9. Sarah Slean - Day One

Sarah Slean has never found the success she deserves in the United States or her native Canada; if it were up to me, she'd be ranked popularity-wise alongside other contemporary piano-pop songwriters like Regina Spektor, Ingrid Michaelson, and Sara Bareilles. During her peak period, 2002's Night Bugs and 2004's Day One, Slean was writing smarter and catchier songs than any of them. Although many fans decried its more mainstream tendencies at the time, Day One has always been my personal favorite. It's full of effervescent pop tunes with a theatrical flair, like the soundtrack to the next hip Broadway production everyone will be clamoring to see. Slean's dramatic vocal inflections, rich cabaret-inspired tone, and bright piano-playing further add to this impression, from the bubbly title track to the brooding noir of "The Score." Even the lyrics are rife with stage-ready calls to action: "Fight the war!/What are your hearts and your wheelbarrows for?/Lean on me, man, I don't keep score," she crows on "Out in the Park." The imagery, too, seems tailor-made for intricate production, as on the dark, frenetic highlight "When Another Midnight," where Slean warns, "All the commuters will hear our words and hide in garages like frightened birds/But you can't stop the moaning of the earth and the midnight crackling of my nerve!" Such high drama wouldn't work were it not rooted in an unshakable foundation of composition. Even potentially schmaltzy ballads like "Mary" and "Your Wish Is My Wish" shine like jewels for their spare intimacy and understated sincerity.


8. Deas Vail - Birds & Cages

Deas Vail can be a hard sell because of two polarizing words: emo and Christianity. However, they're really only emo by association and more accurately make beautiful melodic pop, and if the God thing bothers you, it's easy enough to focus on music over lyrics. The real draw is Wes Blaylock's voice, which could sing the McDonald's drive-through menu and still leave you dabbing tears from your eyes. His falsetto is one of the most pristine and effortless I've ever heard. He glides through octaves as smoothly as a knife slicing through hot butter - just try listening to his performance on the slow-burning closer "Atlantis" without getting chills. It isn't only the technical proficiency of his vocals that stuns but the emotional potency behind them, and the mid-album one-two punch of "Cages" and "Birds" is a powerful display of both. These songs, along with "Sunlight" later on, serve as the pinnacle of the band's songwriting by emphasizing all of their greatest strengths at once: a seamless transition from driving, aggressive rock to lushly orchestrated swells of pure beauty; gorgeously intertwined vocal harmonies; surprising melodic turns; and choruses that refuse to vacate your head for days at a time. This band has more hooks than they know what to do with, which means that even their most straightforward songs ("Growing Pains," "Excuses") never grow any less exhilarating than they are the first time through. After releasing Birds & Cages in 2009, the band struggled to match its greatness before falling off the map completely; even with that knowledge, the album still bursts with ceaseless potential.


7. Nerina Pallot - Fires

When an album isn't even available on Spotify, you know you're onto a real hidden gem. Nerina Pallot had just crossed the threshold of her thirties when she released her sophomore album, Fires, in 2005, which doesn't come as a surprise once you've heard it. The album has the descriptive lushness and emotional specificity of a sprawling bildungsroman: it tells the story of a bright, neurotic woman coming of age in a society where her place and worth are not always clear. "I've played a role so long that I've forgotten myself," she admits frankly and elsewhere, "You say you see heaven/I see hell but want to try." Instead of buckling under the pressure, though, she transforms her battle wounds into badges of courage: "I'll scream until I'm hollow/I'll carve it in my skin/Save it for tomorrow." But the personal resonance of Fires is only half its story because it also happens to be one of the catchiest, tightest pop albums I've ever heard - it's pop music for adults, but in a way that still has fun with itself rather than being stodgy or stilted. Pallot's effortlessly lightweight vocals are the perfect vehicle for the breathless melodies of "Everybody's Gone to War" and "Heart Attack," which remain buoyant even as their lyrics go dark ("I've got a friend, he's a purebred killing machine/I think he might be dead by Christmas"). At the same time, her voice holds enough emotional weight to sell the more somber moments, too, from the brooding and atmospheric "Damascus" to the driving piano-led furor of "Idaho" to the reflective tenderness of "Sophia."

6. The Rosebuds - Loud Planes Fly Low

Musical couples are always a precarious thing because if one relationship falls apart, the other likely will, too. However, breaking up seems to have been mutually beneficial for Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp, the musical duo known as the Rosebuds. After all, they wrote and recorded an entire album about it in Loud Planes Fly Low, which is arguably their best work to date and ranked as my top album of 2011. It's a painful listen (the lyrics are brutally honest in their heartbreak), but it's also oddly uplifting, in not only the laid-back effervescence of the music but also the fact that it has the feel of a final bloodletting, from which Howard and Crisp emerge newly-formed. The gentle, breezy opener, "Go Ahead," hints at the necessity of balance between letting go of the past and fondly recalling old memories, particularly in its closing metaphor: "Go ahead and leave two notes/And place them down inside old library books/And fold back the pages/Put them back in their spaces, undisturbed/And we'll come back and see inside/Who checked them out and if they replied/Or if they're still there, unread and unanswered." More impressionistic tracks like "Limitless Arms" serve as dreamy counterpoints to their emotionally potent surroundings. In the '70s pop-styled "Come Visit Me," Crisp makes a desperate plea in the guise of a catchy chorus: "I want to feel something way out here/I need something happy now/Even if it fucks me up." And the wistfully romantic swells of "Waiting for You" are tinged with regret by Howard's freshly post break-up confession: "In the middle of the night, I don't know who I am."


5. The Anniversary - Designing a Nervous Breakdown

I bet you didn't know you needed early '00s Midwestern emo backed by '80s-influenced synthesizers galore in your life, did you? Well, I'm here to tell you that you definitely do. The Anniversary is so ridiculously slept on, even by supposed aficionados of their scene/era, who seem to be too busy waxing nostalgic over bigger acts like Sunny Day Real Estate, American Football, and Mineral to branch out. The band released their debut, Designing a Nervous Breakdown, in 2000, and, in my opinion, it actually holds up a lot better than many of their contemporaries' albums do. I know I'm always raving about hooks but, my god, the hooks. This is one of my go-to albums for dialing my emotions, positive and negative, up to eleven because every song sounds like it was assembled in a factory specializing in pump-up music. "All Things Ordinary," "The D in Detroit," "Emma Discovery," "Till We Earned a Holiday," "Without Panasos" - pick any one of these out of a hat and you're guaranteed power pop perfection. You can easily make the same argument for the other half of the album, too. The vocals are split three ways between Josh Berwanger, Justin Roelofs, and Adrianne Verhoeven. What any of them lack in technical proficiency they make up for in volume and energy, often capitalizing on call-and-response and gang vocals for maximum impact. Their lyrics are occasionally clunky and juvenile, but, oddly enough, this makes them even more cathartic. For example, a line like "Dear Dad, I'm having trouble feeling sad" looks ridiculous on paper but feels great when shouted along to at the top of your lungs.


4. Carissa's Wierd - Songs About Leaving

There are a lot of things about Carissa's Wierd that shouldn't really work. Their purposely misspelled band name (they even have an album titled I Before E, that's how serious they are about it). Mat Brooke's apathetic baritone mumble, often barely audible over its musical accompaniment. Jenn Ghetto's equally elusive voice, so slight and haunting it seems to float like an apparition. Their song titles, which alternate between sounding like the product of a bratty teenager ("Ignorant Piece of Shit," "Sofisticated Fuck Princess Please Leave Me Alone") and a pretentious teenager ("September Come Take This Heart Away," "Low Budget Slow Motion Soundtrack Song for the Leaving Scene"). The way their quivering, classical-leaning piano and string arrangements clash with their blunt, confrontational lyrics. But, somehow, they mesh these disparate components together in a way that makes complete sense, especially on their standout album, 2002's Songs About Leaving. Emotionally, the album alternates between utter despair ("Won't tell a single soul that my soul's gone/It's hard to write this song/It's all a joke/It's all been wrote down by someone who's probably dead") and tongue-in-cheek cynicism ("Telling everyone you know/Maybe I'll be bad for you/Maybe you're too good for me/Everyone is getting screwed"). It hurts to hear, but it's also too beautiful not to. The soaring instrumentation and delicate vocal harmonies turn each song into a tiny heartbreaking symphony. Even after you think you've got a handle on the band's patented formula for build-up, they take your breath away every time.


3. Mandy Moore - Wild Hope

Public awareness of Mandy Moore is fairly scattered these days. You may know her as the disembodied voice behind Rapunzel in Disney's Tangled or as the teenage pop star who sang the uncomfortably oversexed one-hit-wonder "Candy" or, most recently, as a Golden Globe-nominated actress on NBC's This Is Us. People rarely seem to connect the dots and realize she's actually accomplished a great deal for being just over thirty years old. This includes a nearly forgotten period from about 2003-2009 when she reinvented herself as a folk-pop songstress part Joni Mitchell, part Carly Simon. While this wasn't a commercially successful move, in 2007, she managed to craft an utterly perfect album in this style called Wild Hope. With assistance from Americana and folk heavyweights like Chantal Kreviazuk, Lori McKenna, Rachael Yamagata, Sara Watkins, and the Weepies, every song becomes a masterclass in pop composition. You've got kiss-offs for every mood, from quirky mid-tempos ("All Good Things") to slightly twangy alt-rock ("Most of Me," "Latest Mistake") and from jazzy missives ("Ladies' Choice") to stark balladry ("Gardenia"). But the songwriting and vocal support of these collaborators always boosts rather than supplants Moore's individuality. As it turns out, her rich timbre is perfectly suited to the style. She's particularly adept at delivering barbed one-liners: "In time, you will fade into the nothing that you are;" "the burns on my fingers were all that was left of the spark." I've still got my fingers crossed she'll follow up 2009's nearly-as-good Amanda Leigh eventually.

2. Now It's Overhead - Dark Light Daybreak

No one truly knows me until they know one of my darkest secrets: I am unnaturally obsessed with Andy LeMaster. This is a difficult obsession to maintain because he no longer seems very interested in pursuing his own music. I can't say I blame him when his pet project, Now It's Overhead, has never broken free from the shadow of his behind-the-scenes work with others, which you've probably heard at some point. He's most commonly associated with Saddle Creek mainstays like Bright Eyes, Azure Ray, and the Good Life, but he's also worked with R.E.M., Drive-By Truckers, and countless more. But this isn't about them. This is about Now It's Overhead and a perfect little electronic album called Dark Light Daybreak, which, released in 2006, remains the band's most recent output. It's one of those albums I think everyone should listen to, even though I have trouble articulating why. The primary draw for me is LeMaster's voice: I have a thing for sort of cerebral, nerdy, nasally male vocals, a style which LeMaster encapsulates to a T. Oddly enough, his twangy delivery, often coupled with subtle harmonies courtesy of labelmates Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink, marries perfectly to the icy, detached atmosphere cultivated in many of the album's songs ("Believe What They Decide," "Night Vision"); it's also a perfect fit for the soaring intensity of the title track, where every syllable seems ripped directly from some deep interior chamber of emotion. In the end, though, the best track here isn't even electronic in nature: instead, it's the acoustic-based "Let Up," the toe-tapping nature of which obscures some serious pain.


1. Rainer Maria - Long Knives Drawn

Like the Anniversary, Rainer Maria is another underrated band that rode out the final wave of late '90s/early '00s emo before the genre came to be erroneously associated with "edgy" teens and the bands that commercialized their angst. (Not that I have anything against these bands or the people who loved them; they were just never for me and unfairly colored my perception of the genre for too long.) Honestly, I think a lot of it comes down to misogyny, intentional or not, as the band definitely deserves to be listed alongside other greats of their time. Caithlin De Marrais is a vocal phenom; the power and urgency she conveys is staggering, and 2003's Long Knives Drawn finds her in top form. Songs like the title track, "Ears Ring," and "CT Catholic" have this intensely anthemic quality that I've never found quite replicated in anything else. In large part due to De Marrais' lung-emptying vocal performances, this is just as much a result of the blistering guitars, chaotic drumming, and full-speed-ahead melodies. The melodies are especially intriguing because they initially seem to follow very straightforward, no-nonsense rock structures - that is, until the band reconstructs them and fits them back together in ingenious ways that keep the listener constantly guessing. The lyrics, too, are memorable for the off-balance feeling they convey; cryptic declarations ("Have faith in the blue lady") coexist alongside gut-punching confessions ("Maybe now we can lay our weariness down"). But it's not all bluster and bombast: in moments of vulnerability ("The Awful Truth of Loving," "Situation: Relation"), De Marrais' voice becomes a muted murmur, quietly straining beneath the lyrics' emotional weight.

In late 2009, a series of cryptic viral videos began to be uploaded to Youtube by a mysterious account with the teasing riddle of a name, iamamiwhoami. These short clips centered on imagery that was often unsettlingly sensual: a woman, identity obscured by face paint and visual distortion, twitches and writhes ritualistically in a dark woodland setting to the pulse of warped electronica. Once the videos were discovered, guesses as to the identity of their creator(s) inevitably cropped up, the most popular being Christina Aguilera, who vaguely resembled the woman in the videos (mostly because she was blonde) and who had been teasing her upcoming album (which would become the disappointingly bland Bionic) as futuristic electropop.

At the time, I followed the videos avidly but never participated in the feverish decoding and theorizing that occurred in certain corners of the Internet. My interest lay less in uncovering the performer's identity and more in immersing myself in the audiovisual aesthetic, a cross between Goldfrapp and the Knife that was discomfiting, otherworldly, and entirely captivating. After months of teasing, iamamiwhoami's first full-length song, a hauntingly distorted piano ballad titled "B," was released in early 2010. In the video, the woman from the earlier clips sits at a keyboard inside a claustrophobic wood-panelled room, her body and face entirely wrapped in plastic. Both song and video are as beautiful as they are disturbing.

With the release of further singles, followers collectively settled on Jonna Lee as the project's face and voice. As unlikely as this seemed, Lee being a barely-known Swedish singer/songwriter whose previous music was of the safe acoustic folk-pop variety, the evidence, gathered largely through social media stalking, was compelling. By the final installment in the sequence that would come to be known as Bounty, the moody electronic epic "Y," the truth was in plain sight. Even if Lee would remain coy about her involvement, not officially confirming it until late 2011, the mystery was more or less solved.

Many lost interest when it became clear that iamamiwhoami was not, after all, a vehicle for the reinvention of some current pop superstar like Aguilera or, another common guess, Lady Gaga. This is unfortunate because at the root of the project's mystery and obfuscation lies, in my opinion, some of the most engaging and creative electronic music to emerge in recent years. Lee and her producer Claes Björklund reached the pinnacle of their genius with 2012's Kin, released as a series of nine audiovisual singles over the course of the year, beginning with the muted "Sever," its lilting synth opening recalling the somber piano of "B." The visuals are cleaner and more organic, free of visual trickery, with Lee's bare-faced anguish front and center as she is terrorized by an odd woolly beast. The rest of the album plays like a remarkably cohesive greatest hits, every song better than the last.

2014 was the year of Blue, a surprisingly tropical and poppy turn that, just as surprisingly, works rather well. Smoothed of the project's darker and more experimental edges, some of the magic is lost, but there are enough infectious hooks and burbling synth lines to make up for it. It remains to be seen if Blue will stand as iamamiwhoami's closing chapter, but its final video, "Shadowshow," serves as an effective swan song if so. Hearkening back to older imagery, Lee, draped in plastic, wanders through an eerie nighttime forest. Our final image of her is naked in broad daylight, sitting at the water's edge as shadowy figures file past to drown themselves one by one, a scene which seems to represent the coexistence of death and rebirth. However, it is left up to the viewer to determine what this symbolism means for the project's ultimate fate.

Nearly three years later, a clearer answer seems to be in sight as Jonna Lee, now successfully re-branded as an ethereal electronic goddess, is reviving her solo career with a new single, "Samaritan," released under the moniker of ionnalee. On first listen, it's not a far cry from anything she created in collaboration with Björklund as iamamiwhoami. Of course, her unearthly, heavily-processed croon has become so unmistakable that it's nearly impossible to divorce it from previous context, even if the music were entirely different. In this case, it's not, built on heart-pounding beats and heavy, sinister synths, with ghostly verses that crescendo in an effervescent, instantly infectious chorus.

The major difference is that "Samaritan" is driven by vocals rather than atmospherics; most of Lee's lyrics are decipherable on first pass, and their content is also clearer and more direct. In past interviews, Lee has defended the elusiveness of iamamiwhoami as a means for the work to speak for itself without distractions, meant to turn the listener's focus inward toward the music instead of outward toward her. Yet many fans have deified Lee, blurring the distance between her and her onscreen counterpart and holding her to unattainable expectations. In this context, the song's chorus reads as a pointed reminder: "I don't remember promising my life and soul to bring you all bliss."

Fittingly, the song's visual accompaniment (produced in association with Comme des Garçons) paints a chilling vision. Lee watches as her alter ego's story unfolds on a flickering television screen. Having found self-realization, as symbolized by interpretative dance, her expression of identity is misinterpreted by those around her as something to be feared and excised. "If I am what you say, I expect to be hanging on a wooden cross," she sings as, bound by rope, she is led into the woods, fitted with a crown of blazing candles, and seemingly burned alive. Meanwhile, real-life Lee changes into elaborate dress and rehearses the dance moves she has just witnessed in the mirror; despite having seen the grisly outcome, she appears willing to subject herself to judgment all over again for the sake of her art.

With such an elaborately-crafted aesthetic, it's difficult not to over-analyze every frame of the video and every second of the track. But while this adds a layer of richness, particularly for those who have been following iamamiwhoami for years, it is not at all necessary to the song's enjoyment. On its own, "Samaritan" is a fresh and catchy experimental pop song that new and old listeners alike should be able to appreciate. I also assume that it is only the beginning of what ionnalee has in store this year, and I will be anxiously awaiting the rest.