I tweeted this the other day, but this is probably the best song of 2010 so far.

It’s not safe for work. And really not safe for kids.

But amazing all the same.

Cee-Lo Green (the dude from Gnarls Barkley)

Apologies in advance for the pedestrian entry. It’s about 2 weeks late and I would have had more to say if I had written this more real-time. Instead, you get a video. So, that’s cool.

Over the past few weeks (about 6, to be exact), we’ve been had a nice run of concerts. First, we had a bill of We Were Promised Jetpacks (best name in music) and Tokyo Police Club (one of the best names in music) at Royale in Boston.

I’d been a bit turned off over the past couple of months at shows, as the crowds had gotten decidedly disinterested in the music and interested in chatting it up and being seen (which is why a place like TT the Bear’s is nice — no one goes there to “be seen”). This was show was better — it was a random Thursday night, school was over, so it wasn’t a scene. It was just a few hundred people who liked the bands there to check them out. Both were spot on.

Then, a few weeks later, we hit up Bank of America Pavilion (probably my second least favorite place to see a show) to see Arcade Fire. Arcade Fire, at the time, were probably the only band I really love that I’d never seen live. They didn’t disappoint. Just a spectacle from beginning to end, only tempered by the fact that BoA Pavilion is such a craptastic venue.

Finally, a few days after that, we checked out Interpol at House of Blues. They played a nice mix of older stuff and stuff off the new album (which sounded pretty good). Interpol isn’t a hugely dynamic band (especially compared to Arcade Fire), but it was a good crowd and Interpol seemed to feed off it and really ripped into things.

Anyway, after all that, I decided I wanted to screw around and learn iMovie a bit. So, for your pleasure, here’s four bands and probably 5.5 hours of music cut down to 8 minutes.

This could have been any of about 10 songs off of Phoenix’s album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Phoenix just basically craft these intricate pop/rock songs, where not a note is out of place. Sure, the lyrics make only very abstract sense, but partially that’s a French band writing American pop music.

I had only vaguely listened to Phoenix (their last album) before I saw on them on SNL. Watching them perform and hearing this layered pop song come together — the first repeated note, the drums, the melody, then the lyrics. If it never built from there, it’d still probably have made my top ten (as I’m a sucker for power pop).

But nope, then it hits the bridge, gets very quiet with the piano, and it’s just like a time bomb … there’s the bass and boom, everyone hits at once, all on beat, and we’re off.

Like a riot, like a riot, oh, indeed.

(It’s not “like a rhino”, as I’d initially thought.)

(Also, if you don’t like this song, you have no soul.)

The second of the Scottish-related bands that made the extended list (We Were Promised Jetpacks being the other), Camera Obscura always seemed to me like they were a female-fronted Belle and Sebastian-lite. The same sorts of meandering chamber pop, but just not quite as good.

I’ve liked them, but there just wasn’t anything about them that made them stick out.

Then I heard “French Navy”.

With it’s 60s Girl band sound, and production that wouldn’t have been out of place in Motown, Camera Obscura may have eclipsed single song their forefathers of Belle and Sebastian created (well, maybe not “Boy With The Arab Strap”). It’s also my second favorite song of the year, and likely could have been number one if you I wrote this a week ago or a week from now.

Top to bottom, Metric’s Fantasies might be my favorite album of the year. Or at least it might have the most songs that stick out. “Sick Muse”, “Help, I’m Alive”, and this one “Gold Guns Girls”. Emily Haines’ voice carries the album, with Metric bringing what they do, which is a pretty straight forward rock sound that gets reinforced by some synthesizers and looped beats. What results are these great songs with a cacophony of sound surrounding Haines’ voice which runs the spectrum from whisper to scream.

Put all together, it can be amazing or …. less than amazing (see some tracks off of the re-released debut album).

This is amazing.