Playlist: Perfect Closers

In nearly all things, the key to a good conclusion is a summary of points with a twist, something to remind you where you've been and to keep the content ringing in your ears. Here, then, is a list of some of my all-time favorite album closers, songs that not only polish off key albums in the artist's oeuvre but totally expand upon what I saw the artist as capable of accomplishing:

5. Bjork - "Unison" (Vespertine)
In the hands of anyone else, an album like Vespertine might has been the beginning of the end, a late-career slide into a lush, sentimental comfort zone where a once endlessly inventive songstress could rest her tired head. Bjork's decision, then, to close the album with her most straightforward love song to date was a risky one. Fortunately for all of us, Bjork knows what she's doing. "Unison" is an ecstatic high note for the artist, an unqualified, seemingly effortless success. More than anything, it seems to prove that it's merely her own relentless ambition that keeps Bjork from dominating the mainstream.

4. Madonna - "Easy Ride" (American Life)
Speaking of dominating the mainstream, Madonna's American Life nearly shoved the artist out of the picture entirely. It's commercial failures aside, though, American Life was, in all likelihood, Madonna's most musically consistent outing. The real problem was a general downheartedness and some obnoxious lyrics (even the most die-hard Madonna fans likely found the album's endless diatribes on the shallowness of the media to be a little much coming from, well, Madonna.) Nonetheless, you can't argue with results like album closer "Easy Ride". Beautifully orchestrated, then chopped and edited to dirty precision, the end result sounds like Carole King got eaten by Autechre--which I mean in the best sense possible. It's one of the best songs of a rich career, making this whole excursion more than worthwhile.

3. Pavement - "Carrot Rope" (Terror Twilight)
Maybe it's just a four minute joke about Stephen Malkmus' penis, but Pavement were never more charming or incessantly catchy as on their final track as a band.

2. M.I.A. - "Paper Planes" (Kala)
Even as I mourn the definitive end of the era in which I could consider M.I.A. a personal love rather than a mainstream phenomenon, the very fact that this song's brief inclusion in a single ad campaign was enough to catapult it into the iTunes Top 10 is a testament to the irresistibility of "Paper Planes". A song that cements into your mind from the first listen, it's both an anomalously undancy track for M.I.A. and, as Kala's closer, an ironic entry point for mainstream audiences into the work of the woman who may well turn out to be the most notable musician of the decade.

1. PJ Harvey - "We Float" (Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea)
Restraint has never been PJ Harvey's strong suit, and the attempts to file down her edges for a top-40 push like Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea resulted, unsurprising, in a mixed bag of an album. There's good and there's bland, but it isn't until the very end that we get the true pay-off--and it's way more than bargained for. Bolstering lyrics both sentimental and, uh, sharp as knives, "We Float" was a major, long-time-coming climax for the artist: the track that finally merged her larger-than-life facade with her underlying vulnerability without going overboard on either end. Rarely has moderation been so satisfying.


And just for fun, my least favorite album closer of all time:

R.E.M. - "Find the River" (Automatic for the People)
Automatic for the People is, in many way, America's great "group therapy" album, an album of turmoil and recovery that everyone can find some nice advice in. But it's at album's end, when Michael Stipe flows into an excessive river analogy over a country harmonica, that it all ends up feeling more like a regrettable night of drunken commiseration with someone totally inappropriate. That the incomparable "Nightswimming" had already effectively closed the album only frustrates the situtation.