5. Passion Pit, “Folds in Your Hands”

- From the 2009 album Manners.
- Official website.

My other favorite album of 2009, Passion Pit’s Manners, dropped like, I don’t know, some sugarcoated candy-flavored meteor from heaven. My friend Laurel claims (I paraphrase here) that it’s “typical Wily Filipino music”, which I take to mean that “it features electronica roots, danceable beats, and unsyncopated ensemble rhythms.” Or perhaps she means that a) it’s happy, and b) that it’s sung in vocals way beyond my non-existent singing capabilities. Though, let me digress for a moment, the singers I like to sing along to – Neil Young, James McNew, Mac McCaughan (and on the more modulated side of the spectrum, Matthew Sweet and Dean Wareham) – all have that same pinched tenor.

Michael Angelakos’ falsetto, alas, doesn’t always hold up live, but the tooth-rotting goopiness of their keyboards is shamelessly, joyfully intact in concert. “Everything’s easy when you’ve never had to choose,” Angelakos sings, and quite frankly I had a difficult time choosing between “Folds In Your Hands” and just about every other song on Manners – the quest for spiritual uplift on “The Reeling”, that children’s choir on “Little Secrets”, the odd Catholicism of “Eyes as Candles” – but “Folds in Your Hands”, even with its inscrutable lyrics, wins this round for now.

Played live, it’s perfect because of the DJ dynamics engineered right into the song: the people singing “Like the sun and the moon I will circle you till you bloom”, hands raised to the ceiling, as the drums drop out, then the keyboards swell into a crescendo just before the beats kick back in. And that last refrain? “Feel it rain / Feel it rain / We’re alive / Feel it rain”? In a crowd of singing, jumping dancers with huge smiles on their faces? Didn’t I say it was perfect?

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The rest of the list so far:
6. Ximena Sariñana, “Vidas Paralelas” (2008)
7. Thomas Tantrum, “Work It” (2008)
8. The Zombies, “I Want Her She Wants Me” (1968)
9. Ben Kweller, “Old Hat” (2009)
10. Ida Maria, “Oh My God” (2007)
11. Anna Fermin’s Trigger Gospel, “How Do You Judge Me” (2003)
12. The Phenomenal Handclap Band, “15 to 20″ (2009)
13. Speech Debelle, “The Key” (2009)
14. ComaR, “I Want You D.A.N.C.E.” (2008)
15. Michael Jackson, “Happy” (1973)
16. Wonder Girls, “Nobody” (2008)

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