Billed as Jigga’s final record before retiring (which seems ludicrous looking back…), The Black Album was both his hardest-hitting record and also his most reflective to date. After the sprawling double album The Blueprint 2: The Gift & The Curse the previous year, Jay-Z got back to first principles – these were shorter, clipped but lethal upper-cuts, delivered by an artist who was seemingly determined to bow out at the top of his game and with the help of several top-shelf producers – Kanye West, The Neptunes and Rick Rubin to name a few. The hard-hitting saga ‘99 Problems’ is probably his most famous song, but every track was similarly sharp and incisive. Here was a man surveying the breadth of his empire, determined to raise the bar one more time. In honesty, he’s never quite hit these peaks subsequently. (LISTEN)
For the first time in his prodigious and restless career, characterised by unpredictability with regard to musical direction from one record to the next, Beck Hansen delivered something that most people would regard as a stereotypical ‘Beck sound’ with his eighth album Guero. Teaming up with the Dust Brothers, responsible for his sample-heavy career highlight Odelay back in 1996, it was a light, bright and danceable collision of pop, hip-hop and indie with sparkling flourishes of electro. While the likes of ‘Girl’ were a bit more mature than the goofing-off of his ‘90s material, Beck still found time to indulge himself on the irresistable mechanical funk of ‘Hell Yes’ and the dirty, riff-tastic ‘E-Pro’. (LISTEN)
Given Radiohead’s massive popularity, it seems surprising that it took such a long time for Thom Yorke to put out a solo album. Picking up the same overtly political threads that he had tugged on with Hail To The Thief three years previously, The Eraser may have been afraid to rock but it was a rare and valuable insight into the singer’s mind, like an electronically-based coda to that tricky album. Built on glitches, whirs and electronic loops, tracks like the panic-stricken ‘Analyse’ and single ‘Harrowdown Hill’ – concerning the headline-grabbing suspicious suicide of Dr David Kelly – were among some of most evocative and direct music that Yorke has made to this day. (LISTEN)
Welsh post-hardcore heroes Mclusky made a dramatic improvement from their uneven debut two years before. Hiring the legendary Steve Albini to arm their low, growling bass-driven sound with teeth, Mclusky Do Dallas is every bit as subversive and relentlessly awesome as some of his more famous productions, like In Utero or Come On Pilgrim. Deep enough to blow out the speakers, the improved sound complimented Andy Falkous’s (now of Future Of The Left) trademark humour perfectly – an opening track called ‘Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues’ and lyrics like “all of your friends are c***s, your mother is a ballpoint pen thief,” say it all. Mclusky soon split, but not before leaving a perfect blueprint for future bands like Pulled Apart By Horses. (LISTEN)
Having made one of the most original musical statements of the ‘90s with …Endtroducing, Josh Davis spent the best part of six years arranging and tweaking his follow-up, and the effect was just as stunning the second time around. Slightly more accessible on the face of it, with vocal samples prominently mixed in to some of the tracks such as the spooky ‘Six Days’ or the strutting ‘Walkie Talkie’, The Private Press was another brilliantly arranged treasure trove of funky breaks, ingenious samples and rare grooves that revealed Davis’ love of crate-digging in a way that his debut hadn’t quite explored as fully. (LISTEN)
Telescoping in even more precisely on their brooding, dark take on indie rock than their 2005 breakthrough Alligator, The National’s fourth album really saw them pick up steam, making their national television debut at around this time. For sure, Boxer was very bleak at times, but those barren soundscapes were nevertheless haunted by the spectre of hope, the possibility of redemption, made possible by the spectacular production that made highlights like ‘Mistaken For Strangers’ explode onto a widescreen canvas despite their intimate production and bookish, introverted sensibilities. Little wonder that Barack Obama’s campaign made use of ‘Fake Empire’ for their video “Signs of Hope and Change”. (LISTEN)
Recorded when he was just 19 but with the best part of five years of indie musicianship behind him, Fevers And Mirrors was the first complete demonstration of Conor Oberst’s talent for songwriting that managed to be simultaneously abstract and personal. As its title suggests, our own projected anxieties are reflected back upon us when we think about our lives, and in this way the listener gets out what they put in to Fevers And Mirrors. Ostensibly a record about failed relationships, insecurity and fear of the future, Oberst left enough of himself out of these epic tracks to make them universally relatable, with their rough and ready production making the likes of ‘An Attempt To Tip The Scales’ accessible rather than impenetrable. It was an astonishing achievement for such a young talent, and stands to be revisited over and over again, revealing new meaning and significance each time. Unbelievably, he’d go on to do even better next time out. (LISTEN)
Elbow had been around for some time before they were given the chance to deliver a full-length album, but Asleep In The Back was well worth the wait. Full of beautifully woven songs that added up to far, far more than the sum of their influences, Guy Garvey’s weary yet optimistic and fundamentally humanist voice was the star of the show. Just listen to the tender delivery on ‘Powder Blue’ and ‘Presuming Ed (Rest Easy)’, his lyrics insightful yet grounded and uncluttered by imagery as his band’s music soars to the heavens. From the howling catharsis of album centrepiece ‘Newborn’ to the satellite town desperation of the ‘Any Day Now’, it was a heroic debut and it put Elbow on the path to success, picking up the anthemic, post-Britpop torch that The Verve had dropped three years before. (LISTEN)
The fourth and final Sparklehorse album before Mark Linkous’s tragic demise, Dream For Light Years…’ genesis came in the same material used for 2001’s career-defining masterpiece It’s A Wonderful Life. The recording process was slow, Linkous’s process disrupted by periods of depression and fighting drug addiction, and indeed, 25 of its 55 minutes had been released in some form or another already, so it was going to be something of a patchwork effort. What’s so surprising is how cohesive it all sounds, tied together with Danger Mouse’s clipped production. Sad, beautiful moments of melancholic pop (‘Don’t Take My Sunshine Away’) sit snugly alongside more abrasive rockers (‘Getting It Wrong’), all of which were stamped with Linkous’s trademark approach of disassembling a song and putting it back together, bits jumbled up but all sounding unmistakably right. Not quite as heart-stopping as its predecessor, but a suitable monument to an under-appreciated and sorely missed talent. (LISTEN)
After remaining ahead of the curve with a couple of serious, studied albums in Vespertine and Medulla, Björk decided to let her hair down and have fun with Volta. This was signalled with the Timbaland production ‘Earth Intruders’, the album’s opener and lead single, but, despite the beat-orientated nature of most of the album, it was to be no crossover into the pop world. Most of Volta remained characteristically eccentric and left of centre, as she explored lustrous hook-ups with Antony Hegarty on ‘The Dull Flame Of Desire’, whose lyrics were an English translation of a Russian poem by Fyodor Tyutchev, the fevered despair of ‘Pneumonia’ and the bonkers beat onslaught of ‘Declare Independence’. One of the more varied musical efforts in her fearsome catalogue, it was yet another excellent album from an artist whose golden era seemingly goes on forever. (LISTEN)
If Heartbreaker put him on the radar, Ryan Adams’ second album Gold catapulted him into the upper echelons of the alt-country pantheon. A sprawling 70 minutes of dusty Americana (‘Answering Bell’), twilit acoustic reflections (the walkaway perfection of ‘La Cienega Just Smiled’), raucous soulful rockers (‘Touch, Feel & Lose’), bar-room blues (‘Goodnight, Hollywood Blvd’) and heartfelt ballads (‘When The Stars Go Blue’), Gold is another brutal break-up record – inspired by a completely separate romantic catastrophe to its predecessor, in case you were wondering. But it’s also a love letter to his musical heroes like Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Gram Parsons, and a demonstration of the versatility of his style and writing. It still registers as Adams’ magnum opus, his most consistently enjoyable effort. (LISTEN)
Following the cluttered maximalism of their 1999 self-titled debut, which they themselves declared was “fucking awful” upon release (it wasn’t…), The Beta Band took a different approach for their second album proper, deciding to do and say more with less and to be less consciously madcap. As a result, Hot Shots II was a proper demonstration of their genius on the album format, restlessly innovative, understated and subtle but always working within a pop template. The laid-back beats of trip-pop classic ‘Squares’ heralded a concise, accessible kaleidoscope of psych-rock, breakbeat, indie and funk that sounded like nothing else on the scene. (LISTEN)
Nick Cave unexpectedly began life without his long-term creative foil Blixa Bargeld with one of his greatest ever musical statements, an incredible double album borne out of necessity and their sheer number of brilliant musical ideas he was producing. The first disc, Abbatoir Blues, was a riotous affair concentrating on Cave in his thunderous, ranting preacher-man mode. This was something with which the band’s fans had long been familiar, but the amount of choice cuts is staggering, ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’ being the very best. But the second disc, The Lyre Of Orpheus, was even more special, featuring finely crafted and more restrained songs where Cave demonstrated his flair for theatricality and insight. Rarely has quantity and quality converged so magnificently. (LISTEN)
Delivering fully on the occasional brilliance of her ‘90s output, Missy “Misdemeanour” Elliott’s third album was all things to all men, so to speak. Boasting a stunning array of totally fantastic singles, led by the hip-hop/club slayer ‘Get Ur Freak On’, Miss E… So Addictive was Elliott’s most assured and varied display of prowess yet. Leading the charge of rappers into the world of dance music, she turns her talents to club bangers like ‘4 My People’, half-step ballads like ‘Take Away’ and the twitchy hip-hop of ‘One Minute Man’ and ‘Scream aka. Itch’. Even when she sticks to more traditional rap territory, she takes the spotlight from high-profile guest stars like Redman, Method Man, Busta Rhymes and Jay-Z. Timbaland’s production is also a marvel, pulling a galaxy of different ideas together under one roof. (LISTEN)
Having stumbled with the deeply flawed Uh Huh Her, Polly Jean Harvey ditched the drum/bass/guitar band format to compose an album of songs written for the piano. This was despite her almost total lack of familiarity with the piano – like the true innovator she is, she told The Wire “the great thing about learning a new instrument from scratch is that it liberates your imagination”. White Chalk was utterly different to anything she’d done before: loosely grounded in British folk and the kind of gothic pop mastered by Kate Bush, it was a funereal, hopeless record that sounded like it had been recorded at the dead of night, with Harvey’s keening, high-register vocals haunting the mix, pitched somewhere between wailing and whimpering. At just 33 minutes long, it had the effect of a fleeting fever dream, and it helped inform her second all-time classic Let England Shake four years later. (LISTEN)
Beating Mike Skinner by six months, the unassuming figure of Rodney Smith can lay claim to recording the first indisputably great British rap album since Tricky’s Maxinquaye. Improving vastly on the promising Brand New Second Hand, Smith staked out new territory for the ailing British scene. Not only was his flow easy to follow and his lyrics vivid, relatable and descriptive (check out ‘Sinny Sin Sins’, dealing with his strict religious upbringing), his patois was authentically British and totally unaffected, finally bridging the credibility gap that so many British artists had failed to do before. Not only that, but ‘Witness (1 Hope)’ was an absolute stormer of a single! Narrowly losing out on the Mercury Music Prize to Ms Dynamite (the panel completely misjudged who was going to be the enduring talent there…), Run Come Save Me is to this day one of the ten finest rap albums to have come from the British Isles. (LISTEN)
Tentatively expanding his set-up from lone bedroom artist to a band project, Joe Mount found himself as one of the most sought-after producers and remixers in the business after his second album. Conceived of as a “soundtrack to a bad weekend” according to its creator, Nights Out packed home-made beats and breakdowns in with wonky, squelchy 8-bit synths and made something totally distinctive. The euphoric ‘Holiday’, the post-punk/Prince mash-up of ‘A Thing For Me’ and the raging bacchanalia ‘My Heart Rate Rapid’ sought to make something magic from the mundane – the flat lager and disappointing clubs that characterise almost all of British nightlife but also the friendships that make it tolerable. Six months after its release, London hipsters were climbing over each other to claim ownership, but its appeal was obvious to every bored teenager in every cultural backwater in Britain. (LISTEN)
Where their seminal debut Funeral concerned itself with issues of family and community, Arcade Fire decided to turn outwards and face the wider world on their second album. Rather than use its themes to reach a point of catharsis, Neon Bible was much angrier, accusatory and bleaker in its outlook than Funeral, yet strangely much more measured when it came to releasing tension. Tracks like ‘No Cars Go’ and ‘Keep The Car Running’ had a steady, streamlined forward momentum, rather than an explosion of energy. Conflating personal crisis with global catastrophe and taking aim at government, religion and the military, holding up the figurative ‘Black Mirror’ to show a malevolent reflection of society, Neon Bible often felt like a state-of-the-nation address – but this time, nothing was going to be okay in the end. (LISTEN)
Given the festival-headlining, stadium-filling music that has allowed Coldplay to be the biggest guitar band in the world for the last 15 years, it’s curious to revisit their debut album Parachutes and be struck by how small it sounds. Unlike the precision-tooled singalongs in which they came to specialise, consciously designed for massive outdoor spaces, tracks like ‘Trouble’ and ‘Sparks’ had a sparse, ambient quality that belies those ambitions, with only their breakthrough hit ‘Yellow’ indicating their future direction. But this sense of economy only shows how great a songwriter Chris Martin can be when he doesn’t ladle on the cynicism, with a wide-eyed wonderment characterising the fragile opener ‘Don’t Panic’ and the Jeff Buckley-esque ‘We Never Change’. Parachutes is the point at which there was no masterplan for world domination, just total, unbridled passion. (LISTEN)
Everything you could possibly need to argue the case for Wainwright’s brilliance is contained in the bookends of Want Two – the musical spectacle of opener ‘Agnus Dei’, featuring a Latin mass for peace and gypsy violins, and the sprawling Brian Wilson-esque ‘Old Whore’s Diet’ with Antony Hegarty. In between, there’s the self-revelatory acoustic highlight ‘Gay Messiah’, pieces of sophisticated pop (‘The One You Love’), romantic/tragic ballads like ‘Peach Trees’ and the captivating personal lament of ‘The Art Teacher’, the latter actually recorded onstage in Montreal rather than in the studio. Together with the rather more conservative Want One, these records represent the artistic peaks of one of the decade’s most distinctive singers and arrangers, and in terms of old-fashioned musicianship, Wainwright’s personal best. (LISTEN)
This beguiling solo album from The Knife’s Karin Dreijer Andersson is the highest-ranking solo project by someone in a band also in this list. Inspired by the sleep deprivation she experienced as a new mother and the social isolation and distance she felt, to describe Fever Ray as stripped down would be to do it a disservice. Constructed often from the barest of bones, these songs unfurl at a stalking, creepy pace with an often nightmarish ambience (the eerie ‘If I Had A Heart’) underscored by Andersson’s pitch-shifted vocals. It was an album of precise, finely articulated beats that collided tales of mundanity into the fantastical – “we talk about love / we talk about dishwasher tablets” (‘Seven’) made domestic life seem fascinating and yet also imprisoning. While it didn’t have the immediacy of any of The Knife’s albums, it was a perfectly constructed alternate universe to lose yourself in. (LISTEN)
It’s taken a while, but British Sea Power’s thoroughly unique debut album has eventually come to be regarded as a minor classic. Defying conventional wisdom that says a band’s first album should consistently deliver on one version of themselves, BSP seemed to want to cover as many musical bases as possible. The Decline Of… confounded the critics and public at first, but the band’s existing fans adored it instantly. Veering between the wildly chaotic (classic indie singles ‘Apologies To Insect Life’ and ‘Remember Me’ with their hectic guitars) and the contemplative and atmospheric (the beautiful ‘Blackout’ and ‘Something Wicked’), it was a perfectly paced demonstration of the appeal this most peculiar of bands. Ending with the duo of the squalling 15-minute epic ‘Lately’ and the lilting ‘A Wooden Horse’, it was an enduring statement of virtuosity. (LISTEN)
In contrast to the monochrome behemoth of their debut Lost Souls, Doves’ second album infused their smoky, grimy musical mixture with a few splashes of light and colour. British media outlets loved The Last Broadcast, with the distinctive hooks of their surprise UK #3 hit ‘There Goes The Fear’ and the colossal piledrivers of ‘Words’ and ‘Pounding’ used everywhere on TV clips and ads for about a year. The pace was varied on the heartbroken, gospel-influenced lament of ‘Satellites’, while texture and different instrumentation were explored on the woodwind-driven ‘Friday’s Dust’ and the orchestrated ‘Sulphur Man’. However, the heart-in-the-mouth emotion of the glorious closer ‘Caught By The River’ stole the show right at the end. Full of windswept drama from this most distinctively northern of English bands, it was Doves’ second great album in a row and topped the British charts, proving to be a massive hit for indie imprint Heavenly. (LISTEN)
Recorded at the same time as the game-changing Kid A, released the previous year, Amnesiac is often harshly considered remembered as an inferior sister album. Which it is, in fairness, but only to the extent that it’s a 9/10 album in comparison to the 10/10 of its predecessor. Split between the glitch-ridden beats and ambient soundscapes of Kid A and the guitar-driven motifs of ‘classic Radiohead’, Amnesiac made sense as its own album as well as an outgrowth of its more admired twin. The narcoleptic, dead-eyed vocals of ‘You And Whose Army?’ made it a standout, as well as the queasy nausea of ‘Like Spinning Plates’, the looping beats/guitars of ‘I Might Be Wrong’ and the spectral single ‘Pyramid Song’ making it packed with highlights from a very creatively fertile period for Thom Yorke and his bandmates. (LISTEN)
After their barnstorming debut Fever To Tell, the YYYs defied music industry logic and took their time in crafting a follow-up, therefore avoiding the dreaded second album syndrome by striking the perfect balance of being the same band people remembered before and yet expanding their sound to avoid repetition. The superb lead-off single ‘Gold Lion’ doubled down on the glam-rock influences they’d previously only hinted at, while ‘Cheated Hearts’ acted as the show-stopping ‘Maps’ moment. The art-punk freakouts had been smoothed out to make a mature sound anchored more in human emotion, but the delicious sense of subversion was still present, centred around singer Karen O’s force of nature presence. (LISTEN)
Tags: 2000s, classic album, Ed Biggs, feature, noughties, staff lists, The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s
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