Well, our work here is done. We now leave 2005 with our first of two annual holiday features, retracking the best music of the year. Tomorrow, it's our Top 50 Albums of the 2005, but today it's all on the singles. And as with our previous two singles lists, this one runs down a crazy array of indie pop and indie rock, radio hits, B-sides and remixes, compilation and mixtape highlights, white label releases, and mind-blowing multi-part one-man soap operas. Of course, the exclusion of non-single album tracks made staff favorites like Robyn's "Konichiwa Bitches", Beanie Sigel's "Purple Rain", and anything from Sufjan Stevens' Illinois, among many others, ineligible. Fortunately, it all gets its due on the albums list, and everyone ends up happy. Be sure to check out our Spotify playlist to hear most of the songs.

50: The White Stripes
"My Doorbell"
[XL]

Cover your eyes, stop fixating on Jack White's vaudeville villain pencil 'stache, and turn your attention to partner Meg White's quasi-bored pounding: never before has the White Stripes' thumping rhythm section been so oddly mesmerizing, perfectly paired with spare piano diddling and squeaky vocals. A dedicated fan of blues-born, thinly-veiled sex metaphors, Jack hits the keys and whines plaintively, thinking and thinking and thinking about his doorbell, while Meg jingles her tambourines and kicks out the beats, finally (and miraculously) validating Jack's longtime insistence that she stare into space and drum like a toddler. --Amanda Petrusich

49: !!!
"Take Ecstasy With Me"
[Touch & Go]

Turns out the world is different when you view it through psychedelic new-wave glasses. Cats grow wings, fire hydrants do backflips, cars stand up on their back wheels and Crip-walk, and dour Magnetic Fields jams become eight-minute celestial starry-eyed workouts without losing any of their swoony melody. Basses pop, string sections swell, drum-circles ripple and bang, shoegazer guitars whirl and swoop, synths melt, and Stephin Merritt becomes some smartass doing a gurgley-voiced Stephin Merritt impression. !!! may have proved last year with Louden Up Now that they have no business writing songs-- at least not conventional ones-- but here they show that an outsourced hook is all they need to churn out a furiously gorgeous monsterpiece. --Tom Breihan

48: Spoon
"I Turn My Camera On"
[Merge]

The album title must be a typo, because "I Turn My Camera On" proves what long-running Austin, Texas heroes Spoon really want is friction. Frontman Britt Daniel struts in the foreground, flaunting his double-tracked Princesetto like handcuffs or a feather boa while shaming Sir Jagger's "Emotional Rescue" register-climb. There's violence in Spoon's sex, though. Guitars jag like irrepressible memories, a throbbing bassline represses its incipient pelvic thrust, end-of-the-world noises swirl from side to side, and eventually Daniel's grim lyrics come into focus: "I turn my feelings off/ Y' made me untouchable for life/ And you wasn't polite." Passions sublimated, desires conflicted, "I Turn My Camera On" savors tension while threatening climax. --Marc Hogan

47: Feist
"Inside and Out"
[Universal International]

Pairing Leslie Feist's strutting Rickie Lee Jones vocal sass with a Bee Gees classic was a sure thing. The production generally defers to relaxed 1970s soul, but a few trip-hop touches-- vinyl crackle and pinched Portishead horn gurgles-- pry the song loose from time. It's impressive how completely Feist inhabits this world, her elastic vocal mannerisms imparting an easy wisdom. This is the kind of single that casually leaks from a radio and makes everything in the room a touch brighter. --Mark Richardson

46: Rex the Dog
"I Look Into Mid-Air"
[Kompakt]

Pissed cos you missed that Castle movie? Check the six-minute condensed version: Less song than magic carpet ride, "I Look Into Mid-Air" riffs wondrous as Miyazaki-- even if the two understand "dub version" a little differently. Here's techno at its most transcendent: No MDMA-drip euphoria, but a jet-stream jaunt through cloudbursts and arpeggios, and we feel only cold, exhilarating air, the world like a curved lens beneath. --Sam Ubl

45: Stars
"Ageless Beauty"
[Arts & Crafts]

I'm sure Stars' male singer Torquil Campbell is sweet and nice to dogs and everything, but one of the main reasons this song sounds so gallant is because he's barely on it. Over mildly shoegazing fuzz chords and a simple drum beat, guitarist/female lead Amy Millan takes full advantage of her console's "angelic" setting, as overlapping coos soothe like a thousand enraptured glories hail-hailing from on high. Immortal love is the purported ideal, and adorned in such a crushing package, "Ageless Beauty" could temporarily wipe slates for the divorced, dumped, and disengaged alike. Indie rock, too often cloaked in a tight web of rarified self-consciousness, rarely allows itself this kind of unabashed optimism. --Ryan Dombal

44: My Morning Jacket
"Off the Record"
[RCA]

My Morning Jacket hitch their classic rock wagon to a reggae beat with stunning results on "Off the Record". The track roars with the band's characteristic fervor, choppy guitars slamming the up-beats as Jim James leaves the reverb in the silo and offers one of his most unaffected vocals. But that's only half the song. The big guitar riff that bookends the vocal section is left to echo off into oblivion, and the other half slides into a spooky dubside soaked in mellotron, Rhodes piano, and echoplex. Voices speaking backward float on a river of bass and hand percussion to the song's haunting final fade. Taken whole, it's a remarkable demonstration of how a band can integrate an influence without sounding remotely imitative. --Joe Tangari

43: The MFA
"The Difference It Makes" / "The Difference It Makes (Superpitcher Remix)"
[Kompakt]

Every tone on this thing is just so impossibly warm, a wool blanket with loose tufts of fuzz making the edges indistinct, blurring the line between sound and silence. The catgut bass grinds forward, a digital reference to the bow dragged across strings, and the rhythm continually falls into the next bar, a perpetually renewed invitation to move. The original is glorious but the Superpitcher remix is perfection-- not a note could be added or subtracted without making it inferior. When the clipped female voice cuts in, inaudible shifted words, a ghost of trance remixes past, it reminds us that sometimes dance music can solve all the world's problems, if only for as long as one rushy build. --Mark Richardson

42: Love Is All
"Felt Tip"
[Smashing Time]

Moving from an icy, preening strut to a rallying clairon call, "Felt Tip" shows off Love Is All's preternatural knack for crafting the bittersweet, combining dejected, melancholy sentiment with an impossibly hopeful delivery. From the slight echo on the bass to the bed of maracas and pick scrapes during the lugubrious verses to the heavily-accented female singer urging hip kids to "step right on the beat" before the tempo shift in the chorus, "Felt Tip" is a near-perfect amalgamation of lo-fi production styles that's an embarrassment of rich detail. --Jason Crock

41: Cam'ron [ft. Juelz Santana]
"It's Nothin'"
[mixtapes]

These verses sounded better over "Dreams" on Rap City, but facts are that some bits here need (ahem) nothin': "But the eight whips I'm about to trade for a spaceship/ Call me NASA, man, inside plasma fam/ You gotta warrant? I'm in orbit/ Come after Cam." Oddly prescient considering the DC bluff-calling, but what can you do. Maybe it'll get the unbelievers off Cam's back finally, or the New York Press at least, who earlier this year awarded him their "Best Sign Hiphop Is Dead" zing for "nonsensical blathering," then said, "Welcome to the apocalypse, bitches." Sounds good to me. --Nick Sylvester