“Roscoe” by Midlake

"Roscoe" led off the campaign for The Trials of Van Occupanther, Midlake's second album, in 2006, and it's a strange, lovely thing: soft-rock harmonies and folk-rock drift that sound like they were dug out of a Texas time capsule. The band cut the album at their own studio in Texas and produced it themselves alongside Tim Smith, with Paul Alexander engineering and mixing, and Smith, who wrote it, slipped bits of the M*A*S*H* theme into the tune.

Critics fell hard. The A.V. Club thought it worth dropping everything for, Paste heard it as forceful and assured, Pitchfork grumbled that nothing else on the record came close, and Rolling Stone later counted it among the decade's 100 best songs. The dissent came from Tiny Mix Tapes, which missed the synthesizers and the rougher vocals the band had left behind.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.