109. Band of Horses - Everything All The Time (2006)

This is one of the out-and-out lamest albums I've ever heard. It's the 00s equivalent of something like Candlebox; everything is so incredibly generic that one is surprised to find that actual human beings created this music and not robots or an incredibly sophisticated team of marketers and trend-analyzers outfitted with the newest and best tracking devices. "The Funeral" is a power ballad, and in about ten years it's going to seem about as embarrassing as most other songs that bear that descriptor; "First Song" is lame glossy rock, "Weed Party" is lame folk-rock, "Our Swords" is lame folk-rock...it's all lame folk-rock. "The Great Salt Lake" has a neat little power chord opening but the melody is lame and Ben Bridwell's vocals, which sound like Robin Pecknold's with all the beauty and personality sucked out, ruin everything they touch. There are plenty of albums on these Pitchfork lists that aren't up to par, but this one might anger me the most--it's so aggressively boring, as if music were just something you did as a painful duty, something to be cranked out between other things. The following two Band of Horses albums, both of which are allegedly terrible, only seem to confirm what I think about this record. It's awful.

MY RATING: 1.1

Band of Horses - "The First Song"

110, The National - Boxer (2007)

The National are a band I like and respect, despite the fact that they've only released one album that I like without reservation, and this isn't it. One could almost say the idea of the National is more promising than the National themselves--dour, gloomy, moody music, written and produced with an exactness so complete that it borders on the obsessive. The most noticeable thing about these guys at first is Matt Berninger's vocals--he's a baritone, and he's got the kind of voice that seems to embody pain and suffering without being excessive about it. The problem with this album in particular is that it's too much of a slow-burner--music this emotionally fraught needs a few moments of release (like the four tracks "Secret Meeting", "Friend of Mine", "Abel" and "Mr. November" from Alligator, each of which were placed perfectly to relieve the tension). There just isn't any of that here. It's all slow and dark and ponderous. The sheer weight of the style sucks all the power out of what would otherwise be great tracks ("Slow Show" and "Apartment Story"). Only the opening track, "Fake Empire", really works--there's a lightness in the opening piano line that is missing from the rest of the album and since it's encountered first the style seems invigorating instead of depressing, as it does near the end. I don't want to impugn this album too much because the National do what they do better than anyone else and this really is a mostly gorgeous, well-written record; it's just too much of the same thing.

MY RATING: 6.9

The National - "Squalor Victoria"

111. M83 - Saturdays = Youth (2008)

It's so satisfying when a group with an interesting sound but less-than-interesting ways of implementing it gets their act together and finds the perfect style and subject matter for their music. Jose Gonzalez' idea to meld his super-emotional electronic noise washes with John Hughes movie soundtrack-esque melodies and song structures was one of the most genius conceptual moves of the entire decade; a specific time in music is evoked so perfectly that it practically induces flashbacks. And, most importantly, this music evokes the 80s without copying it: the songs might be a little retrograde, sure, derivative of stuff by Single Minds and Richard Marx and (most obviously) Peter Schilling, but M83's style itself is wholly futuristic. The album is perfectly tuned and sequenced: "Kim and Jessie" is basically opening credits music, gigantic chords and longing, longing, longing. The word "emo" gets thrown around a lot, and if you could somehow remove all its negative associations this kind of music is what would be left: huge, pastel-colored blasts of synth coupled with lyrics that make absolutely no logical sense but make perfect emotional sense--just like the music. Most of these songs build up to apocalyptic climaxes of electronic noise and Morgan Kibby's alien vocals, and it works. You get chills down your spine. The final track, being little more than 12 minutes of the exact same keyboard line over and over, is a little disappointing, but if you treat it like closing credits music (i.e. feel free to ignore it, walk out) it works. Just play "You, Appearing" again, and if the hair on your neck doesn't go up, I don't know what's wrong with you. A huge, huge, huge improvement on  this band's previous two records.

MY RATING: 9.2

M83 -  "Skin of the Night"

112. Feist - The Reminder (2007)

This album edges dangerously close to the dreaded adult contemporary--the kind of music you listen to while drinking wine and considering art with your yuppie friends in a Whit Stillman-esque panorama of decadent wealth. The album cover doesn't do much to alter this conception. Feist's vocals throughout are kind of emotionless and pretty and the arrangements are simple, unobtrusive and--sigh--tasteful. I find this kind of record as pointless to hate as it it to love--only by using the most tortured Marxist criteria could you call the thing "bad", but it's not going to change anybody's life, either. The whole thing is just too cold and distant to be a classic--compare this record with Cat Power's far more spotty but much more emotionally tortured You Are Free. Several of these songs are so "atmospheric" and without melody that they pass by without any memory of even having existed at all ("The Park", "The Water") and "Sealion" is an annoying kids' track that should have been cut. But even I have to admit that the melody to the infamous "1234" is something special and "Honey Honey" is effectively austere and chilling. The result is a record that seeks to be professional above all things--how far you're able to stand that kind of thing is exactly how much you're going to like it.

MY RATING: 6.5

Feist - "My Moon My Man"

113. LCD Soundsystem - LCD Soundsystem (2005)

James Murphy might be too smart for his own good. I saw LCD Soundsystem perform at Lollapalooza in 2007. They were the second-to-last performer of the night, right after which was to be, holy of holies, Daft Punk. It was like the heavens had aligned, but Murphy almost seemed embarrassed by real life's lining up with one of his songs, simply saying "I'm not even going to comment on this." Murphy might be rock's most ironic frontman--even his attempts at sentiment in later records have this apologetic thing about them, like "Isn't it crazy that a cynical guy like me is being so emotionally direct?" The pose seems so...calculated. Again this would all be moot if the music were more interesting, but LCD's first record is pretty boring, an album as bleached-out as its cover. I've never understood exactly how this could work as dance music, since Murphy refuses to put any low end into any of these songs. Everything is harsh and trebly and minimalistic--dance music for art installations. The attempts to combine dance and rock don't work as well as they did on the two follow-up records and a couple of these songs are nothing more than eight-minute-plus odes to percussion and screeching synth noises. James' method is to start out quiet and get louder and louder and louder, which might work if you're Mogwai but gets awfully irritating in a dance track. The only track that really works is "Tribulations", but nevertheless it's depressing to note that it's the album's least adventurous song. "Losing My Edge" is a shaggy-dog story set to music, "Great Release" starts out as an alright Brian Eno ripoff but ends in three minutes of pointless noise, and "Yeah" is just too noisy to enjoy. At least the album's, uh, clever?

MY RATING: 5.5

LCD Soundsystem - "Losing My Edge"

114. Cam'ron - Purple Haze (2004)

This is one of the most stridently awful hip-hop albums I've ever heard; nearly 80 endless minutes of subpar beats and Cam'Ron's terrible vocals. The guy is one of the least charismatic rappers there is. There are more than twenty tracks here, and while that's fine for a record with some kind of thematic through-line (Raekwon's two Cuban Linx albums) here everything is bogged down in a seemingly-endless number of skits and subpar tracks. I'm not catching any of the "atmosphere" others say this album has, and I think I'm going to have to call them on their bluff. There isn't any. Listen to Kool Keith's Octagonecologyst: there's a hip-hop record with atmosphere. Hardly a moment on this record differs from any other because Cam'ron isn't able to generate a convincing enough presence to bring us along with him. He seems like he barely cares--which might well be the effect he's going for, but that doesn't make this thing any easier to listen to. Also, if he says the word "dipset" one more time I'm going to flip out.

MY RATING: 1.2

Cam'ron - "Dip-Set Forever"

115. The Shins - Oh, Inverted World (2001)

This is one record that's almost certainly going to be remembered more as a cultural artifact than anything approaching a great collection of music; while it's catchy enough, the thing is too low-key and mediocre overall to have done much if it hadn't been for a certain (annoying) character in a certain (terrible) movie saying that this band would "change your life". Well, no, seeing that there's more than enough groups out there who produce music just like this, and alleged "highlight" "New Slang" is disappointing, a mindlessly pretty acoustic track that's like Nick Drake with all the atmosphere sucked out. The more upbeat pop tracks generally fare better, and while there's hardly a song here I can remember once the thing's over, they certainly sound great while they're on. About one-sixth of this really short album is taken up with a minimal acoustic ditty called "The Past and Pending", and it's the best thing here, the only thing on the album that could be said to approach a truly timeless melody. The jury's still out (for me) on these guys: Chutes Too Narrow was great, Wincing the Night Away was awful, and this sits somewhere in the middle. It's pleasant, just don't expect it to change your life or anything. How could music this dementedly unpretentious ever change anything at all?

MY RATING: 6.2

The Shins - "Caring Is Creepy"

116. Michael Mayer - Immer (2002)

Another German microhouse record, except this time the tracks are chosen in such a way that they flow faultlessly from one to the next--you'd be forgiven for thinking this was all the work of the same artist. The consistency here is pretty astonishing, seeing that these are all (ostensibly) the work of different producers: what this shows me is that the Kompakt label (from the roster of which this record was compiled) maintains its aesthetic with such an iron grip that it effectively renders the idea of the "artist" kaput, the quality and styles of the music so similar from one to the next that it matters less who makes the music than who selects it--thus this album's being shelved under the name of the compiler, Michael Mayer. I'll name some highlights--the early 90s house organ of "A Rocket In Dub", the obsessive beat of "Gratis", and the almost cartoonishly Germanic "love" track "Perfect Lovers". The music doesn't perhaps reach the level of natural genius of Ricardo Villalobos' work, but it's of consistently higher overall quality--the whole thing is so expertly sequenced and recorded that any doubts about it being a little too monochromatic in style are rendered irrelevant. One Immer is probably all you need, but you need at least one.

MY RATING: 8.6

Rocket No.3 - "A Rocket In Dub"

117. Low - Things We Lost in the Fire (2001)

What is your tolerance for depression in music? What is your tolerance for moroseness? It better be high, because this record, as beautiful as it is, might well drive you to suicide if you listen to it in the wrong frame of mind. It's not happy music. The first lyric is "When they found your body / Giant X's on your eyes" and it only gets more despairing from there. Low's music is like a black-and-white line drawing: everything is leached out of it until all that's left is a skeleton, the aching slowness of their melodies repeating and repeating. The two vocalists sing as though they thought there was nothing left to live for. I find this album to be one of the decade's most emotionally punishing--you either have to give yourself up to it or ignore it entirely. Not a single song deviates from the general atmosphere of glacial depression except for "Dinosaur Act", and that one's just a little bit louder than the rest--and just as depressing. I can't love this album--I don't think anyone really could--but it is what it is: a celebration of the futility of love and laments for the dead.

MY RATING: 8.8

Low - "Closer"

118. The Beta Band - Hot Shots II (2001)

The Beta Band's first (non-EP) record legitimately sounded like the work of a band who didn't give a shit whether anyone liked them or not. It was as shambolic and disconnected a record as I've ever heard; the band themselves disparaged it later. All of which makes this followup even more surprising--every track follows the same underlying aesthetic, that of a simple electronic pop overlaid with harmony vocals. It's like a far more accomplished version of the Notwist's Neon Golden--while the Notwist so systematically stripped their songs of emotion that what was left over was--nothing, the Beta Band make sure that their electronics are wedded to great songs. Actually, this album is pretty much faultless--the problem is that the thing is so damn tunnel-visioned, so committed to a single sound, that it can become fatiguing to listen to. It's best appreciated in small doses, when you can listen to individual tracks and appreciate them at your leisure. One after another it all becomes numbing. It's too laid-back. Still, if you're at all interested in electronic pop music, only the Postal Service's Give Up and the Junior Boys' Last Exit managed to best this album this decade (and the Beta Band's vocals are way less annoying than the Postal Service's).

MY RATING: 8.0

The Beta Band - "Al Sharp"

119. Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)

Eminem was huge ten years ago and enough critics have written enough about him that I don't know what else I can add except that it's clear the reason Eminem is a great rapper isn't his lyrics, it's his delivery. If we consider Eminem just a vocalist, then he's certainly one of the greatest to ever live: he changes his voice every five seconds, acts out little dialogues in almost every other line, and just basically pulls every trick in the book to make his lyrics more interesting. The beats are little more than a backdrop for Eminem's rants: all Dr. Dre does is put down a simple nursery-rhymey melody and that's it. The problem with this thing is that it's way too long. "Amityville", "Bitch Please II", "Under the Influence" and "Criminal" could have all been dropped, and whose idea was it not to end the record with "Kim", an incredible bit of playacting that decimates everything that comes after it? Too many reviews of Eminem's music (like Kanye West after him) are little more than crappy bits of sub-psychology in which the reviewer tries to figure out what it all "means" for our society that something so violent and antagonistic could be such a huge hit. What's really in Eminem's head, etc. It doesn't surprise me at all: Eminem's delivery is so above and beyond what any other rapper was attempting at the time that (to me) it was almost a foregone conclusion he'd be successful. This is his magnum opus, I suppose, although one wonders exactly how much of a masterpiece it is when nearly a half hour of it should have been chopped.


MY RATING: 7.8

Eminem - "Kill You"

120. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - The Tyranny of Distance (2001)

Ted Leo and his band are no-frills. There is no attempt on this record to be anything else but a really good pop-punk group, and it's in this that Leo most resembles Elvis Costello, where his innovations were mostly taking a more modern aesthetic and marrying it to an older style. Although I prefer Leo to Costello--his songwriting seems less predictable and contrived. Also, a good seventy percent of these songs are great. The beginning is a little shaky, but once you hit "Timorous Me" the album just becomes one great track after another. Leo also shows his talent at sequencing--the gorgeous, two-minute folk track "The Gold Finch and the Red Oak" is perfectly placed after the propulsive riff-fest "My Vien Ilin". The album is free of the bizarre production choices that plagued the followup Hearts of Oak and, frankly, the songs are just better. Listen to that vibrate-y guitar bit that shows up in the verses of "St. John the Divine"! The Gaelic-sounding fiddley part at the end of "Timorous Me"! Leo is able to fill his songs with clever little bits that help them transcend mere catchiness, and it's this that tosses him to the top of the pack of the hundreds of groups out there that essentially sound just like this one. It won't ever be confused with a classic (it's too workmanlike for that)--it's just a group of excellent songs.

MY RATING: 8.6

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - "Biomusicology"

121. Broadcast - Haha Sound (2003)

Basically the same thing as the last Brodcast album, except considerably less good, mostly due to the fact that the band dials down the "atmospheric" quality of their sound (which was the only thing they had going for them) in favor of going further down the "pop" route, which they aren't nearly as good at. Other than that it's the same sort of thing, more simple melodies surrounded with chimes and organs and 60s swinger-pad-isms. I like "Pendulum"'s excellent drumming, and "Lunch Hour Pops" has a nice uptempo melody (even though, for a band who sounds exactly like Stereolab, the track sounds EXACTLY like Stereolab), but what else is there here? Pleasant, unmemorable, forgettable. Get their first album and forget this one.

MY RATING: 4.9

Broadcast - "Man Is Not A Bird"

122. Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker (2000)

There can hardly be a more disappointing career in the decade than that of Ryan Adams, a country singer who started out by recording one of the best debut albums in the history of the genre and followed it up with album after album of second-rate, whatever-pops-into-his-head stuff. That shouldn't take away from the greatness of this one, though; what's best about this is how well Adams is able to get away with reconciling the two sides of the "country outlaw" character: the wild outlaw and the sensitive outlaw. There are far more ballads on this album than uptempo numbers, certainly, but those that are here are so powerful they come close to redeeming the entire genre. "To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)" is certainly one of the greatest country stompers ever written or performed by anyone, a monstrous explosion of excitement that seems connected by lightning directly to the greatest folk performers of the 20s and 30s--Uncle Dave Macon, Dock Boggs. The ballads are no less good--the only one of them that approaches generic is "Oh My Sweet Carolina", and Adams saves it with his stunning arrangement and vocal performance. The songwriting is impeccable, the lyrics fantastic, the highlights so many it's easier to list the songs that aren't than those that are--this is a classic. I fully believe that.

MY RATING: 9.5

Ryan Adams - "Bartering Lines"

123. Four Tet - Rounds (2003)

Four Tet are usually thrown in the "electronica" bin, but that makes no sense to me because this stuff sounds closer to a more melodic and less improvisatory Tortoise: the emphasis here is on live instrumentation and songwriting and less on "exploration". I love this album. I think it's gorgeous. Kieran Hebden seems to have built a career on expanding the prepared piano sound Aphex Twin got into on Drukqs, and the whole thing is easily recognizable as a single style but there are enough variations on it that it never becomes boring. There are so many highlights here--the languid "Unspoken", the frantic "Spirit Fingers" and of course "Slow Jam", which features one of the greatest instrumental melodies of the decade. What really brings this album over the top is the rejection of length: most instrumental records are way too long, the artists apparently laboring under the delusion that eschewing vocals and a normal pop-song structure gives them free reign to let their songs run for eight minutes under the same repetitive pattern. There's only one track on this album that goes over 8, and the majority are between four and five--these are short tracks, comparatively, and each does its business and gets out. I'd be more willing to classify this as jazz than anything else--but it's a new kind of jazz, one just as technically proficient but one that focuses on emotional and melodic connection instead of endless instrumental wanking: a Marquee Moon to most jazz's Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs. Beautiful.

MY RATING: 9.2

Four Tet - "Slow Jam"

124. PJ Harvey - Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000)

This is a record that by sheer melodic and songwriting skill manages to overcome the general boredom that one would expect to find in it. This is a big, glossy modern rock record with a big, glossy modern rock album cover, the kind of thing that brings to mind images of the Wallflowers and Tonic and Third Eye Blind and later-period Tori Amos and other mostly awful artists. But what saves this one is the songwriting: these songs are (mostly) so fucking good. "Big Exit" might be the best song Harvey ever wrote, a track that resembles nothing so much as Heart but a hundred times better than anything they ever did: the lyrics are fantastic and the chorus is heart-stopping. "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore" is like a glossier, more anthemic variation of a Rid of Me track, and the four tracks "One Line", "Beautiful Feeling", "Horses In My Dreams" and "We Float" approach and even eclipse Kate Bush in their gorgeous ambience. One or two tracks ("Is This Love" and "Kamikaze") are a little less inspired than the rest, but this is a fantastic record, varied and well-written and worth every bit of praise heaped upon it.

MY RATING: 9.1

PJ Harvey - "Big Exit"