A smorgasbord of hip-hop, psychedelia, soul and funk, Outkast’s fourth album ‘Stankonia’ presaged the genre-blind approach to music today.
Innovative in promotional terms as well as purely musical ones, it’s hard to remember a major label album as shocking and revolutionary as Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’.
A jaded, cynical yet ultimately touching analysis of Western civilisation’s obsession with technology at the dawn of the millennium, Grandaddy’s ‘The Sophtware Slump’ feels even more relevant 20 years on.
A charming, retro-futurist vision for pop that was wildly out of step with the mainstream in 2000, Broadcast’s debut album ‘The Noise Made By People’ is a lost treasure.
An understated mix of alternative country and lush chamber-pop, Lambchop’s 2000 album ‘Nixon’ remains Kurt Wagner’s masterwork.
A skull-crushing onslaught of psych, krautrock, dub and post-punk enhanced by a small army of cutting edge producers, ‘XTRMNTR’ was Primal Scream’s second masterpiece.
The band’s third and (to date) final album of original material, 1999’s ‘The Battle Of Los Angeles’ acted as a course corrective for Rage Against The Machine.
A magnum opus of masterful, conceptual songwriting spanning a bewildering number of genres, ’69 Love Songs’ by The Magnetic Fields has not been surpassed.
An optimistic fin-de-siecle masterpiece offering hope for humanity, The Flaming Lips’ 1999 album ‘The Soft Bulletin’ turns 20.
Aphex Twin’s 1999 EP ‘Windowlicker’, combined with its memorable video, was so far ahead of its time that it still sounds cutting-edge today.
