100. ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - Source Tags & Codes (2002)

No album of the 00s has been treated more disingenuously by the P-Fork guys than this one, which was given a perfect rating at the time and proclaimed a masterpiece, an album to end all albums, the logical endpoint of the entire postpunk era, etc. Now, it's tossed into the ignominious #100 spot on their end-of-decade list and treated like a bad memory, a bit of embarrassing youthful exuberance that we've all outgrown. Certainly Trail of Dead's followup records didn't help: I don't think they're that bad myself (and if you say you can't hear the beginnings of their later ridiculousness in this album, you're nuts) but they certainly aren't that good. But all of that is unfair--this album is huge, it's pretentious, it's embarrassing in parts, certainly, but it's incredibly powerful and for my money it beats anything the band's obvious forebears, Sonic Youth, have ever done (not Fugazi, however). This is an incredibly emotional record--one of the few that manages to generate true and real emotion not though simplicity but through complexity and density, a million things going on at once, orchestral samples, layered guitars, thundering drums. The album is a torrent of sound. The songs move in and out of each other, from the vicious "Homage" to the super-duper-anthemic "Relative Ways". It's a punk record that sounds like it cost a billion dollars, and it's ridiculous and stupid. It's also fantastic, one of the decade's most important and enduring albums.

MY RATING: 9.6

...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - "Days of Being Wild"