5. The Long Winters vs. Pixies vs. Stone Temple Pilots

	vs.		vs.
"Stupid" by The Long Winters from When I Pretend to Fall		"Winterlong" by Pixies from Complete 'B' Sides		"Interstate Love Song" by Stone Temple Pilots from Purple

"Stupid" (13 plays at Last.fm, tied for #101): Listening through these songs, it's becoming clear I have a thing for little opening flourishes, whether they're loud and brash or lush and pretty like the one that opens this song. Like most of the Long Winters' terrific catalog, this tune combines a nice, simple chord progression with great poetic lyrics and a wonderfully bright vocal line from frontman John Roderick. On top of that it's some of the best vocal harmonies of any of their songs and an interlude of what sounds like (but probably isn't) two-part lap steel. Then there's the little stutter-step false start near the end, which I can't help suddenly thrash about to -- a great cap to a really strongly constructed song.

"Winterlong" (2 plays, unranked): Another great opening bit, as a quick run up a scale sets up a great duet between Kim Deal and Frank Black's not-quite-falsetto. Their voices, and the band's guitar sensibility, is what really makes the track work for me -- I really can't get into the Neil Young original, even though I've given it a valiant try (though I wonder if Young had re-recorded it around the time the Pixies did, if it wouldn't sound much the same as theirs). The ability of the Pixies to both display and reinterpret their influences like this is one of the things that really separates them from many of their peers and followers -- this is a perfect companion to "Here Comes Your Man," for instance, but it's also a perfect homage.

"Interstate Love Song" (2 plays, unranked): I probably should've been a major label executive. I had an impressive string of predicting songs that would become hit singles back in the early and mid 90's, and this was one of them. I bought Purple largely on the strength of Core, and when this track first came up I was blown away. It's a step away from the 1992-era grunge that STP was otherwise soaking in at the time, sounding really nothing at all like, say, the Pearl Jam catalog to that point. The riffs are great, and the subtle bass line does way more work than it has an right to. The way the verses move forward is so well aligned that it's hard to believe the band didn't pop champagne as soon as they finished the last take. Unfortunately, they never really took this sound anywhere, which is pretty much true of every good song they ever had. A schizo band if there ever was one, I certainly hope this is something they can recapture if they ever record again.

VERDICT: There's a lot of perfection in these three songs, to be sure; it's probably the strongest group of three so far. I think the win has to go to "Stupid" on the basis of visceral love -- it's a song I still turn up when it shuffles to the top, while the other two have shifted somewhat into historical love territory.