[Right. Eight months late, but that’s still better than never. I had it mostly written for the first week in January, but since then the SA “thing” was happening I decided to put it off. After all, it’s meant to be a cute celebratory event about friends mocking me for my failings of taste rather than the cheap seats lobbing shit. A delay on something that isn’t paying and has missed its deadline tends to stretch out and… well, eight months changes everything. There’s a mass of stuff from 2005 which I discovered after the fact, none of which I’m going to include. My relationships with a lot of these songs have grown or shrunk. Hell: Some of them have got stories so powerful attached post December 31st 2005 I can’t listen to them without it in mind. I’ll probably mention them, it won’t change whether they’re included or not. There may be exceptions upon my whims and the influence of this bottle of cheap corner shop white that’s keeping me company. And Ed comments are me talking about my later take on it]

An atypical year. But aren’t they all?

Out of all the Top 40s I’ve done since starting this venerable tradition, back before most of you were born in the mystical winter of 2003, this is the one I’m least happy with. The concept is that it’s songs that were released this year, with a little tweaking – generally singles, but not always. This year, that rule alone makes the list something of a lie, as a fair chunk of what I’ve been listening to /hasn’t/ come from there.

Retro and History have weighed on the stereo more than usual. For this, I mostly blame a couple of books. For several months after publication, Simon Reynold’s Rip It Up And Start Again sent me back into the archives, both returning to past pleasures and things which I simply hadn’t investigated properly before. I’ve listened to more Joy Division this year than any since… well, probably ever. If it was a chart just about the inside of my head, a certain Orange Juice track would find itself Top 10.

That’s the history part. The retro part is the fault of Phonogram. There was a month where I force-fed myself everything from that 94-96 period where the book was based to try and really get back to the place I occupied in the period. Even the bad stuff. Having to listen to Kula Shaker again reminded me that there’s nothing actually playful about the full-body loathing of it, and it was a pleasurable surprise I could still find pain in it.

And, as Dave McNamee told me after a long debate about problems with modern music, perhaps I’m just getting old.

So between the two, that’s a lot of listening time devoted to the old than the new. I’ve also been picking up on stuff I somehow missed over the last few years – Girls Aloud’s “Grafitti My Soul”, Lightning Bolt’s “Assassins” or “Dracula Mountain” and (especially) Melt Banana’s “Shield for your eyes, a beast in the well of your hand”. Three of the four would be top 10, with Melt either one or two. While I’ve been listening to Lightning Bolt’s Hypermagic Mountain, I haven’t quite gravitated towards any one track there.

So that’s the problem of the Old. The new has a few twists too.

In terms of New Music, there’s another main influence. I’ve moved to Bristol. This means two things. Firstly, I’m getting out to see a different selection of bands more often. It’s an infinitely livelier city gig wise than Bath. There’s always interesting music here, though often people who haven’t released a record. The second influence is that since my girlfriend gets up for work and has the radio on, I’ve listened to more commercial radio for any point since… well, since I left Stafford. I’ll expect that they’ll be a higher proportion of tracks the non-music-obsessives know than usual. I’ll also expect a little more mockery than usual from the music obsessives for getting in touch with my inner indie-kid.

(Fuck – there was a note of Dakota by the Stereophonics scrawled in the document. Deleted, as it was more the surprise that they’d produced something that wasn’t completely woeful than a genuine love, but a good signifier of where my head is. There was even a few seconds where I thought I may actually like “Fuck Forever”, before realising I was just drunk. Again.)

This list is unusual in another way. As I start to write it, I have no idea what’s going to be number one. I think it’ll be a case of writing it all, and then deciding at the last minute who comes on top.

I also get the feeling that I’m missing more than usual from my notes through the year. One of the top-10 contenders was visibly missing, and if I didn’t make a note of that, what chance is there of me having not overlooked something even less central.

Let’s do this thing, right here.

40 – Ugly, Sugababes.
Where, I fear, I’ll part company with the Sugababes even as they part company with themselves. The entire world loved Push the Button, but it seemed etheric and insubstantial in all the wrong ways (though did like that Mutya forgot to wear trousers in the video). Ugly, on first listening, was one of the worst songs of the year. Afterwards it wasn’t. Pop Music! Worth noting that it’s heart-warming method of realising that anyone who says people are ugly /are/ ugly can be flipped into a misanthrope’s statement that everyone /is/ ugly. Sniff.

39 - Chicago - Sufjan Stevens
Going through the list I suddenly realise that I’ve actually only got 39 records down. Can’t strain my brain to think of another one, so insert this. A Complete cheat, as I’ve barely listened to the album yet, but should make Walker, fans of US State-based-guitar pop and the little baby Jesus happy. Why Chicago? Well, I just played it and the concubine immediately started to mock it. Being a particularly pretty agitant always a good reason to like anything. Also, horns. [Actually, I’ve listened to it non-stop for the last eight months, and if I did the list now would be Top 20 at least – Ed]

38 - Kittens and Puppies – War Against Sleep
Bristol’s very own Scott Walker plays it cute with the prettiest song from this year’s album. So heart on sleeve romantic that you find yourself exploring the song’s velvet folds in search for a hidden dagger. I still can’t find it, and the absence creates an odd chill.

37 - Shot Me Down - Audiobullies
Blame the radio #1. Post Kill-Bill, the Nancy Sinatra rip is fucking obvious. Post Kill-Bill, the Nancy Sinatra rip is Fucking awesome. Big and dirty and soft and sad and really big and dirty. Rest of the album, of course, is shit.

36 - Down River – Gravenhurst
At the Christmas ATP, Gravenhurst’s (brilliant) album “Fires in Distant Buildings” was played literally between every single set on the main stage. It seemed both entirely natural and completely unexpected, which is a good metaphor for Gravenhurst. Fiercely ambitious, Talbot’s spidery folk here expands in spiderlands directions. The best track is an exemplar of all this: Down River sounds like its title – a vocal floating away, emerging from a dying man’s lips, bobbing in the gentle waves.

35 - Pink Ink – Shooting at Unarmed Men
For the tumbling post-McLusky melody line: “She’s gotta little bag! She’s crammed with her leg-hair”. Well, like, /obviously/.

34 - Emily Kane – Art Brut
Recall drunkenly arguing with Ste about this. He posited it was the worst song he had ever heard. I wittily countered with a “IT’S FUCKING GREAT!”. It’s a regular Wildean circle here. The album as a whole was great – including “Rusted Guns of Milan”, being one of the best songs about Impotence from a Male point of view ever written* – but Emily Kane just takes off after the counting off the days since he’s seen this Emily Kane lass, spitting about “I want schoolgirls on Buses screaming your name”. Sentimental and plain mental, in equal helpings.

*Best song about impotence from a female point of view: Stutter, Elastica.

33 - Dark Angel – Katie-Jane Garside
There’s been a lot of Katie-Jane this year in my life. Live gigs, comics and… solo material. Lo-fi bedroom in an asylum trip-hop with Bad Alice Vocals. Stately, in a kingdom of the dead, a waltz between doomed lovers after their doom has already found them.

32 - Insidious Winge – SJ Esau
Think this was this year. If not, close enough. While Cat Song was crazier – hell, almost anything else SJ Esau does is crazier – this is where you start if you want to explore his oblique soul. A flurry of acoustic guitars and a smear of sarcasm and, by the time the winge winge condensces into the weary “It’s like waiting for a bus: when it comes it’ll probably full of total utter fucking cuts”, you’re in love.

31 - Hollerback Girl – Gwen Stefani
This is partially guilt, as after I was dismissive to What You’re Waiting For last year, before it emerged into one of my utilitarian pop-song standards early this year. Any time inertia started to drag me down, it got turned on and I got turned on and I stopped waiting for. Partially guilt, yeah, but more that Hollerback Girl’s practiced, inspired quirk and the B-A-N-A-N-A-S!

30 - Rama Lama – Sons and Daughters
Arab Strap meets the Bad Seeds, and gets an inevitable nod in this list. It’s all about the storytelling and the tension and the DARRRR-dar-darr-darr-darra-dum and the whistling and the Scotish Fishwife who barges in and STARTS TO HARANGUE US RELENTLESSLY ABOUT SOMETHING OR ANOTHER. I’ve also just realised that it starts with us being asked to “listen”, which gets bonus style points.

29 - I Feel Just Like a Child - Devendra Banhart
Yeah, yeah, yeah: fucking hippy. And yeah, yeah, yeah: It’s a little like drowning in a lake of whimsy. And yeah, yeah, yeah: there’s no “yeah yeah yeahs”, which always reduces any song. But put all that aside, and this is as compulsive and light as the swing of a thin summer dress over bare thighs. If I still went to Glastonbury, this is what I’d be humming to myself. You know – assuming it’s not one of the years when you’re waist deep in a lake of faeces.

28 - Want You – Afriampo
Cutchy-cutchy-cutchy-cutchy!

27 - Scotch Chicken – DJ Scotch Egg
A gameboy and a gentleman screaming FUCK!!!! and/or discussing the merits of popular fast food franchises through a loudspeaker, together as nature intended.

26 - Jumpers - Sleater-kinney
Almost impossible to choose a single track of their album. Let’s go for second single, Jumpers, as among the absolutely FEARSOME propulsion and aimed aggression of the rest of the album, this was nervy and delicate… but never gave the impression it was about to break. [If I were to do this now, I’d go with Modern Girl, but that’s tied to a particular car drive in San Diego sixth months after this list was written, so screw it. – Ed]

25 - California – Rogue Wave
And talking about SF people, Laurenn – driving the car above – pointed me in the direction of California. “Screw California/And friends who are never there”. Which made a lot of sense when I first heard it, and makes even more sense now.

24 - Pink lady lemonade - Cosmic Mother Temple
Saw two magnificent gigs from these bearded Japanese gentlemen who managed to work out a way to make everyone else acid casualties through pure sound alone. Having them close the winter ATP with Damo Suzuki on vocals was just about as good as rock and roll got in 2005. (“I am Damo Suzuki” by the Fall is another one of those not-this-year tracks of the year). Fucking hippies. FUCKING AWESOME HIPPIES.

23 – Rocket - El Presidente
Worth noting this is the first time that Lazarii introduced me to a pop record I actually liked. Now he’s an interesting case – going from the whipping boy of various forums to one of the best of a new wave of games journalists in four years. Anyway – this is Post-Electric Six pop-funk with a four-to-the-floor forming so tight a seal that you could use it to protect your kitchen floor.

22 - Love Me Like You – Magic Numbers
There’s been a whole lot of pretty, effective modern rock music in the last year and a bit. This is the prettiest, the most effective and the one which seems out of place when listened to half-drunk, late on a Sunday Night. And you have to applaud their storming off Top of the Pops when the presenter made gags about their chubbiness. You do. I mean it. You really do.

21 - Golddigger – Kayne West
Misogyny you can dance to. The best kind.

20 - Rebellion (Lies) - Arcade Fire
Funeral was one of my albums of the year in 2004. Thankfully its delayed release in the UK meant that by the time it was starting to be played to death on the radio I was back into it. In my walks into Bristol city centre and back, Rebellion (Lies) never failed to make my step up a half-beat. Also, for the record, their gig in Bristol was probably the best of the year. As a song, desperately manipulative, yes, but mostly just aching with straight desperation and the urge to escape.

19 - Heartbeat – Annie
Changed my mind on Annie in 2005 totally, and since the album was only released over here then gives me a chance to make amends for sneering at it in 2004. As pretty as a pretty girl. A really pretty girl. The sort who walks past and you turn your head and you sigh, and then that sigh condensces into a beat and which jumps out of your mouth and skips down the street. Yeah, that good.

18 - My Friend Dario - Vitalic
Didn’t listen to this nearly as fraction of much as I wanted to. It’s less an entry in the list, more of a note to self to pay this more attention. [It worked. I’ve listened to this any time I’ve wanted to wave my hands around in a this-is-how-republica-should-have-sounded kind of way since then. Robotically dumbly dance-guitar pop which makes you feel as if you’re in deep in a crowd crowd even when you’re dancing by yourself – Ed]

17 - Somewhere Else – Razorlight
Razorlight are, of course, utter shit, but almost every band’s got a great single in them. This is theirs. Sometimes the big hits are hits for obvious reasons. Somewhere Else is one of those obvious reasons. You couldn’t get more obvious than its ludicrously minor-key-emotions anthemic Boomtown-Rats pastiche that just accelerates towards an escape than never comes. Key connected memories: Lying in bed, listening to it on the radio, and rewriting the lyrics to be “Someone Else” occasionally, as the mood struck. Alec Meer and I, a couple of months back, having a Singstar breakdown to it towards the end of his highly enjoyable evening.
But, seriously, the fucking lyrics. “I met a girl/She asked me my name/I told her what it was”. WTF!?!?!

Yet when the chorus kicks in, I start singing. I just can’t help myself.

16 - This is the Dream of Win and Regine - Final Fantasy
At one of the last pieces I wrote for Panelbleed, I compared several bits in Scott Pilgrim to the feyest record of the year (there’s no B&S this year, so consider this my nod towards that end of the emotional spectrum). Now, that was overstating its merits, but this… oh, God. He’s just sang the “Montreal may eat its young/But Montreal Won’t break us down” bit and then the violin just pirouettes off in the most graceful un-graceful way you can imagine.

15 - You make me like Charity - The Knife
Yeah, this got a late UK release too, so let’s slide the knife in here. Consider it warning for 2006’s chart if I do one, as Silent Shout is one of my favourite albums of the entire year. This judders along playfully, with the dual vocals just wrestling with each other. You can imagine them fighting, and as each punch impacts their morph into another shape. Including one moment 1:44 seconds into the song where one audibly becomes Miss Piggy. I’m not even joking. Also gets bonus credit for being the first song I’ve ever infringed copyright for an accountant. Which is triply ironic, thanks to the “You make me like charity/Instead of doing my taxes” lyric.

14 - I’m not Okay (I Promise) - My Chemical Romance
If I were 12, it’d have been the best song ever. At 30, it was the funniest. The pop song equivalent of the best class of teen movie, its emotions primal and pubescent, its angst joyous. If it was a song by a girl, it’ll be Ladder In Your Tights by Amy Studt. Yeah, that good. And the timesis on I’m not o-fucking-kay! POP MUSIC!

13 - One Thing - Amerie
In comprising this list, this is the first track I’ve listened to which compelled me to reach other and spin the volume dial to the right. Crazy In Love II, of course, but since when has that been any kind of criticism?

12 - Hounds of Love - Futureheads
A cover’s a tricky thing to justify, especially when it belongs at first glance to that loathsome Indie-band-playing-pop-song genre. First thing: There’s only a little funny and nothing mocking about Hounds of Love. It’s all Gang Of Four Love-Paranoia, a band in a shell of their own making and trying to crack of out it. Secondly, a good cover should make you return to the original song with new insight. Where Bush mostly succeeded in the song was the final ecstatic release where she falls into this endless orgasm of release. Futureheads, limited of voice, can’t manage that, but excel in the initial half, the failure to release, the “I’ve Always Been A Coward… and I don’t know what’s good for me.”, the rush of guitars leading to the section about the fox and – most of all – “It’s coming at me through the trees” and the “I feel ashamed to be there”. By forming a venn diagram of the two songs in my head, I get closer to the greater truth, and that’s all I ever ask of a record.

11 - Big Baboon – Flipron
Luke Haines fronts the Bad Seeds with a vaudevillian tip, basically. Also, in the form of “As my head and my heart fought like brothers torn apart/I got cained and completely unabled” probably my lyric of the year.

10 - List of Demands – Saul Williams
December ATP again. Saul Williams is down to do a spoken word set. Does a bit. And then, he tells us that was it. And then he just explodes into this, and was the musical highpoint of a weekend of musical high-points. Politically insurrection you can dance to. In fact, you can’t help but.

9 - Biology – Girl’s Aloud
Nu-nu-pop’s last stand, and glorious as all doomed things ever are. Better minds than mine has taken it to pieces, but the constantly delayed release of the chorus – which doesn’t appear until /exactly/ two minutes in somehow always reminds me of the Who’s “I can See for Miles” (My favourite Who song, randomly). And when it appears, it’s only a half-inch forward from the rest of the song… I don’t have the musicology to say why it works, but that half inch is the difference between coming and not coming. That is, the all the difference in the world, all that’s needed, all that works.

8- Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor - Arctic Monkeys
Just have been watching the Reading coverage on BBC, with charming hypermouth buffonary of Zane-Low, and caught the Arctic Monkeys playing to a crowd of eight hundred million, every one of which know every single lyric of every single song. And – y’know – wow. They’re fundamentally Oasis versus Pulp fired through a Billy Bragg filter, and to see them provoke that kind of mass adulation brings a smile to my face. Doesn’t matter what I think, really.

And the singles up to whatever they renamed SCUMMY as (and Mardy Bum for good measure) – are as good, as heartfelt, as accurate, as intense, as true an expressions of what guitars and drums and mute sarcasm and plain honesty as almost anything in my lifetime. Fuck you if you’d have loved them if you were ten years earlier, and now can’t see over the gap. Fuck you if you’d have /never/ loved them because of your fucking prickish re-re-reactionary bollocks. Just fuck you. Artic Monkeys have had the misfortune of appearing in a universe which, due to the Zeitgeist’s twisting, has made them Jesus Mrk 2. I suspect, in the long run, we’d have been better with them doing a low-level Buzzocks thing rather than the inevitable implosion this headed for. But this is Pop Music. Only U2 fans care about the longterm.

Man, this wine’s working.

7 - Er…

6 - Galang – MIA
MIA’s nonsense-gibberish-insurrectionist track stands in the unique position as the only track in this chart that actually inspired a comic I’m desperate to write. Walking across the city at dusk with its dull clunk rep-rep-repeating in my headphones, and suddenly it drops to the multi-voice Ah-Ah-AH!! Bit as the half-visible form of Bristol’s housing blocks move up my field of vision in Akira-esque parallax… and the beat kicks in, and everything makes sense and it was there. Even without the moment of inspiration, this is dumb and danceable and just about perfect.

5 - What You Wanna Believe – Kevin Blechdom
Imagine Maria from the Sound of Music went absolutely apeshit and was locked in a room full of circa 1970 electronic bleeping things, and you’ve got half of the appeal of this hymn to autonoymy and self-destiny. Oh, you’re not convinced at how awesome she is. Try this: when I went to see her live, she smeared bloody livers on her naked, freckled breasts.

4 - Fifteen Minutes – Johnny Boy
This was a bit of a cheat when I put together the chart, but I’m playing Stalinist games. Got the Johnny Boy album very late in 2005, and was immediately a hyper-love standout. The last eight months have only cemented it. It makes me feel as if I’ve just fell out of the best nightclub in the world into a cold night, pushing through the crowd, hand in the hand of the best person of the world, pulling out, pulling out in the future, tell me, tell me watchagonna do, everything, everything.

3 - Berd Guhl - Antony and the Johnsons
I’ve probably cried to this record more than anything else this year.

What throws me – and what makes me cry – is that I’m not sure that the Berd Guhl’s can (“I’m a berd guhl. And Berd Guhl’s can fly”). It’s so overwrought, so needing that I can’t help but think that despite the arc of the album which leads to the transcendence that, no, no matter how much they want to, no matter how much they need it and have strived towards it and ache towards it with every part of their body, Berd Guhl’s can’t fly and they – we’re - doomed.

It’s beautiful. It’s insanely beautiful. But I don’t think it’s some kind of musical Apollo program. It’s Icarus. Except, right now, as he’s it’s singing it – oh, those wax wings aren’t melting.

I suppose that’s why it’s transfixed me above anything else this year. That what I know and what I feel are entirely at odds with each other.

2 - Hard To Beat – Hard Fi
As I said at the start of this particular exercise, I had no idea what was going to be at number one – or even at the top end – until I finished it. And I suspect that Hard To Beat has gained more from the last eight months than any other song in this chart, which found itself being reached for any time I stumbled in a strange street at a strange hour of the day during those six strange months in the middle of 2006. Hell, at one occasion I was literally doing the shouting at strangers routine from Spaced to it, bouncing between road and kerb, throwing shapes and not caring…

I dunno. I’m sorry. You have to care too much to not care like that, and I’ll cherish that.

Understand Hard Fi are an entirely forgettable, sludge-grey band. Which makes Hard To Beat such an anomaly – a structure which leans on the basis of that ska, before draping every colour of the universe over it. It’s like walking into the strange dusty cupboard in some relatives place and finding yourself in a club at 2.50 am with only the people who care about caring there. Even elements like the absolute basic crassness of the lyric rubbing against the songs waves of sonic-eroticism are key – it’s a macho-posturing record which sounds enormously fey, with Hard-fi seemingly unaware of it. Like the hardest guy you know wearing a pink shirt because it’s in fashion, it’s both inspiring and hilarious.

It’s not just a record which makes me want to turn around dramatically, hoping someone’s behind me.

It’s a record which makes me believe if I do so, someone will be.

1 - Who’s that girl? – Robyn
Ste messaged me at a party back in 2005 ordering me not to ruin the song by over-analysing it on my blog.

I tried, Ste. I tried.

“The Girl’s are pretty.
Like… All The Time.
I’m just pretty… some of the time.”

Who’s That Girl is a song by Robyn. It’s produced by The Knife, who provide it with characteristic grace and irresistible momentum – its increasing hysteria being married to the slowly constructing wall of electro is absolutely key to its appeal. It’s equal parts tough (which makes you believe it) and scared (which makes you know it’s true).

It’s about the pressure of identity.

(Garbage dealt with the same issue, albeit in a far crasser fashion, with their comeback single “Why Do You Love Me?”. That the Question Mark remains, is probably worth noting – you touch this shit, you’re dealing with pop music that doesn’t leave full stops, but just runs out into space, faling to its death before it can nail down the things it wants to.)

Who’s that Girl? is a dialogue between Robyn (Lover A) and you (Lover B). She loves you. You love her. She doesn’t see why. Because she knows that who you think she is – fundamentally - not the person she is. After all, she’s lived with her for all her life. She knows who she is. And she knows that one day you’re going to find out that the person you thought she was… well, she isn’t it. The song moves from the argumentative “Who’s that girl? WELL! I’M NOT LIKE HER!” to the slightly panicked – yet still trying to put a brave face on it - “Who’s that girl? Well… what if I’m not like her?” Because if you ever realise she’s not like the girl you think she if…. well, it’s over and it’s all for nothing.

Then there’s the bewildering middle section where Robyn asks the question: Let’s pretend you were the girl and I was the guy and everything was changed… would you love me any different? “Ah-ha!” says Robyn in the backing vocals, but no-one’s laughing as the wall’s complete and everyone’s crushed between it.

I listen to Who’s That Girl? And I think of every girl I’ve trapped in my expectations of her, and think of every time I feel as I’ve been trapped in theirs. I think of the infinite distance between people and – nevertheless - our urge to cross that gap, knowing that most people fall into the void.

It makes me want to dance and makes me know that no matter how big the dance floor, no matter how many friends I was with, how happy I was… I’d be alone, and I’d know I’ll always be alone. And so will everyone else.

But – mostly importantly – it doesn’t matter.