Pitchfork's Top 50 albums of the 2000's
musicismylife78
Posts: 6,116
I they put out the top 200 albums of the 2000's but I thought I would just do the good stuff, the top 50. I actually agree with most of the list. I am sure their will be much debate about the list, I think the top 2 fit perfectly, Funeral at 2 and Kid A at 1. 3 being Daft Punk, dont know if I believe that one, though.
50. Deerhunter
Microcastle
[Kranky/4AD; 2008]
Pop music is often escapist, dwelling on the weakness of the flesh-- but usually not like the songs of Deerhunter, where bodies are fevered, insubstantial, and frail. On Microcastle, a ringing set of crashing guitars, chimes, and squalls of noise, people are literally wasting away in six-by-six cells surrounded by concrete. Some are crucified in front of their friends, and drunken children torch an old man in his own garage. But this imagery isn't for shock value; it's about escape. Deerhunter's musical aesthetic-- partially composed of smeared sounds and unstable footings-- proves a beautiful companion to uncertain lyrics. On tracks like "Little Kids" or "Never Stops", a framework of driving rhythms and gorgeous melodies is lit up with tracers of noise and feedback. Deerhunter sounds tighter and more fragile than ever on Microcastle, able to sweep up listeners in a tempest of hazy, anxious joy. --Patrick Sisson
49. Antony & the Johnsons
I Am a Bird Now
[Secretly Canadian; 2005]
The downtown art scene of late 20th century New York left such an impression on the city, it was hard to imagine any artist in the 2000's could touch on it without sounding like a nostalgia act. But Antony Hegarty confronted that gender-blurring heritage-- think Andy Warhol's Factory, Lou Reed's 1970s androgyny, the 80s cabaret scene-- to create something both reverent and new. Even more daringly, he opened with a showstopper, the devastating "Hope There's Someone". But the rest of the album answers that call, exploring complex issues of identity, mortality, and companionship with the guiding light of simple emotion. Antony's performance-art pedigree gave his history lesson credibility, attracting contributions from icons like Reed and Boy George. But his breathtaking voice and laser-like vision transcend time and place. Every sentiment on I Am a Bird Now comes through loud and clear-- even if you know nothing about New York. --Marc Masters
48. The Hold Steady
Separation Sunday
[Frenchkiss; 2005]
From the album's very beginning-- an unaccompanied vocal that ends with a joke it takes a few listens to get-- you know Separation Sunday is for the lyric geeks. So there are maybe a few less sing-alongs; instead, we get barrages of noir-worthy imagery and singer Craig Finn's preoccupations with over-the-counter highs, Christianity, seedy characters, and the bars, churches, and river camps where they meet. The music is as bar-ready as ever, but rather than the big choruses they'd later trade in, Separation Sunday's memorable moments are stray licks, half-slurred lyrical asides, and the disarming bridges of tracks like "Banging Camp" or "Multitude of Casualties", all of which shine brighter than the songs that surround them. There's no typical ebb-and-flow album sequencing here, no breathers, slow jams, or bathroom breaks: Every moment of the record aims to be the best moment. --Jason Crock
47. Joanna Newsom
The Milk-Eyed Mender
[Drag City; 2004]
She wafted in like a hippie but sang about the pitfalls of poetry. She wrote like a poet but praised the birds for their illiterate flight. Her brave wail betrayed her age and her simple instrumentation-- harp and voice, mostly-- betrayed how hard the music probably was to play. The record was a breeze for the first 20 seconds. Then she started singing. You either craned your head toward the sound or you left the porch. Her whimsy was obvious and her word choice was, well-- let's say that "boat" doesn't work because only "caravel" rhymes with "beetle shell." (I kept the dictionary out after that.) She warped soft acoustic music into art-- neither "freak" nor "folk," just a harpist with a good imagination. The puns were an aside to remind us she wasn't a stiff. Her debut-- to paraphrase author Ben Marcus on the subject of experimental fiction-- didn't compete with paintball for attention; it ferreted out sensitive folks for whom lyric analysis is as spiritually gratifying as dancing. She deserved us and we needed her, puffy sleeves and all. --Mike Powell
46. The Shins
Chutes Too Narrow
[Sub Pop; 2003]
Behind James Mercer's melodious whimper and his band's polite folk-rock is some unheralded meanness-- hard-hearted thoughts on relationships; songs that sit like oval pegs in round holes, filled with detours and hiccups. Mercer writes thoughtfully about art and Utopianism but treats a new crush like she's a game he lost to his erection. He buries a wimp's anger in tangled words and unexpected codas. But it's catchy and it's pretty, so I have to assume that people listen selectively.
In 2003, it was hard to find a big indie band that played quite as safely as the Shins. Most of the songs on Chutes were around three minutes long, and it didn't sound like there were too many overdubs. No bhangra breakdowns, no "electronic manipulations." It starts with a false start and ends with the sound of thunder-- and between, the band scrapes at its own self-imposed limitations in a hundred great little ways. --Mike Powell
45. Fugazi
The Argument
[Dischord; 2001]
The members of Fugazi spent most of the decade working on other projects, but the one time they came together to make an album, they made one for the ages. The Argument is the band's most nuanced and melodic record, and possibly its best. The refined approach doesn't come at the expense of intensity, though-- some of the record's most harrowing moments are its quietest, and the album finds the band learning that a whisper can rage as powerfully as a shout. Outside of the masterful anti-eminent domain statement "Cashout", the record is indirect about its politics without sounding uncommitted, and the band takes its narratives of personal and societal turmoil on wild rides through complex arrangements featuring intricate interplay and unexpected shifts. If we ever get another Fugazi album, it'll be welcome, but if we don't, The Argument is a perfect swan song: accomplished, righteous, challenging, and totally vital. --Joe Tangari
44. D'Angelo
Voodoo
[Virgin; 2000]
Musically a triumph of hands-on, real-time, old-school soul minimalism, Voodoo is simultaneously tough as old wood and as fragile as a smoke ring. But it's D'Angelo that makes the album something more than the work of talented young turks neck-deep in classic records. Save the breathtaking single, each vocal performance on Voodoo is a subdued, almost conversational marvel. The phrasing is as idiosyncratic as any great singer you may think he's homaging; you can't imagine anyone else squeezing the dangerously wordy chorus of "The Root" into such a shiver-inducing, fluid rush. The delivery, tending more toward a murmur, has an almost unbearable intimacy-- maybe the most erotically tactile singing put to disc this decade. --Jess Harvell
43. Luomo
Vocalcity
[Force Tracks; 2000]
In seconds, we're off. Lost in a labyrinthine maze of compulsive deep house in which every synth spurt, each softly tearing hi-hat seems to plug into your body like acupuncture. Perhaps better than any other dance album this decade, Vocalcity blurs the line between process and product: when "Class" coalesces from a sea of continental shelf bass and disembodied and dissected sighs into a tremulously romantic diva refrain, it's like watching cells multiplying to create a life form. But don't just stand there watching: producer Sasu Ripatti doesn't merely want you to dance, he wants to make dancing the only possible response. As expansive as they are, these aching grooves come on like snapshots of much longer, broader epics whose tantric possibilities are unnerving-- if Vocalcity in fact stretched on forever, what dancer could bear to stop? Luomo provides the soundtrack; you bring the red shoes. --Tim Finney
42. Grizzly Bear
Veckatimest
[Warp; 2009]
A triumph of craftsmanship, the 12 tracks of Veckatimest click and whirr at a deliberate tempo, like a clock tower in a town square. Even the slightest of vocal snippets gets shaped and sanded down with care-- the only maybes are on the lyric sheet. And like those triumphant timepieces, it's the dozen variations on a scene-- instruments and effects rearranging themselves-- that make things intriguing. Contrast is the key; beautiful vocal harmonies, such as the peeling-like-bells choir kicking off "Dory", can be a flourish of sound or the longed-for release. Deceptively simple guitar melodies, spiked by sharp notes or riffs, let you know every turn was planned two songs in advance. Talent in music is often measured by extreme gestures, but Grizzly Bear's greatest skill may be making small moves sound massive. --Patrick Sisson
41. Burial
Untrue
[Hyperdub; 2007]
Burial's masterful second album Untrue seems a mass of contradictions. Although the world now knows Burial to be the work of London dubstep producer William Bevan, Untrue remains faceless and largely anonymous, yet also acutely personal and introspective. It is unconditionally linked to both its place of origin (South London), and to a specific musical lineage that traces back through UK garage, yet it has deeply resonated with listeners regardless of physical or musical geography. Though his jittery rhythms and brooding atmospheres are endlessly captivating, Burial's distinctive treatment of vocal samples provide Untrue much of its enduring fascination. Manipulated and detuned, the disembodied voices that populate the likes of "Etched Headplate" or "Shell of Light" sound uniformly lost and heartsick, their half-heard pleas ("I can't take no more tears," "Please hurry and find me") repeating helplessly into the night like residual hauntings. Yet despite Untrue's immersive melancholy the album never becomes oppressive-- on the contrary, Burial's moody, evocative dubstep has an allure that always beckons the listener for one more lonely walk beneath its flickering streetlights. --Matthew Murphy
40. The National
Alligator
[Beggars Banquet; 2005]
The National surely knew it, and a handful of longtime fans likely knew it as well. But it wasn't until the group toured with opener Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! in fall 2005 that word finally spread of the group's third album Alligator. A few years later, Alligator remains an unabashedly powerful and deceptively primal work, capable of knocking unsuspecting audiences on their collective ass. But back then, CYHSY was riding an unequaled (if fleeting) wave of buzz that resulted in sold-out clubs and spillover crowds, many of which thinned significantly before the headliners even took the stage. Those who stayed, however, witnessed an incredible transformation, as the National played the hell out of tracks that now feel like inextricable parts of the indie firmament. Songs like "Abel", "Lit Up", and "Mr. November" are ringers now, but they hit like a ton of bricks back when no one saw them coming. --Joshua Klein
39. Boredoms
Vision Creation Newsun
[Warner Bros.; 2000]
Nu-Baelerica, indie's fascination with house and techno, Brooklyn noise, freak-folk, the proggy minimalism of Battles, the futuro-hurricane stomp of Orthrelm, the baroque noise-adelia of Panda Bear and Animal Collective, Lindstrøm's space disco, Optimo's beardy disco, M.I.A.'s electro-beats, the noise bands who were really jam bands (Lightning Bolt, Hella), the jam bands who were really noise bands (Excepter, Black Dice), any band with multiple drummers, any band whose front man played something with motion-sensors instead of a fretboard, any band who issued a remix album instead of an actual follow-up record (and especially those for whom the remix record was almost as good), any band who connected the dots between no-wave and trance and whose sound could only be described using three to five hyphens, and most of all ANY BAND WHO RECORDED A PERFECT RECORD FOR THE MILLENNIUM THE YEAR BEFORE IT STARTED. Oh wait, there's only one. Boredoms win. --Dominique Leone
38. Phoenix
It's Never Been Like That
[Astralwerks; 2006]
Two albums into a career of slick, reedy pop-- and more notably, brilliant singles such as "If I Ever Feel Better", "Too Young", and "Everything is Everything"-- the Versailles quartet Phoenix must have had some sort of epiphany. The opener to It's Never Been Like That, "Napoleon Says", narrates an encounter between a Frenchman and a (presumably) American tourist, but the greater effect is to signal the band's torrid love affair with the rough young curvatures of Brooklyn. Ruffling their polished yacht-rock around the edges by applying measured doses of Strokes-esque rock guitar, It's Never Been Like That compromised none of the preternatural pop songcraft wizardry of United or Alphabetical, but traded in a litany of odd old touches-- palm-muted guitar, disingenuous blue-eyed soul-- to arrangements that actually sounded like the guys were having fun. Outstanding single "Long Distance Call", as the title implies, furthers the metaphor of the trans-Atlantic romance (perhaps inspired by singer Thomas Mars' baby-mama Sofia Coppola?) as Mars insistently shouts the album's title in the chorus. The unspoken response: And it'll never be the same again. --Mike Orme
37. Yo La Tengo
And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
[Matador; 2000]
As the new decade arrived, Yo La Tengo seemed between worlds. They were indie rock vets whose career stretched back to the college-rock 80s, and during the alt-rock years they held their own against Matador labelmates like Pavement with Painful and I Can Heart the Heart Beating as One. But the groups they'd come up with were vanishing and the path forward for a band in their position wasn't exactly clear. How do you act your age in this business while remaining vital? And Then Nothing Turned Us Inside-Out was the sound of them finding their way. It disappointed some at the time with its subdued sound and slower tempos, but it's the kind of record that sounded better with every listen. Slow, spare, dreamy, but ultimately grounded, And Then Nothing… radiates warmth and maturity and is never boring. With it, Yo La Tengo showed us that it was possible to make indie rock about grown-up relationships-- this is a couples record if there ever was one-- and, after a few rough patches, they found themselves revitalized as a recording unit, doing some of the best work of their career by the time the 00s were ending. --Mark Richardson
36. The Streets
Original Pirate Material
[679/Vice/Warner Bros.; 2002]
Don't forget how much this music risked embarrassment. Mike Skinner took the sounds of modern club music (2-step, garage, hip-hop) and made them small, chintzy, and unglamorous-- no bright lights, no dancefloor, just someone pasting together beats on his computer in a messy apartment. Unlike London's grime producers, he wasn't doing it in the service of world-conquering fierceness. Skinner-- young, suburban, Northern-- rapped in a plainer voice, clowning about his daily life and telling earnest, unabashedly sentimental stories. I'm sure someone, at some point, told him this was embarrassing, cheap-sounding, and way less cool than proper club music-- that his beats were shabby and his confessionals corny. But Skinner, good-humored and palpably sincere, followed his ideas where they led. And as it turns out, it's exactly that sincerity that makes this record so special-- something like having a great conversation on a ratty couch, surrounded by empty pizza boxes, stacks of old video games, and the beats from the cars down on the street. --Nitsuh Abebe
35. Spoon
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
[Merge; 2007]
"I'm in need of someone to take care of me tonight," confesses Britt Daniel at the close of Spoon's sixth album. The uncharacteristically direct emotional plea is earned. Because the entirety of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga dances around the vulnerability of indie rock middle age, when a life playing to blurred faces might seem indulgent and/or hopelessly transient for someone tripping over their friend's kids. But the band hasn't given up on an indie rock nirvana typified by bristling loose ends and fallen feelings-- it's the end as no end, and they've got it down. The music bubbles, blooms, and cuts away as if struck by unseen forces throughout; Daniel matches it line-for-line with words that confuse, burrow, and-- eventually-- strike the psyche like a suppressed memory suddenly broken free. "Sometimes I think that I'll find a love/ One that's gonna change my heart," goes the singer. He's got little reason to believe, but he does anyway. --Ryan Dombal
34. Radiohead
Amnesiac
[Capitol; 2001]
Shoes to fill, shadows to escape-- Amnesiac had quite an uphill battle when it emerged in spring 2001, mere months after Kid A confounded expectations, and indeed quite before the dust of debate surrounding that record had settled. Yet, lest we (ahem) forget, Amnesiac confounded a couple expectations of its own: namely, it wasn't the rumored "return to rock" Radiohead record, nor was it a motley collection of inferior Kid A also-rans. What it was was a selection of the great band's many strengths in convenient digest form: ballads custom built to alter the brain ("Pyramid Song", "Like Spinning Plates"), paranoid clatter ("Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box", "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors"), winning curveballs ("Life in a Glass House"), and, okay, some stuff approximating rock ("I Might Be Wrong", "Knives Out"). It's a cheeky record too: Early in the record they give us "Pulk/Pull", easily the most out-there vocal track to appear on a Radiohead record, while "Glasshouse"'s oft-quoted line about "someone listening in" is as politically unnerved as it is artistically self-aware. If only all "afterthought" albums could be this A-list. --Matthew Solarski
33. Basement Jaxx
Rooty
[Astralwerks; 2001]
As interpretations of classic Chicago house went, Basement Jaxx's 1999 debut Remedy was hardly a muted and polite take on the genre. But even accounting for the record's nods towards mutant funk, the Jaxx warped their style into something even grander and crazier on this sophomore excursion. Their palette of voices expanded from a slate of booming divas to a motley collection of neurotic ingénues, haywire sexbots and 2-Tone rudeboys (with the two tones in question being fluorescent pink and neon green). Their rhythms drew from hyperventilating bump-and-grind 2-step ("Romeo"), grotesquely snarling Gary Numan-gone-rave drones ("Where's Your Head At"), squirrelly, skeletal electro ("Crazy Girl"), and the brashest caricatures of the Prince aesthetic ever devised ("Breakaway"; "Get Me Off"; "I Want U"; "SFM"). It's so all-encompassingly manic that even the stylistic detours-- like the baroque Latin/Mediterranean 60s-pop longing of "Broken Dreams" or "All I Know"'s chirpy Intellivision boogie-- sound inextricable from the rest of the album. --Nate Patrin
32. Fleet Foxes
Fleet Foxes
[Sub Pop; 2008]
Vocal harmonies became an indie touchstone during the later 2000s, but no band capitalized on that trend as well as Seattle's Fleet Foxes on the 1-2 punch of their debut EP and LP. Then again, no band had Robin Pecknold singing lead and four other voices backing him up on just about every note (and this was before Seattle solo artist J. Tillman joined the group). Like that Breughel painting on the cover, there's a hell of a lot going on in Fleet Foxes' rustically moody songs: Skye Skjelset's guitar swoops in and out in graceful arcs, allowing the band to glide from one fluid jam to the next and to incorporate an impressive range of styles that transcend the "Southern rock" and "stoner jams" that greeted the album upon release. Those elements helped the band graduate from unsigned to "SNL" in barely a year, but it's those harmonies that make this one of the most beguiling debuts of the decade. --Stephen M. Deusner
31. TV on the Radio
Return to Cookie Mountain
[4AD/Interscope; 2006]
Return to Cookie Mountain is a coy, fantasyland title for an album with tales of ravaged love and alcohol on its breath. Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone's voices sound heavenly here, but they're often about the search for absolution. Dave Sitek sets the mood with a synthetic grind-- guitars screeching like subway brakes and static combusting like sparklers-- that speaks to the elemental tensions of the vocals. It's poetry for lovers lost ("Suddenly, all your history's ablaze/ Try to breathe, as the world disintegrates"), regretful ("A recent memory of when we shit our bed of roses"), and broken ("tangled up in the flesh of a girl"). TV on the Radio often get tagged as avant-garde, as if it's challenging to pick up on the feral intensity of songs such as "Wolf Like Me". Listen to this album filled with teeth-gnashing, gut-wrenching passion and try to disagree with the idea that love is the province of the brave. --Patrick Sisson
30. Boards of Canada
Geogaddi
[Warp; 2002]
I love this record even though it creeps me the hell out. Or: I love this record because it creeps me the hell out? Or: I love this record out of a deeply embedded respect and admiration for things I do not understand and which also, incidentally, creep me the hell out? On this, Boards of Canada's toothy second full-length, the Scottish duo mottled their trademark loping hip-hop rhythms and decaying synth patches with more urgent, craggly, sweaty sounds, and in turn revealed just how fine a distinction it is between childlike/naïve and paranoid/schizophrenic. With its gnarly rhythmic patters and sinister atmospherics bouncing around a tightly packed soundstage, this conjured fear, longing, and creeping unease better than anything since Tricky's Maxinquaye. It is a black forest of a record, full of psychedelia and psychosis and gauzy National Film Board samples of Leslie Nielsen talking about nature; I look forward to never untangling it. --Mark Pytlik
29. Bon Iver
For Emma, Forever Ago
[self-released/Jagjaguwar; 2007]
The backstory has been repeated so often with such insistence that three years later it's become a mythic tall tale: Guy breaks up band in North Carolina, decamps to the wilds of Wisconsin, makes a record originally intended to be heard by almost nobody. But what happened next is much more interesting: After Justin Vernon made 500 copies and distributed them himself, the album is picked up by indie juggernaut Jagjaguwar, gets big props from Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, holds up to hundreds of repeat listens, and get thousands of festivalgoers singing along solemnly to "The Wolves". Quiet and folkily ambient, For Emma, Forever Ago is an impassioned cry too compelling not to become heard. From those opening strums to the "Flume" to the closing hums of "Re: Stacks", the album communicates acute loneliness and nurses a pain that has dulled but obviously not died-- which is perhaps our own romantic view of ourselves. It's easy to get caught up in the stories surrounding this out-of-nowhere album, but the music pulls you back to the real world. --Stephen M. Deusner
28. Kanye West
The College Dropout
[Roc-A-Fella; 2004]
The truth is that without this album, rap is in an entirely different place right now. And while Kanye West's growth and experimentation has resulted in some thrilling music, this is bedrock for a generation of MCs. Deeply middle class, musically ambitious but never alienating, emotionally naked: This was not the stuff of pre-2002 hip-hop. The paradigm shift is only now really taking shape as young rappers like Drake, Kid Cudi, Wale, and Asher Roth bend and pull on West's thorny contradictions. As singles, "Slow Jamz" and "Jesus Walks" made for the perfect dichotomy; light and dark, secular and devout, stupid and smart. But what still moves me are the beautifully told personal notes: retail details while slinging sweaters at the Gap, peeing in the bed as a snot-nosed kid, landing in the same hospital as Biggie after a devastating accident. On Dropout, Kanye wasn't the best rapper or the best producer or even the best album-maker. But he was the most original. --Sean Fennessey
27. Animal Collective
Sung Tongs
[FatCat; 2004]
My favorite decade theory: You get the best sense of what the decade is about by starting from its midpoint, and going until the next. In true experimentalist fashion, Animal Collective's Sung Tongs (created entirely by the Panda Bear/Avey Tare duo) arrived a full year before the middle of the aughts, and perhaps more than any other record of the decade, foresaw where indie hearts, ears, and minds would go in the next five years. And while its rustic psychedelia and warm-hearted electronic touches might have extended hands (paws?) outward to the best avant-pop of the previous generation or two, the magic of this record was that it was both innovative and utterly, peerlessly beautiful. Fittingly, it was also a turning point for the band, who by decade's end were playing Letterman and putting on the biggest light show this side of Daft Punk. How's that for zeitgeist? --Dominique Leone
26. Fennesz
Endless Summer
[Mego; 2001]
The title of Christian Fennesz' 2001 record evokes a few specific things: a 1964 song by the Sandals sampled on the title track, a 1966 film documenting two surfers' global journey, the Beach Boys' singles collection. But the thoughts and feelings it inspires are much larger. This isn't one season without end, but a string of summers fused into the infinite loop of memory. Beaches, pools, ball fields, hazy humidity rippling over pavement: all the images of summer are visible in Fennesz's analog-to-digital constructions, but they're refracted through the warping prism of human recollection. This could've resulted in a mess of glitches, but Fennesz rearranges his decaying source material into songs, much the way the brain constructs narratives when reliving memories. Noisy and bright, hot and dense, challenging and catchy, Endless Summer slices up sound the way we slice up experience, rescuing the remnants of sunny, sweaty seasons. --Marc Masters
25. Madvillian
Madvilliany
[Stones Throw; 2004]
As individuals and in collaboration with other artists, MF Doom and Madlib have each been responsible for tons of great, grimy underground hip-hop. Even still, Madvillainy was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment, a preternaturally perfect pairing of like-minded talents who somehow managed amidst mountains of pot smoke to submit a brilliantly whole-cloth work of surrealistic shit-talk and superhero fantasia. Madvillainy is famously brief, and to compensate Madlib crams his woozily bass-heavy, key-laden tracks full of off-the-wall samples (Frank Zappa, Steve Reich) and movie snippets, while Doom tirelessly unravels verse after verse of wildly discursive, hallucinatorily vivid, insanely quotable lyrics. There's little reason to suspect Madvillainy won't make good on its promise to serve as "the components which have fueled nightmares for decades to come." --Joshua Love
24. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Fever to Tell
[Interscope; 2003]
Watching the Yeah Yeah Yeahs make their wobbly-but-determined ascent up the pop-cultural stepladder was one of the more heartwarming success stories of the young decade. When their EP hit, the YYYs seemed the definition of a scenester's band-- gawky Brooklyn-via-Oberlin art-fucks with a silly name, some catchy tunes, and a frontwoman who poured beer all over herself onstage and yowled profanities like Wendy O. Williams's kid sister. Their expiration date felt nigh not long after Julian Casablancas wore a prominent Yeah Yeah Yeahs button onstage with the Strokes. But then, something else happened: they began growing, in wild, uncertain spurts, right in front of our eyes. Fever to Tell, their Interscope debut, was their hip thrust into the mainstream, an attitudinal blast of the shouts, squiggles, chants, and spiny rhythms that they rode to Internet semi-notoriety. And it's highlighted by "Maps", the most affecting rock ballad of the decade. With one open-hearted plea-- "Wait-- they don't love you like I love you"-- we were given our first glimpse of Karen O's heart, as well as her flowering ambition to one day be "bigger than the sound." --Jayson Greene
23. Broken Social Scene
You Forgot It in People
[Arts & Crafts/Paper Bag; 2002]
"I was scared to see if people were going to embrace the idea of a whole shitload of sounds on one album," said Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew a couple months after You Forgot It In People first let out its sprawl in October 2002. By that point, file-sharing had revealed the Internet's infinite library of sounds and iPods turned strictly organized 500 CD towers into bits of shuffle-ready randomness. So the Ultimate Indie Rock Mixtape vibe of the Toronto group's breakthrough LP most definitely helped its collective cause and conveniently mirrored the splintering culture that birthed it. While any band could attempt an album full of unexpected genre jumps, few could make it sound like a complete thought; from epic post-rock ("KC Accidental") to woolly bossa nova ("Looks Just Like the Sun") to pitch-shifting balladry ("Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl"), the record plays like an all-star team that's actually trying to win the game instead of merely preening. --Ryan Dombal
22. M.I.A.
Kala
[XL/Interscope; 2007]
A thousand blog posts couldn't achieve what one well-picked soundtrack did: M.I.A's a star. Listening back to Kala it seems just a trick of history that she wasn't already-- surely our memories deceive us, and "Boyz" was 2007's summer jam, just like "Jimmy" ruled that spring with its Bollywood disco vamps? But for every fantasy pop triumph on Kala, there's a hidden door or three. "Paper Planes"' lyrics are a better pointer than its lilt: Most of the album is a similar road trip through world town, a shanty planet M.I.A. both represents and packages for her tourist audience. There's no contradiction-- the hustle is the world.
Other voices break through her sales patter-- the heartbreaking kid gang on "Mango Pickle Down River", the deadpan MC Afrikan Boy on "Hussel", Timbaland playing the smug first-worlder on "Come Around". But from "Bamboo Banga"'s "strike match, light fire" promise on, it's M.I.A.'s own vision, charisma, and ear for a killer slogan that drives the record. Since she emerged, she's been criticized as an art-school fraud, but as she reminds us over "Bird Flu"'s henhouse apocalypse, "credentials are boring." In the territories she's mapping authenticity is a trap, and her skill at baiting and escaping it is what makes Kala so intoxicating. --Tom Ewing
21. Radiohead
In Rainbows
[self-released/ATO; 2007]
Are we far enough removed from In Rainbows that we can finally start arguing about how it compares to Radiohead's other albums? If so, I'll get us started with something vaguely controversial: I actually think it might be their best. Better than OK Computer, better than Kid A. My reasoning for this is based partly on anecdotal evidence that mostly involves friends who have historically not cared one iota all casually marveling about how good it is. It also considers my nagging suspicion that our tireless and self-conscious canonization of OKC and Kid A have undone some of their magic; when I listen to those records now, I hear our own projections and cultural ghosts just as loudly as I hear the music. In Rainbows, though, remains a shiny, untroubled thing, an architectural marvel with requisite balances between light/dark, simple/complicated and utilitarian/vanguard intact. I still listen to it all the time, occasionally even on Sunday mornings. Some people are now Radiohead fans because of it. --Mark Pytlik
50. Deerhunter
Microcastle
[Kranky/4AD; 2008]
Pop music is often escapist, dwelling on the weakness of the flesh-- but usually not like the songs of Deerhunter, where bodies are fevered, insubstantial, and frail. On Microcastle, a ringing set of crashing guitars, chimes, and squalls of noise, people are literally wasting away in six-by-six cells surrounded by concrete. Some are crucified in front of their friends, and drunken children torch an old man in his own garage. But this imagery isn't for shock value; it's about escape. Deerhunter's musical aesthetic-- partially composed of smeared sounds and unstable footings-- proves a beautiful companion to uncertain lyrics. On tracks like "Little Kids" or "Never Stops", a framework of driving rhythms and gorgeous melodies is lit up with tracers of noise and feedback. Deerhunter sounds tighter and more fragile than ever on Microcastle, able to sweep up listeners in a tempest of hazy, anxious joy. --Patrick Sisson
49. Antony & the Johnsons
I Am a Bird Now
[Secretly Canadian; 2005]
The downtown art scene of late 20th century New York left such an impression on the city, it was hard to imagine any artist in the 2000's could touch on it without sounding like a nostalgia act. But Antony Hegarty confronted that gender-blurring heritage-- think Andy Warhol's Factory, Lou Reed's 1970s androgyny, the 80s cabaret scene-- to create something both reverent and new. Even more daringly, he opened with a showstopper, the devastating "Hope There's Someone". But the rest of the album answers that call, exploring complex issues of identity, mortality, and companionship with the guiding light of simple emotion. Antony's performance-art pedigree gave his history lesson credibility, attracting contributions from icons like Reed and Boy George. But his breathtaking voice and laser-like vision transcend time and place. Every sentiment on I Am a Bird Now comes through loud and clear-- even if you know nothing about New York. --Marc Masters
48. The Hold Steady
Separation Sunday
[Frenchkiss; 2005]
From the album's very beginning-- an unaccompanied vocal that ends with a joke it takes a few listens to get-- you know Separation Sunday is for the lyric geeks. So there are maybe a few less sing-alongs; instead, we get barrages of noir-worthy imagery and singer Craig Finn's preoccupations with over-the-counter highs, Christianity, seedy characters, and the bars, churches, and river camps where they meet. The music is as bar-ready as ever, but rather than the big choruses they'd later trade in, Separation Sunday's memorable moments are stray licks, half-slurred lyrical asides, and the disarming bridges of tracks like "Banging Camp" or "Multitude of Casualties", all of which shine brighter than the songs that surround them. There's no typical ebb-and-flow album sequencing here, no breathers, slow jams, or bathroom breaks: Every moment of the record aims to be the best moment. --Jason Crock
47. Joanna Newsom
The Milk-Eyed Mender
[Drag City; 2004]
She wafted in like a hippie but sang about the pitfalls of poetry. She wrote like a poet but praised the birds for their illiterate flight. Her brave wail betrayed her age and her simple instrumentation-- harp and voice, mostly-- betrayed how hard the music probably was to play. The record was a breeze for the first 20 seconds. Then she started singing. You either craned your head toward the sound or you left the porch. Her whimsy was obvious and her word choice was, well-- let's say that "boat" doesn't work because only "caravel" rhymes with "beetle shell." (I kept the dictionary out after that.) She warped soft acoustic music into art-- neither "freak" nor "folk," just a harpist with a good imagination. The puns were an aside to remind us she wasn't a stiff. Her debut-- to paraphrase author Ben Marcus on the subject of experimental fiction-- didn't compete with paintball for attention; it ferreted out sensitive folks for whom lyric analysis is as spiritually gratifying as dancing. She deserved us and we needed her, puffy sleeves and all. --Mike Powell
46. The Shins
Chutes Too Narrow
[Sub Pop; 2003]
Behind James Mercer's melodious whimper and his band's polite folk-rock is some unheralded meanness-- hard-hearted thoughts on relationships; songs that sit like oval pegs in round holes, filled with detours and hiccups. Mercer writes thoughtfully about art and Utopianism but treats a new crush like she's a game he lost to his erection. He buries a wimp's anger in tangled words and unexpected codas. But it's catchy and it's pretty, so I have to assume that people listen selectively.
In 2003, it was hard to find a big indie band that played quite as safely as the Shins. Most of the songs on Chutes were around three minutes long, and it didn't sound like there were too many overdubs. No bhangra breakdowns, no "electronic manipulations." It starts with a false start and ends with the sound of thunder-- and between, the band scrapes at its own self-imposed limitations in a hundred great little ways. --Mike Powell
45. Fugazi
The Argument
[Dischord; 2001]
The members of Fugazi spent most of the decade working on other projects, but the one time they came together to make an album, they made one for the ages. The Argument is the band's most nuanced and melodic record, and possibly its best. The refined approach doesn't come at the expense of intensity, though-- some of the record's most harrowing moments are its quietest, and the album finds the band learning that a whisper can rage as powerfully as a shout. Outside of the masterful anti-eminent domain statement "Cashout", the record is indirect about its politics without sounding uncommitted, and the band takes its narratives of personal and societal turmoil on wild rides through complex arrangements featuring intricate interplay and unexpected shifts. If we ever get another Fugazi album, it'll be welcome, but if we don't, The Argument is a perfect swan song: accomplished, righteous, challenging, and totally vital. --Joe Tangari
44. D'Angelo
Voodoo
[Virgin; 2000]
Musically a triumph of hands-on, real-time, old-school soul minimalism, Voodoo is simultaneously tough as old wood and as fragile as a smoke ring. But it's D'Angelo that makes the album something more than the work of talented young turks neck-deep in classic records. Save the breathtaking single, each vocal performance on Voodoo is a subdued, almost conversational marvel. The phrasing is as idiosyncratic as any great singer you may think he's homaging; you can't imagine anyone else squeezing the dangerously wordy chorus of "The Root" into such a shiver-inducing, fluid rush. The delivery, tending more toward a murmur, has an almost unbearable intimacy-- maybe the most erotically tactile singing put to disc this decade. --Jess Harvell
43. Luomo
Vocalcity
[Force Tracks; 2000]
In seconds, we're off. Lost in a labyrinthine maze of compulsive deep house in which every synth spurt, each softly tearing hi-hat seems to plug into your body like acupuncture. Perhaps better than any other dance album this decade, Vocalcity blurs the line between process and product: when "Class" coalesces from a sea of continental shelf bass and disembodied and dissected sighs into a tremulously romantic diva refrain, it's like watching cells multiplying to create a life form. But don't just stand there watching: producer Sasu Ripatti doesn't merely want you to dance, he wants to make dancing the only possible response. As expansive as they are, these aching grooves come on like snapshots of much longer, broader epics whose tantric possibilities are unnerving-- if Vocalcity in fact stretched on forever, what dancer could bear to stop? Luomo provides the soundtrack; you bring the red shoes. --Tim Finney
42. Grizzly Bear
Veckatimest
[Warp; 2009]
A triumph of craftsmanship, the 12 tracks of Veckatimest click and whirr at a deliberate tempo, like a clock tower in a town square. Even the slightest of vocal snippets gets shaped and sanded down with care-- the only maybes are on the lyric sheet. And like those triumphant timepieces, it's the dozen variations on a scene-- instruments and effects rearranging themselves-- that make things intriguing. Contrast is the key; beautiful vocal harmonies, such as the peeling-like-bells choir kicking off "Dory", can be a flourish of sound or the longed-for release. Deceptively simple guitar melodies, spiked by sharp notes or riffs, let you know every turn was planned two songs in advance. Talent in music is often measured by extreme gestures, but Grizzly Bear's greatest skill may be making small moves sound massive. --Patrick Sisson
41. Burial
Untrue
[Hyperdub; 2007]
Burial's masterful second album Untrue seems a mass of contradictions. Although the world now knows Burial to be the work of London dubstep producer William Bevan, Untrue remains faceless and largely anonymous, yet also acutely personal and introspective. It is unconditionally linked to both its place of origin (South London), and to a specific musical lineage that traces back through UK garage, yet it has deeply resonated with listeners regardless of physical or musical geography. Though his jittery rhythms and brooding atmospheres are endlessly captivating, Burial's distinctive treatment of vocal samples provide Untrue much of its enduring fascination. Manipulated and detuned, the disembodied voices that populate the likes of "Etched Headplate" or "Shell of Light" sound uniformly lost and heartsick, their half-heard pleas ("I can't take no more tears," "Please hurry and find me") repeating helplessly into the night like residual hauntings. Yet despite Untrue's immersive melancholy the album never becomes oppressive-- on the contrary, Burial's moody, evocative dubstep has an allure that always beckons the listener for one more lonely walk beneath its flickering streetlights. --Matthew Murphy
40. The National
Alligator
[Beggars Banquet; 2005]
The National surely knew it, and a handful of longtime fans likely knew it as well. But it wasn't until the group toured with opener Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! in fall 2005 that word finally spread of the group's third album Alligator. A few years later, Alligator remains an unabashedly powerful and deceptively primal work, capable of knocking unsuspecting audiences on their collective ass. But back then, CYHSY was riding an unequaled (if fleeting) wave of buzz that resulted in sold-out clubs and spillover crowds, many of which thinned significantly before the headliners even took the stage. Those who stayed, however, witnessed an incredible transformation, as the National played the hell out of tracks that now feel like inextricable parts of the indie firmament. Songs like "Abel", "Lit Up", and "Mr. November" are ringers now, but they hit like a ton of bricks back when no one saw them coming. --Joshua Klein
39. Boredoms
Vision Creation Newsun
[Warner Bros.; 2000]
Nu-Baelerica, indie's fascination with house and techno, Brooklyn noise, freak-folk, the proggy minimalism of Battles, the futuro-hurricane stomp of Orthrelm, the baroque noise-adelia of Panda Bear and Animal Collective, Lindstrøm's space disco, Optimo's beardy disco, M.I.A.'s electro-beats, the noise bands who were really jam bands (Lightning Bolt, Hella), the jam bands who were really noise bands (Excepter, Black Dice), any band with multiple drummers, any band whose front man played something with motion-sensors instead of a fretboard, any band who issued a remix album instead of an actual follow-up record (and especially those for whom the remix record was almost as good), any band who connected the dots between no-wave and trance and whose sound could only be described using three to five hyphens, and most of all ANY BAND WHO RECORDED A PERFECT RECORD FOR THE MILLENNIUM THE YEAR BEFORE IT STARTED. Oh wait, there's only one. Boredoms win. --Dominique Leone
38. Phoenix
It's Never Been Like That
[Astralwerks; 2006]
Two albums into a career of slick, reedy pop-- and more notably, brilliant singles such as "If I Ever Feel Better", "Too Young", and "Everything is Everything"-- the Versailles quartet Phoenix must have had some sort of epiphany. The opener to It's Never Been Like That, "Napoleon Says", narrates an encounter between a Frenchman and a (presumably) American tourist, but the greater effect is to signal the band's torrid love affair with the rough young curvatures of Brooklyn. Ruffling their polished yacht-rock around the edges by applying measured doses of Strokes-esque rock guitar, It's Never Been Like That compromised none of the preternatural pop songcraft wizardry of United or Alphabetical, but traded in a litany of odd old touches-- palm-muted guitar, disingenuous blue-eyed soul-- to arrangements that actually sounded like the guys were having fun. Outstanding single "Long Distance Call", as the title implies, furthers the metaphor of the trans-Atlantic romance (perhaps inspired by singer Thomas Mars' baby-mama Sofia Coppola?) as Mars insistently shouts the album's title in the chorus. The unspoken response: And it'll never be the same again. --Mike Orme
37. Yo La Tengo
And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
[Matador; 2000]
As the new decade arrived, Yo La Tengo seemed between worlds. They were indie rock vets whose career stretched back to the college-rock 80s, and during the alt-rock years they held their own against Matador labelmates like Pavement with Painful and I Can Heart the Heart Beating as One. But the groups they'd come up with were vanishing and the path forward for a band in their position wasn't exactly clear. How do you act your age in this business while remaining vital? And Then Nothing Turned Us Inside-Out was the sound of them finding their way. It disappointed some at the time with its subdued sound and slower tempos, but it's the kind of record that sounded better with every listen. Slow, spare, dreamy, but ultimately grounded, And Then Nothing… radiates warmth and maturity and is never boring. With it, Yo La Tengo showed us that it was possible to make indie rock about grown-up relationships-- this is a couples record if there ever was one-- and, after a few rough patches, they found themselves revitalized as a recording unit, doing some of the best work of their career by the time the 00s were ending. --Mark Richardson
36. The Streets
Original Pirate Material
[679/Vice/Warner Bros.; 2002]
Don't forget how much this music risked embarrassment. Mike Skinner took the sounds of modern club music (2-step, garage, hip-hop) and made them small, chintzy, and unglamorous-- no bright lights, no dancefloor, just someone pasting together beats on his computer in a messy apartment. Unlike London's grime producers, he wasn't doing it in the service of world-conquering fierceness. Skinner-- young, suburban, Northern-- rapped in a plainer voice, clowning about his daily life and telling earnest, unabashedly sentimental stories. I'm sure someone, at some point, told him this was embarrassing, cheap-sounding, and way less cool than proper club music-- that his beats were shabby and his confessionals corny. But Skinner, good-humored and palpably sincere, followed his ideas where they led. And as it turns out, it's exactly that sincerity that makes this record so special-- something like having a great conversation on a ratty couch, surrounded by empty pizza boxes, stacks of old video games, and the beats from the cars down on the street. --Nitsuh Abebe
35. Spoon
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
[Merge; 2007]
"I'm in need of someone to take care of me tonight," confesses Britt Daniel at the close of Spoon's sixth album. The uncharacteristically direct emotional plea is earned. Because the entirety of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga dances around the vulnerability of indie rock middle age, when a life playing to blurred faces might seem indulgent and/or hopelessly transient for someone tripping over their friend's kids. But the band hasn't given up on an indie rock nirvana typified by bristling loose ends and fallen feelings-- it's the end as no end, and they've got it down. The music bubbles, blooms, and cuts away as if struck by unseen forces throughout; Daniel matches it line-for-line with words that confuse, burrow, and-- eventually-- strike the psyche like a suppressed memory suddenly broken free. "Sometimes I think that I'll find a love/ One that's gonna change my heart," goes the singer. He's got little reason to believe, but he does anyway. --Ryan Dombal
34. Radiohead
Amnesiac
[Capitol; 2001]
Shoes to fill, shadows to escape-- Amnesiac had quite an uphill battle when it emerged in spring 2001, mere months after Kid A confounded expectations, and indeed quite before the dust of debate surrounding that record had settled. Yet, lest we (ahem) forget, Amnesiac confounded a couple expectations of its own: namely, it wasn't the rumored "return to rock" Radiohead record, nor was it a motley collection of inferior Kid A also-rans. What it was was a selection of the great band's many strengths in convenient digest form: ballads custom built to alter the brain ("Pyramid Song", "Like Spinning Plates"), paranoid clatter ("Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box", "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors"), winning curveballs ("Life in a Glass House"), and, okay, some stuff approximating rock ("I Might Be Wrong", "Knives Out"). It's a cheeky record too: Early in the record they give us "Pulk/Pull", easily the most out-there vocal track to appear on a Radiohead record, while "Glasshouse"'s oft-quoted line about "someone listening in" is as politically unnerved as it is artistically self-aware. If only all "afterthought" albums could be this A-list. --Matthew Solarski
33. Basement Jaxx
Rooty
[Astralwerks; 2001]
As interpretations of classic Chicago house went, Basement Jaxx's 1999 debut Remedy was hardly a muted and polite take on the genre. But even accounting for the record's nods towards mutant funk, the Jaxx warped their style into something even grander and crazier on this sophomore excursion. Their palette of voices expanded from a slate of booming divas to a motley collection of neurotic ingénues, haywire sexbots and 2-Tone rudeboys (with the two tones in question being fluorescent pink and neon green). Their rhythms drew from hyperventilating bump-and-grind 2-step ("Romeo"), grotesquely snarling Gary Numan-gone-rave drones ("Where's Your Head At"), squirrelly, skeletal electro ("Crazy Girl"), and the brashest caricatures of the Prince aesthetic ever devised ("Breakaway"; "Get Me Off"; "I Want U"; "SFM"). It's so all-encompassingly manic that even the stylistic detours-- like the baroque Latin/Mediterranean 60s-pop longing of "Broken Dreams" or "All I Know"'s chirpy Intellivision boogie-- sound inextricable from the rest of the album. --Nate Patrin
32. Fleet Foxes
Fleet Foxes
[Sub Pop; 2008]
Vocal harmonies became an indie touchstone during the later 2000s, but no band capitalized on that trend as well as Seattle's Fleet Foxes on the 1-2 punch of their debut EP and LP. Then again, no band had Robin Pecknold singing lead and four other voices backing him up on just about every note (and this was before Seattle solo artist J. Tillman joined the group). Like that Breughel painting on the cover, there's a hell of a lot going on in Fleet Foxes' rustically moody songs: Skye Skjelset's guitar swoops in and out in graceful arcs, allowing the band to glide from one fluid jam to the next and to incorporate an impressive range of styles that transcend the "Southern rock" and "stoner jams" that greeted the album upon release. Those elements helped the band graduate from unsigned to "SNL" in barely a year, but it's those harmonies that make this one of the most beguiling debuts of the decade. --Stephen M. Deusner
31. TV on the Radio
Return to Cookie Mountain
[4AD/Interscope; 2006]
Return to Cookie Mountain is a coy, fantasyland title for an album with tales of ravaged love and alcohol on its breath. Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone's voices sound heavenly here, but they're often about the search for absolution. Dave Sitek sets the mood with a synthetic grind-- guitars screeching like subway brakes and static combusting like sparklers-- that speaks to the elemental tensions of the vocals. It's poetry for lovers lost ("Suddenly, all your history's ablaze/ Try to breathe, as the world disintegrates"), regretful ("A recent memory of when we shit our bed of roses"), and broken ("tangled up in the flesh of a girl"). TV on the Radio often get tagged as avant-garde, as if it's challenging to pick up on the feral intensity of songs such as "Wolf Like Me". Listen to this album filled with teeth-gnashing, gut-wrenching passion and try to disagree with the idea that love is the province of the brave. --Patrick Sisson
30. Boards of Canada
Geogaddi
[Warp; 2002]
I love this record even though it creeps me the hell out. Or: I love this record because it creeps me the hell out? Or: I love this record out of a deeply embedded respect and admiration for things I do not understand and which also, incidentally, creep me the hell out? On this, Boards of Canada's toothy second full-length, the Scottish duo mottled their trademark loping hip-hop rhythms and decaying synth patches with more urgent, craggly, sweaty sounds, and in turn revealed just how fine a distinction it is between childlike/naïve and paranoid/schizophrenic. With its gnarly rhythmic patters and sinister atmospherics bouncing around a tightly packed soundstage, this conjured fear, longing, and creeping unease better than anything since Tricky's Maxinquaye. It is a black forest of a record, full of psychedelia and psychosis and gauzy National Film Board samples of Leslie Nielsen talking about nature; I look forward to never untangling it. --Mark Pytlik
29. Bon Iver
For Emma, Forever Ago
[self-released/Jagjaguwar; 2007]
The backstory has been repeated so often with such insistence that three years later it's become a mythic tall tale: Guy breaks up band in North Carolina, decamps to the wilds of Wisconsin, makes a record originally intended to be heard by almost nobody. But what happened next is much more interesting: After Justin Vernon made 500 copies and distributed them himself, the album is picked up by indie juggernaut Jagjaguwar, gets big props from Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, holds up to hundreds of repeat listens, and get thousands of festivalgoers singing along solemnly to "The Wolves". Quiet and folkily ambient, For Emma, Forever Ago is an impassioned cry too compelling not to become heard. From those opening strums to the "Flume" to the closing hums of "Re: Stacks", the album communicates acute loneliness and nurses a pain that has dulled but obviously not died-- which is perhaps our own romantic view of ourselves. It's easy to get caught up in the stories surrounding this out-of-nowhere album, but the music pulls you back to the real world. --Stephen M. Deusner
28. Kanye West
The College Dropout
[Roc-A-Fella; 2004]
The truth is that without this album, rap is in an entirely different place right now. And while Kanye West's growth and experimentation has resulted in some thrilling music, this is bedrock for a generation of MCs. Deeply middle class, musically ambitious but never alienating, emotionally naked: This was not the stuff of pre-2002 hip-hop. The paradigm shift is only now really taking shape as young rappers like Drake, Kid Cudi, Wale, and Asher Roth bend and pull on West's thorny contradictions. As singles, "Slow Jamz" and "Jesus Walks" made for the perfect dichotomy; light and dark, secular and devout, stupid and smart. But what still moves me are the beautifully told personal notes: retail details while slinging sweaters at the Gap, peeing in the bed as a snot-nosed kid, landing in the same hospital as Biggie after a devastating accident. On Dropout, Kanye wasn't the best rapper or the best producer or even the best album-maker. But he was the most original. --Sean Fennessey
27. Animal Collective
Sung Tongs
[FatCat; 2004]
My favorite decade theory: You get the best sense of what the decade is about by starting from its midpoint, and going until the next. In true experimentalist fashion, Animal Collective's Sung Tongs (created entirely by the Panda Bear/Avey Tare duo) arrived a full year before the middle of the aughts, and perhaps more than any other record of the decade, foresaw where indie hearts, ears, and minds would go in the next five years. And while its rustic psychedelia and warm-hearted electronic touches might have extended hands (paws?) outward to the best avant-pop of the previous generation or two, the magic of this record was that it was both innovative and utterly, peerlessly beautiful. Fittingly, it was also a turning point for the band, who by decade's end were playing Letterman and putting on the biggest light show this side of Daft Punk. How's that for zeitgeist? --Dominique Leone
26. Fennesz
Endless Summer
[Mego; 2001]
The title of Christian Fennesz' 2001 record evokes a few specific things: a 1964 song by the Sandals sampled on the title track, a 1966 film documenting two surfers' global journey, the Beach Boys' singles collection. But the thoughts and feelings it inspires are much larger. This isn't one season without end, but a string of summers fused into the infinite loop of memory. Beaches, pools, ball fields, hazy humidity rippling over pavement: all the images of summer are visible in Fennesz's analog-to-digital constructions, but they're refracted through the warping prism of human recollection. This could've resulted in a mess of glitches, but Fennesz rearranges his decaying source material into songs, much the way the brain constructs narratives when reliving memories. Noisy and bright, hot and dense, challenging and catchy, Endless Summer slices up sound the way we slice up experience, rescuing the remnants of sunny, sweaty seasons. --Marc Masters
25. Madvillian
Madvilliany
[Stones Throw; 2004]
As individuals and in collaboration with other artists, MF Doom and Madlib have each been responsible for tons of great, grimy underground hip-hop. Even still, Madvillainy was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment, a preternaturally perfect pairing of like-minded talents who somehow managed amidst mountains of pot smoke to submit a brilliantly whole-cloth work of surrealistic shit-talk and superhero fantasia. Madvillainy is famously brief, and to compensate Madlib crams his woozily bass-heavy, key-laden tracks full of off-the-wall samples (Frank Zappa, Steve Reich) and movie snippets, while Doom tirelessly unravels verse after verse of wildly discursive, hallucinatorily vivid, insanely quotable lyrics. There's little reason to suspect Madvillainy won't make good on its promise to serve as "the components which have fueled nightmares for decades to come." --Joshua Love
24. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Fever to Tell
[Interscope; 2003]
Watching the Yeah Yeah Yeahs make their wobbly-but-determined ascent up the pop-cultural stepladder was one of the more heartwarming success stories of the young decade. When their EP hit, the YYYs seemed the definition of a scenester's band-- gawky Brooklyn-via-Oberlin art-fucks with a silly name, some catchy tunes, and a frontwoman who poured beer all over herself onstage and yowled profanities like Wendy O. Williams's kid sister. Their expiration date felt nigh not long after Julian Casablancas wore a prominent Yeah Yeah Yeahs button onstage with the Strokes. But then, something else happened: they began growing, in wild, uncertain spurts, right in front of our eyes. Fever to Tell, their Interscope debut, was their hip thrust into the mainstream, an attitudinal blast of the shouts, squiggles, chants, and spiny rhythms that they rode to Internet semi-notoriety. And it's highlighted by "Maps", the most affecting rock ballad of the decade. With one open-hearted plea-- "Wait-- they don't love you like I love you"-- we were given our first glimpse of Karen O's heart, as well as her flowering ambition to one day be "bigger than the sound." --Jayson Greene
23. Broken Social Scene
You Forgot It in People
[Arts & Crafts/Paper Bag; 2002]
"I was scared to see if people were going to embrace the idea of a whole shitload of sounds on one album," said Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew a couple months after You Forgot It In People first let out its sprawl in October 2002. By that point, file-sharing had revealed the Internet's infinite library of sounds and iPods turned strictly organized 500 CD towers into bits of shuffle-ready randomness. So the Ultimate Indie Rock Mixtape vibe of the Toronto group's breakthrough LP most definitely helped its collective cause and conveniently mirrored the splintering culture that birthed it. While any band could attempt an album full of unexpected genre jumps, few could make it sound like a complete thought; from epic post-rock ("KC Accidental") to woolly bossa nova ("Looks Just Like the Sun") to pitch-shifting balladry ("Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl"), the record plays like an all-star team that's actually trying to win the game instead of merely preening. --Ryan Dombal
22. M.I.A.
Kala
[XL/Interscope; 2007]
A thousand blog posts couldn't achieve what one well-picked soundtrack did: M.I.A's a star. Listening back to Kala it seems just a trick of history that she wasn't already-- surely our memories deceive us, and "Boyz" was 2007's summer jam, just like "Jimmy" ruled that spring with its Bollywood disco vamps? But for every fantasy pop triumph on Kala, there's a hidden door or three. "Paper Planes"' lyrics are a better pointer than its lilt: Most of the album is a similar road trip through world town, a shanty planet M.I.A. both represents and packages for her tourist audience. There's no contradiction-- the hustle is the world.
Other voices break through her sales patter-- the heartbreaking kid gang on "Mango Pickle Down River", the deadpan MC Afrikan Boy on "Hussel", Timbaland playing the smug first-worlder on "Come Around". But from "Bamboo Banga"'s "strike match, light fire" promise on, it's M.I.A.'s own vision, charisma, and ear for a killer slogan that drives the record. Since she emerged, she's been criticized as an art-school fraud, but as she reminds us over "Bird Flu"'s henhouse apocalypse, "credentials are boring." In the territories she's mapping authenticity is a trap, and her skill at baiting and escaping it is what makes Kala so intoxicating. --Tom Ewing
21. Radiohead
In Rainbows
[self-released/ATO; 2007]
Are we far enough removed from In Rainbows that we can finally start arguing about how it compares to Radiohead's other albums? If so, I'll get us started with something vaguely controversial: I actually think it might be their best. Better than OK Computer, better than Kid A. My reasoning for this is based partly on anecdotal evidence that mostly involves friends who have historically not cared one iota all casually marveling about how good it is. It also considers my nagging suspicion that our tireless and self-conscious canonization of OKC and Kid A have undone some of their magic; when I listen to those records now, I hear our own projections and cultural ghosts just as loudly as I hear the music. In Rainbows, though, remains a shiny, untroubled thing, an architectural marvel with requisite balances between light/dark, simple/complicated and utilitarian/vanguard intact. I still listen to it all the time, occasionally even on Sunday mornings. Some people are now Radiohead fans because of it. --Mark Pytlik
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Turn on the Bright Lights
[Matador; 2002]
Interpol's 2002 debut has been slighted as being strictly a matter of a specific time and place. The band was quickly saddled with Joy Division comparisons, but its stormy, romantic rock was one of the decade's sharpest distillations of that common post-punk influence. At its best, Turn on the Bright Lights has the power and pull-- and the requisite dryness and ennui-- of Television's "Venus" or the work of early-70s Lou Reed. And so it was, and is, about its time and place: downtown New York recomposed in Giuliani's wake, proud of its rough history and ever skeptical of its future. This album exudes gritty glamor, careless pride, and that special sad lament of twentysomethings who have nothing to be sad about and everything to look forward to in life. "You've supported me for a long time/ Somehow I'm not impressed," Paul Banks sings on "NYC". Surely boys, you owe the city more than that. --Patrick Sisson
19. Spoon
Kill the Moonlight
[Merge; 2002]
Normally when rock bands enter a "using-the-studio-as-an-instrument" phase, their songs get overworked and overblown, but Spoon moved in the opposite direction, opting for a rhythm-centric economy of sound akin to what Prince achieved on hits like "Kiss" and "When Doves Cry". Every cut on Kill the Moonlight is stripped to its most essential elements, lending pop songs like "The Way We Get By" and "Jonathon Fisk" a bold, uncluttered urgency, while atmospheric numbers such as "Paper Tiger" and "Stay Don't Go" come across like loose gestural sketches rendered by the purposeful hand of a master craftsman. The arrangements may be spartan, but the production is rich in detail, with sleek textures scuffed just enough to seem lived-in, and painterly keyboard tones that evoke vivid nighttime imagery. Despite the brilliance of the production, the music is ultimately successful due to Britt Daniel's sexy rasp, which grounds even the most cerebral moments in the offhand intensity of his raw, immediate passion. --Matthew Perpetua
18. Kanye West
Late Registration
[Roc-A-Fella; 2005]
Kanye, you jerk. Late Registration? Perfect. Even in its unruly sprawl. The last time you really seemed to bother to push yourself. To give us over-stuffed, unashamedly contradictory, all-of-you-and-more art that lived up to your autodidact genius entitlement shtick. It arrived at precisely the right time, too, more or less a year after the intriguing if uneven The College Dropout said you'd be someone to fear if you could ever curb the hype-mongering to bear down in the studio. It mixed world-conquering pop crassness ("Gold Digger", "Diamonds From Sierra Leone", a friggin' guest spot from Adam "Maroon 5" Levine for chrissakes) with some of the harmonically oddest hip-hop in the genre's history (the drunken reverb on the guitars on "Addiction", the sly, conversational bounce of the strings on "Gone"). Even the throwaways were musically rich: Has any hip-hop track as slight as "We Major" bothered with such an opulent arrangement? You blurred social comment (some of it admittedly a little entry-level) into the enjoyable party-hound doggerel and shouts to mama and grandma. We all know that you're selling yourself short until you ditch the solipsism shoved through Auto-Tune and bother crafting a true follow-up to this album. --Jess Harvell
17. LCD Soundsystem
Sound of Silver
[EMI/DFA; 2007]
What musty FM rock radio pixie dust did James Murphy scatter over Sound of Silver to make it feel so instantaneously like a classic? Here's a theory: It's an occupational hazard of dance music journalism that every so often you laud a record for sounding future-forward only to realize a few years later that your compass was way broke. So maybe a huge part of the overwhelming critical confidence in Sound of Silver had to do with the fact that it wasn't trading in new untested sounds as much as it was confidently updating a pastiche of the proven past. David Bowie? Check. David Byrne? Check. Brian Eno? Check plus. Combined with Sound of Silver's inspired songwriting and production, the easy familiarity of those touchpoints gave us something that was easy to immediately absorb and consequently mobilize behind. A dance-rock record from a former punk agnostic, this hybrid of 1970s art-rock and more traditional dance elements conspired for one of the only truly great dance albums of the decade. Simple, right? Ha! Guaranteed that producers all over the world are still shaking their fists in Murphy's general direction for making it seem this damn easy. --Mark Pytlik
16. Sufjan Stevens
Illinois
[Asthmatic Kitty; 2005]
When Illinois and Late Registration placed #1 and #2 in Pitchfork's Top Albums of 2005 list, some took it as symbolic, a situation in which a hip-hop record that catered to every single rockist habit in the book still played runner-up to our precious lily-livered indie rock. But they're a hell of a lot closer than they look: each a staggeringly ambitious, lushly orchestrated big-top extravaganza whose ringleader mixes in frivolous tall tales and Chicago civic pride with heavy meditations on God, mortality, and love, all to suffer criticisms about too many tracks, too many interludes, and too many French horns.
No one's gonna confuse "John Wayne Gacy" with, like, "Drive Slow", but this sort of context is a helpful reminder that while there might be a discrepancy between these two in terms of ego, it ain't by that much. Though Stevens hasn't done much since to counter his image of a banjo-toting Cub Scout, Illinois is a record that took a massive amount of cojones to pull off, taking the framework of the Michigan album that Stevens seemed placed on this earth to make and then blowing it up in every way possible. But while Illinois is ultimately a testament to Stevens' sky-high confidence in his compositional and lyrical sophistication, it's also a record that's almost completely non-autobiographical. Stevens' self-confidence manifests itself in having enough belief in his own voice to tell everyone else's story-- all geographical namedrops aside, Illinois could've been relocated anywhere and it would still be nothing short of universal. --Ian Cohen
15. The Knife
Silent Shout
[Mute/Rabid; 2006]
The amazing thing about Silent Shout is how whole it feels-- the way it summons up every weird gift this Swedish brother/sister duo's been blessed with and puts it in the service of a sound so astonishingly complete and coherent. (So complete, in fact, that it becomes resistant to explanation: You can describe its attributes, but at some point it just sort of is.) So: There's the percussive clang of the rhythms. There's the way the synth arpeggios shudder and swell ominously in and out, like surf against rocks at night. There's Karin Dreijer Andersson's otherworldly voice, which gets stretched in every direction, distorted and detuned until the "real" Karin can keen against demonically low doppelgangers and creepily high doll versions. But somewhere within that, there's just multitudes more: fairy-tale creepiness, waltzes for ghosts, icy energy, stories, elegance, rage, gender critiques, forests, politics, wit, jokes, families, children, Volvo employees, The Godfather. It feels pretty colossal. There are certain aesthetics so whole and singular that we use them as shorthand to refer to other things-- stuff can be Lynchian, Dickensian, Pynchonesque. Repeated exposure to this record makes it tempting to start describing things-- say, a bird of prey circling an ice-covered lighthouse-- as Silent Shout-ian. --Nitsuh Abebe
14. Animal Collective
Merriweather Post Pavillion
[Domino; 2009]
At its core, Merriweather Post Pavilion is very ordinary. The lyrics read like stuff you'd talk about around the grill. Even that UFO at the start of the disc sounds like its drain got clogged. But on their strongest and-- not coincidentally-- most accessible album to date, celebrating the everyday is the point. High-pitched electronics heighten alertness. Every detail of the daily routine brings joy. The lover you dream about is the one at home. And making that home is the thing that makes life amazing.
The hominess may be a departure from their early tribal adventures, but it's a natural one. The 00s didn't hurt for talented and idiosyncratic artists striving to make their mark against the generations of records they'd inherited. If Animal Collective outpaced the rest, it's because they pulled their experiments toward the center-- not just by easing the rhythms to an everyday heartbeat, or by penning ever-warmer melodies, but by celebrating the most common connections between human beings. The wrenching confusion and stabs of ecstasy have never been more intense, now that the backstory's so banal. The masked, pseudonymous Collective may still be in a tribe, but the tribe they've joined is our own. --Chris Dahlen
13. OutKast
Stankonia
[La Face; 2000]
Look back at the cover of Idlewild. Not the split-screen, we're-still-a-team version but the original with André 3000 in the foreground, staring intently at sheet music above an antique piano. Then there's Big Boi, deep in the recess, pimp suit on, mic in hand, ready to rap, shrugging in frustration as if to say, "What the hell are we doing here?" Never did they seem so far apart, and it's one of the great disappointments of the decade that OutKast, once America's most promising pop group, have effectively stopped making music together. Still, Stankonia remains. The sprawling LP, as weird and futuristic as mainstream hip-hop gets, finds the duo managing a delicate balance between its two very distinct personas. They drew you in with sugary sweet, ladies-first jams like "Ms. Jackson" and "I'll Call Before I Come" only to invite Killer Mike to spit vulgarities like "Need her to gobble up jism like school lunches" on the violent "Snappin' & Trappin'". Vehemently anti-flossing one minute ("Red Velvet"), they sounded hard as nails the next on "Gangsta Shit". The tightrope act must have drained them, but one thing seems obvious listening to Stankonia now: OutKast need each other as much as we need them. --Joe Colly
12. The White Stripes
White Blood Cells
[Sympathy for the Record Industry; 2001]
An aspiring young journalist once said to me that the Strokes were our Beatles and the White Stripes our Rolling Stones. If you'll forgive the reductive nature of the comment, she may have had things backward. Jack and Meg White hit like an adrenaline shot to the chest when they released their third album-- mostly because the mainstream media found a peg with the band's Michel Gondry-directed Lego-to-life video for "Fell in Love With a Girl". But lo and behold, the band just happened to be arriving at a creative peak at the same time, transmogrifying the scuzzed, tensile garage rock of their first two underrated albums into pop pandemonium. And they were fortunate to exploit their truly strange, typically inspired shenanigans to the press. Siblings, lovers, friends-- it ultimately didn't matter. WBC is still their best album because it is so amazingly true to their ethos-- no bass, no overdubs, no bullshit-- but also because it so merrily dances between fire and flowers. There is an almost impossible transition from the dark, haunted "The Union Forever", with its "no true love" caterwaul, to the big-hearted weeper "The Same Boy You've Always Known". Maybe Beatles proclamations are a bit overenthusiastic. But what's wrong with a little ambition? --Sean Fennessey
11. Ghostface Killah
Supreme Clientele
[Sony; 2000]
In 1997, Wu-Tang Forever was released. A mere two years later, thanks to ill-fated tours, internal squabbling, and a run of mostly regrettable solo albums, the Clan entered the new century with almost no momentum. If Ghostface Killah hadn't been incarcerated in Rikers Island during that span, Supreme Clientele might've come out in 1999, but its release in the decade's first month provided an unexpected millennial rebirth, singlehandedly restoring Wu Tang's mysterious artistic vitality and positioning Tony Starks as hip-hop's most consistently astonishing and confounding lyricist.
When it first hit, new possibilities in language emerged with a topical breadth that's become Supreme Clientele's most underrated aspect. Rap definitely got weirder, but you weren't getting a straight-up party rhyme like "Cherchez La Ghost" on an Anticon disc; on an El-P record, "Child's Play" becomes "Stepfather Factory"; and whatever you want to call the indelible character sketch of "Malcolm" ("He eat hams, shitted on his self twice/ Big-hatted Jews rushed a nigga out in Crown Heights"), nobody was on that level. --Ian Cohen
10. The Avalanches
Since I Left You
[Modular/Interscope; 2000]
Here's a curious album: It's constructed like a hip-hop record, it flows with the momentum of a great dance mix, but its component parts seem to come from strange places-- musical soundtracks, oddball comedy routines, and easy-listening thrift-store pop from the 60s and 70s. It skirts cheese but hits the pleasure center of the music-geek brain dead-on, blurring lines we never knew existed: sunny lite-soul congeals into the surrealist coda from a John Cale song, flashes of Camp Lo and De La Soul mutter hooks over some unseemly alternate-reality disco, and a gothic choir gets chopped up and modulated to provide the wordless vocals of a funk jam that, as it turns out, is sourced from an especially dirty Blowfly single. Non sequiturs spring up even as all the musical patches hide their seams; "Frontier Psychiatrist" alone has enough bewildering decontextualized soundbites to count as some kind of deranged dada exercise ("And tighten your buttocks/ Pour juice on your chin/ And I promised my girlfriend I'd get/ A violin"). But Since I Left You isn't just a well-built assemblage of sample-based plunderphonics, it's a masterpiece of mood-setting that riffs off an ideal where getting on an airplane and landing in another corner of the world was the most exotic thing a person could do. It's like a travelogue put through a Steinski filter, an escape to a world so new: "Get a drink, have a good time now, welcome to paradise." --Nate Patrin
09. Panda Bear
Person Pitch
[Paw Tracks; 2007]
Person Pitch is the third solo album from Noah Lennox, yet it seems difficult to take measure of the album except as it relates to his regular work as a member of Animal Collective. (This is partially because Person Pitch was the first AC-related album to really lure some of their more skeptical listeners into the tent.) In many ways, the album seems the most succinct possible distillation of exactly what qualities Lennox brings to the Collective's kaleidoscopic mix. And it certainly doesn't hurt Person Pitch's cause that those very qualities-- the beatific melodies, the multi-tracked choral vocals, and the general head-in-the-clouds drift-- tend to be the most immediately appealing draws of the AC universe.
The premise for Person Pitch is fairly simple-- take the production techniques and repetition of minimal techno and apply them to what might otherwise be relatively straightforward dreamy guitar pop. In Lennox's hands, however, this basic template becomes a pathway for sublime invention, as his layered loops of acoustic guitar, overlapping voices, and stray sound effects encircle his songs like halos of sunlight. The album balances widescale epics "Bro's" and "Good Girl/Carrots" with such irresistible short pieces as "Ponytail" and the radiant "I'm Not", resulting in a cohesive whole that is lean, symmetrical, and filled with a continual abundance of fresh surprises and discoveries. --Matthew Murphy
08. Sigur Rós
Ágætis Byrjun
[Smekkleysa; 2000]
They came from Iceland and Radiohead liked them. That's about all we knew back when Ágætis Byrjun first starting making its way around near the turn of the decade, but in those days, that was enough to get people intrigued. Discovering the music of Sigur Rós was an active process, because a series of questions inevitably followed: How do you pronounce their name? What does it mean? Is that a man or a woman singing? Did I hear right, that the words aren't actually in any language? Indeed, since Ágætis Byrjun was one of those records that filled a deep-seated need listeners didn't even know they had, experiencing it was at first a little confusing. Punk had taught us to be skeptical of pure, unapologetic prettiness, so as underground music fans, we'd been conditioned to reject this sort of thing. We were used to it being cut with noise, irony, or emotional distance, which left us unprepared for exquisitely crafted music that asked to be appreciated in the same way as a bright orange sunset or the first snowfall of the season. But we got over it, and once that happened, after we'd given the record a couple of spins, one final question came to mind: Is there any other music like this? --Mark Richardson
07. The Strokes
Is This It
[RCA; 2001]
The Strokes helped to keep alive the romantic notion of pre-Giuliani New York, before the Lower East Side became an amusement park and Times Square became Disneyland. At the time, these guys were naïve enough (and good-looking enough) to firmly believe they were the best band in the world; and for a moment, it actually came true. Is This It is a time capsule of that youthful bravado and it would probably sound quaint if the songs weren't so amazing. Never mind that Julian Casablancas' detached vocals presaged a good percentage of the music that came out this year-- listen to the effortlessness with which the band brings tracks like "Barely Legal" to life, literally laughing during "When It Started" because it sounds so damn easy. Part of that was skill, part of it was innocence. These days, even the Strokes know they'll never make another record this good. That's not to say they couldn't come close, but nearly a decade later, we're all seasoned enough to recognize you only capture this kind of a lightning in a bottle once. --Joe Colly
06. Modest Mouse
The Moon & Antarctica
[Epic; 2000]
The Moon & Antarctica is easily Modest Mouse's most ambitious album, a staggering leap in vision and scope from their previous records and a completely self-contained universe. Frontman Isaac Brock's worldview had always made room for a fair amount of existential loneliness and drugged madness, but from the opening moments of "3rd Planet", all of those elements suddenly cohered into something serenely whole. It's as if the garbled transmission he'd been receiving from parts unknown his whole life suddenly beamed in clear, and in three minutes, he spins out a creation myth so bewildering and uncanny that we're still trying to parse it nine years later. Brock manages to channel this unearthly perspective for an entire album, and everything old, under this gaze, is rendered new and freshly strange: stars become projectors, lives end but no one ever completes them, someone smart says nothing at all. Even Brock's trademark scathing insults turned trippy: "You were the dull sound of sharp math when you were alive/ No one's gonna play the harp when you die," he mutters in "Lives". If there's a way into that statement, I haven't found it yet, but it's hard not to sense a rare wisdom encrypted in its code. --Jayson Greene
05. Jay-Z
The Blueprint
[Roc-A-Fella; 2001]
When it comes to prophetic hip-hop album titles, Ready to Die was the most tragically accurate of the 1990s. This decade, The Blueprint was rap's supreme soothsayer: a grand layout too enamored with life to entertain fatalism. Without it, Kanye West may have never gotten out of his mom's basement. Nas' "Made You Look" probably wouldn't exist. And Jay-Z may have become another aged-out rap casualty, gasping for relevance in a realm where 30 may as well be 60.
When the album wasn't mastering tried-and-true hip-hop tropes like the diss track ("Takeover"), the player's anthem ("Girls, Girls, Girls"), and the puffy-eyed ballad ("Song Cry"), it perfected a lush, sample-based aesthetic that didn't rip-off Al Green, David Ruffin, and Bobby Byrd as much as it paid homage. Just as The Chronic revived 70s funk, The Blueprint brushed off 70s soul for fresh ears. And at the center is Shawn Carter, then 31, who supposedly recorded the bulk of the record's vocals in a near-divine two-day, paperless outpour. Reasonable Doubt may be more complex and The Black Album more personal, but Jay's Blueprint persona is the one that will match his legacy-- towering, effortless, and as eternal as its 12-minute finale. "If I ain't better than Big, I'm the closest one," he claimed-- a controversial line at the time. In 2009, the sentiment seems quaint, if a bit modest. --Ryan Dombal
04. Wilco
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
[Nonesuch; 2002]
Jeff Tweedy had allegedly been boning up on World War II while he wrote many of the songs that would become Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, an all too fitting lead-up to Wilco's well-documented battles with the record industry as well as within the band itself. Touring behind an album still weeks away from official release, Tweedy would often pause to ask how many people in the crowd had downloaded the new Wilco record, and if the substantial show of hands wasn't answer enough, the folks singing along to every word only amplified the extent to which the disc had made the rounds. More importantly, it was making new fans, too, as burned copies of YHF were passed around like totems with the band's tacit blessing. But the historic, narrative-defining leak of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was only part of the story. The real story was the resonance of elliptical songs like "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart", "Ashes of American Flags", and "Jesus, Etc.", which often reduced crowds to hushed silence once 9/11 attached a real world frame to Tweedy's cryptic lyrics. Given the general hoopla surrounding the supposedly "experimental" turn the former alt-country standard bearers were taking, the album itself is a relatively austere work, the subtle sonic tweaks (courtesy of Tweedy's late collaborator Jay Bennett, with an assist from Jim O'Rourke) complementary rather than distracting, adding an extra layer of enticing mystery to the band's most unlikely breakthrough. --Joshua Klein
03. Daft Punk
Discovery
[Virgin; 2001]
Daft Punk's first album had helped refresh house music in the mid 1990s; the second went further, rewriting electronic pop's pleasure principles to such a degree that when it came out a lot of people thought Discovery must be a put-on. They took the joy in the record for irony. Rather, the band had simply plunged into the raw popstuff of their 70s childhoods, from AOR to disco, Buggles to Manilow, rock to robotics. They wanted their listeners to get the rush of context-free delight they had hearing music as kids, and on "Aerodynamic" and "Digital Love" they succeeded wildly, dissolving a decade-plus of dance music good taste. And not all of Discovery looked back. The middle of the album is house music as string theory, with the duo finding dimensions of pleasure coiled within the tiniest loops: "Crescendolls" releases an awesome, gleeful energy by repeatedly triggering one five-second sample.
Discovery was simply the decade's best good-times record, with Daft Punk as pyramid-toting party wizards and the chipmunk Kraftwerk of "Harder Better Faster Stronger" their anthem. But this most celebratory of records has a bittersweet streak, too: Daft Punk know that a rush always carries the risk of exhaustion. Perhaps the album's most underappreciated track is the sad but gorgeous "Short Circuit", a three-minute robot graveyard of crumbled transistors and dying LEDs. But from Romanthony's first blissful, vocoded shout of "one more time!" the dominant emotion on Discovery is joy. A joy that wasn't afraid to be sentimental and funny as well as hard and futuristic, and is all the better for that. When a generation looks back and tries to catch a fuzzy hold of the music that made them happy this decade, Daft Punk's will be top of the list. --Tom Ewing
02. Arcade Fire
Funeral
[Merge; 2004]
Will there ever be another album like Funeral? Sounds silly considering the second half of this decade has seen plenty of bands establish nice careers by ripping off the communal euphoria that Arcade Fire made fresh after four years of rock records that boasted metropolitan chic, emotional austerity, or lyrical removal-- the music was amazing, but it was all kind of a downer. It's debatable that Funeral itself is even original-- considering they share a label, love of archaic brass and string instruments, and an undeniable ability to wring life affirmation in the face of personal tragedy, it might just be a crossover version of Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
But besides being a turning point for indie rock, Funeral was one for the indie community as well. Whether it's due to increasingly fractious listening habits or the increased ability for dissenters to be heard, Funeral keeps on feeling like the last of its kind, an indie record that sounded capable of conquering the universe and then going on to do just that. The consensus hyperbole that met Funeral resulted in any record that threatened to reach that level becoming met with severe scrutiny or even outright derision. And still, we wonder if there will ever be anything quite like Funeral-- something tells me that as music becomes even more readily available to us in the next decade, we'll still go through it all in the hopes we can find something with the unifying force and astounding emotional payload that only albums like Funeral can provide. --Ian Cohen
01. Radiohead
Kid A
[Capitol; 2000]
Nine years ago this month, Brent DiCrescenzo reviewed Radiohead's Kid A for this website. As far as its rating, no one blinked. Pitchfork was still a blip then, but if you cared at all about the broad sphere of music that included Radiohead, chances are that you heard something very special in Kid A. It was that exceptional artifact of modern culture-- something about which most people could agree. To ears that'd had the second half the 1990s to ingest the rapid developments in electronic music, ears weary of the bankruptcy of post-Nirvana alternative rock, Kid A sounded like a next development in rock music that was both logical and surprising. And, of course, a lot has been written about this record since. "What's left to be said about Kid A?", Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber wondered when we published our Top 20 Albums of 2000 list. Good question.
First, I go back to the old reasons, the ones that were kicked around from the moment the record hit: Thoughts about millennial techno-dread; fragmentation, broken transmissions, garbled communication; the feeling of helplessness that comes from having access to so much information about the world while not having the power to change any of it; the subtle and dramatic ways that electronics are altering our landscape and our consciousness. And there's still something there, though in some ways it's all now more intense. Part of our brains moved online in the last 10 years, and this will continue; it's not a good or bad thing; it's just the way it is. Refracting these developments through the prism of Kid A, it still resonates, even if so much has changed since. Radiohead were not only among the first bands to figure out how to use the Internet, but to make their music sound like it, and they kicked off this ridiculously retro decade with the rare album that didn't seem retro. Kid A-- with its gorgeously crafted electronics, sparkling production, and uneasy stance toward the technology it embraces completely-- feels like the Big Album of the online age.
But you know what? I almost never think about that stuff. It all feels true, of course, but when I slide Kid A into the CD player (how's that for a retro image?), something else happens. Once that drawer closes and the first chords of "Everything in Its Right Place" start-- those haunting, clicking keyboard textures and Thom Yorke's warped voice-- all these other ideas feel secondary. Instead, I get lost in the dissonant horn blasts of "The National Anthem" and hypnotized between the play of the drones and the hissy beats in "Idioteque"; I feel the deep pang of yearning and sadness with the title track, and I rest during the gorgeous Brian Eno-like interlude of "Treefingers". I'm listening to a brilliant album by an especially creative rock band functioning at its peak. Such records have strong melodies, exciting chord changes, unexpected arrangements, and tricky rhythms that you want to hear over and over again. Songs. Kid A has those, too. Ten of them, all great, here, in this order, working together perfectly. For a record with so much baggage and such a reputation for density, the appeal, in the end, is pretty simple: Other records were catchier or better for dancing or more appealingly nostalgic. But no other record captured the complex feeling of the era in such an elegant and beautiful way. --Mark Richardson
Didn't realize Pitchfork gave them an 8.1... ahh, that's the type of shit they eat up though.
EV: Los Angeles 4.12.2008, Los Angeles 4.13.2008, Nashville 6.17.2009, Nashville 6.18.2009, Memphis 6.20.2009
A couple other albums I would have put in that top 20: Bloc Party - "Silent Alarm", Matthew Good "Avalanche".
These lists are meant to generate buzz (and attention to Pitchfork) ... that's all.
Lots of ommissions above
"I don't believe in damn curses. Wake up the damn Bambino and have me face him. Maybe I'll drill him in the ass." --- Pedro Martinez
2010: Newark 5/18 MSG 5/20-21 2011: PJ20 9/3-4 2012: Made In America 9/2
2013: Brooklyn 10/18-19 Philly 10/21-22 Hartford 10/25 2014: ACL10/12
2015: NYC 9/23 2016: Tampa 4/11 Philly 4/28-29 MSG 5/1-2 Fenway 8/5+8/7
2017: RRHoF 4/7 2018: Fenway 9/2+9/4 2021: Sea Hear Now 9/18
2022: MSG 9/11 2024: MSG 9/3-4 Philly 9/7+9/9 Fenway 9/15+9/17
2025: Pittsburgh 5/16+5/18
i've been reading along all week because as much as i dislike pitchfork i have found good music from that site too.
Charlotte 03
Asheville 04
Atlanta 12
Greenville 16, Columbia 16
Seattle 18
Nashville 22
Ohana Festival 24 x2
They're good with finding new bands, but any bands that are'nt a la mode or less than 3 years old will have reviews that can't be accepted at face.
this.
the "top xx list" is a collective response of all staff versus a single writer....guess it just goes to show the arbitration of any review or list.