Top Albums of the Beginning of the 21st Century - Part I

So this post was started quite some time ago, but events conspired to delay it. Finally though, it has reached completion. Please enjoy the Top Albums of the Beginning of the 21st Century.

When deciding on the criteria for such a list, the first question one must ask is whether to look at each album via the lens of presentism or not. We've worked through this intellectual conundrum by simply ignoring it. Enjoy, and please let me here some feedback.

2000
U2 - All That You Can't Leave Behind

It may be a bit ironic to start a list of the 2000's with a band who reached their artistic highpoint in the 1980's, but such is U2. And thought it may be one of the more personal choices on this list, ATYCLB is really a stunning album by a band that has created some of the greatest pop/rock music of all time.

After the sub-par 1990's releases of Zooropa and Pop, All That You Can't Leave Behind' marked the return of a more traditional U2 style led by the undeniable singles 'Beautiful Day,' 'Elevation,' 'Walk On' and 'Stuck In a Moment..." Perhaps the most overlooked song on this album is the bands moving ode to 'New York.'

Unfortunately, U2 wasn't able to retain this high level of song writing and the remainder of the decade brought us the craptastic How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, and the slightly less worse 2009 offering, No Line On The Horizon. But that is one of the beautiful things about music: No matter how bad something you put out is, it cannot mar your greater work.

Runner Up - Outkast - Stankonia

Honorable Mention:
Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker
Common - Like Water for Chocolate
Modest Mouse - The Moon and Antartica

2001
The Strokes - Is This It?

If rock n' roll has a place where it retreats and recovers from its excesses, it's surely the garage (at least metaphorically). That is where The Strokes went to record their debut Is This It? which arrived just in the nick of time to wash away post-alternative detritus like Creed, Kid Rock and Limp Bizket, which had been infesting the airwaves.

Is This It? borrowed heavily on the back-to-basics garage sound that has been with rock since the 1960's, and it received some (unfair?) criticism for leaning on the sounds of The Velvet Underground and Television. But what is rock but reinventing things that were done before? Besides, Julian Casablanca's lyrics were at their circuitous best and the band was metronome tight.

The Strokes were never able to reach this level of success again, and though the recent efforts of Casablanca, Albert Hammond Jr., Nikolai Fraitur, Fabrizio Moretti are worth checking out, they will never come close to reaching the immediacy and importance of Is This It?. Modern indie owes more to The Strokes and this album than it would care to admit, but the fact that they are a source of such debate among music aficionado's is probably a good sign of the albums importance 8 years later.

Runner Up - White Stripes - White Blood Cells

Honorable Mention:
Incubus - Morning View
Jay-Z - Blueprint
The Shins - Oh, Inverted World

2002
Blackalicous - Blazing Arrow

Wow, 2002 was a good year for music. Spoon, Wilco, The Roots, Beck, Eminem, The Flaming Lips, Coldplay, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Atmosphere all had offerings which were some of the best of their careers. And while some of those albums have aged for better or worse, Blackalicious' second LP remains a timeless classic, one that will probably never be matched by it's creators. Producer/DJ Chief Xcel incorporated funk, r&b, rap, and rock with such seamlessness that nearly anyone who heard it was immediately drawn in. Rapper Gift of Gab crafted lyrics so dense yet clear that his message, whether verbally abusing other m.c.'s or ruminating on the beauty of the world, is always moving and unmistakable.

The sequencing on this album is impeccably arranged with each song melding into the next, sometimes in a new track, but often continuing in the same one. By my count the albums 17 tracks actually contain 23 songs. Outkast have been referred to as The Beatles of Hip Hop, but this album is surely the genre's version of Abbey Road.

Runner Up: - The Roots - Phrenology

Honorable Mention:
Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head
Red Hot Chili Peppers - By The Way
Spoon - Kill The Moonlight

2003
Postal Service - Give Up

This is an album that changed peoples lives. And no matter how much you argue it, most people would argue that Ben Gibbard's work here trumps anything that he's done with Death Cab For Cutie. There's are four major elements to this album that all just complement and balance each other perfectly:  Gibbard's mournful (and sometime flat-out depressing) lyrics, his placid delivery balanced by Jimmy Tamborello's equally mournful strings which are in turn countered by his bouncing, blippy beats.

Part of the genius of Ben Gibbard is to paint clear pictures with his lyrics and average or unique events (visiting Washington, D.C., surviving a nuclear winter) universally relatable to the listener. In this writers opinion, this album hasn't aged very well, and that may be partly due to the lack of any kind of a follow up by the impromptu group. They've publicly stated that they have no plans to release another album, which is a shame. If they did and were able to recreate the magic on 'Give Up,' they could change even more lives.

Runner Up - Broken Social Scene - s/t

Honorable Mention:
Outkast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
Jay-Z - The Black Album
White Stripes - Elephant

2004
Arcade Fire - Funeral

2004 was another great year for music, and if not for the debut from Arcade Fire, it would have been a tough call. Epic to the point of being theatrical and layered to the level of being orchestral, Funeral is such a powerful album that it is almost a watershed moment in 'indie rock.' There is before Funeral, and there is after it.

The stirring opening of Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) turns into a steady charge that slowly builds and never lets go. Every song contains it's own unique energy, like different movements of a symphony, and they are each filled with interesting twists and turns. But on Neighborhood #3 (Power Out), the band unleashes a tsunami of sound and avalanche of emotion, clearly declaring that song the pinnacle of the album.

Funeral is deep with subtext stemming from some personal losses in the band and a disquieting ethos of the time. But despite all of the consternation over adulthood vs. childhood, communal reliance vs. isolation, love vs. loss, there remains a sense of positivity. This album is like feeling down from some kicks that life inevitably gives then remembering that there is always something bigger.

Runner Up - Kanye West - College Dropout

Honorable Mention:
Foreign Exchange - Connected
Feist - Let It Die
RJD2 - Since We Last Spoke

 Stay tuned for Part II and let me know what albums I've missed!

My Two Cent(ence Reviews)

MGMT's album 'Congratulations' lacks anything approaching the holy triumvirate of Kids, Time to Pretend and Electric Feel. Is it the big middle finger we all should have seen coming when their followup to Oracular Specatular was Metanoia?

'Together' lacks the "power" in the power-pop that The New Pornographers previously excelled at. Nico Case is great, but in the context of the N.P.'s she's better utilized as a foil for A.C. Newman than as the centerpiece.

While 'World Sick' is world class, I'm not sure the rest of Broken Social Scene's new 'Forgiveness Rock Record' measures up to that song or their previous two l.p.'s. This one still needs some time to grow on me.

Lost in all the hubbub of owning the internet earlier this year, OK Go released a really good album in 'Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky.' I also had to miss this show when they came to D.C. but at least I got to see them on Colbert. (Ok, three versions of the same song may be excessive, but just check out the rest of the album.)

I have no idea how I heard of them but somehow but I ended up with Drummer's 'Feel Good Together' in my digital music library. Made up of all Ohio musicians, including the Black Key's drummer (bah-dum) on bass, the album is definitely a rhythm driven rock record, punctuated equally by guitars and synths.

Delorean - Subiza

Although Delorean has been around since 2000, they only began popping up on the indie-radar last year with the ep Ayrton Senna. Originally from Basque country, the band relocated to Barcelona where their musical stylings became a mishmash of rock, pop and dance. Although most of the tracks on Subiza follow a pretty rigid formula, it doesn't grow wearisome. Dance music figures heavily in these songs, but techno it ain't. Think the atmospherics of M83 with the buoyancy of Phoenix. Or perhaps one could make a comparison to Cut Copy, but whereas that band has a cold and mechanical sound Delorean gives a strong sense of the warm Mediterranean locale that they now call home.  With song titles like 'Endless Sunset,' 'Come Wander' and 'Warmer Places,' it's pretty clear that Delorean aren't reaching for deep meaning and that suits these songs just fine. 

Unfortunately, Delorean set the bar pretty high on their previously mentioned ep Ayrton Senna. Although Subiza is solid from front to back, but it never comes close to reaching the ebullience of 'Seasun,' one of my favorite songs from last year. But no matter; Subiza has arrived just in time for summer and after just one listen, you'll know that summer is exactly what these songs were made for. 

  

Broken Bells - Broken Bells

Back in 2004, before internet buzz became ultra-instant, a young producer named Danger Mouse became famous by mashing up the vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album with the Beatles' White Album creating, you guessed it, the Grey Album. Ultimately, the Grey Album was more notable for it's concept than its execution (except for this badass version of 99 Problems, mixed with Helter Skelter). But the project launched DM's career into the stratosphere and he would go on to work with the likes of The Gorillaz, Cee-Lo, Beck, The Black Keys and many more, with the latest being the Shins' James Mercer. But we'll get to that soon enough.

Coincidentally, it was also 2004 when Natalie Portman's scripted recommendation was enough to create quite the buzz of it's own. I'm referring to, of course, the "indie" movie Garden State, in which Portman's character claimed that the Shin's would "change your life." That moment certainly changed the Shins' lives more than they changed mine (they didn't). (Oddly, several days after I wrote this sentence, I came across this article on that exact subject.)

So now here we are, 6 years removed from those two unconnected events that strangely found a way to come together (cosmic, man) in the form of Broken Bells, the latest collabo between Danger Mouse and __________. A lot of time has passed since DM splashed his name all over the internet with the Grey Album or even when he took over the airwaves with Cee-Lo as Gnarls Barkley. And much like the vegetables in my fridge right now, what was once fresh is now just old and soggy. Danger Mouse hasn't grown much as a producer these last few years. As documented in older posts, I found his recent projects with the Black Keys and Beck to be varying degrees of bland and uninspired. He took the funk out of Beck, and that is just plain wrong.

All that being said, Broken Bells still manages to be a solid album, probably on the strength of Mercer's voice. While DM's sounds are a bit vanilla, he doesn't take away from what the artists with whom he works are. That's great and all, but I feel that a good producer should push whomever they're working with into new creative heights.

Trying to pick out a favorite track isn't very easy, since they all sort of run together. This is an album you can play front to end, a rare feat, but not because it is so great, but because it's so plain. You probably won't skip any songs, but you won't be reaching for that 'repeat' button either.