The Songs We Can't Escape

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Skullflower
"Nibelungen"

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang or a whimper, but with the sound of a hundred thousand ancient air conditioners wheezing and jostling asthmatically under a blackened, endlessly falling sky.

Ascites
"Caput"

"All these terrible drilling sounds," an unidentified woman exclaims in the sample that opens this monster. "I never got to sleep unless the whole pavement is jumping outside." Then these Dallas noiseniks plunge us into a distorted, hyperbolic plague of Bubble Bobble effects that evolve into what sound like literal bells and whistles, albeit ruthlessly whirled.

Chris Dadge
"Untitled track 6 from The Tangled Woof of Fact"

Dadge's brave, unretouched Woof is a slippery sort of percussion-improv exercise, less concrete and centered than Chris Corsano's and less bombastic than Brian "Black Pus" Chippendale's. This track is a wonder of sly rolls, light cymbal petting, and gentle bass-drum-pum that flirts betwixt seasick abstraction and daft jazz groove. Tight.

Timbaland feat. Justin Timberlake
"Carry Out"

Consensus maintains that Timbaland is well into his wilderness years, and I don't disagree; there's nothing particularly game-changing happening here or anywhere else on Presents Shock Value 2. But "Carry Out"—all formulaic sleepwalking lecherousness and played-out production clichés—charms nonetheless, even if "I'll have you open all night like an IHOP" isn't going to get anybody blown in real life.

Wesley Wolfe
"Another Weed"

Here Wolfe showcases his talent for reedy, good-natured self-immolation, nicely shorthanding the sense of utter, irreversible failure that taps some of us on the shoulder as we wander into middle age: "I'm just a seed that grew to be another weed/Nothing carries me, nothing gets to me."