Do I Wanna Know?
Arctic Monkeys -AM
This song has been played almost to death, in part because gets airplay on pop, rock AND indie stations. While it's nice to see a masterful song getting it's just desserts, it makes me sad to see that most of this track's exposure has been in single form, cut off from the rest of the album (which, if you've heard it, is one of the more cohesive ventures in recent history). But even in light of this ubiquity, "Do I Wanna Know" is brilliant. Decriers have branded it as a Black Key's ripoff, an easy mistake to make when you are a rock-and-roll surface dweller who thinks that the Black Key's invented the concept of the isolated guitar riff (they didn't). If "Do I Wanna Know" is anything, it's an loving homage to the Tommy Iommi-era of Black Sabbath; a sludgy, sexy, footstomping jam based around a single riff. The Monkeys are admitted fans and they often break into War Pigs during the live performances of Arabella. Combine that minimalistic English metal with Alex Turner's cabaret-smooth vocals and you have yourself a album opener that will last the ages. And that bass drum at the beginning...
Everything In It's Right Place -
Radiohead - Kid A
Thom Yorke and company probably took a freshman psych class at the University of Exeter. They know the secret of sequence learning; the easiest parts to remember in a set of data are the beginning and the end. Any one of their albums could qualify for this list on musical merit alone, but I chose the opener from Kid A because of it's broad impact on the music scene at the time of its release Radiohead, up to that point, had perfected brit-rock. Pablo Honey wasn't excellent but it set a great tone and yielded a few hits. With The Bends, they ironed out all the kinks and turned out a masterpiece of melancholy, guitar driven complaint rock that provided a template for Coldplay's debut, the much less groundbreaking yet much more far-reaching Parachutes. OK Computer is an undisputed modern classic and a fantastic embodiment of the collective, post-industrial revolution British guilt that has been a reoccurring key component of British art (especially horror movies, oddly enough). Kid A is where things change; it is the extremely divisive point in Radiohead history at which Thom fully embraced his electronic ambitions, to the chagrin of "rock purists" and the delight of those who saw Aphex Twin, not Blur or Oasis, as the new prophet of British music. Like every song on this list, it sets the tone for the rest of the album within seconds. The deep, resonant glissando of the opening synth is a watershed moment for music, and the fact that Radiohead pulled it off without a hitch is a testament to their constant ability to identify and impact the musical zeitgeist.
