Words by Jacob Barron

The general consensus on Valentine’s Day is that it’s an exploitative holiday invented by heartless greeting card companies and “the man” to try and wring a few heterosexist consumer dollars out of the wasteland that is the six months between Christmas and summer. However, it also happens to be a holiday designed by vindictive couples in an attempt to rub their happiness in single people’s faces. Or it’s a day to take some time and think about how to best let your sweetheart know just how much he or she means to you. It’s an excuse to go out to dinner, or it’s just another day on the calendar.

Really, it’s all of these things, exploitative, showy, mean-spirited, mundane, cute and uplifting, all at once. It just depends on who you ask, and while the easy route for soundtracking such a holiday would be love songs, that’s a pretty reductive take on something as complex as Valentine’s Day. Better then to look V-day, and love, in the eye, with all its unique contradictions, and listen to tunes that try to do the same.

Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Phoenix / 1901

I once described this album as a collection of peppy, upbeat songs about how much life sucks, and while there’s plenty of remembered agony in the lyrics here, it’s all presented as something weirdly desirable, or even sexy and sustaining. The word “epic” is tossed around with reckless abandon these days, but it applies here, especially to “1901″ and the two-part, nearly wordless “Love Like A Sunset.” Everything is steeped in memory and filled with details as intricate as Thomas Mars>’ snaking, instantly whistle-worthy melodies, but it’s all very inclusive and remarkably engaging. On the whole, I’d call this album a nostalgic one, as it seems to yearn for a time when everything made sense while recognizing that nothing was probably ever as good as we remember it.

Morrissey – Ringleader of the Tormentors

Morrissey / You Have Killed Me

Fun game: have you and your friends compile a list of imagined, quintessentially “Morrisseyan” song titles, which, after this album’s “You Have Killed Me,” “Life Is A Pigsty,” and “Dear God Please Help Me,” seem increasingly plausible. Some examples:

-”Babies Are Assholes”
-”Please God I Don’t Want To Die (No Wait, Yes I Do)”
-”Ow, Ow, Ow, Ow, Ow, Ow, Ow”

Even without the song titles, an album by the pope of mope might not be the most obvious V-day listening choice, but the thing that always struck me about Morrissey, at least about his solo work, is that even though he has some of the most perversely depressed lyrics in the business, he never sounds like he’s trying to make anyone else feel the way he does. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty sad on this album, but I still find it’s of an all-too-upbeat character to really drag anyone down into Morrissey‘s misery. In this way, he sets a pretty solid example for all the world’s sadsacks, save for his embarrassingly racist public statements; it’s alright to be depressed and hate the world, but you don’t have to make everyone else feel the same way. It’s the perfect anti-Valentine’s Day music, depressed and morbid and hopeless and cynical, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.

Destroyer – Destroyer’s Rubies

Destroyer / Rubies

This is another album that gets by on its details. Everything is pretty standard instrumentally, catchy, even jazzy or lounge-worthy at times, but Dan Bejar, the band’s lone member, is a perfectly conflicted writer. He’s too sarcastic to take any of this love shit seriously, but he can’t stop seeking it either. He sings his lines in a disaffected tenor, but composes them with rich detail and quiet optimism. Take the line in the impossibly exquisite opener “Rubies” where he moans “all good things must come to an end / the bad ones just go on forever.” I didn’t think I’d ever write an article where I used this word twice, but anyway, it’s pretty “Morrisseyan” on its surface, for sure. When read as sarcasm though, it’s clear that Bejar’s rejecting the easy, and flatly pessimistic answers provided by idioms like “all good things must come to an end.” He doesn’t believe that’s the case, and he flips the phrase on its head, turning it into a far more productive indictment of why we think all good things must end. It’s ultimately more comforting than a pithy excuse for why things don’t go your way, and the album is full of similarly challenging, iconoclastic moments, coupled with extremely visual, specific details that let us all take part in Bejar’s reluctant romanticism.

Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca

Dirty Projectors / Stillness Is The Move

If my girlfriend and I had a song, or an album, it would be this one. You can’t have it, cause it’s ours, but the reasons why you should want it to be the soundtrack to your relationship are legion. Led by mad virtuoso genius Dave Longstreth, the DPs officially came as close as they’ve ever come to accessibility with this album, and that’s not a knock in any way. There’s plenty of idiosyncratic, occasionally jarring weirdness here, but plenty to agree on as well, like the fact that “Two Doves” would fit right over the credits of your favorite rom-com, or that growing old with someone has never sounded sexier than it does on “Stillness Is The Move,” or that the harmonies on “Temecula Sunrise” actually sound like a Temecula sunrise. “Bitte Orca” is sort of self-consciously reaching for that simplified, youthful, exuberant take on l’amour that you’re likely to hear in Mariah Carey slow songs at middle school dances. No one’s going to mistake anything here for “One Sweet Day,” but it’s still shamelessly reaching for that same gloriously hopeless celluloid romance in a breathtakingly unique way.

The Postal Service – Give Up

Postal Service / We Will Become Silhouettes

This album changed my world when I first heard it, and I still consider it a modern lovestruck masterwork. Ben Gibbard’s breathy adolescent singing voice and wide-eyed poetic narrator set the standard for pee-pants millennial romance, and while its sentiments may not age as well as some of the more “mature” entries on this list, few albums before or since Give Up have been this endearing, this sweetly descriptive of the things everybody feels. Even on the songs that describe relationships stagnating, or dissolving, or imploding, there’s something in each of these tunes that expresses the idea that love, struggle though it may be, is worth it. It might be Dntel‘s semi-chintzy electronic sounds that often sound like they could’ve been made by anyone with a metronome and a $5 keyboard, or it might be the lyrics, that are grandiose but perpetually honest. No matter what it is, even when it meanders into darker territory, it’s still resilient and never bitter, which is fitting for anyone who’s ever been, ever will be or currently is totally stoked about love.

Would Cupid, or whatever agree with this soundtrack? How does it fit into your idea of Valentine’s Day? Whether you love it or hate, had an awesome one or a shitty one, leave us a few comments and tell us what you think.

Filed under: Lists, Not Blake, Jim, or Brendan