Last year was the best year because I got to get down with Chromeo twice in one week! The Montreal hustlers are hard at work again, touring in support of their third funk homage record Business Casual with MNDR and the Young Empires (I also saw MNDR last year; how one person on a keyboard can command a room, I dunno, but she did). Catch them before they start selling out gigantor venues this upcoming weekend at the Opera House where they’ll play back-to-back shows. Saturday night is sold out, but courtesy of The Union, we’re giving away two (2) pairs of tickets to the Sunday Jan. 23 show! To enter, leave a comment with your favourite Chromeo song and e-mail address. We’ll be picking two names on Thursday Jan. 20.

*EDIT: In the original post, I credited the venue as The Phoenix but the shows will be taking place at the Opera House.

Does the thought of an entire summer with Ke$ha, Usher, and Katy Perry pumping from car stereos give you a serious case of the Beibonic plague (see that, a play on Bieber, a contagious and mind killing pop sensation who we will surely be hearing a lot of this summer, and bubonic, a contagious and killing plague sensation we hopefully wont be seeing)? With official summer songs lists like this, that’s what you have to look forward to. That is, of course, if it wasn’t for the completely random and subjective series of lists from the Ashcan. Here we run down the top 10 songs that we would like most to be pumping from car stereos instead. Have a read and let us know your picks.

Robyn – Dancing On My Own

Obviously a Swede would make it okay to love pop music again. I’ve written about it before but here, again, is former pop tart Robyn, with a banger of a summer track about love and heartbreak on the dance floor. If you ain’t know, Robyn shed her Max Martin-made pop veneer a long time ago and has been churning out indie dance wreckers since. This song—a throbbing, movey cut laced with heart-pounding drums and wrenching vocals—might be her biggest chance at recreating that late ’90s fame, on her own terms.—am

Kelis – Home

I’ve been a Kelis fan for years—she’s always unraveled the fibre of R&B divadom with avant garde-ish concepts and production, while making pretty commercial tracks. And though there’s nothing cutting edge about linking up with Eurodance kongs David Guetta and Benny Benassi (who, IDGAF, still make the treadmill bangers I love) it doesn’t come off as a gimmick with Kelis. Listen to the pounding Justice-esque base beat and 90s rave synths on “Home” and tell me you don’t want to feel like a champion and dance ’til 7 in the morning.—am

Mark Ronson Ft. The Business INTL – Bang Bang Bang (Feat. Q-Tip & MNDR)

As his studio output grows, Mark Ronson continues to prove just how adept of a producer he is. The first single from his upcoming sophomore is “Bang Bang Bang”—a catchy, stuttery gem that sounds exactly what a futuristic-retro-funk pop song should sound like. The best part? It features one of my favourite finds of 2010—singer and Kraftwerk-inspired producer MNDR, a bold-ass chick with tons of talent. Oh, and Q-Tip is on it too. If “Bang” doesn’t get you excited (you’re lame), I’m letting you know that The Business INTL, featured on the new record, includes some VERY AMAZING AND BIG FUCKING NAMES: D’Angelo, Boy George, Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, Alex Greenwald, Miike Snow, Ghostface, the Dap Kings, Spank Rock, Rose Eleanor Dougall, Wiley, MC Pill, and some guy from Kaiser Chiefs.—am

The Roots – How I Got Over

A lot of things surprised me about the lead single from the Roots’s 11th album. For one, they are on bloody Fallon, which I thought meant they were right up there with Max Weinberg and Paul Schaffer – aka finished. But then they dropped this bomb of a single on, where else? The bloody Fallon show! And it was great. The other thing that surprised me? Black Thought can sing. I mean, I’ve seen him mess around with it on stage, but nothing like this. It’s raspy and gritty and bluesy and it complements an otherwise classic Roots song. I’m as excited  about this as I was when I was first introduced to the band with “You Got Me” over 10 years ago.-jkg

Shad – Rose Garden

As great as the first single off Shad’s latest is, “Yaa I Get It“, “Rose Garden” is probably the one that is going to be played most this summer for me. Mostly because it’s pretty listener friendly, and the last thing your friends who don’t like hip-hop want to hear is a song with no hook like “Yaa I Get It”, even though I can’t help but turn it up as loud as it goes whenever I play it. That’s not to say “Rose Garden” doesn’t stand on its own, and it definitely has one of my favourite lines off the whole album – “the missis-sauga continues / Brampton, my DJ’s lampin like Green Lantern.”  Plus when he played it at Toronto’s Opera House concert, Brendan Canning of Broken Social Scene fame joined in for the chorus, which is pretty cool in its own right.-jkg

Nas & Damian Marley – Nah Mean

It’s not like these guys haven’t had success teaming up before, but I still had my doubts until I heard the whole album. It also didn’t hurt that they played a lot of this stuff at Rock The Bells last year and killed it. But by far one of my favourite tracks off their album, Distant Relatives, is this, which perfectly combines the elements of their respective musical genres, and accomplishes what they sought out to do when they planned this album, which is to put some challenging, positive lyrics out there. Also, for fun, here it is live with this crazy strong dude who waves the Jamaican (Correction: Er, Rastafarian) flag for the entire length of every Damian Marley concert. -jkg

Sleigh Bells – Crown On The Ground

A summer song must sound better the louder it is played. This is a token qualification for great summer songdom, much like how sandwiches must be cut diagonally to achieve true tastiness. In this regard, Sleigh Bells’ lo-fi romp is made for this list. Even on the lowest volume setting, “Crown on the Ground” sounds like it’s being sprayed directly into your ear. Assaulting your body with infectious beats and an irresistibly simple, sing-song chorus, the Brooklyn duo’s wall of sound is an aural manifestation of summer’s unlimited potential energy. -sy

Janelle Monáe – Say You’ll Go

Janelle Monáe’s current concept album is simple: her alter-ego, Cindi Mayweather, becomes a messianic figure to the android community of fictional city Metropolis. Totally Michael Bay right? Casually sprinkling Bernstein and Outkast in equal measures throughout her debut LP ArchAndroid, Monáe’s “Say You’ll Go” is a slow jam with the heart-on-sleeve mentality of an open stage folk singer. Add the pedigree of a Claire de Lune piano coda and Monáe takes summer ballads to an entirely new level. I don’t know if they dream of electric sheep, but I am certain androids fall in love to music like this. -sy

Drake – Show Me a Good Time

Like he did on last summer’s “Best I Ever Had“, Drake plays with pacing on “Show Me a Good Time”, drawling, crooning, speeding up, rushing, but this time creating a verse/chorus swirl of declarative statements and faded-out disorientation. On the hook Drake can’t figure out how it got this far with this girl, but he quickly shakes the thinking process away and tries to enjoy himself. The smatter of his sentiments is superficial but of personal import, Kanye’s beat is noisy when dissected but sweet as a whole, and, well, if that ain’t summer to you, you need another shot. -jc

Cody ChesnuTT – Come Back Like Spring

I’m not sure if this one even counts — it’s about spring, not summer, and it’s a ditty, more of a sketch than a song — but whatever, it sounds like sunshine and can kiss you all the same. ChesnuTT’s an oddball, wrapping his soulful melancholy around honeysuckle and beautiful breezes but also annoying ant bites and allergies. I love this guy. This one’s for the quiet moments, the mornings, the hangover coffees staring off porch steps, the feel of grass or someone else’s hair. It’s not an anthem, no, but let it surprise you on shuffle and be rewarded with a private, cinematic moment, everything making sense again. You’ll need it, trust. -jc

YACHT—”a band, a belief system and a business”—is the kind of act that exceeds every expectation you might have of seeing them live. The dance-pop duo is making their living off of showboating, playing energetic shows masked as old-timey country revivals in small, packed bars.

But before YACHT came on, my friends and I got to Wrongbar in time to catch the very last strains of Bobby Birdman’s set and say a quick hello to electro-pop singer MNDR. Here’s the thing about kooky singers making synth music: it’s never usually very good because so many “artists” are doing it. I mean, sure people will dance around and have a good time, but in the end it doesn’t pull you in. MNDR is precisely the opposite. So she looks weird, with these gigantic white-framed glasses, but she’s working the board and belting her heart out. Talking to the audience, intro-ing songs and telling us about each one also meant we could invest in her performance. It’s incredibly difficult to be a one-woman show and still command attention from your audience, but I’d say everyone was pretty rapt. On a smoke break after her six-song set, I overheard more than a few people saying they enjoyed it—a difficult task for an opener.

Afterward, MNDR DJ’d while the packed crowd waited for YACHT. The backers—including Bobby Birdman on bass—came out first dressed in tuxedos then leads Jona and Claire, Jona in a ’60s, back-country style white tux with suspenders. They jumped, and jumped, and jumped, and jumped. Claire made black lipstick look so good. They sang and played guitar and had more personality than I’ve seen in most performers. They left me wondering why they don’t have a bigger following, because their music is the strangest combination of upbeat pop belying semi-apocalyptic lyrics and themes. At one point, Jona jumped down into the crowd—which had been dancing sweatily for some time now—and got everyone around him to get down on one knee (and we obliged, I mean, who wanted to be the loser still standing?) and follow his lead in an ominously aspirational invocation. So we’re all bent over and Jona is crouched in the middle, preaching to us—telling us to take control of our lives and, essentially, stop letting the man get us down. It really brought home the theme of the show: a glorious indie-pop revival.