11. Mates of State vs. The Anniversary vs. nine inch nails

	vs.		vs.
"Proofs" by Mates of State from My Solo Project		"All Things Ordinary" by The Anniversary from Designing a Nervous Breakdown		"Dead Souls" by nine inch nails from The Crow

"Proofs" (1 play at Last.fm, unranked): I don't know if any debut album has had a more style-encapsulating first song than this one. You can hear where Mates of State will go over their first three albums in this song, and yet even now it feels much more unique than derivative. The recording is still a bit lo-fi and the basic song structure is wonderfully natal -- plain organ and drums, vocal back-and-forth with occasional harmony. And it's so happy! Kori Gardner's "Yea-eah!" near the end is just blissful, coming on the heels of two and a half minutes of "It doesn't matter what might come true/It's simple enough to try." It's a triumph of the boy-girl indie pop genre and a testament to track sequencing; I don't think anyone could listen to this song and not want to hear more, more, more.

"All Things Ordinary" (6 plays, unranked): Between My Solo Project and the album this song comes from, 2000 seemed to herald a new age of poppy, keyboard-driven harmonies. This one, too, is a bit of archetype for the band, and it's one that was followed-up on much more by other bands (like the Hush Sound and 1997) than the Anniversary, who produced one more, quite different album, then broke up. What I like about these guys more than the rest, though, is that they're not ashamed to let the synth lines be out in front. That bouncy line along with the yearning vocals -- nicely split between male and female parts -- creates a danceable setting that's still recognizably within the late 90s/early 00s emo landscape. It's too bad that there's nobody really putting all those elements together anymore.

"Dead Souls" (1 play, unranked): In the middle of 1994, a crazy year musically and the first summer of my college years, The Crow was released with what's turned out to be a relatively seminal soundtrack. What I remember most from the movie and from the ads are Stone Temple Pilots' "Big Empty" and this superb Joy Division cover by NIN. I had no idea it was a cover at the time, I was just getting into the band and thought, hey, awesome new song that's not on my copy of the downward spiral for some reason. Now I know it's heresy in some circles to admit this, but I don't care for Joy Division at all, and as a result I find this cover vastly superior to the original. Trent Reznor pulls back some of the explosive energy he had on broken and combines it with the atmospherics of some of the remixes that were being made from the downward spiral at the time. The result is both a great soundtrack tune and a terrifically listenable song that fits flush within the NIN canon, even presaging the thick drums of 1997's "the perfect drug" a little bit.

VERDICT: All these songs are pretty evenly matched and it's tough to say one is any greater than the others. But, "All Things Ordinary" is the one that I get the itch to listen to the most, so that gets the win.

4. Cowboy Junkies vs. Taxpayer vs. nine inch nails

	vs.		vs.
"Sweet Jane" by Cowboy Junkies from The Trinity Session		"When They Were Young" by Taxpayer from Bones & Lungs		"wish" by nine inch nails from broken

"Sweet Jane" (1 play at Last.fm, unranked): This track is from an early Cowboy Junkies album, but really it's from the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. It's in many ways the processional for Mickey and Mallory's impromptu bridge-top wedding, and I'd say it reimagines the original Velvet Underground version at least as significantly as Jeff Buckley reimagined John Cale's reimagining of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." Margo Timmins' voice and style bring a totally different flavor to the song than the downtown wink-and-sneer maleness of Lou Reed. That such a simple song could be so changed is one of the things I like best about music.

"When They Were Young" (10 plays, tied for #218): I discovered this band when I learned about the Boston Phoenix's music blog, a site from which I subsequently never found anything else good. The song came out a year before the Killers' "When You Were Young," and coincidentally is not dissimilar to that song's style. The difference is that Taxpayer's song is wickedly catchy, with much livelier vocals and more interesting lyrics. The band in general is pretty good, though this is by far their best song; if they'd gotten any exposure outside the northeast I suspect they'd've hit it big by now.

"wish" (4 plays, unranked): When I got into the NIN back catalog around the time I was 16 and deep into the downward spiral, this song sounded like a clear pivot point for Trent Reznor. Nothing on pretty hate machine was this full or loud or aggressive, and much of it actually sounds pretty thin compared to subsequent NIN material (maybe down to late 80's mastering style, but I don't think so). This song (and broken as a whole) came through on the Reznor's clear promise, apparently at the expense of all kinds of personal damage. It's a great metal song and a great live experience, and it's too bad that so few of the bands influenced by this NIN era seem to get how it works.

VERDICT: It's a tough call. "Sweet Jane" is too slight compared to the other two tracks. As great and historically important as "wish" is, "When They Were Young" is one of a handful of tracks that I often feel compelling to listen to, even when I'm in the middle of listening to something else, so it moves on to the next round.

3. Everclear vs. Nine Inch Nails vs. Firewater

	vs.		vs.
"Queen of the Air" by Everclear from Sparkle and Fade		"No, You Don't" by Nine Inch Nails from The Fragile		"I Still Love You Judas" by Firewater from The Ponzi Scheme

"Queen of the Air" (3 plays at Last.fm, unranked): This was the song that made Everclear my favorite band for a while, after "Santa Monica" had prompted me to buy the record. There's a lot of mid-90's shimmer in here, but the structure also calls back to the abrasiveness of Everclear's first independent release, 1993's World of Noise. Maybe the most significant addition it makes to that structure is a terrific melodic bassline that has a really nice interplay with the slight guitar melody -- it's not overpowering the way a lot of contemporaneous songs are. The story that Art Alexakis tells is short and compelling -- the narrator's supposed aunt but actual mother jumping from a bridge to her death -- and I was surprised to learn to was totally made up. Alexakis uses so many harsh autobiographical details in the first three Everclear records that a story like this one doesn't raise an eyebrow, but it's of a piece with the working class heartbreak and drama that he used to be so good at.

"No, You Don't" (4 plays, unranked): Looking back on what Trent Reznor has done in the past nine years, The Fragile looks like the most important thing in the NIN catalog. You can hear bits and pieces of his subsequent three full-lengths and the Ghosts collection all over the place -- it's the beginning of a more cohesive sound than he ever had with pretty hate machine, broken and the downward spiral (though those are better works overall). When the album came out, the build and noise of this track were just what I wanted to hear (another NIN song, "the great collapse," appears later in the tournament for the same reason). It's a great singer and a great screamer, and I suspect largely underappreciated in a sea of album cuts from an oft-overlooked record.

"I Still Love You Judas" (9 plays, tied for #299): I discovered Firewater through their first album when hosting a college radio show at 3AM Sunday mornings, but it's their follow-up that I really love. Frontman Tod A is a terrific lyricist, but the band manages to create music that's both atmospheric and cinematic as an accompaniment. It's unfortunate that the band's style was so out in 1998 (it would've been killer in 1992 or 2006), because their vocal-driven, minor-key rock with strings could've developed a real audience in the right conditions.

VERDICT: This is a tough call, but I think Firewater wins out. The opening of the song has that spark to it, that when you hear it come up on shuffle you perk up, turn up the volume and get ready to submerge into the song.