Happy Birthday OTD: Our Top 10 Exclusives

In case you haven't been here in a week, it's our birthday . . . almost. We're celebrating tonight at Enormous Room. This post was supposed to be up hours ago, but we started getting hammered at noon, Cami just left to pick up some Suicide Girls, and, well, you're lucky we haven't puked on our keyboards yet. But in honor of OTD's first anniversary, and to remind you of why you love us, we present . . . the top 10 OTD exclusives of our first year in business. (The fact that this list doesn't include the ultra-amazing songs Bonde do Role and Black Helicopter is verifiable proof that we are totally not very serious about this list.) Get these songs now, because sometime this weekend we're ditching the exclusives nav-bar thing on the right and replacing it with something more useful. (Like drunken photos, or a show calendar, or a blog roll, or barbeque recipes.) In the meantime, everyone should go download Ray Lamontagne's cover of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" over at Stereogum -- holy shit, so good.

10. Major Stars, "Pocket." Simply put, it sounds a cross between Black Sabbath and Bikini Kill . . . or, if that's too square for you, try Hawkwind meets Phantom Pregnancies. By any measure, it fucking owns.

9. Big Digits, "Music is Magic." We didn't give this an OTD-styled intro when we first posted it 'cuz Cami was swamped with dead people and OTD was fresh from wrecking shop with Minnie and Mickey. But for the last few days, we've had this track repeating on our iTunes Playlist and we're happy to report that TD and Mac remove the muffling sweaters from their mouths and do some real, earnest singing! Against a piano sample! And it rules! Best of all, you can't get it anywhere else.

8. Keys to the Streets of Fear, "Modern World." Six months, one recording session with the Walkmen, and one New Yorker namedrop later, we still can't introduce this Boston-on-Boston exclusive better than KttSoF's two-string guitarist, Elio DeLuca did: "The song is a terse, hot blast of USA-bent Schlitzphetamine-fueled anti-nursing-school modern-sonic face-fucking." Go ahead, let them fuck your face!

7. Kay Hanley, "Cellars by Starlight." Sure, the Phoenix covers Kay Hanley every time she farts. But this time she farted a song named after our local-music column, and more importantly, after local-music scribe Brett Milano.

6. Hidden, "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate." Their new riffs will knock Alkaline Trio's teeth down their throats, and their singer does the best Danzig impersonation this side of Type O Negative. Picking up where Keys to the Streets of Fear's Modern Lovers cover left off, it's round two of a two-part OTD series where great Boston bands cover classic songs by other great Boston bands. There were going to be more parts of this series, buy, hey, shit happens.

5. Casey Dienel, "Frankie and Annette." Our girl Casey Dienel, who's moved to Brooklyn and gettin' all huge, is receiving a warm welcome to her new NY home. Time Out anoints her a member of the '06 pack. Fluxblog posts the opening track of Wind-Up Canary, "Doctor Monroe." Jane Magazine publishes her in its March issue alongside Annie, the Giant Drag girlie, Annie, and Maja from the Soungs (not online) -- "very humbling company" as Dienel says on her homepage. And then -- drumroll puhleeze -- Pitchfork gives Wind-Up Canary a better-than-respectable 7.6. We told ya she was dangerous.

4. Anal Cunt, "You're in a Coma." Extreme metal's most notorious fuck-up writes song mocking people in a coma, consumes $200 worth of crack cocaine, an untraceable amount of heroin, and at least a fifth of whiskey, and ends up in a coma. Next thing you know, Joe Bonni will punch him in the face.

2. Cave In, "Down the Drain." This is unlike anything else on Cave In's Perfect Pitch Black. Two, it is unlike anything they've ever done. It's a pop song, maybe; closer to Brodsky's solo folk-psych records, sort of; but with an ingenious arrangement (the bass filter from Metallica's "Orion" meets, like, the electronic rainwater-trickle of Postal Service?).

1. Tunnel of Love, "Paint It Black." The world's greatest rock and roll band, covering a song by the pretenders to the throne. A random Warner Bros publicist emailed us earlier this year: "Maybe it's just me, but I think this is better than the original." Whaddya mean, you "think"?!