Now that our year-end lists and articles are all up, huge and delicious like the traditional Christmas meal of turkey with all the attendant goodies, and now that we’ve all had time to digest it and sleep off the metaphorical tryptophan overload, here’s a little after-dinner mint. I haven’t heard all forty of our Top Forty Albums of 2004, but I’m working on it; these three songs, meanwhile, all offer what to me were unexpected ways into some of those records.

Junior Boys– Last Exit, [Last Exit]

Number four on our list. I still don’t love the Junior Boys’ first album, but I’m beginning to like it, and the fact that I’ve slowly come around to “Last Exit” makes me think my initial reaction may have been more a product of me than the music. When I first heard of the band the two acts whose names most often got tossed around as comparisons were Timbaland (which I can understand) and New Order (which is like comparing the Hives to the Clash; as much as I love both bands, that comparison does neither any good). So I was expecting a certain type of experience from the music, which a few of the songs (primarily “Birthday”) provided, but most of them didn’t. And so I walked away with the opinion that Last Exit was at a standstill; boring. It wasn’t until recently that I happened to hear the title track directly after hearing Massive Attack’s (underrated) 100th Window, and suddenly the track just made sense. New Order, yes, possibly; but stripped of all propulsion. It’s supposed to be almost static; if I can love Low, why should this be difficult?

None of this is the band’s fault, of course, and I kind of doubt many others suffered the same myopia as I did, but there’s an object lesson in there somewhere about appreciating music for what it is rather than for what you want it to be. And above all that theoretical stuff, of course, is an absolutely gorgeous song.

[visit the Kin Records website here, buy Last Exit here, read Mark Fisher’s Stylus review here]

Nellie McKay– Waiter, [Get Away From Me]

Number three on our list. This one isn’t a conversion tale, of course; I gave Get Away From Me an 8 back in March, and although I don’t feel compelled to listen to it that often, I do feel it’s a pretty tremendous accomplishment which I think more people should hear. And although pretty much everybody has noted the stylistic range of the album, usually they’re just referring to the showtunes-to-rap spectrum, represented primarily by “Sari” (which is awfully good, I’m not denying that). But Nellie McKay agnostics might want to check out instead “Waiter”, which I’m sure doesn’t sound like what most would imagine she’s like based on reviews alone. It’s a song that didn’t really jump out at me until my fourth listen, but it’s also been my favorite ever since. The interlocking piano-and-drums backing is both deadened and impelling, McKay sighing out over it “Do you mind / And do you care / That you will die / Do you despair?” I think she’s making a point about soldiers or something, but it’s a question we might as well ask ourselves. Nellie’s politics are just as present here as they are in all of her other songs, but she manages to weave them into the fabric of the song more skillfully than throughout most of Get Away From Me, being no less confrontational but a little less ad hominem. And then there’s the chorus proper, where not much changes but suddenly and briefly “Waiter” becomes disco before reverting back to what it normally is: a pop song with a Krautrock beat. We could use more of those.

[visit Nellie McKay’s website here, buy Get Away From Me here, read Ian Mathers’ Stylus review here]

The Futureheads– Man Ray, [The Futureheads]

Number thirty-six on our list. I got into the Futureheads in what is quickly becoming my normal way: I downloaded four or five MP3s and then rushed out and bought the record as quickly as possible. See? Downloading isn’t killing music. But it did mislead me for a while: I’d heard “Decent Days And Nights” and “Carnival Kids”, and they led me to expect a certain tone from the album; even “Stupid And Shallow” feels more bouncy than spiteful (as Todd Burns noted when he had it up here in November). I did love the album immediately, but tenser, starker tracks like “Le Garage”, “Alms”, “He Knows” and closer “Man Ray” were not quite what I expected. In fact, if you’d just handed me the album with all identifying marks stripped off, I might have assumed it was an underheard artifact of first wave British punk; it possess the same sort of feel, a kind of spiky, restless (and vaguely misanthropic) intelligence. “Man Ray” is where it gets tensest, someone chanting “Touch yourself / Touch yourself / Touch each other black and white” while the twin guitars follow trebly in unison and the one who sings lead most of the time grinds out “I could see his hands, they were touching you all night”. All of which reminds me a little of the Killers’ “Mr Brightside” in subject matter if nothing else, but this feels a lot more creepy and desperate as opposed to stylishly lovelorn. This is occasionally exactly what I want from my rock and roll. It gives him Man Ray, he says, and if I can’t explain in words how this song relates to the great Surrealist photographer, I think he’s made me understand what it means.

[visit The Futureheads’ website here, buy The Futureheads here, read William B. Swygart’s Stylus review here]