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Best Musical Snippets of 2013

It's always great when you get a song that's consistently great from beginning to end, but sometimes it doesn't work out that way.  Sometimes you get songs where a certain section clearly stands out from the rest. Here's a few from this year:
  1. The Chorus of Kanye West's Bound 2: The soul sample that occupies the rest of the song is soul only in name.  It approximates College Dropout-era Kanye with none of the warmth and, well, soul that made those tracks great.  The chorus is the exact opposite.  It uses the electronic music technique of putting a soulful male voice over a bass-heavy beat to create something emotive and genuinely soulful.
  2. The 3rd Minute of Youth Lagoon's Mute: Most of the song is nothing but warm, hazy fuzz, but, for about a minute, Trevor Powers cuts through that fuzz with a soaring, uplifting melody that Bono would be jealous of.
  3. The Pre-Chorus of Vampire Weekend's Unbelievers: One of two things this year that absolutely blew me away on first listen (the other being Daft Punk's Doing It Right).
  4. The Bridge of The National's Demons: The rest of the song isn't bad, but this bridge has more grandeur, momentum, and melody than the rest of the song combined.
  5. The Chorus to Phoenix's Bourgeois: It takes two and a half minutes of boredom to get to this chorus, but oh, what a chorus.

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