The Best Closing Tracks From V&B’s Top 100 of the 2000s
Finishing your album on a strong note is an oft-overlooked skill, especially in an age where albums seem to be increasingly front-loaded to appease shortened attention spans. It would almost seem that the back half of even some of the greatest albums are meant for filler and the last song is usually meant for forgettable tracks or painful extended jams that needlessly extend an album’s running length.
These 10 tracks, however, are different. They emphasize the concept of an album as a united whole, something to be viewed as a single entity. The provide the lingering resonance that makes an album truly something to cherish. You could say that these songs are the last of a dying breed.
10. Brian Wilson “Good Vibrations”
Dude, it’s “Good Vibrations.” What else can you say? OK, everyone was super stoked that SMiLE was going to officially see the light of day and, as I noted before, it’s basically all about the tracklisting. But the most ingenious move Wilson made in releasing the album was slapping the album’s most well-known and beloved track at the end (revised lyrics and all), validating everything Beach Boys fans had been hoping SMiLE would be and leaving us all with a big, goofy grin on our faces. “Good Vibrations” lives up to the song and the album’s title.
9. Harvey Milk “Mothers Day”
Special Wishes is the sound of a band slowly getting its fucked up mojo back. It starts out solid, but unsteady and a bit tame. But as Special Wishes moves along, Harvey Milk get wilder and weirder, ending with an eight-and-a-half minute legitimately sincere ode to mother. Opening with organ and violin, “Mothers Day” sounds like either a wedding or funeral march, but everything slowly gets more sinister and worrisome until the whole song is drenched in blood and guts thanks to Harvey Milk’s lumbering aural assault. It’s funny, but I’m afraid to laugh.
8. The Dismemberment Plan “Ellen And Ben”
Change is a bit of a breakup album. Sure it’s about a guy who lost his semi-serious girlfriend to a UFO, but the fallout is difficult and confusing like any good breakup. For Change’s final song (and, ultimately, the Dismemberment Plan’s final official song), singer Travis Morrison turns his attention on another couple, narrating their initial interaction, the excitable courtship, their disappearance from social settings and their eventual breakup. Then Morrison turns the story back on himself, using the failed relationship as a springboard for reflection on his own life (things are good, he’s busy hanging with his nephew, trying to keep his eyes on the prize). He also mentions something about model fighter planes that I don’t quite get. Either way, it’s all draped in funky Prince guitars and giddy keyboard beeps and feels like a tremendously warm way to cape off a wonderful, often overlooked career.
7. Animal Collective “Brother Sport”
The funny thing about “Brother Sport” is that it doesn’t sound like a traditional end-of-the-album track. Instead, “Brother Sport” has mid-album pop blast written all over it. Slapped at the end of Merriweather Post Pavilion, “Brother Sport” feels like one of those old albums where the band slaps a big unrelated single on the end of the album, like “Radio Radio” at the end of This Year’s Model or “Dear God” from Skylarking. It may feel too big a banger to be at the end, but nothing feels like a more deserved high-five for a job well done than closing an album with a song this dizzying and joyful.
6. The New Pornographers “Stacked Crooked”
The biggest difference between Mass Romantic and Twin Cinema is basically summed up in these two supplemental lists. Mass Romantic is a “first song” kind of album, while Twin Cinema is a “last song” kind of album. One jumps at you, frothing at the mouth before limping its way to the finish line (talk about mixed metaphors), while the other takes its time, coming to a close with energy and life. “Stacked Crooked” opens slowly and subtly, but the song quickly starts to build to a crescendo that feels larger than anything the New Pornographers had done before, pulling in African music influences for its final, wonderful coda.
5. Joel Plaskett Emergency “Light Of The Moon”
“In late September / I drove across the prairies / The mountains behind me / And the ocean beyond,” sings Joel Plaskett on what may be the ultimate lonely road anthem released this decade. Of course, Plaskett is a romantic soul with a penchant for syrupy lyrics and CanCon name-dropping, but he also has an absurd ability to cause the listener to conform to that same romanticism – at least for us north of the 49th types. “Light Of The Moon” captures a bit of the mystique of Canada (at least better than that piece of shit One Week movie did) – it starts in the wheat fields, man, and it bursts and blooms from there. Canada is expansive, but sweetly demure. “Light Of The Moon” captures that perfectly.
4. The Hold Steady “Southtown Girls”
You want E Street cheese? You’ve got it with the hokey hands over the ears, a cappella harmony that opens “Southtown Girls.” It’s a silly little moment that hearkens back to the breakdown of John Cougar Mellancamp’s “Jack And Diane,” but it’s also a first rate goose bump moment and a testament to the band’s continued appeal. The song settles into a grimy groove, with Craig Finn muttering more drunken brilliance (and it also manages to land in some first-rate Thin Lizzy guitarmony and a funky harmonica solo), but that chorus (“Southtown girls won’t blow you away / But you’ll know that they’ll stay”) is something truly special and another strong argument in the case for Hold Steady being the best rock band of the decade.
3. The Wrens “This Is Not What You Had Planned”
You ever just sit down at the piano or with your guitar when no one’s around and start making something up on the spot and everything just comes together perfectly? The lyrics flow out naturally, the melody is strong and you’re just singing the hell out of it and having a legitimately amazing musical moment. Of course, once the moment’s gone, it’s gone. You can’t remember how it all went and trying to replay it proves way less than rewarding – like attempting to re-dream a dream (Halle Berry become Chuck Berry, etc.). You kick yourself because if you recorded the whole thing in the first place, everything would have worked perfectly. It’s extremely fortuitous that someone pressed record in the studio when Wrens’ singer Kevin Whelan sat down and came up with this beauty. We should all be so lucky.
2. The Constantines “Little Instrument”
If you were ever in a high school punk band that played live from time to time (like I was) you may have had that moment where you’re playing and everything seems so desperate and important, sweat is pouring off your face, your bloody fingers have smeared your guitar pickups, strings are snapping, voices are desperately reaching for air and everyone is IN. THE. MOMENT. The reality, of course, was that you were making some kind of ungodly racket with your shitty Face To Face knock-off band and only, like, 12 people were there watching you (all other bands, or friends with other bands). But it didn’t matter, because what was happening in your mind was beautiful and urgent and unattainable. That’s “Little Instrument.” When singer Bryan Webb bellows “We’ve got an amplifier” it’s like…chills. No other song this decade could quite define and re-create this type of rare, possibly unrealistic moment, with quite the same aplomb. With “Little Instrument,” you can recreate that moment again and again.
1. Smog “Permanent Smile”
A good album-closing track doesn’t need to be showy or obvious, it’s allowed to be repetitive and slow-moving – as long as it strikes the listener in a real way. “Permanent Smile” moves slowly, with nothing more than a trickling piano, a repetitive guitar arpeggio and a glacial Spector-sized “Be My Baby” drumbeat to decorate Bill Callahan’s cool, detached voice, but its deliberate movements still haunt me nearly 10 years after I first heard it. “Permanent Smile” is in keeping with Dongs of Sevotion’s theme of flawed characters and the violent imagery that surrounds them (“And the flesh rotted off my skull”), and while the hypnotic beauty of “Smile” sounds like an exaltation (“Oh God…”), it’s really a lament and, ultimately, as the final, deafening drum crack makes abundantly clear, a suicide note. It’s a transfixing work and one that sits in the pit of your stomach for days. A gorgeous, almost uplifting final brush stroke followed by a finite and deafening silence – going out the way a good album should.