The Top 100 Albums of 2000-04

Aging hipsters may-- as they have at all points in history-- mope and whine that none of today's artists share the lasting appeal of the artists of bygone eras. But looking back on the first half of the new millennium's first decade to create this list of the Top 100 best albums to date only re-enforced our already well-founded beliefs that, not only are these bellyachers just too old, their opinions are laughably wrong. The '00s have, thus far, produced as many innovating, life-changing, just-plain-amazing albums as had any other decade by this point, and while the intent of this list is simply to have some good, nostalgic fun celebrating the best music of the past five years, it just so happens to double nicely as ammunition against anyone who forgot how to enjoy themselves along the way.

100: Various Artists
DFA Compilation #2
[DFA; 2004]

Murphy, Galkin, and Tim Handclaps aren't aloof-- they just want nothing to do with your scene. This comp documented DFA's increasing eclecticism, but more importantly, defended it from pigeonholing. While many labels anxiously tried tapping the post-Rapture heroin worm for last sprays, the DFA explored expansive disco (Black Leotard Front), revived electro-analog (Delia & Gavin), and confronted their own musical influences (Liquid Liquid, LCD). And of course, the two times the DFA did play into stereotype-- LCD's "Yeah" and Pixeltan's "Get Up/Say What"-- well, you've heard those songs. --Nick Sylvester

099: The Unicorns
Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone
[Alien8; 2003]

No one should believe a word that comes out of the Unicorns' lying mouths. They say they're broken up-- maybe they are, maybe they aren't. They say they wanna produce hip-hop-- right, sure. Steel cage matches? Doubtful. All that we know about them for sure is this unlikely, almost impossibly quirky mélange of song-seeds, a career's worth of glorious melodies and darkly sugary would-be choruses-- the Unicorns never repeat themselves-- got crammed into a lone, intricate pop accident, like a fatal crash between Brian Wilson and Daniel Johnston. Maybe they broke up from depression, regretful over tossing away so many great, half-formed notions on one album. If they're even broken up at all, that is. The Unicorns can't be trusted beyond the 13 tracks of their debut album, but at least follow them that far. --Eric Carr

098: Clipse
Lord Willin'
[Arista; 2002]

In 2002, Lord Willin' seemed to be the Neptunes' album-- their science-lab synths punched and clinked as well or better than any tracks they'd made before (see "Grindin'", whose rhythms made of flesh and breath foreshadowed their finger-popping on 2004's "Drop it Like It's Hot")-- while the Clipse got a lot of hate for rapping ever-familiar tales of playing, pushing, and block-posting, territory covered since, essentially, the dawn of hip-hop. Unfair. Despite their claims to hoodrich and the sound of coin on the beats, Pusha T and Malice painted a darker, raggedier telescopy of street-life, their lip-curled irony cutting devastatingly: on "Comedy Central", after describing shooting someone as "cock the gauge/ Polkadot your braids," Malice raps, "I hate to think the dope game is my callin/ 'Cause it got us singing lullabies to our fallen." In the same track, Pusha says, "Ghetto streets so numb they call me Novocaine"-- so deep is their dichotomy of dealer braggadocio and S.O.S. ("Virginia"). As the men say, "i live this shit." --Julianne Shepherd

097: Black Dice
Beaches and Canyons
[DFA; 2003]

There are lots of patterns to follow and like. I might guess Black Dice was caught in a pattern whirled up by Boredoms, and that Vibracathedral Orchestra and Excepter were mixed up in the same spiral. Or, I could say that Black Dice were caught in their (new) city's bubbling underground of beats and electronics, surging with life even after death from above. Or, I might wonder if all of us were caught running after something mystical in an age of instant gratification and shared information; a quartet of former noise-mongrels were as good ambassadors as any for recognizing beauty from seemingly infinite bits of noise and static. However, ultimately, I'm struck not by the myriad of patterns, but the transitions: Beaches & Canyons writhes with life and the tease of resolution, caught between states of euphoria and confusion, and it makes absolute sense that it doesn't sound like anything else they've done. --Dominique Leone

096: The Decemberists
Castaways & Cutouts
[Kill Rock Stars; 2003]

Efforts to typecast the Decemberists as face-painting, pirate costume-wearing indoors types fell apart after 2004 embraced freak folk's much weirder acid-fed progenitors. The Decemberists' rococo folk-rock is sweet and pure, and Colin Meloy's Pulitzer-aspirant lyrics are just the icing on a deeply labored-over cake. "July, July" is jubilantly traditional, organ-bumping folk-rock-- a far cry from the putative weirdness interpreted into this album by lazy, overeager critics. And while "Odalisque" and "The Legionnaire's Lament" are undeniably Mangum-steeped, the Decemberists have likely read as much Bangs as Beard, borrowing discreetly from sources far and wide; there's nary a song that doesn't stutter on its own immense cultural vocabulary. --Sam Ubl

095: Unwound
Leaves Turn Inside You
[Kill Rock Stars; 2001]

Drone heads be wary: The two minutes of glaring sustained synth notes you hear at the beginning of "We Invent You" are deceptive. Leaves Turn Inside You is an Unwound album, and-- despite the band's penchant for obfuscation and risk-taking-- what would an Unwound album be without big, steely guitars? It may come as great relief when the harmolodic six-string melody finally comes ricocheting through the din like a rope of light through deepest space, but by then the band have made their point: Leaves Turn Inside You is one of the most aggressively unaffiliated albums of the aughts captured in (primarily) guitar, bass, and drums.

This is a departure from even the band's most far-reaching prior material-- Unwound did some major musical soul-searching (nearly three years' worth) before deciding to construct their own studio and record a self-produced double album on analog. Shear pomposity aside, how else could the ran-backward guitar solos, percussive jamborees, cinematic organ builds, and slow-burning 10-minute seances have come about? Take the high-arching three-act "Terminus" out for a spin and begin to love perhaps the least-heard album on this list. --Sam Ubl

094: The Strokes
Room on Fire
[RCA; 2003]

I have a difficult time recalling why this album was seen as a disappointment. It seems each member of the Strokes learned a few lessons about the true meaning of being rock stars in the aftermath of Is This It? : Nick and Al learned to make guitars into keyboards, adding the illusion of increased complexity while sticking to the stripped-down melodic simplicity that served them so well, not to mention some kickass two-note solos. Julian learned that he's capable of drawing-out vowel sounds better than almost anyone, and that those sonds are the source of his vocal powers. Fabrizio learned that every beat can sound the same and that as long as you hold steady, let Nick and Al dish the hooks and Julian drawl, everything will be beautiful. Their bass player learned that he's invisible. And collectively, they learned that by sticking to the simple if formulaic reliance on great riffs and killer choruses, you can make one hell of a rock record. Just like the last time. --Eric Carr

093: Eminem
The Marshall Mathers LP
[Interscope; 2000]

There's Marshall Mathers, and there's Slim Shady. There's the multi-millionaire from Detroit writing lengthy letters to fans, and there's the multi-millionaire calling his fans "fucking retards." There's the man wondering why parents are allowing their children to listen to his music ("Now because of this blonde mop that's on top/ And this fucked up head that I've got, I've gone pop?"), and there's the shifty thug screaming "I don't owe you a motherfucking thing." There's the single father from a broken home inexplicably finding himself the idol of millions, and there's the obnoxious class clown reveling in the rewards and money he's received for acting like a fuck-up.

There are the thoughtful and considered stories of Em's life, and there's the skit where Em pretending to be both some guy getting his dick sucked by the Insane Clown Posse and the Insane Clown Posse sucking some guy's dick. There's a brilliant and nuanced track tackling fan worship and artistic responsibility like "Stan", and there's an interminable and nearly unlistenable wife-murdering scree like "Kim". There's a happy-go-lucky shiny pop hit like "The Real Slim Shady", and there's a hard-knock-life dirge like "Amityville". There's the doubt and reflection in "The Way I Am", and there's the irredeemably ignorant fag-bashing in "Criminal".

This is where Em played Marshall against Slim like a chess master playing both sides of the board to a draw. Marshall redeems Slim; Slim validates Marshall; Eminem tries to stay true to both, and succeeds by simply acknowledging that both Slim and Marshall need to co-exist in order for Eminem to survive. This is where Eminem rose to the top. This is where Eminem began to fall. --David Raposa

092: The Clientele
Suburban Light
[Pointy; 2000; Merge; 2001]

The Clientele are about place. Over the course of the early singles collected here you can hear them building the fictional geography in which one hopes their music will always be set. Down these leafy lanes, striding through empty parks, illuminated by dingy lamplights as dogs bark in the distance, people quietly fall in and out of love beneath their umbrellas (weatherman is the dream gig in Clientele-land). Suburban Light is the triumph of romanticism: It doesn't matter what happens with that girl or guy, as long as it's sharply observed and you can wallow in the result with a heavily reverbed and catchy melody. As long as we have rain and Augusts inevitably fade, we'll have the Clientele, a band that illustrates the virtues of tirelessly revisiting familiar places. When your parents complained that you didn't live in the real world, this is where you were hiding. --Mark Richardson

091: Yo La Tengo
And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
[Matador; 2000]

Yo La Tengo had to get old, too. But though the distortion-soaked sonics of previous outings may have quieted, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out spotlights some of the band's most emotionally acute songwriting. "Last Days of Disco" nicks the title of an underappreciated Whit Stillman film to languidly look back on the first moments of a now-aborted relationship. "The song said 'let's be happy,'" Ira Kaplan recalls, "I was happy/ It never made me happy before." Anyone who has over-appreciated an awful love song can appreciate the sentiment (for me it was DJ Sammy's cover of Bryan Adams' "Heaven"). "Our Way to Fall" captures the same moment on the way up. Kaplan adapts a Thomas Pynchon title for a hilariously bittersweet half-spoken song about lovers' quarrels ("It seems like just a little thing/ You don't want to listen and I can't shut up"). Georgia Hubley's vocals render a George McRae cover quietly sublime. Then the squalling power-pop of "Cherry Chapstick" proves Yo La Tengo have still got it. --Marc Hogan

090: DJ/Rupture
Minesweeper Suite
[Tigerbeat6; 2002]

Its title alludes to the beats he digs and the diasporas they represent, and if rupture had one thesis, it might be that music is never a a separate entity from the climate it was made in. This was his first "bona fide" release, and the maestro, aka American expatriate Jace Clayton, has such a gentle relationship with the music he mashes, and a respect for it evident in the shape of his sculptures. Less decoupage than a seamless knit, he brought Cutty Ranks together with Foxy Brown and clenched-tight gravity-chamber breakbeats; draped Soul II Soul elegantly across a maniacal, bomb-conjuring riddim; slowly emitted the sonic language of reformation and revolution; and connected hard rap tracks with bhangra while testing the emergency warning system ("Up from the Underground"). Even as the beats converge and propel, we never forget that above and below his gorgeous landscape, someone's cleaning up bombs. --Julianne Shepherd

089: Franz Ferdinand
Franz Ferdinand
[Domino; 2004]

Franz Ferdinand's debut album was a rock monster that conquered the airwaves and catapulted the band onto magazine covers, in turn spawning an evil backlash monster that spread far and wide on the web boards and in certain quarters of the blogosphere. As the two did battle, though, the backlash monster never grew strong enough to obscure the fact that the album was an incredibly solid, manifestly enjoyable record bereft of filler and possessed of some totally sweet grooves to boot. We all know how the staccato disco attack of Pazz and Jop champ "Take Me Out" spread like a virus through radio, MTV, and sporting arena PA systems, but that's a tiny part of the story when measured against the jumpy bassline of "Auf Achse", the dreamy harmonies on the chorus of "Tell Her Tonight", the ear-grabbing riff of "Cheating on You", and the wholesome ball of all-powerful awesomeness that is "Dark of the Matinee". Stateside, the sexual ambiguity of "Michael" was refreshing in 2004, a year stuffed with talk of Constitutional amendments designed to deprive specific people of basic marriage rights, while "This Fire" was refreshing simply because it rocked. The sloppy early century make-out session between rock and disco had mixed results, but Franz Ferdinand stands as one of the best. --Joe Tangari

088: Viktor Vaughn
Vaudeville Villain
[Traffic; 2003]

After a long period of silence that MF Doom apparently spent drinking gravel smoothies and losing his damn mind, he reemerged with a vengeance in the new millennium. He abandoned the socially conscious rap he'd trafficked in with KMD, amassed enough aliases to give Kool Keith a run for his money, and began cranking out concept albums about super-heroes, alien invasions, and comestibles. Of the Many Faces of Doom, Viktor Vaughn is the least oblique--no interminable samples, and any superhero shenanigans are more figurative than literal. Instead, it's all rhymes, all the time, as Doom swims through icy, polluted beats, gargling his brilliant, nonsensical fire. Without all the ponderous high-concept stuff to distract from them, Doom's strengths as an MC, rather than as a visionary sound manipulator, come to the fore: His ability for locating the most obvious, dopest similes that somehow no one has thought to use ("I came to save the game like a memory card"--duh!), and his knack for perfectly cockeyed, ebullient braggadocio laced with obscure references ("For a buck they'd likely dance a jig or do the huckabuck/ To Vik it's no big deal, they're just a bunch of knucklefucks"). Oooooooh! --Brian Howe

087: Ekkehard Ehlers
Plays
[Staubgold; 2002]

Spend years in Frankfurt reading Adorno, listening to Sun Ra, Black Flag, and the latest Force Tracks 12-inch, and learning a thing or two about computer software, and you might wind up making a record like Plays. Trying to get a handle on its layers of referencing-- Ehlers folds music in on itself and cryptically salutes his aesthetic heroes ("Plays Cornelius Cardew", "Plays Hubert Fichte")-- is like imagining what a universe with five dimensions might look like. Setting aside the intellectual puzzles, Plays is an excellent and unusually varied collection, as each two-song homage explores a different range of moods and textures. At some point during these 75 minutes, Ehlers gives most of the latest ideas in experimental electronic music a whirl. Still, there's no escaping the enigma: the song where Ehlers Plays the Beatles is called "Plays John Cassevetes". --Mark Richardson

086: Björk
Medulla
[Elektra; 2004]

The fact is, I really don't know what great art is supposed to be. It could be something that illustrates a principle of what it means to be human, but then what does that make a Rothko painting or Cage piece? It could be something that makes clear how the world looks to one person-- the artist-- and our appreciation lies only in how well we recognize its nuances. But what if I just don't get it? Or don't like it? And who determines what it is I'm supposed to be getting and liking? My best guess is that art is both of those concepts, but also the idea that our views of the world color the paintings and fill up the strange harmonies in songs just as much as any artist's. Medulla doesn't give me any other choice but to fill in the missing colors and notes with my own lingering thoughts and doubts. That Björk gave me a record where I can find both of us inside is something amazing and beautiful. And I think it's good art, too. --Dominique Leone

085: Keith Fullerton Whitman
Playthroughs
[Kranky; 2002]

John Cage despised the "Hallelujah Chorus" in Handel's Messiah. "Don't you like to be moved?" a friend asked him. "I don't mind being moved," Cage replied, "but I don't like being pushed." No record on this list does as little pushing as Keith Whitman's Playthroughs, a subtle masterpiece that sits in place with its glorious geometry and waits for you to make the first move. The varied material Whitman has released since suggests Playthroughs was a radiant one-off and not the statement of purpose it first seemed, when Hrvatski dropped the nickname, quit dissecting the "Amen" break, and plugged his guitar into his laptop. Here he explored how much could be done with a bare minimum of material. Quite a lot, it turned out. --Mark Richardson

084: Mu
Afro Finger and Gel
[Tigersushi; 2003]

Fuck "When is it okay to fart in front of my girlfriend?"-- if she don't dig AF+G just take your shit elsewhere. There's no middle ground for this leftfield house freakshow: screaming, cartwheeling, Brechtian face-splitting, schizo Chicago housing, scene-obsessing, venom-spitting, domestically violent beyond beliefing-- and you can dance to it, and you do. With yourself. --Nick Sylvester

083: Prefuse 73
Vocal Studies & Uprock Narratives
[Warp; 2001]

If you can't re-invent the wheel, then you can always turn heads by taking time-tested music and recontextualizing it. Without getting too deep into the history of collage, we can at least say Vocal Studies & Uprock Narratives uses the technique to the fullest. Scratching and sampling are far from new, but cutting up the delivery of an MC made sure those elements took front and center. This is where Scott Herren succeeded, by using ageless jazz tones as his backdrop and fusing it with the attraction of the new. And no matter how hot their guest spot was, MCs were just as vulnerable to manipulation as a bassline or a beat. Fortunately, Herren's beats are as canny as his presentation, helping him define and create a "Prefuse 73 sound" right from the start. --Jason Crock

082: King Geedorah
Take Me to Your Leader
[Ninja Tune; 2003]

Daniel Dumile is more convincing as a three-headed movie monster than a comic book supervillain, and even though he's made more sophisticated albums, dropped better rhymes, and maybe even made better beats as MF Doom, somehow nothing beats the whole package of King Geedorah's Take Me To Your Leader. The music is bold and oversized-- like the searing guitar lick on "Fastlane" that just gets better the 80th time you hear it, or the weeping strings on "I Wonder", or the drum machine that stomps across every unyielding, repetitive loop. Geedorah mostly stays behind the boards to give the mic to a well-chosen entourage of guest MCs, but he steals the show on a couple cuts, especially when he takes his crown and charges in over the trumpet fanfare and beat box of "The Fine Print"-- and when the king speaks, you ain't worth a swipe of his monster-sized tail. --Chris Dahlen

081: Les Savy Fav
Rome (Written Upside Down) EP
[Southern; 2000]

Silence on Nixon Watergate tapes: 18 minutes. Length of Les Savy Fav's Rome EP: 18 minutes. Coincidence? Probably, but Nixon had evil plans for the future and Kissinger was sort of like a cyborg, topics that get a lot of play on the record, so who knows? You could make a proper, worshipful article about this EP by just quoting Tim Harrington's evocative couplets, but the journey into the band's funky, tuneful dystopian vision wouldn't be complete without mentions of their fractured sense of rhythm and anti-orthodox sense of songcraft. Ballads of degraded civilization morph into four-headed post-punk monsters, tape defects make beautiful rhythms, and innocent electronic bleeps give no clue to the ensuing fragmented exhilaration of "I.C. Timer", which rides rambunctious punk-funk histrionics all the way to Harrington's nightmare conversion into something more machine than man. "You know who built this house/ You-know-who will tear it down" goes the opening of "Asleepers Union", and it reads like a manifesto as the band innovates a sound all their own. --Joe Tangari

080: Annie
Anniemal
[679; 2004]

"If ever there's a girl who could rock your world," Annie Lilia Berge-Strand sings on "Me Plus One", "then that girl sure is me." Singing in a breathy voice like Kylie's younger sister (although not that other younger sister), she makes pop music even indie kids can love, with more class, inventiveness, and joy than any of her sex-obsessed American counterparts. Subtle shades of emotions, perhaps sparked by the tragic death of her musical and romantic partner Tore Korknes, make all the catchy choruses and enticing beats on Anniemal more than just pop accoutrements, but rather expressions of a singular personality. The Richard X-produced "Chewing Gum" is a nonchalant kiss-off, and "Me Plus One" is potently satirical and even a little self-deprecating. But the stand-out is "Heartbeat". Not only is it as perfect a pop song as you could ask for, but it's an affecting expression of loneliness and longing. --Stephen M. Deusner

079: The Go! Team
Thunder Lightning Strike
[Memphis Industries; 2004]

Lo-fi became an indie cliché sometime around 1996, with bands relying on tape hiss and nonexistent mixing to mask the stale classic rock influences in their DNA. It took the Go! Team to remind us to hate the player, not the TASCAM-- or in other words, that the underwhelming effect of most basement recordings were due to the tired influences rather than the methods. Rather than sticking to pop-rock vanilla, the Go! Team played at blending Toni Basil, Ennio Morricone, and Henry Mancini, like kids going through their parent's terrible record collection and deciding to remake all of them at once. Each concoction ends up like a quick music history lesson beamed in over a transistor radio, like the progression through Motown girl-groups to early rap to electro-pop on "Ladyflash". DJs take heed-- the home recorders of the world may be catching on to your game. --Rob Mitchum

078: The New Pornographers
Mass Romantic
[Matador; 2000]

In theory the New Pornographers are a supergroup-- a loosely defined, binational crew of Pacific Northwest musicians from bands like Destroyer, Zumpano, and Limblifter. Oh, and there's Neko Case. In practice, however, the New Pornographers are actually a superdupergroup. Carl Newman writes hooks so infectious-- like the title track and the transcendent "Letter from an Occupant"-- that the U.S. has already run out of vaccine for them; Dan Bejar injects "Jackie" and "Execution Day" with magnificent pop drama; and the rest of the band perform them with a live-wire snap. Oh, and there's Neko Case. Although she only appears on a few tracks, she overcompensates by hitting each note more perfectly than you thought possible, sounding like Kate Pierson with super powers. --Stephen M. Deusner

077: The Wrens
The Meadowlands
[Absolutely Kosher; 2003]

Hate them for procrastinating, hate them for their myopic lyrical scope, hate them for filling a record with half slow songs and giving it awkward sequencing, hate them for giving their lyrics a narrative arc between this record and the last one they put out more than seven years earlier and expecting you to still care, hate them for being hopelessly over the hill and crying into their beers about their rockstar careers that never were... All that's fine. But don't hate them for writing the best power-pop sing-along on this list ("Hopeless"), as well as the second and third runners-up, "This Boy is Exhausted" and "Ex-Girl Collection". --Jason Crock

076: Missy Elliott
Miss E...So Addictive
[Elektra; 2001]

Showing customary disregard for artificial boundaries, on Miss E...So Addictive Missy Elliott and renaissance-man producer Timbaland completely gobbled through the cellular walls that supposedly separate club hip-hop from IDM, dub, and sheer Martian lunacy to create a mutant masterpiece so intoxicating that Busta Rhymes (of all people) sounds completely justified in his mid-album recommendation that the record come equipped with a designated driver. Elliott plays the perfect hostess to her steady succession of A-list guests, keeping the drinks filled and ashtrays emptied without ever letting anyone forget who pays the electric bill. And Timbaland's jam-packed, sanitized-fresh production remains astonishing; from the outrageously salacious funk of "Dog in Heat" and "Lick Shots" through the still-irresistible Morse code convulsions of "Get Ur Freak On" to the fervent Sign O' The Times gospel of "Higher Ground". Other artists might work harder at busting frontiers, but few have managed to do it with Missy's sheer hot-wired joy. --Matthew Murphy

075: M83
Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts
[Mute; 2003]

Pulling from a rock-meets-Metropolis palette, M83's Before The Dawn Heals Us navigates glow-stick landscapes and culminates time again in bouts of Wagnerian bombast. On this earlier gem, Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, French aesthetes Anthony Gonzalez and Nicolas Fromageau take a more synthesized shot at digital romanticism with half the indulgence, cheaper sounding keyboards, and-- in hindsight-- a bummer of a lack of live drums. Depending on how you like your cyborg melodrama, this could be either welcome respite or a complete downer; regardless, there's enough buzzing power, ringing hooks, and joie de vivre to keep just about anyone with an inkling of an interest in hazy keys and gigantic guitars more than happy. Think of M83 as the airborne collision between a new wave Matmos posse and a Mogwai laser-light show (really, only later did the My Bloody Valentine name-dropping start to make legitimate sense). Regardless of the comparisons, if you prick the whirls of M83's echos, you'll draw blood, which is more than you can say about most electro-based, Robocop boogie woogie. --Brandon Stosuy

074: Aesop Rock
Labor Days
[Definitive Jux; 2001]

The critical schism between gang-bangers and backpackers, if you believe the propaganda, seems to be to pit monosyllabic street smarts against smart-ass book learnin'. Some would say the former treasures immediacy and big beats over nuance and meaningful messages. Some would say the latter sacrifices brevity for depth and prides itself on musical and lyrical obfuscation. Clearly, these folks need to recognize that they can both be used to cook chicken soup, and there are plenty of performers on both sides of the divide that can be standard bearers regardless of where they currently stand.

This is where Labor Days comes in, but not so much because of Aesop-- though he is an excellent MC, there are plenty of spots where he gets in his own way ("Life's not a bitch, life is a beautiful woman/ You only call her a bitch 'cause she wouldn't let you get that pussy") and crosses that line where nerds begin to earn their wedgies. The album's true strength lies in the production (offered by Blockhead, Omega One, and Aesop himself). Labor Days puts forth a more refined version of Wu-Tang's orchestral shimmy, providing Aesop a sturdy platform where he can scat-a-bee-boop about sidewalk artists and the daily grind and other workday concerns and not resort to sterile soapboxing. Take it from the Greek guy-- if you're going to try to teach folks a lesson, it's better to do so without sounding like a teacher. --David Raposa

073: Deerhoof
Reveille
[Kill Rock Stars; 2002]

Deerhoof are the best band out there right now. They are better than your favorite band. If your favorite band is Deerhoof, they are better than you think. And if you're in Deerhoof, congratulations, I think your band's awesome. Reveille? It's Apple O' in crystalis: rougher, maybe slightly more surprising, noisier but never loses sight of melody, tight in that "least tight band ever" sort of way. Sonic Youth openly advertised their Deerhoof love after Reveille -- probably because they knew the Frisco quartet they'd influenced finally had them beat. --Nick Sylvester

072: Sleater-Kinney
One Beat
[Kill Rock Stars; 2002]

Sleater-Kinney do this thing where they sing with enormous force and conviction about huge, personal subjects without ever miring themselves in portentious self-righteousness or cloying melodrama. Their sixth album is their most ambitious; Corin Tucker sings about love and war and motherhood with fierce clarity and searing eloquence. But it's also their most immediately satisfying; Tucker and Carrie Brownstein's guitars dip and weave and slash with delirious sugar-rush abandon, while Tucker's biblical yowl and Brownstein's arch, playful gasp steamroll into glorious, full-bodied hook after glorious full-bodied hook and Janet Weiss's perfect drums keep everything moving constantly forward. The candyburst stomp of "Oh!" captures the dizzy, frantic rush of love's first blush while "Step Aside" triumphantly, passionately, and desperately states its intent to fucking rock you. Best of all is "Sympathy", Tucker's song for her newborn son, a raw, bruising scream of ecstasy and fear and helplessness and awe. --Tom Breihan

071: The Shins
Oh, Inverted World
[Sub Pop; 2001]

I call this band Les Savvy Fey because their smooth debut archly manipulates so many stereotypical fan-factions. "Know Your Onion" was practically crass bait for geeky music critics: blending some of the best moves of darlings such as the Beach Boys, the Who, the Kinks, and R.E.M., and including lyrics such as "Shut out, pimply and angry...Lucked out, found my favorite records." And of course, "New Slang" was practically cocaine atop a Honda key for a certain type of female who would go through great (and somewhat uniform) pains to be identified as "indie," but who would never identify as "indie." The tease continued with a seductive tune called "The Celibate Life". Oh, Inverted World is a coy buffet offering hundreds of portions on thin, meticulously arranged trays. The album's illusions are made more tempting by its historical context as the most hypnotic gem from the last dreamy summer before the new terror era began in earnest. --William Bowers

070: Sonic Youth
Murray Street
[Geffen; 2002]

Murray Street was an unexpected light at the end of the tunnel for both longtime and casual SY fans, as well as the first indication that Jim O'Rourke wasn't steering the plane into the mountain. If Sonic Youth's once-unpredictable penchant for feedback jams had to be indulged, then they could at least as be structured and effective as in "Karen Revisited", Lee Ranoldo's dark mirro to Kim Gordon's tribute. As for Kim, while we may never get another "Halloween" or "Shadow of a Doubt", her popstar-fascinated squealing over the noise squalls of "Plastic Sun" and "Sympathy for the Strawberry" are well-juxtaposed against Thurston Moore's rambling epics like "Disconnection Notice" or "Empty Page". If everyone was shouting Daydream Nation after this one, it's because Murray Street was the evidence that Sonic Youth could reach that level of greatness again. --Jason Crock

069: Erlend Øye
DJ-Kicks
[Studio K7; 2004]

We make mixes all the time: for ourselves, for exercising, for driving, for people we want to know we have a crush on them, for parties, to impress our friends, to suit some mood we predict we'll have at some point in the near future. Mixes are not just signposts for our tastes and our environment, but our lives, ourselves, really. Erlend Øye made a mix in 2004 that somehow managed to apply itself to almost all of the above situations for me and lots of others, which makes me really curious at all the allegations of "oh, but the beatmatching is terrible" and "oh, but indie kids are all supposed to be into dance music now". Øye's entry in the DJ-Kicks series is kindred to any mix made by a passionate, young music fan; full of good songs (and I'm convinced it ensured very good years for Phoenix, Justus Köhncke, Alan Braxe and Fred Falke), unabashed fandom, and even good old bedroom escapism via his own private sing-a-longs. Like any great album, it's easy to get lost in the flow of songs, and like any great mix, it makes all of them seem better than they might be alone. I couldn't ask for more. --Dominique Leone

068: 2 Many DJs
As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Vol. 2
[Pias; 2002]

Since we steal every good song for first kisses, O.C. soundtracks and low-budget gifts, we kinda deserve mind-fucks like Radio Soulwax. For instance: I was listening to The Stooges' "No Fun" the first time I was shot; when my mom was pregnant with my youngest sister, she piped Salt n Pepa's "Push It" into the womb to encourage a premature birth. Now mashed up, whenever the song comes on all I can think of is my mom shooting bullets out her vagina. --Nick Sylvester

067: Herbert
Bodily Functions
[Studio K7; 2001]

I'll never forget when my friend Heather showed me that she could rotate her head and her hips not only in different directions, but at totally different speeds. I just didn't know that you could do that with your body. Which brings me to this album, which sets the feet and the heart in sneaky syncopation. Conflict of interest alert: I contributed some laser eye surgery noises to this album (it has a loosely worn "samples of human bodily noise" theme) and remixed one of its singles. But I didn't contribute one iota of Herbert's slithery melodic gifts, his innate understanding that when you mic something you have already begun to play it, his nous for when to back off and when to pile on textural detail (a fatal Cleopatra to most electronic producers), his refusal to cut corners compositionally or strategically, or his knack for tilting Rhodes piano melodies, scuttling house rhythms and wry lyrics in opposite directions, stretching a taut pop canvas over the whole thing, and then reclining in the cool shade cast by this delicate tension. Sublimely intimate and resolutely modern, this album is at its best when, as on "Leave Me Now", Matthew Herbert's structures and Dani Siciliano's vocal phrasing stare each other down, take an elegant turn, and then, joyously, click right back into place. Yes, you can do that with your body. Go on, try it. --Drew Daniel

066: Basement Jaxx
Kish Kash
[Astralwerks; 2003]

065: Basement Jaxx
Rooty
[Astralwerks; 2001]

Depending on how strongly you feel about the Jaxx (and this is assuming you care about them at all), Rooty and Kish Kash's back-to-back placing up here in the mid-60s is either an affirmation of Felix Buxton & Simon Ratcliffe's consistency or proof positive that well-adjusted dance music still isn't afforded the same critical respect as poorly-adjusted guitar music. If astonishingly produced, maximalist, grin-inducing dance is your bag (sounds terrible, doesn't it), I don't know how you could possibly ever want more than what Rooty and Kish Kash provide.

That said, the reason these records suffer on critical and commercial terms is also the very thing that makes them special. Both have always felt gloriously out-of-step with the highly codified, nomenclature-obsessed world of dance music-- even when the comparatively pop-minded big beat was happening, Rooty wasn't it. A composite of electro, house, wet funk, songful pop, and whatever the hell the incredible "Romeo" is, Rooty was always the purple elephant in the room, the record whose place didn't exist outside of Pringles and Levi's commercials.

Even more far-reaching was 2003's Kish Kash, which at its best, sounded like the aural equivalent of Shiva's rainbow cumshot. Containing fused-together fragments of disco, electro, acid, bollywood, new wave, and whatever the hell the incredible "Living Room" is, Kish Kash's gaudy world collage fell by the wayside next to the minimalist sounds of microhouse and grime. Oh well-- at least Felix and Simon had the good sense to dress Dizzee up in pretty colors while they had him. --Mark Pytlik

064: Animal Collective
Here Comes the Indian
[Paw Tracks; 2003]

Sung Tongs' deconstructed Beach Boys harmonies transformed Animal Collective from Brooklyn's experimental favs to nationally recognized critical darlings, but with a back catalogue including Here Comes the Indian-- as well as Campire Songs' mellow cricket roast and Danse Manatee's spiraling raconteur-- there's no reason the crossover needed to take so long. Like the hidden treasure at the end of a Caroliner Rainbow, Here Comes the Indian is Sung Tongs' raw, Ritalin chomping older brother. Recorded in a psychedelic cauldron, there's the kinetic call-and-response/lazy day clap around a capella of "Hey Light", "Native Belle"'s centrifugal merry-go-round safety dance, flitting Scarborough fireflies and spattering Midsummer Night's hardcore propulsivity via "Slippi" (etc), all of which is salad-tossed from treetops by clever, ecstatic wood deities speaking tongues with heavy reverb accents. --Brandon Stosuy

063: Cat Power
You Are Free
[Matador; 2003]

Chan Marshall's pained self-consciousness, which has exhibited itself in countless awkward shows, is notorious among fans and detractors alike, who find her Cat Power persona alternately magnetic and frustrating. But what makes her sixth album, You Are Free, so surprising is how unself-conscious she sounds, even as she sings about the terror of inhabiting the spotlight, and even as she shares that spotlight with guests like Eddie Vedder and Dave Grohl. On the title track she excuses Kurt Cobain for taking his own life, even identifying with his fatally conflicted earnestness; on the next song, she lays out her artistic mission: "Don't fall in love with the autograph, just fall in love when you sing your song." Nothing else sounds as self-reflexive as those first two tracks, but the album expands her hushed sound with songs that go beyond the stark intimacy of previous work and with a performance that is equally contemplative and sensuous. The result is an album that sounds like a battle but ultimately lives up to its title-- Marshall sounds freer than ever. --Stephen M. Deusner

062: Iron & Wine
The Creek Drank the Cradle
[Sub Pop; 2002]

Long before Margaret Mitchell, the American South was lending itself to romanticism-- there's something about the muggy summer days or the wide, lolling rivers. Iron & Wine's Sam Beam adds his grainy, stripped-down songs to that tradition with The Creek Drank the Cradle, his debut. The whispered-in-your-dreams intimacy of his compositions brings to mind other singer/songwriters like Nick Drake or Elliott Smith, but even their most uplifting works were always tinged with resigned self-loathing. Beam sings about love like someone joyful and humbled to be in its grasp, from the earth-warming laughter in "Lion's Mane" to the touching keepsakes of "Weary Memories". The tangled history of the South breathes complexity into Beam's rosy visions through the bare-bones arrangements. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville deemed the South a land "gone to sleep." He was speaking of its politics, but Beam's understated anthems are lullabies worthy of a ride along the Mississip' or the reflected vista from Lookout Mountain in the corner of a lover's eye. --Marc Hogan

061: The Books
Thought for Food
[Tomlab; 2002]

Often when a record needs a certain kind of technology to happen, technology becomes in some way the music's subject. The Books collage approach could never have happened without a computer (at least not with a budget this low), but Thought For Food sounds old and creaky, like it was sort of always there. Though this was a big and surprising record for a lot of people upon its release, The Books don't make music of extremes, and Thought For Food will never make you cry or dance. Instead, they celebrate a peaceful state of quiet reflection, those moments when you feel curious about the world and want to know all the details. If you've been there, Thought For Food is the perfect soundtrack. --Mark Richardson

060: Spoon
Girls Can Tell
[Merge; 2001]

Recording Girls Can Tell after their brief, misguided coffee break on Elektra left them frustrated and label-less, Britt Daniel and the men of Spoon certainly had no reason to swagger into the studio brimming with confidence. And a quick peek at the album's lyric sheet would seem to verify the band's self-doubt ("How come I feel so washed up at such a tender age now?") and disappointment ("Tough break handjob sent me back home to Ma, back to Cowtown and the fish shop and the mall"). But here there's absolutely nothing hesitant or uncertain about the band's music or their faith in it, with Daniel flicking off his dynamite pop hooks like 100ドル bills off a fat roll. Throughout the album the band show themselves equally adept at the brooding simmer of "Everything Hits at Once", the folkish pallbearer's lament "10:20 A.M", and the angular, bass-heavy "Me and the Bean", and prove once again the endlessly restorative powers of brilliant songcraft. --Matthew Murphy

059: M.I.A. / Diplo
Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1
[Hollertronix; 2004]

In a few weeks, when Arular becomes the best album of the next five years, people will probably shelf the Diplo mixtape that preceded the official release. That's fine, really-- I say leave Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1 in 2004. The tape dropped a few days before the presidential election, and when shit went bad November 2, we were fortunate that M.I.A didn't disappoint. If the election dissipated most if all the hope we had in the social power of pop, M.I.A.'s smattered canvassing of world revolution, enhanced by Diplo's rio baile funk accents and weighty instrumentals, re-sparked us. --Nick Sylvester

058: Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Fever to Tell
[Interscope; 2003]

The early 00s New York scene that begat the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, among others, resembled the early 80s New York scene, when buzz often outweighed talent and hip young artists like Julian Schnabel and Ashley Bickerton sold works for exorbitant amounts before the paint had dried. Likewise, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs earned a great deal of hype and suspicion before they even released a full album, let alone their eponymous ep. But Fever to Tell didn't just live up to all the band's press; it surpassed it. The album conveys such ragged spontaneity and glorious disarray that it seems unimaginable that these dozen songs (counting the hidden track) could have been written down beforehand. Instead, they feel more like the band found pieces of them on street corners and in bar bathrooms, in gutters and unmade beds, then cobbled them together during an all-nighter. Despite the hype, money, and inevitable backlash, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs managed to create something exciting, vital, and durable: Fever to Tell survives as art and not merely as an artifact of a particular scene. --Stephen M. Deusner

057: Ted Leo & the Pharmacists
Hearts of Oak
[Lookout; 2003]

Hearts of Oak proved that there was hope yet for white people by being a thing of intelligence, spirit, and talent from-- whodathunkit-- an intelligent, spirited, and talented man/band. Throughout this even-paced disc, Leo sings on par with the leader of any heralded glam-band filtered through an Elvis-Costello-versus-George-Michael colander. With the exception of a few percussive breakdowns, he plays the guitar as if he rigged it to generate electricity for his amp. Even better, he writes adventurous lyrics that go political and religious, yet sustain a healthy slogan-to-observation-to-analysis ratio. Boogie-provoking, and implicitly/explicitly ambiguous about its subjects (nostalgia, the existence of God, nationalism, rock), Hearts of Oak should have been bundled as a diet supplement called Vitamin Lightning. "Bridges, Squares" alone sounds like a pastiche of bands that could have made the Carter-Reagan segue easier on the brain. --William Bowers

056: The Postal Service
Give Up
[Sub Pop; 2003]

Give Up sounds like that scene from season one of "The O.C." where Seth jumps up on Summer's kissing-booth table and demands that she stop ignoring him and kiss him in front of everyone. It's the sound of a hyper-articulate emo dork pulling his head out of his ass and staring the outside world straight in the face, an emo album that dares to be something other than emo. Jimmy Tamborello's twinkling, shimmering sonics sound like Boards of Canada after a pitcher of Kool-Aid and an afternoon watching cartoons. Ben Gibbard sings like Bernard Sumner having a really intense conversation on the floor of his dorm room at three in the morning when he totally has a final in, like, a few hours. "Such Great Heights" is the song that Natalie Portman should've played for Zach Braff, and "Nothing Better" is the Human League's "Don't You Want Me?" in a Ramen-stained hoodie and yesterday's socks-- at least until the beat drops out and that amazing string sample comes in. --Tom Breihan

055: Cannibal Ox
The Cold Vein
[Definitive Jux; 2001]

Cannibal Ox's math and science teachers must have been rather fierce, because while many of this group's admirers fixate on the comic book apocalypse imagery that runs through their work, I'm convinced that there is in fact a strange mathematical and (meta)physical subtext to this album: Vordul Megilah and Vast Aire keep insisting upon medians and modes and parallels and adjacencies, while limning a cosmology of dark, oppressive forces that flicker in and out of view like ambassadors from the kind of non-Euclidean occult geometries that drive people insane in H. P. Lovecraft's short stories. Songtitles about Asgard and El-P's smoggy, proggy production keep pulling you up to a twinkling, celestial Roger Dean empyrean full of acid fuzz, warrior horns and Wagnerian string-swells gone foghorn long-- and then the rhymes slam you down on the hard concrete of poverty, addiction, and predatory violence, puncturing this sonic utopia with luciferian ingenuity. From the stark ethical choices of their mini-narrative "Vein" to the gently knowing humor of "The F-Word" (where Vast raps: "The Big Bang theory/ What is this, a trend?/ You ask a girl out/ And the universe extends?") to the Hieronymous Bosch hell of "Iron Galaxy", there's a desolate brilliance and sharp wit that is much missed. One Cannibal Ox album is the loneliest number. --Drew Daniel

054: Joanna Newsom
The Milk-Eyed Mender
[Drag City; 2004]

At first glance, Joanna Newsom-- with her eccentric, childlike vocals, her angelic harp, and her complex, thorny lyricism-- might resemble a visitor from another world. However, once you become acclimated to her peculiarities (and anybody who's digested much American folk as anthologized by Harry Smith or Alan Lomax has surely endured voices more unorthodox than Newsom's) the intricately knotted patchwork of her songs teems with life-affirming beauty. With lyrics that weave bizarre non-sequiters ("even mollusks have weddings, though solemn and leaden") with homespun aphorisms ("Never get so attached to a poem, you forget truth that lacks lyricism") into starkly personal journal entries, songs like "The Book of Right On" and "Sadie" become more profoundly moving with each successive listen. And though her songs abound with such fanciful creations as dirigibles, cockles, and bean sprouts; it's not long before you realize there's nothing otherworldly about Newsom's talents-- she just has a unique gift for capturing the stray magic that already exists on this planet. --Matthew Murphy

053: The Dismemberment Plan
Change
[Desoto; 2001]

"Change" is an understatement: This record is as far from the Dismemberment Plan's frenzied mission statements of ! and Is Terrified as you can get. However, once you get past the grown-up tone (and a few stumbles like "It could have been off the hook, now"), everything that made the band great is here: Thoughtful lyrics, hyperactive Motown-robbing rhythms, and melting their influences into a sound that was uniquely theirs. It's easier to play connect-the-dots with the Plan's favorite artists on Change, as their influences are more clearly explored: the Remain in Light workout of "Sentimental Man", the Björk-ish samples that saddle up next to the crying-emo chorus of "Face of The Earth"; "Secret Curse" picks off the chorus to R.E.M's "So. Central Rain" and struts all the way to the end zone, and the Paul Simon-storytelling over laid-back funk on "Ellen and Ben" closed the album (and their career) with a big hug and few thousand "yeeahuuuh"'s. Still irreverent while poignant, still goofy while gallant, the Plan at least had the sense to go out on top. --Jason Crock

052: Max Tundra
Mastered By Guy at the Exchange
[Tigerbeat6; 2002]

Ben Jacobs knew exactly when to quit: He piled layers upon layers of beats and bright synths onto twelve pop songs, obsessively cramming horns, accordions and keys into every second of the record, and practically drove the whole thing over a cliff. The result is exhilirating IDM/pop, yet compared to the music, Jacobs wrote lyrics about nebbishly mundane events-- boy fancies girl, boy treats a cold sore, boy spends weeks in the studio-- and sang them in a voice that is pleasing but not striking, sounding like any number of smart and withdrawn men you might see hunched over a computer in an unkempt bedroom. And there's the charm. Jacobs transforms his daily rut with digital effusiveness, making a sixth or seventh love feel like the first, and coming to peace with any lousy day job that helps him pay for his music. He sums up the whole project when he sings that the colored diodes in his studio remind him of his lover's dress; MBGATE finds the explosions that roil inside us all, and draws them out one light at a time. --Chris Dahlen

051: Prefuse 73
One Word Extinguisher / Extinguished
[Warp; 2003]

Every time I've reviewed a project by Prefuse 73's Scott Herren, I've received an e-mail response from him...and it's not always a polite thank you note. But the fact that Herren does bother to personally respond at all is an anomaly in a genre where anonymity is typically protected like a fortress, just as Herren's music frequently carries far more emotional weight than that of his IDM peers. Whatever the backstory, One Word Extinguisher wrings real feeling out of its technological innovations, maybe because Prefuse so expertly walks the unincorporated regions between electronic music, hip-hop, and jazz. Glitched vocals stand in for communication breakdowns, arrhythmia beats project uneasiness, and warm keyboards comfortingly stroke hair. Oh, and just to show how easy it all comes to him, Herren also turned a hard drive dump into the brilliant companion megamix of Extinguished. --Rob Mitchum

050: Kanye West
The College Dropout
[Roc-A-Fella; 2004]

Kanye West is a prancing contradiction. The College Dropout's boasted a devastatingly successful combination of wonton (and admitted) social irresponsibility and biting social commentary. Kanye is a exercise in ideological wanderlust in that he advocates for so much, his positions come full circle. He puts his cross above the mantle next to his Louis Vuitton backpack. He pushes for black advancement but openly mocks formal education. He mixes crotch-grabbing posturing with misty-eyed reminiscences. And in truly iconic fashion, he sees no inconsistencies.

West's enigmatic outlook fortunately spilled onto his music. The utter diversity of his collaborations immediately earns laudits for a major label release (as he shameless points on "Last Call") and easily births two-headed beasts like Jay-Z/J. Ivy and Freeway/Mos Def. The merging of underground and mainstream artists only demonstrated Kanye's ambivalence about his position in hip-hop. "We Don't Care" had us triumphantly screaming with the kids while "Slow Jamz" peeled off our jeans and socks. And at the end, "Family Business" stood at the door with the photo album and a plate of mama's pies. Not to mention Kanye's Trimspa endorsement on "The New Workout Plan". Kon covers so much ground that we should hope he can decide what he wants to be when he grows up. --Jamin Warren

049: Lightning Bolt
Wonderful Rainbow
[Load; 2003]

Though they haven't surpassed the gloriousness of earlier aggro group Harry Pussy, Providence's Lightning Bolt certainly pounded out a colorful packet of noise on Wonderful Rainbow, turning bass and drums into a fleshy, distended landscape. The loudest moments get deserved props ad infinitum, but it's actually the more tentative, spare beauty of the tiny "Hello Morning" and the finger-tapping/chirping of the title track that establish the compelling dynamics that separate these ragtag, stage-free comic nerds from a seemingly endless slew of like-minded noise assassins. (Of course, there's also entropic metal scowl of "Dracula Mountain" and it's equally gargantuan neighbors.) More important than volume, Lighting Bolt-- along with Wolf Eyes and Black Dice-- gave uninitiated youngsters an idea of how to differentiate between good noise and tiresome wanking. --Brandon Stosuy

048: ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead
Source Tags & Codes
[Interscope; 2002]

This record is full of moments that sound ridiculous when taken out of context, the kinds of flourishes that never should have flown in our cynical 00's: The spastic drum fills from "It Was There That I Saw You", the strings and bells of "Another Morning Stoner", the Muppety shouting and bombast of "Days of Running Wild", the Brian Wilson-aping segueway that closes "Relative Ways". This is a record written by kids of the 90s, kids who listened to the same Sonic Youth and Sunny Day Real Estate records that a lot of us did, and when it came time to write their opus, they went as big as possible, and Source Tags succeeds on its sheer wide-eyed exuberance and I-heart-rocknroll sincerity. --Jason Crock

047: The Shins
Chutes Too Narrow
[Sub Pop; 2003]

The Shins occupy a peculiar realm dominated by bands whose skills are too good for either complete suppression or mainstream success. Along with the Walkmen, Interpol, and Air, they've got Saturn commercials and "The O.C." locked down; but, Natalie Portman's iPod aside, seldom do these bands infiltrate starrier domains. With any luck, Chutes Too Narrow will get its due during the next generation's scheduled round of VH1 canonization; for now, the album stands apart from even its most competitive peers, earning rarely bestowed compliments of the utmost simplicity: consummate songcraft, an immaculate recorded treatment, and lyrics that make as much or as little sense as you assign them.

Opener "Kissing the Lipless" consolidates the band's strengths into a sleek pop farrago. Each new layer incorporates seamlessly yet feels instantly essential to the whole. The same goes for the regal promenade of "Saint Simon", the exalted shuffle-bop of "So Says I", and the organ-drenched wistfulness of "Pink Bullets". It all sounds simple enough, but Chutes Too Narrow is so nuanced it carries a nagging air of something amiss. You can never remember a Shins song exactly how it happens because the band are operating on some mystic level that tweaks memory and gives the illusion of things that aren't really there. Perhaps it's that subversiveness that's keeping the mainstream away. --Sam Ubl

046: TV on the Radio
Young Liars EP
[Touch & Go; 2003]

On the Young Liars EP, TV on the Radio crafted something more complete and satisfying than many top bands' best full-length efforts. Critics spoke of the comparative vulnerability of the EP's follow-up, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes as if it were an evolutionary character trait, but I think that album's quaking timorousness was the sound of humility, of a group of musicians absolutely cowed by their sudden, out-of-left-field greatness. Young Liars is a phantom Frankenstein, a bulletproof yet sensitive creature reared through unmitigated nurture that seemed to reap havoc where it never stepped. It may have changed everything, or nothing at all: At once timely and timeless, its persuasive power is endless, starting with the asteroid shuffle of "Satellite", winding through the rubble-strewn "Blind", and capping things-- presumably-- with "Young Liars", perhaps the premier fusty-garage-to-digital-age union of the decade. That indie's best a cappella caper this side of the Futureheads is tacked on as an unlisted afterthought is further evidence of Young Liars' boundless surprise, breadth of imagination, and world-weary genius. --Sam Ubl

045: The Arcade Fire
Funeral
[Merge; 2004]

Stuck in the cold winter of Montreal, stuck in grief for lost loved ones, stuck in an introspective rut over their conflicted childhoods, the members of the Arcade Fire look for transcendence in music, as millions of teens and twentysomethings have been doing for more than 50 years. The miracle is not that they actually found it, but that they are able to communicate it so intuitively, so urgently, and so movingly on their debut. Funeral sounds elegantly mercurial as the band finds new uses for indie-rock conventions like crunchy guitars, vaguely dance-derived rhythms, string sections, and unrelenting self-reflection. Relating tales of suburban dystopia and snowbound emotions, these songs-- which are arty and dramatic, yet earthy and tensely sincere-- change shape restlessly from verse to verse and intensify as they move toward hard-won catharses, each building on the previous song until the album's scope becomes novelistic and its emotional payoff undeniable. --Stephen M. Deusner

044: Deerhoof
Apple O'
[Kill Rock Stars; 2003]

Through all the flailing drums and angular, disjointed guitar lines, I hear Satomi Matsuzaki's squeaky melodies and skeletons of what should be Zappa etudes but instead come out much more...approachable. Deerhoof excel at a forgotten art wherein the complex is made simple, the convoluted made cute. Of course, "cute" isn't really an endearing quality for some people, but when it's balanced out with raucousness and dissonance, as on Apple O', it's just sour enough to sip straight. It's easy to give the band the benefit of the doubt because their tunes never leave us behind. In fact, it's fun running alongside them, humming with those squeaky songs, perfectly content with stories about flowers and pandas because nothing so benign could ever turn out bad. As we begin the second half of the decade, I wonder if this kind of music will be deemed too quaint for reality. I hope not. --Dominique Leone

043: Mclusky
Do Dallas
[Too Pure / Beggars; 2002]

It would be tempting to write off the sophomore slump as a rock myth if reality didn't support it so frequently. In a characteristically contrary gesture, the ornery Welsh post-humans in Mclusky pumped every iota of their ferocious misanthropy into their second album, which remains the purest distillation of their considerable wrath. Do Dallas doesn't grow on you; it savagely waylays you. It gleefully garrotes you toward epiphany. It erupts with an immediate, palpable force, the sort of spiritual cataclysm one experiences when faced with the primitive imperatives of brute violence. Bearing traces of Pixies, the Jesus Lizard, Gang of Four, and Wire, Do Dallas comes into its own with stunted rhythms and thrashing, mutant guitars, as singer Andy Falkous's deadpan, absurdist disdain locks and unloads upon trendy fashion bands on "Collagen Rock", "Fuck this Band", and "To Hell With Good Intentions" ("My band is better than your band/ We've got more songs than a song convention SING IT!"), and sprays invective on just about everything else on "The World Loves Us and Is Our Bitch". Being hated never felt so good. --Brian Howe

042: Manitoba
Up in Flames
[Domino; 2003]

Few records in the last five years displayed such a shocking about-face in terms of the artists' previous sound. Who would have thought in early 2002 that a record of kaleidoscopic dreampop channeling 60s psychedelia through the same busted lens as early Mercury Rev would come from "Handsome Dick" Manitoba, middle-aged lead singer of the notorious punk band The Dictators? While many old fans abandoned him completely, convinced that he'd sold out, gone soft, and was simply following trends, Manitoba quickly found a receptive (if smaller) audience for his gorgeous soft-focus blissout. --Mark Richardson

041: Godspeed You Black Emperor!
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
[Kranky; 2000]

Before M83 had a lock on outsized instrumental opulence, Godspeed You Black Emperor! wore the jewel-encrusted crown. Even people who write off the Canadian post-rock ensemble as crescendo-mongering showoffs would be hard pressed to deny that their sprawling opus, Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, is anything short of transcendent. Godspeed is the post-rock Platonic Ideal, and this double album is the fullest realization of their art we're likely to hear. Antennas is as engulfing and boundless as open, uncharted waters, churning with bombastic string sections, oversized melodic phrasing, vast tidal rhythms, sweepingly lyrical guitar passages, apocalyptic vocal samples, and yeah, many a spine-tingling upsurge. Everything about this record is a little too big; it spills out of windows, overflows basins, and threatens to sunder ceilings. Whether it's setting your teeth on edge with relentless, cacophonous pageantry, or lulling you into a somnolent torpor with some twinkling lullaby, Antennas consistently engages, transports and mystifies. It creates a tremulous pressure that mounts with no upper limit, a release so prolonged it becomes a more enchanting sort of tension. --Brian Howe

040: The Fiery Furnaces
Blueberry Boat
[Sanctuary; 2004]

At the start of Blueberry Boat, Eleanor Friedberger loses her safety locket and effectively goes down the rabbit hole-- and only a cult of listeners chose to follow. While a handful of critics, mainly on the web, raved about-- and fought for-- Blueberry Boat as a modern masterpiece of adventurous album rock, the plebes dismissed it with "that's nice," or "it sure is long" or "please turn that off." But that was fine for the believers, who got sucked in the way lonely adults reread Harry Potter and who find, oh, Arcade Fire a tad blunt by comparison. With so many crevices to explore it's easy to forget that this was meant to be fun, to hurtle rather than bewilder, to evoke childhood not with dewy nostalgia but in the joy of playing hooky and landing in only enough trouble to be fun. I could argue it all over again, but it's easier to repeat what most of us told the disbelievers: "Maybe you should start with their singles?" --Chris Dahlen

039: Radiohead
Hail to the Thief
[Capitol; 2003]

Old habits die hard-- having left the grand spotlight-sweeping gestures of "Creep" and The Bends far behind, Radiohead still can't help but sloganeer disenfranchisement. "The raindrops." "This is the gloaming." "Little babies' eyes." "We want young blood." "Just because you feel it doesn't mean it's there." This isn't subtle stuff, even if Thom Yorke spends a good amount of time singing (mewling, wailing) in a near-whisper. These fragments repeat endlessly, transforming into funereal rallying cries, the perfect chants to accompany these resolute dirges. So damned serious and earnest, these guys. And, of course, there's title of the album, utilizing a horrifically awkward pun to announce itself and its intentions. Yet where the words and their purported import might be cumbersome, the music is sublime-- electrostatic shocks mingle with three-penny operatics and Sophoclean choral uprisings as if they're long-lost friends kicking back a few cocktails. Even the Horsemen of the Apocalypse need some down time, y'know? Yes, this is An Important Album, all of it, every scratch and breath, every tic and squeal. But don't let that nonsense stop you from enjoying it. --David Raposa

038: The Rapture
Echoes
[Universal; 2003]

I'll be honest: I'm still pretty disappointed that this dancepunk thing hasn't really taken off. Sure, we got a bit enthusiastic about Echoes, but can you really blame us? It seemed like the rock club and the discotheque were heading for the kind of cross-breeding that only occurs every decade or so, and usually results in a boom period for innovation and drug-taking. But the failure of the scene to achieve liftoff isn't the Rapture's fault, as their collaboration with the DFA should've been enough to light a fire under the U.S. indie scene-- if not under the nation's dancefloors. The gritty basement show vibe of the album's middle section, anchored down by the delirious "House of Jealous Lovers", is everything the genre needed to be: immediate, groovy, and not afraid of using too much hi-hat. "I Need Your Love" is the other branch of the road, pristine tech-house with Luke Jenner's frantic Robert Smith impression thawing the icy rhythm. Too bad everybody kept on talking about it, but nobody got it done. --Rob Mitchum

037: Ghostface
The Pretty Toney Album
[Def Jam; 2004]

Supreme Clientele was an unhinged, hallucinatory masterpiece of raw, paranoid expressionism. But on Pretty Toney, Ghostface has both of his feet firmly on the ground; his voice has a comfortable, lived-in warmth, better suited to heartfelt contemplation than abstract frenzy. The thick, lush production pulls swollen pianos and triumphant horns and liquid strings from luxurious, tear-drenched 70s soul, giving Ghost the space and lift he needs to hit tough emotional notes. And he hits those notes hard, opening the album with a few tracks of rock-hard street-rap nihilistic strut but soon veering off into desperate devotion ("Save Me Dear"), sweaty sex ("Tush"), bittersweet nostalgia ("Holla"), and sad, impotent longing ("Be This Way"). The album closes with a revelatory one-two punch as the blaring sirens and gripping, breathless scramble of "Run" give way to the soaring, gentle lilt of "Love", a sweet, natural tribute to the good things in life. --Tom Breihan

036: The Streets
A Grand Don't Come For Free
[Vice; 2004]

It's oddly appropriate that Mike Skinner's career arc looks more like that of a young fiction writer than that of a rising pop star, following the short stories and character sketches of Original Pirate Material with A Grand Don't Come for Free, his first novel. Skinner's storytelling skills far exceed his skills as a rapper or producer, and he knows it. His best musical touches exist to enhance his words: the hazy woosh of drugs kicking in on "Blinded By the Lights", the giddy, drunken guitar slosh of "Fit But You Know It", the angry throbbing pulse of "What Is He Thinking?". Skinner has a great writer's eye for detail: A halfway peeled label on a beer bottle, the hairspray taste of E pills, the one spot in your apartment where you can get decent cell phone reception. And he gives us a perfect ending; the moment where the piano comes in halfway through "Empty Cans" feels like the sun breaking through the clouds. --Tom Breihan

035: Jay-Z
The Black Album
[Roc-A-Fella; 2003]

Revisiting The Black Album while bearing the gift of retrospection certainly complicates Jay-Z's "final" performance. The terminal condition of Hov's 10th album achieved both implicit and explicit nods and culminated in his on-screen death at the end of the uncut "99 Problems" video. But while we dried our tears and pondered Jay-Z's breathless flow, the ghost of Hovito reviewed his Stephen Covey time-management plan to drop two more albums, produce a DVD, and populate Def Jam's top executive suite.

Despite revoking his goodbyes (again), The Black Album is brilliant in its execution. Enlisting every hot producer from the last decade (including a very grateful 9th Wonder) and eschewing guest appearances (save a hyper-harmonic croon from Pharrell and his mother's memories), The Black Album was a singles machine. Moreover, this release revealed a disrobed and heavily honest Jay-Z. Remove the bravado, player façade and State Property entourage and Shawn Carter is both circumstances' victim and entrepreneur. Anyone who thinks Kanye introduced emotional integrity to hip-hop need only hear one verse of "December 4th". And then to juxtapose that vulnerability with Timbaland's armpit farts on "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" is almost magical. So when Jay-Z wonders "We'll see what happens when I no longer exist," the answer is unequivocal legendary status (and probably more albums). --Jamin Warren

034: Sufjan Stevens
Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State
[Asthmatic Kitty/Sounds Familyre; 2003]

Browsing the Americana section of a record store-- if one even existed-- used to mean sifting through John Denver, James Taylor, and Don McLean albums. Enter this star-spangled gem from a Brooklyn-based songwriter and producer who invoked his now-infamous vagrant tendencies to promise us a record for all 50 states-- beginning with his birthplace, Michigan.

Music has a strange relationship with place: America is vast, overdeveloped, and maddeningly varied; for a record to accurately evoke its personality, it too has to be full of gaping holes, piled-high landfills, spiritless masses of pandemic symmetry, and the occasional national treasure. Michigan is almost a ruse, its surface is so beautiful. But look closer and you'll find enclaves of unemployed powerlessness, deep-rooted frustration, and mundane melodrama. Treating the state with the subtlety of a character study, Stevens makes factory layoffs, husbands and wives running into each other at Kmart, and other minutiae of recession America seem poignant and elemental. Despite its lurking cynicism, Michigan is ultimately hopeful, giving listeners reason to once again exalt America's vast, confused, apolitical beauty. --Sam Ubl

033: Missy Elliott
Under Construction
[Elektra; 2003]

Generally, the only rappers who adapt the aesthetic of old-school hip-hop are edgeless douchebags like the Black Eyed Peas or Jurassic 5. But when Missy Elliott raids the old-school bin, she's like a kid in a candy store, snatching up oozy elastic bass and giddy, pounding drum breaks and to-the-beat-y'alls, leaving the sanctimony on the shelf. It helps that Timbaland is constitutionally incapable of producing a track that doesn't sound like a gleaming alien starship; he makes Blondie and MC Lyte samples sound like miracles dropped from the sky. The nonsensical hooks of "Work It" and "Gossip Folks" take Missy's giddy gibberish to new levels of insane, cocky joy. Under Construction may have been Missy and Tim's victory lap after they changed the world with Miss E...So Addictive, but its deft comic touch and ecstatic bounce qualify it as a classic. It's also the only Missy Elliott album where the R&B tracks sound every bit as good as the club jams. --Tom Breihan

032: The Flaming Lips
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
[Warner Brothers; 2002]

Life is short. And a black belt named Yoshimi is saving the world from evil robots. I'm still not sure what this album's dual themes have to do with each other, but rarely have so many great songs been so immaculately produced. "Fight Test" turned Cat Stevens to a call to arms like no one else before Homeland Security. The title track is a meticulous masterwork of weird glee. Even the few duds ("Approaching Pavonis Mons" comes to mind) in hindsight possess a certain squiggly appeal. Nothing the Flaming Lips could have done would have equaled The Soft Bulletin, so Yoshimi 's live-in-the-now subtext might well be speaking to fans who, like Wayne's "Ego Tripping" narrator, were "waiting on a moment" that might never come again. But at its best, Yoshimi is a fittingly playful follow-up to one of the finest albums in recent memory. --Marc Hogan

031: Ted Leo & the Pharmacists
The Tyranny of Distance
[Lookout; 2001]

Ted Leo's Pharmacists were once an inside joke, a fake band name he used for the post-Chisel tours where only a reel-to-reel machine shared the stage with the frontman. But all that alone time did Leo well, and by the time his mechanical band morphed into flesh collaborators, the Rush fanatic had a singing and guitar style brash enough to carry a song all by himself. For Tyranny of Distance, the DC friends drafted for his studio band made up the platform Leo needed to fully attain his rightful status as indie rock's reigning guitar god, a point nicely illustrated by the album's centerpiece, "Timorous Me" and effects pedal tryouts like "St. John the Divine". Yet it isn't all fiery fretwork, as Tyranny's mania is fueled by Leo's belt-out singing and spastic spin on classic rock songwriting, drawing upon everything from Irish jigs to chamber strings to Thin Lizzy harmonics. --Rob Mitchum

030: Clinic
Internal Wrangler
[Domino; 2001]

What is an internal wrangler? I imagine it as a sort of cowboy of the psyche, Freud in boots with a gunbelt and 10-gallon hat sweeping into Cerebellum Town to do epic battle with the corrupt sheriff of our hang-ups and his deputies, our inner demons. Clinic came at it from a different angle, of course, defining it as a dark punk explosion of garbled syntax and paranoia shot through with waves of surf guitar, creepy melodica and song shards that mostly clocked in under three minutes long. Ade Blackburn's clench-teethed moan was capable of surprising range, even tenderness, grounding the scattershot tracklist with haunting ballads like "Goodnight Georgie" and "Distortions". But psychosis is the meat of the album, and it comes tossing the word salad every which way on blistering freakouts "The Return of Evil Bill", "Internal Wrangler", and "The Second Line", where words degenerate into gibberish heaps of syllables, and you wind up helplessly singing along to a guy who's saying "diggie diggie de momo no" while intravenous guitars bore into the core of your being. The Ornette Coleman-referencing cover art is oddly apropos; like Coleman, Clinic plays so freely with expectations on Internal Wrangler that they obliterate them, mixing traditional elements into something entirely new and exciting. --Joe Tangari

029: Fugazi
The Argument
[Dischord; 2001]

In 2002, I saw Fugazi from the bleachers of a gymnasium at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston while a couple thousand kids pogoed on the basketball courts, and the temperature in the room must have risen about 15 degrees over the course of the band's amazing, career-spanning set. Fugazi's most mythologized days may be the ones they spent burning up tiny rooms in DC, creating a DIY empire that crowned them kings of the underground, but they've never sounded better as a band than they did on The Argument. "Cashout" is a cogent, passionate lament for people displaced by eminent domain, "Full Disclosure" swings between maniacal screaming and melodic choruses filled with harmony vocals, "The Kill" is Fugazi's spookiest song, and "Nightshop" is an unstoppable raging bull in the China shop of overdevelopment and commercialization, featuring two drummers and a jaw-dropping acoustic guitar break. Fugazi are often thought of as little more than elder statesmen, but on The Argument they proved that they could play with the kids and win every time. --Joe Tangari

028: Liars
They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top
[Mute; 2002]

Remember, how you say, "dancepunk"? That was cute, huh? Gawd! We're so over that, right? Dancepunk is dead! Long-live freakfolk! But when Joanna Newsom is making your pets break their own necks to enjoy the sweet escape of death, Liars will be right where you left them-- as angry, nervous, and corrosive as ever, which is to say, very. Jittery funk beats set the listener up like soft hypnosis, guitars rake like claws, and Angus Andrews drinks glass after glass of battery acid, all for the audience's wonderment; forty minutes of raw tension and one mind-warping locked groove add up to, in hindsight, the unassailable, oddly transient, zenith of dance-punk. People wonder why they abandoned Trench 's sound after a single album-- it's 'cause they got it right the first time. Remember Gang of Four? Yeah, me neither. Just listen to "Mr. You're on Fire Mr." and enjoy yourself. --Eric Carr

027: Broken Social Scene
You Forgot It in People
[Arts & Crafts; 2002]

Broken Social Scene is one of seemingly thousands of bands comprised of the revolving cast of characters from Canada's thriving art-rock circles; its double-digit lineup contains members of Stars, Do Make Say Think, Metric, and A Silver Mount Zion, just to name a few. Their grand sophomore album, You Forgot It in People, blends the scene's more adventurous tenets with the sugary pop confections of Stars and locates a perfect equilibrium between melodic accessibility and vigorously inventive songwriting. With its powerful melodies, breathy indie-dude vocals, expert playing, and sharp musical contrasts (as incandescent, shoegazing guitar figures sear crisp glyphs onto billowy, diaphanous backgrounds), You Forgot It in People rejuvenates worn-out indie rock by injecting it with an enthusiasm, vitality, and technical facility it seldom enjoys. It's a furiously thrumming, spangled machine that never holds still, seesawing between instrumental and vocal tracks with a seamless continuity. Its exuberant spirit reminds you that it's the product of good friends just jamming out together; its mind-blowing chops remind you that the motherfuckers can play. A clattering, coasting, soaring, rambunctious space rock concoction. --Brian Howe

026: Fennesz
Endless Summer
[Mego; 2001]

From Tintern Abbey to Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche, Romantic sublimity finds its architectural epitome in the muted violence of the picturesque ruin; formal fragmentation imposes limits upon our access to an implied totality which struggles, we feel, to speak to us in the face of loss. With Endless Summer, Fennesz managed to transpose this dynamic into musical terms, fashioning a brilliantly seductive mirage by subjecting his instrumental performances to merciless blasts of digital signal processing, aliasing artifacts, clipped edits, and gnarled, ashen EQ. I have no idea whether or not a great lost album of sunshine guitar pop actually lies mummified beneath the gauzey layers of file-frottage, but as with the hallucinations induced by Psychocandy and Loveless, I feel that it is there. The endurance of this album lies neither in the swoony tune-writing abilities of its creator nor in the precision of his textures, but in the way that both already substantial elements have been made to reinforce each other. Perversely, the guitar's pathos expands immeasurably precisely because of the intrusive, prosthetic interference of the laptop. Many folly gardens have been subsequently built in imitation, but this ruin still stands above them all. --Drew Daniel

025: Brian Wilson
Smile
[Nonesuch; 2004]

Perhaps the best way to appreciate the triumph of Brian Wilson's newly completed Smile is to first consider what an utter catastrophe the restoration could've been. If Wilson and his collaborators, Van Dyke Parks and Darian Sahanaja, had mangled the Beach Boys' lost masterpiece (which, considering Wilson's always fragile psychological state, was a distinct possibility) the resulting disappointment would've dwarfed that which met such ill-guided creative resurrections as The Phantom Menace or the Beatles' "Free As a Bird". In this sense, there was no riskier musical project undertaken in the past half-decade, and thankfully we can now say that Wilson's courage has paid off in spades. Though undoubtedly not the same Smile the world would've received had it been completed back in the 60s, this record remains a staggering achievement. A surreal, frequently sublime journey through the lifespan of the American landscape and songbook, it might not be everything that Beach Boy fans have always dreamed of, but that it so resoundingly surpasses what most of us ever thought we'd get to hear is little short of miraculous. --Matthew Murphy

024: Boards of Canada
Geogaddi
[Warp; 2002]

Unfairly maligned at the time of its release for not deviating enough from BoC's landmark Music Has the Right to Children, in retrospect, Geogaddi registers as more tightly packed, even darker. It crackles and glows in a way that its predecessor rarely does, and leaves the impression that it was originally 130 minutes of music that's been somehow melted down into 65. As with nearly everything Boards make, there's a deep sense of black magic and mystery at work here-- from the presence of obscure geographical placeholders ("The Beach at Redpoint") to their abiding fascination with science and numerology ("The Smallest Weird Number") to veiled references to David Koresh and Charles Manson ("1969"), Geogaddi's content is as dense and as mysterious as its sounds. It's a straight-edge alternative to huffing angel dust and strapping flaming seashells to your ears. --Mark Pytlik

023: The Notwist
Neon Golden
[Domino; 2003]

After more than a decade of experimentation, Germany's the Notwist landed as if by accident on a seamless blend of computerized beats and guitar-pop. Just don't make the mistake of calling the former "cold" or the latter "warm"-- Neon Golden's textured electronics are every bit as organic as its banjos and saxophones, bringing high-tech down to Earth even better than the bear market. Markus Acher's tranquil voice speaks to this album's humanity even as his ESL lyrics ("You'll no longer be kissed and kind" on "One With the Freaks") cast the language in an alien light. "Pilot" pulsates with near-perfect dance-pop about desperation and escape. By the finale, "Consequence", the Notwist melt hearts when Acher repeatedly coos, "Never leave me paralyzed, love." Lap-pop is nearly as common now as garage rock was when this record was released, but rarely have both sides of the hyphen carried on so naturally. --Marc Hogan

022: The Microphones
The Glow, Pt. 2
[K Records; 2001]

Sewing sunspots onto rickety piano and sheets of pine-box distortion, The Glow Pt. 2 establishes an epic crackle/pop early and maintains its understated, sometimes explosive sense of space and dynamics until the end of track twenty. From joyous trumpets, overdriven drums, and tree-hugger incantations to those patented whispery body-electric epiphanies ("I'm alone except for the sound of insects flying around/ They know my red blood is warm still"), these Northwestern charms are as perfectly paced, ordered, and delivered as the scruffy acoustic elegance of Sebadoh's early masterpiece, III. Defining moments abound, but for starters pay attention to the acoustic jangle/Neutral Milk Hotel/crunk transition of "I Want Wind To Blow" and the lapidary title track. All considered-- and there's a lot to consider here-- it's no surprise Elvrum has yet to top what sounds like Emerson and Thoreau turning Nature and Walden into transcendental indie rock. --Brandon Stosuy

021: Radiohead
Amnesiac
[Capitol; 2001]

On what may be Radiohead's classiest and most restrained collection of songs, Thom Yorke ran endurance tests on his repertoire, having cast himself in a guitarless role that might be billed as a fight between his piano man, his personal jesus, and his paranoid android. Oddly pretty, the album's cynical showtunes slithered through pop history, flinched with futurism, drank dyspepsia, chewed troublegum, shriveled Big Brother, and inflated Chicken Little. Amnesiac crouched in its own deprivation chamber so elegantly that its initial misdiagnosis of being "10 songs in search of an album" would be forgotten if not for the reprise of Kid A's "Morning Bell". But even that echo was recast from a warm distant place, like a clone baby singing itself to sleep in a makeshift womb, its lullabies dreading much more than prequel-envy. --William Bowers

020: The Books
The Lemon of Pink
[Tomlab; 2003]

The Books' brand of sound collage-- pristine violin squeals, weird vocal samples, chopped-up organics, and plenty of silence-- manages to scramble classic Americana into something entirely unfamiliar. The Lemon of Pink has plenty of banjo, but no beard: Despite all those scratchy strings, the Books never dip into folk structure (or folk cliché), opting instead to twist all those disparate bits into a glitchy, throbbing, and beautiful whole. Unsurprisingly, The Lemon of Pink can seem strange and familiar all at once-- not unlike tumbling down a rabbit hole, arms flailing, skirt flying high, mouth half-open, eyes wide, slowly taking in all the swirling, oddly delicious distortions... and thinking that you must be in for quite an adventure. --Amanda Petrusich

019: Ghostface Killah
Supreme Clientele
[Sony; 2001]

Unless your name ended in RZA or GZA, working outside of the 36 chambers seemed like a risky move. As it happened, there were no worries for hip-hop's Mushmouth: From a man seemingly at war with grammar, Ghostface's Supreme Clientele was an astoundingly cohesive and profound endeavor. To be honest, I understand Toney about 40% of the time, and anyone claiming to do better can kiss my mulatto ass. When he drops shit like, "Supercalifragalisticexpialidocious/ Dociousaliexpifragalisticcalisuper/ Cancun, catch me in the room, eatin' grouper" on "Buck 50", it infuriates my fine-tuned sense of justice. It's not fair, I always think, he's just mashing words together! Ghostface's verses are so absurd and flow with such meticulous ease, you can't help but feel like the man is teasing you, drawing you into livid comprehension before kicking you in the balls. And your balls are humongous, dude. "Yo this rap is like ziti," he says. Absolutely... --Jamin Warren

018: Devendra Banhart
Rejoicing in the Hands
[Young God; 2004]

Once upon a time there was a brilliant young man who was written off by his foes as a freak or a joke because he didn't sing in a way that scanned with his particular era and gender and age bracket; but his supposed "weirdness" was in fact a function of just how narrow the pop marketplace's listening habits had become. What they saw as only an air of outsider innocence or a defensive shield was actually a clever, deeply artful approach to music-making; it was precisely because he knew a good deal about what he was doing and its place in the history of popular music that each tremor of his voice and strum of his fingers seemed to telescope further and further backwards into the past even as its archly constructed feints and bluffs held fast to the present moment. People found that if they let go a bit and got over the initial shock of that voice that, in fact, the dots got connected. It liberated them and gave them joy to hear this voice singing and follow these nimble fingers as they played.

Question: Who was this man?

A. Tiny Tim
B. Marc Bolan
C. Bob Dylan
D. Devendra Banhart
E. All of the above.

Answers in the form of a fine-lined drawing on parchment please. --Drew Daniel

017: Boredoms
Vision Creation Newsun
[Birdman; 2001]

For all their ornery outbursts and short-attention-span splatter, somehow it's not surprising that Japan's Boredoms could create something of such sprawling, perfect beauty. It's not that it's soothing or even "pretty"; rather, its wildness and abandon bring out the crystalline allure embedded in its "songs." It's as if all the great trance practitioners of the last half century-- Ravi Shankar, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Can, Hawkwind-- got together for one last jam session to round out the millennium. But then, I mostly remember afternoons spent driving home, under the sun, staring at the traffic ahead, and lost in a trance to kinetic little songs with symbols for names. They might as well have been hieroglyphics, and Boredoms may as well have been those aliens who were supposed to have taught the Egyptians and South American Indians how to build pyramids. The trick is: just keep going up. --Dominique Leone

016: The Strokes
Is This It
[RCA; 2001]

Hype comes and goes. For puffed-up bands like the Strokes, it's less a matter of living up to rash, unreasonable expectations than outliving them. Eventually, the ballyhoo dies and the detractors stop caring, but ask yourself: Was it the band you were sick of or the 40-foot paparazzi boner than followed them everywhere?

Is This It? is a classic. Plenty of low-slung Manhattanites kicked out Velvet-rooted jams in Prada boots before the Strokes, but if "Last Nite" was mere stage-as-runway fluff, I guarantee the magazine rack at Barnes & Noble would look much different today. Tinged with self-effacement and more than a little earnest brainpower, songs like "The Modern Age" and "Hard to Explain" took on an uncanny melancholic glow in late 2001. Amidst a morass of mourning and mongering, the Strokes remained refreshingly sleek and straightforward. Luckily, the Strokes neither took themselves too seriously nor lacked the goods to back up the whirlwind press storm. In the months after 9/11, we couldn't pop soma, but "Soma" was our incidental remedy, and its feel-good glow hasn't fizzled a wink. --Sam Ubl

015: Dizzee Rascal
Boy in Da Corner
[XL; 2003]

Is Dizzee in the corner because he's being disciplined, because he's deep in contemplation, or because he's gearing up for a fight? You could make a case for any of those situations being central to Boy In Da Corner. Set against the backdrop of his frosty, industrial productions, he gulps out a portrait of life in lower-class East London that resounds with urgency, anxiety, and hope.

In Dizzee's warzone, you have to stay slippery, keep moving at all times, and avoid getting pinned by anything-- gunfire, drugs, girls, even friends. That means staying hard, and yet at the same time, he's not afraid to let us in on his sadness either. It's between those two extremes-- the barbed-wire ferocity of something like "Jus' a Rascal" (check the last verse) and the softened determination of "Do It"-- that Dizzee builds one of the richest and most interesting character studies of the decade so far. Grime's first big record is still its best, and there's no reason to think that's going to change anytime soon. --Mark Pytlik

014: Spoon
Kill the Moonlight
[Merge; 2002]

In my mind, Spoon songs on Kill the Moonlight are like games of Jenga-- Britt Daniel seemingly starts with a completed, fully functioning song, and then goes about removing bits and pieces to see how much he can slot out while still maintaining structural integrity. "Small Stakes" stands tall with little more than a few small bits of percussion, some organ notes, and approximately 8.6 seconds of guitar feedback. "Stay Don't Go" gets by with even less-- some rhythm guitar, a little lead, intermittent sound effects, three piano chords, and beatboxing. (In this light, I expect future songs to be MacGuyverian models of ingenuity, consisting of one rubber band, some nail clippings, and a wad of chewing gum.)

This doesn't mean Spoon has foregone writing more traditionally arranged songs-- indeed, this utilitarian want-not approach benefits the more, um, "indulgent" efforts. Tracks like "Jonathon Fisk" and "The Way We Get By" deploy their musical sorties with alacrity and efficiency, no motion wasted or unnecessary. Not bad for a group that used to crib moves wholesale from Black Francis' fakebooks-- nowadays, it's the moves they don't make that matter more. --David Raposa

013: Madvillain
Madvillainy
[Stones Throw; 2004]

The people thought their meeting was a myth and a rumor, a convergence so desired it had been wished into the consciousness. MF Doom. Madlib. Would the masked, metal-fingered verbalist join forces with the man who magicked the samples to refabric time? We sat on our hopes for months and years; finally, it came to pass-- Madvillainy-- could it be true?

Together, as the story ("The Illest Villains") goes, the fellows were "the personification of carnage... more accurately, the dark side of our beings." Behind a smoky veil of herbalism, the fearless duo navigated the sublime-- patching down basslines, pieces of woozy orchestra, ladies shrieking-- and laminating aural pictorials like one might splice together frames of film. (Or rather, their methods created the effect of experimental cinema, like the photo-pastiche of Jonas Mekas, which is not to say it's more legitimate or that one follows the other-- listen, have you read Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, about the confluence of hip-hop, film, and comics? That is this album.)

While Madlib's special power played tricks on your ears-- a sample you were sure was the sound of cars rolling by on the street might sound like the hiss of a record on a different day ("Rainbows")-- Doom unfurled his clever lyrics like a roll of sod on earth... and the album curved in on itself like a two-way mirror. As Doom promised on "Strange Ways": "When the smoke clear, you can see the sky again/ There will be the chopped off heads of leviathan." --Julianne Shepherd

012: Daft Punk
Discovery
[Virgin; 2001]

What do you think Guy-Manuel and Thomas did in the studio when they listened back to the ridiculoid moments of total genius strung across this album-- moments such as, say, the vocoder breakdown in "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger"? Did they high-five? Did they do a backspin on the floor in celebration of making the tuffest, most disgustingly ill breakdown ever? Did they even know how many people were going to smile until their face hurt when they heard this shit for the first time? Did they consider the spine and neck injuries this funk could cause? Could they already hear drunken, loved-up crowds singing, "Why don't you play the gaaaaaaaamme," in hoarse football hooligan voices back at them, European vowels and all? Did they groan inwardly at the snooty comments about resurrecting ELO, the Buggles, 10cc, and Zapp that their eerily glossy pop masterpiece was going to occasion from rockist yahoos? Were they haunted by a fear that the first half of their album was so spine-tingling that people were just going to rewind it and play it over and over instead of riding this ride out to the finish? Are Daft Punk even human, or is this "ha ha I'm a fake robot wait no I'm not" shtick concealing something far more sinister? An interstellar conspiracy, perhaps? --Drew Daniel

011: Wilco
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
[Nonesuch; 2002]

Hey, remember when Yankee Hotel Foxtrot changed the world? When the album went ten times platinum, when Warner Bros. dissolved its music division out of embarrassment, when Jeff Tweedy became the voice of a generation? Okay, so none of that really happened, and all the instant mythologies and extramusical meaningfulness attached to YHF upon its release maybe caused it to burn a little too bright too fast. But now, as all that nonsense flakes away, we can appreciate the album for what it really is: a wildly successful crack at mild ambition for a band that could have made a comfortable living doing Woody Guthrie reconstructions for the rest of their career. Credit Tweedy for realizing folk Americana didn't have to be a rumpled guy with an acoustic anymore-- it could now be a rumpled guy with an acoustic and a laptop. --Rob Mitchum

010: The Streets
Original Pirate Material
[Vice; 2002]

Mike Skinner remembers the halcyon days of England's rave culture: the underground parties, the DJs, the big tracks, the pianos that loop over and over and over. He remembers following rave into superclubs, and tolerating sketchier drugs, skyrocketing prices, and massive queues. Now he sees those same superclubs shuttering up and, like rave itself, Skinner feels himself getting older. He still occasionally dabbles in pills but when he does, it feels like he's fumbling for past glories. He turns his attention instead to more earthly delights-- booze, women, weed, takeaway-- all of which he leans on to divert him from the creeping realities of depression, his bank balance, the government. Like anyone with affection for a long dead scene, he flits between indulging his nostalgia and pushing things forward. Luckily, when it comes to the latter, there's hope-- Mike Skinner feels something happening with 2-step and garage and wonders if he can happen with it. If he does, will it be the same? Probably not. Will it be as wonderful? Absolutely. --Mark Pytlik

009: Animal Collective
Sung Tongs
[FatCat; 2004]

After many walkabouts through the far reaches of sound, noise, and melody, Animal Collective released what you could call their "breakthrough" record in 2004: Sung Tongs was surprisingly accessible, an herbal ear bath that still satisfied their die-hard followers. While Animal Collective are sometimes mocked for their "sticks and stones" naturalism, Sung Tongs succeeds by tempering its spontaneity. With percussion and guitars that sound like they're made from tree branches, they built a single with Hollies-esque vocals ("Who Could Win a Rabbit"); every sung line of nonsense here yields a straightforward hook, and the naturalistic aesthetic comes to life in a sparkling, almost surround-sound production that lets the extended instrumentals build and ebb like gusts of breeze on your face. With no manic avant-gardisms to hide behind, Panda Bear and Avey Tare looked naked and even naive making this music; but for all the new listeners who dismissed it as just so much chanting and banging, still more were startled and pleased to discover something so original that still sounded so simple. --Chris Dahlen

008: The White Stripes
White Blood Cells
[V2; 2001]

Hard as it may be to remember now, there was a time when the rock stardom of the White Stripes was not a foregone conclusion. But that was before White Blood Cells came along, delivering on the tender promises made by the duo's first two albums. Jettisoning much of the more traditional blues-based material of De Stijl, Jack White lashed his massive, pile-driving riffs to lyrics of genuine emotional heft, lending "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" and the Citizen Kane-quoting "The Union Forever" a level of expressive depth that the average garage rock band-- grid-locked in the hoary clichés of hot rods/girls/beer machismo-- could never match. Nor would most bands ever attempt to muster the sensitivity and songwriting acuity necessary to make "The Same Boy You've Always Known" or the sweet nostalgia of "We're Going to Be Friends" the new classics they deservedly are. --Matthew Murphy

007: Modest Mouse
The Moon & Antarctica
[Sony; 2000]

Isaac Brock's universe is dark, cold, and lonely. But at least some of his desolation is self-defense, balancing the higher order he glimpses everywhere-- in microcosms, in nagging phone calls from the Lord-- against his underlying suspicion that all is "water and shit." It's the secret that Snowden gave Yossarian: Man is matter. Or, man doesn't matter. The Moon & Antarctica proved that the dark center of the universe isn't a Nissan minivan. ("Laugh hard, it's a long way to the bank.") It's the self, fucking up everything as everyone watches. Yet, for me this album always evokes "The Land of Nod", Robert Louis Stevenson's short poem depicting a child's nocturnal journey into a frightening kingdom. Stevenson writes: "Try as I might to find the way/ I never can get back by day/ Nor can remember plain and clear/ The curious music that I hear." Dude, it's Modest Mouse. --Marc Hogan

006: Sigur Rós
Ágætis Byrjun
[Smekkleysa; 2000]

With one or two too many aesthetically bankrupt soundtrack appearances (Vanilla Sky?), sold-out performances, and hackneyed Iceland-has-a-scene feature stories, Sigur Rós lost a bit of the white magic, but when Ágætis Byrjun appeared, its mesmerizing secret falsetto and magisterial bowed-guitar patience arrived like an unexpected icestorm with unbelievably moving aftershocks. At the time, I found "Svefn-G-Englar"'s foggy/wraithlike night buoy so all-consuming that I locked myself in a room and listened to each ripple for hours, my head resting against the buzzing speaker trying to translate faerie speak. From the glowing angel fetus to the moving boy-on-boy doll-toss of the slow-mo video for "Vidrar vel til loftarasa", there isn't a single misstep, and plopping Ágætis Byrjun back on the record player today, the attendant cloudburst feels just as new as it did during marathon No. 1. --Brandon Stosuy

005: The Avalanches
Since I Left You
[Modular; 2000]

A Napster classic. The Avalanches started in Australia in late 2000 and took the slow boat west, moving from one 56k modem to the next during 2001 and 2002-- a time when, as with LSD in 1965, file-sharing was still legit and above ground. The idea of stitching together songs using nothing but samples was far from a new idea by the time the group formed, but the Avalanches were on a completely different tip from someone like DJ Shadow. Instead of fetishizing breaks or searching for the elusive cool, the Avalanches mined for AM Gold, uncovering the simple joys of on-the-one-hand cheesy songs. The Avalanches applied the sampledelic technique inspired by the same idea as John "Plunderphonics" Oswald: to improve on the past. A record comprised of old records that was thick with nostalgia on the day of its release has only grown more poignant; the Avalanches have been silent, and Since I Left You remains frozen in time. --Mark Richardson

004: OutKast
Stankonia
[LaFace; 2000]

Upon its release in October 2000, prescient critic/author Chris Ryan called Stankonia "the brazen, cotton-mouthed blood transfusion you'll need to get through the next four years if Gomer wins the party." One term and a double album later, that statement feels eerie like the tarot: Stankonia, with all its joy and fusion, was the final great document of the Clinton years. Its classic joints ("So Fresh, So Clean", "Ms. Jackson", "B.O.B.", and "We Love Deez Hoez") defined the era's Southern shine, dished generously the daddy-love, and sounded the parallel sirens of the hood and the warzone, while OutKast made itself at home among funky freak-da-tweeter tweakers, spacefunk, soul snappin'/trappin' and the heartbeat-thrum of the speakerboxxx. Congealing the pimp and the poet, Dre and Big Boi equated Hendrixian feedback impulse with low-end theorizing, and leveled the upward push of the playas game with the ground-level rhymes of boho dreamtime. Aquemini was OutKast's pressing together and Speakerboxx/The Love Below was their peeling apart; Stankonia was one last missive of unity before their values divided. --Julianne Shepherd

003: Interpol
Turn on the Bright Lights
[Matador; 2002]

The following are excerpts from transcripts of the chat forum maintained by the Fall 2099 section of the required course "The Debirth of Cool" at Quilted Northern State University.

Professorbot: Why is this considered a seminal artifact from cool's last days?

Stud A: Because that word 'seminal' has something to do with semen, and this album is seedily obsessed with man-rock lineage? It writhes in anxiety over its influential fathers. I still expect Lou Reed to start singing on "NYC". I still expect Johnny Marr to sue for "Say Hello to the Angels."

Stud B: Who's the father of the deliberately awkward "Obstacle 2", then? A nerdy sperm donor or test-tube enthusiast?

Stud C: Why are we asking this album "who's your daddy?" when the more interesting question is why it seems invigorated by rivaling its British brothers in bombast and self-seriousness? Look at the big Matador band from the previous decade, Asphalt or Concrete or whatever they were called: They dressed so dumb, like they were afraid of themselves, or of success. I love that Interpol aren't "just kidding, man." They crave/mimic authority; this album exudes post-punk as much as it does Wall Street.

Stud D: The brouhaha over their poses, clothes, and underwhelming shows is a false consciousness, a foggy defense against this anxious work of art. The record's audience needs-- pathologically, almost-- to cite the artists' mortality.

Stud E: The cavernous production does sound like the music was recorded in some throne room for humorless gods. I am naming my thesis "Atmosphere and Aura in Early American" something.

Stud F: What about those lyrics, investigating the difficulty of dating and loving while being a smart person? The title of a popular "tele-vision" show from the early 2000s seems to rank this album's concerns, respectively: "City and the Sex".

Stud A: I still think that Turn On the Bright Lights is evidence of ancestor worship-cum-graverobbery.

Professorbot: Yah, but what a gorgeous pyre they built with the digitally remastered bones. Type together with me, class: "Baby, my heart's been breaking..." --William Bowers

002: Jay-Z
The Blueprint
[Roc-A-Fella; 2001]

Curiously, our #2 album, The Blueprint is almost completely the inverse of Kid A, our #1. One is the work of a band looking to distance themselves as far as possible from their pop-culture image; the other the work of an artist declaring his supremacy over the music world. Kid A was consciously designed to be radio-allergenic and promoted as elliptically as possible; The Blueprint is as radio-fertile as albums come these days-- it was, in fact, virtually a concept album about self-promotion.

Hopefully, you'll need no convincing that The Blueprint is any less an artistic achievement for its directness. The record found Jay-Z eschewing the space-filling crutches of skits and guest stars (excepting Eminem) and recruiting the hottest producers of the present and future (excepting Eminem). Beatmakers Just Blaze, Kanye West, and Timbaland laid down their most complicated tracks to try to snare Hov, but Hov couldn't be stopped: sludgy Doors loops, horror-movie soundtracks, Mexican dancehall, all are easily taken down by his effortlessly melodic, charismatic ruminations on arraignments, drug dealings, and of course, smacking down Nas (was there ever a more productive rap battle?). Here, Shawn Carter ascends his throne with apt regality, backing tracks appropriately cinematic, soul strings swelling, fanfare blasting, everything in its right place. --Rob Mitchum

001: Radiohead
Kid A
[Capitol; 2000]

Exactly how and why Radiohead's Kid A has come to stand as the definitive artistic statement for rock consumers born after 1975 is almost ridiculously difficult to discern. People believed (and continue to believe) in the metaphysical heft of Kid A: in its aesthetic worth, its innovation, its meaning. In 2000, Kid A felt true and inscrutable; five years later, it somehow still does: From its chilling opening organ figure to its closing silence, Kid A is enormous-- a huge, sweeping testament to Radiohead's ever-swelling worldview.

Kid A was an obvious departure from its predecessor, the guitar-swollen OK Computer, and it alternately challenged and confounded Radiohead's core audience. Regardless, the record's supposed difficulty also lent it a certain sense of gravity: Kid A is confrontational and insistent, mysteriously capable of convincing some of the most stridently anti-electro guitarheads that inorganic flourishes can feel bloody and real. Consequently, in the months following its release, Kid A transformed into an intellectual symbol of sorts, a surprisingly ubiquitous signifier of self. Owning it became "getting it"; getting it became "annointing it." The record's significance as a litmus test was stupid and instant and undeniable: In certain circles, you were only as credible as your relationship to this album. And that kind of intense, unilateral, with-us-or-against-us fandom felt oddly, uncomfortably apropos in the face of all that sound.

It is in this weird sense that Kid A was (and continues to be) the perfect record for its time: Ominous, surreal, and impossibly millennial, its revolutionary tangle of yelpy, apocalyptic vocals, glitchy synths, and beautiful drones is uncertain about both its past and present-- and, accordingly, timeless. --Amanda Petrusich