Aaron Keck’s Live & Local Top 100 Countdown continues! You can check out the complete series here, only on Chapelboro.com!
Building 97.9 The Hill’s local-music library, I’ve listened to tens of thousands of songs – many of them by Chapel Hill’s best known artists, sure, but some of my favorites are also among the most obscure. Some of this week’s artists only ever released one album – in fact one has only ever released two songs! – but somewhere in there they struck absolute gold, and our local scene wouldn’t be the same without them.
Reminder of the ground rules: Orange, Durham, and Chatham-based artists only; no more than three songs per artist; covers are allowed but originals are preferred; and the songs have to be radio-friendly.
Away we go!
40. Hardworker, “Look More Like A Girl” (2017)
“We’ve got to talk about your nails…”
On face, the lyrics are anti-feminist from start to finish, but Sus Long will make sure you get the message loud and clear. A biting, brilliant, Swift-level satire about how society pressures women to conform and kowtow and self-subjugate, “Look More Like A Girl” (engineered by local legend Mitch Easter) also happens to be one of the best straight-up rock songs the Triangle has produced this century. The local scene has produced its share of great female-empowerment anthems and we’ve seen a few on this list already, but this one tops them all.
39. SkyBlew, “I’m Blew” (2019)
“How blue? Inside and outside…”
Fast-paced and mad-skilled, nerdy and cool, socially conscious but relentlessly upbeat, and armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of both hip-hop history and American pop culture: if Michael Caesar were real, he’d be SkyBlew. (And I’m pretty sure SkyBlew knows it.) Mario Farrow’s made lots of great music, but “I’m Blew” is the one I listen to over and over: building on an Eiffel 65 sample (you’ll never need the original again) and propelled by an Afrofuturist vibe, SkyBlew crafts a masterpiece of an intro track that stands alongside the very best rap (or paint-the-sky) songs the Triangle’s ever produced. Oh, and when he gets to “inside and outside” – stand back.
38. Mipso, “Get Out” (2013)
“I will do the best I can…”
From the most inauspicious of beginnings – UNC students Joseph Terrell and Jacob Sharp playing together at local open-mic nights – Mipso has gradually emerged over the last ten years as one of the best Triangle bands of the century, and they keep getting better and better. For their spot on this list, though, I’ll go back to their very first album, 2013’s Dark Holler Pop, and this heartbreaker about a man who has to leave the woman he loves in order to escape a stifling small-town life. (Kind of a jerk move, really, but I guess he seems sincere.) Mipso re-recorded “Get Out” with a bigger sound in 2018, but the original’s still the best.
Stay tuned, though, because we may have to switch this song out for another in the near future: bandmates Libby Rodenbough and Wood Robinson have branched out with their own solo albums, but the group’s still together too, with a much-anticipated new album due out very soon.
37. John Howie Jr. and the Rosewood Bluff, “Why You Been Gone So Long” (2014)
“I can hear that lonesome wind blow…”
Armed with a baritone and an attitude, John Howie Jr. has been kicking up dust and damn good music for over two decades. He’s best known for his earlier work with the Two Dollar Pistols, but as individual songs go, I always come back to this one off the Rosewood Bluff’s fittingly-titled album Everything Except Goodbye. Drenched in rain and booze and pot, with a guitar as twangy and bitter as his voice, Howie drowns his sorrows (and his anger) over a lost love he still can’t let go. Capital C, capital M: this is Country Music at its finest.
(I didn’t put these two songs together on purpose, but now that I’ve heard them back to back, my new head canon says this is the companion piece to “Get Out,” with Howie as Mipso’s long-ago jilted lover. Both songs have gender-neutral lyrics, so it totally works; they even both open with the same rainstorm. Forget him, dude, you can do better.)
36. Clockwork Kids, “Suffer” (2014)
“You don’t know how you can save me from myself…”
Clockwork Kids came and went in the space of two years, but not before creating one single, phenomenal album, 2014’s “Rememory.” (That’s a Toni Morrison reference, if you’re wondering.) The album has several highlights, but none can top this epic, six-minute slow burn of an opening track, which begins with a single acoustic guitar and builds imperceptibly to one of the hardest-rocking climaxes Chapel Hill has ever produced. (Don’t ask me what it’s about, I have no idea and I don’t care.) This was also our introduction to one of the Triangle’s best male vocalists, Justin Ellis, never better than here.
This particular fivesome didn’t stay together long, but the individual members have gone on to numerous other terrific bands, from The Color Exchange to Fluorescence to the Ellis-fronted Ravary, which just dropped its own first album this year.
35. Kent Nickerson, “Favorite Year” (2017)
“Everything we love will all come together, come together, come together…”
Durham singer-songwriter Nickerson is a great musician, but I wasn’t feeling his debut LP “Warrior” – until I got to the finale. Buried at the end, the very last track on the album, is “Favorite Year,” an absolutely devastating gut-punch blow about a couple’s breakup, punctuated by a chorus that quietly and ironically repeats an optimistic line they must have shared a thousand times: “This could be our favorite year.” Every New Year’s Day, it’s a true thing; every year but one, it turns out to be a pipe dream. “Even our imagination lets us down.” Nickerson’s calm demeanor adds an extra layer to the irony as his lost protagonist wanders the city in the middle of the night, trying to make sense of what hasn’t happened and what needs to be done. This one’s guaranteed to make you cry, every time.
34. Sarah Goss, “The Tunnel” (2010)
“You might not believe it, but the driver looked a lot like you…”
Okay, here’s the story about Sarah Goss, as near as I’ve been able to piece it together. She graduated from UNC in 2008 and her mother got her a cool present: recording time at Nightsound Studios, with genius producer Chris Wimberley, to realize what she described as “the mess of thoughts in my head.” Their collaboration resulted in two songs, “Lonely House” and “The Tunnel” – and that’s the end of the story. Wimberley says a new album is in the works, but so far that’s all the music she’s released.
But oh lord, “The Tunnel.” Starting with a hypnotic beat and floating on her dreamy vocals, Goss coolly leads us into the Twilight Zone with a weird, uncanny narrative about an ordinary woman in an ordinary car, “stuck in my head” and lost in her own directionless thoughts – until the vehicle rounds a corner and approaches “a tunnel I’d never seen.” What happens next – well, I won’t spoil it. Just sit back and let her take you for the ride.
Said Chris Wimberley about Goss: “She reminds me of a reclusive Nick Drake-style songwriter, where all the music sounds like it’s coming from another world.” That new album is coming out soon. You want it.
33. Bombadil, “Sunny December” (2015)
“Love will break you apart…”
Bombadil is that rare band that’s survived through many incarnations, new members coming and going, with numerous songwriters and various people taking the lead on different songs. But whoever’s in the band, whoever’s writing the song, whoever’s on the mic singing lead, their music always comes back to the same driving theme: the sad realization that every relationship, no matter how beautiful and pure, will someday, somehow, come to an end. (Probably their sweetest love song, 2019’s “The Real Thing,” features the repeated refrain “I want to die.”) Bombadil’s music is about coming to terms with that end, knowing it’s there, and learning to embrace love anyway.
“Sunny December” (a bitterly ironic but perfectly fitting title) takes that theme and distills it down to its purest form. It’s just one guy on this track, Stuart Robinson, playing a nice, simple piano tune and venting the most bitter, angry, nasty feelings in the softest and sweetest voice. “Love is a disease,” he sings. “Love is vicious and love is spiteful, but love also just doesn’t care…(and) when I find it, I will kill it, so that I can get on with my life.” But life and love are one and the same; it won’t let go of him, and he can’t let go of it.
“Sunny December” is Bombadil’s doctoral thesis – delivered, appropriately, by a band member who was just about to split. Equally appropriately, the band soldiered on.
32. Rapsody, “Nina” (2019)
“And still, I will never be defeated…”
It was Rapsody’s second album, “Laila’s Wisdom,” that earned her a Grammy nomination, but her third and most recent album “Eve” was even better, with each song an ode to a powerful Black woman present or past, from Oprah Winfrey to Sojourner Truth to the ancient pharaoh Hatshepsut. (Queen Latifah guests on that last one.) Any song on the album is worthy, but I’ll go with the harrowing, triumphant opening track: with Nina Simone singing “Strange Fruit” in the background, Marianna Evans takes us on a poetic, psychohistorical journey through glories and humiliations and the weight they all leave on the present. Rapsody ends her own lyric on a note of uplift – “I will never be defeated” – but she’s not naive enough to let the song end there: she leaves us instead with one more verse of Simone’s, lamenting the “bitter crop” of a lynching victim hanging on a tree. It’s everything you need to know in four minutes, delivered by two indelibly great artists.
31. Jennyanykind, “The Heat, The Hot, and the Hard Luck Swill” (1997)
“But I guess most things will never stay the same…”
Of all the great 90s-era Chapel Hill bands, Jennyanykind may have been the most eclectic, creating wildly different sounds from album to album. “Hard Luck Swill,” my favorite, comes from their late-period album “Big Johns,” recorded after the Holland brothers and Tom Royal had moved into their Americana phase. It was an unexpected hard-right turn from their earlier work, but they pull it off big time: “Hard Luck Swill,” in particular, proudly stands alongside the greatest roots music ever made (clearly recalling “The Weight” in the opening line), without sacrificing any of Jennyanykind’s irreverent humor.
Next week: SCOTS get frisky; the Zippers get hot; and the Moaners get claustrophobic.
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