142. Primal Scream - XTRMNTR (2000)

This is certainly the most aggressive record on this entire top 200 list--I mean, look at the titles: "Kill All Hippies". "Accelerator". "Exterminator". "Swastika Eyes". "Blood Money". "If They Move, Kill 'Em". The entire album is soaked in this violent, militaristic rage that in this age sounds even more prescient than it must have in 2000. If ever an album's sound was perfectly evoked by its album cover, it's this one--"Accelerator" is a garage rock song so loud and distorted it sounds like a jet taking off and the rest of the tracks are nothing more than celebrations of aggression and violence, and at points I was reminded of vintage Stooges, except with a more electronic flavor. This album is a near-masterpiece: every track feeds into the central theme of violence perfectly and each track does something different while never seeming extraneous--variations on a theme. It's a concept record of a sort--the opening sample is a woman saying "It's not sexual, it's just aggression," and then you've got the insane militaristic funk of "Kill All Hippies", stuff like "Insect Royalty" that sounds like a drinking song for robots, and "Blood Money", which sounds like Miles Davis being force-fed amphetamines in Hell. The second remix of "Swastika Eyes" is totally unnecessary, but everything else is so perfectly written, performed and produced that it boggles the mind. Bands should not be releasing albums this good fifteen years into their career. Play it loud and have your brains knocked out.

MY RATING: 9.4

Primal Scream - "Shoot Speed/Kill Light"

143. The Decemberists - Picaresque (2005)

The Decemberists have their own sound and their own purpose, and you either have to give yourself over to it and accept it, or reject them entirely. Their sound is a super-bookish collection of overwritten songs about pirates, star-crossed lovers, sailors, spies and so forth, the lyrics loaded with three-dollar words (just look at the opening track: "palanquin", "largesse", "infanta", "folderol", "chaparral", "phalanx", "rhapsodical"). The singer, Colin Meloy, sounds just like Al Stewart (I also look exactly like him--Meloy, not Stewart--in case you wanted to get a picture of your humble webmaster), so if that's your thing...I actually enjoy a great deal of this, and its preciousness really doesn't get on my nerves too much simply because the lyrics are (mostly) well-written in spite of their studied archness and the melodies are (mostly) excellent and the songs are well-performed. What separates this group from every other roaming pack of drama and English majors is that they have a real talent at constructing a world for each song they write: the instruments and arrangements are perfectly chosen for each topic. They are masters of atmosphere. Actually, the followup record The Crane Wife seems, to me, to be easily this group's masterpiece, and I'm not sure why this one was chosen to represent the group on this list. This album, for example, contains the infamous "The Mariner's Revenge Song", a minimalistic story-song that might work well in concert but recorded is a near-disaster, where it seems little more than an interminable nine minute long novelty track. "On The Bus Mall" has wonderful, evocative lyrics but the melody is too undistinguished to support its six minutes, and I don't know what the hell the band is trying to do in "The Bagman's Gambit". Overall this is good, but I'd only recommend it if you've already picked up The Crane Wife and want to hear more.

MY RATING: 7.3

The Decemberists - "We Both Go Down Together"

144. Andrew W.K. - I Get Wet (2001)

When it comes to the phenomenon (thing?) that is Andrew W.K., there's not much room for subtle thinking. This music rejects subtlety, forcefully and almost involuntarily like a human body rejecting a donor liver. The message of "Party Hard" is to party hard. The message of "I Love NYC" is that Andrew loves NYC. The message of "She Is Beautiful" is that she is beautiful. There may have been subtlety in this music's making but there is none in the final result, and it's one of the greatest examples I've ever seen in which what must have been thousands of hours of studio time was spent slaving over something so brilliantly, gloriously stupid. What does this album sound like? It sounds like Van Halen's "Jump" if it were performed by Metallica. It sounds like a sweaty man jumping around a room. It sounds like if Queen decided, after recording News of the World, to double down on that style and never attempt anything else. You can't argue with this record. It will break into your house and party you into submission. There's a song on here called "Party Till You Puke", and that's exactly what the song is about. I can't argue with that.

MY RATING: 8.3

Andrew W.K. - "Party Hard" (what else???)

145. The Fiery Furnaces - Blueberry Boat (2004)

 

This is by far the most extreme example of the (for a time) popular "progressive pop" style, in which pop melodies are placed one after another in endless profusion so we get 8 minute-plus tracks in which melodies last for about a minute, to be replaced by another. Destroyer's Destroyer's Rubies was an example of this, but this is even more out-there, with 5 tracks over 8 minutes, singing in Inuit, four-minute Steve Reich-y minimalist patterns and lengthy, surrealistic children's stories. It's too complex for its own good; to get anything out of this record requires about four or five careful listens (i.e. no distractions) and even then you'll realize that what you get out of it isn't all that great. There are catchy moments, yes, but they don't develop or lead into or out of anything and the endless childishness of the lyrics gets annoying after a while. Also, lead vocalist Eleanor Friedberger has a snobbish-sounding, schoolmarm-y voice that is totally inappropriate for this kind of music. It needed a Joanna Newsom, someone who isn't afraid to embrace her inner child when singing. But even then, would this have worked? There comes a point when the sheer amount of mental work required to understand a composition works against its quality--or, the quality revealed is incommensurate with the work you had to put in to discover it. It ain't about how good a musician or arranger you are--this is why the Ramones are a better band than say, Dream Theater. Plus there is no sense of atmosphere or any attempt at soundscaping on this record--at least when the Decemberists write their stupid songs about pirate ships they make you feel like you're on a pirate ship through the production and instrumental choices. It's all just one annoying pop bit after another, and it could have easily been 30 short tracks as opposed to 13 long ones. I want to say that despite all this, the album is still impressive in its scope and ambition, but even saying that rings false to me. It just goes to show that excellence in art more often happens when one takes a single thing and works it to perfection, rather than taking a million things and throwing them against the wall.

MY RATING: 4.3

The Fiery Furnaces - "Mason City"

146. My Morning Jacket - Z (2005)

I feel like this record is a good deal more ambitious than it was credited for being--most gushed over it, yes, but basically on the level of it being a "great classic rock record", filled with great melodies and musicianship and nary a weak track to be found, and really neglected to mention what, to me, is this album's greatest asset--an attempt to combine 70s and 00s rock styles on an almost molecular level. Now, aping the 70s today is no new thing--there are a million bands that do it, some excellently (The Black Keys), some pretty well (The Datsuns, Black Mountain) and some fairly terribly (Wolfmother, Eagles of Death Metal). What My Morning Jacket are doing here, though, is far more interesting than anything those bands have yet tried--what's going on here is an attempt, I feel, to try and figure out the links between Neil Young and Radiohead, between Skynyrd and the Strokes, between the Rolling Stones and Beck, and slam them together so seamlessly that there's no way they can be accused of cheap nostalgia or contemporary scene-following. And (mostly) it works. When it does, it's a hell of an achievement--"Off the Record", to pick one, is something else, a track that simultaneously invokes Bob Marley, Neil Young circa Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere and Radiohead, and does so so efficiently and effectively that it sounds like entirely its own thing. When this album is on its game it's one of the greatest examples of rock music stretching across decades that I've ever seen. When it doesn't (a few tracks on the second half of the record) it just sounds like a slightly updated version of Mountain or the Allman Brothers Band--certainly not bad, but not inspired either. It's a kind of miracle, this album, and I certainly can't think of another this decade in which a band stepped so far outside its comfort level and had it work so well.

MY RATING: 8.9

My Morning Jacket - "Lay Low"

147. T.I. - King (2006)

Now here's an album that isn't bad, exactly--but it's so punishing and unchanging and blank in its style that it seems to be twice as long as its already lengthy 75 minutes. You've heard "What You Know", right? And you liked it (of course you did--it's a great song!). Now imagine 70 more minutes of tracks exactly like "What You Know", except not quite as good, and there you have King. There are a few standard R&B ballads, but they aren't anything special, and the skit tracks are just as disposable as they generally always are on rap records. T.I. basically constructs gigantic truck-bangers out of thick bass and massive, regal-sounding synth lines. These are songs meant to be played loud, preferably out your window while you're driving down the street and slapping your left hand against the outside of the car's doorframe. That's this album's purpose, and in that context it succeeds wonderfully, but it doesn't transcend that milieu at all, and in the end it all just starts running together. Play it when you're driving around, or when there's a party, but don't think of getting much out of it anywhere else.

MY RATING: 6.0

T.I. - "Ride Wit Me"

148. Erlend Øye – DJ-Kicks (2004)

This is a mix record, of which there are a few on this list, but what separates this one from the rest is that Kings of Convenience member Oye uses the format to indulge his own particulars, doing things like covering "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" and re-recording certain songs with his own vocals. The whole thing is like a cross between Michael Mayer's Immer and a DJ Shadow record, and it works beautifully (most of the time). Oye has a great, soothing voice, perfectly suited for this kind of electronic pop, and the album works the best when it's focusing on that and not trying to make us "dance". Because, frankly, this isn't a very good dance record. The interpolation of "2D2F" is a near-disaster; while this kind of hyper-aggressive and filthy as hell dance track might have worked on 2 Many DJs' As Heard on Radio Soulwax, here it's a total mood-killer and doesn't fit with the rest of the record. The interpolation of the more "obvious" artists doesn't work too much either--Phoenix don't fit with this kind of record, as good as they are, and the Rapture's "I Need Your Love" is too straightforward a pop track to fit with the rest. Other than those caveats, this really is a well-sequenced, at some parts gorgeous pop record. Oye manages to keep the thing flowing nicely despite the frequent switches between tracks, and with his own re-recorded vocals there to tie everything together, it really feels all one thing, as opposed to just another mix record.

MY RATING: 8.4

Erlend Oye - "Sheltered Life vs. Fine Day (accapella)"

149. The Tough Alliance - A New Chance (2007)

I figured it wouldn't be long until the nostalgia factory that is modern indie music got around to early 90s dance pop--stuff like Dee-Lite, Haddaway, Real McCoy, etc. Granted this album doesn't exactly copy those (there aren't any rap bridges performed by deep-voiced bald men, for example) but it's pretty close. The operative word here on this record is fun--everything's uptempo, upbeat, and happy. The group tosses in a reggae groove ("Looking for Gold") and a minimalistic dance number ("Miami") but this is happy European pop music, not so far removed from something like Eiffel 65. The best thing about this album is that it's short--not that it's bad, but too many groups seem to feel like they're required to pump out at least 40 minutes or it isn't a proper record. This album is 30 minutes exactly--not a minute too short or too long. It won't change the world, and I'm a little confused as to why it's on such a list, but it isn't bad at all, and if, like me, you have a soft spot for Londonbeat or Bizarre Inc., this is more of the same.

MY RATING: 7.6

The Tough Alliance - "The Last Dance"

150. The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema (2005)

Power pop is probably my least favorite type of music in the world. I like music that, for lack of a better phrase, creates some sort of coherent emotional world--and while that sounds complicated it really isn't. Music, of all the arts, is probably the one that works most on pure emotion. The problem with power pop, to me, is that it neglects everything else music can do in favor of one thing--melodies. That's it. Power pop is the quest for the catchy melody, and nothing else much matters. The New Pornographers are as guilty of this as anyone--I find Electric Version near-unlistenable, and it's a good lesson on what happens when a band neglects everything else in favor of melody. You stand on melody, and you fall on melody. If the melody isn't memorable, the rest of the song is worthless. But I don't know what the hell happened here, because Twin Cinema is, quite possibly, the greatest single collection of melodies on one album in the entire decade. The music--that is, the arrangements, the performances--are pretty middling. There's the neat stuttering part in "Falling Through Your Clothes", and the horns in "Stacked Crooked"--but that's about it. But God, the melodies! I don't know what family member A.C. Newman had to sacrifice to his god to come up with these, but even if it was his only son it was worth it. Surely I'm not the only one who repeatedly thought of Lennon/McCartney when these songs were playing. No other pop group even comes close to this level of melodic invention--each track contains so many gorgeous, intertwining chorus melodies that the level of complexity almost approaches progressive rock at times. Just listen to "Use It"! I count at least four melodies in that track that any other band would have killed to have written. These guys seem to get more acclaim these days for Mass Romantic, but this--this is the one. It even made me like power pop.

MY RATING: 9.5

The New Pornographers -  "The Bleeding Heart Show"

151. The Walkmen - Bows + Arrows (2004)

This one's definitely a grower. I don't even want to know about the number of people who bought this album on the strength of "The Rat", a fantastic song but not in any way indicative of this album's sound, and at that moment immediately swore off buying another Walkmen album ever again. That's too bad, because once you get around the fact that this is largely an atmospheric record, it works very well. The Walkmen are a five-piece rock band, yes, but they appear to be influenced less by other rock groups than by singer-songwriters like Tom Waits. Basically, if the spirit of Waits could be split among five guys in a band, that would be the Walkmen. This was the first time they found songs that were worthy of their intense command of dark and panicked atmosphere, and while it's not the best album they've made (that would be You & Me) it's probably the second best. The constant alternating between gauzy, feedback-laden ballads and aggressive rock tracks works well, and Hamilton Leithauser's voice (despite its obvious similarity to Bob Dylan's) is the perfect one for this band. Nobody else sounds quite like them, and I think that's a worthy enough achievement to celebrate. They evoke classic American folk music without falling into a single one of the obvious cliches practiced by pretty much every mediocre folk group--in its own way it's as brilliant a reinvention of blues and folk as that made by Led Zeppelin forty years earlier. But when it's all over it'll be the sound--not the songs--you'll be remembering.

MY RATING: 8.3

The Walkmen - "Little House of Savages"

152. Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein (2001)

Man, I really wanted to like this one, and even now it still baffles me why I don't; the producer is EL-P, mastermind behind Funcrusher Plus, one of my favorite hip-hop records of all time, and Cannibal Ox, lyrically, cover similar themes (science fiction, surrealism)--except maybe even to a more extreme extent than Company Flow. So what's the problem? The problem might lie in the beats--while the beats on Funcrusher were a bit odd and skewed compared to most hip-hop production, there was still a solid enough low end that the songs never floated away--a track like "Silence" was as funky as anything the Roots ever did. This album, though, mainly focuses on the "creepy" side, and the songs kind of fly away with it. Also the guys in Ox are nowhere as good at rapping as Company Flow were--while the first half of Funcrusher Plus was alive with memorable lines ("mute like Maggie Simpson"; "I see through pussy like the Invisible Woman") there's almost nothing here to latch onto--they're trying to be too weird, and frankly, when it comes to surrealistic lyricism in rap, nobody is ever going to outdo Kool Keith on Dr. Octagonecologyst, so best not even try. It might not seem fair to constantly bring up another record when looking at this one, but Funcrusher Plus is this album's most obvious referent, and the similarities between the two are so strong that when listening to this one, all I can hear are its faults. It's great for two tracks, but becomes incredibly numbing for longer than that--every track has the exact same production tricks and atmosphere. Disappointing, all the more so because modern hip-hop could use a bit of branching-out like this album tried to do.

MY RATING: 4.4

Cannibal Ox - "Stress Rap"

153. Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala (2007)

First thing: this is one of the most repulsive-sounding albums I've ever heard in my life. I tried to think of a nicer word, but I couldn't. There's something about the combination of Lekman's smooth, Vegasy voice, the maudlin orchestration and electronic beats that makes me feel ill. It's like some sort of terrible inversion of Tindersticks' music--but the gulf in quality between these two artists' music is so vast I won't comment any more on it. As the first track came on my first thought was: is this a joke? It sounds like a Ween parody of showtune music, except there's no parody here: it's done straight. And it's no good. It's as though this music, which is so awful nobody would question its being sold for twenty-five cents in a used bin had it been released in 1972, is supposed to suddenly become good when it's being done by an attractive, Pitchfork-approved singer-songwriter. There is exactly one good track on this album and that's "A Postcard to Nina"; the lyrics are clever (if a bit annoying when coming out of Lekman's mouth) and the chorus is actually well-written and catchy. The production is just as bad as the rest of the album, sucking every bit of life and spontaneity out of the music, but a good song is a good song. The rest is terrible. This album is like a dentist's drill to me, like nails on a chalkboard, like a cat being strangled, etc. Maybe it's me. And I liked "Black Cab"! Why do so many artists, on attempting to emulate Scott Walker, choose to emulate the first half of his career and not the latter half?

MY RATING: 0.8

Jens Lekman - "And I Remember Every Kiss"

154. Ghostface Killah - The Pretty Toney Album (2004)

Ghostface is without a doubt in my mind the greatest rapper of the 00s (perhaps the greatest rapper of all time) and this album, while it's considered a "minor" album in his canon, is just as good as Supreme Clientele. What helps here are the relatively short lengths of each track; most of them are done in just over three minutes, and each one is accompanied by an ass-kicking soul beat. Nobody is better than Ghostface at re-appropriating these soul beats in hip-hop, and an instrumental version of a Ghostface album would work just as well as a modern funk record. The relatively low-key quality of this album allows Ghostface to loosen up and just do whatever the hell he pleases, which gives the album the relatively rare feeling of sounding both casual and intense--or maybe it's just that Ghost is so good at what he does that he makes it look easy. Both the uptempo tracks ("Beat the Clock") and more balladesque material ("It's Over") are expertly performed and produced, and there's hardly a slow point from beginning to end, aside from a few ill-chosen skits (but thankfully, they're short--nowhere near the 3+ minute skits that were a major liability on Supreme Clientele). It's not as serious as an album like The W, nor does it try to be--it's just a fun, professional record, well-suited for the over-the-top Vegas font of the album cover. It's not nearly as weird as Ghostface's other stuff (he never would have let an obvious dumb pop track like "Tush" on Fishscale) but for what it is, it's great.

MY RATING: 8.7

Ghostface Killah - "Beat the Clock"

155. Clipse - Lord Willin' (2002)

As good as this is it still seems like a dry run for the masterful Hell Hath No Fury four years later; there's little this one does that the other one doesn't do better, and what few things this does that the other doesn't (uptempo party stuff), probably didn't need to be done at all. Generally the more uptempo the beat is, the worse Clipse do with it. They're masters of creepy, disturbing rap music, telling tales of utter amorality, and the best of this stuff follows that pattern. Still, this is vintage Neptunes, and Pusha T and Malice are so well-matched that they seem to be split from the same consciousness; their rapping is top-level the whole way through, completely unmatched in its violent realism, and it's only when the album tries to be "fun" that it fails. The Neptunes' presence is obvious right away: simple, live-sounding beats and minimal samples, and while they would become far more adventurous on the followup record, this one still has some amazing moments ("Virginia" and "Comedy Central" seem to me to be the standouts here). The famous "Grindin'" is worth the price of admission all by itself, a rap track that uses syncopated sound effects (doors slamming) as the beats, creating an astonishing atmosphere. There are no skits, and the album flows very well, but again it's one of those unlucky albums that lives in the shadow of a superior one.

MY RATING: 7.8

Clipse - "Virginia"

156. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm (2005)

Bloc Party resemble Gang of Four both in their sound and in the fact that a brilliant first album was followed up by two albums of meandering crap. Granted, Gang of  Four's meandering crap wasn't nearly as bad as Bloc Party's would end up being, but the point still stands. But luckily this album is before the rot set in, and it's still as great as I thought it was five years ago--super-energetic guitar rock in the vein of 80s U2 (but with a funkier low end), masterfully written and played. It's one of those albums where every song is a potential single, which is all the more impressive because of its variety--there's catchy singles ("Banquet"; "Pioneers") funky dance tracks ("Positive Tension"; "She's Hearing Voices") tearjerkers ("Blue Light"; "This Modern Love") and creepy, Joy Division-y stuff ("Luno"; "Compliments"). It's such a near-masterpiece of 00s guitar rock that in retrospect it seems like the band was blowing its load here; everything since has been awful. It's just fantastic guitar pop, in the old style--setting sad words to pretty music. If the album has a problem it might be that it's entirely too serious and poker-faced--there is not a hint of humor or irony on this thing, and every single track is attempting to be a GLORIOUS NEW ANTHEM for the YOUTH OF TODAY. It's a testament to the band's skills that they didn't fall on their face, and while they didn't exactly become the new Radiohead at least they made one great record, which is more than what most groups of this type can say (remember Maximo Park?)

MY RATING: 9.0

Bloc Party - "Positive Tension"

157. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow (2003)

Lightning Bolt most resemble Deerhoof and Clinic in that their first album outlined a totally original style and subsequent albums did nothing to change it. Frankly, it doesn't matter what Lightning Bolt album you pick up--they're all the same thing, and all comparable in quality. What do Lightning Bolt do? Lightning Bolt, more than any other group, make a racket. Their purpose is the production of noise. Their music doesn't "rock" in the conventional sense; the guitar riffs are too fast to really hold onto and the absence of comprehensible vocals immediately renders their music useless to sing along to. But their music is loud and it is fast. It's basically the Platonic ideal of a marriage between the most extreme elements of both metal and punk--metal's volume, punk's speed. Their music is noisy, but interestingly it's not the kind of noise that makes you plug your ears in distaste, like a car alarm or something: it's noise deployed with a purpose, noise designed to pummel you into submission. There's no point here in discussing differences between tracks because there aren't any. Lightning Bolt are Lightning Bolt, and you're going to have to (sunglasses descend from sky) deal with it.

MY RATING (although ratings hardly seem to matter for a group like this): 7.9

Lightning Bolt - "On Fire"

158. Destroyer - Destroyer's Rubies (2006)

Destroyer is the vehicle of Dan Bejar, he of the bizarre, affected voice and cryptic lyrics, perhaps better known as the guy who writes the three less good songs on every New Pornographers album. Those songs are certainly nothing like what appears on this record, a dense, confusing work--the album it most evokes for me is the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat, and while it is neither as poppy or as complex as that one it shares the ambition to create multipart, 6+ minute pop songs. The pop song format is not naturally conducive to extended track lengths, and so what both of these bands did was either stick several songs together in one or go the Hey Jude route and turn it into a campfire singalong. The problem here is while the melodies themselves are attractive and inviting they get lost in the overambitious arrangements and the whole thing starts to feel a bit clinical and cold. Bejar also has the annoying tendency to start scatting in every single song, pumping out "la la la"s and "na na na"s so often you want to reach into your computer and strangle him. He uses this technique so often it seems to be a function of writer's block--that he's just tossing in na-na-nas every single time he can't think of anything else to say. So this is less a case of an album being bad than being unstrung by its ambition--while it's certainly preferable to something boring and safe, it doesn't really work, and I can't imagine anyone really listening to this kind of thing for pleasure. Impressive and cold.

MY RATING: 6.3

Destroyer - "Looters' Follies"

159. Girl Talk - Night Ripper (2006)

The issue here is not whether this is done well (it certainly is) but whether or not it should have been done at all. What Girl Talk does isn't new, at least in the macro view: he's a sampler, a plunderphonics guy. His music is constructed entirely from samples of other music. This isn't original: it had been going on for a good decade before this record came out. But what GT did to differentiate himself was simple: when he chose music to sample, he didn't do what most other samplers did, i.e. find obscure samples that gain interest when placed in a new context. He just took the best parts, the stuff that everyone recognizes. While this adds up to an incredibly fun album, it also produces the inevitable question: does this mean anything? does it have any lasting value? The fact is that as fun as this is, it's fun like eating at McDonalds can sometimes be fun. It isn't bad, exactly (it is, after all, scientifically designed to be good) and you know what you're getting, but nobody would mistake it for the best you could get, or in fact anything with any lasting value at all. A huge problem with this album is there is no tonal variety: on far superior sample records like Endtroducing or Since I Left You or As Heard On Radio Soulwax there is actual ebb and flow in the music, slow parts and fast parts, reflective and excitable. Here it's all coming at the same pace with no variation. Familiar rap verse over familiar rock backing--repeat. Over and over.  Basically, the interest lies in the quality of the original samples, not in what GT does with them, which is pretty much nothing. It's its own thing, but it's its own thing like a six-legged dog: there's a reason there aren't very many.

MY RATING: 4.8

Girl Talk - "Once Again"

 

160. Deerhunter - Cryptograms (2007)

Disclosure: Deerhunter are, IMO, the best new American band to come along in the last five years, so take into consideration that this review is written by someone who loves the band, loves their sound, and would likely love anything they do. So. Deerhunter's second album is a head-on collision between ambient feedback tones and poppy shoegaze music, and what makes it work as well as it does is the band's unerring sense of how to sequence a record. Nobody today puts albums together as well as Deerhunter does; each song expertly gains power by its placement in the whole, and I do not envy the task of whoever, ten years from now, is given the job of extracting tracks from their albums to put together a compilation. I suppose one reference point is Sonic Youth, but I feel like Deerhunter are even better at combining their pop influences and their avantgarde influences; the band, through amazing production and the aforementioned sequencing, makes a straight-up pop track like "Spring Hall Convert" fit in perfectly with a weird piece of avantgarde disco like "Octet". The band would get even more poppy and outsized than this later, with the compressed masterpiece Microcastle and the gorgeous pop record Halcyon Digest, but this is easily the equal of those.

MY RATING: 9.2

Deerhunter - "Spring Hall Convert"

161. Air France - No Way Down (2008)

Or: there was once a band that sounded like Air, and they were from France (well, actually Sweden), so they called themselves Air France. That should tell you all you need to know about the number of original ideas this album contains. What the hell is this? Why is this here? How is this different from anything? Alright: Air France's debut is a series of mid-length pastoral tracks and pretty 80s-y synths and samples of crickets and children's voices, all of it designed to support that "pastoral" atmosphere. It's not bad, exactly, but there's absolutely nothing here that hasn't been done a million times before in a more interesting fashion. Like, say, by Air! Air France is what Air would sound like if they had no taste and listened to nothing but Wyndham Hill records and believed in the healing power of natural crystals. It's insufferable. What can be said for it is that it does create a distinct atmosphere, but that atmosphere is dull and uninteresting and minus any variation--everything comes at you at the exact same "pretty", "wistful" level and never changes, like a Michael Bay movie that, through its endless assault of ACTION, paradoxically becomes boring. There are moments of beauty here, but they're so repetitive and over-the-top that they quickly become boring. It's not actively offensive in its badness like Camera Obscura, but this is pretty bad.

MY RATING: 2.3

Air France - "Collapsing At Your Doorstep"

162. Wu-Tang Clan - The W (2000)

With a debut album as game-changing and singular as 36 Chambers, it was obvious that anything else the Clan would put out wouldn't approach that one in quality and historical importance, and the relative success of this one is more a function of how great that album was than this one; because of all their followup records, this is the one that hews closest to the style of the debut. The star here, as always, is the RZA's beats, which are like nobody else's: thin, creepy and distorted. RZA's at his best when he sticks to what he's good at, which is frightening little horror-raps like "Hollow Bones"; when he tries to expand the palette, as on stuff like "I Can't Go to Sleep", the results are pretty embarrassing. But he sticks to the former more than the latter, and in its sheer atmospheric and cinematic brilliance, this still puts most hip-hop to shame. RZA actually constructs worlds with these songs, rap tracks you can live in, and at its best this album is less a generic rap record than a kind of book-on-tape to set off dark and violent images in your own mind. If this album had a look it would be black and white, grainy and high-contrast: everything is leached out, enervated. Tonally it sits on the opposite side of Kanye West, because where West's work is candy-colored and huge, the Wu-Tang work in minimalism, darkness, the night, cigarette smoke and bullets. It's a very evocative record and while about a fourth of it is embarrassing experiments, the best stuff is about as good as hip-hop music gets.

MY RATING: 8.4

Wu-Tang Clan - "Hollow Bones"

163. DJ/rupture - Uproot (2008)

This is a mix record in the style of Michael Mayer's Immer series, except this time the focus is on dubstep and electronic reggae rather than minimalist German techno and microhouse. The album has the benefit of being better sequenced than Mayer's series; the unexpected introduction of Ekkehard Ehlers' orchestral pieces in the middle of the mix gives the album an emotional heft these kind of mix records don't usually have. The problem is how repetitive the album is, or, more accurately, to what minimal purpose such repetition is put. Repetition in dance and techno music usually works by creating an atmosphere of hypnosis where the track seems to be changing even though it isn't, where the brain kind of tricks itself into thinking that the next time the melody rolls around, things will be different. What happens here is even though the album is 23 tracks long the ones that would work in repetition are too short to have any effect, and the ones that would work in atmosphere are too short to create one. After a strong beginning the album becomes a depressing series of downtuned beats, a weaker version of the kind of stuff Tricky was doing thirteen years earlier, and that Burial had already bested in 2007 with his masterful Untrue, probably the greatest electronic record of the decade. This one had the bad luck to appear a year later, and it can't help but suffer from the comparison. At its best it is effectively atmospheric and the interpolation of "Brooklyn Anthem" adds a nice moment of aggression that works, but this thing basically needed to be twenty minutes shorter or twenty minutes longer.

MY RATING: 6.0

ConQuest - "Mirage"; Team Shadatek - "Brooklyn Anthem (Acapella)"

164. Les Savy Fav - Rome (Written Upside Down) (2000)

Good enough by itself, but almost anything by Les Savy Fav is, and one wonders why a 17-minute long EP was chosen to represent them on this list, rather than Go Forth, Inches or Let's Stay Friends, any of which are superior to this one both in songwriting and production. Anyway, if you've heard Les Savy Fav before, you know the drill: angular postpunk, kind of like Fugazi with a better sense of humor and a fatter singer, thumping Gang of Four-ish bass and weird, twisty song structures. Truth be told, there's not a weak track on this record, but a lot of it just seems like a dry run for the more ambitious and affecting work the band would put out just a year later on Go Forth (not to mention Inches, which is without a doubt the best singles compilation of the entire decade). Also worth noting here is that numerous songs on this release begin with a gorgeous melody and eventually drop it for a less interesting, somewhat generic post-punk backing, which is disappointing--both "Asleepers Union" and "In These Woods" have this problem. Basically the band was in a transitional mode here, still a little bit too much in thrall to the Jawbox/Fugazi mode. They hadn't found their own style yet. Maybe the shorter length makes it more "punk" or something, but generally any musical classifications not based upon the music itself are bullshit anyway. Good for what it is, but there's a lot better out there.

MY RATING: 5.8

Les Savy Fav - "Hide Me From Next February"

165. Ricardo Villalobos - Alcachofa (2003)

Villalobos' 2003 record is so minimalist it seems to travel to a level beyond minimalism, where the only sounds coming off your computer are a series of repetitive bleeps and bloops that last 8+ minutes and seem to never, ever change. The first time you hear this album, you'll probably hate it. Villalobos steadfastly refuses to buff up his arrangements: listen closely to the few bloops you hear in the first minute of each track, because that's all you're going to hear, and the entire 80-minute album sounds so samey and minimal and without peak or valley that you're going to go nuts at about the hour mark. But there's a lot more going on here that only becomes apparent after several listens: the beats, though of course minimal, are weird and unsettling, especially on tracks like "Dexter", where the bizarre "thwa-CRACK" noise that comes in at about the minute mark takes the whole thing in a different direction. "Waiworinao" sounds like a bass guitar riff run through about a million effects filters and shoved out the other end flattened and distorted, and while the track itself changes little from beginning to end, the original noise is so weird and captivating that you want to listen to the thing over and over to discover that which you know isn't there. The whole record is like that. It may be long, it may be boring (there's hardly any other word for it) but it certainly isn't stupid or lazy, and Villalobos has done about as well as he can within the parameters he's created for himself. At the time, there simply was no other electronic music out there like this, and the years since have only solidified its importance. More significant then actually enjoyable, though.

MY RATING: 7.5

Ricardo Villalobos - "Dexter"

166. Jim O'Rourke - Insignificance (2001)

One of the weirdest turnarounds this decade: avantgarde/jazz maven from NYC named Jim O'Rourke produces...a 70s classic rock record? I don't know what the hell possessed him to do this, but it was certainly a good choice, as this album shows there's still life in the old genre yet. Aside from the bizarre (and fantastic) cover art, O'Rourke is going all the way towards trying to make this feel like a forgotten 70s rock classic: it opens with a catchy guitar riff, there are only 7 songs and the whole thing's over in less than 40 minutes, it's split up fairly equally between sunshiny acoustic pop and big 70s Foghat-esque guitar riffs--often in the same song. The record's main flaw is that it isn't sequenced very well--there's a glut of slow-paced acoustic stuff near the end so the album just kind of peters out after the fantastic "Memory Lane" ends. Aside, of course, from the album's last two minutes--O'Rourke, seemingly apropos of nothing, piles on layers of static and noise that steadily increases in volume until the album just shuts off, leaving you to wonder just what in the hell that all was and affirming his identity as more of a noisemaker than a pop songwriter. Still, this is an excellent try, and certainly one of the more weird and singular records of the decade. A rare example of an artist seemingly stepping completely out of his or her comfort zone and coming up with a success (partially--the last couple of tracks really are pretty boring). Play it for your dad: just sneak it into the CD player between the local radio station playing "Slow Ride" and "Foreplay/Long Time" for the sixtieth time that day, and he'll probably like it. Just don't show him the cover.

Jim O'Rourke - "All Downhill From Here" 

MY RATING: 7.8

167. Annie - Anniemal (2004)

I'm not a fan of most modern dance-pop; it seems to me a genre that reached its apex with Michael Jackson and never really recovered since then. The very idea of "indie dance-pop" is enough to make my brain explode, because has there ever been a type of music where commercial success and radio play is so intrinsic, so utterly required? Dance-pop seems to exist only as a function of commercial success, the logical endpoint of a desire to make music as simple and unoffensive as possible. Yet every once in a while something good sneaks through, like this one. Annie's debut record is everything you'd want in a modern pop record: great vocals, great hooks, great production. The problem is that it's too unpretentious. This kind of music is pretentious as hell: fashionable guest stars and incongruous hip-hop sections are the rule. Not here. It's just 80s-style pop, through and through. It makes no concessions to modern trends; it just sounds as though Annie and her producers loved early 80s Madonna and wanted to make an album in that style as accurately as they could. It's pointless to talk about singles here: they could all be singles. It's that kind of record. It's shallow, but this music is designed to be shallow; one might as well castigate a Slayer record for being too loud. For what it is, it's as good as it can be. A weird kind of minor miracle.

MY RATING: 8.1

Annie - "Happy Without You"