10. Foo Fighters vs. Portastatic vs. Mates of State

	vs.		vs.
"For All the Cows" by Foo Fighters from Foo Fighters		"You Blanks" by Portastatic from Be Still Please		"Whiner's Bio" by Mates of State from Team Boo

"For All the Cows" (2 plays at Last.fm, unranked): The first time I played the debut Foo Fighters album was an unnerving experience. I had heard "I'll Stick Around" a couple times but I was basically going into it deaf and trusting in my love of Dave Grohl as Nirvana's drummer. As good as the whole thing was, this was the song that immediately stuck out for its quiet-LOUD-quiet structure, its shimmery guitars, even its obtuse lyrics to a certain extent. It's the one that sounds most like a Nirvana track, and I kind of felt at the time (and especially when the next Foo record came out) that it was a closure track -- the thing that allowed Grohl to move forward. That was probably a bit of a 16-year-old's overreading, but the way the album is sequenced, you can still get that sense that Grohl needed to make some kind of statement, but that he wanted to build to it over the first 2/3 of the album, and then do it indirectly.

"You Blanks" (22 plays, tied for #13): The most overlooked measure in public opinion polling is the right track/wrong track measure. For the last couple years of George W. Bush's presidency, even before the economy crashed, right track was at about 20%. Now it's in the high 40s, even though little substantive change has actually happened yet, the economy's still in the toilet, we're being besieged by pirates, etc. Atrios, who frequently promoted this song, formulated today that right track/wrong track is all about subconscious feelings about the president, and that everybody basically hated Bush. This song captures that era perfectly: "All my songs used to end the same way/'Everything's gonna be OK'/You fuckers make that impossible to say." The sheer lizard-brain loathing for what the Bush administration did to this country is still not well appreciated by pundits or scholars, but Mac McCaughan expresses it as well as can be -- both at the individual level of his song-writing and at the societal level ("Now every horse I dream about is pulling a hearse").

"Whiner's Bio" (9 plays, tied for #299): The night I met my wife Mates of State played what I assume was one of the earliest live performances of this song; a couple years later we saw them again and they dedicated it to us. It also represents in a lot of ways the end of the first Mates of State era. This song is structurally more similar to their first album than to the one that followed it, but it includes some of the flourishes (e.g., a horn line) that would mark their transition on Bring It Back. That combination really has them at their peak so far -- complicated harmonies, a good mix of keyboard tones and a catchy chorus.

VERDICT: I thought coming into this round that "You Blanks" might have the edge. My Last.fm stats go back to the start of 2006, and it's the highest-ranked song in the tournament so far by quite a bit. But listening to "For All the Cows" again really brought home how well put-together it is. A part of my music brain is always going to be stuck in the early and mid-90s (earlier today I found myself thinking how underappreciated the Juliana Hatfield Three's Become What You Are is), and this song is one of the important tethers.