Expert dealers in wordless, apocalyptic soundscapes, Montreal’s post-rock ensemble Godspeed You! Black Emperor started the new millennium just as they had left the old one, releasing a colossal double LP displaying them at their most powerful and moving. Spanning nearly 90 minutes, all four tracks on Lift Your Skinny Fists… were >20-minute song suites comprised of several informal and almost exclusively instrumental movements, designed to be listened to as a whole and whose thematic purpose was left to the listener. However, at their rapturous, widescreen best, Godspeed sounded like nothing else on this earth – opening sequence ‘Storm’, in particular, conveying a vague but unmistakably communal sense of rage, in keeping with the band’s leftist political ideals. With avant-classical ambient landscapes building slowly into crescendos of unalloyed, cathartic noise, and extended passages of shoegazing and musique concrete, it conveyed the same sense of existential dread as 1997’s F# A# Infinity and 1999’s Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada EP, and was often an emotionally draining experience. As skilled and artfully arranged as it is messy and sprawling, as startling and disquieting as it is comforting, Lift Your Skinny Fists… was the third dazzling release from Godspeed in a row, one that informed the likes of Arcade Fire, Explosions In The Sky and Sigur Rós in the coming decade. (LISTEN)
It’s always struck me as strange that it took a group of American Anglophiles, from the cultural wasteland of Las Vegas, of all places, to reconnect British audiences with their own sense of pop history. Hot Fuss didn’t so much wear its influences as scream them from the rooftops – everything about the music suggested Echo & The Bunnymen, New Order, early Bowie and classic Cure, with Brandon Flowers’ vocal style owing an obvious debt to Morrissey – but the key to this album’s brilliance was in its execution and heavily stylised charm. Led by the stone-cold betrayal classic ‘Mr Brightside’, surely the most distinctive intro to a noughties guitar song, The Killers laid waste to the charts, with Hot Fuss spawning three more Top 20 hits and spending a total of more than four-and-a-half years on the British albums chart. Each and every one of its 11 tracks could have been a single, in truth – tracks like ‘Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine’ and ‘Midnight Show’, even the absurdly tongue-in-cheek ‘Glamorous Indie Rock ‘n’ Roll’, were musical escapism and cosplay at their best. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then British music can be very proud of itself. (LISTEN)
Not only has Björk never made a bad album, she’s never failed to make a brilliant one. Having done so much to shape the electronic music of the ‘90s, she went about doing the same for the new decade, consciously aiming to make a record whose sound quality wouldn’t be compromised by the then-rising trend in file sharing. Custom-made music boxes, home-made ‘microbeats’ made from sampling cards being shuffled or ice being cracked, and a swathe of harps, strings and celestial noises comprised her fourth album Vespertine, which was sometimes a tricky listen but a thoroughly rewarding one with time. Songs like the stunning ‘Hidden Place’ or the tricksy ‘Cocoon’, speaking to a more introverted and complicated soul than the personality portrayed on Debut to Homogenic, sounded totally modern and yet had an instantly timeless quality, proving that up-to-the-minute production and a human heart were not exclusive elements. (LISTEN)
For the best part of a decade, Dave Longstreth’s Dirty Projectors toiled away in the American indie scene, gradually growing more popular in the critical fraternity by turning in album after album of forward-thinking, entirely original rock brimming over with ideas. Bitte Orca was their sixth LP, and at last brought them to international recognition, filtering their staunchly avant-garde leanings through more conventional song structures, yet it frequently defied description or even categorisation altogether, sounding like extremely disciplined chaos. Like a melting pot of old-fashioned heavy rock-riffing and modern R&B, this was incredibly distinctive math-rock set to wildly shifting tempos, Longstreth and his trusted lieutenants were paradoxically capable of drawing in and confounding the listener at the same time. ‘Stillness Is The Move’, in particular, could have passed for a mainstream hit, but for the dark undercurrents holding it up. Heavily informing the sound of Arctic Monkeys, whose leader Alex Turner raved about it in interviews for months, Bitte Orca is still Longstreth’s personal valediction, and has been one of the most quietly influential records of the subsequent decade. (LISTEN)
Having built up a bullet-proof reputation for being a mercurial, wildly unpredictable band whose musical direction couldn’t be explained from one album to the next, Feels represented the first time that Animal Collective invited significant musical contributions from outside the band’s core membership. It was this, possibly, that accounted for about half of it resembling a patchwork of rock and pop history – the likes of ‘Grass’ and ‘The Purple Bottle’ sounded like a seriously whacked-out Beach Boys. But, due to the deliberately unconventional tunings of all the instruments (as all the tracks were composed on a friend’s piano that was out of tune to begin with), there was something profoundly striking and unusual about every single moment on Feels, particularly in the more amorphous and free-form second half. The sprawling, quasi-spiritual climax of ‘Banshee Beat’, in particular, set them quite a distance apart from anybody else in 2005. As such, Feels perfectly demonstrated two Janus-like faces of Animal Collective – the left-field pop weirdos, and the experimental wizards, and was one of three incredible albums they made in the noughties. (LISTEN)
Just when you think guitar music is all played out, a band like Wild Beasts always comes along to impose a new template, to breathe new life into the genre. Hailing from the Lake District but formed in Leeds, Wild Beasts perfected their glorious, effortless and flamboyant music at the second time of asking, with Two Dancers being provocatively antithetical to all the bullshit machismo flying around so much of British indie in the noughties. With Hayden Thorpe’s glorious falsetto brandished like a weapon to underscore both his own vulnerability, anti-masculinity and emphasise the sexual frustrations and desires of his lusty protagonists, Two Dancers managed to be warm and sensual yet coarse, lowbrow and genuinely funny. Wordplay like “This is a booty call! My boot, my boot, my boot, my boot up your asshole” just two lines in to ‘The Fun Powder Plot’ said it all. Bassist Tom Fleming’s throatier backing vocals had greater prominence than on their debut, and his interplay with Thorpe was a source of the dramatic tension in tracks. An intuitively-played style of horny baroque’n’roll, Two Dancers and Wild Beasts’ subsequent LPs have gone on to serve as an inspiration to a great many of the best British guitar bands of the ‘10s. (LISTEN)
After nearly 20 years spent trying to break through to mainstream success, Elbow at last became a household name with their fourth album The Seldom Seen Kid. Their appeal has always lain in inventive yet accessible arena-indie song structures and lead singer Guy Garvey’s eye for the beauty and drama in the everyday, his down-to-earth lyrics delivered in his plaintive, poignant and soaring vocals. Naming the album in honour of one of the band’s friends, Bryan Glancy, who had died two years before, The Seldom Seen Kid was their most humanistic and affecting artistic statement yet. Radio-ready tracks like the call-and-response ‘Grounds For Divorce’ invited audience sing-alongs, and elsewhere they, they indulged in heart-stopping moments of grandiose beauty like ‘Starlings’ and ‘The Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver’. Climaxing in the skyscraping ‘One Day Like This’, a cathartic tour-de-force that has subsequently become the band’s signature song and the closest thing that modern rock has come to ‘Hey Jude’ in nearly half a century, it all added up to the perfect commercial breakthrough. This author actually leapt off the sofa and punched the air when they were awarded the Mercury Music Prize – there was no band who deserved that success more than them in 2008. Good guys don’t always have to finish last. (LISTEN)
The mercurial duo of Big Boi and Andre 3000, who had recorded as Outkast for nearly ten years by 2003, had long been diverging in terms of their musical interests, so to avoid artistic impasse they decided to make their fifth album a double LP, with both effectively making an album each. Not only was it a fascinating document of each member’s personalities and influences, it was also by far the biggest commercial success Outkast had enjoyed to that point, selling 11 million copies in the US and responsible for a small army of smash singles. Big Boi’s disc, Speakerboxxx, scans much more readily as traditional hip-hop, albeit with cutting edge production and sonic wizardry on muscular moments like ‘Tomb Of The Boom’ and the frenetic slow jam / scattershot beats of ‘Ghettomusick’. However, it was Andre 3000’s effort, The Love Below, that truly dazzled. A simply breath-taking compound of hip-hop, electro-funk, soul and R&B whose sheer creativity hadn’t really been heard since Prince’s golden age in the mid ‘80s, cuts from his album like the crazy ‘Hey Ya!’, the luscious ‘Prototype’ and the epic diss track ‘Roses’ were some of the most expertly crafted hits of the decade. The kind of career-defining double album that even the greatest artists struggle to make just once in their careers, Big Boi and Andre 3000 have dwelled in the shadow of Speakerboxxx / The Love Below ever since. (LISTEN)
King of introspective lyrics and effortless outsider cool, Bradford Cox’s left-field dream rock outfit Deerhunter has gone through many different iterations in its history, but their third album Microcastle perfected their sound for the first time. They resolved the fractured art-punk sounds of its predecessor Cryptograms that had divided fans so profoundly, adding a layer of accessible pop production and lighting it up with licks of noise and feedback. Paradoxically, though they were tighter and more disciplined than ever, their songs and characters within had never sounded more volatile or on the verge of collapse. Violence reigned in the imagery of tracks like ‘Little Kids’ and ‘Never Stops’, but they were transformed into moments of fantasy and escapism in Cox’s hands, covered in experimental rock haze. The zig-zagging guitars and synths of ‘Nothing Ever Happened’ is a quite brilliant moment of musical singularity from a band that often defies categorisation. It was co-released with a second album of bonus songs, Weird Era Cont., which played like a kind of inversion of Microcastle where the scuffed, angular pop was placed ahead of the prog-rock like wig-outs. Though he’s made more albums of exceptional quality since, Microcastle remains Cox’s personal best. (LISTEN)
James Murphy’s peerless LCD Soundsystem project had been releasing incredible, limited-run singles for nearly two-and-a-half years before they came up with their debut album – tracks like ‘Losing My Edge’ and ‘Yeah’ had been red-hot underground successes as far back as 2002. Rather than let those iconic tracks become hard-to-find rarities for hipsters to fawn over, LCD made them all available on a second, overflow disc on LCD Soundsystem – a masterstroke, as it provided a refresher course for everybody just getting up to speed on them in 2005 and allowed the album to double up as a kind of greatest hits set at the same time.
Importantly, the main body of the record itself easily matched the standards set by those early singles: from the robotic funk of opener ‘Daft Punk Is Playing At My House’ (“ah my house!”), it perfectly bridged the chasm between post-punk and club music as Murphy channelled his influences of Talking Heads, Can, Brian Eno and Suicide into something truly original. The brutal onslaught of ‘Movement’ to the pulsating centrepiece ‘On Repeat’, it was truly a masterclass in cool, with chilled-out respite coming in the form of Beatles / Floyd pastiche ‘Never As Tired As When I’m Waking Up’. LCD Soundsystem epitomised the spirit of invention that characterises all truly great independent music – and there would even better to come from them by the end of the decade. (LISTEN)
Released just three days before his tragically early death from the incurable blood disease TTP, Donuts was destined to serve as the epitaph for the visionary hip-hop producer and rapper J Dilla. It’s a good job, then, that it was as brilliant as it is. Consisting of 31 pocket masterpieces in a little under 44 minutes, 29 of them were recorded with a small sampler and a single 45 record player in hospital as Dilla received treatment for his condition.
No single track can be highlighted, as each and every moment is crafted with laser precision in a veritable tour de force, with familiar samples twisted into unrecognisable new forms with just the simplest of technologies at its creator’s disposal. But there’s also a very tangible legacy that’s much more relevant than any amount of critical adoration, and that’s in the amount of big hip-hop artists who have sampled the beats that Dilla laid down in Donuts – Drake, Big Sean, Nas, Ghostface Killah and Lupe Fiasco, to name just a few, have sought inspiration from this richly fertile record. (LISTEN)
Given their name, in addition to the vast, incredibly noisy instrumental song structures they apply, which automatically render them invisible from mainstream radio play, Bristol’s electro-noise duo Fuck Buttons unexpectedly found themselves on the biggest stage of all when Danny Boyle used two tracks from Tarot Sport (‘Surf Solar’ and ‘Olympians’) during his Olympic Games opening ceremony in 2012. But perhaps this wasn’t the ludicrous idea that it sounded like. More accessible than their debut album Street Horrrsing the previous year but sacrificing none of its raw, stunning power, Andrew Hung and Benjamin Power introduced some pop sensibility to take the edge off the experimental noise.
This led to seven tracks of massive, sweeping majesty, where fragility and grace were able to exist alongside brutality – the militaristic stomp of ‘The Lisbon Maru’ and the anxious ‘Surf Solar’ were but the very best of these. Producer Andrew Weatherall, the genius behind cross-genre masterpieces like Screamadelica, held the key to this change, creating genuinely cinematic soundscapes that unfurl and climax slowly like sequences from a movie. Tarot Sport was simply a cut above the vast majority of examples in experimental music, and allowed Fuck Buttons to establish themselves as one of the best in the business. (LISTEN)
After the false start that was their sterile 2001 self-titled debut, Damon Albarn’s post-Blur project Gorillaz finally came good on their ‘dark pop’ premise four years later with the edgy, post-apocalyptic masterpiece Demon Days. The sound experiments reined in and made subservient to a more pop-oriented template with the help of producer du jour Danger Mouse, it became a touchstone for genre-splicing, contemporary pop. In addition to worldwide hits like ‘Feel Good Inc.’, ‘DARE’ and ‘Dirty Harry’, there was a strong thematic thread to Demon Days, lent to it by Gorillaz’ conceit as a ‘virtual band’.
With their understated melodies, the spooky likes of ‘Kids With Guns’ and ‘Last Living Souls’ seemed to perfectly soundtrack the domestic paranoia and global political upheaval in Western society post-Iraq, songs which gave off the impression that not only was the future coming towards us at ever greater speed, it might very well spell our doom. However, it was kept from feeling overly weighty by some lithe, nimble production from Danger Mouse and Albarn’s compositional skill, and the public responded well. Selling eight million copies around the world, it’s by far and away the biggest album that Albarn has ever been associated with, despite all his glories with Blur. (LISTEN)
By 2002, Coldplay were already huge – probably the biggest band in Britain – after the multi-platinum success of debut Parachutes. But its follow-up turned them into the biggest band in the world. Opening with the sweeping, endless vistas of ‘Politik’, Chris Martin’s ambition was on an entirely different scale to Parachutes, its late-night ambience and occasional timidity replaced by something much more self-assured and confident, and capable of filling the biggest spaces and sonically dwarfing its predecessor.
All-encompassing sing-alongs like ‘The Scientist’ and the buoyant ‘In My Place’, to brooding epics like the title track and ‘Clocks’, and even oddities like the faintly psychedelic quasi-waltz of ‘A Whisper’, were underscored by a feeling of unease and dread at the state of the world post-9/11. These were songs ultimately about faith in humanity itself, with a spirit of anxiety and inquisition, where absolutely everything felt at stake. Trailed by a well-received headline spot at Glastonbury a few months before its release, A Rush Of Blood To The Head was more or less instantly hailed as a classic, and is still the 8th biggest-selling album in the UK in the 21st century. Coldplay have never come close to matching it artistically since, though their sales have only gone upwards. (LISTEN)
Sufjan Stevens is one of those incredibly rare musicians you can legitimately label as an auteur – someone who infuses absolutely every aspect of their work with their own identity. Recorded in a variety of unusual locations (in a church, at a school and in the living rooms of his friends) and produced entirely by Stevens himself on a shoestring budget, it was an ambivalent yet unmistakably heartfelt letter to his home state, with 15 tracks sprawling over 65 minutes exploring the population, geography and history of the Great Lakes state.
Opening with a downcast hymn to de-industrialisation with ‘Flint (For The Unemployed And The Underpaid)’, it was a mixture of journalistic observation and devastatingly personal memories, spanning fragile folk (‘Romulus’) and joyous neo-folk (Say Yes! To M!ch!gan!’). Occasionally, the author got lost in himself on some of the longer tracks as he over-indulged on polyphonic ambition, but this was entirely forgivable in the context of such a grandiose work that, for 95% of the time, plumps for minimalism in restraint and is all the more emotionally impactful for it. It was a conceit that Stevens would take to even greater heights with the more illustrious Illinois two years later, but Michigan most certainly deserves recognition too. (LISTEN)
Temporarily stepping out of the shadow of the prestigious Animal Collective for his third solo album under his recording moniker Panda Bear, Noah Lennox managed to artistically eclipse his parent band. Although on the surface it scanned like a love letter to his childhood influences, Person Pitch absorbed and regurgitated those musical cues into something startlingly original that pointed the way forward for alternative music in the mid-noughties. A warm, trippy and kaleidoscopic patchwork of sound, replete with minimalist beats and stacks of reverb-drenched vocal harmonies, Lennox’s extensive use of pop melodies – albeit twisted into thrillingly unconventional structures – made Person Pitch noticeably more accessible than anything Animal Collective had recorded up to that point.
‘Take Pills’, whose rhythm is built from interlocking samples of scraping skateboard wheels, and the 12-minute album centrepiece ‘Bros’, were but the very best examples of Lennox’s approach. Though its sales make it a cult classic at best, like all the best cult classics, it had a noticeable influence on the wider indie scene, with prominent American acts like Deerhunter, Grizzly Bear, Vampire Weekend, St. Vincent and even producers like Diplo taking inspiration from Person Pitch over the subsequent decade. (LISTEN)
In many ways, Black Holes And Revelations represented ‘peak Muse’ – the furthest they could keep travelling along the same trajectory, the logical end-point of nearly a decade-long journey where the mission was to sound bigger and more epic all the time. With their fourth album, the Teignmouth trio pushed that agenda as far as it could go and more overtly than ever before, to the point where it often threatened to collapse into total absurdity. Tapping the stupendous ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ for a single release was one signifier of Muse’s ambition, a slinky yet crushingly loud number that sounded like Prince covering Queens Of The Stone Age, which remains one of their finest moments.
But that blueprint was evident throughout BHAR: introducing pounding house rhythms into ‘Take A Bow’; the Depeche Mode-esque drama of ‘Map Of The Problematique’; the military drumroll of the impossibly grandiose ‘Invincible’; and, of course, the mindfuckery of album closer ‘Knights Of Cydonia’, which has long since become the group’s calling card. All absolutely ludicrous, for sure, but in Muse’s expert hands, one of the most enjoyable pieces of pure escapism. Their live performances from around this time are some of most fondly remembered among fans, and that essence was captured in 2007’s H.A.A.R.P., recorded at the newly revamped Wembley Stadium in London. (LISTEN)
Every now and again, guitar-pop has to reboot itself like this and readdress core principles before it can move forwards once again. In 2003, The Shins provided that moment with Chutes Too Narrow. Boasting much clearer and cleaner production standards than their endearingly lo-fi debut Oh, Inverted World, the band kept their DIY aesthetic intact for their second record, recording almost all of it in singer James Mercer’s basement in Portland. The result was an almost old-school study in classic songwriting: a series of ten brightly produced, perfectly sequenced indie-pop gems whose cryptic lyrics sat beautifully alongside crisp, heroic guitar lines.
It was so gloriously improbable that such a seemingly simple and humble collection of folkie acoustic strums could encompass such technicolour visions, or were capable of re-stating the basic elements of pop and make them seem so fresh and revelatory, and so maddeningly addictive. Mercer’s tuneful whimper masked an array of emotion that he martialled in literate but homespun lyrics, on particular highlights ‘Saint Simon’ and ‘Kissing The Lipless’. Chutes Too Narrow won universal rave reviews, and The Shins became the biggest indie band in America for a few years, their songs appearing all over television and movies, and their place in history was secured with their first all-time classic. (LISTEN)
At the time of writing, Kanye West is the most notorious and divisive music superstar on the planet, so it’s extraordinary to think that his career as a rapper almost never got off the ground in the first place. Having cut his teeth as a producer for some of the biggest hip-hop stars in the ‘90s with his sped-up, chopped samples and dazzling beats, The College Dropout was the result of four years’ work in the studio and battling to land himself a record deal in his own right. Then, in 2002, he had to recover from a near-fatal car accident (documented in the gripping single ‘Through The Wire’).
Executive-produced in tandem with the biggest names in industry, such as Damon Dash, Kareem Burke and Jay Z, West called in all his favours and went for broke straight away. The result was a timeless collection of classic singles (the grimy spiritual ‘Jesus Walks’ and the more chilled ‘All Falls Down’) and deep cuts (‘The New Workout Plan’, the 12-minute closer ‘Last Call’) that showed Kanye’s abilities as a witty, insightful rapper as well as cutting-edge sonic wizard. (LISTEN)
Marking a pronounced shift in Yo La Tengo’s established style, the New Jersey-ites ninth album was noticeably a lot slower and quieter than their imperious career highlights of the ‘90s. Taking place in a perpetual twilight, with soft folk-rock strums and harmonic humming characterising the bulk, it’s a perfect setting for Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, the married couple whose lyrics and chemistry shape so much of what makes YLT awesome, to expose the minutiae of their relationship in compelling confessionals. ‘The Crying Of Lot G’, for example, sees Kaplan ruing the aftermath of an argument (“It seems like just a little thing / you don’t wanna listen and I can’t shut up”).
Sensitive, adult and subtle, it represented a slight maturation of the themes of much their nineties work, but was no less accessible for it given multiple listens. Happily for older fans, the feedback-laden college rock explorations of their origins are still intact in a couple of places (‘Cherry Chapstick’ and ‘Saturday’). The astonishing psychedelic lullaby ‘Night Falls On Hoboken’, unravelling over 17 minutes, ties yet another incredible YLT record together, this one more graceful and understated than masterpieces like Electr-O-Pura. (LISTEN)
For all his celebrated work with Death Cab For Cutie, a band that characterised noughties American indie like few others, Benjamin Gibbard’s all-time best came in the form of a side-project. Constructed through a long-distance collaboration with electronic musician Jimmy Tamborello where CD-Rs would be mailed back and forth across the country (hence the project’s name), Give Up was a warm, affectionate update of the new-wave of the ‘80s for the impersonal, atomised noughties. Integrating the human and the machine-made in a ‘yin-yang’ fashion, Gibbard and Tamborello complemented each other’s strengths perfectly, the flourishes of electronic wizardry ideally suiting Gibbard’s lyrical whimsy where Death Cab could often come across as twee.
‘Nothing Better’, coming across like a transatlantic update of The Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me?’, was the finest moment, but iconic tracks like ‘Such Great Heights’ and ‘The District Sleeps Alone Tonight’ have lived on and are still frequently heard more than 10 years later. Currently standing as legendary indie label Sub Pop’s highest-ever-selling album (don’t forget it once had Nirvana on its roster…) with over 1.1 million sales, Give Up has become one of the most fondly remembered cult albums of the new millennium. (LISTEN)
By 2004, nearly ten years after the success of Dookie, Green Day were in serious danger of becoming irrelevant. Warning had tanked commercially four years previously, and the trio’s mouldering brand of prank-rock made them look like yesterday’s men, trapped in a permanent adolescence. So, in late 2003, they took a tremendous gamble by reviving what had long been a deeply unfashionable concept – the rock opera. Constructed around two nine-minute, multi-segmented pieces and concerning the coming-of-age of a character, Jesus of Suburbia, American Idiot’s plot articulated the frustration and disillusionment of a generation that became politically aware in the engulfing paranoia post-9/11 and the Iraq War.
Right from the razor-sharp chords heralding the opening title track, here was a new, smart Green Day, not just smart-alecky. Many of the tracks, like the show-stopping ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ and ‘Are We The Waiting’, had much more in common with classic rock structures than Green Day’s traditional three-chord, boxy punk songs, and were primed for the biggest stadiums and arenas. As well as becoming a musical touchstone for an entire generation, American Idiot is one of the most stunning comebacks in pop history, selling six million copies in the States and completely re-inventing the band in the eyes of critics and fans. (LISTEN)
At the start of their career, Yeah Yeah Yeahs were the subject of a furious bidding war, the resulting pressure of which nearly broke them apart before they had even started. Scrapping material left over from their 2002 debut EP and starting all over again with Dave Sitek and Alan Moulder on production turned out to be a masterstroke. Fever To Tell was a delight from start to finish, crammed with deliriously trashy art-punk freakouts that celebrated all the aspects of New York’s post-millennium underground scene: atonal blitzes of guitar; jackhammering drums; and tons of garage rock fun that all added up to a kind of retro-futurism.
But tying it all together was the charisma of Karen O’s vocal performances. Here, truly, was one of the great frontwomen in rock, like a Frankenstein’s monster of PJ Harvey’s confrontational vulnerability, Siouxsie Sioux’s histrionics and Debbie Harry’s seductive presence, leaping and hollering around the stage in ludicrously coloured outfits. The unashamedly sentimental centrepiece ‘Maps’ rightly gets the plaudits, but almost every other moment was as strong – the raunchy ‘Rich’, the almost cartoonishly noisy ‘Date With The Night’ and ‘Tick’, and the more mature dynamism of ‘Y Control’ being but the very best. YYY’s accomplishments have been many and varied since, but Fever To Tell was the point their career really took off, where the hype was delivered upon in spades with their powerful DIY aesthetic totally uncompromised by major label oversight. (LISTEN)
More arranged and controlled than their self-titled 1998 debut, Rated R was the point at which Josh Homme truly put distance between himself and his past in desert-rock titans Kyuss, and where Queens Of The Stone Age came into their own as a musical force. Like Nine Inch Nails before them, QOTSA managed to be heavy as all hell without actually being that loud, and that was down to Homme and Oliveri’s mastery of texture and ambience combined with ex-Screaming Trees’ Mark Lanegan’s talent for psychedelia. Therefore, the tracks were able to make their point through walls of warm guitar fuzz and solemn, spine-chilling harmonies rather than raw power.
‘The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret’ was one of the first classic rock singles of the new millennium, while drug-induced paranoia was spelt out in ‘Auto Pilot’ and ‘Better Living Through Chemistry’, more tuneful and groove-orientated than anything any musical contributor had done before. That said, the stoner-rock affiliations were still intact with the gleeful ‘Feel Good Hit Of The Summer’, listing recreational drugs over and over again to a headbanging, pummelling rhythm that served as a kind of philosophical exposition. Getting more exposure after the commercial success of Songs For The Deaf two years later (see #83 on this list), Rated R now stands as one of the last great hard rock records. (LISTEN)
Although it would have been the case that absolutely anything Boards Of Canada released would have been doomed to dwell in the shadows of Music Has The Right To Children, a record that did for electronic ambient music in the ‘90s what Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue did for jazz in the ‘50s, what Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison eventually came up with satisfied fans and had critics purring once more. With Geogaddi, they basically decided not to tinker with a winning formula, but implemented darker and more sinister undercurrents while slightly readjusting all of their core elements, to make for a much more unsettling listening experience.
With distorted, masked voices and samples, latticed with colder analogue synths, this was not an album to fall asleep to – ‘The Devil Is In The Detail’, in which a child cries out as a woman leads a self-hypnosis session, in particular, was utterly chilling. This was something played up by internet rumours and by Warp Records itself ahead of its release, with suggestions that demon faces could be seen in the artwork, and the theory that its running time of 66 minutes 6 seconds meant Geogaddi was recorded by the devil. While it didn’t cover any different musical ground, the difference was in tone and texture – and besides, when music is this lovingly crafted and constructed, who cares? A worthy follow-up to a groundbreaking, genre-defining classic. (LISTEN)
Tags: 2000s, classic album, Ed Biggs, feature, noughties, staff lists, The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s
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