.E.M. or Pavement. Frontman James Mercer began the writing of the band’s...
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The 10 Best Bloc Party Songs
Back in 2005, the year of their stellar debut album, Silent Alarm, Bloc Party truly felt invincible. The British quartet wrangled explosive melodrama from the simplest of rock ‘n’ roll tools: the...
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The 10 Best Pulp Songs
Way back before poptimism became a thing that went beyond anti-rockism and into the territory of taking every sound ever very seriously — I am still not on board with the ’70s schmaltz-rock moments of...
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The 10 Best Soundgarden Songs
For a while there, it seemed like people forgot about Soundgarden. If you got into Soundgarden in the ’00s, you got into them during what was a bit of a wasteland for the band. While their peers and...
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The 10 Best Le Tigre Songs
Le Tigre was a band that was never supposed to be. What was initially founded in 1998 as a backing band for riot grrl legend Kathleen Hanna’s lo-fi electronic solo project Julie Ruin ultimately became...
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The 10 Best Pixies Songs
The best part of getting into music while growing up is the constant sense of discovery. This feeling disappears as the years go by. Most adults who spend a lot of time and money on music know the lay...
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The 10 Best Leonard Cohen Songs
There’s just no getting around it: writing about Leonard Cohen is an intimidating proposition. Trying to put into words the magic of Cohen’s art is like trying to play a guitar solo about Jimi Hendrix....
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