Bands riven by internecine warfare and creative tensions can often produce great, if volatile, works of art, and Texan post-hardcore quintet At The Drive-In’s final album Relationship Of Command is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Infusing their inherent aggression and razor-sharp riffing with a melodious edge and some of Cedric Bixler’s most surrealistic and bizarre lyrical imagery yet, there was friction in the group related to their strict punk origins and the increasing prog-rock-derived influences of Bixler and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. Alternating between seething raw energy, heard in the raging opener ‘Arcarsenal’ and the breathlessly fast, Iggy Pop-featuring ‘Rolodex Propaganda’, and the slower-paced and more grandiose ‘Enfilade’ and ‘Invalid Litter Dept.’ was a winning combination that won the album fans from far beyond the post-hardcore world as their wild live performances drew comparisons with Fugazi and MC5.
The stunning single ‘One Armed Scissor’, performed riotously on ‘Later…’ in Britain as their equipment malfunctioned live on air, attempted to marry those opposing musical tendencies with memorable results. The galloping claustrophobia of closer ‘Catacombs’ ended with Bixler’s hollering vocal burning itself out, a suitable full stop for the band. Bixler and Rodriguez-Lopez would go on to form The Mars Volta (see #93 on this list for their debut), while the remaining trio continued as the more purely punk Sparta. Not only was Relationship Of Command arguably the greatest album of its genre in the noughties, but also one of the most impressive accomplishments in the general field of guitar music. (LISTEN)
Before they descended into a tabloid circus, The Libertines briefly burned brighter and more fiercely than almost every other British guitar band of the decade, bursting onto the scene with such confidence and charisma that it was impossible to not at least look at them. Produced by The Clash’s Mick Jones, one of the only people who could have captured the excitement and tension of their early gigs and Doherty and Barat’s chemistry, their debut album Up The Bracket was a total triumph despite its obvious flaws. While overtly part of the garage rock revival that was springing up around the world – bouncy guitars, economic drums and earworm hooks were all present and correct – there was a clear, consistent pedigree to all of its best moments. Opening with three songs of pure attitude (‘Death On The Stairs’ being the best), the Libs then delivered generational anthems ‘Time For Heroes’, ‘Up The Bracket’ and ‘Boys In The Band’.
More humorous songs like ‘The Boy Looked At Johnny’ provided levity; ‘The Good Old Days’ and ‘Radio America’ proved they could at least attempt a more mellow side; and they tied it all up with the bravado of ‘I Get Along’. As such, it placed the Libs in a lineage of great British rock, playing fast and loose with more than four decades’ worth of beat, mod, punk and Britpop with a cheeky irreverence that endeared them to legions of dedicated fans – and this is why they were more fondly remembered than almost all of their grot’n’roll contemporaries. More than a year after The Strokes’ debut had landed, the British indie scene at last had its own watershed moment. As for the Libs themselves, their potential quickly faded into in-fighting and druggy self-annihilation, with another ingeniously flawed album following in 2004 (see #147 on this list), but Up The Bracket will always stand as a document to what could have been a brilliant career. (LISTEN)
Sonically in the same vein of gothic post-punk as Joy Division, Television and early Cure, complete with sharp suits and sternly monochrome artwork, sophisticated New York four-piece Interpol delivered one of the most endlessly fascinating and cryptic guitar records of the decade. With masses of compressed guitars layered on top of each other to form an impenetrable wall of gloom-rock noise, with an acknowledgment of the shoegazing textures of My Bloody Valentine, Turn On The Bright Lights was less an album than a force of nature, full of paradoxes that made it so enjoyable to revisit. The comparisons were extremely obvious – Paul Banks’ freeze-dried baritone channelled Ian Curtis so precisely that it often felt like a séance – but Interpol very clearly had enough songwriting chops to stamp their own vision on proceedings, with Carlos Dengler’s high-end bass smoothing off the jagged post-punk edges.
At times so intensely atmospheric that it felt like it might crush your chest, and at others so expansive that its horizons seemed to expand forever, TOTBL was consistently unsettling, with Banks’ lyrics so immensely inscrutable yet delivered with such dagger-eyed sincerity that it defied logic. The vertiginous guitars of the towering opener ‘Untitled’ set the tone for a haunting and cathartic experience – the immediate post-9/11 paranoia in the city made ‘NYC’, with its seeming platitudes like “New York cares”, a kind of healing anthem. The bullet-grey doom of the coda to ‘PDA’; the spectral intro of ‘The New’; the wintery quiet of ‘Hands Away’ were all brooding standout moments. But Interpol were also capable of fun, launching into an almost Strokes-esque bar-band blues on ‘Say Hello To The Angels’, or throwing clattering post-rock shapes on the highlight ‘Obstacle 1’. Confounding and charming nearly 15 years later, rarely has revivalism sounded so utterly original. (LISTEN)
Modest Mouse was already one of the most critically acclaimed American indie acts to have emerged from the latter part of the ‘90s, but for his first act of the new millennium and his band’s major label debut, Isaac Brock applied his worldview of drugged madness to quite literally universal themes in one of the most significant artistic leaps forward recent memory. There was something desolate and existential at the heart of The Moon & Antarctica, as Brock meditated continually upon themes of the afterlife and the fleeting nature of everything in the human experience (“everything that keeps us together is falling apart” and “that’s how the world will end” he sings resignedly and matter-of-factly on opener ‘3rd Planet’).
Produced clearly and given an ethereal shimmer by Brian Deck, gorgeous tracks follow one after another in stately, unhurried fashion – the e-bows and violins of ‘Perfect Disguise’ morph into the stiff bassline and scattergun lyrical approach of ‘Tiny Cities Made Of Ashes’ all the way through the infinity of ‘The Cold Part’ and its thematic coda ‘Alone Down There’ in a breathtaking mid-album segment. Brock’s personal uncertainty and lofty visions were underscored by the most expansive and confident music the band had made. A record that demanded repeat listens, it plotted an important point on the graph of Modest Mouse’s long journey from college radio darlings to mainstream success, an arc that can’t just be explained by ‘Float On’ four years later. The Moon & Antarctica was the sound of a band leaving behind their lo-fi beginnings, massively expanding their scope, embracing new possibilities and embarking on the path to true greatness. (LISTEN)
A meeting of brash Italo-house and impeccable New York punk chic, bridging the chasm between the rock and dance worlds in America like The Stone Roses or Screamadelica did in Britain more than ten years before, The Rapture’s debut Echoes was one of those rare occasions when shame-faced revivalism was actually needed. Led by the scintillating single ‘House Of Jealous Lovers’, a joyous dance-punk hybrid that made good on its instructions to make their listeners “shake doooown!!”, it was a multi-coloured party album that cut’n’pasted influences from the past and re-arranged them into something modern and essential.
The ricocheting 808s of opener ‘Olio’, the moody, Joy Division-by-the-pool rhythms of ‘I Need Your Love’, and the curiously ecstatic sadness of ‘Sister Saviour’, one of the most criminally underappreciated singles of the decade, all melded synths with wiry post-punk guitars to make some truly irresistible dancefloor tracks. Tender moments like the heaven-sent ‘Love Is All’ or the sax’n’piano-led ‘Open Up Your Heart’, with lyrics like “kill your fears today” added a charmingly naïve spiritual edge to the mix, while the careening ‘Echoes’ and ‘Heaven’ boasted an impeccable set of post-punk steals from PiL and Television. Crucially, it was also brilliantly presented, like the band were being recorded in a series of one-take performances, with Luke Jenner’s excitable, out-of-tune vocals suiting the highly kinetic music right down to the ground. The ‘dance-punk’ genre, as it was called in the States, was born. The Rapture collapsed under the weight of expectation subsequently, with two deeply disappointing albums following it causing them to fade into obscurity, but Echoes has earned them a small place in history. (LISTEN)
1999’s debut Showbiz had marked Muse out as one of the more characterful post-Radiohead ‘complaint rock’ bands, but what they did next raised the stakes and absolutely dwarfed their previous achievements. Harnessing the operatic and dramatic power of Matt Bellamy’s astonishing vocals, fully utilising their classical training and generally turning everything up to 11, Origin Of Symmetry was barking mad and, by all logic, should have collapsed under the weight of its ambition. Instead, it held together brilliantly and was massively entertaining, with the band’s extraordinary musicianship amply supporting the weight of Bellamy’s complex concepts and lengthy, ultra-vivid musical explorations that felt like 2001: A Space Odyssey set to music.
Right from the tinkling piano opening of ‘Newborn’, which promptly went nuclear in its second verse with riffs exploding and bouncing off of each other, Bellamy, Chris Wolstenholme and Dom Howard turned in what remain their career-best individual performances, alternating between gracefully weightless quiet sections (the opening of ‘Space Dementia’ and middle of ‘Citizen Erased’) and spectacular sonic pyrotechnics (‘Hyper Music’, ‘Plug-In Baby’, all the rest of ‘Citizen Erased’!). It advanced Muse’s sound so dramatically that Bellamy became the guitar god for a new generation, setting them on the path to the stadium-conquering titans they became by the middle of the decade, spawning four UK Top 30 hits and expanding their appeal well beyond the indie kids. Its importance in their story was acknowledged by Muse themselves, as they played Origin Of Symmetry in its entirety while heading Reading & Leeds Festivals ten years later. (LISTEN)
Having perfected the psychedelic/alt-pop sound they’d been gradually honing through the ‘80s and ‘90s with 1999’s exquisite The Soft Bulletin, The Flaming Lips’ 10th studio album emulated the artistic achievements of its predecessor but refracted it through a much more accessible musical prism. Their performance of the album’s hit single ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots pt.1’ on Top of the Pops, with Justin Timberlake playing bass in a dolphin suit, was one of the most memorable and unlikely TV moments of the decade, but underlines the extremely attractive and persuasive nature of the record – the Lips were deadly serious about not taking things seriously.
Touching upon themes of love, mortality, artificial intelligence and emotion, pacifism and the cosmos, Wayne Coyne may use broad, cinematic brushstrokes in his lyrics but that was matched by his backing band’s luscious prog-pop performances. ‘Do You Realize???’, the most ecstatic and life-affirming song about death ever made, encapsulates that appeal in one song, but the entire album was packed with thought-provoking, awestruck and wide-eyed observations that, in the hands of almost anyone else, would have been hammy. But with The Flaming Lips, platitudes become revelations. ‘Fight Test’, teaching us that sometimes we must fight and bend our principles, and ‘It’s Summertime’, reminding us to make the best of the world as it is, are just two examples. The sumptuously orchestrated ‘In The Morning Of The Magicians’, with beautiful decorations of oboe and crystalline acoustic guitar, heralded a rich mid-album sequence of luscious arrangements. Adapted into a musical ten years after its creation, Yoshimi… was breathtakingly beautiful, even by the Lips’ own extremely high standards, and made them a mainstream concern for the first time in their career. (LISTEN)
In a brilliant break with cliché, the album which still stands as the greatest achievement in British rap came from a completely normal white guy from Birmingham. After the deluge of critical acclaim that met the release of Original Pirate Material, it’s easy to forget that Mike Skinner was widely ridiculed in late 2001 when he dropped its lead single ‘Has It Come To This?’. Many dismissed him as a novelty act at that point, but six months later they were embarrassed into silence with an extraordinary debut. Hip-hop and the then-nascent British 2-step and garage scenes may have informed his sound, but Skinner eschewed the bling and bluster of its leading lights to focus on realism. Skinner’s conversational, humorous and philosophical style, free of the divisive rhetoric that often accompanies music that professes to be ‘street level’, allowed you to look at his situation through his eyes and, because he was such a good spinner of yarns, you stuck with him.
The actual music and beats were hardly revolutionary, string-swept loops and garage beats clicking metronomically and faithfully, but as a self-produced bedroom project it suited his storytelling vibe down to the ground. There wasn’t anybody who couldn’t relate to at least something that Original Pirate Material had to offer – if not the drudgery of day-to-day existence in ‘Geezers Need Excitement’ and ‘Same Old Thing’, then the male camaraderie of ‘Too Much Brandy’ or ‘Don’t Mug Yourself’, or even the parable of mental fortitude in ‘Stay Positive’ or that sense of nostalgia and lost youth encapsulated so perfectly in album highlight ‘Weak Become Heroes’. Original Pirate Material was a broad church, and it was this that made Skinner a household name in the noughties. While some of its time-specific references may have dated, it remains a totem in British rap. (LISTEN)
Recorded over three harsh winter months in complete isolation in a remote hunting cabin in northern Wisconsin, Justin Vernon’s debut solo album, a paean to loneliness and heartache, has been so endlessly documented and celebrated that its stark, raw emotional power is now obvious to everyone. Focussing on wordless melodies which he later fit lyrics around in search of a more heartfelt, unconscious feel, the nine songs of For Emma, Forever Ago would be a perfect reference point for dictionaries for words like ‘gossamer’, ‘spectral’ and ‘haunting’ that music journalists (us included) use a bit too often. Often sounding like a man lost inside his own head, rigorously self-analysing with the weight of his loneliness bearing down on his soul and revealing his thoughts in a dialogue between himself and a microphone, For Emma… is a frequently uncomfortable experience, like the listener is intruding on a man’s personal apocalypse.
Vernon had broken up with his girlfriend, and his retreat into isolation reflected a kind of quarter-life crisis he was suffering at the age of 25, having felt he had wasted his life up until that point, something you can hear in the gold-selling single ‘Skinny Love’, a track that sounds like it’s going to fall apart completely at any moment. It became an extremely slow-burning success: it took at least 12 months for people to start talking about it in any meaningful way, and it only got a physical release in Europe 10 months after it first appeared as a self-released album, and it peaked at #64 in the Billboard 200 in January 2009, 18 months after it was first available. It also won Vernon a host of high-profile fans and breathless reviews, and the vulnerable, white-boy vocals layered on top of each other and manipulated by Auto-Tune have influenced an awful lot of the most inventive pop music ever since. (LISTEN)
For many lovers of American hip-hop, the thought of Outkast replicating the success of their extraordinary 1998 album Aquemini must have seemed like a very tall order. Not only did they emulate it, they topped it with one of the defining rap albums of the new millennium. Having unrestrained, unlimited freedom of the studio for the first time, having moved into their own Stankonia studios for which the new album was named, was the only way they could have accessed a higher level of artistry than that which they had already achieved, to still find room for growth after three increasingly excellent records in a row. Colliding everything from rock, R&B and gospel to electronica, rave music, funk and psychedelia and subsuming it all within a Dirty South hip-hop context, Stankonia took a year to complete and somehow managed to be stridently experimental, socially aware and radio-friendly all at once.
From the wall-shaking scattergun beats of the astonishing ‘B.O.B.’ that crams psychedelic guitar, turntable scratches, gothic organs and gospel choirs into just one track, to the teen suicide chronicle of ‘Toilet Tisha’ and the American Dream-shredding ‘Gasoline Dreams’, Stankonia was a totemic artistic achievement and a state-of-the-nation address at the same time. Sweeping the 2002 Grammys on the back of the international success of their mainstream breakthrough single ‘Ms. Jackson’, an exquisite R&B/neo-soul fusion whose refrain is one of the most distinctive in recent pop history, Stankonia opened up Southern hip-hop to the world as a commercial alternative to the binary East/West Coast scenes. (LISTEN)
Every truly great American underground act goes through a moment in their career where they drop the surface-level oddness of their songs to let their hearts and souls float free, at the same time accessing a much wider audience. Sonic Youth did it with Daydream Nation, The Flaming Lips did it with The Soft Bulletin, and Animal Collective, having done so much to define what was great about the indie scene during the noughties, did it right at the end of the decade with Merriweather Post Pavilion. Focussing more on tunefulness rather than the maximal production of the likes of Strawberry Jam, it felt like both a summary of everything Animal Collective had done to that point and also a bold expansion of it.
Audio delights, heavenly tapestries of sound that resembled Brian Wilson and classic rock radio re-interpreted by The Orb, tumbled out of the record one after another as every band member operated at the peak of their powers. The nimble interplay between melody and rhythm on standout single ‘My Girls’, with both elements surging and subsiding in different places, was truly exceptional, and in ‘Summertime Clothes’ they found their most commercially friendly moment yet, with distorted voices and synths underpinning a simple repeated chorus “I want to walk around with you” that felt like the most revelatory statement. Merriweather Post Pavilion was joyful, utterly transcendent pop, immediately friendly and accessible for the unconverted yet intricate and challenging for the faithful. Selling 200,000 copies in the US – a huge amount for an independent release – and receiving rave notices by the barrelful, it meant that nobody could have an excuse not to at least give Animal Collective a try. (LISTEN)
One of the crossover sensations of the decade and one of the most significant releases to bring the term ‘dubstep’ to national consciousness was Untrue, the second full length album from London-born producer William Bevan and a landmark for the genre. While it retained and streamlined all the base elements from his enjoyable self-titled album the previous year, it added many more ingenious elements to the mix that made his sound truly expressive and haunting. Time-stretched and pitch-shifted samples made the record’s vocals seem like they were actually stuck in the record, long-dead ghosts haunting the dead-of-night ambience of tracks like ‘Archangel’. Untrue was an unusually uniform and pure collection, the sound subtly varying and mutating from track to track so that each of the 13 was as important to the whole as every other – there were no MC-featuring tracks, no hard-hitting cross-over pieces to appeal to radio playlist compilers, no pyrotechnics or extraneous flashiness of any description. Just nocturnal ambience, spectral vocal loops and cobwebbed beats, from the sub-frequency basslines of ‘Etched Headplate’, the 2-step garage inflections of ‘Ghost Hardware’ and the shimmering interlude of ‘Endorphin’.
As such, it was the overall impression of Untrue that mattered rather than any individual moment, like the temporary image of the sun seared onto your retinas when you’ve looked at it directly. Since the success of Untrue, which he himself couldn’t have expected, Bevan has chosen to focus on the noble art form of the 12” single, releasing a series of excellent EPs in which he’s been able to indulge himself over an entire side of vinyl at a time, a move which has suited his style of music. But nothing conjures up that overwhelming sense of monochrome loneliness than this, his finest hour. (LISTEN)
The surgical precision of the goth-house of Silent Shout’s opening title track felt like a thoroughly modern update of Kraftwerk’s age-old aesthetics for electronica, but sonics weren’t the only thing The Knife shared with the German pioneers. The adoption of masks and silhouettes during their live performances, the cultish glamour that appealed to misfit teens, the seeming aloofness and almost total lack of publicity, came from a shared belief that their music should do the talking. But even a cursory listen to their third studio album revealed bottomless chasms of depth underneath the surface-level disconnection, and the intrigue sucked in the listener again and again. Elevating itself far above 95% of post-millennium electronica because of its rare combination of humanism and invention, Silent Shout was an album of frighteningly real evocations – of fear, safety, loss, desperation and lust – that spoke directly to the human soul, piercingly clear in a way that their previous records simply hadn’t been.
The bass punch that intrudes upon the ghoulish ambience of ‘The Captain’s lengthy intro sends a shiver down the spine; the pounding tri-syllabic bassline of the title track threatens to lay waste to the building; the trickling, water-like flow of percussion on ‘Like A Pen’ was like little else around at the time. Karin Dreijer Andersson’s wildly pitch-shifted vocals made her sound alternately demonic and hilarious, and allowed The Knife access a huge range of expression. It was also subtly, subversively political – the popping, plastic box beats of ‘We Share Our Mother’s Health’, maximalist and noisy, warns of the environmental cost of mindless consumerism and mankind’s obsession with technology. Amid fears of rampant capitalism post-recession, Silent Shout gets more relevant with each passing year, as well as being one of the most impressive achievements in electronic music in recent memory. (LISTEN)
Quite a lot about the musical content of Radiohead’s seventh album was overshadowed by the innovative manner of its roll-out. The band, finally freed from its contract with Parlophone, introduced a ‘pay what you want’ system with just ten days’ notice, in an ultimately futile attempt to shake up the record industry (even they’ve not done so again). That talk lasted for a little while, with Radiohead’s latent countercultural attitude reflected in the presentation of the record rather than what was actually in it, but the reason why people still remember In Rainbows a decade later is because it was consistently brilliant from start to finish. Heralded with the tricksy, static-covered beats of ‘15 Step’, it saw the Oxford five-piece going through their full repertoire, from the tightly-wound rock of ‘Bodysnatchers’ and ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’ to the sheer loveliness of the twilit ‘Nude’ and the sparse ‘Faust Arp’.
‘House Of Cards’ found Yorke shedding his cryptic lyrical bent and being unusually direct (“I don’t want to be your friend / I just want to be your lover”), and ‘All I Need’ was a rare love song, its electronic bassline a masterclass in soulful economy. Not a single moment on the album was wasted, but conversely no moment was ever laboured or over-indulged. In Rainbows was a sublimely peaceful experience, the sound of a band at ease with its own identity, exploring a range of moods as the album’s title suggested. Equally, it was also yet another subtle but nonetheless dramatic reinvention for them, and arguably represents the last time they truly challenged themselves. Scooping the 2009 Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album, nominated for the 2008 Mercury Music Prize, it reasserted the relevance of one of the most important bands of the last 25 years. (LISTEN)
Typifying the garage rock revival in 2001 along with their countrymen The Strokes, Jack and Meg White’s third album was the one that brought them to prominence and the record that most fans would cite as their best work. Although they were still very much a cult concern at this point, White Blood Cells seems to presage the worldwide fame they would imminently discover with this album and its successor Elephant (see #48 on this list) over the coming four years – the artwork even sees the duo being besieged by shadowy photographers. By now, the group was now supremely confident in the blocky blues-punk that had characterised their first two records – the frantic garage riffage of their first signature song, ‘Fell In Love With A Girl’, and the carnal, full-blooded ‘Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground’ and ‘Expecting’ – but the Stripes had now expanded their sound. The childlike ditty ‘We’re Going To Be Friends’ and the jaunty country-punk of ‘Hotel Yorba’ were charming throwback delights whose total simplicity was the key to their brilliance.
Listeners also gained insight into some of White’s deeper cultural influences: ‘The Union Forever’s lyrics were all cribbed from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, his favourite film; while the hi-hat/bass drum thumbnail sketch of ‘Little Room’ took their minimalist ideology to its logical endpoint. Everything on White Blood Cells was leaner and more disciplined than its predecessor, with Jack and Meg reacting against De Stijl’s relative indulgence by banning guitar solos and using as few overdubs as possible. The result was a phenomenal record where every diverse idea struck musical gold, and it all came from a deliberately restricted palette, showing what truly creative people can do with even the barest cupboard of musical ingredients. Huge amounts of media coverage trailed White Blood Cells and their tiny indie label struggled desperately to keep up with demand, and The White Stripes were on the path to glory. (LISTEN)
Following hot on the heels of the rapturously received Sun Giant EP earlier in 2008, Seattle-based Fleet Foxes had an awful lot to live up to with their first full-length album. With a studiously bucolic style that totally eschewed any urban influences whatsoever, they could easily have been accused of being hipsters if it weren’t for the fact that Fleet Foxes was so immensely, obviously great at first listen. Furthermore, it has gone on to quietly inform the aesthetic of the folk revival of the ’10s. Transcendent, close-chorus harmonising led by the band’s figurehead Robin Pecknold was only the most immediately noticeable aspect of its greatness, as the unnervingly assured songwriting (for a debut) revealed hidden depths listen after listen despite its surface-level straightforwardness.
The a-cappella ‘Red Squirrel / Sun It Rises’ intro and ‘White Winter Hymnal’ opened a sequence of precisely rendered and surprisingly varied songs, matching the beautiful tapestry of the album’s artwork. The fast-paced rock-folk hybrid ‘Ragged Wood’, the sturdy, patient guitar of ‘Blue Ridge Mountains, the heroic chord changes and vocal lines of ‘He Doesn’t Know Why’ and the stately ‘Your Protector’, the lonely acoustic guitars of ‘Tiger Peasant Mountain Song’ and ‘Meadowlarks’… Fleet Foxes was truly an embarrassment of riches, and the listener can only revel in wide-eyed wonder. A work of timeless beauty and an instant American classic, it was the sound of a band steeped in the knowledge of folk and rock history but who never sounded like merely the sum of their record collections. (LISTEN)
In one of the most staggeringly short-sighted decisions made by a major label in recent memory, Wilco’s fourth album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was rejected on first listen by the suits at Reprise (a Warner Bros. imprint) who couldn’t hear the potential for dollars and then made the harsh call to drop them altogether. They had long been darlings of the critical fraternity, but the reception it received when they sneakily released it via webstream in September 2001 was far beyond anything they could have expected. Inking a fresh deal with Warners with the more artist-friendly subsidiary Nonesuch two months later, its physical release in April 2002 quickly ran up half a million sales on top of that, generating one of the countercultural success stories of the decade. It would be very easy to overstate, but YHF really is as excellent as all the reviews said at the time. With hired hand Jim O’Rourke bolstering their in-studio line-up, this humble little Midwest alt-rock band had turned in one of the defining guitar records of the decade, and one so subtly challenging that it made the listener question whether they had actually ever heard music before.
From the gently undulating drums of opener ‘I Am Trying To Break Your Heart’, YHF was characterised by a finely textured, college-rock approach to songwriting, but spoken in a comparatively conventional and austere language: clear yet understated guitars, warm synths and stately drumbeats. The musical abstractions of dirge tracks like ‘Poor Places’ and ‘War On War’ were offset by some heart-stoppingly perfect pop gems like ‘I’m The Man Who Loves You’. In a spooky coincidence, Jeff Tweedy’s elliptical lyrics took on new significance in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, with the soulful alt-folk of ‘Jesus Etc.’, with just a whisper of pedal steel guitar coated as a veneer, going “Tall buildings shake / Voices escape singing sad sad songs”. Captured in Sam Jones’ excellent documentary, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was a most unlikely breakthrough for Wilco, with each successive listen always throwing up more questions than answers. Like a fine wine that gets better with age, it remains one of the most seemingly innocuous, yet revolutionary and fundamentally unknowable albums in the history of guitar music. (LISTEN)
Before Since I Left You, Australian six-piece DJ collective The Avalanches had only a clutch of EPs and the occasional remix to their name. After, they were the toast of the critical world, an international festival fixture and the only band to have ever had a Madonna sample approved. As you listened to the opening bars of the opening ‘Since I Left You’, a voice says “get a drink, have a good time now, welcome to paradise”, and it was hard not to feel as if you’d genuinely arrived there, its salvo of trilling woodwind solos, sighing strings and a looped vocal sample the perfect introduction to their aesthetic. A musical patchwork stitched together from an astonishing 3,500 different samples whose origins span the whole of popular music and beyond, Since I Left You was a joyous kaleidoscope of a record, a sonic travelogue / pop-art mixtape dedicated to the art of turntables and sampling.
The Avalanches’ undertook an epic journey into sound itself, spanning silly movie scores, musicals, ‘80s pop, golden age hip-hop and all manner of seemingly disposable pop-culture detritus add up to way, way more than the sum of its parts, and one that was incredible emotional and evocative despite not featuring any actual vocals per se. The memorable and, frankly, bonkers single ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ elevated itself way above mere novelty to become a tribute to the careful, respectful musical crate-digging that produced the album. However, it was to the group’s eternal credit that the listener’s attention was never drawn to the painstaking process of its creation. With the seemingly eternal wait for a follow-up finally ending 16 years later, Since I Left You has only grown in stature in The Avalanches’ absence, standing as one of the best-reviewed albums of the decade and one that continued to be rediscovered by new generations of fans. (LISTEN)
Primal Scream are rightly remembered for their 1991 groundbreaking dance-rock hybrid Screamadelica, but the same people that praise them for that often forget 2000’s XTMRNTR, their other undisputed masterpiece and every bit as sonically inventive, simply because it didn’t sync up with the zeitgeist at the turn of the millennium. But in many ways, it was the sound of the dystopian dread of OK Computer made flesh and blood, a searingly bleak world characterised by faceless, unchecked hyper-capitalism (‘Exterminator’), corrupt war-mongering politicians (‘Swastika Eyes’, ‘Blood Money’) and culture war (‘Kill All Hippies’). The subversive themes extended to the entire presentation of the record – the stylised title was chosen because ‘vowels are capitalist’, according to a slightly bug-eyed Bobby Gillespie at the time. A protest album musically as well as politically, XTMRNTR was a savage indictment on complacent mainstream thought, the terrifying sound of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four updated for Y2K.
Ever the musical chameleons, Gillespie and co. worked with veteran dub DJ Adrian Sherwood and My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields on production, and allowed ideas to flow back and forth to make an album of twisted, gun-metal grey noise epics whose influences came from a number of different genres. Skeletal, mechanised hip-hop (‘Exterminator’, ‘Insect Royalty’) rubs up next to supremely gentle mid-album highlight ‘Keep Your Dreams’. The blistering atonal aggression of the highly unlikely Top 40 hit ‘Accelerator’ held the distinction of being the last ever release on Creation Records.
Sometimes the band was sidelined to give the producers the spotlight – for instance, there were two mixes of the savage ‘Swastika Eyes’ (Jagz Kooner’s digital battering ram of Atari Teenage Riot distortion beat The Chemical Brothers’ calmer version), while the shoegaze/dub/feedback apocalypse of ‘If They Move Kill ‘Em’ was actually a 1997 track listed as an ‘MBV Arkestra’ remix, aided and abetted by Shields. A stunning musical experience was capped off by the astonishing closer ‘Shoot Speed/Kill Light’, a vertiginous wall of industrial-punk noise that positively glowed with evil. Few bands make a cross-genre album as great as this even once in their career – Primal Scream have made two. (LISTEN)
Polly Jean Harvey’s fifth studio album finally delivered her the mainstream attention that she had so richly deserved for almost a decade by that point. SFTCSFTS sold more than 300,000 copies, earned her multiple Brit and Grammy nominations, and became the first of two Mercury Music Prize victories in her illustrious career. What can best be described as a concept album about love and lust, it was a noticeably more widescreen and slickly produced affair than her previous records, with Mick Harvey tasked with producing a “rounder and fuller sound”. A big melodic breakout characterised by the soaring, sonorous single ‘Good Fortune’, Harvey sounded happier than ever before, but even that sense of joy could lead her down some pretty dark avenues – the dangerous, full-blooded passion of ‘Big Exit’ or the violent horniness of ‘This Is Love’, for example, were as glamorous as all hell, but the influence of New York’s darker, seedy underbelly could be heard in ‘The Whores Hustle And The Hustlers Whore’.
In other places, delicacy achieved the same ends, with the preternaturally hushed ‘Beautiful Feeling’ sounding like it would disintegrate if you breathed too loudly while listening to it, while ‘A Place Called Home’ and ‘We Float’ benefitted from sparse, crystalline production that brought out their beautiful, hidden depths. Every single track was a resounding success, revealing new depths to an artist who was intent on not only altering people’s preconceptions about her, but also exceeding her own previous artistic achievements, and she did so with such consummate ease it was scary. Post-9/11, Harvey’s reminiscences of love on New York’s streets took on a new sense of dread, with the Thom Yorke duet ‘This Mess We’re In’ containing lyrics like “we’re in New York / no need for words now / we sit in silence” that were impossible to hear in the same way again. Indeed, Harvey was stuck in Washington DC on the fateful day itself, accepting her Mercury win on September 11th over the phone in a memorable interview. Polly Jean has always been great, Stories From The City… was the first of two all-time classics. (LISTEN)
Tags: 2000s, classic album, Ed Biggs, feature, noughties, staff lists, The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s
Counting down The Student Playlist's top fifty albums released in…
A beginner's guide to the dramatic, gothic and romantic post-punk…
As they mark the 30th anniversary of the release of…
Your email address will not be published.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
