Sifting for Gold in Pitchfork's Year-End Lists: Pt. 1

The end of the year means list-making time in the music world, and, out-of-touch with the Indie zeitgeist though I may be, I still doubt any site's list carries more weight than Pitchfork's (admittedly there's the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop and Idolator.com's Jackin' Pop, but both of those are aggregate lists, combining votes from hundreds of disparate music critics for a more mainstream picture). So it's interesting to check in with them at the end of the year and see exactly how things turned out in their view, what narratives they use to frame the year, and also which early heavily hyped juggernauts have run out of steam, which underdogs might sneak their way to the top (I remember Sufjan Stevens' Michigan coming out of nowhere to grab the #3 slot in 2003; he was a relative unknown at the time and it really helped kick-start his ascent to his current place in the mainstream Indie pantheon).

Their lists (especially the singles list) provide a broad and decently diverse (read: Indie-centric but dipping in dance, rap, pop, and metal) pool of music, and a great opportunity to discover some of the year's highlights that may have slipped under your own personal radar. I'll make a few posts with my own favorite discoveries from the lists. Here's one to start:


Women - "Black Rice"



This song caught my eye partly because its high rank (#17 overall) combined with its obscurity, and partly because it sat atop Pitchfork-founder Ryan Schreiber's own individual top tracks list. Superficially, the track stakes out the same sort of echo-ey garage-psych-postpunk territory Deerhunter so successfully inhabited on Cryptograms, but "Black Rice" finds hypnotic splendor not in rapturous overload (see, i.e., "Spring Hall Convert") but in shambolic, plodding warmth, bone-dry production, Panda Bear-like vocals (read: Beach Boys-derived), and an absurdly catchy, serpentine melody that I somehow feel justified in describing as "sideways". A truly dusty gem.

Quality Details: the deceptively intricate xylophone part that enters the song accomplanied by zombie handclaps on (what sounds like) the words "lemon and daylight"; the lovely cascading bassline that funnels the song back into its second verse; the sudden falsetto leap in the chorus that best exemplifies the melody's pleasantly queasy quality.