The Singles Jukebox

And if The Singles Jukebox End-of-Year Best-Off 2009 were televised, this would be the game that got fobbed off to ESPN at teatime on Saturday. Be thankful we can’t be arsed doing an impression of Ray Stubbs…

Jessica Popper: “Lisztomania” has grown on me a lot recently. I may even change my opinion that they’ve been rubbish since 2004.

Erick Bieritz: “Lisztomania” compares unfavorably to “1901” and Phoenix’s impressive run of past singles in general, while “Trap Goin Ham” introduces a new voice pinned against an immense, quaking slab of urban noise.

Tom Ewing: Phoenix are the sort of group I get into boring passive aggressive fights about when people call them “perfect pop” or something. There’s something so anal about their pursuit of fiddly happiness, they’re like the indie Mika. I would have voted against them even if it was Peter Kay’s Animated All Stars in the bracket, let alone a funny, scary, super super catchy hip-hop track about piefights as a social breakdown metaphor. (That is what it’s about, right? I read that in a blog once.)

Briony Edwards: This one was hard to call, so I used the logical argument formation of: I like angry music. Pill is angrier music. Pill wins.

Erika Villani: I don’t love either of these songs, but I can recognize “Trap Goin’ Ham” is a good story well told, even if it doesn’t do much for me. The jury’s still out on “Lisztomania.”

Jonathan Bradley: No matter how mannered Phoenix sound, their best songs burst with an emotionality their rhythmic constraint cannot withhold. “Lisztomania,” however, merely cruises. Not “Trap Goin’ Ham”; every single second of Pill’s horror-lurch sounds like a riot about to break out. This song’s a live grenade and all you can do is hang on for dear life.

Tal Rosenberg: “Trap Goin’ Ham” is a third-rate “Ha.” Phoenix rock their collars up, but they look good when they wear it well.

Martin Kavka: “Trap Goin’ Ham”‘s charm — also on ample display in its video portraying joy, suffering, and booty in the ruins of Atlanta’s Pink City — makes the cry of “like a riot, like a riot, oh!” in “Lisztomania” seem like the most lifeless white Euro lame thing ever.

Alfred Soto: “Lisztomania” is so clean that not even the filth of “Trap Goin’ Ham” would muddy its porcelain surface, and so affectless that it’s impervious to any subtextual excavation.

Anthony Miccio: Enjoyable French rock is infinitely more fascinating and novel than crack entrepreneurship.

Matt Cibula: Straightforward ghetto testimony makes Pill an easy winner here; I like the bounce of “Lisztomania” but it buries the lede and never gets where it threatens to go.

Rodney J. Greene: To be honest, between this and Lil Cali and Young Dro’s similarly fly “Ric Flair” I’m ready to see people go anything other than ham. Going bananas and going nuts are so old that I learned them from the squares. Pill suggests that one might go bologna meat, but that hasn’t really caught on. Has anyone gone porkchop yet? How about goin’ grits ‘n’ gravy? First Dirty Southener to go hog maw gets an automatic [10]. As for Phoenix, there are some fun organ doodles in the second half of “Listzomania,” but otherwise the frou frou Frenchmen’s pleasant, ultimately rather ordinary guitar pop goes in one ear and traces a beeline for the other.

Iain Mew: I haven’t really fallen for “Lisztomania” as a song, but its sonics are awesome at times. The clomping bass under the chorus is something else! “Trap Goin’ Ham” almost catches up as it races away at its conclusion but there’s a bit too much of the same thing on the way there.

Chuck Eddy: Pill is certainly more useful than Phoenix for getting unsightly antiperspirant stains out of the carpet. Also, his song makes for a better lunch, at least if you add spicy mustard and a few scallions.

Alex Macpherson: Phoenix have maintained their popularity by trundling away in the background making inoffensive noises; in nearly a decade they have yet to persuade me to care about them. On the other hand, this is the track with which Pill seized my attention as an artist who proves hip-hop’s continuing vitality. No contest.

Frank Kogan: Man, “Lisztomania” is so not my thing. Dreamy and pensive with rock ‘n’ soul backing it up but the singing such a blank that this holds no dreams or thoughts for me. “Trap Goin’ Ham” sounds like Atlanta 2001, and it doesn’t touch me/scare me quite as much as Backbone et al. once did, but this is still a good sound, and Pill could be shoveling the driveway in Pittsburgh and I’d find it more galvanizing than the Phoenix track.

Cecily Nowell-Smith: Don’t get me wrong, I’ve absolutely nothing against jaunty spangly indiepop– but “Lisztomania”’s sweet lightness cannot compete against “Trap Goin’ Ham” and its menacing pizzicato arpeggios and distant hollers and proud posture, so vividly like that feeling of walking tall when you’re terrified.

Mallory O\’Donnell: Phoenix by a buslength. Not really sure why the thoroughly dull Pill track even made it this far – was it paired against Gaggle?

Anthony Easton: Liszt is just so fucking boring.

Alex Ostroff: To be honest, both Phoenix and Pill made work that I appreciated more than I loved. Objectively, “Trap Goin’ Ham” is slightly better, but it’s really a toss-up.

Renato Pagnani: Both songs are really good; I’m not convinced either are great. Phoenix gets the nod, but on another Pill could easily get my vote. Perhaps I’m just in a very francophone mood tonight.

Edward Okulicz: An unfair pairing – these two are my least favourite songs remaining in the competition, and one of them gets to go through. No fair etc etc. At any rate, the weedy hookless prattling nothing of “Lisztomania” is everything that was wrong with Phoenix circa their last album, and I thought on the basis of “1901” they’d run away from it but no, here it recurs. But it’s still better than “Trap Goin’ Ham” which infuriates for being not only awful, but for absolutely wasting that fierce plucked-string production – eerie, creepy, menacing and reduced to the level of complete nonsense. Mediocre beats ruined potential.

Jordan Sargent: Phoenix are the best pop-rock band in the world and “Lisztomania” is their crown jewel. This is rock music that is as invigorating as it is pristine, as hooky as it is heady, and it blew just about every indie rock single out of the water this year. Regrets to “Trap Goin’ Ham,” which is a great single qua single in its own right, but while both were titanic hot month hits, I’ll remember summer 2009 as belonging to Phoenix.

Michaelangelo Matos: I heard the Phoenix song and got everything I will ever get from it on the first play; “Trap” kept burrowing.

Andrew Casillas: “Trap Goin’ Ham”, oddly, has a less interesting title than its opponent.

Pete Baran: “Trap Goin’ Ham” was one of the year’s best daft hip-hop songs (where the daftness may be in the eye of the beholder) but it streaks miles ahead of the dull college indie of Phoenix.

Ian Mathers: Out of all the second round matches, this is the one I care most about, partly because it’s the one I can most easily see going the way it absolutely shouldn’t. No disrespect to Pill and the perfectly fine, fun “Trap Goin’ Ham” (although “Glass” was better), but “Lisztomania” not only generated maybe the best fan-made video of all time, it’s the perfect distillation of everything I love about and respond to in one of my absolute favourite records of the year (and one of the few from 2009 I felt confident enough about to include on my Stylus Decade ballot).

Al Shipley: Both are utterly generic and unremarkable examples of their respective genres, but at least the Phoenix song has a nice toe-tapping beat.

Doug Robertson: Despite sounding a lot more like Adam and the Ants than I remember it, I’m still plumping for Phoenix whose lovely lilting vibe can still lift my spirits from their general grumptastic ebb. Not that the aggression in “Trap Goin’ Ham” doesn’t hold a powerful allure, but sometimes you want a warm cosy blanket of a track to snuggle up to, rather than one that’s going to leave you with some uncomfortable blisters.

John Seroff: “Trap” still manages to slightly quicken my heartbeat as soon as the first strings are plucked, whereas a dozen spins of “Lisztomania” has yet to leave me with any impression at all. It might make fine production music? I loved Phoenix when they were more Komeda than Killers; these days I’m ordering pork over fowl.

David Moore: That Phoenix song is super annoying. Can I vote for Pill twice?

Martin Skidmore: An easy one for me: hopelessly aimless indie versus one of the most enjoyable new acts of the year.

VOTES

“Lisztomania” – 12 (Iain Mew, Mallory O’Donnell, Jessica Popper, Ian Mathers, Al Shipley, Doug Robertson, Edward Okulicz, Alfred Soto, Anthony Miccio, Jordan Sargent, Renato Pagnani, Tal Rosenberg)

“Trap Goin’ Ham” – 20 (Martin Skidmore, Chuck Eddy, Frank Kogan, Alex Macpherson, Cecily Nowell-Smith, Anthony Easton, Martin Kavka, Michaelangelo Matos, Andrew Casillas, Pete Baran, Tom Ewing, John Seroff, David Moore, Erick Bieritz, Alex Ostroff, Erika Villani, Rodney J Greene, Briony Edwards, Matt Cibula, Jonathan Bradley)

Forgive us for not hanging about, but we need to get this done before the end of January. Pill goes through to face off against Taylor Swift. Good luck on that, fella.

NEXT UP – joint-rank outsiders Electrik Red stand between ”9xs Outta 10” and a place in the quarter-finals. There’ll be blood on the lycra…