As you may have noticed, this week’s Willy Week is stock fulla year-end lists, including the Local Cutters’ picks for the best albums, songs, venues, labels and surprises of the year in local music. Check out all of those lists on the Willamette Week site or below under the heading “Paper Cuts,” and listen to MP3s (listed respectively below) of our songs of the year right here.

D. Yellow Swans, “I Woke Up,” from Psychic Secession: At 11 minutes in length, this is about as concise as DYS gets. The opening minutes sound like an overloaded PGE substation, but a machinelike beat fights its way out, and that mangled industrial alchemy burns away into one of the best introductions to noise you could hope for. “I Woke Up” lies just outside inscrutable—a knot of indecipherable screaming, heartbeat bass, live and programmed beats, and swells and squalls of evil electronics. It’s also the only noise track I know of to feature live hand claps. MICHAEL BYRNE.

Kind of Like Spitting, “If the Shoe Fits, Cut the Foot Off,” from The Thrill of the Hunt: “We went to see the country,” Ben Barnett sings over gentle, finger-picked guitar in his best don’t-wake-the-neighbors voice. “All we saw were bars. We went to see America…We didn’t get that far.” Then, just when the self-deprecating songwriter seems as if he’s about to make sense of love’s most puzzling moments, he admits, “I can’t remember when it wasn’t a mess/ So I guess it’s time to abandon ship.” Barnett refuses to tie up loose ends, save his implication that noticing your imprisonment won’t win you freedom, and not even true love cleans up the shit in your cell. CASEY JARMAN.

Alan Singley & Pants Machine, “Watersong,” from Lovingkindness: From the echoing piano and slipping-along-the-strings acoustic guitar squeaks of the intro to the heartbreakingly beautiful chorus (”I would rather be dead/ Than have you think/ You were anything less/ Than the strongest thing/ That has ever lifted me up”), Singley’s “Watersong” is simply one of the most romantic songs I’ve ever heard. And the counterintuitive way he changes up the melody of that refrain is so interesting I once used it (by singing it over and over again to myself) to stay awake during a really challenging road trip. AMY MCCULLOUGH.

PRF, “Days of Davey Jones,” from Days of Davey Jones: “Days” is more than a quick hardcore punk song played by teenagers and delivered with low, spastic, JFA-style vocals: This ode to Southeast Portland venue Davey Jones’ Locker—an all-ages club that closed two years ago—is a symbol of the history of a scene populated by kids so young it’s hard to believe it has a history. For bands like PRF and fellow youthful punk group Autistic Youth—who both launched their first tours and full-lengths this year—the DJL days represent exciting, simpler times. JASON SIMMS.

The Meat Sweats, “Ich on My Back,” from 30 Seconds Over Portland: You might as well leave this stomping, garage trash gem—written and performed by local high-school kids the Meat Sweats—to the lore-infatuated music geeks of the future. They will hear this as godhead. You, almost assuredly, will not. The super-dumb vocal refrain tells the whole story: “I got, an itch on mah back/ And I’ve gotta find a bitch, to itch mah back.” In essence, a tender song of longing. SAM SOULE.

Photo: Kind of Like Spitting’s Ben Barnett (from jealousbutcher.com)

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