Number 1 - "Sea Within a Sea", The Horrors

The Horrors. They wrote the best song of the Noughties. You now it.

Sea Within a Sea - The Horrors

Primary Colours (2009)

No, I'm not entirely sure where this came from either. Their first album gave frankly little indication of how brilliant the sophomore effort would be. That's not the way it's supposed to be done.

And just look at these punks. They look like they're auditioning for Baby Edward Scissorhands. They can't possibly have the experience, the gravitas, the canniness to occupy this echelon, surely?

Well they flipping well CAN. And they did. We're not assessing artists here, we're assessing songs. Their body of work is by now impressive and solid, and we've heard them once already in the countdown with "Scarlet Fields". But this is the masterwork - it's an epic, grandiose, sprawling beast that touches all the standard bases for musical greatness while coasting into home.

It sounds at one level like an extended jam session, the rhythm section is basically CAN's "Mother Sky". So base one would be doing structured improvisation to sound like the best of them. Jog on by.

I'm getting this on borrowed wisdom, since I've rescinded my qualifications to keep doing this, but I did come across one reviewer who claimed copiers of the rhythm section became so many that it had been "reduced to the late noughties equivalent of the 'funky drummer.'" I wonder if they're aware they're just following in a fine tradition.



So that's it. There's no other track from the entire decade that I find myself NEEDING periodically to return to for musical sustainance. There's no other track that continually seems to present hitherto hidden facets of itself on repeated listings.

It's not the track you spent most time flinging yourself around a dancefloor to. It's not the single that's going to get you all nostalgic for the decade in years to come because it speaks to some significant event. It's probably not going to stay on any list of songs anyone recalls from the decade for long.

But none of those invalidate it. Remember the criteria. It's simply the finest song that was released during the last decade. And this story is over.

A very big thanks to those who have been following along this absurdly epic project from the beginning. I literally first began making this list in 2011. First blog post was about eighteen months back. That's all a measure of LOVE, not incompetence, readers can be reassured.

But y'know what? The reality is that I don't think this decade was up to much. How many of this top ten would make my all time top ten? Not many. Recapping the theoretical palaver that I first pushed this bat out with, the lesson here is welcome to postmodernity.

Welcome to a world with fewer genuinely inherently stellar things. But also a world where the ability of everyone to participate in the "making of stellar things" in a genuine way has never been greater. There is a greater chance of a given unknown artist being 'found' than ever before because the barriers to global music distribution have been torn down.

But there's a significantly lower chance that your society is going to have a body of people within it called "musicians" who genuinely make a meaningful living from their art.

Is this a better world? And does it matter? Because we're not going to be able to wish it away. We're going to have to live in it.

Or you could take this author's own approach, and remember very regularly to look backwards. Nostalgia actually performs a vital role for humanity's collective psyche. It grounds us in higher ideals, elevates our eyes to nobler horizons.

The Top Ninety of the Nineties starts Monday. A real decade. MY decade. We are done here. With a very large and sustained thanks to those who have sustained me, endured all of this and taken the time to give feedback.

Remember this started out as an exercise in right of passage, my letting go of being eighteen forever. It's actually been quite painful. I never started that band ... and now ...

But The Horrors might just have said it as well as I ever could...

Though youth may fade with boyhood's cares
New fear will catch us unawares
I know it will

So you might say
The path we share is one of danger
And of fear
Until the end

Number 2 - "Machine Gun" - Portishead

Beth Gibbons from Portishead with Beth Gibbons from Portishead

Machine Gun - Portishead

Third (2009)

I hear tell that they once did this live with Chuck D from Public Enemy rapping "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" over the instrumental section. If anyone knows of a recording of whatever quality of that, I will pay good money for it. Pints of blood even.

And so, much as I try to keep these fresh, it's very hard to find anything at all original to say about this track, and that may well be some sort of testament to why it belongs here.

Yes, the band that we loved, the band that the nineties regaled for never putting a single note in the wrong place, well we turned around one day and, like your best mate from high school, we realised we hadn't heard from them in a decade. Not another flipping overdose???

Well, no. This story ends well. Not dead, only resting. Only taking the requisite time to produce  again at the standards we expected.



The song is everything that was ever great about the band, it's a micro-studious take on one riff married to a vocal that never sits perfectly at ease with its musical partner, and in the zone of that semi-awkward interplay greatness is born.

Only Beth Gibbons could render a melody this jarring and disjointed so effectively well-contained and melodious. Ask yourself when was the last time you had some many weird minor notes bouncing round your head was, as you humm along as if it were some Madonna chorusline.

So once again we see the prevailing formula in effect. Great art is crafted from one well-conceived concept, however humble, rendered by artists whose focus is singular and set within a coherent and meaningful purpose.

And should you ever have the opportunity to catch these folk at work live, do not pass it up at any reasonable price, for the aesthetic they bring to their songwriting is unlike many acts, equally present in their performance work.

Music was only capable of clambering a mere rung higher than this during the decade. And tomorrow, having spent literally years ascertaining that fact, I'm finally ready to declare it. Seems like an anticlimax now. It feels like in finishing this thing I have to kill it ... gulp!

See you tomorrow.

Number 3 - "Say Valley Maker", Smog

Smog, aka Bill Callahan

Say Valley Maker - Smog

A River Ain't Too Much to Love (2005)

And a big welcome everyone to probably my largest personal indulgence of the countdown.

No, this wasn't on any other lists, Smog wasn'y on many full stop. Both situations are wrong. This album is possibly my favourite of the decade. Smog/Bill Callahan (although somehow the eponymous releases were kind of B grade) would have to vie for the title of its greatest singer-songwriter.

If readers have been following at all, they'll have already discerned that this particular commentator values above all else sell-crafted simplicity and poecy in songwriting above almost all else. And this simply excelled at both to an extent in my musical pantheon that this was always going top five.



It's just a beautiful song, but it's little more than a two chord arpeggio. It is however perfectly married to a lyric strong enough to virtually carry the song itself. Callahan's incredible bass emotes to the exactingly calibrated level he's perfected, hovering perpetually between irony and pathos. And some weight it hefts around.

"With the grace of a corpse in a riptide/I let go/and I slide, slide, slide/downriver"

But it's the repeating sections "There is no love ..." and most particularly the "Bury me in wood" 'crescendo' that concludes the song that render it truly memorable. These can scarcely be done justice in printed reproduction. But it's this section in particular which really earns this song it's spot amongst the decade's mightiest.

But if anyone's ever written a better pop lyrics than "bury me in fire/and I'm gonna phoenix", I'm keen to know what it is.

Because that's just one of the most perfect twenty seconds of songwriting you'll ever hear.

Number 4 - "Maps", Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Karen O, Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Maps - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Fever to Tell (2004)

And didn't this lot burst well out of the blocks. It's hard to believe a track this polished came from anyone's debut album.

This deserves its spot here as much as anything for being the pinnacle of the short-lived but significant mid-decade 'garage punk revival' that also spawned the likes of The Strokes, The Black Keys, The Hives, White Stripes, etc.

It's beauty is in its ability to maintain a rock tempo while at the same time being so utterly languid in most of its elements. From the blissed out guitar treble that mutates just occasionally into a big dirty solo, to Karen O allowing her otherwise perfectly tempered voice to run occasionally just that tiny bit out of control "theydontloveyoulikeiloveyou" this song ebbs and flows perfectly, and our emotions with it.

The song navigates effortlessly territory that sinks most pop music - that between sentimentality and affectation. Maps' power is in its ability to linger in the former without invoking the latter.

It achieves this in its fairly raw simplicity, exquisite production and above all else in Karen O's extraordinary vocal. She was without doubt one of the greatest new such talents the decade produced, and I submit the following evidence....

Number 5 - "Strange Overtones" , Brian Eno and David Byrne

Eno and Byrne in the 80s

Strange Overtones - Brian Eno and David Byrne

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (2008)

Pitchfork had this as their #11 for 2008. Pfft. It's way better than than. It's a fairly obvious meta-song about songwriting from two absolute past masters of the craft, both of whom seemingly needed the other to finish this project.

This was I believe the only single released from the album, which was given away free online. It was apparently based on a number of gospel-based tracks that Eno had written but couldn't write lyrics for as he was unable to write anything "hopeful" enough.



The album was completed largely by correspondence, and while it doesn't really reach the heights of their more seminal "My Life in the Bush ...", this is an absolutely killer single that stays with you for days.

The music video you see above apparently features some of Eno's own paintings.

The album dealt with themes that have occupied both artists in the past - around the interaction of humanity and technology.

Strange Overtones/In the music you are playing
We're not alone/It is strong and you are tough
But a heart is not enough--

I'm reminded fairly acutely of one of Talking Heads' more forgotten gems - Nothing But Flowers, which I've generously furnished you with also.



The backing is reasonably by-numbers Eno, but still astonishingly accomplished. After what going on forty years of this, the guy just farts these things out in his sleep, I swear.

Both Eno and Byrne have dubbed this "Electronic Gospel, which is probably fair enough. The world could do with a bit more "electronic gospel."

And so, brethren, today's hymn ...

Number 6 - "Dem Never Know", Rhythm and Sound

Dem Never Know - Rhythm and Sound

See Mi Yah (2005)

Another one that was largely absent from the other charts. What is this? Well it's essentially Basic Channel, Berlin duo Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald.

Von Oswald is a particularly interesting character, kind of like a less annoying but far more Tuetonic Adrian Sherwood. He's been almost singlehandedly responsible for pioneering this genre of ultra-authentic roots/dub/reggae with a minimalist techno bent.

The point of the exercise is to obtain a purist, authentic original dub reggae (analog) sound with modern (digital) technologies.

And that he's been able to work with some of the biggest names in the notoriously insular reggae business like Cornel Campbell, Jennifer Lara and Love Joy is some testament to the authenticity of the effort.

And this here outing carries the imprimatur of none other than legendary 70s/80s Jamaican DJ Joseph Cotton/Jah Walton, appearing here just for simplicity's sake as Jah Cotton with Ranking Joe, U-Brown AND the Blood & Fire Sound System.

Basically nothing could possibly go wrong, and so nothing does.

The track is lifted from what is unquestionably one of the most obsessively purist of musical exercises ever attempted, and one of the greatest. It's ten different vocal and one instrumental versions of the one rhythm.

They're for the most part only subtly different from each other, but the tonalities of the differences are the work's genius. The artists' claim that

"the tracks are lined up in a way that allows the listener to enjoy See Mi Yah as one continuous program running for about 46 minutes. It's never a bore - and goes on in the listener's head, when voices, rhythm and sound will be long gone."

is entirely credible. But the pinnacle is unquestionably this track.

It belongs here for electing to utterly excel at only one thing. And for honing in on that thing with an obsessive's mania. It soars above the rest of the decade's noise.

Number 7 - "Idioteque", Radiohead

Radiohead

Idioteque - Radiohead

Kid A (2000)

Never released as a single, you can just imagine a bunch of drunk record execs in navy suits slurping paella, not knowing what to do with it. Especially way back in 2000.

But of course it was actually the soaring highlight of this entire masterwork.

You've never heard anything quite like it. It's an exercise in playing off jarring syncopation against a smooth falsetto that contains just enough melody to warrant the name. The vocal seems perpetually poised just this side of panic.

It's a cloying, claustrophobic, almost sinister track that you just so happen to be able also to dance to. There's a sense of alarm from an external threat. The lyric supports this.

"Who's in a bunker, who's in a bunker?/ Women and children first"

The album itself is peppered with references that Yorke has acknowledged regarding what was taking place in the former Yugoslavia at that time, and it's hard not to read this in the same context. The riff is a sample from Paul Lansky, apparently.

Lansky wrote an essay about the song explaining all the nerdy complexities of the chord progressions which is no doubt lurking around online for the truly avid fan.

Number 8 - "The Underdog", Spoon

Spoon

The Underdog - Spoon

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (2007)

"You have no fear of the underdog/that's why you will not survive".

I find Spoon confusing. Mostly competent, they're one of those indie acts whose work TV shows love syndicating. Competent, but safe. Not a band to inspire fandom, but nor do they earn much criticism. And very occasionally they produce a single for the absolute ages.

As with a few entrants in this list, your humble compiler is willing to let one brilliantly crafted song outrank those of far more established artists, this being after all a song-based exercise.

Spoon seem to shine when they are as self-consciously musical as possible. This is a complex beast, the melody's not quite as simple as it first appears and catchy as hell. Vocalist Britt Daniel's voice is a great textural match with its brassy bottom end.

If music performs any sort of valuable social function, this song knows exactly what that is, and on that basis proceeds to excel in everything that matters.

If even one sad soul drags themselves off any terrible canvas to which they may have fallen in life bouyed naively by the sentiment that this song peddles, Spoon have already done the world more good than Bono will in his entire lifetime. And I reckon it's a good bet.

This never really charted, and none of the other noughties lists put it this high, I just think it's archetypally great by the one criterion I ultimately use in these tests...

"How many showers have I sung this under?"

I'm not ashamed to say it's flipping LOTS.

Number 9 - "Britain is Sh*t", Selfish C*nt

Selfish Cunt, Martin Tomlinson and Patrick Constable

Britain is Shit - Selfish Cunt

No Wicked Heart Shall Prosper (2004)

A lot of bands were assigned the rather mutoid moniker of 'post-punk' over the course of the decade, and the term was almost already meaningless the minute it was uttered. As if anything could come post-music's nihilistic end...

But of course the music did continue, it just wasn't punk anymore.  To suggest that for instance Green Day have in the slightest relevance to or provenance from the original seventies genre is to render the original meaningless.

Maybe it's in the art of reducing punk to shallow symbolism, void of all its original significance, in drawing an equivalence between The Clash and playing your guitar quite loud with a safety pin on, in failing so completely to understand punk, that you evoke in the process a perfect nihilism. The act of neutering punk's most genuinely transgressive dimensions becomes in itself the most authentically punk act possible.

And it's the authenticity that was so frequently lacking in the things terms like 'post-punk' or 'new punk' or whatever permutations were applied to during the decade. Music that almost always seemed to veer more properly towards other genres - pop at one end of the spectrum, hardcore or even emo at the other.

There's only one act since the Pistols that have given us any sense that they are in any way inheritors of punk's wholesale aesthetic, political and musical mantle, and that act is Selfish Cunt.

 Yes, it's in part about the notoriously violent concerts, the beating up crowd members, the cancelled gigs, the bannings from venues, but it's also about the overtly nihilistic take on politics, it's about the aggressively sexualised cross dressing of Tomlinson (if Brian Molko and Iggy Pop ever spawned ...)

And it's about realising that THE most punk instrument in this day and age MUST be the drum machine. The quintessential enabler of so many musicians not even good enough to play with a bad band.

And it's about the lyric, the give-nary-a-shit vocal delivery, the utterly vicious pillorying of the middle classes, the political classes, the working class. It wants to kick the whole lot down, not because it has a better world in mind, just merely that it's run out of interest in this one. It's petulant, destructive, wanton, and throughly non-didactic.

Are you listening, Green Day?

Above is a little video I made for YouTube as this is kind of a hard one to stream. See below for more hot cross dressing action, from when we last encountered SC earlier in the countdown.

Number 10 - "There is no Such Place", Augie March

Augie March

There is no Such Place - Augie March

Sunset Studies (2003)

The highest ranking Australian act you will find in this chart, rendering this the quintessential Aussie tune of the decade. So there.

Yet another example that great, timeless pop relies on little much more than one tremendous melody. It's plaintive, maybe it's a little affectatious, but its emotive power - even after all these years of how many listenings is there.

Where Glenn Richards can at times veer into the purple prose, as with a lot of the Augies' more recent material wherein you feel the song was being made to fit the clever-clogs lyrics with, ironically a less lyrical overall effect.

But here, the balance is just perfect. The final lines, which would have the option of being delivered as a heart-jerking crescendo, are instead just left to waft off with the tune such that the song leaves us with nothing so much as an abstract sense of loss, of longing.

It's evoking these senses so effectively without straying into cliche or becoming overblown by surplus emotive devices that places this near the pinnacle of the decades' genius.

Numbers 15-11, "Blood on My Hands"

I hope we all had Ricardo Villalobos in our SuperMuso teams this week ...

15.	Fizheuer Zieheuer - Ricardo Villalobos
	Fizheuer Zieheuer (2006)
	Well. You either know it or you don't. Or you may just know it by the horns 'breakdown'. Yes, it's a 37 minute 'dance' track with a funeral speed 'breakdown' in traditional horns sampled from a Serbian gypsy folk group. 37 minutes of large-scale monotony, where the horns appear as oases amongst the seemingly never-ending dunes of "oom-pah" that blanket everything. But this is not an exercise in banality. A desert at scale could be read as monotonous, but closer perspective will reveal much texture amongst the dunes. This is an exercise in monotony, but it's a deeply profound one. If taken at one sitting and in the right mood, it's mesmeric to the point where the ear becomes, in the midst of the sameness, intensely attuned to the very subtle ways in which the track does ebb and flow. If you're willing to give it your full attention, it is certainly one of the most profound musical listening experiences the decade delivered. And this man is without doubt amongst the finest practitioners of his craft, consistently pushing the boundaries of an often stale genre. For the faint-hearted, I made a YouTube video for a shorter, 15 minute version. Give it space. You won't be sorry,
14.	Evil - Interpol
	Antics (2004)
	Too easily derided. Maybe they invite it in their self-conscious hipsterism, but musically I do maintain they were easily a million times more creative than say The White Stripes, who readers will find rather conspicuously absent from this list. This utterly irresistable dancefloor-filler was probably their finest moment. It ebbs and flows in a way so much contemporary pop just refuses to do. The "chorus", pitches up to what could be full crescendo about three times, only to push further, finally hitting the pinnacle - a series of emphatic drum smashes "Why. Can't. We. Just ..." It's just a superbly crafted song, superbly produced. The only thing that genuinely sounds like Joy Division about this band is Paul Banks' voice. People were far too quick to dismiss them for their po-facedness, but this album and ... Bright Lights would probably both belong somewhere in a Top Forty Albums of the Noughties.
13.	Moan - Trentemøller
	The Last Resort (2007)
	What to say about this? No, this wasn't on many other lists and never this high. But I'm still, after nearly a decade past, completely addicted to this. It's like the finest stuff Massive Attack ever did with their female guest vocalists. Anne Trolle is the vocalist here, and based on this she deserves be known far wider afield than her native Denmark. Delivering her vocal this breathlessly could have easily come across as trite, but Trolle goes nowhere near that domain. She serves up just ... just enough emotion to set up a conflict between the deadpan delivery and the almost desperately emotive content. This entire work is a Danish tour-de-force, with the artist himself hailing from Copenhagen, where he's helped popularise a number of local acts through his remixes. The song just oozes Scandi cool. But I swear it's not just because it's a Dane-ophile's wet dream that this one has earned its place here. Use your ears. Brilliant video too. You can check out my Pinterest tribute board to Laika here.
12.	Blood on My Hands (Ricardo Villalobos' Apocalypso Now Mix) - Shackleton
	Blood on My Hands (2007)
	Why is this at number 12? Who the hell is Shackleton? Well, put simply, I don't think I know of a better, more powerful or significant artistic response to the events of September 11, 2001 than this. Shackleton's other works - particularly Music for the Quiet Hour are all well worth checking out for fans of stripped back yet moody minimalism. It's both a response to the events themselves and a response to OUR response, but it totally avoids lecturing or moral posturing from any dimension. Instead, we're asked to create meaning from a set of almost uncannily disparate phrases. "I'm standing on a mountain top/letting out a scream/it's the language of the earth, it is the language of the beasts." And it's thoroughly unclear throughout who our narrator is. It seems to me that this work is drawing a very sophisticated parallel between the drivers of the terrorist horrors that were visited upon the world, and the response of our political leaders to those events. We're perhaps condemned for failing to speak ourselves in anything less mute than "the language of the beasts", but we're never really sure. And it's from within that ambivalence that the song derives its power to deeply unsettle. It's just a great, great work of art.
11.	Walk In The Park - Beach House
	Teen Dream (2009)
	There's only ever really been one way to write a great pop song. Pick a melody. Pick a really catchy melody. Now repeat it ad nauseum. Congratulations, you're now an artistic genius. In some dimension. Because it should simply be that easy. But if it's that easy then why has so much utter musical dross been written? If it's that easy, then why is is this SO sublime?

Numbers 20-16, "Special Cases"

#20. Miss Kittin "D'you know Frank Sinatra? He's DEAD. Hahahaha."

20.	Frank Sinatra - Miss Kittin & The Hacker
	First Album (2001)
	So, there's a wee language warning on this one. And a rather large taste one. This rates so highly as a vicious satire on the sheer vacuity of modern celebrity culture. And frankly I'm not sure any song on this list  deals with a more important contemporary issue. If Black Mirror is vital TV for the same reason, this is its vital soundtrack. The vocal is delivered with such deadpan while the content has such shock value, it's from that fissure that the song derives its power to unsettle. You kind of want a shower after this. Or a time machine. There's a hot tub time machine gag in there somewhere ...
19.	Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) - James
	Pleased to Meet You (2001)
	It's a kind of sad story this one. One of Britain's longest lasting and best loved bands were approaching their 20 year mark when they released what was to become a surprisingly poorly received swansong album, even with the benefit of Brian Eno's production. This was the only single lifted from the album, it charted poorly and the band soon split, faced with a supposed massive unpaid tax bill from Her Majesty. They deserved a better sendoff. We'll hear more from James in the Top Ninety of The Nineties project (stay tuned), during what was really their heyday, but this song is not a bad way to cap a career. Easily the best track on the album, it combined everything that was great about the band, obtuse lyrics wedded to virally addictive chorus melodies that make the whole pub want to stand up and sing along.
18.	No Pussy Blues - Grinderman
	Grinderman (2007)
	It's always an interesting experience to first encounter a good band live rather than through their singles. I knew what Grinderman were about when making my way to what is still the most fabulous music festival I've ever attended - the sadly sole stranded lonesome Australian All Tomorrow's Parties at Falls Creek. I was expecting something more Nick Cave-y and less Warren Ellis-y. The band just seemed to love creating NOISE. Clearly they were enjoying themselves and most of all were really enjoying playing together. Tight wouldn't really be the right word, perfectly loose would be closer. But when they played this, this one really shone for the CRAFT of the songwriting, and that's where you now the hand of Mr Cave is at play. Oh, plus the misogyny ...
17.	Special Cases - Massive Attack
	100th Window (2003)
	Here's another band that rightly belongs at the pinnacle of the NINETIES pantheon doing their gamma ray burst from a dying star thing. This album featured songs far more complex than anything the band had previously attempted. This isn't the sparse, catchy triphop that defined them in the previous decades. This album heralded the demise of a singles band - OK they were always much more than that, the demise of that dimension of their work is probably better - and the birth of one of the most important outfits experimenting in musical form still known to us today. As always with Massive Attack, it's all about the BASS here. Musical bass. Vocal high treble. The vocal sprints hurriedly where the bass just barely creeps. And I say creeps, because it really is haunting, ominous, foreboding ... A tremendous video to boot...
16.	Wolf Like Me - TV On The Radio
	Return To Cookie Mountain (2006)
	The song that launched a career, and revived a million flagging dancefloors. Yet another song that proves the timelessness of the pop formula - create a catchy hook, repeat it ad nauseum, and provide backing that gives it a fitting pedestal. That's how you go about creating art. You don't need to be able to sing flouncy trills like Beyonce, all the great poets ever born have shown a simple structure in repetition can generate meaning and profundity, and that's what's going on here. Lycanthropy is normally a kind of corny affectation in popular culture. Not here.

Numbers 25-21, "Such Great Heights"

#21, M.I.A. Tamil nitrate.

25.	Heartbeats - The Knife
	Deep Cuts (2003)
	Remember how this whole thing began? Jealousy of my friend Dan's countdown, which he now appears mysteriously to have deleted was the motivator. This was Dan's number one, and a case  could certainly be made. The Knife have long been one of the more interesting and experimental electronic acts going around, and they have a significantly better ear for a good melody than can be said of the majority of their peers. But it's the weird, sparse, wobbling, ungrounded baseline here that really makes this one stay with you.
24.	Banquet - Bloc Party
	Silent Alarm (2005)
	Bloc Party always suffered from a perception of being a bit of a bit of a poor-man's Interpol, and it's pretty easy to see how Interpol could have written this. It's almost got 'movements' that  play with the listener's expectations. A question that begins in soaring vowel-y falsetto is completed with a rapid-fire staccato of consonants. "Why d'you feeeeeeeeeel/sonegated?" The chorus relies again on phrases that start with the repeated long-format word "tuurning/coooming" followed by a response so rapid-fire it leaves pauses in the chorus where the notes should be. And it follows in that fine literary tradition of conflating food and sex that began with humanity's very earliest origin myths.
23.	Such Great Heights - The Postal Service
	Give Up (2003)
	Another indie song that made a successful crossover into television - both soundtrack and commercial, such that it really ought to have become thoroughly irritating. But there's something about those curious, oscillating midi blips in tandem with the vocal that just doesn't seem to age. It's also been scientifically established as the twee-est track still physically possible to dance to. "They will see us waving from such great heights 'Come down now', they'll say But everything looks perfect from far away 'Come down now', but we'll stay."
22.	Hey Ya! - OutKast
	The Love Below (2003)
	The song that revived a million flagging dancefloors. All ages, all genres, all good. I believe this is the highest positioned song in my countdown to have spent significant time at number one internationally, so arguably the winnner of the People's Choice Award. The best and most successful song of the entire decade. Please don't tell me rap has no musical dimension. It's the musical chops, the fact there's actually a melody present virtually throughout the entire track, it's the ability again of that melody to carry some unusually complex vocal shennanigans, and this is nowhere more in evidence than the "alrightalrightalrightalright" call and response breakdown. This has always been where most rap artists just in-fill rather than create, in structural terms. But who DOESN'T remember where they first heard "Shake it like a Polaroid picture"?
21.	Paper Planes - M.I.A.
	Kala (2007)
	Rap has always performed strongest when it wears it's rhythm and dance heritage lightest. Full marks to the Producer, Major Lazer for the correct response when the artist announced she wanted to include four gunshots not just DURING the chorus, but AS the chorus lyric. Listen to this. One semiotically vacuous sound repeated for times creates a very pecific "meaning", that the listener actively interprets as language. "All I wanna do is/ BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG/ and a' take your money." There's no information missing from that sentence whatsoever.

Numbers 30-26, "You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve"

#29, Robert Smith - fat bastard

30.	Silence (DJ Tiësto's In Search Of Sunrise Remix) - Delerium Feat. Sarah McLachlan
	Perfecto Presents Another World [Disc 2] (2000)
	Voted by Mixmag as the "12th greatest dance record of all time", in what's an otherwise mostly appalling catalogue of utter dross. (Seriously, that's the WORST BEST OF anything I think I've ever read. It's not even vaguely canonical.) Because of the vagaries of randomly tagged pirate MP3s I spent most of the decade thinking this was Paul Oakenfold. But no, bugger me, it turns out I like a Tiësto song. Well, mix. And it's the source material that really shines, rather than the mix. There are umpteen similar versions, but this does actually seem to be the best. Sarah McLachlan's voice is what carries it. She bends just the right notes JUST enough to render the delivery quite unique, quite effective, and quite affective, and the semi-breathless vocal is married perfectly to a curiously haunting and for the genre atypically complex melody. The original is MUCH slower, more like a traditional pop song, so well done Tiësto for seeing the potential in it. Now would you mind explaining the remainder of your career?
29.	Bloodflowers - The Cure
	Bloodflowers (2000)
	God, The Cure are irritating. When this came out, Robert Smith was all over the media saying this was going to be the last ever Cure album, and well they've pulled that act about three times now. But this was believable. Because this sounds like a gamma ray burst from a dying, once massive star. The utterly epic swansong you'd produce if you wanted to keep your place in history secure. Smith has said he sees this as the culmination of a trilogy that began with Pornography (1982) and Disintegration (1989). The lineage from Disintegration is everywhere obvious, these are brooding, sullen, monolithic, epicly serious songs, all driven by reverb laden guitar riffs. They're both albums crying out to be played end to end in a massive darkened stadium. "This world always stops," I said "This wonder always leaves, The time always comes to say goodbye" "This tide always turns," I said "This night always falls again, And these flowers will always die." Lying, deceptive bastard. Lying, deceptive, obscenely talented BASTARD.
28.	You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve - Johnny Boy
	Johnny Boy (2006)
	I can still remember the first time I ever heard this. I was in Sydney for  I forget what reason, some conference I was flogging books at, probably. Women's Health? doesn'tmatter. I was banged up in bed, Friday night I think, with a huge tray of room service, remnants of the minibar scattered artfully across the duvet. Rage on the telly. This came on and well bugger me, now I need another miniPims, because that song is the damnest, catchiest, freshest, most original bit of pop I've yet heard this side of forever. These guys are the NEXT BIG THING. You heard it here first, and boy did I tell everyone I met for the next fortnight exactly that.   Well. I have no idea how any artist can possess enough talent to produce a debut single THIS GOOD from an album this turgid. Do NOT ever buy this album. Little chance of that unless you only shop the 99c bin at Dixon's, of course, because it and this band, frankly deservedly, sank without trace. How can anyone have the ear to produce a tune this killer and not be able to hear the other 11 tracks aren't in the slightest bit tuneful or interesting on frankly any level? Doesn't matter. Enjoy this, because it's the last you'll ever hear from Johnny Boy.
27.	The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
	Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (2005)
	This works on so many levels, the intro riff that's basically one note and a pitch bend that stays in your head for hours. Alex Ounsworth's voice. The wholly unintelligible vocal. The way it ramps up to the chorus: "Hauuuuuuunteeeeeeeeedd byyyyyyyy apastijustcantsee anymore anymore anymore well leeeeeeeeetmetellyou..."   It's got a vaguely alt-country whiff about it, but in essence it's pure pop. And I think I've had grander fun bouncing around dancefloors than any track discussed here so far. Actually maybe Modest Mouse win that. You don't care, either way. PLAY LOUD!!!
26.	Halo - Beyoncé
	I Am... Sasha Fierce (2008)
	OK, this is the last of the Beyoncé. Not a track I should really need to introduce. But it's everything that's great about her. It's epic, it's positively oozing grandeur, the vocal goes places most singers simply aren't capable, it will run madcap around your head for a solid hour after any given listen. It's some of the finest Top Forty Chart-pop of not merely this decade, but most of those preceding it equally.

Numbers 35-31, "Middle of the Road Class War Terra Nullius Blu-hoos"

#32 Lil Wayne

35.	Punks - I heart hiroshima
	Tuff Teef (2007)
	"Don't lock your doors, I have these PUNKS  on the ropes..." OK so once again, we start this list with a duplicate #35, because, well I find numbers challenging. Shurrup. So, here we have one of the highest-placed Australian acts of the decade, and easily the lowest-profile such artist to make the top ranks. Because this is just GREAT songwriting in every dimension that matters. It has a hook to it that could land a White Pointer, it's delivered with sass and bravado, it swanks around your speakers like it was wearing a zoot suit. And the band is WELL worth  catching live. It's ALL rather weirdly about Susie Patten. Weirdly because she's the drummer. Weirdly because she's the archest tomboy you're ever going to meet, and we're not used to either of those tropes as "frontman". The band is now apparently on hiatus as Susie is spending some time in Germany, like all the best Aussie artists do eventually. And I can't wait to see what she comes back with. Songwriting chops like this - and this came from their DEBUT - don't just evaporate. This one belts you with the first beat and doesn't stop whacking for three solid minutes.
35.	Float On - Modest Mouse
	Good News For People Who Love Bad News (2004)
	Ah, the mice of modesty. Supposed to be indie, but this will fill any given dancefloor. The chorus is as catchy a one as has ever been written. Not much more to say really, you know the tune already. All-RIGHT.
34.	The Coast Is Always Changing - Maxïmo Park
	Apply Some Pressure (2004)
	I  seem to recall back in the day I hailed this as the finest song of 2004. It now appears I was right, but only just. Someone from Sydney tried telling me I was 'Emo' for that opinion, or I forget, maybe it was my haircut, but what nonsense. "You react to my riposte" is apparently pretentious emo lyrics or some such rot. But this BELONGS here for wearing its poecy so LIGHT on its sleeve. For a song with so may finely strung together shades of light and dark, an effect itself like waves over the sea floor. Oh, alright ... piss off.
33.	Umbrella - Rihanna Feat. Jay-Z
	Bravo Hits - The Hits 2007 (2007)
	Some songs are just so well written that even an anodyne hits funnel like Rihanna can't mess them up. Even adding Jay-Z won't render them COMPLETELY banal, hard as he tries here. Uh huh, uh huh, Yeahhh Rihanna, Uh huh, uh huh, Good girl gone bad Uh huh, scoop the remnants of my brain out with a fish fork ...
32.	A Milli - Lil Wayne
	Lollipop (2008)
	So, yes, you know I'm supposed to be all gender progressive and blah. But I've always loved hip hop. LOVED. Picked on every day for a year for wearing a RUN DMC shirt to school camp. "Rap is crap, man." Yes, seeing what you did there ... But some songs you just have to listen to with your ears half closed. It's a male-dominated genre, and it's in its essence puerile. And when those two factors work in tandem, sexism is going to bubble up. You either need to find a coping mechanism or a new genre. So, here's what works for me. Some of this stuff is SO puerile that it's completely self-parodying. And there's a rare breed of artist that you no doubt instinctively despise, who actually when you drill down through the discourse seems to just know, accept and revel in it all, to such an extent that they're not really spreading ideology. I'm talking about Eminem, and I'm talking about nobody more than Lil' Wayne. There's nothing here to mimic, it's all too ridiculous. "I'm a venereal disease like a menstrual bleed", "Coke in her derrière"? For God's sake, it's all just so laughable, does it parody itself so much that it's actually progressive? I'll reserve judgement. This, its entire form, the lyrics, the backing track, it's all just RIDICULOUS. And there's never been a song like it.
31.	Middle of the Road Class War Terra Nullius Blu-hoos - G.A. Richards and the Dark Satanic Mills Bros
	Closed Off, Cold and Bitter - My Life as a Can of Beer (2005)
	The good people in Augie March may well use this chart as evidence of their utter prominence amongst quality Australian artists over the course of the decade. You recall the rules here limited each artist to a maximum three songs. Glenn A Richards, next to whom I once had a piss at Lounge..."Can't really say 'love your work' while we're doing this, can I? CAN I?"... Glenn is the only artist to feature here FOUR times. I wish the Augies would add this to their repertoire, as it's up there with their finest, lyrically and musically. It kind of drones along letting the vocal to most of the work. And the vocal is certainly up to it. "Here rests the thief who stole my self-belief."

Numbers 40-36, "Hope There's Someone"

#39, Antony and the Johnsons

40.	We Call Upon The Author - Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
	Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2007)
	OK so firstly, I messed up. So there are TWO #40s. I can't imagine why you'd care. This is some kind of brilliance this one. Cave's songwriting has evolved significantly to allow the "voice" that's present here. There's no Birthday Party DNA left in this one at all. In the place of po-faced junk-addled posturing is real humour and self-effacement. And while arguably the most self-consciously LITERARY track in this entire list, it extracts its own piss in a manner you can't help but think of as quintessentially Australian. The brilliance of "everything is banal and jejune" rests on the reality that absolutely no human being alive would ever use those words in any context, and yet here they are in a pop song rendered almost conversationally. And it's the conversational tone "My friend Doug's tapping on  the window/Hey Doug how ya been?" and the succession of weird banalities that populate the song that are its central charm. It seems a song of literary pretensions, but is it laughing at them or not?? "Prolix, prolix, there’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix." That seems to be the crux of the song, but is that Fitzgerald or is it Freud? Literature or its interpretation? It's highly entertaining, that's what it is.
40.	Hoppípolla - Sigur Rós
	Takk... (2005)
	One of the decade's truly standout and standalone musical wonders, both the band and this track, and their live shows for that matter. Almost impossible to situate, it has a post-rock provenance, but also a world music heritage, at least for a western audience where the experience of hearing sounds not words is the essence, and what sublime sounds. It could be absolutely noone else.
39.	Hope There's Someone - Antony and The Johnsons
	I Am A Bird Now (2005)
	What to say. If I called the last track sublime, this goes wherever beyond that your imagination might allow. That voice. The plaintive lyric and the matching melody. The sentiment that makes every human at the core of however cold curmudgeonly heart yearn. A wonderful band, and they make wonderful albums, although frankly an hour of this stuff is just a bit too much ...
38.	Fall From A Height - The Honeydrips
	Here Comes The Future (2007)
	This is just a WEIRD weird beast. It's kind of Retro-minimal-futurist, but there's a lot more going on than that. Probably because there's a movie soundtrack playing out in the background. That's a sample from Annie Hall, if folks are interested. The child actually becomes the central figure, and his sense of both naive threat and resignedness to it is affecting. Plus it turns heads at parties in a way that says it's not just me.
37.	At Death, A Proclamation - Phosphorescent
	Pride (2007)
	Surprisingly disappointing live it must me said. At least their set list was. I'm only familiar with this album - mostly excellent, but the tracks were sort of rocky dross. This was a very standout highlights, and some of the finest experimental rock certainly the noughties threw up.
36.	Carry Me Ohio - Sun Kil Moon
	Ghosts Of The Great Highway (2003)
	So this is Mark Kozelek's noughties project. And some of his finest work was done in the decade - selecting the highlights here was hard, but this is probably fore amongst them. A typically  languid, woozy melody and a lyric that probably suffers from veering into purple prose a few too many times. What the hell is  he actually talking about?

Numbers 50-41, "Formed a Band"

#42, Liars

50.	Formed A Band - Art Brut
	Bang Bang Rock & Roll (2005)
	"It's not irony/ it's not Rock 'n' Roll/ we're just talking, to the kids." And that of course is just oozing irony. It's the song that tries to be as banal as possible. "Formed a band/ we formed a band/ look at us/ we formed a band." But it's a case study in pop banality and pop meanings, this song is about every song. The fact that it generates a quite profound narrative from elements that are in their own right so bland is its genius. Art Brut's debut album seemed to offer so much potential, it crackled with about eight tracks that were all single-worthy, and Eddie Argos seemed at least to this observer to be the absolute next great thing, and mostly because of the well-worn hipster irony. "I'm drinking Hennesy/with Morrissey" is about as knowing as genius gets, at least until he starts singing about David Hockney, or 'Ockney, as pronounced "Modern art makes me/ want to rock out." But something went wrong. He'll probably fancy I'm just kissing arse, but when Chris Chinchilla upped and made Melbourne home, the band seemed to totally lose the knack of writing pop music altogether. And Eddie Argos suddenly didn't wear his ironic pantaloons nearly half as well. So if you buy an Art Brut album, make it this one. JUST this one. And you should, because I'd probably have it in my decade's Top 20.
49.	Poison Dart - The Bug Feat. Warrior Queen
	London Zoo (2008)
	So we've spoken about dubstep, we've spoken about grime. This beast distils and melds all the greatest elements of both. A beat that sounds like a heart attack. A rap that belts you with a sonic baseball bat. Wire magazine had this as their best album of 2008, and they know a thing or two. The culmination of about twenty years quiet achievement by Kevin Martin, I'm really not terribly familiar with much of his other work, and I need to fix that.
48.	Matadjem Yinmixan - Tinariwen
	Aman Iman: Water Is Life (2007)
	There's not a heap of World Music in this list, and I'll confess that's because it's a bit of a musical gap of mine. The Tuareg are a semi-nomadic desert Berber people from Mali, and Tinariwen actually means "the deserts" in their native tongue. Tinariwen the group formed while the founding members were exiled in Algeria during the Malinese civil war, basically building their own guitars, in one case out of "a tin can, a stick and bicycle brake wire." The band were actually trained as rebel soldiers by Gaddhafi's Libya, eventually returning to their homeland following a Tuareg uprising in the early 90s, and finally laying down arms for guitars on a permanent basis. Their guitar style is known locally as 'assouf', and as is obvious from even the first bar of this number, draws substantially on NON-western musical traditions. While there's a hint of blues to it, it appears to be because it's sourcing the same West African traditions as the blues itself. The band claim never to have heard any actual blues music until they started touring internationally in the early noughties. But in a decade where my thesis starts with "you've heard it ALL before", Tinariwen stand very resolutely out, because unless I've got a bunch of Touareg nomads online here, you very definitely HAVEN'T.
47.	Ready For The Floor - Hot Chip
	Made In The Dark (2008)
	Hot Chip, if Pee Wee Herman went electronic. No question these guys produced some of the catchier indie-centric dancefloor numbers of the decade, the art of it all is these strange, languid almost anti-dance melodies that somehow find themselves very neatly shoehorned into their least suited genre. It all just works.
46.	Nine Samurai - Kode9 and The Spaceape
	Memories Of The Future (2006)
	OK this is the last of the dubstep. Which means this is the decade's finest dubstep. The riff sound at all familiar? It's Fumio Hayasaka's "Seven Samurai Suite" from Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai", and would you have ever thought that would work as a dubstep tune? No. Nothing about this should work. Yet EVERYTHING does.
45.	(I Know) A Girl Called Jonny - Rowland S Howard
	Pop Crimes (2010)
	A collaboration with HTRK's vocalist Jonny Standish, it all hangs on the chorus: "She's my narcotic lollipop" intoned into virtual narcolepsy. Is it a love song or a fantasy? The song's subject matter being audibly present in the song is actually extremely unsettling. It's as creepy as it is romantic, this musical strangeling really does stay with you.
44.	Single Ladies - Beyonce
	I am Sasha Fierce (2008)
	No credible summation of the decade could leave this  out. Arguably the only real candidate for single of the decade, Beyonce has always had a knack for walking JUST enough the artist's side of the populist street, and that extends to every element of the "brand". She herself is possibly the quintessential postmodern gesamtkunstwerk. So this is WAGNER ...
43.	NY Excuse - Soulwax
	Any Minute Now (2004)
	If there were such a thing as dance-punk, this would probably be its anthem. Lyrically its a pick-apart job on late capitalism's erosion/appropriation of human identities "This is the excuse that we're making/ is it good enough for what you're paying?/ You're PAYING!" For all the effort house music most specifically goes to in manipulating the listener's emotions through normally facile "builds" and "drops", this is a properly crafted work of art that starts sloooowly ratcheting up from the minute it starts, and it builds towards a crescendo that Tiesto reckons he'd know exactly what to do with, Soulwax, whom you may also know as 2manydjs, are quite happily to let NY Excuse spin off like a mad loose bobbin into the realms of self-annihiliation. And therein is the genius.
42.	The Other Side Of Mt. Heart Attack - Liars
	Drum's Not Dead (2006)
	Well worth seeing live, if you ever get the chance, Liars are largely LA-based aussie Angus Andrew's project. And throughout the decade they were certainly amongst those bands doing some of the most interesting stuff in the noise/experimental zone. Although let's face it, a lot of that's not really all that interesting. The album's terrific too. Experimenting with gated rhythm and pedal effects to fully deconstruct the entire idea and purpose of rhythm within the traditional song format. Here, rhythm is present, but it's almost totally indistinct from melody, and with a genuine sense of poetics, the vocal is amongst the most effective and affective things that the noughties produced.
41.	Icarus Smicarus - McLusky
	The Difference Between Me And You Is That I'm Not On Fire (2004)
	"GET BACK IN YOUR HOLE/ AND GET BENT, SON!" I challenge anyone to not let this beast leave them reeling from exposure to even a fifteen second sample. This is absolutely everything that's great about McLusky. Completely irreverent, middle finger thrust proudly in the air. If it's not poetry, and it isn't, then that's basically just poetry's loss. As a great man once said, "play FUCKEN LOUD!"

Numbers 60 - 51 "The Night Is A Blackbird"

#60, Nurse With Wound

60.	Lass Mich - Faust & Nurse With Wound
	Disconnected (2007)
	Nobody seems to really know anything about the actual provenance of this album. It sounds a LOT like NWW got a hold of some Faust out-takes and decided to fuck with them, and a lot LESS like an actual collaboration. Some artists find themselves included in this list possibly more on the basis of a body of work or album than on a stellar standout single, and this is Nurse with Wound's moment. NWW as band, as opposed to NWW as Steven Stapleton began performing live again in 2005, but this appears to mark something of a side project - though Stapleton has apparently played a couple of live encores with Faust over the last couple of years. Anyway, while the whole album rightly deserves a place here, as certainly the best NWW offering I've heard in a long time, Stapleton is impossible to keep track of, so who knows what gems I may have missed? Regardless, this is probably the most accessible track off the album.
59.	Clint Eastwood - Gorillaz
	Clint Eastwood (Single) (2001)
	It's kind of hard to imagine how Gorillaz ever had their conceptual birth. Would anyone in the nineties have even remotely dreamt that Damon Albarn would ever put out a rap album? Or that Misterdobalina WOULDN'T be the only thing Del the Funky Homosapien would be remembered for? Del performed on Gorillaz first album under the identity of "Del the Ghost Rapper", with the band having an unusually exhaustive fictional metanarrative incorporating cartoon half-ape/half-human characters. Del was supposed to be a spirit that was hiding from death within the band's drummer. Whatever. It's funky, dance oriented pop, and that's arguably a height Gorillaz could be said to have scaled almost alone during the decade.
58.	Sabrina - Einstürzende Neubauten
	Silence is Sexy (2000)
	Marking a neat and definitive break with their erstwhile trademark industrial raucousness, Silence is Sexy saw The Neubauten reborn as newly restrained, pared back, experimental unit. Silence itself is, obviously enough, the unit of analysis for the album. It's in the spaces BETWEEN events that the band creates meaning, not from the events themselves. But it's the very success of that pursuit which the band themselves seem to want to undermine, and the title track concludes oxymoronically with the rejoinder that "silence is not sexy at all." Sabrina is easily the most radio friendly offering from the album, and quickly became one of the band's staple performance tracks. The song asks the question of what colour can be ascribed to this new music. Those who know the band's ethos know that they have always drawn inspiration from dada-ist processes of creation, using randomly drawn cards as musical instructions from which the songs are then improvised, so the idea of colour representing both mood and sound is no great leap of logic. And Sabrina answers in a resolute voice that the colour of silence is BLACKNESS. "It is as black as Malevich Square/The cold furnace in which we stare." And it's a brilliant blackness, with a video that does it complete justice.
57.	The Night Is A Blackbird - Augie March
	Strange Bird (2002)
	Yep, well I'm pretty confident this isn't going to be in anyone else's top forties anywhere. So all the other lists are wrong. This song is like a slow-paced ritual emotional disembowelment. That's a GOOD thing. And Glenn A Richards is probably Australia's greatest contemporary lyricist. And I'm probably the only person in the country who thinks that. So all the other Australians are wrong too.
56.	To Clean - Woods
	Songs Of Shame (2009)
	Don't know much about these guys, though they've been around since 2005, they only actually ever appeared on my radar through this whole noughties list shebang. It's New York folk, but with a disharmonic twist, they're extremely prolific - with nine albums in the last ten years, this is an extremely well crafted neat little gem.
55.	Can't Stand Me Now - The Libertines
	The Best Of... (2004)
	Somehow they managed to come across as a pack of frat boys, but man, Pete Doherty could WRITE. "Cornered, the boy kicked out at the world/ the world kicked back/ a lot fuckin' harder now". That's basically James Joyce. Shuddup.
54.	The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores - Morrissey
	You Are The Quarry (2004)
	Who did the decades most extravagant and unexpected comeback? The bloke who'd been putting out wallpaper since 1995. Who won an entire new legion of fans and extended his career by at least another decade with one album? This bloke. Even while failing to release its pinnacle track as a single. This is absolutely everything that is utterly brilliant about Morrissey. Its simultaneously curmudgeonly AND self-deprecating, it ripples with pathos but sung with a knowing wink. He knows this is everything people have come to expect of him, many of them not intending to flatter. But he sings it to soak up the flattery, whether it truly exists or not.
53.	Four To The Floor (Thin White Duke Mix) - Starsailor
	Silence Is Easy (2003)
	Here's a weird one. So, EVERYONE knows the remix. NOBODY has even heard the original. And you listen to it and you wonder "how the hell did anyone ever think to turn THAT into a dance track?" and to have it become one of the most ubiquitous, and seemingly obvious such beasts ... it's all very strange. You can compare them below. The remix is in a whole other league entirely.
52.	Pork and Beans - Weezer
	Weezer (Red Album) (2008)
	The award-winning video draws extensively on the still reasonably nascent YouTube and its meme stash. Could you be ANY more frigging po-mo if you TRIED? Well yes, actually. Apparently this killer-catchy number was written in anger after their record company insisted they produce significantly more commercial material. The pop culture references "They say I need some Rogaine to put in my hair", "Oakley makes the shades that transform a tool", "Timbaland knows the way to reach the top of the chart/ Maybe if I work with him I can perfect the art", are so deliciously obvious, the chorus so over-amped, this is the hit single that tries to murder every other hit single ever.
51.	Oh Yeah - The Subways
	Young For Eternity (2005)
	Another one you'll probably struggle to find in other lists. I have no idea why. The list of songs during the course of the decade capable of stopping in your tracks - "what the fuck was THAT?" - isn't very long. But I still remember the first time I heard this, but it was on RAGE, so by the time I was hooked the band's name had already flashed off the screen. Then they played the Big Day Out, and I was just checking out this new band - or probably more accurately checking out Charlotte Cooper (all the great rock chicks have been bassists of course) when they flipped into this, and so did my brain. The album was really promising also. I probably should have found room in this list for "Rock n Roll Queen". You can have it as a bonus below. And they sounded well polished beyond their scant years, although by all reports their more recent albums haven't really matched the promise of their stellar debut.