Taiko Super Kicks – Hikui Gogo (2016)
Hikui Gogo is a song by the Japanese indie rock band Taiko Super Kicks. Can I call it lazy and miraculous? Like a blizzard lazily blanketing a town, like a kudzu lazily subsuming a farmhouse, like incense smoke shimmering in temple air. It unfolds slowly, across almost six minutes, across almost every kind of electric guitar – fast and slow, spiky and wavy, grumbly and precise. I could use the technical terms but what's the point: this is a floating, meandering song, peaceful as a baseball play-by-play, until suddenly it's not, the singer's yelling, the end is here, and someone's shooting flares from all the bases. Until that moment, Taiko Super Kicks feels like a melting version of the Police or a lethargic version of Pavement, slacking even further off. Whether you're trudging through the snow, digging out your driveway, or hiding from the weather – in the safety of your home or halfway across the world – Hikui Gogo will set you right, cozy your cockles, put some sea surf in your ear.
Cass McCombs – Bum Bum Bum (2016)
The California songwriter Cass McCombs has hidden one song (apprehensive, foreboding) inside another (bobbing, pleasant). It's a confusion that extends into the track's structure: The verses seem like choruses, or the chorus like a verse. McCombs will mumble a line about tolling bells or congealing blood and end with a jaunty "bum bum bum" – as if it were a tune about cats and dogs forming a jug-band. In fact, the singer's got his sights set on the grim landscape of contemporary America, where there are Klansmen and murderers with iPhones, white dogs growling in their cages. Yet Bum Bum Bum never descends into sanctimony. It's too buoyant a melody, performed by too temperate a band, and McCombs's marble-mouthed delivery would disqualify him from preaching. He sounds instead like a surfer – sitting on some driftwood, beside a bonfire, squinting into flames.
Reykjavíkurdætur – HAEPIÐ (2015)
There's something unusually inspiring about Reykjavíkurdætur's party rap. It's not that I'm finding lift to the lyrics (I don't understand Icelandic), nor is there anything notable in the group's dark, minimal beats. What's inspirational comes down to biography. Reykjavíkurdætur, or "the daughters of Reykjavik", are a crew of 20 MCs and counting. They include part-timers and professional musicians, teenagers and thirtysomethings, students and moms, two Andrésdóttirs and a Gunnarsdóttir. The group has an open-door policy – they recruit additional members at open mic nights, inviting anyone with hustle to join. This recruitment strategy lends their songs a sense of fizzy possibility: New voices are always appearing, with different cadences and energies. After all, any one of us can become a rapper – you just have to do some rapping. Although some members of Reykjavíkurdætur have incredible flows, others seem entirely credible. Every time I listen to HAEPIÐ I consider the idea that I wouldn't be able to do this until I could.
Sean Michaels received the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Us Conductors. He is the editor of the music blog Said the Gramophone.